Dave nuzzled his face deep into the folds of Joy’s fox fur and whimpered to himself. He had waited until Joy went out for lunch then slipped inside her office. A liquorice pipe was not enough. He needed real comfort as he faced the prospect of his guilty secrets being revealed. And her fur felt so good, so warm, so loving, and he prayed it was going to make everything all right. It was a classic, and he was something of an expert on the subject.
In his belfry, he’d spent many happy nights watching films and furs from the lost age of elegance. Baby Face: Barbara Stanwyck. Fur cape and muff combo. Lady Be Good: Ann Southern and Eleanor Powell. White fox fur coats plus a bonus silver fox wrap! Party Girl: Cyd Charisse, sublime in a silver fox trimmed mink. He knew them all. Intimately. There was nothing to beat the glamour, the romance, the relief of fur.
On the subject of relief, he had thought about it, but one of Joy’s mannequins, wearing a black and white sixties dress from The Knack, was sitting in the chair opposite him and her wide-eye stare was putting him off.
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Nearby, there was also Mothra, Gorgo, Godzilla, Lady Penelope and Parker in her six-wheeled pink Rolls Royce FAB 1, looking down accusingly from Joy’s bookshelves.
Joy was a geek in an age before the word became widely used. Before geeks there were anoraks, but Joy was too stylish to be an anorak, so her obsession had no name. It began when she started collecting memorabilia from film sets while she waited around for her actress mother who starred in British films in the fifties and early sixties. She now had enough nostalgia and toys to open her own shop which she was, in fact, considering.
In the end, Dave decided to ignore the mannequin’s accusing eyes. The fur coat’s slight fusty smell took him back to gentle, far off, happy times, even as it mingled with the faint perfume of the current owner and … It was good … Soooo good …
The perfume was stronger now as his hand unzipped his trousers …
‘You are fuckin’ disgusting, Dave.’
Shit! He turned, panting heavily, to see Joy standing, glaring, in the doorway, a shopping bag in hand. ‘I’m scunnered wi’ ye!’
‘Hi, Joy,’ he said. Limply.
‘If you’ve got jizz on my coat, you’re paying for the dry cleaning.’
‘No chance of that. Now. Now you’re here.’ Joy had had an instant deflationary effect on him. Her looks and perfume may have been seductive (Charlie, she’d been given free samples by My Gang), but her Glasgow accent and menacing manner had the opposite effect.
‘Good,’ she glared at him as she crossed the floor and dropped the shopping bag behind her desk.
Dave breathed a sigh of relief. It didn’t look like she was going to deck him. Although he was actually one of those people who enjoyed being caught in flagrante. Or, in his case, in furgrante.
‘So you weren’t kidding about lusting after my coat?’
‘It is a beautiful fur,’ he said, giving it a final wistful stroke.
‘Aye. It was mum’s,’ she said sadly. ‘Present from dad.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Dave.
‘She didn’t want it anymore after he left her for that fuckin’ bitch.’
‘Right,’ said Dave, relieved that Joy’s anger was directed towards someone else. He zipped up his trousers. ‘Morning Glory,’ he explained.
Joy looked down at him and sneered. ‘Dinna flatter yourself. I dinna see much glory there.’
‘No, no. Not me,’ he corrected her. ‘The film. Starring Katherine Hepburn. Your jacket. It reminds me of the fur she wore. From the lost age of Hollywood glamour.’
‘Ah. Thanks. Hollywood glamour, eh?’ Joy smiled. ‘I must admit, it does go well with my tennis shoes.’
She sat down at her desk and looked curiously at him. ‘So what is it with you and fur, Dave?’
‘You don’t want to know, Joy. But I could tell you anyway …?’
Joy considered his offer for a moment and then made a decision. ‘No. I’d rather you didn’t. You need help, Dave. Have you thought about talking to Cross Line?’
Dave was nonplussed. ‘Why would I talk to Cross Line?’
‘Because they say “Whatever your cross, we’ll help you carry it.” And it’s free.’ Joy looked excited at the prospect of a bargain.’ Think of the money you’d save on therapy.’
