by James Newman
Didn’t need a torch to get there. The moonlight was enough, that and this animal sense of direction inherited from the years and the years as an unkempt, feral, traveler; a gypsy boy.
An oak.
Solid.
Used to climb it as a boy and take eggs from nests. The night fell and I began to feel the same kind of fright that I had that first day of school. The fear of being watched by those with unclear agendas. What if she didn’t show? What if Byron showed first and I had nothing to give him?
No daughter.
No MDMA.
Nothing. He would tear me apart there and then...
Flashlights. Two of them. I could hear the voices of two men. The sound of police radios; my balls rose up a notch.
Mouth dry.
The other side of the clearing two voices and two torch lights. Two groups of two either side of the clearing. The other voices I recognized as Byron and Ed.
Where was Rose?
The four men met in the middle of the clearing.
“Nice night for a stroll, officers,” Byron said.
“Likewise. Your daughter is safe. All we want is some names. Who supplied you with the gear and who intercepted the hand-over.”
I held my breath as a silence grew between the four men. A sudden gust of wind blew the leaves from the tree-house.
“The only thing I want to know is where my daughter is. I don’t know nothing about any drugs or money. She ran away from home. I’m out here in the fackin wilderness looking for her.”
“She’s at the station. Made a full statement. She’s safe. Now if you give us Jimmy, we might be able to come up with a deal. A dead drug dealer is one thing. A woman raped in broad daylight in a betting shop is quite another. And by the way, what’s in the case?” The officer motioned towards Ed, with the bag holding the cash.
Looking down, things sprang into action. The case came up and hit one of the officers under the chin. He fell backwards and Ed mullered into him like a starved whippet.
Byron looked at Swift. Saw him go for his radio and snapped into action grabbing him by his collar and head butting him squarely on the forehead. Byron brought out his shot gun from inside his overcoat and finished both the coppers with head shots.
“Fuck,” I didn’t mean to say it. But they heard it. Torch beam followed the sound of my voice.
“Okay, Jimmy,” Byron said. “Come on down. We won’t hurt you. We missed you Jimmy, we missed you real bad.”
Climbed down the tree. Walked up to the pair of them, hands held up. “Look I can explain...”
Byron slapped me. A slap, administered the right way was worse than any punch.
The ground caught me.
The dirt and the dust caught me.
Caught me off guard.
I looked up. He had the barrel aimed at me. They say that your life flashes before you at moments like this. Well. It don’t. Death flashes before you.
Dark and unforgiving.
JIMMY JAZZ
JOE WATCHED as Jimmy stood up straight with the gun aimed at his head. He had to hand it to the kid. He had guts. Some would get on their knees and beg for forgiveness or pray to an imaginary deity.
Not Jimmy.
He stood there with the flashlight and the barrel pointed at his noodle and grinned.
Joe stepped forward into their beam of light. “Excuse me for crashing the party.” His hands were held up defensively.
Byron swung the gun in Joe’s direction. “And who the fuck might you be?”
“I’m a private asshole all the way from Fun City. Name’s Joe Dylan. This kid’s father and another interested party have retained my services to bring him back?”
“What that fackin pikey, Noah? Everyone knows that he hasn’t got two copper coins to rub together. The kid owes me fifty large ones and then has the audacity to kidnap my fackin daughter. Noah doesn’t give a rat’s arse about Jimmy. I’m gonna shoot him and then as you’re a witness I’ll have to put your fucking lights out too.”
“Not his real father, Byron. Natural father. It’s a long story and I don’t want to go into the details. But I’ve been retained to bring the kid back and that is exactly what I intend to do.”
Edward moved forward, “Rub him out. We’ve already got two dead coppers. How’s another private facin dick gonna make any difference – we feed them all to the pigs at the farm the way we always do, init.”
Joe spoke: “Not so fast my furry friend. Byron, tell your kid to shut his trap for a second. Listen to what I say. Listen very carefully.”
Byron nodded at Ed and his shotgun moved from Jimmy to Joe. From Joe to Jimmy.
