Within the hour, still buoyed by my encounter with H’s dad, I walk the mile or so to Gunwharf, which turns out to be a newish shopping and leisure complex. The promenade at the seaward end looks out over the harbour, which is as empty as Gunwharf itself, and I linger beside the water, knowing how rare it must be to have a view like this to myself. I’ve already spotted Casablanca on the way down, a stylish confection in light pastel shades of green, pink and light blue. One of the plate-glass windows is dominated by an extravagant palm which frames the view of the interior, and back from the waterfront, I have the opportunity to take a proper look.
By now it’s nearly dark and at first all I can see inside is the bare outline of tables topped with upended chairs, but then I make out the faintest suggestion of a bar in the depths of the restaurant, a line of bottles dimly lit by the flicker of a single candle. I’m still looking for a bell or a buzzer beside the entrance when I feel the lightest pressure on my shoulder.
‘Enora? C’est toi?’ A throaty chuckle.
I glance round. This has to be Shanti. She’s tall, full-figured, a commanding presence in a floaty dress with a fountain of playful stars that explode upwards towards her bosom. Her hair is cut brutally short and she’s wearing a huge pair of plastic earrings. She has a bag over her shoulder but, for a big woman, she moves with the lightness of a ghost.
She’s dressed for summer. I ask her in French whether she isn’t cold.
‘Never.’ She’s unlocking the door. ‘Come. I must feed you.’
I follow her into the emptiness of the restaurant. She trails the scent of patchouli oil, a sweet spiciness that hangs briefly in the stale air. She collects the candle from the bar and checks the phone for messages.
‘You’re expecting bookings?’
‘Bookings would be good.’ She’s speaking English now, and she shoots me a sardonic look over her bare shoulder. ‘In fact, anything would be good these days. I used to love Albert Camus, La Peste especially. Now I realize he wasn’t joking. Days like these steal your soul.’ She nods gravely, abandoning the phone. ‘And the nights are even worse. You have a friend, no? One of the fallen?’
The fallen? H, I think, would take offence.
‘I have a friend who’s not very well,’ I say loyally. ‘Better soon, inshallah.’
Inshallah, if Allah wills it, raises a broad smile.
‘You believe in God, my child? In the face of such evidence as this?’ She gestures round the shadowed, empty space that should be so busy. Beautifully shaped hands. An interesting assortment of silver bangles on her thin wrists. When I follow her into the kitchen, she lights more candles. A little window at the back is broken and the draught makes the shadows dance on the shelves of pots and pans.
‘You prefer candles to electricity?’
‘I love electricity.’ That throaty laugh again. ‘But I haven’t paid my bill. The gas people, too. They’ve cut me off.’
‘Carelessness? You forgot?’
‘Poverty. I couldn’t afford it.’
‘Times are that bad?’
‘Oui. Pénible.’ Cruel.
‘So what happens when all this is over? And you have meals to cook?’
‘They turn me on again. Because by then we’ll have lots of money.’
‘We?’
‘You and me, my child.’ She puts a finger to her lips. ‘Inshallah.’
For the time being she volunteers no more details but busies herself at the work surface beside the double sink. From her bag she produces onions, an aubergine, two small courgettes, fat beef tomatoes, and a bunch of something green I take to be coriander, and in no time at all I’m looking at the ingredients for a substantial tagine. Chopping garlic and root ginger, she tells me to take a candle back to the bar.
‘The cupboard beside the telephone,’ she says. ‘You like Sidi Brahim? In Marrakesh we lived on it, and you know what the locals said? Only infidels and Jews drink red wine from the fridge. Tonight, we have no choice. Either Sidi Brahim at room temperature or water from the tap. Your choice, my child.’
She turns her back and begins to layer the sliced veggies into a tagine dish before hunting for spices. I fetch the wine from the bar and by the time I return, I can smell the sweetness of the red paprika. She’s cooking on an ancient-looking two-ring camping stove, dwarfed by the big tagine. The little blue tank of butane gas, she says, is nearly empty but there’s a popping noise and then a blossom of flame the moment she strikes a match.
‘You want another job?’ She nods at a nearby drawer. ‘Sidi Brahim is like us. It lives to breathe.’
