Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (12 page)

He had long ago grown tired of all this. In the beginning he’d soaked up the adoration like a kind of vain sponge. They’d stare at him with those doll-like fixed expressions, with downright awe at times, and he’d sit there and lap it up. They were in the presence of a god, of sorts, and he let them believe that, remaining aloof and just out of reach, never letting them get too close so that he always managed to keep that thin, glossy barrier of fame between them. Sure, they were there to buy his books, it’s what kept him in the elevated position he was, but he never let them quite believe that. He was there to do them a favour, he was there to sign their copies, he was there and he didn’t have to be. In fact he never tired of seeing ‘Gavin Miller’ scrawled across the title page, because each signature was in its way proof in ink that he’d done it, he’d achieved his goal. He was there more because of his growling vanity than anything. They lined up to feed this insatiable beast, which sucked on their admiration like they were marrow in a bone. He always came away tired but curiously revitalised by the book signing.

But now it was different. There was no desire to feed, no hunger, no gratification. Exhaustion was setting in. Self-contempt was freezing his veins. Instead it had all turned about, and the people filing past him now were gorging themselves on his emaciated corpse, tearing great bloody chunks off his unresisting body, chewing him, swallowing him, digesting him. He saw the look in each and every one of their eyes, one of ravenous insatiable appetite, the hunted transformed into the hunter. He could only scribble away with the pen, each line another drop milked from his soul.

“Could you dedicate it ‘To Mary’?” she asked politely enough, her eyes imploring.

Once upon a time, in the time he called his Golden Age, he would have sucked on that youthful, attractive marrow with relish. But now he couldn’t see what the big deal was anymore. She was too young, too foolish, too hung up on something he wasn’t and never had been. His look admonished her for her naivety, and he felt a tiny electric thrill of satisfaction course through him when he saw her flinch, but he obliged anyway, signing ‘To Mary, all the best, Gavin Miller’. She went away sporting a baffled expression.

There seemed no end to them, one book after another thudding on the table in front of him, and he mindlessly scribbled away till his hand ached and his signature degenerated into something bestial, something alien even to him. He felt it reflected his true self and he was afraid of it. He paused in his signing, taking a cup of coffee, exchanging idle gossip with customers, with the shop staff, eventually having to escape to their staffroom to sit all alone and brooding at a Formica table beside a gurgling water heater and a wall clock that ticked loud and incessant. But he couldn’t stay cooped up here forever in a dingy tube-lit den that was an austere reminder of his past, and so he went once more to his thankless task.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the manuscript he’d brought back from his visit to Overton Hall, which remained like a firebrand at the forefront of his mind. He’d put it somewhere safe. Out of sight of his wife.

He noticed a young man’s hand sliding a book towards him, and he glanced up at him. Tall, gawky, hardly out of his teens. The youth read it as an opportunity to talk. “I write, like you,” he gabbled, “well, not like you, not like that, not as good as that. I write – you know, in my spare time. I’d like to be a writer one day, like you. I’ve read all your books. Inspired, they are. They inspire me. One day I hope to be able to put down words on paper like you. Thank you, Mr Miller, thank you for the autograph. I’ll treasure it. You don’t know how much this means!” and he withdrew from his life as fast as he’d speared into it.

He signed for another ten minutes or so till a migraine savagely attacked a point behind his eyes and he took a couple of aspirin the manageress handed him.

He wondered how he could kill himself.

He’d thought about it a lot lately. Actually, it wasn’t only lately; the thought had been there hounding him for more than a few years, but he’d only recently started to consider it with a modicum of seriousness. Aspirin, he thought? Too painful. Drowning? Too frightening. Hanging? That was a contender. But what if you dropped and the rope didn’t break your neck? What if you hung there gasping for breath that wouldn’t come, awareness slow to dissolve? Would that put it on a par with drowning?

“Excuse me,” a shrill voice intruded.

He looked up at the middle-aged man in a leather coat. He smelled faintly of stale deodorant.

“Yes?” Miller asked tiredly.

“Who’s ‘Maxwell Stone’?”

“Pardon?” said Miller, taken aback on hearing the name.

“Look, you’ve signed my book ‘Maxwell Stone’.”

Horrified, Miller snatched the book back, struggled for words that wouldn’t form, and ripped out the entire page, screwing it up into a tight ball and then ramming it into his pocket. Sweat pasted a dull sheen on his forehead. “Sorry," he said. “Sorry.”

*  *  *  *

A strange thing happened in the yard only yesterday. At least, I judge it strange. Perhaps to you it is perfectly ordinary. Perhaps it is my peculiar situation that lends it strangeness.

