Nowhere to Go

by Iain Rowan

  I headed in the opposite direction to Walker. Not that it made much difference; sooner or later he would come for me. It didn't really matter if I was sitting in my flat when the door went flying off its hinges, or was caught out on the estate, the end result would be the same. By the time I had reached my block I had decided that it was inevitable that he would come tonight. Walker was nothing more than a thug, a Robbie Gilden in a smart suit. He wasn't sophisticated enough to wait for revenge. Walker would come tonight, take advantage of the chaos on the estate. Tonight. Still, I thought, look on the bright side, it wasn't as if I had much planned for my old age.

  There was no sign of him when I got back to my flat. It would take him some time to circle around the outside of the estate so I had a chance to do this my way. I let myself into the flat, ripped the panel from the side of the bath and pulled out the supply I had been saving for the end of it all. Maybe that was just going to be sooner than I thought. Small ziplock bag of powder, clean syringe and needle from the exchange—now there's a laugh, mustn't be unhygienic when one commits suicide. Still, I hated sharing my needles when I was an addict, and the habit of a lifetime was hard to break. Habits. I stuffed the works into my pocket and headed straight back out of the flat.

  The corridor was still empty. One fluorescent light twitched and hummed. I stopped at the door next to mine and knocked. When Alice opened the door as far as the chain would allow and saw that it was me she smiled but could not hide her disappointment.

  "I thought it was Dean. I hate him being out with all this going on, I keep thinking he's—I keeping worrying he's—"

  "I saw him, Alice," I said, "other side of the estate, less than half an hour ago. He was fine. Don't worry."

  "Thanks Mickey. But I will worry until he's back in his bed. He's only a boy, you know, my boy."

  "Yeah, I understand. He'll be OK, he's a smart kid. Look Alice, I've got to go. Walker's looking for me."

  "That bastard. Thought you were the only one on the estate that didn't owe him?"

  "I don't. But I suspect that's not the way he sees it now. But anyway, he's going to come here and ask where I am. Don't give him any grief Alice, just tell him. Tell him I've gone to the war zone. Tell him I've gone there to score and shoot up."

  "Oh Mickey, no."

  "Alice, just tell him that, please, just that, just like I said it, and nothing else. For me. Please."

  "If I have to. You take care, Mickey. My Dean looks up to you, you know."

  Jesus. Just when I thought things couldn't get any worse. I went down the stairs as fast as I could, before Walker turned up and the whole thing ended in some badly-lit piss-stinking stairwell.

  I was just about to walk into the alley between Hyacinth and Iris when I heard the sound of running feet on one of the walkways above me. I looked up and saw Walker, moving fast towards the stairwell. I had three floors advantage on him. The police helicopter fizzed low over the other side of the estate. A firework shot up past it to the sound of cheers and exploded harmlessly high above, petals of green and gold falling gracefully from the night sky. I ran down the alley, pain in my stomach, pain in my legs, pain in my lungs. I rounded the corner and the war zone grinned at me with its stumpy and uneven brick teeth.

  I was into the first house before Walker had come out of the alley. That bought me more time, but not much. I staggered through the rooms in the dark, picking my way over piles of rubble, trying to avoid the sudden gaping holes in the floor. The kitchen wall had been kicked through and a low arch led into the next house. I scraped through and kept going, scrambled over fallen joists into the front room, down through the hole in the floor and then I crawled over cigarette ends and the used condoms that lay everywhere like squashed slugs, crawled through the damp and into the floorspace of the third house along, hoping that this rat run still worked, that I wasn't trapped there, about to die under the floor in the dirtiest place in the most derelict part of this whole ruined estate. Then there was a gap in the floorboards, and I could pull myself up and into space. I could hear noises in the adjoining houses, the clatter of feet. I found what was left of the stairs and dragged myself up.

  My whole body ached, and strange things were happening to my peripheral vision, as if the whole world was slipping and sliding away from me. Your body will get weaker, my consultant had said. You will have to rest and take life very easy. I'm not entirely sure that this was what he had in mind. I got to the back bedroom, the farthest point from where Walker might enter the house, avoided the holes that gaped in the floor, and slid down a wall until the floor stopped me from falling any farther. All I wanted to do was to lie down, curl up and go to sleep. What stopped me was the desire not to give Walker the satisfaction of finding me like that. I wanted to do this my way.

  I have never had control over my life. I gave it up to heroin, and it danced me on silken strings for years and years. When I finally wrestled my destiny away from the drug, the cancer stole in and took it away again. Now, for once, I was going to be master of my own fate. As footsteps thudded through the other houses I pulled out the bag of heroin and my works, and began to cook. The flames from my Bic danced shadows around the room, and despite the devastation, despite the rot, it made it look warm and homely. A good place to end it, for things to come to a close.

  ~

  I was right, the bedroom was the last place in the house that Walker checked. He steamed in through the door, kicking it open, but when he saw me he slowed down. Hurry over, time to relax, time to play. He brushed at his suit, smacking brick dust from its sleeves with sharp little chops of his hand.

