Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  * * *

  It might be sunny outside, but to us there’s shadows and rain all over the fucking place. Me ma came in just now and asked us what I wanted for me tea. I goes shepherd’s pie, peas, chips, bread and butter. She said right, buckethead, that’s your starters sorted, so what do you want for your mains? Least, I wish that’s what happened. I can make them come to me, the daydreams, if I close me eyes and I’m alone in a silent room. Everything’s clear in me head, what she smells like (she wears this perfume called Charlie), what she’s wearing – sometimes she’s got a button missing on her cardi or her necklace has twisted, the one she liked best with all the tiny conch shells on it – and the way she’s got her hair; but her voice and her face won’t form. I look at it and it kind of mists over, as if she’s too shy to let us see it. I know why that is. It’s not ’cos she’s shy or me imagination is letting us down. I know what Ma looks like. I carry her with us wherever I go. It’s because she… it’s the way she…

  Turn and face.

  Mr Tones’ voice in me head. Good name, Mr Tones, for a PE teacher. I liked him. He was a Scouser like us. Was. What a divvy. Still is. Once a Scouser, always a Scouser. I bunked off whenever we did cross-country or 1500 metres. If you’re fourteen, you shouldn’t be doing cross-country. And I was only two at the time. That kind of lark is for spindly old bastards with digital watches and beards wearing shiny shorts that go right up your crack. I think he knew, but he never said nowt. Everything else I liked. Football most, of course. There’s a bit of football in every Liverpudlian’s blood. Tonesy said to us once, he said, ‘If I had your left foot, I’d be playing for Manchester United.’

  ‘I’m not that shite, am I, sir?’ I said and everyone fell about laughing.

  I played left-wing, John Barnes, me. I took everyone on, made them look like cunts. Tonesy said I could ghost past players. I liked the sound of that. But I could move, too. ‘Skin him,’ Tonesy would shout if I just had the right back to beat and press on the gas and, see yer mate, have a nice time down there on yer arse with all the other worms. Then cross the ball in with the sweet left foot for Connie or Wez or Warbo to nut in. Either that or bury it meself. Leather it. No chance, ’keeper. Pick that one out.

  End of every attack, Tonesy calling out to us, Turn and face, and as one we’d twist round so we were facing the ball, back-pedalling, keeping our eyes on the ball every moment. A new start, a new play. Find your man. Mark him. Keep your eye on the ball. Never look away.

  I don’t know what her voice was like. I lie awake at night sweating over that. I wish she could have recorded her voice for posterity. It kills us to think that I’ll never know how her laughter sounded. Looking at her picture, well, you just can’t tell from the look of her, can you?

  If I’d been old enough to go to a school where the kids were old enough to know how to be cruel, I’d probably have been called Dads, ’cos I seemed to have had more than me fair share of them. I don’t remember any specifically, but Ma’s diaries say it all. She wasn’t a slut, me mother, and anyone says she was’ll find themselves grinning through a second gob, she was just a lonely mare in search of company. They flitted in and out of her life like restless cats, staying for no longer than a few months. Her emotions were all fucked up, though. She was clingy, making demands that they couldn’t deal with. She recognised this and wrote about it in her diary. The entries start off neatly enough, the handwriting resting on the faint lines on the paper, but it isn’t long before the words start jagging about, becoming crushed just to fit on the page, the margins crammed, the sentences loaded with swear words and question marks. It’s hard to believe that she would go to work and spend the day with a classroom of kids, like a completely different person, being as breezy as I know she was, open and friendly to her pupils and colleagues. I’ve seen the cards they sent her, wrapped up in tissue paper and tied off with ribbon. They all loved her. There wasn’t a single person who came into her life who didn’t love her, for a while, for at least a little bit. Except…

  Turn and face.

