Graven Image

by Williams, Charlie

  The mum appeared at the kitchen door, oven-gloved and holding a backing tray. ‘You alright, Trev?’

  ‘Trev’s alright! It’s me. It’s Leon here who’s fucked, ennit? Leon’s being played for a right one here!’

  ‘Oi, if you’re gonna talk like that you can—’

  ‘Where’s my Kelly?’

  ‘Oh God, it is you, isn’t it? When I saw the paper, I wondered if you might try to—’

  ‘Don’t dick me around! Just tell me the score. I’ve fallen for it, OK? You win. Graven wins! He wants me insane? I’m insane. I’m a fuckin’ nutter! OK? Now tell us the deal. Tell us what I do now!’

  I think I’d made a breakthrough here. Whatever script he was sticking to, I’d knocked him right off the page. They thought I’d lose it and start smashing the place up but I was cutting to the chase, conceding the point without a fight. Now we could get somewhere.

  ‘Erm, OK. Let me just... Wait here, OK?’

  ‘Don’t keep me waiting.’

  ‘I won’t! I’ll just, erm... He pushed the door to and kept on pushing it, ever so gentle, hoping I wouldn’t notice he’d shut it. Where had they found him? I’ve got to say, I was far short of impressed by Graven’s people. You’d think he could have made an effort for me. But he didn’t need to, did he? He was stringing me along just fine with bargain-basement chumps.

  Mind you, must have been a job converting Destiny into this place so fast.

  I looked through the door glass. There was net on the other side and you couldn’t see much. The mum and dad were in the kitchen. Looked like they were talking at first but Dad turned his head and I could see he was on the phone, waving his spare hand around. Mum was looking at him, chewing her nails. She looked in my direction and let out a shriek that even I heard. I didn’t like that. Made me feel like a stalker. Or an escaped lunatic.

  ‘You got three minutes!’ I shouted through the letterbox. ‘Three minutes and I’m coming in. Right?’

  ‘Er, no, don’t... I’m just talking to Gra... Gravesend.’

  ‘Graven, you twat! Where did he find you?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry. Er, you’d better give me some privacy, OK? You know what Graven’s like.’

  ‘Just hurry up.’

  I left him to it and went to peer through the bay window into the waiting. The light was off in there and it was hard to see, streetlight streaming down behind me. You could make out where the curtains were separated but I couldn’t seem to look beyond it. Some big thing was in the way, made of material and some sort of frizzy stuff at the top, and—

  I jumped back.

  I was staring right at her, the one who wasn’t Kelly. Except...

  Except it was different now. I couldn’t see the skin or the eyes, only the shape of her. And I swear it looked just like...

  Was it?

  I mean, maybe it was?

  Hadn’t Carla said she’d be here?

  ‘Kelly?’

  I was quiet at first, gentle. Don’t want to frighten her. She’ll be scared enough already.

  ‘Kelly, lift the window. Go on.’

  She just stared back at me.

  ‘I’m here to save you, Kel. Come on!’

  I turned and scanned at ground level. Plenty of gravel but nothing big. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw it, weighting down the base of a wooden bird table. I picked it up.

  ‘Move back, Kel.’

  But she wouldn’t. She just stood there like a shop dummy, staring back at me. Maybe they’d drugged her. Yeah, that’d be it.

  ‘Alright, stay right there!’

  I half expected her to move now, but she didn’t. I went to the far panel and lobbed the brick through the window. There was loads of jagged glass so I got the bird table and knocked it all away. Then I climbed in.

  She was screaming. The poor girl was...

  Light comes on, Mum and Dad stood there, horrified.

  ‘Kel,’ I’m saying. It sounds like a word, not a name. Sounds like the noise an animal makes, a bird of prey, thwarted at the last moment as he swoops for his quarry. It’s not Kelly.

  Sirens behind me, two or more of them coming from different directions, some way off but getting near. Suddenly they stop, almost in unison.

  Hands around my waist, hauling me out. I twist around and aim a backhander to the face, knocking Darren on his arse.

  Darren.

  16.