I find a corkscrew in the drawer and draw the cork from the bottle. Shanti adds water to the tagine, gives it a stir, makes the sign of the cross, and then takes a sip of the wine before settling on a battered stool.
‘Tell me about your sick friend. Du coin, n’est-ce pas?’
Du coin means local. I nod. Pompey born and bred, I say. First a hooligan. Then a trainee accountant. Then a very rich man.
‘Cocaine?’
‘Yes.’
‘So easy. Especially now. Me? I used to love it, talk to it, make it be nice to me. More. I always wanted more.’
‘This was when?’
‘Not so many years ago. In Marrakesh. There you have three choices. Kif from the mountains, good kif, very good kif. Or cocaine. For enough, you needed a lot of money and a lot of discipline and I had neither.’
‘And the third choice?’
‘Sidi Brahim. Life in Marrakesh could be unkind. Red wine made me fat. Kif made me sleepy. While cocaine was going to put me in the gutter with the poor people. God invented choice to make us crazy, n’est-ce pas?’
‘So, what happened?’
‘I got fat.’ She stares briefly into her glass, then shrugs and empties it. By now, I’ve found another stool. She looks up at me for a long moment, and then gestures me a little closer as if other people might be listening.
‘How much do you need?’
‘Wine?’
‘Money, my child. To pay that bill of yours for your friend.’
‘My child’ is wearing a little thin. She’s probably my age, maybe even a year or two younger, but I’ve been in these situations before. A lot of people I know assume that only men play power games, jostle for advantage, insist on being top dog. It isn’t true.
‘A quarter of a million pounds.’ I hold her gaze.
‘How soon?’
‘Very soon.’
‘You have debts?’
‘I have obligations. My friend is very sick and refuses to go to hospital. It’s my job to keep him alive and a quarter of a million pounds might just do that.’ I offer her a thin smile. ‘And you? What do you need?’
‘Apart from a man?’ She pours herself another glass of Sidi Brahim and offers me the bottle. ‘I need enough to turn my lights back on again.’
‘Maybe a man would do that.’
‘Sure, my child. Touché. But maybe not.’
‘So, we’re talking electricity?’
‘Of course not. Pas du tout. The electric will help. The electric will let me feed people, make a little money, enough to pay the other bills, but no. A confidence, my child, a secret, do you mind?’
‘Not at all.’
‘My life is so boring, so tedious. Take this place, this little business of mine. It was making me a living, not so much but enough. I have somewhere to live. I have amusing friends. Then everything stops, not my fault, and suddenly’ – she frowns – ‘tout-a-fait fauché.’ Fauché. Broke.
‘So?’
‘So, I look back at the days when my lights were on, when there was gas in my pipes, and do you know what I feel? What I realize? That this new life of mine was never enough. Does that make me greedy? Or just bored? In London I lived like a pirate. The man in my life was like a dog with mange, always scratching, always on the move, never still, never at rest. But at least every day was different.’
‘You were dealing?’
‘He was dealing. And he was very, very good at it. We made a lot of money, stayed out of trouble. And we were laughing all the time.’
‘Until?’
‘Until he met someone else. Never trust Italian journalists, no matter how often they smile at you.’
‘She stole your man?’
‘He, my child. He stole my man. And that was a surprise, not just to me but to him as well. The morning he told me he’d never been so happy in his life was the morning I left. Not “happy”. He used a different word: “complete”. He said Giuseppe made him complete, and you know what that means? It means I’d been living with half a man, not a whole man at all.’ She shakes her head. ‘Nearly ten years. Unbelievable.’ The tagine is simmering now, bubbling softly under the thickness of the glazed lid. ‘You like couscous? Of course you like couscous. The whole world likes couscous. God is kind. I have a second ring on my little cooker. All I need is a little water and maybe a drop of olive oil.’ She leans forward, her hand on my knee, and gives me a playful kiss on my cheek. ‘Inshallah.’
The tagine is delicious, full-bodied, perfectly spiced. I have a list of questions I know I ought to be asking her. About exactly what H’s investment might buy us, about how the cocaine might be sourced, and – most important of all – about how we turn all these uncut kilos of pure white into the umpteen deals which will multiply H’s stake into the kind of money he so badly needs. If he’s ever well enough to listen, these are the details H is going to demand, testing whatever Shanti has to say against his own experience, but whenever I try to pin this woman down, the only thing that appears to interest her is H’s cash.
