Insecure

by Michael Shevlin

  ‘You want a cup of tea?’

  ‘Nah, let’s go to the pub.’ He said. He had the gun in his right hand and idly started flicking the safety back and forth, back and forth with his left. I could hear it clicking. I watched him do this and thought that I couldn’t remember which way was supposed to be safety.

  ‘What are you doing round here anyway?’ I put my hand out for the gun, he either didn’t see my hand or ignored me as he sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘Pat said you would be here and my new girlfriend is in town and I want you to meet her.’

  ‘Today?’ I was frantically thinking of a way to get the gun back, put it in a drawer and get rid of Steve. I heard the clicking of the safety again, click-click-click-click, as he switched it back and forth.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, pointing the gun at a picture of Erica, ‘you’re not doing anything else are you?’

  The gun went off.

  I thought it was going to be like thunder, rumbling through the house like the bass line of a garage tune. Instead it was just a really loud hand clap, not like thunder, but really, really loud.

  Steve was on the floor, for one moment I thought he’s managed to shoot himself, but then realized that the recoil from the gun had sent him toppling backwards in the chair. He was breathing hard and looking at the ceiling. He said something but I couldn’t hear him, my ears were ringing so loudly. In fact I couldn’t hear anything that much except this huge buzzing in my ears.

  Andy appeared in the kitchen doorway, breathless. His mouth made shapes, but I couldn’t hear him, it sounded like a whispered muttering. I looked towards the picture. It was still in tact but there was a neat hole beside it. I walked past Andy and looked at the other side. The bullet had emerged from the wall and entered the doorjamb of the door to the sitting room. It had splinted completely, a section of painted wood exposed the dark wood underneath. The bullet had continued it’s progress through the door. Pat had big, thick Victorian doors and the bullet had lodged into one of these and not emerged from the other side.

  I turned back to the kitchen. Steve was slowly getting to his feet. I approached him and took the gun from his hand. He looked at me, obviously in a state of shock, and picked up the chair. There was a strong metallic smell in the air, the gunpowder – or cordite, I seemed to remember – from the gun. I put the gun on the kitchen counter, turning the barrel away from us, and sat down at the table.

  Andy came to the table and started speaking again. I said, ‘I can’t hear you, my ears are ringing.’ I couldn’t hear it too well, but was sure that something had come out of my mouth. Andy sat down and looked at Steve and then at me then got up again and went to look at the damage, as I had done.

  We sat like this for a minute or so. Steve was looking at his hands, turning them over and over. I heard Andy step inside and noticed that the ringing in my ears has subsided a little bit. He held my phone in his hand and passed it to me.

  ‘It’s for you.’ I guessed that and put the phone to my ear. I heard distant garbling.

  ‘YOU’LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP, IT’S A TERRIBLE LINE!’ I shouted.

  ‘IT’S RICH! I NEED TO TALK TO YOU!’

  ‘CAN IT WAIT? I’M A BIT TIED UP AT THE MOMENT!’

  ‘NO! WE NEED TO TALK NOW!’ I thought for a minute, then got up went upstairs and into the bathroom and shut the door.

  ‘OKAY! SHOOT!’ I hollered. Not a good phrase in the circumstances.

  ‘NOT OVER THE PHONE, I NEED TO SPEAK TO YOU IN PERSON’

  ‘I CAN’T RICH! NOT TODAY, I’M REALLY BUSY!’

  ‘IT CAN’T WAIT, IT”S IMPORTANT, REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT!’ my hearing was starting to return slowly. I could now hear the faint buzzing in the earpiece as the microphone struggled with the shouting.

  ‘Rich, please, I can’t come round, not today…’

  ‘I’LL COME TO YOU!’

  ‘No, Rich, I’ll come see you tomorrow – you can stop shouting now, I can hear you better now.’

  ‘It has to be today, Dan.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t say, not on the phone - is Pat still in that place in Chelsea?’

  ‘Yeah, but Rich this is not really a good time – ‘

  ‘- I’ll see you in half an hour.’

  ‘Rich! –‘ the phone was dead, he’d hung up. I scrolled through the names in my phone and dialed Rich. Sorry, but the person that you are calling cannot be reached right now please leave a message after the tone... Shit.

