The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [34]
‘You’d be on the scent,’ his brother said to him. Patrick blinked, but the blear remained across his eyes.
Paul sipped wine.
‘In the hunt,’ Patrick said. ‘The chase. The game’s afoot, is it not?’
‘Don’t sound so disapproving. It’s hypocritical. You’d shag anything with a pulse.’
Patrick appeared to ponder this. ‘Wouldn’t necessarily insist on a pulse,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to over-egg the pudding.’
Paul laughed. And from the other side of the room, he saw Lucinda Grey smile at him above the shot glass held poised beneath her lips. She raised an arched eyebrow and, with the fingers of the hand not occupied with the glass, she beckoned him across.
‘Your fat rockabilly friend looks drunk.’ She sipped her drink and looked at him over its turning rim. The drink was iridescent, like her eyes.
Seaton looked back to his group. And back again at Lucinda Grey. She had her arms folded across her chest and the posture pulled the leather sleeves of her jacket, taut and soft. It had a mandarin collar, the jacket, and her neck was long under her jawline, the hair cut close, razored to a velvet nap above the hollow at the back, rising above her collar.
‘He isn’t fat. And he isn’t a rockabilly.’
Patrick, who was powerfully built but cherubic of cheek, had made the fatal mistake of wearing a letter jacket with some collegiate logo displayed across its back in his first week at art school. It had cost him thirty-five quid at Camden Market. And it had cost him any shred of credibility. He’d been the first to admit, afterwards, that this particular item of Americana had been a misjudgment. But despite the peach zoot suit he’d teamed with a hand-painted tie tonight, despite the careful strokes of eyelash dye he’d brushed into his pencil moustache, he’d been the Fat Rockabilly, at least in the third person, ever since.
‘You’re right,’ Seaton said. He sighed. ‘The Fat Rockabilly’s definitely had a few too many tonight.’
She lived in a hard-to-let council flat. She’d queued all night outside County Hall to get the tenancy, she told Seaton. It was in a walk-up block on Old Paradise Street, just on the south side of Lambeth Bridge. She told him this as he walked her home along the river an hour after meeting her, an hour after speaking to her for the first time. They passed an anchored barge in the darkness and the smell of gunpowder drifted up off the breeze on the river. It was one of the fire-works barges used in the GLC’s sporadic extravagant displays. A party boat wallowed by, over near the far bank, its lights pearly now through thickening mist and the voice of Boy George, thin and tremulous, singing ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ over its sound system.
He looked at her. He couldn’t stop looking at her. She was tall and slender in her black leather jacket and a cream silk blouse and a black calf-length skirt that hugged her hips, and there was something in her hair, brushed back from her face, that gave it an oily, intricate gleam when they passed under the bright globes, every few yards, of the Embankment lamps. Her skin was very pale and her mouth full under deep red lipstick. The Culture Club song carried over dark water and light jigged through mist on the distant boat. And Seaton smelled the scorch of dead rockets and burned-out Catherine wheels and his skin pricked and his heart hammered in his chest with the hurtling joy of life and youth and possibility. He’d never felt so alive. His life was a brimming adventure. A sensation accelerated through