Kev said:
I first met Vernon while I was working on the docks. I was doing anything I could for money back then. Seventy hours a week I’d be breaking my back loading or unloading ships. Fruit, textiles, meat, sometimes arms, although that was often midnight stuff. And never at the docks. Very naughty. Vernon was on one of the boats bringing in an illegal shipment of pistols from the Americas to sell on to Europe one night when I was helping out. I didn’t know much about his operations but I’d heard he was just about the best smuggler there was. I’d heard about him long before I met him. He was a bit of a legend.
We went down to a boathouse on the river and helped take the boxes off this boat while Vernon sat on a chair smoking cheroots and watching us working. When we’d finished, he called me back and thanked me, told me I put my back into it more than any other dogsbody that he’d seen. He was looking at me strange, like I had something green on my face. The others were in the boathouse by this time, divvying up the booty and loading it into the backs of stolen cars for delivery. They gave me filthy looks as they walked back and to.
Vernon never blinked when he talked. First time I ever saw his eyelids was when I caught him asleep one time. And even then I had to look twice because it was as though they were so thin they were almost translucent, like he was watching you while he kipped. He gave me a chunky little glass filled with rum and told me to down it. After the drink he asked me straight if I wanted to come and work with him. He needed someone he could trust, he said. He needed another set of eyes. Another set of hands. It was getting too dangerous, he said, this line of work he was in. He was getting too old. He pinched my cheek and laughed when he said this. He said that the rewards for helping him out would be great. Unimaginable.
I didn’t like it, the work he was offering. But I stuck at it and developed a tough skin. The boat work tailed off anyway. We lost our gills and went inland. I took beatings for Vernon. I took a knife once. I got harder. The beatings didn’t happen so often. I started doling the beatings out more than I was taking them. Vernon and me put the frighteners on this part of the country. We had the Northwest in our pockets. We got word of the rich pickings and went round to collect. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t money that Vernon was picking up. I thought he was a debt collector pure and simple. I never asked who for and I never asked why. I just matched him pace for pace and stood behind him in the shadows, cracking my knuckles while he pleased and thank you’d and scraped shit off his heels on the steps of all those sorry little houses.
It was seven or eight years before I twigged. A long time, I know. But if I’d been known for the quality of meat between my ears I’d never have been in this game in the first place, would I now? There’s me, picking up my grey hairs and getting a bit of lard round the guts and Vernon, my elder and better, looking as thin as a stiletto and twice as sharp. I never saw him exercising. He ate like a gannet and drank as if to chase off the Devil’s thirst.
We were friends by now. Fast and firm. We talked a lot, but he pretty much clammed up when the chat turned on him, his family, his loves. He got a cloud in his eyes when I asked him about his loves. Because I never saw him once with a lady on his arm. He had no tattoos proclaiming his desire for a Mavis or a Maude, or a Malcolm come to that. But we talked. One night he had had a bit too much to drink and the shakes were on him. I thought he was fearless, but this night he shook so much I could hear his bones rattling. He told me he was never going to be able to stop working. He was scared to stop working because he didn’t know what would happen to him. It wasn’t the poor bastards we visited that put the willies up him, nor was it the people he delivered the money to – what I thought was money. He said he was scared of himself. He had terrible dreams, he said. Dreams in which he walked through a corridor of mirrors and was terrified to turn to his left or right to see what kind of reflection walked with him. Ask him how he was feeling and he’d tell you that he didn’t feel himself today. Then he’d cackle to himself darkly for a bit. The drinking got worse. I drove him everywhere. But he got on top of it. Beat it, I suppose. Wrestled his demons to the ground like the hard bastard he is.
Doesn’t matter any more, he told me, when I asked him if he was okay. He dreamed of his corridor of mirrors and walked along it, smashing every one down with a baseball bat. Dead if I do and dead if I don’t, he told me. I never let it rest. I asked him to tell me what was going on. I dogged him. I went after him about the true nature of his work like a hound after a fox. I threatened that I’d leave him. He came round after that.
