Conrad Williams's Blog, page 9

Advent Stories #4

CRAPPY RUBSNIFF

Stanniford was waiting for them when they got back. He watched the two men enter the room and help themselves to drinks from his cabinet. They settled into a pair of leatherette armchairs on the other side of Stanniford’s desk. Soon, the only sound was that of the traffic on the main road and the ice chinking in their glasses. They seemed relaxed, but Haslam was looking anywhere but at him and Tasker couldn’t get his drink down fast enough. Stanniford left it a little longer. The drink wasn’t doing what it said on the label. Haslam started to squawk.

‘I think…’ he said. ‘I think…’

‘Charlie,’ Stanniford said. ‘That is something you manifestly do not do. I think. You listen. And act. Or you’re supposed to.’

‘I think…’ Haslam began again.

‘You think, therefore you’re a cunt,’ Stanniford said. He left him to it, slowly rolled his eyes Tasker’s way. Tasker was busy refilling his glass. His face was pinched hard and greying, as if someone had coated it with quick-drying cement. ‘What’s Descartes here trying to say, Phil?’

Tasker took a mouthful of whisky and swiped at some invisible hairs on his jacket. ‘He got away, John.’

‘You. Fucking. What?’

‘I think he did. It was hard to see. Dark. Lots of smoke. But I saw… we saw a shape coming out the back window.

‘Well now,’ Stanniford said. He caught a glimpse of himself in the waxing blackness of the window, a pallid man who had lost too much weight too quickly and resembled something ill-packed. His skin was baggy, as was the black Dior Homme wool suit, which had once looked so very sharp on him. The light was such that he was unable to see anything of his eyes beneath the heavy ledge of his brow, just a couple of wedges of shade above a hawkish nose and the humourless slit of his mouth. ‘Well now. What’s it come to? I can’t rely on my best men to do a job for me? Did you follow him?’

Haslam found his voice. ‘We followed him.’

‘But you lost him.’ Stanniford favoured the younger man with the kind of tones one might use with a child.

Tasker put down his glass and got to his feet. ‘We lost him, but there aren’t that many places he can go. We’ve shut the door on most of his people. Give us a little more time and we’ll flush him out.’

Stanniford sucked his top lip between his teeth. He had no choice, but he didn’t like conceding to an employee’s suggestions. ‘Fix me a drink,’ he said, flatly, not wanting one, but needing to lord it. ‘Vodka. Plenty of ice.’

Tasker handed him the glass but Stanniford took his time before accepting it, keeping his eyes on him, keeping the shadows there so the other man wouldn’t be able to read him.

‘You bring me Kelleher’s face in a paper bag before this time tomorrow night,’ he said, the ice chinking against the expensive crystal, ‘or I will have your arse for a fucking ink well.’

*

What had he lost? Really lost, in the grand scheme of things? A couple of secondhand paperbacks from the Scope shop down the road; a half-litre bottle of the cheapest white rum he could find; a batch of letters from Fran; his mobile phone. That was all. Losing the letters hurt most, of course, and he didn’t feel too great about grabbing the gun instead of the bundle before removing his arse from the flat. But Fran was dead and what she didn’t know couldn’t bring her back from the grave.

At least he had got one of the fuckers before they came for him. And it was good, really, that he hadn’t died. He’d have the rest of his lifetime to wish he had. They’d know how dangerous he could be. How far he was prepared to go. They’d be scared of him, a little. Maybe more.

Kelleher hadn’t stopped running for ten minutes, but now he ducked into the driveway of a house in Lordship Road to catch his breath and try to work out what to do next. The driveway was blocked, but not by anything so grand as a car. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a car in a driveway, certainly not in London. Driveways were for skips or rotting mattresses, or, in this case, an old GEC cooker and half a dozen swollen, ripped bin bags. He sat down with his back against the cooker, trying not to displace the spilled tin cans and beer bottles too much. It was getting on for 2 am. A change in the wind brought back to him the swoop of the sirens from Amhurst Park. His clothes — thankfully he’d fallen asleep fully dressed — smelled of smoke and part of the sole of one of his Pro Keds had melted in the heat. What had they used back there? Had they doused the whole building in petrol? The place had gone up quicker than Argentinian inflation.

Kelleher checked his gun. A virgin clip, but his last. He’d need to find fresh ammo before dawn. The gun was a battered old thing, a 9 mm Glock 17 that felt too light and plasticky to give him any real confidence, but it was all he had, stolen from the safe of a Korean restaurant he’d burgled in Manchester the previous summer. He hated guns; if you had a gun, you were much more likely to get shot, but the stakes were so high in the city now. Everyone who was a player had a piece. If you didn’t… well, you weren’t a player. Simple as that.

He found himself wondering more and more about that these days. Not being a player. Losing the gun, losing himself. Maybe get out of N16 and drive north, don’t stop till the petrol runs out. Ditch the car, get a job in a bar, find some new walls and a roof, a woman to help forget himself for a while. It sounded so easy, but he couldn’t do it, not yet, not while the sound of Fran’s breath as it gurgled out of her body still swam around in his head.

It was cold, now that he had stopped running. Stopped running. Now there was a joke. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was such a considerate neighbour, he’d have sat there hooting his Jacob’s off at the hilarity of it all. Instead, he closed his eyes and tried to think of an open door, or at least a door that was slightly ajar, offering a chink of light, some warmth. Everyone he knew in the city had been scared off, or had disappeared. And so should he, but for what had happened to Fran. He couldn’t leave until he’d sorted that out.

He caught a night bus to Lewisham, a nightmare of a journey that involved a change at Trafalgar Square where he had to wait for 20 minutes for a connection. The driver woke him up with a nudge at a little before 3.30 am; the bus was parked in the terminus. He thanked him and stepped off, depressed by the oily quality of the dark. He walked the half mile or so to Hither Green Lane and took a right, stopping by the disused St George’s hospital, which was hunkered down in black shadows, its windows boarded up, looking like anything other than a place where you could go for help. Every building, though, looked like that to Kelleher now.

He forced himself to wait for five minutes. Every window in the street opposite he checked for movement. He clocked every car that trundled by and listened hard for footsteps, sniffed the air for the smell of cigarette smoke. All clear.

He paused again outside the flat on Lullingstone Lane and had one more check of the area around him: the residential parking bays and the high wooden fence on to the dead hospital’s grounds. The windows visible in St George’s were either boarded over, punched out or milky with smears. It seemed to suck the silence into itself, becoming ever more still and dark with each passing second. He knew, if he didn’t act, that he would become the same before long. Already he could feel vast corridors of emptiness reaching out inside him, offering him miles of darkness to walk alone.

He knocked on the door.

*

‘You fucking prick,’ Tasker said again. He regarded his partner, who was looking out through the passenger window, his elbow up against the door, busy with whatever feeble thoughts buzzed around that colossal head of his. Haslam wasn’t rising to his bait.

Not for the first time, Tasker wished that Nicky Preece had been able to last the pace. It would be good to have Nicky around now, inasmuch as any endgame could be described as being good. But he’d feel more confident with Preece, instead of this hair-trigger arsehole. Where the hell had Stanniford picked him up from? Tasker squeezed the steering wheel tight for a few seconds, until his knuckles whitened under the sodium lights streaming past the car as they nosed through Holborn. Nicky Preece was on a ventilator now at the Royal Free. Half of his chest had been blown away, and a leg too, one morning two weeks ago when he started his Mazda up outside his gaff in King’s Cross and found out, too late, that the engine had been souped up with something extra special. The day after, Tasker had rented a lock-up for his own motor. The day after that, Stanniford introduced him to Haslam.

He thought back to that evening. They’d met in the World’s End in Finsbury Park, a large pub with a purpose built stage for gigs and karaoke. Stanniford and Haslam were there waiting for them. Two pints of Stella sweating hard on the table. Nothing for Stanniford if the pub didn’t serve Finlandia. Tasker didn’t like the look of the other guy from the off. His muscles were gym muscles. He wore a goatee, one of those jobs that looked like he’d dribbled treacle from his bottom lip to his chin. And he looked around him nervously, fiddled with the buttons of his Paul Smith suit, licked and re-licked his mouth as if it was a fucking lollipop.

Stanniford, Mr Economy: ‘This is your new partner. No buts.’ And he was gone, leaving them to their pints like two desperates on a blind date.

Since then, their hunting of Kelleher had not gone as well as Tasker would have liked. This was partly down to Kelleher’s savvy, and refusal to stay in one place for longer than a night, but it was also because Haslam was making his shit hang sideways. Tasker couldn’t focus. Every time he felt he was drawing a bead on the situation, Haslam would say something to knock him out of whack. He was getting sick of it. If Stanniford refused to notice that Haslam was an issue, a fucking liability, then they could both piss off and play house together. There were other places he could work. At his age, he didn’t need the aggro.

‘What’s left?’ he asked now.

Haslam looked at him as if he’d just suggested they have sex with a couple of rats. He sat up in his seat and looked out as they swung on to Waterloo Bridge. It was raining.

‘Left is St Paul’s, the Barbican, Canary Wharf and — ’

‘Fucking hilarious,’ Tasker spat. ‘Answer the fucking question or you’ll be left too. Left on the fucking bridge. As fucking roadkill.’

He chewed his teeth while Haslam took his time opening the A-Z. Haslam said, ‘Swearing indicates a limited vocabulary, you know.’

‘Answering back to me indicates a limited intelligence,’ Tasker said. ‘Especially in this fucking car.’ Just push it, he thought, just fucking push it a little more and I’ll air some fucking grievances. And then I’ll air you, you scum-sucking piece of shit.

‘We’ve got a shit-pit off the Old Kent Road and that’s it. If he isn’t there, then he’s scooted. We’ll never find him.’

‘You lose this cocksure attitude in front of Stanniford, don’t you? You piss yourself.’

‘I don’t piss myself,’ Haslam said, his voice hard and flat. ‘I play Stanniford like a fish. He wants to see people intimidated in front of him. I tell you something. He’s more comfortable with me than he is with you. He isn’t sure about you.’

‘I’ve known John Stanniford twelve years,’ Tasker said, slowly, making sure he took it in.

‘Counts for nothing,’ Haslam said breezily. ‘He thinks you’re after his crown.’

Tasker’s fingernails had found the soft area at the base of his palms and were digging. He reined it all in and eased back in his seat. Brought the needle down from 45 to 35. There would be time, at the end of all this, to let his steam escape. And then —

He pulled up around the corner from the Dun Cow Surgery and got out without waiting to see what Haslam might say. His back to the main street he dipped his head into the flaps of his greatcoat and checked the chamber of his customised Brocock, then motioned for Haslam to follow. It had been Haslam’s idea to torch Kelleher’s flat and it was the first and last time he went with any of the smaller man’s dumbfuck ideas.

‘You stand in my shadow for this one,’ he warned Haslam as they moved into the target street.

‘Stanniford has us equals in this job.’

‘Yeah, well I’m not Stanniford and I’m telling you to fuck off. Watch our backs. You can cry your heart out to Stanniford later.’ He could feel Haslam tightening up behind him like the coil in an overwound watch. Once they reached the stairwell of the block of flats, however, he pushed Haslam out of his mind. As long as he did his job properly, he wouldn’t have to think of him again until they got back on the street.

But it didn’t work out like that. On the target corridor, Haslam was pumped up so much that he started kicking doors in. He’d done for three when Tasker decked him with a punch to his stomach. He swung around as babies’ screams and yells of consternation came from the adjoining flats.

He waited until the testosterone was coming at him from the doorways and then he showed them his gun. ‘Go back inside,’ he said, and they did, all good boys.

A little further along, Tasker rang a doorbell and a woman answered. He pushed her back into her flat, ignoring the strident demands as to who he was, and pressed the muzzle of the gun against her sternum. He smelled piss, very strong, as her bladder gave way. ‘You should drink more water,’ he said. Her mouth was doing the beached fish. She had nice eyes, but her skin was very tired, her hair so used to colour from a bottle that it was the consistency of straw. ‘I won’t harm you,’ he whispered, conscious of the clock ticking. ‘But if Kelleher is here, if you’re hiding him, give him to me now.’

*

It was difficult to lock down the precise moment that his London life had begun to fall apart. Fran’s death codified it, made it all super-real, but the spark that lit the kindling? If he wanted to be extra anal, he could go all the way back to the day he joined the gym, in his mid-teens, and started making all the connections his parents begged him not to make. But the stuff that was happening now could really only be measured from the date of the cricket match, two summers back, at a nice little ground in Herne Hill. A casual game set up by some friends of his, an excuse to get the barbecue out and order half a dozen cases of lager. Invite plenty of ladies along and hope the sun was strong enough to get them dressing in bikini tops and quim skimmers. It was an in for him. He met a few men who were intelligent enough to know that muscle was no good unless there was a brain on top of it all. One guy had impressed him more than the rest. It helped that they struck up a partnership with the bat out at the crease. Kelleher reached 74, the other man 88 — they’d put on 62 since the previous wicket had fallen — before Kelleher was caught, slashing at a ball on the off side. As he trooped off the pitch, the other man had shook his hand and invited him for a drink later. Yes, he had impressed Kelleher, but his mistress had impressed him more.

— I’m Frances, she had said when the game had been won. Stanny’s not stopped talking about you.

— Who’s Stanny? he asked, thinking I could care less, and wondering how much curve a man could take before he went raving mad.

— My man. Your partner out there. John Stanniford.

He’d turned up then, fresh from the shower, his gaunt face coloured in by the jets, his suit fitting him so well it looked as if it was something to be shed, rather than taken off.

— Great knock, Stanniford said, offering his hand again. Again, Kelleher took it.

— Great century. You carried your bat like a pro.

— Thanks, Stanniford said. Let me get you a drink.

Frances arched her eyebrows as Stanniford went over to the cooler chests and picked out three bottles of beer. — He never gets his own drinks, she got off, before he was back within earshot.

— You here with anyone I know? Stanniford asked him.

— Not really, just those clowns over there, the guys set the match up.

— Nice blokes. You work with them?

— No, Kelleher had said, pointedly, fixing Stanniford with a look, with a come on.

