Sheedy, I thought. What a ridiculous made-up surname.
When I went back up to the house I gave Eli two Ormus capsules and told him they were painkillers, just to see if anything impressive happened.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
There were Power Rangers on the chest of drawers, but teddy bears on the bed. I picked up one of the figurines. Ryan had been too old for this shit for years. He’d done away with teddy bears when he was three. How old were these kids?
I opened some of the drawers. The clothes were neatly folded and ageless.
Returning to the landing, I shouted, ‘This guy doesn’t have kids.’
From downstairs, ‘Does he have a wife, you think?’
Into the master bedroom I went. Again, it was too tidy. But something was off. Rachel’s closet was nowhere near as ordered, and there simply weren’t enough clothes. It looked like the sort of stuff I’d buy if my mission was to disguise myself as a woman.
Into the bathroom and there was just men’s stuff.
It was a man’s house.
‘Is no one fucking normal any more?’ I went downstairs and neatly stepped over the bodies to light a cigarette in the back doorway.
Eli was sitting on the floor against one of the cupboards, dosed up on Ormus and real painkillers and holding a tea towel to his ear.
I looked at the holes in the ceiling. ‘I didn’t hear those, you know.’
‘What?’
It was enough to crack me for a second, and we both grinned.
‘Seriously though,’ I continued, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling again, holding the smoke, ‘my ears aren’t ringing or anything. They weren’t using silencers either.’
He nodded. ‘I once read about a guy whose eyesight improved so much during a hostage situation that his prescription had to be lowered after.’
‘The human body is off its tits sometimes.’
Eli took the tea towel away from his ear, grimacing, and managed to laugh.
‘Well?’ he said, gesturing at the mess.
‘I’ll go search the car.’
I threw my cigarette away and bent to rifle through the men’s pockets. One of them had keys, but no other ID was forthcoming.
Outside it was, if possible, even quieter. I guess that was the idea of suburbia, cutting yourself off so no one could hear you talking, having sex, cooking, dying.
They hadn’t parked in the driveway so I ventured into the road, pressing the unlock button on the keys.
There were a couple of drives not completely shrouded by hedges and trees, but no curtains open.
About twenty yards away, a small dark blue Honda made itself known by beeping. I could tell immediately there was going to be nothing there; it was second-hand. I jogged over and opened the driver’s door.
Nothing. Not even empty crisp packets.
I shut the door behind me and levered myself into the back, checking the seat storage, under the cushions, and clambering into the front again to check the glove compartments. There was one smartphone.
Locked.
The car smelt of smoke.
I got out and jogged back towards Cathal’s house. As I did, a dim rumble and a pair of headlights found me.
I slowed to a walk as the car did, and it was Luiz who leant out of the window.
‘What you doing in the road, man?’
I stared at them both, put the phone in my pocket and walked away.
*
I expected Cathal to – well, I’m not sure what I expected. I didn’t expect him to shake his head and reach out to grasp my shoulder.
‘Boys, I’m sorry, eh. Fuck. I guess it was always… I’m sorry.’
Eli, who may have been on the verge of an overdose, waved from the sofa. ‘You’re not a dull landlord.’
‘He should go to hospital,’ Luiz said in an undertone.
The three of us were standing in an awkward row in the kitchen, huddled shoulder to shoulder awaiting instruction from Cathal. It was his mess, after all.
‘Well,’ he said, eventually, scratching his beard.
Then he went upstairs.
I exchanged a glance with Luiz, and followed.
‘Hey! Um, so what? You going to help us clear this shit up?’
He looked back at me. ‘No, I can’t.’
‘What do you mean, fucking no?’
He ignored me, disappearing from sight. In the bedroom I could hear doors banging, a dragging sound, the noises of someone packing.
I looked over at Eli, who still had the tea towel pressed against his ear and his eyes shut. Luiz seemed as lost as me. So I took the initiative and stormed after Cathal.
‘Oi! We’re not fucking done here.’
He had gone into this spaced-out, eyes-down state. I couldn’t be certain he was hearing me as he threw clothes into the vast suitcase he’d dragged onto the bed.
‘Hey!’ I grabbed his shoulder. ‘What the fuck is going on?’
He flinched out of my grasp but his eyes were still downcast.
‘What are you doing?’ I stepped into his path on his way back to the wardrobe. ‘Hey! What, you’re going to run away? Who were those guys?’
He still wouldn’t look at me.
Like arguing with a fucking woman.
I slapped him.
It seemed a prissy thing to do, probably hurt my hand more than it hurt his face, but I had to snap him out of it.
He glared at me and I thought he was going to throw a punch.
Go on.
But it wasn’t a glare. It was wide-eyed fucking fear.
He sniffed, looked away again, and walked around me to get to his clothes.
This time I didn’t stop him.
‘Cathal, look, I don’t know you.’ I sat on the bed, next to the suitcase. ‘But those guys were pros. If you run away, they might come after us. You should tell me why they were here at least.’
‘They won’t come after you,’ he said.
I sighed.
‘Then help us bury them.’
‘I haven’t got time.’