I was circling the walls of my prison at a steady pace, having given up my running. I have had time to give careful consideration to my obsessions, of which my timed runs were but one amongst many. It comes with confinement, I recognise that now, a desperate need to find meaning. I was at one time obsessed with the exactness of my paper and pen on my desk, lined up perfectly each day to the faintest of faint scratches and scuffmarks on its polished surface. I became obsessed with the lines on my face, peering closer into the mirror in an increasingly protracted morning ritual that sometimes lasted till noon, to a point that I believed one day they’d become massive gashes and slits across my features. I’ve had similar obsessions throughout my time here – food, masturbation, air quality, thoughts of dying, fluff and dust – each has been a focus for my diseased attention. One day I shall write about them all in perfect detail, for I believe obsession is revealing. Or perhaps I am risking becoming too obsessive about writing in detail about my obsessions. I find the thought interesting.

My obsessions, thankfully, wear themselves out in time. So now I walk. It’s wintertime, the murky brown hills above the walls sprinkled with snow or frost, the sky above white like virgin paper. It’s beautiful, but it’s bloody freezing in the yard. So I could have done with running to keep myself warm. Only I refuse to go back to an obsession that’s worn out, tired, used up. I walk slowly and I freeze.

I don’t know why but something caused me to glance upwards. And there it was, held aloft on a breeze that carried it this way and that, and then let it fall sharply as if it had slipped through careless fingers.

It was a feather.

Just a single white feather tipped with black. I guessed it was from a gull, though there was no sign of the bird anywhere; the sky remained a blank expanse waiting an artist’s hand. I watched it fall like a solitary snowflake, and at first I was sure it would be carried back over the wall and out of sight. But just as it seemed it was to clip the edge of the wall and be lost forever, a wayward gust took it up again and tossed it towards me. I stopped to watch its progress. It drifted lazily to a halt before my feet, edging closer inch by inch as if willing me to bend and pick it up.

Wise and his colleague didn’t appear to be the slightest bit interested in me, though I knew this to be untrue. They were engaged in superficial conversation, a fact easily read in those tired, impassive features. I looked at the feather; it nudged my shoe impatiently. So I stooped and lifted it up, holding it to the light – and oh! the way that light tore through the filaments, rendering it translucent and lustrous, as if it carried the very sky within its pristine whiteness.

“What have you got there?” Wise’s voice shattered my reverie.

“Nothing,” I answered.

“It’s got to be something,” he snarled, walking rapidly towards me, one hand brushing the baton by his side.

I grew afraid that he would take the feather from me, my gift from the sky, and so I held it out on the end of an outstretched arm like I was a naughty schoolboy before a teacher. Before Mr Walton again. “It’s a feather. Nothing but a scraggy old seagull feather. Look, it’s even got bird shit on it.”

He snatched it from me, crushing it in his puffy, graceless paw as he did so. He ran his gimlet eyes over it, scouring the surface of the feather so much that I was afraid he’d scour the thing right out of existence. “What do you want it for?” he grumbled.

I never noticed before, but his eyes were green and watery. I was reminded of grapes. I found it difficult to furnish an answer. “Because…What harm can it do?” I said feebly.

He snorted and handed it back to me, his dull, sluggish brain reaching the same conclusion. What harm could it do? It was a feather, a common feather from a common bird. A feather with bird shit on it.

I cradled it in my open palm, carrying it to my room and placing it on my desk. It is here now as I write, lying where I can see it, where I need it most. I have combed its strands together, so now it looks neat and plastic-like, too perfect. It gives me a certain thrill to look on it, because I’m nudged by its presence into remembering that there is still a world outside the walls of my confinement. It has a link with the sky, with the birds that soar unfettered through vast acres of pure, undiluted freedom. It sends a charge through the choked channels of my tired old system, awakens something within me that I haven’t felt for ages, something that I thought had been beaten into a messy, formless pulp.  I feel it is progressively melting my compliance, cutting through my passivity like a heated blade. It is the desire to be free again.

And this is why I find myself terrified, with my heart crashing away in fear, and it’s like a white-hot scorching fire being channelled through the narrow passages of my veins; my entire being is so consumed with burning dread. I get up, move away from my desk, from the feather; yet my eyes remained fixed to that gash of white against the dark grain of my desktop. I would like to fight it. I pace around my tiny room, muttering, fingering my jaw frenetically, turning over the thoughts in my head. I imagine a plough going through the soft soil of my brain, revealing rich fertility beneath a barren layer that has for so long remained crusted and paled.

