by John Dalton
‘OK, this is the last pu-lll!’
From the top of the second set of stairs, the woman practically ran the mattress into Jerry’s new room, and pulled him along too. Then she let go and let it slap against the dusty carpet. She followed, bouncing down on her back, her breasts spreading like liquid jelly and her belly wobbling like the set kind.
‘Wow, I think I’ve earned a rest.’
‘Y-You’ve b-been great. Thanks a lot.’
She hitched herself up onto an elbow and Jerry once more warmed to her eyes.
‘So what are you in here for?’ she asked.
‘Er, I d-dunno, ch-chuck out the old and s-starting anew.’
‘Any particular reason?’
Jerry nodded but couldn’t speak.
‘S’all right, tell me some other time. I tell you, we’ve all got problems here.’
‘Y-Yeah?’
‘Jed’s on methadone, trying to kick the habit but not doing that great. He can’t get a job and keeps getting ill all the time. As for me, I’m on the run. Running from a lousy childhood in the dark and boring suburbs. And, well, knocking down any sacred cow I come across and there’s a bleedin mountain of them about.’
Jerry began to look around the room, knowing he couldn’t think of much more to say. The woman sensed this and stood up. She bounced in her Docs on the mattress.
‘The name’s Mouse by the way,’ she said.
‘M-Mouse?’
‘We all take weird names here. What’s yours?’
‘Er, dunno. F-Fred?’
‘Ha, you don’t sound too sure.’
‘Any old n-name I reckon.’
‘Yeh, well I’m going to call you – Stray. That seems to me what you are.’
‘Yeh, why not?’
Mouse bounced off the mattress and clumped over to the door. ‘I’ll check you later, OK? Stray?’
‘F-Fine.’
The room was reasonable enough. Not too small and with a nice sloping roof. It even had clean wallpaper, although the marks left by picture frames and furniture were a bit disconcerting. His window was at the front of the house and he had a clear view of the road. The only problem was the large tree on the opposite side. Jerry felt sure pigeons would be lodged there. Their irritating noise seemed to be all around. But it was reasonable enough; it was an escape and a chance to start again. He sat down on the mattress amid his possessions. A new life, a new name even, and a chance to re-enter the world in a different way. Jerry smiled brightly.
‘A m-missing fucking p-person, what c-can you m-make out of that?’
And then a fierce spurt of bile rushed through him as he caught a glimpse once more of the battered Mary and the horny face of that politician.
‘Sh-Shit . . .’
Jerry stood up shaking. He began to wander around the room. And then he stopped and stared at a pale square where someone else’s picture used to be. He started to cry.
18
‘So, how’s it going, Wayne?’
‘Same as ever, mate. Three stiffs from down the morgue most nights and the brewery’s getting restless.’
‘The last of the last legs, eh?’
‘You said it.’
‘So where’s Dick then? He makes up the numbers.’
‘Ha-ha, there’s a bleedin story. The bloke’s been nicked.’
‘What?’
‘Too right, got done for flashin. Can you believe it? Indecent exposure, bloody crazy.’
‘Jesus, Wayne.’
‘I mean, it just goes to show, you can know a bloke for years, on the other side of the bar, but it don’t mean you know him at all, you get me?’
‘Yeh. Guess you could say that about a lot of situations. So where’d he get caught waving his willy then?’
‘Fuck knows.’
Des picked up the two whiskies from the bar. He smiled to himself as he imagined Dick O’Malley doing his thing. Desperate times.
‘By the way, any calls for me, Wayne?’
‘Some guy called asking about you. Didn’t want to leave his name, though.’
Des sat down in the far corner of the bar and slid a glass of whisky over to Errol. He looked up at the walls since he knew that Errol was fuming. Time to let things cool down. Des perused Louis Armstrong’s clowning face and then the smoke-filled eyes of Lester Young. Personality, doesn’t it warm the cockles of your heart to have all these familiar faces with you always? He eased down in his seat and began to inspect the whisky’s golden glow.
‘Look, Des, don’t try an fuckin ignore it. You’ve pissed me about, man.’
