What did he do? Did he ring the police and report the attack on his window? It wasn’t exactly a bazooka attack and it wasn’t as if there had been a note attached to a brick telling him to go to a telephone box and bring fifty thousand in unmarked bills, though he fervently wished there had been; at least that would have been something. And what did he say when the police asked him, as they inevitably would, if he had gotten a look at his would-be assailant? They’d think he was a fuckin’ lunatic, and that would do wonders for the looks he was already getting from them.
Had he imagined it? He had always been terrified of that alley - he had no problem admitting it to himself, not at this precise moment anyway. Had he walked out there with his head fucked from the events of the day, spooked the fuck out of some wee spidey bastard into having a go at him and mentally superimposed some nightmarish visage on him? It didn’t sound good for his prospects of rating his own sanity, but what was the alternative explanation? That things that went brick in the night were real? No. Bollocks. Bollocks to that.
“I just hope they’re okay,” he said, rather lamely.
Bee nodded sympathetically. “God love ye,” she said. “It’s terrible, so it is. Terrible. I can’t believe these things happen – isn’t it enough to make ye question what’s wrong with this world, Jesus love I don’t know. If it‘s not hoods in the back alley it‘s people going missin…”
Danny felt his mind begin to wander. He’d had enough of the ‘God love ye’ School of Crisis Management from his Ma earlier. “Yeah…” he said, distractedly. His nose twitched and he noticed that the musty smell that he’d put down to Bee’s advanced years was in fact coming from a fruit bowl on the kitchen countertop. Every single piece of fruit within was in a terrible state - the bananas were blackened, the peaches rotted. For a wee woman who kept the rest of her house in immaculate nick, it seemed oddly out of place.
Bee wasn‘t finished yet. “I know your wee Mummy and Daddy must be beside themselves – and you like I say such a nice wee family! I’ve always said to wee Jackie down the street “they keep themselves to themselves and don’t bother nobody, and that chile’s always lovely turned out, and their garden’s always just beautiful!”
Danny felt himself come back around, as if someone had just waved smelling salts under his nose. “What?” he asked. “What was that?”
“The chile?” Bee replied. “Ach he’s always gorgeous…”
“No,” he shook his head, and stared into space for a second before standing up, his mind made up. Christ it felt good to just decide to do something. He glanced down at the cup, feeling vaguely obligated, and downed the remainder of its contents. Between Bee’s tea and Lircom’s sandwiches, there was a good possibility all of this would turn out to be a hallucination brought on by exotic substances.
“Thanks for the tea, Mrs O’Malley,” he said, walking out of her kitchen. She rose to her feet and followed him, wincing slightly and clutching at her hip as she stood. “And for the rescue. But I really have to go. You keep your doors locked now, won’t ye?”
“Certainly, son, certainly,” she nodded vigorously. “Any of them wee bastards tries anything on me and I’ll cut their fuckin’ balls off.“
Danny blinked. “Good…” he said.
Bee’s face softened and crumpled into her default expression of good meaning wizened old crone. “You try and get some sleep now, God love ye!” she told him and patted his cheek, unlatching the front door for him as she did so.
He made some sort of perfunctory goodbye in her direction, inside his own house in moments, outside of it again moments later.
Lamplight glinted off the metallic edge of his spade. Danny looked down at the small mound of Earth that he’d flattened only the previous night and which, somehow, had returned full-blooded over the course of the last twenty-four hours. The same time period in which the two people he shared his life with had vanished without trace.
The police had asked him did he have anything else to tell them. And he’d told them about the electronic squeal of the phone. But he hadn’t mentioned the rebuilding of the hump of earth, because it seemed so left-field he wasn’t even sure how to explain it. Steve hadn’t even noticed its return until Danny had pointed it out to him just as he was leaving. His friend had suggested that maybe Ellie had a change of heart or maybe there was some sort of subsidence, or fuck, maybe he had gophers.
“Do we have gophers in Ireland?”
“Fucked if I know. What’s a gopher?”
“Dunno. It’s a sorta beaver on benefits. Was there not one in Happy Gilmore?” Steve had wondered aloud, and Danny had shrugged and waved his friend goodbye, glad in a way that they’d parted company for tonight on a completely random note; if one more person had given him the “they’ll turn up safe and sound” speech he had been convinced he would explode.
The spade bit into the ground beneath him. He felt the shudder of resistance go up his arm and shoulder, and a wave of memories of doing this only last night with Steve washed over him, a wave that threatened to destabilise his newfound determination since bound up in it were companion memories of Ellie bringing out beers and watching the stars. He sidestepped them and stuck to his task. He had dug this hole out last night before his life had gone to shit. He had dug it out for Ellie. By Christ he was going to make sure it stayed done.
