Angel Touch by Mike Ripley Page A

staring at me. ‘Not a month.’
    â€˜When do I start?’
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Chapter Four
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    Flushed with my newfound wealth, or at least the prospect of an expense account, I took a taxi – a real one – to Dod’s place in Bethnal Green to collect my horn and Tiger Tim’s banjo from the back of his van. He wasn’t in, but his van was parked outside his block of council flats just asking to be nicked. I knew Dod had it well over-insured, but he might have given a thought to our gear. Some people have just no consideration for other people’s property.
    I helped myself to the instruments and deliberately left the back doors open slightly to encourage joyriders – I knew Dod would have wanted it that way – then hopped back in the black cab and asked for Stuart Street. The driver, a real diehard musher of the old (reform) school, didn’t bat an eyelid at my apparent daylight robbery. Mind you, I got a reaction from him when we got to Hackney and I made him wait while I transferred the instruments to the back of Armstrong.
    When he thought he’d been carrying a fellow musher, he didn’t swear when I didn’t tip him. For London cabbies, that’s the next best thing to discount.
    I got Armstrong wound up and headed for Covent Garden. I reckoned to catch Tiger Tim on his usual pitch, before the tourists and office workers moved out and he switched to his evening pitch outside one of the theatres.
    Feeling lucky, I left Armstrong parked a few yards from Bow Street court and worked my way into the back of Covent Garden through the flea market. There were at least three different styles of music coming from the Plaza – unfortunately you don’t get warnings of the white-faced-clown mime acts until you’re almost on them.
    One theme came across as worryingly familiar. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn it was Werewolf doing his Eddie Cochran medley – a party trick of his that doesn’t last long.
    It was Werewolf playing Eddie Cochran, and hamming it up to the gallery something rotten. He was standing on Tiger Tim’s pitch and had a fair to middling crowd around him. Across the Plaza, trying to compete, were a talented duo I’d seen on the comedy club circuit. They went under the name of Lord Snooty, or something pinched from an old comic strip, and one played soprano sax and the other sang and filled in with a miniature trumpet, Don Cherry style – except Cherry’s good at it. I felt sorry for them. At the rate Werewolf was pinching their audience, if he got onto Chuck Berry then they might as well pack it in and move down onto the Northern Line.
    I joined the crowd around Werewolf for what turned out to be his last number. He’d obviously just been minding the store while Tiger Tim went for a natural break. Tim’s break had been as far as the Punch and Judy, and he’d reappeared with a pair of bottles of lager with the tops off. He handed one to Werewolf as he finished and unplugged Tim’s guitar from the battery-run amplifier without even acknowledging the applause he was getting.
    Tim raised his eyebrows at me and offered the other bottle. I shook my head.
    â€˜Better not, I’m driving,’ I said.
    â€˜I shouldn’t either,’ said Tim, ‘but I’m gonna.’
    I knew what he meant. Since the pubs were allowed to stay open all day, the police had come down fairly heavy on drinking in the street. It was what politicians called a quid pro quo and what Tim and the other buskers called a fucking nuisance; but they had their pitches to think of.
    â€˜I loike this place, lads,’ said Werewolf, in between swigs of lager. ‘I might take a sabbatical and work it for a year, or a summer anyway.’
    â€˜He’s good enough,’ Tiger Tim said to me. ‘You could be too if you changed your style.’
    I tried to look modest.
    â€˜I’m no good at the cocktail jazz