by Tim Scott
I picked myself up off the beer-stained carpet and found that my left arm seemed to weigh a surprising amount all of a sudden. Worse, it wanted to swing casually in front of me, like some foreign body. I flexed my fingers, trying to coax a little more life back into it, and then lifted it at an angle across my chest, so the fingertips rested on my right shoulder.
“I’ll bet I’ve missed calls while I’ve been away!” chirped the phone into my ear.
“Shut it!” I shouted breathlessly.
“I hate missing calls. Makes me so annoyed! I’m telling you, I ain’t gonna miss another call as long as I live.”
“Whatever. Now shut the fuck up.” A deep sense of unease about Teb ran through me as we hurried toward the elevators. Had he just been blown away, or had he managed to bolt someplace? We needed to get out onto the roof quickly and flag down a GaFFA. It would be expensive, but to hell with that.
I didn’t speak about what I feared the most.
The Riders were there.
24
The sleepy drone of the White Noise hum was the only sound we could make out. We stopped dry-mouthed in the tall, austere entrance lobby of Teb’s apartments, but the polished wood-block floor was smeared with thick, looping tire marks, and the spiral stair treads were caked in burnt rubber. I could see that Teb’s front door lay crazily smashed off its hinges and hung by the merest of threads, like some drunken old man who had finally passed out against the bar but not yet fallen over.
“Teb, Teb, Teb,” breathed Mat, surveying the mess.
I nodded ruefully. Then I took a deep breath to steady myself and gingerly led the way up the spiral staircase, feeling the loudness of the White Noise hum tingle around my head. We edged slowly up the treads, in a heart-skipping, mouth-drying procession, then reached the walkway and edged toward the splintered front door, which seemed to be surrounded by an air of palpable shock.
I turned to check that Mat was there, then slid into the apartment. It was unerringly quiet—the sort of quiet that soaks into things after a great deal of noise and leaves the atmosphere echoing something, but you can’t quite hear it.
Things were scattered so wildly, as though Teb had been robbed by a gang of walruses. And clumsy ones at that.
Bike tread marks smeared the floor in weird shapes. I wondered if Teb had something up his sleeve for a thing like this, and I prayed he hadn’t tried to cajole them with stuff about cats. Mat stopped to listen and we both froze, trying to make out anything in the maze of the apartment.
Not a sound.
We inched into the living room where, if anything, the mess seemed more extreme. It felt like the Riders had made a point of destroying every piece of furniture. Stuffing and material and the legs of various things were scattered about. A can or something fell in one of the rooms, thumped and clanged, then rocked itself to a stop against the empty silence.
I realized my heart was pounding so loudly I imagined anyone this side of LA would be able to hear it—and I suddenly pictured some woman in Monterey saying to her daughter: “What’s that thumping sound? Can you hear that, Jolene?”
The silence in the apartment grew, ballooning up as though with every second that passed it expanded, and if it got to a certain point, it might implode. Mat crept up to the door to the Pit and had a tentative look around the corner. Then he turned ashen-faced and shook his head in a way I really didn’t like. At the same time, I heard voices and my throat dried.
“I’ve really trashed my lucky pants, now.”
“They looked like shit anyway.”
“You’d know, wouldn’t you?”
“Listen, I’m getting the feeling I know the Catch from someplace,” one of the others growled. “You guys get that too?”
“Maybe I do, a bit, but they always look familiar, right?” said another voice.
It was the Riders, all right, and images of the one with the ammunition round nestled in his teeth came back to me like a calling card slipped into a mailbox.
Mat tugged at my sleeve and I wondered what he was on about. I followed him anyway, realizing that if the Riders left now, we were trapped. He carefully popped the loft hatch, brought down the ladder, and we slipped up, dragging the ladder after us, and reclosed the hatch door with a soft “clunk.” Tiny slits of light found their way through fissures in the ceiling where Teb had added in various ducts and services, and I could just make out dusty boxes and odd, polyethylene-wrapped shapes tucked into the low eaves.
