by Keith Nixon
Copyright © 2015 by Gritfiction
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Ryan Bracha
Formatting and Design by Craig Douglas @ Gritfiction
Editing by Darren Sant
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. The stories may not be reprinted without permission. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the authors’ work.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintended.
“Thank you!”
The editors would like to particularly thank the fantastic Campag Velocet for allowing us to use their track Ain’t No Funki Tangerine in our trailer for this book.
Check out the Youtube video here —> LINK
Foreword
The things you think, the mood you’re in the food you eat, the booze you drink, the people you wanna fuck. All streamed and shat disdainfully down at and to you by men in suits who control the art, the music and the literature you consume. The great con? You’re convinced that you have a free choice. That your outlook, taste and choices are random…are yours.
The book you’re holding in your hands, flipping across your screen or pirating, is a bold statement by a group of authors who are committed to controlling their own literary destinies. To representing themselves and their stories the way they want to. To producing quality literature without constraints, or middle-management foibles, or decisions based on what will appeal to this demographic or best reflect that group. To give you raw, uncompromising stories from the depths of their filthy imaginations. More punk than Cowell-esque candy pop, this collection captures a group of writers, writing in a spectacularly diverse myriad of styles at the very top of their game. You can feel the enthusiasm for the project and the license they’ve been given to indulge themselves laser from the page.
These men and women, these Indie-writers, have jabbed a metaphorical mid-digit at an industry too enamoured with money and derivative diluted-down novels, and collected into this astounding anthology a hurricane of unique and distinct voices, deliciously, grubby, violent and uncompromising in each of their contributions. No money-men, no committees, just the desire, the skill and the talent to bring you a collection of depraved, emotionally-draining, twisted and deliciously funny tales from their black hearts.
Darren Sant, Craig Douglas and Ryan Bracha have built solidly on the foundations of their first Near to the Knuckle anthology, bringing together not just some of the most distinct voices on the Indie-Scene but also in presenting their work so professionally.
Near to the Knuckle is a big fuck you to the traditional publishing biz and a wonderfully diverse sample of the finest Indie-writers currently strutting the scene.
One word...
Rogue.
Mark Wilson, April 2015
Author of Head Boy.
Introduction
Since its inception in 2011 Near to the Knuckle has published nearly one hundred different authors and in excess of one hundred and fifty stories. We're proud of that. We're also proud to be known as an outfit that doesn't play it safe. We take risks with controversial subject matter. It's up to the reader to judge, as long as the story is solid and fits in with the Near to the Knuckle ethos, then it has a chance of being published. In our Facebook group we've build a little community of authors who all support one another. Again, we're guilty of pride at this too.
We've watched some of our authors tentatively submit their stories - you can feel the trepidation grow in every nervous word of their e-mails. We've watched the positive feedback roll in and we've seen the end result; that sigh of relief; the quick e-mail of thanks; that validation, that what they are doing IS worthwhile: The best feeling in the world to a new writer. We've watched our authors grow and become friends. Some of them are fleeting. They choose us and they go having left their mark on our readership. Most choose to stick around to look in the group for the latest story and chat to their friends, to swap jokes and enjoy that sense of community - of kinship.
We decided that it was time for a second anthology. Gloves Off, our first anthology, has done well and we've made our mark but there's a whole new generation of Near to the Knuckle scribes just waiting in the wings for that chance to be published. Craig and myself chatted for a while, kicking around ideas about what we could do to make the second anthology different and fresh. It was clear to me that we needed fresh input from outside of the NTTK team. As I keep a crafty eye on what is going on, who is making a buzz online, the first person on my radar was the talented author, Ryan Bracha. Not only had I read his work and found it suited our ethos very well indeed but his way of bringing attention to his projects was interesting, different and slickly professional. I asked Ryan to join our team for the project and to my delight he said yes. So if you've seen the growing buzz around this release online, the teaser projects, the fantastic Youtube trailer, we have Ryan to thank for these things.
Behind the scenes, as always, quietly working away and getting little of the glory is Craig. Without his time and effort Near to the Knuckle as a site would not look half so good as it does. Without his formatting and editing and enthusiasm there would be no Near to the Knuckle. I hope you enjoy this anthology which was truly a team effort and please take the time to explore the authors contact links at the end of the book, they point the way to a whole new world of fantastic fiction. Finally, I'd like to thank every author who has put their faith in us, and allowing us to present their work.
You guys rock!
