Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  “I thought I knew him, but I didn’t.”

  De Fleche grinned. “You’ll see many faces here that you thought you knew. Old friends. Old lovers.” He scrutinised Will’s face like an experienced shopper seeking bargains at a fruit stall. “You’re fresh.”

  “Fresh?”

  De Fleche nodded enthusiastically. “Cooling on the slab. Path man tucking into you with his saws and blades. Brain on the scales. Cause of death.”

  “I suppose I’m fresh then. Yes.”

  “You with me? You without me?”

  Will looked around him. In the distance, a dozen grey smocks had clustered at the top of the hill, which was just visible over the tops of the trees. Their heads were turned towards him, he could tell. He wondered if they were the restful dead. The unpanicked dead. Those who had died before de Fleche’s time and were immune to his influence.

  “Sorry?”

  “You in my pocket or fodder?”

  “Fodder for what?” Will asked. “I’m dead. I bought the extra-large T-shirt and I’ll wear it every day. I’ve done death. What else is there, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Death is a beginning. Oh it’s other things too. It’s irony’s best mate. Death is a joker with a bag of pepper sweets. Death is an appointment it doesn’t know how to keep. Death doesn’t wear a watch. Death is yesterday and tomorrow all wrapped up in one. But most of all it’s a beginning. If you want it.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  De Fleche leaned into him, conspiratorially. “I know of things here, if you know where to look for them, that will devour your soul.” He stepped back, beaming at Will as if he had just told him a rude joke and was waiting to see the reaction. “Drink?” He pulled a bottle made from smoky glass from his pocket, leaving enough of the flap open for Will to see what else lay inside, if he so wished.

  “You in my pocket?”

  “What are you after?” Will said. His eyes hadn’t strayed from the pocket since de Fleche had withdrawn the bottle. He ignored the drink when de Fleche offered it to him again. Something was in there; he could see light glancing off it, slow liquid light that snagged in Will’s eyes like syrup spinning from a spoon.

  “Simple things in life,” de Fleche said. “A steak pie and a glass of Tizer. A woman with big tits. Friday night is comedy night on Channel Four. Revenge.”

  Will didn’t hear any of it. Instead, he heard de Fleche’s original question, repeated so often it became mantra-like, became nonsense, like repeating one’s name over and over until the monotony of speech takes away all of its relevance.

  “What’s in there?” he asked, lifting himself on tip-toe to try to define its shape.

  “You in my pocket? You in my pocket?”

  youinmypocketyouinmypocketyouinmypocketyouinmypocket

  It was a book. The first book Catriona had ever bought for him, when they had been seeing each other for about a month. It was a tatty old Corgi Carousel paperback by Gordon Burness called The White Badger. Cat had bought it for him because the picture on the cover – of Snowball, an albino badger – reminded her of Will: pale, bemused, babyish. Inside, she had written: For Will. My own little badger. Love, Cat.

  He remembered the smell of that book. He had slipped it under his pillow once he had read it. He gazed at it now. He yearned for its smell, for its special feel between his fingers. Something she had bought for him. Something she had touched, just for a little time. Something she had touched.

  youinmypocketyouinmypocketyouinmypocketyouinmypocket

  Will said, “You don’t have any power over me.”

  “We’ll see about that,” de Fleche replied, deepening the view for him. “We’ll see.”

  THEY LIFTED SEAN and carried him into the room, a dining room with its long table set to one side. On the walls were various pictures of benevolent seascapes and smiling, matriarchal figures in the midst of picnicking families and frisky dogs. They provided a sickening diorama against which Emma swung gently, the rope (he hoped it was the rope, God yes, the rope, and not the bones in her neck grating together) grinding and popping as it shifted against the beam.

  Gleave said, “Drop her. Take her out the back and put her in the stables. And shave a few fibres from that rope. Stuff them in her mouth before you take the noose off her.”

  Sean tried to kick out, to make some kind of protest, but the strength had been drawn from his muscles as finally as a sting pulled from a bee. He watched Emma sink through the air and diminish, seemingly, into the floor, so violent was her impact with it. She was too slack, too lacking in control for Sean to believe this was Emma. Even in death, she’d retain her grace, her spine. He wanted to tell someone, you’ve got the wrong girl. That isn’t Emma.