Up the street, curtains twitched in a front-room, and a pair of rheumy eyes watched him work silently under the orange glow of the streetlamps.
The eyes crinkled at the corners, and the curtains were released.
The Helper
“Jesus holy Christ of Almighty.”
Danny tasted carpet. It did not taste good. There was an innuendo in there somewhere, he knew, but he was too fucked and his girlfriend and son too missing to bother trying to identify it. He opened his eyes and confirmed his suspicions that he was lying on the floor of his living room. He lifted his head, knowing from the hot rush of blood to his left cheek that he would have a fetching carpet-pattern etched into it.
Steve, emitter of the colourful blasphemy that had pulled Danny from his sleep, was standing in the living room doorway. He was looking at Danny with some sympathy but mostly trepidation, as if approaching a cylindrical object with tailfins he’d just discovered in a hole in his basement that had just begun emitting a tick tick tick noise.
“Mornin lad,” he said, producing a key. “Let meself in, that alright?”
“Course,” Danny mumbled, wondering why Steve hadn’t bothered to shower before he’d come over. Holy fuck, the smell was unbeliev…
His eyes settled on the spade, which was lying on the hearth, the blade covered in earth and muck and bits of grass, much as, he noted, his own clothes that he’d slept in all night after doing some hard graft…
Ah.
Well, that explained Steve’s wrinkled nose.
“Um,” Steve said. “Take it there’s no….?”
“No,” Danny replied. Water. He needed water. He moved past Steve, who retreated well out of his way to allow him to pass and get to the kitchen. As he froooooshed water into a glass little incidentals recurred to him; the missing knife in the block. The back gate to the alley, still open. The crack in the window. He gulped the water down gratefully.
“Jesus! What happened to this lad?”
Danny set the glass back in the sink. He didn’t even look up at Steve for a second. Even a few moments after the incident, it had already seemed ridiculous. Now, in the cold light of day, he burned with embarrassment just recalling it. Some fuckin’ protector he was. Some fuckin’ man of the house. Scared shitless by some wee hood until he’d almost pissed in his fuckin’ knickers in terror. And him heading out with the big knife and all like a hard man. Ha. That was a laugh.
He’d been prepared to let Ellie bring the blue bin out for the extra collection too, hadn’t he?
"Jesus Christ! It's bringin’ a bin out to an alley! I'll do it if it bothers ye that much!"
"Righto. Gla
d we got that sorted. Enjoy…"
He looked up at Steve, who was reaching out a finger tentatively to explore the spider web of cracks that had spread from the initial point of impact. “Some wee hood durin the night,” he said, as casually as he could. “Probably hadn’t a clue what house he was aimin for and didn’t care.”
“Wee cunts,” Steve said hotly. “Knew I shoulda stayed last night. Told ye.”
“Forget about it.” Danny said. “I chased them anyway,” he added, which was broadly true, there had been some chasing and knife-brandishing…before the cowering in fear. Of all that he said nothing. There were limits to his willingness for disclosure.
Amazingly, he found himself phoning work. Of all the things to remember to do in a time like this, some part of him had still flagged the fact that he’d need to let Lircom know he wouldn’t be coming in today.
“Hello?” Thomas’ voice sounded on the duty mobile. He carried that fuckin’ thing about on an honest-to-Christ utility belt whenever he was in the building.
“Thomas, it’s Danny. I won’t be in today.”
“Well Danny,” and he could hear the bastard checking his watch, “it’s past the usual time for informing the duty manager of an unplanned absence. You are requir-”
He couldn’t let him go on any further, lest he say something truly monumentally stupid and force Danny to take the time out of his day to track him down and murder him.
“Ellie and Luke have gone missing, Thomas. I’ve been up all night. The police have been. So…” and he trailed off, trying to think of a way to finish that sentence that didn’t include any instances of the phrase fuck you and failed, so he left it at that.
There was a pause. He found it all too easy to picture Thomas face at that moment processing what he’d just been told. Ninety percent of the time calls to the duty mobile to announce an unscheduled absence were accompanied by excuses weaker than a bubblegum elevator cable. Thomas was in uncharted waters here. Plainly he was trying to get back on track.
“Um. Ellie. Your…partner, Ellie…and…I’m sorry, not sure I caught the second-?”
“Luke. My baby son.”
“Oh…” and now there was genuine puzzlement in the fucker’s voice. Somehow, Danny wasn’t surprised. He’d been stalking the office floor enough times when he and Cal and Alice had been chatting across the desks, and God knows since Luke had been born Danny had been entertaining the other two with horrific tales of fatherhood’s sleepless nights, but to Thomas, all of this would have been so much white noise; all he was interested in was that where there should have been constructive work-related conversation, there was instead idle banter.
