The Bad Fire

by Campbell Armstrong

  Drone drone. Insult insult. Billy held the handset away from his ear. His father’s voice sounded like a gnat trapped in a bottle. Jesus Christ, Billy had spent his whole life listening to Larry carping at him. You’re a useless waste of space, Billy, you’ll amount to nothing.

  Bitter old git. Never a kind word.

  Billy said, ‘I’ll be back before the TV gets delivered.’

  ‘What TV?’

  ‘I told you about it yesterday and the day before that.’ What was the point? The old man rarely remembered anything from one day to the next except to insult his son. His brain was a decaying sponge in a bowl of stale fluid. ‘A new TV is coming, Dad. Digital.’

  ‘Digiwhat?’

  ‘Christ. We went through all this.’ Billy killed the line before he lost his patience entirely.

  Larry would assume that the sudden disconnection was a flaw in the cellphone, even though Billy wasn’t using one. Sometimes Billy found the unpredictability of cellphones a useful ploy. Just went dead, Dad. Must have gone out of range. He often escaped Larry’s abuse by severing the connection. Larry didn’t understand cellphones anyway. In fact, he’d been so unhappy since the country had converted to decimal currency that he’d never used a public telephone after they stopped accepting the old-style pennies and the big black coin boxes had been removed.

  When can I expect you? When indeed. Billy didn’t want to leave this penthouse. He wanted to sit here with the slatted blinds drawn and never go anywhere again.

  The girl came back and poured some coffee. ‘Want any more, Billy?’

  ‘Fill me up,’ he said.

  The girl poured into his cup. Then she sat down and stoked up her little hash pipe. She inhaled deeply before offering him the pipe, which he declined. She looked very stoned. Her eyes were two damp rubies. Billy studied her face, which was pretty in an emaciated way.

  Leila had some story about how she was working her way flat on her back through university, and Billy believed it. He liked to believe most things, because all he ever wanted was an easy passage through life; no bloody traffic cones.

  He wanted simplicity.

  But now he was on a slip-road he didn’t like at all, and he wasn’t sure what lay ahead or even the direction he was meant to be taking. In the beginning it had been straightforward. A little tricky, but most deals had an element of risk. You expected that. What you didn’t expect was a participant getting himself killed along the way –

  Shot in the face. Awful.

  And way out of Billy McQueen’s league. This is what comes of consorting with hard criminal types.

  A stern voice in his head said, Cut your losses and run, Billy.

  Run where precisely?

  The smell of hash was strong. He got up, opened a window. Very thin sunlight was rising over the city. He didn’t like that. He wanted the dark to last a long time because it was comforting. Now Leila, doped to the deepest recesses of her brain, had begun to chatter. She spoke ramblingly of her affection for wire-haired terriers, her fear of death by suffocation and Ronald Reagan’s role in The Killers – there seemed to be some political point in what she had to say about this movie that escaped Billy McQueen.

  Billy couldn’t just sit here and listen to a stoned girl rambling on about nothing. He didn’t have time for that. He grabbed the handset of the telephone and jabbed the number pad with a fingertip.

  The voice that answered was quiet, almost a whisper. ‘Gurk.’

  McQueen said, ‘Look, I know events have taken, uh, an unexpected turn. But who could have foreseen anything like this?’

  The man called Gurk was silent for a while. Something about Gurk troubled McQueen. Even the name. Gurk. Sounded like the noise made by an air bubble popping in a waste-disposal unit clogged with custard.

  ‘I was meditating, man,’ Gurk said. He was black with a London accent, East End or close to it. ‘I don’t like being interrupted when I meditate.’

  McQueen imagined Gurk sitting bare-chested in a hotel room. He wondered if Gurk was running on all four wheels along the cerebral highway, or if he had a misaligned axle. All this meditation, his strange utterances, his talk of transcendence and harmony and the music of the spheres and what have you – it made McQueen, a lapsed Presbyterian, deeply uneasy.

  ‘You got any news for me, Billy?’

  ‘Emm, no, not yet.’

  Gurk said, ‘Too bad. Here’s the bottom line, Billyboy. You and your friend Mallon got something that belongs to me and my associates, and we’ll expect it returned unless the deal is done and dusted.’

