know what he said? He said and I can remember every word, because it was then that I knew that whatever I did, however much I strapped my chest down and cut my hair, I'd never really understand what it feels like to be a guy he said,' she sat forward and looked Jack in the eye, 'he said: 'It's like your heart is sticking out, it's like you're biting down so hard on leather that your jaw cracks, it's like the hard-on to end all hard-ons, it's like having your soul dragged out through your dick.' Souness sat back, stabbing her fork into the meat. 'Pretty loony tunes, eh?' She stopped. Caffery had stood up. 'Hey, where ye going?'
'Do you want another drink?'
'Yeah.' She was bewildered. 'Yeah, go on then, another beer.' She put the food into her mouth and chewed as she watched him go to the bar, wondering what she'd said. Something was definitely a bit tangled in Caffery there was no doubt about it. Sometimes he had the eyes of a lion on a lead. When he got back with the drinks he was quiet.
'Jack what is it? Come on, talk to me.'
'I think I'll call Rebecca.'
'Aye, Rebecca. How is she?'
'She's fine.'
'Good. Well, send her my love, then.' She leaned over and took his plate. 'You're not wanting this, are ye?'
'No go ahead.'
She scraped what he hadn't eaten on to her plate, and started to fork her way through it. The meal finished early and Caffery found he didn't need the extra money he'd got from the cash point
On the phone Rebecca's voice was indistinct. 'Jack -where am I – I mean, God,' she took a breath, 'I'm sorry, I mean where are you?'
'Are you all right?'
'I'm – I dunno drunk, I think. I think I'm lost, Jack.'
'Where are you?'
'At the y'know, at the gallery.'
'The same one I got you from before?'
'I think so.'
'I'm only over the road. Wait for me.'
The Satay Bar was only a hundred yards from the Air Gallery. He went inside, his tired eyes smarting in the smoke, and wove through the bar, past hanging aluminium panels, cast resin columns, tungsten pinpricks of lights, not meeting the cool, otherworldly gazes of all the modern faces in the semi-darkness. When he eventually found Rebecca, on the first floor, he stood for a moment and stared, as if he was seeing into another world.
A fully lit glass cabinet displayed models of pathology specimens in coloured fluid. In front of it, on matching chairs, sat four girls with pale East European faces and geometric haircuts. They wore intent expressions and were leaning forward listening to the man who sat on the red plastic sofa opposite them. He was tall and stricken- looking in a black polo neck and Caffery recognized him as a journalist from a late-night Channel 4 show.
'Like Michelangelo's blocked windows in the Medici library these are vaginas that go nowhere,' he was saying, biting with precision on the ends of his words. 'They invert the natural order of a phallo-centric society; they create the organic, the organ like, where a male-obsessed perspective thinks there should be a space. They are saying, 'Look! Look at the tribal ness look at the vagina-ness do not ignore it!'
Rebecca sat next to him as he talked about her work. She was folded into the crease of the sofa, dressed in a T-shirt and a dragonfly-blue skirt. Her chin was down on her chest, her hands were loosely wrapped around an open bottle of absinthe resting on her bare knees and, although no one seemed to have noticed, she was fast asleep.
'Becky.' Caffery put himself between the small audience and the sofa and held a hand out to her. 'C'mon, Becky.'
The journalist stopped talking and turned to look at him: 'Yes?' He pressed a hand on his chest and lowered his chin. 'Did you want to ask something?'
Caffery bent down to see Rebecca's face. 'Rebecca?' She didn't stir. She'd had her hair cut since he'd last seen her. It stood in wild tufts around her little smudged face. Two clumps of black eyeliner had collected in the corners of her eyes and she looked like nothing so much as a casualty at a teenagers' drinking party. A little drunken pixie. 'Becky come on.' He took her hand, peeling the fingers from the bottle, and she stirred a little.
'Uh?' She looked up and her eyes zigzagged across his face. 'Jack?' Her breath was sour.
'Come on.' He took the bottle from her hands and put it on the table. 'Let's go.' He draped her hand over his shoulder, and bent down to put his arm round her waist.
'She going?' the journalist asked mildly.
'Yes.'
He shrugged and turned back to the women. 'Now, Cornelius Kolig, for example, might take a different approach to the issue of sexual abuse…'
The women uncrossed and crossed their legs with the absolute symmetry of a dance troupe and leaned forward, ignoring Rebecca, eyes fixed on the journalist, ready to suck up his words.
'You bunch of pricks,' she said suddenly, pushing herself away from Caffery. 'Can't you see it's all bollocks?' She plucked the bottle of absinthe from the table and waved it around wildly. The liquid moved like melted emeralds in the lights, sloshing out on to the floor, and the girls looked up in surprise. 'It's all a huge joke don't you get it? The joke is on you.' She stopped for a moment, swaying slightly as if she was surprised to find herself standing up. 'You you She took a step back and almost lost her balance, putting out her hand to steady herself. 'Oh She stopped suddenly, breathing hard, looking helplessly around her. 'Jack?'
'Yeah, come on.'
'I want to go…' She slumped slightly and began to cry. 'I want to go home.'
He managed to get her out of the club without attracting attention. Outside, when the night air hit her, she reacted slowly, raising dead-weight hands to rub her arms but she allowed him to bundle her into the passenger seat of the Jaguar and fasten the seat-belt across her. 'I want to go home.'
'I know.' He propped her up and pushed her hands inside the car, where they remained, on her lap, her head slumped against the window as he drove in silence through Dulwich, glancing at her from time to time, wondering how she had let herself become a sideshow like this. Rebecca had a long, vibrant survival streak in her it was the first thing he'd noticed about her, the thing that most repelled and most attracted him. It was incredible to see her so demoted, so helpless, so needful. Her face in the car headlights was a little grey, her mouth bluish.
They stopped at lights in Dulwich, outside a white weather boarded villa they could have been in a Pennsylvanian Amish village, not South London and he put out a hand to touch her head, to stroke the sturdy little tufts of hair. 'Rebecca? How you doing?'
She opened her eyes and when she saw him she gave him a muzzy little smile. 'Hi, Jack,' she murmured. 'I love you.'
He smiled. 'You all right?' Her mouth was a dusty purple shade. 'You
OK?'
'No.' She dropped her hands. She was shivering. 'Not really.'
'What's the matter?' She fumbled for the door, her feet rucking up the rubber mat on the floor. 'Becky?' But before he could pull into the kerb she stuck her head out of the door and vomited on to the tarmac, her body shaking, tears coming up.
'Oh, Jesus, Becky.' Caffery rubbed her back with one hand, his eye on the traffic in the rear-view, looking for a space to pull over. She was shuddering and crying, wiping her mouth with one hand and trying to close the door with the other.
'I'm sorry, I'm sorry '
'All right, just a moment, just a moment…'
The lights changed and he cut across traffic to pull the car on to the kerb. She dropped back into her seat, sobbing, her hand to her mouth, mascara running down her cheeks. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her cry.
'Come here, come here He tried to pull her to him but she pushed him away.
'No don't touch me, I'm disgusting.'