There was a dry, dead feeling of stagnant air in the cramped space; a strange, sleepy sense that everything in here was waiting for something to happen. Loft spaces, I thought, are time-less—and I wondered in an insane moment whether anyone had ever tried measuring whether time does actually go slower in these unclaimed attics, as it does in space.
Masses of wires crisscrossed the floors, snaking around the wooden joists, and if either of us snagged up on any of them we could fall through the flimsy plasterboard ceiling and make a spectacular arrival. I crept gingerly along the beams, aware of the rough splinters that pricked at my hands, until I guessed I was directly over the roof of the Pit. I put my ear to the ceiling.
“Hear anything?” hissed Mat. I shook my head and listened again, and this time I heard the muffle of voices.
“Think they’re still there,” I whispered, and we both strained to pick up the distant sound, trying to find a hook on any of the words so we could tune in to what they were saying.
“Yippitty doo daaah!” chirped an excruciatingly loud voice, virtually sending me through the roof. “You’ll never guess what’s just happened!”
“Shut up!” I hissed at my phone, and tried desperately to muffle it.
“Another call!” it cried in its tiny, tinny voice. “Another ringing smacker!”
“Get rid of it, now,” I whispered. “You hear?”
“You’re kidding me, right? After I nearly died? Get rid of a call? I’m living to the full, buddy. Connecting!”
“Hello, Jonny,” said the clipped woman’s voice at the other end, leaving a deliberate and cavernous pause after she spoke.
“Emma?” I hissed, turning in despair in the darkness and trying to muffle the sound.
“Yes. Emma, your girlfriend! Well done. You remember that bit, then?” and I realized her voice was thick with poorly leashed anger, which pushed her words out too fast and made them rise despite her efforts to peg them down. “Your girlfriend! The one you said you cared for ‘like the sky loves the moon.’”
“I never said that!” I hissed, despite myself. “‘Like the sky loves the moon’? I wouldn’t ever say anything as trite as that. I might occasionally try and quote something by Shelley, but that’s about my limit.”
“One message!” she screamed and her voice seemed to echo and bounce around in the roof space like a trapped sparrow. Surely the Riders were going to hear this. “One message! Some pathetic excuse about your house being stolen! Did you expect me to believe that? No one steals houses anymore.”
“Emma, calm down. Just keep your voice down, please.”
“No, I will not keep my voice down,” she cried, “and I will not be treated this way. My great-grandmother was Countess of Lewisham in England, and my ancestors were Privy to the King’s Chamber and probably Privy to all sorts of other places like his kitchen and his bloody loft extension, for all I know. How can you treat me like this?”
“Emma, I’m sorry, it really has not been my fault,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to calm things down. “Can we talk about this another—”
“You meet me in ten minutes at my apartment or this relationship is over,” she shouted. “And if that sounds like an ultimatum, that’s because it is! I want to find out exactly where your priorities lie.”
“OK,” I whispered. “Emma, I‘d really like to. Really, if it was up to me, I’d be over there now. But it’s not in my hands—” And the call snapped dead.
“Terminated!” chirped the phone. “Two calls already. I almost
feel just like my old self again. How about we call the speaking clock?”
“No.” I sighed, and Mat looked at me with a rueful smile.
“All finished,” I said.
“Yeah. I heard,” he whispered. “Sorry.”
“Not been my day really.” I swallowed.
“Come on. She wasn’t right for you anyway, Jonny. She was a pain in the ass, wasn’t she? The way she was always getting you to run around after her. Always claiming she had just watched some worthy program about Africa on the EtherMat when she’d only seen thirty seconds in the ad breaks of some other trash. She was a fake. She wasn’t a real person,” he said, laying his hand on my shoulder.
I knew deep down that he was absolutely right, but I hated failure in anything, and that relationship was one humongous failure.
A noise from below caught us both midthoughts and I was suddenly convinced gunshots were going to pop randomly through the ceiling with the same effortless ease a spoon can puncture the seal on a jar of coffee. But it was just the bikes being kicked off their stands, and the next second they roared into life. I pictured the Riders each in turn, with their badly sewn scars, and my head ached again with memory of the name Jeff. I had known someone called Jeff, but it was as if a whole bunch of information in my head had been pushed through a cheese grater, then mixed up and put back in my head in one solid mass.