— You looking for work?

— Yes.

— Well, Stanniford said, knocking back the rest of his bottle and looking at his watch, best of luck. Hope you get some.

Then he was moving away and Frances was going with him, but not before looking back over her shoulder and tipping him a slow wink that he knew he’d carry into his dreams that night. He watched the silver Porsche Boxster swoop out of the car park and rebuffed all other parties, for the rest of the afternoon, evening and night, knowing that something was going to happen there.

And Christ, did it ever.

*

Stanniford suggested Marylebone Library because of its proximity to Paddington Police Station and because it had a security guard, which would make the punters more relaxed and unsuspecting. As an added bonus it was within spitting distance of the Westway, a quick out of the Smoke. And because, who’d have thought it? A fucking library.

It was all news that calmed their nerves. They said, we like it. We like it a lot.

The exchange: a hundred DVDs, no packaging, no labelling, zipped up in a Case Logic disc holder — teen-porn, smuggled in from the Hook of Holland that very morning — in return for a dozen handguns skimmed off the amnesty stockpile, courtesy of their PC Bentboy.

Stanniford was in a suite at the Landmark Hotel across the road, watching it all play out with a pair of Zeiss in one hand and a Finlandia with a fistful of cracked ice in the other. Frances lying on the sheets behind him, naked, smelling good, waiting for him to finish his drink.

The kicker: an hour before swapsies, the security guard had been taken out by Kelleher who was now sitting in the booth in a white shirt and clip-on tie, reading a copy of GQ and stroking the baseball bat at his side. Waiting to do some good work for his new boss.

Stanniford’s men came in a two minutes to eleven. Kelleher nodded at them: Tasker and Preece, good men. He watched them, Tasker carrying the disc holder, as they moved through the swing doors, past the reception desk and over to the travel section, back left of the library.

Five minutes later, and three minutes late, two more men entered the library, both of them uglier than something dreamed up by Grimm. One of them had a green North Face rucksack slung over his arm. Kelleher avoided eye contact. It was better that way.

He watched them move towards the music section back right of the library, where the CD shelves stood. He was distracted by someone knocking insistently on the booth window, but only for a second, till he realised it was his heart beating. Beating like it had the first time he and Frances fucked against the wall in Stanniford’s garage, a wild two-minute thrash in the middle of an evening’s entertaining at Stanniford’s pile out in Egham.

Keep those visuals, he thought, as he lifted the bat and edged out of the booth. Five past, now. A quick peek. The swap made. No trouble. Two men disappearing out through the swing doors at the back of the library, heading for the fire exit. Two men coming his way, making for the main doors.

Fran sucking hard on his ear as he went for it, sliding her hand up his back, her breasts scooped out over her Wonderbra, jiggling against his chest. The warmth of her, the unbelievable heat. He felt her heartbeat, an insistent code of need drumming through to him.

— Morning, ladies, he said, as the doors swung open. He clipped Preece across the jaw, which broke immediately, and he went down in a squealing heap, trying to keep his mouth where it was meant to be. Tasker he felled with a sharp swipe to a kneecap. The sound as it popped made him feel ill. Tasker too, by the look of his face: it filled with grey, the eyes rolling back in their sockets as if he was auditioning for something by George Romero. Kelleher gave Tasker another to the side of the head, to keep him down, and kicked Preece in the balls when it looked as if he was trying to get his hand in his pocket. Then he dropped the bat, picked up the rucksack and left, eyeballing nobody till he was in the Merc with the ugly sisters and screeching away along Upper Montagu Street.

In the back, he punched Fran’s number into his mobile.

— Kelleher. You fucking cunt.

He was about to hit the call end button but Stanniford wasn’t finished. Kelleher didn’t like this. Stanniford never picked up Fran’s calls. Not in the month since they’d been seeing each other, anway.

— This is how you treat someone who was never anything but polite with you?

Kelleher forced himself to remain civil. — I could have been good for you, he said. I was willing to be loyal. A good worker.

— I don’t need any more men, Stanniford said. And those that I’ve got are top professionals, worth any number of you.

— Yeah, well, you might want to come down to the entrance hall and help your top professionals to pick their teeth up off the fucking floor.’

— I’ m impressed, Stanniford said, in a voice that was anything but. Incidentally, I’ve put a stop to your covert shafting, what you thought was your covert shafting, of my bird. It’s all over. The end. She’s here on my hotel bed, room 27 at the Landmark, looking mighty fine, waiting for me to give her some attention. But I’m not in the mood now. I’ve already given her more than enough attention to last however many seconds are left of her lifetime.

Stanniford killed the link then, and Kelleher felt his mouth turn to dust.

— Go back, he said to Blondell, the ugliest driver in the world.

— Are you fucking nuts? asked Gearing, the ugliest passenger.

Kelleher opened the back door, the Merc doing 50 south along Baker Street.

Blondell, then: — Okay, okay, Jee-sus.

At the Landmark, Kelleher barged through the protests in reception and was about to shoulder down the door to room 27 when he saw that he didn’t need to. It was ajar. Seeing that crushed him. If the door had been locked, maybe he could have at least felt that he might have a chance to save her. But a door that was swinging on its hinges was the saddest sign in the world. He opened it anyway. The message Stanniford had left for him had been daubed on the wall in the stuff that had turned hot for him, been pushed around her body by the sweet tempo of her heart. You’d have thought he’d have the decency to spell his fucking name right.

*

Stanniford alone in the rooms above the cab firms, bookmakers and newsagents and endless, streaming traffic. Blackstock Road was doing an impression of a car production line at down tools. The Seven Sisters Road too was nose-to-tail, filling the air with exhaust fumes, impatient horns, blasphemy.

It was only 6 pm, but already the sky was midnight black. North London seemed at its happiest in the dark, as if it were in league with this colour, and revealed its best side. Stanniford watched the army of Arsenal supporters as they downed pints outside the The Twelve Pins or bought burgers and hot dogs from the portable listeria vans parked around Station Place. Some big game at the Emirates, some European night. A clash of the titans, no doubt. They don’t get much bigger than this.

The gun in the drawer was still there when he went to check it for the fourth or fifth time since daylight faded. He had loaded it himself that afternoon but couldn’t decide whether to keep the drawer closed or open. Maybe he should keep the piece in his pocket, but that would only spoil the lines of his suit, and a sharply-dressed man always had an edge over his opposition, even before guns came into the equation.

He poured a drink, a strong one, and took it back in one gulp. It had been such a long time since he’d been at the brink, stoked up to take a life. That was what his men were for, that was what being at this level was about. He didn’t have to do it anymore. He had paid his dues and passed the tests. He’d put the hours in over the years. Blood and fear were a young man’s game. Now he pulled strings and sent men to swap bullets or blades in order to gain ascendency and improve his territorial claims. Pity this this team of men were the most incapable bunch he’d assembled in his puff. He’d lost the nous that had served him so well in recent years when it came to judging character, it seemed. He should have brought in Kelleher at the start, despite his swagger, because of his swagger. Despite his transparent hots for Frances. What did it matter if he was boning her behind his back? He was only doing what he did himself every now and then. Did respect come into it? Was he really so up his own arse as to think that respect meant shit in this day and age? As long as he did the work, what did anything matter?

Well now it was too late. He knew that Tasker and Haslam would fail to hunt down Kelleher. Tasker was too full of resentment to be truly effective anymore and Haslam wasn’t so much the loaded gun he’d hoped for but a loose cannon. They’d had long enough. He knew too, and in this sense his hunches had not deserted him, that Kelleher would not fail to track him down. He was that kind of man, the kind that bears a grudge.

Stanniford stopped himself from reaching for the bottle again. And looking out of the window was the only way to prevent him from imagining the colour of his own death splashed all over the walls.

*

‘I don’t want you here,’ he said again. It seemed as though he had said nothing but in the half hour since Kelleher muscled by him into the living room.

‘It’s okay, it’s safe,’ Kelleher assured him. ‘I wouldn’t come here if I was drawing any heat, would I?’

‘How do I know that?’ he said. ‘How do you know that?’

‘I was careful.’

‘You? You’ve never been careful.’

Kelleher sat down finally, in the hope it might relax the older man. ‘I’ve learned how,’ he said. ‘I’ve been practising. Now Paul, please, relax. Got anything to drink?’

Paul spent longer in the kitchen than retrieving a couple of cans of Stella might have warranted, but Kelleher let it go. When he came back, and passed him his beer, Kelleher noticed the dilation of his pupils, and the dusting of white on his lips, but it was worth it to have Paul tucked up into a cosy manageability. Paul mouthed his can and asked if he had any cigarettes.

‘I don’t smoke,’ said Kelleher. ‘You know that.’

‘I’ve heard nothing but bad things about you, Rory,’ Paul said. ‘You’ve got some fucking nerve coming out here. I don’t want to get a caning for putting a roof over your head.’

‘They don’t know about you,’ Kelleher assured him. ‘You and Ally separated five years ago, for God’s sake. I haven’t talked to you for six. You might as well be some door I knocked on at random, hoping to find a good Samaritan open up.’

‘How come I get so much news about you then? How come?’

‘You haven’t heard any news,’ Kelleher said. ‘You’re playing safe with all that talk. But fair play, all that talk is still the right talk.’

‘See? You’re still fucking about. Still trying to play Goodfellas. You’ll get yourself killed. And me while you’re at it.’

‘Nobody knows about you,’ Kelleher said again, wishing he’d never had the idea to come down this way. But where else? Ally, his sister, was now overseas, living in Tuscany with friends she’d met at University. There was nobody else. Apart from Lucy, his aunt in SE15, but she wasn’t answering her phone. By choice, he hoped.

‘I didn’t want to come here,’ Kelleher said. ‘You think I want to come to the place where my sister took some beatings? The only time I thought I’d ever come here is to give you a fucking going over.’

‘So why are you here then?’ Whatever Paul had snorted was beginning to wear off already. A tiny thread of blood was creeping out of his left nostril. The rest of the flat was pale in comparison to this gentling of hard colour. Ally was still here, in many ways. Kelleher wasn’t certain that he could smell her perfume, but in the decor and the organised chaos her presence was acutely felt, to the extent that he thought she might roll in from the kitchen before too long, a joint smouldering between her fingers, to ask him if he wanted a plate of chips, or one of her fearsome Bloody Marys.

‘Some guys are trying to kill me.’

The line, like something cribbed from a Hollywood film, hung limply in the south London flat, like a deflated birthday balloon sellotaped to the ceiling that nobody can be bothered to retrieve. Paul didn’t even dignify it with a response for the time being. He sank the remains of his beer and went off for a couple more. When he came back the blood on his mouth had been smeared away, turned into an angry comma on his towelling bathrobe.

‘You can stay here tonight,’ he said, as if Kelleher had any intention of leaving if he deigned it. ‘But tomorrow you fuck off. I don’t want my life knackered because of you.’

As he left the room, Kelleher couldn’t resist it: ‘Words you’ve heard before, I’ll bet,’ he said. The door might have paused a fraction, in its shutting, but Paul didn’t come back.

He didn’t sleep. His confidence that he had not been followed was minutely chiselled away by the dark until every creak became the footstep of a man intent on snuffing him out. He wanted to get up and look through Ally’s things. He wanted to spit in Paul’s face and beat the shit out of him. He wanted Stanniford. He wanted to do to Stanniford what he had leisurely done to Fran, while Kelleher was sitting on his arse leafing through pre-pubescent magazines, getting a hard-on about how he was going to make the old cunt rue the fact that Kelleher had been rejected.

Uninvited memories of Fran kissing him hungrily, removing her knickers in the back of his car, he quelled by summoning thoughts of Ally. He had not spoken to Ally for almost as long as he had blanked Paul. She had been Paul’s apologist, even when her husband broke her collarbone, and Kelleher had given up hope of drumming sense into her dope-addled mind. When the only words you speak to your sister are warnings and those words are being ignored, it doesn’t come as a shock to you to find that you no longer communicate, when of course, it should do.

Kelleher rolled over on the sofa and closed his eyes. He and Ally sitting on a slight incline in Finsbury Park, right in the bullseye of summer, aged what — ten, eleven? — and he’s trying to nick what’s left of her ice cream after finishing hers. ‘Fossip!’ she yells at him.

‘What the bloody hell?’ he says. Around them, people are strewn in the grass like human litter, smoking weed, drinking cider from bottles, listening to cricket on the radio.

‘Fossip,’ she says again, more casually, licking at her 99. ‘Collip. Dipoots collip.’

He’s looking at her blankly, more, in an almost panicked way. It’s as if his speech has suddenly become redundant, as if everyone else has graduated to a new level of communication but forgotten to tell him what the new frequency is.

‘Ally, what — ?’

She rolls her eyes and groans. ‘Say it backwards, you tit. God, you are so thick.’

Sudden delight. A new game. They play it all summer, infuriating their parents with the simple code.

‘Cuff the ecilop,’ he says to his dad, trying to pencil in his choice for the 3.15 at Kempton Park.

‘What’s that, a new band?’

‘Sick my bon,’ he says to his mum, as she puts away the shopping.

‘That’s nice, dear.’

He and Ally, crying with laughter, close to suffocation sometimes with the pointless hilarity of it all. Had they laughed so much in the years since? Had they laughed at all? They had ruled Finsbury Park back then; he had never had anything but good memories of the place, an age before Stanniford’s stain crept all over his thoughts.

Somehow he did sleep, his edges softened by memories of childhood. When he wakened, an hour before the sun was due to rise, he was shivering, having shrugged off his leather jacket. He got up, washed quickly in the kitchen sink, and stole an apple for his breakfast from Paul’s fridge. He was at the front door, about to let himself out, when he paused. He could hear his erstwhile brother-in-law’s laboured breathing from the bedroom. Part of him wanted to sneak a glimpse of it to see how much of Ally remained in there. Quite a bit, he suspected, given Paul’s apparent inability to sweep away the cobwebs and start afresh.

He unzipped his jeans and pissed into Paul’s coat pocket. Then he went out, and slammed the door behind him as hard as he could.