  LEVEL 3: ALARM

  1. The alarm is a piercing tone that hammers against your skull and shakes your very soul

  2. Do not panic

  3. Do not lose control

  4. Locate source of alarm

  5. Eradicate

  I do find that cricket bats are a better all-round security implement. Your common baseball bat, being heavily weighted to one end, operates solely on the concept of centrifugal force. It's for swinging, in short, which means you need enough swinging space for it. Meanwhile your cricket bat is weighted quite evenly all over. You can swing it just the same, but you can also poke, drive, sweep, cut, pull and defend with it. I used a MRF Wizard, like Brian Lara.

  Sometimes I took it out back and messed around with a ping-pong ball, imagining I was Lara on his way to 400 in Antigua. But right now I was creeping along the landing with it, holding it out front, edging towards the source of that Level 2 vocal alert. I stopped to wipe my eyes.

  You need 20/20 vision in this game.

  The vocal alert had taken the form of screaming at first, but now it was dying down into a series of sobs and moans. She was in trouble and I had to act fast. But what was he doing to her? If he was strangling her she wouldn’t be able to make sounds like that. If he was beating her, you’d hear it. He must have been using a knife, cutting her so bad that the life was draining from her. I braced myself for blood. A lot of blood.

  I wiped my eyes again. My whole face was wet. I didn’t know why.

  A door opened behind me. Room Three, which was meant to be empty. I turned.

  It was dark but I could see the girl’s outline.

  ‘Mummy?’ she said, rubbing her eyes. A shaft of moonlight was coming from somewhere, lighting up her little face. Her teddy was slung over one shoulder, like a fireman saving a small child from a burning house. ‘Mummy I can’t sleep. Too noisy.’

  She opened her eyes. Sapphires in the desert.

  Just like I remembered them.

  She turned them on the bat I was still holding.

  ‘What you got, Uncle Darren?’

  ‘I’m...’ I had to keep wiping my eyes. ‘It’s Daddy, love. Your Daddy’s home.’

  ‘Daddy away,’ she said. ‘Mummy say Daddy on lorry trip.’

  ‘I was, Kelly, but I’ve come back.’

  The vocal alerts had stopped, but there was another kind of alert going on now.

  Level Three.

  I went over to her and stroked her hair, took her hand. She’d grown. She was up to my belt now. ‘You gotta go to sleep now,’ I was saying, tucking her in.

  I could barely see through the tears as I left her room. But I had to see. I had work to do, incidents to deal with. A punter had gone rogue and one of the girls was in trouble, possibly her life in danger. It was the new girl. She wasn’t new, really. Just that I hadn’t ever been able to understand her properly, make a connection with her. But she was still mine.

  I kicked the door in. There were no locks but I wanted to make a statement, put the shits up anyone who had ideas. You have to get the upper hand in these situations. Getting your job done is paramount and failure to do so cannot be countenanced. I entered the room, bat held high.

  They were both out of bed, she in her gown, he with his jockeys on, bent down to pull up his trousers. You can’t hesitate. Take your best chance when it comes.

  I swung the bat hard. It connected just above the left eyebrow and sent him down.

  17.

  Darren the lifesaver. Darren, my true friend.

  Do you see why I’d been ringing him now?

 
He got me by the hand and dragged me through a hedge into the driveway of the next house, then up the side path and into the back garden. All the while his nose was pouring blood, courtesy of my backhander. It splashed down his chin and onto his nice blue V-neck, and I felt awful about it. I had every intention of paying for the dry cleaning, or even getting him a replacement, and I wanted to tell him that. But he wouldn’t let me.

  He put his hand over my mouth and went: ‘Shhhhhhh.’ Just like that, all drawn out and slow and quiet, staring into my eyes in the darkness. I was nodding, understanding what he meant. This was Darren and he knew the score on most things. In a second or two I heard little noises out front - the odd footstep, scraping, a burst of radio.

  Darren tapped my forehead and I blinked. He pointed at the back fence, which looked about five foot high. We crept down the lawn, finding a gate, but it was padlocked. Darren ignored it, vaulting the fence in one elegant move, making no more sound than one flap of a dove’s wing. Darren used to be a Royal Marine.