‘Don’t see why.’
‘You’ve got vital evidence, for fuck’s sake!’
‘You’ll get the photos, Errol. It’s only a matter of timing.’
‘We were gonna get together and work this through. So what happen? You collar this Jerry git before we do, then he goes and disappears. You get important evidence off him, then won’t give it in or show it. That is sheer fuck’ry, man!’
‘I told you, I’m just getting some copies made.’
‘What is it with you? You don’t trust me?’
Des lit himself a fag. He noticed Errol’s hair was beginning to thin and his cheeks were sinking inwards. The trouble with knowing someone a long time, you see yourself getting old.
‘Well just tell me something, Errol, right? Up there in the hierarchy of our magnificent police, what will they do about the photos of Sir Martin Wainwright having a kinky screw?’
‘Probably nothing.’
‘Right!’
‘It’s not illegal, Des, having a fuck, and the photos could be seen as an invasion of privacy.’
‘Jesus! Ain’t it always for the sirs of this world?’
‘I’m just sayin, man –’
‘Come on, Errol, these photos make Wainwright a murder suspect!’
‘All the more reason you hand them in!’
‘Yeh, and have them sat on by some fraternal mason’s arse!’
An edgy silence returned. Errol frowned hard at the table and sucked his teeth. Des would’ve liked to have taken a photo then. Worry. Vexation. That should be the sort of thing shoved on walls. Everyday lunacies, self-portraits of ordinary lives. Des eased forward and held out his hands in entreaty.
‘Come on, let’s start again, huh? This whole thing’s getting off-limits for the police, and that’s the place I can function.’
‘Dangerous and mad, Des.’
‘No, you can hold the rope for me, right, mate? I’ll give you the photos and any other evidence I can get too and together we can pull it all in and nab the bastards.’
‘And who are the bastards?’
‘Dunno yet.’
‘Great.’
‘Face it, Errol, I’m more likely to find out than you, I mean, with this bigwig involved.’
‘True.’
‘I just need a few more connections and then we’ll know how to play it.’
‘Well, it all sounds like a load of bollocks.’
It was Errol’s turn to ease back then. He pushed against the fake leather seat, gave his tie a tweak and wearily smiled at Des.
‘So why ya doin dis, man?’ he said in his Jamaican voice. ‘You gonna get you’self kill.’
‘Dunno, Errol. You get into it and you can’t stop.’ Des looked up at Louis Armstrong. ‘I mean, if I did stop, what would I be looking at? A big pile of nothing, Errol, and spiders crawling down the wall.’
* * *
He was definitely losing them, no doubt about it. Ross felt he could almost hear the marbles rolling down the windpipe and clunking like gallstones in Scobie’s gut. He’s had that stupid grin on his face for days. The guy has got to go. Ross sighed. Look at the fucker now, one eye on his curly fringe, the other trying to give Mount Everest the come-on.
‘How did I end up with so much shit?’
‘What d’you say, boss?’
‘Never mind.’
Ross Constanza was feeling as miserable as he
’d ever felt in years. From the moment his eyes had first seen light that morning, a big cloud had followed him round. He couldn’t get it up with his girlfriend. He couldn’t eat any breakfast. His office had seemed like a poxy cell full of niggles and bad vibes. For the first time in ages he felt like shoving it all. ‘Hard man Ross’ was a bloody great laugh.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this Wainwright business, Scobie. I don’t like it at all.’
‘Reckon you should let the bugger sink. I would.’
‘We’re in too deep. If he gets fucked, so do we.’
‘So what you want me to do then?’
‘There’s this dick, McGinlay, he’s got some of those snaps of our famous friend.’
‘And we want em back pronto?’
‘Right. But get this, Scobie, we want them back without any more blood spilled, right? You can teeth them, or do a deal with the git, but we can’t afford any more dead bodies. Has that penetrated your friggin thick skull?’
‘Sure, I ain’t gotta do the guy in.’
