Dust and Desire (34 page)

We did the scorpion dance for a few beats, and the sleet eased off. I knew he knew he could take me, but he knew I wasn’t as easy as his other stiffs. There was no wallpaper up here. The light seemed to be intensifying. The wind too. I looked up and there was a police helicopter taking time out to watch the big fight. Someone was saying something through a loudhailer, but they might as well have been reciting The Lord’s Prayer in Welsh through a mouthful of blancmange, for all it meant.

He came again. I ducked right but he followed it, anticipating my moves. He slashed out with the knife and its tip lightly nicked a part of my forehead above my left eye. Blood drizzled into it immediately and I backed off again, blinking madly. The arc of his arm movement helped bring his foot round, and he was raising it high, aiming for my throat. I was losing balance again, but for once I was grateful. His strategy was designed for someone who knew how to stay on his feet. As a result, he missed by a fair whack. I shifted my weight and brought my hand down hard as his foot sailed by my midriff. The claw of the hammer disappeared into the meat of his right ankle and I went down, my momentum dragging him with me. He didn’t make a sound. He slashed at me again as he jackknifed over my prostrate body, and the blade parted the fabric of the jacket over my heart and scored a line along my left forearm that was almost a caress. Then he plummeted over the edge of the roof and I tightened my grip on the handle as his weight yanked against it suddenly, massively. It was all I could do to slam my free hand hard against the rim of the shed roof, to prevent me joining him as human soup on platform number 7.

‘She died because you left her,’ he said, his voice incredibly calm, all things considered. ‘She was like a slow puncture after you left. She had no chance. No fucking chance. And me… I needed someone. I needed a dad. When you went, you ripped something out of me and took it with you. You stole something from me, you bastard. You fucking bastard.’

The spotlight from the police helicopter was fixed on my hand. I had never seen the sinews and muscles distended like that, as if in extreme reaction to an electric shock. The skin of my fist was so taut and white that it looked as if it must soon tear. The handle of the hammer seemed fused to my fingers. Even so, it was slipping, a millimetre at a time. I edged forward, my free arm already shaking at the strain that was being asked of it, cramp shooting up and down my muscles as I gripped the lip of the roof. My foot found the sleeping bag and tucked itself underneath it, secured behind one of the nails that fastened it down. That helped, but not much.

I looked down over the edge at him, dangling. I wanted to get my other hand down there, too, to grab him, and haul him up, but my balance was shot. If I moved, we were both fucked. Someone on the platform was screaming. The claw in his foot moved, pulling away from the meat slightly. Not long now. I told him about his mother, not knowing if he could hear me through the wind and the yells below him, and the clatter of the helicopter. It didn’t matter, because it wasn’t really for him. It was for me. I was still talking long after the claw had sucked itself free and my hand felt supernaturally light, as though, had I not been holding the hammer, it might have floated off into the night. I was still talking, whispering, crying, when the footsteps stopped behind me and firm hands landed on my shoulders. They felt so light, despite their rough grip. There was no longer anything there to weigh me down.

20

T
wo boys died that night. And I killed them both.

I was in hospital for a week. Both the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments in my knee were ruptured. My jaw had a hairline fracture. I needed seventeen stitches in my cheek and three in my forehead. Two of the fingers in my left hand had been dislocated, and I had pulled the muscles in my arm every which way. The ligament in my groin was badly bruised. And my right wrist was broken. Phythian had fallen a hundred feet (a hundred and five feet one inch, according to the tabloids) straight through the roof of an empty train just in from Leeds. He was dead. To me, lying there, hurting when I pissed, he seemed better off.

Mawker came to see me, on the second day.

‘Another hospital visit? People are going to talk.’

‘I could… Fuck me, Sorrell, I
should
arrest you right now.’

‘There’s a bottle of vodka in my bedside cabinet,’ I said, ‘hidden under a bag of magazines. Why don’t you get it out and let’s give both our mouths some time off?’

He looked at me hard. ‘At least I’ve still got a mouth,’ he said. And then, with a dismissive sigh, he retrieved the Skyy. I took mine neat, he mixed a splash of orange squash in with his, the heathen.

