Muscle

by Alan Trotter

  MUSCLE

  ALAN TROTTER

  For my parents

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART 1

  Interlude

  PART 2

  Interlude

  PART 3

  Interlude

  PART 4

  Interlude

  PART 5

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  The two men watch him cascade into the darkness, watch him tumble between the train tracks, his body spinning and broken, his arms snapping at him like whipping rope.

  The smaller of the two, Hector he is called, lights a cigarette and says, ‘So, what did we think of that?’

  The other waits. His look is pointed as an asterisk. He waits and looks at his companion until he is handed the cigarette. He draws on it and, while Hector retrieves for himself a replacement, he speaks.

  ‘Instinctively I suppose I enjoyed it,’ he says. This second man is called Charles. ‘It’s obvious enough why. There is inherent drama in the transformation.’

  ‘One moment he is a person,’ says Hector, ‘the next he is a clutch of broken pencils. He’s blood and meat and roiling volition, and nothing else. And gone. Backwards and out of sight, leaving us to think about him.’

  ‘Or we are gone,’ Charles points out.

  ‘Or we are gone. Of course you’re right,’ says Hector.

  ‘We are on the train, which is moving ahead at speed, uninterrupted. It appeared as if he was pulled away from us, backwards, snatched into the night, only because we continued to travel forward at the full speed of the train.’

  ‘There was a defiant, violent attempt at stillness—what else is a sudden exit from a moving train?—but momentum pulled at him as if he was bound to us at the waist. So he didn’t bounce backwards as it appeared. In that first bounce he was moving forward, and at speed. He was moving forward faster, in that moment, than he had ever before moved, outside of being in a car, or on a horse if we imagine he had ever ridden one, or on a train.’

  ‘One of the rush of new experiences that came to him all at the end.’

  ‘All at the end, all at once. And then the second bounce and any that followed it in the dark—’

  ‘There will have been some.’

  ‘—were quickly slower, as his body resisted movement beyond its capacity to resist, breaking and turning, torn apart by the effort.’

  Hector and Charles share in the loud silence of train travel, the exertions of the engine reduced by their regularity to a calming sidewise cradling.

  The man had dropped something as they lifted him to the railing.

  Hector kneels, inspecting the object where it trembles, insectile, from the movement of the train.

  PART 1

  When _____ arrived in the city I was sitting outside a cafe. It was raining but not hard and I had been smoking a cigarette and patting the ash onto the shoes of a sap at the table next to mine, a man whose moustache I had taken a disliking to. The sap left promptly, leaving me with no one to pat ash on and not much of a cigarette when _____ arrived.

  _____ arrived thrown from a car. He led with his face, following with his knees, his arms back and up as if tied to his sides. When he hit the ground he somersaulted, and ended like a corpse on parade—flat on his back, legs and arms stiff-straight. The car that furnished him never completely stopped, so all that remained of it, when his hat had done spinning like a coin in the dirt, was whatever of its exhaust still lingered. He was thrown more or less at my feet. Somehow _____ managed to look down his nose at me, as if I was lying in his gutter.

  I offered him a cigarette and he took it, pulled himself up, cleared the grit from his hat and his face, and it came about that we got to talking.

  I admired the way he could make an entrance like that and not take it too sore. He admired my height. Or anyway, he said he could use a man like me, and when people talk about me like that, as if I was a ladder or an adjustable wrench, it’s usually my size they mean.

  _____ spat a little blood and said that he could only stay in a city if it had a fairground and rollercoasters, and I said we had a fairground with three rollercoasters, so that’s where we went.

  *

  We were told to remove our hats at the first rollercoaster, and we held them to our chests as it clack-clack-clacked us up high and then shook us all the way down again. I felt like a penny thrown down a drain or a man thrown from a moving car. _____ seemed to take it worse. When it was done he sat on a bench with his head between spread knees, a finger at each upper eyelid, compressing the sides of his eyeballs at a steady pace. He said it helped, he needed a reliable impression to attend to.

  I asked him why we’d come to the fairground if he didn’t like the rollercoasters, and he said he did like rollercoasters, and also that that was one of the better ones he’d been on.

  Once he’d recovered we rode it again, and then tried the others. Our first time on the tallest of the three it happened that I sat in the front carriage, in front of _____. As we turned the tallest peak, the city seemed to tip out in front of me like dark paint down a glass hill. This view struck me like I just woke up, as if I’d never seen the city before, or else never really believed it real—three times the ride took us round and each time as we went over the peak, this same feeling charged me, as if I’d taken some of _____’s love for these rides from him. I was still sharp with the feeling as we got back on dull ground. Only then did I find that on account of my height, _____’s view had been impeded and his enjoyment impaired.

  As we walked away from the rollercoaster, _____ with his drunkard’s stagger, he didn’t touch me or look at me, but he was speaking, and I realised he was talking to me, telling me that he would find me when I was asleep, he would stand over me and kick through my head, described the ear ripping off and the skull creasing then giving beneath his shoe. On the bench, as he pressed at his eyes, he finished snarling, then it was done, and we went back to riding the rollercoasters.

