Angels Of The North

by Ray Banks

  The old man made a move towards him, but Joe shook his head. "Leave him. Let him sort himself out."

  Gav looked at Joe. "What if it was you?"

  "Go home, Gavin."

  "What if it was your little girl? What then? What would you do?"

  "You want Brian, you do the right thing and you call the police. You let them handle it. Do it properly."

  "That's not what we do."

  "It is now."

  "No. That's not the way."

  "Gav—"

  "We don't trust them! They're all fuckin' bent. It's a copper—" He stopped himself. "You. What happened there, eh? You lost your fuckin' bottle, did you? Fuckin' smackhead. Fuckin' junkie fuckin' cunt, eh? Can't handle it, gets hisself smacked up, can't handle life, eh? Who are you to tell me what I can and can't do? You're nobody. You're a fuckin' zero, son. You're as bad as him in there. No job, no hope, except instead of booze it's fuckin' smack, isn't it, eh? Weak."

  Joe's voice was calm. "Get out."

  "Fuck off."

  "Get out of my house."

  "Not your house, marra. Don't kid yourself. Council's house. Fuckin' anyone's house but yours. I'm the only one on our street gives a fuck enough to save up and buy his house. I'm the only one on our street ever gave a fuck about the community. And look at them now, eh? Nothing. I can't even get a smile down the pub. I'm gone. I'm a ghost. Talk to me about community."

  "It's not about you."

  "Course it is. It has to be. It's my son who's dead."

  "And Brian's got the right—"

  "He's not us!" Gav launched himself from the wall, got in Joe's face. "He's shite. He's a fuckin' drunk. He's a fuckin' murderer. He killed my son. He ..." And the emotion caught Gav again like someone tore a lung out. He put a hand to his chest and turned away, looked as if he was going to start crying again. He looked up at the old man, who stood in the doorway to the front room. Joe saw Gav's face become a mask, saw the eyes at work, saw him thinking about pushing the old man aside. He knew Brian was in the front room – they'd been stupid enough to try and bar his access, so he knew there was something in there they didn't want him to see.

  "You can't do anything here, Gav, all right? Go home. Be with your family."

  "You're right." Gav said the words, but was too tensed up to mean them. "You're right. Of course you're right. I'll go. I'm sorry."

  He turned to the front door. Michelle made a move to open it. Gav spun on his heel and charged the old man. Caught him in the gut and put him to the floor. The old man wheezed, choked. Gav scrambled over him into the front room. Joe was straight after him, found him standing over Brian and threw both arms around Gav's neck, brought him to the floor in a dragged headlock.

  Gav choked in the lock. Struggled. His heels kicked off the floor.

  Joe looked behind him. The old man was red-faced and struggling. "Is he all right?"

  Michelle beside the old man, trying to see what the matter was. "I don't know."

  Starting to panic now. What the fuck was going on?

  Gavin let out a strangled scream. Joe tightened his grip.

  He wasn't going anywhere. If he had to put the bastard down, he would.

  "Jesus, Joe, let him up. Let him up."

  Joe looked down. Gavin's face was purple.

  Michelle was panicking, shrieking: "Please, Joe."

  He let go, kicked back along the carpet. The old man was trying to catch his breath. Michelle asked him if he was going to be all right. The old man found the strength to nod. Fear had kept Joe squeezing Gavin Scott's throat. Fear and possible revenge. You hurt my family, I hurt you. And if it hadn't been for Michelle ....

  Gav struggled to his hands and knees, barked a cough, and pressed one hand to his throat. He glared at Joe with pink eyes.

  Joe watched him. Wanted him dead, but didn't want to be the one to kill him. Knew he would if Gav pushed it, though.

  So he had to go.

  Gav got to his feet. He was unsteady, flinched at Joe's approach. Joe grabbed Gav by the collar once more and hauled him away from the front room and threw him against the wall, then once more against the front door. Gav bounced and then steadied himself, holding on to the letterbox for support, his other hand still massaging his neck.

  When he turned back to look at Joe, there was nothing but blind hate in his eyes.