It is so long ago that I last felt this way that the feeling is alien to me, this nipping desire. Strange and yet familiar, like an old flame that storms back into your life following a disastrous affair. She looks so damn good. You remember her beauty, the contours of her warm body, the ardour, the sense of complete deliverance, the intense promise that life seemed to hold. And you recall the hopelessness of it all. It was headed nowhere, travelling at a hundred miles an hour towards a brick wall without you once bothering to apply the brakes, even though you knew you should have done it far sooner, before it was far too late. Sweet bitterness.

I try to subdue the feelings, press my hands against my head to force back the thoughts to whatever dark place they resided. I know I have only survived this long because I accepted things – accepted my lot, my situation, all hope gradually being submerged so that I live like a discarded human battery, storing my energy without an avenue to discharge it. There comes a time when to fight and to hope becomes too painful to bear; because there is nothing worse than to be tempted to believe in that which never comes to fruition. Then hope becomes hell. It becomes a place of screams. Screams in a vacuum. It is like screaming with a plastic bag taped over your head. So leave hope where it is. Leave it outside where you found it. I know it is the best thing.

But I can’t destroy the feather. I want to. I hold it there, so frail inside the clamp of my open hand. I want to crush it like Wise did. Tear it up, bend it, twist it into some ghastly, a distorted parody of what it once was. Yet I can’t.
I can’t!
Something is holding me back. Something inside me wants hope back again. Some crazy thing is insisting it is safe to think this way. I lift the feather to the harsh lights and yell at it:

“Stop it! Stop it!”

But it doesn’t. It goes right on being…

Being a feather.

A feather with bird shit on it.

*  *  *  *

Feathers…

There were feathers scattered all over the place. One clung stubbornly to the wood of the hut, flapping in the breeze as if the instinct to fly was so absorbed into its fibres that it just couldn’t stop.

“It’s a sign of the times, it is,” he remarked forcibly, rheumy eyes that were both accusing and suspicious, searching my face with an intensity I found disturbing to say the least. “Anarchy, that’s all it is. Bloody anarchy. I could weep, I really could.”

He wasn’t kidding either; his eyes filled in response to his words. “Well, Mr Woolley…” I began.

“Double ‘L’ in that,” he said, pointing to my notepad.

“I know that, Mr Woolley.” I hated this kind of interview with this type of person.

“I hate it when people spell your name wrong,” he said. “You know, it’s a fact that people tend to do that more nowadays than I’ve ever known ‘em do it in the past. There’s bound to be statistics proving it somewhere. Downright discourteous it is. And I guess that’s a sign of the times too, what with bloody strikes, power cuts and the likes. It’s what happens when you put too much power into someone’s hands, like the bloody unions. Before you know it the country’s gonna be falling way behind America, then what? I’ll tell you what - them Yanks are gonna march right back into the country with their fancy cars and bloody hamburgers and before you know it it’ll be like the war all over again. Yanks everywhere. You go to the toilet and they’ll be coming out of your arse.”

I blinked stupidly while he sniffed, rolled his tongue around his mouth and spat on the concrete at his feet. I cleared my throat. “So you say you discovered the fire around ten o’clock last night?” I tried to reroute his thoughts back onto the main road and off the dirt track it had taken. It seemed his mind was an off-road vehicle.

“Aye, the whole bloody side of the pigeon loft was ablaze,” he pointed out animatedly, letting his hand brush the charred wood of the hut with a tenderness I found quite poignant. “The door too – one sheet of flame, it was. Still, I managed to shove it open, get inside.”

“I guess that was rather dangerous,” I said, jotting down his words, still hoping that I could read the tangled netting of pen scrawls (having failed miserably at mastering shorthand) when I returned to the office to type it up. I knew that was asking a bit much, even as I laboured away with the notepad and pen.

“Dangerous?” he said, giving a brittle laugh. “I dragged corpses out of the rubble during the London Blitz, son. That’s dangerous.”

My mind was struggling to link the burnt out pigeon loft with the Blitz, give the story some kind of edge – any edge. Flames, pigeons, London, bombs… But I was lost for a connection, partly because I’d had a shitty day, and partly because I didn’t like the old man and couldn’t be bothered. I was ready for home.

“It was horrific. Bodies everywhere.” He shook his head slowly, almost majestically, like a sad old lion, I thought, perhaps aware of a tenuous literary connection I might utilise later. His eyes were yawning pits of melancholy.

“I guess it must have been horrific,” I sympathised. “My dad was in the army during the war.”

“I’m not talking about the bloody Blitz, son!” he said, exasperated with me. “I’m on about the bloody loft. Pigeons everywhere, all over the floor, dead, burnt.”