‘But in my case it’s a very big cross, Joy. I could be on the phone to them all night.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ She quoted Cross Line. ‘ “When you’re hanging from your cross, we’ll never hang up on you.” ’
‘I know,’ agreed Dave. ‘And “When you’re on the road to Calvary, we’re the cavalry.” ’ He looked at her with a classic Dave hang-dog expression. ‘But I’m afraid my past is just too awful, too painful, Joy. It’s my cross to bear alone.’
‘In that case, fuck off, Dave.’
He was about to exit, but then he remembered, in his earlier excitement, he had dropped a pen on the ground and he now went to retrieve it from in front of her desk.
She leaned over to watch him scrabbling around on all fours on the severe, polyester-carpeted floor. ‘You do know I’ve had a modesty panel fitted …?’ she warned him.
It sounded like a strange and discreet Victorian gynaecological device that might appear in the small ads in the back of an old magazine. The reality was stranger. The browncoats, the feared maintenance staff, fitted modesty panels to the front of all the desks of female staff following the dawn of the miniskirt. After numerous complaints from women, they were designed to disappoint hordes of male pen-droppers.
He looked up at her over the desk. ‘No, no. I really did drop my pen, Joy. When I – you know …’
‘Aye. A likely story.’ Despite the modesty panel blocking Dave’s floor-level view of her thighs, she still checked and pulled down her skirt.
He collected his pen and stood up, straightening his safari jacket.
She scowled at the sight of it. Joy could forgive Dave being a Peeping Tom and his strange preference for fur, but what she could never forgive him for was that safari suit.
She had such fond childhood memories of her father, ‘Lawrence of Fitzrovia’, the height of sartorial elegance, dashing and debonair in his hand-tailored safari suits. And now those precious memories had been replaced. By Dave. There was a photo of her father on her desk, wearing such a suit, reporting from Vietnam. She would never look at it in quite the same way again.
‘Actually, Joy, now I’m here, there was something I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Oh?’ she said without enthusiasm.
Dave looked around for somewhere to sit, but the only chair was occupied by the mannequin.
‘I need to get some standing legs for Stella Jeanne,’ Joy explained.
‘Shall I move her?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘You’d rather I stood?’
‘Yes,’ said Joy, lost in thought as she looked at the shop dummy. ‘It’s a worry, you know?’
‘What?’
‘Her hands are cracking and she was so perfect in spite of her years.’
‘Poor Stella Jeanne,’ said Dave coldly.
‘Yes. She’s drying out and her skin is crazing. I think close proximity to central heating is bad for her. She’d be better off at home.’
Dave was surprised. ‘You don’t have heating at home?’
‘Oh, no. My girls don’t like it.’
‘I didn’t know you had children, Joy?’ Dave was surprised.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Joy proudly. ‘Stella Jeanne and Stella Louise.’
‘Ah.’
He looked nervously around him. ‘What happened to that wheelchair from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’
‘No one felt safe in it, so I took it home again.’
‘Maybe I could get a chair from Pinafore?’
‘You want to live dangerously? If the browncoats found out you’d moved furniture, they’d call a strike. What do you want, Dave?’
‘I just wanted to know what you thought of my latest submission.’
Dave had had been saving up for a fur from Sacks and Brendlor, but now he needed the money to hire a hot-shot lawyer. After the Demon Barber’s investigation, when the full enormity of his crimes became known, he would need someone first-rate to defend him. And the only way he could earn extra money was to write freelance stories for Shandy.
Joy didn’t reply. She was too excited by her recent purchase. She took several pairs of thick-seamed stockings out of her bag and admired them. ‘1950s stockings. Still in their original packets. Aren’t they brilliant?’ She tucked them away in a drawer.
‘Yes … brilliant,’ Dave said uncertainly. He wasn’t sure whether she’d bought them to save money or because they were retro. He knew she had an eye for a bargain. When she visited her mum in Scotland, she would bring bundles of firewood back on the plane because they were cheaper in Glasgow.