He showed me, one night, what the fuss was all about. We went out on a collection. A little house in Widnes. Old couple. Desperate for cash. Well, they’d got their bit of cash and Vernon came to balance the books. Instead of leaving me outside, he took me in with him. I wish I’d had a drink beforehand, let me tell you. What I saw... what I saw...
Vernon lays his hand on the old girl’s shoulder. Myra, her name was. Her old man, Clive, he behaves like a good boy and buzzes off to the kitchen to make us all a cup of tea. There’s the three of us standing in the room. I blink. And there’s four of us. I didn’t hear the door open or close. No footsteps. He’s just there. And it takes me a moment or two for it to sink in because he’s so still. This tall doctor bloke with a paper mask. His eyes are crawling all over Myra. Insect eyes, he had. They didn’t stop bloody moving.
Vernon goes, This is Dr. Chater. His voice is cracking all over the place like a wafer, like a bloody choir boy at bollockdrop. I realise, despite the smile on Vernon’s face, that he is shitting himself.
Dr. Chater moved like nobody I had ever seen before. If you think of a film of someone moving, and then take away all the frames that contain the getting from one position to the next, it was like that. Like looking at photographs. One second he was looking at Myra, the next second his hand was full of knives and she was forced back over the arm of the settee, antimacassars all over the shop. Another second, her blouse is up around her ears and Dr. Chater’s hunched over her. I watched him cut her. I watched him take a lung. No blood. He moved too fast for her body to even realise it was open. Clive came in with tears in his eyes asking who took sugar. One look at her and he shut the kitchen door. A good boy, Clive. She was stitched up and in her armchair within seconds. She was dead. She’d had a heart attack.
Dr. Chater slipped the lung into a plastic bag and tossed it to Vernon before propping a Radio Times into Myra’s hands, the doctor’s bloody prints smeared all over it. I blinked. There was three of us again. We left before Clive came back. I wanted to ask Vernon all kinds of questions but I couldn’t talk. Spit had turned to glue in my mouth. We drove for an hour until we came to a house in the country. Nice house. Big. There was this bloody freak waiting for us. He looked as if he was in a state of constant drowning. Snuffling and choking and coughing. I can see by your face you know who I’m talking about. He took the parcel and told us to wait. We were there for about half an hour, standing around, waiting. When he came back he had mud on his feet and he gave Vernon a couple of pebbles from his pocket. Do I eat this, I asked and Vernon started laughing his head off. The sickly kid was laughing too, but it was the kind of laughter people do when they don’t get the joke, but don’t want to be seen to not get the joke. Put it in your pocket, Vernon says. So I do and I sleep the sleep of kings that night and when I wake up in the morning I check for the pebble and it’s gone and I look in the mirror and all my grey hair has vanished.
That was 1970.
Couple of years ago, I’m with Vernon at a night club. This streak of piss called Norman Spence ran the place. Vernon had sorted him out with a loan and now he’s prospering, his club doing really well. We go round there for an eye. Eyes are needed for some reason. Vernon doesn’t get a chance to touch Norman, to bring in Dr. Chater. Doesn’t even get an audience with him. Bouncers pull guns on us. Guns are the thing now. I’m wondering, as this meathead draws a bead on me, is that one of the guns I carried off the boat all those years ago
when I had a wet nose and wide eyes? Could be. Bastard shoots me through the throat. Tears half of it out. Vernon got me out of there. God knows how. Hail of bullets. He patches me up. We get Norman back. We sort him out. You might bump into him if you go paddling in the Mersey. I stick around for a while but my nerve has gone. It’s time to hand in my notice. Tears and hugs and take it easy mate, see you around.
He’s still caught up in it, Vernon. In his eyes, when I called it a day, I could see him thinking I was a jammy sod. I could see him wishing for what I had done. He’s been at it a long time. Maybe that payment, those pebbles, maybe it was worth it for a while. But you get trapped, don’t you? If he stopped now, what would happen to him? All that time, that experience, all of it comes piling down on you, crushes you. It would kill him to give it up now. He knows that. He has to carry on. He has to keep giving, in order to receive. He’s the most generous man in the world, but he doesn’t have a say in the matter.
