Headhunters

by John King

  ‘You sound like a gardener,’ Balti said.

  ‘Why worry about it anyway?’ Carter said. ‘That bird Sherry I went out with had an abortion and a fucking good job too. It’s just a ball of blood and veins before it’s born. It doesn’t matter, does it? If she hadn’t got rid of the thing then I’d still have to go round and see her and pay for it. She didn’t want it either so everyone’s happy. It’s not alive, is it.’

  ‘Don’t you ever wonder what would’ve happened if it had been born?’ Will asked. ‘Don’t you think whether it would’ve been a boy or a girl, or what the kid would’ve become?’

  ‘No. Why should I? It’s done. End of story. It’s your round as well. There’s only half an hour till closing so get your finger out. I’m fed up with all this. If I wanted a fucking lecture I’d have stayed home and watched the telly. Listened to the religious nutters.’

  Will went to the bar and ordered. Eileen served him saying how happy she was to be getting away for a bit of fresh air and sun. It was hot in London now and the place smelt like the inside of a garage there was so much pollution. She couldn’t wait to spread her towel on the sand and relax. He wished he was going with her. Carter had a point. It wasn’t worth worrying about things, but Will could never escape because it was in his nature. He watched Eileen’s bum moving along the bar, and the curve of her breasts when she turned around. There was no escape. It was hormones that drove you on. Chemical warfare.

  It was the first time he’d really argued with Karen and it hadn’t even been a proper row. Not really. She’d said her piece and left. He saw her in a different light now, but hoped it was the drink making things worse than they really were. Maybe he’d wake up tomorrow morning and everything would be alright. Perhaps it would all turn out to be a bad dream.

  He looked at Slaughter at the end of the bar sitting on a stool rocking forward talking with Denise. There was a kind of glow about the bloke and he was stroking her hand. Will knew he was a nasty bit of work, but underneath it all he was a big kid. They all were. They’d started as a cell somewhere and what made someone like Slaughter turn out the way he did? A good woman could bring a bloke like that back to the starting-line. Maybe all of them wanted that deep down. Even Carter. It was just that the women they usually met were acting like blokes giving it the big one all the time. Maybe he’d been wrong acting soppy with Karen. He wondered whether Carter was right and you had to hold something back the whole time so they respected you, because if men expected things from a woman then it followed they thought the same way. Carter had it sussed. He was the happiest one out of all of them. But Will was what he was. He couldn’t pretend to be anything else, however much he wanted.

  ‘Will, you remember that game against Leicester you came to with us a few years back?’ Balti asked, when his mate had brought the drinks over in two shifts. ‘Well, that bloke who came up with us on the train who you were talking music with, Gary, I saw him the other day and he was asking after you. Asked if I still knocked around with that Brentford record collector. He’s a DJ and wanted to have a chat about borrowing some vinyl off you. He’s got a plum spot in the West End.’

  ‘That’s where the money is,’ Harry said. ‘Keeping the kids supplied. A lot of the old boys do that now. We should go into business, though the West End’s going to be sown up, and Smiler and his mob have started doing Blues and a few places round here as a sideline. There again, it’s class A if you’re doing Es, and the roof’ll fall in sooner or later. Always does. We’re not really drug dealers are we? Pissheads more like.’

  Balti had an interview the next day for something a bit more legit than flogging ecstasy, but was keeping quiet till he knew the result. It sounded alright as well, Mango coming through with a job selling insurance. It might be a doddle, following up leads and trying to persuade people to part with their hard-earnt pennies. The money sounded good as well. Mango was the only one of the Sex Division missing and had been reborn since his brother returned. He was like the old positive kid they’d known and this was reflected in him coming up with the interview.

  ‘Give me his number and I’ll give him a bell,’ Will said. ‘It’ll be nice to see Pete again when Mango finally brings him out and play a few records. He was a good bloke. Imagine that. Farming in Norfolk. Well out of order, though, not getting in touch. Mind you, Mango said he’d been ill.’

