by Mark Morris
That’s not how I felt, though, as Chris tensed in the driver’s seat beside me. Not for the first time I felt as though I was getting in way over my head. Compared to the average nineteen-year-old, I was a pretty hard lad from a rough estate, who had taken more than a few knocks in life. Even so, as Chris said, ‘Here we go,’ and slammed the car into first, it suddenly struck me for the first time how fucking real this was, how serious.
At the same time I knew there was no backing out now, that I had no option but to follow it through. I couldn’t do it half-heartedly either. I’d spent weeks thinking that Dennis might prove to be the weak link, so there was no fucking way I was going to allow it to be me. I gripped the edges of my seat as Chris accelerated and the car shot forward out of the warehouse entrance, veering in front of the van. Through the gauze of the stocking mask, I caught the barest glimpse of a shocked brown face – a boy’s face – in the passenger seat, all wide dark eyes and a gaping oval of a mouth. As the driver tried to take evasive action, Chris twisted the wheel of the Mondeo and turned us sharply to the left, directly into the path of the already swerving van. I saw a wall of grey metal hurtling towards the passenger window, and then – BANG! – the door next to me buckled inwards and the window shattered, a thousand tiny cubes of safety glass showering into my lap and across my legs.
My entire body jolted with the impact, sending hard, jagged shock-waves shooting through my limbs, back, ribcage and head. For an instant I was aware of my body as an inter-connected unit, if only because it felt as though my flesh, bones, heart and brain had suddenly become dislodged from one another. The feeling lasted for no more than a split second and then everything dropped back into place. Next thing, the two vehicles were scraping against one another as they careened sideways, but only until the van hit the high kerb side on and crunched to an abrupt halt.
The Mondeo lurched, skidded in a half-circle so that we were facing the van almost nose to nose, and stopped with a screech of brakes and the sharp tang of scorched rubber. Before I’d even recovered my wits, Chris had snatched up one of the two baseball bats lying in the well between the front seats and was shoving open the driver’s door. I grabbed the other bat and tried to push open the door on the passenger side. But it was jammed solid in the frame, too twisted and buckled from the impact of the crash. I kicked at it a couple of times, then gave up and scrambled over the front seats to exit via the driver’s door, almost falling on to the road in my eagerness to show willing. By the time I’d jumped to my feet and joined Chris, he was already holding his baseball bat out in front of him and screaming, ‘Get out of the fucking van!’
Adrenaline was pumping through me. I felt wild, exhilarated, abandoned. I ran up and smashed my bat down on the van’s bonnet, putting a big dent in it. Through the windscreen I saw Mahoon’s brother, a chubby man with a thick black beard, a white skullcap on his head. He looked terrified, and the skinny kid next to him – who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven – was crying in fear, mouth wide and drooling as he blubbed.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ray and Cosmic Dennis getting out of the Vectra, which had come screaming up behind the van and was now jammed tight up to its rear bumper. Like me and Chris, Dennis was wielding a baseball bat, but Ray had a sawn-off shotgun. He strode unhurriedly to the driver’s side of the van, and pointed the shotgun at Mahoon’s brother’s bearded face through the window.
‘Open the fucking door,’ he said, his voice business-like, brooking no argument. When Mahoon’s brother hesitated, he barked, ‘Now! Unless you want to lose your fucking head!’
Mahoon’s brother became a mass of jittery movement as he complied with Ray’s request. As soon as he had pushed the door open, Ray reached in, grabbed his thick beard and wrenched him out. Although I still felt high on adrenaline, I winced as Mahoon’s brother hit the tarmac hard and sprawled in front of us, his baggy white trousers tearing at the knee. The skin beneath tore too, blood mingling with dirt on the white cotton.
Mahoon pushed himself up with one arm. The other he raised as if shielding his face from the sun. ‘Please,’ he begged, ‘please… please…’
Ray stood over him, staring down, and even through the stocking mask I could see the contempt on his face. A chill went through me. For a second I believed that Ray was about to end Mahoon’s brother’s life – and maybe even that of the boy still cowering in the van, goggling at us with big dark eyes. Then Ray jerked his head up and looked at Dennis.
