The second time it happened Divine turned to give whoever it was a mouthful and got hit by Mandy’s boyfriend, a fourteen-stone West Indian, who brought an eight-inch spanner smack down on to Divine’s left eye.
Resnick wanted to drop Ed Silver off at the doors to casualty and leave him there, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Almost the first things he saw, after steering Silver towards reception, were two familiar faces amongst those waiting for attention. “Naylor,” Resnick said. “Divine. What are you doing here?”
Twenty-seven
“Course, I’d heard the records, a few of them anyway, but I’ll tell you, Charlie, first time I ever saw Bird and Dizzy live, I almost pissed myself.”
One of the other problems with drunks, Resnick was thinking, they never knew when it was time to go to sleep. The visit to casualty had been shorter than some, less painful than many; Ed Silver had emerged with a well-washed face, a slightly remodeled nose, and good intentions. “One thing, Charlie,” he had claimed, getting into Resnick’s car, “this has done it for me, I mean it. My drinking, from now on it’s going to be seriously under control. So help me. And you can bear witness to that.” They hadn’t been back at the house half an hour, before Silver was going through cupboards, searching at the back of shelves. “Just a tot, Charlie. Nobody can be expected to give up totally, just like that. The body wouldn’t stand for it.”
Resnick had found tins of frankfurters and Czechoslovakian sauerkraut, the nub ends of a loaf of black rye, pickled gherkins; he had opened the only bottle of wine he possessed, the cheapest dry white he had found in the Co-op, bought months ago to make a recipe he had since forgotten.
Nervous of all this unwonted night-time activity, Bud chased his tail from room to room, occasionally stopping to look perplexed, the White Rabbit in Alice, terrified that he was late but with no idea what for.
“The first of the Dial sessions, Charlie, the ones with Miles and Max Roach, you must have those, eh?”
So they sat through the night, listening to the Charlie Parker Quintet-“The Hymn,” “Bird of Paradise,” “Dexterity”-while, around them, Resnick’s neighbors slept on, dreaming straight dreams unthreatened by flattened fifths.
Ed Silver’s first attempts to play jazz had been as a clarinetist with a revivalist band in Glasgow, doing his best to sound like Johnny Dodds in the twenties. The first thing that changed that was, down south for a rare date at the Hot Club of London, this skinny guy had come up to him and started talking, an accent that stretched across the Atlantic and back to Aldgate. A musician himself, he’d played with a number of USAF band personnel stationed here during the war, taken a job immediately afterwards, polite music for dancers on one of the liners traveling from Southampton to New York. It was in his East End flat that Silver heard his first bursts of Charlie Parker, records he’d made with Jay McShann’s band; each time Parker soloed, the everyday was suddenly pierced by the sublime.
Next day, Silver had pawned his clarinet in exchange for an alto and talked his way into a band working the boats. Anything to get to the Apple, 52nd Street, the Three Deuces and the Royal Roost.
“This is the group,” Silver said now, listening, catching a piece of cucumber at the third attempt and slipping it into his mouth, “I saw at the Deuces. Amazing. Every last dollar I had on me I spent seeing them, three nights in a row, each time it was hotter and better.
“Anyway …” A gulp at the wine now, wincing a little as he moved his mouth. “… there I am the next day, pretty late on, due on board ship at half-seven, taking my last look down Broadway and there’s Bird, crossing the street ahead of me, sax case in his hand. First reaction, Charlie, I’ll tell you, no, it’s not him, can’t be. Then it is and I’m hurrying after him, slapping him on the back, shaking his hand, telling him I’ve come all the way from England just to hear him, every solo he’s played the last three nights has been a fucking inspiration.
“Bird looks at me a shade off and then he smiles. ‘Hey, man. Lend me fifty bucks.’ I would have given that man every stitch of clothing on my back if he’d asked for it, but right then I didn’t have five bucks, never mind fifty. I can’t think of another damn thing to say and all I can do, Charlie, I think of it to this day, is watch him walk away.
“By the time he got to the studio, just a couple of blocks down, he’d copped from somebody else. Story goes he shot up in the studio bogs before going right in and cutting this stuff.”
Ed Silver leaned back and closed his eyes as, unison theme over, Parker’s alto sailed out, clean and clear, over the swish of Max Roach’s cymbals.
“‘Dexterity,’” Ed Silver said.
“Story also goes,” said Resnick, “he’d killed himself before he was forty. Heart, stomach, cirrhosis of the liver.”
Ed Silver didn’t say a thing; continued to sit there, eyes closed, sipping now and then at the last of the white wine.
Saturday: Debbie Naylor sat in the living room, curtains still drawn, trying to get the baby to feed. Up on the first floor, she could hear Kevin retching, head over the lavatory bowl. Serve him right, she thought, though with little satisfaction, let him find out what that’s like, at least.
“What d’you call this?” Graham Millington asked, staring down at his plate. His wife was eating wholemeal toast, drinking chamomile tea, reading the women’s page of the Mail. If she could persuade Graham to drop her off at Asda and collect her, there would be time to get her evening-class homework finished before the boys needed ferrying to that party in West Bridgford. “This isn’t what we normally have, is it?” Millington persisted.
“Extra bran,” she said, “fifteen per cent more fruit and nuts. No added sugar or salt. Thought it would make a nice change.”
Graham Millington mumbled to himself and carried on chewing.
Lynn Kellogg sat in the parked car and poured coffee into the flask’s white plastic cup. When she’d been little, six and seven and eight, Sunday afternoon drives with her parents, east to the sea, south to watch the horses canter on Newmarket common, there had been milk in Tupperware containers, sugar-lumps for the horses, granulated for themselves, spooned from a paper bag-a packet of ginger nuts and another-treat of treats! — of jaffa cakes. Sitting there, watching the still deserted street, she could remember the first taste of jam, the quick sweetness of it the moment the chocolate coating broke through.
“What time did she get in last night?” Skelton’s wife asked, tightening the belt of her dressing gown, turn and turn and pull, a double bow.
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you know.”
Skelton shook his head. Take the kettle to the pot, not the pot to the kettle: amazing how our parents’ precepts stuck with us, governed the trivia of our lives, amazing and terrible. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
His wife opened the glass-fronted cupboard, took out saucers, bone-china cups, white with a tasteful floral design. “If it doesn’t matter, why spend half the night sitting up, the rest of it lying in bed not sleeping?”
Divine blinked into the bathroom mirror with his one good eye. The other was swollen, yellow, stitches like Biro marks, blue-black, across it. “Shit!” He leaned over the toilet bowl to urinate, one arm resting against the wall; when he cleared his throat and spat, it was like dredging Trent Lock. He didn’t know what had been worse, the initial blow, the embarrassment or Resnick’s face. Well. The swelling would subside, the stitches would come out and there was the inspector still to face. “Slag!” wincing as the sound reverberated around his head. “Slag!” slamming the wall with the flat of his hand. “Fucking see her again, I’ll teach her a fucking lesson!”
Calvin Ridgemount woke to the smell of bacon frying and knew instantly which day it was. He cleaned his teeth and splashed cold water up into his face. Same black jeans but a new T-shirt, Stone Roses, he liked the shirt design better than he liked the band. Smack on time, as Calvin entered the kitchen, his father was breaking the first of the eggs against the edge of the pan.