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  Freddy didn’t open it, but instead nodded, over to a display bookcase on the wall. Bertie smiled, – Quite a few been in today, and moved over to the wall. He grabbed a handle and pulled open a door. Behind it was a small, narrow room, with metal shelving stacked with magazines and videos. Two men were browsing, as Freddy walked in and pulled the bookcase door shut behind him. Freddy knew one of them.

  – Alroight, Perks, me old sport?

  Perky Navarro averted his gaze from the cover of Long-Tongued Lesbo Love-Babes No.2 and smiled at Freddy. – Freddy, old boy. How are you? He did a quick double-take to the rack, as he was convinced he saw a likeness of Nurse Lorraine Gillespie in New Cunts 78. He picked it up, studied it closely. No, just similar hair.

  – I’m foine, me old mucker, Freddy began, then noting Perk’s distraction, asked – Zeen zumthin interestin?

  – I rather thought I had, but, alas, no, Perky sounded deflated.

  – Oi dare zay you’ll foind zumthin that takes your fancy. And what news of the Angel, ow’s she farin?

  – Oh, she’s doing a lot better.

  – Well, she’s in the roight place. I’m going to drop in and see her today, cause oime headin down to St Hubbin’s for a fund-raisin meetin.

  – Well, I can see a huge difference, Perky smiled, perking up again. – She’s even talking about starting to do some writing soon.

  – Crackin show.

  – Yes, that young nurse that’s been looking after her … little Scotch girl … she’s been good for her. A stunning little bird as well. In fact I’ve been scouring the wares for a likeness …

  – Anything interesting in?

  – There’s some new stuff that Bertie tells me just came from Hamburg yesterday, but that’s over there, Perks ushered Freddy to one of the racks.

  Freddy picked up a magazine and thumbed through its contents. – Not baad, not baad at all. Oi got moiself a noice little vist-vuckin magazine the other week there. Ow zum of them there girlz an boyz can take one of them vists up their doo-daas oi don’t know. Oi be bad enough trying to shoite if I’ve gone a vew days without spendin a penny!

  – I think some of them must be full of those muscle-relaxant drugs, Perks told him.

  This seemed to intrigue Freddy. – Muzzle-relaxint drugs … hmmm … that open them up noicely now, would it?

  – Yes, that would do the trick. Read about it. You’re not thinking of trying some, are you? Perky laughed.

  Freddy turned a toothy grin his way and Perky found himself recoiling from the television star’s pungent breath. – Oi rulz out nuttin at no toimes, Perky me boy, you knows me.

  Slapping his friend on the back, the television star picked up his package and left the shop, hailing another taxi outside. He was off to see Rebecca Navarro, a woman he, like all her friends, indulged shamelessly. He had playfully, and to her delight, nicknamed her ‘The Angel’. But after seeing her, Freddy would spend more time with some other friends whom most people would describe as ‘absent’, but who, for his purposes, were very much present and correct.

  9 In The Jungle

  The night before his life changed, Glen had had to plead with his friend Martin, – Come on, mate, give it a try. I got good pills, those Amsterdam Playboys. The best ever.

  – Exactly, Martin sneered, – and you’re gonna waste them on this fuckin jungle shit. I don’t go for that shit, Glen, I just can’t fucking well dance to it.

  – C’mon, mate, as a favour. Give it a go.

  – A favour? Why you so desperate to check out this club? Keith and Carol and Eddie, they’re all going down to Sabresonic and then on to the Ministry.

  – Look, mate, house music’s at the forefront of everything, and jungle’s at the forefront of house. It’s got to have a capacity to surprise, innit, otherwise it just becomes affirmation, like country-and-western, or like rock’n’roll’s become. Jungle’s the music with the capacity to surprise. It’s where the cutting edge is. We owe it to ourselves to check it out, Glen implored.

  Martin looked at him searchingly. – There’s someone you want to see at this club … someone from the hospital goes there … one of them nurses I’ll bet!

  Glen shrugged and smiled, – Well … yeah … but …

  – All right, that’s cool. You want to chase the girls, we’ll chase the girls. Ain’t got no objections on that score. Just don’t give me all this cutting-edge bollocks.

