Angels and Visitations Read online

  “Try this on for size. Dumpty—the Fat Man—wasn’t your brother. He wasn’t even your friend. In fact he was blackmailing you. He knew about your nose.”

  She turned whiter than a number of corpses I’ve met in my time in the business. Her hand reached up and cradled her freshly powdered nose.

  “You see, I’ve known the Fat Man for many years, and many years ago he had a lucrative concern in training animals and birds to do certain unsavoury things. And that got me to thinking . . . I had a client recently who didn’t show, due to his having been stiffed first. Doctor Foster, of Gloucester, the plastic surgeon. The official version of his death was that he’d just sat too close to a fire and melted.

  “But just suppose he was killed to stop him telling something that he knew? I put two and two together and hit the jackpot. Let me reconstruct a scene for you: You were out in the garden—probably hanging out some clothes—when along came one of Dumpty’s trained pie-blackbirds and pecked off your nose.

  “So there you were, standing in the garden, your hand in front of your face, when along comes the Fat Man with an offer you couldn’t refuse. He could introduce you to a plastic surgeon who could fix you up with a nose as good as new, for a price. And no-one need ever know. Am I right so far?”

  She nodded dumbly, then finding her voice, muttered: “Pretty much. But I ran back into the parlour after the attack, to eat some bread and honey. That was where he found me.”

  “Fair enough.” The colour was starting to come back into her cheeks now. “So you had the operation from Foster, and no-one was going to be any the wiser. Until Dumpty told you that he had photos of the op. You had to get rid of him. A couple of days later you were out walking in the palace grounds. There was Humpty, sitting on a wall, his back to you, gazing out into the distance. In a fit of madness, you pushed. And Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

  “But now you were in big trouble. Nobody suspected you of his murder, but where were the photographs? Foster didn’t have them, although he smelled a rat and had to be disposed of—before he could see me. But you didn’t know how much he’d told me, and you still didn’t have the snapshots, so you took me on to find out. And that was your mistake, sister.”

  Her lower lip trembled, and my heart quivered. “You won’t turn me in, will you?”

  “Sister, you tried to frame me this afternoon. I don’t take kindly to that.”

  With a shaking hand she started to unbutton her blouse. “Perhaps we could come to some sort of arrangement?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Your Majesty. Mrs Horner’s little boy Jack was always taught to keep his hands off royalty It’s a pity, but that’s how it is.” To be on the safe side I looked away, which was a mistake. A cute little ladies’ pistol was in her hands and pointing at me before you could sing a song of sixpence. The shooter may have been small, but I knew it packed enough of a wallop to take me out of the game permanently.

  This dame was lethal.

  “Put that gun down, Your Majesty.” Sergeant O’Grady strolled through the bedroom door, his police special clutched in his ham-like fist.

  “I’m sorry I suspected you, Horner,” he said drily. “You’re lucky I did, though, sure and begorrah. I had you trailed here and I overheard the whole thing.”

  “Hi, Sarge, thanks for stopping by. But I hadn’t finished my explanation. If you’ll take a seat I’ll wrap it up.”

  He nodded brusquely, and sat down near the door. His gun hardly moved.

  I got up from the bed and walked over to the Queen. “You see, Toots, what I didn’t tell you was who did have the snaps of your nose job. Humpty did, when you killed him.”

  A charming frown crinkled her perfect brow. “I don’t understand . . . I had the body searched.”

  “Sure, afterwards. But the first people to get to the Fat Man were the King’s Men. The cops. And one of them pocketed the envelope. When any fuss had died down the blackmail would have started again. Only this time you wouldn’t have known who to kill. And I owe you an apology.” I bent down to tie my shoelaces.

  “Why?”

  “I accused you of trying to frame me this afternoon. You didn’t. That arrow was the property of a boy who was the best archer in my school—I should have recognised that distinctive fletching anywhere. Isn’t that right,” I said, turning back to the door, “. . . ‘Sparrow’ O’Grady?”

  Under the guise of tying up my shoelaces I had already palmed a couple of the Queen’s jam tarts, and, flinging one of them upwards, I neatly smashed the room’s only light bulb.

