Decay Inevitable (15 page)

“I’m not too happy about this,” Elisabeth said, reaching for his hand.

There was a party in full flight. The fires contained it and illuminated it and encouraged it. Beyond the ring of flames, four or five caravans stood in the gloom like ruminating beasts. Will counted about half a dozen men sitting on blankets on the ground, passing a huge glass jug around that contained what looked like scrumpy from where they stood. The music worked on the three women in the ring like the moon on the tides, pulling and pushing them into fresh configurations. Barefoot, they wore wraps of fabric across their hips, slit to reveal legs tanned by the fire. They wore nothing on top. Four children played with toy cars in the dust at the far edge of the circle. From Will’s viewpoint, they looked misshapen, though that must have been down to the unreliable light. Sadie was not among them.

They moved forwards into the clearing. “Hello?” Will called out, trying to project his voice above the music, but not so powerfully that he startled his intended audience. One of the children looked up, then turned to the men and, waving to get their attention, pointed to Will before going back to his miniature traffic jam.

The music was turned off.

A man in a fleece zipped up to his throat sauntered over to Will and Elisabeth. The women reduced the energy of their dancing by degrees until they were gently swaying from side to side, all eyes turned on the visitors. Their skin seemed incandescent. Perspiration had failed to bead; it coated the flesh of their arms, their breasts, which were silvered by the moon or gilded by the flames, depending on the tilt of their bodies.

“Why are you here?” the man asked. His voice was touched by an accent Will couldn’t place. Something European.

“We’ve lost a little girl,” Will said.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” the man replied. “There are places you can go to for counselling, as I understand it.”

Low laughter from his male companions. One of the children stood up and threw a stone at Will and Elisabeth. It skipped along the floor and pinged off Will’s boot.

Elisabeth said, “What he meant was–”

The man blinked slowly. “She isn’t here.”

“Do you mind if we look around?” Will asked. “She could be hiding. We only lost her a little while ago.”

Now the other males sitting on the blankets rose and moved slowly to be with their friend. One of them hitched up a shirt that was worn loose over his jeans, exposing the curved, polished handle of a knife.

Will said, “We don’t want any trouble.”

“Well then,” said the man in the fleece, “you came to the wrong place.”

The man with the knife stopped in front of Elisabeth. “This your wife?” he asked, taking an age to look her up and down. He leaned over to give her a side-on appraisal too.

“Yes, she’s my wife. We’re lost. My daughter... our daughter was playing. She ran off. We’ve called the police.”

A bowing of the lips, a tiny shake of the head. The slow blink. “I don’t think you called the police. I don’t think you have a phone. I don’t
think
you
know
where
you
are.”

“We’re in the Midlands,” Elisabeth said. She was darting looks around her. Will could feel her bristling beside him. She would take off in a minute, he could tell. He would be right behind her.

“Ah,” intoned the man in the fleece, “the Midlands. ‘Hello, police? Yes, we’ve lost our little daughter. Come and help us find her please. She’s in the Midlands. Somewhere.’”

More laughter from the gang. It was uneasy laughter now though, forced as they considered, like Will and Elisabeth, what would come next. What would be their signal? Will hoped that he and Elisabeth might be away before they found out.

The man with the knife reached out and pushed his fingers through Elisabeth’s hair.

“Don’t touch her,” Will said, in what he hoped was a hard voice. He was no midget and the lack of a shave, he knew, lent his face an aggression that did not exist.

“You’d rather I touched you?” said the man with the knife, failing to take his eyes off Elisabeth. His hand lowered, fastened on her left breast. Elisabeth winced.

“Just leave us alone,” Will insisted. “She’s been in a car accident. She isn’t well.”

“She feels fine to me,” came the lazy, beer-loose voice. His hand palpated and pinched the breast. The cold, rather than his ministrations, was thickening her nipple. But Knifeman didn’t have the wit to understand. Will wanted to smack the curl from his lips, tear those sleazy, half-shut lids wide open. His blood rushed with the thought of violence.

“Do you dance?” asked Knifeman, stepping closer to Elisabeth. He licked his broad lips and they gleamed as though forged from metal. He pressed a denim-clad thigh into the dip where her own met. “You have a dancer’s body. I bet you move like nobody’s business.”

