by Joseph Knox
Ricky was nodding, still not meeting my eyes. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘It looks like you’ve got something else to say.’
‘Look, I appreciate all that. I believe you. You didn’t have to say it and you did.’ He shrugged. ‘She told me about it anyway. You lied to her about having a sister or something. Weird.’ He took another big drink and reached inside his pocket. He pulled out an envelope and placed it on the table between us. ‘I wanted to talk about this, though.’
My name was scrawled across the envelope.
‘What’s going on?’ I said.
‘This shit about your sister. It did annoy me a bit, but I trust Sian. I believed what she said. That’s nothing to do with this.’ I opened the envelope and looked inside.
Photographs.
I poured them out on to the table. They were all of me. Taken from various distances, as some kind of surveillance, while I moved through the city. At first I thought it was a nameless, shapeless threat. Related to the hit that had been hanging over my head, apparently for months.
But I saw that they told a story.
The first picture showed me leaving my flat with a black plastic bag under my arm. The next few showed my car driving across town to the Chorlton Street station. Then there were several of the crippled man who’d been raking the phone machines, pretending to look for change, while I watched. Next, a series of pictures showing me leaving cash in one of the slots and collecting something afterwards. I knew what the rest would show and I went through them reluctantly.
Their inevitable chain of events.
Driving out to the Quays. Waiting outside Cartwright’s building. Going inside with the bag. Leaving with nothing. The final picture showed me staring, directly at the camera. The car I’d seen pull away as I got outside. Somehow this one, with my face perfectly visible, looked most damning of all, like an admission of guilt. The times and dates were stamped in the corner of each picture.
I looked at Ricky. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that?’ I waited for an answer and he went on. ‘I went to The Temple earlier, to see Sian. Found that envelope on a table. I was about to hand it in when I looked inside. Lucky for you I did …’
I thought he was telling the truth.
‘When was this?’
‘Today, when I called.’
‘Who left them there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you see anyone it might have been? Anyone acting weird?’
He shook his head. ‘You’re buying drugs, though, aren’t you?’
I tried to think of a response but finally ignored the question. Swept the pictures back into the envelope. ‘Have you shown these to anyone else?’
‘Nah,’ he said.
‘Sian?’ He shook his head and I looked inside the envelope again. ‘Was there anything else in there?’
‘There were some negatives,’ he said, looking away.
‘I want them,’ I said, jamming the envelope into my jacket pocket.
‘They’re not here. Look …’ He risked a glance up from the table. ‘Sian hasn’t seen them. I hope she doesn’t …’
I tried to stay calm. ‘Don’t fuck around with this. Whoever left them there could be dangerous.’
‘Dangerous to who? Not dangerous to me.’
I stared at him but his eyes remained fixed on the table. ‘What do you want, Ricky?’
‘I don’t want anything, you’ve got that wrong.’ I watched him, waited. ‘It just looks like something really bad. And whoever took them, whoever left them obviously has it in for you. They obviously want to hurt you. I love Sian. We’ve got something really special going.’ I could see him edging towards it. The real reason he was here. ‘I don’t want anything bad around her …’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘You don’t think she should have some say in who her friends are?’
‘I suppose we could show her the pictures and ask?’
I looked at my untouched drink. ‘I want those fucking negatives, I mean it.’
‘Or what?’ he said. ‘You’ll beat me up as well?’
I heard a sound, like something snapping in my ears. ‘What did you just say?’
‘I told you, Sian tells me everything.’
I couldn’t speak. I shook my head, got up and walked out on to the street. Mainly to avoid introducing his skull to the wall. To avoid what he’d just said. I found myself looking over my shoulder as I went, turning my head at sudden movements. The sun blazed, indifferently, overhead, catching the angles of every object I passed. I felt like there were cameras, flashing, all about me.
6
I got back to the flat hot, distracted and stiff from another long day. My conversation with Ricky had been unnerving, and I could feel the weight of the envelope in my pocket, thick with pictures that could send me to jail. Or worse. I almost didn’t want to think about who’d left them there.
The list was getting too long.
The top half was made up of people who’d now faded into the background of my life, criminals and acquaintances I’d wronged. The same people who’d put a price on my head. The rest of the list was made up of more recent additions. Oliver Cartwright, or at least his alt-right friends, felt likely until I stopped to think about it. Surely if they knew that I’d set him up, and if they could prove it, they’d use that information to begin legal proceedings against me. To free him. Then there was the smiling man. An aura of dread and uncertainty hung over the case, and discovering his name, hotel room, the blood patch, had only increased it. What had Parrs said? That I was on my own if the investigation took us to unexpected places. Perhaps he already knew it would. Then, of course, there was Ricky. I thought I believed his account, however much I might dislike him, but it was clear he wanted me out of Sian’s life at all costs, and I’d been wrong about people before. As I got the key into the lock I heard a scuffed footstep behind me.
There was someone at the end of the street, watching.