‘Open her up,’ he said.
Dennis cackled and loped like a big black stick-insect towards the side of the van. Curling his long fingers around the handle of the side door, he tugged, and the door slid open on gritty, squealing runners. Inside was a heap of dirty nylon sacks with draw-string tops. Dennis hopped up into the van and tugged one open. He reached inside and plucked out a thick white envelope which he waved above his head.
‘Christmas presents for all the little children!’ he cried gleefully.
We spent the next minute or so loading up the boot of the Vectra with the sacks from the van. Some of them were full of coins, which it took two of us to carry, and which caused the Vectra to creak in protest as we dumped them in. Before leaving, Ray made Mahoon’s brother and the boy – who was so terrified he had to be wrenched from the interior of the van by the scruff of his neck – lie spreadeagled on the road, face down. Both were shaking violently and the man never stopped begging for mercy, even when Ray told him to shut the fuck up. I’d never seen anyone in genuine fear of his life before, and despite the adrenaline still buzzing through me, it made me feel dirty and ashamed for my part in putting the two of them through such an ordeal.
Ray locked the van doors and threw the keys into the overgrown garden of a derelict house across the road. Then the four of us piled into the Vectra – the Mondeo was a write-off, and would have attracted too much attention even if we had been able to start her up – and fucked off. As we drove away, I peeled the now-sweaty stocking mask from my face and looked out of the back window. The last thing I saw before we turned the corner was Mahoon’s brother slowly raising his head to watch us go, his bearded face betraying shock and wonder at the fact that he was still alive.
TWO
SUNDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2012
‘You all right, Dad?’
Her voice was soft, but it still startled me. She saw the cigarette jerk in my fingers as I lifted it to my mouth and expressed her amusement the same way she’d done since she was two or three years old, by crinkling her nose in such a way that it tugged the corners of her lips into a smile and squeezed her eyes into slits. Even at eighteen it was an adorable expression, and gave me an unexpected pang of nostalgia, an almost melancholy sense of time slipping away.
‘Sorry,’ she said, putting a hand lightly on my arm. ‘Didn’t mean to make you jump.’
‘I was miles away,’ I told her.
‘What were you thinking about?’
I shrugged. ‘Nothing much. The past. Everything that’s happened. How much you’ve grown.’ I turned on my heel to face her, then leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. ‘I mean, look at you, Candice. You’re a beautiful young woman.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Dad,’ she said, drawing out the word like she used to as a kid when I was mucking about, embarrassing her. I put my arm around her shoulders and we stood for a moment, side by side against the wall of the pub, watching the tourists and post-performance theatre-goers streaming to and from the bustling attractions of Covent Garden. The Rusty Bucket, whose upstairs function room Candice had hired for her eighteenth, was a sturdy old London boozer on Russell Street, whose wooden fittings had apparently been constructed from old ship’s timbers. Its status as a grade II listed building meant that it had retained its etched mirrors and embossed ceilings, though that hadn’t stopped the current owner from turning it into a trendy bar-cum-gastro-pub.
After a few moments Candice sighed and snuggled against me. ‘Thanks for coming,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I know, but…’
‘But what?’
‘Well, it can’t have been easy for you, can it, what with Glenn’s family here and everything?’
I grunted a laugh. ‘Into the lion’s den, you mean?’
‘Well… yeah, I suppose so, sort of.’
I gave her shoulder a squeeze, suddenly aware of how slight, almost frail, she was. ‘That’s all water under the bridge now,’ I said. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Doesn’t mean you haven’t still got the scars to show for it, though.’
I laughed again. ‘They’re old scars. Old scars, old me. I’m not the cocky little yob I once was.’
