—Mustard there if yeh wannit. Or red sauce.
Squeeze. Ketchup leaves the nozzle with a wet red fart.
Bite, chew, swallow. Stay under the awning out of the drizzle keep yourself and your hunger dry. Bite. Oh and fuckin look at that; tomato sauce all over the shelly. Bastard.
—What can I get yeh, love?
—Cheeseburger please. With onions. And a cup of oh hello there Darren. Fancy meeting yew here.
FUCK. —Lenny.
—Been lookin for yew, I yav.
—Oh aye? Why’s that, well?
God he looks big this Lenny. Bigger than he usually does. That leather coat buttoned up across his chest and them buttons about to ping off.
Drum of rain on the awning.
—Cracking shiner that is, mun. Nose looks chipped an all if yew don’t mind me saying and how many stitches did they put in yewer noggin?
Bite, chew, swallow. Don’t answer this Welsh bastard. Enough left of the burger and it still hot enough to stuff into this fucker’s smiling face and –
—Tommy wants a word, Darren. Quick as yew can finish yewer dinner ey an let’s go see him, aye?
—Don’t think so, Lenny, no.
—What?
—Pure is not gunner happen, lar, me goin to see T with youse. Is not gunner fuckin happen. I’m just gunner eat me berga likes an then I’m gunner –
—Two pounds please, love.
—Thankyew.
—Ta.
— … go lookin for that fuckin Alastair an then am gunner –
Lenny takes his cheeseburger in one hand, removes the top half of the bread roll with the other and rams the steaming meat and melted cheese and fried onions into Darren’s bruised face. Darren roars and the woman in the serving hatch yells about taking it elsewhere and Lenny spins Darren so that he can clutch him backwards to his chest and apologises to the woman and bundles the bellowing Darren away towards the cab rank opposite the Hanover Arms just a matter of yards away.
—Me eyes! It’s in me friggin eyes yeh cunt!
Lenny locks Darren’s wrists together behind his back in one big hand. Darren’s wounded scalp fills his vision, the glued slit like a slash of bared bone across the blue patch shaved bald. Shoppers stare then look away quickly and rain falls. Darren bellows about cutting Lenny up. Lenny smells onions and melted processed cheese coming off his captive’s head and reflects on how hungry he is. Waste of a good bastard burger, that. Two quid n all.
Rain falls.
—Al fuckin merda yeh yeh fuckin cunt al fuckin –
—Okay now, shut the gob. People’re looking. Just accept it, Darren mun. Tommy only wants a quick word, that’s all, see.
—Al rip yer fuckin face off cunt al fuckin –
—Aye, yeh, am sure yew will, mun. Yur we go now, nice an quiet, ey?
He scans the street for prowling police and sees none then scans the taxi rank for a tame cabbie and sees one, big silver head, and marches shackled Darren over the road through honking fuming traffic and bundles him into the taxi without releasing his wrists.
The cabbie regards them in the rear-view mirror with some alarm. —Aw, Lenny, wharrer yeh tryna do to me, lad? Get me inter fuckin trouble, you.
With one hand Lenny grabs Darren’s nape and forces his head down between his knees. Muffled roars, arms flailing. With the other Lenny digs some notes out of his jacket pocket and passes them through the hatch.
—Stop yewer skriking, Shirl. Buy yewer missus something nice on-a way home.
—Yeh but for fuck’s sakes, Lenny. Mean ter say, like. Droppin me in the shite here you are. The taxi edges out into the traffic. —Out of order this, lar. Where am I takin yiz, anyway? Tommy’s gaff?
—The office, aye. Quick as yew can, like.
—In this fuckin traffic? Jokin, aren’t yeh?
Lenny looks out at the city behind the windows running with greasy rain. Bent-double Darren has ceased thrashing but continues still to roar, a muffled voice rising up from somewhere near the vehicle’s floor. The rage rising off his hunched back and cut skull smells to Lenny somewhat appetising.
