Raucous

by Ben Paul Dunn

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Charlotte.”

  Mitch pondered, it seemed the right name.

  “Suits you,” he said.

  She started the engine, the car was an automatic. She slipped the lever into D. She turned to Mitch as she pressed the accelerator and said, “I didn’t choose it,”

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  The equipment was easy to buy. A small electronics shop in the back streets of Soho. Nothing illegal. Home security for the massively paranoid. The shop owner was late twenties, glasses and slicked back hair with a beard and tattoos copied from the arms of sailors of the early 20th century. They would be cool for ten years and then old fashioned in a heartbeat. Raucous figured the guy would be married and settled by then but still cling to his young carefree life by wearing the same hipster style and still looking like a geek wanting to be cool. He paid in cash and the money went into the till without any official receipt.

  The hipster explained how to set it up. Raucous listened and understood. Plug it in and press a button. It was designed for middle-aged parents who wanted to know what their kids were doing to their drinks cabinet when they were off in the city earning big money for being bastards.

  He opened the box in his apartment. A two piece set up with two wires. One to plug into an electrical source, batteries optional, and a wire to connect the two devices. He opted for the plug and tested the quality. The two devices could communicate over Wi-Fi, but they would be sat next to each other when in use, and he figured Wi-Fi was easier to hack. He didn’t know too much about any of the intricacies of the internet, he had heard of the thing before he went away, had even typed something into a yahoo search engine when he was seventeen on a friend's computer. He hadn’t used it long as the parents had wanted their phone line back. And the rapid rise of the all encompassing electronic boom in consumer happiness had passed him by. But it was a simple set up. A bells and whistles upgrade on an old basic concept.

  He tested the results, played them back and was surprised at the crispness of image.

  He sat in his armchair. His apartment had basic furnishings. A kitchen unit in the corner of the single room. A wooden table, two wooden chairs of basic pine and an old, well-worn leather armchair. He had always wanted one, even when a kid. Now he had one, he realized he had nothing to do when sat other than think.

  He sat down little.

  But now he needed to make peace with what he was doing. He had promised himself and others that he would do everything he could to stop what was going to happen. He could not and would not do what those others had done. But destroying that now, being good to his word from the start, would mean what he wanted to achieve, the people he wanted to destroy would be left untouched.

  He thought back to school. The place he hated. He didn’t understand now why he had hated so much back then. He hated teachers saying he had potential to fulfill, he hated that they saw something within him, within his brain that marked him out different. He grew up in a place where academic success meant you were an outsider. He learned to mask his thoughts in a cloud of ignorance. Play dumb, and they believe you are dumb. And a lot of the time he played it so well, he did the dumb thing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  Mitch liked the type.

  She was compact and lean. Two large muscles started on her hips and slid in, making a large V. Her stomach showed small squares of hard abdominals, her chest a layer of strength below her small breasts. Her shoulders were rounded, and her arms sculpted to show she used them to push and pull high resistance. Mitch saw bruises that had spread and were fading, light yellows in a patch that was darker around its edges. Her ribs had the same markings as if someone had beaten her but wanted to leave the marks unseen under her clothes. Only she was physically not a woman who would take such a thing without defense. Her thighs were large. Bulging muscles from heavy squats. Here she had small bruises in the shape of finger tips.

  She watched Mitch examine her body.

  “I work out. With men. Full contact mostly. The bruises fade. But the muscle stays.”

  "You look beautiful."

  "A little too manly for most."

  "Not for me."

  Charlotte had brought him back to her apartment. She had made no secret of her intentions, although she had not spoken about them. She was confident, Mitch thought, but there is something she is not saying. She had removed her clothes without word as Mitch sat on her sofa and watched.

  Charlotte moved toward Mitch. She pulled the T-shirt he was wearing over his head. She stood back to look at his torso.

  "You are a bit more in shape than I remember."

  "Remember from where?"

  Charlotte knelt down.

  "I'm remembering my father's house,” she said.

  Mitch shook his head as Charlotte unbuckled his belt.

  "I had a lot of fun back there. Kids fun. Not this. Although I wanted to. My father was not about to let that happen."

  "Pretty strict guy?" Mitch asked.

  "More the scary type. Do as he says or else."

  She slid Mitch’s belt free.

  "He still around?" Mitch asked.

  Charlotte stood; she stared into Mitch's eyes for twenty seconds.

  "No," she said. "He's gone."

  Charlotte leaned forward and down, she grabbed Mitch's head and kissed hard as her weight pushed against Mitch's face. Mitch pushed her away. He wanted to ask about her father. There was something in his mind, something that felt right, something he maybe knew. Charlotte wouldn't let him speak. "Later," she said. "After."

  They kissed their way to the bed, crawled under the covers, fumbled, stroked together and made quick, frantic, teenage love.

  They lay naked under a summer duvet, drifting in and out of consciousness for an hour. They held each other in silence and listened to noises coming from the street. Charlotte's unrest grew, and Mitch felt the tension in her muscles grow. She opened her eyes and looked at Mitch. “You don’t remember, do you?” She said.

  “Then tell me.”

