The Kings of London Page 21

  His father had had a builder’s arms. Thick and muscular. Liverspotted from working outdoors. Maybe he should get a bicycle, he thought, still prostrate on the floor. That’s when he noticed the balls of dust. He had used a dustpan and brush to clear up after the fire, but the carpet under his bookshelf was still filthy. How long had it been like that?

  He spent the next half-hour hoovering the house. His Hoover was one of those with a light at the front. After the living room he had to empty the bag, dropping the dust into the bin outside. When he clanged the bin lid back on, the curtains upstairs opened. A man’s face peered out, pointed at his watch.

  Breen checked his wrist. It was still only 7.30 in the morning. Breen smiled back at him. A small wave.

  Cleaning under his father’s bed, the machine clunked into something. Kneeling down he saw something reflecting in the Hoover’s light. An ancient biscuit tin. He hooked it out with one of his father’s old walking sticks. The red Huntley & Palmers tin was crammed with old notes: ten-shillings, pounds, fivers and even a few tenners. He counted the money out on the kitchen table. It came to three hundred and eleven pounds.

  As his father’s brain had gone he had become a hoarder. He had tucked this stash away for years and forgotten about it. Breen put the tin in the kitchen cupboard, behind cans of tomatoes.

  Bored. Nothing to do.

  How could people bear not working? The empty hours. The lack of purpose. The sheer blandness of the everyday. He missed his job. It was what he did. What he was.

  He thought of Danny, Marilyn’s feckless boyfriend. Danny hadn’t worked in months. Spent his day sitting around her flat and still expected her to cook for him in the evenings. He thought of Shirley. Where had she gone? She had no way of contacting him, he realised.

  He went back to the kitchen table and found the photograph of Johnny Knight and his sister that he’d taken from the house full of flies. He stared at them both. On the fresh page of a notebook, he started to sketch him. Added a moustache. Changed the length of his hair. Turned another page. Did it over again. And again. He drew Shirley. More vivid than her brother. Hair up and hair down. Profile and then from an angle, with bare shoulders and a small smile on her face.

  Then, from memory, he drew the man from the burnt house. His memory of the photographs that had been taken from his in-tray along with everything else. The exposed teeth. The curve of the hairless head. The blackened skin.

  Drawing was strange. Sometimes the pencil breathed life into a picture without you even realising it. He tore out the page and held it up, his head on one side. Not bad.

  He pinned it next to Pugh’s print. The dots. If he had a house like Johnny Knight’s, all glass and cool white paint, the Bridget Riley print would look right in it. Here it just looked stupid.

  That afternoon, kicking his heels, he went up to the library and asked if they knew of any life-drawing classes. He considered borrowing some books, but he didn’t. Unlike his father, he had never enjoyed reading.

  He walked round Abney Park Cemetery for a while as the winter light thinned. Then along to Clissold Park. He didn’t want to go home. Home reminded him there was nothing to do. Why hadn’t Scotland Yard been in touch? They had not returned to check his alibi: did they have another suspect in the Prosser murder? Were they getting anywhere? Or were they just dragging their feet, waiting for Christmas?

  When he got back to the cul-de-sac he could hear his phone ringing inside the flat. It took him a while to get the keys from his trouser pocket, and then the lock in his new front door wouldn’t open. When he finally got in, he snatched up the telephone. ‘Cathal Breen,’ he said.

  But the person on the other end of the line had already hung up.

  He called up Deason at Scotland Yard CID. ‘It’s Sergeant Breen. Were you trying to get hold of me just now?’

  Sergeant Deason’s reply – a no – was muffled. He sounded as if he were eating something.

  ‘And why would I be trying to get hold of you?’ asked Deason.

  ‘No reason,’ said Breen, and put the phone down.

  A long sigh. He stood up. Walked around the living room. Sat down again.

  Later that afternoon he was polishing shoes when the phone rang again.

  ‘Paddy. Where you been?’ It was Tozer.