  "Once junkie scum, always junkie scum. I think this suit is ruined, you know. Paul Smith, it is." Walker took two quick steps forward and swung a foot at my face. I jerked my head back and turned it to the side, and the kick skidded over my face and cracked into my nose instead of splitting my head in two. "Paul fucking Smith. And it's been ruined, by the same dead man junkie scum that got my employee arrested, and who's tried his best to make a fucking laughing stock out of me."

  He kicked again. This time his foot connected hard with my leg and fingers of pain grabbed me and squeezed me and didn't want to let go. "And now he's crawled into this shithole, like a rat, a rat crawling back to its nest, to shoot himself full of smack and hope that I won't find him. Well, junkie scum, your luck's run out. I've found you."

  Another kick, another wave of pain. The room smelt of decaying flowers, and I didn't know why.

  "I don't care if you're dying anyway, you'll still want to live. People always want to live. You're still going to beg me not to kill you, and you know what, junkie scum?" Kick. "I'm still going to do it. And you know what, junkie scum?" Kick. "They'll probably never even find your body because no-one will be bothered to look for a nothing like you." Kick. "And you know what, junkie scum? Even if they do find you, they won't give a fuck. No-one will give a fuck. And do you know why, junkie scum?" He bent and grabbed my collar, pulled me to my feet and stuck his face two inches in front of mine. I could smell the rotting flowers even more strongly now, and I realised that it was his aftershave.

  "I said, do you know why no-one will give a fuck, junkie scum?" He let go of my collar with one hand, and used the back of it to slap me across the face, a contemptuous, mocking slap. It hit my top lip so hard against my teeth that it tore, and blood started to fill my mouth.

  "Why?"

  He grinned. He had a piece of meat stuck in his teeth.

  "Because you are worth the same dead as you are alive. Fuck all."

  "True," I said. "But I'm still better than you," and I pulled my hand from behind me, punched upward between Walker's arms, and stuck the syringe into the flesh of his neck, using my palm to force the plunger down as it went into him, giving him the full load, everything that I had been saving for my final goodbye.

  Walker bellowed and hit out at me with one hand, the other grabbing at his throat. I fell but pushed with my foot against the wall and sent myself skidding
a little further across the floor, and as Walker stamped down hard with his foot he missed my head and crashed a splintered hole in the rotting floorboard. It would be a few minutes before the heroin killed him. If I'd managed to hit a vein he would have had less than a minute. But I wasn't that accurate, or that lucky, so it would have gone into muscle or under the skin, and that left plenty of time for him to beat me to death. I kept moving, dragging myself forward with my hands, trying to put distance between us, thinking that I might be able to dodge past him, make the stairs, anything but die on the floor in that room. But I didn't have the strength, and gave up and waited for it to happen. In the end, there's nothing more you can do.

  Walker threw the syringe to one side, snarled, and jumped towards me but his foot was still caught in the hole in the floorboard, and he twisted and fell. His head hit the floor so hard that I felt the floorboard under me lift. He lay still for a few seconds and then got up again and crouched for a moment shaking his head, sending little droplets of blood flying about the room. He said "Whuh?" in a stupid slow voice, and then fell again. He lay completely still for a while and then tried to lift himself with his arms. There was a horrible noise, like an iron manhole cover being dragged over concrete, and then he vomited a great pool of bile. His arms gave way underneath him and he collapsed face first into it. Vomit rattled in his throat as he tried to breathe, and his feet rattled and drummed on the floor.

  I dragged myself to my feet, holding my breath. The stink of flowers and vomit made my head spin. I stepped over Walker and looked around the room. There, the syringe. I picked it up. The needle had snapped off in Walker's throat, but I didn't care about that. I leant against the wall by the window and waited for the formless jerky movements behind me to stop. When they did, I pulled a piece of loose wood from the door frame, slid it under Walker and used it as a lever to turn him over. His body fell over itself in that clumsy way that dead things have. I reached inside his jacket, and found it. The black book. Every name, every address, every debt, every life he owned. In the opposite pocket, his wallet. Today was collection day. There was over a thousand pounds in cash. I stuffed the cash into the front pocket of my jeans, and the syringe, book and wallet into a back pocket. Then I blew Walker's body a kiss and limped away.

  I didn't have to walk far to find a car that was still burning. I tossed the syringe and the wallet in, ripped the black book in half and then threw that in to the flames as well. Little flakes of ash flew up to the sky, snow in reverse. I doubted that the police could connect me to Walker's death, and if they did, what exactly would happen to me? A life sentence? People spent longer inside than I had left for not paying their TV licence. I was very tired, and I hurt, and wanted very much to be back in my own flat, my own bed, the few familiar things that surrounded me like family.

