Vicious Rumer

by Joshua Winning

  She.

  The corpse used to be a she. I can tell from the dress, which is dirty and ripped, but has flowers on it and probably used to be pretty.

  I ease myself up from the floor, then scoot back into the shadows. The wall props me up and I hug my knees to my chest. Everything hurts. My wrists remember ropes and I caress the bruised skin, then stop because it stings too much. I grit my teeth and the jag of pain is a reminder that one of them is broken.

  With faint relief, I realise the stink of bodies doesn’t bother me as much as it did earlier. Funny how quickly you get used to something, though it might just be that the sight of them is worse.

  I count ten. Ten bodies. There could be more beyond the light.

  The nearest one is still laughing at me and I realise I’m the punchline. I follow people for a living but death follows me. Everybody I’ve ever been close to has died.

  That’s what my mother left me with. The curse.

  It’s so quiet I’m embarrassed to breathe. The shapes in the dark must think I’m mocking them.

  How long did it take for her to die, the woman in the flower dress? She’s lying on her front like she’s sunbathing but her head’s to the side and her dried-out eye sockets gawp at me.

  Are they going to keep me in here until I’m like her?

  No, they need me alive. They think I have the Crook Spear, whatever that is. Why does he think that? The guy in the kimono mentioned my mother – he talked like he knew her. I’ve never met anybody who knew my mother and curiosity nettles the spider in my mind. The stories I’ve read about her, it’s not inconceivable that she knew somebody like him. The kind of person with a corpse pit.

  Is she the reason I’m in here? Miles away from the cruddy flat I call home? All these years later, she’s still fucking up my life.

  My life feels so far away. I wonder if Julian knows I’m missing. Would he track me down? Or would he shrug, put his feet up on the desk and say he knew I’d do a runner one day? That’s more likely. I’m just one of his paper cups attached to a piece of string. Who cares if one of the strings gets cut? He has a dozen more.

  What about Bolt? My gut shrivels and I try not to think about him. I shouldn’t be thinking about him anyway.

  I breathe deeply and choke on the stench, pushing thoughts of Bolt and Julian and my mother away, drawing a curtain over them. Especially my mother.

  It’s going to be okay. They won’t kill me until I tell them where the spear is.

  Unless they decide I don’t have it. Then what? I’m dead and funky like everybody else down here, smelling like the worst kind of meat you forgot was at the back of the fridge. Which is poetic justice, right? I’ve killed so many people in my nineteen years I was always going to end up somewhere like this. It was only a matter of time. I almost start laughing with the she-corpse.

  A scuffling sound freezes me where I am. I wait, expecting a rat to dart across the floor. Or maybe there are bugs. A few of the bodies look like they’ve been here long enough to become maggot farms.

  Another scuffle and this time I see where it’s coming from. In the far corner, a slumped form. It’s too dark for me to really see, but it’s definitely a person. A male person, I think.

  Somebody else is alive down here?

  I fight the impulse to creep closer. He’s down here, which means he did something to piss off Butterfly Man. He could be dangerous. I was thrown down here for something I didn’t do, though. Perhaps Butterfly Man makes a habit out of imprisoning innocent people.

  But… this guy could know something about him. He might even know who took the Crook Spear. He could be my ticket to freedom.

  Yeah, that’s a lot of coulds.

  ‘When did you get here?’

  His voice is as weak as parched leaves.

  ‘Just now,’ I say.

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘How long you been down here?’ Talking makes my head pound.

  ‘Long enough to know it won’t be for much longer.’

  He winces. As my eyes get used to the dark, I see how skinny he is. I can’t tell how old, but the voice is young. He sounds a bit like Troll. He’s not wearing any shoes and one of his grubby feet scuffs the floor, as if he wants to move, but it’s too much and he gives up.

  ‘What did you do?’ I can’t help asking.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Who is that guy?’

  His eyes are hazy dots in the gloom.

  ‘Kimono? Butterflies? Bad case of cataracts?’

  I nod.

  ‘You don’t know who that is?’

  There’s no answer to that. Should I know? I feel stupid, like somebody who’s never heard of Pat Benatar or George Bush.

