Before You Wake Page 2

  Frank approached the door. ‘What?’ he whispered back.

  ‘Can I speak with you? It’s all right, Granby’s back in his room.’

  The insinuation that he was hiding from Granby behind a locked door made Frank ashamed. He opened the door. His hand trembled on the handle.

  ‘Can I speak with you?’ The man’s eyes looked in two directions and the skin of his face was yellow-grey from smoking. The first floor reeked of hand-rolled cigarettes, amongst other things.

  Frank let his neighbour inside, closed the door and locked it as quietly as he could.

  The small man spent a few seconds looking about the room, studying the walls. There were no pictures, just wallpaper thick with paint the colour of sour milk. There was little else to look at, if you discounted unpacked boxes of possessions, and the incongruous office chair before a sash window that overlooked a yard, the space filled with broken furniture.

  Without looking at Frank, the man said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, son. For a few days. And he won’t come down to sort you out. Don’t operate like that here.’

  ‘Then how does it operate?’ The question was out of his mouth before he could consider it.

  Malcolm turned to face him. Frank didn’t know which eye to look at. He chose the one that wasn’t dead and bulgy and always directed at the floor. ‘You want to be careful, son. You don’t want to mess with Granby. You might have a day or two to straighten this out, but not much more.’

  ‘I’m not letting him rob me. We agreed a hundred a week. He tried –’

  ‘I know. I heard.’

  ‘So?’ Frank held out his hands, questioningly, at the man’s presence in his dismal room. If he’d just come to reiterate Granby’s threats he might as well leave.

  ‘Take it from one who knows, my friend, you best pay the man what he asks to avoid trouble. Serious trouble. He’s very upset now.’

  Frank opened his mouth to protest. Malcolm held up one thick-fingered hand. ‘You have to adapt. You’re with the Angels now, my friend.’ The man’s use of ‘with’ confused Frank, as if his neighbour was suggesting he’d joined a community established around angels. ‘With the angels’ was also a phrase that had an uncomfortable association with death.

  ‘I’m leaving. So there won’t be any trouble.’

  Malcolm smiled. ‘Oh, they won’t let you leave, son.’

  'What do you mean, “they”? Granby can’t stop me.’

  ‘No, true. But they’ll come and find you to collect the debt.’

  ‘There is no debt.’

  ‘In your mind, son. But not in theirs.’

  ‘What? Who’s they?’

  ‘It’s been decided. See if it hasn’t, my friend.’

  ‘This is crazy.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You’ve a good heart, son. I can tell. So I’ll go and –’

  ‘No. I’m not mixed up in anything. I took a room. A piece of shit in a broken-down building. And now I’m leaving it because I am being threatened. Simple.’

  ‘I wish it were, son. But at The Angel there are different rules, ones we’ve all had to learn.’

  ‘This is getting silly.’

  ‘Oh, no, son, it’s deadly serious. You can trust me on this. I shouldn’t even be here. There’ll be hell comin’ down those stairs if he knows I’m in here, talking like this.’ The way the man mentioned the stairs made Frank’s legs feel weak.

  ‘He’s bullying you all. Robbing you.’

  ‘Oh, it ain’t just Granby. No, no, son. It’s those he has the ear of, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  The man whistled between what was left of his brown teeth and raised an eyebrow. ‘Granby works for others. A bad lot. Very bad. He’s the last of your worries.’

  ‘What, loan-sharks?’

  ‘No, no. Worse than that, my friend. A family. A very old London family. Granby don’t have much say in things. He just does favours for them.’

  ‘You mean organised crime. Like the Krays?’

  ‘No, son.’

  ‘I’m really not following. I appreciate the heads-up, but –’

  ‘I’ll tell you what. You give me the money and I’ll go and see Granby about the disagreement.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Before it gets out of hand.’

  Frank shook his head. The old scratcher was trying to get a cut of Granby’s scam. More threats from Granby delivered by a patsy. ‘No way. I’m not giving you any money. I’m not frightened of him.’

