Nirvana Bites Read online

  At that moment she looked up and saw me lurking in the doorway. ‘Oh, Jessie, darlin. A sensible face at last. Tell them lot to get lost, will you?’

  Everyone swung in my direction. For once I was glad Mrs V only ever got the first letter of my name right. I turned to the paramedic.

  ‘Is she badly hurt?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Nothing broken. But she’s badly bruised and shaken. She really should be looked at properly.’

  I shook my head. ‘You might as well forget it. She won’t leave Derek. And you’ – I turned to the cop, determined to brazen it out – ‘should be ashamed of yourself. You’re certainly not going to catch whoever did this now. So why can’t you leave this poor old lady alone and come back tomorrow to ask your questions?’

  I was counting on him not realising that the ‘poor old lady’ could have eaten him and his entire station house for breakfast without even getting heartburn. I knew what I was doing. By the next day, they could give Mrs V truth serum, lie-detector tests and anything else they had at their disposal. She would remember almost nothing.

  The cop looked stunned. He tried to stamp the last remaining shreds of his authority back on the situation, but he was on a slippery slope and he knew it. He poised his pen over his notebook and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘And you are…?’

  I gulped.

  Mrs V to the rescue. ‘Derek?’ she rasped. ‘Let Tyson through into the front here.’

  Magic. The paramedic and the cop broke the land-speed record for reaching a getaway vehicle.

  Mrs V gave me a wicked grin. She sent Derek in to put the kettle on, reached into the pocket of her pink paisley 100 per cent nylon dress and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She was tough as an old boot, but her hand still shook. I took a fag out for her, lit it and handed it to her.

  ‘So what happened, Mrs V?’ I asked.

  Mrs V told me that soon after Derek and Tyson had gone out, two men brandishing baseball bats had charged into the shop, wearing ‘baccy lavers’ over their faces. It didn’t take a huge investigative leap to link them to the two who had attacked me under the bridge the other night, but it didn’t feel safe to take anything for granted. The thugs had set about trashing the shop. At the same time, they had uttered dark warnings about noses and business – mainly keeping the former out of the latter.

  I checked the Technicolor swelling round Mrs V’s eye and made outraged noises about cowardly bastards hitting defenceless little old ladies.

  ‘Oh no, Jackie, love. That wasn’t them,’ she replied. ‘That was me. I picked up the phone to call the cops and in the excitement shoved it to me eye instead of me ear.’

  We both spluttered with laughter, but it was Mrs V who recovered first.

  ‘Actually, Julie, it might be funny now, but they scared the life out of me at the time, I can tell you. I’m used to those little bastards off the estate comin in and takin the piss, but these two were a different kettle of fish, I can tell you. I thought I’d had me chips for a while there. It was only when one of them spotted Derek and Tyson comin back that they scarpered.’

  It takes a fair bit to frighten me, but I was nowhere near brave enough to tell Mrs V that I was probably the indirect cause of the violence. And something else was sending tremors down my spine. If the baccy-laver boys had waited for Derek and Tyson to leave before embarking on their terrorising of Mrs V, then they must be watching the houses. They could be aware of all our movements. But there were no buildings opposite. Were they hanging out on the railway embankment? Had they set up surveillance cameras under the bridge?

  I’ve always had a paranoid streak. Who hasn’t? But this time it seemed that I had serious justification for being freaked. They really were out to get us. The big problem was, I was still no closer to working out who ‘they’ were.

  I also wanted to know why they had targeted Mrs V. Perhaps they thought she was more than just our neighbour. More likely, they were just proving a point. The point being that they were brutal sadistic thugs who would stop at nothing. On the other hand, it was possible that they were simply incompetent. You can but hope…

  10

  STAN WAS SLUMPED in exactly the same position I’d left him in, except now, instead of staring at the TV screen, he was staring at the inside of his eyelids. As I gazed at him in distaste, the phone rang. I snatched it up and gritted my teeth as I heard my sister-in-law’s voice.

