He kept up his pitch, protesting, smirking, asking whether she was a dyke, but when she stormed to the foyer to find someone, the staff had disappeared like summer snow, all but one little black girl in the ticket box, who pretended she was too busy counting change.
Going home took more courage than she possessed, more than Joseph had any right to expect of her, and all the way there she prayed that she would break her ankle or be run over by a bus or have another of her fainting fits. It was seven in the evening and the café was having a lull. The chef grinned at her brilliantly and his cheeky boyfriend, as usual, waved as if she were daft. Inside her flat, instead of putting on the light, she sat on the bed and left the curtains open, and watched in the mirror how the two men on the opposite pavement loitered and never talked to each other and never looked in her direction. Michel's letters were still under their floorboard: so was her passport and what was left of her fighting fund. Your passport is now a dangerous document, Joseph had warned her, in his sermon on her new status since Michel's death;he should not have let you use it for the drive. Your passport must be guarded with your other secrets.
Cindy, Charlie thought.
Cindy was a Geordie waif who worked at evening shift downstairs. Her West Indian lover was in prison for grievous bodily harm, and Charlie occasionally gave her free guitar lessons to help her pass the time.
"Cind," she wrote. "Here's a birthday present for you, for whenever your birthday is. Take it home and practise till you're half dead. You've got the touch so don't give up. Take the music case too, but like an idiot I've left the key at Mum's. I'll bring it when I next call. Anyway the music's not right for you yet. Love you,Chas."
Her music case was her father's, a sturdy Edwardian job with serious locks and stitching. She put Michel's letters into it, together with her money and passport and plenty of music. She took it downstairs with the guitar.
"This lot's for Cindy," she told the chef, and the chef burst into a fit of giggles and put them in the Ladies with the Hoover and the empties.
She returned upstairs, switched on the light, pulled the curtains, and dressed herself in her full war paint because it was Peckham night and not all the coppers on earth, and not all her dead lovers, were going to stop her rehearsing her kids for their pantomime. She got home soon after eleven; the pavement was clear; Cindy had taken her music case and guitar. She rang Al because suddenly she wanted a man desperately. No answer. Bastard's out screwing again. She tried a couple of other old stand-bys without success. Her phone sounded funny to her, but the way she was feeling, it could have been her ears. About to go to bed, she took a last look out of the window and there were her two guardians back in position on the pavement.
The next day nothing happened, except that when she called on Lucy, half expecting to find Al there, Lucy said Al had vanished from the earth, she'd phoned the police and the hospitals and everyone.
"Try Battersea Dogs' Home," Charlie advised her. But when she got back to her own flat, there was her old awful Al on the phone in a state of alcoholic hysteria.
"Come round now, woman. Don't talk, just bloody well come now."
She went, knowing it was more of the same. Knowing there was no corner of her life any more that was not occupied by danger.
Al had parked himself on Willy and Pauly, who weren't breaking up after all. She arrived there to find that he had convened a whole supporters' club. Robert had brought a new girlfriend, an idiot in white lipstick and mauve hair called Samantha. But it was Al, as usual, who held the stage.
"And you can tell me what you like, you can!" he was yelling as she entered. "This is if! This is war! Oh yes, it is, and total war at that"
He raged on till Charlie screamed at him: just shut up and tell her what had happened.
"Happened, girl?Happened! What has happened is that the counter-revolution has fired its first salvo is what's happened, and the target was Joe Soap here!"
"Let's have it in bleeding English!" Charlie screamed back, but she still went nearly mad before she dragged the plain facts out of him.
Al was coming out of this pub when these three gorillas just fell on him, he said. One, even two, he could have managed, but they were three and hard as bloody Brighton Rock, and they worked him over as a team. But it wasn't till they'd got him in the police car, half castrated, that he realised they were pigs pulling him in on a trumped-up indecency charge.
"And you know what they wanted to talk about really, don't you?" He struck out an arm at her."You, girl!You and me and our bloody politics, oh yes! And did we count any friendly Palestinian activists among our acquaintance, by any chance? Meanwhile they're telling me I flashed my dick at some fetching copper-boy in the Gents at the Rising Sun and made movements of the right hand of a masturbatory nature. And when they're not telling me that, they're telling me they'll pull out my fingernails one by one and get me ten years in Sing Sing for hatching anarchist plots with my faggot little radical friends on Greek islands, such as Willy and Pauly here. I mean this is it, girl! This is day one and we, in this room, are the front line."
They had smacked his ear so hard he couldn't hear himself speak, he said; his balls were like ostrich eggs, and look at the bloody bruise on his arm. They'd kept him twenty-four hours in the can, questioned him for six. They'd offered him the phone but no small change, and when he wanted a phone book they'd lost it so he couldn't even ring his agent. Then unaccountably they had dropped the indecency charge and let him go with a caution.
There was a boy called Matthew among the party, a tubby-chinned articled accountant looking for life's alternatives; and he had a flat. To his surprise, Charlie went back there and slept with him. Next day there was no rehearsal and she had been meaning to visit her mother, but at lunchtime when she woke in Matthew's bed she hadn't the stomach, so she rang and cancelled, which was probably what threw the police, because when she arrived outside the Goanese café that evening she found a squad car parked on the kerb, and a uniformed Sergeant standing in the open doorway, and the chef beside him, grinning at her with Asian embarrassment.
It's happened, she thought calmly. High time too. They've come out of the woodwork at last.
The Sergeant was the angry-eyed, close-cropped type who hates the whole world, but Indians and pretty women most. Perhaps it was this hatred which blinded him to who Charlie might be at that crucial moment in the drama.
"Cafe's temporarily closed," he snapped at her. "Find somewhere else."
Bereavement engenders its own responses. "Has someone died?" she asked fearfully.
"If they have, they haven't told me. There's a suspected burglar been seen on the premises. Our officers are investigating. Now hop it."
Perhaps he had been on duty too long and was sleepy. Perhaps he did not know how fast an impulsive girl can think and duck. In any case she was under his guard and into the café in a second, slamming the doors behind her as she ran. The café was empty and the machines switched off. Her own front door was closed but she could hear men's voices murmuring through it. Downstairs the Sergeant was yelling and hammering on the door. She heard:"You. Stop that. Come out." But only faintly. She thought, Key, and opened her handbag. She saw the white headscarf and put it on instead, a lightning change between scenes. Then she pressed the bell, two quick, confident rings. Then pushed the flap of her letter box.