by Nevill, Adam
The eyes of the other children now moved subtly to watch the two teenagers on vintage bicycles who had appeared and were circling the small gathering, their two-wheeled mounts artfully remade by oily-fingered tinkerings with scrap. The faces of the teenagers were near-permanent sneers, browned rictuses beneath the peaks of baseball caps: a default setting. The bicycles creaked closer in tighter circles but never stopped, and the riders never addressed him. The father moved away from the crowd, but it followed him.
He kept his hands deep inside his pockets, wrapped around the nerve gas and the stun gun, ignoring the first tugs on his shorts and rucksack, before he shrugged off another set of more insistent fingers that flicked the end of his watch strap in an exploratory fashion. He increased his stride away from the medical centre and climbed concrete stairs to a car park filled with rubbish that curled around two sides of The Commodore.
The children waited in the car park, amused at his entrance into the warm darkness of the building, as if he were an imbecile about to attempt some feat that had already defeated a multitude. There were no cameras here and the father wondered if he could risk showing his face to the kind of men who would never report him to the police.
And around they went, stamping their feet like a pair of heat-enraged apes. Palms slid over slick flesh, clothing was gripped and yanked uselessly in a dance of two drunkards, prison lovers enraptured. The father was the younger and fitter of the pair; Rory’s senses were dulled by the alcohol he reeked of. But neither was a natural street fighter. There was little evidence of coordination or balance, scant progress made in the scratching, or from the dull thumps of fists pulled free and swung, or much control amidst the cussings and grunts of these rough-trading beasts.
In the melee, Rory’s teeth had twice closed on the father’s face and he knew the man was straining for his nose, or a lip, with those Neolithic teeth, browned at the root and yellowed like corn at the tip, as if from chewing an Iron Age diet of nettles and seeds. Rory’s head itself seemed newly resurrected from the dawn of human settlements in the area, a crude skull found in a clay pit amidst shards of broken pottery, but now tight with ruddy, sun-spotted skin, suggesting a new regression – from ape to reptile.
Together, they eventually fell towards the bed as Rory turned within the father’s arms and slid to his knees as if to cover his head, before curling into a ball.
From where the nasty little blade was then so swiftly procured the father had no idea, but Rory brought it up fast and into the curtain-shrouded room. The father put out a hand, as if to stop a thrown ball, and his hand pricked painfully, and then something slipped deeper through the meat of his palm and pushed apart the finger bones. Punctured and airless, he yanked himself off the skewer, and fell away.
Rory came up to his full height. His eyes, spider-webbed with blood vessels, flared with excitement, with delight. He stepped to the father, swiped the blade through the air at the level of his throat. Then paused, grinning, only to feint and jab at the father’s ribs. The father caught the older man’s scrawny forearm in mid-air with his blood-slippery hand, and gripped the loose, chilly skin, felt it move over muscle like a fish plucked from shallow water. Tugging Rory closer, he kicked out and his instep struck his opponent’s knee.
On impact, Rory’s face drained grey. He swore, pulled free, and after a laboured hop, reassigned his weight to the other foot.
The father tucked his sliced hand, dripping warm and dark red to the elbow, under his other arm, and moved back to the door of the room. Outside, he heard footsteps on the stairs, and not only one pair. A crowd was gathering.
Thick heat swaddled his brain. He could have been mistaken in believing that Rory had been waiting for him in the hot gloom of the first floor. Perhaps a call had been made from the street, because Rory had been sat on an old sofa in the communal area of the landing, his hair still mussed from a long, hung-over sleep. A mad king on a red velvet throne, waiting to give an audience to a messenger from beyond his fiefdom, he’d even smiled at the father as he climbed the last few stairs to the first-floor landing, as if they were old friends, and asked, ‘Who is you looking for?’
‘Rory Forrester,’ the father had said.
‘What you want him for?’ Rory had asked, and the father had known who he was speaking with.
‘It’s private.’
‘Who is you?’