  We rode each of the three rollercoasters in turn for the next four hours. Every half-hour or so _____ would need to sit on the bench and press his eyes, looking like a man who’d been poisoned, but as we made our way to the next ride he’d be lit with glee.

  *

  That night, as he had no money and no other place to go, _____ came home with me.

  I got into bed next to him—an inverted _____, already snoring—and inches from my face were his naked toes, and I thought about his promise to drive this foot into my head. The hours at the fairground had left me slightly nauseous, I was in the tired, sense-drained final pull into sleep, and still charged by seeing the city tipped out below, and the threat too became part of a warm, muddled calm that was still there when I woke up.

  The next day I made us breakfast and we went together to find _____ an apartment.

  It was _____ that gave me the name Box. He never really explained it to me, and I never asked, not wanting to confront his generosity, but it spoke to me of an unassuming usefulness—and it stuck, and I was glad to have it.

  *

  It felt as if it had been weeks since I had found anything to do but sit by roads or in cafes. Or longer: for as far back as I could think, the best I could hope was that a fight or a conversation might break out nearby. Then _____ arrived and I had an expectation of relief.

  Only there was none. Life continued to move forward with the brakes on tight.

  Two things happened over a whole month with _____. The first was at a bus stop and meant nothing but struck me all the same.

  I was to see _____ at his apartment and as the bus didn’t arrive I grew angry. Angry at how long it would be until I was th
ere, and also because I knew already that however long it took, I would still find ______ in his vest, and have to wait while he made himself coffee and washed his face.

  Then a man limped to the stop: he had big jug ears that poured white hair, he had watery eyes and hands that shook. We stood together.

  He said, ‘The thing to do is light a cigarette,’ and he took a pack from his pocket. ‘As soon as I light a cigarette, the bus arrives.’ He lighted his cigarette and smoked it to the last breath, without any bus arriving, then somehow found a way to keep smoking it. Finally he put it out under his foot. I said something to him about his system being flawed. While I spoke he looked at my mouth like I was a stumbling idiot and only the thought that maybe he was limited in his hearing stopped me from laying him flat. When I’d got it out he said, ‘Ah, the thing is you can’t always tell which cigarette it’s going to be,’ and he lighted another, and from around the corner turned our bus.

  On the bus ride, I spent my time looking at my packet of cigarettes, wondering if somehow I’d smoked the wrong pill on the wrong street corner and I had brought _____ tumbling to my feet. Maybe I would do well to be more cautious about lighting cigarettes, or else I’d light one and another car would tear its way through the street, and out from the door, his arms back and up, would come another _____. It wouldn’t need to happen often, just maybe every hundred or two hundred or three cigarettes, and another _____ would come out until they lined the gutter, until they started to pile up like cards in a deck.

  *

  The other thing that happened during that month was nearly a job until it wasn’t.

  ______ tried to find us work but he had no plan for going about it. We would set out from _____’s apartment, pursue a circuit, and as we went we’d see a key-cutter or a florist and _____ would make an approach. This didn’t come easily to him. Violence was all we had to offer, and there must have been those who wanted it, but it was too obvious in _____’s pitch, too close. Instead we got no work, and left a trail behind us of confused and intimidated key-cutters and florists and road sweepers, which we’d add to until one or other of us grew tired of the parade. At which point we’d take ourselves to a bar, where _____ would drink beer while I dwelt on what exactly I’d expected from him, and from us.

  We repeated this like a circuit on a ghost train where every ghost was an intimidated sweep, key-cutter, spotwelder or meter reader, and repeated it for days, until we hit on what seemed to be some good luck.

  *

  First thing that morning we passed a woman on the street, who was not much older than twenty and standing alongside a van maybe twice her age. She was turning a handle that fit into the vehicle’s chest—the whole side of it was open to copper ribs, a device for the production of coffee, and the handle, we found out, was fixed to a grinder.

  We bought coffee from her and it was dark and thick in tall mugs. As we drank it, _____ asked the woman if she had any work that needed doing, and maybe because _____ was occupied with his coffee and this altered the impression he made, she didn’t recoil from him, but asked what kind of thing he meant. _____ suggested maybe she was owed some money, or there could be someone who had taken advantage of her one way or another, or perhaps an ex-lover. She said she’d think it over. We drank the hot, heavy coffee.

  She said the longer she thought about it the more she realised she knew some kind, decent people, and she should be grateful for that. Because honestly if you asked her would she like to see any of these people have their teeth punched out of them or be made earnestly to fear for their life, then the answer was no. We finished our coffee, gave her back the cups and she reached into the guts of the van to rinse them.

  We went on with a feeling, maybe from the coffee, which was good, together with the outlook of the woman, which seemed good too, that we should stick to our circuit and we’d be rewarded. And before two hours had passed we were in the back room of a clockmaker’s, and he was telling us that there was a customer who owed him money and maybe we could get it back for him.

