Lennox slept in a narrow iron-framed bed with a tatty horsehair blanket instead of an eiderdown. The things in Lennox’s flat were shabby and old, but Michael liked them. He knew that by themselves the chipped mahogany tallboy and the faded chintz curtains might be considered ugly, what his grandmother would have called poverty-stricken, but Lennox’s presence somehow made them all right.
He went to the bathroom to wash his hands, carefully soaping the grazes on his palms. It stung but his skin felt better afterwards. He took off his shirt and ran his fingers carefully over his ribs. There was some soreness when he breathed in, but otherwise he seemed unhurt. He leaned forward, examining his face in the mirror. There was a cut on his cheek but it was shallow and had already started to scab over. Michael thought of the scar on Wilkes’s face, that puckered white line. It looked as if someone had tried to gouge out one of his eyes, the kind of thing that only happened in horror movies. He wondered what had happened to Wilkes, and where Wilkes went when he wasn’t at Lennox’s flat.
He put his shirt back on and stepped out into the hallway. He could smell onions frying, cooking oil – food smells. Michael’s stomach rumbled. He caught sight of Wilkes through the open doorway, in front of the stove. His leather jacket was slung across the back of one of Lennox’s dining chairs.
“What did you mean when you said Lennox doesn’t like to talk about things?” Michael asked.
“I didn’t say things, I said his private life,” said Wilkes. “Let’s have some music on, shall we?”
He turned the heat down under the frying pan and came through to the lounge. Michael noticed he had taken his shoes off. He was wearing the tartan slippers Lennox usually kept beside his bed.
Wilkes flipped back the grooved laminate lid of Lennox’s ancient stereo system and began flicking through the records on the shelf beneath. All of Lennox’s music was on vinyl. There were a couple of classical LPs, but most of the records were jazz albums from the forties and fifties. Michael liked the look and feel of them, the old photographs on the covers, the faint mustiness, like the smell inside a junk shop.
Of the music itself he knew nothing. On the wire CD rack at home in the kitchen they had the Eagles’ Greatest Hits, the soundtrack to Out of Africa and an album by a band called Marmalade. There were various other CDs that had come free with newspapers and magazines, but his parents hardly ever listened to music. His mother preferred the political documentaries they had on the radio and his father preferred to watch cricket. It had been Michael’s Grandpa Felipe who was musical. According to Michael’s father he had owned hundreds of records: tango music and classical symphonies and jazz albums like Lennox’s. Felipe Gomez had come over from Argentina soon after the war and opened a grocery store in Brockley.
“He could add up whole columns of figures in his head, just like that,” his father told him. “It’s him you take after.”
Felipe Gomez had died when Michael was three. There was a photograph of him holding Michael as a baby, but Michael had no memory of him at all. At least he had his grandmother, Lisa von Pelz, with her crazy German accent and her bug spray and her amazing and terrifying stories of Nazi spies. Of all the family it was Grandma Lisa who indulged Michael’s passion for horror movies. But she understood chess and numbers as little as his father did, and Michael couldn’t help wondering what his Grandpa Felipe had been like. Also, Lisa had got rid of all Felipe’s records. She claimed they were taking over the house.
“What do you reckon?” said Wilkes. “Which do you prefer, fusion or bebop?”
“I don’t know anything about jazz,” said Michael. “You choose.”
Wilkes made a tutting sound, striking the back of his teeth with the tip of his tongue as he sorted through the records. Michael didn’t like the casual way Wilkes handled Lennox’s possessions, although he supposed Wilkes believed it was his right. He was masquerading as Lennox’s nephew, after all.
“You’ll like this,” he said at last. “This is a classic.”
He lifted a record from the stack and held it out. The sleeve, like most of the rest, showed a black-and-white photograph of the singer and then the title, red letters on a white background. The singer’s name was one he recognised, Billie Holiday, although he couldn’t have said for certain whether he had heard her sing before. In the photograph Billie had her hair tied back off her face with a silken ribbon. She looked very young, almost childlike, and reminded Michael of Lynette Berger, who sat next to him sometimes in maths class. Lynette had a wooden pencil case with a sliding lid with a silver propelling pencil and a mean-looking architect’s compass inside. Her parents came from Mozambique. Michael sometimes found himself staring at the nape of her neck, at the gleaming white arc of her shirt collar, at the silky wrinkled line where her hair met her skin.
She had once asked Michael if his mother came from Mozambique, too.
“No, from Nigeria,” he replied, praying like a madman that he wouldn’t stammer as he sometimes did when he got nervous. “She was born in Lagos.”
Lynette smiled and turned back to her work. It had been his first and so far only contact with a girl he liked the look of and it had been exhausting. On the whole it seemed safer to be in love with Ruby Castle. It would be difficult to make a fool of yourself in front of a dead girl, even for him.
The title of the record Wilkes had chosen was Santa Fé Nights.
“There are some rare tracks on here,” Wilkes said. “Even the title track is rare, because Holiday only recorded it once, in some tin-pot studio in Mexico. It was released as the B-side to one of her later singles with Lester Young, but other than that the only place you can get it is on this album. The tune is actually a tango by Ariel Ramirez. He was born in Santa Fé.”
He slid the disc out of its sleeve, holding it carefully by the edges. He placed the record on Lennox’s turntable and lowered the stylus. There was a faint crackling and then the music started, a blowsy saxophone over a rhythm line of piano and bass, and then Billie’s keening vocal, a sound so open and pleading it made your stomach hurt.
Michael felt hot and then cold. He recognised the music instantly from the soundtrack of American Star, the film starring Ruby Castle and Raymond Latour. He had never consciously known the woman singing was Billie Holiday, but the track itself was familiar to him as the music from the ballroom scene on board the American Star cruise liner, just before the ship ran aground off the island where the monsters were. The legend was that it was while they were filming the ballroom scene that Ruby Castle and Raymond Latour fell in love. A year later, Ruby Castle had murdered Latour in a jealous rage when he refused to leave his wife for her. Ruby in the ballroom scene was transcendental. She was thirty-eight years old and, as the critics said, at the height of her powers. Those who had written about the film seemed to agree that the impact of the sequence was increased by the painful knowledge of what was to come, not just in the film but in Castle’s life. Some even seemed to enjoy this, to revel in the prospect of Ruby’s tragedy, but Michael felt his heart break for her each time he saw it.
The scene was famous, at least among horror fans. Michael was amazed Colin Wilkes hadn’t mentioned it when he put on the record. He even wondered if Wilkes was playing some kind of game with him, if he knew about Michael’s crush on Ruby Castle and was trying to show him up. He couldn’t imagine how this could be – Michael had never admitted his feelings to anyone. But he wouldn’t put it past Wilkes to have found out somehow. The man was strange. The way he had turned up just in time to save him from Jackson and Pullen, for instance. The way he had guessed about what had happened with Douglas Coote.