  “I want you to remember.”

  “Want or need?” He asked.

  “A lot of both.”

  “What do you remember?”

  She cried and Mitch tried to hold her. She pushed him away.

  “A life I never led,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  Roach had contacts. They had got him in.

  The studio was small, hidden away within a modern glass high-rise that had suspended concrete walkways linking the two sides of the horseshoe design. They required a three digit combination for the elevator keypad to rise to the third floor. The elevator was a glass cylinder with steel floor. The mechanism and cables visible as they moved up slowly. Dr. Michaels met them as the doors slid open. He shook their hands in turn and asked them to follow him.

  They entered the reception to his office. It was somber, the walls a light yellow, serious original art covered the walls and the magazines on the small wooden coffee table were new and untouched. His private work made him 180 pounds an hour. He could afford to have an expensive office.

  Charlotte imagined he volunteered for service with state patients to balance his conscious with the obscene money he made for sitting in a large leather armchair and listening to people open up.

  Dr. Michaels sat at his desk. A glass top covered in neat piles of documents, a telephone and a single photo frame that only Dr. Michaels could see. Charlotte and Roach sat in two functional straight-backed plastic chairs that had the expensive curved design of a bored man from Finland.

  “You’re the second group to ask after him this week,” Dr. Michaels said.

  “The first?” Charlotte asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Enlighten us,” Roach said.

  “Very official, all documents signed and stamped. Doctor patient confidentiality waived. A national level. So I said what I could.”

  “Who was the man?” Roach aske
d.

  “Who are you? I see you are not a follow up team, as I wrongly assumed you to be. Therefore I really cannot divulge too much.”

  Dr. Michaels found his ordered papers of interest and started to flick through.

  “We’re his friends.”

  Dr. Michaels stopped and looked up. He shook his head.

  “I have worked with him for the last ten years. He has no friends. He has no past. So who are you?”

  “Interested parties,” Roach said. He showed a badge, out of date. Charlotte hoped his bluff would play.

  “That’s not enough for me to speak,” Dr. Michaels said. “A wasted trip, I’m afraid. I hope you didn’t travel too far. We could have cleared this up on the phone. Sorry for a wasted day. Although if you ever need assistance in a professional sense, call me. Here is my card.”

  “I don’t think we’re able to afford your services,” Roach said, refusing the card.

  Dr. Michaels pushed the card into Charlotte's palm.

  “Take it anyway, you appear to be people who socialize in circles with money, and I have discovered it is those circles who have most to say.”

  Charlotte accepted his card; she read the details and his number. Out of habit she flipped it over to look at the back. There was small, immediately illegible writing. She looked up at Dr. Michaels.

  “That is all I can give you for the time being," he said. "If you call back and confirm you have an official capacity, then I can maybe give you information you require. Beyond that I can currently say nothing."

  They stood and Dr. Michaels showed them to the door. A man in a tweed suit was sat in the reception. He didn't look up.

  “I hope you can remember the number on the keypad," Dr. Michaels said. "And sorry I cannot help.”

  ******************************************************************

  Roach and Charlotte were silent as they rode the lift down to the ground floor. They walked toward their car and Roach stopped to look up at the office they had just visited.

  “Waste of time,” he said.

  “Not entirely,” Charlotte answered as she passed the business card across. “Flip it over.”

  Roach read.

  “What does it say?” Charlotte asked.

  “Morning coffee, everyday, Lino’s cafe. 8.30 a.m.”

  Mitch looked at Charlotte.

  “We got ourselves an appointment,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  “You still like that shit at your age?” Raucous asked.

  Raucous pulled up a chair from the dining table. He sat with its back-rest facing forward, his arms folded on its top edge. He rested his chin on his forearms and watched Ben.

  Ben was sat crossed legged on the floor of Sophie's living room. A hundred and forty pounds of comics spread around him haphazardly in a rough semi-circle. He was wearing grey jogging bottoms and a loose sports t-shirt. They were all on top of a large rectangle of a cheap Asian rug.

  Ben nodded at the question but kept his eyes on the array of comics. A hundred and forty pounds had bought him a month's good reading. No need to take it slow and drag it out, this was read and read material. Jean wanted in, the Turk had given cash. And if this is the reward for sitting around doing little then he wouldn’t disagree. Mitch would say more, but Mitch could wait. Ben wanted to enjoy this moment. He and Jean united, friends. Probably won’t last, he thought, but I’ll ride it till the end.

  “Green Lantern, right?” Raucous asked.

  “Green Arrow,” Ben said.

  “The worst of the lot. At least go X-men.”

  Ben thought, as if maybe Raucous had a point. He shook his head slightly.

  “I never could make that leap of faith into mutant territory,” he said.

  “Because a guy with a mysterious past, trained up on an island and a vigilante in a big city surrounded by superheroes is so much easier to accept.”

  Ben stared, unsure, believing in a set-up with a punch-line of violence.

  “You sound a fan,” Ben said.

  “I was when I was a boy, because it is for boys. There wasn't so many childish reads where I was."

  Ben stood in one movement, from crossed-legged to standing tall.

