Twist Page 2

  But there was no escaping the past. Not even in the crowd. Her senses quickened and she closed in on her targets, watching pupils dilate as credit cards appeared from wallets, shining brightly beneath shop lights, the day after B-Day, as the bankers broke into their bonuses, topping up their high-maintenance girlfriends like mobile phones in high-end boutiques and three-star Michelin restaurants.

  She could see the girls who had got what they wanted and those that had not by the expressions on their faces. They reminded her of the girls at the school after she’d passed the exam. Girls who learnt early how to make things go their way, all staring at her as the man walked with her to the Headmistress’s office to register on the first day. It was all part of the annual ritual. First the men pretended to be thoroughly dissatisfied with their five-figure bonuses and then it was their girlfriends’ turn.

  She walked further down Bond Street and crossed where it met Jermyn Street. It was a good spot to watch the wallets on legs but she was tired, had slept badly, so she bought an espresso and half-filled it with sugar and sat watching the beady eyes of the stockbroker in the boutique across the road. And he was watching the shop girl as she climbed a ladder to reach for the sparkling silver slippers that seemed to float with all the other pairs of thousand-pound shoes in the high glass ceiling of the shop.

  She crossed the road and pushed her way in between the half a dozen couples who were hogging the floor, doing the bonus-day dance. She felt her pulse quicken as it always did when she was in the presence of easy money, which she felt coming most strongly off a man in a black suit who she knew was alone and who was watching her from behind his wire-rimmed spectacles.

  He was stood in the corner of the room with one of the shop girls. The girl was holding up a white, snakeskin cowboy boot and when he turned to admire it she saw two strands of loose fibre sticking up out of his right rear trouser pocket. He was good-looking in a bookish kind of way and she thought he might be forty-five or -six and self-made, perhaps the brains behind a ‘lucky’ hedge fund. He turned and looked directly at her as she circled in front of him.

  ‘Cowboy boots always come out small. They pinch the toes if you’re not careful,’ she said, watching his eyes blink twice then look back at the boot.

  ‘That’s what worries me,’ he replied, ‘she’s got webbed feet. Like a frog. Kind of broad at the front.’

  His accent was lost somewhere in the mid-Atlantic but there was still a drawl to it that reminded her of cowboy movies.

  ‘But if you get it right she’ll love you forever,’ she said, standing on the tips of her toes and stretching up to touch the heel of a low-flying green slipper, trying to picture the man’s girlfriend because he would certainly have one, imagining she was most likely English and attracted to a geek who went against type.

  She pretended to go on shopping and never once looked at him again until his back was turned and he was walking out of the shop. Then she followed him out onto the street and round the corner and down into the underground, keeping track of his sandy mop as he stood in the middle of the carriage. Then, after he’d changed trains and was bound south-west on the Piccadilly line, she stepped up close to him and watched him smile.

  ‘Are you following me?’ he asked.

  She feigned outrage and allowed the braking train to press her against him as they entered the darkness of the tunnel, feeling the fool’s hand in the small of her back as they entered a final bend, exploring the space between his thighs and the muscles of his lower back as she ran her hands along the top of his belt.

  And then she fell, hooking his right leg with her own so that he joined her, his back pressed hard against the glass partition, masking the sensation of her two fingers pinching the two stray strands of cotton in his back pocket.

  She felt him try to push them both upright but she stuck her breasts into his chest and pulled the wallet vertically out, slipping it inside her inner mackintosh pocket as the lights of the station lit up the carriage and the train slowed and the door opened and the crowd carried her backwards. She watched his face as she let the flood take her. A picture of misery and longing as her feet touched the platform and the exit sign beckoned her away along a tunnel, up the escalator and out onto the frozen street where she broke into a slow jog.

  She ran a while until she reached Covent Garden where Batesy had hacked her membership of a basement kick-boxing club. She nodded to the girl behind the counter then headed down the steps and took a shower. The wallet held about two hundred dollars in bills and just shy of three hundred and fifty pounds in cash. There was also a platinum Amex card, a bank card, a local driver’s licence and a stack of ten business cards which concealed one last card, a single, translucent card with no type on it.

  She washed the wallet in the shower with the shampoo as it ran from her hair and stuck it in a post box outside the studio. The postman would read the address in the bank cards and they or the police would post it there. He’d be glad to get his cards back and surprised to find that no attempt had been made to use them. At the same time he’d be alarmed that the most valuable card of all had been taken; the card with nothing on it.

  She felt her phone ring in her pocket. It was FBoss. He was talking about Harry. His voice was feeble and he sounded like he was genuinely cut up about it all. He was saying that it was important that they all pulled together but she was not listening to him. Instead she was drifting back into the past to the playground and her nemesis, the prefect who had her backed into a corner, after she had passed the exam and won the only scholarship in the school for especially clever girls.

  I knew the day you arrived that you were different. Everyone in your dorm knows and the teachers all know. The ugly man and woman who brought you are not your real parents. They don’t really care for you and they will abandon you, just like your own mother abandoned you. Because you are a liar and a thief and I knew it just by looking at you.