‘How much? Exactly?’
‘A hundred and fifty thousand pounds. I thought I told you.’
‘Tell me again.’
‘One hundred and fifty K.’
‘And it comes directly from him? He has this money now?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘How will he pay? How will I get the money? Bank draft? Cheque?’ She shrugs. ‘Cash?’
‘I’ve no idea. I’ve never done this before.’
‘So, it’s always been him? This H? Is that what you’re telling me?’
‘Of course. I’m an actress, not a drug dealer.’
‘A favour, then? You’re doing him a favour?’
‘Of course. Because he’s sick. In fact, he may be dying. No one seems to know, not yet, but I’m doing my best to help with all the bills we have to pay.’
‘Otherwise?’
‘Otherwise he’ll end up in hospital, in the ICU.’
‘But the ICU is free.’
‘I know, but a friend of his just died there. And H thinks he’d be next on the list.’
Shanti tips her head back, expels a long blue plume of smoke, says she doesn’t understand. Whoever turns down free health care? The kitchen stinks of weed now, but I’ve declined her offer to roll me a doobie of my own.
‘There’s more wine, my child.’ She nods towards the empty bottle and then checks her watch. ‘Me too, please.’
I leave the kitchen to hunt for more Sidi Brahim and return to find her reading a text on her mobile. A sudden scowl clouds her face.
‘Merde,’ she says. ‘He’s at the door already.’
‘Who?’
‘You go. His name’s Sean. He may need help.’
‘With what?’
‘The generator. The little man’s always hungry, too. Thank God there’s still tagine in the pot.’
Sean is waiting outside in the street, a pale, thin face shrouded in a grey hoodie, his hunched back turned away from the wind blasting in from the harbour. I open the door, and for a moment, looking at the blankness in his eyes, I assume he’s drunk. Wrong.
‘Yeah?’
I’m staring at him. Two of his teeth are broken at the front. His question is meaningless.
‘You’re after Shanti?’ I ask him.
‘Yeah,’ he says again. Exactly the same intonation. This vagrant has bits missing, I think. He’s not entirely, to coin a phrase, complete.
‘She mentioned a generator,’ I say.
‘It’s round the back. You’re offering? Or what?’
He doesn’t wait for an answer, just turns his back and limps off. He’s wearing grey trackie bottoms beneath the hoodie, and a shoelace trails from one of his runners. I follow him down the alley beside the restaurant. At the back of the premises, he stops behind a white van parked next to a builder’s skip. He opens the rear door. Peering inside, behind the generator, I can see a mattress, and a grubby duvet, and a couple of cushions. Also, deep towards the back, the outline of a bicycle. Together we manhandle the generator out. Sean smells of something sour, of damp and neglect, but his strength takes me by surprise. Together, we manhandle the generator to the restaurant’s back door, Sean doing most of the heavy lifting. Shanti is waiting for us.
‘You brought fuel, too?’ She’s looking at Sean.
‘Yeah. Tank’s full. Plus two cans extra. Enough to get the fridge cold.’
We carry the generator through to the kitchen. The draught from the door has blown out most of the candles, but when Shanti opens the big fridge-freezer there’s enough light to make out trays of meat joints, still oozing blood.
‘Venison,’ Shanti says. ‘Cheap if you know where to go. You place an order. The poacher does the rest.’
Sean fires up the generator, finds the plug and the fridge begins to purr.
‘You sell this stuff?’ I’m still looking at Shanti.
‘Of course. This city lives for meat like this. Spread the word and it sells itself.’
She shuts the freezer door and busies herself with the tagine while Sean rolls himself a doobie. Conversation between the two of them is sparse, no more than a grunt or two on Sean’s part, but I get the impression that they’ve known each other for a while. She seems to treat him with respect, even caution. The last thing she’s ever going to call him is ‘my child’, and that, too, is interesting.
