Keeping Bad Company

  Keeping Bad Company

  ANN GRANGER

  headline

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 1997 Ann Granger

  The right of Ann Granger to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7724 4

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ann Granger has lived in cities in various parts of the world, since for many years she worked for the Foreign Office and received postings to British embassies as far apart as Munich and Lusaka. She is married, with two sons, and she and her husband, who also worked for the Foreign Office, are now permanently based near Oxford.

  To friend and fellow writer

  Angela Arney

  Chapter One

  I was sitting on one of those red metal benches on Marylebone Station concourse when I first met up with Alkie Albie Smith. Not that Alkie Albie would have been my choice of companion. A cup of coffee brought about our acquaintance.

  I was miserably aware how cold it was that morning. I wasn’t wearing my usual jeans, but a daft mini skirt and useless tights which wouldn’t have kept out the mildest breeze, let alone the draught straight from Siberia that cut through the open-arched station entry to whistle around my ankles.

  I was waiting for the train from High Wycombe to arrive, and for Ganesh Patel, who’d be on it. Just for the purpose, all the trains were running late. To fight off the cold, I’d bought coffee from the Quick Snack stall, and settled down to wait. The coffee was in one of those green-with-white-polka-dot polystyrene beakers and scalding hot, so I put it on the vacant seat beside me until it cooled down. A simple thing like that can cause so much trouble. If I’d kept hold of the beaker. If I’d worn warmer clothing. If the train hadn’t been running late. When all these things come together and then events turn out as they do, you have to believe in Fate – or Sod’s Law, as you may prefer to term it.

  Ganesh, by the way, is a friend of mine. His family used to run the greengrocery that stood on the corner of the street in which was the house where I shared a squat. Re-development flattened our whole area and displaced us all. We straggled away like a bunch of refugees carrying our belongings to find somewhere else and start all over again. I had less to lose than the Patels. I’m an aspiring actress who has yet to get her Equity card and hasn’t done anything yet but street theatre. But what little the squat was it had been a roof over my head, and then it wasn’t there, captured by the council after a long, spirited and ultimately doomed defence.

  Yet others fared worse. The Patels lost their shop, which was their livelihood, and the flat over it, which was their home. That’s to say they pretty well lost everything. Compensation doesn’t necessarily make that good. How do you compensate someone for years of hard work? For their plans and dreams for the future?

  They hadn’t been able to find another similar place to rent – or which they could afford to rent – in London and had moved out to High Wycombe. There they could stay with their married daughter, Usha, and her husband, Jay, while they searched for premises they could afford. That’s why Ganesh was coming in on that particular train. He’d been to see how they were getting on.

  Ganesh wasn’t living in High Wycombe, as there wasn’t room for him. He was lodging with and working for Uncle Hari. Working for Hari had advantages and a rather greater number of disadvantages. The big advantage was that Hari’s newsagent’s and tobacconist’s shop was just round the corner from where I lived. I’d just moved into a basement flat in Camden, of which I’ll tell you more in a minute. The move was thanks to an old fellow called Alastair Monkton for whom I’d done some detective work. (And done it, I may say modestly, rather well.)

  It was a bit of luck for me, having Ganesh nearby. Ganesh thinks clearly in straight lines. Sometimes it’s irritating, but sometimes it helps. At least I knew he was there. I could count on Ganesh and we all need someone we can count on. It was good for him, too, because the job was cleaner and easier than the greengrocery – no hauling sacks of spuds and crates of fruit and veg around – and his family hadn’t to worry about him.

  But on the other hand, Uncle Hari was by way of a grade-one neurotic, one of those people who live on their nerves. Everyone who came into his shop was, in his mind, a potential shoplifter, which meant that after they’d left, he’d rush to count the remaining stock of Mars bars and peanut brittle. If anyone bought a magazine, he leafed through it suspiciously to make sure the customer hadn’t slipped another mag inside it. Either that or he worried that some juvenile had got hold of one of the adult mags on the top shelf. If the customer asked for a packet of ciggies from the shelves behind his counter, Hari’s head swivelled like an owl’s, right round, to make sure the customer hadn’t palmed something from the counter while his back was turned.

  He was, in fact, the most worried man I’d ever met. He worried about everything, not just the business overheads and rates and things like that. He worried about the state of the pavement outside the store and the unreliability of the streetlighting and lack of litter baskets. He fretted about his health, Ganesh’s health, my health, anyone’s health . . . Chiefly, however, he lived in fear of some unpleasant surprise being sprung on him.