The head on top of the fleece started jerking with laughter. “Want to trade a dance with your wife for your girl?”

Will clenched his hand into a fist. “So she
is
here?”

“She is for the sake of my offer. Whether she is once your bitch shakes her arse for us might be a different matter.”

Something went wrong in Will’s mind. It was like the slow bend of a green stick deep within: nothing snapped, but he went dizzy for a second, the earth slanting away from him at an alarming angle. He heard himself say
You fucking
and then there was just a thrum of blood turning his ears hot. When conventional images were tucked into his eyes once more, he saw that his hand was badly gashed and Knifeman was out cold, his blade held loosely between his thumb and forefinger. Elisabeth scrabbled for the knife as the other men closed in. They faced each other uneasily. The women pulled shawls around their nakedness, the children ran into the shadows.

Very clearly, a cry, Sadie’s cry, went up into the freezing sky: “
Don’t!
”

“So,” Will said, trying to keep the edginess from his voice. “Where is she?”

The fires were burning down. Before long they would be dead, plunging the wasteland into complete darkness. Any advantage that the knife was giving them would be lost. Sadie shrieked again.

“What’s happening to her?” Elisabeth demanded, passing the knife to Will.

“We only wanted you to dance for us,” Fleece said. “Now look at what you’ve done. I think, after we’ve fucked your daughter, we’ll kill you and bury you in the cow shit in that field.”

Will, as if in slow motion, stepped forwards and slid the point of the knife almost nonchalantly into Fleece’s shoulder. He yelled to Elisabeth to run, and they did, Will dropping the weapon in his shock and panic. He followed her towards the caravans while shouts and curses raged behind them. Catching up, he grabbed Elisabeth’s hand.

“We’ll lose them in there somewhere. Try to be quiet and keep your head down. Just for a little while. Till I find Sadie.”

Towards the rear of the cluster of caravans, they found another scattering of spent fuel drums. They huddled among them, shivering. Sometimes the voices came close and then drifted away. Will couldn’t work out whether it was proximity or a trick of the wind. He held Elisabeth close to him, and after what felt like hours, the voices faded until they were rewarded with complete silence.

Will lifted his head above the rim of an oil drum. The caravans were little more than grainy pale blocks against the night. One or two windows pulsed with waxy, orange light. The camp was asleep.

“I should go,” Will whispered. “I should find Sadie. That fucking girl.”

Elisabeth’s eyes broadened under the skimpy moonlight. “I have to come with you,” she urged.

“No. Please stay here. If something goes wrong, you have to get away. Contact the police. Sort it all out.”

“Why don’t we do that now?” Elisabeth said, but the tone of her voice had already answered her own question.

Will said nothing, but gradually worked at Elisabeth’s hands until he was free. “Give me twenty minutes,” he said. “If I’m not back by then, get out quick. Promise me?”

Elisabeth drew him to her and kissed him clumsily, almost desperately. “Hurry. Please,” she whispered, looking away from his face.

“Wait, Eli,” Will said. “Twenty minutes.”

And then he was away. She tried to keep track of him as, crouching, he crept towards the first of the caravans, but it was too dark. Did he stumble? Was that what caused the sudden confusion of noise? And now a shape approaching her. Pale. Was it him? Was it Will, returning already?

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY:
T
HE
W
ALL

S
EAN MET THE
others for breakfast at 8.30. The sky was teeming. Figures without umbrellas were bent double, their coats and jackets drawn up around their heads. Water sluiced along the street, reflecting the miserable black seam of cloud.

“It’s just sitting there,” observed Robbie, a huge mug of tea obscuring most of his face. “A big, black bladder of piss. Pissing on us.”

Lutz flicked a baked bean at him from his plate. “That... is
poetry
.”

Trio’s was like any other breakfast hang-out. Populated mainly by the men working on the demolition site, it was also first-stop for a number of ashen-faced office workers poring over briefcases filled with pages and mobile phones that never seemed to cease ringing. The windows were simultaneously drenched with condensation and fogged with heat. The place was run by three Italian guys. During the rush, when plates of chips, sausage, egg, toast, and bacon were being passed around and devoured, their voices ricocheted off the walls as they called out fresh orders or lambasted the help: two women dwarfed by the huge steel tea urns, apparently doomed to a lifetime of scraping a layer of butter onto bread or hunting down the carousel of red and brown sauce.

