‘You tell me, Carl. She’s your babe.’
‘She’s not though. She made that quite clear. Didn’t want to get involved. Wasn’t interested. And yet,’ I went on, ‘I can’t help thinking she was but she was hiding it or something.’
‘Obviously,’ Jaz said.
I lit another cigarette in response to this and arched my back as I settled deeper into the chair.
‘You haven’t got her number, have you, in Manchester?’
Jaz bounded across the room and I heard the darkroom door open. He returned with an old blue address book which was falling apart. He leafed through it. ‘Have you got a pen?’ he asked. I shook my head. ‘Fucking hell. Do I have to do everything for you?’ He got a pen from the kitchen and wrote the number on a piece of scrap paper, which he then passed to me. I held it tightly as if it were a hard-won secret or a key to the next stage in a complicated board game. Folding it in half I slipped it in the back pocket of my jeans.
Jaz was by the window again, watching the canal and the gasholders. ‘How’s the shop?’ he asked.
‘The shop?’ I ran a small second-hand record shop on the Caledonian Road. I’d taken a lease on a former sex shop — a filthy, rank, dilapidated property — with the cash I’d saved from the courier job and various others, and started off by selling some of my own rare picture discs and limited editions: coloured vinyls, Bowie’s foreign singles, Roxy Music’s Viva on Island instead of Polydor. That sort of stuff. They were worth a fortune, some of them — things I’d collected in my youth — but I sold them for whatever I could get just to get through the first weeks. ‘It’s going OK,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d branch out. Sell a few second-hand books as well.’
‘That should make your fortune.’
‘Keeps me off the streets.’
The shop was doing OK. Surviving. It was like my life at the time. Everything was just sort of going along. Nothing major, good or bad. I felt like an engine that was idling, just waiting for someone or something to kick me into gear.
‘You liked her then?’ Jaz said, switching subjects. He was still staring at the canal, occasionally swigging beer. I should tell you what he looks like before you picture him all wrong. Shorter than me and stockier, he wore his dark, wavy hair cut short. His eyes were deep-set beneath prominent brows which made him look quite intense. He had a big nose and a beefy jaw. Like me he wore a lot of black.
‘Yeah, I liked her,’ I said.
Jaz went back to contemplating the canal. I swallowed another mouthful of beer and reached into my left boot.
I met Jaz on my first day at City Circle Messengers. Desperate for a job in the hot summer of ’83 or ’84, I’d looked up courier companies in the Yellow Pages and gone knocking on doors until one of them offered to take me on. City Circle were based in the scraggy grey area between King’s Cross and the Angel, just off Pentonville Road in a vulnerable terrace of bookmakers, video shops and dressmakers surrounded by council blocks and cleared housing.
I climbed a greasy flight of stairs to reach their office. It was thick with acrid smoke that spiralled slowly in thrall to a big fan hanging down from the ceiling. A thin, sandy-haired man at the wrong end of his fifties, wearing a vest and a ropey old pair of headphones, sat behind a desk shouting adenoidally into a dented microphone. ‘Alpha One Eight. Alpha One Eight. Where are you, One Eight? Come in, One Eight. Do you read me? Over.’ Leave the poor bastard alone, I thought. Did I really want to work for this man? As I said, I was desperate.
Almost as pungent as the controller’s Capstan Full Strength was his sweat. His name, I would learn later, was Anderton, but I would give him a different name: the Thin Controller. He had long insectile eyebrows and wore old glasses with grubby lenses and a wire frame that had been driven over by a bus and reassembled by a team of blind people with a roll of insulating tape. ‘One Eight. Where are you, One Eight?… What the fuck are you doing there? You’re supposed to be at number fourteen.’ Another thing I would learn later was that regular client companies had numbers which you had to memorise. Fourteen was some PR agency in Victoria. I don’t remember exactly where now. One Eight, it seemed, wasn’t in Victoria. ‘Do get a move on, One Eight,’ he moaned sarcastically.
So the guy had a business to run and it depended on messengers turning up at the right place at the right time, but did he have to be such a complete twat to make it work? I didn’t know, but I wished him dead. Stomach ulcer, throat cancer, whatever.
Also in the room were an obese, tough-looking woman in blue crimplene trousers and an orange T-shirt with strange stains down the front, and a huge black dog which skulked under the Thin Controller’s desk. This disturbed me most of all. Then I noticed another messenger slumped in a plastic chair, playing with his two-way radio. His appearance and position in the chair made me think of an ape, but he was looking at me. It was a sympathetic look, almost a smile, and I was grateful for it. He might almost have been about to say, Forget it, mate, don’t work for this guy. He’ll fuck you sideways.
But I liked the look of his radio.
‘Alpha Two Four. Two Four, Two Four, Two Four.’
The Thin Controller made some kind of signal in my direction, which the Fat Woman interpreted in her own way. ‘You looking for work?’ she asked me. I nodded, keeping a nervous eye on the black dog which had lifted its head and was slavering lazily. The Fat Woman got up, flesh shivering under the stress of walking. I hoped I would be able to stay out on the road and not have to call in at the office too often. The messenger sitting at the far end of the room drained a can of 7UP and tossed it into a wastebasket. The Thin Controller glared at him. The Fat Woman produced a form from under a mug stained with so much tannin it was black inside. I filled out my name, address and other details and signed some kind of disclaimer without bothering to read it. ‘Where do I get my radio?’ I asked.
The Thin Controller looked up. ‘Listen to ’im. Wants his fucking radio. It’s not a fucking holiday camp, you know.’
The Fat Woman steered me out of the office. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the other messenger watching me with amusement. In a tiny, nicotine-stained office down the landing, which smelt of worn-out house slippers and old files, the Fat Woman gave me a pad of dockets and a fluorescent bag. ‘You have to wait two weeks till you get a radio,’ she said. ‘You have to phone in for jobs.’
This seemed a bit crap to me but I just nodded. It was a job. The Fat Woman then turned her attention to an in-tray overflowing with invoices and seemed to forget about me. I didn’t know what to do. ‘When do I start then?’ I asked.
‘What? Oh now. Today, I suppose.’
‘Well, what’s my first job?’
She looked up again and tutted. If they’d wanted a clairvoyant, they should have advertised. I mean, I didn’t know where to go or what to do. She pushed past me — I held my breath — and I heard her mumbling to the Thin Controller in the other room. I picked out his nasal tones responding: ‘Tell him to go to the West End and ring in.’ I looked out through a jagged hole in the back window — the glass was too dirty to see through — and saw what looked like a tangle of rusty old bicycles in the weeds and rubble of the back yard.
The Fat Woman reappeared and I said, ‘I heard.’
‘What’re you waiting for then?’