Balzac of the Badlands Read online

  ‘So, to recap. Father pays a visit to our fearless constabulary. They are up to their armpits shooting Brazilian tourists. Father comes to you and you employ your skills in the bleeding obvious. Father’s impatient and goes to look for his daughter. He doesn’t tell his good woman because he’s already wasting the Costa del Sol retirement money employing your not-so- good self.’

  ‘Case solved. Not. Why not tell her? She’s got enough to worry about. I agree he might’ve gone looking for his daughter but what then? Why hasn’t he called?’

  H is halfway to the toilet. Our drinks are on the table. I spit the liquid back into the cup. Under a thin layer of scum is coffee white and sugared. I look at H’s doodlings. In the right margin, he has drawn a stick figure of a man and a smaller figure with a triangle just before the foreshortened legs begin – father and daughter. I get it. In a bubble above the stick-daughter’s head is written ‘space = loss = time = space = loss’ and in the bubble above the stick-father’s head ‘proximity + love + loss = loss - love - proximity’. Below these is another triangle made up of sixteen smaller triangles and in each of these is a number and letter. This is H’s betting system. This is why he’s sitting in The Salisbury at 12 noon, drinking Guinness, and not having his feet massaged in a hot tub in Aruba.

  ‘Rather pungent aroma emanating from the gentlemen’s lavatory,’ he says, appearing from nowhere and nodding back towards the toilets.

  ‘Yeah. Homeless bloke. Last night. Shat himself. Think they called the law.’

  ‘So, daughter’s separated from boyfriend…?’

  ‘Yeah. Staying with parents until she finds somewhere.’

  ‘I would say the daughter, unhappy that her parents continue to treat her as if she still dressed in OshKosh B’Gosh and who meticulously maintain her bedroom as a shrine to My Little Pony, doesn’t want to hurt them by saying she no longer wishes to stay at the familial home, goes to a friend’s house and plans to call home in a couple of days when she’s had time to herself, a few bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and a Marks & Spencer vegetarian lasagne. Parents overreacting.’

  ‘Could be. Could be. And dad?’

  ‘Panics. “My little daughter.”. I take it he has money?’

  ‘Yeah, tidy. Owns that haulage company I mentioned.’

  ‘Watched too many Prime Suspects, starts channelling Peter Sutcliffe and Suzy Lamplugh, thinks he’ll throw money at the problem. Picks up Yellow Pages, Abracadabra Agency are busy, Anubis engaged, Astaroth out of business, so he calls you. You don’t deliver his daughter back to him as soon as, so he’s off on his own probably dressed in an old raincoat, sucking a lollipop, driving a red car with a white stripe, because he won’t get far fat, blind, and in a wheelchair. He’s only been gone a few hours. He’s likely to be on his way home as we speak.’

  ‘OK. Do us a favour. You look into the father. I’ll take the daughter. Find one, I reckon we’ll find the other.’

  ‘I’ll just pop across the road and wager a small amount of sterling on a thoroughbred that has taken my fancy and, as you would say, I’ll be all over it.’

  ‘Turn your phone on. I’ll call if I find anything. You do the same. Whatever, meet me back here at seven tonight. We’ll have a pint and then I’ll buy you a shashlik.’

  ‘Agreed.’ And he’s gone and I remember that I forgot to remember to tell him about Inaccessible. Later.

