Silver was shaking his head, even though it hurt to do so, mumbling no.
“You can’t stay here with a broken nose.”
“Why the sodding hell not?”
“It needs attention.”
“I’ll give it attention.” Silver placed his fingers to either side of the nose and began to push.
“Jesus, no!”
“What?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Go back outside, Charlie. If you’re squeamish.” Instead, Resnick closed his eyes; it wasn’t the blood, more the self-inflicted pain. There was a lot of squeezing, a quick click like balsa wood splintering and a lot more blood.
“There,” announced Silver, “that’s done it.”
“What exactly?”
“If the bastard wasn’t broken, it is now.”
Naylor might not have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, but there was Divine, leaning over these four lads and talking low and purposeful, smiling all the while. A couple of minutes and the lads got up and vacated their table, great view down over the dance floor.
“What did you say to them?” Naylor asked as they sat down.
Divine winked. “You don’t want to know.”
The girls were all chatty enough now, not that it mattered what they were saying, most of it lost beneath the music and the low roar that rose from the floor and hung beneath the ceiling like hot air.
Divine put his arm around the tall girl’s shoulders and she made a show of shrugging it off; Divine winking then, across the table at Naylor, giving him the thumbs-up when he thought the girl wasn’t looking, though, of course, she was, pursing her lips at him, just a touch of tongue between the lip gloss.
“Fancy your chances, don’t you?”
“I fancy yours.”
The other girls, sisters it turned out, in on the bus from Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Lord knows how they were expecting to get back, did some more nudging and giggling and Naylor thought, not for the first time, Christ, they can’t be more than sixteen, seventeen.
“Mandy’s a beauty queen,” said one of them, looking at the tall girl, who adjusted her profile into what she assumed to be a regal manner.
“Kevin over there’s middleweight champion of the world, aren’t you, Kev? Stings like a butterfly and sucks like a bee.”
Naylor blushed, the girls snorted into their banana daiquiris.
“I am, actually,” Mandy said.
“Yeh?”
“Yes. Miss Amber Valley. Two years running, as a matter of fact.”
“And she was runner-up the year before that,” added one friend.
“And she got into the heats for Miss East Midlands at Skeggy.”
“I can’t cope with all this,” Divine said, getting to his feet, adjusting the crotch of his trousers as he did so. “I’m off for a slash.”
“Coarse, your friend, isn’t he?” the nearest sister confided in Naylor.
“Hey, Kev,” called Divine, turning back towards the table. “What d’you reckon? Shall I get the colored, the ribbed, or just the plain?”
The car hadn’t been outside Aloysius House much more than twenty minutes, long enough for someone to throw up over the nearside of the boot.
“I hope you’re not going to blame us for that,” said Jane Wesley, walking with Ed Silver and Resnick from the door.
“Wouldn’t think of it,” Resnick said.
When they had maneuvered Silver into the front seat, she said, angling her head away from the road, “If this happens again, are you sure you want me to call you?”
“No,” Resnick shrugged.
“Does that mean you don’t want me to?”
“No.”
“That’s what I like,” she smiled, “clear, decisive decision-making.”
Resnick raised one hand, open, towards her and went around to the other side of the car. A few more nights like this and he’d give up the idea of sleep altogether.
“Lovely woman,” Ed Silver said. “Lovely.”
“So you said.”
“I did?”
“Last time.”
Silver picked at a scab on his upper lip and a thin line of blood began to run towards his unshaven chin. “Have I seen her before? That woman?”
“Not clearly,” Resnick said.
“Hey!” Silver exclaimed some moments later, the car turning right to pass the central Probation Office and the old Guildhall courts. “Was that a joke? Not clearly. Was that a joke?”
“No,” said Resnick. “I don’t make jokes.”
“Take ’em, eh Charlie. Take ’em. Not like that feller tonight, the one as did this. All that happened was, let me tell you this, he was blathering on about football or something, England, you know. That Parker, he said, not so bad but he’d play a damn sight better if he weren’t black. You see, d’you see? So I goes, being black, that’s part of it, makes him as fucking good as he is. Charlie fucking Parker. And he hit me, not with his fist neither, with his knee. Don’t know how he managed it, but that’s what it was, his knee. Ignorant drunken bastard, he calls me, don’t even know his right bloody name.”
Resnick glanced sideways as they stopped at the lights below the Broad Marsh. The swelling round Silver’s nose was certainly not going down; instead it was spreading across his cheeks, up towards his eyes. “I knew he didn’t mean Charlie Parker, somebody else …”
“Paul,” Resnick said. “Paul Parker.”
“It was a joke.”
“Yes.”
“Fucking joke.”
“Yes.”
Silver rested a hand forward against the windscreen, blinking as he tried to focus. “Where we going?”
“Casualty.”
“I’m not …”
“Ed?”
“Eh?”
“Shut up.”
One of those old Motown songs and Divine was pressing himself up against the former Miss Amber Valley, grateful that she was tall enough for him to wriggle his tongue in her ear without having to bend too low.
“How about it, then? Shall we go?”
“What d’you mean?”
“Come on. Ready?”
“No.”
“Come on.” A tug at her wrist.
“No.”
No attempt at dancing now. “Why not?”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t worry about your mates, Kev’ll look after them all right.”
“It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
“My boyfriend …”
“Your sodding what?”
“Boyfriend. He’s meeting me here, picking me up.”
Divine shook his head in disbelief.
“One of his pals was having his stag night.”
“Well, that’s it, then, isn’t it?” He moved in again, hands low at her back, fingers against the top of her buttocks pulling her back towards him, edge of her little panties clear to the touch. “You’ll not see him till morning.”
“What d’you mean?”
“If he’s been out on the piss with his mates, he’s not going to turn up here, is he, ready to drive you home.”
“He will.”
“Be too drunk to stand up, most likely, never mind drive.”
She pulled herself away from him and stood there pouting, lip gloss all but gone. Divine had a sudden vision of the evening ending in nothing and he hated it.
“All right, then,” he said, grabbing her arm at the elbow, “if he’s out there waiting for you, let’s go find him.”
Protesting, Mandy was pushed and pulled towards the exit, until finally, grudgingly she walked with him out through the entrance, past the dinner-jacketed bouncers and round into the car park.
“Where is he, then?”
“I don’t know …”
“Exactly.”
Divine ran his hand up her back and fondled her neck beneath the permed hair. He kissed her shoulder, slid his other hand over her breast as he turned her towards him.
“If you didn’t want this,” he said, “you should have said so before. But then you might not have scored so many free drinks.”
“You offered,” she said. “What was I supposed to do?”
“This,” Divine said.
He was kissing her, pushing his tongue into her mouth, doing his best to stop her wriggling and get a hand inside her dress at the same time, when someone tapped him hard on the shoulder.