The father mumbled something about being a friend of a friend from the prison he knew Rory had served time in, and that he wanted some business with Rory, because he knew Rory was a man who might be able to hook him up with something that he had buyers for. During the brief, tense exchange, the father had looked about the landing and at the fire door, the three closed white doors, and the window facing the new sun that partially blinded him and concealed Rory. Below him in the stairwell, he’d heard footsteps enter the building, possibly those of the curious children.
‘Where you from?’
As he stepped closer to the sofa, the father told him he was from Brighton. ‘You’re Rory?’
‘So what you after exact?’
‘A couple of kids. White.’
They’d gone into one of the rooms, and one so chilled by air conditioning the father had felt momentarily unwell. And in that moment of disorientation, Rory had turned quickly and tried to headbutt the father, who’d blocked the impact of the big red face with his forearm. The force of the fierce, scruffy head had still knocked him back against the door, which slammed shut.
The father had yanked out the stun gun and fired wide, the dart crackling off into the half-light, and Rory had closed with him before he could free the spray canister from his other pocket. And around they had gone, slapping for purchase, for eyes, ears, throats, testicles, desperate to keep their feet and find advantages or weapons.
Now, Rory could only spit and curse at the pain in his knee. In a bark more than a voice, he said things to the father of such ugliness that the father felt his deepest disgust for the man yet, and he unzipped his rucksack with his uninjured hand. Delving inside, he found the handgun quickly, then introduced the final shit into Rory’s immediate future. ‘Yeah?’ he said and walked at the man.
Abruptly, Rory shut his prehistoric mouth, but the father still wrestled with a hot and bulging urge to shoot the hoary face at point-blank range.
Rory threw the knife onto the bed and held one arm out, while the other hand remained clutched at the injured knee. The proffered hand wavered, was stained yellow, rough-palmed. ‘Bowles,’ Rory said, in a fuller comprehension of the situation. ‘He grassed me up. For what? I ain’t done nothing. Not wiv kids. That’s why you is here, from them Nazis? I knew it was them that done Bowles, but you is barking up the wrong tree here, mate. You got the wrong man. I ain’t no nonce.’
Slipping two fingers inside the man’s nostrils, the father pigged Rory’s nose. Pulled his gnarly head back and shoved a knee in the nape of his neck. Made him slobber like a sow in soils dung-plastered. Rory’s face, held to the chink of daylight, was synthetic corned beef, purpled and reddened with rashes and broken blood vessels. He smelled as winey and ethanol-soaked as newly varnished wood. His neck was tattooed with a spidery black King Death draped in rags.
The father managed to speak through ragged breaths. ‘You know who took a little four-year-old girl, in 2051.’ The father said her name, but with difficulty, as if the stench and squalor of the room could stain her precious memory. ‘You were part of it.’
‘Nah-ah. Not me.’
‘Your name’s coming up.’
‘Weren’t nuffing to do with me. Let go.’
‘Liar.’
‘I know who you want, but s’not me. Not Bowles. You got the wrong people.’
‘Tell me what you know or I’ll fuck you through the ear with this.’ The father burrowed the end of the handgun into the man’s earlobe. His left shoulder screamed for relief, the hand below was now a purple dirigible, dripping burgundy syrup from four fingers.
Rory’s e
yes rolled, his skin going sallow. ‘No. Mate. You’s got the wrong man. On me mother’s life. Let me up. I can’t breathe. My neck . . .’
‘Tell me what I ask or I’ll disable you. I’ll start with your ankles, work my way up. I’ll fuck you up, then shoot you through the eyes, prick. And in hell you can ask Nige and Bowwsy where bullshit got them.’
‘’K, ’K, just let me up.’
The father took his fingertips out of Rory’s enlarged nostrils, which the man immediately seized and tried to claw back into shape. Tears spilled down the seared cheeks and blood returned to the mottled forehead. ‘I just heard fings, like.’
The father watched him, kept him covered with the gun. He’d developed a good eye for contrived bids for sympathy and remorse.
‘It was in a pub, like. Dolphin. Ages ago, like. In Exmuff. Ain’t even there no more. But people was saying she was took to order, like.’