  ***

  Smeared. Minor and major, like constellations, gaseous fairy lights falling down, clanging and crashing as loud as ball-bearings in a steel drum. The driver of the van – Middle Eastern? – seems embarrassed by Beckford’s presence. Unzipped or untethered, the light, primitive, slipping through what looks like wet canvas, heavy curtains. The gates to the yard are locked. In and out. No one here yet. First dark, then not so, then darker again. A lorry is parked by the unloading bay but no other vehicles. Strange. There should be at least three here and the one that is he doesn’t recognise. Plum smell, fruit of the meat, meat of the fruit, plum smell, pineapple, sweet but you wouldn’t want to eat it. No. The bearded man takes the keys from him and holds them in front of his face. Which ones? Tongue flesh. Sea food. Like egg sacs, veiny, purple lines on the coral pink. He asks, splaying the keys in his gloved hand. He nods at the two on the right. ‘The ones with the red fobs,’ he says. Edible. Not in his lifetime. The bearded man unlocks the padlock and then the gate and slides it back, pushes him into the office. Pulpy. Prod it and it gives. Not peachy. What are those things? Not plums. Said that. The usual smells: diesel, sodden wood, mud, but undercut with a stench of backed up drains, manure. Red out of orange, like a sunburned arse, like a cartoon drawing of someone bending over on a tropical beach, like the sun going down off the Pacific coast of America. ‘Spread out and make sure no one comes in,’ the bearded man tells his colleagues. What was that place? What is it? Hermosa Beach. Not tangerine. ‘Where’s your daughter?’ the bearded man says, pointing at the truck. And the argument they had in the long red sports car. Pelicans. The chilli cheese. ‘No idea,’ he says. ‘I haven’t seen her. In days.’ His head snaps back then forward as the man rabbit punches him. This place is filthy, reeking, as if someone had rendered bodies here, rendered memories. Outside, in the yard, he is forced to kneel, feels the gravel through his trousers, the material sopping up the dirty water of a puddle, stars boil in front of his eyes, and he retches. The maps grow more vague as the days go by. No one left to answer. No one left to answer to. ‘Don’t give me any more bollocks,’ the bearded man says. ‘Where is she?’ He spits a thick line of drool and vomit down his jacket and starts to gag. All he can think is this: the old man closes his eyes; he lies there whispering to himself, listening to himself. ‘Where’s my daughter, you bastard?’ ‘That’s what I want to know,’ says a man with a Geordie accent, and punches him again. And again. When they found him, they covered his face with an oily rag. Daughter? Nectarine.

  ***

  I can’t drive. It’s never interested me. I’ve lived in cities where it’s a pain to own a car. I had one lesson when I was seventeen. Tell a lie. I had half a lesson when I was seventeen. My mother paid for it as a birthday present. The car pulls up, blue, covered in driving-school decals and paraphernalia. The instructor is a fat geezer, his arse invades the driving seat. I get in and squash myself against the door while he goes through the instructions. What I think is a rather large belt buckle is in fact a second steering wheel – dual control. JD. We go through the turning on, looking behind stuff. Sweet as. Do all the indications, the checks, and we are out in traffic. The Seven Sisters with its schizoid scooters, delirious delivery vans, traumatized taxis, even the occasional hysterical horse. I get beeped, booped, and bipped. Just as we get to the synagogue I execute a perfect emergency stop, open the door, get out, and walk home. Enough of that. Since then, I’ve had to rely on London bloody transport, taxis, minicabs, or mates. That, or Shanks’s. And today feels like a Shanks’s day.

  Think when I’m walking, I only think when I’m walking. So, yesterday afternoon, I’m tracking down some leads on the daughter – Sarah her name is – Sarah Beckford. I’ve been through her address book, called everyone who’s in it. Nothing. They’d all seen her recently but not the day leading up to her disappearance. About a week ago, she’d thrown a big party to celebrate leaving her boyfriend, so most people in the book had either attended, spoken to, or had an email from her. Her work – she’s a fundraiser for a refugee charity – they told me she’d taken a few days’ leave and was talking about going off to the Cotswolds. I phoned all the hotels, guesthouses, holiday rentals – again, nothing. And there’s no reason for her to go under an assumed name. So, my reckoning – pissed off somewhere and she’ll be back in a few days once she calms down, someone’s telling me porkies and knows where she is, or some dark deeds are afoot. Sorry, I’ve always wanted to say that.

  I have other difficulties, too, but I won’t bore you with those. Not just yet. Mr. Beckford says he was the last to see Sarah. He met
her for lunch in a café in Palmers Green – when I say ‘café’ I mean café not caff – they’d had a nice chat – he’d waved her off into the afternoon crowd and that was it. She was supposed to come home for dinner – roast chicken – never showed. The Beckfords waited until morning and rang the police. The police told them, ever-so politely, to fuck off. They waited until the afternoon and came to me.

  The London sun seems powerless in its attempt to light the street; the low buildings filch the yellow heat, turning the rays cold, challenged. The cabbages wink at me with their great green eyelashes. Crates of chillies like newly shat emeralds and rubies. Cauliflowers swish their skirts up to reveal cellulitic arses, and there I can see the extruded alien eggs of the aubergines – squeaky – when not, viscid.