‘I’ve been doing a bit of checking. He hangs around the Fedora a bit, got a pad off Argent Street and is buddies with a well-up tec in the police.’
‘Who’s paying the fuck?’
‘Not sure yet, but I can make a good guess.’
‘OK, boss, I’m on it.’
‘You got it clear what I want now, Scobie?’
‘Yeh, yeh, no dead bodies.’
Scobie got off his chair, gave his hair a flick as he passed a mirror by the door and then went out of the office. Ross hugged himself. First chance, he thought, feed that git to the wolves.
Gus then poked his head into the office. ‘You got a visitor, boss.’
Ross looked up. The big black cloud had walked right through the doorway.
‘Why did I think I might see you again?’
‘Guilty conscience probably.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Ha, see you haven’t changed.’
‘Well, it must be nigh on twenty years since we last mixed it and you certainly have changed. But that’s the curse of a lot of women, though, ain’t it? Big bums and big tums. Sagging tits and double chins.’
‘Still as charming as ever, I see.’
It had been in the back of his mind, somewhere, that Bertha Turton would turn up on his doorstep. There could be no direct connection. He felt sure she couldn’t have known. But like Vin St James, Ross had thought that Bertha would come prying about the loss of the daughter whore. One more headache in what was becoming a migraine world.
‘So, Bertha, what is it I can do for you? Need a new outlet for your secretarial skills?’
‘You’re not that far off actually, Ross. I am looking for a new outlet but word-processing wasn’t what I had in mind.’
Ross kept his mouth shut. There was a determined edge to Bertha’s voice which he didn’t like. He noticed, too, that she was wearing what seemed like expensive clothes. A cream and brown kit with padded shoulders and a gold necklace that looked full carat. Maybe she wasn’t just a mousy nobody in a council flat any more. Ross decided to feign compassion.
‘I was very sorry to hear about Claudette, you know.’
‘I’m sure you were, Ross.’
‘Really, when it happened, I thought about you, us, the fun we had before the shit hit the fan.’
‘Jesus, Ross, the way you –’ Bertha suddenly stopped herself. She took a cigarette out of her bag and lit up. She gave Ross a hard stare.
‘Sod this conversation. I never pushed it, the question of who the guy was, but it could well have been that out of the fun we had, Ross, out of the fun came Claudette.’
‘Now wait –’
‘You wait. The point has to be made that Claudette may have been your daughter. The fact that has to be faced is that you may have killed your own flesh and blood!’
‘Jesus, fuck. You stupid bitch, who d’you think you are, coming in pointing the bleeding finger? I haven’t killed anyone!’
‘I’m onto you, Ross. I know what it’s all about and I reckon you owe me, twice over now, and you’re going to pay!’
‘This is a ridiculous conversation.’ Ross stood up abruptly. He felt his whole body clench as he walked a few steps to stand looking out of his small office window.
‘I’m not going to let go of this,’ Bertha said to his back.
Ross ignored the comment. He had a view of tarmac and the grilled roller doors of an empty industrial unit. It seemed a strangely comforting view compared to what was behind him. A black cloud in a confined space and the walls moving in. An ex-lover still resentful and out to get him. He smiled to himself. The way to conduct a conversation with the past. The way to face up to its unwanted and ugly return. He let his eyes focus on the horizontal lines of the warehouse doors as if he was watching a malfunctioning TV.
‘Bertha,’ he said wearily, ‘I don’t care what you think or suspect me of, and I certainly don’t care about things that happened way back. So let’s cut that shit out. You’ve come here – you haven’t changed I’m sure – you’ve come here with some angle so you might as well spit the bleeder out and then we can talk.’
‘Yeh, it’s probably best to keep it impersonal. Strictly business, as you used to say when you screwed around. I want back in, Ross. I want my cut of what I had before. The escort business – girls, punters, files, the lot. I’ve got money and a backer, and you know, full well you know, I could run things far better than you.’
Ross sighed loudly. Bomb the bleedin lot, he thought. Exterminate and scarper . . . but where the bloody hell to?
