Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  I was bypassing a door to my left, keeping my eye on the torch beam as it gradually intensified, its angle of attack rising as it met the hand that wielded it, when he did decide to move into the next room in the suite, directly in front of me, despite being able to see that there was nothing in there. I glimpsed him, not ten feet away, and stepped neatly to my right just as he turned the beam my way; I watched it fall across the space I’d just occupied. Again I followed his lead, matching his measured tread, my heart leaping like a barefooted punk in a mosh-pit full of broken glass, and I heard him sniff loudly as we bypassed each other, separated by a mere inch or two of wall.

  I gathered pace once I had jinked back on to the main corridor, knowing that he would be out of the suite before I reached the far end. He might not train the torch back along the route he’d already covered before arriving at the servants’ stairway, but then again he might. I was steeling myself to face the wash of light, to hear a strident voice calling after me, but it never came. Instead I found myself turning on to the main landing of the second floor of St Pancras Chambers. The sweeping staircase before me made the stairwell back home look like something borrowed from a Barbie doll’s house. Other corridors peeled off this floor, leading to suites and storerooms and function areas. They all seemed to contain yet more beams of light pushing through the darkness, so I skipped up another floor, hoping that Phythian was shy of security guards, too, and had done the same.

  I thought I saw something move, like a shadow that flirts with the periphery of your vision, at the end of the corridor opposite the top of the stairwell. I moved into it fast, because the landing was better illuminated than the corridors, thanks to the huge windows sucking in the lights from the main roads surrounding King’s Cross. Some of the rooms along this arm abutted the roof of the train shed. They were filled with damaged filing cabinets and desks, and they seemed to have been overlooked. In one, a table groaned under the weight of a prehistoric manual typewriter, so these rooms must have been used by hotel staff, presumably as their administrative offices. Perhaps no guest would tolerate a view of the train-shed roof, or the constant clamour that went on beneath it, so maybe these rooms would end up being part of the staff headquarters, and therefore didn’t need to be improved as urgently as the others.

  The last room on the left was the WC. A stained, cracked toilet bowl gaped as if in shock at some of the things it had witnessed over the years. Flyblown mirrors hung over sinks that bore the tracks of hard water dribbling from loose taps over a long period. The window above the urinals was open. A gangway beyond led to a metal stairway that crisscrossed the rising vault of the train shed, leading to its apex a hundred feet above the ground. The weather gods, in their wisdom, had decided that a session of sleet was in order; it now slanted in across the roof of the shed, propelled by a bitter wind. Sleet is the most miserable weather going: it can’t be arsed to wait till it’s cold enough to become snow, and it’s not wet enough to be proper rain. Every time you see it, your mouth goes south and your eyes garner the kind of weighed-down, pained look that often accompanies stomach cramps. I made a mental note to send that DJ who had promised pleasant weather something unpleasant in the post, then ducked through.

  I clambered on to the gantry and hurried across towards the shed itself. Spotlights picking out the clock tower provided a little ambient light for the shed roof, like a gleaming finger stroking the outermost curve. Outlined against this, Phythian was making his way up to one of the catwalks that led the entire length of the shed, extending to the furthermost point overhanging the converging tracks that, as soon as they had crossed a narrow bridge over York Street, split into numerous routes diverging out of the city.

  How desperate was this clown? Was he so intent on evading capture that he’d taken to living on rooftops like a fucking pigeon? I watched him until he disappeared beyond the crest of the arch, heading towards the opposite side of the shed. I followed, glad of the donkey jacket, but I could still feel the cold searing through me, sleet stinging my face. When I got to the brow of the roof, where he had slipped out of sight, I was able to see him a couple of hundred feet away, crouching down on his haunches and staring out at the night sky. Liverpool lay in that direction: a home and a hell for the both of us. He remained as still as a bit of architecture, a gargoyle waiting for time and the weather to erode him.