  The clockmaker was fat—as round as a watch face. He kept the back room of his shop cold, every window open, but still he kept wiping the sweat from his brow. He had been a military man once, he told us, and it had hit his head like a hammer hits an alarm bell, so now he had neuroses, and there were people who took advantage of them. For one thing, he could no longer be in the same room as anything that resembled a military uniform, whether it was a uniform on a policeman or a cigarette girl. Even as he spoke sweat sprang from every degree round the big circle of his face. Weapons too, he said: if a shadow reminded him too much of a barrel of a gun it could freeze him in his chair until some change of the light saved him. And he told us all this, because there was a time when he would have taken care of this customer himself, but now he was constitutionally unable. But then we had arrived to him. Like grace, he said, like daybreak.

  For the first time we had work. The clockmaker gave this man to us, a customer who had taken advantage of his weakness: he gave us the name, and the name of the joint the man owned and worked as a counterman. He said that we should go to him, take what money we could and retrieve a wristwatch that the man would be wearing.

  _____ had started twitching in his seat with anticipation, like he was grease in a hot pan. He started talking. He suggested that we might bust the customer’s nose. He said we might cut him up. A storm reached the clockmaker’s face, his big cheeks fluttered like tent canvas in the wind, but _____ didn’t see it: he swung his butterfly knife out from his pocket and its handle, and held it to his own throat as part of his play about what we’d do to the customer. The clockmaker’s face parted so wide and quick it might have been split with an axe, and as he shrieked he came over the top of his table and drove us out before him with his great chest, until we were back in the street and the door of the shop slammed tight.

  *

  From having our first piece of work to having nothing and being back on the street went so quick that we stood for a moment while the situation asserted itself.

  _____ laughed and said he would come back later, when the clockmaker had calmed down, and he would speak to him again and the job would be back on, and he slapped me friendly on the cheek.

  Later though I watched through the door as one of _____’s hand slipped across the large, wet face of the clockmaker and the other drove short punches with the small knife through straining waistcoat fabric, which striped with blood.

  Outside I asked him how the talk had gone. The job was back on, he said.

  *

  So we went to the joint the clockmaker had given us, to find the man who owed him money. We sat, and spent the day smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, drinking water. _____ would pour liquor into his coffee from a flask. The clockmaker’s customer worked the counter. He pinkened every time I caught his eye.

  As the place emptied he started sending us free coffee, free food. We ignored it. He had the expensive wristwatch on. This man pleading poverty: a romantic, clinging to heirlooms. Eventually, darkness filled the room like cold coffee, and the waitress lit the dim fluorescent night.

  At closing the counterman had her ask us to leave. I kept my eyes on him, while she tried her best, but timidly. _____ put out one finger, and used it to tip a cup onto its side. The cup rang a small sharp note as it hit the table top, and the waitress ran away like she was chased.

  The counterman straightened his apron and organised his courage in a little heap and stepped out from behind his bench. Before he was halfway to our table we stood and left. We heard him, relief flooding out as anger, yelling at the waitress, and she got the door locked tight behind us.

  And then we met him that night as he took the garbage out the back.

  *

  We got better at finding work after that, but it still didn’t come easy. _____ had to bully work out of people. He had to have me shake work out of them. We were given some people to scare, a few hands to break.

  After some months, word
started to get around that we were the people to go to if you needed a hand broken. In this city, that was a lot of hands. You’d be surprised. It was all we ever seemed to do: find people, young men mostly, and then break hands. Dried blood began to clog the metallic lighter I’d place between their middle and ring fingers.

  We grew bored.

  _____ wanted to approach Jarecki, but Jarecki was a notoriously difficult figure to approach.

  Jarecki owned half the city, Danskin the other half. Their nearness in size made the peace between them a particular kind of uneasy. The difference between them couldn’t have been much more than the weight of a single bill, but each eyed the scale and felt sure it fell in his own favour.

  The lesser man in any setup is always prone to indignities—raids, passing money up, receiving judgement when he gets above his station. Every so often, in all kinds of ways, he’s made to pay. Both Jarecki and Danskin thought the other should be suffering, so both made it happen. There were incursions, there was payback: the friction was constant, but didn’t often throw up so many sparks as to impede business.

  But it was a difficult atmosphere for a paranoid man, and Jarecki was a very paranoid man. Regularly, we knew, he would disappear from sight, convinced that Danskin was plotting to assassinate him, or that the police were preparing a raid, and in the meantime his proxies were left to manage his operation.

  This was during a long absence for Jarecki, but we visited his club anyway. It was one of the two big gambling joints in the city (the other was Danskin’s).

  _____ went to curse at waitresses and dealers, demanding to see Jarecki. They looked at him with the blankness of good discipline. He might as well have tried to shake some better news out of the man on the television set.

  I watched two gamblers playing blackjack. A child or a dog can learn basic blackjack strategy by rote in twenty minutes. Stick with a hard total of nineteen. Double down on eleven if the dealer’s got anything but an ace showing. Nothing in blackjack exists on a more complicated level than this. The gamblers were solemn with their cards and their chips. They weighed their options and tugged on their cuffs and tossed back their whiskies and then did exactly what they were always going to do. They didn’t seem sharp to the fact that the house was winning not because of some flaw in their tactics, but because the house is meant to win.