  * * *

  He made it to the telephone kiosk at Manor House a couple of minutes before the appointed time. The night had further defined itself during his journey underground; only a palest stripe of dark blue under the black indicated that daylight had ever had anything to do with this broken place. The traffic on the Seven Sisters Road was ugly and fast: grubby white vans; sleek, executive cars driven by scowling faces, erratically steered Volvos. The cars slowed down for the speed cameras, and then tore away. It was a relief to get away from the sound of howling engines when the phone in the kiosk rang. He closed the door behind him and picked up the receiver. –‘Don’t talk,’ the voice says, the same voice, ‘just listen. I am not happy about your being here. I don’t think it’s a good idea. I know you believe you’re up to it. You’re clean, simple and fast. And I like the sound of that. I know you’ve grown. I know you’re impatient. But I can deal with this. I don’t want you harmed. I will not allow that to happen, my sweet. But, for now, I have something for you to do. I have someone.’ She passes on an address and the name of the target. –‘I’ll watch you every step of the way.’ And then the line goes dead. The Wire – the Four-Year-Old – steps into the noise and chill once more. He’s feeling the gentle curve of the combat knife against his thigh and can almost imagine the quilted Micarta handle in his fingers, so familiar that it’s like a part of his hand. He feels clumsy without the weapon. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t own one.

  * * *

  Me memories feel false, as made-up as the words in a book. But they say that even the most wildly imagined novels have a bit of truth in them, bits of a lived life tucked in by the author, little grains that give the feeling of truth to the whole thing. I was four when she died (no, I was one, remember, I was only one when she died) but, through the diaries and the few photographs of her that I’ve got, I feel as if I’ve known her for much longer.

  We lived in a quiet little two-up-two-down. She looked after us well. I know this because I’ve still got all the clothes she bought us when I was a baby. Ironed, folded up and stored in a big suitcase. They have me name stitched into the collars and waistbands. Also, in her diary, during calm times, she wrote notes to us, or else poems. On the date of me birth – 29th February 1996 – she’d glued a picture of us, a few days old, and drawn a big red love heart next to it. When I got older, old enough to start looking after meself, I met up with a few of the men who spent a little time with her, got to know her through them. I never held a grudge against them. It wasn’t their fault they couldn’t bear me ma’s strange moods.

  One of them I got on with all right. His name was Neil Lever, a bloke who used to work in a chip shop in New Brighton when he was seeing her, the last person to be with me mother before she topped herself. He thought I’d tracked him down because I wanted to kick his head in. He cowered away from us in this little Wirral pub, where they served beer called Wobbly Bob and people sat outside eating lunch: plates of what the menu called chilli con carne but what I knew had come out of a tin and had a bit of curry powder mixed up with it. I’d seen their kitchens, and nothing gets past me.

  Lever thought I thought he’d driven her to it. I liked the feeling that gave us, his cowering away from us, but I told him I wasn’t there for any aggro. I just wanted to hear about me ma. Once he could see I didn’t want any money out of him, and that the only thing I was happy banging on the counter was an empty pint glass, he opened up a bit and told us about the few months he’d spent with her.

  * * *

  The target was within walking distance: Amhurst Park. It was a large road, but it seemed to be used as little more than a rat-run. Cars screeched along it from the Seven Sisters Road, or Stamford Hill, and bombed past squat blocks of flats masked with scaffolding and brick nets, crumbling synagogues and masses of fat black bin bags. He walked quickly past a large queue of people at the bus stop, who were more interested in what might or might not be comin
g along the road than noticing who he was. And that was good. He felt comfortable among people, in the thick of them, because they tended not to pay him much attention. He had something grey about him, something bland, despite his physicality: he could blend into his background. The address emerged among the hedges on his right, a Victorian terrace set back off the road. A gravel forecourt was packed with a variety of cars: a Ford Cougar, a Rover 25, a Golf GTi plastered with dead leaves and sap from the lime trees, a black and red TVR that looked as if it hadn’t been driven for years. He skipped up the steps to the front door and casually glanced around at the main road and the people on the street. There was a fat guy washing a Citroën Xsara but, bar the speeding cars, the rest of the street wasn’t too busy. Kids playing with a wheel rim in a vacant parking space. A dog checking out the smells in an overgrown garden. The Four-Year-Old was protected by the screen of hedges, and by the trees, ready to do his best, and his worst.