*

Haslam was asleep. Tasker watched the other man slowly drool across the dashboard of his car. His face was too fucking big for his features; Tasker hated that. He also hated the fact that Haslam wore one of those stupid pins that went through the collars of his shirt with a fine chain attached that rested on the front of his knotted tie. He hadn’t seen those since he was at school. He hated Haslam’s thick bottom lip and thin upper one. He constantly looked like a camel chewing a bit of toffee. The twat.

‘Twat,’ he said.

‘Hey?’ Haslam came out of sleep and regarded Tasker with red-rimmed eyes.

‘Wake up, Sparky,’ Tasker said. ‘No bonus for you if you sleep on the job.’

‘I wasn’t sleeping. I was resting my eyes.’

‘Rest your fucking lip,’ Tasker said. He could feel himself getting fired up inside, the way he felt whenever he day-dreamed about violence. He wanted Haslam to slap him, so he could retaliate with an excuse, really go to work on him without worrying about how Stanniford would react.

He craned his neck and looked up at Stanniford’s office. He suspected the light there had burned all night, certainly for as long as they’d been there, which was about two and a half hours now, since Stanniford called them in on the mobile. ‘You guard that fucking entrance during the night from now on,’ he’d said, in a strangled voice. Soft old fucker. Shitting himself in his little room. Sucking on the voddie bottle like it was a nipple.

‘Nothing will get past,’ Tasker had said. His jaw still twinged occasionally where Kelleher had tapped him with the bat. Sometimes he lay awake in bed, trembling with the need to pay him back, with interest.

‘I want some coffee. Is the rag-head’s shop open yet? You want some coffee?’

‘Stay in the fucking car.’

Seven Sisters Road was gearing tself up for the morning’s rush. Buses carrying the first wave of commuters — the zombified 6 am shifts — rattled by, breathing diesel fumes all over Tasker’s Beemer, parked illegally on the pavement by the bowling alley on Stroud Green Road. Tasker caught sight of Stanniford at the window, a man whose face seemed to be made entirely of shadow, his body beneath the immaculate suit of stuff barely more tangible. He saw Stanniford rub his mouth and loosen his tie. Then the light went off.

Difficult for a man to do, even Stanniford, when you were twenty feet away from the light switch.

‘Shit,’ Tasker said. He got out of the car and that was what saved his life. He was into the road, Haslam mimicking him with a falsetto voice: Stay in the fucking car, stay in the fucking car, when it went up like a rigged vehicle in a James Bond film. The blast helped Tasker to cross the street faster than he would otherwise have managed, and he hit the doorway of a hairdressers hard, thinking as he went down how grateful he was that the door was made of wood and not glass.

Haslam tried to follow him, the poor, game fuck. But he was never going to get too far with both his legs gone at the knees and fire fucking him over every square inch of his body.

Tasker was on his feet and moving to the entrance to Stanniford’s gaff before the other man had given up and turned instead to the small matter of his own death.

*

The sky was putting on some blusher, but it was still too dark in the room to see what had gone down. Tasker toed the threshold, looking in, wetting and re-wetting his lips, his eyes as wide as he could get them, sucking in every possible crumb of light, trying to put some meaning to the shapes in front of him.

‘John?’ he said. His voice hit the wall and dropped, much as he had done only a minute or so before. There were no other sounds. ‘Kelleher?’

A voice. Little more than a whisper. What was it saying? Oh, God, something like that.

‘John? John. Are you all right?’

He edged into the room. It looked as if Kelleher had been and gone, but too fast, perhaps, to make sure of a kill. A shape in the window was too dark to be a cloud, now he was certain that it was blood. And Stanniford’s desk looked as though it had a heap of clothing on it. The light was improving all the time. He could discern the soft gleam of Stanniford’s expensive suit, sprawled over the blotter and the phone. He saw a foot twitch. Tasker entered the room and switched on the light, but the bulb had been removed.

Fuck.

‘It’s okay, John,’ he said, edging closer. He thought he could smell the smoke from the burning car coming up the stairs after him. It wouldn’t be long before the filth turned up. He switched the Brocock to his other hand and fished out his Nokia.

He was dialling for an ambulance when Stanniford shifted on the desk, rolled over slightly. Something wasn’t quite right.

‘Oh, Dod…Oh, Dod.’

There was too much bulk for the man to be Stanniford. Then maybe Stanniford had got his shot in first and put his man down. In which case, where was his boss?

‘Oh, Dod.’

‘What the fuck — ’ Tasker said. His last words as Stanniford moved, fast, much too fast for a man turned stale after years of sitting behind a desk drinking neat vodka.

Kelleher, in a jacket much too tight for him, grinned up at Tasker and showed him the muzzle of his Glock. ‘Oh, Dod,’ he said again. ‘And you’re as dead as.’

One shot.

*

He took off Stanniford’s jacket and ruined it by covering Tasker’s body. Then he went over to the bar and pulled Stanniford out from behind it by the hair and the plastic ties that bound his wrists and feet. The older man’s face was red with effort. Perhaps he was choking on the gag. Maybe he was having a heart attack. Get in quick then.

Sirens were approaching, still half a mile away, perhaps. With any luck they’d be preoccupied by the burning car in Fonthill Road.

‘Bye, John,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ve got Fran’s sweet face in your thoughts right now.’

Kelleher never wanted Stanniford’s face in his thoughts again so he shot him in it six times. He reloaded the Glock, and shot him again until the trigger was clicking on the spent clip. Another six ought to do it, he thought. He needed a lot of blood, more perhaps than Stanniford was carrying, for the message, the fucking letter, he wanted to write on his walls.

Advent Stories #3

FAILURE

Patrick stepped from the bus into a Cologne morning filled with pigeons and rain. The Rhein moped away to his left, flat and grey, listless as he himself had felt this past month or so. Sigi had grown impatient with his lethargy and bombarded him with insults when she returned from the museum to find him staring out at the lowering sky or lounging in the bath, his skin pruning like that of an old man. ‘I can’t carry the both of us,’ she’d say, fretting waspishly at a cigarette. ‘You must find work. Your studies don’t eat up that much time that you couldn’t wait on tables a few hours each week. You must find work.’

Come midnight, when they were shivering beneath blankets in her bed, she would parry his advances and sometimes weep into her pillow. Patrick’s argument that his research would suffer should he have to find employment no longer made an impact on Sigi. ‘What if we were to split up? What then? You would have no choice.’

She was right, of course. Patrick had proved something of a parasite these past few months as what had begun as a very casual relationship turned into something more intimate without any discussion or analysis forthcoming from either party. An irony existed in that he had had a job before he met Sigi; basic administrative duties in an accountancy firm just off Konrad Adenauer Ufer. Dull, but it paid for the essentials. And then Sigi, followed by infatuation, love and a complete loss of responsibility. Instead of turning up to work he would spend hours grazing the dips and swells of her body. They would sneak off to walk the banks of the river for hours on end, feed each other apfel strudel driving a borrowed car on the autobahn with the windows down and Nirvana’s About a Girl slinking from the speakers. And then Sigi finished college and landed a job at the Arts and Crafts Museum just as Herr Schellenberg reached the end of his tether and told Patrick his absenteeism was unacceptable and it would be for the best if he found a job elsewhere.

But it was so much easier to vegetate in Sigi’s flat.

Until now of course. ‘There are no opportunities, Sigi,’ he appealed, a few nights ago. ‘For every job there are three people available.’ And her riposte: ‘You make your opportunities!’ It was a tiff that had escalated at frightening speed, culminating in Sigi’s threat to either kill him or herself. Though he guessed the warning to be hollow, the sheer fury and frustration in her voice had finally shocked him into accepting that measures needed to be taken. He had called Josef as soon as he had a moment alone.

Last night they had made love for the first time in weeks. It had been a cold, textbook affair. Head resting on his chest she’d said: ‘Patrick, I’m at my wits’ end. There is talk at the museum of laying off some of the staff. The recession is picking people off one by one. If I lose my job, we lose this.’ Her gesture took in what their life meant to them at the moment, all of it within arm’s reach: a few books, a suitcase of clothes, a photograph album. The flat itself. He made her breakfast and kissed her goodbye, watching the way she moved down the steps to the street, pony tail bobbing.

He followed Josef’s directions, angling down a cobbled road beneath an archway off Pfälzerstrasse where blouses and towels hung out to dry whipped about like strange birds trapped in netting. He seated himself outside the café beneath a birch tree filled with copper chimes and let their music relax him, knowing that Josef would doubtless be ten or fifteen minutes late for their meeting.

Patrick had met Sigi at a party thrown by an ex-girlfriend who lived in Koblenz. Patrick guessed he’d been invited just so Heidi could rub his nose in the success she was enjoying these days: she was like that. He went along just for the sour victory of proving this prediction and he was not disappointed; Heidi was swift to show him her new boyfriend (a tanned, flat-stomached astro-physics graduate called Wolf); her new flat; her car; on and on and on. He bumped into Sigi in front of the open fire where surreptitiously they tossed Heidi’s business card to the flames at the same time and howled over the coincidence of such an act.

‘Oh but wait,’ she’d said, stifling her laughter, ‘it wouldn’t surprise me if this fire was being fuelled with Heidi’s precious business cards. Isn’t she just insufferable?’

She didn’t apologise when Patrick told her she was a former girlfriend, a matter that impressed him. Within the hour they’d traded telephone numbers and lingered over a goodbye that had left Patrick dry-mouthed and palpitating, remarkable for the fact that their proximity had only encompassed a handshake and eye contact. It pained him to think of her, six months on, her eyes less vibrant, her posture collapsing in on itself. He wondered if she had any ambition left; certainly the fiery creature he’d once seen her to be had grown sullen and maudlin. It wasn’t all his fault, surely?

‘We’ll take a drink, I suggest. To celebrate our meeting again. It’s been a while, no?’ Josef towered above him – he was almost a foot taller – and clapped a huge hand on his shoulder.

Inside the café they ordered bottles of Pils and spent a while splitting open pistachio nuts, watching the video screens.

‘Thank you for coming Josef. I know how busy you are.’

‘Remember summer? Three years ago? The last time we spoke.’ Josef chewed slowly, fingernails worrying at the hasp of his Filofax. His suit rippled and shone so readily it might have been made from water.

‘Of course I do. You know I do.’

‘It was not an enjoyable time. For you, that is. Especially for you.’

Patrick shook his head. ‘I know. But I’d be interested in something like that again. It would be worth the fear.’

‘Things are that bad?’

‘Worse. I think Sigi will leave me if I don’t find some money soon. I’ve been such a shit to her.’

Patrick felt the weight of Josef’s gaze, and the thickness of the silence that spread between them. Then Josef leant close enough for Patrick to smell the sweetness of his breath, his lavish perfume.

‘I have excellent contacts these days. In this city there works a man who can make you rich, if you have the stomach for what he would do with you.’

‘This is how you make your money?’

‘Christ no! I’m not desperate. I… supply him with his raw materials. He pays me well, but then, so do many of my business associates.’

‘I don’t like that. Raw materials? This is how you see me?’ Patrick took a long swig of his beer. Around them, the bar drew in towards them, as though air were being sucked out of the building, pulling everyone closer together. Patrick could smell aftershaves clashing; a hot volley of cooked sausages; even the tacky, sugary teats depending from the liquor optics. A barmaid wearing luridly coloured hair extensions pulled the hem of her tee-shirt down till the cotton creaked. Patrick watched a single gem of sweat stroke a line from the back of her ear to a gold choker where it sizzled brightly.

Josef, for the first time, was betraying his impatience with a long suck on his teeth and a crinkling in the soft folds at the corner of his eyes. ‘Why are you here? In Köln? Do you remember your reasons for coming here?’

‘Of course I do,’ said Patrick flatly. ‘To broaden the scope of my research.’ The words aired as dispassionately as those of a child regurgitating rote-learned multiplication.

‘This is untrue. You came here to make money. You came here for the butchers, you said. Medical experiments were limited in Britain; their wages weren’t enough to pay for the drugs you needed in order to put your belly right after filling them with chemicals week after week. You said.’ Josef stressed the last words with a poke of his finger into the limp shield of Patrick’s shoulder blade.

‘So what if my feelings are different now?’ Patrick argued, all the while thinking: He’s right, the bastard’s right. There’d been that time when the 8th and 15th of each month meant a trek to and from Leeds so that he could swallow half a pint of an untested lemon and lime flavoured drink called FYBOGEL which was being hailed for its potential cholesterol reducing properties. Was it worth £1000, travel included? Hardly. There’d been the 3Cs too; Common Cold Centres he haunted during the late 80s till research funds became so piddling that they closed down. It had felt like he was being made redundant – only without the severance pay. He’d talked to a few friends about the dismal situation, one of which had suggested getting in touch with Josef. Josef with his Technicolor labcoat promises of injections and induced muscle spasm and sleep trials and mild Electro Convulsive Therapy. All designed to line his ruptured pockets with marks and pfennigs. He’d come across the water, helpless as a Bisto kid, floating on the anaesthesia which poured from Josef’s lips. In the foetus crease of sleep he’d danced with molecules that whispered their drowsy names into the very gristle between his ears: thiopentane, helothane, enflurane. He spent soporific breakfasts popping ‘jellies’, his body gradually becoming conversant with the torpid heat of temazepam and omnopon. In the University library where he was to land his doomed job, amputated chunks of sunlight scattering the dust and people, scalpels grinned at him from the pages of the British Journal of Surgery.

‘Who is it you know? What can he offer me?’

Josef’s presence seemed to diminish, a salesman who has hooked into a big fish and can finally relax. As he softened, he slid into the chair next to Patrick and blinked for what must have been the first time. Now he was at eye level with Patrick, his clout retreating, Patrick could only wonder at the chameleon nature of his character, the way he had piled on so much unspoken pressure, his bullyboy charm.

‘You can make £12,000.’

Patrick scoffed and turned to look into his friend’s concave face, at the wide spaced eyes that seem almost to be turned in towards each other. A smile played in there, like a candle in a bowl, tinting the edges of his face with light. Fuck, Patrick thought, he really means it.