  ‘Thought everyone knew about him,’ Skinny says. He sounds more surprised than judgemental, as if he didn’t realise there was another world outside of whatever crime ring he’s part of. ‘You really are lucky. Or, you were. Must’ve done something to get his goat. What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  His scrawny body convulses with laughter.

  ‘What’s his name?’ I ask.

  Skinny stares at me. Or, I think he does. I realise we’re talking over the woman under the grate and I feel bad for her. I wonder if Skinny talked to her before she died.

  ‘Reverend Mara.’

  ‘Reverend? He didn’t look like one.’ I say it before I can stop myself. Of course he’s not a goddamn reverend. It’s probably a nickname or a title. If he’s the boss of some crime syndicate, it stands to reason he answers to cardinals and – maybe somewhere – a pope.

  ‘Might as well be one,’ Skinny says. ‘The way he thinks he’s God’s gift to London.’

  ‘He’s some kind of gangster?’

  ‘Wow, you really don’t know anything.’

  I’d be angry if Skinny didn’t look so messed up. If we weren’t in this pit, I’d have smacked him. Of course, if we weren’t in this pit, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

  Mara’s face flashes before my eyes. Beautiful and chiselled. When I first glimpsed his dark outline on the sofa, I thought it was her. My mother.

  She lies with her mother’s tongue, he’d said.

  How did Mara know my mother? Did she work for him? Were they friends? Did she help him pick out kimonos? Mara’s not how I ever pictured gangsters. I imagined guys in hats, smoking cigars, fingers hard with gold. What’s Mara’s story? You grow up in London, you see the different ways people live, none any better or worse than the other, mostly. Mara wears dresses, big whoop, but to do that in his world, a world run by angry men… That takes balls.

  Despite myself, I shudder at the memory of his flashing nails. He had the deranged aura of a desperate man. Desperation makes people do crazy things. I should know.

  Skinny’s gone quiet in his corner.

  ‘Hey,’ I hiss.

  No reply.

  He might have passed out. Or died. I think I hear faint breathing on his side of the pit. Maybe he’s playing dead. It doesn’t make much difference to me.

  ‘Hey, you still alive?’ I ask.

  No reply.

  Fine. Be that way.

  I just managed to get comfortable against the wall, but I have to move, even though my limbs feel so heavy it’s like they’re coated in lead. Grimacing, I prise myself up, my boots scratching the cement floor loudly. I peer up through the grate, but there’s no movement. I don’t know if we’re being watched, but I’ve got a feeling Mara’s guards are confident in my confinement. Nobody else down here escaped.

  There has to be a way out. I just have to find the flaw in the pit. Something tiny, maybe. A mouse hole or an opening into the sewer. I’ll Shawshank my way out of here somehow.

  Moving must have disturbed the air down here because my nostrils are assaulted by a fresh wave of death-stench and I fight the bile, swallowing it down, trying not to think about the tiny molecules of dead skin and hair that must be floating around me in a putrid soup.

  Breathing
through my mouth, I trace the walls with my fingers, searching for anything that might give. The wall’s knobbly and flaky, but rock solid. If I had a pickaxe, it’d take a week to bust through.

  Stepping over bodies, I keep searching.

  Nothing nothing nothing.

  Wall wall wall.

  Frustration sets my jaw ticking. I’m almost at Skinny’s side when my fingers brush something different. Metal. My heart flutters and I don’t want to get ahead of myself but, as I forage the surface, I realise it’s a door. I tap it. Thunk. That’s one heck of a door.

  ‘It’s locked.’

  I nearly jump out of my skin.

  Skinny blinks up at me from his corner. ‘You don’t think I already tried that?’

  I ignore him, exploring the rusty contours. None of the bolts are loose. They’re practically welded into the metal. What the hell was this cell used for before Mara and his mob moved in? Was it purpose-built by the Rev for his enemies?

  My fingers find deep gouges in the door. Long, narrow furrows, like something tore at the metal, and I realise something probably did.

  No way out through there. There must be something else. I eye Skinny as I go past. He’s too weak to move. Besides, what would he get out of attacking me? We’re in the same shitty predicament down here.