  "Don't even think about it. Go home. Sort yourself out."

  "Oh, Jesus, Joe ..."

  Michelle's voice, coming from the front room. Joe backed up to the doorway, kept an eye on Gav. "What is it?"

  "He's dead."

  Joe turned, but the old man was on the floor, still breathing. Confused, he looked for Michelle. Found her down by the settee. She was watching him with shining eyes, Brian's wrist in her hands. She swallowed, and Joe could see the first small convulsions in her throat as she started to cry.

  "He's dead," she said again. "I don't know how ... He's just ..."

  Joe couldn't get his head round it. Couldn't understand. Michelle moved out of the way as he wandered into the front room. Joe held Brian's wrist, checked for a pulse, then pressed two fingers to Brian's throat. Both were still. The man's eyes were closed, and his skin looked like wax. There was that smell about him, too. Stale sweat, something else that prickled the sinuses.

  The look, the smell, it was all too familiar. He was gone, all right.

  "You happy now, are you, Gav? Job done?"

  There was no answer except the slam of the front door.

  59

  They didn't understand. Nobody understood. This was his problem. He could never made himself understood until it was too late. They were all the same in the end. Nobody cared. Nobody bothered to care. It was too much work. They were ... this was a community, all right, but it was a fucking sty, a congregation of swine, of thick-skinned, selfish pigs.

  But Gav knew that ages ago, didn't he? He knew back when he tried to get them interested in the Neighbourhood Watch. He knew then, the way they'd looked at him when he'd gone door to door with his little folder full of stickers and leaflets, that spiel he'd given them, practised in front of the bathroom mirror – not spoken out loud because he was self-conscious and afraid that the boys or Fiona would hear him if he spoke out loud, but mouthed, the words little more than dry clicks made by his tongue against his teeth and the roof of his mouth, just like when he'd practised for Neil Bigelow. This was about community, he'd said. This was about getting together, power in a union, right? If they stood up together, worked together, then there was nothing that could hurt them. All they had to do – and it was so fucking easy, wasn't it, saying it like that – was stick together, watch out for each other, notify the police of any suspicious activity. It was simple. They just had to care about their estate, about their neighbours, just care enough to stop the bastards in this life from taking what wasn't theirs, ruining whatever they'd spent all this time building up and maintaining.

  They just had to care.

  But they didn't. Blank looks, mealy-mouthed half promises and nothing ended up being done. The leaflets, the stickers, they went in a drawer in their kitchens, never to be opened unless something went wrong with the boiler or the shower or the fridge, and they needed to dig around to find the warranty or manual. And then they'd see those leaflets and they'd give them a momentary glance – a sudden exhalation like, Neighbourhood Watch, aye right – and then forgotten. The only one on the estate with any pride was Gav Scott, and when you were the only one with pride, you became a target for rumour and derision. You weren't normal, so you were a fucking joke. They'd watch Neighbours on their tellies, and shut their doors to the real thing. As much as Gav tried to smother the idea, the fact was his neighbours – each and every last bastard one of them – were selfish scum, happy to be a part of the success he'd brought, but cowering and quick to betray when it waned.

  Such was the problem when you were better than the rest, right? All the great men suffered because of their mediocre contemporaries. All the b
ig thinkers were called ridiculous and vain. And there were always moments in the lives of those great men when they worried that the consensus was correct – that they were undeniably mediocre people, that if everyone thought one way, there had to be some element of truth to it that he just couldn't see.

  Gav walked on. His hand hurt. Pulsed. Throbbed. So did his throat. The pain kept him awake. He wanted to get drunk. But he couldn't do that. Couldn't blot it all out like that. Drink wasn't an answer here. It wouldn't work on him. It would only sharpen the pain, hone those edges to a razor edge and cut him until he was on his knees begging for understanding. Just like he'd been in the soldier's house. And who the fuck did he think he was? He wasn't special. Another mistake Gav had made: thinking the soldier was someone he could trust, someone he could use, an ally in this fight. Not knowing that he was just as weak and callow as the rest of them. Only difference was he was dangerous and he was a smackhead. You could never trust a smackhead. Only thing they cared about was getting off their heads, and the soldier's family would find that out sooner or later. He might've had them fooled now with his Good Samaritan bit, his clean-living bollocks, but there'd be a day – not too long from now, Gav knew – where he'd come tumbling off that wagon and end up blue and drooling in a ditch somewhere.