‘Yeah,’ he humoured, ‘and what would I have to do for twelve grand?’

Josef’s smile faded. He wore the countenance of one searching a set of features for steel, for inner grit.

‘Die a little,’ he said.

*

Sigi was asleep under the yucca, headphones on. The only light in the room came from the dancing equaliser on their stereo and the violet neon from the snooker hall across the street. He left it that way.

She came to bed hours later and he watched her undress from the half mask of their blanket. Sigi rubbed her neck where the cold had stiffened it and applied a little night cream to her cheekbones and forehead. She brushed her hair. She lalled a fragment from whatever song was looping in her mind; something that sounded like I got so high, I scratched till I bled before killing the light and smothering his chest with her heartbeat. Her mouth and cunt made gummy demands on his skin but it was too much like being dabbed with open wounds. He pushed her away and felt her dampness on his thigh tighten and dry. When her hand scooted under his leg to gently mash his balls, peel the skin back from a reluctant hard-on, he tried to relax. Her thumb capped his tip, smeared a tear of fluid over his glans and: ‘Fuck me, Pat. Come on.’

The flesh across his chest tightened so swiftly he almost heard his skin tearing. In there, bloated within its cell of ribs, he convulsed and spat; a leathery knot tiring all the while. His fear travelled quick as his blood; he dwindled in her fingers.

‘What’s wrong?’ her voice was thick with sex. She sat up. He saw the spike of a nipple against the window; a curtain of hair sweep the wedge of her brow; cilia eyelashes flutter in uncertainty. He imagined the purple net of veins stutter on his retina. Ear-drums concussing with the pressure of his blood as if it wanted to be away from the body which contained it.

Again, her question, voice see-sawing on a fulcrum of confusion, not yet knowing whether to lend weight to the cynical end or its charitable opposite.

‘I’m tired.’

‘What have you got to be tired for?’ The sudden injection of outrage, for the first time, was unable to find its way through to him. He lay there, numbed as she ranted, to her credit finding new ways to express old, old things. But it didn’t matter how much she dressed the words up; they could make no impact on him any more. He wondered if that was because their content was stale or the person delivering them was no longer so vital to him. And, consequently, was that feeling merely forced by his reluctance to tell Sigi where he had been, what might be in store for him? Was he trying to hate her in order to spare her?

He listened to the music of her body when finally she slept. All of it seemed circular, reproductive: the wet mechanics of her breathing; the dull knell of her heart; occasional glottal murmurs. It all sounded too insular and stale. He knew that trawling his memories for something soothing was likely only to fret him more but he couldn’t prevent a regression; insomnia seemed to be its perfect bedfellow.

*

Meat. Sunday afternoons hanging round the kitchen with the cats waiting for Mum to finish roasting the hunk of dead stuff in the oven. Patrick liked lamb best; the fat blistering and loose on the rich, dark meat. He was never able to finish his serving, mainly because Mum always dished out too many slabs of the stuff but also because he didn’t want Gatsby and Mac to go without a few scraps from his plate. And one time, everyone was rushing around for some reason or other: Dad had a meeting to attend; his sister Mo was helping a friend with her display at an art gallery. And Mum was gearing up to go to a yoga session – she wasn’t eating till later. Only Patrick was free of obligations: he tooled around with Gatsby, a ping-pong ball and Dad’s shoe while Mum clattered her timpani orchestra on the old Belling cooker.

Tucking in while Mum stuffed a duffel bag with leggings and leotard. The first cut of Patrick’s knife brought a dribble of blood from the spongy pink cross section of meat; it spread in a watery pool to infect his mashed potato. Dad and Mo were mopping up spillages, scraping and slurping: pulpy noises at the centre of his world. He imagined blood forming a thin wash on their gums, swilling hotly in bellies packed like haggis. Then a whitening as the kitchen faded and his chair didn’t feel as though it could support him properly.

Dad leaning over him: vermilion lips peeled back. Clotted, meaty breath.

Patrick had steered clear of red meat ever since.

Hours later he slid from the sheets feeling misshapen, as though, during the night, he’d been eclipsed and gently crushed by a giant fist. He scrimped breakfast from a curl of bread in the larder, a rind of tired cheese. Coffee was in abundance but he could hardly brew up without rousing Sigi. He didn’t want her questioning him; he didn’t want to let on as to the nature of his insomnia.

Josef’s BMW was a lozenge of black assuming form out of the soupy half–light beneath the railway bridge. Inside (against the fetor of leather upholstery), was a fleeting whiff of freesias, money – a stale waft of fanned banknotes – and Doublemint. Patrick listened to the whispering engine, the chuckle of an unseen fountain. Water always made Patrick feel cold. His upper arms he pushed against the shivering shanks of his chest, hoping Josef wouldn’t notice and misinterpret the gesture as fear but his friend was busy clipping a large cigar.

‘Well?’ Patrick quailed at the pleading in his voice. He so wanted to prove his mettle, not only to Josef – and Sigi – but to himself. Since his voice broke he’d been cursed with a reedy delivery, lacking any character building inflection, any gravel or, conversely, any silkiness, like the brogues he’d known when relatives visited from Ireland years ago. People such as Josef, though no bigger in stature, could pinch out Patrick’s light with an articulation only dreamt of by the other.

Josef wouldn’t allow himself to be hurried. He bolted the cigar between his teeth and torched it with a match which seemed to have extended from hisfingers. ‘You – paff – told – piff – her – poff poff?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘The boy lies. He lies well, but not well enough.’ For the first time Josef eyeballed him. The buffer of smoke made his face appear unstable; his mouth roiled around the cigar and Patrick found it easier to follow the orange pastille of its coal than the eyes behind it.

‘Christ Josef, if I told her, do you think I’d be here? I’d be out on my arse. Better I just do it and come back with the cash. Then I’ll tell her.’

‘Because then, if she kicked you out, you’d have your own money to take care of you, instead of hers.’ He grinned: the cigar grew erect, gleaming on the narrow bridge of Josef’s brow.

‘Look, it was you. You who encouraged me to go for this. Why do you want to piss me off about it?’

‘Because I can. So easy.’ He shifted the gear out of Park and into Drive; let the car mosey over the cobbled alley till, hitting the main street, he dipped his foot and Patrick was pressed back into the bucket seat. If he looked out of the passenger window on his right, the houses and hedges – all that was solid and detailed – grew molten.

*

Sloe-eyed Sigi passing him a dry Martini. ‘See?’ she said. ‘See how you have to make sure the glass is cold? Now rinse it with vermouth and throw the excess away; you just need to coat the glass. Pour your gin from an ice cold shaker. Olive.’

The way she pronounced olive – as Oh-live – made him laugh. Her lips were wet with traces of cocktail; teeth too as she smiled, as though the reaches of her mouth were flush with a layer of cellophane. This image clogged in his mind as they took a series of lefts and rights through an area of the town he was unfamiliar with (gabled roofs and streetlamps like unfinished gallows; block buildings with pastel slivers in frameless windows). A woman in white with a gash of red silk at her throat rode by on a piebald horse. Trees encroached, first dotted between, then concealing and finally replacing the houses on the city’s limits. Patrick suddenly realised he was wearing the necklace Sigi had bought him during the summer – the last gift she had proffered before their current impasse. It was a simple claw of metal gripping a blueish enamel swirl which he wore on a leather cord. He liked its weight against his sternum; during lovemaking, it would answer the knock of his heart against his ribs with a dull call of its own. Sometimes, as she peaked, Sigi would draw it into her mouth and suck on it till her bucking waned.

‘This is how it shall be.’ Josef spat the butt of his cigar out of the window and didn’t speak again till the electrics had sealed it once more. ‘We go in. I talk to Brandywine and Losh. You do your stuff. We get paid. We go out.’

‘We? We get paid?’

‘Yeah, we. I’m acting as your agent on this, remember.’

‘So what’s your cut?’

‘Not as painful as your cut, I can assure you.’

‘Bastard.’ Patrick felt like ordering him to stop so he could get out and walk home. ‘Maybe I should become an agent.’

‘You don’t have the contacts or the cuntishness. And you speak German with all the composure of a tightrope walker with one leg suffering from Parkinson’s who is in the midst of morphine withdrawal.’

‘What’s your cut?’ Patrick didn’t really want to know any more, but he’d just caught sight of a building through the net of branches up ahead and felt the first slow convulsion of fear in his loins. Hearing his voice – andJosef’s smug rejoinders – was helping to nail his panic down.

‘Six k.’ And then, as if parrying any protest of Patrick’s before it was aired: ‘Do you know how hard it is, liaising? How perilous? There are butchers in this country, Patrick. I’ve worked laboriously to get you this and you can be sure you’ll be treated well. Proper anaesthetists, sterile conditions that are second to none, excellent post-op and Intensive Care facilities.’ He risked a cheeky glance, perhaps gauging the humour of his friend before mugging: ‘If you snuffed it here, the quality of your death would be orgasmic.’

Patrick sneered; his hands were greasing up. He couldn’t summon the spit he needed to coat his words with venom. ‘Not funny,’ he wheezed, but Josef was corpsing, ratcheting the car into a space it seemed was designed for a motor half the size.

‘Let’s be having you, my lad,’ he soothed, releasing the child lock so that Patrick could get out.

The air. The air was brittle and rarefied, as though cleansed in a filter made of pure ice. When his foot crunched satisfyingly into the gravel of the car park, he thought his metatarsals had powdered from fear-weakness.

‘I can’t do this,’ he whispered as Josef steered him into the revolving door.

‘But you will, all the same.’

They were met by a woman in a starchy, cream suit. She wore her hair in a Thatchered black hive; a silver brooch in the shape of a heart clung to her left nipple area.

‘Imogen,’ she said, a rising note on the last syllable so it seemed she were addressing Patrick thus. He was about to deny the name before realising what she meant, not that he could have summoned the clout required to send adequate breath past his vocal cords.

An odd gesture busied her hand: it dived down, index finger pointing to the floor, thumb stuck out at 45°. The rest of her digits tried to press themselves against her wrist. Patrick saw, very clearly, a tendon and a vein rise against the skin, like flaccid rubber hosing suddenly made stiff with water. Her other hand fussed at the back of his, making his knuckles hot. ‘If you’ll just wait here,’ she said, ‘I’ll get Dr Losh to come and see to you.’

There were no paintings or flowers; nothing resting on the desk marked Reception bar an open ledger, pages blank. There wasn’t even a receptionist. Or any of the bustle Patrick might have associated with a hospital.

‘Who said this was a hospital?’ countered Josef when Patrick explained his unease.

‘What is it then?’

Josef didn’t answer. Instead, he led the way forward, down a corridor that was at least as bland and thinly antiseptic as he would expect. At the far end, a trolley came into view, pushed by a tall black man who wore a mask and glasses which filled with white light when he turned his head to look towards them. Patrick saw something small and dark fall from under the crumpled blankets. They didn’t appear to be getting any closer to him, despite Josef’s devouring stride. The trolley, and its guardian, disappeared into the white perfection of the opposite wall; Patrick could hear a dodgy caster protesting in diminuendo.

‘Know the tools of your torture,’ said Josef, but his mouth was shut. Somehow, without his knowing, Patrick’s hand had been subsumed by his friend’s. At last, they reached the end of the corridor and Patrick could see the splash of red that had fallen from beneath the blanket. This, at the same time as a man dipped through a doorway, hand extended, beard shifting to display a greenish scythe of teeth. Patrick leaned over, not to accept his salutation, but to catch the gloops of flesh which were sagging from his cheeks before they hit the floor. He couldn’t stop the left side of his face from melting.

Patrick splayed both hands – a kind of Whoa, let’s just calm everything down and be rational gesture. ‘This is an unorthodox procedure,’ he meant to say, but his lips kept stumbling on the fourth word. His knuckles itched where she had been fussing at them.

‘I’m Reuben Losh,’ the beard said, slipping a business card into Patrick’s shirt pocket. ‘What’s that? Unearth a what? An ox?’ Josef and the doctor laughed; Patrick watched their faces mingle, mouths folding together like something monstrous and Picasso-like, tilting on different planes.

He found that he could move much more freely now that Josef had let go of his hand, but it was probably because he was lying on a trolley, fading fast, losing all sense of what was ceiling and what was floor.

Brilliant light. So bright it was almost liquid; so liquid he could see the splinters of colour refracting, some of which he could give no name to because of their immediacy and freshness.

‘Patrick…’ Losh swam into view, his head causing an eclipse of the operating spotlights. His beard was like the copper wire graveyard of an electrician’s dustbin. ‘I want you to meet Dr Olivia Brandywine. She’ll be monitoring you while I still your beating heart, ha ha.’

Patrick didn’t see Brandywine, only felt a hand cup his shoulder, and catch a peripheral glimpse of flesh that seemed bleached and smooth to the point of plasticity. ‘We’ll need to send you deeper, Patrick,’ she soothed, with a smoke-scarred voice that was not unpleasant. ‘I’ll be administering a general anaesthetic and then Dr Losh will puncture your femoral artery. We need to feed a catheter along the vessel to the sinoatrial node in your heart. Once we’ve found that, we’ll send some radio waves to cause an arrest. I want to record your body’s reaction –

Another sting in the dip of his arm. Shouldn’t I be given a medical first? He felt heat sweeping up towards his neck.

– and then we’ll have you up and out of here before you know it.’