Fumes rose up from the bikes, spewing through the tiny holes into the roof until we were both coughing, hacking up the smoke in silent fits as the bikes churned up the quiet like a plow chewing up a hard, dry field.
The cramped space was soon choking with toxic smoke, and we scrabbled for the hatch as the growl of the engines bounced away from us in bursts of acceleration. I hoped they had all gone, but we were past caring to check as we both tumbled out of the loft in a ramshackle bundle of coughing mania. I picked myself off the floor, still wheezing from the fumes, which clouded the entire apartment.
“Teb?” I shouted, staggering around the apartment. “Teb?”
A low moan seemed to be coming from somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. “Teb?” I cried again and began to home in on the moan, which I realized was coming from under the sofa. I heaved away the remains of the thing and found Teb lying in an appalling mess.
His face was plastered all over in this red gunge that seemed much thicker than it was in the movies. “Mat! Here!” I shouted. “Easy, Teb. You’ll be OK.” I tried to remember what you should do at times like this but all that came to mind was the image of someone bandaging a sprained ankle with lots of curving arrows drawn on.
“Jesus, Teb!” said Mat arriving. “You’re covered in so much—”
“Jam,” said Teb abruptly, and pulled himself up. “Had the doughnuts in hand when I heard them coming. Safest place is always under the sofa. Learned that watching films when I was a kid.” He sniffed, getting up. “It’s a wonder the army doesn’t take sofas with them into battle so they could get underneath them if they came under attack. You two OK? They’ve made a mess here, haven’t they? Bet I get a memo from the management committee about the noise too.” And he wandered into the next room idly eating the remains of the doughnut in his hand.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief and shook my head.
“You had me worried there, you know?”
“‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’” he replied.
“Still barking on about Shakespeare,” I said to Mat, surveying the fantastic level of destruction. “He is from another planet.”
“Hey! Hey! Look,” Teb beamed, holding up his typing gizmo, as he blundered back in. “They didn’t get the cat stuff!”
Mat made coffee. We sat amid the debris trying to put things back into some sort of perspective, but the taste of the first sip jolted me back to the moment Caroline had given me coffee in that safe house in the woods. How did she come to make it so perfectly with just the tiniest drop of milk? I elbowed the thought away and relaxed. Avoiding the Riders felt like something of a victory, even if it had been at a huge price to Teb’s apartment. But it wasn’t just that. I felt chilled out in a much deeper way. It was as though I had finally let go of feeling responsible for things that I couldn’t control.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to me before,” Teb was saying.
“Strange that, dude,” said Mat.
“No, I once nearly had a fight with one of those huge furry mascots at a college football game after I tripped him up when I was drunk. That was the closest I’ve ever been to a fight before. He was dressed as a giant banana slug, and I just ran away when he got up, ’cos he could only hobble. It wasn’t what you could really call a proper, bare-knuckle fight.”
“No?” said Mat. “You wouldn’t put it on a par with some of the great Heavyweight World Championship bouts of the world? Not up there with Muhammad Ali?”
“Who’s he?” Teb said.
“A man who never fought a banana slug in his life.”
And so they bantered on. And I just sat listening to their aimless conversation, sipping coffees and moving on to beers Teb dug out from the fridge, letting my mind crunch all the events and sensations that had come at me in the past days. My brain had a massive backlog of stuff to sort out and file and so I just let it do its own thing, giving it a chance to try and juggle everything around. It was as though my emotional hard disk was full, and it was time to junk what wasn’t needed and defrag the rest of it. The evening drifted past, and I felt a wonderful peacefulness expand my mind. A belief that underneath it all, whatever happened, everything was actually all right.
“Shame I didn’t get your address book. I tried, but it wasn’t there,” said Teb at one point.
“How do you mean?” I said, draining another bottle.
“Oh, couldn’t find your address book for your Skin Media, so lost all your numbers.”