Cooked, I thought. “Have you any idea who’d do this to your birds?”

He leant closer. His breath reeked and ruined the mystery of the moment. “Too bloody good they were, that’s why. Took all the trophies we did. It was sabotage. Now I’ve lost nearly all of ‘em – Sid, Rocket, Clementine. The world will never see the likes of birds like that again. I didn’t call him Rocket for nothing, you know.” He picked at the black wooden slats, yanking a piece off that came away with a dry crackle. He looked over the chunk before tossing it to the floor. “I reckon he hated the yanks, too.” He said.

“Who, Rocket?” I asked, perplexed.

He sighed heavily. “Churchill,” he said, eyeing me like I was some kind of imbecile. “I reckon Churchill hated the yanks as much as I did, but he’d hardly say that would he? He wanted the tanks and planes and things, didn’t he? So that our lads could have a proper crack at Jerry. He’d soon sort out these strikes, he would. No bloody power cuts then, oh no. Punks, that’s the problem. All this Punk-thing.” He waved his hands over his head, imitating, I assumed, a spiky Punk hair-do. “Nazis, the bloody lot of ‘em. I mean, you don’t wear pins in your nose, do you? It’s bloody unhygienic, that’s what it is. That’s why the damn country’s going to ruin. Punks. What’s the Queen gonna have to say about it, eh? It’s her bloody Silver Jubilee, for God’s sake. You don’t want all this anarchy on your bloody Silver Jubilee, do you?”

I turned off, wound up the interview quickly when I realised he’d paused for breath, thanked him politely, stowed my camera into its bag and then cursed my pitiable existence all the way to my bicycle. The headline was already running through my mind: WAR VETERAN PENSIONER IN PIGEON LOFT ARSON DRAMA. It invested the dreary article with an excitement it didn’t really possess, but such banners failed to enliven either the sad, tedious weekly contents of the struggling
South Yorkshire Chronicle
, or convince me that my so-called career as a journalist had finally taken off and was in full flight. Hell, it could hardly flap its wings, I thought miserably, imagining the albatross trying to get aloft in Disney’s
The Rescuers
.

I pedalled furiously, because I had another interview to do in the locality concerning preparations for a Silver Jubilee street party that was doomed to failure because of a shortage of appropriate bunting, and every breath I expelled was either a cry of anger or of desperation. It was my first lesson in real life; it doesn’t matter how fired up you are, there’s always a bucket of water to douse your flame. In fact, the
Chronicle
had played a cold hose over me since the day I started at the newspaper. I guess my expectations of it were a little too high, because in truth youth rarely has any other. But I ought to be grateful, I told myself with little conviction as the narrow saddle chaffed my already sore bottom, because I’d at least progressed up from buying sausage rolls for the office.

I finished school in the summer of 1975 during a terrific heat wave that I held to be a portent of my scorching launch into a world where I would make my mark amongst men and eventually die remembered by millions. So I didn’t have as many GCEs as I’d have liked – five to be precise, and those of a lacklustre quality – but I was me, and everyone liked me, and I was sure I could get everyone else to like me enough to give me a bloody good job with bloody good wages that would give me a bloody good living. All I had to do was turn up for an interview, pour out my numerous talents and personality, then bingo!

Ruby and Max in the meantime had embarked on A-levels at sixth form, which – I was assured by my concerned parents and those relatives closest to me who were pleased to find a wide-necked empty vessel into which they could drip their knowledge of the workings of the world – was a complete and utter waste of time. Education did you no good at all except to distance you from your family and drive you to drugs, drink, various inscrutable diseases that rotted away your private parts and homosexuality. There was, as far as my muddled brain could deduce, no other option. I would throw myself straight into the world without the dubious benefit of further schooling, with a vague notion that I should continually monitor Ruby for signs of drunkenness, addled brain or a sudden attraction to the same sex.

So while Max and Ruby embarked upon what I thought to be pointless exercises on their individual roads to university educations, I signed on at the dole office and scoured the situations vacant. Local papers, I add, did not take much scouring; I soon began to wonder whether they simply recycled the same page of sewing machinists and cleaners week after week, for the identical posts came up with tiresome regularity. And it was then I learned another valuable lesson, though it was slow in the learning; advice often given by those closest to you is not necessarily good advice, and that those people you trusted implicitly to keep you afloat during childhood are often unsuitable - indeed downright dangerous - lifejackets once you’re immersed in the fierce storms of adulthood. In short, I could not get a job, no doubt employers reading all manner of inadequacies into the many blank spaces I left on the application forms that referred to educational qualifications. I soon began to envy Ruby and her business studies. She’d daily relay all the knowledge she’d avidly consumed, and more often than not I could only stare blankly at her as she tried to go over in passionate detail about a Kondratiev Wave, some Malthusian theory or other, or the importance of economies of scale. I should have known that this educational wedge between us was destined to grow larger.