*

00.01

black upon me like that zoo time when a murder of crows falls out of the trees a strange sudden autumn full of screaming and mummy scratched from lip to ear and my heart full in my throat dreadfully sorry dreadfully sorry madam shall i call an ambulance here sonny have an ice cream courtesy of the management

00.02

maggie’s lips cold and blueish when she kisses me christmas day messing with mistletoe what will you do if i pin some to my fly maggie hey maggie and laughing and the smell of her breath oaten and chocolatey and wild and a lipstick heart on my wrist we run through forest brambles and the welts are still healing on my legs when she tells me it’s all over

00.03

sigi (oh sigi i love you) tossing me off for the first time in the back of her beetle as night spreads itself across the industrial estate and i come into the wad of tissues she’s stashed up her cardigan sleeve and she’s amazed at my quantity and she kisses the tip even as it twitches and weeps like something rent open and left for dead

00.04

I’m feeling cold. And halted, funnily enough. A feeling of stasis – could be my pumpless blood, settling thanks to a gravity it’s never known before. I’m able to think though there’s a godawful storm at the edge of my awareness, like a piece of paper lit at the edges, eating its way towards the centre, but no pain, only a tickling sensation deep inside. No ships sailing towards me for that rubicon moment. No dark tunnels or horizons of white light. No out of body

00.05

experiences like the time i burned my hand on the electric ring on mum’s old stove watching the clean red spiral blacken must be cool now but such a depth of pain that i can’t even bring it to mind but mum being mum always mum pressing her mouth against the hurt and blowing gently as i cry my heart out

00.06

in the bowl of my home town the rarity of snow whitens the grimy avenues and dad readies to take my sister mo and i on a walk to the land of far beyond where’s that i ask him far beyond he replies pulling on my wellies and we go out i’m humming a song from the beatles film on tv let it be and the warmth in my fingers and toes retreats and we all make breath sculptures in the chill down by the canal where they’re landscaping and knocking down old pill boxes and strange roads filled with glass cobbles the fallen tree is ash coloured with mould and snow and dad’s daft sayings the camels are coming hurrah hurrah and even my sister’s tiny tears looks frozen to death in the dusted patch of rhododendrons i spy a red swatch of cloth brighter than blood we’ve arrived dad says

00.07

morgan and me eating blood oranges on the train to Manchester we’ve got seven quid between us all of it going on the new police album and at birchwood station she gets on board and sits opposite her eyes like smoke made solid smiling at us at the sticky glaze on mouths agog and before we reach piccadilly morgan’s getting all cheeky with her saying give us a sticky snog love and shoving his fist up his top thrashing it around to mime a heart out of control when she blows us a kiss

00.08

There’s a definite kind of brittle coldness suffusing my limbs now but it’s not unpleasant. Not like I can feel Death’s fingers giving me a massage. The voices are calming and sufficiently distant to negate my understanding their content. I have the image of Dr Brandywine in my head with her tapered fingernails deep inside me, coaxing my heart awake. Sigi. It’s a feeling Sigi gives me all the time. I have that achy feeling of missing her, even when she’s near. We’ve been together a long time now, yet still I get excited when I know I’ll be meeting her later in the day. I can’t remember how tender her mouth feels against my own

00.09

room is a cell as i grow and more stuff accrues softening the corners erasing the concrete structure of the four walls and helping me lose my sense of place and belonging which i think is precipitating this huge unfocused dream i have though less a dream and more a wall of irresolute significance which includes what might be a stairwell for want of something banal to defuse its threat something approaches from the dark gulf larger than my mind’s confines will allow more momentous than the most extravagant unfurlings of imagination like viewing a fragment of film at a magnification of x10000 all detail lost but the power of violence and substance and movement inflating in my head it comes back regularly it comes even now

00.10

is it death?

00.11

sigi rubbing the oiled wishbone curve of her cleavage into my face steering her nipples into and out of my mouth cupping her breasts together with her remarkable hands pressing their delicate independent weight upon me till it’s hard to breathe and the thud in my head does it belong to me or to her

00.12

o me o my o god

Coming out of it hurt even more. Through the pain, he thought of birth and was almost able to conjure the moment his lungs were shocked into use for the first time. How many of us are born again? he thought, as the trauma of re-animation retreated, having left its fire smouldering in every shred and dribble of his body. His eyes felt poached and tender; the light seemed too much like living matter, crowding his immediate space with swimming motes – he didn’t know whether the headache was a side effect or a result of the insufferable thereness of day.

Only when the colour began to leech back into his vision did he realise he had been without it. Shapes acquired depth and mass. The chair. The table. Josef. He was looking down on Patrick with an expression of dismayed fascination.

‘What is it?’ Patrick asked, through a mouth that felt numb and tight. ‘Have I been amputated by mistake?’

‘No, you look fine. Just a little pale, that’s all.’ Josef recovered his joviality, plonking himself at the foot of the bed. He fished a cheque out of his waistcoat pocket. ‘This’ll keep you in bratwurst for a week or three,’ he said, planting the piece of paper on Patrick’s bare chest. ‘The doctors wanted me to tell you all went swimmingly. They say you can come back in six months for another stint. If you’re up to it.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Ah, come on. You’re strong as a piece of my great aunt’s knicker elastic.’

Patrick kicked Josef off the bed. ‘You do it, if you’re so keen. Please leave me alone now.’

Josef made a performance of pulling on his driving gloves. ‘Can’t offer you a lift back into town I’m afraid. Meeting a client in Dortmund this afternoon.’

‘I can go home?’

‘Of course. God, anybody would think you’d undergone major heart surgery.’

After Josef had gone, Patrick lay still for a while, listening for the knock in his chest. It was there, but it sounded hollow and sluggish. He dressed slowly and wandered the corridors till he found the reception where they’d entered, God, just two hours ago. There was nobody to see him off.

Outside, the light was waxy and uncertain, smeared about wads of cumulus like some brilliant resin. He handed over most of his change on the bus back into town, and spent the journey trying not to examine the stagnation within him. It was as if his soul had been taken out and washed of all its interesting impurities and flecks of self. He didn’t feel alive, he just felt as though he was living.

He got off in Herzogstrasse and watched the sky spin around the twin towers of the cathedral while he grew accustomed to the flail of traffic and pedestrians. Walking back to the Kunstgewerbemuseum, he checked the faces of those streaming around him. All were pinkish and vital; varnished eyes and teeth like tablets of ice. He felt stunted and tired in comparison; catching his reflection in a darkened window he was appalled to see how jaundiced he looked. The dough of his face appeared to lack elasticity. Turned off and switched on he’d been – like a car or a transistor radio. Drinking coffee in a backstreet bar, Patrick’s hunch that he’d been soiled, or abused, took on an ever increasing concretion. Should he have been counselled before leaving? He fed coins into the telephone on the counter and dialled the number of the institute on the back of Dr Losh’s card. Nobody answered.

*

In the museum he watched Sigi arranging a pastel display through the gallery’s glass doors. The sunlight had sliced her in half. Even from here, fifty feet away, he could see it playing on the wet curve of her mouth, the loose filaments of hair. In he went. Her smell was upon him; the same sweet odour that rose from the bed when he turned back the blanket in the morning.

‘Sigi?’

She twitched her head his way but said nothing, continuing with her task, perhaps a little more starchily now.

‘Sigi, I’ve made a little money today. A lot, really. I want you to have some.’ He reached for her but she ducked away before striding backwards, hands planted in her back pockets.

‘Is that picture straight?’ she asked, so softly it might have been to herself. She hadn’t looked at him yet.

‘Sigi.’

Now she fastened him with the angry green of her eyes. If she saw anything lacking in his countenance she didn’t let on. ‘We’re through, Patrick. Can’t you see that, honey?’

‘But I’ve made some money.’

‘Congratulations. Go and spend it. And then wonder where the next lot is going to come from.’

‘If it hadn’t been for you, I’d still be earning at the accountancy firm,’ he regretted the jibe, and the way he’d said it as soon as his mouth was shut.

‘Get a life, you sad bastard.’

‘But I love you,’ he finished lamely.

‘I’m tired,’ she said. She seemed almost not to notice him, to be looking through him, as though he were made of glass or water. ‘I don’t want you to be there when I get back tonight. I’m sorry.’ She tried a smile; her lips merely thinned. ‘I’m sorry.’

*

Patrick scuffed about the flat for a while, desultorily bagging his things (a piffling amount) and delving into his past for happy moments to feed the sense of loss that must come to him soon. He considered a number of follies: he’d open a vein in her bath tub, burn the cheque in front of her, leave the cheque on her pillow. In the end, he did nothing, simply sat in her rocking chair by the window and watched the boats fart and froth in the Rhein till darkness crept upon the city, flooding it with streetlamps. His body still felt strangely bland and ropy; the squish of meat in his chest was making him ill. He lit a candle and tossed his keys on to her desk. As he went to the door, a book caught his eye. It was lying flat on her shelf whereas the others were erect, a volume he’d given to Sigi early on when gifts and cards were exchanged as gladly as kisses and hugs. A novel she enjoyed, as he recalled. Picking it up, he leafed through, bending to smell the paper’s age. His riffling was halted by the card, a simple white affair with a pale heart sketched into a corner. Inside, his hesitant hand, in dark ink:

Always.

 

Advent Stories #2

  TO THE BEACH

Petra was all for it, which scared me deeply. I knew I would have to go along with her or risk losing her to Prentiss or Fauchon, the only other fertile members of our Warren. I wasn’t ready for that, not when I’d spent the best part of a year applying for a conjoinment. The other boys were younger, healthier than me; I could sometimes hear them beyond my wall, spending their lust on each other or on the matriarchs who were barren and dying.

What I’d initially hoped was idle fancy on Petra’s part had soon formed the focus of her every waking moment. Fatuous as it was trying to dissuade her I found myself attempting just that one night during breakfast. I waited till the screens came down, knowing how the stars and that faint, diminishing smear of red relaxed her (not me; that colour and the body it signifies chilled me to the quick). As I composed my argument I watched her eat, her golden eyes fixed on the thickening dark.

‘It’s suicide,’ I said.

‘Not if we take care,’ she countered, so quickly it seemed she’d been rehearsing her gainsay. ‘Then it would be as close to living as we’ll ever get.’ She stretched, pushing away her tray of powdered fruit and water tablets. The hairless curves of her body looked jaundiced and tired this evening; at least the sores she (and all of us) had inherited were weeping less.

‘There’s more to life than dreams, Petra. They more or less died with the City.’

‘You don’t dream?’ Had she eyebrows they’d have arched.

‘I didn’t say that. But I know the value of keeping a dream in its place.’

‘In its grave more like.’ The bitterness in her voice unsettled me. Would Prentiss have the balls for this? Fauchon probably did it all the time. They’d be her next port of call if I wimped out.

‘The sentries, Petra,’ I pleaded. ‘The cameras. The Craw.’

She swept her plates to one side and spread herself over me, sensing victory. ‘The Craw has never been seen baby love. I never knew you were a sucker for myths.’

‘What do we do when the sun comes up?’ I asked, thinking, shit I’m going to do this.

‘We find a place to hide,’ spoken as if I was an idiot.

I toyed with my tablets. She knew she had me, knew the reasons why I would accompany her. For a second I hated her for that blatant manipulation of my need. Love was an old fashioned concept, existing only on the crumbling onionskin pages in the library. I didn’t understand what it truly meant but if it could encapsulate all the warmth, the yearning I felt for Petra then love was something I knew for her. She was looking into the distance which had now blackened completely. What she held in her eyes for that skyline tweaked at the craving she invoked in me. She was my horizon in a way; often visible, frequently beautiful but beyond my reach. No matter how much we sexed, she’d be unattainable. I wouldn’t have her, I wouldn’t have an inkling as to the complexities of her essence. I wouldn’t know Petra. Perhaps she wouldn’t let me know her –knowledge is an unfashionable thing here; I’ve been in the library just once and that to administer first aid to an epileptic. I noticed a quiet that was unlike any silence I’ve ever known before. Only a small room, the library, but its hush is almost cathedral in its immensity. There are few books. Only a few of us are granted access to them. Maybe too many educated people would promote ideas and argument, and a rocked boat is something Lascelles, our leader, doesn’t want. Anyway, if this was Petra’s motive for not letting me inside her head then certainly it was a charitable one. Life here is too base for a caprice like love I suppose, or so everybody thinks. The cynic in me is convinced Petra just wants me for now, that when I’ve exhausted my usefulness and influence she’ll move on to someone fresher and stronger. I was about to broach the subject of us, but she could read my misery and cut it off with a kiss and a smile that made me wonder why I could get so lachrymose at all.

Her pluck astounded me. During the night, while I worked in the surgery, she’d got her hands on weapons, packs of water tablets, even a lead coated parasol and, best of all, some asbestos sandals. I felt terribly inadequate having pocketed stuff I had access to anyway: painkillers, zinc cream, ointments and salt pills. After long deliberation I’d thieved a syringe and enough morphine to see to us both should it come to that, should we manage to evade the sentry guns and the Craw, or whatever existed Outside – if indeed anything could.

We moved together when dawn came, sucking the safe dark colours from the sky and turning it metallic. Just before the sun appeared the screens came down, squealing grittily. Her voice was blunted by fatigue.

‘Toohey?’ I was amazed that she thought I’d drifted off – how could I? ‘I wonder how the sun feels when it touches your skin. How it used to feel I mean, before it was dangerous.’

‘Warm, I imagine,’ I said, pathetically, keeping watch over her face, only half recognisable in this false night. One of her eyes contained a glimmer.

‘Just think, all those stars, all of them as lethal as ours.’ She paused for a while, perhaps shaping her next sentence, perhaps awed by the enormity of her vision. ‘Strange how they can provide life and hope but…take it all away just as easily. Can you think of anything else like that?’

‘No,’ I said, thinking you. ‘We should sleep Petra. We’ll need all our strength come evening.’

The sun was little more than a hazy stain through the screens, like an ulcer wrapped in gauze. I held her till, in sleep, she pushed me away and turned her face towards the sky. Kissing her smile, scared to share the blistered dreams that no doubt burned beyond her ‘lids, I shut my eyes and cast my mind towards something wintry.

Instead I was filled with fire. Smoke billowed from my throat; bones turned to ash. And every step I took split the blackness of my flesh to show me something ember–red winking beneath.

I could feel myself clenching for a scream but Petra’s mouth glued the sound in. She was already dressed; I could see I’d have to be careful for both of us: she was high with excitement and hadn’t even noticed in how much of a state the dream had left me. I showered the sweat off and remembered to ask her about the key cards.

‘What?’

‘The key cards,’ I shouted, turning off the water. ‘Did you manage to get copies?’