  He pressed the button for Number 18, but there was no reply and that was good too; that made things that little bit easier. He tried the buzzer to the ground-floor flat, the curtains of which were twitching. A woman with a scratchy voice answered. –‘It’s Dave,’ said the Wire. ‘I locked myself out. Can you let me in?’–‘Dave? Hang on.’ He watched the woman unlock her door and peer out at him from the communal landing. He smiled and shrugged, all sweetness and light. She was wearing a threadbare dressing gown with more stains than material on it, and her hair was mussed and matted. She moved slowly towards the front door, her limbs swollen and bent like a child’s drawing of an old person. But this woman could not have been that old. She moved into the light and he saw she was quite young, perhaps only in her late thirties. Her back was hunched and her legs moved stiffly, as if she was walking on stilts. She fumbled at the lock with pink claws. Seriously, seriously fucked. –‘What flat are you?’ she asked. –‘Nineteen. I moved in a couple of weeks ago.’ –‘Oh, right. People move in and out here so quickly these days,’ she droned on. ‘I’ve been here ten years, and I won’t be going anywhere else.’ She got the door open finally and he pushed past her towards the stairs. ‘Listen,’ she continued, ‘if I gave you something to sign, a petition for a handrail to go outside, would you sign it for me? I’ve got MS. It’s a swine getting up them steps. They’ll do it if enough people sign.’ –‘No problem,’ said the Wire. She smelled of sour alcohol and stale cigarette smoke. Lipstick made her look tragically clownish. He said: ‘You wouldn’t have a metal coat-hanger by any chance, would you?’

  On the top floor, there were two flats. He listened at the door of Number 19 for a moment, but there was only silence, nobody home. It took just under a minute, with the coat-hanger through the letterbox at 18, before he caught the latch. Inside, he allowed the flat’s smells and sounds to sink into him. He stood at the doorway of each room, assessing their contents, memorising them: the kitchen with its piles of dirty dishes and takeaway food cartons. The Jordan calendar on the wall above an empty bottle of Woodpecker cider and an ashtray crammed with scorched roaches. The living room with its battered La-Z-Boy, the 36-inch Mitsubishi widescreen, the pile of videos: Dr Fellatio’s Marathon Suck-Off, Bukkake Blow-Out, Ring Driller 2000. The deck of cards on a coffee table sticky with beer and grease. The bathroom with its unflushed toilet, its veins of green, cracked sinks and dripping taps. He worked out the routes that its owner might take every morning, trying to absorb the sordid rituals that took place here in the flat. He became the flat. He became the ghost of the person who moved through it.

  After an hour, he shifted to the bedroom and peered under the bed. Porn magazines, football boots, a wedge of fossilised mushroom pizza. There was a thick layer of dust under there too. He found the Hoover and cleaned it out. Then he slid underneath and waited. On a job, he always wore soft leather trainers with a specially softened sole, the cleats melted smooth with a cook’s blowtorch. He never wore jeans because the rivets might scratch against the wood on bare floorboards, like the ones in here. Moleskin trousers instead. Soft cotton or woollen jackets. No nylon. No leather. To be dangerous, you had to dress like a baby; you had to be soft.

  He stared at the underside of the mattress for seven hours, thinking of the voice, of the woman. He thought of how she had promised him protection, when he felt he could offer her the same thing, even though he was ten years younger than her. Yet he was no child, and he did not want her to deny him the reason for his coming here. Not when he had waited so long, and channelled his every waking moment into preparing for it. He supposed she played this game because, deep down, he needed her to. He needed that game to make him feel as though he wasn’t really there, as though he were a character in a film: real, but imaginary and therefore untouchable. She had played it with him since the off, and she played the game well. He didn’t know her real name. And he half suspected that she didn’t, either. He has always had to find one for her. It helped. It helped that he was involved in the issue of her identity. Again, it made him feel less there. Like a spirit. A ghost. And now, listening hard, there came the key in the lock. He didn’t move for another three hours while his target heated something that shivered in plastic in the microwave, then watched the blunt, brutal sluicings of hard inside soft on his TV. He remained a statue, the Wire, for an hour after the target slipped into bed. Had a wank. Swore at some guy who made his day go badly. Winding down. The weird unquiet of sleep. And then the Wire moved. In the darkness, he moved with the speed and grace of something that has never known anything but.

