Show Me The Sky

by Nicholas Hogg

  When he’s snapped them on, run through the steering wheel as instructed, I release the lace. He gasps like a man who just swam a length underwater. I jump out of the car, open up the driver’s door and find him slumped over the dashboard. I grab a handful of collar and wrench him upright. His throat is bleeding, a fancy red necklace.

  ‘Now talk to me.’

  Handcuffed to a radiator in a kitchen, I leave a man who was hired to kill me. When I pushed him through Gary’s back door with the muzzle of his own gun between his shoulders, I think my brother was more afraid of me than my prisoner. He saw again what I was capable of, remembered what I’d done with a pocket knife twenty years ago. How I thought revenge could bring a soul back to earth.

  But he had nothing to fear. There were no revelations from a tortured interrogation, no. I’m still a policeman, and this man on the floor with a strip of duct tape across his mouth is a professional. He understands his game’s up, and that mine’s beginning.

  I already had what I wanted from my assassin’s glovebox, the meeting place and time, a rendezvous with the man I’ve chased across deserts and slums, through my own memories of escape.

  I’d screamed in his face, ‘Is it Billy K? Is it him?’

  The only words he spoke were, ‘You’re a copper, Dent. We both know that. We both know that I’m saying fuck all. Prison is preferable to being shot by my employer.’

  So I don’t know who was hired to kill me, and why the man I’ll meet tomorrow was also destined for a rented bullet. And whether, dare I even think it, he is Billy K.

  But first, before the sun rises on a day with answers rather than questions, I drive, once again, to the coast to meet Anna.

  Captain James Cook, at seventeen years of age, left his job as a grocer to work on a coal barge, to brave the crashing white surf of the North Sea, the waves and storms that for the previous eight months he’d watched tumble and foam into Staithes’ tiny harbour.

  Walking the steep, cobbled lanes, to the small cottage, I think of Cook as a young man, what dreams he had of countries, whole continents, that were not yet lines on a map.

  At the top of the steep lane I look down to the bay, the roofs of slate glinting, precious in the moonlight. The lights of the pub reflect on the wet sand. A car is negotiating the tight turns back up the hill, the headlights flaring off the windows.

  Beyond this town of narrow alleys, the mouth of the bay, these sheer cliffs, Cook was called across the globe, again and again, returning from each voyage restless for more, as though the journey itself had become his home.

  Inside the cottage I turn on the TV, too loud in the low- ceilinged room. I hit mute on the remote, and leave the sunny skies of a holiday show flickering across the screen. I walk into the bathroom and touch my hair and adjust my shirt collar then go back into the bedroom and open all the drawers and wardrobes, until I’m content at the emptiness. Then I turn off the TV and lie on the bed with my shoes still on. I have his gun by my side, a new clip loaded. Beyond the house, the sound of the North Sea could be warring armies, some epic battle forever raging.

  I’m almost asleep when there’s a knock at the door. I jump up and smooth the bed before checking my face again in the mirror. Through the spyhole in the door, I can see her profile, looking down the cobbled and quiet lane. I put the gun in the dresser and take a breath. I open the door, and feel the volts prickling skin and bone. She says, ‘Jim, Jim.’ We stand for a moment, face to face, wordless, not yet touching. When the door is shut we kiss, and kiss, each enveloped by the other, a single being.

  She stops and says, ‘I have something to tell you.’ I kiss her again. ‘Important,’ she says.

  I only stop to say, ‘Not yet.’ I can taste her in my mouth as I speak.

  She takes my hand and leads me to the centre of the room. I breathe in the scent on her neck and in her hair, loosened now, soft and free between my fingers.

  Then she reaches behind my head and grips at the base of my skull, almost clawing, then a palm, opening, her fingertips drawing out behind my ear, slowly along the line of my jaw, before hooking her thumb into my mouth. Our eyes meet again, her pupils so dark and vital.

  The room is bright and she says so. I switch out the light but the lamp still glares.

