Hell Is Empty

by Conrad Williams

  The next time he sashayed in with his fancy fan akimbo, I jinked out of his reach and performed a yoko geri keage – a side snap kick that of course he was expecting – but I reinforced it with a reverse hook kick. I managed to connect with the side of his head, pushing him off balance. Knowing I had a split second I followed up with a kick to the left hand, which he was now favouring, putting it out of commission even as he folded into my attack, whipping his fan around to strike at my kidneys.

  No joy there, I thought, knowing that my piss filters were protected by a good lining of thick leather. But it was just part of a series of assaults, a pattern offensive designed to reduce me physically and psychologically. If you’re up against someone who knows what they’re doing and has done it every day for years then you’re more likely to feel inadequate, no matter how experienced you feel you are. The compulsion was strong inside me now to just shrivel up on the floor and wait for the killing strike. Give up. Let it happen. It would be over in seconds.

  And then I was stunned to find myself in a position where I could cram my boot into that precious space between a man’s legs known technically as the knackers. I didn’t need asking twice. He went down grunting like a boar. I followed it up with a jab to his nose and a near simultaneous strike to the hand holding the fan; the weapon went skittering away across the dusty floorboards. I was on top of Henry, besting him by a good seventy-five pounds, and his fight was done.

  ‘What now?’ I asked. ‘You going to sweet talk my chi to death?’

  He smiled. I smiled. And then he launched me.

  I wasn’t expecting that. I thought I had him pinned down fast, but he shifted like a fart in a wind tunnel. The smile disarmed me. I must have relaxed my grip, no matter how minutely. I’d been thrown to one side as swiftly as a right-wing newspaper in a left-wing reading room. But then someone else was next to him, blocking his efforts to retain his tessen, striking out on his own with a length of iron pipe and launching Henry backwards towards the edge of the building space.

  I went to him, reaching down to pick him up, to demand some answers, when he kicked out at me and found the edge of my jaw. I saw stars and toppled over. The next thing I knew I was rubbing my face and Henry was standing right on the edge of forever. A lump the size of a child’s fist had risen from Henry’s forehead. The architect was standing close by, holding the pipe, breathing fast, his face hard and determined.

  Henry said: ‘There’s a legend in Japan that if you jump from Kiyomizu-dera, the Buddhist temple in Kyoto, and manage to get away with not being injured, that all your wishes will come true.’ Blood fizzed from his nose. There was fear in his eyes, but also determination. I was finding it hard to breathe. Two people miles up in the sky who kind-of liked each other. Blood and fear. This fucking life. This job that we did.

  ‘Don’t do this,’ I said. ‘We can all walk away. No tragedies. Think of your wife, Henry. Think of Oka. Think of your unborn child.’

  But he wasn’t listening. To listen was to lose face, I guessed, and Henry wasn’t the kind of person to do that. He was all about honour, despite his background. I wondered if that was a good thing, to change your viewpoint no matter the kind of life you’d lived, the upbringing you’d enjoyed or endured. I imagined it didn’t make any difference at all to him. I guessed he thought he was free, no matter what choice was made.

  He stood on the brink and his face was serene. He was in Japan. He was at the temple in Kyoto. Survive this and there was milk and honey for eternity. Only this wasn’t a survivable hop. This was eighty metres plus. And you didn’t come back from this kind of dive, even if you believed you were blessed.

  ‘Tell me where he is, Henry,’ I said.

  He said: ‘Tōdai moto kurashi,’ and stepped off the edge.

  17

  Minutes later the architect was telling me to go, just go, that this place would be flooded with police before long and then I wouldn’t have a chance to get clear for hours.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  ‘I know all the best hiding places,’ he said.

  I got moving.

  I studiously avoided going anywhere near the spot where Henry had landed, though I knew if I’d buried him with some of the sand available on site it might give me some valuable time. Instead, I was violently sick and had to crouch down for a few minutes until my limbs stopped trembling.

  The pain in my ribs was sharp but manageable, at least for the time being. Nothing a fistful of Nurofen wouldn’t budge. Tender examination suggested there were no complete breaks. Fractures I could live with. Breathing would hurt like bastards for a week or so, but I’ve been with some form of pain or other for so long it would feel wrong if it wasn’t there at all.