  They got to the club, and Glen felt despondent when they saw the size of the queue. Martin strode up to the front and talked to one of the bouncers. He then turned and gesticulated violently at Glen to come up. There were some moans of frustrated envy from others in the crowd as Glen and Martin strode through. At first Glen had been terrified that they would not get in. After Martin had blagged it so effectively, he worried that Lorraine might have been stuck outside.

  In the club, they went straight to the chill-out zone. Martin hit the bar and bought two fizzy mineral waters. It was dark and Glen pulled a plastic bag out of his Y-fronts. It contained four pills with a Playboy bunny logo stamped on them. They swallowed one each and washed them down with water.

  After about ten minutes, the pill kept coming back on Glen, as it tended to do, and he had dry, hiccupy wretches. He and Martin were unconcerned; Glen was just bad at taking pills.

  Three girls sat down close to them. Martin had been quick to start chatting to them. Glen was equally quick to leave him and hit the dance-floor. These Es were good, but unless you started dancing straight away you would sit around talking in the chill-out zone all night. Glen had come to dance.

  He skirted the already-busy dance-floor and quickly came across Lorraine and her friend. Glen danced a discreet distance away. He recognised Murder Dem by Ninjaman sliding into Wayne Marshall’s G Spot.

  Lorraine and her friend Yvonne were up there, going for it in a big way. Glen watched them dancing with each other, Lorraine blocking out all the world, focusing on Yvonne, giving her friend everything. God, for just a bit of that attention, he thought. Yvonne, though, was more disengaged, further away, taking in the whole scene. That was how it seemed to Glen. His pill was kicking in, and the music, which he had had a resistance to, was getting into him from all sides, surging through his body in waves, defining his emotions. Before it had seemed jerky and disjointed, it was pushing and pulling at him, irritating him. Now he was going with it, his body bubbling and flowing in all ways to the roaring bass-lines and the tearing dub plates. All the joy of love for everything good was in him, though he could see all the bad things in Britain; in fact this twentieth-century urban blues music defined and illustrated them more sharply than ever. Yet he wasn’t scared and he wasn’t down about it: he could see what needed to be done to get away from them. It was the party: he felt that you had to party, you had to party harder than ever. It was the only way. It was your duty to show that you were still alive. Political sloganeering and posturing meant nothing; you had to celebrate the joy of life in the face of all those grey forces and dead spirits who controlled everything, who fucked with your head and livelihood anyway, if you weren’t one of them. You had to let them know that in spite of their best efforts to make you like them, to make you dead, you were still alive. Glen knew that this wasn’t the complete answer, because it would all still be there when you stopped, but it was the best show in town right now. It was certainly the only one he wanted to be at.

  He had looked back over at Lorraine and her friend. He couldn’t tell at first, but he was dancing like a maniac, and when he glanced over at them, he realised. There were no poseurs here, they were all going crazy. This wasn’t dance, that wasn’t the word for what this was. And there they were: Lorraine and her friend Yvonne. Lorraine, the goddess. But the goddess had multiplied. There wasn’t just one of them now, like when he came in, there was just Lorraine and her friend. Now it was Lorraine and Yvonne, in a dance of crazy, rapturous emotion which, while conducted at ninety miles an hour, slowed down to almost nothing under the onslaugh
t of the throbbing strobes and jerky break-beats. Lorraine and Yvonne. Yvonne and Lorraine.

  A mass scream went up from the crowd as the music left one crescendo and changed its tempo to build up to the next one. The two women, danced out, collapsed into each other’s arms. At that point Glen knew that there was something wrong in their body language. Lorraine and Yvonne were kissing, but Yvonne, after a while, started to resist and was pulling away. So slowly, under the strobes. It was as if she had snapped: as if she had gone beyond the range of her emotional elasticity. She jerked free from what at first seemed a symbiotic hug with a violence the strobes couldn’t disguise, and stood in cripplingly uncomfortable rigidity as Lorraine appeared to look at her with a brief, odd contempt, then ignore her.

  Yvonne headed from the dance-floor, making her way towards the bar. Glen looked at her departing, then looked at Lorraine. Lorraine. Yvonne. He went after Yvonne. She was standing at the bar drinking a mineral water. On the night his life changed he tapped her on the shoulder.

  – Yvonne, innit?

  – Yeah … she said slowly, then, – you’re Glen, aintcha? From the hospital.