‘Very interesting, Bertha, funny even,’ he said aloud. ‘So tell me, why should I give this crap more than a few seconds thought?’
‘Huh, I used to stroke your balls, Ross. Now I can cut them off.’
* * *
It was his first venture out of the squat as Fred Stray. All very alarming. The two spliffs he’d smoked seemed to have given him no protection. Jerry felt like a child out on the streets alone for the first time. He stood in the dark shadows of the old house and tried to work out which way to go. This was strange territory. A zone of the city where he was already lost. The solid trees presented the first problem. Trunks large enough to hide a man. Foliage dense, matted and eerily fissured with streaks of light. Jerry tentatively moved forward towards the pavement. The windows of the houses became apparent. The eyes of the street. Some brazenly shining, others pitch black and threatening. He almost retreated but a comforting thought eased its way into his fretful mind. Some kind of past remembrance of when the snow was thick and pavements had to be abandoned. A time when, as a child, he’d followed the thin lines of tyres right up the middle of the road. It seemed to present a solution. Jerry lowered his head, stepped between parked cars and imagined he could see tracks leading off into the night.
Mouse had given him the idea. They seemed to have hit it off straight away and she’d visited his room for a number of chats.
‘You can’t just sit and mope,’ she said. ‘Brooding is a kind of living death. This bleedin room could end up a coffin. You’ve got to get it out of you, Stray, be in the world in whatever way you can.’
Jerry got the stutters bad then. He could hardly get any words together other than, ‘What the f-f-fuck w-was out th-there in the f-f-first p-place!’
A spark of anger glinted in Mouse’s eyes and she kicked out in Jerry’s direction with a heavy boot.
‘Don’t be such a defeatist runt! What is there? Well, for one thing there’s the shitbags who killed your woman. Are you going to let them just fester? You may not be able to do much, but you could do something, even if it’s just kicking in a few car lights.’
Mouse was all for action, hyper-action almost, and she didn’t seem to give anything a second thought. This, Jerry could just about see, was the kind of influence he needed, though the thought of him doing something seemed remote. Dope and depression just meant more dreams and anxieties laid out face u
p on a carpeted floor. But Jerry fought the urge to wallow. He did see the possibilities offered by a violent act, the frustrations it could purge. So, that evening, with the darkness down and the streets empty, Jerry got off his arse and went out for a dry run.
It all went smoothly at first. There were no cars or people about. Walking down the middle of the road, he felt a sense of freedom and a kind of immunity. This enabled him to think, to think positively and not to brood. He vowed to seek revenge, any act of revenge, big or small, against those who had killed Mary. He didn’t know what he could do or how. He thought that maybe Mouse would help, and that out of it would come a new direction to his life.
This unexpected glimpse of optimism made him smile, but it was short-lived. The bright glare of headlights and a loud horn shocked him back to reality. He had to jump for the pavement as a car accelerated past. Someone inside the car shouted, ‘Yer stupid fucker!’ Jerry felt disorientated. The front door to a house opened and he saw a burly silhouette looking out at him. He began to rush along the pavement. He became conscious of the trees and of the strange dripping noises they made. Then he ran and came to a stretch of parkland. The blackness was inviting. Jerry crept in.
He stalled. An animal, a dog maybe or a fox, was standing on the grass in front of him. Two eyes, glinting with streetlight, yellow and malevolent, were staring right at him. And then it came. The snow, grey snow this time, filtering through the darkness like ash from the death-throes of a fire. Jerry collapsed.
19
‘This is a shitty job, you know that, Des. Goes completely against my principles.’
‘I surely know it, Liam.’
‘I mean, this is smut, tacky smut and it’s not very well done either.’
‘Well, the fifty quid should at least ease the pain.’
‘You’re corrupting me, man.’
Liam was arranging a set of lights over a table in the resource centre’s photography room. One of Liam’s offspring was also there, fiddling around with drying spools and bits of old film. Des kept a cautious eye out, prepared to believe the kid would wreck the place.
‘The thing I’ve got to do is not get any reflection or shadow. Difficult when you haven’t got all the right gear.’