  It’s a good thing I like the dark or I’d have lost it by now. I try not to imagine what it’d be like spending weeks locked in Mara’s pit. Slowly ripening, then rotting. My starving body eating its own flesh until I’m a withered skeleton, and then it’s impossible to move, impossible to breathe, and just like that I’ve become the girl in the flower dress.

  The dark’s comforting. The shadows are an ally. I’m one of them and they embrace me like a sister.

  My fingers discover something in the wall. I dab it, feeling something hard.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Quiet.’

  I work at the thing in the wall, cement crumbling around it. The object wobbles and I tease it out of the little hole it’s nestling in. I turn and hold it to the grate’s grey light.

  A rusty nail twice as long as my index finger.

  ‘Jesus,’ Skinny breathes.

  The girl in the flower dress grins.

  So now I have a weapon.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FOUR YEARS BEFORE THE HAMMER

  When I’m fifteen my best friend is Troll Mason. I can’t remember why I call him that, and it’s only partly because if you call him by his real name, Tashaun, he looks like he’s stuck his hand in a bag full of broken glass. He’s the only person who doesn’t hiss behind his hand when I walk by at school. I’ve been living with my fifth foster family – the Trumans – for a year and it’s pretty obvious they only take kids in for the benefits. They couldn’t tell you my middle name if there was a cash prize. (I don’t have one, actually, but they’d probably guess something insulting like ‘Raven’ or ‘Inga’.) The one time they tried to discipline me for staying out late, I stared at the floor and nodded that I was sorry, then I snuck out the window to meet Troll in the park.

  Their daughter, Pearl, is my age, and hated me on sight. I’m five months older and she’s a pro at ignoring me. At school, her coven snicker and shoot me acid stares whenever I get within a hundred yards.

  They’re popular. I’m the weed crushed under their Converse. I wear black and purple and draw dark lines around my eyes. My ears are pierced in five places and my hair’s an unruly black mane.

  The five of them are like clones. (Pearl’s the original; the others were grown in the lab. Probably from cells shaved off her arse.) They have blonde hair, jeans frayed at the knees, friendship bracelets from when they were kids. Lola’s the only one who looks different. Her hair’s copper red and she files her nails into talons. She always has a shoulder ready for me. Or a foot.

  I can handle snake bitches like her now. Life’s a bitch, now so am I. Deep down they just want their mummy. When I’m fifteen, though, I don’t know better. I’ve bounced between foster homes and each move stripped away a piece of me until I’m not a whole person any more.

  At least there’s Troll. For a little while anyway. We’re in a cemetery the day it happens. We look like the kind of kids who hang out in cemeteries, but it’s the first time we’ve been here. I haven’t told him why I wanted to come and I was too much of a coward to come alone.

  When I stop by a grave, he clamps his mouth shut for once.

  CELENE CROSS

  The headstone holds my eye. Small, ragged like a chewed fingernail.

  ‘Huh,’ Troll says. He gets family shit. His mum’s an alcoholic and his brother’s a criminal, so his standards are pretty low when it comes to friends. Besides, I’ve always got on better with boys. They’re easier to read and their secrets are generally stupider than girls’ secrets, which can level cities if they detonate.

  I stare at the grave, trying to imagine what’s going on six feet under. It’s been almost fifteen years since the Thames spat my mother out. Her remains have probably been digested already, picked clean by worms and insects and whatever else slithers around down there.

  Everything I know about my mother floats to the surface of my mind like the scum on the Thames and I consider taking a piss on her grave. I ball the anger up in my fists, thinking about everybody who’s died, the patchwork of holes in my life, all because of her.

  Troll lights a cigarette and goes to lean against a tree. He talks too much, but for the first time he seems to get that talking won’t achieve anything.

  I retrieve a spray can from my jacket pocket and shake it, then I crouch down and add long black letters beneath my mother’s name.

  CELENE CROSS

  BURNS IN HELL

  Straightening, I don’t look at Troll as we traipse out of the cemetery, not wanting to see the questioning eyebrows and, knowing that if I ignore him, he’ll pretend this never happened. He’s trustworthy like that.

