Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold

by Stringer, Jay

  “Listen, if I was looking to find someone around here who would bribe politicians, who would I look for?”

  She smiled. “Me.”

  “Do you know Michael Perry?”

  “I hear his son is missing.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s my job to know.” She smiled at me and blew a kiss before walking away down the steps. I made to follow, but Bull raised his hand. I flinched.

  “I guess I’m not invited,” I said.

  Bull nodded and followed Gaines.

  The autumn day, full of half-gray dusky light, had died.

  The muted sun was setting as I walked back to the house, where I’d left the car that morning. The funeral felt like a long time ago, but I wanted to change my clothes and see if I could stomach staying in the house again.

  I put my keys in the door but hesitated and looked up at the house. I couldn’t keep avoiding it. I opened the front door and let it swing in away from me. The smell of fresh paint and disinfectant greeted me, and I remembered that Bobby had been working on the place. I began walking from room to room, switching on the lights. The walls gleamed with fresh pastel-colored paint. The hardwood floors shone. There was a brand new fitted kitchen, and the fridge had been restocked.

  Upstairs, the bathroom was fixed and polished, and my bedroom had a fresh set of paint and furniture. This had cost far more than I’d given Bobby, and I guessed it was another favor from the Mann brothers. The new bed was huge and looked like the most comfortable thing I’d ever seen.

  The doorbell sounded, and it was a new sound.

  I had to laugh. Bobby had even replaced my doorbell.

  I don’t know who I expected as I opened the door, but it wasn’t Laura.

  She stood there, still in her suit, looking tired. There was drink on her breath, and for the first time I noticed a little bit of age around her eyes. My heart did something it hadn’t done for a few years, and I stepped aside for her to enter.

  She didn’t step in, though. She leaned against the doorframe and smiled at me.

  “You looked good today,” she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  I could have told her how good she’d looked. I could have told her how I thought she looked a little better right now with a few cracks of humanity showing through.

  She reached up to touch my face, tracing the edges of the bruise I’d picked up from visiting Ash Coley. “What happened to you?”

  She’d broken the silence. I could have counted that as a victory for me, but I didn’t feel like keeping score. I didn’t feel like playing any games at all.

  “What happened to us?” she said.

  “I wish I knew,” I said. “Want a coffee?”

  I stepped farther away from the door, and she followed me in. I made us both coffee and started frying some bacon. She took off her jacket and leaned against the kitchen counter, watching me.

  “Place looks good.”

  “Yeah. I got a friend to fix it up for me. It was looking a little rough.”

  “Like the two of us.”

  “No.” I held her gaze for a minute and finally said it. “You look pretty good if you ask me.”

  She smiled and lowered her head, hiding a blush. Something passed between us that neither of us missed, and I wasn’t sure I could cope with where it was heading. I turned away and busied myself with the food, making her a sandwich and turning back to hand it to her.

  Our hands touched as I gave her the plate, and I felt it again. There wasn’t much time to change direction before we did something stupid.

  “Why are you here?”

  She put down the plate and looked at me hard for a minute or two. The tiredness was written large across her eyes, but there was loneliness as well. I recognized it from looking in the mirror every morning.

  I stepped in and kissed her gently, tasting vodka on her tongue. She stepped into it and kissed harder. The first few years of our relationship came back in one second, everything up until it started to go wrong, and it all felt right again.

  She ran her hand through my hair, and I ran mine across her back, and we got lost for a few moments. She pulled out of the embrace, staying close enough for our noses to touch, and we shared deep, heavy breaths for a moment.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  She searched my eyes, and I realized she was looking for some glimmer of hope. I was probably looking for the same.

  “I think I’d like to see you later. Maybe eat a proper meal.” She pushed the untouched sandwich away with her spare hand. “You know, relax.”

  I nodded. “Go home and get changed. Think about it. If you still want me to come round, call me in a couple of hours.”

  She ran her hand across my bruise again and left. I leaned against the counter and put my head in my hands. What the hell were we doing? My gut tightened into a knot and stayed that way.

  Long after the sound of the front door closing had bounced around the hallway, I realized I’d heard another sound. The sound of mail falling on the floor again.

  I walked into the hallway and froze.

  Again there was the usual collection of junk. But nestled in the pile was another brown envelope. This time the question “Where is it?” was written across the front in block capitals. Inside was a photograph of Mary’s body. It looked to be in a worse state than when I’d seen it last, lying on my bed. Now her skin was almost translucent white, and her eyes were filmy. She was lying in the boot of a car. Something metallic in the corner of the photo caught my eye. It was the golf club I keep for emergencies. Then I almost threw up because I knew straightaway that it was my car.

  Outside I looked around, making sure there was nobody to see me opening the boot. I lifted the lid and stopped breathing.

  Mary was in the boot of my car.

  She was staring up at me with her dead eyes. Her mouth hung open more than it had before, and her skin was slightly shrunken. She was still wrapped in my bedsheets, which now seemed to be stuck to her.