  I went downstairs. I had to get rid of these two before Rich turned up. The doorbell rang. I stopped in my tracks. Andy’s head appeared from the doorway. I froze for a bit and looked at him. He mouthed, again, who is it? I looked to the heavens and sighed and motioned for him to get back in the kitchen and went to the door. I looked in the mirror and checked that I looked alright. I think I’ll pass the test.

  I looked through the peephole. It looked like a neighbour; she must have heard the shot.

  She mouthed something, but I couldn’t catch all of it. It seemed like there was an okay in there and think and some other words.

  ‘You’ll have to speak up a bit…my ears blocked…blocked in the bath, I can’t hear very well.’

  ‘I heard a loud bang, are you alright?’ She said, much louder this time. Some people who were walking by looked at us. I smiled at them. Fuck off.

  ‘What loud bang?’ I said. I was going to brazen it out.

  ‘It was really loud. Like a firework, it came from your side.’

  I shrugged my shoulders, ‘like I say, my ears are a bit blocked, I didn’t hear anything,’ I said pointing at my ears.

  She looked at me a bit, flicking a strand of hair from her eyes. ‘Where’s Mr Sullivan?’

  ‘Fine, absolutely fine, never better…apart from the ears of course, they’re driving me crazy…kinda giving me a headache in fact,’ I rubbed my head a bit to emphasize this.

  She looked at me askance, noticing that I only had the door open a little bit. I was worried she’d see the splintered doorframe. She edged to the left a bit to try and see past me.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ She asked.

  ‘Sure, everything’s fine…’ She frowned again. She had that whole twin-set and pearls Chelsea thing going on.

  ‘I think I should ring Mr Sullivan.’

  ‘He’s on holiday at the moment, skiing, in France with Erica and the girls,’ her shoulders loosened, relieved, ’I’m looking after the house for them…mine’s flooded. My house is in Fulham,’ I said, as if my postcode might allay her fears. ‘I’m his friend.’ Some friend.

  ‘You didn’t hear the bang,’ I shook my head, ‘it was very loud.’ I shrugged, pointing to my ears.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear anything,’ I said,’ maybe I had the TV on too loud and didn’t realize…I’m sorry, I’m watching Die Hard.’ She blinked.

  ‘I’m next door,’ she said, ‘I was reading.’

  ‘Sorry, I’ll keep it down.’

  She gave me an icy smile, ‘how long are you here?’

  ‘Another week.’ She nodded.

  ‘If you need anything, my husband and I are next door.’ I smiled a warm smile and clicked shut the door. Leaning back against it

  I returned to the kitchen, Steve looked at me, a deep shade of anger on his face.

  ‘What the fuck is going on Dan?’ he pointed to Andy, ‘…and who’s this guy?’

  Andy made to speak, but I held my hand up and silenced him. ‘You better get going.’

  ‘He isn’t going anywhere, not until I find out what’s going on – fuck, my ears!’ He winced and put his fingers in his ears as if this might help to clear the buzzing.

  Andy looked at me, a bit stunned, not really knowing what to do.

  ‘Just go.’ Steve looked at me, but I pursed at my lips in determination.

  ‘But- ‘

  ‘No buts, just get going. I’ll speak to you soon, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ he stayed seated, but reali
zed I wasn’t going to change my mind and stood up. ‘Okay, I’m out of here….’ He picked his rucksack up and slung it over his shoulder. He made to say something, but then just turned around, walked down the hallway and left. The door banged shut.

  Steve looked at me through suspicious eyes. ‘Well, Dan? What’s going on, why have you got a loaded – real – gun, what was he doing here?’ he shook his head a couple of times, ‘I could have shot someone, I could have shot you…’

  I put my head in my hands, hoping that this would clear it, hoping that maybe all of this would have gone away went I took them away. It hadn’t. Steve was still there, sniffing his hands.

  ‘They say that the residue stays on your hands for days,’ he said, looking down at his palms.

  ‘Steve, I have really fucked up this time…’

  Steve looked at me, ‘what’s happened?’

  I put my hands through my hair and looked down at the table. I looked up, ‘Steve, I need a really good mate at the moment. All I’ve got is you and Rich, after you two the cupboard is bare.’

  ‘Okay.’ He said, uncertainly.