  “I used to read all the classics," he said. "Spiderman, Superman, Batman, you know? But like a kid at school who discovers the Beatles first then gets annoyed because everyone else follows him and it becomes the norm, nothing new, so they look for something more obscure, something different. They go to the velvet underground then some other never-quite-made it band in the 60s and so on, until they have to love the crap they listen to because they want to be different.”

  Ben expected an answer, a sarcastic comeback or bullying insult. Raucous stared at the floor in silence.

  “That boy was Phillip Downes,” Raucous said.

  “Who?”

  “The boy who went Beatles, Rock, Trance and pills. His name was Phillip Downes.”

  Ben nodded.

  “There’s a Phillip Downes at every school,” Ben said.

  Raucous looked up like a lawyer who has just had a witness bite.

  “What was yours like?” He asked.

  “Like every other. Lessons and teachers, kids growing up, trying to be adult, hiding their fascination with childish things.”

  “Got to become adult at some point, take on responsibility.”

  Ben hated this argument. He had heard it before.

  “Adult model train clubs," he said. "Rugby and Football clubs, shared emails with dirty jokes. They’re adult, right? But it’s the same childish shit.”

  “That’s regressed men for you.”

  “Women too. Wives get together to talk about men. Back then it’s who they fancy and what they would like to do. Now it’s wives talking about husbands who want too much sex or none at all. The difference is they pretend to be this concept called adult. Reality is they know more, have bills but don’t change.”

  “Adult means you have to do things to survive, get by.”

  “So do kids. Even if parents protect.”

  “If you don’t have any?”

  “Same as an adult. If you have no one, you rely on the state. But many times that fails, right? Kids get hurt and so do adults.”

  Raucous was staring now. Not anger at the words, annoyed with the concept he had hard. The state looking after people.

  “Keep going theory boy,” he said.

  “You don’t look like a man who escaped pain on either side of the adult divide. And when is that divide? At a certain age, at a certain level of experience? Seems you confuse adult with getting hurt. And anyone can see you’ve been hurt.”

  Raucous stood. “Well, you are a deeper thinker than you appear. Certainly that night you met Sophie you were thinking of adult concepts.”

  “That night was a room full of kids in mature bodies seeking childish pleasures.”

  “Well, let’s go see if you can back up your theory in action. We have an appointment with a reluctant lender.”

  “That’s not until the day after tomorrow.”

  “You can’t get by in an adult world working one day in three. The appointment has been moved up.”

  “By who?”

  “By me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  Dr. Michaels was there as he said he would be. He sat in the corner of the bar, his back to the far wall. He saw them enter and approach and he made to stand and leave. He walked up to Roach as if he was going to keep walking straight through him. Roach moved to his left to let him through, Dr. Michaels stepped right, bumped his chest against Roach.

  “Make it look like you aren’t letting me leave,” he said.

  Roach didn't pause, he played along. He backed Dr. Michaels up to the table and they sat down. The Doctor took a different chair and sat with his back hunched to the cafe window. Charlotte sat opposite him and Roach to his side. To an onlooker it appeared Charlotte and Roach were sat in such a way as to block any escape.


  “You have a couple of minutes before a man will come and break this up. I’ll tell you what they wanted to know and then that’s it. They threatened my wife and I do not intend to be caught up in this again.”

  The doctor looked at Charlotte, “Do you know many song lyrics?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Start reciting them, or saying something else, because I need you to look like you are doing all the talking.”

  ******************************************************************

  Outside the coffee shop a man named Jobs in casual weekend clothes dialed a number on his smartphone. It rang twice before he heard the answer.

  “Speak,” the voice said.

  “The woman and Roach followed him to his morning coffee, he tried to leave, they pushed him back to his table and now they are speaking,” Jobs said.

  “They or him?”

  “The woman continuously. The other two have their backs to me. But if they are speaking, she’s not listening. Her mouth is going at speed. What do you want me to do?”

  “If she stops speaking and the Doctor starts, break it up. The Doctor has seen you before, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Go in and make sure he sees you again. He’s not dumb enough to try anything. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  The phone went dead. Jobs checked his pocket for change, realized he had enough to order cappuccino, and walked toward the cafe.

  ******************************************************************

  The doctor saw the man called Jobs coming and spoke fast.

  "Christian is a very strange case. He has a seriously fractured personality. From what I can gather he is divided into three distinct types. Each with a name: Ben, Jean and Mitch. All three are aspects of him but they will not mold back together. They are each intelligent but each act on different impulses. From one day to the next his response to the same situation will change. He is a man without a childhood. Before he came to my institution at eighteen he has no real memory. I am sure there is something, but he never spoke, in any of his states. And this I must stress again, he has no memory of his childhood that he has ever spoken of. It is if he was born aged eighteen as he is now. His different personality types have developed from there. The trauma that caused this we know nothing about. Where he came from we do not know, although the man who came to visit me clearly does. He asked of possessions. Christian had three. A zippo, and two keys. One for a lock and one for a car. No idea what they are for, or even if they are relevant. But they are in a bag. On the floor next to your feet Mr. Roach.”