The mug of tea Alastair ordered is growing cold but he’s not going back to his table in this state, no way, not with this water running down his battered face. Crying like a fucking babby, man. Disgrace this is. Got his face in his hands and his shoulders are shaking and he’s gritting his teeth to dampen the sobs so that the other visitors to this toilet won’t be able to hear him. Fucking sad. Fuckin blubbin away here what kinda man Jesus Christ how the fuck are yeh ever gunner –
Mountains and lakes and he was a child once and so was she more of a mother than his own frigging mother who is now where? So old so old like that and the words she whispered that voice like a ghost itself that body almost broken who she is and the THUNK of that hammer and the fall and crack of the pool cue on skull and the screaming in his head and the blackness and nowt goes right nothing ever goes right he’s tryna only fucking tryna gorrer get that fuckin money back gorrer fuckin gerra grip stop this stop this it’s all fucked up the mess we’re in how the fuck do we how do we ah Jesus friggin Christ what is wrong here it’s all gone wrong when will it ever
get a fuckin grip
get a fuckin grip man
Sobbing Alastair who weeps as a child weeps, in the delusion that their tears can ever alter anything. In the hope forlorn and fatuous that all external assault may cease in the flood of shed and stinging brine as if their waters are uncommon, scarce enough to startle, as if rare enough to arrest. As if as if as if as if
He delves in his pocket and pulls out a bunch of keys. With the tip of one of them he starts scratching in the paint of the cubicle door, more words among the many already scored in or scrawled on, those legends scraped and scribbled he now adds to:
DARREN TAYLOR SUCK’S BIG COCKZ
DARREN TAYLOR LIKES IT MMM UP THE SHITTA
FUCK ALL YOUSE ARSE-BANDITS
DARREN TAYLOR IS FUCKEN DEAD
And maybe writing that last will make it happen. Draw it down from the leaking sky a spell a promise a a a a
Alastair again, back out in the city, searcher in a shell suit, quester in a cap. The water now on his afflicted face only from above and not any more from within, yet shared of salts it is and of a similar mineral consistency, the drizzle without, this drizzle within. With face upturned he tastes it and whether from that one-cloud sky or dreg from reddened eye he cannot tell, cannot discern any difference. Just this wet and heavy lees that sheens all features alike.
Two figures in the dark back street between warehouse hulks all up until recently deserted and dilapidated yet some now renovated in the last few years. Once they stored cotton and sugar and tobacco and flour and oil and other such staples, stored them in amounts vast and attended by a workforce of similar size, then to lie unused and empty for several decades although some now converted into offices or even living quarters and others still as they have been for many years, shot through with slanting sunlight and inhabited only by pigeon or rat and a few vagabonds who in corners too build nests of rag and shredded paper like their counterparts rodential or avian and like them again survive on the city’s leavings and lean on the generosity of the odd few of its denizens. Call these spaces crumbling, cavernous, shot through with slanting sunlight some unusual kind of a home and the ghosts of gone commerce carried by the wind that wails through broken window and subsidence crack, not only the clank of cog and pulley or gabble of a hundred different tongues but also the wailing of those who were broken to build this city’s parts, those enslaved, their pulverised bones in the mortar of these storehouses now and their blood in the buried sumps long unused now drying to red scale and the many voices which lift the wind, form the wind that moans and shrieks and draws up from the vast flat empty floors little dancing devils of dust and detritus, fiend-friend and familiar to those souls lost and desolate which roost in the shadows of these high halls.
The drizzle so thin and fine doesn’t exactly fall as instead
saturate the air. Lenny and Darren stand by a door of reinforced steel and face each other, a few feet of wet air between them.
—You’re fuckin slashed, Lenny, Darren says. He might as well be remarking on a new jacket that Lenny wears for all the flatness in his tone. —No lie, lar, you are pure fuckin ribboned. Sometime in the future, like. You’re fuckin sliced, lar.
—Am I?
—Oh aye, yeh. Don’t you worry about that, lad. That fuckin kite o’ yours is Stanley’d an that’s that. Consider yerself marked.
—Consider meself quakin in me shoes, Darren. Tremblin with fear I yam, see.
—Yeh, you fuckin well will be, knob’ed. No cunt treats me like this, knowmean?
—How else was I gunner get yew to come? Send out a fuckin invitation is it?
Darren shakes his head. —Don’t wanna hear it, lar. You’re gunner need a friggin calculator to count the stitches I’m gunner give yeh.
Lenny laughs. —Ee, yew an that Stanley knife. Like a kiddie with a toy yew are, see. Favourite teddy bear, like. Just can’t leave it alone, can yew?
Darren says nothing, just extracts a curl of fried onion from his ear and examines it and flicks it away. Lenny leans and rings for a second time the bell next to the reinforced door and this time hears heavy steps clump along the hallway behind that door and the galumphing tread and woof of a big dog.