  ‘All right, Aziz?’ I say to the shopkeeper pyramiding his oranges.

  ‘Hello, mate,’ Aziz says, ‘Interest you in a mango?’

  ‘Not today, Az,’ I say, ‘I’m all mangoed out.’

  ‘Sweet,’ he says, and chucks me an apple, which I catch in my right hand, and take a bite.

  So I agreed to look for this girl and now I’m looking for her father as well. There’s a big Rottweiler that hangs out all day in a shop just up from here and I’ve put the poor thing through hell. I thought at one point it might have to start prowling the street wearing a nappy and a bib. I’ll cross the road and make sure I don’t give it the eyeball. I’ll keep my powers honed for some Palmers Green pooch. At this moment in time, I have absolutely no idea what’s happened to Mr. Beckford and his daughter. Against H’s theories, I’m leaning towards the dark deeds. Let’s lay it out as I walk. Daughter: fallen in canal, off building, car crash, assaulted, kidnapped, raped, murdered. Father: car crash, heart attack, brain haemorrhage, mugged, GBH, murdered. I wish my head was full of good things to think. Not all this sherbety doom and liquorice gloom. It’s the weather. It’s only early afternoon but the sky ahead looks like it’s already giving way to the plum-blue night, the aromatic wafts from the fruit and veg now sweetly violate the air, furled clouds like touch-me touch-me bruises. The whole street a zapping vengeful toothache I have to suffer in silence. The exhausted air is getting to me – I wonder if the pigeons wore their petrol collars before they moved inland, to the towns, the cities? Fuck the cliffs. Too dangerous, mate. Digression helps me focus and perform Homo Sapiens Sapiens Jones-like leaps of logic.

  Homo Sapiens Sapiens Jones, Homo, HSSJ, HSS, H. Ex-army, ex-university, ex-Wormwood (Scrubs and absinthe). Heroes: John Dee, John Donne, John Milton. Enemies: to be honest, whoever – or whatever – pisses him off at the time. At the moment, I do believe it’s closed-circuit television and Somerset Maugham. This is how my mind works: sky equals robin’s egg, pool-cue chalk, The Mermaid’s eyes. The sun is variously an old penny at the bottom of a swimming pool, a greasy thumbprint on baking paper, or a cycloptic owl undergoing Clockwork Orange-like torture while trying to find its way out of a pea-souper. This is how H’s mind works: sky equals an imprecise term to describe Terra’s denser gaseous atmosphere. And the sun? The sun’s a yellow dwarf, innit?

  So, my mind’s going like this – kidnap, ransom, kidnap, ransom. The old man’s well-off. Is that what he was doing? Was he going to pay the fuckers and they took him as well? Makes sense. I wonder if Mrs. Beckford has had a phone call she’s not telling me about.

  I’m at the fag end of Grand Parade leading on to the Turnpike, and from here, because I’m feeling lazy, I’ll catch the 141 to Palmers Green. As luck would have it, I can see one coming. Impatient and bustling, it looks like it’s about to leapfrog the endless white vans and silvered cars. ‘Come on, come on!’ it’s saying, like some bullish pumped-up sergeant major, ‘Get on with it, will ya?!’ I swipe my Oyster, climb the steps to the top deck, take a seat by the left window, and take out my book – can’t do that if you have to drive a car, can you? – and start to read: “Whosoever has observed that sedate and clerical bird, the rook, may perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward towards nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will suddenly detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight for some distance, and will there poise and linger; conveying to mere men the fancy that it is of some occult importance to the body politic, that this artful couple should pretend to have renounced connection with it.” Ahhh… Reading Dickens is like slipping into a warm bath with a pint of your best ale on one side, a cheese and bacon toastie on the other, your girlfriend’s in the bedroom putting on her finest rubber and latex, your mum’s left a roast in the oven and taken your shirts home to be ironed, and your mates are waiting for you down the pub, sharpening your darts, and chalking your finest cue. He can be a bugger, though, Dickens. Never got round to finishing this one. He up and died and left us all in the lurch.

  Right: “Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin…” I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn.

  ‘All right, my son?’

  No. No. For the love of Princess Puffer, no.

  ‘Sergeant Dumar,’ I say through grinding teeth.

  ‘Undercover, innit?’