  It only delayed the shooting a few seconds, but a few seconds was all I needed, and as the Queen of Hearts and Sergeant ‘Sparrow’ O’Grady cheerfully shot each other to bits, I split.

  In my business, you have to look after number one.

  Munching on a jam tart I walked out of the palace grounds and into the street. I paused by a trash-can, to try to burn the manila envelope of photographs I had pulled from O’Grady’s pocket as I walked past him, but it was raining so hard they wouldn’t catch.

  When I got back to my office I phoned the tourist board to complain. They said the rain was good for the farmers, and I told them what they could do with it.

  They said that things are tough all over.

  And I said. Yeah.

  VIRUS

  There was a computer game, I was given it,

  one of my friends gave it to me, he was playing it,

  he said, it’s brilliant, you should play it,

  and I did, and it was.

  I copied it off the disk he gave me

  for anyone, I wanted everyone to play it.

  Everyone should have this much fun.

  I sent it upline to bulletin boards

  but mainly I got it out to all of my friends.

  (Personal contact. That’s the way it was given to me.)

  My friends were like me: some were scared of viruses,

  someone gave you a game on disk, next week or Friday the 13th

  it reformatted your hard disk or corrupted your memory.

  But this one never did that. This was dead safe.

  Even my friends who didn’t like computers started to play:

  as you get better the game gets harder;

  maybe you never win but you can get pretty good.

  I’m pretty good.

  Of course I have to spend a lot of time playing it.

  So do my friends. And their friends.

  And just the people you meet, you can see them,

  walking down the old motorways

  or standing in queues, away from their computers,

  away from the arcades that sprang up overnight,

  but they play it in their heads in the meantime,

  combining shapes,

  puzzling over contours, putting colours next to colours,

  twisting signals to new screen sections,

  listening to the music.

  Sure, people think about it, but mainly they play it.

  My record’s eighteen hours at a stretch.

  40,012 points, 3 fanfares.

  You play through the tears, the aching wrist, the hunger, after a while

  it all goes away.

  All of it except the game, I should say.

  There’s no room in my mind any more; no room for other things.

  We copied the game, gave it to our friends.

  It transcends language, occupies our time,

  sometimes I think I’m forgetting things these days.

  I wonder what happened to the TV. There used to be TV.

  I wonder what will happen when I run out of canned food.

  I wonder where all the people went. And then I realise how,

  if I’m fast enough, I can put a black square next to a red line,

  mirror it and rotate them so they both disappear,

  clearing the left block

  for a white bubble to rise . . .

  (So they both disappear.)

  And when
the power goes off for good then I

  Will play it in my head until I die.

  LOOKING FOR THE GIRL

  I WAS nineteen in 1965, in my drainpipe trousers with my hair quietly creeping down towards my collar. Every time you turned on the radio the Beatles were singing Help! and I wanted to be John Lennon with all the girls screaming after me, always ready with a cynical quip. That was the year I bought my first copy of Penthouse from a small tobacconist’s in the King’s Road. I paid my few furtive shillings, and went home with it stuffed up my jumper, occasionally glancing down to see if it had burnt a hole in the fabric.

  The copy has long since been thrown away, but I’ll always remember it: sedate letters about censorship; a short story by H. E. Bates and an interview with an American novelist I had never heard of; a fashion spread of mohair suits and paisley ties, all to be bought on Carnaby Street. And best of all, there were girls, of course; and best of all the girls there was Charlotte.

  Charlotte was nineteen too.

  All the girls in that long-gone magazine seemed identical, with their perfect plastic flesh; not a hair out of place (you could almost smell the lacquer); smiling wholesomely at the camera while their eyes squinted at you through forest-thick eyelashes: white lipstick; white teeth; white breasts, bikini-bleached. I never gave a thought to the strange positions they had coyly arranged themselves into to avoid showing the slightest curl or shadow of pubic hair—I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at anyway. I had eyes only for their pale bottoms and breasts, their chaste but inviting come-on glances.

  Then I turned the page, and I saw Charlotte. She was different from the others. Charlotte was sex; she wore sexuality like a translucent veil, like a heady perfume.