The door opens a crack. A Rottweiler’s massive head black and beige and jowly snarling sniffs the air. A blue rope around this dog’s neck and wrapped around the wrist of Jamie ‘Gozzy’ Squires, his lopeyed leer above the tightly buttoned neck of his anorak and his shaved head haloed by the fur-spikes of its collar.
—Oh would yeh fuckin look who it is. He grins at Darren, fixes him with his one good eye while the other one regards the sky. —Got some fuckin explainin to do, you av. Wanner start now, well?
—Fuckin geg out, Gozzy. Al speak to Tommy and only Tommy. Ain’t got werd fuckin one to say to youse so just fuckin geg out, will yeh.
—Gerrin. Gozzy pulls the dog to one side to allow Darren and Lenny entrance. Lenny ruffles the dog’s huge head as he passes it and leans to whisper endearments in its ear enamoured as he is of large powerful animals and Gozzy leans too to secure the rope lead’s D-clip to the collar and for a moment their heads are clustered like that to form one beast three-headed. Three-faced hybrid of human and dog leering all three with bared teeth and tongues aloll at this strengthened threshold.
A swagger on Darren as he walks down the corridor lined each side with boxes of DVD players and Megadrives stacked eight, ten high. Dark corridor this towards a lit portal at the end and through and into this light. Some kind of office with a loud central point of two young women, their big hair and leopard-spotted thigh boots and displayed tan midriffs and made-up faces blaring in Darren’s eyes that still sting from hot grease.
Tommy sits between them on a swivel chair. The cheeks of his arse spill out over each side of the seat and in this position he looks like an immense 8 topped with a perm, Rockport boots planted flat and splayed on the floor and chino trousers tucked in. He glances once at Darren with eyes like slate chips pressed into lard and tucks a thick wad of paper money into the breast pocket of his red Kappa jacket and then looks back at the women, his eyes upwards, standing as the women are.
—Right, youse two. Fuck off, well. Get back to work. Money to be made out there.
They leave. One of them glares at Darren as she passes and Darren stares and checks out her arse which she wiggles all exaggerated in more of a fuck you than a fuck me way. Lenny stands aside to let them pass and smiles at them then looks sort of shyly away. Gozzy just leers one-eyed. Their stack heels clomp down the corridor and the front door opens then slams shut and drabness descends into the room. It is as if a macaw has just exited a bank.
Pugnose Tommy sniffs the air doglike.
—What’s that friggin stink? Slike onions.
—It’s him, innit, Lenny says, nodding at Darren. —Had to put me burger in his face to get him to come, didn’t I?
Glance at Darren. Back at Lenny.
—So yer’ve ad no dinner, Len?
—Not a bean. Starvin, I yam.
—Get yerself in the kitchen well an knock up a butty or summin. Take Shay Neary with yiz.
Lenny takes the dog by the collar into the adjoining kitchen and closes the door. Tommy spins and stabs something on a computer keyboard and the screen goes blank then he spins back and points a banana finger at Darren.
—You. Fuckin knob’ed there. Sit down.
Darren looks for a chair. There are three but in one is Tommy and in another is Gozzy and in the third in the far corner leaning back against the wall is Jez Sully, hands locked across his belly, steroid-swelled muscles stretching his skintight white polo neck.
—Wharrav I just said, Darren? Sit. Fuckin. Down, lad. Are yeh deaf?
Darren sinks on to the dusty floor. Shuffles back so that he leans against the same wall as Sully and so cannot be struck from behind by him or indeed anyone else. Sully regards him amused and side-on as he would a small entertaining animal. Puppy with a plaything, say.
Tommy wheels himself on his chair towards Darren. Castors squeak and he leans, looms like a wave of flesh.
—Two little cunts name of Robbo an Freddy, Darren. Ring any bells?
Very bright, stark light above. Humming fluorescents cast no shadow, expose and illuminate everything.
Darren shakes his head. —None, Tommy.
—Yeh sure?
—Aye, yeh.
—So them fuckin stitches in yer ed an that shiner an that fuckin smack in the nose there, got them fallin down the fuckin stairs, did yeh? Or were yiz fuckin bushwhacked behind Lime Street Station by two lil no-marks names of Robbo and Freddy?
Darren says nothing. Tommy wheels himself back away to a desk topped with a computer terminal with a South Park screensaver and opens a drawer and takes out a gun and lays it flat on the mousemat and spins it, spins it. It catches the harsh yellow light on its barrel as it revolves. Tommy’s favourite nine-mil, this. Darren has seen it before. Heard it shout, even, and seen what it can do.