  ‘Wait,’ she says, and tells me to stand still. I ask her to keep the light on, I say I want to see her naked. She’s just beyond my reach, unbuttoning her shirt. I try to talk but have no words, captive to the act of her undressing. And she watches her own fingers pop each button, as though she too can’t look away. Down to the very last one. The shirt hangs from her shoulders, half opened, the contrast of her pale skin against a black bra.

  She looks at me seriously now, then smiles, and tells me to take it off. Making that first step towards her, I move like I might break. She stands motionless, waiting for me to draw the straps from her shoulders, sighing as I brush her skin with mine. Before I drop the shirt to the floor she clutches my wrist. She takes the shirt from my grip and drapes it over the lampshade. The edges of the rooms soften. I pull her close now, and kiss the curve of her breasts. Then I reach around and unzip her skirt. She steps from where it drops, and kicks off her shoes. My own clothes seem to fall from my body at her touch. We play the game of kissing, not kissing, aching for each other, making certain how much it all means before we lay on the bed, naked and glowing.

  Now she breathes as measured and deep as a diver at sea, and I move and kiss her again, submerged too. Because nothing matters here, a haven of sheets and skin, sperm and sweat, that rhythm of sex for a stamp of being.

  We lay in the starlight with the curtains open. The shadows of crossed window frames lay on the floor like targets. And into the bare room the expanding universe burns. Her body is luminous. I kiss from the small of her back, along the length of her spine to her hair, then down her shoulders. I’m afraid that when I run out of skin we’ll talk again of the hunt.

  I say, ‘I love that sound.’

  ‘My beating heart?’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘You mean the sea on the beach.’

  ‘Things bigger than us, the moon swinging tides, stones rattled in the breaking waves.’

  ‘Bigger than one man chasing another?’

  ‘Or one man chasing himself.’

  Now I’m naked, warm, in the arms of a woman who quivered with electricity, took me inside her and erased whatever the world wanted from a life, I want to stay a while feeling small, no challenge but one breath to the next.

  She says we have to talk. ‘I have a confession.’

  ‘I forgive you already.’

  ‘Do you?’ She sighs, leans on her elbows and looks me hard in the eye. ‘Stolen Car. I took it from your desk. When Roberts turned over your house. From the first paragraph I knew it was you, fact not fiction. I slipped the manuscript into my bag.’

  ‘I wrote that behind bars. I was a teenager.’

  ‘I know. Young enough to have your record wiped and become a policeman. And I know about the car because you told me. I presumed that’s why you were sent to borstal.’

  ‘It was. Partly.’

  ‘And what happened with your stepfather?’

  ‘So I’m the one with the confession, not you.’

  ‘Look, Jim. This case is everything to you, and I have my theories on why it’s more than policing. It goes back to what happened to your mother. And your stepfather. You see Billy K as you abandoning your mother. And what happened to her is not your fault. You were a boy, Jim. He knocked her to the kitchen floor, not you.’

  ‘I know, believe me.’

  Anna leans and kisses me on the forehead, light brushes of her lips.

  I gently stop her and ask, ‘And this is the complete theory?’

  ‘Well, I also know how stubborn you are. But maybe I’m completely wrong on the reasons you’re obsessed with Billy K. Perhaps it’s just your professional ego, the man wanting to win, the result.’

  ‘Exactly. The result
. Finding someone missing. And did you get hold of Robert’s phone?’

  ‘In my bag. Slipping into his office during the morning meeting was easy enough, had a slight panic sifting through his papers, then realised his member card was tucked into the bottom corner of the notice board. One swipe, then to your dodgy friends on Borough High Street to get it copied. You were right about the gym being quiet, just Roberts and another super beating a squash ball. Was in and out of his locker in less than sixty seconds, copying the SIM data with the adaptor. Now, Roberts did see me in the gym, but no reason for suspicion when I was pedalling away on a cycle machine.’

  ‘Special Agent Monroe.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d be impressed. But listen. This is more serious than you think.’

  ‘Well, it got pretty serious earlier.’

