Just Another Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Afro-Asian rock, whatever that was, and who were destined to go far. They had a girl lead singer who also played the electric plastic lids that pass for a drum kit nowadays. She was good, if incomprehensible, and quite a looker, despite the salmon-pink Mohican haircut. The other two Pekingetts played keyboards, didn’t look old enough to get served in a pub and were probably designing clothes by computer in their spare time.
    One of them at least could write music and had scored out a few bars to give us a theme, but we were under strict instructions to stick to the breaks and not to improvise. Which was a pity, because Bunny was very good and could have done a lot for their arrangements, given half a chance. But then Bunny was really interested in only one thing, sex, and was halfway to making the girl drummer before the end of the first set.
    It was a way of life with Bunny, who always went for quantity rather than quality and, where possible, married women. It all stemmed from finding his wife in bed with a bloke from the office. Well, not so much that as finding out during the ritual punch-up that always follows such discoveries that the affair had been going on for three years and two months, the marriage being three years and three months old. Once the divorce had been finalised, the flat in Muswell Hill sold off and the goldfish divided between them, Bunny had packed in his job as an insurance broker and taken to the streets with his alto. He was good with it and earned a regular wage as a theatre-pit musician and a session man on the odd recording. On warm summer evenings, he polished up an ancient soprano sax (making a comeback after Sting’s ‘Dream of the Blue Turtles’ album) and busked in Covent Garden outside the Punch and Judy. I told you he was good; you have to pass an audition to busk there these days. But it was all only a means to financing his hobby of women.
    Not that he needed the cash to wine and dine them or buy them expensive presents. Bunny needed loot to finance his campaign, and it was at times as spontaneous and light-hearted as a U-Boat trailing a convoy. I mean, Bunny thought in terms of this woman being worth x gallons of petrol and that woman was y+1 pints of beer. It was very cold-hearted … I mean, not the sort of thing I could do. Bunny always knew the best days for shopping at Sainsbury’s (usually the day women picked up the family allowance) and when every ladies darts team in the area was playing away (home matches sometimes attracted husbands). And the worst thing about it was, he was successful. And with chat-up lines like: ‘Hello, I’m Bunny. I suppose a fuck’s out of the question?’ I ask you! I once suggested a more subtle approach, such as a sock filled with sand, and I do believe he considered it for a day or two.
    So it was not surprising that Bunny saw her first. In between numbers, he nudged me in the ribs and whispered, ‘Third table back near the bar.’
    Between the strobes that lit up Peking, I could make out the two girls at the table now in the crosshairs of Bunny’s randy sights. If the Mimosa had been smoke-filled and dimly lit, it could have been a scene from a 1940s movie scripted by Chandler. But the Mimosa could never be smoke-filled as it was far too draughty, and the only dimly-lit parts were where the odd light-bulb had blown. The one on the right, wearing what appeared to be a pink jumpsuit, was a stranger to me, but the other was Jo, the girl from the Gun and Seymour Place. Well, at least I’d remembered her name.
    â€˜I think you could be in there, boy. I know the one on the left.’
    Bunny perked up at that and put a real zip into the intro to the last number of the set, a good standard rocker that, with a stronger bass line, would stand a chance in the charts. We both enjoyed ourselves with it to the extent that neither of us noticed the two women had left.
    The Peking trio didn’t bother