Guilty Parties

by Martin Edwards

  His best friend considered this carefully, then shook his head in an exaggerated side to side movement that he must be copying from some cop show on TV. ‘You disrespected my sister. You shouldn’t have said what you said.’

  ‘You call her stuff like that all the time,’ Michael pointed out. ‘You say she’s a slut and a whore and all sorts.’

  ‘I’m allowed to. She’s my sister.’

  That seemed reasonable.

  ‘OK, sorry then.’ Michael half held out his hand, waiting for a matching gesture from his friend. It didn’t happen. The gun was somehow in the way.

  ‘That’s not good enough. You shouldn’t have said it. End of.’

  ‘I’m very sorry.’ Michael hoped the words sounded more sincere to Calum than they sounded to himself. After all, everybody knew about Calum’s sister. ‘Slut’ was almost a compliment.

  Calum again shook his head. Maybe he really was the only one on the estate who genuinely had no idea what she got up to.

  There was a strange lull in the conversation, as if Michael had stupidly forgotten his lines and Calum was patiently waiting for him to remember. But no magic words came to Michael that might help him make any sense of what was happening. So, having nothing better to do, he let his gaze travel upwards, away from the gun, skimming the blank concrete wall behind Calum. At the very top of the wall, way above them, he could see pure blue sky. There was always more concrete than sky round here. It was as though, when they designed the crummy estate, somebody had thought: why not put in lots of obscure corners where people can do all sorts of bad stuff without being seen? When he was a little kid he’d rather liked these blind spots, always in the shadows even at midday and well out of the way of adult eyes. Not any more. Not for a long time. The sky, of course, was the same sky that hung above the Georgian terraces over by the Fields, but they seemed to have more of it there. Money could buy you anything. Why not? Go to university. Get a good job. One day he’d have the dosh to buy all the sky he could use.

  Michael sighed and dropped his gaze to meet Calum’s eyes. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Just tell me what you want me to do. Then we can both go home.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ said Calum. ‘You can’t take the words back. Dead man walking, that’s what you are.’

  It was odd, Michael thought. Here was Calum, about to shoot him through the head, and his friend looked strangely unworried – strangely, because normally Calum worried about pretty much everything. Being late for school. Being early for school. Kids from other estates. Staffordshire terriers off their leads. Girls who weren’t his sister. Social workers. And guns, naturally.

  ‘What?’ asked Calum. ‘Why are you laughing like that?’

  ‘It’s not real, is it?’ said Michael.

  ‘What’s not real?’

  They both looked at the heavy gun in Calum’s hands. He could scarcely manage its weight, holding it out at arm’s length. But it had to be a fake.

  ‘I’m sorry about your sister,’ said Michael. ‘I didn’t mean it. I’m going now. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.’

  ‘You can’t just walk away from this,’ Calum insisted. He glanced over his shoulder, as if expecting to see somebody in the shadows, hanging out by the rubbish bins.

  ‘See you, Calum,’ said Michael. ‘Regards to your mum … and your sis.’

  Michael sidestepped and Calum sidestepped with him. He placed an open palm firmly against Michael’s chest, holding him at arm’s length. He could do that, because Michael was just a bit shorter than he was.

  ‘This is a real gun,’ said Calum. His words spilt out clumsily into the clammy afternoon, as if his tongue had suddenly grown too large for his mouth.

  ‘Yeah sure,’ said Michael. ‘Like you’ve got the money to buy a tool.’

  ‘Bennie gave it to me,’ said Calum.

  ‘Bennie?’

  ‘You don’t believe Bennie would give me a gun?’

  ‘I don’t believe you would go anywhere near Bennie. He’s an arsehole.’

  ‘He’s my friend.’

  From a long way off, Michael heard a dog yap, then nothing except the distant drone of traffic on the main road. He licked his lip, tasting the salt of his own sweat. How much would it hurt, being shot in the head? And for how long?

  ‘Bennie doesn’t have any friends,’ said Michael, explaining something very simple, very slowly. ‘He’s crazy. Somebody told me once: he killed a kid. A long time ago.’