  ‘At the airport?’

  ‘Taken care of.’

  ‘Nothing happened did it?’

  ‘Something happened. Tell me about Roberts and his phone.’

  ‘God, Jim.’ She sighs. Maybe she wonders what she’s doing here in bed, how her life has shrunk to a man chasing another man. ‘Caller ID on most of the numbers. His wife and daughter, other officers. So, posing as a market researcher, I dial the others. And, well …’ She takes a deep breath.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, one number belongs to head of Gecko records, Ricky Wise. Only got a name, and a frothing: “Sell your bullshit to some other mug.” Nothing untoward about Roberts talking with Wise, following up with inquiries. But. And this is a big but. I also discover that Roberts sent him a text. And …’ She sits up now, reaches over and switches on the lamp, extinguishes the starlight. ‘Details of a bank account.’

  ‘Bank account?’ I repeat.

  ‘Two days ago, an hour after a ten-minute conversation dialled from Roberts to Wise, Roberts received a text from Wise saying, “Where do you want it?” The reply from Roberts is a series of numbers, followed by the instruction: “In $.”’

  ‘He tipped him off.’

  ‘What?’

  I sit up. ‘The man who came to kill me.’

  ‘Came to kill you?’ Anna asks this angrily, betrayed by what I haven’t told her. ‘Jim, what the fuck is happening?’

  I tell her about the tracker, the field and the man with the gun. How I throttled him an inch from death.

  ‘And where the hell is he now?’

  ‘Handcuffed to a radiator at my brother’s.’

  ‘Look, Jim, this has gone too far. This sounds ridiculous. But we need to call the police.’

  I grab her hand and kiss the back. I throw off the bed covers and look out on to the starlit sea. A faint shade of blue pales the eastern sky. I put on my clothes while Anna asks what I’m doing, what the man said.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  I tell her I have an appointment to keep, a rendezvous. I take the gun from the dresser.

  ‘Who the hell with?’

  ‘The man I’ve chased halfway around the world.’

  The original rendezvous was under a railway bridge at the end of a disused canal, a lonely spot to have died. No grave to dig when a body hits water. I changed the meeting place to a location on my terms, texting a new address from the phone of an assassin. An abandoned house I know all too well.

  The garden is overgrown and neglected. Grass grows over the path, moss greens the guttering. I still have the key, after all this time. I kept it in an envelope with some pictures of my mother. When I open the door I’m shaking, but more fearful of a ghost than another person. And that smell, my stepfather, a stale phantom of alcohol and cheap cigarettes. I pick up a wad of junk mail from the hallway floor, letters with his name on them. Then I close the door behind me. I search the ground floor, drawing the faded curtains as I move from lounge to kitchen, before heading upstairs.

  I stand in my bedroom. Or what was my bedroom. So long now since I slept in this house. Twenty years. I’m a giant in a shoebox. Where I scratched Jimmy on to the windowsill with my pocketknife has been painted over. But through the layers of gloss, I can still read my name. The entire house has been redecorated, but he couldn’t paint that out.

  Two months ago Gary and I came back. We paid a removal company to go in before we even looked. We gave instructions to burn anything that might belong to a man. To him. No name. When we speak about our stepfather we navigate around his name with the skill of sailors over treacherous reefs. Because if we speak of the devil he might come. This is nonsense, we know. But rather not ruin a conversation.

  When his death arrived in my letterbox, a note from a solicitor, I felt loss. In the same way I imagine a cancer patient does after a tumour removal.

  Twenty years. Twenty years he lived after the night I waited for him to roll out of the working men’s club, drunk.

  I walk from room to room, and think about what a Pakistani man once told me in a car park. ‘People hold us like ghosts in their memories. We hold people like ghosts in our memories. We’re forever haunting or being haunted.’

  I go downstairs. The house clearance company had done what they said they would. Nothing left, except a single folding chair in the pantry. I open it out and set it down in the middle of the dining-room floor.

  And here I wait.