Kev said, “Vernon Lord was born in 1892.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: THE GRAND PANJANDRUM
WHEN IT BECAME apparent that Sadie wanted someone dead, there weren’t as many rushing for the exits as Will might have anticipated. Some volunteered. And if Will had realised what was lined up for him, he might well have done the same. There was plenty of genuflecting going on as she stepped down from the stage and walked among the punters, the utricle hanging off her side sloshing in time to the swing of her hips. The sad-looking, pickled thing within turned and turned, its ill-formed arms hugging itself. Will realised what it was in George and Alice that he had recognised. It was Sadie.
Brad Pitt was back on stage now, trying to calm everybody down. He minced around, patting down his oily hair and lifting his voice to compete with the hubbub as people threw themselves at locked doors or tried to break windows with chairs.
“This guy walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a double entendre. So the bartender gave him one. Now then! Hey?”
Nobody was listening. Will slipped over the bar and knelt among the beertaps and barsnacks. From his position he could look up at the splashback mirror that ran the length of the bar beneath the optics and watch as Sadie stalked among the audience, rating and discarding potential victims. It took a few seconds for him to realise that there was another man down here with him, cowering just a foot to his left.
“Hi,” Will said. The other regarded him as if he had just extracted a monkey from his ear.
“Do you know who this bitch is?” he asked.
“Yes,” Will said. “Her name is Sadie. I rescued her from a bunch of travellers a couple of weeks ago. She’s a real handful.”
Will was rewarded with a slow shaking of the head, from the moment he had begun to speak. The monkey had become a belly-dancing piglet wearing nipple-rings.
“That’s Sigourney Weaver,” the man hissed. “The piece of skirt that bosses this place.”
“The bar?”
“No. The entire place. Queen bitch.”
“Really? She’s just a spoilt brat, you know. More trouble than good.”
The man was looking in the mirror now, his eyes widening all the time. He reached up and loosened the knot in his tie. “Okay. Well if you know her so well, put her in her place.” With that, he launched himself away from the box of crisps he was hiding behind, vaulted the counter, and hurled himself through the window into the night. When Will returned his gaze to the mirror, Sadie was standing at the bar, regarding him coolly.
“Fix us both a drink, Will,” she said. “On the house.”
“ARE YOU GOING to sacrifice me?” he asked.
Sadie, halfway into a swallow, looked at him uncomprehendingly and burst into laughter, spraying some of her champagne on his shirt. “God no,” she said, when she had finally managed to compose herself. “My hero. My saviour. Why should I do that?”
“You were looking for sacrifices.”
“And I’ll have one,” she assured him. “But not you. Not Uncle Will. There’s better in store for you. A more noble role.”
“What happened to you and Elisabeth, when I left you?” he asked, steeling himself for some awful reportage of what the mountaineer had done to them after the crash.
The bar had been emptied. Once it was clear that Sigourney Weaver had someone in her clutches, widespread calm had broken out. The bartenders reappeared and unlocked the doors, and people filed into the foggy twilight, chatting about where they were going to spend the rest of their evenings. Now a few bartenders were clearing away glasses and wiping down the tables. Bouncers were gathered by the doors, arms folded, nodding apocalyptically. Brad Pitt was sitting on the edge of the stage with a half a lager and his pants unbuttoned to allow his beer belly a breather, crooning to one of the cleaners who was gazing at him, a bucketful of cigarette ends in her hands.
“We’ll come to that, presently,” Sadie said. “In here, little man, you are no longer the boss. This is my playground. My sandpit.”
“How long have you been in a coma?” Will asked. Sadie laughed again. Maybe she was laughing because Will was studiously avoiding the obvious question. Maybe she was laughing because she found his questions to be piffling and trivial. Whatever, it was pissing Will off.