He was unmistakably the same man who’d been into The Temple the day before, asking about my drinking habits, my friends. He was built solid, with the purposeful, unshowy muscle and simple prison tattoos that Sian had described. He wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt, pulled tight across a large, well-developed chest. I could see half-crescents of sweat under his arms and moisture glistening off the sides of his neck. His hair on one side was neat, buzzed short. On the other side it looked like it had been burned away, with odd, untended tufts protruding at crazy angles. His skin on this side ranged from light purple to dark, except for the area surrounding his dead eye. There, the skin was caved in, cratered and scabbed over with near-black scar tissue. It was this side of his face that he had turned to me and, as with Sian, I got the impression he was inflicting it, aware of its power. His head moved slightly, and I felt his left eye, the good one, searching my features.
And just like that, I knew him.
He spat a cigarette on to the kerb, crushed it beneath his boot and then walked, easily, towards me. I tried to get my key in the door but my hands were sweating, my fingers wouldn’t work. The man stopped a few feet away, and I smelt the second-hand smoke. It had been more than twenty years but I remembered it so well. It was blended with a new aroma. Urine, I thought, sweat.
‘Can I help you with something?’
We both heard the shake in my voice and he smiled.
His mouth looked like a wound, ripped right across his face.
‘Aidan Waits,’ he said. His speech was impeded by the damage to his skin, coating his words in a wet clicking sound. ‘Lives here …’
I looked at him.
Felt the heat beating off his skin.
‘I don’t know him,’ I said.
He turned his face, as though using his dead eye to look down the street. He was allowing me to take in the unscarred side of his head. The living eye that I’d always tried to avoid. I turned back to the door, opened it and went throu
gh, slamming it behind me, feeling sick. I went up the stairs, feeling sunspots wash in front of my eyes, the blood doing laps of my veins. When I got inside and went to make myself a drink I saw that the bottle I’d recently opened, that I’d had one drink from, was empty. I went to the window and looked out. The man was gone.
* * *
The boy was running away from the house and down the path. He didn’t need to rise out of his body now. In spite of the bag’s shifting weight at his shoulder he felt lighter than air. His senses came alive, overwhelming him with information in one generous rush of blood to the head. The night, the moon and the stars. The cold air, stabbing in and out of his lungs.
He stopped when he saw a man, a shape, sitting on the car bonnet. The shape threw its cigarette and rose up, detaching itself from the shadows. It drew closer to the boy, meeting him in the middle ground between the car and the house.
‘Is that it?’ said Bateman, stepping into a patch of moonlight. The soft blue hue of his stubble looked like the flame from a blowtorch. The boy nodded. Bateman let out a breath and reached a hand behind the boy’s ear. He retracted it, holding a coin out for him to take. ‘Fucking gold mine,’ he muttered, reaching for the bag. He froze then, staring over the boy’s shoulder at the house, the smile on his face twisting into a grimace.
There was a skeleton standing in the doorway. The figure was uncomfortably tall, like a thing on stilts, and its emaciated, stick-insect legs didn’t look like they could support even the frail body on top of them. It ducked under the doorway, transforming from something unreal into a pitifully tall, slender man. The man moved towards them, walking with the frightening, illogical gait of an arachnid. When he lifted an arm there was a flash of steel and the gun was suddenly visible. Bateman placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder, his grip tightening as the figure took a final step into the light.
He was barefoot and his clothes were the rags that might once have been a suit. There was no shirt beneath his haggard, balding jacket, and his torso, a series of tight, grey double knots, was exposed to the elements.
There was something wrong with his hands.
It looked like he was wearing dark, sloppily applied nail polish, but the boy realized he was bleeding. The man’s fingernails had been removed. The skin on his face was pulled tight, and his eyes were buried so deep inside his skull that they were just two black holes.
‘Bagh …’ he said.
The boy recognized the voice from behind the door that he’d unlocked. He saw that the figure’s lips were loose, hollow and caved in. That what he’d taken at first for stubble was a beard of dried blood. Someone had pulled out the man’s teeth. When neither Bateman nor the boy moved, the man threw his head to the other side and shouted.
‘Bagh!’
‘All right,’ said Bateman, drawing the boy towards him. ‘We’re going back …’
‘Bagh!’ screamed the slender man, spraying red spit. ‘Bagh! Bagh! Bagh!’ Bateman and the boy stopped, hypnotized by the gun, which was drifting from side to side. With a frown of concentration the man raised his free arm, so both hands were wrapped around the grip. Breathing deeply, focusing his attention, he swung the gun barrel downward, pointing it at the boy.
‘Bag,’ he said with effort.
Automatically, the boy started to slip the strap off his shoulder, but Bateman’s hand moved on top of it, gripping it into his skin. They stood like that for a moment until a woman’s voice, tired but gloating, came from the forgotten car behind them.
‘Give him the bag, Bates,’ said the boy’s mother. ‘Face facts.’
Bateman’s grip on the boy’s shoulder tightened.
‘No chance,’ he whispered.