  Her pulse was racing and her breathing was shallow. She had tried to outrun the past by stealing from the present but it was no use. She wondered again if her path had been marked from the outset; if it had always been that way and that now it was time to go home, to the life she had truly, always belonged to.

  ‘I’m coming,’ she heard herself say as she held the translucent card up to the light.

  2

  No guide should have to put up with this kind of abuse, let alone the most highly qualified guide in London’s Tate Britain. But such was Trimble’s fate this cold January afternoon.

  The Fine Art Undergraduates were a walk in the park. They wanted to know how, not why or when, and the act of actually trying to create art made them appreciate it in a way this group of middle-aged amateur art historians from Tunbridge Wells never would.

  They were pedants who concerned themselves only with where the artists ‘fitted in’ so that everything had to be placed chronologically, so that nothing was valuable, in and of itself, unless it was clearly labelled ‘late this’ or ‘early that’. For them art wasn’t supposed to move you. It was a platform on which they competed, falling over each other to ask him questions that only a world expert or a fool would attempt to answer.

  And this particular group had excelled themselves. The cherry was now officially on top of the perfect shit of a week. It wasn’t their fault Trimble had recently emerged from a catatonic depression, but he felt like they had somehow sensed the abyss he had just crawled from, and had seized upon his weakness like a flock of psychic vultures, taking it in turns to peck at him before swarming in to tear him apart.

  The ferocity of their initial assault had shocked him. Unanswerable questions ranging from the obscure to the wholly irrelevant had rained down on him for the first forty-five minutes leaving his palms sweating and his nerves shredded, watching their mouths open, their gums receding over yellow fangs as they smiled and he parried, apologised, turning questions into questions, tumbling on through the charnel house of the late Middle Ages.

  He watche
d as a lady in a peach-coloured cardigan stepped forwards and smiled at him before unleashing hell.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to ask my colleague Harvey about what Lowry liked to eat for breakfast. He’s quite the expert,’ he replied.

  He felt tired. On his feet all day, rudely used by cretins to the point where he wanted only to sit down in one of the white chairs in the cafeteria and weep into his Earl Grey, but instead he had to stand and suffer this abuse, turning just in time to mount a defence against the ring leader, the Queen Bitch in a grey cardigan whose nostrils flared, thick black nasal hair bristling, as she spoke.

  ‘Isn’t the real problem with Blake that we struggle to isolate him because he doesn’t belong to any system or movement, and as a result he doesn’t get looked at in a broader context?’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck what his broader context is,’ Trimble wanted to say. ‘Just look! Look at the face of the devil as he tumbles down from the gates of heaven pursued by Gabriel’s sword of burning white fire!’

  But it was no use. After the two-month leave of absence it was more than his job was worth.

  He needed some kind of a distraction. A fire drill or some catalyst that would allow him to accelerate from the killing fields of the Romantic era into the relative safety of World War One.

  ‘Of course, Blake was a true original,’ he said, raising his right arm in a dramatic circular sweep, using it to part the ladies and make his run up the gallery, careful to avoid his reflection in the coal-black habits of Millais’s grave-digging nuns and not stopping until he had reached the queer piece, provenance unknown, on which he was the gallery’s undisputed expert.

  They were a pair, identical, Elizabethan, and sat side by side, bolt upright in bed, cradling a pair of identical, red-swaddled, grub-like babies.

  ‘Ladies, please allow me to introduce the Cholmondeley Ladies,’ he said, smiling at Queen Bitch as he pushed the boat out into waters unknown. ‘Now who can tell me who the artist was?’

  He watched, waiting for one of them to try and fail. But none spoke and then, just as he was about to begin his party piece, a small shrewish lady in a pink jacket stepped back from the group, pointed at the polished walnut bench in the middle of the gallery and screamed.

  Pushing through the gaggle he saw the source of the excitement. A pair of dirty white Adidas sticking out from under the near end of the bench, by far the most beautiful thing he’d seen all day.

  ‘Do something!’ Queen Bitch shrieked.

  But Trimble already was, walking with all the confidence he could muster towards the figure of the man lying face down beneath a dirty black trench coat. Dead or alive, sane or insane, it hardly mattered. He was Trimble’s ticket, a blessed escape from the Bitch and all her kind.

  He reached the bench and looked down. Poor devil, he thought, it was hard to blame the ‘sleepers’ as they were known. It had to be two or three below at night. Too cold to sleep outside so they ended up pacing all night just to stay alive and then staggered in, exhausted when the gallery opened at nine and either locked themselves in the men’s lavatory or passed out here, beneath the benches in the main concourse.

  He edged closer and saw a bare arm stretched out across the floor. It was stained with red, white and brown paint and pockmarked with tiny black pinpricks which spiralled round his arm to disappear from sight.

  Was the story the guard had told him true? About a sleeper who’d pulled a needle to protect himself? True or false, it had certainly made a profound impression on him. Enough to make him wonder if this man was not just an addict but infected and was ready, playing dead, with a needle teeming with an incurable flesh-eating virus ready to stick in the first person who dared to disturb his narcotic slumber?

  He edged closer and used his foot to lift the right arm high enough so that he could see beneath it. He was no hero. He just wanted the tour to end, to go home and put the kettle on and crawl into bed.

