East of Innocence

by David Thorne

  ‘Want me to get rid of him?’ Brendon asks. He has a nasal Mancunian accent and for some reason I find it extremely irritating, so much so that I forget my good intentions and without reflection imitate him like a child would in a playground: ‘Want me to get rid of him?’ So much for keeping my mouth shut.

  Conneely cackles and slaps the arm of his chair but Brendon does not see the funny side. He walks towards me and pushes me. It has little effect; I weigh at least half as much again as him and, anyway, what is the point of pushing somebody? Hit them or don’t has always been my view. I smile and punch him in the face. I don’t hit him hard but he still staggers backwards. He puts his hand to his nose and when he takes it away it has blood on it. I turn back to Conneely and do not notice Brendon take a knife out of his pocket. I sense rather than see movement and turn back to him but it is too late. He stabs me in the outside of the thigh, but because I was turning it does not penetrate deeply. He takes the knife out. It is a lock knife, black handle, four-inch blade. Blood begins to seep through my jeans. This person, this boy, has stabbed me? I am almost too surprised to be angry.

  Brendon is coming back to stab me again. He has a manic hatred in his eyes. As his hand arcs over to cut me, I catch it. My hand engulfs his. I hold his knife hand up high and with my other hand punch him in the armpit. I punch upwards, so hard that his feet leave the ground and the blood leaves his face. Already the fight has left him but he stabbed me, so I punch him again, this time in the face. I hit him hard and feel the crunch of the cartilage in his nose. He sits down heavily on the path just inside the gate and looks stupidly around him, as if he has dropped money in the dark. It is all I can do to not move in, hit him again, humiliate him, really hurt him. How dare he? The leg of my jeans is soaked with blood. They will have to go in the bin.

  Conneely looks at me with a newfound respect. ‘Well now, that was nicely done,’ he says, but he is interrupted by a woman who runs out of the open front door. She is perhaps sixty-five and wearing a dressing gown. Conneely cackles again. This is turning out to be some morning for him. The lady runs down the path and bends down and puts her arms around Brendon whose chin is resting on his chest, blood staining his wife-beater, his legs straight out in front of him. She looks up at me in fury.

  ‘What have you done?’

  I can do nothing but shrug. Brendon attacked me; not only that, he stabbed me. And this is my fault? But sometimes there is nothing to say.

  ‘He’s after looking for his mother,’ Conneely says, wheezing. ‘Marcela. Show her the photo.’

  ‘I don’t want to see any photo,’ the lady says, dabbing at Brendon’s nose with a handkerchief. ‘Just take yourself away.’

  ‘Take a look,’ Conneely says, and there is a snap to his voice that I have not heard before. The lady clearly has though; she reacts as if struck, turns, looks at me.

  I take out the photo and show it to her. ‘She’s my mother.’

  She reaches up for the photo from where she is crouching next to Brendon, takes it, looks at it carefully. ‘Your mother?’ she says incredulously.

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘I did. I recognise her. Of course I recognise her.’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t. I don’t.’ Who is this woman, I wonder. If she is married to Conneely, I have only sympathy for her. I take out a business card with my name and number on it.

  ‘If you know anything, anything at all. I do really want to find her. Very much.’

  She takes the card from me, then looks back at Brendon who is showing signs of life. ‘Go on,’ she says, handing back the photograph. ‘Go. Go.’

  I look at Conneely but he just raises a hand in friendly farewell. I am too confused by the events of the last few minutes to feel disappointed that I have not come away with more than I have. I walk out of Conneely’s front garden and down the street, looking back when I reach the end and I see that Brendon is now standing up and being fussed over by the woman. Conneely is lighting another cigarette and when it is lit he shakes his fists at the sky, for what reason I cannot guess.

  I have to walk a long way until I find a minicab firm that can take me back to my hotel; this area of town appears to be about as affluent as Mogadishu. The driver looks doubtfully at the blood on my jeans; he looks more approvingly at the fistful of money I wave at him. On the way back, I reflect on the little I have learned from Conneely. My mother worked for him for only a handful of years before she got out; that in itself is better news than I had expected. That he did not know what happened to her afterwards, though, is devastating. Apart from a measure of peace of mind, I have discovered nothing from my strange experience with Conneely. Right now, my mother seems as far away as she has ever been.