Standing awkwardly in front of her desk, he reminded her. ‘My latest story, Joy. What did you think?’
‘I had a problem with credibility,’ she responded.
‘Why? You run serials with blind tap dancers, blind horse riders and blind swimmers.’
‘I think a blind javelin thrower is stretching credibility too far, Dave. Una Never Saw the Umpire didn’t really work for me.’
‘I see.’
She took a hairbrush out of her bag and went over to Stella Jeanne. ‘Anyhoo … it was an improvement on your previous proposal: My Dead Little Pony. A lassie meets a gypsy who persuades her to swap her record player for a dead pony that appears to her as a ghost.’ She looked up from brushing Stella’s hair. ‘That’s too weird.’
‘I don’t agree. I myself have regular conversations with the dead.’
Joy looked quizzically at him. ‘Yes. With your mum or something?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Greg told me.’
Dave grimaced as she took a joint out of a tobacco tin.
Dave felt he needed to explain further. ‘Yes. I often hear her voice inside my head.’
‘What do you talk about?’
‘Usual mother son things. She’s always giving me good advice.’
‘And do you take it?’
‘Of course not. She’s my mum.’
Joy opened the window and sat on the ledge smoking, lost in her own private thoughts. Dave’s eccentricities were really not that interesting to her. She offered him the joint. ‘Want some?’
‘No thanks. I’m a pipe man.’
She took a long draw on it. ‘I need realistic stories, Dave, relevant to girls’ lives in the 1970s. Hard-hitting. Social realism, showing the kind of Britain we’re living in today.’
‘Less Ken Barlow, more Ken Loach?’
‘Yes. If you like.’
‘Then I think I’ve got just the story for you, Joy. How does this sound? Tower Block Tessa. She’s homeless and sleeps in the lift. Her mother’s a bag lady and her father lives in a burnt-out car. She wants to be an Olympic swimmer. So she’s training in the water tank on the 30th floor. Maybe she has a disability, too, and is using her crutch to sweep aside the dead pigeons. She could find her alcoholic mother in the tank as well.’
Dave saw Joy’s wide-eyed face. ‘I’m not reaching you. Too over the top? Not enough? Give me some guidance here.’
But Joy was speechless.
Greg swaggered in and Joy lit up. ‘Ah. Maybe Greg can help.’
She indicated a multi-coloured story popularity graph that contrasted with the drab vanilla office walls. ‘Greg’s Feral Meryl has been number one for six weeks running.’
Dave scowled at his assistant’s success. His graph line easily overtaking the others and shooting to the top of the chart.
Greg sat on the corner of Joy’s desk and opened his hands in a gesture to receive Dave’s applause, but none was forthcoming.
‘Tell Dave where you get your ideas from,’ suggested Joy. She passed him the spliff.
Greg took a drag and explained. ‘Meryl’s a wolf girl. So obviously I drew on Kipling’s The Jungle Book. But James Joyce has always been a big influence, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Dave.
‘And Thomas Hardy.’
‘I’m more Laurel and Hardy myself,’ said Dave.
Joy looked amorously at Greg, ‘He writes about such strong women. Powerful women. Real women.’
She indicated the original art pages of the latest Feral Meryl episode. ‘Have a read of them and you’ll see what I mean.’
‘I probably should be going,’ said Dave, starting to slope off. ‘Another time, eh?’
‘Read them,’ said Joy menacingly.
‘Okay,’ said Dave reluctantly picking them up. ‘Let’s just review this literary masterpiece.’
The opening caption read: ‘Feral Meryl was a wild girl, brought up by wolves in the wilds of Berkshire. She was rescued by her friend Mandy who was trying to stop her being sent to a Special School.’
The art depicted two realistically drawn girls in school uniform chatting in a bedroom. Or rather Mandy was chatting: Meryl was growling.
Serial Killer by Pat Mills & Kevin O’Neill is the first book in the Read Em And Weep series and is on sale digitally or as paperback.