  ‘If Bennie killed a kid, why isn’t he in prison?’

  ‘He killed him without going near him.’

  ‘Yeah, right. What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Michael realised he didn’t know what it was supposed to mean. It was something he’d overheard – just whispered. Bennie had killed a kid without going anywhere near him. He tried to imagine how you would do that. A rifle with sights on it, maybe, with Bennie up on a roof and the kid walking across the yard below. A really, really accurate rifle with the best and most expensive sights you could buy. And a silencer. Pfft and the kid is stretched out on the concrete. But that didn’t seem to be the sort of thing they were talking about. Bennie’s method, whatever it was, had been strange, underhand, unnatural. And for some reason, nobody was allowed to talk about it. Not ever.

  Maybe it was true, maybe not. Either way, it wasn’t something you’d care to ask the man himself. Bennie limped around the estate in his dirty peaked cap and tracksuit top, smiling at everyone. Sometimes, if they didn’t know him, people half-smiled back. The worst thing about Bennie was that he didn’t look evil. Just thin and a bit grubby, with a smooth face and wispy blond hair. That was what gave you the creeps. It was like the bit in a film where you suddenly catch sight of the ghost of a small child, and it’s even more frightening because a little girl with blonde ringlets shouldn’t be frightening at all. Then you notice the wisp of shroud still clinging to her hair. And the green teeth. You want to yell at the screen that everybody should run away as fast as they can. That was what it was like with Bennie. But Calum hadn’t run. He’d walked up to the smiling ghoul and accepted the gun.

  ‘It’s just what they say,’ said Michael. ‘Bennie killed a kid without going near him. But nobody’s allowed to say he did it.’

  Calum shook his head. ‘Bennie says nobody likes him on the estate.’

  ‘Well, they don’t, do they?’

  ‘Bennie says they’re too stupid to like him.’

  ‘Why does Bennie live here if he’s so smart?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he? What’s wrong with living here?’

  Michael thought again of the stuccoed porches that lined the Fields. They said houses like that cost millions. One day, he’d buy one of those. You just had to work hard enough, earn a million pounds and then go and buy it. Easy.

  ‘Bennie’s a dickhead,’ he observed.

  ‘Don’t say that about my friend.’

  ‘You’re going to shoot me for that too?’

  ‘He’s my friend.’

  ‘You can’t be friends with him and me. If he’s your friend, you can’t be mine too.’

  Calum looked from the gun to Michael and then back again to the gun. That was Calum’s problem, thought Michael. It took him a while to work things out. Not a moron like some people said, but not exactly a genius either. In his fantasy about buying a Georgian house, he’d seen Calum coming to live with him in some undefined capacity, with his own sun-bleached room high up in the attic, overlooking the canopy of green chestnut trees. Calum would sit there in his room, listening to Mozart and watching the people playing football and walking their dogs far below. But Michael hadn’t thought any of that for some time. Calum would be as happy away from the estate as a butterfly in a jam jar. And anyway Calum didn’t like Mozart.

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to be your friend,’ said Calum.

  Michael felt like replying, ‘Don’t be, then’ – inviting ‘I won’t be’, and getting into an endless round of pointless negations and counter-negation
s. So he didn’t say it. ‘What’s wrong with Bennie’s leg?’ he asked.

  ‘He was born like that,’ said Calum. ‘That’s why he limps.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘What do you care whether it hurts him?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘I haven’t asked him,’ said Calum.

  ‘I thought maybe …’

  ‘Maybe what?’

  ‘Maybe that’s why he’s like he is. If his leg hurt all the time …’

  ‘He’s OK,’ said Calum. ‘He doesn’t want you to care about him.’

  ‘I just thought, maybe he could be helped,’ said Michael. ‘A doctor or somebody.’

  ‘Just shut up about Bennie,’ said Calum. ‘He doesn’t need anybody to do anything for him. Not a doctor. And certainly not you. He thinks you’re a prick.’