  ‘Well, naturally,’ McQueen said. ‘But Mallon –’

  ‘Yeh. Well. That’s tragic. Fella gets shot. But it’s not my problem, Billy. The world turns. We go through cycles.’

  Cycles? Billy wondered. ‘I’ll arrange to return my commission. No problems there. And I’ll cooperate with you any way you like.’

  ‘I know, I know. You’re a man of honour.’

  ‘My reputation’s excellent.’

  ‘A man who tells you his reputation is excellent is using himself as a character reference,’ Gurk said. ‘I’d be very careful of a man like that. We need to meet.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Call me back in an hour,’ Gurk said. ‘And don’t think about buggering off, old son. Confucius say one-legged man never gets very far.’

  McQueen heard the connection click.

  Leila was chattering about Lee Marvin in Point Blank and whether the character he played, a guy called Walker, was actually dead or alive. In one sense, Leila remarked, the film might be construed as the tale of a vengeful ghost.

  ‘It’s a fucking gangster film,’ Billy said.

  ‘Ah, but only on one level, Billy. That movie has layers, man. Like strata.’ She sucked her hash pipe and segued into a story she’d heard about a headless man alleged to be roaming the streets of Castlemilk, a housing scheme in the distant south of the city. Kids had reported sightings.

  ‘Urban myth,’ Billy said.

  ‘Ah, but what gave birth to it? How did it get started?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue, Leila.’

  ‘I have theories,’ she said.

  ‘Do you mind keeping them to yourself, hen?’ Billy reached for her hand. ‘See, I’m not clever like you, love. And who wants to be casting pearls before swine, eh?’

  She gazed at him fondly. ‘Am I too smart for you, Billy?’

  ‘You’re so far beyond me it’s like I’m sunk in a trench and you’re way up there in the bloody stratosphere.’

  ‘I’m flying high,’ she said.

  ‘Bully for you. I’m up to my neck in shite and sinking.’

  15

  Eddie Mallon woke at first light. He was stiff from his spine-crunching sleep on the sofa. He rose slowly, rummaged inside his bag, finding toothbrush, toothpaste and comb. He left the room, guessed correctly that the frosted glass-panelled door across the hallway led to the toilet. He doused his face in warm water, brushed his teeth, ran the comb through hair that had always been too thick and springy to discipline.

  He looked at himself in the mirror: sweet Christ, it was like seeing a younger Jackie Mallon just for a moment, a shade gazing back at him from the glass. It startled him, as if he’d stepped through the mirror into some other universe where the dead were resurrected.

  Time zones and bad sleep, he thought.

  He dried his face and went inside the kitchen. There was a note on the table with a Yale key placed on it. Joyce had scribbled: Here’s your key. If you wake before me, don’t wake me. Appreciated. Love J. He stuck the key in a pocket of his jeans, opened the refrigerator. He found a half-empty bottle of Chablis, a bunch of puckered black grapes, eggs, a can of Irn-Bru, a slab of cheese and a bruised orange. He plucked some grapes and opened the drink and sat at the table. Early light had begun to suffuse the backs of the sandstone tenements visible from the kitchen window. Brick changed from grey-black to red-brown as the sun rose. Pigeons flew among the tall chimne
y stacks.

  He finished the drink and the last of the grapes. He left the flat and went down the stone staircase and out into the street where the colour of the sky awed him, because it wasn’t a city sky thick with smoke and smog, it was limpid and sea-blue. Something unusual had happened to the weather here, a strange inversion, as if all the sun destined for the Mediterranean had gathered over Glasgow for a couple of days, creating this rarity.

  He walked to the corner of Ingleby Drive and Whitehill Street then turned left and went south in the direction of Duke Street, a route that would take him past his old school. I must have come this way a thousand times, he thought. On either side of him the tenements were silent. Soon alarm clocks would rouse people and the day’s outpouring of life begin, men and women rushing to their cars or hurrying to board crowded buses, children beginning another day of the long summer holidays.

  Eddie could already sense heat building. He thought: All this was home once. These buildings, these streets and intersections, the school just ahead to his right.

  He stopped suddenly. Where was the damn school?

