Wreckage

by Niall Griffiths

  I checked my phone, made sure it hadn’t been spat on or anything, and then I checked the timetable at the bus stop, so I didn’t notice where Terry or Barry or whatever his Scouse name was went. Didn’t see. The timetable told me that I couldn’t catch a bus to Capel Garmon from there anyway so I just carried on walking, thought I’d get to the next village then call Si, tell him to come out and pick me up in his new 4x4 he got for his birthday. So yes, I had a bit more on my mind than what some brain-dead Scouse scally was up to. I did hear a gunshot, yes, when I was walking down the lane to the next village; I heard the crack, but I just thought it was someone shooting pheasants or grouse or whatever. Didn’t see anything, just heard the gunshot. Thought to myself: there’s some yokel’s breakfast sorted out, innit? Wasn’t until I watched the local news that night at Si’s place that I realised what had happened. But what can ya do? And what can ya expect? Some scally mugger trying to get into your shop … Jeez, I’d shoot the bastard too. I stayed at Si’s for a week – canoed on Bala Lake, climbed one of those mountains with the mad Welsh names. I did the Adam and Eve jump but Si wouldn’t do it, too chicken-shit. So he’s getting slated for weeks about that one. So yes, apart from that fucking Scouse mugger, my time in Wales was quality, or most of it was … I mean, I didn’t do the jump either, to be honest. But I wasn’t as scared as Si was. But Jeez I was pleased to get back on the train again, get back to some fuckin civilisation. It’s the Wild West out there, my bravvah. And it follows ya; I mean, two days back at home and me mobile rings; some fucking Scouser tellin me that he knows I’m in on it all cos the call came from my phone. Threatened to rip my arms off, said he was blind in one eye now cos of me, and that he was going to murder me and someone called Alastair together. I told him that I didn’t know what he was talking about, that I don’t know anyone called Alastair, and switched me phone off. Wrong number, must’ve been. But I’m monitoring all me calls from now on. But ya see what I mean, how it follows ya? Just can’t get away from it, man. It follows ya.

  EMRYS

  Buzzards. He hears them squealing. They must be soaring low over the shop and the adjoining fields, scanning for newborn lambs in the pastures, for unprotected new lives to rend and destroy and if the events of the past few days have taught him anything then it is the necessity of protection; the moral imperative to guard the innocent, to shield the vulnerable from harm and hurt. Which is what Frank’s gun is for.

  Still in the hospital, she is. She may never leave it alive.

  Buzzards. Big, brutal birds. Wheeling and screeching above the shop. The way they kill rabbits: not strong enough to kill them outright or carry them aloft they will swoop and strike, swoop and strike until the rabbit is dragging itself broken across the field still seeking sanctuary trailing its guts behind and the raptor will then eat. Whilst the rabbit still lives. It will eviscerate and eat the eyes of the still-living thing.

  Protect the innocent. Shield the susceptible, the unsafe.

  Frank’s shotgun in his arms feels perfect. The shape of it, its heft. Like some sword of justice. He carries it outside into the bright morning and shields his eyes as he scans the sky and sees no birds in the glare but hears them and there is a figure, a shadow crossing the road towards him. Shellsuit and baseball hat and battered face and holding a rucksack tight to his chest this figure stepping out of the sunlight and approaching him and Emrys knows what this is it is the evil returned the badness come back as it will and will again.

  She may never leave the hospital alive. When he saw her on that horse. Forty years. Stillborn baby and the tears and the infant badger found in the barn and that time they came and shot the sheep. Take this off me I cannot bear it.

  The figure stops. Holds out the rucksack in its arms towards him. The split and swollen mouth opens to speak beneath the eyes blank in the shade of the cap’s peak and Emrys levels the gun and twitches his finger. The index finger of his right hand, it twitches once and quickly. To protect the innocent. From harm to safeguard them.

  DARREN

  If there will be one event that, for the rest of his life, he will regret ever happening it will be, here and now, the pissing of his pants. Not a good way to confront death. Although it will not be it will feel, until he eventually does die, half blind in Melbourne, Australia, in a motorbike accident at the age of sixty-three, like the final indignity. Like the ultimate indignity although of course in the days to come there will be many, many more.