  I paused before I started and pulled in a big breath, as if I were going to tell all in one go. ‘The gun is Rich’s, how I managed to get hold of it is complicated – but I essentially nicked it off of him, or borrowed it because that guy was coming round.’

  ‘What? Were you going to…shoot him?’

  ‘What? No, of course not…I’ll start at the top.’

  ‘That’d be best,’ muttered Steve.

  ‘I’ll give you the short version, because Rich is coming around soon and I think he might hit me.

  ‘I discovered, the other day, that Pat’s computer holds passwords to a bank’s computer system, that he set up. I found out some stuff, but the rest was encrypted. I went to see Rich because I didn’t know where else to go. I told him about the idea I had – the idea that was just kicking around in my head, really – and he laughed his head off.

  ‘We got high, he asked questions and rung some bruiser he knows who said he was going to send round some bloke who knows about this kind of thing. I protested, but Rich said it was too late cause he didn’t want to let this bruiser – Barney is his name – down, or there’d be trouble.

  ‘I assumed that the fucking anti Christ is going to turn up, so I nicked Rich’s gun – don’t ask – just in case he was a head case. He wasn’t.

  ‘Anyway, Andy is a bit of a computer wunderkind and he managed, just now, to hack Pat’s PC to get all the passwords, schematics, diagrams and whatnot off of Pat’s computer.’ I thought that I had outlined it all very well.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Haven’t you been listening?’ I said testily.

  ‘Well, yeah, but it doesn’t make much sense.’

  ‘Why? So we can rob the bank of course.’

  Steve frowned, ‘What?’

  ‘Rich and I are going to rob a bank.’ Steve shook his head and scratched it, ‘I don’t want to, but Rich and Andy do. Now I’ve got to find a way for this to stop, but it’s kinda got out of control.’

  ‘Well, just tell them to stop, that you don’t want to do it anymore – Rich’ll understand, won’t he?’

  ‘Yeah…but Andy won’t and if Andy tells his boss, then I’m fucked…I don’t actually know what’ll happen then.’ I looked at Steve for some kind of reaction. He just sat there looking into space.

  ‘Steve?’

  ‘Why do you want to rob a bank?’ he finally asked.

  ‘I don’t’

  ‘Okay, then why did you want to rob a bank?’

  ‘I dunno, seemed like it would be…exciting.’

  ‘What are you going to do if you can’t persuade them not to do it?’

  ‘I really don’t know…I guess I’ll have to go through with it to a certain point and then, well, I haven’t thought that far ahead yet…I’m just winging it at the moment. Andy thinks I’ve got form – a criminal record, because I have that gun – and…’ I rubbed my face again. ‘Jesus fuck! I should have just kept quiet, why didn’t I just keep fucking quiet?’ I asked this to the world, not Steve, but he guessed this. The doorbell chimed again. I’d totally forgotten about Rich. I looked at Steve. ‘That’ll be Rich.’ He nodded.

  I approached the door and the letterbox flap opened again, I could see Rich’s mouth through the opening. ‘You’ve really gone an’ done it this time, bro. Get this fuckin’ door open now!’ Shit, it’s about the gun.

  I opened the door to see Rich straightening up in front of me. He pushed past me and stood in the hallway glaring at me, he waited for the door to shut. ‘You just couldn’t fuckin’ resist could…’ He saw the damage to Pat’s doorframe. ‘What the fuck is this?’

  I went past him to the kitchen and took the gun from the worktop and handed it to Rich, he looked at it blankly, looked at me and then looked at the door again.

  ‘It was an accident, no one was hurt.’

  ‘What the fuck is this?’

  ‘I borrowed it…’

  ‘I can see that!’ He noticed Steve sitting there for the first time. ‘What’re you doing here?’

  ‘I popped round to say hello to Dan. I shot the gun.’ He said this matter of factly. Rich shook his head.

  ‘That what you do when you visit people? Shoot up their house?’ Steve rubbed his forehead and said nothing.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Rich,’ he looked at me and shook his head, a small, tight smile played over his lips. ‘It was an accident, it just…it just went off… I shouldn’t have taken it, I know that now.’ I hung my head.

  He turned round and looked at the damage that the bullet had made and then looked at the gun, he flicked the switch on the top back to safety and put it in his inside pocket. He pulled a chair over and sat down. ‘This is a right fuckin’ mess, this is.’