  They'd see. They'd all see then. They'd see and they'd understand and then they'd do their best to drown that understanding because it didn't fit with an easy, ignorant life. Because that was all people round here wanted – the same old easy, boring, eyes-shut existence they'd always had. There was no ambition, no life in them, and they deserved to die like Brian fucking Turner, alone and drunk and on someone else's settee.

  Gav arrived at the cab office. The lights were still on. He lit a cigarette and took a deep first drag. Rain spotted his face.

  It happened to everyone in the end. You lived your life thinking that you were special. Maybe it was your parents brought you up to think like that, maybe you just knew it deep in your soul, that you were someone special and that you were on this planet to do something great, achieve something if not for the ages, then for the time being. You were above average. You had potential. And so you had your family and you worked and you waited for the day when that opportunity would come along to prove your worth to the world, to say, "This is it, this is me, fuck you all, I always knew I was made for better things!"

  And that opportunity came along. It was signposted, neon-lit, it was a connection point between you and all the great men in the world. It was your gateway to greatness, and it'd be hard going – anything worth having was tough to get – but you were the right man to grab that opportunity with both hands and bend your troubles to your will.

  He was not a mediocre man. Even after all this time and drenched by that tidal wave of shit, he knew that much. He was a great man. And a great man had to do great things. He marched into the cab office. The reception was warm and smelled of Calor Gas. Rosie sat at the dispatcher's desk. She watched him enter, on the phone to some fare, her large eyes following him as he approached. She looked frightened. She hung up the phone and moved to the radio.

  "Don't bother, Rosie. Get yourself away."

  "I just a got a call in from—"

  "Doesn't matter. I said get yourself away." He moved towards his office. "I'm closing up."

  "It's all right, Gavin. You can go home. I can handle it here."

  He turned at the door and bellowed at her. "Get out. You hear me, you deaf bitch? I'm closing up."

  She stared at him, her mouth open, the bottoms of her grey teeth showing above her slick lips. She blinked mascara from her lashes – there was a glut of it coagulating in the corner of her eyes. She looked as if she was going to say something, but when Gav made a move back to the desk, she pushed away and grabbed her bag. "All right. Okay."

  Gav plucked her coat from the peg and tossed it over to her. "Go home."

  She nodded and scurried out, the wet flapping of her flat shoes sounding across the lino floor. He crossed into the dispatchers desk, picked up the radio as she left the office. Pressed the button and made sure he was heard by every last one of the drivers. "This is Gavin Scott. Finish off your runs and go home early." He swallowed. Pressed the button again. "Go and hug your kids or something."

  Then he pulled the radio off the desk onto the floor. It crashed and buzzed, barely damaged, but apparently angry at the attack. He thought about braying it with his foot, but decided it would probably do him more damage than the radio and stalked away from the desk into the back office.

  He sat down, smoked the rest of his cigarette, staring into space.

  It was still his, this place. Still his kingdom. Still in his name. Made sure of that after Crosby's visit. The paperwork hadn't been signed off properly, not yet. It'd take a couple of weeks to get everything sorted. Crosby thought he had a stake. He didn't have shit. For tonight, anyway, this place still belonged to Gavin Scott. The office was in his name, the cars were in his name, the insurance was in his name.

  These fucking yuppies ... This fucking lie. See the woman – if it was a woman – stalk through the doors of Number Ten. See her stiff smile for the cameras. See her sit at her cabinet, discussing the nation's problems and extolling her own Final Solution. Get them to buy their council houses. Get them to invest in the utilities. Get them to believe that their business sense is cultivated, that their future is rich and powerful if only they put forth the effort and show the kind of work ethic she knew was in them. Get them to praise the free market. Get them to think that they were all in it together, but at the same time that there was no such thing as society, and that the individual controlled his own destiny. Get them to cheer on the troops and despise those who sought to demoralise and dismantle what she'd brought – the Irish, the unions, the left-wing, pipe-smoking scaremongers. The future was bright, the future was enterprise. All for one, as long as one was me, and the least you could do was stop whining, you Moaning fucking Minnie, you.