  ‘Jenny? Are you there, Jenny? Oh, thank goodness. It’s Kate. I have some very bad news. I think you’d better sit down, Jenny.’

  I didn’t like the way she kept repeating my name. It was the closest Kate ever got to an endearment. I pulled the phone out into the hall and closed the door to the front room.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Jenny. I’m so sorry, Jenny. Your father – he passed on. About half an hour ago. We’re at the nursing home. Dennis asked me to call you. He’s too upset.’

  For a moment I was confused by her euphemism.

  Then, ‘He’s dead?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, Jenny. Yes. I’m so sorry.’

  It was the strangest thing. I had visualised – even prayed for – this moment so many times over the years. I’d imagined my reaction. Elation? Triumph? Relief? So I was totally unprepared to feel this – nothingness. It was as though I had become detached from my body and floated, ceiling height, to look down on the empty shell below.

  ‘Jenny? Jenny? Are you OK?’

  ‘Mmmm,’ I managed.

  ‘We – er – we were wondering if…if you’d like to see him.’

  See him? I reeled. The thought of seeing him dead was infinitely preferable to seeing him alive, but even so I was filled with revulsion.

  ‘Um. Thanks. But I think I’ll pass on that one.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Christ she was prim.

  ‘We also wondered if you would like to be involved with the funeral arrangements. We thought it would be nice if he could be buried next to your mother.’

  I catapulted back into my body with a jarring shock. The vacuum was instantly filled with tidal waves of foaming red rage.

  ‘No!’ I shrieked. ‘No! What kind of sadistic bastards are you? She killed herself to escape him. Now you’re going to plant his corpse next to hers? You can’t do that! You just can’t do that!’

  ‘Now calm down, Jenny,’ Straight Kate mewed, ‘I can tell you’re upset.’

  ‘Upset? You think I’m fucking upset? I’m not fucking upset. I’m fucking incan-fucking-descent. Can’t you see what you’re doing you, stupid, insensitive cow? That man made my mother’s life a living hell! What do you fucking know about it? I was the last to leave. And do you know why? Do you think I willingly chose to stay under the same roof as – as him?’

  My chest was heaving with dry sobs, but the Thames Barrier had shattered and nothing could stop the flood.

  ‘It was because I didn’t want to leave her. I begged her to come with me. But she virtually pushed me out. And do you know what she said? She said her life was over, but mine was still ahead of me. Her life was over! She was forty-fucking-five, Kate. Forty-fucking-five! She pushed me out but she still cried when I left. She cried for six weeks. She cried for six weeks and then she died.’

  I stopped, my body racked with the pain of unshed tears.

  ‘Jenny, Jenny, Jenny,’ soothed Kate. ‘Of course this is all very distressing for you. But you know, you’re not responsible for your mother’s death.’

  What?

  ‘She always was unstable.’

  I should have hung up, of course. But that would have robbed me of a target for my rage. A torrent of incoherent abuse tumbled out. In the background, I could dimly hear Kate’s measured tones.

  ‘I can’t talk to you when you’re like this, Jenny. Dennis said you’d be difficult. I’m going to hang up now. I’ll speak to you again when you’re calmer.’

  I carried on yelling into the receiver long after I heard the dialling tone.

  At some
point I hung up. I slumped to the floor and sat, knees drawn up, head in hands, and went in for some manic rocking. Agonising pains stabbed my guts. In an award winning moment of self-delusion, I told myself I must have picked up a stomach bug.

  I lurched to my feet and shot down the hall in a Groucho Marx lope. Reaching the toilet, I threw up violently, straightened, pulled the chain, splashed cold water on my face and then repeated the process. Twice.

  Most people who have trouble expressing their emotions would have gone and kicked the cat. I couldn’t do that – Gaia would never have forgiven me – so I decided to go in and kick Stan instead. As it turned out, I was to be denied any satisfaction from even this simple pleasure.

  Stan hadn’t moved from his previous position. I walked round him, took careful aim and planted a kick on his arse that would have impressed Nick and Robin’s rugby-playing chums. There was no reaction. Stan’s body jerked with the force of the blow – and that was it. Disappointing or what?