  I kept my hand inside the jacket as I approached, loosely clasped around the hammer. I couldn’t see the blade on him, but he wouldn’t have dropped it. It was with him like an extension, an extra finger for his hand, and every bit as familiar. I thought of the way Barry Liptrott had been carved apart, and any doubt I had that this kid wasn’t insane flew apart in my mind like tissue paper fed to a flame. Twenty feet away I spotted the remnants of a meal scattered next to a sleeping bag nailed into the framework enclosing the panels that comprised most of the roof. He was totally still, his hands empty, planted firmly on either side of his body. Dark shapes moved faintly underneath us like fish swimming at the bottom of a brackish pond.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, trying to come over all authoritative, but sounding like a boy at bollock-drop. I should have brought a clipboard. ‘Hey, this place is off limits to the public. You’re trespassing. We could have you arrested.’

  I wasn’t going to get an answer from him. That was okay. We both had plenty of time on our hands. I dumped the site-foreman voice and squeezed the handle of the hammer. I thought about how, only the day before, I was determined not to listen to his side of things. That I would simply jump in and do him before he could have a chance against me. But now he was right in front of me – a big, solid shape, yet somehow still possessing the stature of a child – I found my resolve fragmenting. He was what? Eighteen? He had a whole lifetime in front of him. And then the frozen, lizard-like part of my brain must have thawed a little, and I thought, he’s going down for life for multiple murder, so you might as well fuck him over anyway.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s cold. Let’s get inside. It’s over.’

  Quietly, but just audible above the slashing sleet, he said: ‘It isn’t over till I say so.’

  He knew my face.

  He knew my face, because I knew his. Some famished thing in the back of my head extended a claw that was holding the school photograph Don Banbury had shown me. Gemma Blythe smiling out of it, looking tired, looking like a teacher whose class is getting on top of her. Gemma, her voice broken and hoarse with tears, saying, Don’t leave me, Joel. How will I get by without my Sorry Boy? Don’t leave me, please. What about my babies? WHAT ABOUT MY BABIES?

  ‘You… Gemma?’ I said, but he rolled on to his back and flipped his legs over his head – agile, frighteningly agile for his size – before I could get the rest of it out. His feet were bare. I saw the knife only after it had ricocheted off the hard hat I was wearing, and slithered away down the curve of the roof. Now he was upon me and I was staggering back, trying to keep my footing on what was to me uncharted territory, and slippery with it, all the time trying to get the hammer clear of the pocket. The claw had become caught in the heavy, wet fabric.

  I jammed my arm up in between us and, though he was total calmness, economy of movement, focus, there was also madness in his eyes. I knew it would be dangerous to do so, but if I could unlock that frenzy, try to bait his rage, then I might survive.

  He was trying to get at my throat with his teeth.

  ‘I know you,’ I said. He laughed, not even expecting that himself; a rope bridge of saliva connected our faces for a couple of seconds. Everything slowed down: I saw each and every arrow of sleet lash into us, every wet explosion of it on our skin in acid-bright detail. The powder-white arc of light from the floods turned the outer edges of him into frost, left his centre an impenetrable black thing. I said, ‘I’ve wiped your arse.’

  The eye is the only part of the human body that does not alter in size throughout a person’s life. It possesses exactly the same dimensions from the first breath to the last. I kn
ew this fucker’s eyes – eyes now close enough for me to lick them.

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ I said. ‘She took her own life. I was well out of it by then. I had no idea. You want someone to blame, dig her up and stick your knife through what’s left of her. She’s to blame. She took her own life, and she took your life too.’

  He breathed on me and I almost folded with pity, with the horrific threat of love. I realised that, if things had turned out differently, I might have loved him. I remembered him as a baby, lalling happily in his cot, smiling up at me, his eyes brimming with complete trust. The smell of his scalp. The tiny hands, the fingers grabbing my hair, sometimes reaching out to touch my nose or my mouth with barely creditable tenderness and precision. There had been nothing evident in him then to turn him this way. No stains, regrets, grudges. All that was in him was the warmth of love and a blissfully simple routine of sleep and nourishment and play, and wondrous things viewed with large laughing eyes. He had been a happy baby, so what had gone wrong?

