Angel City by Mike Ripley Read Free Book Online

classed as condominiums among Tigger’s friends sleeping rough down at Lincoln’s Inn. They still had over three months before Doogie moved north to coincide with one shooting season or other, but every day there would be a different combination of boxes and bags on the stairs. It was Miranda’s way of deciding what could be shipped and what had to be sold. As they didn’t have a car, they were trusting everything to either the postal system or the railways, so maybe they had a reason to be concerned. Yet the volume of sheer stuff that they seemed to have baffled me. When I’d arrived at Stuart Street, I’d had a Sainsbury’s carrier bag. And I’d had trouble filling that.
    Lisabeth and Fenella were no better. They had discovered iridology, staring deeply into each other’s eyes and claiming to be able to diagnose not only present ailments, but past ones, by studying the iris of the eye. I did the old mine-look-like-road-maps routine (‘You should see them from the inside’) but they didn’t see the funny side and went off in a sulk.
    Even Springsteen kept out of the way, sensing my mood – or, more probably, my bank balance. Once the cans of cat food started to appear more regularly thanks to Bassotti’s pay packets, then I saw him maybe twice a day for a snack, calling in from wherever he’d been to wherever he was going.
    After the third trip, I didn’t hear from Tigger for a couple of days, and then an old mate called Bunny rang and asked if I fancied a few nights jamming at a club in the West End where they were trying to introduce Merengue music as the latest dance craze. I dusted off my faithful old B-flat trumpet, swilled water through it, spat out a couple of scales and made a mental note to buy some new lip-salve as the tube in the trumpet case could now double as sandpaper. Then I rang Bunny back and said sure, where and how much and, by the way, what the fuck was Merengue music anyway?
    Merengue turned out to be the Dominican Republic’s version of salsa, only less structured. That meant the brass section (Bunny on alto sax and me as two out of a seven-piece total) could do as much or as little as they liked, and so could the dancers.
    The club, off Oxford Street, was a flash place, but quality flash, no tat. The owner was an Iranian with money and no hang-ups about the Ayatollah, the Koran or the price of oil. He wandered around the club spreading bonhomie and free samples of Iranian caviar on triangles of toast in equal proportions. Halfway through the set he insisted the band tried some of his world-famous collection of vodkas. I stuck with the lemon vodka but Bunny went straight in the deep end with the Bison-grass vodka followed by a Polish over-proof vodka that had been flavoured with brandy to tone it down. Almost immediately, the seven-piece band became a sextet, but the dancers didn’t seem to notice and Bunny didn’t seem to care.
    It was after two in the morning when I left carrying Bunny’s saxophone case as well as my horn. Despite advanced numbness of most nerve endings brought on by the vodka-flavoured Bison (his words) he’d been drinking, he’d scored with a teenage brunette who said she was ‘in publishing’. I didn’t believe it as, for a start, her clothes smacked of so much money she obviously didn’t have to work, and from her conversation, she had obviously never read a book in her life. Well, not one without pictures. Come to think of it, she could have been in publishing. Then again, she might have said she was in polishing. I wasn’t paying much attention and I didn’t really fancy her friend anyway.
    One of the club’s dinner-jacketed bouncers nodded to me as I left.
    â€˜You Angel?’ he grunted, without moving his lips or unfolding his arms.
    â€˜I can get a message to him,’ I said cheerfully. It’s best to be reasonably honest with people like