  Now get up and get out. On to the next bit of business. Attaboy.

  But I couldn’t move. It felt good, hunkered down, my boots dusty with cement, close to that puddle of my own hot waste, a symbol of all I’d become. Getting up meant opening myself to attackers, presenting a bigger target. They’d barely see me if I was scrunched up like a mouse. I could stay here all day. Even better if I shut my eyes.

  Sarah used to do that.

  She did, didn’t she?

  She’d play hide and seek and choose a crap place to hide, but then she’d shut her eyes because she thought she wouldn’t be seen.

  It didn’t help that she called out ‘I’m here’ when the seeker came looking.

  Come on, Joel. We’re all waiting for you.

  What Becs would call out when she and Sarah were at the table for the evening meal. It was the one sacrosanct in our lives. We always ate dinner together. None of this trays-in-front-of-the-TV malarkey. No newspapers, no gadgets. Three people eating, engaging. But now that line carried a weight to it, an ambiguity I wasn’t sure I liked.

  I heard the groan of a lorry. I got up and walked to the fence. Here it came, crawling along Cheapside, bed loaded with aggregate and rebars. I saw three guys in the cab. More would be on the way.

  I slipped over the fence just as they turned into the construction site. I almost didn’t make it. Dizziness gripped me and I nearly fell backwards; they’d have me in their sights then. Lots of explaining on the cards, especially when their digger picked up a pile of Henry porridge.

  I got on the phone and asked Jimmy Two to help me out. I needed an emergency fix on the Saab, or a replacement if that was unlikely. Soon as.

  Back on the street I had to stop every hundred yards or so to catch my breath. The fear was all over me. It was like suddenly coming to in a strange part of town after a weekend bender to find your wallet empty and somebody’s tooth embedded in your bloody knuckle (although, to be fair, that only happened to me once).

  I didn’t want to stand there for ages frightening off taxi drivers, but I didn’t want to get into any conversations either. So I hopped on the first bus going north – a 214 – and promptly fell asleep.

  * * *

  I rapped my head against the window and snapped awake. The bus had taken a sharp corner in… where were we? Gospel Oak? I got off and thought about breakfast. I needed something in me, if I could stomach it, but maybe not pancakes.

  I walked up to Hampstead and bought a bag of doughnuts and coffee from a sandwich shop. I ignored the funny looks. At the water fountain I rinsed away all the blood that was congealing on my face and knuckles and ate the doughnuts, one after the other, in quick bites, relishing the hit of sugar. I drank the coffee while it was still too hot. I became aware of people hurrying by, the usual gyre of cars and buses and black cabs. The farting, sooty exhaust on a vintage delivery van. A noisy parakeet in a plane tree.

  I stood up and this time there was no accompanying disequilibrium. I don’t like that spatial special effect, and it’s acutely unfair when I don’t even have a head full of vodka to cause it.

  Every time I blinked, though, I caught a frame of Henry in attack mode. The only way I could escape it was to staple my eyelids to my forehead, or maybe even go on that short w
alk to infinity that he’d taken.

  But maybe there was another way.

  I snagged a taxi on Pond Street and in the few minutes it took to skip up Rosslyn Hill the Polish driver was foaming at the mouth about the Syrian immigrants pouring through the border threatening to take his family’s jobs.

  I headed along Flask Walk to Stodge, admiring the sleek, gutsy coupés and convertibles, and thought about the car I might choose to drive now if it transpired the Saab had gone skid-plate up. I’d had no call from Jimmy Two as to the seriousness of the repairs. My mind filled with Aston Martins and Bentleys, but I could probably find just enough spare change to buy something built in the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s, held together by spit and willpower.