“No problem. They’re all in my house,” I said without thinking, and they looked at me. “Oh yeah.” And then out of the haze a thought poked me, and I smiled ruefully. I actually would never see my house again. Up until now, I’d sort of believed I would. “Phone,” I said, already knowing what the answer would be, “redial the number I gave you yesterday morning about 10:00 AM, will you?”
“Yes sir!” chirped the phone and then it paused. “Errr…hang on. Can’t remember. Did it have a two in it?”
Teb snorted with laughter.
“No,” continued the phone, its tinny voice getting quite serious, “all I can remember is I’m lost somewhere and it’s dark and there’s like a purple haze. And a white light and I start heading for it. And a voice inside me is going: Don’t head for the light! And I can’t help it, I’m getting drawn there. And the voice is going: Don’t head for the light! And—”
“All right, phone,” I said. “Easy now.”
“Handsets; you can’t beat them,” said Mat, waving his unit about, seeing my expression. “Call me old-fashioned, but they’re a lot less bother.”
“But how much horse manure does that thing take? Or do you need a handle to start it?” Teb said, unable to stop himself. It was an old joke. Mat refused to buy into Skin Media and we always gave him a hard time.
So, I thought, my phone couldn’t remember the number for the punks that stole my house, and I had dropped the card they had left me in Zone Securities. My house was gone. I had to let go of the idea I would see it again, and somehow it didn’t seem so hard. I had to let things go and move on, and I wondered if that had been my problem all along. That my head was in a tangle because I was hanging on to too much old stuff.
“Sorry if I’ve been selfish about all this,” I said.
“What?” said Teb.
“Well, what does my house really matter?”
“Well it’s your house. ’Course it matters.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got things all out of proportion, haven’t I?”
“No, you haven’t, Jonny.”
“Yeah, I shouldn’t have got you t
wo involved. Look at your apartment, Teb,” I said. “You don’t deserve all this.”
“I’ll have to smash your face in if there’s any more talk like that,” said Teb. “Just like I did with that mascot.”
“Your problem is our problem,” said Mat. “OK? It’s a chance to prove that our friendship is worth something. Yeah?”
“That’s very cool,” I said after a moment. “Very cool,” and I nodded, not knowing how to express properly the gratitude and love I had for these two unlikely friends. “I’ll get some more beers,” I said, slightly pathetically, then I stopped myself. Moments like this make life worth living. Moments like this don’t come along very often—and when they do, I knew you needed to drink deeply from them because they’re landmarks in our lives.
“You two have my deepest respect and love,” I stumbled, through the haze of beer.
“Thanks,” said Mat quietly. “We’re too sensitive for all this stuff with guns really, aren’t we?”
“Maybe,” I said, nodding but not moving.
“We are, you know. Much too sensitive. Now fuck off and get us some more beers, will you?”
I turned, laughing, and lunged in the general direction of the kitchen as I heard Teb’s voice wafting after me.
“‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he that shares his beer with me, shall be my brother!’…or something like that.”
25
I didn’t have any clue whether this qualified as the next morning, or even possibly a week later.
All I knew was that my tongue felt the size of an air mattress and my head throbbed as though someone was pummeling my temples repeatedly with a blunt chair leg. I opened my eyes.
Big mistake.
A particularly crisp bolt of pain rebounded around my head, like someone had stuffed a bouncing ball in there and it was still flying about; perhaps that was why my ears were hammering. I’d had a lot of hangovers in my life but this had to be in the top ten. Then again, that’s how I always felt the morning after about all of them.
I was torn between trying to get back to sleep so my body could repair itself without me noticing and getting up and taking charge. I closed my eyes and thought about anything other than spinning. I saw the image of a big, leering face, very close to mine with a round of ammunition where one of its teeth should have been. Then, in some confusion, I tried to work out whether my eyes were open or closed and decided they were closed. I tried to drift off, but felt something tickling my forehead, and when I scratched it I found that it was very hard and very metal. I roused myself as well as I could and saw the same image of the face again.