Balzac of the Badlands Read online

  A few weeks later, after doing more dogwork for The Bison, I get a call from Mikey asking me to tail the Green Girl, who he suspects is cheating on him. I say yes. Got nothing better to do and it gets me out of my pit and into the world – well, Stamford Hill. Plus the GG – a bit skinny for me – has a nice pair of pins and I’m not going to be seeing The Mermaid for a while so will enjoy the vicarious eroticism during my peripatetic investigations. Whoa, Balzac!

  A shorthaired Dachshund walks by on my first morning of trailing the Green Girl. I don’t see it at first and nearly bump into its owner. I swerve at the last minute, apologise, and try to keep track of where the GG’s going. I look down and ‘blam!’ The dog starts howling, pissing its little self and I get an instant guide to Stamford Hill’s doggy news. By sift and edit, I realise this little sausage dog is doing me a favour. Its owner must walk it at the same time every day. Along with strained attempts to sniff other dogs’ parts, the piles of do, the lampposts and trees, the smells from the kosher butchers, are trails of odour, like wispy clouds, drifting out of the GG’s shoes (she always wears the same pair – green versions of Dorothy’s red shoes from the Wizard of Oz) and then the GG stops, rings a bell (I can hear it, not see it), opens a door and disappears. And there, not ten feet ahead of me, is the actual door. No sign of the GG, though. I look down at the little fellow, and if he hadn’t been puking and shitting himself, I would have kissed his shiny little nose.

  Five doorbells tell me the building is inhabited by travel agents, solicitors, a Kurdish political party, Lydia Luna – palmistry and tarot cards by appointment only, and on the third floor a place called The Anpu Centre. Now, which one is the GG visiting? Could be three of five. Rule out the political party, the GG is about as political as Big Bird. Travel agents? No. Mikey would sort that. Solicitors? Maybe. Palm reader? Definite maybe. The Anpu Centre? Hmmm… I look back at the dog and get another jolt. The dog’s looking up the GG’s skirt as she exits the building and I can see her tanned legs and what appears to be a smoke trail issuing from her emerald silk La Perlas. Thanks, Fido. I strike the palm reader from my list – that would have been a very unusual divination. The solicitor could be schtupping her. I’ll look in and then I’ll check the Anpu Centre.

  The carpet, worn and smelling of Branston pickle, sticks to my shoes, and the soles make a phlep-phlep sound when I walk. The walls, cream coloured and decorated with bad paintings of boats. On the first landing, two doors. One has a sign that reads Toilet, so I’m guessing the other is the solicitor’s office, and after being shocked by my own powers of deduction, I see a small laminated card stuck on the wall to the left of the door handle. It reads: ‘Mordecai Marx – Solicitor’ and under that a phone number. I try the door. Locked. I put my ear against it. Silence. I knock. Nothing. I take out my notebook and jot down the number.

  I walk up three flights of stairs. There is a skylight and the top landing has a thick monkey-brown carpet, two shed-door-brown leather armchairs face each other and between them is a black coffee table topped with an immaculate fan of glossy home and garden magazines. ‘The Anpu Centre’ reads the etching on the frosted-glass door. A clear-plastic bell beckons me to ‘press once’. I do. The door opens.

  A woman sitting behind the desk smiles and I say,

  ‘Er, do you have any leaflets?’

  She puts her head to one side and nods. There are two other doors in the office and a low drone comes from behind one of them.

  ‘Of course, sir,’ she says, and opens a drawer and shuffles pamphlets that look to me like Chinese-takeaway menus.

  ‘You may use our waiting area to peruse these or feel free to take them home with you,’ she says, offering them.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, trying to fathom the noise. It sounds like a filter in a swimming pool.

  ‘Er, thanks,’ I say again. ‘I’ll look at them later. At home. When I have more time. I’ll call when I’ve decided,’ I say, backing out of the office.

  ‘Do,’ she says, ‘and make sure you check out our membership discounts.’

  ‘I will,’ I say, ‘I will.’

  I notice that the smile on her face never falters the whole time I am in the office, that and the way she is sitting makes me think of the look on a ventriloquist’s dummy’s face if controlled by a spinached-up Popeye. I leave the building, cross the road and sit on the chewing-gummed plastic seats at a bus stop to read the literature. Bloody hell. Never thought of having that done.

  I call Mikey and tell him, ‘Sorry, mate, your girl’s cheating on you.’