  Malcolm smiled at the lie. ‘It’s no place to go taking a stand, my friend. Not here. Won’t get you anywhere. I’ve seen what happens. And as I said, it ain’t him you need to worry about.’ Malcolm dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘It’s them others he’s got up there with him at the top of the house. They’s running things. Always have done. Granby’s a go-between. But he has their ear, like I said.’

  Frank swallowed the lump in his throat that tried to shut his voice off. ‘He’s alone up there. Surely?’

  Malcolm shook his head, his expression grave. ‘No, my friend. You don’t want to go believing things like that. And it’s best to keep them up there. Keep the peace, like.’

  ‘So . . . what . . . what do you mean? They attack people, this family?’

  ‘When Granby came here he brought a bad lot with him. An old family that’s been in this city a very long time. Long before Granby and most of them out there.’ The man waved one hand at the windows. ‘This used to be a different place, I can tell you. Was once called The Jerusalem. Clean. Good sort of people lived here. We used to drink in that bar when it was open. Even women lived here. But there’s not been a woman here in fifteen years. Not since they come and changed the name. It all went downhill when Granby brought them here.’

  ‘Fifteen years. You’ve lived here for fifteen years?’ He nearly added, ‘Jesus Christ’ to add weight to his horror.

  ‘Twenty,’ Malcolm said.

  Frank could see the man wasn’t joking.

  ‘I used to be upstairs. On the second floor. Better room. But Granby moved me down here. I couldn’t pay enough, see?’

  Frank slumped more than sat on his bed and tried to comprehend what the man was alluding to: some kind of hierarchy of favouritism connected to the rooms and rental rates. ‘You mean . . .’ He couldn’t form the words.

  ‘What, son?’

  ‘He demoted you from the second floor. Because you wouldn’t pay more rent?’

  ‘Couldn’t keep up with the cost. Down here I can manage. But think of this, son. You’re on the first floor. Where can you go that’s further down? There’s no rooms on the ground floor. Nowhere to live. So you’re already on your last life.’

  Frank thought of the dusty, abandoned bar, then became irritated with himself for even considering the man’s nonsense.

  Malcolm nodded. ‘You can’t afford to make enemies when you’re already at the bottom.’

  ‘I can’t believe you put up with this. Do the other two upstairs?’

  ‘Oh, yes, we all keep to the rules, son. There’s no other way. I’ve been here long enough to know that. Jimmy on the second floor still works in the City, and he’s been here as long as me. He’s the only one left who has. So why do you think a man like that lives in a place like this? You think he chooses to?’

  Returning from night shifts, Frank often saw an elderly man in a suit. He always left the building early. They’d never spoken and the man refused to meet his eye. ‘How much does he pay?’ Frank’s curiosity had taken over.

  ‘That’s between Jimmy and Granby. You never discuss money here. They don’t like it. That was your first mistake.’

  ‘Oh, they don’t like that? What a surprise. This just gets better and better. So some guy in finance is trapped here and has been shaken down by Granby for fifteen years? Fuck’s sake. This is unbelievable. What about the drag queen?’

  Malcolm didn’t return Frank’s grin. ‘The fella who dresses like a w
oman, Lillian. That’s what he calls himself now. And that’s a bad business right there, my friend. Oh, Lord. But it shows how bad it can get if Granby is upset about rent not being paid.’

  Frank had caught sight of a frail and elderly cross-dresser more times than he wished to remember, but never outside the building. A habitual haunter of the bathroom and its speckled mirror, the cross-dresser often clattered around inside while Frank waited on the stairs to use the toilet. ‘Lillian’ also played opera records and made the stairs stink of perfume. Frank didn’t know anything else because they’d never spoken. The man may have once been a convincing female mimic, as he was small-boned, but now looked haggard and was always drunk.

  ‘He was an actor once,’ Malcolm said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, yes. On the stage. West End. Long time ago. Work dried up and he couldn’t keep up with Granby. That’s when he made the change. To go on the game.’