‘What a sorry, fucking mess,’ he said, and he could have been talking about his drink. Or about my face. ‘You should be more careful who you shack up with.’

‘Thanks for that, Elizabeth fucking Taylor.’

He told me that Phythian, whose real name was Steven Blythe (Steven, yes, yes, I now remembered), had been living at St Pancras for weeks, on the train-shed roof, under the platforms, in the bowels of the Renaissance hotel, or in its neighbouring acres of construction sites and the unknowable territories deep underground, where the tunnels of the Northern Line roamed.

Mawker’s counterpart in Merseyside had worked with him on Phythian’s – on Blythe’s – bedsit. The head that I had stumbled upon wasn’t Georgina Millen’s, as I had supposed. A DNA test nailed it as Gemma Blythe’s. That head that, once upon a time, I’d had in my lap. I’d had that mouth – that pulped and varnished and freeze-dried mouth – all over me at one time or another during our six-month romance. And Steven had missed her so much he had dug it up and given it pride of place in his crummy Liverpool bedsit. It must have been more of an incentive than any photograph of me.

Georgina Millen’s head, and the rest of her, remained missing. It would turn up, though. They always did, eventually.

Steven Blythe had me down as the reason his mother had killed herself. Because I’d meant something to her, but I hadn’t reciprocated. He was unbalanced enough to decide that nothing else mattered. We hadn’t been right for each other, but all he saw was my rejection of her, and therefore my rejection of him. And all those people had been killed or damaged in his need to resurrect her, and put me where she had gone. He was trying to wipe out the people on that photograph, the kids who had been in her last class at school before she got the sack. It had all been training, in the lead-up to nailing me. Kara Geenan had been feeding him scraps, amateurs and no-hopers like Liptrott, giving him a sense of worth while trying to have me killed at the hands of her drugged-out drones, in order to spare him. So I suppose she
was
protecting him, after a fashion. Although, in the end, his desire was too great. She no longer had control over him. She no longer had the influence that had so obviously once been there. He had come of age and wanted to mark that fact, to celebrate it.

I have no idea – nobody does – as to what Kara’s real name was. Maybe it was Olivia Rawle. Maybe it was something Blythe. If she
was
his big sister, then she certainly wasn’t around when I had been on the scene.

All the police had found on him, other than the knife, was one of Gemma’s diaries from the year in which she killed herself, and a battered black journal filled with notes he had made about her, and about me. His dark little promises and oaths. The police let me have a look, and I read the first few lines –
It might be sunny outside, but to us there’s shadows and rain all over the fucking place. Me ma came in just now and asked us what I wanted for me tea. I goes shepherd’s pie, peas, chips, bread and butter. She said right, buckethead, that’s your starters sorted, what do you want for your mains? Least, I wish that’s what happened. I can make them come to me, the daydreams, if I close me eyes and I’m alone in a silent room.
– and quickly handed it back. That kind of thing is interesting only to ghouls and psychiatrists. It was over now for me and him.

The photograph was in there, too, with the faces of the three girls he had killed obscured by the adhesive gold stars that teachers give out to kids who’ve done well in class. Their crime was to have reported Gemma to the headmaster after she came in smelling of booze one morning, and fell asleep at her desk. She had been given her marching orders not long after. So the boy had got a revenge of some sort, out of it all, even if it wasn’t the blue-riband event he wanted.

Mawker didn’t stay long. After giving me his information, he told me to keep my beak out of his seed tray, or he’d make it his ambition to be sacked from the Force for police harassment of me.

I hadn’t thought about Gemma for fifteen years. Well, maybe I had, but not while I was awake. Not while I could avoid it. That was one very black mark against my name, one that I had tried to turn into a white-chalked tick against the word EXPERIENCE. But who was I kidding? It was a fuck-up, plain and simple, but at least I’d learned that early enough to save myself. We were kids then, we knew no better, and I got out. Only one of thousands, hundreds of thousands, who have done the same thing.

