The Graft

by Martina Cole

  Now, though, she wasn’t so sure.

  Jude would be there still, like the spectre at the feast, as she had always been; only now she really was poor Jude who had lost her only child.

  Sally prayed that her bitterness would vanish, but feared that it wouldn’t. A dead lover she could have coped with, but Jude was a different kettle of fish altogether. She was the living dead and she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Spearmint Rhino was packed out. In the VIP bar Nick had been drinking steadily for hours. The coke and the whisky were taking their toll and he felt completely and utterly out of it. His head was starting to ache and his eyes had stopped focusing an hour earlier.

  He had also lost Joey.

  Nick sat on a sofa and watched the goings on around him. He tried unsuccessfully to find his mate but he was nowhere to be seen. Getting up, Nick lurched into a big man who, suited and booted, was very obviously a City gent.

  Nick mumbled an apology as he tried to pass him. But the man, by day a respectable accountant, was as worse for wear as he was. He followed Nick outside.

  As he flagged down a cab the man started swearing at him. It took a few moments before Nick even realised this was aimed at him. He actually looked around to see who had annoyed the man.

  He watched as the City type came towards him, face screwed up in anger, and felt the urge to laugh. This guy was flabby, a typical desk boy, not an ounce of muscle to be seen. But big enough to be a problem if you didn’t know how to handle yourself.

  Nick put up his hand in a friendly fashion.

  ‘Oh, come on now, you don’t want to fight with me.’

  Paul Cross wanted to fight anyone and everyone, that much was evident by his demeanour.

  ‘You taking the fucking piss?’

  It was a fair question, Nick supposed.

  ‘I don’t know, mate, you tell me.’

  It was as good as a battle cry, said with enough disdain to cause a fight or to prevent one, depending how the other man decided to take it.

  Paul Cross, much to Nick’s chagrin, decided he wanted a fight. Nick sighed as he planted his feet more firmly on the pavement. He could have a row, had always been able to have a row. It was what had got him where he was in life.

  He had been the best fighter in his year as a teenager, and eventually the best fighter in his whole school. His skills were legendary where he came from and now, in his drink- and drug-fuelled state, he was quite looking forward to taking on this man who had probably never, in all his life, had a fight that wasn’t driven by anger. Well, Nick had fought without anger all his life, just to prove a point or to get a little bit further in his chosen profession. This prat would not know what the fuck had hit him.

  In reality this was the best thing to have happened to Nick all day long. He had been looking for scapegoats since he had left his house and here was a big burly one just waiting to be burned. And Nick would burn him all right. This ponce would be drinking through a straw for the next six months of his fat, stupid and pointless life.

  Paul Cross saw the change in his antagonist then. It showed first in his eyes. He looked more closely at Nick and something in his stance told him that this man really wanted to hurt him. He also realised with an even bigger sense of shock that the other man was genuinely capable of doing it.

  It was a revelation.

  Paul Cross had fights as a matter of course, had made himself the big man with his mates by always being ready to rumble. But never before had he felt in actual danger of his life.

  Now for the first time he realised what fear actually was.

  He had always been careful to pick on people he knew he could beat, people who were not capable of real fighting in the same way as he wasn’t really capable of it. He was nothing but a bully, and this guy had looked drunk enough to have taken a smack and gone down leaving Paul the victor as usual. It would have been something to talk about the next day. Something to brag about.

  Now Nick was walking towards him, fists clenched and eyes dead. He was menace incarnate in a red shirt, looking more scary at that moment than the devil himself.

  ‘Come on then, you cunt, I fucking dare ya.’

  There was something in the man’s voice. It was as if he was looking forward to hurting his opponent, and hurting him badly.

  Nick enjoyed taunting his victims like this, it was all part of the game.

  ‘Come on, big boy. You wanted it, now you’ve fucking got it.’

  Paul Cross was sobering up faster than a dealer at a blues. He stepped backwards, trying to get away from the man before him. The club bouncers watched the proceedings but kept their distance. This alone told Paul Cross that he was dealing with someone well out of his league.

  The black cab Nick had stopped had waited, and the driver, a big man with a false smile and too many tattoos, watched them squaring up to one another. He put his money on red shirt; that was one aggravated fucker.

  Paul was cornered now. He was up against the wall and he was panicking. He could feel the sweat of fear pouring down his back. It was the first time anyone had intimidated him to this extent.

  Nick pushed his face close to Paul’s as he whispered, ‘What’s the matter, City boy, lost your fucking bottle?’

  He was smiling now.

  ‘Do you want to die?’

  He laughed quietly, staring into the man’s face.

  ‘You see, I’ve killed once before and I could easily do it again.’

  It was said matter-of-factly but Paul believed him. He vaguely recognised the man before him but wasn’t sure where from.