  It was a lie, wasn't it? A shining lie, sparkling and dancing in front of your eyes, a promise of great wealth, spiritual satisfaction and a newfound sense of self-esteem that those rotten old Labour lot had spent a decade trying to grind out of you. But it was just one big no-limit poker game, and the only players who won no-limit were the ones who could afford to buy the pot, even when they had nothing in their hand. The odds were stacked against you from the get-go. If you weren't wealthy, if you weren't powerful, if you didn't know the right people, if you had an accent that betrayed your comprehensive education and a vocabulary that the BBC would find lacking, you were fucked.

  Crosby was a winner. He had the power, the connections, the money. He could afford to be a thug; nobody was going to stop him. When he did it, it was called "getting things done". He was the real entrepreneur; all Gav had been doing was playing the part and dancing for scraps.

  To these people, he was that mediocre man. To his own people, too. But they were wrong, all of them. He was great. And it was time to prove it.

  He pushed away from his desk, clicking his lighter in one hand. He crossed through to the back room. Calor Gas canisters stood against the far wall. He dragged them out into the middle of the office and then went outside. It was raining now. Cold rain. Waking him up, jarring him to his purpose. He siphoned the petrol from three of the standing cabs into a couple of cans, then went into the office and doused the lot. His desk. The dispatcher's desk. That crackling, worried radio, drivers asking what the fuck was going on. He splashed the walls and the lino and the seats in the waiting area. He coughed against the fumes and watched the Calor gas heater's bubble flames quiver as he passed. He popped the seals on the other two canisters, then took the last can and dribbled a trail out through the front door, stopping before he hit the gravel.

  Rain matted his hair. He didn't have long before the petrol washed away. He lit the trail, watched it blossom blue then orange and snake back into the office. Then he walked quickly across the gravel, his feet crunching at
speed until he reached the end of the parking area. He turned.

  He wanted an explosion. He wanted a blast and a fireball and fireworks to stream sparks into the air, but he got none of it. Instead, he saw the flames grow beyond the windows. He saw the orange glow become deeper and brighter.

  This was how his world ended, like the poet said: not with a bang, but a whimper.

  A whimper was good enough. A whimper would do the trick.

  The flames grew higher, appeared over the windows. The petrol had caught, the air was circulating, the fire was growing. He watched it, feeling his breathing stiffen and hurt. A part of him wanted to go back inside. There was a photograph in there of his family as they were. Him, Fiona, the two boys – both of them, happy and hanging off each other the way brothers were supposed to be – and Fiona held Sophie in her arms, a newborn, her face all scrunched up, confused and irritated at the world around her. He wanted to fetch it, but he knew that wasn't what he really wanted to go back for.

  The insurance was his, yes. And so was the life assurance. It would be easy to walk back inside, go down with the ship. Walk in there and burn. So much would be taken care of there. So much would be over and done with. He could go into his office, hunched against the stifling heat, his broken fist pressed to his mouth as he coughed against the smoke, and he could pick up that photograph – the frame cracked by heat and the corners already peeling and black – and he could sit in his chair – his chair, his office, his business – and gaze lovingly at his family as they were, when they were happy, as his skin blistered and his flesh roasted from his bones. That way he wouldn't have to go home and suffer the blank looks, the misunderstanding, the judgment. He wouldn't have to sit with Fiona at the kitchen table, the light too bright and hurting his head, mutual disgust choking the pair of them into silence, their minds unable to find one decent thing to say to one another, that torrent of marital strife now full flowing, no land in sight.

  But he couldn't do it. The flames were too high and too hot. He could already smell the singed hair. It brought back memories of a drug house and a dead bairn, of a screaming junkie and Phil Cruddas' assertion that it would be all right, he'd take care of it. He couldn't go in there. That was a loser thing to do.