And The Street Screamed Blue Murder! Read online

  Lime had no time for those constructs. He did not need to see women pissing in each other's mouths. When Lime needed some company, he would go to the places where the freelancers frequented. The ladies who kept all their cash for themselves.

  Hypocrisy or not, that was how Lime had like to do business.

  His memory laid out a route that noticed a landmark here, a cluttered feature there. He turned into a street that shot up and then across and finally he saw it and was stood outside The Lotus Bar. It looked, for all the world, like a shabby little Parisian bar. Nothing out of the ordinary. There were hundreds of similar looking places scattered around in a mile squared.

  Night was when it truly showed its colours. Ladies who were not in the service of any fucking parasitic pimp came to dance and show themselves to all the fucking parasitic Johns. Students looking to live well, divorcees getting revenge on their former spouses, single mothers down on their luck that never seemed to move on up. Exploitation? Risk? Most certainly, yet they were completely in control of who they went with, where they went and how much they got paid. They charged what they wanted and did what only so far as they wanted to. A perfect example of the free market at work. Sexual entrepreneurs.

  Lime sat on a table outside and waited. He would stew a while in simmering memories. It was difficult at first to focus, he had been a touch inebriated and had to stop himself feeling so again. Then he was in.

  Lime recalled the faces of girls interacting with each other and the men that swarmed around them. He sifted through their faces as if he was pulling files out of a cabinet.

  There.

  There was one.

  Strawberry blonde.

  Lime saw her once touch Véronique tenderly on the hips while the shitty house music thumped on and on. He saw the dilation of the pupils that spoke of true affection. Véronique's nod and soft stroke to the other's cheek. Lovers? He heard her faint whisper, asking if she felt “comfortable with this one?”. Implication that abuse had taken place? The fumbling nerves of a beginner? The other one face was vague to him. The booze had rattling one too many braincells and he always preferred to concentrate on other's behaviour and their unspoken relationships.

  It had come from having a stutter as a child soon after hearing that Gallows had bitten the painful dust. When his mother's deterioration had begun to take its noxious toll and burden. Little Alfie had hardly spoken to anybody for a six months and even his teachers had become worried, yet another language unpuzzled itself to him then. That of the body.

  Little Alfie had begun to notice the way people turned and reacted. How they touched their body and face. He learnt that you never can really tell when somebody is really telling porky pies(another Hollywood misconception blown), but you can tell when they are in discomfort or uncomfortable or guarded. A bounce on the legs, a long blink or a tightening of the lips. A blocking of the eyes as they read something that was difficult, or that they did not wish to see.

  It was the perfect skill of information hounding for a reporter. Which is why he had been so good at it. Asking questions that always sniffed out the flaw in the argument. It was one of the reasons why he had been sacked from a major syndicated newspaper. His line of questioning had led to accusations of paranoia. Was it his fault that the whole shebang was a seemingly stained bed of corruption? His job was after all to try to find out the truth and report on it. It was after that incident that The GutterPress had gotten in contact, and the rest, as they say, was history.

  *

  Lime lit up a cigarette. You never knew who you might into in the daylight. Also, he could gently groom some of the day shift staff for information. If Véronique had been a regular around this joint they would have, at some point, come across her. So to speak. A tall off-white ratty looking waiter came over and asked if he wanted another drink. Lime glanced at the diseased rodent, judging him, weighing him up - a talker for sure - and nodded. When the rat returned Lime touched his arm gently and began to ask questions softly and politely in the argot French he'd picked up over the years, using Véronique's description as a starting point. The gnawer listened closely, the gleam in his eye showing his thoughts of personal advantage, then something clicked and the unshaven pointy face became an unshaven leer.

  “Yeah, I know the one you mean, M'sieur.”

  Side of the mouth speak. Conspiratorial.

  “Do you know any of her friends?”

  "Ladies like that don't have any friends, M'sieur. Only clients.”

  "Any female friends?”