  There were words beside the pictures and I read them in a daze. “The entrancing Charlotte Reave is nineteen . . . a resurgent individualist and beat poet, contributor to FAB Magazine . . .” Phrases stuck to my mind as I pored over the flat pictures: she posed and pouted in a Chelsea flat—the photographer’s, I guessed—and I knew that I needed her.

  She was my age. It was fate.

  Charlotte.

  Charlotte was nineteen.

  I bought Penthouse regularly after that, hoping she’d appear again. But she didn’t. Not then.

  Six months later my mum found a shoebox under my bed, and looked inside it. First she threw a scene, then she threw out all the magazines, finally she threw me out. The next day I got a job and a bedsit in Earl’s Court, without, all things considered, too much trouble.

  The job, my first, was at an electrical shop off the Edgware Road. All I could do was change a plug, but in those days people could afford to get an electrician in to do just that. My boss told me I could learn on the job.

  I lasted three weeks. My first job was a proper thrill—changing the plug on the bedside light of an English film-star, who had achieved fame through his portrayal of laconic, Cockney casanovas. When I got there he was in bed with two honest-to-goodness dolly-birds. I changed the plug and left—it was all very proper. I didn’t even catch a glimpse of nipple, let alone get invited to join them.

  Three weeks later I got fired and lost my virginity, on the same day. It was a posh place in Hampstead, empty apart from the maid, a little dark-haired woman, a few years older than me. I got down on my knees to change the plug, and she climbed on a chair next to me to dust off the top of a door. I looked up: under her skirt she was wearing stockings, and suspenders, and, so help me, nothing else. I discovered what happened in the bits the pictures didn’t show you.

  So I lost my cherry under a dining-room table in Hampstead. You don’t see maidservants any more. They have gone the way of the bubble-car and the dinosaur.

  It was afterwards that I lost my job. Not even my boss, convinced as he was of my utter incompetence, believed I could have taken three hours to change a plug—and I wasn’t about to tell him that I’d spent two of the hours I’d been gone hiding underneath the dining-room table when the master and mistress of the house came home unexpectedly, was I?

  I got a succession of short-lived jobs after that: first as a printer, then as a typesetter, before I wound up in a little ad agency above a sandwich shop in Old Compton Street.

  I carried on buying Penthouse. Everybody looked like an extra in The Avengers, but they looked like that in real life. Articles on Woody Allen and Sappho’s island, Batman and Vietnam, strippers in action wielding whips, fashion and fiction and sex.

  The suits gained velvet collars, and the girls messed up their hair. Fetish was fashion. London was swinging, the magazine covers were psychedelic, and if there wasn’t acid in the drinking water, we acted as if there ought to have been.

  I saw Charlotte again in 1969, long after I’d given up on her. I thought that I had forgotten what she looked like. Then one day the head of the agency dropped a Penthouse on my desk—there was a cigarette ad we’d placed in it that he was particularly pleased with. I was twenty-three, a rising star, running the art department as if I knew what I was doing, and sometimes I did.

  I don’t remember much about the issue itself; all I remember is Charlotte. Hair wild and tawny, eyes provocative, smiling like she knew all the secrets of life, and she was keeping them close to her naked chest. Her name wasn’t Charlotte then, it was Melanie, or something like that. The text said that she was nineteen.

  I was living with a dancer called Rachel at the time, in a flat in Camden Town. She was the best-looking, most delightful woman I’ve ever known, was Rachel. And I went home early with those pictures of Charlotte in my briefcase, and locked myself in the bathroom, and I wanked myself into a daze.

  We broke up shortly after that, me and Rachel.

  The ad agency boomed—everything in the sixties’ boomed—and in 1971 I was given the task of finding “The Face” for a clothing label. They wanted a girl who would epitomise everything sexual; who would wear their clothes as if she were about to reach up and rip them off, if some man didn’t get there first. And I knew the perfect girl: Charlotte.

  I phoned Penthouse, who didn’t know what I was talking about, but, reluctantly, put me in touch with both of the photographers who had shot her in the past. The man at Penthouse didn’t seen convinced when I told them it was the same girl each time.