  I didn’t, but I got over the fence somehow.

  From there on it was easy. Two connected alleys, a quiet crescent and we were on the canal path, walking casual and heading for some teenagers lurking under the bridge up ahead. Any sane person - even someone useful like me - would think carefully before pressing ahead with that route on a normal night. But not Darren.

  With Darren, it’s the teenagers who thought carefully about what they were doing under that bridge, and did they really need to be there just now. They didn’t, it seemed, sloping off out the other side and up the bank.

  ‘Darren?’ I said quietly, testing the waters. He didn’t shush me this time. ‘Darren, I been trying to get hold of you for—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh, right. You got my messages, then?’

  ‘No. I got a different number now, Lee. Changed it a couple of years back.’

  Lee. I liked that. It was like a totally different name, a secret identity that I only got to use when Darren was around. I’d missed it.

  ‘Oh. Well, how’d you find me?’

  ‘Just knew you’d be here.’

  ‘How?’

  He shook his head, which I thought was a strange gesture. We were passing under the bridge now. It smelled of fresh spray paint and fags. Someone had done a giant comedy cock on the damp bricks, white paint still dripping.

  ‘Is it to do with being a Marine?’ I said. ‘That how you found me?’

  ‘Everyone’s looking for you, Lee. Ain’t you seen the papers?’

  ‘What papers?’

  ‘No, I suppose you’d avoid them, wouldn’t you? Too much reality.’

  ‘What are you on about, Daz?’

  We were out from under the bridge now. Across the canal was a retail park. Behind us a bank of grass led up to the park. Darren stopped and kicked a stone into the water.

  ‘You can’t go doing stuff like this, Lee.’

  ‘Stuff? What stuff?’

  ‘You know what.’ He seemed to remember something and turned to me, looking into my face. ‘Alright, maybe you don’t know. I can’t even begin to understand all this shit that’s going on with you. People have tried to explain it to me. I even spoke to...’

  ‘Who?’

  He got some fags out and didn’t offer me one.

  ‘Who’d you speak to, Daz? Was it Graven? Did you speak to Graven?’

  He snapped his gaze to a spot behind me, like he’d heard something up there. Always the soldier. The moonlight came from under clouds and lit up the scar tissue around his left temple. It was pink and shiny. I think he’d taken a bomb blast in Bosnia or something. He didn’t like to talk about it.

  ‘Look, Daz,’ I said, ‘it’s alright. Really. There are some things I just gotta do on my lonesome. You... well, you got enough of your own problems, things you’ve seen in combat and that.’

  He was looking at me again. He still hadn’t lit the fag in his mouth. ‘I heard they gave you a kicking over at the Eagle,’ he said. ‘I don’t blame them, you know. You should leave Jane alone, bothering her like that in her local. And she knows you were snooping around in her flat. She don’t hate you no more, Leon. It’s called moving on. I’ve done it as well, and now it’s your turn.’

  I was feeling dizzy, like some drug was kicking in.

  ‘I can help you, Lee. I’ll come see you, in the—’

  ‘Daz!’ I said, shaking off the dizziness. ‘Don’t you see? I gotta find Kelly! I gotta find her now!’

  He shook his head, kicking another stone into the water. ‘Go to Birchwood.’

  ‘Birchwood? What?’

  ‘You wanna deal with your shit, go there.’

  ‘What the fuck is this? Some kind of Halloween game? Halloween was last week, Daz. I need to find Graven! I need to find Kelly!’

  ‘But you wanna play games, though, don’t you? Come on, let’s play. She’s at Birchwood. She’s... Graven put her there.’

  I just stared at him for a bit, bouncing from one eye to the other. ‘And Graven? What about Graven?’

  ‘Can’t help you there, Lee. Only you can sort that one. But do yourself a favour, eh? Do everyone a favour: when you find him, get it sorted. Once and for all, like. Maybe...’

  ‘Maybe what?’

  ‘Maybe you should finish him off.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I meant... ah, nothing.’

  Calming down now. Trying to slow my heartbeat, get on top of things. This was serious shit and I needed answers. I grabbed his jumper and posed a question:

  ‘How come you know all this?’