  Michael looked around the obscure space they were in. Concrete wall on two sides, a row of dustbins protected by a makeshift roof and backed by yet another wall on the third, a narrow passageway to the rest of the estate on the remaining side. He wanted somebody to emerge suddenly round a corner, dragging a large black plastic rubbish sack. Then he’d make a run for it – well, not a run exactly, which might not be safe – but a steady determined walk away from this gun.

  ‘You’d better give that thing back to Bennie,’ Michael said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do you think? Bennie doesn’t give guns away as presents. Even to his so-called mates. If he’s given it to you, it’s because it’s hot and he doesn’t want it around his own flat.’

  Calum now thought about this too. Michael was surprised it hadn’t occurred to his friend before. Nobody on the estate kept a gun in their own flat if they could help it – even if it wasn’t hot. You never knew when the police might call round. On an estate like this one, the police pretty much had season tickets to search the flats. You didn’t want to gift them a charge that they could always make stick. You gave the gun to some little kid you could trust, or who you’d frightened enough to keep quiet about it. Then, when you needed it, you got them to bring it to you. Bennie was crazy enough to leave a gun on top of his telly, along with the remote, so it would be handy for whatever stupid thing he planned to do next. If he’d ditched this one, it had to be so hot it would glow in the dark.

  ‘It isn’t hot,’ said Calum.

  ‘Just throw it away before somebody catches you with it.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Give it to me, then. I’ll take it and drop it into the canal – I can do it from the bridge. It’s just soft mud there. Nobody would ever find it.’

  Michael didn’t fancy any part of what he had described – taking the gun, carrying it through the streets wrapped in his hoodie, waiting until nobody was watching, then letting the gun fall agonisingly slowly into the still water. Cold steel almost floating in the air. Then the splash. Somebody would be bound to hear that splash. Then it was a toss-up whether the police or Bennie got him first. Still, he’d do it for Calum.

  ‘What would I tell Bennie?’ asked Calum.

  ‘Tell him it’s no business of his,’ said Michael with no more confidence than he felt.

  ‘It might be his business.’

  Well, yes, obviously.

  ‘So, he’s only lending it to you, then?’

  ‘No … it’s mine. But he could ask me where it was.’

  ‘Lie to him.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Lie to Bennie? Like I’d do that.’

  Michael said nothing. He didn’t doubt that Bennie would ask for it back some day – when the police were no longer looking for it. And Bennie probably wouldn’t want to have to dive into the canal to get it. He didn’t look like somebody who did a lot of swimming.

  ‘Say somebody nicked it off you.’

  Calum said nothing. Only an idiot would imagine a story like that would save you from a beating. On the other hand only an idiot would trust Calum with a gun. Waving it around like this was not the best way to keep it a secret. As for actually firing it … Michael imagined the sound reverberating around this enclosed space. It would be deafening. Not even Bennie would risk doing something that stupid.

  ‘I’m going home,’ said Michael. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  As he walked away he heard Calum shout some sort of final warning. Then he was flung forward as if his friend had pushed him suddenly from behind and his face smashed onto the concrete path. Then, or perhaps a little after that, he died.

  Bennie stepped out from the shadows of the bin shed. It stank in there on a hot day like this one, but bad smells didn’t bother him the way they apparently bothered some people. Smells couldn’t hurt you.

  The scene in front of him was not entirely without interest, though. A small kid – couldn’t be more than nine or ten by the look of him – was standing holding a gun in his hand. His friend was lying on his face, arms flung out in front of him and very, very still. The back of the friend’s shirt had a ragged hole in it and was now almost entirely red, as was the ground around him. The kid with the gun was called Calum. A bit dim, but nicely brought up by his mum. Everyone on the estate said what a well-behaved boy he was. They wouldn’t say that any more, of course, but they’d said it in the past. The other one – the dead one – had been called Michael. Bright. Very bright. They reckoned he’d go to university. Become a lawyer or a doctor or something. Well, that just showed how wrong people could be, because he obviously wouldn’t become either of those things.

  Bennie noticed that the kid with the gun was staring at him. Bennie cocked his head on one side and smiled in a friendly way.

  ‘You said it would be OK,’ said the kid. ‘You said they weren’t real bullets.’

  Bennie considered. ‘Did I?’