  Danny Sweet’s staff were arranging tables. The front-of-house penguin was being talked through the lunchtime menu when I reached him and asked where Danny was to be found. He gestured with his head towards the kitchen, wearing a look that said of course. I left them to their talk of quenelles and mushroom foam and pushed through to the engine room. A chef was washing salad. Or maybe he wasn’t a chef. Maybe he was a sous chef, or a prep boy or an underling, someone further up the food chain than a dish zombie but a couple of links down from soup ponce. I have no idea. Danny was haranguing some poor… saucier? sauce whipper-upper? gravy monkey? for filling squeezy bottles with beef jus before it had properly cooled. He used the word ‘cunt’ liberally, as if he was adding salt to a tureen of steamed cabbage. And if ‘cunt’ was salt, then ‘twat’ was pepper. The poor saucejack cringed before Danny like a leaf of spinach before a blowtorch.

  ‘Do you think,’ I said, to try to distract him from the roasting of his staff, ‘that it helped to become a celebrity chef because you had the surname Sweet?’

  He didn’t seem surprised to see me, but he was surprised by my demeanour. He hurled a copper pan at me and I ducked just in time to see it carom off the corner of a fridge and into a pile of potato peelings.

  ‘I’m no fucking celebrity chef,’ he roared. ‘Do you see me getting my big hairy pepper grinder out on Can’t Cook, Won’t Wank? Am I in the TV studios at the weekend showing people how to spunk the perfect Hollandaise on their ham and eggs? No. I’m in here showing thick twats like this cunt how to fucking cook. Do you want a fucking coffee?’

  ‘I’d love one,’ I said. ‘You should have a sit down and some camomile tea. You’ve got veins thicker than my fingers sticking out of your forehead. You’re herniating.’

  He got some beverage slave to sort out due espressi and we sat in his empurpled restaurant. The silver teaspoons were tiny in his hands.

  ‘You know what you should do?’ I said. ‘Origami serviettes. Take your dining experience to a whole new level.’

  ‘Fuck off, you plebian tosser,’ he said. ‘And it’s napkin. “Serviette” might work if you were eating shit chip butties in a Warrington mankhole. Not here.’

  ‘Says indigenous Hampstead man. You’re from Kirkcaldy, aren’t you?’

  ‘And proud of it. I used to catch flounder from Tiel Burn that were bigger than me when I was two years old. Mum helped me gut ’em and cook ’em.’

  ‘So go and open a Michelin-starred restaurant there,’ I said. ‘Deep-fried Mars bars with rosemary ganache… whatever the fuck a ganache is.’

  ‘You’ve perked up,’ he said. ‘Look at the state of you. You look as if you’ve been headbanging in a rose bush. Do you need a plaster?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said. I touched one of the fan wounds and it stung like fury, but the bleeding had stopped.

  ‘What are you doing round here, anyway? I’m not going for another old man’s jog around the Heath with you again.’

  Now we were at the crux of it, I didn’t want to say. Danny Sweet is a man’s man. Moreover, he’s a bastard’s bastard. He doesn’t like to see weakness of any kind. Though he might have steak tartare on his menu, he certainly doesn’t like the mincing of words.

  In the end it just fell out of me: ‘I was hesitant, and I almost died. There was a weapon involved. I don’t think I can do this any more.’

  He didn’t say anything. He took the coffee cup from my hands and placed it gently on the table. He held up a finger to Aptenodytes patagonicus and took me to the magic doors. He unlocked them and we went through.

  I’d been here before, of course. And it was why I was here now. I needed to find a way to shift the burden that was weighing heavy around me and Danny Sweet was the only person I knew who might be able to help with that. Fear was turning me sluggish. Was there a better way to prise its fingers from my throat than spend half an hour in this illegal bear pit?

  It hadn’t changed much since my last visit. The fug of male sweat was thicker, maybe. The puddles of dried blood on the floor, the crazy splashes of it on the walls were more numerous.

  Danny snapped his phone shut. ‘Mungo the Child Crusher is on his way,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’m kidding. His name’s Eric.’

  ‘So you’re still doing this?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And you know it. That’s why you came to me.’

  ‘I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea, really. Fight fire with fire?’

  ‘It costs considerably less than lying on a brain masseur’s couch doing Rorschach tests. And, I’d argue, it’s safer and more fun.’

  ‘Fun? Christ.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘When you go toe-to-toe with a naughty man, when you land the critical blow, you can’t tell me that doesn’t feel good.’

  ‘I honestly do not feel any pleasure from hurting another human being,’ I said.