  ‘Game?’

  ‘Whore.’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘These days he sucks cocks down The Duchess to keep up with Granby.’

  Frank started to grin. He was close to screaming with hysterical laughter.

  ‘It’s terrible. He lost everything. Now he drinks. He let this place get to him. But you can’t afford to let it get to you. Never. You have to learn to adapt if you want to enjoy any kind of life here. This is how it is once they let you inside. Lilly can’t keep up with his rent now. He’ll be the next to go, unless he gets your room at the reduced rate.’

  His visitor never intended the story to be amusing, but Frank couldn’t stop grinning. ‘Go? Go where? Where will Lillian go if he doesn’t get demoted into this shit-tip of a room?’

  ‘What I am trying to tell you is that I’ve known others here too, who also thought like you, and who held out on Granby. But they’re not around now.’ Again, Malcolm dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘But they never left either.’ He winked the eye Frank had been looking at. ‘Granby will give anyone a few months to make arrangements and you’ve had that. But then the collecting goes to others. And Granby don’t like that because it makes him look bad. And they are all he’s got going for him. If he can’t collect they have to get involved. They come down. You follow? And them coming down to sort things out makes them very angry at being disturbed. Angry at Granby, angry at us. And I’d guess we’re close to that time now.’

  ‘He and his imaginary family up in the attic are not getting another penny from me. I’ll be gone in four weeks, or less.’

  ‘Oh, son, don’t go getting ahead of yourself. There’ll be no four weeks. Like I said, you have to pay now. That’s how it works here. To keep them others up there. And no one leaves unless they say so. That’s the arrangement.’

  Frank had heard enough. ‘OK. OK. I appreciate the advice. But I know a racket when I see one. This is bullshit. Do you honestly think I’ll stay here and let myself get threatened? Maybe for fifteen years, while Granby takes my money, whacking up the rent whenever he wants to? And if I can’t pay then I have to put on a friggin’ dress? Christ almighty, what is wrong with you people?’

  Frank briefly entertained an image of himself as an older man, wearing a dress in The Duchess, wherever that was. He wanted to howl with laughter.

  He stood up and unlocked his door. Malcolm understood it was time to leave, but hesitated. ‘You’re in The Angel now. You’re in their house.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Thanks. I get it. But no thanks.’

  The old man stepped out of his room into the half-darkness of the corridor. The one begrimed window of the stairwell let a little light through. A silvery-grey infusion illumined half of the decrepit old figure’s silhouette, which stood perfectly still. Without blinking either of his mad eyes, Malcolm watched Frank’s door close.

  Outside his room, Frank heard a trace of opera music. A muted fanfare. He shuddered.

  Night fell and Frank paced his room, from the windows to the radiator, back and forth. The carpet looked as if it had been worn down by the similar movements of previous inmates.

  Neither of his friends, Nigel or Mike, would help him out with a sofa to sleep on: girlfriends were cited as reasons in both cases. Cheers.

  Frank had twelve-hour shifts across the next three days, so looking for a room was not an option he could pursue in the morning. As a temp he could not afford to lose the money by taking a day off work. He’d have to stick it out at The Angel for a few more days. Maybe return to his room late after work and keep a low profile for a bit. When the shift pattern concluded he could find a new place and split.

  Worn out by his nerves and thoughts, Frank placed the office chair under the door handle and flopped onto his bed.

  Sleep came quickly. Sleep hectic with dreams.

  He saw a fat man stood by a window that opened above the pub’s sign. The room must have been situated at the front of the building. The man fed pigeons and shouted, ‘Bitch, fucking bitch’ at most of the women who passed in the street below.

  In another room similar to his own, an old man crawled in circles on the carpet. His false teeth were lost and the host of a quiz show spoke about angels to him through the window of an old television.

