by John Eider
They walked us, not as quickly as they might have, through the town. Wareing, to his credit, had risen without wincing, and as we walked I hoped this sedate pace would be exactly what his seized ankle needed. Behind us trudged the younger gunman, behind him the elder: who had his gun and his breath back if not yet his equilibrium. As we met the ends of terraced streets and B&B-filled roads, so scared-looking people peered from windows or came out into their gardens to watch us pass. We emerged onto the seafront – from where we saw clearly the gleaming twisted metal now heaped along the quay, as if a dozen robots had died there fighting.
From past experience, I knew that all but the biggest seaside towns, behind their bright-lit facades and evening exuberance, could by the light of day bear faded paintwork and the traces of neglect; and getting down among the buildings, that town was no exception. Within a few years, without heating to warm the houses or anyone to keep the public buildings, then even with their gang to keep their ‘order’, that place like many others would need razing before it could be rebuilt. The men led us, where else, but to the Palais.
Up close the building seemed timeless, perhaps dating from the Thirties and looking something like an old cinema I still remember being taken to as a boy. At the door were two guards I wouldn’t have trusted in a crisis: surly, unkempt and probably hungover. I doubt that they’d had any real resistance in that town for months – the bodies we’d seen had been hung from the sign a while back. These were puppet guards, there to wave their guns at any locals unlucky enough to have to pass that way. And then it occurred to me, as so many strange thoughts had lately, that we were on the seafront on a warm, if not too bright but still serviceable, August day – and yet we were the only ones there.
Joining the joshing guards in the shadow of the overhanging sign, we were quickly ushered through the plate-glass doors and into the building, the older of our gunmen prodding me in the back with the snout of his machine gun. (He was obviously made of strong stuff: half dead half an hour ago, he had shaken off his stupor.)
Shown past the ticket booths and posters of long-past ‘Coming Attractions’, we entered through the darkened inner doors to the main room. Like a school assembly hall, it was longer than it was wide and floored with wooden slats in an alternating herring-bone and diagonal-square pattern. At the end, between two audio speakers on tripods was the stage, elevated and of the sort built into the end-wall rather than rising from the floor. Either side of the stage, above the modern speakers, were murals of town life from happier times: to the audience’s left children building sandcastles on the beach, to its right senior citizens imitating a chorus-line on the seafront, arms around each other’s shoulders and left legs out.
Along each side wall were high windows, though velvet curtains rendered the room in perpetual twilight. Above these though and below the roof’s edge were skylights which let in some grey-blue light at least (and through which we had seen the electric lights burning the previous night; these lights we saw now had round lampshades and hung along the centre of the ceiling.)
The room could have been used for anything: from craft fayres and whist drives by day, to plays and cinema showings by night. However, its tables and chairs were now stacked against walls and in corners, bar a few taken down and scattered around as if for ad hoc poker games. At one of these tables sat two men without obvious purpose, while the clinking of glass behind me made me turn to see another man, machine gun over his shoulder – the patrolling guard talking to the pub drinkers the previous night – passing boxes of spirits over the bar to two young women serving there, the bar’s plastic security grating three-quarters up. Both women wore white blouses, the closest thing I’d see there to a uniform.
‘Is Dahla in?’ asked our younger gunman.
‘She’s up there,’ pointed one of the men sat at the table without looking up, the lad heading for one of the sets of little steps at each corner of the stage.
‘Who’s asking for her?’ Emerging Stage Left was a woman in black jeans and fur jacket. She looked like the boyhood dream of how of an actress ought to be in the films he wasn’t old enough to see yet. ‘And who are they?’
‘Dahla, they attacked us at the depot. Ted’s dead.’
This was one of the very few things we would hear said in that room that caused any kind of honest response, the men at the table sitting up as though the man had been a friend.
‘And yet you didn’t kill them?’ asked Dahla of our wardens.
‘If I’d have had my way…’ grumped our older guard, his voice still sounding half-strangled.
‘I thought Ashe would want to see them,’ explained the younger.
‘Yes, yes. He’d want to. Who are they?’
‘We frisked them, but they’ve got no ID.’
‘Are they the ones creeping around last night?’
‘Don’t know yet.’
‘Well, we’ll leave it to Ashe to find out, shall we? No one else goes near them.’
She had already cast a casual glance our way, but now she fixed us firmly,
‘You idiots don’t know what you’ve walked into, do you,’ she said, before returning to whatever she had been doing off-stage.
