24. Sparrow Sparrow Sparrow Sparrow Sparrow

The sizing up

The day goes on, and also it stalls for the gathering of perspectives.

In the booth, they all sit quietly for a moment, the boys arranging their smoking paraphernalia in that way they do, lighter lined with the edge of the fag box. Waingard puts her pint to one side, half a sip taken at the bar will do. She takes a note pad out of the inside jacket of her woollen blazer and a clip top pen from her trouser pocket. She’s a bit trussed up in this suit. It’s the first time it’s occurred to her she’s put a few pounds on whilst being away. As she leans over to pull out the biro her collar sticks into her chin. When she straightens, she sees the two of the, are staring at her, probably assessing her weight gain without having any clue it’s new.

“How can we help you?” Vardaman says.

She look them both dead eye for less than a second each, and takes in all she needs to know about them as characters, suspects, human figures who will, for the next few hours or days, have a very singular purpose in her world. They are going to tell her things. SO, what does she see?

They are bright men, probably fairly well-read and have some cinematic and musical critical faculties in their armoury. She can get that from the fact they drink in The Pipistrelle. This pub is known for that sort – always has been. And they look the sort, they look that type, they both have a serious-yet-friendly look about them. Like sheep dogs. The pointed ones, black and whites, not the Dulux shaggy ones. Their intelligence means very little. Waingard doesn’t need it, and in fact, it could become a problem if she has to keep wrestling with their interpretation of things, their perception of the changing world as they reveal things and things become revealed to them. But in a wider sense, this intelligence is something she recognises. It is wasted here, in this town, mostly because it is hemmed in and is already a lazy intellectualism that has evolved almost no emotional intelligence to go along with it. So, these two, if nothing changes for them, will become competent at carrying out the tasks of their waged life, and this pub will be the place they convince themselves they’re exploring progressive ideas, by telling women that enjoying music for dancing too is intellectually inferior to unpicking music for its left-wing political symbolism. Christ, it’s all coming back to Waingard now. Less than one second each, she looks at them, mind, but it’s all clear as rain water. This Vardaman guy, big but light, his greasy hair tucked back behind his ears, he has piercing blue eyes and full lips, and if he bettered his posture his height could be a winning aspect of his presence. But he feels too tightly wound, and he has the bloodshot eyes of an enthusiastic drug user. It’s not just the bloodshotedness though, is it? It’s the glaze to them, and the fact he won’t look Waingard straight on, as if she might catch some truth just beneath the surface that he’s managed to keep concealed from everyone else around here. Vardaman can sense she’s a local, can’t he? An escapee who’s back in the room with all the fresh air of the real world running through her lungs. Very dangerous. Does she have him marked as a killer? Probably not. But that depends on what happened the night before. Stick a pin in that one.

This Moses character is a little easier to read. He could definitely have murdered the bouncer on the train tracks. Whatever the reason. Although for people like this, it’s always desperation. Self-defence, self-preservation, revenge, psychosis. Whatever. Desperation. He has no problem looking Waingard in the eye, no problem in welcoming the challenge of sparring with an investigator, even if he had nothing to do with it, it gives him some idea of what he’s made of. Will he rise to it, will he embarrass himself? He’s pale, a little thick around the middle, which means he’s spending too much time on one of those bar stools. He’s well-liked, you can see that in the looseness of his shoulders, in the way he looks at Waingard expecting her to come around to him in the next ten minutes or so. That burly confidence. It’s charming. She doesn’t like being charmed.

Waingard sucks up a second, her mind distracted by the belt line digging into her new well-earned soft post-vacation hips. She smiles.

“You mind if I take notes?” she says.

The boys look at each other, and then shake their heads at her. Why would they mind? Should they mind?

“So, let’s start by telling me what it is you bought off Aaron last night?”

The boys glance at each other again.

Nothing no nothing bought we don’t we don’t know what we could’ve bought no we didn’t buy anything off him what could we have bought?

“Aaron was a drug dealer,” Waingard says. “Did you not buy drugs off him?”

No no god no Jesus was he did you know that wow he kept that quiet no we never bought anything off him we like beer really that’s my thing our thing yes sorry our thing we don’t know we don’t do drugs.

“You were just friends?”

Shrugs.

“How did you become friends?”

“He’s a bouncer up at The Loft,” says Vardaman.

“You go out on massive benders with any of the other doormen?”

“When?”

“Ever?”

Shrugs.

“No,” says Vardaman, deflating.

“Aaron had a specific charm?” Waingard says.

It’s a rhetorical question.

“What do you guys talk about when you go out?” she says.

“Music. Football. I don’t know. What do blokes talk about?”

Football? Why did Vardaman say football? They had never talked about football. If she asks what team Aaron supported, they’re fucked.

“What team did Aaron support?” Waingard says, her pen hovering over her notepad like she’s a street vendor with a questionnaire.

“Y’know, it wasn’t the football that mattered,” Moses says slowly, leaning in, lighting a cigarette. “It was the music. We were talking about music, and he likes hard stuff. Crass and US hardcore and all that stuff. Not my bag…”

“Love that shit…” Vardaman interjects and looks at Waingard as if he’s waiting for her to write that down.