  He held his arms up in a gesture of supplication.

  ‘Come on, mate, I was out of order . . .’

  He was trying to talk himself out of the situation, as humiliated as he was terrified.

  Nick looked at the man in disgust.

  ‘You’re all fucking mouth, ain’t ya? All fucking mouth and no trousers, as my old mum would say.’

  The words made him laugh.

  He put a hand on the wall, effectively trapping the man in front of him. Paul Cross could smell his coke breath, horribly rancid and heavy.

  ‘You give me one good reason why I shouldn’t smack you all around fucking Kings Cross and I’ll let you go home, all right?’ He laughed once more and said quietly, ‘Because, you see, I want to hurt you. I’ll rephrase that - I really want to hurt someone and you’ll do.’

  Paul Cross knew that the bouncers were waiting with bated breath for his answer. They had moved closer, knowing they were all out of range of the CCTV cameras and happy that anything that happened would not be down to them. He took another breath before he said placatingly and in obvious terror, ‘I’ve got kids, mate. Look, I was out of order, out of my depth . . .’

  Nick grinned once more. He was shaking his head in sorrow now.

  ‘See, you mate, you are the cancer that is blighting society. You go out with your mates and you pick a fight, and I bet normally, in all fairness, you fucking win it. The big I am, eh? Well, I ain’t never lost a fucking fight yet, and I have fought the best. Now you want me to leave you alone because you got kids?’

  He laughed once more.

  ‘Well, tough shit, because tonight you picked on the wrong person. You inadvertently came across your Nemesis because ten of you wouldn’t fucking scare me, right? No one in the world scares me. And I feel this terrible urge to wipe you all around this pavement just to teach you a lesson.’

  Nick poked him hard in the chest as he spoke.

  ‘Because, you see, I don’t like you very much. But then, today I don’t fucking like no one!’

  It was delivered with so much hatred even the bouncers stepped back in case they themselves inadvertently antagonised the enraged man.

  Paul Cross felt urine running down his legs and the utter humiliation was too much for him. Pushing past Nick, he ran off as fast as he could. Nick watched him go without a word. As he had witnessed the other man’s fear he had felt all the anger leave him as qu
ickly as it had arrived.

  He looked down at the pool of steaming urine on the pavement and, turning to the bouncers who were still watching him warily, bowed theatrically.

  ‘Was it something I said, lads?’

  Nick walked back inside the club, suddenly sober again and ready once more for a night on the town.

  Joey saw Lance Walker across the bar and felt his heart stop in his chest.

  Lance had a reputation for causing trouble, even though his countenance belied this. A big man, heavyset and muscular, he had been blessed with a bullet-shaped head and a neck like a bull’s. He also had huge, blue eyes that made him look easy-going and kind. His thick, black hair was streaked with grey and this just added to his look of amiability. People assumed he was a nice man, a friendly soul. In fact, Lance was one of the most dangerous individuals to ever walk the earth, and if no one else was aware of that fact, Lance himself was.

  He also loathed Nick Leary, and Joey knew that if Nick saw him the Third World War would erupt.

  Nick and Lance had fallen out a few years before and no one knew why. Nick had never offered any explanation and neither had Lance. Joey knew though that Nick was still out to harm him and felt the nervousness wash over his body. He put his drink on the bar and then walked away trying to find Nick.

  Ten minutes later he went into the toilet and saw the two men chatting to each other as though they were lifelong buddies. Smiling, to hide the fear in his heart, Joey had a quick line and prayed that whatever had gone down between them was now sorted.

  He could see though that there was still an atmosphere and Joey wondered when it would all go off.

  Lance was a handful, but Nick was already in overdrive and Joey had watched him getting more and more uptight as the weeks had gone on. Nick was looking for a scapegoat to vent his pent-up feelings and Lance could be exactly what he was looking for.

  Joey decided that his money was on Nick if it went off now.

  Both men ignored his presence as Joey slipped away from the room. He knew when he was not wanted.

  Chapter Seven

  Tyrell woke up to a dingy light that told him he was not at home. He closed his eyes and winced as he remembered the night before, then opened them again to see Jude lying beside him. She was gone, completely unconscious, and he knew that if his marriage to Sally survived this it would survive anything.

  He remembered leaving the cemetery with her and taking her back to her flat. He also vaguely remembered going out to buy more white rum when they had finished the bottle she had already had. He was quite sure he had not had sex with her.

