Vail Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  A CHRISTIAN PRAYER

  1ST SECTION LONDON (I)

  2ND SECTION MOTORWAY (I)

  3RD SECTION LONDON (II)

  4TH SECTION MOTORWAY (II)

  VAIL

  Trevor Hoyle

  First published in Great Britain in 1984 by Calder Publications Limited,

  and in the United States of America in 1984 by Riverrun Press Inc

  This ebook edition published in 2014 by

  Jo Fletcher Books

  an imprint of Quercus

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 1984 by Trevor Hoyle

  The moral right of Trevor Hoyle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 848669 277 1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  To John Calder

  A CHRISTIAN PRAYER

  Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace:

  Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

  Where there is injury, pardon;

  Where there is discord, union;

  Where there is doubt, faith;

  Where there is despair, hope;

  Where there is darkness, light;

  Where there is sadness, joy.

  O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

  To be consoled as to console;

  To be understood, as to understand;

  To be loved, as to love;

  For it is in giving that we receive,

  It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned;

  And it is in dying that we are born

  To eternal life.

  St Francis of Assisi

  LONDON (I)

  [1]

  Vail had been in London less than a fortnight and had been accosted four times by the police. Each time he had given them a different name, address and occupation. Either they were incompetent or the national computer wasn’t functioning properly, or his luck was just too good to be true. Then again, maybe they really couldn’t care less: he was a scrounger, a layabout, a fringer, – no real threat to society except perhaps for a spot of petty larceny and the odd rape here and there. Why waste a cell on a useless swmbwl such as him?

  If they locked up all the useless swmbwls they could find there wouldn’t be room for the Krays and Kagans of this world.

  He could remember the moment of decision exactly. It occurred while he was standing on the pavement outside an electrical retailer’s at twenty minutes past ten one night watching twenty-two television screens showing the same identical face. A woman in a beige hip-length coat walked by and laughed in her throat at his expression. Vail didn’t hear, – or if he did paid no attention: his gaze was fixed, rabid. The idea seemed very simple and obvious, and he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

  [The reason was that until this minute he’d never contemplated killing anyone. Most people don’t, as an act of retribution, much less as the solution to their problems.]

  Vail is now firmly committed to this course of action, and while he hasn’t formulated the means of carrying it out, and knows it will be difficult (some might say impossible), he isn’t too much concerned. He has a naïve faith in the inevitability of the evolutionary imperative: nature fills an available niche, abhors a vacuum, etc. It had to be and therefore would come to pass.

  Sooner or later an Opportunity will present itself.

  He goes home to his cardboard box under the viaduct off Southwark Park Road and beds down for the night. It is balmy August. Vail composes himself for sleep, and drifts away, despite the frostbite nibbling hotly at feet and hands.

  [2]

  His belly full of Salvation Army pea soup, Vail sets off on another aimless ramble of the capital. Tourists everywhere. It is cloudy and heavy, a torpid sort of day. Smells come from the drains and mingle with the dense blue vapour of the traffic. Near a sandbagged sterile enclosure in the vicinity of Piccadilly Circus he overhears a conversation:

  ‘And I’m telling you, Freesia-Belle, – the South Bank is this way!’

  ‘All righty, I believe you. But can’t we get the toob? I’m so hot’ – suffering complaint.

  ‘I thought you wanted to see the ass-hole of the universe? You don’t see it underground. Just diarrhoea and vomit!’

  ‘Let me imagine.’

  ‘Listen: imagine in your own time on your own money. I didn’t sell four hundred twenty-eight Datsuns because I love the Japanese junk!’

  ‘I’m too hot, honey. Can’t we take a cab?’

  ‘And get lice? Are you serious?’

  ‘Well at least can’t we …’

  ‘What, for chrissakes!’

  Whispers.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That man.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘He’s listening to us.’

  ‘Can we do anything for you, mister?’

  ‘Now, honey, don’t be …’

  ‘I don’t give a goddamn! Well?’

  Vail stares for a moment, blinks, moves on.

  ‘He wasn’t begging, Spud.’

  ‘Just let him try! I’ve stepped on better looking roaches …’

  Vail presses his face to the diamond mesh of the perimeter fence around Hyde Park and looks at the dewy sprinklered grass. The greenness makes him swoon. He can see Enid Blyton in the shimmering haze perambulating to her dressmaker’s. She moves incorporeally along the neat gravelled paths to the sound of chimes calling the hour. England trails in her wake like a dozy playful poodle. Her face is smooth, padded, rosy, bountiful. In her eyes are hatpins.

  [3]

  A man touches Vail’s shoulder.

  ‘I know you, don’t I?’ Vail shakes his head. He is always being accosted by policemen or fringers. Why can’t he be accosted by somebody clean and prosperous and well-attired, – somebody with a jewelled ring, say, or a fat black shiny car?

  ‘John, isn’t it?’ He is thin and shabby and exuberant, the narrow ridge of his nose criss-crossed by broken purple veins. ‘It is John, isn’t it?’