  Back at the hotel and faced with the silent reproach of my empty suite, I realise that I have no reason to stay in Manchester, no leads left to follow. I do not wish to return to Essex; I have told what clients I have that I will be away for a week and figure that I might as well stay away for that long at least. But for a man with some financial resources and five days to kill, the choice of where to go is bewilderingly wide, nowhere on the planet out of his reach. I do not have any family except for the father I do not want to see and, possibly, the mother I can’t find. I do not have any close friends living overseas who are due a visit. However, my conscience is nagging away at me and I realise that I can kill two birds with one stone.

  Terry Campion is still, as far as I know, hiding away in Marbella but he does not yet know what I do, that Baldwin wanted the footage back for darker reasons than a mere case of police brutality. Terry needs to know that, rather than blow over, this problem will never go away and that perhaps he might want to consider staying in Spain until Baldwin ceases to pose a threat. I have tried his mobile again and it is disconnected; I have called his sister who claims not to know where he is. The only lead I have is that he told me when I called him that he was in his mate’s bar; Marbella is not a small place but, still, I should be able to find it.

  I head down for reception, to check out and call a cab for the airport. I have never been to Spain before and what self-respecting Essex man makes it to the age of forty without having visited the Costa Del Crime?

  23

  I BELIEVED THAT in England we were suffering from a heat wave of unparalleled intensity but in Spain the air is so hot that breathing in feels like a hairdryer is blowing down my throat. As I leave the plane, it is as if the air has been replaced by something denser so that walking through it feels like a struggle. It seems impossible that life can survive in such a hostile atmosphere, that plants can grow, that people can function. The sun is so bright that I cannot look at the tarmac of the airport runway without my eyes squinting and pricking with tears. The baggage reclaim area is half-heartedly air-conditioned and already I can hear the English muttering to themselves that it’s hot, too hot, how can people stand it? The security staff and customs officers look at us with unconcealed contempt, as if we are a fresh batch of prisoners being shipped into a third-world prison. I find my bag and head outside to get a taxi.

  On the flight out, I had sat next to a drunk young man with innocent blue eyes who told me that he had been to Marbella fourteen times and that if you wanted pussy then there was nowhere better to get it, although saying that his brother had gone on a stag weekend to Bratislava and reckoned he’d had a threesome with two six-footers. The young man was called Jim and Jim was with a group of seven other young men who were all equally drunk and sitting in seats behind me and across from me and in front of me. The harassed trolley dollies were clearly counting the minutes until we landed, wearing fixed smiles that did nothing to conceal the fact that they were, basically, terrified by these people they were meant to be responsible for. Even I did not fancy asking them to please shut the fuck up, not in a confined cabin thirty thousand feet up, so instead I smiled and told Jim that I had never been to Marbella but that I had a mate who had moved there, only th
e problem was I didn’t have his address. I asked him about bars where I was likely to find him and unwittingly provoked a loud and tedious discussion amongst Jim’s friends about what the best bars in Marbella actually were. None of the places they suggested had Spanish names; I suspected that neither would any of them serve Spanish food or even Spanish beer. I have enough middle-class pretensions to try to sample a country’s culture when I visit it, but Jim and his friends had no such designs. Nor, if I knew him at all, would Terry. I left the plane with a list of bars and an invitation to join Jim and his friends on the pull that night.

