Dust and Desire (15 page)

I took a match and struck it. When the flame had settled, I set fire to the cardboard box and tossed it through the window. The box landed on the wank mag, obscuring the blonde’s snatch. I felt enormous relief and a sudden sense of utter correctness. Of poetry.

The box flared up and the mag caught fire. Tavlin didn’t move a muscle.

I cycled away. I was maybe a hundred metres away from the tramp’s hut when I heard the first shouts.

‘Fogn helpuzz,’ I whispered. ‘Fogn bazd.’

I was nearly home when I heard the sirens. He was on the news that night, Tavlin.

I went to sleep and I dreamed about him coming out of the hut. When he opened his mouth to speak, fire flew from between his teeth. His clothes were burnt off him and he had the girl’s body. I went to him and twisted his head off, as easily as loosening the screw-cap on a bottle of pop. Inside his head were the words MADE IN CHINA. When I looked at his face, he was the girl from the wank mag. She winked at us and peeled herself open. I stepped inside her and fell asleep for a thousand years.

When I woke up in real time, in real life, I realised what the smell of blonde was. But it was gone just as quickly. I didn’t see the girl again for a long time, but it didn’t matter. I was getting into other things then. I was growing up.

* * *

He stopped now in front of an Indian restaurant and looked at his reflection in the window. He noticed that he was idly stroking the small diary in his chest pocket. He got it out and flicked through the pages almost tenderly, his fingers soft and delicate, not wanting to damage the paper, tracing the patterns worn into its leather covers. The names written in here were added many years before, and his handwriting reflected that: it was the handwriting of a child, of someone who was just learning to join his letters together. Three of the names – there were thirty in total, the size of her class – had been neatly ruled out, but the pencil that had scored through them was recent, its lead shiny across the old, dull names. Putting a new layer on top of those names was like closing an electrical circuit; he felt a jolt leap through his head as if he was at home again, a child in those lazy, hot days in a Liverpool classroom as the summer holidays chased him down.

Some of the names he could put faces to, some he had trouble remembering at all. But it didn’t matter: those names would continue for as long as he kept his book. It was the names, not their owners, that justified him. He had already put a line through the three names that had conspired to take his mother away from him, and the most important name of all didn’t need to be written down. It was so well known to him, it might as well have been carved into the meat of his brain with a knife. That name sat on his tongue every minute of every day. The shape of its vowels and consonants were as well known to him as those of his own.

He bought a ham-salad roll from a sandwich shop – no mayonnaise, no salt, a multigrain roll, extra tomato for the antioxidants, the lycopene – and ate it on the way back to his secret hideaway. Once he arrived, he spent ten minutes picking the blood from under his fingernails. There was a lot of it, dried and black now, and removing it was a sad job. Getting rid of any trace of what he did upset him, because then it felt as if it never happened, as if he was never involved. Rubbing away the signs of his work was like rubbing away the work itself. Sometimes it was an effort to convince himself that he had ever killed.

* * *

It was Jamzy got us into body-building. He told us that birds wouldn’t look at you unless you had some meat on your biceps, a six-pack under your shirt. I told him I didn’t like beer and he looked at us as if I was joking. But I don’t like it. I don’t like any alcohol. I wasn’t interested in birds either, apart from the girl I’d seen at the footy that time, but I didn’t dare tell him that in case he thought I was queer. I wanted to improve meself, make the best of us that there was. I wanted to find the full capacity of the power in me arms and legs. I wanted to reach that brink, and stay there – go beyond it if I could. I wanted to be a mirror to all that compacted violence I saw leaning over me mam. I wanted to reflect that go away in their eyes. I wanted to return a little bit of the fear they’d put up me.

We went to a gym called O’Riordan’s one night, when it was teeming, cold winds tearing up and down the streets like invisible drag racers made of winter. I was wearing a torn grey T-shirt and jogging pants, a pair of weight-lifting gloves. The T-shirt flapped around us like a sail that was going to take us off into the sky if I wasn’t careful. I tucked it into me waistband and bent me head against the wind and rain.