  He smells of fags, fumes, and realism. His breath coming out in clammy gasps, his forehead a tic-tac-toe of lines and scars, his hair unfamiliar with comb and unashamedly dandruffed. His skin, the colour of used bathwater, sagging and waxy, ripples as the bus jerks, brakes.

  I really don’t need this conversation but here goes:

  ‘What are you undercovering for?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What are you undercovering about?’ I can feel a sugar low coming on.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Er, why are you undercover on the 141 in the middle of the afternoon?’

  ‘Gangs.’ And, unbelievably, he taps the side of his nose and arches his straggly eyebrows.

  ‘Gangs? On the 141? Don’t they go more for Mercs and Beemers?’

  ‘Youth gangs,’ he says and licks his lips, which, once together again look like over-packed luggage, ‘Somalians, innit?’

  ‘Is it?’ I say, starting to feel cold, sweaty, and stupid. Shit. ‘Somalis, you mean.’

  ‘Yeah, did a whole bus the other day. Four of ‘em. Stole jewellery, wallets, phones.’

  ‘Got any chocolate?’

  ‘Got a Yorkie,’ he says.

  ‘That’ll do. Give us a few chunks.’

  ‘Here,’ he says, throwing it at me, ‘have it.’

  I unwrap it and eat three of the big rectangles. Instantly, I feel my senses coming back to me. OK, I wasn’t hallucinating. I am sitting on the top deck of the 141 bus heading to Palmers Green and I am having a conversation about Somali gangs with Sergeant Dumar.

  ‘Where you off to?’ Dumar asks.

  ‘See a mate.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I’ve known Dumar since forever. We played football together when we were kids, always different teams, him in defence, me in attack. He joined the police force straight from school. He’s been a disappointed and petty man ever since.

  It takes some of us a long time to figure out what it is we want to be. My fantasy career has taken me from footballer to actor by way of pilot and chef. H has always wanted to be a university lecturer: tweeds, leather patches, pipe, glasses, stinky basset hound in wicker basket chewing on a collected Tennyson – the lot. Dumar? Dumar’s had ‘Oi, copper’ written all over him since birth. If he was ever mother-born, that is. My theory is that he hatched fully formed from a custodian helmet, his swaddling made from bobby-blue serge, his bottle a whistle, his comforter the chippered-off end of a truncheon used in the 1958 Notting Hill riots.

  I jump as Dumar asks, ‘You on a case?’

  ‘Me? Nah. Told you. Off to see a mate.’

  We’re outside Wood Green Shopping Centre and I’m about to ask Dumar if he wants the rest of his Yorkie back when he says,

  ‘Probably illegal immigrants.’

  ‘Who?’ I say?
/>
  ‘Somalians. No doubt they’ll be given penthouse flats, university places, and gold watches after they’ve exhausted the hospitality of the social and the NHS… Hospitality, get it?’

  ‘Yeah. Cheers, Dumar,’ I say, ‘Thanks for the enlightened racism.’

  ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna read my book.’

  ‘S’all right,’ he says, ‘I’m getting off here.’

  The crackling of his radio.

  ‘Sergeant Dumar.’

  ‘–––-’

  ‘Kurds? Yeah. Ten minutes? What ward?’

  ‘–––-’

  ‘Another lot of illegals,’ he says.

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘Kurds this time. In the North Middlesex. Stomach pumps. Smuggling heroin.’

  ‘What about the Somali mafia?’ I say.

  ‘They don’t come this far north,’ he says, ‘too cold, innit?’

  He gets off and I watch him cross the road in front of the bus, open the cerise doors of The Lord Nelson, and disappear into its contaminated embrace.

  I read: “..and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears. Their fallen leaves lie strewn thickly about.”

  ***

  I jump off the bus at Palmers Green and, still a bit weak from the hypo, stagger into the café, whip out the photo I have of Sarah, push it in front of the waiter’s nose.

  ‘Remember her?’

  ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘Sorry. Feeling a bit rough. Sugar low. Balzac. She’s missing.’

  ‘Yeah. She comes in twice, three times a week. Usually on her own. Last time I saw her she was with an older guy. Looked like her dad.’

  ‘Bang on. Notice her leave?’

  ‘They left together. She pecked him on the cheek. Went right. He went left.’