  ‘Bollocks,’ he said.

  There was the squeal of hinges as the door was opened.

  ‘That was quick,’ I said. Cartoon heavy echoes on the concrete steps. ‘Who’s this? The Hoxton Creeper?’

  ‘Eric’s one of my chippies,’ he said. ‘He’s putting new window frames in the conservatory out back.’

  Eric arrived smelling of hot sawn timber. His boots were tanned with sawdust. He wore a utility belt loaded with tools: hammer, Stanley knife, measuring tape, screwdrivers. Nails jingled in a pouch when he walked, like spurs on a cowboy.

  ‘Do you ever wear that and pretend to be Batman?’ I asked.

  ‘Fuckeryou?’ he said. He spoke in a hurry, as if the spaces between words were a luxury he couldn’t lay claim to.

  ‘I love it,’ Danny said. ‘You just have this face, this way with words that instantly gets people spitting blood and piss.’

  ‘I was being friendly,’ I said.

  ‘You insulted him,’ Danny said. ‘You implied that his work equipment was a toy.’

  ‘I’d pretend to be Batman if I was him,’ I reasoned.

  ‘Iknowyou,’ Eric said. He was peering at me as if through fog. ‘User copperwonce. Youput my babybrotherTony behindbars.’

  ‘It was kind of my job,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Danny. ‘Well this adds a little spice, doesn’t it? Eric, if you’re in the mood, Joel here has come down to the mosh pit to try to battle some demons. I wondered if you might fancy a break from all those pieces of oak upstairs.’

  He didn’t need asking twice. He made a great play of removing his tool belt and draping it delicately over the back of a chair. Then he rolled his sleeves up. There was the obligatory tattoo, a Chelsea Football Club crest. Another reason to not care too much about stoving his great haggis of a face in. ‘I bet that’s recent, isn’t it?’ I said, nodding at the blue lion carrying its Polo mint on a stick. ‘Post success. I bet you didn’t have that when Chelsea were kicking lumps out of teams in Division Two in the late eighties.’

  ‘Hoojoo sport?’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it?’ I said. ‘But we’ve won four European Cups more than you have.’

  ‘Shouldaknown,’ he said. And came wading towards me.

  ‘Hang on,’ Danny said. ‘Let’s make this interesting. We don’t want Joel to have to
o easy a ride of it.’

  ‘Easy?’ Eric said. His face twisted with offence, confusion and hurt.

  ‘Pick a weapon,’ Danny said. ‘How about that box cutter?’

  ‘Fuck off, Danny,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not going to ever get better unless you stare it down, Joel,’ he said. ‘A punch-up won’t wash. You’ve got to be James Stewart climbing the bell tower. Roy Scheider getting on board the Orca—’

  ‘Wotsy onabout?’ Eric asked. I shook my head.

  ‘—Sigourney Weaver stripping to her smalls. You’ve got to face your fear and wrestle it into submission.’

  ‘It’s not about the knife,’ I said.

  ‘Yes it is. It’s all about the knife. Eric.’

  Eric dutifully picked out the Stanley and ratcheted a couple of inches of razor from its mouth. ‘Whatify cuttim?’

  ‘He’ll thank you for it,’ Danny said.

  ‘Idunno.’

  ‘He’ll pay you as well,’ Danny said. ‘Won’t you, Joel?’

  ‘I’ll give you a hundred quid,’ I said. ‘But I’d rather we forgot about the knife.’

  ‘The knife stays or you go and find yourself a couch and someone who wants you to talk about your mother.’

  Why should I have been surprised? You go courting madness, you end up in a room filled with it.

  Eric seemed happy, absolved of any blame should he slash my face to ribbons, plus money, plus vengeance for Tony. I couldn’t even remember who he was or what he’d been put away for, beyond having a criminally stupid brother.

  And so here he came, and I couldn’t separate the blade from the person who wielded it. Eric was overweight, dimmer than a ten-watt bulb; his monobrow was probably more intelligent than he was. But the blade elevated him. And the closer he got, the more it pressed him into the background, until only that triangle of silver mattered, and I could feel its heat and penetration before it had gone anywhere near my flesh.

  I felt myself dwindling.