O’Riordan’s was just a couple of hundred square metres of a warehouse up Prentiss Lane. The rest of it was closed, windows boarded up, falling to shit. Used to be a wire factory; there was a lot of that round here, a big industry in these parts. The entrance was up a fire escape. The girl on the reception desk didn’t say one word to us, just pushed a clipboard at us for us to sign, and pointed at the entry fee, which was laser-printed on a sign behind her chair: £1.50 per hour. We gave her three quid each and moved into the gym proper. A short, bullish guy, whose neck was disappearing into the ledge of muscle rising from his shoulders, gave us our induction lesson. He was all right, as it turned out. Name of Bobby Jepson. What was left of his hair was dirty blond, cropped short. He made up for that with a thick moustache. His skin was dark from the solarium, his eyes blue as the stone on me mum’s engagement ring. He showed us the free weights and the bench presses, the exercise balls, skipping ropes and treadmills. We warmed up with a fifteen-minute ride on the exercise bikes, and then worked our way around the machines.

‘What is it you want from this place?’ Bobby asked us.

‘I just want to get fit,’ Jamzy said.

I said, ‘I want to build up me body and get strong. But I don’t want to lose any mobility, like you have.’

Bobby looked at us hard, and I smiled as if to show I was joking.

‘Okay,’ he said, slowly, not taking his eyes off us. ‘Okay.’

He taught us how, if you want to build up mass, you do lots of reps at a low weight. If you wanted to improve your strength, though, you had to up the weight.

‘There’s no point doing lots of reps on a high weight,’ he said. ‘What you’re looking to do is put lots of little tears in your muscles, and you can get that from one set of 15 reps. When the tears heal, it forms a new layer of muscle. That’s what body-building is all about: doing yourself damage.’

So that’s what I did. Jamzy stuck to the treadmills to build up his stamina and try to burn off the beer belly he was getting. The gym started filling up after half an hour, as workers came off the 6–10 shift. The air was filled with the clank of iron and the grunts of men, and a few women, pushing themselves through the resistance of the machines.

About fifteen minutes before the gym was due to shut at 11 p.m., a man in a smoky-grey suit came through the doors. One or two of the men on the machines nodded to him as he strode right through the gym towards the door at the back with a sign that said
Staff Only.
He flashed his teeth at them. Bobby cut him off as he was about to open the door, and they shook hands, swapped verbals for a few minutes. The man in the suit then clapped Bobby on the back and went through into an office.

We left soon after, and I could hardly walk. Me legs felt as weak as a foal’s and me chest burned where I had been using the bench press. We went to the pub across the road for a couple of glasses of water, and necked them double-quick while the staff were emptying ashtrays and putting stools up on tables. I felt amazing. I felt cleaned out, reassembled.

‘That was fucking brilliant,’ I said. I couldn’t stop feeling me arms. They felt thick and powerful, pumped up as though someone had been inflating them on the sly.

‘Yeah, let’s go again tomorrow.’

‘Day after,’ I said. ‘You have to go every other day, because you need to let the muscle recover.’

Jamzy didn’t come with us, next time I went. He was seeing some girl he’d chatted up at the bus stop. Fair enough, so I went on me own. I was aching something chronic by then, but I went. And I kept going. Every other day. Couple of miles on the bike. Stretching. And then I zoned in on various areas of me body. One day I’d work just on me arms. Next time legs. Next time back and chest. Next time abs. Moving the weights in different directions to draw the potential from me body. I put on weight. I started eating lots of carbohydrates the night before a training session. I ate steak and eggs for protein. I ate so many greens, I thought I’d start shitting pure spinach.

‘You’re looking all right, Wire,’ Bobby said to us one night, maybe six weeks after I’d started. Blokes down the gym started calling us Wire because I was thin and full of sinew. And tough. I was getting on all right with everyone because I kept me mouth shut unless I was talked to. There was Bobby, who I could call a mate now. And Fivesy, who lived round the corner and bred pedigree Burmillas. And Colin ‘Garden’ Rakes, who ran a taxi firm and would give us a lift home in his Lexus. I still saw the man in the suit, either the smoky-grey one or a black number. Always with a white shirt, and a tie in a solid colour, no patterns ever. Turned out he was O’Riordan. He was built like a brick shithouse, very thick through the chest, a face like a block of wood, heavily tanned, and lots of lines but it looked good like on an actor, a little bit like Willem Dafoe maybe.