  I had gone wrong. His mother had gone wrong.

  I could almost smell milk on his mouth. His teeth didn’t yet know what a filling was.

  My woeful boots slipped on the glass panels and I went down, my other leg twisting awkwardly under me, the knee popping as if it had just opened a bottle of champagne. He actually winced at the sound. I screamed as I landed on my back, and the violence of it threw him off me. I rolled as he sprang back towards me, already on his feet. Again I tried for the hammer. It shifted a little, tearing the lining of the pocket. Sleet filled my eyes, slapped me awake.

  I lifted an arm, but could only partially parry the kick he aimed at my nuts. I felt the jag of pain cut through my groin. I was off-balance again. This time I tripped on one of the gangway rails and sprawled on to my back. I started sliding and the sky rolled like a few half twists on a kaleidoscope. I rammed my fingers into the roof’s curve but was rewarded only with a couple of torn fingernails. Another tug on the hammer and it ripped free, but I almost lost it as my arm jerked back. I tightened my grip and brought the claw down hard, felt myself jerk to a halt as it bit into one of the rubber seals edging the roof panels.

  Christ, what was wrong with me? I thought I was all right. I thought I could move okay, still pretty fit for a guy in his mid-thirties. I was no Premiership footballer, but then I wasn’t exactly a Sunday afternoon toe-poke either. Phythian was making me look like the last spaz to get picked for the school netball team.

  I levered myself upright and scrabbled back to an even footing, my kneecap feeling as if it had been replaced by an eggshell filled with molten lead. He’d retrieved his knife, and my cheek burned in recognition. I peeled off the hard hat and flung it at him. He volleyed it back over my head, showing me exactly what balance meant.

  We did the scorpion dance for a few beats, and the sleet eased off. I knew he knew he could take me, but he knew I wasn’t as easy as his other stiffs. There was no wallpaper up here. The light seemed to be intensifying. The wind too. I looked up and there was a police helicopter taking time out to watch the big fight. Someone was saying something through a loudhailer, but they might as well have been reciting The Lord’s Prayer in Welsh through a mouthful of blancmange, for all it meant.

  He came again. I ducked right but he followed it, anticipating my moves. He slashed out with the knife and its tip lightly nicked a part of my forehead above my left eye. Blood drizzled into it immediately and I backed off again, blinking madly. The arc of his arm movement helped bring his foot round, and he was raising it high, aiming for my throat. I was losing balance again, but for once I was grateful. His strategy was designed for someone who knew how to stay on his feet. As a result, he missed by a fair whack. I shifted my weight and brought my hand down hard as his foot sailed by my midriff. The claw of the hammer disappeared into the meat of his right ankle and I went down, my momentum dragging him with me. He didn’t make a sound. He slashed at me again as he jackknifed over my prostrate body, and the blade parted the fabric of the jacket over my heart and scored a line along my left forearm that was almost a caress. Then he plummeted over the edge of the roof and I tightened my grip on the handle as his weight yanked against it suddenly, massively. It was all I could do to slam my free hand hard against the rim of the shed roof, to prevent me joining him as human soup on platform number 7.

  ‘She died because you left her,’ he said, his voice incredibly calm, all things considered. ‘She was like a slow puncture after you left. She had no chance. No fucking chance. And me… I needed someone. I needed a dad. When you went, you ripped something out of me and took it with you. You stole something from me, you bastard. You fucking bastard.’

  The spotlight from the police helicopter was fixed on my hand. I had never seen the sinews and muscles distended like that, as if in extreme reaction to an electric shock. The skin of my fist was so taut and white that it looked as if it must soon tear. The handle of the hammer seemed fused to my fingers. Even so, it was slipping, a millimetre at a time. I edged forward, my free arm already shaking at the strain that was being asked of it, cramp shooting up and down my muscles as I gripped the lip of the roof. My foot found the sleeping bag and tucked itself underneath it, secured behind one of the nails that fastened it down. That helped, but not much.