“Right. Okay. Um. If they come back before lunch, will you be in this afternoon, d’you thi-”
Click.
When he’d taken several deep breaths to steady himself and quell the murderous urges, he found Steve standing in front of him, hopping from one foot to the other and clapping his hands together in what was probably supposed to be a decisive gesture, but only made him seem like a psychotic life coach moments before he retrieves the Uzi from his bag and begins motivating his students in a whole new and exciting way.
“Right,” he said. “I’ve brought the car. We’re going out.”
“Out?” Danny echoed. He understood the word but not the concept.
“Out. Out lookin. Have a wee drive round. Maybe you can think of a few places if you’re out and about you forgot to tell the police about.”
“I don’t want to leave the house. Just in case there’s a call or…”
Steve rolled his eyes. “Come on, lad. You’ll feel more useful getting’ out and about and fuckin’ doin’ somethin’ than sittin’ here on your hole feelin’ – what was it? – useless? Ready to tear yourself apart?”
He had a point, Danny had to admit. These four walls were so stuffed full of wee anecdotal memories that every time he entered and re-entered a room he felt a fresh jab of pain go right through him. He was tired of it. That was partly why it had been so fuckin’ therapeutic to get out of the place last night and flatten that garden once more. Trying to explain this to Steve did not meet with success, so he stopped trying.
“Sure if you’re worried about the home ‘phone goin’, ‘phone your Ma and get her to house-sit,” Steve suggested, when Danny had assented to the out and about plan, in theory at least.
In more jovial times Danny might have been tempted to ask this helpful person before him chock full of good ideas who he was and what he had done with his best friend. As it was he simply nodded. He grabbed his coat and made as if to put it on and caught Steve’s expression.
“What?”
“Look mate, not that I’m questioning your particular method of stress relief in a crisis,” Steve said, holding his hands up to ward off any comebacks. “But um…d‘you think you might go up and have a wee shower before we head off…?”
***
Steve drove like Steve talked - quickly, a little aimlessly, and pausing every so often to emit a loud fuck in someone’s general direction. Danny couldn’t be too harsh though, because at least his friend could drive; he’d been all set to start his first driving lessons, had even started saving a few quid here and there with an eye on acquiring himself a wee runabout, and then…well, a blue line had appeared, or not appeared, or appeared twice (he could never remember which) and driving had…gone away, the same way a lot of other things had gone away.
His Ma had waved them off not five minutes ago, promising to ring if any news came through. Christ, she’d looked gaunt; Danny had guessed - correctly - that she hadn’t had a wink of sleep the previous night. He’d had a flash of guilt over not asking her to stay over with him the night before, but he knew rightly what would have ensued - them all sitting in the living room, glancing at the telephone, trying to talk about anything but Ellie and Luke and eventually crumbling and engaging in a long sob-fest.
He couldn’t have handled that. Besides, it would have deprived him of his nervous breakdown in the middle of the night with a side order of hallucination. Wouldn’t that have been a tragedy.
She’d stopped talking about Luke altogether, he noticed. When the Issue had been mentioned this morning, it had been in reference to Ellie only. He didn’t comment on it. She was making the assumption that news about Ellie was news about Luke as well, no doubt. Danny’s own mind shied away from any other eventuality like a scalded cat.
They slid to a stop at a red light only a few streets away from Regent Street. The hazy plan was to crisscross the estate and its surrounding estates, on the off chance (and it was an extremely off-chance) that either one of them would spot anything or see something. Quite what the fuck that ‘something’ was meant to be Danny hadn’t a clue, but he had to admit, just being in a car moving along wasn’t completely horrible. A moving car implied an end destination.
“So,” Steve said, and Danny sighed, for he knew immediately that this was The Talk.
“So?”
“Um…how were things with you and-”
“My Da already tried this with me, lad,” Danny cut him off neatly, making a show of looking out the window as if for the mystic clue they were supposedly seeking. “Don’t make me use the same language on you I used on him. I like you.”
“Fella in work a few weeks back was telling me about his cousin – came home one day and his wife had taken off with some Internet fucker. Moved to Belleek. Belleek, fucks sake! You’d think it’d at least be somewhere like New York.“
I’m not cut out for this. I need my freedom back. And you’ve come to represent everything that’s holding me back in my life. I’ve tried to be a husband. Tried to be a father. I’ve pretended until I can’t pretend any more and it’s not fair. Not fair on you, on Danny. Not fair on me.
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