Dust and Desire (16 page)

‘He looks much better, doesn’t he?’ I said, and the cronies backed off. One of them was swallowing against a tide of vomit that kept surging into his mouth. He gave up fighting it and sprayed over one of the treadmills.

‘The cleaning bill for that comes out of your wages, Eddie,’ O’Riordan said. When I was calming down, the cords on me neck going back to sleep, O’Riordan told the others to fuck off. He got bored waiting for Boardo to snuff it, so he cut his windpipe open with the Stanley. He kept saying, ‘Your hands… your fucking hands.’

He told me what to do with the body and I followed his instructions to the letter. When I came back, he had us in his office again and he told us he had a job for us, if I wanted it. Shadowing him in the clubs. Chauffeuring for him. Being the bite to his bark.

I said, ‘Yes, I’ll have your job, but if you set us up like that again, I’ll give you cause for concern.’ I said it just like that, as calm as you like, something I heard on the telly. He wasn’t expecting it, and it took the tan out of his face for a few seconds. And then he said: ‘Deal.’

* * *

A neutral voice answered when he rang the number in the morning. It was raining heavily and it was difficult to hear what the voice was saying. Buses and taxis were turned into a blurred mess of reds and blacks, through the foggy windows of the phone booth. –‘I did what you asked,’ he said. ‘Can’t we meet?’ –‘Very soon,’ the voice said. ‘I’m happy with the way you went about your business. There’ll be another job for you.’ – ‘
The
job?’ –‘Maybe, but darling, I am so worried about you.’ –‘When?’ he asked, hating the wheedling tone of his voice, hating that he cut across her while she was speaking from her heart. –‘You will be contacted. You will have the details. Cold now, distant.’ –‘When? When?’ The line died in his hand. She must have many contacts, the Four-Year-Old thought, and some of them must be watching him, to see how he conducted himself. He must keep himself calm and focused at all times. He mustn’t give her cause to doubt his ability.

He dashed across the street, fast and light, powerful and invisible, hunching away from the deluge, feeling so nimble that he might have dodged each and every drop of rain. He bought a newspaper and took it inside. It was less busy, it seemed, today. The coffee bar where he had found Linda – where Linda had found him, where he had drawn her to him – was very slow; three or four customers sitting at tables, sipping from their cups. Her smoothie stall was now closed, while the flowers, the croissants, the handkerchiefs on the other stalls were for the benefit of nobody but the staff today, it seemed. The platforms were populated by people who didn’t appear to be getting on or off the trains. It could have been a tableau of pointlessness and apathy, arranged specially for his eyes.

Wire watched some of them as they strolled around the concourse. He bought a cup of coffee and sat at the counter, blowing on it till it was cool enough to drink. His eyes settled on the scars on his arms. He flexed his muscles slightly and the scars writhed like livid snakes.

* * *

I worked on me third birthday. My last birthday before I decided it was time to make me move down to the Smoke. O’Riordan needed some help in dealing with an ex-colleague called Wilkes who was muscling in on the club scene, offering his own bouncers, what he called ‘professional, no-nonsense doormen’, and undercutting O’ Riordan something mental. That way we’d already lost our business with Echoes, and Flight, and Mirrors. We’d had word Wilkes was going to be at Blue Storm on this particular night, and we got in O’Riordan’s Merc, just me and Fivesy with O’Riordan himself driving like a mad bastard, running red lights, clipping kerbs. He was frothing at the corners of his mouth, swearing constantly; you could just about hear it under his breath: cunt… cunt… cunt… cunt… Me blood was up, too. I was thinking, I become a man tonight. I prove to meself, and I prove to the girl, that I can cut it. I would reach a new gear tonight.

O’Riordan wanted us tooled up for the evening, but I said no, I didn’t want anything that was going to slow us down. Fivesy had a compact hunting knife he’d bought in Kentucky on holiday the previous year which he’d smuggled in to the country in a giant jar of Smucker’s peanut butter and jelly. O’Riordan had his piece on him, a Derringer with a pearl handle – a lass’s gun, but nobody was going to tell him that. I didn’t want nothing, because I wanted me hands free. Me hands could do more damage than Fivesy’s knife or O’ Riordan’s toy shooter. What was the point of filling your hand with something that your hand could do itself anyway?