  – Yeah, Glen smiled. She was beautiful. It was Yvonne. Yvonne was the one. Yvonne, Yvonne, Yvonne.

  – Didn’t know you wos into this, she smiled. It was as if her big white teeth burrowed through his chest bone and ate a hole into his heart. She is so fucking beautiful, Glen decided. This is a woman to die for.

  – Oh yeah, said Glen, – Most definitely.

  – Having a good one? she asked. He was gorgeous, Yvonne thought. He was a fucking hunk. He’s fucking well noticed me big time.

  – I’m having the best ever, and what about you?

  – It’s getting better, she smiled.

  This was also the night Yvonne’s life changed.

  10 Rebecca’s Recovery

  Lorraine was taking Rebecca’s temprature when her illustrious patient’s distinguished visitor arrived. – Angel! announced Freddy, – How goes it! Oi wos supposed to be down ere to zee you yesterday, but this vund-raisin meetin dragged on and on. Ow be you?

  – Mmmm, Rebecca began, and Lorraine withdrew her thermometer, her hand trembling and unsteady. – Freddy! Darling! Rebecca outstretched her arms and gave Freddy a theatrical hug.

  – That’s you, Rebecca, Lorraine forced a smile. She was on a bad comedown and Yvonne had the hump with her. She’d let things get silly, out of hand. No, she had got out of hand. She consciously stopped the psychic self-mutilation before it gathered momentum. Now was not the time.

  – Thank you, Lorraine darling … have you met darling Freddy?

  – Naw … said Lorraine. She went to shake his hand. Freddy gave her a lusty shake followed by a kiss on the cheek. Lorraine winced at the cold, wet feel of the greasy saliva that Freddy’s lips left on her face.

  – Oi’ve been hearin all about you, that you’ve been doin a great job lookin after the Angel here, Freddy smiled.

  Lorraine shrugged.

  – Oh Freddy, Lorraine’s been perfectly darling, haven’t you, sweetheart?

  – No really, it’s jist ma joab, eh.

  – But you do it with such style, such savoir faire. I absolutely insist, Freddy darling, that you bring all your considerable influence to bear on advancing Lorraine’s career within this health authority.

  – Oi think you’re overstatin the influence of a zimple Zomerzet varmer’s boy ere, Angel, but ah’ll obviously be puttin the roight wurds in the roight lugs, zo to speak.

  – Oh, but you must. It’s due to my Nursey Lorraine that I’m going home next week. And I’ve lost over a stone. Oh Freddy darling, I had let myself go in recent years. You must promise to tell me when I’m overweight and simply not indulge me. Please, darling, do say you will!

  – Anythin you say, Angel. Great newz about you gettin out though, Freddy smiled.

  – Yes, and Lorraine’s going to come and see me, to visit, aren’t you, darling?

  – Eh, well … Lorraine mumbled. This was the last thing she wanted at the moment. Her legs ached; they would ache more before the end of the shift. Her eyes were tired. She saw the beds she had to change and wanted to lie down on one so badly.

  – Oh, do say you will, Rebecca pouted.

  Rebecca made Lorraine feel strange. Part of her detested her patronising and moronic behaviour. Part of her had an urge to shake this stupid, bloated, naive and pampered woman, to tell her that she’s been a fool, to try and get herself together, to come out off her childlike fantasyland. However, part of her pitied Rebecca, felt protective of her.

  Lorraine realised that, for all her irritating ways and pitiful inadequacies, Rebecca was essentially a good, warm and honest person, – Aye, right, she told her patient.

  – Wonderful! You see, Freddy, Lorraine has inspired me to write again. I’m going to base the heroine on her. I’m even going to call her Lorraine. She was going to be called Agnes, but I think I could get away with a French-sounding name. I’m thinking that Flora may have had a French lover before she met the Minister. The auld alliance, you see. God, I’m bursting with ideas again. I’ll definitely dedicate this book to you, my dear dear Nursey darling Lorraine!

  Lorraine cringed inwardly.

  – That’s great, said Freddy, impatiently wanting to get down to the path lab, – but oi must be off now. Tell me though, Angel, that woman in the next room, what’s up with her?

  – Oh she’s very ill. I think it’s only a matter of days, Rebecca sighed.