‘Oh I did better than that,’ she purred, tossing me a towel. From her thigh pocket she extracted a rectangular piece of laminated plastic – its shape spoiled at one corner, which was clipped. Two bands of sharp green at the opposite corner told me it was an original and that somebody on Intelligence Tunnel 8 was missing it.

‘How – ‘ I began, but I saw her jaw harden.

‘Toohey, you don’t want to know. And it’s not important.’

I tried not to show how crushed I was that she’d sexed with another. Attempting to curry favour by displaying emotion was doomed to fail and anyway, I’m not the doe–eyed type. ‘Suit yourself,’ I said dismissively, hoping she’d be pricked by the cruelty in my voice. Fat chance.

She squatted in front of a mirror and spread her eyelids with the forefinger and thumb of her left hand. With the other she gently pressed a flat black disc on to her eye. It melted, spreading across its surface till it looked as though the socket was empty.

‘You okay?’ she asked, turning to face me. The live/dead look of her made me wince and I recalled the dream, moving my fingers to where I thought the cracks would be. I nodded all the same.

‘Some of those lenses for me?’

‘Of course. Here,’ she said, blinking another into place. ‘I’ll help you put them in.’

There was a flare of panic when her empty face sank in front of mine but it was less cloying now and I was able to return – if somewhat shakily – the smile she offered. My lenses in place (I had to quell the urge to rub – it felt as though my eyes were too big to blink over), I dressed and collected together the stuff we’d hoarded for the trip. The corridor outside our room was empty and dimly lit. My shadow engulfed Petra’s as I followed her out. Locking the door we waited, looking at each other, listening for something that shouldn’t be, something that would force us back inside. All that I could hear was the buried thrum of the generators and people snoring in Fauchon’s room.

‘This is not a good idea,’ I whispered as we crept towards the shuttle.

‘No, perhaps not. But it’s an idea at least. I’m up to here with people who make their minds up for me. And with people who just stupidly go along with them.’ That stung. ‘All this…’ she spat on the wall where a large poster of deadpan Lascelles hung next to an inelegant chalk depiction of a penis encrusted with glass – the current celibate defence. ‘All this restriction can go to fuck.’

I had to stifle my laughter at her use of the old obscenity despite the forcefulness and crude logic of her point.

The shuttle responded to the key card and was silent enough but I knew that when its doors opened on the Chamber we’d be exposed to the motion cameras. Rumour had it that Security weren’t as effective as they might be – little went on these days to warrant their intrusion – but the appearance of the guards I’d seen around did little to support the gossip. Alert and pristine they were and I couldn’t envision them feet up on a desk.

I kept looking at Petra as the shuttle swept along, searching her face for some betrayal of emotion but she was relaxed, eyes just about closed, breathing measured as if she were psyching herself for what lay ahead. Her performance only made me more nervous. It would have been nice to hold her hand but I had to look as though I was in some control. Keep your eye on her, I told myself. No matter how calm she seemed to be I could sense a bristling energy rising from her. She’d surely commit some rash error if I didn’t watch out. Finally there was a deceleration and we separated to opposite sides of the shuttle. I missed the moment of its stopping – so smooth were its brakes – for the sudden whisper of opening doors surprised me. Deep blue shadows spilled in from the Chamber, along with cool air from huge, slow moving fans on its ceiling, some ninety feet above us. Petra gestured with her head that I should take a look. I craned my neck, trying to keep within the block of shade, and searched for the cameras. There were just two of them, set on either side of the great room: I could see the infra–red sheen that coated their lenses and belied their apparent lifelessness. One of them must have caught some kind of motion; click–whirr it went, a strangely unsettling noise which echoed and settled in the dim heights.

I moved slowly back. We’d have to go soon or the shuttle would close and take us back to where we came from. I widened my eyes, hoping she’d recognise the futility of this venture. Instead she pulled out one of the rubber balls I store in my surgery – they’re squeezed by people with wasting diseases to try and keep their muscles supple – and rolled it slowly across the floor. The cameras jerked round in our direction and then panned back, following the ball’s progress. Petra hustled me out and, hugging the wall, we tiptoed beyond their arc of vision to the vacuum doors set into the wall. I was getting excited by this time; I wanted a whiff of real air though I wasn’t at all sure if it was poisonous. We smeared zinc oxide on our arms and faces and unfolded the great parasols. The ball bobbled against the wall, its energy spent. Those pale red eyes began to sweep slowly back towards us.

‘Quickly Petra,’ I whispered. She swiped the key card across the lock and a pneumatic hiss filled the chamber. The door drifted open and we crept Outside. We waited till the tower’s revolving ‘eye’ was turned away from us before sprinting towards a low ridge of rubble from which broken fingers of steel thrust. Only when we were safely shielded from the Warren did the force of what we’d achieved sink in. Since birth I’d sucked in air that had been strained through millions of lungs. Now, though far from fresh, it was a thrill just to have the flavour of something different in my chest. Petra was smiling, eyes wet and wide.

‘You did it!’ I shouted, beginning to laugh.

‘Hush,’ she put her fingers over my mouth but she was laughing too. ‘We should be elsewhere – it’s not safe yet.’

We stumbled away, looking back to ensure we remained in the wake of the largest heaps of debris. Soon, the Warren was little more than a grey needle tipped with light. We walked in silence for a few more miles, quickly growing tired as we were unfamiliar to such exertion. I grew conscious of a dim shape pulsing at the corner of my eye but when I looked there was nothing there, the shape simply kept out of my line of vision. The lens must have been faulty – I was about to ask Petra if she could see okay when the klaxons went off behind us, carrying on the still night air in rolls of sound.

‘God,’ I said, looking back. The Warren was out of sight now though I fancied I could still see a faint pink halo low on the horizon. ‘They’re wise to us already. How can that be?’

Petra tugged at my hand. ‘Let’s go, Toohey. I’m sure I can hear its rushing. Can you?’

Maybe I could. Or maybe it had something to do with the creeping dimness in my eye. But I wasn’t interested in her Great Blue Need at that moment. ‘Who was it you slept with? Who was it you stole the key card from?’

She looked genuinely shocked. ‘I sleep with only you. It’s on paper. You know that – we both signed it after all.’

‘You respect the conjoinment?’ I couldn’t keep the sneer from my voice.

‘Why should I sign otherwise?’

‘There are benefits for couples.’

‘Such as suspicion?’

She had this unerring ability to make me feel guilty when it was her in the wrong. ‘So how did you get his key card without him knowing?’

‘I killed him.’

My mind wouldn’t allow me to understand what she’d said. ‘You kissed him?’

‘Killed, Toohey. Murdered. I took his belt and strangled him. Okay?’

‘No, not okay. How are we supposed to get back into the Warren?’

She managed to make her grin look incredulous. ‘Who said anything about going back?’

The klaxons had stopped. I imagined a phalanx of troops surging from the Warren baying for blood. ‘You didn’t think we could live out here? We’ve no food. Nowhere to go to. The Warren…we were always going back. You must have known that.’

She moved up close to me and gripped my sides. ‘Well we can’t go back now. They’ll carve us up. And anyway, even if I hadn’t killed him, they’d have put us in quarantine for months before giving us our own jail cell.’

‘Not if we were discreet. We broke out. We could have broken back in.’

‘Too late. I’m not going back to die.’

‘You won’t have to,’ I said, but my bitterness couldn’t penetrate. To the east, dawn’s yolky spread signalled another hour’s safety. We had to find shelter, both from the sun and Lascelles’ hunters. I thought of my room at the Warren – the drabness of the walls. I thought of my job treating people who were beyond help. Petra had pushed all my greyness away. I kissed her. ‘Time to go.’

We picked our way through a gutted church once the sun’s leading edge whitened the sky. A great black shadow filled one area – where, in the last century, Mankind made a last desperate attempt to save the planet by trying to patch the ozone layer with a thousand square miles of mirror. The shuttles orbit the Earth even now, their wizened crew no doubt still drifting: a monument to our failure.

The parasol fluttered at my shoulders; I made sure we were contained in its shadow as the heat soared. My breath grew strained as whatever was left of the air’s freshness was scorched dry. A tiny popping noise carried to us as the heat increased. We traded theories on what it might be to pass the time and stave off nervousness before discovering it was the sound of flies combusting. In the shade of a calcified apse we huddled, watching the bleached stone as the quickening day fell across it. Petra started humming a tune, now and then throwing in a lyric or two as if half–remembering them:

Here comes the sun….Here comes the sun and I say

It’s all right….

It would have been nice for some of her steel to pass on to me but her blasé attitude, even the delicate melody she toyed with couldn’t banish my distress. The dimness in my eye was gathering again. I caught a whiff of something green and cool which then translated itself into something tangible, whispering up and down my back to settle between my shoulders, stitching the flesh there with a chill that was not unpleasant. Petra’s song died. She slept with her eyes open; I could see myself fixed in them, my face doubled and curved across the black gloss of the lenses. I wiped away the sweat forming on the scarred dome of her head and tried to equate the brash, sassy woman with the soft bundle of peace I held in my arms. I think I told her I loved her before my own sleep came – at least, I like to think I did.

When I woke, my legs had stiffened and my arms were sore. The cool patch at my nape was a salve: the stone around us had been cooked well; it radiated a heat of its own which rippled the view beyond the apse’s archway. I ate a salt tablet and chewed on a brittle stick of yeast. Petra, smelling my breath, stirred and plucked the meal’s remains from my fingers. The setting sun found a sliver of stained glass. Its light became civil for a brief time, playing lilac and green on the nave till it moved on and regained its cruel whiteness.

‘How do you feel?’ I asked. My voice was dusty, beginning to fail.

‘Hot and wet,’ she replied, rising. ‘And stiff.’ She stretched and her spine crackled. She looked at me when her movement stopped yet the sound continued, scuttling down through the ruins. Could they have caught up with us already? I couldn’t believe that, much as I’d have liked. I knew that whatever moved beneath the crumbled span of the church roof was in some way connected to my neck’s chill and the bloom in my eye. I wanted to ask Petra to move – she was in my line of vision and something beyond her was shifting slowly, seeping down from the shadows like a tide of thick oil.

Finally she crouched and the full breadth of what was coming detached itself from my eye and swelled. Then it faded, making me wonder if it had been there at all – a suspicion furthered by Petra’s complete lack of reaction.

‘Could you not see that?’ I asked, trying to stand. She stooped to help me, shaking her head.

‘You must have wakened with one of your dreams running through your head. We must move on. And carefully, in case there are any hunters nearby.’

It remained with me for a while, like a pattern of light imprinted on my retina. The muscled bulk of it, furred with green, its eyes great liquid swirls. Its smile was a needled curve of ice.

We slipped outside. The ground, having sucked in all those hours of heat, seemed to hum with energy; my feet ached with the constant rush of heat, despite the asbestos sandals. Dusk still contained enough of the sun’s ghost to draw sweat. Within minutes we were open mouthed, feeling so dry I thought I might crumble. Behind us, perhaps a mile or two, metal glinted. Why should they be so bothered about us? Was it because they thought we’d try to come back, bringing with us whatever plagues we attracted? Or was there something Lascelles simply didn’t want us to see? Perhaps the very creature I’d glimpsed. But Petra hadn’t seen it. My confusion was distracting me. I could see Petra was heading towards a crippled tower on the horizon. The light was becoming so grainy now that the shapes of rock around us writhed as if trying to rise up and block our way. My eyes, though tired and scratchy from the lenses, at least were free of any flaws and the pressure at the back of my neck had lessened. I couldn’t help but feel these things had become more an internal part of me, that they had fixed upon me, chosen me rather than Petra. I also felt the shapes and the chill were parts of something bigger – the creature I’d seen or imagined – and its name was the Craw. Since childhood, when the Warren was little more than a maze to play in, the Craw has filled the darkest moments of my life. All my fears and shortcomings are wrapped up in the ripening of me and the accompanying stories of the Craw. It was as much a part of me as my memories of parents, or the peculiar, pregnant moments I sometimes experience at midnight when the sky seems friendly, when there could almost be the promise of snow and my mind flees to some land filled with green. Talking to Petra about this, once she finished scoffing, she’d mentioned race memory – the capacity some have to recall ancient occurrences through some marvellous chance twist in the genes. A sucker for all things magical, I lapped this up; something else to cling to when the leaden sky burned the hope from you. It was odd, to garner such a love for nature, to be fulfilled by something that was generations extinct.

Petra checked the action on her Splinter rifle as we walked. I passed her some food and tried to smile but my lips were too sore. She stopped me and rubbed ointment into them, her other hand resting on my chest. I couldn’t tell which of us was trembling. How could she read the disquiet in my eyes when both of us looked so blank? But she held me, containing my need to talk to her about the Craw. A hug was enough, for now.

‘Will we see it before they catch us?’ she asked. For a moment I thought her question referred to the same thing but then I realised.

‘I’ll make sure of it.’ I said.

‘If they’re lenient…if we can ever go back, then we should Produce. And I’d call it Atlantic. Do you like that?’

‘Very much, Petra.’ I might have cried if the water wasn’t so necessary.

We carried on and, sometime before the redness returned, I realised she’d taken hold of my hand.

‘Describe it to me,’ I said. ‘How do you want it to be?’

I could feel her swell with so many different ways to express her obsession and an attendant frustration that most would remain unspoken. I waited, trying to ignore the compulsion to check the hunters’ whereabouts or the proximity of the Craw.

‘I want it to be fresh and blue. The waves topped with frothy white crescents. I want it to be huge and loud and angry. The ocean is Life, Toohey, the Earth’s great magic cauldron. I want it defiant.’

I gripped her hand, excited by her vision and proud of the way she’d delivered it. All I could see though was a scummy, shallow puddle: lifeless and losing itself as steam to the sun. Not that I could utter my reservations. At best I’d cause an argument; worst, destroy her (and my) joie de vivre which had been leavened by this whiff of liberty. I hoped I was wrong. It would be heartening to stand by something that harked back to a more urbane period.