  I don’t know at what point it occurred to me to go through Stan’s bag. Somehow he had come to personify everything that was wrong with my life at that point, if only by denying me the satisfaction of a reaction to my violent impulse. As such, he was now exempt from my normal moral code. This was extremely dubious logic. Before I had a chance to think too hard about it, I was on my hands and knees in the bedroom, rifling through the contents of the Gucci suitcase.

  In my experience, snoopers never find anything that will make themselves feel good about their actions, but if they’re lucky, they will at least find something that will justify the search. Well, lucky bloody them. Their names clearly aren’t Jennifer Stern.

  There was his electronic digital data thingy, but I had no idea how it worked. Anyway, it was bound to be password-protected, that much I did know. I found his mobile and made a note of the names and numbers programmed in, and that was it. Hardly a cornucopia of gritty info. His wallet held nothing more exciting than a stack of credit cards. I put his keys aside. I could get copies from the hardware shop on Nunhead Green.

  His toilet bag yielded the most interest. Which is to say, one notch above bugger-all. Among the more obvious items, there was a large selection of condoms – ribbed, ridged, flavoured, rainbow-coloured and ticklers. There was a small vial of what I assumed to be an essential oil. I pulled out the stopper and took a whiff, and for the second time that day I had an out-of-body experience. Only this one was chemically induced. My brain shot upwards, bounced against the ceiling several times and then reversed back into my skull with a force that threw me on to my hands and knees on the floor. I recognised the powerful rush of amyl nitrate, gone almost as soon as it came. No wonder it was so often used to enhance the moment of orgasm.

  There were also razor blades in Stan’s bag – as well as an electric Shaver. The blades were in a separate zip section, nestled up to a small mirror. Unfortunately, there was no sign of any of the white powder I was sure that little kit was for.

  Stan’s Tardis-like toilet bag also revealed a prescription bottle of Seconol, which would certainly provide the explanation for his comatose state. A combination of downers and alcohol could have him out for hours. Or even days. Or even permanently…

  As that thought hit home, I was up and running back into the front room. I yanked Stan over on to his back and dropped to my knees beside him. I pressed my ear to his chest. I heard nothing. Damn it, you bastard. Don’t do this to me. Don’t die in my lovely home and poison the karma for ever by sailing out on a cocktail of barbies and booze.

  Before terminal panic set in, I realised it would have been impossible for me to hear anything, since the ear welded to Stan’s chest was the deaf one. The one damaged by contact with a wall on my seventh birthday. Another of those exciting little high points from my childhood.

  I tried the other ear, but by this time the blood was pounding so loudly in my own head, I couldn’t work out if what I was hearing were my own rhythms or Stan’s. I grabbed a cushion and pounded it until feathers flew. I picked one up and held it under Stan’s nostrils. That didn’t work either. My hand was trembling so much, the feather acted like it was being buffeted by a tornado. Stan could have been dead for months and the result would have been the same.

  I rocked back on my heels and grabbed handfuls of hair, willing myself to think straight. Inspiration struck from an unlikely quarter. I remembered an article in a magazine I’d seen at the dentist’s. It was about people who had been wrongly pronounced dead. The most extreme case was that of a Spanish woman who was being lowered into her grave when the mourners heard scratching sounds coming from inside the coffin. In one of those pseudo-scientific info boxes, they had listed the tests for establishing when a person is genuinely dead and not just very, very tired.

  I pulled open Stan’s eyelid and dry-sobbed relief when his pupil fluttered like a ping-pong ball in an updraught. It was also relief that made me kick him once more for good measure.

  So I could get no satisfaction from hurting Stan. And I didn’t want to go down the road of hurting myself – a familiar route, but one I did my best to avoid these days. I needed distraction. I went and got a set of Stan’s keys cut and returned the originals. I was in acute need of a friendly face.

  Mags was the only one in the co-op who knew anything at all about the man who was my biological father. But she wouldn’t be back for at least a couple of hours.