  "As I said before, M'sieur ...”

  Lime cut him off with a sharp upward wave of his hand.

  “Cut the shit, son. Any females that hung around her? Strawberry blonde? Pretty?”

  At the choppy cut off Ratfink froze and estimated the best wily way for him to react to get out of the situation. He was torn between insulting or suffering for a reward.

  Suddenly Lime stared directly into his eyes and spoke.

  “Nice shoes.”

  "Wh …?”

  "Your shoes, they're nice. Supercool.”

  "Oh.”

  "Need a shine though.”

  The rat sputtered and his body seemed to uncoil and droop.

  “Strawberry blonde?”, pushed Lime, his voice deeper now.

  "Yeah, I know her.”

  "What's her name?”

  "She's a Yank.”

  "What's her name?”

  "She calls herself Lily.”

  "Lily, nice name, eh?”

  "S'pose.”

  "You suppose?”

  Suddenly, it seemed like the rat would begin to chew of his own legs to get away.

  “Yeah.”

  "Thank you”, smiled Lime as he slid a twenty euro note over which the rat grabbed in his claws as his feet, torso turned towards the door and scuttled into the bar and relative safety. Lime sank his espresso, left some money on the table (no tip) and vowed to return later that week. After he was dead. He then remembered that the devil laughs when you make plans and cursed silently inwards.

  Chapter 9

  30h of January, 2011

  Alfie Lime knew the only way to waste his time and lose himself for a couple of hours before he shuffled off his mortal coil was to go to the cinema. He made his way to the middle of the row of scarlet seats and found an appropriate one and sat down. Pulling it down off his shoulder, he placed his bag on the seat next to his and stretched his back. Hearing the click and snap of a spine that should belong to someone else. Gazing behind himself to double check that there was nobody there. He knew there was no one there but had to check.

  Because kidneys demand such attention.

  These seats had once been plush. They had once had all sorts sitting on them. Lovers, factory workers, drunks, sodomites, vicars, whores. Now it was only a matter of time before they closed this place down. Before they converted it into yet another meat market night club. Before it became yet another car park. The faint smell of smoke mixed with damp panties and a hundred year old farts permeated the seats.

  Lime began to think:

  “If only you had the same feeling of entering a dark red cinema and finding your seat in anticipation of a emotionally filled hour and a half when you finished your job on a Monday night.

  If only.

  If only the seats in porno theatres had tissue dispensers and little plastic bins on their backs in the same way they had ashtrays. The world would be that little bit more of happier place to live in.

  These classic old rooms. Like L’Entrepôt, here.

  The muted lighting, those seashell lights, the reverence for atmosphere, the scarlet curtains. The place is a holy shrine. Cinemas are temples to our mythologies. To our heroes and villains. Our screen Gods and Goddesses. We pay our tickets. That is the point. We willingly part with our hard earned cash there. Cash earned by suffering dullness after dullness. Indignity after indignity. We pay and are open to worlds of fantasy.

  Of far flung wars that we hope never
to fight in.

  Of femme fatales and suave mad men.

  Of thrills and heartbreak and sex and death.

  New York becomes a place of symbolic significance. London. Paris. Bangkok. Berlin. Baghdad. They are no longer cement and glass and plastic and steel. They are no longer the pushing and sweating mass of humanity. The stench of kebab shops. The dog shit on the streets. They become Atlantis, Sodom, Eldorado. They become places where all is possible.

  Paradise or Inferno.

  The blood red curtains themselves are alive with graceful purpose and poise. They swish with a female elegance as they open to reveal the wonders between each other. To reveal sights and sounds from our dreams. From the back of our minds. From the places less travelled. From the places where our secret desires spring from, trickling and gushing. Holy wells.

  Oh yes, I love the cinema.“

  I would like to bring you here one day.

  To show you what I see.

  For you to feel what I do.