Praise be, our bags were still hidden in the long grass around the side of the depot. I wondered if anyone would think to check there? And this wasn’t the only question I was asking: for the lad who took us prisoner could have beaten us black and blue before dragging us to Ashe’s lair, which would surely have been the least Ashe or Dahla might have expected. Again, I thought there something odd in that kid’s conduct; and was glad it was not him but his trigger-happy chum who I’d left gasping for breath on the floor at that critical moment.
Tied to our chairs, we were there for hours, hardly noticed by the clientele but for occasional glances; perhaps because they knew we were Ashe’s, not theirs to idle away time in taunting. So we were left with time to think and to notice; but not to talk, ‘Shut it!’ being the only time anyone spoke to us. The hall echoed sound though, and left even our gaolers’ mumbles as clear as the words once spoken by the actors on the stage – if only any of them had said anything at all interesting. Most frustratingly, whatever the men at the card table had thought earlier on hearing of friend Ted’s death, they said no more about it. Others would drift in and out during our time in the hall, some with a gun, some with a bottle, to add nothing more to the mix than slurred and obvious observation, or card-game braggadocio.
Running along the base of one wall, I noticed a row of grain sacks laid out as if sandbags, seemingly forgotten and used only to stack other junk and items on top of. They must have had more food than they could eat to have been stashing it around the place like that and then ignoring it. I looked closer, and on one could see the logo of a well-known charity.
The air in the hall was several-days-stale with cigarette smoke, the smell of the fried food they still had the power to cook, and who knew what else. Around the room were occasionally scattered heaps of clothes, expensive-looking objects torn out of their original context – a gilded garden statue, a Rolex watch display cabinet – and smears on floor and furniture of what might have been spilt blood, spilt food, brought-up drink, or else had origins as mysterious as the odours that accompanied them. Sometimes these pools of mess had built up to a dried consistency of dirt or grit, and must in part have come in off the boots and overalls of the men out ‘working’ in their deconstructive chores.
I am afraid that the not-tremendously-politically-correct images came to me during these times of a bun-haired nurse entering a gangrenous ward, or a maid at the site of her master’s previous night’s debauchery (for there was something archetypally feminine in my characters’ desire for cleanliness) and this or that noble woman pulling back the curtains, throwing open the windows, and getting down to some serious scrubbing. But no such antiseptic remedy was being employed there in the hall of the Palais, as if those contained within its unhealthy confines acknowledged their sickness and wanted only an environment i
n which it could continue.
All there seemed to know that the boss was elsewhere occupied, and so it was only a matter of time before we enjoyed the pleasure of his company. By the time he arrived more people were present, some arriving with him, others I thought simply expecting a performance. Our two original captors though had returned to duties since delivering us, and had not been seen since.
And then there he was again suddenly, just as he’d looked the day before in the forest, Ashe, the master of this fetid court. In his lambs-wool coat and with an air about him of tropical dictator, he seemed a cross between John Motson and Idi Amin.
After greetings, slaps and handshakes, all went silent as they waited on him turning his attention to us. Obeying the iron rule that you never show a sadist weakness, I adopted a sneering aspect that I hoped came across as I looked down my nose at him. Whether or not it did the trick, he seemed to think he had a handle on us as he sat down on a chair among those already pulled down from the stacks along the wall. There were tables piled too, long and thin and I imagined once laid out for bingo or chicken-in-a-basket dinners. This was a tinpot empire run from the premises of a local business – but such things could happen now, the world was on its head. The thought of chicken dinners made me hungry – we were desperate men.
When Ashe spoke he spoke loudly, his every utterance for the room’s benefit, and changed topic on a sixpence. All were silent when he held the floor, but for the moments when he played up for some crowd response, most usually mocking laughter.
‘Ted,’ he began in memory of the man who’s head had been near sliced off by falling metal in that morning’s fracas. ‘Ted. A nice guy, he manned my arcade on the front there,’ he explained for our benefit. ‘He robbed off me for fifteen years; thought I wouldn’t notice an armful of fifty pees fallen off the end of a shuffle board here, a box of chocolates taken off the prize shelf for his wife there.’ He laughed, echoed by the room a moment later. ‘And he had the gall to tell me people had won those digital watches in the grabber machines – when we both knew those machines were fixed!’ He shook his head, ‘I was in every one of my venues every day all that summer, and I never saw one worn – when wouldn’t someone who’d won one of them want to show off such a prize?’ All murmured to the effect that they would. ‘God knows how far away he went to flog them. Those were the days, the penny arcades. Not much call for them now thought, eh? People don’t have very much money to spend anymore, have you noticed?’