  I phoned the third house. If I was lucky, Ali would be in. He might be crap at stringing sentences together, but some stonking good sex might help. It certainly couldn’t hurt. If Gaia was in, I could at least get an aura massage or something. No reply. I should have known better than to expect any help from a deity who, if not downright vindictive, was at least bloody mischievous where I was concerned.

  I gave up on the phone and stomped next door. Frank hardly personified articulate empathy, but he’d had a crap childhood too and had a good heart. Robin and Nick were unknown quantities to me. Their irredeemably bourgeois backgrounds placed them in a different solar system to my own, but again I reckoned their hearts were in the right place. Unfortunately, their bodies weren’t. I resisted the urge to head-butt their front door and started back through my own.

  I cast one last despairing glance along the street, and was rewarded by the sight of Frank’s gaunt frame shambling towards me. Before I could so much as open my mouth, he started a rant of his own.

  ‘Not one,’ he said. ‘Not one fucking Big Issue sold all day. I’ve been there five hours. Five fucking long, cold, boring hours. Can you believe it? What is it with these Bermondsey bastards?’

  Frank continued in this vein as he unlocked the door and clumped up the stairs. I followed him, but to be honest I couldn’t be sure if he noticed. He could well have been continuing a monologue started long before he saw me.

  He flung himself into an over-stuffed armchair he’d rescued from a skip a couple of years earlier. I sat cross-legged on the floor opposite him. His front room was identical to mine in shape only. For a start, it was spotlessly clean. Secondly, it was black. Very, very black. The bare floorboards and walls were painted black. There was a small black and white TV – draped with the same black cloth that covered the armchair. A portable stereo – black of course. And that was it. The only thing that prevented the room from feeling like a large coffin was the ceiling. For some bizarre reason known only to himself, Frank had papered it in tin foil.

  His Rotherhithe rant showed no signs of slowing down. I began to wonder if he’d found an alternative source of amphetamines. He’d sworn never to touch whiz again after his previous supplier, Gonzales, had died last year. Big G had climbed into Brockwell Park Lido at the dead of night in mid-November. He’d been speeding out of his box and had either fallen or dived into the freezing cold pool. The inevitable result, as any GCSE biology student would tell you, was instant heart failure. As the lido was closed for the winter, he wasn’t found until New Year’s Eve, when the place was being spruced up for a millennium pa
rty, by which time his corpse was bloated to hideous Michelin-man proportions. You could say, it put Frank off.

  I waited till he drew breath and asked him straight out if he was speeding.

  Frank seemed shocked at the question. I was actually quite impressed. I never knew adrenalin could be so powerful. I used the ensuing pause to pass on some information of my own.

  ‘My dad’s dead,’ I said.

  Frank floundered, uncertain what was expected of him.

  ‘Oh. I didn’t know you had a dad. I mean I know you must have – y’know – by nature and that. But I didn’t know he was – I dunno – like – in your life.’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ I said. ‘He was an evil bastard.’

  Frank brightened. ‘Oh, well, that’s all right then,’ he said with evident relief.

  ‘Yeah. I suppose it is,’ I shrugged. Then, ‘I thought Stan was dead too,’ I said.

  Frank’s eyes filled with panic.

  ‘But it’s OK. He’s just off his face.’

  Frank nodded. He could relate to that.

  I got up to leave. ‘See you then,’ I said. ‘Oh, by the way, did you see anything new at Koi Korner?’

  Frank froze, his eyes wide with horror. I sighed as I lowered myself back on to the floor. I’d seen him in rabbit-in-headlights mode many times before. Frank had been so caught up in his role as Big Issue vendor that he’d forgotten the real reason for being there.

  I sat in silence while the horror gradually faded from the open book of his face. He’d thought of something. With a bit of luck, it might even be useful.

  ‘A guy gobbed at me,’ he said with the triumphant air of one delivering a valuable gem of information.

  I waited. Frank realised more detail was needed.

  ‘He was one of those straight weirdos who go in there,’ he added, by way of explanation.