  * * *

  The men in her life. All the fucking men. The sounds I had to put up with, the banging and the moaning and the pillow-screams. All of it coming through that thin wall like remembered nightmares. They never fucking stopped an all, even if I went in to her to tell her I was scared, or couldn’t sleep. The men would look round at me from where they had her jackknifed over the corner of the bed, and they’d mouth at me to fuck off away. Naked bodies glistening with sweat. Tattoos that looked glossy with it, as if they might just slide off their skin. Red faces and bunched muscles. Pudding guts. Gritted teeth and stubble. Grunting. All this grunting. Sounds of pain. The eyes narrowed and furious. And they call it making love? Making hate more like. I’d go and pour meself some milk and I’d hear them blow their wads and then the jangle of belts soon after, as they hurried to be dressed and out of it. No cuddles in the moonlight. No ‘There, there’. No breakfast in bed for these cunts. The slam of the door and the moans didn’t stop. It was like listening to a hard wind testing the weak spots of a house, trying to find a way inside. I’d take me milk into her room and she’d be this pile of tits and tissues. How do you come back from all that? The numbers of men increasing but the need for affection never going away, never having its edges rubbed smooth. Where do you turn when what ought to be working doesn’t? What else is there but the need to try to find an echo of that first one: the man who planted the seed of love in her heart. The bastard. The fucking bastard. At least the cunts that followed were honest enough. All they wanted was a bit of slit. No promises. True grit. Kitchen sink. Not him, though. Not that sorry twat.

  Where are the real men? she’d ask me, her eyes glassy with gin. I could see him in their wetness, a memory she clung to like a wish never shared. He’ll come back. It was all over her expression. He’ll come back. Where have they gone? Or are they all just hiding from me?

  * * *

  He was sitting on a bench, playing the game, trying not to look at too many people but trying to guess which one it might be. It was a bright afternoon, very cold, with the sun pale and unformed in the sky, struggling to gain altitude. He rubbed his hands together to keep them warm, to keep them ready, always ready, and took in the scene unfolding around him. There was a number of office workers in their suits and smart skirts, trying to fit their mouths around overloaded sandwiches while reading magazines, Heat and Look and Now, or broadsheet newspapers that were like origami tests – papers you needed a map to help you read. A woman in a tra
cksuit, with an orange sweatband keeping her hair out of her eyes, leaned against the park railings, her hands behind her back, face tilted up towards the sun. A man in a yellow reflective bib swept up dead leaves and litter from the pavement, nudging people’s feet aside so he could get at the crap under the benches. As he did this to the Four-Year-Old, there was no accompanying eye contact. So did that mean he was actually the one, or not? Wire waited, but the dustman moved on. He didn’t mind that much. It was important that such episodes were subtle. He was the blunt end, the inflicter of damage. The woman had to be the cunning one, the sweet, cool and calculated one. It wasn’t all about putting your target down. The planning had to be keen and correct; he himself merely signed off the blueprints. He rolled them up and put them into a tight tube and sealed them away for ever.

  ‘Is anybody sitting here?’ The woman startled him, and that wasn’t good. He had to make sure that never happened again, but he chewed hard on his panic and tried to gather some control.

  ‘You,’ he said, chummily, ‘if you get a wiggle on.’ He waited for her to say something, offer him something more but, after sitting down, all she seemed interested in was her apple and her book.

  He watched a group of schoolgirls move across the square, awkward and gangly in their grey jumpers and black skirts. At the same time, a man carrying a Budgens shopping bag emerged from Conway Street and approached him. This time; it had to be this time. How long must he wait? His view of the shopper was intercepted by the schoolgirls as one of them leaned towards the bin to drop in an empty crisps packet. The Four-Year-Old kept his beady on the man, craning his neck to see around the girl, but he had already strolled on, swapping his shopping to the other hand, then dragging a handkerchief from his pocket to blow his nose. The Wire looked down at his hands and, there was an envelope resting on the bench, by his thigh. The schoolgirl didn’t look his way again until she and her friends were almost on the other side of the square. By then her face was nothing but a pink blob framed by light brown hair, a ponytail coming to rest on her shoulder. Nice. Clever. He liked it. Subtle.