—These two lil scallies callin themselves Robbo an Freddy come to see me. Wanner buy a coupla grand’s worth of beak, step on it, set themselves up in biz. That’s what thee tell me thee wanner do.
Jez Sully laughs. Just one abrupt humourless bark.
—An am thinkin to meself: now where did a pairer blerts like these get ahold of that kinda swag? Jez is thinkin the same, aren’t yeh, Jez?
—Yeh. An am also wondrin what’s happened to the fuckin car youse were given day before yesterdee.
Darren speaks: —I called yeh, Tommy. Left yiz a voicemail. Didn’t yeh gerrit?
—Not fuckin interested in no fuckin voicemail, lar. Tommy flaps a fat hand. —What I wanner know is where these two little fuckin toerag neds get ahold of that kinda dough. Two fuckin grand. Terns out, dunnit, that thee jacked some fuckin pissed-up shite-fer-brains outside Ma Egerton’s alehouse cos, an here’s the fuckin funny bit, his mate told em to. Some dopey twat in a baseball hat, thee said. Know anyone fits that description, Darren?
Flame begins in Darren’s stomach. Grinding in his teeth. —Alastair …
—That’s the one, aye. Dozy cunt in a baseball hat. Accordin to this Robbo lad, or Freddy, whoever the fuck it was, this Alastair one came up to him in the Lime Street Station bar, said he could earn some wedge like, if he jacked the pissed an brain-dead cunt with the fuckin rucksack full of it. Which was you, by the way. Said he’d split it with em, like. Then it terns out that some postie in North Wales has been screwed an people saw a Morris fuckin Minor at the scene like, an two dick’eds with Liverpool accents an surprise surprise where was fuckin you an yer dozy fuckin no-mark mate yesterdee? An what fuckin kinda car were yiz drivin?
—Yeh, Sully says. —An where’s that friggin motor now, eh? Fuckin liked that car, I did. Classic, like. Pure fuckin quality.
Th
e kitchen door opens. Lenny’s there, leaning left shoulder against the jamb, eating a fried-egg sandwich and holding a saucer underneath his chin to catch the drips of brown sauce and runny orange yolk.
—So what I wanner know now, Darren, is this. Tommy scoots on the wheeled chair with shocking speed like a white van pouncing and his big face is suddenly in Darren’s the dark eyes wide bright light on dry skin: —WHAT THE FUCK IS GOIN ON HERE, TWAT? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOUSE UP TO?
Darren’s face heated by bad breath and he would recoil but the wall is there against his back and he can see a gun close to him it gulped in Tommy’s huge ringed hand but for the barrel a gun a gun: —Fuckin Alastair, Tommy! Tellin you, lar! Nowt to fuckin do with me, man, it’s that fuckin Alastair! Believe!
He shows his hands to Tommy, palms out, fingers spread: —Honest to God, Tom! Look! No fuckin fingers crossed, lar! It’s that fuckin Alastair!
—Oh, an that Alastair screwed the postie, did he? On his own, like? Yer tellin me that that dozy get –
Squires yells: —Smack him, Tommy! He’s windin yer up, lad!
Darren spits words at that voice: —Fuck off you yeh gozzy cunt! Al fuckin –
Choke. Tommy’s huge hand, the gunless one around Darren’s neck squeezing SQUEEZING the room is abruptly red.
—Ey, Tommy … c’mon now, mun … got to let him speak, first, mun …
Lenny’s hand on Tommy’s arm. The hand opens and Darren gasps and splutters and Jesus Christ some bastard will pay for this shit. Pay for it all, man, no lie.
—Speak, Darren. Quick now, boy, while yew’ve got the chance.
—Yeh, go on, twat, Tommy sneers. —I’m fuckin dyin to hear it, like.
—Alastair, man, Darren wheezes. Breath through his throat like a blade. —That fuckin Alastair … I know what happened now … that bleedin betrayin cunt …
Gozzy’s voice again: —Whack the divvy, Tommy. Always said he was a fuckin wrong’un, didn’t I? Doan need gobshites like that, lar, better off without em. Tellin yeh. Avn’t I always said?
Lenny gestures at Squires to shut up. All four faces gather round Darren, leaning leering looming faces without mercy three of them one softer slightly all reflecting the severe yellow light above and washed now in a redness receding.
Wreckage Page 15