  We walk in silence but even Troll has his limits, finally launching into a sermon about how screwed we are, how it’s all the government’s fault; it’s basically stuff he’s heard old guys joke about on late-night TV, but he always adds a twist.

  ‘We’re the McGeneration!’ he whoops as we head into a weird little park that’s reserved for drunks, tramps and kids with nowhere else to go. ‘We’re getting rammed through a meat grinder until we all come out the same.’

  ‘Sounds delicious.’ My standard response.

  The park’s our private haven. We talk about what we’re going to do when we fail our exams and end up taking jobs we hate. Troll’s brother got banned from driving, so we take his Corsa out and Troll teaches me how to drive. I still don’t have a licence, but I know how to get around without causing a pile-up. Hell, I’m positively restrained compared to most Londoners.

  Troll introduced me to comics. Tank Girl, Catwoman, Preacher,Umbrella Academy. All the twisted stuff that, weirdly, I feel I’ve almost lived. He has cash to burn – something about his mum’s conscience, though I’m pretty sure he steals from her when she’s drunk – and he lets me read them when he’s done.

  ‘The best thing about Preacher is it just doesn’t give a shit!’ Troll’s hopped up on energy drinks and nicotine. He leaps onto a low wall in the park, scattering pigeons. ‘Religion? Fuck it. Firearms? Screw ’em. Old ladies in wheelchairs? They’re worse than anybody! It’s the most important piece of literature ever written.’

  He does this sometimes. It’s the day of the accident, but neither of us know that. If I’d known, I’d have made sure Troll was nowhere near the park. Or me.

  He’s giving one of his comic-book sermons while I sit rolling us cigarettes.

  Neither of us notices Pearl and Lola and the others come into the park. It’s only when Rufus, Pearl’s scruffy, half blind Jack Russell, shoves a wet nose in my face that I spot them.

  They line up by the gate, the saddest girl group you’ve ever seen. They never come in here and they eye the park with the same disg
ust they usually reserve for me. They must’ve seen us as they walked back home from the less interesting park down the road.

  ‘Christ,’ Troll says. ‘What are they doing here?’

  ‘Don’t stop on our account.’ Lola’s got that dangerous look she gets when no adults are around.

  ‘Rufus, get back here.’ Pearl eyes me nervously, like I might do something to her precious pooch, but I never had anything against animals.

  Rufus ignores her, snuffling around my pocket. I remember I have a Peperami in there.

  ‘He doesn’t know better.’ Lola rakes her gaze up and down my body. ‘Probably thinks she’s another dog.’

  ‘Nah, Rufus knows a lost cause when he sees one,’ Pearl mutters.

  That’s actually a good one for her.

  Troll jumps off the wall, his boots loud on the pavement. He’s wearing a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves and his hair’s spiked up like all the best rock stars. Before he can say anything, I’m on my feet and grabbing his arm.

  ‘Come on, Troll.’

  ‘Yeah, Troll, come on.’ Lola’s mouth twists.

  Troll shoves my hand off. ‘What’s your problem, L-L-L-Lola?’

  ‘Daddy probably said she couldn’t have another pony,’ I say under my breath. The dog’s still trying to get into my pocket and I shove him away with my knee. Lola crosses her arms, flanked by the others, who snare me with their sneers.

  ‘Look at those boots,’ Lola says. ‘Steal them off a tramp?’

  ‘Yeah, ’cos you spent all that time on the street, right?’ one of the others says. I think her name’s Leah but they’re so interchangeable I honestly don’t know.

  I don’t say anything. It’s true I spent a few weeks on the street. That was after foster home number four. I ran away, but social services found me and stuck me with the Trumans. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime.

  ‘It’s rude not to answer when somebody asks you a question,’ Lola says. She’s the best at this. Probably had plenty of years picking on other kids before I turned up.

  ‘Come on, she’s not worth it,’ Pearl says, finally grabbing Rufus’ collar and dragging him away. Lola turns her back. ‘She’ll end up just like her mum.’