‘What about Luiz? Does he know what’s going on?’
‘No.’
Those weren’t appropriate clothes to flee in, I thought, surveying his baggy jeans and Aztec shirt. The last thing you wanted to look like when you were on the run was a vagrant.
‘Take my scrapbook on the Cecil,’ he said, going into the bathroom and coming back with hands full of products. ‘In fact, take anything. Take anything you want.’
He zipped up the case and took it downstairs.
I stayed in the bedroom for a while, listening to him and Luiz conversing in rapid tones. My phone was in my right pocket and the phone from the car was in my left. I didn’t know what to do about Eli; he wouldn’t go to a hospital so we’d have to make do.
Going to the top of the stairs, I watched Cathal carrying appliances out of the front door from his shed, loading them into his car. I sat on the top step and scrolled through my phone, looking for anyone we could stay with.
After a while even Luiz stopped trying to intervene.
Cathal shut the back door and I stood up. ‘Cathal, come on! Let us help you!’
He pinched the bridge of his nose.
‘What about your wife and kids?’ I ventured.
He looked up at me and actually smiled.
It was almost funny, I thought. I guess it had to be.
Cathal reached into his pocket and then held out a wrangled piece of metal.
I realized, as I looked at it in my palm, that it used to be a spoon. It had changed colour; wasn’t entirely silver.
Eli said, ‘Maybe I should go to the hospital,’ and it jolted me out of my reverie in time to see Cathal leaving, with Luiz in tow.
He looked back at us apologetically and said, ‘I’m going with him, guys. I’ll call you, I promise.’
It seemed so fucking inconsequential that I didn’t answer.
Then they were gone, and I was left standing in the doorway hol
ding a repurposed spoon.
Eli started laughing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Daisy
It was colder than it should have been on Hampstead’s West Heath. Beautiful though. It would be an amazing place to take an acid trip, with all the flowers and shit. But I was sober as a fucking Tuesday morning and wasn’t in the mood to look at nice things.
This was the second day I’d sat here, headphones on and listening to Caribou beneath the pergola.
It boiled down to me knowing more than them, I realized. That’s why they all thought Seven was in Chicago or Japan or Timbuktu. Noel might have been able to contradict them if he was capable of doing anything right now. He’d known her, I reckoned. But not as well as me.
Seven said the only place you could go in London to feel like you weren’t in London was the Hill garden and pergola on Hampstead Heath. She used to eat her lunch here when the sun was out, no matter how cold it was. In fact she said she preferred it when it was chilly. Less people.
Every so often I moved to another bench or walked to the pergola and sat on one of the walls, watching faces.
Maybe I’d just been wasted for too long, creating a black hole of time where recovery might have been, but I had definitely reached that stage of a break-up where every morning felt like the end of the fucking world. I woke up, remembered what had happened, and wanted to be unconscious again.
And I kept crying for no reason. It was making me tired, all the spontaneous crying.
I kept composing a text to Edie and deleting it.
‘Come on, Seven, where the fuck are you, you crazy bitch?’
She was still in London, I fucking knew it. I could feel her lurking, as if the bullet she’d embedded in my shoulder had given us some psychic link. Like it was Harry Potter’s scar or something.
I laughed out loud to myself.
Mark had told me once that the interesting thing about the word ‘nemesis’ was that it used to refer to the deep hatred of a part of yourself. Your biggest enemy, your sabotage, your end, was a part of you. Was Seven my nemesis now? Nemesis didn’t mean any old enemy; it was the need to destroy a malignant part of you. My aching, stiff and scarred shoulder was her.
I’d been high at the time. It sounded cooler then.
None of this made a difference to Mark. He was still going to Chicago whether I thought she was there or not.
Nothing I thought made much difference to anyone, it fucking seemed.
I watched another girl walk by with her boyfriend.
I hated how couples fell into that walk; the girl always slightly on the back foot, being led along like a pet. I hoped me and Nic had never looked like that. But then neither of us had ever been into walking along hand in hand.
Gay, as Nic would have put it.
I’d walked into every pub, club and bar in the West End looking for Nic once. If I had to sit here for a week, or a month, I’d do it. There were worse places to be.
*
‘Do you think you’re managed well?’
I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. It was the first one she asked. Not even a How are you? Just straight to business.
Actually, to be fair, she had asked if I’d wanted a coffee.
I’d been invited to a late lunch with Edie at her house before work. I’d never been there before. It was kinda like her; disproportionately large and intimidating for something quite feminine. I’d heard rumours that she had a kid, but I couldn’t see any sign of him. Unmarried, but then women like her – fucking powerhouses – often were.
She was wearing jeans, which was weird to see.
‘Um…’ I’d only just started to take off my jacket, not sure where to sit. Her kitchen looked like the inside of a fucking spaceship. ‘Managed?’
‘At the club.’ Edie had her back to me for a time, making coffee in one of those fancy coffee-making Italian things. ‘Do you think you’re managed there well?’
‘Honestly’ – and I meant it this time – ‘I don’t really feel managed.’
‘You feel like the manager?’