She muttered something that I didn’t quite catch and I asked her to repeat it. After a moment she sighed and said, ‘I’m not sure Glenn’s changed that much.’
I frowned. ‘What do you mean? He doesn’t knock your mother about?’
‘No, nothing like that. It’s just… well, his attitude.’ She paused. ‘He’s like a big kid. Always going on about “students” and “getting a proper job instead of sponging off the government”.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘He does my head in. I reckon he’d be happier if I was working in fucking McDonalds. Sorry.’
Listening to her, I felt my stomach knot with long-standing contempt for the man who had married Michelle, Candice’s mother. But I also felt a surge of satisfaction that my daughter was confiding in me, viewing me as an ally against someone who I suppose had been more of a father to her over the years than I had.
Michelle and I had never actually been together as such. Candice had been conceived on Christmas Eve 1993, when I was sixteen. Back then Michelle had been a hard-edged punkette, her hair as red and spiky as her attitude, and on the night in question I had staggered out of The King’s Head, where I’d been drinking since mid-afternoon and was feeling the worse for wear after God knew how many pints of Special Brew, to witness a blazing row between Michelle and her long-term boyfriend, a steroid-popping skinhead called Glenn Dass. Once the fireworks were over and Glenn had stalked off after calling Michelle a ‘piss-ugly cunt’, I stumbled across and stupidly asked if she was okay.
Swiping away black lines of mascara that were trickling down her tearful face, she snapped, ‘What does it fucking look like?’
‘Sorry,’ I said, flinching as if I’d been stung. Sober, I might have walked away, but because I was pissed (and horny) I hovered a moment, peering at her through beer-blurred eyes.
‘Is there anything else?’ She spat out the words like bullets, her face scrunching aggressively.
‘Weren’t you in my year at school?’
‘So? What do you want – a fucking medal?’
‘No, I just…’ I shrugged and looked down at my feet, waiting for inspiration to seep into my drunken brain. Finally I asked, ‘What you doing now?’
‘Apart from freezing my tits off in a pub car park, you mean?’
I squinted at her, half-grinned. For a boy of sixteen, a girl mentioning her own tits, regardless of the context, was a big turn-on. ‘You don’t have to stay out here,’ I said. ‘We could go inside.’
‘Oh yeah, and do what?’
My grin widened. ‘I could buy you a drink.’
Her panda eyes, bloodshot from crying, narrowed to slits. ‘It’ll take more than that, you know. I’m not a fucking scrubber.’
‘I never said you were. Forget it if you’re not bothered.’
She stared at me sullenly for a moment, then gave an abrupt nod. ‘Go on then.’
I remember little about the rest of the evening, though I do know that an hour or so later Michelle and I were shagging in a cubicle in the women’s toilets. My abiding memory of that encounter was the wet floor, the stink of puke which clogged up one of the sinks, and having to constantly change position in the tiny cubicle because cold, sharp edges kept jabbing me in the buttocks, legs and back. Ultimately our desperate rutting became more a war of attrition than an expression of mutual desire, both of us wanting it to be over but determined to see it through to the bitter end. When it was over we went our separate ways, disheartened and battle-weary, neither of us expressing any inclination to see each other again.
Just over a week later, on New Year’s Day 1994, Glenn Dass and a couple of his mates jumped me outside the local chippy. I rolled into a ball as they kicked me repeatedly in the spine and stamped on my ribs and head, before rolling me, barely conscious, off the road and down a steep railway embankment choked with weeds and nettles. It was a bitterly cold night and I might well have died if an old geezer hadn’t walked past with a Jack Russell half an hour later. The dog sniffed me out and started barking, and the old boy phoned an ambulance. I was admitted to hospital with three broken ribs, a cracked vertebra, a fractured wrist and various head injuries. The worst part of the experience was not the beating itself, but waking up in a hospital bed a few hours later. Everything had swollen and stiffened up, and despite the heavy-duty painkillers I’d been prescribed, each tiny movement sent an eye-watering jolt of agony through me. Just blinking and breathing were bad enough, but when I tried to chew or swallow it felt as if rusty gears were grinding into life inside my body, each one connected to a cluster of exposed nerve endings. And as for moving my bowels… well, let’s just say it was probably the closest to the torment of childbirth that a man is ever likely to get.