We get to Blue Storm at just gone midnight, and the place is humming. Cudge and Dobbo on the door, as usual, and we give them the nod from the Merc as we cruise into the car park and find a dark corner. Come 2 a.m., kicking-out time, we see Wilkes turn up in his gunmetal Lotus, followed by a black BMW. He gets out of the Lotus with a tall red-haired slut in a glittering, tight green catsuit. Four of his no-nonsense doormen get out of the car too, and I think:
in the bag.
They’re soft fuckers: all buffed fingernails and cleanse, tone and moisturise. I bet they wore gloves in the gym. I bet they took bottles of Powerade in with them. Spent more time waxing their French-crop hairstyles than they did pressing metal.

We saunter over, while Wilkes is amiably chatting to Dobbo, maybe trying to get him to turn coat. Smiles all round. Bigger smiles when Wilkes sees O’Riordan. But not when he sees us. That smile dims a bit, the way the reflection of bright sunshine on a wall will fade suddenly when thin cloud passes in front of it. It was the look of someone who recognises madness when he sees it. He’d heard talk of what I could do. He had an inkling that the rumours of what happened between us and Boardo were anything but. He had a feeling that, were he to take a spade to some of the soil around Alderley Edge, he might find Boardo or at least pieces of him.

Wire,
he says quietly. There’s none of that shouldn’t you be in bed shit. Shouldn’t you be doing your homework. Nineteen or ninety, it makes no odds in this business. Violence couldn’t give a toss how tight your skin is. Wilkes’ boys are looking us up and down like a bunch of farmers at a meat auction. I don’t blink. I don’t smile. I don’t say a word. I don’t meet anybody’s gaze. I slowly flex me fingers, that’s all. I’ve got long fingernails, like a classical guitarist. I soak them in vinegar every night. I can puncture the top of a tin can with them. Click-click-click they go now, as I stretch and massage each one against its neighbour.
Click-click-click.

O’Riordan says:
Let’s go inside, shall we? Let’s all have a drink.

We file in. I take up the rear. I don’t want them to see us. I just want their sense of something animal padding after them. I want hackles rising.

The club is still emptying. Staff dip into shadowy booths, first asking, and then telling the pissheads to drink up, let’s have your glasses. The music’s stopped playing, but the system hasn’t been switched off yet; the hum and crackle might easily be the tension leaping off our little posse as we head to the bar. Everyone orders bottles of San Miguel. O’Riordan pours tequila for him and Wilkes. I shake me head. I don’t want nowt. I’m assessing the lie of the land: how the stairs down to the dance floor are edged with protective metal strips. I’m looking at the brass rail running the length of the bar. Me eyes are assessing this grainy club light, getting chummy with its shadows. I see the booth with the bottles that have been missed by the barmaid collecting empties. I see the cigarette in the ashtray that hasn’t been put out properly. I see a thousand things that I can maim you with, a dozen things that will kill you. I slow me breathing. I feel me heartbeat levelling out, so it would keep time with the second hand of a watch. I wait for it. I wait.

The suits unbuttoning. Laughter. Wilkes saying
, This town can be big enough for the both of us, Walter. We could clean up if you throw your cap in with us.

O’Riordan
: If I throw in with
you?
How about the other way round?

Some of Wilkes’s puppies joking now, relaxing. Wilkesy and O’ Riordan getting on like best mates. No bloodletting tonight. Take advantage: have a few beers. Enjoy yourselves. Think Liverpool can win the title this season, now they’ve got a bit of width? How’s the car? Seen the new de Niro film? Flirting with the women cleaning up behind the bar.
Look at the Tangas on that.
And Fivesy joining in, but tipping me a look every now and then, his hand in his pocket. Me, I’m waiting, eyes on O’Riordan.

Sometimes I wonder what I would look like if I let this rage inside us take over for good. Would I have fangs? Red eyes? Would me hands twist into claws? The hate fills me every waking moment so that I have to force meself to calm down before I let fly on the first fucker to cross me path.

Waiting.

One time, sleeping rough in Stanley Park, this old woman grabbed me toe to wake us up, and I had her down in the grass, throttling her, roaring in her face before she’d had chance to blink.

Waiting.