  I knew he’d switched off from me now, said all he had to say. He was waiting for me to finish. Waiting to go home.

  I had the BB gun in my pocket. I wasn’t sure why I remembered it at that moment but I did. I wanted to get it out and fire it in Darren’s face, punish him for... I swear I don’t know what.

  ‘Oi!’

  It came from behind me, a female voice, quite young and carrying a lot of bolsh. For some reason I thought it was Kelly, and I turned. I couldn’t breathe. Some teenagers were up on the bank, hands in pockets, hoods up.

  ‘Oi!’ it came again.

  You’d never have known from their outlines that one of them was female. How could I ever have thought a voice as harsh as that could be Kelly’s? It was more like her mum’s.

  ‘Are you hearing me or what?’ she said. ‘I want me money.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘Half now, half later, you said.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Are you thick or summat? For ringing that number and saying all that “where’s Kerry?” shit to some bloke called Leon. So cough up, you fuckin’ mong!’

  I got the BB Gun out and fired it at them, making them disappear. A minute or two later, after I’d chucked the gun in the canal, I remembered Darren in time to catch a glimpse of his back disappearing into the tunnel. I shouted his name as I went after him, but I knew I’d never catch him.

  18.

  I couldn’t make sense of it. Birchwood? What was someone like Graven doing at Birchwood, let alone holding a girl there? There wasn’t even a building, unless he had keys to the very public one in the middle. And this is Graven we’re on about here. We’re talking influence.

  I was carrying on down the canal path, thinking this. I didn’t know where Darren had gone. Didn’t care.

  Did care.

  And there’s no point denying that. But friends end up betraying you, always. Even best ones. Especially best ones. I couldn’t worry about that. I had to think and breathe and walk. Towards Birchwood.

  I was there in ten minutes. Or maybe two hours. My throat was parched but I ignored it, thirst wouldn’t hold me back. I walked along Birchwood Road, skirting the perimeter wall, looking through the trees. Could it be true? Or was Darren just feeding me bullshit? Why not? Carla had fed it me, saying Kelly was at Destiny. No one was at Destiny.

  Not even Destiny was at Destiny.

  Whic
h meant Destiny had to be somewhere else.

  ‘Yo, Nigger!’

  Sometimes you react before thinking. Quite often I did that, actually, but sometimes it’s like a taut wire snapping, a catapult fired. Before my next breath I had the kid in a headlock, face-down on the wet pavement. That’s how keyed up I was.

  ‘Oh cm om!’ he was trying to say, chewing concrete. I took my knee off his head. ‘Oh come on! I ain’t having this shit! They call each other niggers in films all the time! Ain’t you even seen Pulp Fiction?’

  ‘You call someone nigger, you are a nigger,’ I said, still sitting on him. His pal Gnash was a few yards off, stepping around like he needed a piss bad.

  ‘Yeah, and I told you - I got a bit of black blood! My great-granddad was a sailor from Liverpool and he was black like coal! I swear! That makes me a nigger, bro. And that means I can say it to other niggers.’

  ‘Well, I ain’t a nigger, so you can shut your white mouth!’

  ‘But...’

  But bollocks. I was off down the road. There was less trees round the other side of and maybe I could get a better view. Of what? I still couldn’t see how Kelly could be here. Or if she was, she was well hidden. No way was I gonna find her without some more intelligence. There was no way around it:

  I needed to find Graven.

  ‘Mate!’ the lad was shouting, running to catch up. He was heading for a kicking, this Sid character. Another time I’d give it freely. ‘Mate, just hold up a minute! I got summat for you.’

  ‘I got summat for you as well: free dental job, via my black fist.’

  ‘Look, I understand why you’re being like that.’ He was alongside me now, waving his arms around. His pal had more sense, being about ten paces behind. ‘It’s natural for black people to have a chip on their... Alright! Alright. I won’t say no more about the righteous struggle. I just wanted to let you know, well...’

  He looked left and right. Birchwood Road was deserted. When he turned his head I saw the five inch long slash, butterflied up on his cheek.