The torn grey T-shirt was filling out. It no longer flapped on us when I walked to the gym in the evening. I started spending days in the woods, driving my fists, and the edge of my hands into the gritty loam, toughening them up. From a standing start, I’d take off through the wet, getting up to sprint speed as soon as I could. Then I’d stop. Short sprints, quick turns, again, again, till I was moving so quickly it was as if it was happening before I even decided to do it. I was bulking out, but the running and the bikes and the sprint work kept me lean.

I was working the rope one night when Bobby came over and said that O’Riordan wanted a chat with us.

I went up to his office and walked in without his say-so, but he didn’t mind. Said he expected it. He told us he was shutting the gym for the weekend for refurbishment, but he wanted me to come in and use the machines for free, as long as I’d make a cup of tea for the workmen, let them in and out, that kind of thing.

‘Why me?’ I said.

He was looking at his nails, which were buffed to a high shine, nicely shaped like a lass’s. ‘Because I don’t trust any of the other cunts in here,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you do it yourself, then?’

He stopped preening and looked at us. He had hard, grey eyes. He also gave us a look at his gnashers. They seemed bigger than they ought to be. ‘Because I run this outfit. And because I’m asking you to do it.’

‘What if I say no?’

‘Find another gym.’

‘There in’t another gym.’

‘Then say yes.’

I said yes.

I came in the next morning in my kit, letting meself in with the key O’Riordan gave us. I brewed up in the staff room and listened to the radio for a bit, then did some stretching. I was twenty minutes into a bike ride when the door opened, and Boardo come in. Paul Boardman worked on the wagons, driving freight up and down the motorways. When he wasn’t on a job, he was in here, pissing everyone off with his pushing in on equipment when everyone else was waiting patiently, or banging the gear around, no respect for the weights. But he got away with it because he was O’Riordan’s minder. He talked to you while you were concentrating on your reps, telling you in detail about the birds he licked out in his cabin the night before, picked up from some service station or other: how he had to clamp his hand over their lipstick because his prick was so big he made them scream, and he didn’t want people thinking he was killing tarts inside his rig.

He didn’t look at us once as he walked over to the free weights and started curling the kilos. Which told us plenty: he knew I was going to be here. O’Riordan hadn’t let on about Boardo being around. So I kept vertical, working on the chin-up bar and the bike and the rope, waiting for him to make his move. There were no refurbishments taking place today. No cups of tea to make. No banter with the carpenters.

He took his time about it, sidling along the workout mats, checking himself out in the full-length mirrors, till he was close enough for us to smell the sweat off his armpits.

‘All right, Wire?’ he said, voice low, his back to us. I tensed up. It was coming.

When he twisted around, quicker than a man of his bulk deserved to be, I was ready. He had a Stanley knife, the handle wrapped in insulation tape. I watched it move past the spot where me cheek had been a second earlier. I stepped back and passed the handle of the skipping rope into me right fist, freeing me left, me best hand. He launched himself at us and I stepped aside, sweeping the loop of the rope under his foot and tugging hard. He went down awkwardly, his ankle folding under him, and he shouted. He rolled on to his back, the Stanley knife pointing at us all the time, and rubbed at his ankle. His face was very red. I put the rope down and picked up a dumb-bell, about twenty-five kilos piled on to it. The weights chinked and clinked on the bar as I moved towards him.

He levered himself upright and slashed out at us as I broke into his space. I met the blade with the weights, knocking his arm to one side. Unbalanced, he put out his other hand to stop himself from going down again, and I sent me left foot steaming into the centre of his chest. His face went pale. He knew it was the beginning of something very bad. Twenty minutes later, when O’Riordan and three of his cronies were pulling us off him, I couldn’t see any expression on his face any more because most of it was dangling between me teeth. One of his ribs was poking out of a hole in his vest and he seemed to be breathing through it. The top of his head had a dent in it you could have filled with a large apple. I thought it was an improvement.