  T … W … I ….

  Trimble let the arm drop to the floor, then watched as the man began to stir. He saw a chin, mouth and nose emerge from beneath the mop of greasy hair and the sinews of the exposed arm twitch involuntarily as the man opened his eyes. They were pale blue, clear and focused, and they were sat in the face of a boy, no more than eighteen years old, who had woken with a start and was staring up at him through the walnut slats of the bench.

  And now Trimble had to pause for thought because, quite unexpectedly, he had a dilemma on his hands. Should he deal with the interloper himself, or wait for the guards to get hold of him, knowing that if they caught sight of the tattoo on his forearm they would most certainly hand him over to the police?

  He looked up, listening to the sound of steel-toed boots booming in the gallery next door, then down at the pale, unwashed boy with the stained hands who was scrabbling sideways, clearly realising for himself the peril he was now in. For this was the boy they were after. The one who each night for the past two nights had stood all night in the freezing cold painstakingly spraying a giant, picture-perfect version of William Blake’s The Simoniac Pope on the gallery’s rear wall.

  Yes, thought Trimble, there was no doubt about it. Here lay Twist, the only graffiti artist dumb enough to tag his own forearm.

  3

  Red turned the transparent card in her hand. She had a feeling she had seen one like it before. No name, no address, no logo. Just clear plastic she could see her fingertips through. If there was a chip inside it then it was transparent too. She held it up to her eye and stared through it at the young policeman across the street who was alternating between his walkie-talkie and his Big Mac.

  ‘You fat bastard!’ she shouted, blasting him with her cheesiest smile then laughing as he went to take a bite out of his walkie-talkie.

  They weren’t all bad but quite a few of them were stupid. At least Big Mac had a sense of humour.

  She picked up her mobile and called Batesy, who used to work for his uncle in Hatton Garden. He knew about shit like this. About security holographs and high-tech stuff. She’d seen him use a special magnifying glass with a UV light to check to see if a stone was a blood diamond. Calling him seemed like as sensible a next move as any.

  He wasn’t answering but she let it ring. He was crazy about her and she knew he would call her back, especially now, at six o’clock on a Thursday, when the bars were beginning to fill.

  She crossed Oxford Street and walked down Wardour Street to the junction of Old Compton Street. She didn’t mind the bars here. She got a lot less hassle from the boys in them than the ones in the City at this time of year.

  She walked into a pub called the Ship and the men at the bar didn’t even look at her. It was dark on the stairs but they were empty so she walked down them holding the handrail to steady herself. She pushed open the black swing door and went into the dance room. It was pitch black so she used her phone to find the light switch and watched her teeth turn blue.

  She pulled the card from her pocket and held it up to the light. It looked very different now. A single word was written across the front in plain font. It read:

  LUNA

  * * *

  She asked a girl she knew who worked in a sex shop. The girl was not going to help her until she put a bottle of something called Super X on the counter and refused the change for a twenty. Then she smiled and pointed next door.

  ‘The DJ next door fixes shit for rich people,’ she said. ‘Ask him.’

  * * *

  Next door was a neon-lit bar. The door was open so Red went in. She could see a shadow in the corner of the room, gesticulating behind a Plexiglas window as his other hand worked what had to be a turntable. He couldn’t mix a pudding, let alone a track, but he had enough self-confidence to pass it off. He was stood up in the booth with his headphones on, pointing at imaginary dancers in the empty bar, and as she walked in he pointed at her, turning his palm skyward and lifting it in a series of jerky movements, calling upon her to move to the beat that only he could hear.
She lifted her right fist half-heartedly and walked across the empty floor and stuck the card through the semicircular hole in the Perspex.

  He shook his head and kept shaking it, even when she held the card up to the fluorescent tubes above his head. And it was only when he looked down and saw the twenty pound note that he smiled and nodded, as if to say, hit me again.

  * * *

  Knowing the location felt somehow like money in the bank, so she took a cab, which cost her twenty on top of the forty she’d dropped finding the address. It was just off Gloucester Road and the description checked out with the address. It was a white faux Regency building with recessed triple-glazed windows whose white wooden screens made it impossible to see in from the street.

  She stepped up to a large black front door and saw a crescent moon in the glass above the door. She pulled the chain and a bell rang somewhere in the interior, then she waited for someone to come to the door. But nobody came and she felt uneasy, aware that she was alone, outside some kind of secret club for men that the pimp had been reluctant to tell her about.

  She stood looking up at the white walls of the house. She imagined the scene inside. Probably a dimly lit corridor and a cloakroom like a strip club. She knew places like that from the east. There were always doormen in the hallway and a dimly lit basement bar with a few tables and chairs, mirrors and poles on low stages.

  She checked her pockets. The money was almost gone but at least she was warm. The stop in the Selfridges sale had made sure of that. A winter coat to replace the mackintosh. Red, full length, with a belt fastened tight at the waist. And she had left the Green Flash trainers in a changing room and traded up for a pair of black Italian heels. She pulled the chain again and heard the same bell ringing in the hallway. At least she looked the part.