  Tim Enever sloped out of the shadows, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “I told you, didn’t I? I said you were fucked.”

  Sean spat at him. He wiped the spittle away with the same vapid indifference. “Do you want some kind of happy badge for that, you phlegm-head? You fucking freak.”

  Tim bound Sean’s hands behind him with unexpected strength; rough hemp bit into his wrists, causing his pulse there to sing loudly. He wondered if he would exist long enough to feel it cease. When Tim had finished imprisoning Sean, he grabbed Emma by the hair and dragged her out of the room. Sean bit his lips when her head clouted the wainscot. Tim would pay for that. They all would.

  Gleave had lost interest in him. He was standing by the window, looking out at the fields as their hard edges were slowly rubbed out by mist tip-toeing in from the river. Sean might as well have been dead already.

  “I could be of use to you,” Sean said. Gleave did not turn around but Vernon Lord began cackling.

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “Like you were a great help to me.”

  “Gleave,” Sean persisted.

  “You’d kill me the first chance you got,” Gleave said. He could have been soothing a child to sleep. “You’ve worked hard, Sean. It’s time you had a rest. A long one.”

  Tim returned, wiping his hands on a tea towel patterned with cats. He moved in front of him and draped the noose around Sean’s neck.

  Sean said, hating the wheedling aspect that had crept into his voice, “Tim, how long do you think you’ve got? Hey? Before they fuck you up too?”

  “I do good,” Tim said, conversationally. “Me and Lordy. We clean up. He harvests, I deliver. Nice.”

  “And all because people call you ‘sir’ over there, is that it? Do you know how sad that is?”

  “Do you know how sad you are? In two minutes, you’re going to be as dead as the thing in Vernon’s boxers, dangling there, kicking imaginary footballs, but I’ll still be earning a crust and getting my back scratched by the girls In Country.”

  “For how long, Tim? As soon as you start slowing down, or fucking up, whichever comes first, how long do you think they’ll keep you in custard, hey? For as long as it takes to find another weirdo who’ll happily go wandering among the stiffs while they sit back and rake in the goodies.”

  Tim was staring at him, but Sean couldn’t work out if it was because he had hit a nerve or whether Tim had just switched off, as he had seen him do at the de Fleche building sometimes.

  “We all share the takings,” Tim said.

  “Really?” The noose was causing Sean’s throat to itch. It hugged his Adam’s apple when he swallowed. It felt as though the rope was getting to know him, sizing him up. It felt impatient for the work it was best at. “There’s more than just money. Rich pickings you haven’t been told about. Vernon there. Have a guess how old he is.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Vernon. Do you know how old he is?”

  Tim’s mouth was opening and shutting like the slow gape of fish in restaurant tanks. At last, he said, “Vernon’s my friend.” He busied himself checking the knots on Sean’s wrist and around his throat, but he was troubled, Sean could see that. He must suspect something himself, even if he wasn’t saying as much now. S
ean suggested that was the case.

  “Just fuck off,” Tim said, the profanity sounding clownish coming from his too-soft mouth. “All right? Just fuck off. It’s not going to save you. Nothing’s going to save you.”

  “What’s going to save you, Tim?” And then he told him how old Vernon Lord really was.

  “What?” Vernon said, when he was distracted from his tabloid newspaper for long enough to see that Tim was gazing at him, his shoulders slumped, the end of the rope like a limp prick in his hands. “What’s up?”

  Sean said, “What is it, Tim? You not getting any of this deal? They give you a bit of pocket money to shut you up and send you on your way? And there’s Vernon. Pink and perky. And old enough to be your great-great-grandfather.”

  “He’s having you on, Tim,” said Vernon. “Listen to what he’s saying. The madness.”

  Sean went on, “You never see Vernon with a cold, or a bad back, do you? And all those things wrong with you, Tim. They could sort you out in a second if they wanted to. But they don’t want you or anyone else getting too strong. They want people they can control.”