  My taxi driver is listening to some music that I do not recognise on a tape deck, a toothpick in the corner of his mouth jigging up and down as he sings fragments of the song in a language that is not Spanish. We are driving past an industrial zone of aluminium-sided warehouses and supermarkets and chain restaurants; I see an enormous McDonald’s and a Carrefour the size of an aircraft hangar. I do not wish to emulate my countrymen in complaining about everything that is foreign but I do not believe that I have ever experienced worse driving in my life, my driver stamping on the accelerator as if it is an especially resilient cockroach that refuses to die. The seats of his taxi are made of plastic and I can feel myself sweating against them. The sky is so bright it is no longer blue but white and the sun has bleached everything so that the landscape looks like it would in an overexposed photograph. I have never been to Marbella before but I am an exception in my corner of Essex; for many it is an ideal of heaven on earth, a corner of Spain that will be for ever England. Looking out of the window, I have to wonder why.

  Growing up with my father, it was inevitable that I should hear about the wonders of Spain; I know of four of his friends for sure who left England in a hurry before the police caught up with them, heading for Spain and its lack of an extradition treaty. Although Spain is now only too happy to extradite criminals, it is no longer a simple matter to find them; there are going on for half a million British expats living in the south of Spain and their population is disproportionately represented by the criminal class. I am aware that an English version of Omertà is the norm amongst the community and that aiding any authorities brings with it severe repercussions. Punishment beatings and fish and chips; the Spanish must love us.

  We are approaching the city now and passing half-finished apartment buildings, cranes standing idle next to windowless façades that lack a roof as if it is the day after the apocalypse. The motorway gives way to boulevards, black tarmac and white kerbs with palm trees standing in the middle of roundabouts and soon the unfinished blocks are replaced by concrete houses, then huge white mansions with lush grass and bright flowers in their front gardens, spilling over white walls. My driver blows through a red light and nearly kills two boys on a scooter; they have to swerve to avoid him and turn so tightly their knees almost touch the ground.

  We turn a corner and suddenly we are on the seafront and the Mediterranean is the bright blue of a stained-glass window, luminous and beautiful; the enormity and serenity of it affects me immediately, soothing me somehow. Even with the driver’s strange music in my ears and the ragged hot air blowing through the window, the sight of that expanse of water acts like some kind of balm. I take a deep breath and feel the oppression that had been sitting in my pores lift and dissipate. Regardless of whether I find Terry Campion or not, that simple view means that this trip will not have been wasted.

  My hotel is on the seafront, an orange concrete behemoth that steps further away from the sea at each floor making it look like the superstructure of a ship emerging from the hills behind it. I can watch the sea from my balcony, which has a table and chairs and a parasol. The tiled floor under my bare feet has been cooled by the air-conditioning. I walk out on to the balcony, again shocked by how hot it is; my skin immediately pricks with moisture. On the horizon is a tanker, a hundred thousand tons of steel rendered hazy and ephemeral in the distance. Directly below me four lanes carry cars and scooters up and down the seafront, two lanes either side of a green border in which flowers grow. Beyond that is the beach, which is covered with people, the top halves of young men and women sprouting out of the shallow water. The seafront curves away from me and the buildings facing the sea are mostly hotels or restaurants or bars. I look at the list of bars that Jim and his friends gave me on the plane and already I can see one, The Banana Tree. I am in Marbella and evening is on its way and I need a drink. The Banana Tree seems as good a place to start as any.

  I draw a blank at The Banana Tree, same at Jake’s, Reflections, Room 8, Den’s Den, O’Malley’s, Oxygen and The Tiger Club, which has the distinction of a real stuffed tiger behind the bar. I spend the afternoon threading my way in between outside tables occupied by drunk English people with sunburns and dozy chaotic expressions as if they have just been woken up to be told that their house is on fire. Lager and forty-five-degree temperatures do not seem to be an ideal mix, particularly for young men and women accustomed to a sixty-watt sunshine. Next on my list is JoJos, no apostrophe, a waterfront bar with blacked-out windows and red ropes threaded through brass stands leading the way to the main door. Inside, I could be back in Essex; there is a long black bar with backlit spirit bottles on glass shelves behind it, leather-covered booths and three pool tables in the back. It is not busy and I stand at the bar. A blonde woman in a bikini top comes over; she is nearly fifty and the tanned skin on her chest looks like the hide cover of an old book. Her pink lipstick is fighting a losing battle at standing out against her orange skin.