Over the next half hour or so, while Sean wolfs the tagine and a couple of stale baguettes, Shanti is bent over her smart phone, firing off a volley of texts. I, meanwhile, work steadily through the second bottle of Sidi Brahim, listening to the howl of the wind through the broken window and trying not to think too hard about H back at the flat. There may, or may not, have been a third bottle of Moroccan red but by midnight I’m past caring. Not once has Shanti shown the slightest interest in resuming negotiations over H’s investment, and for that, I’m grateful.
Instead, I find myself listening to Sean. He’s evidently taken a bit of a shine to me and the weed has opened him up. He does most of the talking, an exercise in free association that takes in everything from the millions of undeclared corpses he’s heard about in the basement of the local hospital to the promised screening of Pompey’s epic 2010 FA Cup tie against the hated Scummers.
‘Fucking classic,’ he says. ‘Listen to those old guys who were at the game that day and you’d think we’d got to Wembley. You know what else happened that season? Four changes of owner, most of the ground staff sacked, thousands of other redundancies, the tax man knocking on the fucking door, and on top of all that we get relegated at the end of the season.’ He peers at me, as if I’d just arrived. ‘You from around here?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘No?’ He reaches for my glass. ‘I don’t fucking blame you.’
At the end of the evening, Shanti puts her phone away and declares she’s had enough. She looks at the empty bottles and shakes her head.
‘Sean will walk you home,’ she says. ‘He’ll be back to sleep in the van. Right, Sean?’
Sean nods, and moments later we find ourselves out in the darkness again. The wind, if anything, is even stronger and between flurries of rain I can taste salt on my lips. Saying goodbye to Shanti, she holds my hand for a long moment, then gives it a little squeeze.
‘À plus tard,’ she murmurs. See you later.
Quite what this means is a mystery but Sean, who must be freezing inside his thin hoodie, plays the gentleman and squires me back through the tangle of waterside battlements that have always, he says, kept the fucking French out. The Round Tower. The Square Tower. Garrison Square. Long Curtain. Each of these Pompey landmarks sparks a grunt or two of explanation from Sean, and I peer into the windy darkness as we stagger past, trying to imagine the roar of cannon and the glint of unsheathed cutlass blades in the fitful moonlight. Say what you like about this hooligan city but stuff has happened here, important stuff, stuff that ends up in a list of names on countless monuments, and Sean is telling me about the sinking of the Mary Rose untold years ago when we find ourselves wandering through the fun fair.
I pause a moment, staring up at the bones of the helter-skelter ride, trying to get my bearings. Then I become aware of Sean bent over the door of the nearby games arcade. I’ve guessed his age at late twenties, early thirties, and by now I know that he’s a self-taught electrician, taking money off anyone who’ll put work his way. One of his clients, he now tells me, has the franchise for the games arcade, and only this morning he’s been doing maintenance on some of the older machines.
He has the key to the door and moments later I’m following the torch on his smart phone through the muddle of slots and games machines. At last, in the bowels of all this tat, he stops. The place has already spooked me. I’m far too drunk to be seriously frightened but the place has the feel of a certain kind of film set, full of artful menace, and the howl of the wind outside supplies the perfect soundtrack.
Ahead of me, Sean has stopped. The beam of his smart phone sweeps left and right and then steadies on an array of stand-up mirrors. I last saw mirrors like these half a lifetime ago on the cheaper end of the promenade at Cannes. They’re malformed to make you look seriously weird, offering wildly distorted images that used to make me laugh. Us thesps would pay them a visit after partying at the film festival, the cherry on the cake after an evening’s boozing, and those surreal moments – fat in one mirror, thin in the next – became a kind of tradition. Now is no different. In the light of Sean’s beam, I throw a few shapes, pout, smooch, blow myself a kiss, and then attempt a final twirl that sends me crashing into Sean’s arms.
Again, much to my surprise, he has the strength to carry my weight. I’m totally relaxed, staring up at the shape of his hoodie.
‘Brilliant, yeah?’ He’s grinning fit to burst and the torch beam spills briefly across the wreckage of his mouth. ‘I knew you’d fucking love it.’
We say our goodbyes at two metres distance back outside. I can see the Common from here and, thanks to H, I know my way home.
‘Good to meet you,’ I say. ‘Do you really sleep in that van?’
‘Yeah, some nights.’ He gives me a strange smile. ‘Next time, eh?’