As he broke to allow the crowd’s merriment to die down, I couldn’t help but look at his hat, he seeing my interest.
‘Ha, you like it? It’s called a Karakul. I took it from a Kurdish butcher; that was when you could still find fresh meat in cold stores. Fine times they were. We’ve never eaten as well, before or since! Yes, we made hay those first days, with just the truck and a couple of guns. Who was going to stop us?’
‘No one,’ called someone in the back to general agreement.
‘Where did we meet him, the butcher?’ asked Ashe of the room.
‘Peterborough,’ called a man who I noticed was armed but who we hadn’t seen before – there seemed no end to these foot soldiers. Also back in the room was the one delivering drinks earlier and who we’d previously seen from the cliffs, talking to the drinkers outside the pub.
‘Peterborough,’ Ashe chuckled. ‘A right bloody nightmare that place turned out to be, we got out of there with our arses in our hands.’ This talk of butchers reminded him though of something, ‘When Bobby died last year, on that boat, I sent his family a ham. You don’t see much ham now. Have you seen ham?’ He was facing me directly.
‘Yeah,’ I answered in defiance. How stupid.
‘Really? Where?’
I scrambled for answers without mentioning the commune, ‘Some fellow, shot a pig.’
‘Did he?’ This seemed to satisfy Ashe though, as turning to his grisly court he asked,
‘But what’ll we send Ted’s wife? They’ve had enough out of me over the years, that pair. Something off the boats, maybe? I know, we’ll send her a bag of grain.’
This raised another low chortle among the sycophants. Yet I just renewed my aching sneer; this bringing an instant change of mood in him, he moving forward and asking me,
‘What are you thinking? What are you thinking when you look at me like that?’
‘I’m thinking, when did you last tell a joke that didn’t get a laugh?’
This got a laugh, one single laugh, a shocked giggle, by one who very soon shut up.
He turned to me, speaking quietly, for the first time for my hearing alone,
‘You think you can turn up in my town, looking at me like that? Once this delivery’s in, I’ll have my fun with you…’
But he was interrupted,
‘No sign, boss,’ announced a man just arrived from some scouting mission.
‘Where is that tanker?’ asked Ashe of himself, as he gave me one last glare; before leaving to supervise the chaos, coming in close and whispering,
‘When I’m finished with you, your own mother won’t recognise you.’
He came and went throughout the rest of the afternoon, entertaining low banter when he fancied, and with whoever happened to be there at the time – his listeners laughed when expected, but never in a way that drew special attention to themselves. His crew followed a similar working pattern, or rather lack of pattern: their duties, their movement, perhaps even their lives, lacking any apparent structure or purpose. Meals were scant fare, unhealthily-looking and taken on the hoof, while drink was consumed by armed and unarmed alike in any form and at any time of day; though never enough to make anyone properly drunk it seemed. (Neither food nor drink were offered to us.) I wondered if this was how days were lived here: in a timeless daze, in-between heading off to neighbouring towns to rip up churches, or engaging in senseless acts of cruelty?
Dahla interested me, like the frustrated actress she possibly was, forever appearing – as if rehearsing her entrance – upon the stage whose lip protruded slightly out onto the dancefloor. Clearly intelligent and highly self-aware, I wondered if this wasn’t one of those ‘power behind the throne’ situations, and Ashe in reality was as posturing and useless as the guards at the door? But no, from what we saw this striking woman seemed content to let her madman make decisions.
At one point later on, the heat of the unventilated room making me drowsy, I sensed a sullen Ashe-like presence regarding me from afar; this presence becoming real as he moved quickly toward me to kick the legs from under my chair – quite a feat with a man sat in it – and would have stamped away at me, prone with my hands tied to the chair’s back, had a guard not dared to approach and pull him back at the shoulder; which earned a glare for him but paused the attack on me.
My feet raised ready to kick him back, he instead went in verbally,
‘You come in here..?’ he spat, ‘You come in here..?’
But the guard was not restraining Ashe for my benefit, but to bring his attention to Dahla being on the stage; she saying from that place,
‘Leave him till tomorrow, love. Come on, big night tonight.’
He merely glared at me afresh, before concluding,
‘If we weren’t busy here… I swear, I would have my leisure with you.’
With this the two men walked out, not even bothering to right me; before Dahla came down the steps from the stage to walk across the floor and follow them out, casting only one utterly ambiguous look my way: a smile of cruelty, glee and pity.
Chapter 28 – The Dutch Arrive