  ANOTHER NURSE: WENDY MURRAY

  Sometimes they get to you; sometimes there’s one among the hundreds of others that gets to you, that stabs your heart. That makes you realise the futility of it all and the pointlessness of existing for so many years just to die alone and adrift in the corner of some terminal ward with a view of the gridlocked traffic from the window, had you the strength to just sit up and peer out through the glass … and all the other illnesses around you … and within you, everything failing, shutting down …

  Kate died today. The ancient lady in Ward H who in her rare moments of clarity had the mental energy of someone half her age, she died today, shortly after her grandson or was it her great-grandson, rough-looking lad with the beaten-up face, came in to visit her. Over a century old, she was. She went as Wendy was washing her; as she lifted up the left arm to clean the oxter, sun-parched powdery shell, the old lady gave out one last rattling breath and all the life left her, all the more-than-a-hundred-years of it. Wendy was asking her if she’d received a telegram from the Queen when she turned a hundred. Suspected that her words made no sense to Katie if indeed they could even be heard but enjoyed chatting to her anyway, enjoyed it especially when the ancient lady would respond in Welsh, how songlike that language came from her withered lips. Did she send you a telegram, sweetheart? and that was when Katie died. Just rattled and went limp. And Wendy thought that the last word Katie heard in her life was an endearment, was someone calling her ‘sweetheart’. And she felt a cold skewering sensation inside her chest, beneath the starchy uniform, within her thin skin.

  She called for the duty doctor who arrived and noted the time of death. No point in even attempting to revive such an ancient human being; her ribs and lungs would be shattered by the defibrillator and the unacknowledged yet widespread triage system in operation throughout Merseyside hospitals forbade it anyway. So that’s all he did, the doctor, just noted the time of death and looked into Wendy’s face and told her to go and take a break, have a few minutes’ rest.

  On her way to the nurses’ station she stopped at a vending machine and bought two bags of crisps, ready-salted flavour, a can of Coke and a Snickers. She’d been watching her weight recently but there’s solace in salt and sugar and E-numbers. There’s a kind of energy. Some comfort. As she ate and drank alone she watched the local evening news which told her of an incident earlier that day at Liverpool docks, a shooting incident; evidently, armed police had been trailing men suspected of gun-smuggling from Northern Ireland and had followed their Transit van to the docks where a firefight had ensued. A grim-faced reporter with the Cunard building as a backdrop spoke of a ‘hail of bullets’ in which four men died, one a local underworld figure police named as James Squires. In the back of the van was found a ‘substantial’ amount of firearms and also two men trussed up in rope with heavy weights tied to their bodies; one of these died in the shootout, the other remained in hospital in a critical condition. Sergeant O’Malley appeared on the TV screen and spoke of his fears of a coming gangland war for control of the city’s lucrative drugs trade. Then back to the studio where the newsreader informed Wendy that no police officers were hurt in the incident and on to the next report of another fatal shooting this time just outside Wrexham, a burglar shot dead by the owner of a post office whose wife was in hospital following an earlier break-in. Police were investigating.

  Wendy thought: ‘Seriously injured.’ She thought: ‘Critical condition.’ And she thought of other gunshot wounds that she’d treated, of the appalling damage guns will
inflict. Of the way bullets blast and blunder through miraculous delicacy, through processes of fine-tuning measured over millennia. And her heart sank when Sister Thomas entered the room and told her she was needed now to help treat such a wound; some young thug complaining that he’d been shot in the eye and that he was going to kill the people who’d done it, only he wasn’t using the word ‘people’. Hysterical, Sister Thomas said he was. Highly agitated. Very probably about to get violent.