There was never any possibility of Michelle and I getting married, not even when she burst into The King’s Head two months later – just after my seventeenth birthday – screaming the odds and telling me that I was ‘gonna fucking pay’ for getting her up the duff. I was in no mood for a row; the cuts and bruises were only just starting to fade, and I was still moving gingerly. But for the next month or so I refused to accept that the child was mine – until my appointment finally came through for a DNA test, which confirmed what I felt (at the time) was the awful truth.
Glenn was back on the scene by then, and to his credit he stuck by Michelle, despite the fact that she was carrying another man’s child. I think partly because he’d proved his physical dominance over me, and partly because I hadn’t grassed him up, which in his eyes was like me admitting that I’d been out of order and deserved the beating, it helped him come to terms with the fact that I’d violated his ‘property’. It even enabled him to put aside any resentment he might have felt towards Candice and, despite his limitations, become a pretty decent stepdad for her.
In the almost two decades since that New Year’s Day encounter, he and I had never seen eye to eye, though I suppose we’d tolerated each other well enough when we’d been thrown together in family situations. Even so, the fact that he’d once bested me, regardless that he’d caught me by surprise and had been backed up by his mates, was clearly still a big thing for him. It was almost instinctive the way he adopted a cocky, swaggering manner whenever we met, the way a slightly contemptuous arrogance would creep into his voice. Many times I’d felt the urge to tell him to grow the fuck up and move on, but I’d always managed to bite my tongue, and so keep the peace.
As for me and Michelle… well, I can’t pretend that it hadn’t been tricky between us over the years. We were like repelling magnets, always rubbing each other up the wrong way. The main problem was that we had different outlooks on life, which had led to a hell of a lot of resentment, at least on her part. Whereas Michelle had obstinately dug herself into a rut and refused to change her circumstances, even though (according to Candice) she was bitter and unhappy, I had pig-headedly rejected what it seemed at one time was the path laid out for me, and had done my best to turn negatives into positives – most obviously by viewing the misery of prison life as a watershed, an opportunity to motivate myself into crawling out of the sewer, shaking off the shit and moving on to better things.
I don’t mean tha
t to sound smug. I’m not saying it to make you think that I consider myself superior to Michelle. It’s just the way things were, just an illustration of our different personalities. Maybe you have to fall a long way in life before it hits you what a fuck-up you’re making of it, and maybe Michelle had simply never had a jolt big enough to persuade her to change her situation. I don’t know. All I knew was that we were polar opposites, and that it had led at times to arguments over how we each thought Candice should be raised. My worry had been that Michelle and Glenn were holding her back, stifling her natural intelligence, whereas I knew Michelle had been obsessed with the idea that whenever Candice had been with me she’d been exposed to some kind of weird, academic, cultural life that might turn her into a snob, or make her want something that Michelle didn’t understand and couldn’t provide.
Despite all that, though, I think both of us were agreed that Candice had turned out all right – more than all right. She was bright, sensible, funny, tolerant, all the things that ought to make any parent proud. In spite of Glenn’s sneery attitude towards students, she had just started the second year of her A levels and wanted to do Hospitality and Event Management at Loughborough University. Everything was going brilliantly for her.
Or so I thought.
After her outburst about Glenn, I gave her another squeeze and asked, ‘What are you sorry for?’
‘Swearing,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to worry about that,’ I said with a grin. ‘I was swearing like a trooper before I could walk. I think my first word was “bollocks”.’
An elderly woman with coiffured hair and expensive-looking jewellery turned to give me a disapproving glance as she tottered past, and both Candice and I burst out laughing. Her laughter died quickly, though, which prompted me to give her another reassuring squeeze.