Now Petra had stopped talking the silence bore down on us again. I could still sense her, brimful with possibilities and I considered ribbing her about my belief that dreams had died – she was teeming with them, all of them briny and blue. The tower glowered softly. It seemed like a good enough target to aim for though I was conscious we could be travelling in the wrong direction. The chill at the back of my neck returned and I was glad of its company. When his voice came I had to look down at Petra to see if she’d heard it too but of course not – it wanted to speak with me. My faith was being rewarded, that’s all.

It’s to be a beautiful day come the ‘morrow Mr Toohey. Stay a while. Share a sunrise with me and you’ll see a fair sight. You’ll cast your eyes on a world no human has glimpsed for two centuries, you’ll feel the warmth of a sun unknown to millions.

‘Can’t. It’s too hot. I’ll die.’

‘Toohey?’ she said. And I looked at her as if she’d only just become a part of my life. The chill dissipated and I blinked a few times till I became more like the person I knew I was.

‘Sorry. Just daydreaming.’

In the dark I couldn’t tell if her face had softened with belief. The pale oval remained – I could imagine the concern etched upon it – before slowly turning again to the horizon. The light on the tower had died. The sun was scorching the other side of the globe now. I wondered if there were others, like us, pining for something as we were. Something that shouldn’t be so important yet was now vital enough to risk our pitiful lives upon. If it hadn’t been the Ocean, it would have been something else. The spirit needs something to feed upon I suppose, or, like so many of those convulsed people in my surgery’s cots, it withers away to nothing.

Its voice. So like my own yet some bass note had been twisted lightly; a discrepancy that made us separate, no matter how entwined we might be. I wanted to tell Petra. Just think, the Craw was communicating with me! The myth made solid. But Petra would scold me and tell me the sun was getting to what was left of my brain.

‘How much further?’ she asked.

‘I can’t tell anymore now the tower’s gone. Maybe we’ll make it by dawn. If we walk a while in the sun we’ll surely get there without the need for another night’s shelter.’

‘Don’t talk wet, Toohey. For the sake of God – you’re meant to be the sensible one. Yet here you prate: of strolling merrily in the red death of it all. Madman.’

‘We’d be all right for a time.’ The voice in my head, the chill in me said so.

‘Aye. And then I could scoop up your remains and carry you around in my pocket.’ She let go of my hand. Always a sure sign something’s amiss. I didn’t give her the satisfaction of asking what was wrong.

‘What’s got into you Toohey? I need you to be strong. If there’s trouble ahead I don’t want a half–man by my side.’

I couldn’t say anything to that, partly because I wanted its voice to say something else and partly because, at that moment, sodium flares – three of them – exploded above us, magicking odd shadows from anything erect enough to provide them. Petra turned, her Splinter rifle cocked and primed, its barrel thrusting towards the already failing canopy of light.

‘We’re well out of range Petra. They just want to see where we are. Don’t forget, they’ll be wearing protective suits. They’ll be weighed down.’

Maybe to show she could choose to spurn my advice she let loose a short volley of shots. The shells disintegrated, spraying the dark with thousands of metal splinters. I watched the tracer fire vanish and put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged me off and strode away.

‘Shape yourself,’ she hissed, but I was past caring. I walked behind her a while, angry that she’d caused the Craw to back off. A hint of it remained – something sourly tempting – how I imagined the forests of Amazon might once have smelled. Their photographs, which I’d glimpsed in the Library seemed to possess some of the Craw’s lushness. Might it contain the secret of the forest’s rejuvenation? I almost swooned with the heady need for green.

After a couple of hours it became obvious the Craw was unlikely to make contact again. By that time my anger had risen and I just wanted to be close to Petra again. She was still in front of me but she was tired, head down, sandals scuffing the dust.

‘I’m sorry Petra,’ I said, reaching for her hand. She didn’t move away. ‘I’m giddy with all this. It’s a novelty – you have to admit. And I thought it was you full of mischief. You’ve more sense in your little finger.’ I didn’t mention the folly of her trigger–happiness. We had to heal the rift quickly. What would be the point of our expedition otherwise? And, if we did have a future together – no matter how tenuous its link with reality – I had to try for it.

She thawed after a while and by the time the tower reclaimed its shape from the darkness – huge and twisted and frail – I’d won a smile from her.

‘Not far now Toohey,’ she said. ‘I can hear it. I’m sure I can hear it. You?’

I tried, but the shushing in my ears could only have been the Craw soothing me. A thin breath of air caught itself in the wrenched metal and moaned as if sensing the coming of the sun to soften its limbs even further.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘I have no idea.’

‘Maybe it was a beacon of some sort. Or a watchtower.’

‘Maybe.’ We crested a rise of land and Petra guided me into a great mountain of bleached wooden slats and lengths of salt encrusted steel. A large white board, flaking and warped, struggled to state some kind of name or message in painted words so pale they might have been ghosts.

B ACKPO       LEASU       EACH

That was all I could make out.

‘What does it mean?’ Petra’s voice was deepened by the echoes of the chamber in which we now found ourselves.

‘I don’t know.’ I felt ineffective. I wanted to offer answers but I couldn’t. Maybe I had something else on my mind. Or in it. ‘Petra, there’s still time before it gets dangerous. We could be at the Ocean within quarter of an hour.’

She was undressing. ‘The beach can wait,’ she said.

It was different, sexing beyond the confines we’d always known. Our inhibitions were still in evidence – a throwback to days in the Warren when we’d have to muffle our excitement or risk inflaming the passions of Prentiss and Fauchon – who were not averse to banging on the walls and hollering invitations to join a congress of their own. Petra took it all in good humour of course but I, perhaps because I’m old fashioned, fretted over the act. I didn’t want her running off to something else.

Now, though our instinct for silence prevailed, something in the freedom of our environment or the release we knew in our own bodies conspired to heighten the thrill. Sexing slowly, we stared into the blackness of each others eyes till our movements became strained and trembling. No longer able to hold off the sprinting will of our muscles, we fled towards that blinding moment: more instantly intense than any number of suns.

And then: Come with me and I’ll promise you a Forever that is Ocean deep.

My mouth was wet upon hers. Petra was pushing upwards still, trying to gulp every last twitch of me. I sucked her tongue into my mouth: something to suppress the yell of surprise and delight at the Craw’s return. Sanity returned, as did the normal beat of my heart. We might have dozed but the pull of the tide was too great. The sky was beginning to bleed: dawn could only be minutes away.

‘Don’t look at the sun,’ she warned, before kissing me deeply and scampering outside. We ran like children towards the shattered railings that buttressed the edge of what must once have been a promenade. I wanted so badly to be wrong in my prediction of the sea that I almost heard the frothing surf of Petra’s.

We were both wrong.

The hissing of the sand was all. It was shot through with black striations of oil like poisoned veins showing in flesh. Some of them were sootily aflame. Loose sand raced in ribbons of white movement across the surface. Far away, a beached oil tanker slept on its side, picked clean of colour.

‘Atlantic,’ she whispered, and I sensed her slump beside me – any soul she’d managed to cling on to evaporated like the water we’d come so far to see.

We found a set of pockmarked concrete steps and descended to the beach proper. The sand felt firm, and warm from the previous day. I couldn’t tell her how sorry I felt. Words would have been pathetic anyway. She dropped the rifle; I fumbled for her hand, which felt cool and reassuring despite her anguish.

Only when she stepped out from the safety of the parasol did I realise whose hand I was holding.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘I love you too,’ they both replied, as a brilliant cuticle of light found our world once more.

She turned to me and smiled, her lips cracking, washing the teeth with blood. Then she simply walked away. I wondered if she felt the sun on her skin before the bullets ripped into her. Twin trails of smoke drifted from her hidden face as the heat found its muscle. She fell forward and began to blister. Fauchon pushed past me and shot her again in the back of her head.

The Craw was no longer holding my hand. There was a syringe full of morphine instead.

‘You must return with us, Toohey,’ said Lascelles, stepping in front of me. I liked the way he recoiled at the void in my eyes. Thinking of Petra’s nerve, I laughed.

‘Go to fuck,’ I said.

‘We need you back in the surgery. People are depending on you.’

The sun was a great, wonderful orb. I wanted to be a part of its mystery.

Come then, it said. Something cold chattered by my ear. It showed me the pulse in Lascelles’ wrist as he lifted his hand towards me. The syringe grew swollen with promise. His blood sang.

‘We need you Toohey. Let’s be friends.’ His hand opened. ‘Put it there.’

So I did.

 

Advent Stories #1

Every day during the run-up to Christmas I’ll be posting one of my short stories on the website. I hope you see something you like.

INSECURITY

We are only human. People make mistakes. These words swung around and around in Hugh Raikes’ head as he set about making his work area secure. It was as much about a state of mind, an attitude, as it was keeping a watchful eye on procedures and protocols. It didn’t matter how diligent you were. If you were tired or hungover or grouchy because of a row, if you were having any kind of bad day, then the slip could be made. Add the malicious intent of some outside forces and the rare case of insider treachery and it was a wonder that people didn’t drop from exhaustion just making sure that their own flies were zipped up. Raikes prided himself on his attention to detail and his immaculate service record, despite his being in this job for just five years. There had been no system failures on his watch. No breaches. No assault on the rockface of security that had not been repelled at base camp. His boss, a tuck-the-shirt in kind of guy in his late fifties was openly dismissive of the new technology. He thought ‘digital age’ meant liver spots on your fingers. He didn’t agree with computers and their streams of zeros and ones. What was wrong with a filing cabinet and a ream of paper and a good old-fashioned lock?

Paper gets lost, Raikes wanted to scream at him. Paper gets torn. Paper gets stolen. The best place for paper, Raikes had decided, many years ago, was first the shredder, then a hamster’s cage. People make mistakes. Raikes thought: Not on my watch. He’d not be caught out. The secret was to be as unblemished as the software you created. How could anybody touch you if you had no secrets to divulge? Squeaky. Clean. No flies on me, buster.

Now Raikes entered a code into the core computer that would initiate a sweep of the email system across the suite of machines in the building. Any spam would be gathered and filtered and cross-referenced to see if patterns were emerging. He was responsible for these networked machines, their firewalls, their ability to resist hackers and viruses while at the same time ensuring that any and all packets of date leaving HQ were beautifully and brilliantly encrypted. It had been hard work, but he was proud of this set-up, as if he himself had designed and fashioned the computers himself. Indeed, it was his only regret, though he never aired it for fear of ridicule. You could only ever be truly certain of maximum security if you had crafted the doors and locks, fitted the bullet-proof windows, erected the building and oversaw every single job that was undertaken within it.

The program running, Raikes used his passkey to exit the room, ensuring that he activated the CCTV camera over the door first. Only he and two trusted deputies were allowed access to the security offices, but he kept that electronic eye running anyway. If he could have installed a moat and a portcullis, he would have done so. He strolled along the corridor to the staff room where he made coffee and chatted with a couple of data inputters.

He checked his watch. The programme took twenty minutes to run. After lunch he was due to attend a seminar on biotechnological advances in the threat to risk management. There were rumours of rogue criminal outfits kidnapping members of staff from banks and removing faces and fingertips to transplant on to the heads and hands of desperate villains looking for new ways to access vaults. Nonsense, of course, but such urban legends served their purpose. It reminded one to always be looking forward, to be anticipating where the next threat might originate. It kept people alert.

He strolled back to the room and readmitted himself. Raikes punched in his password and perused the onscreen report. Everything was good. There were a few spam alerts that he had not seen before, but a quick run through showed that they were not malicious. The barricades were holding.

He turned to go and saw the writing on the wall.

Home, for Raikes, was an end-of-terrace house in a non-descript avenue at the foot of a phalanx of streets that all looked the same, right on the edge of town. It resembled him, in many ways: minimalist, clean, ordered, almost anonymous. There was a TV, a few pieces of sleek furniture; little else. No drawers. No clutter. His clothes were beautifully folded, hidden away in recessed cabinets. There were no photographs, no love letters, no mementoes whatsoever. If he wanted to wallow in the past, he had a filing cabinet of images he could riffle through in his mind.

He sat in his study now, the smell of chemicals on his fingers from rubbing away the marker pen: PEEK-A-BOO, HUGH. I SEE YOU.

Immediately, he had called his deputies, Norton and Bull, to establish where they had been that morning. Neither of them had been in the IT suite, and discreet checks with other colleagues provided an alibi for them. So who would have broken into a secure room to leave a message for him? He’d re-checked the terminals but none had been compromised. Nothing had been taken. The visitor had wanted to deface the wall, but to what end?

Raikes tried to push the uncomfortable thoughts from his mind, turning instead to his desk and that afternoon’s post. The feel of paper beneath his fingers irritated him. He loved his paperless office. He didn’t understand why these objects couldn’t land in his inbox as a sequence of PDFs: industry magazines, invitations to speak at security conventions, overtures from software companies eager to be associated with his organisation. And the last: an envelope bearing his name and address in cursive script. He stared at the handwriting for a long time. It had been an age since he saw his own name penned in such a way. Emails and printouts were all he focused upon these days.

One word in the centre of a piece of paper: v@ncOuver1979

He dropped it immediately, as if the paper were burning.

Vancouver, 1979. The place and year, according to his mother, where he had been conceived. But that wasn’t what had quickened his heart, drawn cold sweat to his forehead. v@nc0uver1979 was his password. Nobody else knew it. He was staring into impossibility.

He plucked the envelope from the bin and turned it over in trembling hands. He didn’t recognise the handwriting. He sniffed it. Utterly neutral. He sat dumbly in his chair for five minutes and knew that his mouth was open only when a thread of drool spun out on to his lap. He was the kingpin of a national company’s security system – a man of action – but here he was, made impotent on the back of a couple of inexplicable incidents.

Raikes roused himself from torpor: he shredded the page and the envelope. He switched on his PC and fired up his own security software. He changed his master password and checked the sites that it allowed entry to, but no money had been stolen, no information rifled. According to the datestamps, his own footprint was the last to tread these pages.