  Silence from Mikey’s end. I leave it for a minute and then say,

  ‘If you call thrice-weekly visits to a backstreet colonic irrigationist cheating.’

  ‘Arse,’ he says, ‘I had plans for tonight. Now you’ve wrecked ‘em.’

  I say nothing.

  The job pays well and Mikey gives me a few other little tasks, which we won’t go into right now.

  After a few months and couple of referrals I have enough money and balls to start my own little business – The Bison says it’s cool and we can pool resources if necessary. JD.

  At some point later in this story, we’ll meet Mikey and the gang again. And Mordecai Marx. Remember him? The absent solicitor? The GG might not make it back, though, even for a brief reappearance. Mikey bought her a set of speaking scales so that she can keep an eye on her weight – she’s still standing on them, she thinks she’s in a play by that Harold Pinter bloke.

  ***

  She chose this place. She thinks. Or did it choose her? Choose her? Her parents will be sick with worry but she doesn’t want to get them involved. There is something in her hair. Last night. The plan is to get the refugees out of the lorries. Some things. In her hair. On her head. Under her scalp. Ozan and his men are to take them from the yard, and then dump the lorries somewhere in London. Crawling. Inching. Wriggling. Itching. Ozan says a gang, chancing their arm now the Badirkhans are out of the way, are the ones smuggling the Kurds into the country. There’s a spider’s web. Once they find out it’s other Kurds who are hijacking the lorries they’ll leave it be – they’ll drop it, write it off. Too much hassle. And what for? Field gangs? Cheap labour. 160 people. Weighed down by insects, it sags. This is not exactly how she planned it. It reminds her of childhood holidays and beach balls on a trampoline. Two days ago. Tells everyone she knows she’s going away for a few days just so they won’t call her parents’ home. The spider’s vibrator receptors. Plans to be back home by morning so her parents won’t miss her. Going away for a few days. They won’t mind. She’s a grown woman. The spider scurries from the centre along the walking thread. Sleep. Get up, go see Ozan, help him with the side she knows best – forms, applications, finding money to pay for all this. Hurries to the flies caught on sticky lines. No. She has to be Wonder Woman, Charlie’s Angels all rolled into one, She-bloody-Ra! Like those people on the lorry. Her Timberland boots are sodden and heavy and her right ankle is swollen inside her spongy socks, pressing against the sides like overripe fruit. Punctures their bodies. Injects them with venom. She grazes her hand jumping from the back of the lorry and it’s hot and stinging and she’s back in the playground face down, her hands smarting in the gravel as she falls trying to dodge Suzanne Bricker while playing British Bulldog. Wraps them in a shroud of silk. And like that day. For now. For later. But still the buzzing. She begins to cry and wants her daddy. The roar of the engines. Shit! The spider works hard but the flies are many and bob on the web like rotten, angry fruit. Shit! ‘I’m coming. I’m coming,’ the spider says, as yet another guest entangles itself in the trap. Shit! And she runs. But what can she do? Stay? She looks at the sky, watches it split and she sees beyond the blue, the semolina clouds, and the pink there, the red there, like veils. Pull yourself together, Sarah, she tells herself. The spider, gorged on flies, its pale head bulging, its mandibles click and ooze a clear liquid, its legs straddling, squeezing, popping, bursting. She jumped out of a plane, she climbed a mountain, she
spent a fortnight in Marbella with ten other girls. This is nothing. Crashing to the floor with the weight of the cocooned flies, the web brushes her cheek in its descent and she knows this is impossible but she smells the carrion breath of the flies. But the tears still come and she thinks back. The first time she hears of the Kurdish problem. Knows what it is. Spiracle, trachea, tracheole, trachea, spiracle, see herself reflected as a mosaic in their compound eyes, feel their mouths reach out to suck, call to her for help, she watches their antennae tremble. The sound of gunfire, a sound she’s never heard before. Has she? And all of them know her fear, her disgust.

  ***

  I like walking around the park. I know what you’re thinking, ‘Come on, Balzac. Get a bloody move on, for fuck’s sake. Narrative imperative and all that.’ I know. I know. But a good walk clears my head. Allows me to think. The things I’ve seen and done here. Saw the Sex Pistols reunion gig, partied at the Fleadhs, sometimes even visited the fair. I had sex for the first time over where there’s now a baseball diamond – bat and pitcher’s mitt. Played football on Saturdays and Sundays. Swallowed, snorted, injected, and inserted about every drug you can imagine. Dumped girlfriends, been dumped by girlfriends. Ran around the athletics track bollock naked and pissed as a fart. HSSJ tells me the park was opened in 1869, it used to be called Hornsey Wood but they cut down most of the trees and renamed it Finsbury Park. It was a place where Londoners could escape the smoke. At one time, years back, it had a chrysanthemum house, a bandstand, and a steamboat on the lake. Now it has winos, crazies, and muggers. They cleaned up the lake a few years ago. Wonder how many bodies they found. I know of two.