  Tim said, “In Country, I can breathe clearly. My chest doesn’t hurt. I’m well there.”

  “And how often are you allowed over there, Tim? My guess is, not very often, and when you are, they’ve got you on a leash. Vernon doesn’t take those risks, and look at him. Look at a photograph of him from fifty years ago, like I did, something Kev showed me, and you won’t find a single difference. They’re ripping the piss out of you.”

  Tim returned his attention to Vernon, who had pulled himself to his feet, a sorry expression on his face. He was slowly shaking his head. Tim said, “Is that true?”

  “Timmy,” Vernon said, weakly. “You’ve been like a son to me.”

  Gleave strode back into the room, a mobile phone clamped to his ear. It came away from his ear when he saw what was going on.

  “Why isn’t he dead yet?” he asked, waving the phone vaguely in Sean’s direction.

  Tim said, “I want more life.”

  Gleave’s expression was that of a father who had just returned from an apocalyptic Christmas shopping trip to find he has forgotten the turkey. “I want you to do as you’re told. Now string that fucker up.”

  Tim said, “No. I want to know why I’m not in the loop. Why aren’t I getting what I deserve?”

  “You want what you deserve?” Gleave asked, all patience evaporated. He grabbed Vernon’s revolver from the older man’s hand and pointed it at Tim’s face. There was a flash of light, but the sound that the revolver made, in the same instant that Tim was launched off his feet to paint the wall with his own colours, was not that of a gunshot. Sean, pulled onto his side when Tim dragged the bight of the rope with him, his neck on fire, thought that clouds had entered the room. They passed in front of the sun, blocking the light. But clouds don’t carry brick-dust in their hearts, and their thunder is not caused by collapsing masonry.

  The rope liked the feel of itself against his neck. It liked the taste of his sweat as it soaked into its fibres. Sean was sure he felt it constrict against him, like a boa sensing victory: a bitter peristalsis. For a second he thought he was back in the de Fleche building with Robbie Deakin and Nicky Preece, swapping insults and working up a sweat on the hammer. Plaster dust was in his hair, making an old man of him. It stuck in his throat. They’d take an hour after work and sink a few Stellas at the Ferry Inn. Home for a bath, phone Emma, go out for a steak, and take the car up to Walton Reservoir. Watch the sun go down, kiss her throat, see what happens next.

  There was a lorry in the hallway. It had come at them across the field – Sean could see out of the grotesquely slanting window frame, through the settling plumes, a haphazard set of tyre prints slewing in great, lazy zig-zags as they homed in on the farmhouse – and ploughed through the face, lurching onto its side and taking out two of the walls completely. Gleave was trapped beneath one of them, screaming so violently that there was blood in his spittle. His leg was trapped under a pile of bricks and one of the ancient beams that had dropped from the ceiling. The shin was folded neatly back on itself. If Gleave could have waggled his toes he’d scratch his calf with them.

  Vernon was nowhere to be seen. The lorry’s cab with its starred windscreen was empty, the door swinging on its hinges. Sean worked his wrists inside the loop that trapped them, trying to ease them free. Gleave’s screams were like cups of espresso for a drunk; they slapped him awake when it would have been easier to drift off and let things happen without his say so for a while.

  But the knots were complex and keen. Already Sean could feel an oiliness on his skin that was not just sweat. Gleave was looking at him now with clownish wide eyes. His lips had been given a coat of purple greasepaint. He was going to black out soon. He focused on the appalling injury to Gleave’s leg, and the hands, outstretched as if Gleave was pretending to turn an invisible steering wheel. He worked against the knots more feverishly, shutting his mind to the heat they forced into his wrists. His blood helped to lubricate the configurations. He felt a swooning in the centre of his brain and blackness moved in on his vision, dark fire burning at the edges of paper. He stopped for a moment and breathed deeply. To faint now was to die. He imagined Naomi stroking his forehead and kissing his cheek with her cool lips. He smelled her: rosewater, chocolate, the faint vegetable whiff of henna in her cropped hair. The knots gave a little and the snake around his throat relaxed its grip. Oxygen flooded him and he revived, the miasmal chaos of the dining room resolving itself around him into its constituent parts: pebbles of glass, dunes of dust, splintered beams. Gleave was hunched over his ruined limb, shaking, his skin bleached by shock. The engine block of the lorry had ruptured: the room was filling with the stink of scorched oil.