  ‘When do you reckon we’ll get to see him?’ Balti asked. ‘Now that’s like a rebirth. All those years and he turns up with everyone thinking he was dead. Mango’s well chuffed.’

  Will forgot about Karen and thought of Pete. Balti was right, it was like he was newborn, in adult form. He wondered if he’d be the same, or at least similar. Maybe they wouldn’t even recognise the bloke. It was a long time. He was pleased for Mango. A minor miracle. Pleased for all the Wilsons. Most of all Mr and Mrs Wilson. Their flesh and blood. It must be the worst thing in the world losing a kid.

  He thought of Pete in his Snow White T-shirt and how silly it all seemed now. Childish really. His last gig with Pete had been The Clash at the Electric Ballroom. Will remembered it so clearly. The air conditioning or whatever wasn’t working, and people were sweating buckets, dropping with the heat. He thought of Strummer there with the mic. All the great lyrics and commentary that fitted in with what was going on around them at the time. Another life and yet that education was the best education. Johnny Rotten’s attitude that showed you could do whatever you wanted in life never mind what the wankers and controllers told you. Poor old Pete. It would be funny seeing him again. Suddenly Will was hungry and went back to the bar for some crisps.

  ‘You know,’ Eileen said, leaning across the counter, ‘everyone thinks that because you’re going to Ibiza you’re just going for the sex. Like that changes because you get on an airplane. It’s cheap and I can’t afford expensive holidays. Two weeks sitting in the sun will do me fine.’

  Will thought about the time he’d gone to Magaluf with the rest of the lads. Ten thousand or so British between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five living in a town of high-rise hotels and Watneys pubs. Chicken and chips and clubs full of DJs celebrating the Leeds Service Crew and Huddersfield Soul Patrol on tour. He remembered the holiday league. There’d been books run for sex, wanks and the amount of times they’d had to shit. Carter won the Sex League, Mango the Masturbation Conference, and when Harry had come down with food-poisoning he’d cleaned up in the Shit Series. If there’d been some decent music and drink, and a few nice women around, Will wouldn’t have minded so much, but after two days and nights it was boring. They stood on Psycho Street watched by the Spanish riot police out in full force after, rumour had it, a Spaniard had been glassed and killed a month before. Packed in tight, hundreds of them drinking their Chelsea Aggro cocktails, with a Union Jack hanging from Balti and Harry’s balcony. Up there on the ninth floor and one night at five in the morning a girl from Barnsley forgot the acid and thought she was a bird, attempting lift-off and falling to her death. Rockets exploded in the sky and van loads of police waited tooled-up looking for trouble, mopping up the mess.

  That reminded him, Carter and Harry had booked up this year. Once in Spain the league would be blown apart. The season was drifting.

  ‘What’s going to happen when you two go to Spain?’ Will asked, back at the table. ‘You’ll get so many points over there it’ll mess up the Sex Division.’

  The others looked at him and laughed. Now he was with Karen, Will’s ground had been shut down and the gates barricaded with barbed wire. He was right all the same.

  ‘We’ll have a league of our own over there,’ Carter said.

  ‘No more leagues,’ Harry moaned. ‘You’re always on top. We should finish the season the night before we go away. Get it ended. Like Will said, it’s going to throw the whole thing out and we’ll only end up even further behind. It’s the same as using prostitutes over there. There’s no competition. Mind you, I might get into second position.’

  ‘It’s a
lright with me,’ Carter said. ‘Funny, isn’t it, how birds go mad when they go abroad. It’s like because they’re outside England they think they can do whatever they want, though they could do it here as well. It’s the same when England play in Europe. Everyone goes on the rampage. There’s no respect. The laws don’t count any more and the chains are removed. It’s like nothing really exists outside England. We obey the law here, but once we’re over the channel we don’t give a fuck.’

  The Sex Division laughed because they knew Carter was right. Nail-on-the-head job. They were an island race and the laws of the land only applied at home. It was fucking mental when you thought about it. They’d left the Amsterdam trip because they were planning to see England play away and wanted to pass through Holland. That way they could make the money stretch further. Blackpool hadn’t exactly been a replacement, but it had been a good laugh. The beer tasted like shit but you got used to it, and the Buddhas made for a good night out.