‘Well, yeah. I don’t mean I’m unmanageable.’
‘Would you like to be?’
‘Unmanageable?’
She smiled. ‘Manager.’
I hadn’t expected her to come right out and say it. Ronnie and Noel didn’t say anything to me straight any more. It was as if, after what Seven had done, every woman was tarnished. Wives had left them – though I guess Ronnie’s was still hanging in there by a fucking thread for the sake of the kids – and lovers. Next their employees, their friends…
I’d thought I was Noel’s friend, but I’d probably never be seen as his equal.
‘What, like, co-run the place with Noel and Ron?’
‘No. Run the place. Daisy, can we not be so fucking “British” about this?’ ‘British’ was placed in air-quotes. ‘I’ve never got the impression you were into all that coy bull-crap. That’s why I think you’d be perfect.’
I decided, finally, to sit down at the breakfast bar, on a stool that was far too high for me. It tipped backwards. It was lime green and impossible to balance on. I never understood why rich people insisted on using these displays of abstract art as furniture.
‘You know I’m not some big-shot drug-dealer, right?’ I watched the silver Italian thing sat on the hob and speculated as to whether it was actually doing anything. ‘Like, if I was a manager I’d just be… y’know, a manager.’
She shrugged, sitting opposite me with ease upon another lime-green monstrosity. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. Everyone was making money and I liked them. No, really, I can see that look on your face… But I do, I love those boys.’
‘You know what happened wasn’t their fault.’
She stared at me and raised an eyebrow.
‘OK, it wasn’t entirely their fault,’ I conceded. ‘But I was Seven’s friend and I didn’t see what was going on either.’
‘But you did see what was going on. That’s why she had to do that.’
I touched my shoulder. I might have imagined the twinge when she nodded at it. With all the drugs and the imposition of the outside world I hadn’t thought about it in a while.
‘I heard about you and Nic.’
I wondered how she could possibly have known, unless she’d spoken to Nic herself.
I made some non-committal – maybe vaguely disgusted – face.
‘I’ve never known Nic to have a girlfriend,’ she said, not getting the hint or just steamrollering over it.
Sometimes I’d been painfully aware of how easily I adopted that label for convenience. I’d been more a lodger at first, in the absence of a place to stay. But if you hung around in the same place and had sex with the same person and shared breakfasts for long enough, I guessed that made you their girlfriend by default.
It was none of her fucking business, so of course I didn’t say any of this out loud.
I went, ‘Oh.’
‘I just want you to know I’m not offering you this because of who your boyfriend is, or was. Because that’s what I would suspect, if I was in your position.’
The thing on the hob reached a crescendo.
She stood up and removed it, poured me a coffee and pushed it at me.
I was too self-conscious to ask for milk or sugar. To ask for anything else at this point seemed like pushing my luck.
‘So what would happen to Ronnie and Noel?’
‘They’ll be fine, or they won’t. They’re adult men, why should you look after them?’ She eyed me. ‘Daisy, aren’t you sick of looking after them?’
I sniffed the coffee and it smelled like bitter European shit but I drank some anyway, to appear sophisticated.
‘I guess… you’re right.’
She shook her head and said, ‘There’s something so weak about men.’
‘Well, yeah,’ I had to agree.
‘I really want you to think about this offer.’
‘Oh yeah, I
am thinking about it. Really.’
‘You think if I offered Ronnie and Noel more power on the condition they sell you up the river they’d deliberate for even a second?’
I looked away, out through vast glass windows, into a garden made entirely of stones. ‘No.’
‘Never do anything for a man when he wouldn’t consider doing the same in return.’
‘You mean anal?’ I blurted it out with a peal of nervous laughter that had been hovering at the back of my throat.
Thank fuck, Edie laughed too. ‘Business and anal.’
I drank more coffee, smirking. ‘I once asked an ex why he wouldn’t have a three-way with another guy. A devil’s three-way.’
‘What did he say?’
I put on a ridiculous macho voice. ‘Uh, I just couldn’t have my dick that close to another guy’s.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Sad.’
For a second I forgot who she was. But then I remembered and stopped laughing.
‘Is your real name Daisy?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘What is it?’
‘Eh. Ick.’
‘On our books you’re… Well, you never gave us your bank account details, I know the boys pay you in cash. You’re nameless.’
It seemed pointless to put up a fight.
‘It’s Catherine.’
‘Catherine…?’
‘Murray-Spinks. No one’s called me that for years. Only my parents really, and I ran away when I was like sixteen so… it’s Daisy.’ I looked at the stone garden again. ‘Look, I want to take your offer.’
There was a glimmer of a smile. Good-natured or not, I couldn’t tell.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to think about it?’
‘I’ve thought about it.’
‘Well then.’ She stood up and filled the silver thing with more water.
I forced down some more coffee even though it was making me feel sick.
‘You’d tell me if you knew where that girl Seven was, wouldn’t you?’ she said, without turning around.
I wondered who her friends were, and whether they were bigger and badder than my friends.
‘Oh, I dunno, me and my fucked-up arm will have to confer and get back to you.’
Road Kill Page 15