the vision of the woman he saw and heard so often inside his head. Now was one of those times.
He turned to look at himself in the mirror; he was twenty-eight years old but his blue eyes showed the signs of someone older. A man who hadn’t slept for a couple of days. His skin was pallid and pale and Tommy knew he looked as bad as he felt. He was tired; his head was tired and that was a constant.
It seemed as if he’d lived with the voice and the visions most of his life. As a child he’d heard and seen it but there was never anyone to tell. No one to help him understand what it was. No one to trust, except for maybe Maggie. He’d often thought about telling her, but when it actually came down to it, he couldn’t. Worried by what she might think. So every night he’d huddled alone in the dark, listening to the voice. Seeing the woman’s face which haunted him and made him live in terror. Then on the rare days his head was quiet and still, he’d had to listen to the screaming voices of his mother and drunken father in the room below.
As a child he’d always been too frightened to call out for help in case the woman with her bloodied whispering screeches – which only he could hear or see – became angry with him. Or worse still, in case his father had heard him calling out and had come up the stairs to beat him for making a noise, leaving him struggling to walk the next day.
Over time, the secret fears which had plagued Tommy’s mind as a child began to isolate him from his family. He was unable to listen to their raised voices as well as the one in his head.
Sometimes it got lonely being on his own, though he’d never had many friends as a child either. Not after the age of ten, not after Tommy had brought two of his best friends home after school to celebrate his birthday.
He remembered he’d had fun; his mother had secretly made him a cake. Maggie, who was three years younger than him, had given him a cross of St. Christopher, having nicked some of the church collection money off the plate. It had all been going so well, then his father had come home and found them playing with his music collection. Although nothing had been broken or damaged, no excuses were ever needed in the Donaldson household to launch into a violent attack.
His friends had managed to escape with only minor cuts and bruises; too terrified to tell their parents for fear of reprisal from Max. But Tommy had been badly hurt, as well as deeply humiliated at the thought of his home life becoming the subject of his classmates’ idle gossip.
After he’d recovered in hospital – telling the medical staff he’d been attacked by a group of boys – Tommy had left friendships for other people. As he got older, the only other people he had around him apart from his family were the almost daily one-night stands. He liked the company of women. If it’d been his choice some of them would’ve stayed in his life longer than the few midnight hours, but he knew his father would have none of it, seeing women only good for two things; fucking and causing trouble.
On some days like today, shameful, clear and vivid memories came back to Tommy. Things he’d been a part of, things he certainly couldn’t tell anyone about. And then he’d find himself drowning in his private sea of despair unable to save himself, seeing himself as a monster; a freak.
It was too late now to tell Maggie, everything had already gone too far.
Tommy stood in the deserted car park behind Lexington Street, wondering if anyone had seen him. It was dark as he stood over the semi-naked woman lying helpless at his feet on the cold wet ground. He saw the fear in her eyes as she looked up at him, wondering what he was going to do now.
His breath formed a hazy mist in the frosty unlit night. He tilted his head to one side watching the woman’s chest rise slowly up and down with rasping breaths, blood oozing out from the side of her mouth onto the freezing earth. He put his hand on her mouth but the sound of the horn startled him and Tommy quickly ran off into the dark chill of the night.
The mobile phone rang in his pocket. Tommy’s thoughts were immediately broken. He could feel his face covered in perspiration as the adrenalin pumped through his body and the images in his mind started to fade away.
Looking at his watch he saw it was coming up to three. He needed to get a move on; he was supposed to be meeting his father in Soho later. There was always hell to pay if he wasn’t there by the strike of the clock. The last thing he needed today was his father on his case, especially when his father was gunning for the Taylors.
Johnny Taylor slowly opened one eye and groaned as the previous night’s heavy session of drinking and copious amounts of cocaine finally caught up with him. He could feel the air was heavy with the early summer smog of London and the sound of a saxophone cut through the morning. If he’d been at all capable of moving, Johnny might’ve been tempted to open the window and throw iced water onto the musically inept busker outside, whose flat rendition of ‘Moon River’ certainly wasn’t helping his hangover.
Carefully he lifted his head, which slammed it into a pulsating throbbing pain. He tried not to move it any more than necessary; afraid of the hangover from the bowels of hell he was certain to awake.
Opening the other eye just as slowly as the first, he was surprised to see the naked body of a sleeping woman, ungainly sprawled with her mouth wide open, snoring discordantly at the end of his bed. Though at least he recognised her, which was a start.
There was no mistaking the harsh bleached blonde with the dark roots and the faded rose tattoo on her thigh who worked in his father’s clip joint at the end of Berwick Street. Her name was Lucy; not that Johnny heard many people call her by her real name any more.
She’d turned up looking for a job a few years ago and within a short period of time she’d acquired the nickname, Saucers, thanks to the impressive size of her nipples. Far from being offended however, she’d warmed to the name immediately, proudly telling the punters her new pet name as she licked her heavily glossed lips.
Johnny found Saucers to be a bag of contradictions; a hardened brass who never raised her eyebrows at the often perverse requests asked of her, yet one who spent her spare time devouring books, romantic classical novels being her favourite. On many occasions he’d sat in the back of one of his father’s strip clubs, handing her a box of Kleenex as she cried tears over one romantic hero or another.
‘Oh I’d like to wring his neck. Pass me another tissue, Johnny.’
‘Who is it this time?’
‘Prince Stepan Oblonsky, that’s who. Not a heart in the man. He’s only gone and had an affair with the governess. Chop his balls off, I would.’
As usual he’d look at her blankly, only for Saucers to raise her eyebrows in exasperation at his ignorance. ‘Anna Karenina?’
‘You’ve lost me now, babe.’
She’d laughed warmly and stared at him. ‘Johnny, a snail would bleeding lose you.’
As Johnny lay on his bed trying to blank out the saxophone, he was thankful that their nakedness was undoubtedly down to the Soho heat, rather than him screwing her. He saw Saucers like he would a sister. Besides, he’d tried to leave all the one-night faceless beauties behind; on the whole he’d managed it. It was really only when he’d had too much to drink – which wasn’t that often – that he found himself waking up beside a woman with no name.
He could feel the breeze coming from the open window. He winced as he tried to turn towards it. The pain was now making its way round to the back of his eyes. Even the small movement made his head hurt, though he wasn’t surprised. He’d been on one of his ‘legendaries’.
They were a joke amongst his friends and family. In the past he’d had to make SOS calls, finding himself stranded in places as far-flung as Hull with no recollection of how he’d got there, or who he’d been with.
He’d always been a lightweight when it