  I buy a bottle of Diet Coke from the news kiosk by Manor House station and start my walk up Green Lanes to the ‘ladder’. While I’m in the mood, I’ll fill you in on the ‘ladder’ and then I won’t have to keep putting it in inverted commas. Saves on the typing. Then I’ll give you a peep at the day’s itinerary. Just over a decade after Finsbury Park opens, and because of London expanding outwards – must’ve looked like someone blowing up a kipper-coloured balloon – the ladder – a series of roads between Green Lanes and Wightman Road – is built. If you go east from Green Lanes but not any further north than St. Ann’s Road, Grand Parade – where the shops are – turns into a spine and the streets radiating off it – what we call Harringay Gardens but there aren’t any – combine with the ladder to form a giant ribcage. Grand Parade, built in 1899, has some of the best kebab shops in the world; you can buy all types of weird fruit and vegetables, and get takeout booze 24 hours a day. Sorted. It’s got a bit poncified lately – the estate agents call it gentrified – but there’s still enough action to keep it buzzing and me in readies.

  Turks, Kurds, Greeks, Irish, Somalis, Jews, and the allsorts that make up the rest of us North Londoners congregate here, roguish, nerves cocked. Then there are the gangs: I’ve already mentioned Mikey O’Reilly and the O’Goons – strictly second division, pick up scraps, do OK, stray enough from the law to make a good living, but not so far as to much bother the police or the other gangs. Then there’s the Eeaveses – Jonathan and Martin. Jonathan gives me the willies. Though, I’ve heard that’s not what he gives his girlfriends. Martin is saner, more amiable, that’s if you think a Taser massage is the height of etiquette. To keep the football analogy going, they’re Arsenal on a good day, Manchester City on a bad. About a year ago, another gang, run by another two brothers, Kurdish – the Badirkhans – got their comeuppance in the courts. One of the brothers is doing muesli and answering to the name of Doris in one of Her Majesty’s bang-ups somewhere in England and the other brother’s watching Anal Diddler DVDs and poking his mistresses in a ‘prison’ in the Netherlands. They ran a billion-pound business dealing mostly in smack, people smuggling, and gun running, with additional little side orders of protection, blackmail, and torture. Even the Eaveses gave them a wide birth and let them alone. No Chingford mansions for the Badirkhans, mind. They ran their empire from a café. Couple of years back they fought a war – the Battle of Green Lanes – with other Kurds – political refugees, I think – in the street. The police cracked down and put the brothers away for a score or more each. Without the Badirkhans around, the gang broke up and the Lanes became more peaceful. The young Kurds now more interested in social rather than billy clubs.

  Right. Let’s track down HSSJ, fill him in on the call from Mrs. Beckford, get his lock on events, put plan in action, man power, time, cost, that sort of thing. Then I’d better call The Mermaid, charm her, promise her dinner and a drink, or a night in with a Turkish takeout, bottle of wine, and a DVD. I know what she likes. OK. I’m just crossing Endymion Road, I dodge past the second-hand fridges and washing machines littering the corner, look over to the McDonald’s, my stomach’s growling, look at my watch – 11 a.m., perfect timing, and I’m into the belly of the beast. First stop: The Beaconsfield.

  The sun draws greasy stripes across the threadbare carpet. Pencil-thin, the light illuminates black sticky patches, chewing gum, ground in and mixed with beer, ash, and whatever’s been walked in from the street – dog shit, foot-printed buns, kebab corpses. Somewhere in the world, waistcoated men play snooker. Six punters sit at the bar already halfway through their pints, their whiskies, their barley wines, all of them ignoring the big screens at either end of the pub. I know them all. John the Singer, Vince the Bike, Hairy Gary, Rich G, Brendan O’K, and Micky B. None look up. None of them say a thing, not to me, not to each other. Wiping a glass with a newly steamed towel, Eric the barman nods and reaches for a Stella glass. I shake my head.