He shut down and rubbed his face with his hands. His skin felt dry, papery. On legs foal-weak, he moved to the bathroom and showered until the steam had reduced visibility to centimetres. As he dried himself, and the steam began to disperse, he became aware of two things. That he could see something dark on his skin in the mirror, and that there was something at his shoudler. He was not alone. He flinched from it, smacking his hip against the edge of the sink. His foot became caught in the bathmat and he almost went over, managing to put out a hand to halt himself. He tried to ignore the conviction that his fingers had sunk into something like flesh, but greasy, cold and yielding. Upright once more, he saw that he was alone. His breath came fast and shallow in the confined space. He held on to his own hand, that was all. Yet this was warm and firm where the other had been more like setting wax. He peered into the mirror, still befogged though the room had cleared around him. He thought, maybe, the dark patch was his heart, visible through his skin, like a watermark on paper. He staggered into his bedroom and fell asleep for fourteen hours.

He woke up and it was still dark. He checked his watch. Eight o’clock in the morning. He would be late – first time ever – if he didn’t shake himself. He had fallen asleep naked, on top of the bed. This he never did – even on the rare occasions he drank too much Guinness on a Friday after down tools. He dressed quickly, feeling awkward, embarrassed, mindful of the soft, bruised area in his chest, but unwilling to turn on the light to allow himself a more intimate inspection. His health could wait. There had been a breach at the office and that must be his priority; he felt well enough.

He made the journey to work without realising it. By the time he arrived, sweat was wicking off him. He bypassed the hellos and coffee offers that usually came his way first thing, and ensconsced himself at his workstation where he checked his digital inboxes and memos for any news on the previous day’s attack. Nothing. He created a dummy data packet and launched it into the security system, then tracked its every move through the various pathways and junctions to a variety of predetermined destinations. No open loops. No malware. No diversionary or blinding techniques. Everything was as clean as the gleaming granite worktop in his kitchen at home.

He sat back, stymied, stifled, unsure as to how to proceed. The technology was secure; it was via other means that they were being invaded. Mentally he cursed Pace for his slovenly, paper-based systems. It was a habit that most of his co-workers clung to despite the no-brainer lure of the paperless office. They worried about system failures and drives burning out. They didn’t seem to want to hear his lectures about failsafe back-ups, or streamlining, or efficiency. Backing up paper meant copying it or scanning it, which doubled the amount, which reduced space. Raikes rubbed his head, and made a mental note to buy moisturiser; his skin was making awful, dry, shushing noises.

When he opened his eyes there was a tablet of paper lying on his intray. It was a running joke at the company that a spayed puppy saw more action than Raikes’ intray. Raikes himself castigated anybody who dared to drop anything into it; it remained on his desk only because it was bolted there. He snatched the paper up and unfolded it, hating its arid flatness, its angularity. The message read: All of your walls will not keep you safe.

He barely suppressed an urge to go stalking around the office, waving the paper in his colleagues’ faces and demanding to know who was harassing him. He suspected Pace only because the man was seldom without a pen and some scrap of A4 in his mouse-shy fist. But Pace wore a genuinely puzzled expression when Raikes stormed in to demand an explanation. Placatory tones: ‘Hugh… Hugh…’

He was talked down, asked to refrain from rash action, advised to see it as a poor attempt at humour; Pace would circulate a memo that day, warning against pranks in the office. A critical security hub – the gleaming cog in the system – was no place for practical jokes. Almost as an afterthought, Pace asked him how he was feeling. ‘It’s just that you look… pale, like something that’s been… I don’t know… bleached.’

Raikes ignored his suggestions to take off the rest of the day, went back to his desk, switched on his shredder and destroyed the paper. Later that morning he received the memo from Pace, who had been true to his word. Ready to leave work that evening, after a long day, he let himself into the secure suite of computers in order to monitor the resistance of the anti-virus software program.

Every machine was running a screensaver. Red text streaming across black screens: Hi, Hugh… Ghosts in the machine…

Raikes shut down the entire system. Warning lights began flashing across the control panels. It was cool in the room, but sweat was breaking out on Raikes’ forehead like bubblewrap. He exited, and passed along the corridor to the main nexus of offices; empty now. Everything was still and silent, but for the soft, persistent alarm. The police would be here soon.

There was only one failsafe way of ensuring that the network you had set up was totally clean of bugs and viruses. And that was to destroy it all and start again. Purge, cleanse, deconstruct. Year dot. Raikes went to his workstation and folded himself into his chair. He entered codes until he was granted access to the inner sanctum of the system he had created. He regarded it for a while – this soft miasma of blue energy, a swarm of data sparking and trembling, numbers tumbling across the screen in regular pulses, almost like the heart in a foetus at the magical moment that it begins to beat. And it was a little like staring at his child, his baby. The lights on the hard drives flashed softly against the glass walls of the office and after a while, they were augmented by the red and blue stutter of lights arriving down in the street.

He breathed, and the sound was thin.

He pressed a hand to his chest and it felt as though his skin creased under the attention of his fingers. He was diminishing. There would be no place in the new security regime for him. How he had become a liability, he had no clue. You could be too careful, he thought. You could erect walls around you and not let anyone through. You could erase the memory banks to the extent that you had no reference points to who you were any more. At the last, he saw how Pace was right. The paperless office could never happen. You needed tangible proofs; you needed that undeniable link to other things, other people. Everybody needed a secret.

He heard the bell of the lift at the ground floor.

He stood up and took off his clothes, wincing at the dry scraping sound they made against his skin. He felt so tired, so flimsy, so unlike what he was meant or expected to be. He gazed at his flesh in the uncertain light: puckered and cockled like the pages of a cheaply-produced book. He breathed at the ghostly plane of his hand and his body trembled, threatening to be borne away on its own gusts.

As the lift doors opened on the landing, and shadows began piling along the corridor towards him, Raikes reached down and switched on the shredder.

We are only human, he thought, and stepped into the churning, silver teeth, trying to remember… anything. But some of us are barely even that.

Coming Soon…

Gray Friar Press are soon to publish the next in their Terror Tales series edited by Paul Finch. It will contain my story The Offing.

Why Blonde became Dust

In the mid-90s I read all five of Derek Raymond’s pitch black Factory novels: He Died with His Eyes Open, The Devil’s Home on Leave, How the Dead Live, I Was Dora Suarez and Dead Man Upright*. I’d been of a mind to write a crime novel of my own for some time, and had dabbled with the odd short story here and there, but I wasn’t sure how to attack it. Reading Raymond unlocked the handcuffs. His nameless, profane (but intensely compassionate) Detective Sergeant was the grit in the grease of the police force, but he ground out results, identifying with the victims and immersing himself in the psychology of their killers to an uncomfortable degree.

Illustration by Paul Millner

I didn’t want to get bogged down in the politics of police procedurals, and decided my rogue element would be an ex-copper with a weakness for missing persons. I wanted it to be gritty and grimy, harrowing and horrific, and Derek dark.

I wrote Blonde on a Stick in 2003, the first in a planned series in which my protagonist would come to terms with the violent death of his wife and the subsequent disappearance of his teenage daughter.

I struggled though, to find a publisher, despite the enthusiasm of my then agent. The rejections were full of encouragement, however, and one or two houses had almost bitten, which kept me optimistic. But it wasn’t until my wife noticed a Facebook post by Maxim Jakubowski referring to the news that he was overseeing the launch of a new crime imprint – MaxCrime – at John Blake Publishing, that I felt my confidence return. Maxim had known Derek Raymond; indeed he had acted as Raymond’s agent for a spell (and still represents his estate). The stars were in alignment, it seemed.

I was thrilled when Maxim bought Blonde for his list and my mind turned to future books. At last Joel Sorrell was on his way…

Alas, more bad fortune was to follow. John Blake is a publisher of repute, but its bread and butter is in non fiction. This first foray into novels lasted less than eighteen months before the list was cancelled. However, they had only purchased UK rights so it was not inconceivable I might be able to resurrect the series with another publisher. Luckily Titan Books showed an interest in Joel Sorrell towards the end of 2013. They agreed to publish two more books in the series, but they also wanted to reprint book one, albeit under a new title.

I was very attached to that original title, but Titan’s argument was that it didn’t quite sit comfortably with the content. It needed a more elegant name, so I came up with one and they produced a striking cover to go with it. I was happy with the decision (all three novels in the series so far are quotes from literary sources – William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett and William Shakespeare) and excited that finally, over ten years on from his conception, Joel would be able to reopen the file on his missing daughter.

I worry a little that people who have read Blonde will pick up Dust and Desire thinking it is a new book. It is not. It has been revisited, spruced up, modernised, but it is not substantially different. A brand new Joel Sorrell story – Do Not Resuscitate – set shortly after the events in Dust and Desire is included, along with a Q&A. Not that many people would have chanced upon the initial MaxCrime version – I only ever saw one copy in one bookshop and that was positioned ‘spine on’ – so I doubt much confusion can arise given that there was no worldwide or e-book release.

I believe the novel deserves a second chance and I’m grateful to Titan Books for granting it.

 

Dust and Desire Up For Grabs

Ten copies of Dust and Desire are being given away at Goodreads. Enter here for a chance to win one.

 

Experiential writing?

My thanks to Crime Time for posting a little piece from me about writing what you know. Or what you don’t know. Or what you should know… You can read it here.

007 – The Films

I was six years old when Dr No was aired on UK television in October 1975 – the first appearance of James Bond on the small screen. I was seven when From Russia with Love and Goldfinger were shown. Chances are one of those was my first meeting with 007. I was smitten, although I can’t put my finger on the reason why. It was likely due to a combination of factors. The cars. The exotic locations. The fights with the henchmen. The banter with the baddie. Not the women though… not then. Like any healthy young chap, I’d cover my eyes when there was any kissing and cuddling nonsense going on. And the music. What music. John Barry was a genius. And then there was the way the films began. That terrific gun barrel sequence and the accompanying assault of brass. 

Having written about my favourite 007 novels recently, I thought it only right I should turn my attention to the films. So here are my top 5 cinematic Bonds.

5. Licence to Kill (1989)

I want my Bond to be like the bastard in the books. Mean, thuggish; a guy who looks capable of very nasty behaviour. Pierce Brosnan caught my attention in Goldeneye (which loiters just outside my top 5), but he was always a little too smug, and he looked as if he’d overdone it with the hairspray. Roger Moore? Roger Less, in my view. He played 007 as a clown (literally in Octopussy) and seems so uncomfortable in his skin. I didn’t believe in him at all, and hated the double-takes and the sheer buffoonery (the gondola through Venice in Moonraker, the Beach Boys music as he surfs across snow in A View to a Kill, and the Tarzan cry in Octopussy – the nadir). If I was to have to nominate one Moore Bond it would be The Man with the Golden Gun. But only for Christopher Lee and a cracking score. No. Connery had that cruelty, along with the glibness. Daniel Craig has it in spades. And so did Timothy Dalton, perhaps the finest actor to be in possession of the Double-O licence. Dalton was the right man at the wrong time.

The Living Daylights was a major return to form after Roger Moore creaked his way through A View to a Kill. And, as Dalton insisted, this was a return to the books. He played it straight: here was a Bond to believe in, and to fear. However, Joe Don Baker, though an excellent actor, was a rather pallid villain, and the cello case ride across the Austrian border seemed like something Dalton’s predecessor would have done.

Dalton made the role his own with Licence to Kill, which sees 007 stripped of his Double-O privileges when he takes off on a revenge mission against Robert Davi’s ruthless drugs baron, Franz Sanchez. Benicio del Toro is menacing in an early screen role. Unfortunately, due to a number of problems (failing box office clout in the face of hits of the day including the Die Hard franchise, Lethal Weapon, Batman and Indiana Jones‘ third outing; MGM’s sale resulting in legal wrangling over TV rights), it would be six years before 007 returned to the big screen, and by then Dalton had moved on.

4. Goldfinger (1964)

The last of the great Connery Bonds. A brilliant film with a strong female lead (albeit with a dubious name), an engaging villain and an imposing henchman. One of the best John Barry scores. And a genius plot: Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) intends to detonate a nuclear device inside Fort Knox to irradiate the US gold supply, thus driving up the value of his own stock. Some great lines: “Auric Goldfinger? Sounds like a French nail varnish.” And one of the most iconic scenes in movie history: Shirley Eaton’s character Jill Masterson on a hotel bed, coated in gold paint.

3. Casino Royale (2006)

A much-needed reboot after the dreadful Die Another Day. Daniel Craig’s Bond crashed on to the screen like a bristling bull, a face and physique meant for dirty work: you believed this guy could kill with his bare hands. SMERSH paymaster Le Chiffre (brilliantly portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen) has embezzled his employer’s funds, and is in a bit of a panic to make it all back on the poker table; 007 is there to make sure he doesn’t. It’s a simple plot, and a welcome break from the quest for world-domination. There’s no underground lair to blow up, which is nice. And in Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd, there is a confident, sassy foil for a change, who brooks no nonsense from our randy English spy.

2. From Russia with Love (1963)

A tense pre-credit sequence introduces us to Red Grant, played by Robert Shaw, a KGB thug who provides 007 with one of his toughest challenges. James Bond willingly walks into a honeytrap set by the Soviets, who want this pest of a secret agent killed. The potential prize is a Lektor code-breaking machine. The film is studded with great set pieces, including a gunfight at a gypsy settlement and a showdown on board the Orient Express, one of the most brutal in Bond history. Along with Grant, Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) is a memorably nasty villain.

1. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

The best theme tune bar none. An absolute pulse-pounding classic. I spent far too long wishing Sean Connery had been in this film, but after a lot of thought, I don’t think it would have been as good without George Lazenby. He infused the film with an uncertainty, a vulnerability that Connery did not possess. If he had been persuaded to stick around for this, mightn’t he have phoned in a performance, as he did in Diamonds Are Forever? Telly Savalas plays Ernst Stavro Blofeld, hiding out in Switzerland and trying to claim for himself a title of nobility. Bond, disguised as a genealogist from the London College of Arms, flies in to ostensibly check Blofeld’s credentials and unveils a plot to distribute biological warfare ingredients around the world. Diana Rigg provides steely support as Tracy.

 

London Relevant

Many thanks to HorrorTalk, who asked me to contribute a piece about London genre novels. I supplied them with six of my favourites. You can find the article here.