  – Terrible, Freddy said, trying to stop his features shifting into a smile of gleeful anticipation. She was a hefty one. The kind of body Freddy could happily get lost in. All that meat to conquer. – It’d be loike climbin Evirizt, he said happily, thoughtfully, under his breath.

  11 Untitled – Work In Progress

  Page 47

  It was, in the event, not until the end of March that Lorraine and Miss May set out to accomplish the long trek to London. To a young girl from the Scottish borders, who had only once been as far as Edinburgh, every new sighting on the road was viewed with eager interest. At the start of the journey, Lorraine was still in a fit of intense excitement, which was as much to do with the small fortune of sixty pounds that her father, the stoical Reverend, had surprised her with prior to her departure.

  They travelled by an old coach pulled by two sturdy beasts and driven by Tam Greig, a Selkirk man who had undertaken the journey many times in the past. To those accustomed to the speed which the post-chaises were able to attain, a journey in a rather ponderous, creaking carriage drawn by only two horses often seemed so painfully slow. So while for Lorraine this was a great adventure, for her travelling companion, Miss May, it was an untold grind – the only benefit being the superior comfort.

  However, they were happy to be offered excellent refreshments at most of the halts, and the beds in the posting houses were generally of an acceptable standard. Lorraine found a three-day break at York most agreeable. It was extended on the advice of Tam Greig, who had noted bad fatigue in one of the horses. So enthralled with the town was Lorraine that she begged that they stay just one more day, but the dour Scotch coachman reported the horses to be quite fresh and Miss May, as ever, had the last word. – I have a duty to get you to Lady Huntingdon’s, my girl. While no time was given for your arrival, I would be less than prudent in my responsibilities were I to sanction long holidays at every interesting point we pass through! There is little gain in lingering!

  With that, they set off.

  The rest of the journey was uneventful until Grantham. It had been raining heavily for most of the day as they approached the Gonerby Moor, and the Lincolnshire landscape was sodden. Seemingly from nowhere, a post-chaise and four dashed by at such pace that the more docile horses drawing the carriage were thus highly vexed, and ran the vehicle off the road. The carriage tilted and Miss May banged her head. – What …

  – Miss May, Lorraine held her hand, – are you all right?

  – Yes
, yes, yes, girl … I thought the carriage was going to tilt over … what, pray tell, has happened?

  Lorraine looked out of the window to see Tam Greig shaking his fist and cursing in a guttural Scotch, the likes of which she never heard before. – Ye devils, ye! Ah’ll cut oot yer feckless English herts!

  – Mister Greig! Miss May barked.

  – Begging your pardon, ma’am, I was fair scunnered by the recklessness of the men in yon coach. Officers they were too. Officers, but no gentlemen, I’ll wager ye.

  – Perhaps they were in a hurry to get to some posting, Miss May said. – We too should be in a hurry.

  – I’m sorry, ma’am, but yon horse has gone lame. He’ll have to be replaced in Grantham, and I’d say it’ll take some time to make yon arrangements.

  – Very well, Miss May sighed. – Oh, Lorraine, I am so vexed by this journey!

  It took longer to get to Grantham than expected, due to the lameness of the second horse. There was no room at the Blue Inn, so they were forced to billet in a much less genteel lodging. As they disembarked, Tam the coachman cursed as he saw four officers, the occupants of the post-chaise which had caused them their grief, pass them en route to a tavern.

  One of the soldiers, a dark, handsome chap with an arrogant twist to his mouth, raised an eyebrow in Lorraine’s direction which caused her to look down and blush. Miss May noted the officer’s gesture and nodded approvingly to herself at Lorraine’s response.

  The stop-off in Grantham held them up for another two days, but the final part of the journey to London was uneventful and they reached Earl Denby and Lady Huntingdon’s grand town home of Radcombe House in Kensington in fine spirits.

  Lorraine was overwhelmed by London; its size and scale were beyond anything she could have conceived of Lady Huntingdon, a strikingly handsome woman, and much younger-looking than her thirty-six years (for Lorraine’s mother Flora was the same age as her friend), proved to be a most amenable hostess. Lorraine also had Miss May, whom only Lady Huntingdon addressed by her Christian name of Amanda, keeping a watchful eye on her during her induction to society. Earl Denby was a dashing, handsome man, and he and his wife together seemed so full of vitality and gaiety.