  Vail is about to say no, –

  ‘Copy man at Benton & Bowles. I must be right. ‘78-’79 or thereabouts. Danish Dairy Products. Cushionflor. Callard and Bowser. Or was that Doyle, Dane & Bernbach ‘77? Might have been. Never can remember. You get them confused, don’t you, switching around year after year?’ The man shoots his hand out. ‘Rarity. Pete. You can’t have forgotten Pete Rarity. PR. Had my pisser pulled about that more than once. How are you, John, you’re looking pretty fucking awful, but who isn’t these days, eh?’

  Vail shakes his head instead of the man’s hand and says, ‘I’m not a copy man.’ What is a copy man?

  ‘Not now you’re not,’ says Pete Rarity. ‘You’re like the rest of us now, eh? In the same boat. Sink or swim. Up the creek paddleless. Always was a dab hand at the sustained metaphor. No, seriously, I get the picture, I know the story. You don’t have to lay it on me, friend
.’

  Vail says, ‘I can’t somehow help feeling you’ve made a mistake. I’ve never worked for any of the companies you mention. Yes, I am out of work, as, judging by appearances, are you. In any case I’m not from around here; never worked in London, in fact.’

  But of course this doesn’t disconcert Pete Rarity one bit. He is the type of person who talks without ever listening to himself. Words are puffs of air, otiose, expendable. In one ear and out the other.

  ‘What are you doing these days?’

  ‘I have several plans. Nothing definite,’ Vail says cagily. ‘Nothing decided.’ (You have to be careful with casual acquaintances; there are gwiches everywhere who would sell their grannies for a yellow card or a Resident Alien permit.)

  ‘Fancy a drink?’

  ‘I haven’t any money.’

  Pete Rarity winks a bloodshot eye. ‘Trust Forte. Got my SS today.’

  ‘Not milk.’

  ‘I’m flush. Come on.’

  They walk through the crowded noontime streets, Vail keeping a sharp eye for police, Pete Rarity endlessly talking to fill the vacuum inside his head (Pete Rarity abhors a vacuum). A newspaper placard reads: LEAK SCARE AT DUNGENESS B. The town is crawling with Germans, Swedes, Japanese and Yanks. Men in loosened ties with lightweight jackets draped over their shirtsleeved arms are coming out of pubs. There are the usual number of braless women. The activity is stupefying.

  What Vail can’t figure out is this: where does the wealth come from? All these people are parasites, non-producers, using up space and resources, and yet by some miracle they continue to exist and thrive and prosper without any visible means of support (braless women!). The manufacturing base is gone, wiped out, he knows that, and with it the underpinning of the economy. Yet money is everywhere on brash vulgar display. It reminds him of a cardboard ocean liner with all lights blazing and a ragged dark brown stain seeping soggily upwards past the lower portholes whose circles resemble dim green glow-worms shining through the viscous submarine gloom.

  A nudge from Pete Rarity, – ‘Look, Jimmy Tarbuck!’

  It is indeed the famous Liverpool comedian riding past in a ghostly silver-grey Rolls-Royce with tinted windows, polished feet propped up on a tasselled cushion, a crystal tumbler of some pale amber liquid in his bejewelled hand, smoking a torpedo-like cigar.

  ‘He told a great joke once,’ Pete Rarity informs Vail. ‘Forget what it was now.’

  [4]

  Vail is thirsty and his feet hurt. They pass several establishments where coffee is available but Pete Rarity doesn’t suggest stopping at any of them and Vail is too timid and penniless to bring up the subject himself. What is he looking for, the cheapest cup of coffee in London? A topless coffee shop? Health coffee made out of roasted caribou droppings?

  On Brewer Street Pete Rarity asks Vail if he’d like to see a live porn show. Vail doesn’t express a preference either way. A pair of flabby pockmarked thighs will look the same here as anywhere else, he supposes.

  ‘The coffee is free.’

  They go down some thinly carpeted stairs and enter a gloomy cavern. They help themselves to a polystyrene cup of machine-dispensed coffee (Vail’s black) and sit in the eight-wide cinema-style seating which fills the room wall to wall. The entire row rocks and creaks as the man at the end masturbates under his raincoat. The show hasn’t started yet. Half Vail’s coffee slops over his hand.

  ‘What made you leave B&B John? Phased rationalisation? Voluntary redundancy? Premature retirement?’

  ‘Not me. I told you that.’

  ‘Must have been your bloody twin. Could have sworn…same dark eyes. Same black hair, – but not thinning like yours is. A lot of semen shot into the lavatory bowl since then though, eh?’ Vail shrugs. ‘You remind me a bit of Jack Nicholson. You’ve got Jack Nicholson’s hands. Slender, dark-haired, expressive. Though his aren’t blue.’

  Vail looks at his hands, pitted with blister scars. He wonders whether he ought to reply in kind to this flattery and decides not to. Which is just as well, because Pete Rarity does not have a very prepossessing exterior. Far from it. Pinched narrow face with hard spatular chin and sucked-in mouth as if the gums were receding and quick beady bird-like eyes that are never still. This bird-like impression extends to his thin-ridged beaky purple nose.

  Pete Rarity drops the crushed polystyrene cup between his bony knees and puts his hand onto Vail’s empty groin.

