by Beau Johnson
I’m no driver of note. I’m one of the few that knows I’m below average. This car is built for someone a lot higher up the food chain than me. I rake at the wheel as the car tries to take control. It starts to drift sideways and I try to correct. The lack of grip from the gravel fights my correction. I wrench the wheel full lock and the car flips its tail further out. Into the skid. Steer into the skid. Old advice and probably not for gravel, but I flick the wheel again and the car responds, tyres gripping before we rush in between the trees that flank the driveway.
I’m plunged into darkness. I scrabble for the headlights but I’ve no idea where the switch is. ‘Blind luck’ is not a phrase that my life is peppered with, but something I do spreads light in front of me. I scream as a tree fills my life. I twist the steering wheel and two amazing things happen. First, I live and second, the car decides it likes the middle of the road.
I ease off on the speed, not much, but I need to gain some control. I might be shit at driving, but at the moment I’m not the one that’s deciding where we’re going to crash—the car is happy making those calls. I chance a glance in the rear-view mirror. I see nothing but black. That could be good or it could just be the rear visibility from the car is piss-poor.
The main gate—a leviathan that works off another remote—is next on my agenda. I’m praying it’s the same remote as the one for the garage doors. If not, I’m on a second prayer that the remote is in the car. I have no third prayer. I’ll just climb and run. The driveway swings to the left. If someone is on my tail, I’ll not know until they are up my arse.
The smell, forgotten in the heat of the moment, forces me to open the windows. Only there seems little difference between open and shut. The stench is that strong. I have the car at fifty and the driveway is fit for twenty. I want more but can’t handle it. If Sebastian Vettel is a guest he’ll overtake me before I get halfway to the gate.
My head spins away once more. It was the dark cousin of bad luck that placed me in front of Mr McLaren; never Samuel, always Mr McLaren. I’d been recommended to him as a tax specialist. His company, a small outfit that sold consultancy advice to the oil and gas world, had just fallen out with their incumbents. Not that I had been told this. Mr McLaren had never mentioned how tax had been calculated before I arrived. If I think back, and I do on a frequent basis, he suggested the notion of paying into the exchequer was something he had just become aware was compulsory. Previous accounts were thin and suggested a string of trading years that wouldn’t pay for the five cups of Starbucks that Mr McLaren drank a day.
Of course, when I got down to it, the revenue seemed to increase with great alacrity. Month on month the cash through the books rose exponentially and my original quote for my services (tax and monthly management accounts) was way too small. I was, inside six months, all but their accounts department. I tried to negotiate an increase in fees and was told that I had more hope of a try-out for the Scotland rugby team. So, I threatened to quit and that’s when things turned sour.
I was invited into Mr McLaren’s office; a six feet by eight feet box that was furnished with two chairs and nothing else. Mr McLaren’s chair was a plush leather executive model. Mine was from a local school classroom. The conversation was pleasant enough to start with. Mr McLaren had even bought me a coffee. I was too polite to refuse. It tasted like it had ten sugars and the milk from half a dairy in it. I like black.
We roamed a little in the conversation. I had a vague connection with him on a non-work basis in that I had once swung a golf club. He played off three. That was a number that had never appeared on my scorecard so the connection was tenuous but, as with all golfers, there’s always mutual ground to be found. We chatted about his business and its continuing meteoric rise in income. And then we got down to my fee, my demand and his reply.
The reply was direct and forthright. It didn’t need to be boiled down or summarised in any way. It had no extraneous language to hide or confuse its meaning. In Mr McLaren’s own words, I would ‘have both kneecaps shot out from behind’ if I did not continue working at my current pay rate for the foreseeable future. We then returned to the tricky fourteenth at Mr McLaren’s golf club and I agreed that a blind dogleg with a tabletop green and a negative camber on the fairway was not playing fair. I didn’t finish my coffee. The meeting finished with a promise to play a round with me when the weather picked up.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I wasn’t a stranger to the world of criminals. At the hands of a previous bent set of company crooks I had taken a beating, been flung from a forty-storey building and survived, before descending into a realm that I had no desire to return to. But, and it was a big but, I was back in the world of crime—on the edges, but back.
Mr McLaren doubled my workload and smiled as he did it. The fact that he worked for Phil Tuff didn’t become apparent until Tina, one of my cohorts on my last dabble with the criminal fraternity, told me. Just after she told me that she had stolen a drawing worth four hundred thousand pounds and had sold it to one of Glasgow’s hardest hard nuts.
The gates, painted silver, catch the car headlights and I touch the brakes. The car takes back the minimal control it has ceded to me and slides off the driveway. This time my blind luck is out to lunch; the car sideswipes a tree. Lacking the foresight to have buckled up, I’m thrown into the passenger seat. At least part of me is. My legs can’t join the upper half and that hurts.
The engine dies. My first thought is to avoid placing my hand in the vomit/wax mix. My next is to get the car running again. Pursuit has to be close. My love handles hurt. The crash has focused the transfer of weight through them. I try the engine: it leaps back into life.