The Detective continued. “You just shot two coppers. I have it on camera,” Joe showed them the smart phone, “and have already sent the footage to a reliable lawyer in the city. In addition I’ve been doing some homework on you, big boy. You have quite a history. Before I became a private dick I was a fraud investigator. I even swapped hats for a while and cleaned money for people just like you.” Joe pulled raised his hands to indicate he was about to reach into his bag. Byron nodded. He pulled out a file from his shoulder bag. “This here is a record of your tax avoidance schemes for the last fifteen years. Seems that you owe the inland revenue somewhere above the tune of three million nicker, mate. It’s all here in black and white and also with my lawyer in the city in a safe. Now all this can simply vanish and go away if you give me the boy.”
“How do I know you aren’t bullshitting me?”
“You can take the risk, Byron, but it’s a risk only a fool would take. Plus there’s one extra detail. I know where your daughter is and seeing as this case has taken a lot of time and money I’m going to pick up one of those bags of cash. You keep the other. Jimmy, open the bag and check it’s the real thing.”
TICKET TO RIDE
I STOOD frozen as Byron lowered the weapon. The stranger, Joe, put an arm on my shoulder. “Open it, son.” I counted the dough, looked like the real deal. Zipped up the bag and picked it up. “Okay, empty the weapon, Byron. There will be no more fireworks tonight. I suggest you get rid of the evidence here before the station begins to wonder where they are.” Joe motioned down to the two police officers, dead meat in the woods. Byron cocked the shotgun and the cartridges fell to the ground, hidden by the grass and the bracken.
“This is not the last you will hear of this, sunshine, not by a long fackin chalk. I got connections, Sunshine, connections.”
We backed away slowly and then once passed the clearing hit the trail that led out onto the road. Joe had a Nissan, on hire. He threw me an envelope.
“A passport, and don’t ask me how I got it.”
“Where we going?”
“Fun City,” he said.
TANGLED UP IN BLUE
THIS GYPSY blood, although it weren’t mine, I had it, and with it you have to keep moving, keep traveling, keep pushing through the clowns, jugglers, con-men, bastards, thieves, women, keep on keeping on jumping through the hoops, cleared immigration at Heathrow.
Sat in the airport pub crammed with travelers. Pub Irish, themed, plastic, staff Polish. Joe ordered a pint of ale for himself and a lager, Belgium, for me.
“I really miss this stuff,” he said taking a long drink on his pint of London Pride.
I took a sip on mine. Stella. Said: “What can you tell me about where we going?”
“You look like him,” Joe said.
“Like who?”
“Your father. He’s an intelligent man. Thoughtful. Perhaps too thoughtful. He likes to brood, but, most writers do. He lives in a town called Fun City. You ask about it? Best not to ask, kid. The place is a neon jungle, Jimmy. Now, I’m guessing you have your wits about you and you’ve burnt by money, women and drugs. Have you ever lost everything? You been burnt by a woman, Jimmy? Run over by a truck?”
“Today,” I told him.
“Tell me about it. This could be important.”
I told him about the plan. About Rose and Byron
and how she hadn’t shown at the exchange.
“Listen, Jimmy,” Joe said. “I have trusted men and been disappointed by them and I have mistrusted women and never been disappointed. Do you understand?”
“Carl Jung, a quote from Jung.”
“Exactly,” Joe said. “You and your father will get along just fine. Trust nobody, and you will be fine.”
We drained our pints as the flight was called.
We each had the five one large ones in a bag on our persons.
“It’s the limit,” Joe told me. “Doesn’t weigh as much as all that, but it’s not exactly comfortable.”
It wasn’t.
The rest of the cash was strapped around our body. Some of it we had in the carry-on bags and some in the suitcase in the hold. Shit, we could take risks.
The flight wasn’t just awful it was unbearable; I was coming off all kinds of drugs. I didn’t know which one was doing what to me. The Valium Joe administered did a bit but not enough. Would I die like this? Where would the death certificate name the place of death?