  ‘Has anything happened?’ he asked. The sweet, ordinary sound of typewriters and telephones in the background.

  ‘I was just checking you were still on for tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘The Royal Albert Hall.’

  ‘Oh.’ He said. ‘Right. Of course.’

  ‘Be there on time.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then.’

  He wasn’t looking forward to it. There would be rock music. He didn’t like it much. He wondered what he should wear so he didn’t stand out too much. A thirty-two-year-old man at a pop concert. Or ‘happening’. Or whatever they were calling it.

  Ridiculous.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Is that Donovan?’ said Tozer, nudging him in the ribs.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the funny jacket. There.’

  Breen looked, trying to understand what a funny jacket would be in this context.

  ‘I’m not sure I know what Donovan looks like anyway.’

  ‘Course you do.’

  Breen looked into the crowd. They all looked the same to him. Young men with long hair, milling around.

  The Royal Albert Hall’s uniformed staff stood against the corridor walls, nervously. The place was half full. London’s underground had come out in force. All the hippie poets and revolutionaries, and the rock musicians and spaced-out girls with dopey faces. He had the idea that if a bomb fell on this place right now, London would sink back gratefully into the same state it had been in in, say, 1962.

  Breen still didn’t understand what was supposed to be ‘happening’ tonight, but then he wasn’t sure anyone was. So far, they had been here an hour and nothing had taken place. People were milling around, waiting for it to start, whatever it was.

  ‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’ he said.

  ‘In a sec,’ said Tozer.

  Breen had grown up in a Britain where everyone looked the same. Men wore jackets, women wore skirts and dresses. Here, people came in infinite varieties – denim and suede, pink and green, short skirts and long kaftans. Hair down to shoulders and beyond. A girl here with a painted face. Another wearing an old jacket sewn with coloured buttons. A girl wearing a First World War German helmet sat cross-legged on the carpet holding a sign saying ‘Stop The War Now’.

  ‘Which war?’ asked Breen.

  She looked at him as if he were an idiot. She could only have been about fifteen.

  The air was thick with a herbal smell Breen didn’t recognise.

  Tozer was dressed in a miniskirt and a khaki military jacket. She fitted right in. Breen hadn’t worn a tie.

  ‘What is this anyway?’

  ‘It’s a benefit, supposedly.’

  ‘Benefiting who?’

  A woman in a long skirt handed Tozer a bracelet made from thread. ‘I made you this,’ she said. ‘It’s a gift.’

  ‘Arts Lab and the Alternative Information Centre,’ said Tozer, holding out her arm.

  ‘I heard the Stones were going to be here,’ the woman in the skirt said. ‘Somebody said that Dylan was going to come.’ The woman was tying the bracelet onto Tozer’s arm as if she had known her all her life.

  ‘What’s “alternative information”?’ asked Breen.

  ‘If you knew, it wouldn’t be alternative,’ said Tozer.

  ‘Free crash pads, what to do if you’re arrested by the fuzz, that kind of thing,’ said the woman, finishing her knot.

  ‘Right,’ said Breen.

  The woman in the cotton skirt said, ‘My old man says when they get enough money they’re going to build a giant computer where all this information is held so anyone can get it at any time.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Breen
. ‘A giant computer.’

  ‘Wow?’ said Tozer. ‘Did you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Breen. ‘It just came out.’

  ‘Are you a cop?’ said the woman, looking Breen up and down.

  ‘Yes,’ said Breen.

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tozer.

  The girl started untying the thread. ‘I can’t believe I was going to give the fuzz one of my bracelets,’ she said.

  ‘Are you going to say “Cool” next?’ she asked Breen, when the girl in the long skirt had scurried off down the curving corridor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Breen.

  They pushed their way through the crowd. Someone had set up an impromptu cake stall in one of the lobbies, laying out plates of cakes on a white sheet. A sign read ‘Macrobiotic gingerbread and banana tea, 1/-’.

  ‘You like macrobiotic, don’t you, Paddy?’