  Naomi’s smells lifted from him, but he felt her near. If he could turn around he felt he might see her. He fought with the rope at his wrists and got a thumb free; the knot’s grip lessened and he had a hand free in seconds. He lifted the noose from his throat and rubbed at the tender burn that encircled it like strange jewellery.

  Naomi was nowhere to be seen, but his disappointment was brief: she had been here for him, in some form or other. She was still alive for him, if he wanted her. He just had to deal with their new level of involvement. She was still Naomi; she was different, that was all.

  Sean got to his feet and kicked away the remaining coils of rope. As soon as it was off him, he felt strength beat a path through his limbs again. Something caught his eye on the floor in the midst of all the rubble: Vernon’s whistle on its chain. He gathered it up and slipped it over his head, relishing the feel of the cold metal against his chest.

  Ignoring Gleave, but pocketing his revolver, he ducked out of the dining room and padded in darkness down a corridor that led to the kitchen. A track in the lino: the heel of Emma’s remaining shoe as she was dragged to the back door. Outside, the cold air scoured the inside of his throat as effectively as the rope had done for the exterior. It beat tears from his eyes as he stumbled over the cobbled yard. A mealy smell drifted to him from the barn, of ancient manure and stale hay cleansed by the wind and made palatable.

  She was a broken heap in the corner of the barn, inches away from a pile of straw that might have cushioned her and kept her warm if she had been placed in it. The foot without a shoe had blackened on its short journey outside. A stick of chewing gum peeked from the top of her jeans pocket. He went to her and smoothed her hair, rested her head on a pillow of straw, trying not to dwell on the lack of firmness in her neck, or the way her tongue would not stay inside her mouth. Instead he thought of how her neck had tightened when he kissed it, the pulse quickening as he drew her towards him. How her tongue had flickered around his own, or mapped a silver route across his torso.

  He wanted to take her away now. Find the taxi and drive them somewhere safe. Force Pardoe to take care of her. Her death ought to be the end of it, the right kind of closure. He held her hand for a little wh
ile longer, then went out to find Vernon Lord.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX: HYDRA

  WILL COULDN’T GET his balance sorted out for long enough to take a proper look at where he was. He remembered de Fleche’s remarkable eyes joining with his and making it hard to see anything of any significance in his periphery. At one point it appeared that he was inside de Fleche’s pocket, with its silk lining and corners deep with lint, a forgotten Polo mint and the book Catriona had given him. He had forgotten who he was and what was happening for a while, content instead to flick through the pages while what must have been a surrounding illusion tried to impinge on him. He found a receipt for a meal they had shared in a Hammersmith restaurant and a passport photo of Cat in frightened rabbit mode. He lingered over her inscription to him.

  When he finally closed the book, he was on the floor, alone, shivering in an uncommonly chill wind that channelled down to the end of the alleyway in which he was crouched. Blackened brick walls made a chute that lifted on either side of him, so high that he couldn’t see where they turned to rooftops, or gave way to the night sky. The book was gone. He felt cheated, unfulfilled. What had de Fleche promised him, in the end? Words that wound themselves around his mind like mating worms.

  “De Fleche!” he called out, and the flat, dead weight of his words bounced back off the walls. The wind filleted him. He did not recognise this place.

  He walked without seeing another person for what seemed like hours. All of the streets he turned into were like photographs he had seen of wartime London, windows boarded up, shivering under the sky and what it might bring. All lamps had been killed. Then the rain started. Serious rain. Good old Great British rain. Rain that did not fuck about.

  “This is death for me, then,” he thought. Nowhere to go, nothing to do but find a chink of light in an eternity of darkness. High on an embankment a rail track slithered away to unknown, unknowable, distances. Shop fronts that might have given him something with which to entertain the eye for a little while were barricaded with corrugated iron, their awnings selfishly hiding their names from him under coats of rot or rust or graffiti.