“Not my bag,” Moses goes on after a second of glaring at Vardaman. “But he lit up when he found he could join in on our level, y’know? God, I fucking love it when men starved of intellectual engagement finally get some. They’re born anew.” Her flutters his hands in the air as if releasing a dove. “I truly believe in that.”

Waingard is trying to get passed Moses’s small-town idea of what an intellectual is, but at the same time she’s inwardly shrugging why not, let him have it, let him claim it, let someone come and argue against it. She’s listening, Moses’s going on and on about how pissed up conversations about art and culture can open minds and change lives. Maybe he’s right. Who knows? But Waingard becomes aware she’s slouching, and sometimes that comes with a certain expression that in the past has been mistook for flirting. She tries to straighten, presses the small of her back against the wooden slats of the pew and sticks her breasts out. Moses and Vardaman look sharply at them and then look away. Moses stumbles over his words, Vardaman grabs for his fag packet.

“I was telling him that I had this grand vision for a band,” Moses spits out; “A band that would only ever play one song and it would go on for hours, and the song would be What Goes On by the Velvet Underground. You know that song? You know it? Of course you do. Everyone knows that song. Well, we’d have this band and we’d just play this song…”

“Handy,” says Vardaman to Waingard, “Because I can’t play an instrument so I’d only have to learn this one song, like when American actors would go and do an Italian horror film in the seventies and just learn their lines in Italian and nothing else.”

“…Yeah so it would go on and on and on until it began to mean something else, like when you say a word over and over and it loses meaning, and then it picks up another meaning, maybe a nonsense meaning but it means something else. Like saying Rudimentary. Or Sparrow. Anything. Try it. Sparrow.”

Waingard isn’t going to join in, but she maintains a personable visage.

“Sparrow sparrow sparrow sparrow,” Moses begins.

Waingard shuffles in her seat. How long is he going to say sparrow for?

“So, you told him about this idea for the song that never ends,” she says, raising her voice so Moses is left in no doubt that he is required to stop fucking about. He stops. “And what then?”

“He loved the idea,” says Moses.

“He totally didn’t have a fucking clue what you were on about,” says Vardaman.

“But he still loved the idea,” says Moses.

“Who suggested going back to his flat?”

“He did,” says Moses.

“We wanted to go to the Railway for last orders, but he wouldn’t go over the bridge,” says Vardaman.

Waingard is making notes now.

“I didn’t even know he had a flat,” says Moses.

“Suggesting you knew something about his living arrangements,” says Waingard.

“What do you mean?”

“His flat was his second property, wasn’t it?” Waingard says. “He had a house up Christchurch where he lived with his girlfriend, and then a flat that he kept a secret from her, assumedly for doing things girlfriends usually frown upon. You knew about that arrangement.”

“Only because he bragged about it,” says Vardaman.

“You approved of that arrangement?”

“I didn’t judge him, if that’s what you mean,” says Vardaman. “Every man makes his own way in life.”

“Do you have a secret flat, Vardaman?” Waingard says.

“I don’t have a girlfriend to hide anything from,” he says.

“Smart,” says Waingard. “What about you, Moses? Someone waiting for you at home?”

“No,” Moses says.

“Footloose and fancy free,” Waingard says, not letting on that she recognises – saw it immediately when she came up to them at the bar – there are dark and lonely vaults within the souls of these young men. The ghosts had been on every street corner walking through town, all those boys masking their fears with bravado and sexism and now she’s sitting opposite these two, not ghosts, but filled with the spirits of the past and not even knowing it. “So, you stayed at Aaron’s place all night?”

“Not all night,” says Vardaman. “We left around three, I reckon. Walked back. Mo and I parted ways near the Civic.”

“And where is Aaron’s flat?”

“Rourke’s Place,” says Vardaman.

“That’s in Maindee,” says Moses.

“I know where it is,” says Waingard as she jots down notes.

“Nothing bad happened,” Moses says after a moment of watching her write in silence. “Nothing that happened last night had anything to do with whatever happened to Aaron today. There’s just no way.”

“No way?” says Waingard.

“We got a bit fucked up,” says Vardaman. “But we were good.”

More notes.

“Why do I hear he was looking for you two this morning?”

Shrugs.

“He got off, didn’t he?” says Vardaman.

“Probably looking to carry on the buzz,” says Moses. “We were singing Crass records at two in the morning. He had the fucking time of his life.”

“Anyone else with you?” Waingard says.

“No,” says Vardaman.

“What about your friend Hersh?”

The boys look at each other.

“Wasn’t out,” Vardaman says. “Why are you asking about Hersh?”

“A lot of leads to follow up in a case like this,” Waingard says. “Your friend Hersh bought a lot of drugs off Aaron.”

“I doubt it,” Vardaman says.

“It wasn’t a question,” says Waingard with a polite smile. “So where was he last night?”

Shrugs.

“Work probably,” Vardaman says suspiciously.

“Just so you know,” Waingard says, “I’m writing down here the words ‘conspicuously absent’.”

“Who have you been talking to about Hersh?” Moses says.

Waingard is beginning to feel it, a draw in a certain direction, and Moses is at the gate of it.

“I’ve been asking around and his name came up, just like yours did,” Waingard says.