Black Butterfly by Mark Gatiss Read Free Book Online

tobacco, coffee, sweat, sex. Wide-open restaurant doors belched Bolognese over the smell of the drains and tarmac.
    I zipped past Little Italy and swung right into Dean Street. A youth in a bum-freezer absently sloshed a pail of soapy water across the pavement, forming a black bloodstain. His hair shone with Brylcreem and a desperate moustache clung to his lip like an anemone to a wet rock.
    I slowed down in the traffic. He caught my eye and, clearly having finished his shift, wandered over. ‘Peps?’ he offered, laying an elbow on the sill of the open car window. ‘Weed? Bennies? Barbs?’
    ‘How thrilling of you to offer,’ I said. ‘However, I think I can struggle through the evening without artificial stimulants. Thanks all the same.’
    The youth just shrugged and shambled away from the Bentley towards a pale blue moped that was parked on the kerb. He kick-started it and the engine rattled and fired. Where was he off to, I wondered. Pockets stuffed with cheap fags, pills and French letters, roaring through the sultry night…
    The traffic shifted and I headed north towards Oxford Street, passing narrow entranceways as quaint as Eastbourne beach huts. In most, below stuttering red lamps, hoveredghostly whores. Out of the tail of my eye, I caught the slash of pink blouse and pink mouth, stockings with holes in them the size of two-bob bits, cheaply peroxided hair tumbling out of bent pins. As I drove by, the girls drifted in and out like figures on a weather house, and fugitive memories sprang up unbidden. How gaily I had trawled these same streets as a young man, a raffish De Quincy, my scarlet-lined opera cloak shielding each of my couplings as completely as the veil of the night itself.
    The car was idling again. I glanced over my shoulder and the image thrown back in a tobacconist’s window–an old man hunched over a steering wheel–banished all such nostalgia.
    Then another memory intruded. An occasion, a lifetime ago, when wee me, dressed in a little sailor-suit, had been ushered into the presence of a dying aunt. She was a vision in black bombazine, extending a fragile hand from the dark pit of her bath chair to stroke my smooth cheek. ‘Ah,’ she had cooed, ‘little Lucifer. How I wish I could change places with you…’
    Now, in the plate-glass reflection I seemed to see myself stretching out a withered claw to touch the face of youth with envy, envy, envy…
    I shook my head. Christ! I was being ridiculous! I’d never been a maudlin soul and had no intention of starting now. Throwing the car briskly into first, I dodged the traffic of Oxford Street and headed for the fabled Blood Orange.
    Three storeys tall, the club staggered between a pair of more respectable buildings like a drunk between two coppers, the windows of its tumbledown, mucky Queen Anne façade bobbing with shadows and candlelight. In its twenties heyday,it had been the epitome of glamour. Now, in its dotage, it had a seedy appeal all its own. I parked the car in a cobbled mews that stank of last night’s relief, then went up worn steps into a kind of vestibule.
    A bare bulb caked in dust threw ugly shapes over the chocolate-brown walls and the fretwork of a tiny, asthmatic lift. With a melancholy sigh, cables twisting and coiling like the undulations of a charmed cobra, the lift arrived with a jarring thump. I pulled open the grille, got in, and jabbed at the soiled green button, which had seen too many thumbs.
    The lift juddered upwards two floors and then decanted me into a big, dark room, every available surface covered with shards of broken mirror, grotesquely reflecting the heaving mass of jabbering, laughing faces. A shifting miasma of tobacco smoke rolled under the low ceiling like a storm cloud.
    I intended to get very drunk.
    I headed for the curved bar, where sat a big man with a neck like a block of ice cream. He was forcing flat champagne onto a sad-eyed girl in her mother’s furs, whilst two skinny queens in evening