  As soon as my breathing started again, I breathed in the stench. Now that I knew what it was, it was unmistakeable. Once you’ve tasted it, you’re never going to mistake the smell of a corpse for anything else.

  Don’t panic.

  Fuck it.

  Panic.

  I was done. This was it.

  If it wasn’t a watertight case before, with her dead in my house and wrapped in my bedsheets, it was cast-iron now that she’d been stagnating in my car. There was no way out of this that didn’t leave me royally fucked.

  That buzzing I’d experienced when I first found the body, that heavy hum at the base of my skull, came back big time. The blanket wrapped around my brain again, and I felt the world go away.

  When it lifted, I was driving.

  It took me a bit to realize where I was, driving through my hometown again like a lost child. The buzzing was still holding onto my skull and my ears, blotting out the noises of the traffic around me. I changed direction without understanding where I was going. I was in the outskirts of the town of Dudley before the buzzing faded enough for me to hear my own thoughts. It was then that I understood what I was doing.

  I was looking for the old mines.

  The Black Country is riddled with them. I remember reading stories of how, up until quite recently, gasses would occasionally escape from the mines, sending spurts of flame shooting up from the ground at night. The locals, poor and superstitious, said it was the devil walking the streets in the darkness.

  Almost all the new housing estates were built either on the sites of old factories or old mines, so it was never hard to find an old shaft even if you didn’t know exactly where they were. But it was a specific mine I was heading for. Watching over Dudley from atop one of the tallest hills are the ruins of Dudley castle. A zoo inhabits the grounds of the castle, and as a teenager I used to spend evenings there, getting high with my friends as the animals howled in the dark. One of our best
discoveries was that the hill was riddled with tunnels and mine shafts. Some of the tunnels were flooded; some were filled with debris from the castle and housing estates. Some contained the rotted carcasses of exotic animals. We used to fancy that they had escaped from the zoo, but I later found out that the staff dumped the bodies there in the days before paperwork and regulations. These tunnels were being lost as the land was sold and built on. The council had recently announced it was going to fill the caverns with concrete for safety reasons. To bury something here was to lose it forever.

  I parked the car on an industrial estate that backed onto the castle hill. In the dark, my path lit by the headlights of passing cars, I retraced my teenage steps. The exact spot where I knew the main entrance shaft to be, my old haunt, was now the foundation of a McDonald’s drive-thru, and the second entrance I could remember was now underneath a tarmac car park. Tracing my old walk around the hill toward the zoo, I crawled through some bushes that seemed vaguely familiar and found a rusty grill stuck into a bed of crumbling concrete broken into dusty old clumps. I picked up a piece and dropped it through the grill. Almost right away I heard it hit water. The spaces of the grill were just big enough for me to fit my hand through so I gingerly pushed into the darkness. In a moment I was up to my wrist in cold, clammy water. Most important, the water felt still. There was no current here. Either the council had flooded this section of mine, or it had filled naturally, but it seemed now to be an old and stagnant well. When I pulled out my hand, it was coated with a film of scum from the filthy water.

  Perfect.

  Walking back out, I came out on a dirt track that led back to the road. A damp wooden fence separated the track from the bushes. Most of the wooden strips were missing from where kids must have pulled them loose over the years. A few kicks knocked out a large section of the fence completely, large enough to squeeze my car, and I stood there for ten minutes, checking that nobody was curious about the noises I’d been making.

  I brought the car around the hill slowly, letting cars pass me as fast as they liked so that I could have the road to myself for a moment, and it worked. No cars came by as I turned onto the dirt track and then eased the car through the gap in the fence. The headlights showed boxes, newspapers, and empty bottles pushed against the fence, no doubt once a home.

  The newspapers were all several years old. There were no recent feces or rotting food. It looked clear.

  I pulled out the golf club. I have never in my life played the sport, and never swung the club in anger, but it’s good to have in the boot just in case. Just in case, for example, you need to pry off a rusty grill to an abandoned well. Just in case you should need to hide evidence. The grill came up with few complaints. The concrete must not have been a good mix to start with, and now that it was old, it fell apart like papier-mâché as I applied pressure.

  I used a torch rather than risk the cars headlights, lifting the bundle out of the boot and onto the ground and then dragging it in three attempts to the edge of the hole. With one last look around me, I rolled the bedsheet bundle into the hole. It was more than weighty enough with everything in it, but it took a moment before sinking as the water seeped into it, loosening it a bit. It disappeared slowly down into the oily darkness. Horror-film visions plagued me as the bundle sank past my sight, my brain filling in images of the corpse breaking free of the sheets, reaching toward me.

  And then I was free.

  A wave of nausea passed over me as the realization truly hit me, and I sat in the car for a while, feeling very tired.

  I pulled the grate back over the hole and covered it with branches and the remnants of the wino’s old home until I could no longer see the metal.

  I coasted the car back through the gap with the lights off, took a minute to prop the broken wood back loosely across the gap, which wouldn’t last, and then hit the lights and began the drive home.