  That formidable 1890s dark red stone edifice, which had seemed so indestructible, had been demolished and now only the segregated entrance gates stood, one marked Boys, the other Girls; and where the school had been was a deep green forest of thistle and nettle and dock leaf and thorn. Shocked, Eddie stared into this density of foliage. You turn a corner, you expect a familiar landmark – but it’s gone, the world has altered. This was the school he’d attended for almost two years before flight had been forced upon him. He remembered the narrow staircases, the classrooms, the toilets where everybody learned to smoke.

  The disappearance of the school was one less thing to hook him to his boyhood. He wished he could blink his eyes and magic it back into existence if only for a minute, and see kids crossing the yard and the wind blowing scraps of paper into the bicycle shed. He wished he could see again the pretty brown-haired girl he’d fallen in love with at the age of thirteen: Dorothy, the name came back so easily. How miserable and how ecstatic that first love had been. This is how the heart works, young Eddie: welcome to the House of Paradox.

  On a cold black winter afternoon in Alexandra Parade, she’d kissed him and he’d tasted sugar on her lips. He’d experienced his first real erection, and she must have felt it too, but it was a wonderful shared intimacy more than an embarrassment, and it added to the intensity of his love for her. Where was she now? in a middle-aged marriage? did she live in this city still? He had a sudden urge to see her, as if he might retrieve by looking at her the ferocious sensation of that kiss, that moment –

  What the hell was he thinking? She was gone, a casualty of time. She’d drifted into the same slipstream that carried everything and everyone away. Eddie Mallon, 13, had been ferried off in the same spate as Dorothy McCallum. And drowned.

  He continued to move, passed the corner of Roslea Drive. Nearby, in Hillfoot Street, there had been a snooker hall called Dan’s that you reached by going along a dank narrow corridor, and he’d sneaked into it a few times to watch older kids stick coloured balls across green baize under lamps where cigarette smoke billowed. It was daring to enter this musty demi-monde. But the pool-hall would be gone by now, turned into something else. Bingo, he imagined. A video arcade. He didn’t want to look to be certain.

  He crossed Duke Street, the main thoroughfare that ran east-west in a long straggle of tenements and small shops. A few early buses blew foul smoke, a bakery van made a delivery of morning rolls to a store, newspapers lay stacked and twined outside a newsagent’s door.

  He stopped. He had a strange feeling, as if somebody had just touched his back lightly in a sensitive spot; it was shivery, and he couldn’t attribute it to anyone because there was nobody within a hundred yards of him. Somebody walking on your grave, Eddie. More buses passed, a couple of lorries, passenger cars; he caught a tick-ticking sound, a metallic tapping, maybe a car with a flaw in its engine.

  He walked a couple of blocks then turned right into Bluevale Street. There was something new in the skyline, two tall concrete high-rise towers that resembled architecture he’d seen in photographs of old Communist countries, a suburb of Moscow or Minsk. The towers, drab and lifeless, had an oppressive quality.

  He reached the warehouse at the foot of the street. The doors and windows were steel-shuttered and splattered with freaky Technicolor graffiti, and the enigmatic sign ‘J MALLON, TRADER’ needed a coat of paint. Trader: Jackie had chosen a description of his occupation that could mean almost anything. Eddie walked to the high wire fence that protected the open-air yard where the overflow from the warehouse was stored.

  He saw a sign: BEWARE OF GUARD DOGS. He hooked his fingers into the wire and gazed at the stock: weathered bricks taken from dismantled chimneys, old sinks and cisterns, bird baths, rolls of chicken wire, rusted wheelbarrows, broken tools that had served no apparent purpose. He also saw a large white delivery van, a Mercedes with the name J MALLON on the side panel and the address of the warehouse.

  He found himself wondering if Jackie’s killer had ever come down Bluevale Street, on foot or in a car; if the killer had ever gazed through the wire fence and watched Jackie in the yard; if Jackie’s murderer had tracked his victim and created a timetable of the old man’s movements and knew where to locate him for the purpose of assassination – but that implied premeditation. That meant Jackie had been marked for death. I want to believe it was utterly random, Eddie thought. Jackie was killed in the course of a robbery that went wrong, an innocent party.

  He imagined this. The killer says, I want your wallet.

  And Jackie replies, Fuck off.

  And then a struggle, hand to hand, a gunshot more accidental than intentional –

  A dog barked from the yard, but there was no sign of the animal. I played here, Eddie thought. This was my kingdom. He gazed for a while, half-expecting Jackie to come out of the warehouse and cross the yard.