  I looked at my hands, feeling twelve again.

  ‘How much does he know?’ he flicked his head in Steve’s direction.

  ‘All of it,’ said Steve. ‘You got to stop this right now, Rich, this is fucking crazy.’

  ‘Too late for that.’

  ‘We can fix the door, Rich. I know you’re…annoyed that I took the gun –‘

  ‘Annoyed? I’m fuckin’ well pissed off, that’s what I am. When’d you nick it?’

  ‘Last night – wait a minute, what was so bloody important that you had to come round here?’

  ‘I got a call from Barney.’ My stomach clenched.

  ‘What did he want?’

  Rich blew out his cheeks, ‘it seems that Barney Gibbons knows about our little enterprise and now he wants a cut of the winnings.’

  I flopped back in my chair and looked at the ceiling. I knew – just knew – that today was going to be a bad day. My mind went through all of the situations that I had been in and relived them in way that didn’t end up with me, Rich and Steve sitting round Pat’s kitchen table with a hole in the wall and a possibly violent gangster as an employer. How had this happened? Andy Gibbons. Andy fucking Gibbons, the little rat. He’s related.

  ‘I’m gonna kick the shit out that little runt,’ I spat out.

  ‘I’d gladly help but I don’t think Barney’ll put us on his Chrimbo card list.’ Rich plucked a cigarette out of the pack and lit up, ‘we’re in deep shit now, brother.’

  ‘You can’t smoke in here,’ Rich snorted. ‘Can’t we just say that we’re not up for it? That we’ve changed our minds?’

  Rich laughed,’ You are joking?’ he saw that I wasn’t. ‘This isn’t like getting a job at McRonnies, you get offered a job by Barney Gibbons then you accept it and the P45s tend to be Colts.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ asked Steve.

  ‘Do I look like I’m joking?’ I had to admit that Rich looked pretty serious to me.

  ‘What are we going to do then?’ asked Steve.

  ‘You’re not getting involved in this as well,’ said Rich.

  ‘I’m Dan’s mate, I’m not going to leave him in the shit.’ Ste
ve looked at me.

  ‘That’s really good of you Steve, but this is our problem, I don’t want you in this mess…besides, we need someone to visit us in prison.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, it won’t get that far.’ Said Steve. Rich snorted…again.

  ‘What are we going to do Rich?’ I asked.

  ‘Fuck knows,’ he sighed, ‘Barney said that he’s going to supply us with some muscle for the job, couple of lads he said, the rest is up to us.’ I put my head in my hands. I was too shocked to start crying yet. Too full of dread to start opening wailing.

  ‘Do you have a plan?’ asked Steve.

  ‘Not really,’ said Rich.

  ‘No,’ I said at the same time. Rich looked at me and the corners of his mouth curled up. He started laughing. I took my hands from my face and looked at him, but I couldn’t help it, it was infectious and I started laughing hard as well Steve looked at us like we were mad.

  ‘Why are you laughing? Why are you laughing?’ Steve kept asking.

  Rich shook his head, ‘I dunno, just struck me that he’s saying to me,’ he pointed at me, ‘that he wants a bit of excitement back in his life…’

  ‘I guess…this is a real mess though, Rich, I’m scared,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you should be. Barney’s a fuckin’ nutter,’ said Rich.

  ‘Great, that’s really reassured me Rich, you could have lied.’

  ‘What’d be the point in that? The fact is, he’s nuts and it’s better that you’re armed with that knowledge than thinking that you’re working for Mother Theresa.’

  ‘I am gonna beat the shit out of Andy, I can’t believe he told Barney…’ I said.

  ‘He was bound to tell him. If he hadn’t told Barney and then Barney had found out about it later then he would have killed you for getting Andy involved.’

  ‘Well that’s a comfort, thanks Rich…’

  ‘Why’d you tell him in the first place?’ asked Steve.

  ‘He would have found out, just by sneaking around Pat’s computer…’

  ‘I suppose so…’ Steve looked over my shoulder and nodded towards the hole in the wall, ‘what’re we going to do about that?’ I turned round and looked at the damage, I wanted it to not look as bad as I remembered. It looked worse.