  Shot. In the eye. But the patient had calmed somewhat when Wendy arrived at the scene; still and supine he was, with a nurse on each of his arms and a leaning doctor closely examining the damaged eye, shining a light into it, squinting. The patient was typically dressed; trainers, shellsuit trousers tucked into white sports socks, fingers chunkily agleam with sovereign rings. One of the nurses explained to Wendy how this man had been shot in the eye at extreme point-blank range with an air rifle; it hadn’t been loaded, but it was fired at such close quarters that the blast of compressed air had popped the eye from the socket and damaged the eyeball so severely that it would almost definitely have to be removed. He’d been given a sedative to calm him; he’d arrived at the hospital in a fury. Wendy smelled urine and studied the patient’s face and remarked to herself how one eye might be irrevocably ruined but that the remaining one was working enough for two; surrounded by the blue bruising of some older wound it was darting madly from face to leaning face, flitting across features with the lips below it grinning and nostrils flared with the sedative-high. It took everything in, this one eye; gulped all before and above it with a hunger great and rapacious. And when it swooped on to Wendy’s face it locked instantly on to the hirsute wart on her upper lip and the subconscious zeal with which it searched for and the skill with which it found her weak spot made her flinch, made her unsteady on her feet. Made her feel sick, this simple glimpse into a soul so attenuated and weakened that its gusto for cruelty propelled the motion of one eye even as its twin was dying. Even as it was being removed. That there could exist a need for power so great that it narrows ocular function down to one sole perverse purpose even in sedation, even in pain.

  The unknowable darkness in that one eye. Wendy dropped her gaze from it, down towards the scabbed mouth. It was sneering at her.

  A stretchered overdose case crashed then through the nearby double doors with calls for assistance and, thankful, Wendy moved away from the eye to help. And on her way home that night upset and exhausted she decided to leave her job. Eating curry and chips alone in her flat above a bookmaker’s she decided that she’d had enough; enough of death, enough of injury, enough of the knowledge of the human heart’s hopelessness and the suspicion of its terminal unperfectability. Enough of slashed faces, like the one brought in yesterday; enough of a world in which as a punishment a man is ironed, about two years ago, brought into Accident and Emergency with his face, his hands dripping yellow with melted skin and fat. So she handed in her notice the following day, and two months from now she will find work in the gift shop of the Catholic cathedral and in a year’s time she will commence a platonic affair with a priest a full decade older than her and this affair will become physical when, unable any longer to resist temptation, this gentle and kind and caring man will leave the priesthood and they will marry and then as Wendy Murray-Donaghy she will bear three children to him. He will for ever carry with him a deep sense of disappointment and sadness at the failure of his calling and he will die first and seven years later at the age of seventy-nine Wendy will pass away at her home on the Wirral overlooking the Dee estuary and beyond that Wales and the huge bridge that will be linking the two by then, she will expire attended by one of her grandsons who had just popped in to see if she needed any shopping and his concerned stare into her face will be the last thing she’ll ever see, his eyes, his pair of beautiful, bright blue eyes.

  ALASTAIR

  NO NO THIS SHOULDN’T BE HOW IT WORKS NO I’M SORRY THIS IS FOR YOU LOOK HERE’S MY HERE’S YOUR NO NO IT SHOULDN’T HAPPEN LIKE THIS MY VOICE I NEED TO SPEAK HEAR MY WORDS PLEASE LISTEN NO DON’T

  I’M SORRY DON’T

  shoot

  To wake in pain. Or not to wake in pain, that’s the aim, that’s what he craves, to wake safe in his own bed without a vicious booming in his head and with the surety that the stalking pain of the world has found someone else, has locked on to another target, someone somewhere not him. He hasn’t caused enough pain himself recently, that’s what it is; he hasn’t tipped the quotient of suffering in his favour. If he can cause enough people to hurt so that he exhausts the city’s supply of anguish then he’ll be able to come conscious again without this ache, without this breaking. Without a throbbing in his skull so sharp that it clangs and jangles in his back teeth.

  He hears voices, in this unique darkness of his; Squires’ voice, followed by Tommy’s:

  —An Snake Tong Tony’s in on this caper, is he?

  —Aye, yeh. Euro Objective One, lar, them cunts’re fuckin brewstered. Tony Tong’s settin up this import business, some fuckin spices from China or somethin. Piecer piss, Goz. Sully’s round there now, likes, patchin things up with Tony, learnin the ropes, altho it’s gunner take him fuckin years, soft get tharry is.

  —An so yer apply for these funds …

  —Yer apply for these funds to, to diversify into legit businesses. Simple as. Investment in domestic and commercial properties an opening trade negotiations with other countries, that’s what theer lookin for, lar. Tellin yeh; easy fuckin graft, this. Stega’s been at it for ages.