The father nearly swooned, and almost smelled again the fragrance of shampoo and the warm perspiration in his daughter’s hair, where he burrowed his face after she woke and curled upon his lap and watched cartoons in the living room, before he buttered her toast and poured milk onto crackling cereal. ‘Which people? Names.’
‘Was a fella called Alexis. Big fella, like. Him and this guy I didn’t know. His mate. Was called Boris, I fink. Ruskies. I was helping them with a fing. Booze and pork that was coming in froo Plymouth that the navy didn’t know about. And they was all pissed up. We all was, like. And they watched this fing on the news and they looked at each other. I caught it, like, this look they give out. And I was saying something about what a shame it was, cus she was such a nice-looking girl, and all that. Then Alexis says she was took. Kids get took all the time, they said so. Ransom money. Someone else told them it was done that way. Stole to order, like.’
‘Who told them?’
Rory shrugged. ‘They didn’t say no names. You don’t ask questions to people like that. They was full kings. It don’t go down well. They’s fink you is a grass.’
‘There was no ransom demand. The parents were not wealthy.’
The shrug again, twinned with a show of fear belied by the loquaciousness that was now coming too easy. Acting out. ‘I never seen nuffing but that picture on the news. Sweet girl, I thought. Lovely girl. Kind of face you remember. I ain’t fenced or trafficked for years, like. Totally gone off all that. We’s all make mistakes. Don’t mean you can’t change. Kids was never my fing anyway. You’s making a mistake right now, finking I took her. On my mother’s life, I swear to you I had nuffing to do with this.’
‘What do the people in your community think? Men in your trade, who also made your mistakes? Men who kidnap children? Men who’d sell anything to the nonces?’
‘Nah, nah, nah, you’s got me all wrong, like. And the kiddie groups that was still down here then, the rings, like, didn’t have nuffing to do with it. Wouldn’t need to buy no one like her neither. Too risky. Why’d you take someone like her when there’s thousands down the coast in them camps? No one’s watching them. They’s could take their pick, like. Why go into someone’s house and pinch a kid? Fink of the risk of somefing like that. I’m not saying there’s not some who might do it, ones that is a bit cracked, like. And if it was one of them, then she had no chance, and you is wasting your time. But that was a snatch to order, Alexis said, so he must have heard somefing, like. Alexis was into all kinds of fings. He was running them brothels they busted in Bristol. Bringing in the girls an’ everyfing. He knew if they was snatches, or if they was just pervs taking kids. He would have heard somefing, like. You go up a drive and snatch someone’s kid out the garden, like, when her mum and dad’s back is turned, then you is fearless or you is desperate. Stands to reason. You ain’t in control, or you got the stones to take what you want anytime, anywhere.’
The father found Rory horribly convincing, despite the lack of specifics. In the first lightless era of his own grief and despair, when he’d considered the whys and hows, his instincts had suspected a loner, a predator, an opportunist, deranged by its urges, who had seen them out and about as a family and followed them home after biding its time. Scarlett Johansson had always thought the same. ‘These Russians. Where are they?’
‘Who, Alexis? Don’t know what happened to him. He ain’t around no more. But they’s all over, Kings. They’s running most of the coast now. Dover froo to Plymouth. Police won’t take them on. Too much grief. But you needs to ask them, the King hard core. I can hook you up with some. I got friends, like.’
‘Then you’re coming with me, out this door, right—’
And then the father realized Rory had only been so forthcoming, and so emphatic and loud of voice, because the corridor outside had fallen ominously silent, until the moment the door opened quickly. And before the father could turn about, the very air behind his head exploded white and his ears whistled like the whales that once drifted in the cold darkness beneath ice flows long vanished. His final thought, before his hearing whined beneath clods of muffling, was that he had been so close. That at last he had names. Two names: Alexis, Boris. He’d had something, but now he was going to die.
A sense of his daughter bloomed bright then diminished like a spark.
The father turned so sprightly, his finger squeezing the t rigger as his heels swivelled, and as his hand pointed in outrage at the thin-headed youth, who had kicked in the door and blazed near the father’s ear, but somehow missed in its excitement and nerves, with the gun held out sideways as if the youth was some hip-hoppity gangsta of old.