  Sally would think he had, of course. She was like all women in that respect. She thought that his caring about Jude was because he still wanted her. Yet he had not wanted Jude sexually for years. Why would he? Thanks to the heroin, Jude was now asexual as far as he was concerned. As far as she was concerned too. Sex had never really meant anything to her other than a means to an end. She had, however, always been more sexually active than he had. In fact, by the time he had taken up with her she had had more sexual encounters than Bill Clinton, and Tyrell used the expression advisedly because she had been doling out blow jobs for years. Jude, as a good working girl, honestly didn’t see oral sex as any kind of betrayal and had nearly convinced Tyrell of that. But only nearly.

  He closed his eyes once more at the humiliation of finding himself back with her.

  He remembered how even when he had found all that out, about her extra-curricular activities, he had still wanted her. She had held an attraction for him he had never fully understood. She had been like a hidden cancer to him, he had never realised until later what she had done to him and her son.

  She had been his world once, and therefore his world had become as small and petty as hers.

  As time went by the sexual favours she traded in to finance her habit had become more and more outlandish and she was getting paid accordingly, seeing it as something funny, something so hilarious she would try and laugh about it with him. And because at the time he had been obsessed with her he had laughed, or tried to laugh at least. What had she done to him that had made him forgive her so much? What did she have that made him overlook so much?

  Whatever it was, it had made him take whatever she decided to dole out to him and be grateful for it. Consequently anything she had done, and she had done things that would make most prostitutes blanch, had not really seemed important in the big scheme of things. Jude had become all in all to him. It had taken him years really to see the big picture. See the world beyond her and her needs.

  Jude would do anything to get what she wanted out of life, and that meant literally anything. Sonny had had to come to terms with that at an early age and had actually coped with the knowledge much better than his father ever had.

  Sally, when he had met her, had been like a breath of fresh air. Yet Tyrell knew that if he learned she had done half the things Jude had done, he would blank her completely and walk away from her without a second’s thought.

  But he also knew that if Sally ever did that to him, slept around like that, then it would have been meant, she would have done it deliberately. Whereas with Jude it was nothing, all that really mattered was satisfying her craving for drugs.

  Sally would never hurt him, not like Jude had. She wouldn’t stand there and look him in the face as if he was the one with the problem. Yet Jude had done just that, so many times, and he had overlooked what she had done, overlooked what he had heard about her, because she was an addict and addicts were not responsible for their actions.

  Or were they? Was his sister Hettie right? She always maintained that Jude only did what she did because he let her and in a tiny part of his mind Tyrell had always agreed with her, though he had never said it out loud.

  Jude was like a disease, and he and his mother had ignored that fact because once you accepted it you would have to do something about it and they both knew there was nothing anyone could do about her.

  Only Jude could help herself, they all knew the truth of that, but the guilt he felt for leaving her was still raw. Probably because of it he could not have left her last night if his own life had depended on it. He had missed his own son’s wake for her, and in a way he was glad about that. It had been hard enough facing up to Sonny’s death without the funeral as well. He imagined everyone trying to find nice things to say about his son and failing. Saw his poor mother surrounded by her family all busily pretending to her that Sonny’s death was a tragedy when to everyone else it wasn’t, it was just a foregone conclusion.

  Tyrell wiped his hand across his face. The feeling of being out of control was familiar in these surroundings. Jude had always affected him like that. He realised now she had probably made Sonny feel the same way too. He closed his eyes once more. Sally was going to kill him and she had every right. At this moment he didn’t care.

  He slipped from the bed and stared down at Jude. She was snuffling in her sleep, her face harsh in the early-morning light. He thought briefly again about his Sal. She looked wonderful in the morning, but then she had no reason not to. If Sally had a drink you got the fireworks out. He pushed the uncharitable thought from his head, but how he wished he could find a happy medium with his women.

  Tyrell walked quietly along the hallway to the kitchen. Putting on the kettle, he lit one of Jude’s Bensons. He had not smoked a cigarette in years but he needed one this morning. It was funny but when he had been with Jude he had smoked like the proverbial chimney and since he had left her he had rarely touched them. He only smoked these days when he was stressed, and usually the stress was caused by the woman lying asleep not ten feet away from him or by the son he had buried the day before.

  It was still early, dawn was just breaking. He watched the lights going on in the other flats, could see TV screens flickering in the distance, and wondered at the fact that his son would never see anything like this again. Seventeen years old and he was gone forever. Never to be held again, never to be loved
again. Not that his mother had held him for years.

  God certainly was a hard task-master.

  His own mother was always talking about a vengeful God, and at this moment Tyrell hated Him, almost as much as he hated himself for never being there for his son. His boy was dead and the world was still carrying on. The sun still came up and the clouds still gathered for rain. It felt wrong somehow. There should be more than this to mark the loss of a young life.

  Tyrell pulled deeply on his cigarette once more. The clouds were growing darker and he knew it was going to pour down. Somehow the estate always looked storm-laden; it was as if this place attracted bad weather.