  I shuffled back towards home. I could use the money fly out to somewhere hot and cheap, rent a small room, spend the last months of my life in a lazy, sunny paradise. The estate seemed to be calming down now, the helicopter had hummed away to another part of the town and the sirens wailed less often. I turned at the top of the stairs and looked out over the flats and streets and alleys, the places where my choices had led me. Where I had lived my life—most of my life—thinking that one day I would be somewhere else, do something else, not realising that this would be all there was. All there ever was. No changing that now. Besides, programmes on the TV abroad would be rubbish. I walked wearily down the corridor, split the wad of notes roughly in half, slid one pile under John and Sheila's door, one pile under Alice's, and then let myself into my flat, my place, my home.

  NOWHERE TO GO

  Miller didn't go out much now, because the more people there were, the lonelier he felt. He hid in his flat, watched TV, read the books that he had borrowed on quick, nervous expeditions to the library.

  Sometimes though, he needed to remind himself that he was not alone. That night was one of those times. He had eaten a microwave meal and flipped channels but found nothing to watch that would not leave him either bored or anxious. So he pulled his battered laptop from under his sagging sofa, waited for it to grind into life, and then clicked on his bookmark.

  He wandered at random at first: watched the endless press of people through Times Square, blurred streaks of light from car headlights on a rainy Kaiserplatz in Aachen, a solitary cyclist weaving from side to side across a bridge over the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.

  And then his town, the three public webcams that never showed much of any interest. But it was home, and it gave him a connection to the way that he used to live before the illness, and for a while it stopped the walls of his flat from pushing in too close.

  Miller watched taxi drivers talking and smoking outside their cabs while they waited for the next train to come in. A man in a suit sprinted from the pub next to the station, late for his train. Miller clicked back, and then on to the link for the camera that overlooked the pier. Shapes bundled fat against the cold sat in darkness, waiting for the fish. A few feet below them a deeper darkness moved and surged. Miller preferred to watch the pier camera when the nights were lighter. When it was dark like this, the sea almost invisible but always moving, it made him anxious and a little sick. He went back again, picked the last link. This one had only appeared a few weeks earlier. He was not sure why anyone had put a camera there at all, let alone made the feed public. It wasn't very reliable, sometimes there was a picture, sometimes just a page not found error.

  The camera looked out over Burdon Square, a place that people went through, rather than to. A boarded-up Wesleyan chapel occupied most of one side, the short flight of stone steps to its door littered and stained. The wet asphalt of the road glowed orange from lights in the window of an interior design shop. Every few minutes, the light dimmed and changed into a different colour. Miller liked the orange best. Above and behind the shop, a high embankment curved away towards the distant Victorian arches of the station. Miller sat and watched, waiting for the light to change colour, because he had nothing else to do.

  A movement caught his eye, something dark against the steps of the chapel. A man was standing there, as if he were looking for something that he had lost. The man turned, looked across the square, and Miller saw what had caught his attention. A woman hurried out of the square, unsteady on high heels, tugging down at the hem of her short black dress with one hand, clutching tight at her handbag with the other. Then there was movement above her, a train passing along the embankment, rectangles of pale yellow light flickering past for a moment, and then one final arc of blue as the overhead power cable sparked. The man took two steps back up the steps to the chapel, as if retreating from the square. A taxi drifted along the far side, slowed. The man stepped forward, raised a hand but the taxi accelerated away again, until it was just red lights, and then it was nothing at all.

  The lights in the furniture shop window changed colour, warm orange to a sickly green that turned the air into thick water, deep under the sea.

  They came from the alley at the side of the chapel, two of them, not particularly hurrying, walking towards the man. One wore a light coat, one a dark coat, and both pulled their hoods up as they walked. The man took a step out, then back, then stopped, no time any more, nowhere to go.

  The figures did not seem to hurry, but they closed the gap very quickly, and then they were on him. One vicious punch to the gut dropped the man to his knees, and then a kick in the face threw him back on to the steps, where he flapped about like a fish just out of the water. Then there were more kicks, a stamp and then another, and then another, like they were trying to put out a fire, and the man on the ground did not move any more, and the two attackers suddenly broke away, drifted down the steps and out of sight, not hurrying any more than they had when they arrived.

  Miller sat in horror, hand opening and closing over the mouse as if with one click he could pause time, with another rewind it. But there was nothing that he could do that would change anything. The light from the sho
p changed from green to red, and the square looked as if it was on fire. Miller took a deep breath, and hurried over to the phone on the kitchen wall. He took another breath and dialled.

  He spoke to a calm voice, gave his name and address like a child lost in a store, and then described exactly what he had seen. He told the operator that he thought it best to phone the police first, but that they would need an ambulance too.

  "I'll get them straight there," the woman said. "Can you tell me sir, is the victim conscious? Please don't move him, but can you see if he is conscious?"

  "I didn't explain myself well," Miller said. "I'm not actually there. I saw it on camera."

  "On camera, sir?"

  "Yes, on my computer. I'm not a security guard or anything. It's a public camera. You can watch it. On the computer."

  "Thank you sir," the woman said, as if she didn't understand what he meant but didn't have the time to find out more. "We'll send someone right away."

  When he went back to his computer, the browser had refreshed to an error page, the camera or the server down, and no matter how many times he clicked refresh, he could not get it back again.