  When the bell went for last orders, they’d all had enough and there was no last-minute rush for refills. Slaughter sat with them for a bit slagging off some bloke who’d said something to someone that he didn’t like, and Carter’s heart shot into his mouth as he saw a machete handle inside the nutter’s coat. So that was why he was wearing it in the heat. Carter wanted to ask why he was tooled-up on a beautiful summer’s evening, but reasoned that if Slaughter knew anything he wouldn’t be sitting there swapping idle chit-chat. It was better to leave well alone and get moving.

  The Sex Division walked out of the pub together and Will left the others in the Caribbean takeaway. He walked slowly home, turning the key in the door to the flat and noticing that the lamp in the hall was on. That meant Karen had come back. He was relieved. He stripped off, went for a piss, and then climbed into bed. She was asleep and hadn’t heard him come in.

  Will watched the patterns of the street lights on the curtains. It was a game he’d played as a kid, trying to create shapes and then scenes out of the curved and ragged lines. Between the ages of nine and twelve he’d had a lot of trouble sleeping, with all the wonders of life racing through his head. He’d lie there for hours wishing he could drift off. Once he became a teenager he was fine. It was funny how those things worked. Like Harry and his dreams. The bloke was wasted. He’d dreamt about an abortion before Will even knew what Karen was planning. Harry had a gift. He should be dealing with psychiatric cases, honing his skills. Balti, too. He had a lot to offer but instead he was wasted on the social. Mango was out on his own and that was understandable considering what had happened with Pete, while he’d never really known what Carter was thinking. He didn’t worry about anything. Nothing that had happened in the past could be changed, and the future was a lottery. He was right, but somehow Will didn’t think it was enough. It was incomplete. If you had no sense of the past or future, then maybe you didn’t really exist.

  Forget the philosophy. He had work the next day and was going to have to face Karen. He looked at her back and regretted the way he slipped into the familiar pattern. Blaming her and thinking of Eileen like that.

  Will remembered Balti telling them years ago that ‘the only real difference between a man and a woman is that a bird can have a baby. That’s it.’ Of course they’d laughed, Will as well, because women were different in a lot of other ways, physically and psychologically, but on a bigger level Balti was right. Divide and rule. The ordinary men and women in The Unity and the streets around, in the clubs and markets and the rest of London, England, Britain, the world, had more in common with each other than with the tiny band of financiers who kept them at each other’s throats. Women blamed men and men blamed women, but unless you were gay you couldn’t really live a proper life without the opposite sex. It wasn’t about having sex either, it was something else. You needed the balance. On their own they were just men; half-human almost. A man without a woman ended up in the Sex Division.

  Will got up and walked to the curtains, pulling them aside. The window was open and a breeze picking up. He pictured Bev as she’d looked the last time he saw her. Was she awake or asleep at that moment? Did she ever stop and remember him? He often wondered. What she looked like. What she thought about. Whether she had a man and kids. He tried to imagine her sitting in front of the TV watching a film, or deep asleep with the blankets pushed back struggling against the heat. Did she remember that New Year’s Eve they’d gone to Trafalgar Square and got pissed in a pub in Soho, just the two of them, and she had a balloon but it was popped by someone and she was so drunk she started crying. But she was happy. He couldn’t remember hearing Big Ben. They took the night bus home after a long wait that gave the drink time to wear off, stopping at every stop like night buses did, with the windows misted up and an above-average ratio of nutters aboard. What happened next? He wasn’t sure, but maybe they’d had a row. A nice way to start the new year. It was a long time ago now so it didn’t matter any more.

  No music, no blow, no nothing but the empty street outside and the heat that sent sweat trickling down his back. He stayed there for a long time, thinking, until the breeze got stronger and cooled him down a bit. Eventually he went and laid on the bed and started running through names for their baby. First he thought of girls’ names because he knew it was going to be a girl. Then boys’ names, because what if it was a boy? And he wondered if Carter ever thought about the kid he could have had, just the once. He must, now and then.