  I got hold of the photographers, trying to find her agency.

  They said she didn’t exist.

  At least not in any way you could pin down, she didn’t. Sure, both of them knew the girl I meant. But, as one of them told me, “like, weird”, she’d come to them. They’d paid her a modelling fee and sold the pictures. No, they didn’t have any addresses for her.

  I was twenty-six, and a fool. I saw immediately what must be happening: I was being given the runaround. Some other ad agency had obviously signed her, was planning a big campaign around her, had paid the photographers to keep quiet. I cursed and I shouted at them, over the phone. I made outrageous financial offers.

  They told me to fuck off.

  And the next month she was in Penthouse. No longer a psychedelic tease mag, it had become classier—the girls had grown pubic hair, had man-eating glints in their eyes. Men and women romped in soft focus through cornfields, pink against the gold.

  Her name, said the text, was Belinda. She was an antique dealer. It was Charlotte all right, although her hair was dark, and piled in rich ringlets over her head. The text also gave her age: nineteen.

  I phoned my contact at Penthouse and got the name of the photographer, John Felbridge. I rang him. Like the others, he claimed to know nothing about her, but by now I’d learned a lesson. Instead of shouting at him down the telephone line, I gave him a job, on a fairly sizeable account, shooting a small boy eating ice-cream. Felbridge was long-haired, in his late thirties, with a ratty fur coat and plimsolls that were flapping open, but a good photographer. After the shoot I took him out for a drink, and we talked about the lousy weather, and photography, and decimal currency, and his previous work, and Charlotte.

/>   “So you were saying you’d seen the pictures in Penthouse?” Felbridge said.

  I nodded. We were both slightly drunk.

  “I’ll tell you about that girl. You know something? She’s why I want to give up glamour work, and go legit. Said her name was Belinda.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “I’m getting to that aren’t I? I thought she was from an agency, didn’t I? She knocks on the door, I think strewth! and invite her in. She said she wasn’t from an agency, she says she’s selling . . .” He wrinkled his brow, confused, “. . . Isn’t that odd? I’ve forgotten what she was selling. Maybe she wasn’t selling anything. I don’t know. I’ll forget me own name next.

  “I knew she was something special. Asked her if she’d pose, told her it was kosher, I wasn’t just trying to get into her pants, and she agrees. Click, flash! Five rolls, just like that. As soon as we’ve finished she’s got her clothes back on, heads out the door pretty-as-you-please. ‘What about your money?’ I says to her. ‘Send it to me,’ she says, and she’s down the steps and onto the road.”

  “So you have got her address?” I asked, trying to keep the interest out of my voice.

  “No. Bugger all. I wound up setting her fee aside in case she comes back.”

  I remember, in with the disappointment, wondering whether his cockney accent was real or merely fashionable.

  “But what I was leading up to is this. When the pictures came back, I knew I’d . . . well, as far as tits and fanny went, no—as far as the whole photographing women thing went—I’d done it all. She was women, see? I’d done it. No, no, let me get you one. My shout. Bloody Mary, wasn’t it? I gotter say, I’m looking forward to our future work together . . .”

  There wasn’t to be any future work.

  The agency was taken over by an older, bigger firm, who wanted our accounts. They incorporated the initials of the firm into their own, and kept on a few top copywriters, but they let the rest of us go.

  I went back to my flat and waited for the offers of work to pour in, which they didn’t, but a friend of a girlfriend of a friend starting chatting to me late one night in a club (music by a guy I’d never heard of, name of David Bowie. He was dressed as a spaceman, the rest of his band were in silver cowboy outfits. I didn’t even listen to the songs), and the next thing you know I was managing a rock band of my own, The Diamonds of Flame. Unless you were hanging around the London club scene in the early seventies you’ll never have heard of them, although they were a very good band. Tight, lyrical. Five guys. Two of them are currently in world-league super groups. One of them’s a plumber in Walsall; he still sends me Christmas cards. The other two have been dead for fifteen years: anonymous ODs. They went within a week of each other, and it broke up the band.