up there.’
‘Huh. S'pose. Well, here you are then.’ Todd pulled a different, rolled-up fiver from his pocket and handed it to Richard, who noticed with minor revulsion an encrustation of dried snot and blood at one end. ‘Home to wifey it is – I hope he doesn'thave any regrets.’ He departed, slamming the door behind him.
However, as Richard continued to watch, the man didn't head for home. Far from it. He crossed the road diagonally and disappeared below the horizon of the windowsill. He was – Richard realised with a jolt – coming into the Sealink. Richard was surprised, if not exactly astounded. Chances were, if the man was a member of the Sealink, that he had something to do with the media, and was vulnerable if recognised. Perhaps he didn't care? Perhaps there was no wifey, back at the Green, taking the casserole off the hob, leaving it to settle, leaving it to cool.
Richard sighed. He was a young man, slim, of medium height, with curly, blond hair. His features had something strained and delicate about them; blue veins showed at eyelid and ear curl. His expression was usually purposive, quizzical, lacking – as yet – urban guile. There was no wifey at home for Richard. No girlfriend either. Not so much, he grimly meditated, as a dry-gashed brass.
The words felt ugly enough in his mind to produce a bitter sensation on his tongue. Richard wasn't really that crude a young man. He half-hawked, swallowedhis own bile, hunched his shoulders, shivered, and then followed in Todd Reiser's wake, out of the door, down the orange-carpeted, winding stairs, and into the bar.
It was late on in the cocktail period and the atmosphere in the Sealink Club bar was, to say the least, rocky. Over the past couple of hours a lot of rebarbative, ulcerated and embittered people had been working hard at bedding their resentments down in sensory-deprivation tanks full of alcohol. In this no-alternative therapy, they were ably assisted by Julius, the club's chief barman. He pirouetted up and down behind the big, mirrored buckler of the bar, waltzing bottles of whisky, gin and vodka from shelf to glass. He did the cancan with the shaker, the lambada with the ice cubes, the Charleston with the bottled beers. He was a snappy mover. His bright orange hair was sculpted into a Cubist divot, his earrings were jade studs, his shirt, apron and bow tie were immaculate, gleaming. His deportment was so irrefutably classy that – as is often the case – the members of this exclusive club looked shabby by association.
Richard took this all in from the small lobby area outside the bar, before entering. To do so he had to near-clamber over the raised sill of the door. It wasthese sills, together with the functionalist decor of the establishment – naked bulbs behind wire basketry, bright orange floorcoverings, steel furniture bolted to those floors – and the persistent humming judder which perfused the place, that had gifted it its name. For the club was sited in a building directly above the main terminus of the Post Office's miniature underground railway, and the committee had elected to make a thematic virtue out of an urban necessity. But more importantly, to be in the Sealink was to be at sea – in more senses than one.
Then the human hubbub assailed Richard. Advertising people, television people, media-associated subsidiary professionals, jingle music composers, voiceover actors, public relations people, design consultants, gallery girls, commercial artists and a fair littering of moneyed or titled deadbeats. These were the denizens of the Sealink. They all seemed to smoke, they all seemed to drink, they all held themselves in exaggerated postures, heads jerking around, on the lookout for better social prospects lying behind the heads – or the bodies – of their interlocutors.
So pervasive in the bar of the Sealink was this tendency to scan all parts of the room, other than the faces of
your immediate neighbours, that it
‘Huh. S'pose. Well, here you are then.’ Todd pulled a different, rolled-up fiver from his pocket and handed it to Richard, who noticed with minor revulsion an encrustation of dried snot and blood at one end. ‘Home to wifey it is – I hope he doesn'thave any regrets.’ He departed, slamming the door behind him.
However, as Richard continued to watch, the man didn't head for home. Far from it. He crossed the road diagonally and disappeared below the horizon of the windowsill. He was – Richard realised with a jolt – coming into the Sealink. Richard was surprised, if not exactly astounded. Chances were, if the man was a member of the Sealink, that he had something to do with the media, and was vulnerable if recognised. Perhaps he didn't care? Perhaps there was no wifey, back at the Green, taking the casserole off the hob, leaving it to settle, leaving it to cool.
Richard sighed. He was a young man, slim, of medium height, with curly, blond hair. His features had something strained and delicate about them; blue veins showed at eyelid and ear curl. His expression was usually purposive, quizzical, lacking – as yet – urban guile. There was no wifey at home for Richard. No girlfriend either. Not so much, he grimly meditated, as a dry-gashed brass.
The words felt ugly enough in his mind to produce a bitter sensation on his tongue. Richard wasn't really that crude a young man. He half-hawked, swallowedhis own bile, hunched his shoulders, shivered, and then followed in Todd Reiser's wake, out of the door, down the orange-carpeted, winding stairs, and into the bar.
It was late on in the cocktail period and the atmosphere in the Sealink Club bar was, to say the least, rocky. Over the past couple of hours a lot of rebarbative, ulcerated and embittered people had been working hard at bedding their resentments down in sensory-deprivation tanks full of alcohol. In this no-alternative therapy, they were ably assisted by Julius, the club's chief barman. He pirouetted up and down behind the big, mirrored buckler of the bar, waltzing bottles of whisky, gin and vodka from shelf to glass. He did the cancan with the shaker, the lambada with the ice cubes, the Charleston with the bottled beers. He was a snappy mover. His bright orange hair was sculpted into a Cubist divot, his earrings were jade studs, his shirt, apron and bow tie were immaculate, gleaming. His deportment was so irrefutably classy that – as is often the case – the members of this exclusive club looked shabby by association.
Richard took this all in from the small lobby area outside the bar, before entering. To do so he had to near-clamber over the raised sill of the door. It wasthese sills, together with the functionalist decor of the establishment – naked bulbs behind wire basketry, bright orange floorcoverings, steel furniture bolted to those floors – and the persistent humming judder which perfused the place, that had gifted it its name. For the club was sited in a building directly above the main terminus of the Post Office's miniature underground railway, and the committee had elected to make a thematic virtue out of an urban necessity. But more importantly, to be in the Sealink was to be at sea – in more senses than one.
Then the human hubbub assailed Richard. Advertising people, television people, media-associated subsidiary professionals, jingle music composers, voiceover actors, public relations people, design consultants, gallery girls, commercial artists and a fair littering of moneyed or titled deadbeats. These were the denizens of the Sealink. They all seemed to smoke, they all seemed to drink, they all held themselves in exaggerated postures, heads jerking around, on the lookout for better social prospects lying behind the heads – or the bodies – of their interlocutors.
So pervasive in the bar of the Sealink was this tendency to scan all parts of the room, other than the faces of
your immediate neighbours, that it
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