It was following the ignominy of having to ‘sign on’ at the dole office, to queue with some of the other unfortunates who were feeling the pinch of a wider economic depression I was totally unaware of, that I remembered the business card Jimmy King gave me, the reporter who’d splashed my story all over the front page of the
South Yorkshire
Chronicle
, giving me two weeks of fame the entire length of High Street. I found the card out, crumpled but safe in a drawer, under my underpants and socks where I kept all things I considered too personal for my parents to see. The idea of becoming a journalist had been fleeting and forgotten, but seeing his name brought the flush of excitement and anticipation right back. I
could
be a journalist, I said to myself, taking a few coppers and setting out immediately to the phone box, hardly dwelling upon the fact that I had written nothing longer than a short paragraph or two since leaving school, and those only in answer to job adverts, encompassing all the literary flair of a shopping list.

Unfortunately, I was told over the phone that Jimmy King had legged it to pastures new, but – and this following much hesitation and interspersed with the sounds of swallowed liquid, which just had to be strong black reporters’ coffee – I was told to come over and “have a chat” in a day or so. Chat duly arranged and conducted, something must have clicked because I was told to start the following Monday, part-time initially, which I did, and I got to grips not with typewriter, notepad and telephone, but with the rubbish bins and light bulbs. Oh, and those sausage rolls I mentioned earlier; and cups of sweet tea, which appeared to be a universal staple diet and which I was expected to deliver at the allotted time each day.

It was a baptism of tea and pig meat that initially seemed to have no end. My fantasy soon dissolved when it became plainly apparent that the
Chronicle
owed more to the juice of sausage rolls and bacon butties, or PG Tips and sugar, than it did to the news it ostensibly reported. But at least I could console myself by thinking I was the provider of this valuable stimulating lubricant; that I had a purpose every bit as significant as the stories lukewarm off the
Chronicle
press. And I received a whole six pounds a week for the privilege.

By and by I was let loose on an old Adler typewriter and managed to eventually clunk off a few pages that impressed the editor enough for him to let me roam unfettered on the streets hunting down scoops. Desperate for photographers, as the Chronicle always seemed to be, I had a battered Pentax SLR thrust into my hands, given a swift and hazy whistle-stop tour of f-stops and depths of field then told to “go snap ‘em with a smile” – and I was so naïve it was a long time before I cottoned on that he meant it was the subject that had to grin, not me. “Shit, there’s enough depression round these parts without shoving photos of miserable gits in punters’ faces,” Mr Ranklin, the paper’s senior editor, thundered. “An’ if we can’t afford tits an’ bums like the nationals we gotta give ‘em smiles. Big ones.” So right now I was worried that my picture of a grim-faced Mr Woolley might not go down too well, though I hardly thought it reasonable to ask the poor man to grin over the charred remains of his beloved pigeons Sid, Rocket and Clementine.

I pedalled my bicycle tiredly up to the old red brick front of the
Chronicle
offices. A long time ago the gaunt, emotionless building had been some kind of Victorian warehouse, perched dangerously close to the side of the canal – the very same canal that, ten miles away, had almost claimed my young life – and onto which it had apparently discharged cargos of offal, skins and bones to make Victorian pies, shoes and glue. I guess times had changed, but as far as I could see the offal was still being shipped out, but in a different form.

There wasn’t a day went by without me thinking that the canal was a kind of watery thread that seemed to run through my existence, dogged my every footstep, and now patiently watched me as I put a toe into adulthood. I had to trace its path to reach my place of work, its black, algae-carpeted waters peering up at me, reminding me. But today I wasn’t in a pensive mood. I was hot, aching and smelly. I was growing tired of being sent out on all the local runs in all weathers on my aged and not too willing bicycle. And to make matters worse I recognised the two figures stood by the entrance to the
Chronicle
building.

I dismounted, self-consciously reaching down and plucking off my bicycle clips, stowing them out of sight in my trouser pockets. “Hi, Ruby,” I said.

She stepped away from the motorcycle – a shiny new Honda, the pristine blue of its metallic paint and the glinting of its macho chrome standing in sharp contrast to the dirt-grimed walls of the old building. The rider, clad in black leather, lifted his helmet and revealed his face, running a hand through dark tousled hair to tease it back into shape. It was Max. Ruby sauntered over to me, planting a warm kiss on my lips.