Darren Sant, April 2015
CONTENTS
The Yank
Singing From The Same Sheet
Don’t Tell
The Brat Snatcher
Route 66 And All That
Doing Prince
Fish Out Of Water
An Imperfect Arrangement
The Burning Question
Something Rotten
Babysitting
Doctor Bitch
The Delivery Man
Weekend Dad
I Can’t Just Let You Go
A Week Of Sundays
Bonkers In Phoenix
Security Of Supply
Old Times
The Straggler And The Yes Man
Too Much Too Young
Wedge
Contact the Authors
Other Work
THE YANK
Gareth Spark
John Lee Dixon woke when the woman’s blood turned cold against his shirt. His eyes flickered open and looked into hers, blue and cold as slate in the dim light of the London Underground.
“Jane,” he said softly.
She wore the black fur jacket he’d stolen for her. It was thick with blood, matted, and he thought of a bear he and his Daddy shot one time in Peg’s holler back home; how its rancid fur was hot, wet, and steamed in the cold.
“Jane,” he said again. The tunnel shook as another brace of German high explosives broke against the shattered streets. Men and women muttered around him; a child whimpered as dust fell from the Victorian masonry. He pushed himself against the slick tile wall an
d squinted into the darkness, then back to her. The thought crossed his mind it was piss, maybe she’d pissed herself in fear, but he knew the stink of blood better than most anything. Her head lay in the crook of his arm. He lifted her face towards his. Her blonde hair was loose, blood stained, and he saw the wound yawn open in her throat. “Shit, Jane”.
An old man dressed in a dusty blue suit, his white hair filled with soot, pointed and started to yell. “He’s killed her, look, that bloody yank’s killed that girl.”
Bodies shifted in the collapsible cots around him. There was another crunch as bombs fell in the London night.
“No,” John Lee said.
“Someone get the police,” a woman yelled.
John Lee pushed Jane to the side. They’d met the year before in Piccadilly, where she worked the streets. He was going to save her, take back some of the steel the world forced into her soul. She was 18 years old.
He ran.
A fat man in the tight uniform of a War Reserve Constable tried stopping him near the exit of the Bounds Green station. John Lee ducked under the man’s flailing arms, ground his blood-wet fingers into a ball and crushed the Copper’s nose. The man collapsed with a grunt. Flashes of fire and explosions burst on the steps as John Lee raced toward them.
Then he was in the street beneath screeching bombs let loose like iron feathers from the black birds above. The snarl of engines and the boom of artillery filled the night and shell bursts lit the quick, dark shapes of the enemy.
Smoke consumed the eastern sky, rising from countless fiery homes and blood-wet streets. The earth shook with falling buildings, explosives. Fire trucks worked in the dark and women screamed and a plane fell, caught by searchlights that crossed the night like vast blades.
John Lee Dixon ran.
***
Detective- Sergeant Strathclyde sat opposite the young woman in the parlour of her flat in Wardour Street, sighed and lit a Senior Service. “Do you smoke, Pearl?” He asked.
“If I may,” She answered nervously. She was 20 years old, a good-time girl who worked the stage in a third rate Soho club. Strathclyde knew she worked the streets too, when times were bad enough, and times were always bad. He was a big man in his 50’s with a scar across his forehead picked up in the trenches of the last war. He dragged the smoke in, felt the tar hit and smiled. Somewhere, a blackbird was singing.
“Now, Pearl, tell us again about this American.”
“He turned up a month ago,” she said, a little too quickly, as though it was a speech long rehearsed. “In some old suit, spoke funny he did, not like them Yanks in the flicks. I never liked him, but he brought us hooch and meat and, well, beggars can’t be choosers. She was me best friend and we’d shared this flat Lord knows how long, so I let her off. I knew he was a deserter, but Jane loved him.”
“She did?”
“Said she did, but she was funny like that and now look where it’s got her, dead as mutton in the bloody underground.”
“Not alone there, though, is she?”
The dawn, grey with smoke and ash, filtered through yellowed lace curtains above the kitchen sink and Strathclyde squinted into it as he spoke. “You girls still tomcatting for the Maltese, are you?”
He saw her pale, even beneath the thick makeup. “I know nothing about it.”
“Joseph Grech, the Maltese gentleman, owns houses of prostitution along Bond Street, Queen Street and who knows where else? You know who I mean, Pearl, surely?” He smiled, patiently. “Show me your arm.”
“What you want to see me arm for?”
“Indulge, me won’t you?”
She crushed her cigarette onto a dirty plate and rolled up the sleeve of her sweater.
“All the way,” said Strathclyde.
Spite flashed in her eyes and she yanked the sleeve up another inch. A small tattoo on the grey skin of her wiry bicep read, ‘Joe has my heart’.
“I understand all you girls have them,” Strathclyde said, stubbing out his own cigarette. “You can roll your sleeve down now, my dear. I suppose it’s like cattle branding for good old Joe.” He smiled. “I take it Jane had one?”
“You said it yourself, all the girls got ‘em.”