  He did have reason for this. Ganesh told me Hari had had a traumatic experience that had marked him for life. A kid had come into the shop one day and bought twenty cigarettes. He was a big tough-looking kid, perhaps not quite sixteen, but big enough to be sixteen. Anyway, as Hari tried to explain to the magistrates, he was the sort of kid who, if he’d been refused the cigarettes, would’ve come back that night with his mates and kicked in the windows. So Hari sold them to him.

  Only moments later, when he’d hardly had time to put the money in the till, a woman representing some trading standards agency rushed in, yelling at him for selling cigarettes to an underage customer. She was followed by a guy with a camera and another with sound equipment. The whole thing had been a setup by one of those TV programmes which like to make sure the consumer is being protected, or getting his rights. Never mind protecting poor Hari against that element of local youth which didn’t care about anyone’s rights. Hari found himself star of a show he hadn’t volunteered to be in. He nearly had a nervous breakdown and was still swallowing a fearsome array of herbal rem
edy pills, all supposed to enable you to Cope.

  Now he worried every time he sold a packet of ciggies to anyone who didn’t qualify for a bus pass, and worried more when he didn’t sell any, because business was down. Chief among his current crop of obsessions were: that the traffic going past the shop was shaking the foundations of a very old building; that the air pollution was bad for his sinus problems; that the new council parking regulations had put double yellow lines outside, which put people off pulling in to the kerb and nipping in to buy something.

  Ganesh is a practical sort of person but even he was getting jumpy, being with Uncle Hari all the time. The way things were going, he would be trying the herbal pills soon. Visiting his parents that day would have given him a break, though not exactly a restful one. But even a change of problems is something, and the way life goes, sometimes it’s the best you can hope for.

  The display screens above the access to the platforms flickered and informed us that the delay, which was due to a unit failure at Wembley, was likely to last another half-hour. I wasn’t going to sit there for thirty minutes more slowly petrifying. I’d take my drink and find somewhere warmer. So I reached for it and that’s when I became aware that I had company.

  The immediate impression was of a looming presence, hovering over me, and a whiff of sour booze dregs. There he was, no more than an arm’s length away, with his eyes fixed on my coffee. He was wondering whether it belonged to me or whether some traveller had abandoned it to sprint for a train. He reached out tentatively and asked, ‘That yours, dear?’

  I told him it was and snatched it up protectively. Disappointment crumpled his face, which was already creased in folds like a bulldog’s. He was a good sixtyfive, or so I judged, with long greasy grey hair and pepper-and-salt stubble on his chin. He wore a tattered, dirty army greatcoat teamed oddly with clean, newish, stone-washed jeans. Some charity that hands out clothes to the homeless had probably given him those. It was a pity they hadn’t also given him a pair of trainers as the ones he was wearing were about to fall apart. Inside all these clothes he was so thin he looked as if the keen breeze might bowl him over and back down the escalators to the tube, up which I guessed he’d just come.

  Partly to get rid of him and partly because often enough myself I’ve not had the price of a cuppa, I took pity on him. I fished out a fifty-pence piece and told him to go and buy himself a coffee.

  He brightened up. ‘Thanks very much, dear!’ He grabbed the money and padded off in a curiously light-footed way, actually making, rather to my surprise, for the coffee stall. I’d have guessed he’d have put my contribution towards something in a bottle, but it was a cold day.

  I know I should have ignored him, but when have I ever acted wisely? I soon knew I’d been unwise on this occasion, because, having got his coffee, he came back and chummily sat down beside me.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ he said. ‘Pity there ain’t more like you.’

  That was a first. I don’t remember getting such generous, unqualified approval, not since Dad and Grandma Varady died. My mother walked out on us when I was only a kid, so I was brought up by my father and Hungarian Grandma Varady. They were the best family anyone could have asked for, so I didn’t miss my mum. Things started to go wrong, as far as I was concerned, my first day at primary school. There was a mishap with the fingerpaint and the teacher stood over me – like a twenty-foot-tall ogre in a fairytale – shaking her finger and intoning, ‘I see you’re going to be a naughty little girl, Francesca Varady!’

  She must have been a witch because that really put the kibosh on it. I never did get the hang of pleasing adults. After that, it was downhill all the way until the fatal day, just before I was sixteen, when I was asked to leave the private dayschool I attended.

  That school was a meeting place for upwardly mobile entrepreneurial types and downwardly sliding impoverished professionals clinging on by their fingertips. The two groups collided there via their daughters. One group of pupils was collected by sharp-faced, bottle-blonde mothers driving flash cars. The other set of girls was collected by plain, vague women in sagging skirts, driving old motors. Occasionally, when it was raining hard, one of the first group would let down the car window and bawl at me as I stood at the bus stop, ‘Jump in, love, and I’ll run you home!’ The others never offered me a lift and acted as if I were contagious.

