I must have looked like someone who'd been having an eyeball-to-eyeball with the Medusa, because Dirk asked if I was feeling OK.
'Sure,' I said, not daring to take my eyes off Charlotte.
'Rostropovich,' said Lemmy. 'Gastarbeit king wenceslas.'
'Uh-huh,' agreed Dirk. 'Beam me up, Scotty.'
'Hang on a sec,' I said to Dirk and Lemmy. 'Back in a tick,' and, leaving them standing there, I wove through the crowd to head Charlotte and Grenville off at the pass. They greeted me with taut little air-kisses and muted chirrups of pleasure.
'This place!' said Grenville, looking round. 'Did you ever see anything like it?'
I wished he would keep his voice down. 'As a matter of fact I did,' I said. 'There are a lot of places like this.'
'Who were they?' asked Charlotte.
'Who were who?' I asked.
'Those fabulous lowlifes you were talking to.'
'The long-haired hippy with the moustache,' said Grenville. 'And the gorilla. You know who they remind me of? Asterix and Obelix.'
Charlotte chuckled. 'Typical examples of traditional Notting Hillbilly.'
'Just some guys,' I said.
'Amazing,' said Grenville, still gazing enraptured at Lemmy and Dirk. 'You can always tell, can't you, when people have been too long on the dole.'
Charlotte clutched my arm. 'Oh my God,' she gasped. 'Don't look now, Clare, but King Kong's coming over.'
I looked up with dread in my heart. Dirk was wading through the crowd with an expectant grin on his face, like a channel swimmer who had just felt shingle beneath his feet. I could just see it. He was bound to make some stupid remark about the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, or Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles. I knew I had to get out of there right that second or I would die.
'Excuse me,' I said. 'I have to go and powder my nose.'
'Hang on,' began Charlotte, but the slimmest of instants before Dirk reached us, I plunged back into the milling crowd and dog-paddled towards the Ladies. I made it just in time. The door swung shut, but not before I'd glimpsed Dirk staring after me, his face crumpling into an expression of childlike bewilderment.
I locked myself into one of those foul-smelling cubicles for a full five minutes, then spent a further five staring into the mirror, fiddling uselessly with lipstick and mascara, and aching all over, as though I were about to collapse with flu. There was nothing for it. I would have to swallow my pride and introduce everyone. Maybe they'd all get along with each other after all. But by the time I'd scraped together the strength to go back into the bar, it was too late. Charlotte and Grenville were nowhere to be seen.
Dirk and Lemmy had vanished too.
I went straight back to the flat and lay on my mattress with my head pounding, feeling like a heel of the first magnitude and trying desperately to think of ways of justifying what my mind had now blown up into a perfidious act of betrayal.
It wasn't my fault. I couldn't help being bad at straddling social boundaries. Dirk and Lemmy belonged to one part of my life, Charlotte and Grenville to another. Mix them together, and there could be an explosion. But what kind of explosion were we talking about here? Wouldn't it be simply an explosion of social embarrassment — a minor fart at the most? And wasn't I the only one in danger of being embarrassed?
It didn't matter what I told myself. I still felt like the lowest form of pond life. I couldn't sleep. I could hear Sophie in the flat below, and I knew she hadn't brought anyone home with her, but she was whimpering and groaning and squealing with what sounded like nonstop orgasmic pleasure.
Ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk
She was really partying on down. I didn't know where she'd got the tape from, but she had the Drunken Boats on loud.
And I realized at last that it didn't matter much whether her lover was real, or a ghost, or a figment of her fevered imagination. At least she had company. At least she was having fun. Not like me, stewing here alone in my misery.
Maybe Sophie had the right idea after all.
Maybe the only good man was a dead one.
Chapter 9
From the outside, the basement flat looked more than a trifle shabby. Despite the bars on the windows, there was an air of dilapidation, as though whoever owned it couldn't possibly possess anything worth stealing. At the same time, it didn't appear to be a flat that was regularly left unoccupied for months on end. But if passing squatters, winos or drug dealers had tried to break in, they would have found themselves stumped by a formidable security system. The rickety-looking front door turned out to be made of steel and fitted with every type of deadlock known to man.
I'd finally managed to corner Walter Cheeseman and remind him of his promise to show me some of his films. He'd invited me down the very next day. 'Is that an alarm or a biscuit tin?' I asked as he opened the door, pointing to a discreet black box attached to the outside wall.
Walter said it was an alarm.
'So if someone tries to break in when you're not there, the police turn up?'
'Not exactly,' said Walter. 'Not the police.'
I never did get round to asking him who turned up if it wasn't the police. He'd made the place as impregnable as Fort Knox, and as soon as he let me in, I saw why. It had nothing to do with the decor and furnishings, which screamed expensive, though the effect wasn't one of which Sophie would have approved; there were glass-topped tables, and a three-piece suite in cream-coloured leather, and fluffy white rugs strewn across the shiny parquet like cotton-wool clouds.
But it was the walls that grabbed the attention. Or, to be precise, what was on the walls, because they themselves were hidden from view. Every last inch had been fitted with adjustable shelving. And the shelving was stacked with modern technology: video recorders in half a dozen different formats, screens of all shapes and sizes, loudspeakers and computers and keyboards and editing equipment and earphones, and little lights that winked on and off, and hundreds of metal film canisters and laser discs and video cassettes, each with its neatly typed label giving title, director, year of release and running-time of the contents.
The labels and their neatly typed, perfectly spaced print made me wonder whether perhaps Walter wasn't a little too anally retentive for comfort.
While my host disappeared into the kitchen to make coffee, I examined the labels on the nearest stack of cassettes. The director was Walter Cheeseman, and the titles — Edward Scissordick, Big Dick Tracy, RoboDick and Muff-Diving Miss Daisy — spoke eloquently of their subject matter. Walter said most of his work had gone 'straight to video', but even in video form, I gathered, it had never been released on my side of the Atlantic. Walter blamed the distribution system, which he said was 'loaded against the independent operator.'
'I didn't realise you made porno movies,' I said, trying to hide my disillusionment as he came back from the kitchen carrying a pot of coffee, two mugs, and a large bowl of buttered popcorn.
'That's just my day job,' he said. 'It helps finance the real stuff. Here, I'll show you.'
He bade me sit down on the sofa, slotted a cassette into one of the machines, and we began to watch something called The Pig and the Pendulum. It was set around the turn of the century and opened like an episode of Upstairs, Downstairs before veering off into darker territory when a stuffy accountant became possessed by the evil spirits lurking in the basement of the house where he lived with his wife and daughters. To begin with, he confined himself to drinking and gambling and wenching, but one night, during an unexpected blizzard, the evil spirits took over completely and made him hack his family to pieces with an axe. As an afterthought, he hacked the servants to pieces as well.