The boy’s mother raised her voice. ‘Give him the ba—’
‘No chance,’ screamed Bateman. He pushed the boy forward and projected himself at the thin man. ‘Gonna smoke a kid, are ya?’ The boy stared into the gun barrel. Felt the ground sinking beneath him. After what felt like forever, the gun started to shake, finally drooping down at the ground in answer. ‘Didn’t think so,’ said Bateman, touching the boy’s shoulder.
As he did so, a new light emerged. Waves of pulsing blue, washing through the trees.
The sound of sirens.
The figure’s head turned in their direction and his body started to convulse. ‘Hur,’ he said. ‘Hur-hur-hur.’ His laugh revealed blackened, bloody gums. Bateman’s mouth fell open, watching the lights draw closer. A mechanical roar surprised him and he turned to see the Skoda starting up, its headlights flashing momentarily. The boy’s mother made a three-point turn and drove in the opposite direction to the sirens. He saw his sister, wide-eyed, pressing herself into the rear window as they got further away. After a moment Bateman laughed, squatting down like he’d forgotten the thin man, the gun, the police.
‘Wally, mate,’ he said to the boy. ‘Them trees. Go as far as you can, hide that bag, remember where you’ve gone and mark the spot. Tell no fucker. We’re coming back for it.’ He stood and looked at the figure. The boy didn’t move. ‘Go,’ said Bateman, without looking at him. When the boy still didn’t move the man stepped between him and the gun.
‘Run, Aidan, you little shit!’
At the sound of his real name the boy started across the road, breaking towards the woods where the car had been parked. He felt the gun like a pair of hateful eyes, burning into the back of his head, and burst through the foliage, feet beating wet ground.
The sirens were on top of him, louder now.
He smashed into clawing thorns, thumping through bushes and tree trunks. He saw blue lights from the road, illuminating a possible path, and threw himself down a bank, clearing the way with one hand, holding the bag with the other.
The sirens were going off in his head.
He crashed down into a dirty stream, and felt the cold water up to his waist, tasted the blood and soil in his mouth. He started to crawl backwards, out of the mire, breathing hard, holding the bag up over his head. The sirens were screaming.
Then a gunshot cracked, unmistakably, through the trees, and everything stopped. Everything but the boy. He pulled himself on to dry ground and staggered deeper into the woods. Away from the house, the thin man and the gun. Towards anything as long as it was away from Bateman. He could still hear him like a broken record in his head.
‘Run, Aidan.’
* * *
VII
Ultraviolence
1
You forget things after a while, and I pieced together my understanding of that night from three main sources, none of which were entirely reliable. The first was from my own memory, which I’d consciously felt morphing throughout my lifetime, starting as a series of facts featuring people I’d known, and ending as a story filled with characters, infected by my imagination. My memories had become unreliable on the subject through years of drug and alcohol abuse. Over time, they absorbed the violent, menacing tone of my nightmares, until they were entirely transformed from a linear sequence of events into a swollen dream sequence that grew with me. Warping and altering like my face in a mirror. They were important for understanding the feeling, though, which had never changed or gone away.
The wide open, panoramic fear.
The second source was through my interpretation of the police and social services interviews which I’d given at the time. As a child I hadn’t understood them, but the questions were designed to build a consistent narrative, and, through repetition, had made me certain on some points. My sister and I had been woken in the middle of the night. Taken to a car we’d never seen before by our mother and the man she shared a bed with. We’d driven for a long time, out to a grey-brick farmhouse. There, I’d been sent inside by the man I knew as Bateman to retrieve a bag from an attic. I was told not to enter any other room but had disobeyed him when I felt a breeze coming from the kitchen. The windows had been blown in by gunfire and the room itself was the scene of explosive physical violence. I saw a woman who looked as though s
he’d been tortured. Whose throat had been cut, saturating the walls with blood. Leaving the kitchen, I’d heard the sound of someone crying behind a locked door. Once I’d retrieved the bag, I’d been frozen by this sound. Whether through simple humanity or as a conscious act of disobedience against Bateman, I’d turned the key in the door and left the house.
The final and most illuminating source for what I knew of that night came in the form of newspaper articles I’d searched out as a teen. For years I’d carried around the fear and the facts, as I understood them, devoid of the context. In the late nineties, Nicholas Fisk had been a powerful player in the Northern drug scene, a precursor to the more business-minded success stories that followed him. He eschewed violence where possible, building respect, and a rumoured fortune, through negotiation and deal-making.
Then one day, no one arrived to collect Fisk’s two boys from school. Three men had kidnapped their parents, taking them to a remote, dilapidated farmhouse which, it later transpired, Fisk owned. He’d kept it secret from everyone but his wife as some kind of safe house. The kidnappers had watched him for weeks, believing he stored a part of his vast, illegal fortune there. Locked inside, they’d started a campaign of intimidation against the Fisks to coerce information from them.
I still remember the moment.
Fifteen or sixteen years old, hunched over a newspaper reel in the local library, feeling the world stop when I saw Bateman’s face staring out at me from a black-and-white front page.