“I’m not in a coma, chucky-egg. It’s you who’s in a coma. You and all the other veg-heads floating around here.”
“You’re deluding yourself.”
“Am I?”
“Everyone here...”
“Everyone here is in a coma. Except me.”
Will looked around him, bored by the argument. “Tell me what happened to Elisabeth. Is she here?”
Sadie took a sip from her glass and rearranged the sac on her knees. The homunculus within rolled onto its back and gazed at her through the milky suspension with pale eyes. “I told you, we’ll come to that. When I say.”
Will turned the frosted glass in his fingers, spreading a base of condensation across the scarred bartop. He said, “If you’re not in a coma, what are you doing here?”
“Putting the fear of God up my subjects.”
“Subjects?”
“Yes. Here, I’m important. If I was a cheese here, I would be a big one.”
“I don’t get it.”
Sadie winked and rubbed the shiny skin of the sac. It wrinkled and gurgled beneath her fingers. “You did get it though, didn’t you? Remember? In the church? Naughty boy.”
Will forced himself to concentrate on one thing at a time. He felt as though he were sinking under the weight of so much innuendo and concealed threat. If he was going to be of some use to Cat or Eli, wherever they were now, then he had to tread water. “Why are you so different?” he tried again. “What marks you out as something special?”
She said, “I was an Insert once. Like your friends. One of the first. A guinea-pig. They lost me as soon as they put me in. I’ve been lording it here ever since. I’m a rare bird, Will. I can cross over. I have that talent thanks to the men in the white coats and the big beards. A failed experiment, but I’m not complaining. I didn’t go in quite as far as they were hoping, or needing, me to go. But, as I say, I’m not complaining.”
“And what about George and Alice. Relatives of yours?”
“Ah yes,” Sadie said. “George and Alice. No. Not relatives. That was me. A welcoming party for you. How’s your arm?”
Will stiffened. “What’s all that about?”
“Well, a girl’s got to eat, hasn’t she?”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Sadie?”
She licked her lips at him. “What is it, you think, keeping our child here sustained? Nourished? Gold top milk and a pot of puréed chicken and sweetcorn?”
“It’s not my child. I don’t know what sickness has got into your brain, but it’s got to stop, Sadie.”
“Will, meet Cherub, Cherub, meet Will. Daddy’s home.”
The curl of grey flesh twisted. A smile curled its lip.
“Come home with me,” she said.
�
��Fuck off, Sadie. I’m not scared of you.”
Sadie widened her eyes. “Jesus, Will. You should be.” She tapped a nail against her teeth; her other hand absently stroked the umbilicus joining her to her progeny. “Tell you what, let me show you why you need to be scared. There’s plenty to be scared of, you know.”
She reached behind her, for one of the puling idiots begging to be put out of his misery: an elderly man whose spine was a shattered bow sticking through the sheepskin coat on his back gibbered his appreciation. He placed a gnarled hand in hers at the same time that she caught hold of Will’s sleeve.
A blink: the bar resolved itself into the twisted, burning carriage of a passenger train. Commuters lay around the carriage in various states of physical collapse. There was a lot of blood. The old man was now lying half in, half out of the train, his spectacularly ruined back shredded apart on the mangled remains of the window. Will watched as he turned his face to them, his shattered teeth bared in a grateful leer, bloody bubbles bursting on his tongue as he fought for breath.
“Now,” he begged.
Sadie leaned over and covered his mouth with hers. She drew breath so violently that it seemed half the old man’s jaw was sucked between her lips. His body jerked twice and was still. She let him fall. The scene disintegrated around them as she let go of the man’s hand.
“Now then,” she purred, leaning over to kiss Will’s cheek with her bloody mouth. “Come back to my place.”
“I saved your life, Sadie. I came after you when you went missing.”
“Pah.” Sadie dismissed the claim with a flap of her hand. “I was prospecting for a mate. You were strong and resourceful. And your arse looks good in jeans. Now. Home.”
He could hardly object, not when two of the bouncers moved behind him, casting long, long shadows across the bar.
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