The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [103]
He went out to a phone box on Ladbroke Grove, but it was back-to-back with another and he thought perhaps the man who was in it would hear what he said; he seemed almost to be expecting him, since he wasn't evidently talking, just leaning there. And it was still very close to home; it seemed to implicate Gerald. He went on down the hill, into a street that looked far more amenable to drug-dealing, where a man who could well have been an addict was just coming out of the phone box on the corner. Nick went in after him, and stood in the stuffy half-silence, fiddling in his wallet for the paper with the number on it, and wishing he'd already had a line of coke, or at least a gin-and-tonic, to put him in charge. He wished Wani could have done this, as usual, in the car, with the Talkman. Having given Nick the money, Wani liked to set him challenges, which were generally tasks he could more easily have done himself. Wani claimed never to have used a phone box, just as he had never been on a bus, which he said must be a ghastly experience. So he had never breathed this terrible air, black plastic, dead piss, old smoke, the compound breath of the mouthpiece—
"Yep."
"Oh, hello . . . is that Ronnie?"
"Yeah."
"Oh, hi! It's Nick here," said Nick, with an urgent smile at a spot low down on the wall. It was like calling someone you'd fancied at a party, but much more frightening. "Do you remember—I'm a friend of, um, Antony's . . ."
Ronnie thought for quite a while, while Nick panted encouragingly into the phone. "I don't know any Antony. No. You don't mean Andy?"
Nick tittered. "You know—sort of Lebanese guy, has a white Mercedes . . . sometimes calls himself Wani . . ."
"All right, yeah—enough said! Yeah, Ronnie . . ." said Ronnie, and chuckled affectionately, or with a hint of ridicule, so that Nick didn't know for a moment what he thought of Wani himself, any view of him seemed plausible. "The man with the portable telephone. He's Lebanese, is he? I didn't know he was Lebanese."
"Wani? Well actually he was born in Beirut, but he went to school here, and in fact he's lived in London since he was ten," said Nick, getting snagged as usual in a sub-clause to a more important sentence.
" . . . right..." said Ronnie after a bit. "Well I expect you'll be wanting to see me then. About something."
The great thing about Ronnie, as Wani said, was that he always came through. The stuff was tip-top, he dealt to some big names, and if the price, at one-twenty a gram, was a little steep, the mark-down at three-fifty for a quarter-ounce was a deal indeed. (A quarter-ounce, seven grams, was the only metric equivalent Nick had yet been able to memorize.) The downside of Ronnie was a strange delaying manner that would have seemed sleepy if it hadn't been also a kind of vigilance. He never rushed, he was never on time, and he had a puzzled porous memory. Nick had only met him once, when they'd driven round the block in his red Toyota and he'd watched the simple way the exchange was made. Ronnie was a cockneyfied Jamaican, with a tall shaved head and doleful eyes. He talked a lot about girlfriend troubles, perhaps just to make things clear. His voice was an intimate murmur, and since he was giving them something they wanted he had seemed to Nick both seductive and forgivable.
Today, it all felt much less happy. Ronnie asked him to ring back ten minutes later, when the routine of the first call was repeated almost verbatim, and again ten minutes after that, to check he was on his way. After each call Nick hung around the streets and felt glaringly criminal as well as