Where was Rose?
How would I make it in another country?
Questions.
Questions, questions, questions.
Rattled around inside my noodle until I let the V weave its message and dreamt a strange dream – back in the caravan.
The old woman and the crystal.
Beware of the Black Rose,
Snake,
Flower,
A snake hiding in the flowers...
The sun that brought out the lilies..
Make it to the airport, Fun City, man the heat, the heat, the heat, and Joe shoves me in a green and yellow taxi and I lay in the back seat, shivering and sweating, while he sits in the front casually talking in the local language to the driver. He was all teeth and sunglasses smiled back at me in the back seat as if he knew something about detox. Perhaps he did. The city felt like the sun was just above it with an intense brightness that shone down and sucked away the color away from everything. Once brightly painted shop signs were now dull and ancient-looking. The heat having dried the paint and robbed it of its sparkle. The driver looked at me as if he knew what it was like to displaced and disorientated coming off all manner of illegal substances and shivering like a cornered rat. How long we drove I don’t know but I noticed the scenery. Noticed it change. Concrete blocks and dusty shops became rocks, and shiny golden temples, and then a mountain, two mountains, black out. Wake up in a city by the beach. Sickly palm trees and motorbikes. Men drinking beers in a bar trying to work out the last ten twisted years of their lives through the bottom of a glass darkly. I watched, and I watched. I watched a mangy street dog cock his leg and piss against a van. I watched a flying cockroach land on the taxi window, thinking the glass were sky. I watched a woman begging in the street with broken teeth and dreams too broken to be contemplated. I watched the full latitude and magnitude of human degradation as the taxi rolled through Fun City until it stopped at what may have been a bar or hotel. I was reeling with a sense of anticipation riddled with hate, remorse, homelessness, loss on an unspeakable scale. On the distant dirt beach a homeless Westerner collected bottles and cans presumably to be recycled.
Meanwhile a woman who could have been a man snatched a gold chain hanging around a tourist’s neck.
As Charley D. Said.
We gotta pick a pocket or two.
“I think we better get the meeting over with first,” Joe said.
“Give me some time to rest,” I told him. “Time to think it over.”
Checked me into a hotel.
Slept for the next two days.
Bliss.
Between naps I hit the mini-bar. Drunk the bastard dry.
A CELLULAR SONG
TAYLOR OPENED the door to his office. Joe walked in and took his usual chair.
“Well, you completed the assignment,” Taylor said tossing over an envelope. “Here’s a bonus.”
“It will take time,” Joe said. It was feeble. But it was all he had.
“You know what I should be feeling at a time like this?” Taylor asked.
“I guess you should be feeling relieved.”
“I should be over the moon. You know what I feel?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I feel nothing, numbness, like I just met another drinker in a bar who is half my age and thinks he has it all figured out. How can I relate to a person that, although he is my son, he has never been part of my life. This is the second time now, I’m getting used to it. We have never experienced the things that sons and fathers should have experienced. We have never shared the times kicking a ball in the park, we have never argued, played catch, cuddled, we have never loved nor hated. Gone to the zoo. Who taught him to swim? We are strangers.”
“Is it too late to change that?” Joe asked.
“I think he can probably swim already. Swam out the canal didn’t he? I think it is too late for any respect to grow. If you have the respect of one child out of say three, it is a victory. You see I never respected my parents. It makes these things more difficult.” Taylor looked out of the window and watched the passage of a distant oil tanker. “There are some things too monstrous for remorse. As a man’s imagination grows so does his awareness of the world outside. A world of tumbling phobias and acute anxieties. Maybe it would have been better to have stayed in clinical practice. To have stayed on the boat. To stayed away from the glamour, the bottle and that awful woman. Did you hear she is some kind of high class pimp now?
“Who?”
“The White Flamingo.”
“It doesn’t surprise me. Plenty of things I’d like to change about my past too, you know.”
Taylor let the thought sink in. “Yes, we all have to live with regret. The older you get the worse it becomes.”