Sean was sitting with his back against the wall, watching the smears of colour hurry past the window. He felt nauseated by what had happened the day before, but the boys around him were helping to make him feel normal again, part of a crowd, rather than someone picked out for the limelight.

There was one customer he had noticed who visited every day and seemed to end up bickering with the staff about his order. Here he came now. He wore a red, corduroy jacket and blue jeans. Caterpillar boots. Simple black T-shirt. He shed his earphones and dug in his pocket for some change with one hand while the other marked his place in a paperback.

“No,” the chap was saying now. “I said mustard. Who has tomato sauce on a hot beef sandwich?
Mustard
. Anyway, it doesn’t even
sound
like tomato sauce.
Or
ketchup.”

The old Italian guy said sorry maybe a dozen times, his voice thick with accent. Sean liked Luigi. He had a kind face, even though it was heavily lined. He had friendly, sorry eyes magnified by unflattering glasses; his hair was oiled and swept back from his forehead. His brothers were younger, beefier. Sansone had a series of diagonals shaved into his right eyebrow and wore a Fiorentina football shirt; Pepe sweated profusely and rarely lost his expression of bewilderment.

“Reminds me of Salty, that,” Robbie said, gesturing towards the counter. “Every day is the fucking same for Salty in this caff. He asks for marmalade on his toast. Every morning. They stick Marmite on it. He says something about it and some of them, especially the hard-looking one, complain, make a big song and dance. I half-think he does it on purpose. Fucking Italian stereotype game. Scowling like he’s some mob fuck with an itch up his shitter. He goes: ‘Fack, meester, iss like you ask Marmite I give you Marmite but iss no facking good. Iss marmalard you want. Haysoo facking Chrize, man. You thin’ I here for your good health an sanidy?’

“So this morning, right, he gets it spot on, first time. Without Salty having to ask for it. Marmalade. No problem. Salty, mad bastard, tells him he wants Marmite. The fucker barred him. Barred him from a
caff
, for fuck’s sake.”

“This weekend,” Nicky Preece was saying. “What do you say?”

A friend of the family was getting married. Nicky, as best man, was organising the stag do, which would be an all-day affair. The celebrations were due to begin on the Saturday morning: a game of football at Victoria Park. Nicky was trying to recruit some ringers.

“It’s nothing serious, just a kick-around, really.”

“Will there be nets?” Jez asked.

“Does it matter?”

Jez shrugged. “I find you can’t have a really decent game of footie unless you get some nets. It’s the sound of the ball hitting the back of it. That kind of wet, whipping noise.”

Robbie laughed. “A noise you and your mother know all too well, eh, Jezzer?”

“’K off.”

“Look, we need five more people. That’s all. It’d be great if you lot turned up. We’d have a laugh.”

“This Saturday, you say?” Lutz asked. “Only I can’t make it.”

“Fuck,” Nicky spat.

“Me either,” said Jez.

“But you were just asking about nets.” Nicky looked around him, as though for confirmation that this was so.

“Yeah, but I was just asking for the others. You can’t have a decent game without nets.”

Sean said, “I’ll go. If you want me.”

“That’s great,” Nicky said. “Anyone else? Robbie?”

Robbie nodded, his mouth full of bread.

Nicky gave him an OK sign. “Come on, Tim. You look like a footballer.”

Tim was bent over his poached egg on toast, still bovinely chewing his first mouthful. In this time, Lutz had gobbled his breakfast and was half-way through his second mug of tea. Tim sat up at the mention of his name and swivelled his large, moth eyes until he was staring at Nicky.

“Brittle bones,” he said. “Asthma. Glue ear. Angina...”

“Okay, okay,” Nicky said, wearily. “I asked you if you wanted a game of footy. I didn’t ask you for a list of stuff queuing up to kill you.”

Tim said, “Piles.”

T
HEY MADE GOOD
progress that morning. Nicky and Sean worked as a team on a fresh wall while the others pulled up floorboards in another room. In his T-shirt, sweat hooping the neck and armpits, Sean had mastered the art of talking and working with the hammer.