  ‘Pint of…’ I scan the pumps. ‘Carling.’ She pours and I look around but there aren’t many people in the bar and none of them is Terry.

  ‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ I say. ‘He had to leave England in a bit of a hurry.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ She is chewing gum and she blows a small bubble which pops untidily against her pink lips.

  ‘Name’s Terry Campion. Wouldn’t know him, would you?’

  ‘No, love.’

  ‘Couldn’t miss him, he looked like he’d had a fight with a bear. Black eyes, stitches. Skinny, about this high.’ I put the edge of my hand against my chin.

  ‘You haven’t got a picture?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Might not have noticed, but this is summer.’ She puts my pint down in front of me, licks the last of the bubble gum from her lips. ‘Lots of people. They come here on holiday.’

  I nod, acknowledge her sarcasm. She has a point. Finding Terry might not be as simple as I had thought it would be. He cannot be the only Englishman in Marbella with a bruised face and if I am to be honest Terry is not the world’s most memorable man. I drink and decide that for the rest of the evening I will try to enjoy myself and push my search to the back of my mind. But it seems that try as I might I cannot put Essex behind me because I feel a hand clap me on the shoulder and a loud voice says, ‘Put your hands up or you will get it, son.’

  I turn around and see Jamie DeLaney, a twenty-five-year-old wastrel from my neighbourhood who could have played tennis at national level if it was not for the fact that he was born without sense, like some people come into this world without sight. He is grinning happily but then I have never seen him do anything else; I have in the past found myself resentfully jealous of his incapacity for gloom. He has blond hair and a well-fed face that would be handsome if not for the puppy fat, and he is as stupid and friendly as a Labrador.

  ‘Jamie.’

  ‘What you doing here, Danny?’

  ‘Holiday. Lots of people come here on holiday.’

  Jamie grins. ‘I’m on holiday too.’

  ‘Amazing.’ Jamie’s father owns a company that makes the uPVC surrounds for double-glazed windows and I don’t believe that Jamie has done a day’s work in his life. He is a professional gambler who once dropped £200,000 on his team, Chelsea, to win the league. When they didn’t, he laughed and paid for everybody he knew to go on a three-day bender. But I am not being entirely fair; apart from that error
of judgement, the word is that he makes good money, mostly from playing poker in big tournaments. Probably nothing significantly bad will happen to him in his entire life.

  ‘Drink?’ he says and I hold up my full pint.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Oi, darling? Pint of Carling.’ He turns to me. ‘So, who you here with?’

  ‘Nobody. On my own.’

  Jamie looks at me like I’ve confessed to molesting children. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Couple of days. Change of scenery.’ I take a drink and Jamie notices my finger.

  ‘Jesus, Danny, you in some kind of bother?’

  ‘Nah. This? Shaving accident.’

  Jamie nods. He’s streetwise enough to know when not to push something. There’s a brief pause but Jamie’s never been one to put up with a silence for long.

  ‘Tell the truth, it ain’t just a holiday. I’ve got a poker game too.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘At the Four Seasons. You should see it, Danny, it ain’t like round here. Two sides to Marbella innit, and over there it’s proper classy. Lamborghinis, Ferraris, fuck me you can’t move for it.’

  ‘When does it start?’

  ‘Yeah, started actually. Been playing the last four days, got a day off today so, you know.’ He hands money to the woman, picks up his pint, takes a healthy swig. ‘Getting on it.’

  ‘You winning?’

  ‘Yeah, not doing bad. Cost me ten grand to buy in but we’re down to the last four. Two Yanks and some woman from the Philippines, looks like she should be cleaning my room but she plays like fucking Yoda.’ Jamie’s guileless face chucks out this racial slur as if it is meant as a compliment. He leans in close to me. ‘I’ve got two hundred and sixty grand in chips,’ he says. ‘Definitely got a sniff at winning the lot.’

  ‘How much would that be?’

  ‘Million and a half, but it’s in Euros, so, fuck knows. Probably buy a villa here if I win anyway, so… Don’t matter, does it?’