  Will rolled against Karen’s back and looped his arms around her, moving his left hand down her body until it was over her belly, resting his open palm on the warm skin, wondering what was happening inside her womb.

  NORTHERN LIGHTS

  Balti was well into his second day with West London Decoration. He was top of the world. Running with Jimmy Cagney as he moved the extension-fitted roller up and down the wall. Cagney on a black-and-white time bomb going mental with bullets popping off all round him, calling for his old girl, counting down till the whole place went up. Top of the world? Top of the slide more like. Sitting in the adventure playground looking down at the sad fuckers roaming the streets pushing supermarket trolleys packed with tin cans and their heads stuffed full of green politics. Sad fuckers like Balti hanging around with spaced-out care-in-the-community gents. Sweating with Lottery fever. Playing the numbers game loading his basket with cheap tins of butter beans. Standing in line handing over saved pounds, juggling balls, a clown in the circus. Helping to build West End opera houses and art galleries. Not that Balti was giving up the Lottery. There was no chance of that because he’d put a fair bit in already and had to keep going till he won. It would be easier now. He was a winner. Knew it deep down. With a wage coming in he could afford a flutter and it wouldn’t mean going without. It was goodbye to the butter beans and welcome back BSE. He’d been working two days and it was great how everything raced away. It had been the worst time of his life with nothing to do during the day—bored out of his skull and fuck all in his pocket.

  He kept thinking about all those blokes who had families. He didn’t know how they survived. Thing was, a lot of them didn’t, and then you got some Parliament cunt on the box saying how the government was paying out too much in welfare. That they were going to crack down on benefits fraud while their mates in industry pocketed hundreds of thousands in privatisation deals. It made you feel like shit. Like there was going to be a knock on the door and then a sledgehammer following through. It was the lowest trick in the politician’s book. Pinpointing the weakest people in society and redirecting the rest of the nation’s bitterness their way. MPs with outside interests sitting on advisory boards earning more in a week than most people did in a year. It made Balti sick. At least he was on his own. No small kids to explain things to when all they saw in the shops and on the telly was the endless stream of consumer goods. Made to look bad in front of their mates. There was no union of the unemployed to state the case. No sense of comradeship. You were on your own. The opposition had been either crushed or paid off.
Taking the shilling. The gloss applied insisted there was nothing wrong. They were all in it together and you were isolated, and Balti knew he would move on now he was working and look after number one. He didn’t have the guts to do anything else. Wouldn’t have known where to start.

  ‘Come on lads, tea up,’ Paul shouted from downstairs.

  Balti stopped work, propped his brush in the paint tray and went into the bathroom to wash his hands. There was a massive glass mirror that reflected the size of the room. Everything was oversized. The bath, shower, sink, even the drugs cabinet. The taps were ornate brass and there was one of those French things for cleaning your arse. They were going to put in a cork floor once it had been painted.

  ‘It’s too nice to be working,’ Harry said as Balti sat down next to him in the garden.

  ‘Should be on a beach somewhere watching the girls,’ Paul replied, passing Balti’s tea over. ‘Sitting by the pool with a bottle of lager in my hand.’

  ‘You expect me to drink it out of this?’ the Balti man laughed, holding the West Ham mug up in front of him and staring at the crest. ‘You cheeky cunt. What’s the matter with Mickey Mouse?’

  ‘I want Mickey,’ Harry said. ‘I’m not drinking out of a West Ham mug.’

  ‘Well what about yours, Paul? What’s wrong with Goofy?’

  ‘I’ve already put three sugars in. I like the Goofy one.’

  Paul was West Ham, even though he came from Acton. He shrugged his shoulders and passed the biscuits. Balti took four custard creams and put them on the iron garden table they were sitting around. The chairs were uncomfortable if you sat on them too long, but the garden was smart—long and wide with old brick walls decorated with flowering clematis and Russian vine. There were ceramic pots and several small trees. It was great, having a tea break in the garden, feeling the sun. Better than some scabby common smothered in dog shit.