  ‘When you gave me the gun. You said it would be a joke. I could frighten him.’

  ‘I don’t think you did frighten him, Calum. If you wanted him to be frightened, you shouldn’t have shot him in the back.’

  Calum was fighting back the tears. He knew that he’d done it all wrong. He just wasn’t sure what he’d done. Bennie was a grown up. He was his friend. He’d said it would be OK. But it wasn’t.

  ‘Is he dead?’ asked Calum.

  Bennie glanced again at the body. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe if we got him a doctor …?’

  ‘You could, if you like,’ said Bennie very reasonably. ‘You dial 999. Have you got a mobile?’ He heard Calum give a choking sob, then another.

  Bennie looked away, as if to save Calum some minor embarrassment. He should probably be going, he told himself. The shot would have been heard all over the estate. Not that that meant anyone would come here any time soon to find out what had happened. Round here, if you heard a shot, you didn’t necessarily run towards the sound of firing. Few people wished to become collateral damage in a turf war between two of the ephemeral gangs that strutted their stuff on the estate. One solitary shot might not even be enough for most people to think it worth a phone call to the police, depending a bit on what was on television at that moment. When the police finally did come, they’d all say what a nice kid Calum was – thick as a plank but kind to his old gran. Their memories wouldn’t stretch to much more than that. ‘Yes, inspector, we do know somebody called Bennie – by sight anyway. No, we’ve never seen him with a gun, have we, Jim? We definitely didn’t see him down by the bins earlier. I haven’t been down there all day of course. Jim hasn’t either. We don’t get out much. Not at our age.’

  Calum saw, through his tears, Bennie turn slowly and deliberately, as if to leave him. Calum held out the gun, silently imploring him to take it. Bennie was a grown-up. He’d know what to do. Even now, Calum expected Bennie to reach out, gently remove the gun from his hands and say, ‘Run along, kid, I’ll deal with this.’ Because that was what grown-ups did. And Calum would sprint home and bury himself under the duvet and not come out until they had taken Michael away and cleaned up the blood and everything back to
how it was before. Because that was what grown-ups did too.

  But Bennie simply shook his head.

  ‘It’s your gun,’ he said, generously. ‘I told you that. Yours to keep. You look after it now.’

  ‘Will they make me go to prison?’

  ‘I imagine so,’ said Bennie. ‘You’ve just killed your best friend. But they’ll have to let you out eventually because you’re also only a kid. Probably give you a whole new identity. It’s what they did for me. It worked out fine.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to prison,’ said Calum.

  Bennie shrugged. ‘Why don’t you tell the police that? See what they say. Maybe they’ll just let you off with a warning.’

  ‘Really?’ said Calum.

  ‘No,’ said Bennie. ‘Not really.’

  Bennie walked cautiously, almost sideways, down the narrow passageway and out in the light. He paused and lifted his head, as if to sniff the air. He was not especially surprised that nobody was risking coming out and checking who had been shot, but he knew curtains would be twitching all over the estate. Let them twitch. He had carefully wiped the gun clean before handing it over to the child. There couldn’t be any doubt who had actually shot Michael. Bennie hadn’t gone anywhere near him. As for who had supplied the weapon – well, that would be Calum’s word against his.

  And maybe Calum wouldn’t try to grass him up anyway because Calum was, at the end of the day, a decent kid. Straight as an arrow. Kind to his gran. A young offenders’ institution would toughen him up and teach him some useful skills – give him a proper career. Car crime, for example. Or drug dealing. In the long run, he’d probably be grateful.

  As for Michael, the estate wouldn’t miss that stuck-up little jerk. Listening to Mozart and that sort of shite on his iPod. Looking down his nose at everybody. The tosser wasn’t even properly frightened of him. When you thought about it, Bennie had done society a favour by squashing him under his foot before he could become a politician or a judge or a psychiatrist or a probation officer.

  And why shouldn’t he offer society a helping hand now and then? Society had been good to Bennie, in its way. It had fed him, clothed him and accommodated him for much of his life. It had made him what he was today. He was only too pleased to give something back from time to time.