I had plenty of time to think now. I tried hard, but I couldn’t remember much about Gemma Blythe. I had met her at some party in Hatton, a tiny little place near Daresbury, while I was at college. She had already been teaching at primary school for a year, having graduated from teacher training in Nottingham the previous summer. I remember getting pissed and striding up to her, thinking she was all right, and sticking my tongue down her throat in a spur-of-the-moment bit of madness. We went out together a bit after that. Cinema, pub, walks in the park, and suddenly things were serious. Well, they were for her. The only serious things in my life were playing football, buying records by The Cure and trying to develop my abs into a six-pack.

Women, or rather shagging, made it into the top five – but relationships? I always used to think that I met the girls I liked the most at the wrong time. When I wasn’t ready for them, or them for me. That was the reason things didn’t work out.
Wrong
. Things didn’t work out because we were fundamentally mismatched. It was like trying to marry a Lego brick to a jigsaw piece. It was never going to happen. At the time, I’d been what, seventeen? She was twenty-two but seemed older, perhaps because of her kid. Hard work for a single mum. But I thought I’d hit pay dirt: my first woman. My first grown-up woman. Time to shut the drawer marked
Girls
and delve into the one marked
Adult Relationships
. What a bollockhead I was.

Things hadn’t changed too much meanwhile. I’d long given up on the hope of a chiselled gut, and I’d rather listen to people in a cave making sounds with a pair of emu bones rattled against a bucket than to
A Forest
. But the relationship problem remained. Rebecca had been killed, but things weren’t going brilliantly there beforehand, partly because she said she couldn’t get access to my head. It was best that she didn’t:
I
don’t like what’s in there very much, so it was for her own protection, but she seemed to think such familiarity was an intrinsic part of any long-term hook-up. And now I had yet another dark file of secrets to lock in that sad cabinet in the basement of my brain; another barrier between me and the world, and all the sweet, loving people who moved through it.

Talking of which, the day before I got out:

‘You’re looking better,’ I lied.

‘I wish I could say the same for you.’

I reached out to touch her hand, but she withdrew it. That was painful for any number of reasons, not least because she looked so fragile. Her days of being locked naked in the storeroom, without a scrap or a drop, had eaten away at her. She had lost, was still losing, pounds. The skin around her hairline had peeled away, leaving it pink and tender. She had since dyed her hair black, which only served to highlight the ravaged flesh. Her mouth was dry, her eyes puffed up; shadows filled the hollows of her cheeks with grey cross-hatchings. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, meet my eye.

‘I came to say goodbye,’ she said. I made to protest but she held up a hand. Her voice was tired and resigned, and I wondered how long it might be, if ever, before it regained some of its sass and sexiness. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t stay. The city… it’s too big now, too many people. Too many people I don’t know and don’t know about. I’m going home.’

Home was now Salcombe, Devon. She was selling her flat and returning to the family-run veterinarian practice.

‘Maybe I could come to see you, when you feel all right. I’d like to–’

‘No,’ she said, and stood up. She turned to leave, but quickly leaned over me and gently brushed her lip against my cheek.

Three hours after she had gone, I could still smell her perfume poised in the air near my bed.

It took an age, racked as I was with aches in parts of the body that science had yet to discover, and it also took a while to get used to the crutches, but I picked up Mengele, lean as a whip after his time scampering through the labyrinthine passages at Keepsies, and tottered back to the flat in Homer Street, feeling as if I’d been away for years. I picked up the Eiger of post behind the door and started cleaning the flat. The pain was too great to get much done, however, so I sat on the sofa with a cup of tea and sifted through those depressingly brown, formal envelopes. There was one envelope stiffer than the rest, with a pleasingly handwritten address. I tore it open and a cream card slipped into my hand, an invitation to a photography exhibition by Neville Whitby. It was that same evening. I hadn’t RSVP’d, but I doubted it would matter if I just turned up. I fancied an hour or two in the real world, even if
my
real world wouldn’t have a canapé within about three thousand miles of it.

I had a long bath, and a couple of martinis to put me in the mood. Then I treated Mengele to a tin of tuna and left him to patrol the assault course of the flat, while I went out and hailed a cab on Crawford Street.