  I looked down over the edge at him, dangling. I wanted to get my other hand down there, too, to grab him, and haul him up, but my balance was shot. If I moved, we were both fucked. Someone on the platform was screaming. The claw in his foot moved, pulling away from the meat slightly. Not long now. I told him about his mother, not knowing if he could hear me through the wind and the yells below him, and the clatter of the helicopter. It didn’t matter, because it wasn’t really for him. It was for me. I was still talking long after the claw had sucked itself free and my hand felt supernaturally light, as though, had I not been holding the hammer, it might have floated off into the night. I was still talking, whispering, crying, when the footsteps stopped behind me and firm hands landed on my shoulders. They felt so light, despite their rough grip. There was no longer anything there to weigh me down.

  20

  Two boys died that night. And I killed them both.

  I was in hospital for a week. Both the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments in my knee were ruptured. My jaw had a hairline fracture. I needed seventeen stitches in my cheek and three in my forehead. Two of the fingers in my left hand had been dislocated, and I had pulled the muscles in my arm every which way. The ligament in my groin was badly bruised. And my right wrist was broken. Phythian had fallen a hundred feet (a hundred and five feet one inch, according to the tabloids) straight through the roof of an empty train just in from Leeds. He was dead. To me, lying there, hurting when I pissed, he seemed better off.

  Mawker came to see me, on the second day.

  ‘Another hospital visit? People are going to talk.’

  ‘I could… Fuck me, Sorrell, I should arrest you right now.’

  ‘There’s a bottle of vodka in my bedside cabinet,’ I said, ‘hidden under a bag of magazines. Why don’t you get it out and let’s give both our mouths some time off?’

  He looked at me hard. ‘At least I’ve still got a mouth,’ he said. And then, with a dismissive sigh, he retrieved the Skyy. I took mine neat, he mixed a splash of orange squash in with his, the heathen.

  ‘What a sorry, fucking mess,’ he said, and he could have been talking about his drink. Or about my face. ‘You should be more careful who you shack up with.’

  ‘Thanks for that, Elizabeth fucking Taylor.’

  He told me that Phythian, whose real name was Steven Blythe (Steven, yes, yes, I now remembered), had been living at St Pancras for weeks, on the train-shed roof, under the platforms, in the bowels of the Renaissance hotel, or in its neighbouring acres of construction sites and the unknowable territories deep underground, where the tunnels of the Northern Line roamed.

  Mawker’s counterpart in Merseyside had worked with him on Phythian’s �
�� on Blythe’s – bedsit. The head that I had stumbled upon wasn’t Georgina Millen’s, as I had supposed. A DNA test nailed it as Gemma Blythe’s. That head that, once upon a time, I’d had in my lap. I’d had that mouth – that pulped and varnished and freeze-dried mouth – all over me at one time or another during our six-month romance. And Steven had missed her so much he had dug it up and given it pride of place in his crummy Liverpool bedsit. It must have been more of an incentive than any photograph of me.

  Georgina Millen’s head, and the rest of her, remained missing. It would turn up, though. They always did, eventually.

  Steven Blythe had me down as the reason his mother had killed herself. Because I’d meant something to her, but I hadn’t reciprocated. He was unbalanced enough to decide that nothing else mattered. We hadn’t been right for each other, but all he saw was my rejection of her, and therefore my rejection of him. And all those people had been killed or damaged in his need to resurrect her, and put me where she had gone. He was trying to wipe out the people on that photograph, the kids who had been in her last class at school before she got the sack. It had all been training, in the lead-up to nailing me. Kara Geenan had been feeding him scraps, amateurs and no-hopers like Liptrott, giving him a sense of worth while trying to have me killed at the hands of her drugged-out drones, in order to spare him. So I suppose she was protecting him, after a fashion. Although, in the end, his desire was too great. She no longer had control over him. She no longer had the influence that had so obviously once been there. He had come of age and wanted to mark that fact, to celebrate it.