I’ve often wondered why the blood I’ve tasted is so sour, and I think it’s because the meat of the men who carry it has been spoiled by fear. I saw this programme once about abattoirs where pigs were slaughtered unprofessionally; where they were aware of their fate and ruined themselves with panic. PSE, they call it: pale, soft, exudative meat. Where the meat is lighter than normal in colour, with a sludgy texture and wet surface, often with high drip loss, and a pH below 5.6.

O’Riordan turns to us and says:
‘What about you, Wire? You ever thought of running a club?’

Unleashed.

I turn to one of Wilkes’ puppets. I say, ‘What’s your pH? Lower than 5.6, you reckon?’

He goes: ‘You wha–?’ And it’s the last sound he’ll make without some kind of synthetic assistance, because
click-click-click
me forefinger and finger-fucking finger disappear into his throat up to the first knuckle.

He’s out of the game, so it’s just three left and Wilkes, who’s already backing off. Fivesy’s got his blade out and it’s stuck in the guts of another stooge who’s looking down at it and he’s got his mitts around Fivesy’s and it’s like he’s trying to help Fivesy as he slowly hoists it north, ripping a line through him that turns his crisp, white shirt into a very noisy red.

The buzz fills me head, as if me brain has been replaced by a nest of angry wasps. It’s the sound of violence. The oldest sound there is.

The stragglers have seen what’s happening and some of them are screaming, heading for the doors without any encouragement at all now. The staff have frozen, watching us with mouths open, thinking, ‘Do I wade in and try to stop this? For minimum wage?’

I’m standing over one of the two poor saps that are left, and somehow I’ve transferred a great patch of his face on to me fists. I pick him up at the waist while he babbles at me about his girlfriend being pregnant, please, please, and he’s light, so criminally light it’s almost not fair, and I swing him round and down, and the back of his head cracks against the bar rail, right where there’s a lovely couple of nuts securing it to the wood. His chin snaps into his chest hard enough to give him a bruise, and I leave him on the floor where he twitches, eyes flickering, losing blood through every hole he was born with, and some new ones too.

The last one I punch once, hard, right in the solar plexus, while he’s busy throwing kung-fu shapes and warning me about what colour belt he wears. During his fish impressions I donkey-kick him down the steps. He lands nastily on the dance floor and stays there, and I think he’s dead because there was one mighty snap when he landed, and I don’t think it was the sound of O’Riordan tucking into the free Twiglets at the bar. It’s all taken less than a minute. Fivesy’s cleaning his knife against Wilkes’s jacket. Wilkes’s crying, saying to O’ Riordan through great bubbles of snot and spit:
What is it you want? Anything, I’ll sort it. I promise.

And O’Riordan, soothing him, saying
, Come on, Peter, let’s all go for a ride.
And Wilkes begging now, but nobody likes a cry-baby and we get him outside and into the Merc. We’re out of the car park and heading up the Chester Road even as the first of the blue lights comes stuttering on to the scene. Couple of minutes later, O’Riordan parks up by a gate in front of a field. A pale track leads into it a few feet, and then gets swallowed up by the dark. We ignore that and invite Wilkes to walk across the road towards a wall. Beyond the wall is the golf course. We scramble over, Fivesy getting a laugh from O’Riordan when he says we wouldn’t have this problem if you was a member, and we push through the trees and the rough and find ourselves on the fairway of the first hole. The sweep of grass looks as smooth as soap.

O’Riordan takes a hip flask from his jacket and offers it to Wilkes. Wilkes shakes his head, but then grabs the flask and has a hard drink out of it.

What are you going to do?
Wilkes asks, and then answers his own question.
I don’t want to die.

We have to make an example of you, Peter,
O’Riordan says.
If I let a cunt like you piss all over my operations, well, that’s just going to give the green light to any other Joe who wants to come and steal a bit of my land.

I won’t bother you again, I promise,
Wilkes says.

O’Riordan:
I know you won’t.

He looks at me and I take Wilkes by the arm. Fivesy hands me his hunting knife, and I pause for a moment before accepting it. O’Riordan starts screaming, but I give him a slap and he shuts up fast. He’s looking at me as I drag him along the fairway. He’s looking at me, and looking at the green, and looking back at O’Riordan and Fivesy who are sharing the hip flask and looking up at the stars.