  He tries the disconnected bell. Then he flaps the letterbox. I tick-tock across bare floorboards into the porch, feel the gun tucked in my waistband. Then I open the door.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘This wasn’t the arrangement.’

  He crosses the threshold, the body of the shadow I’ve chased across continents. He walks into the hallway, nervous, like a man might suddenly feel his weight on a frozen pond. When he sees no furniture in the lounge or the dining room, he turns to run.

  But I’ve already shut and locked the door.

  ‘Let me out, you fucker!’

  I take the key from the lock and put it in my pocket.

  ‘A little chat first.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘What shall I call you? Phillip? Peter? How about Dominic?’

  ‘You’re in big shit, whoever you are.’

  ‘How I wish I could call you Billy.’

  But I can’t. It’s Mathew Quail, quivering as he speaks. The Billy K lookalike who fooled half a million Muscovites, the impostor chased daily by screaming fans while the real Billy K slipped out of back doors, hotel laundry chutes, concerts.

  ‘Fuck you. I said let me out.’

  He’s a good head shorter than I. And about two stone lighter.

  ‘In the back room.’

  ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with.’

  ‘That’s what we’re about to find out.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Do you have a gun, Mathew? No? How about a knife? Because even if you have, and you decide to pull it on me, then I’m going to take it off you and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.’

  He walks into the empty room. He slinks like a dog about to be hit. The entire house empty but for this single chair.

  ‘As you’re the guest, Mathew, and I’m the host, I suppose I should offer you the only seat.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘And I don’t care if you have. It’s not as though I’m a policeman, is it? Now sit down.’

  Mathew backs on to the chair. He reaches with his hands when he sits, as though ready to snatch the chair back from someone who might pull it from under him. And I’m standing before my catch, the cornered prey. Mathew looks smaller sitting down, small beneath the high ceilings.

  ‘First of all, I want you to know I have nothing against you personally. I just need a little information.’

  ‘What would I know to tell you? Anyway, why fucking should I?’

  ‘Well, how about I tell you something first? We can trade knowledge about each other, maybe I can encourage you to make things easier. For us both.’

  Mathew fidgets in the chair. I take a step closer, stoop and lean i
nto his face.

  ‘Know that I’ve given up everything to follow you halfway around the world, to here. This poxy fucking room. This chair. I’ve lost my job. I’ve lost precious time with my daughter. And I have no more idea about the location of Billy K than I did a year ago. Don’t you think I deserve a little explanation?’

  I stand straight again. The boy is sweating. He’s put on a little weight since the Moscow stunt, but yes, the likeness to Billy K is uncanny.

  ‘Explanation about what? My holiday? You should be explaining why the fuck you’ve been stalking me?’

  ‘So you’re going be a smart arse. Does he know you’re here?’

  ‘And who the fuck is he?’

  ‘He’s the man paying for your jet setting.’

  ‘Well, if he knows I’m here, you can guarantee he’ll be coming after you if anything happens to me. Think about that.’

  ‘Maybe I’m counting on it. Think about that.’

  ‘You’re fucked.’

  ‘Or how about your mum, does she know where you are?’

  ‘This has got nothing to do with her. Nothing. I swear, anything’s happened to her I’ll kill you. I fucking will. I know some powerful people.’

  ‘I had a feeling you did.’

  I pace the floorboards, walk a circle around the chair. Each time I go behind him, Mathew turns to keep me in sight, twisting quickly from one shoulder to the other.

  ‘Anything happens to me, and you’re fucked.’

  ‘You’ve already said that.’

  I think he’d cry if I struck him. I stop pacing.

  ‘Did you have fun in Moscow?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Onstage, in front of all those fans, it must have been quite a buzz. They really thought you were him, Billy K. From a distance you were convincing, but, well, not him.’

  I walk another circle. This time Mathew doesn’t twist in his seat. Again I stop dead before him.

  ‘You look the same, the hair and eyes. Same height and build. Strange life being a professional fake. With no talent? Billy has more in his little toe than you have in your entire body. He’s special. You’re not.’