  —Who, Stephenson? One snidey get that Stega, lar. Stay well away.

  —Aye, Goz, but Joey’s been at it n all. Tony Tong, same thing. Not seen Tony’s new bar? Used to be the Shangri-La club? You’ve been there, Len, aven’t yeh?

  Darren can’t move. His arms, his legs, they are concrete. And the voices are like chainsaws in his head, he blacks out to block them out but when he reawakes they’re still there, still rattling and snarling in the razor dark:

  —Tellin yiz, lads, that fuckin brudder of mine, his fuckin conscience’ll kill him. He’s all for goin completely fuckin legit, believe that shite?

  A snort. —More or less already is straight, lar.

  —That’s what I’ve told him. Joey, a said, a said buyin debts for half theer price then sendin a coupla mushers round to collect em in full, that’s exactly what big fuckin businesses do. Only difference, they buy em off banks n stuff and we buy em off dealers an twats like tha. That’s thee only fuckin difference.

  —Aye, an them cunts’re friggin legal. Bailiffs an stuff. That’s another diff.

  —Aye yeh. But –

  Roar. Blackness. Blackout again. And reawake still to Tommy’s voice:

  —An another fuckin thing, what’s this fuckin Leo Sayer revival all about? Never could stand that fucker, me.

  —Not aware that there is one, Tom.

  —Aye, Len, there is. Seen the twat on the telly, aven’t we, Goz? Member when he used to dress up as a fuckin clown? In the seventies? Clown is right, lar. Shoot that knob’ed, tellin yeh. Fuckin shoot him. Ever heard that joke about the bus in Belfast, and –

  A groan escapes. Too eager to express some mountainous pain it flees his broken mouth before it can be gulped back.

  —Aye-aye. Gobshite’s awake.

  Something cracks his face, snaps his head to the side. Old scabs inside his mouth reopen and he tastes the copper of blood.

  —Wakey-fuckin-wakey, dick’ed.

  —Slap im again, Tom.

  —Wakey-wakey. You’ve got a fuckin story to tell us, Darren.

  His eyes open to stare into a black hole brightly circled that is the entire cityscape. He can see down into that hole, can see the spiralling set into the metal that will cause the bullet to spin as it exits thereby maximising impact damage. He can smell cordite. Then he can smell urine, his own. He doesn’t want to die.

  Too excited for breakfast Alastair pays for the room and leaves the pub, squinting int
o the sunlight that bounces off the windows and flanks of the buses arranged in grumbling queues. He crosses the tarmac apron of the bus station and consults the timetables on the wall and notes the number of the bus he requires. He has seven minutes to wait. Despite the arrayed vehicles there is no one but him waiting here at the stand and small hidden birds are singing from litter-strewn tree and bush and the grey skies and drizzle of the last few days have gone and there is a strong sun in the pale blueness above and no cloud at all. Soon his conveyance will come, soon.

  —WANNA FUCKIN BULLET IN THE BRAIN CUNT WANNA FUCKIN –

  —JESUS TOMMY I NEVER

  —I’M GONNA FUCKIN DO IT LAD YERRAH FUCKIN DEAD MAN NO CUNT LAUGHS AT ME TIME TO DIE YEH FUCKIN – … Ey, Lenny; where the fuck djer think you’re goin, lar?

  —Need a slash, T. Him pissin isself; smade me wanner go as well, see.

  —Alright well. Be quick. TIME TO FUCKIN DIE DARREN YERRA FUCKIN CORPSE LAD THIS IS WHAT YEH GET YEH FUCKIN

  The bus arrives. Alastair gets on, pays his fare, takes his rucksack to the back seat and sits down. Gazes out the window at the bright and waking town as he leaves it. He sees a milkman and a stray ginger cat; he sees many papers.

  —NO TOMMY PLEASE I NO TOMMY I

  —HERE IT FUCKIN COMES LAD TIME TO FUCKIN DIE DARREN YEH FUCKIN

  —Do it, Tom, do it! Pull that fuckin trigger, lar! Waste that no-mark get! Laughing at yeh, Tommy! Pure fuckin laughin at yeh, lad!