  More people come in. In couples. Alone. They move stealthily and whisper between or to themselves. They do not sit behind me. This is good. I sit and I stare at the covered screen, the soft light from above casting a green haze over the rich scarlet of the curtains. Increasing its otherworldly aura. I sit and I drift away into its colours and swirls. Its surface ripples.

  Only a couple minutes now until the show starts. The anticipation is building up. I clasp my hands together almost in prayer and stare at the curtain. Willing it to move yet enjoying the tender suffering of its slightest swish. The tease.

  All of a sudden.

  They open.

  The lights go down.

  All is as dark as your mother’s heartbeat while you wait in the womb.

  Go away now.

  Let me be by myself.”

  *

  Lime turned and glanced furtively at the large room.

  His holy place.

  Even before he saw The Godfather. He still remembered his first film at the cinema. It was The Cat From Out Of Space. It was raining in Llandudno, so him and his mum stayed there and watched it twice. She dried his hair with her coat. His dad was down the pub chatting up a barmaid.

  He still felt the same excitement, as then, every time the curtains closed. Another world away from the madness and banality. Another world.

  Bamboozle has his books and he had his films.

  The lights went down and there was the silence of anticipation, sharply broken by a female voice somewhere up in the back rows. She was coughing. She sounded like a lamb in the darkness. Waiting to meet the blunt edge of a bolt as it passes through her skull and into her brain.

  In annoyance and having no visual focus to blank out her noise, Lime felt the weight of my right arm on his chest as a hand unconsciously covered his mouth. A mouth that would have liked to tell that lamb to get the fuck out of the cinema, or at least suck on a boiled sweet. Or something like that.

  The opening titles of Emil Kustirica’s Black Cat White Cat flooded light into Lime's eyes and he felt a surge of some contented spirit, some relief, wash through his cells and he blinked. He loved this film as a friend. A raucous and anarchic story of love and mischief in a community of Serbian Romany, and did I tell you that he loved this film?

  The voice behind him coughed again and again.

  “She should really cut down on the cigarettes or go and see a doctor” thought Lime.

  His attention asserted itself back to the film, as the dodgy father of the young hero of the film was haggling with a Russian captain over the price of goods that he was trying purchase to make enough money to live on.

  Lime laughed as he gripped onto the washing machine then fell head first into the river and he laughed as the drum that he just bought contained nothing more than water and not the oil that was promised.

  Lime always laughed a lot during this film. It just made him feel good. The absurdity of the situations that people allow themselves to be put in, the characters, the singing coked-up drug dealers, the old mafia guys with golden teeth talking about vampires, the lunacy of it all.

  And still she coughed.

  She did not laugh.

  She coughed.

  The lickle lamb coughed and coughed and coughed and ...

  Lime re-focussed back to the film, that cough momentarily blocked out, that itch on your back that nature did not design you to scratch and the young heroine was flirting with the poor entangled boy as her mother watered the telephone pole.

  Suddenly Lime realised that he was looking at a young Véronique. The girl before the woman who destined to be murdered and laid to rest in his bed.

  Suddenly there she was, right in front of him larger than life, larger than in reality. Those naughty playful blue eyes, that sideways smirk. As large as he would have liked to see her, to smell her, to feel her breath against his face again.

  Suddenly he could see her, the day she was born in all her glory. Foam and seafood. Floating nymphs. As she shot at pot plants, as she ordered the boy to jump into the river to get her an ice cream and as she ran through the sunflowers abandoning her clothes in the field.

  *

  Yet, still the lamb coughs.

  “Can’t she just fucking go home!?”

  Go home, go home, go home, go home, go home go home, go home, go home, go home, go home, go home ...

  Lime felt a shot of electric irritation strike him. He began to dry heave and his hand shot up to his mouth but it never got there as he was blinded by a flash of white light. He heard his broken heart thumping in his ears and suddenly thought “Jesus, I’m having a stroke” but he was not and he thought “Jesus, a bomb’s gone off” but one had not. Through the light that rattled his molecules he saw a large figure in front of him. No, no, there were two figures. One the size of a man and the other a large dog. They were stood inside the heart of that all consuming sun that burned with a perfect white flame. Before Lime's eyes, the form became what seemed to be an unkempt vagrant and stood next to him was the most vicious looking black hound that Lime had ever slapped his eyes on.