  The tightness in my gut had not faded. Ever since Laura had left to get changed, it had only grown. It felt as if soon I wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  My appendix had burst when I was twenty-two, and this pain was similar. I took a couple of painkillers, but they didn’t help. I took a long shower, trying to wash the dirty water and imaginary blood off my hands. Then I remembered my conversation with Becker that morning and knew what the pain was.

  Never go back.

  That’s what I’d said. The past is the past, and that’s it.

  I sat damp on the end of the new bed, the towel wrapped around my waist, and waited. Sure enough, my mobile rang, and I recognized the number as Laura’s.

  She sounded happy as she said hello, and for a moment so was I.

  The pain got worse. I breathed hard, feeling the pause build between us. I imagined her heart was doing the same stretching that mine was. I said sorry. I told her that the timing was wrong, that I didn’t think we were doing the right thing. I heard the disappointment in her voice as she told me that she understood, that it wasn’t a problem. I heard her lie as she said we could do it another time, and I agreed. After I hung up, the tightness that had been wrapped around my insides faded away.

  All I was left with was loneliness.

  I’m back in the private booth at Legs.

  Veronica is dancing for me, just as before. This is all about power, but not mine. Her breath on the crotch of my trousers, I lean back against the sofa and take a lord’s name in vain. Her hands are stroking my thighs, getting ever closer.

  She unbuttons my jeans, and I’m holding my breath. I lose myself as she puts me in her mouth, the warm closing around me, her tongue moving. I have no smart answers, no strength. I’m just desperate for it to continue.

  My wife, Laura, is in the room. I hadn’t noticed. She strokes my neck and whispers in my ear. I can’t make out what she’s saying. It sounds like she’s taunting me, insulting me. I don’t care.

  Veronica takes my cock out of her mouth and instead grips it, stroking, getting me close. She flicks her eyebrow and says something that Laura laughs at. They’re both taunting me now.

  I beg her to continue. To finish me off. Then I’m back in someone’s mouth as I come, being sucked and licked, cleaned. I feel alive and drained.

  I cry out.

  The lights come up, and I’m alone in the room with Chris. He’s wiping his mouth.

  He’s wiping me off his mouth.

  “My name’s Sharon, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  It was delivered deadpan, devoid of emotion, like a football score. Sharon was the only person standing. The rest of us sat on plastic chairs arranged in a semicircle, like the audience in a bargain-basement amphitheater.

  I was attending an AA meeting and trying very hard not to see myself in any of the people around me.

  Sharon was in her late forties, maybe early fifties. She was tall for a woman and looked very tired. Tired wasn’t the right word; what she looked was weary. She told her story in short, clipped tones that got longer and more emotional as she went on. She talked about what she called her “career of drinking.”

  “Anybody does something for thirty years,” she was saying, “they can call it a career.”

  There were a few nods and a few grunts of agreement. She continued, talking about something she called “maintenance drinking.”

  “I never really drank much. Not that I noticed, not that anybody noticed. I never went to the pubs or clubs. I never got drunk. I was never sick at parties. My friends? They would drink too much and pass out or get loud and obnoxious. I never did any of that, so why worry, right? But still, twenty-five years had gone by, and I finally realized I’d been having four or five drinks a night, every night, for twenty-five years.”

  “I hear ya.” A black guy sat in the middle of the room. He looked familiar, like I knew his face from the pubs, another one we’d lost. Sharon looked round the room. Looked at me.

  “I realized that I needed it. That I’d always needed it. I realized that I’d always need it, whether I wanted it or not.”
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  The black guy murmured his agreement again, and a few others followed along. I stopped concentrating on Sharon and started looking around the room, trying to take in the people. After calling Laura I’d drifted again. One of my mental fogs, but when I’d snapped out of it I’d called the Samaritans to find out where the AA meetings were held in town. I’d been late coming in, the session already underway when I took my seat at the back.

  From the backs of people’s heads, I noticed one thing:

  So young.

  There were older people, like Sharon. But so much of the crowd looked young. Twenties. Maybe under twenty-five.

  Kids.

  Our drug war. Our Recession. Our casualties. Our alcoholics. We’re chewing them up and spitting them out young.

  Everyone began a polite round of applause. Sharon took a seat at the front near a younger man. He was in his early thirties and looked like a social worker or a PE teacher. He seemed to be chairing the discussion.

  The chair told his own story.

  “I’ll never forget it. For years my eyesight was going. It only bothered me when I was watching the telly. If I was watching a football match, I couldn’t read the scores. They were always blurred. I knew I needed an eye test, but I kept putting it off. I didn’t want to wear glasses, you know? But then when I stopped drinking, I could read the scores perfectly. I’ve got twenty-twenty vision. All those years, it was the drink in me.”

  There was some muted laughter and more heads nodded. Chairs scraped as people began to stand up, to greet one another, and to walk toward the table where coffee and biscuits waited.

  I joined everyone else at the table for coffee in a plastic cup and a couple of digestive biscuits. Turning to face the chairs, I noticed that both Paul Lucas and Mark were sitting there, not far from where I had been. They were deep in conversation and staring at me. I smiled my best annoying grin and raised my coffee to them in a silent toast.

  “You’re new here.”