  ‘That’s not allowed,’ one of the ushers was trying to argue. ‘This is the Royal Albert Hall.’

  ‘Everything’s allowed,’ said the man.

  Breen asked Tozer, ‘Did you tell Scotland Yard about Johnny Knight’s house like I said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did they believe you?’

  ‘To be honest, they didn’t seem particularly bothered. They said nobody had reported him as a missing person anyway.’

  ‘Well, well. It’s the policeman, isn’t it?’ Breen turned. It was Suzi, the revolutionary from Kasmin’s gallery. ‘What are you doing here?’

  She was with a young, long-haired man in a grey suit who wore a red star on his lapel.

  ‘Just come to watch,’ said Breen.

  Suzi looked Tozer up and down, then said to her, ‘Did you know he’s a cop? Is he bothering you?’

  Tozer said, ‘I know. You can spot him a mile off.’

  The man said, ‘We heard there’s going to be a raid. Is that why you’re here, man?’

  Breen said, ‘A raid on the Royal Albert Hall?’

  ‘You fuzz are surrounding the building.’

  Breen held his hands up. ‘Nothing I know anything about,’ he said. ‘I’m not working.’

  The revolutionary girl said, ‘So why are you really here? Don’t tell me you’re here for the poetry.’

  ‘Maybe I like poetry,’ said Breen.

  Suzi snorted and tugged at the arm of the man in the suit. ‘Why can’t you just leave us alone, Mr Jones?’ she said.

  ‘I’m not doing anything.’

  Come on,’ Suzi said. ‘We should find our seats.’

  ‘God. Where did you meet her? What an arse,’ said Tozer.

  ‘Why did she call me Mr Jones?’

  ‘ “Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?” ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Breen sniffed the air. ‘Is that what I think it is?’ he asked.

  At around nine a bearded man with long hair and thick glasses came on stage and stood on a white sheet laid out on the stage, and mumbled some words into a microphone. There was a squawk of feedback.

  ‘Is that John Lennon?’ She pointed at a figure in a brown jacket sitting on a chair at the side of the stage. ‘It looks like him.’

  The sound from the stage buzzed and squealed. Breen said, ‘What is that man saying?’

  ‘He’s asking us to listen to the sound of our own silence. It is John Lennon. I could swear.’

  ‘What?’ said Breen. But the hubbub of the giant hall quietened for a second.

  Breen looked around. They were in balcony seats, above the mass of heads below. ‘There is work to be done,’ the bearded man was saying in an American accent. ‘We need to create a silence that will fill this hall itself.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Tozer.

  ‘Look at the person you came with,’ said the man on the centre of the stage.

  ‘There!’ Tozer pointed down at the crowd below.

  The microphone hummed. ‘Now look at someone you didn’t come with.’ People turned, chattering, laughing, embarrassed.

  ‘What are you pointing at?’ asked Breen.

  ‘It’s the people from the squat.’ Breen looked. He recognised one of the men from the squat. And beside him, the woman he had spied on in the garden: Hibou. The woman he had last seen the day before yesterday.

  ‘Look at your past life,’ said the bearded man. ‘Now look at your future life.’

  People were nodding. Others rolled their eyes: Like, what is this crap?

  Tozer stood, took Breen’s hand and said, ‘Come with me.’ She led him back up the steep aisle. ‘I want you to get a closer look at them,’ she said.

  ‘Is that why we’re here?’

  ‘Kind of,’ said Tozer. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing Leonard Cohen too.’

  They were back in the corridor now, circling round to find a staircase that led downstairs.

  ‘You said the squatters were something to do with this event?’

  ‘That’s what they told me. They’re going to do a chant.’

  ‘A chant?’

  ‘On stage. It’s a religious thing. Hare Krishna. You know?’

  Breen said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘It frees your soul, kind of thing.’

  They stopped in one of the long, curved corridors.

  ‘You don’t believe that, do you?’

  ‘Don’t be an ass, Paddy,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in anything.’