I’m less than twenty feet from the massive gates. I press the remote, but nothing happens. I try again, but still nothing. I go hunting in the interior for another. There are few places to store things and, using my iPhone light, I come to the conclusion that another remote, if it ever existed, is not at hand. I push open the car door and scrabble out. My midriff is telling me it’s not happy. Rather, it’s yelling it. I ignore the call to be still and make for the gate.
At the foot of the metalwork I scan it with my light. There’s a large box to the right. Everything else is metal gate or expensive stonework. The box has a hole for a key and is locked tight. I look back, expecting to see headlights or burning torches and pitchforks. There’s nothing. I had riddled the front of the house with enough stones to start a quarry. The people in the house might be slow, they might be confused, but they will figure it out—and soon.
I have no choice. The car is history. I grab the highest bar that I can reach, and start upwards. The gate is a good ten feet tall and at the top it’s a tight-packed row of spikes, miniature spearheads with sharpened points that seem a little excessive to me. Seconds later I stand, one foot dangling in the air, trying to figure a way over. The gate looks ornamental but the design is clever. There is no space between the spikes to place your hand, or foot, and the tips of the spikes are far enough apart to penetrate a good four or five inches of arm or leg. I try placing my fingers in between the spearheads, but when I apply weight to pull up they slide into the gaps and sharp edges draw blood. The bloody thing has been well thought out. If I had a heavyweight coat I might be able to throw it over and protect myself, but it would have to be hellish thick material. I’d seen nothing in the car that would suffice.
When a beam, like the sweep of a lighthouse, clips my feet I know I’m out of time. The engine note is high. I swing around and two headlights are dancing towards me. I have twenty seconds, at the outside, before the vehicle reaches the gates. I wrestle my jacket off, trying not to fall back to earth. Fifteen seconds. I wrap it round my right hand and force my fingers between the spears, driving holes into the material. Ten seconds. I pull up and know there is only one way over—vault the thing. Five seconds. I hear a car grind gravel as the brakes are applied. I put all my effort into the pull, and launch myself upwards. Fear supplies adrenaline and
I crest the spear tops, with millimetres to spare. I let go and fly into the night, hitting the ground on the other side with a breath-emptying slam. The little I had to drink last night goes into a spin cycle in my stomach. I roll onto my back and the click of metal I hear isn’t a key turning in the lock. I might not be a hardened underworld criminal, but the noise sounds a hell of a lot like a gun to me.
‘Where the fuck are you going?’ The accent is pure Govan, threaded with whisky. ‘That’s the big man’s car you’ve just ploughed into a fuckin’ tree and there’s a thousand busted windows back at the hoose.’
I love Glaswegians a million times over. Exaggeration is built into their DNA. I recognise him as one of Phil’s goons. Clean-shaven, bald, more gut than muscle and less brain than hair, he had spent most of the party trying to separate a blonde in cut down jeans from her clothes. The gun is by his side. Phil wouldn’t thank him for shooting someone this close to home, but he wants to make a point. I start to stand up.
He shouts, ‘I asked you a question, wee man. Where in the fuck do you think you are running to? You’ve got some questions to answer—so get your arse back here.’
That’s not near the top of my list of things I want to do. It’s not even on the bloody list. I push up and turn away. If he’s going to shoot me it will be now. I take a step.
‘Stop right fucking there.’ As he speaks a second engine begins the race to the gate. I take a second step.
‘I’m fucking warning you. Stop now or I’ll put a bullet in your fucking head.’
Like a kid defying his mother I take another step.
I once had a school friend called Crooky, long since dead—he went for a walk on the M74 at rush hour—who had a theory on moments like this. He said, after watching more westerns than made sense, that there’s always a point when the baddie (the goon at the gate) points a gun at the goodie (me) and tells him he’s going to shoot. There were, according to his theory, three steps beyond which you either fired or let the person walk. Step one was taking the gun out (already done). Step two was pointing the gun at the goodie. I’m not sure we are there, but I’m assuming we are—I’m not looking back to check. Step three, if you have the right type of gun, is cocking it ready to fire. I’m not sure that the gun the goon is holding needs cocking, probably not. In either case, after the cocking, or non-cocking, it’s game time. Beyond this you either let the good guy walk free or insert a bullet somewhere in their carcass.
I take a fourth step and brace myself for the unbraceable. Being shot is not something that you can be ready for.
The voice strengthens. ‘Stop. Fucking stop.’
Step five and my body is a violin of highly strung wires, all waiting on the sound of an explosion. Step six and I’m desperate to look back, but that’s not going to happen. I’m thinking of step seven and hoping that step eight through a couple of a million lie ahead.
‘I’m fucking warning you.’
And that’s all that he’s going to do. One too many ‘fucking warnings’ for a man who is serious about shooting someone. I pick up the pace as the second car sprays gravel. I break into a jog, I need distance—once they get the gate open, I may as well have taken the bullet.
I cross the small road that passes by the gate, leap a hedge and drop into the field beyond. My shit covered shoe sinks into a cowpat, but in the cloud spotted moonlight I ignore it and get back to my jog.
The dark grabs me as the moon vanishes behind a heavy black rain cloud. I run for a few hundred yards and then I look back. I can see the headlights of the cars, but the gate still seems shut. Maybe they don’t have the key.
The gunshot throws me to the ground.
Click here to learn more about Falling Too by Gordon Brown.
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