  In a chaotic and nonsensical carousel of what resembled excerpts from a seemingly unending collection of ethereal footage, his own room was featured several times. The carpet was brighter and the walls not so sallow in each brief episode. In one scene he vividly dreamed of a bearded man with a thickly haired body lying on the bed. A yellow candlewick bedspread covered him to his stomach. In one hand he held a two-litre bottle of vodka. The man stared at the ceiling with what looked like revulsion and terror.

  In another dream a yolk-eyed drunk also appeared in the same bed. This time the mattress was partially covered by a tatty purple sleeping bag. The man sang a music-hall song while someone shouted ‘Cunt!’ through the door. In that scene there was a strange sound too with no visible source. It sounded like a large bird was stuck inside the room and was beating the walls with its wings. Either that or the creature was desperately trying to flap its way inside.

  Frank awoke and sat up in bed. His face was wet with tears. He was exhausted. Shaken by the dreams, he didn’t go back to sleep. He got up and dressed in his security guard’s uniform.

  It then took him a few minutes to summon enough courage to open the door of his room and to enter the dark passage outside. He urgently needed to empty his bladder.

  As he came out of the bathroom, and before his scrabbling fingers could locate the switch and turn the timed light back on, he realised that he was not alone in the corridor that passed between his room and Malcolm’s.

  At first he thought the scuffling sound was being made by a dog. But thin bluish light, falling through a sash window on the stairwell, illumined something that was not a dog, rising from the floor outside his room, until it was standing on two thin legs.

  Someone frail, with unkempt hair. Perhaps an elderly woman. What may have been a nightgown fell to the form’s scrawny knees. But the arms of the figure appeared to be too long for a person of any age. And behind it something that sounded like a pair of broken umbrellas was being shaken with fury and thrashed at the air.

  Frank whimpered and slapped the light on to reveal an empty corridor. Paper peeling from the walls, red skirting boards, faded green carpet, but no sign of life.

  He stood still, stunned. The thud of his heart filled his head. His thoughts groped for an explanation. The light clicked out, leaving him in the dark.

  At work, Frank was often stood before the plate-glass doors, at the entrance of the residential building he guarded. Staring at the forecourt of Clarendon House, without really seeing the parked cars, he contemplated the hallucination and his dreams from the night before. He wondered if the building was some kind of hellish trap, where alcoholics and the unstable came to die. Or maybe the actual building damaged the occupants enough for them to see things, to hallucinate.

  By the end of the afternoon,
he’d more or less convinced himself that the tourniquet of stress constricting his life had tightened and led to the dreams and the episode endured the night before. A growing sense of entrapment, Granby’s threats of violence, and Malcolm’s elliptical suggestions of a sinister ‘family’ housed within The Angel had all played their part. The resulting strain had caused him to half-glimpse the remnant of a nightmare in a dingy, unlit corridor.

  After Frank clocked off, he whiled away four hours in Islington, sipping beer that he could ill afford to buy, before making his way back to The Angel.

  At 10 p.m. he inched open the front door, removed his shoes and crept up to the first floor. He used the sides of the stairs to reduce the noise of his ascent. Despite his best efforts to move silently, once he reached his room, with his keys at the ready in one hand, he heard the distant sound of Granby’s door opening, two floors up. The idea of something slipping out of that attic room was too horrible to entertain, and Frank eschewed all attempts to keep quiet in his haste to get inside his room, before locking the door behind him.

  From ten o’clock until midnight the total absence of Lilly’s opera music, the lack of a mutter from Malcolm’s television, and no sign of any congress in the communal areas beyond his door, Frank interpreted as unwelcome signs of anticipation, if not apprehension, among the other occupants of The Angel. Something was about to happen. And the suggestion by his neighbour the previous evening that something would come down from the top of the house to ‘collect’ rent from him no longer seemed as absurd to Frank as it had done during daylight hours.

  He managed to stay awake in the large silent building until 2 a.m., when sleep overcame him.

  At 4 a.m. he sat up with a small cry, convinced that the group of thin figures who were standing around his bed, had actually come out of the dream with him and were now present at the bedside.