  I couldn’t blame them. The fact was, I belonged to neither group. They didn’t know what to make of me. I didn’t have a mother in skin-tight designer wear nor in a Barbour. I had Grandma Varady, who’d turn up on Open Day in a rusty black velvet dress and a crooked wig. They treated me like a freak so I began to behave like one and it stuck. My family had slaved and saved to send me to that school. I wasn’t sorry to leave it but I was desperately sorry for Dad and Grandma, who sacrificed so much for me. I was also sorry I dropped out of the Dramatic Arts course at the local college which followed my swift removal from school. I did seem to fit in there. But my leaving was due to circumstances beyond my control, as they say: Grandma dying about a year after Dad died, and my becoming homeless and all the rest of it. One day I’ll make it as an actress, you see if I don’t.

  In the meantime, even the approval of an old wino like my companion rang comfortingly on the ear. So easily are we flattered.

  I said, ‘Thanks.’

  He was prising the plastic lid off the beaker and he had a touch of the shakes, so I added a warning that he should take care. I doubt he had much sensation left in his fingers, which were white beneath the dirt, due to lack of circulation, and tipped with ochre-coloured overgrown nails.

  ‘It’s all right, dear,’ he said. ‘What’s your name, then?’

  ‘Fran,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m Albert Antony Smith,’ he announced with something of a flourish. ‘Otherwise known as Alkie Albie. They call me that but it ain’t true. Slander, that’s what it is. I like a drink like anyone does, don’t they? Dare say you like a drink, glass of wine, mebbe?’ He belched and I was engulfed in a souvenir of his last encounter with the grape.

  I shifted smartly along the metal bench and told him that yes, I liked a glass of wine, but this wasn’t one of the occasions and if he thought I was going to buy him anything alcoholic, he could forget it. The coffee was as far as it went and he should make the most of it.

  His crinkled, grey-stubbled face was a mesh of open-pored skin dotted with blackheads, which gave the impression he looked at you through a spotted veil, like the ones on hats worn by forties film actresses. These damaged features took on a shocked expression. He denied vehemently that he’d had any such idea in mind.

  Then he slurped up the boiling coffee in a way that suggested he couldn’t have much sensation left in his mouth either. I sipped mine cautiously and it was still almost unbearably hot. Why do they do that – serve it so hot? They know you’re waiting for a train and have only got so much time to drink the stuff.

  ‘I’ve been down the tube,’ he said, confirming my guess. He indicated the entry to the Underground a little way off, by the ticket windows. ‘It’s nice and warm down there. I spend most of the day down the tube this time of year, till the transport coppers throw me out. They’re miserable buggers, them coppers. I sleep rough mostly, in doorways and such. Bloody cold it is, too.’

  I knew that. But I said nothing because I didn’t want to encourage him, though I’d left it a bit late for that and he didn’t need encouragement anyway.

  He rubbed his nose on his sleeve and snorted noisily. ‘Cold gets you terrible on the chest.’

  ‘Have you tried the Salvation Army hostels?’ I asked.

  ‘I never go to hostels ’less I has to,’ he said. ‘They’re very keen on baths in them places. Don’t do you no good, bathing. Washes away the natural oils.’ Slurp. Sniff. Snort. ‘You got a job, dear? Or you on the dole?’

  ‘I haven’t got a job at the moment,’ I said. ‘I was waitressing but the café burnt down.’

  ‘Shame,’ he s
ympathised. ‘Protection geezers, was it?’

  ‘No, just the chip pan.’

  ‘Nasty,’ he said.

  ‘I want to be an actress,’ I told him, though goodness knows why. Perhaps to stop him sniffing.

  ‘They always want girls in them bars in Soho. Bit of waitressing, bit of stripping. Do all right.’

  ‘Acting, Albie!’ I snapped. ‘A-C-T-I-N-G, all right?’

  ‘A thespian!’ he said grandly. ‘I know what that is. I ain’t ignorant. Ter be or not ter be, that’s the ticket!’

  ‘That is the question, Albie!’ I wasn’t sure why I was bothering but I sensed there was a good-natured sociability under all that grime. It made me feel I couldn’t just tell the poor old devil to push off.

  ‘I had an act once.’ He leaned back on the metal bench and gazed dreamily at the Quick Snack stall. People had cleared away from all around us and we sat there together in cosy isolation.