  Words filled the frazzled air around them.

  “Have no fear. He is soon coming.”

  The tramp seemed to be speaking with his mouth wide open but when Alfie looked closer he realised that the man had no tongue. His mouth was just a broken and hole. It was the beast that was talking.

  “Who are you?” squawked Lime.

  “I speak for my man. His name is Sam and he is as lost as you are. Though he has no language anymore, he sees events unfold from his gutter. He is the gutter prophet.”

  Lime squinted at them.

  “Who is coming?” he asked.

  The Black Dog seemed to smile through fangs still unclean with the rotting flesh of some transgressive thought or another. His tail began to wag.

  “Two pawns come to steal a queen. Yet, a knight will dance in a spiral for you.”

  The dog began to chase his own tail.

  “Such a knight!”

  Fucking riddles.

  “Why don't you supernatural types ever speak straight?“ Lime asked without speaking and the beast and the man began to laugh soundlessly and the chuckle moved Lime's DNA in twists and filled him with a feeling of joy and despair at the world that let him feel the chemical love letters that termites send to each other in the bark of pine trees and the vibration and song of subway trains under the earth and the snowflake’s feeling of exhilaration as they plummet down to earth, safe in the knowledge that they will once again undergo a journey as they pass on their way back to the sky.

  "Die well, Alfie Lime!”

  The beast began howling.

  Lime felt the one called Sam lean in and touch his cheek as the flames flickered and passed in front of his eyeballs.

  As he inhaled and came up to the surface of reality for air, he breathed in the dusty cinema atmosphere and though it felt as if he had been away for hours the girl was still jumping through the sunflowers, shedding c
lothes.

  And the lamb was still coughing.

  And he realised that it was he and not she who was going home.

  Then he remembered that he did not have a home anymore.

  Chapter 10

  30th of January, 2011

  The blurred but bright outline of a TV screen was all that the young kneeling woman could see through the tight weave of the blood red silk blind fold. The silk was pulled tight around her eyes. She could feel the constricting pulling her ears and long blonde hair close to her scalp. The pressure of the knot at the back of where her skull curved away from the top of her spine.

  It was okay though.

  She liked the colour red.

  The colour reminded her of a holiday to Spain with her recently deceased father. She had been thirteen and had seen the bull run in Pamplona from her hotel balcony. All those red bandanas tied around those swarthy young virile men's necks and sashes around waists. Her dad had called them “silly spics” as he puffed away on his cheap cigars but she had thought them to be brave and dashing. The chaos and the delight of seeing a wild beast run riot through the streets of the town. Don't get that in Wolverhampton. The only wild beasts there are the drunken men spilling out of the pubs on a Friday night.

  Her thoughts then alighted to Little Red Riding Hood.

  She had once read an original version that had put the horrors into her guts. Granny had been cooked by the Wolf, then fed to the little girl. The girl had her head loped off for dessert. Naughty Old Wolf.

  She had met a wolf recently too.

  A lean posh young gentleman.

  He had wined and dined and fucked her good and proper on her hands and knees. and she had, of course, let him. He was so charming. This wolf. Promised her the world, he had. Designer shoes. Foreign holidays. Posh restaurants. Even marriage had been mentioned, though she had thought it a bit quick. Caught up in the whirlwind of romance, she had been. Beginning to dream of a time when she wouldn't have to get up every morning and trudge down to that department store and be at the beck and call of the Great Miserable British Public. Her friends had told her to be careful. She had lost her daddy and needed to looking after. Some men can smell and abuse the frailty that comes with hard times. She was sure she had seen flickers of jealousy. All she had wanted was some security. Was that too much to ask?