  A man appeared and walked between the clutter towards the fence and stopped about twenty feet from Eddie. Sunlight made gold discs out of the man’s glasses. He was in his early sixties and stooped and he wore a navy-blue warehouseman’s coat with big breast pockets stuffed with pens.

  I know this man, Eddie Mallon thought. What the hell was his name?

  ‘You looking for something? You a reporter?’

  ‘I’m Eddie Mallon.’

  ‘Eddie Mallon? You? No way. You’re kidding.’ The man whipped off his glasses, came a few steps closer. ‘Eddie Mallon. In the name of Christ! So you are! Wee Eddie. Bloody hell. I wouldn’t have recognized you in a hundred years. Look at the height of you! Jesus Christ almighty.’

  The name came to Eddie. ‘You’re Joe Wilkie.’

  ‘The very same Joe Wilkie that used to chase you out of here when we had a shipment coming in and we didn’t want wee boys underfoot and getting squashed.’

  Eddie lowered his hands from the fence. He realized he’d been gripping the wire tightly and it had left indentations on his fingers. He was tense without fully grasping why: this place so resonant with Jackie’s life, so stuffed with reminders of his own boyhood, unsettled him.

  Wilkie said, ‘I’ll unlock the doors and you can come inside and I’ll make a cup of tea.’

  He opened the gate in the fence and Eddie stepped through. Together, they entered the warehouse which smelled as it had always done, of rust and mildew and bird droppings. The ceiling was high and dark, pigeons infested the shadows, and shit covered whole areas like calcium deposits. In the poor light of the big metal building, Eddie saw Jackie’s inventory in dim outline, the statues, stone columns, urns; it might have lain undisturbed for thirty years.

  Suddenly a dog bounded out of the shadows, a massive Alsatian that circled Eddie and snarled, until Joe Wilkie said, ‘Sit, Chet. Sit sit sit … Good boy,’ and he thumped the dog’s body with the flat of his hand a couple of times, and the pacified Alsatian slunk off to lie down a few yards away.r />
  ‘He’s all sound and fury,’ Joe said. ‘What are you, Chet? A right pussycat, eh? I always call my dogs after jazzers. Remember that? Chet Baker. The Alsatian before that was Lockjaw, after Eddie Lockjaw Davis. Then I had one I called Basie before Lockjaw. Oh, aye, and I had a Thelonious once too.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a Django?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘Django, aye, you’re right. What a memory. He was a fierce bastard. I’d forgotten about him.’

  Wilkie went inside the office, a small cubicle marked PRIVATE. Eddie followed, conscious of the dog’s unbroken stare. Joe Wilkie plugged an electric kettle into the wall; the gas ring that had been used in the past was history. And so was the paraffin heater, replaced by an electric fire. The desk was the same – massive, strewn with invoices and phone messages on a long metal spike. The telephone was a clunky old black Bakelite job.

  ‘No computer, I see,’ Eddie said.

  Joe Wilkie laughed. ‘The idea of Jackie in the age of the Internet defies understanding, Eddie. I had to beg him to buy a bloody electronic calculator two years ago …’ He opened a cupboard and took out a tin of tea bags and two china mugs.

  Eddie found a chair and sat. ‘It really hasn’t changed much.’

  ‘Not so many employees,’ Wilkie said. ‘There used to be four or five, now there’s only me and my son Ray, and we run the place between us. Jacks of all trades. Nightwatchmen. Drivers. Stocktakers. We do it all.’ Wilkie cleared phlegm from his throat and replaced his glasses. He sounded emotional. ‘Your dad … You ask yourself: what’s this bloody world coming to – but you don’t get any answers. Scum’s taken over everything.’

  ‘It’s no different anywhere else in the world,’ Eddie said, a feeble response to Wilkie’s remarks, yet all he could come up with.

  Joe Wilkie made tea, handed Eddie a mug. Eddie tasted the tea, which was hot and unsweetened.

  ‘Your dad was awful proud of you, Eddie,’ Wilkie said. ‘My son’s a cop in New York City, he’d say. He’d show a photo of you in uniform every chance he got. He kept it in his wallet. He never tired of it.’