“Except in the present moment. Use your own training, your own beliefs. In the present moment there is no regret right?”
“The problem is I’ve lost them. The beliefs, that is.”
“Where?”
“In that canal. On the horrible, dreadful, day. I thought I had it all figured out like a ten old kid who has just learned how to manipulate his parents. What do you think it was like for him?”
“You mean growing up?”
“I mean growing up.”
“Tough, gypsy camp, care home, ran with a football firm, drugs, alcohol, crime. Probably a spell inside. Pretty average for a kid of his generation. The nineties were kind of brutal if you knew the wrong people, we’re not different apart from the years.” Joe stood up made it to the drinks cabinet. Poured two glasses. “Who could say you would have made things better? Look what happened to the White Flamingo’s kid?”
“You’re, of course, right. This place is no place for a young man to grow up.” Taylor looked at Joe directly. “There’s something about this case that you’re not telling me, isn’t there.”
“Perhaps.”
“Then spill. This was my assignment.”
Joe told him about it. Told him about the girl Rose and her father. Told him about the two bags of cash. Exchange.
Taylor let it all sink in. “He will come looking for it and so will she.”
“Let them come looking, this isn’t their patch of woodlands.”
“Watch your back and watch Jimmy’s. Have you seen Hale?”
“No. Not since London.”
“Last I heard he was playing the detective in your absence.”
“Is that a fact,” Joe said. “Guess I owe him a visit.”
He picked up the envelope and started walking, before turning. “Taylor. You want to see the kid?”
“I don’t know what I want, Joe. The truth is, I never did.”
ROLLING STONE
A GIANT lizard as long and ugly as her dad’s criminal record and just as frightening, crossed the cracked pavement in front of Rose. Vomit rose to her throat until she swallowed it. The cracked pavement that she had first
tried to roll her suitcase along using those ultra-handy-airport-friendly wheels was biting like a bitch. The reptile turned its head at her and flicked out its tongue in a predatory gesture before slinking off the pavement and into a sewage inlet.
Inlet or outlet?
The city stank.
Raw sewage wafted up from the sewers, the heat was making her faint, the alcohol drank on flight made her dizzy. She had to find a room. Find a room and sleep it off. Later she would find a job. Then she would find the money.
The room wasn’t too much trouble. Using her basic English and with the help of a motorcycle driver in a green vest she was taken to a small slice of Fun City called the Metroland. As she got off the motorbike and hauled her luggage towards what looked and smelled like an Irish pub, she overheard a tourist on his mobile telephone. It went like this.
“Listen, I’ve been to a few places, travelled the world, but nothing, and I mean nothing compares to this. This is Sin City. Everything about it is sin and if this some people’s idea of paradise I’d hate to see hell. This makes Dante’s inferno seem like a kid’s sandbox.”
It was late afternoon and the heat was beginning to pump out that last wave of unbearable heat as Rose took her luggage and walked up to the barman.
“New to town,” he said looking her up and down, tenderizing her in his mind.
“I need a room and a drink,” she said.
“You’re in luck,” he smiled.
He carried her suitcase up four flights of stairs and opened the door to a large room with balcony, two wardrobes, a television, en suite bathroom and a king-sized bed. There was a fridge stocked with drinks. He gave her the price and she calculated that the same room would cost 20 times the price in London. He told her not to pay now, anytime was fine and then he closed the door. She hit the bed fully-clothed and fell into a sleep that would last fitfully for the next eighteen hours. It was only the need for food that caused her to shower, get dressed into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and return downstairs to the bar. It was late but the Metro had shifted up a gear. All around her young brown females entertained men. Men in wheelchairs, men covered with boils, welts, wrinkled and those with nervous ticks, tasseled cowboy jackets, rugby shirts, muscle vests, hats, caps, sun visors; some were as thin as rakes, others the size of sea lions propped in bar stalls laughing and speaking some mangled version of the local dialect. Others were hunch-backed in lonely corners reading the sports section of Western newspapers.