  By the time they reached the stalls, a man was on the stage reading a long, repetitive poem. The audience were mostly ignoring him and chattering. Some were already wandering around, looking for something better to listen to or do, ignoring the ushers who were trying to keep the crowd seated.

  Tozer stood on her toes, looking around. ‘There they are.’

  They stood at the back of the hall. By now a throng of men dressed in orange robes was walking onto the stage, some of them holding drums and bells. They started banging the drums and chanting quietly.

  People turned again to look at them.

  ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare,’ they sang. The men had shaved their heads. Some wore painted marks on their faces.

  People in the crowd started to sway. Some held their hands up and waved them gently in the air.

  Tozer said, ‘It’s like things have changed so much, no one knows what’s good any more. Everyone’s terrified they’re missing something. They’re clutching at anything that comes along. I mean, look them. Hare bloody Krishna!’

  The funny thing was that while most of the young people here were all struggling to look different, to be different, on stage there was a big gang of men and women all dressed in the same orange, all trying to be the same. The men had shaved off their long hair into uniform nothingness. The women wore scarves over their heads. A rebellion against rebellion.

  ‘Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.’

  ‘It’s like the emperor’s old clothes,’ said Tozer.

  ‘New clothes,’ said Breen.

  ‘That’s what I said.’ She took Breen by the hand again and started to push onwards down the aisle. Now others were joining the Hare Krishnas on stage, joining in the chant.

  ‘Look,’ she said, pointing ahead.

  A chosen few were joining the orange men on stage. And there, with women on either side of him, was the the man from the squat. The man who had called himself Jayakrishna. Breen spotted Hibou again. The women were swaying from side to side, slightly self-conscious about being on stage. Jayakrishna, dressed in a long white collarless shirt, with beads draped around his neck, was at home there, being stared at by the crowd, a small smile on his face as the women danced on either side.

  ‘I had a dream about Hibou,’ said Tozer. ‘I dreamed she was my sister.’

  Tozer had told Breen about her sister only once. Two years younger than herself. She would have been sixteen, then.

  ‘I didn’t real
ise until I dreamed her how much she looked like Alexandra.’

  He wondered if he should tell her that Hibou was the same age as Alexandra when she had been killed, too. ‘What’s he like – that one?’ Breen pointed at Jayakrishna.

  ‘He’s sexy. Loads of charisma. He could have been a pop star or something. Apparently he used to be in the army.’

  ‘Have you been going there a lot?’ Breen said.

  ‘I’ve been going there most evenings.’

  Breen looked at her, puzzled.

  The chanting was getting louder and faster. People were dancing more wildly now. Breen watched Hibou: nervous, eyes flicking from side to side, looking uncomfortable, embarrassed, but still swaying from side to side.

  ‘You really learning to play guitar from them?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Tozer. ‘I was curious. Look at her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Hibou. She’s having sex with him.’ She was looking straight ahead of her at the stage.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Not just her. Other women too. It’s a weird place. It’s like they’ve got to fuck each other all the time, otherwise they’re not, you know, free.’ She made a face.

  ‘She has sex with him? And she knows that the other women who go there have sex with him too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The idea of it made him nauseous. Confused.

  ‘You’re sure.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And have you had…?’

  ‘Fuck sake, Paddy.’

  ‘You’re just spying on the place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought you were really learning the guitar. I was worried there, for a sec.’

  ‘I am actually learning the guitar. For your information. What’s wrong with me playing guitar?’

  ‘Krishna krishna, hare hare…’ chanted the crowd.

  Breen said, ‘All I mean is that people are allowed to… have sex with whoever they like. I suppose it’s none of our business.’

  Tozer was getting agitated now. Shouting to make herself heard above the chanting. ‘That’s not what I’m on about.’

  ‘What, then?’

  They watched Hibou up on stage, a rabbit in the spotlight, trying to smile as one of the other men Breen recognised from the squat stood behind her and placed his hands on her hips as she danced.