Read a Short Extract
III
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‘Now look, love, you’ve got a whole new generation of trendy Camden wonks out there, so give it all you’ve got.’
Maria Peters frowned. ‘Alan, these kids are not like the kids back in the eighties,’ she said. ‘These are affluent, clean living, environmental activists…
‘And hippies too, there’ve always been hippies.’ Alan Myers was, not for the first time that day, getting a little tired of his artist’s objections. Either she wanted to revive her career or she didn’t. And if she didn’t, she could clean up her act as much as she wanted – but without him.
A tiny cupboard-like space painted dark red constituted the Comedy Ringside’s Green Room. Squashed in with a bloke who took the piss out of his own Parkinsonian symptoms, a woman with a stuffed Yorkshire terrier on her head, Maria and that interfering, churchy friend of hers, it did not do a lot for Alan’s nerves.
‘You can’t bomb out again, Maria,’ he said. ‘Not like New Cross.’
‘They were a much older crowd there, Alan. They really wanted the old stuff. I’m not sure about these kids…’
‘You don’t have to go on,’ the friend said.
Alan felt his whole face explode with heat. ‘Yes, she does.’ The girl with the dog on her head was looking and so he lowered his voice. ‘She’s contracted to do so and they want the old stuff.’
‘Not if she’s ill, she isn’t. She has collapsed-‘
Alan leaned across Maria’s body and hissed at her tiny boring friend. ‘But she isn’t ill! She had tests! She won’t collapse!’ He wanted to add in all sorts of abuse about how the woman, Betty Muller, looked a damn sight nearer the grave than his tall, beautiful client. But he held onto that. Some of the friends that aria had these days – mostly religious sorts – were very odd, but she liked them. For some reason.
Maria put her hand on Betty’s arm. ‘I have to go on,’ she said. ‘Alan’s quite right, I can’t let people down. It wouldn’t be right.’
Betty didn’t look happy. But then Alan was beginning to wonder whether she’d come along less to support Maria than to pander to her desire to radically change her act. It had, Alan thought, to be a noughties thing, this PC, religious, hemp skirts and saving-trees-from-McDonald’s trend. The thing was that although young people were into all that, young people who went to comedy clubs were into what young people had always been into – sex, drugs, rock ynd roll, fags, booze and lots of swearing too. They’d come to see Maria Peters who said ‘cunt’, not the Maria Peters who told nice little stories about mildly amusing antics performed by rather sprightly little old ladies. This was, after all, Camden not bloody Midsomer Bumhole. ‘Maria, love,’ Alan said. ‘The omens are marvellous. I’ve made sure. No peacock feathers in the place, no mention of the Scottish play, everyone talking about “breaking a leg”.’
Yes, the old theatrical superstitions were all covered, but still Maria had to concentrate to make her mouth smile.
Lee put an arm around the woman in the sharp nineteen eighties-style suit and whispered in her ear, ‘Business or pleasure?’
Half the audience for the carefully ironically titled Wot Larks! – the comedy showcase at the Camden Ringside – were out on the pavement swigging bottled beer and smoking fags and other things. Detective Inspector Violet Collins was just one of them. She turned her heavily made-up, heavily lined face towards Lee Arnold and said, ‘I could ask the same of you.’
He smiled, kissed her on the cheek and then said, ‘Ah, couldn’t do that, Vi. If I told you what I was up to I’d have to kill you.’
She nodded her head. ‘Likewise,’ she said. ‘But without the murder. We’re the good guys, remember? The cowboys with the white hats.’
‘So what does that make me?’
She took his arm and led him across the cobbles towards the wall overlooking the canal. It was dingy, a bit foggy and cold, but Vi still had a way to go before she got enough nicotine into her system to be able to get through the show. She leaned against the wall and lit up yet again. ‘A private dick? she smiled. ‘Grey hat? Brown? Where d’you think you lot come in the moral colour code of the universe?’
Lee narrowed his eyes. ‘Come on, Vi,’ he said, ‘don’t keep a fella in suspense – how old is he and is he Moroccan or Tunisian?’
Vi Collins pursed her thin, red, wrinkled lips. ‘Oh, no totty tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ve come to see our local girl. Why else would I drag my arse up to Camden?’
‘Maria Peters?’
‘Remember her from the old Comedy Store,’ she said. ‘Now that was a comic that was going at my speed.’
‘She could swear like a sailor.’
‘Still can – I hope.’
A couple of young girls walked past dressed in nineteen fifties-style dresses with lots of net petticoats underneath, all made up to the nines and sucking suggestively on lollies. As they walked past, Vi muttered, ‘So much for the Women’s Movement.’
‘Some people think it’s just a modern form of feminism,’ Lee said with a smile on his face. He hadn’t worked with Vi for over five years but he still knew how to wind her up.
‘What? All these prats who reckon that these girls getting bling out of thick footballers are some sort of noble feminist army? Sisters with breast implants doing it for themselves?’ Vi sucked hard on her fag and pulled a face. ‘Do me a fucking favour.’
Lee laughed. ‘Oh, Vi, you are such an easy mark.’
She laughed. ‘And you’re a cheeky sod.’
He put a hand out, ready to curl around her waist again, but then thought better of it and just lit up a fag. Vi had been his colleague, his best mate at the Forest Gate station and, for just one drunken night, New Year’s Eve 1999, his lover. His lover from another century.
‘So if you’ve come to see Maria Peters, you expecting a car crash? Lee asked.
‘You mean like New Cross? I hope not,’ Vi said. ‘Just collapsed apparently. Christ knows why.’
Maria had told Lee that she’d fainted during the New Cross gig, in part because of the stalking. That made sense; one of the consequences of stalking was that the victim slowly but surely lost confidence in themselves, stopped eating, got sick. But he wasn’t about to share that with Vi. Maria had come to a private detective and that was what she was getting.
Copyright © 2012 Barbara Nadel