The father fired through the eye-stinging smoke that wreathed the doorway and made the figure shake as if electrocuted. The bony head clicked back and threw matter noisily up a wall, mercifully unseen in such poor light, and from its thin and angular silhouette the father knew he’d put out the mind of one of the teenagers on the bicycles.
The smaller shadows about the dead boy’s legs that had gathered to gleefully watch death, though not this one, scattered and bump-slap-bumped down the stairs like the frightened children they actually were.
A shuffle of motion sensed more than heard in the room behind brought the father back around and into a crouch with his gun held out and his second hand gingerly supporting the trigger hand, like he had learned on how to steady a weapon. Rory was up and coming, with the recovered, and now flashing, knife, but already taking a lurch into the gun’s ultimate purpose at a very favourable range. The father said, ‘Stop.’
But Rory was not for stopping, and probably knew he had no choice after what was fetched out of Bowles’s place on stretchers, all skull-shot and liver-punctured. And if it hadn’t been for his kicked-in knee, Rory might even have reached the father and slashed about his face with his mean blade. So the man just came on, gibboning like some old, half-lame troglodyte enraged in a cave mouth. The gun coughed and Rory stumbled, a hand immediately at his throat that gargled like nothing human.
The father had aimed for his chest and momentarily wondered how far astray the first shot had gone. And in an urgent desire to not hear the wet wheezes from the devastated throat one moment longer, the father went and stood behind the figure, now stooped over and dripping into the sink, and he shot a black smoky hole behind its big red ear. In the mirror on the wall, Rory’s cheek flowered black rags.
The father turned away and wiped his face.
Outside the room, doors were opening, slamming shut. Out of the hot, coppery darkness of The Commodore came rough voices rising. Feet boomed on the stairwells.
A gun barked twice. Plaster cracked and spumed dust ahead of where the father stumbled. He’d ducked late, after the shots had already found the wall, and fell at the bottom of the stairwell. Putting a hand down to break his fall, red lightning struck through his eyes at the movement of the fine bones in his bulbous paw, stabbed deep by a rapist and slaver.
So wet was his injured hand now, and dripping with his own outpourings, it might have been immersed in a bucket of oil to the elbow. The
father could not make a fist and whimpered with pain as he rose to his feet, and started for the front doors. They were open and a white glare illumined the tatty woodchip walls, torn linoleum, yellowed safety instructions that he staggered past to get outside, and into the afternoon inferno. His breath steam-trained in and out of his chest, his knees clashed together and his feet were scuffling.
Above him in the building a voice shouted, ‘Pack it in,’ in response to the shots fired. The father had not heard the phrase in years, but familiarity brought no comfort. ‘You’s’ll bring the filth in!’ followed the first order. ‘Finish him outside. Round the back.’
‘He’s done Rory,’ someone else shouted, outraged in a distance muffled by the walls.
The father fell from the front door and waved his gun in the sudden volume and brightness of the air that engulfed him. He wanted the crowd at the perimeter of the car park to see what he was holding and ready to use.
Small figures scattered like cats into the scrub of dry flower beds around the edge of the tarmac, puffs of sand heralding their retreat. Three boys slid over a low concrete wall. Taller figures reared back, tensed, or crouched, but didn’t run. A sharp-nosed, ferrety face under a baseball cap spoke quickly into a device, one finger plugged into the other ear, like a soldier calling in reinforcements or the coordinates of the enemy’s position. Behind him, men bellowed and thumped their way down the stairs and into the reception of The Commodore. Shoes slid as they slowed near the doors.
He trotted backwards, away from the old hotel building, his gun sights wavering all around the door of the front entrance for the first man to come through. Shoot eight times, count them. Last one in your mouth.
The father turned in the car park, his feet dragging across loose stones, and the world wheeled through his jittery vision. He couldn’t run back into town, or push up into Upton, Barton or Hele on foot; those places were too crowded, and he imagined doors and windows being flung open as he stumbled in the street, and long queues of people behind him, keeping pace, running him to ground until the bullets were gone.