  The seats rock and creak.

  If it is really true, as Vail reflects, that he is the spitting image of the copy man at B&B, might this not, in one way or another, by some deviously plotted strategem, present itself as an Opportunity?

  Not so long ago he had had a past, a green van with a faulty transmission, a wife and child beyond the wire. The memory beckoned to him seductively like lust. Even now inside his own head it was compact and complete, unimpeachable. He could recall many things with absolute sharpness of clarity. The doctor’s grey insubstantial presence in the room with the hard chairs and uncurtained window. The limp tartan blanket in his arms, dear to him as breath …

  Obscurely he felt betrayed, not knowing by what. The scales hadn’t completely fallen from his eyes; his thoughts were still confused. The taint of corruption and decay was everywhere, interfering with his senses. He still had, however, his intention, his resolve, – the good deed in the naughty world, – to carry out the supreme act of retribution. That at least, alone, was safe.

  Pete Rarity says, ‘The smell of urine in here makes me sick.’

  The street is quite as crowded as before: drunks and addicts slump in doorways. The police leave the area unmolested because it is better to contain a cess-pool than have it spilling all over the place and contaminating everything else.

  [With his scant knowledge of London Vail thinks this scene of degradation and despoliation is typical, whereas it isn’t, just symptomatic.]

  Men and women of both sexes parade up and down selling orifices. You can buy any shape, size and combination of orifices you fancy here for a few quid. Some of these suck you in while others secrete fluid, depending on whether you want to be swallowed whole or spat upon. In some dank booths you insert a coin and press your face to a cardboard slot and watch a black girl cavort her hips to the disco-throb of a transistor. She pushes sweating flanks close enough to smell and invites you with a moist erect finger to feed in more money if you want to see her have a really good time. For paper she will go berserk.

  They walk through the sweltering city with no particular destination in mind. It is the height of summer and those with yellow cards are making money hand over fist. The feeling in the air is that the country is booming like never before: video shops going full blast, 5th generation microprocessors selling like there’s no tomorrow, Oxford Street thronged, millions of square metres of denim hanging stiffly on plastic rails before being stretched and pummelled to accommodate bulging beef-fattened flesh (a manufacturing base, hoop-la!) while the cars negotiating the choked streets and parked amongst the detritus on buckled pavements are sleek and shiny under their coating of electrostatic dust. The restaurants and pubs are doing a roaring trade, the theatres are packing them (foreigners) in, there is so much frenetic activity and consumption that you wonder how the sewers can cope with it all. Vail has not seen the like in all his thirty-seven years.

  The intersection of Foley Street and Cleveland Street is sterile, cordoned off because of a bomb blast. This is in the vicinity of a hospital, so the theory goes that somebody of importance receiving treatment there was a marked target. Who can it be? Did the terrorists get the VIP? Imagine killing hundreds of ‘innocent’ people in order to dispose of just the one individual.

  Vail would like to poke his nose in to find out how it’s done but one glance at the mirrored visors and blunt black stun sticks is enough to warn him off. In any case this method is too crude and indiscriminate; he prefers the intimacy and accuracy of direct confrontation, the inexorability of having the target in his sights and ma
king deadly sure of the outcome.

  ‘Would you like to meet a friend of mine?’ Pete Rarity asks him. ‘He’s a producer at Thames. Lives in Notting Hill. Keeps open house. If we’re lucky we can get a meal on his expense account. We were at school together and he must be making thirty K a year. He’s kept his nose clean, adopted a low profile, and consequently they trust him. Might even get a bed for the night. Better than any old soapbox.’

  They make their way via Knightsbridge and through the barricades catch a glimpse of workmen swarming over scaffolding in the latest phase of the Harrods’ rebuilding programme. Signs curlicued with barbed wire proclaim proudly We Never Close and Business As Usual in the grand British tradition.

  Notting Hill is quiet and riotless these days since the ghettoes were broken up. Families still live in the burnt-out boarded-up shells and fragant cooking smells of braised rat emanate from the gratings.

  Everything is peace and harmony.

  [5]

  The producer who keeps a low profile at Thames for thirty K a year is in his middle thirties, tallish, thinnish, with John Lennon wire-frame spectacles wrapped around large pale ears. Short fine hair brushed forward like a cap over a bony protruding forehead, the veins in his temples resembling blue bulbous worms throbbing beneath a millimetre of pale soil. In speech he is rapid and staccato, in manner brusque and buzzing with nervous energy, as if it is a constant struggle to keep pace with the fleeting moment. He isn’t fond of Pete Rarity and, by association, is suspicious of Vail.

  For his part, Vail can make out only about one word in ten from the stuttering blizzard of sentences, and no sense at all.

  ‘Fast overrun tight schedule. Damn rewind fucking VTR edit. Silicone pricks. Take studio time and wrap-up ridiculous. Even they couldn’t if he tried. But partly Kenny’s fault, see to trouble dumb for must, drink or money.’

  [An accurate verbatim transcript would have sounded like this to Vail’s ears. Yet Pete Rarity appears to have no trouble understanding him: indeed he responds with a toadying question to which Bryce Ransom replies:]