  ‘Homo been in?’ I say.

  ‘Not yet,’ Eric says, still wiping. At this rate, it will take him until Prince Charles’s coronation to clean all the pub’s glasses.

  ‘Was he in last night?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Eric says.

  Because the television is muted, subtitles on, jukebox off, I can hear the flush of a toilet, the cat-mewl creak of a door, and footsteps. I look over to see who is stepping out of the gents’. Fuck. That’s all I need. He doesn’t see me at first, but just as I’m about to turn and walk out, Inaccessible says,

  ‘Balls Ache, you fucker!’

  While he bends over and picks up a pool ball from the torn and beer-stained table, I’ll fill you in about Inaccessible.

  There’s a volcanic island in the south Atlantic Ocean, southwest of Tristan da Cunha – sounds like a Brazilian striker – the Dutch discovered in the mid-17th century. The sailors named it ‘Inaccessible’ because they had trouble landing and could get no further than the beach, its interior difficult to penetrate. Likewise the reasoning behind some of Inaccessible’s crimes. Habitual doesn’t quite cut it in describing Inaccessible’s criminal career. He makes Norman Stanley Fletcher look like Bonnie Langford. He started with shoplifting – community service. Stealing cars – two years in Feltham Young Offenders. Week he got out, broke into his grandmother’s house on his 18th birthday, stole some jewellery and tried to sell it to an off-duty policeman drinking lunch in the Finsbury Tavern. Two years. He gets out after one. He beats up his granny, his dad beats him up; with the help of his mate Dec he jumps his dad. Halfway through the fight, Dec changes sides and starts beating up Inaccessible, his dad then turns on Dec, Dec gets a kicking, someone calls the police and they all get banged up. Where does Balzac come into this? I hear you ask. After doing three in the Scrubs, Inny’s out and he’s got it in for the world. He goes round Dec’s, who got out a year earlier, and slaps his girlfriend about. Problem. Dec’s girlfriend lives in the flat above mine. I hear her screams. I run up the stairs. Inny’s got hold of her hair and she’s bent over and he’s lamping her with uppercuts. He’s so into it that he doesn’t see me coming. I kick him in the kidneys, he goes down. Dec’s girlfriend – can’t remember her name – goes at Inaccessible’s nuts with her stilettos. While she’s at it, I call the law. Now, I could’ve just given him a pasting – or let whatshername puncture his pink and shrivellings – but I know I
nny won’t forget and I don’t wanna be walking the streets, looking over my shoulder. I didn’t grass him up. I stopped him murdering Dec’s tart. The filth are there in no time. After a while, they manage to pull her off him, she’s broken a heel, we know because that’s all she’s screaming at Inny, and for a second I think she has a unique speech impediment, then the penny, oh shiny shiny, drops, ‘You broke me Choos, you cunt! You broke me Choos.’ They cost her 300 notes, apparently. Nice. Black, five-inch heels, rope of pearls up the front, little strap around the ankle. 300? Jimmy Choos by way of Camden Market and 30 quid more like. I’ve got a thing about shoes. Later. So much later. The police bundle him into the car. And, apart from court, I haven’t seen him since. Until today, and, somehow, I don’t think I’ve heard the last of Graham ‘Inaccessible’ Powell.

  And an orange pool ball whizzes past so close I can read the number 5 on it. It crashes into a pillar behind me, showering plaster over Micky B, who automatically covers with a newspaper his glass of Gold Label. Inaccessible. Inaccessible. When did he get out? Now the 13 ball whizzes through the air towards me, back-spinning. I duck and the ball thumps into the curtains, throwing clouds of dust into the air. I have two options. Run. Fight. I’m really not up to either. I need to eat. Maybe I should have had that Stella. Inaccessible picks up a cue from the table and walks around the bar to where I’m standing. So I walk around the bar to where he was standing. He sidles back, cutting me off from the pool table. OK. This could get all Keystone if we’re not careful. Better that than a trip to the A&E, though. I have a choice of weaponry. Glass. Chairs. But he has the edge with reach. Gonna need some projectiles. I go through the hatch and behind the bar, it offers me some protection and I’ve an array of bottles at hand. Eric continues cleaning the same glass, not bothered by what’s occurring. The six punters stare fixedly at their drinks. I keep an eye on Inaccessible and grab a bottle of Magners from the fridge. Nice. Heavy. I flip it, hold it by the neck. It feels like one of those old German hand grenades – Stielhandgranate.