“And this American, what did he make of that?”
“He hated it,” she said, “wanted to get wed to her, take her back ‘ome. I said, you can’t do that, I said, the world’s not like that and there’s a bleeding war on anyway. We might all be dead this time tomorrow. ‘e said she had to go with him, he couldn’t have it any other way. No matter what.”
“So he was angry with her, you could say?”
“He was the kind of man was always angry, even when he was smiling he was angry, you could feel it.”
“And Mr. Grech?”
She laughed. “You know him, guv’nor, he don’t like losing his belongings.”
***
John Lee hid in the bombed out ruin of St. Stephen’s Church on Robson Lane, watching starlings dart between columns that reached into the morning sky like broken fingers. He smoked a cigarette and huddled into the fragments of timber behind the altar. His short black hair was now grey with ash that worked at his eyes and made them sore as hell. He tried not to think of Jane, and failed again.
They were making a run for it when the air-raid sirens screeched into life. Dixon had it all figured out; head west, get over to neutral Ireland somehow, then the world. Maybe not home, maybe not for a long time, but he didn’t care so long as he had her. He was 30 years old fighting other men’s wars, when all the time, he figured, he should have fought his own. He heard the scuffle of boots on splintered stone and spoke without turning, his words heavy in the air as rain clouds, “You all are late.”
“You try makin’ yer way through streets what are bombed to bits, Yank, ‘ardly any of ‘em even streets anymore, bloody Hun bastards.”
Dixon turned. Eshleman stood in the fractured doorway, a cockney Jew with a greasy black coat and hair the shade of a fly wing.
“I guess I should thank you for coming.”
“I came for Jane, my friend, that girl was good to me.”
Smoke drifted between the two men and John Lee said, “I was gonna marry that little girl.”
“And they all lived happily ever after.”
“You bring it?”
Eshleman laid a heavy object wrapped in hessian on the powdery tiles of the church floor. A bell tolled somewhere among the war-smashed spires of the city as John Lee knelt before the parcel and peeled the oily sacking aside. A spit-shined Sten gun lay in the aquatic light like something dragged from the deep and surrendered to the sun.
Dixon whistled. “I don’t care what the hell happens to me so long as I git that son of a bitch.”
“Of course, you could walk away.” The small man stepped backwards into the gloom as he spoke, until only the brute glow of dawn on the glass of his spectacles was all that betrayed his presence. “A man can always walk away.”
“No kind of man I know fit to call himself such.”
“Joe’s at the Kit Kat Club, so I’m told. You know the place? He’s holed up there with his brother, ‘eard he did Jane ‘imself. Was going to do you too and more than likely still intends to. Silly old fool. All this mess over a girl at his age and with a war on too. Not good for business, not at all, still, you get rid of Joe it leaves his shoes empty.”
“For y’all to step into.”
“It’s a consideration, but only part of the bigger picture, my friend. He shouldn’t have done Jane, little Jane, my little sparrow, not like that. Do the right thing, Yank.”
“Count on it,” Dixon said, but Eshleman’s silhouette had drained into the burned darkness of the choir.
The gun was heavy and cold against his hot fist. He glanced down at the dry black and brown of Jane’s blood across his sleeve and it felt as though his heart was a fire alone amid dark mountains, that drew in the cold wind and burned all the harder because of it.
He checked the c
lip of the weapon and then swaddled it in the cloth. Then he sat by a dust-soured font and waited for the night.
***
DS Strathclyde pulled a War Reserve Constable from his post guarding a bombed out jewellers. He needed a driver, and Scotland Yard couldn’t spare a soul, not with the city a step away from chaos. A lunchtime telephone call to US Army C.I.D., revealed the background of the man they wanted. Dixon, John Lee, native of Rainelle, West Virginia, the son of Moonshiners and killers who’d signed up to avoid the deadly feud he and his late brother lit like a brush fire in the hills. A deserter, an inveterate liar and thief, prone to violence, sentenced in absentia for his involvement in the production of a batch of ‘hooch’ that caused the deaths of 14 people. “We’ll send our boys down,” the C.I.D. Captain barked in a voice that rattled like copper coins in a fist. Strathclyde knew they wanted their boy badly.
He visited the clubs and drinking dens of Soho, taking an afternoon to assemble a picture of the dead girl that was, if not a portrait, then at least a study. Jane Addams, an 18 year old striptease dancer from Wales; an orphan who’d run away from the Uncle she’d lived with, running, so one girl said, from his late night whisky stink visits to her room. She may have bashed his head in, she may not, maybe there wasn’t even an Uncle, but there was something snapping at her heels some outer darkness closing in; maybe she wasn’t even called Jane. Maybe she had always been what she was now, a void, a blank in the world filled up by Dixon.