The Hope (24 page)

Pratt deliberated as to what friends Pratt would make next. Pratt was already thinking of the Rain Man, Pratt’s good friend of old, a creature of the whim of the tides and the skies, the moon and the sun, never truly happy but never sad, content to be the slave of gentle masters. Perhaps Pratt should consider another Rain Man. Pratt knew how to make one. Perhaps dozens…

BIG GENERAL

“Where’s Eddy?”

“Hasn’t been around for days. Stopped turning up at the bar. I think it’s that woman he’s been seeing. Pussy-whipped.”

“Ssh. Don’t let Delia hear you.”

“Well, that’s fucking great. Our best man down. And he was looking forward to this, the dumb fuck.”

“Chicken!”

“Anyone see Lock yet?”

“Probably chicken too.”

“Yeah. Running scared.”

The hard men stood at the poolside, their noses filled thickly with the smell of stale, rancid chemicals, old chlorine swollen with old sweat and old urine, their feet ruining still puddles of stagnant water. The smell was the pool’s breath, and the pool was a hungry sky-blue mouth, its teeth white-tile enamel stained yellow and brown in places like a chain-smoker’s. Endless streams of water trickled down from the ceiling but failed to raise the water level above an inch or so in the deep end. Liquid sparks sprayed up where the streams fell and the wet tiles writhed with the effort. Along the bottom ran black parallel lines. If you looked closely you could see they were elongated H-shapes, but their purpose was anybody’s guess. There were useless, meaningless signs at intervals along the walls, faded but just legible: NO RUNNING, NO DIVING, NO DUCKING, NO SPLASHING.

You might as well add NO SWIMMING, thought Small.

There had not been any swimming here for as long as he could remember. The idea of a pool full of water was almost as incomprehensible as a sky clear of smoke or a belly full of food. This pool was not for swimming, he knew. It was one of those places you didn’t go unless you were going there for the correct purpose. The pool was for fighting.

“And where the buggery fuck is Paolo?”

“Dunno. He took off earlier, just like that, no reason. Saw Longpole talking to him and then they both ran off, never came back.”

“Where the hell are these people going? What the hell is happening? This is a scrap, isn’t it? Tell me I’m right.”

“Yeeesss.”

“Good. Thank you. For a moment I thought I was in the wrong place. For a moment I thought I was at an upstairs tea-fucking-party.”

Riot stalked backward and forward along the lip of the pool, flicking his knife open and clasping it shut repeatedly to show his agitation to the rest of them. He had his name tattooed in tiny letters on his right cheek but in mirror-writing so that he could be the only one to read it properly. His short back and sides was evidently self-inflicted to judge by the razor nicks above his ears and on the back of his neck. It was certainly one of the shortest back and sides Small had ever seen. There were patches where it looked more like 17.00 shadow.

Riot’s scared, thought Small, only he doesn’t show it because he’s too cool. Small wished he could do that too, not show that he was scared, but Riot was a hard man and the leader while Small, he of the famous “Small is beautiful” graffiti campaign, was nothing but a snotnose kid.

Wild Billy was there, scraping underneath his fingernails with his blade like he was waiting for a friend to turn up so they could both go and get pissed, not waiting for Lock and his shitheads to come along for a bit of serious mutual damage. Billy had this stupid hat on, a sailor’s hat, which he said he wore as a joke, only Small thought the joke was on Billy. Actually, Billy wasn’t a bad guy. He had confided in Small the other day, “because you’re a little tosser so it doesn’t matter what I tell you”, though Small knew really Billy liked him a little bit and valued him as an audience. No one didn’t like Small but it wasn’t cool to say you did since Small was so small and only a kid.

Billy had said: “You know, I’m lucky to be alive. I’ve seen some weird stuff this week, stuff that would make your teeth sweat and your nipples shrivel and turn your dick green. I don’t think I’m going to live much longer, Small. I thought you should know that.”

Small had tried to cheer him up, but it had been useless. Billy had been enjoying his own morbid mood too much.

“Yeah, I’m going to die, and it may be in a scrap and it may not. I could die just falling off a walkway tomorrow. Or some arsehole could stick me with a blade. Whatever it is, it’s going to be soon. This ship’s going to hell in a handbasket, Small. We’re all fucked, all of us, and we’re all going to die soon.”

Of course it was crap. Billy had been well tanked and Small knew that all the hard men talked stupid like that every so often when they got tanked and didn’t have a woman to talk to. Besides, Billy was wrong. The only people who were going to die soon were old people. Everyone kept telling Small how lucky he was to be small and young because he had a long time to live and might well live to see what was on the other side of the unending ocean. That made Small feel big and sort of special.

Riot stamped his foot.

“Damn it! Where are those knobheads?”

“Maybe they surrendered and decided not to tell us,” Acid Cas proposed. There were a number of things Small didn’t like about Acid Cas, and his sense of humour was near the top of the list. It was rumoured that Cas had lost the use of three-quarters of available brain and Small wished he had lost the use of the part that kept saying crass, dumbfuck things, had maybe swapped it in exchange for the bit that contained common sense. Sometimes, when Cas’s hands started shaking and the whites of his eyes started showing, Small preferred not to be around. In scraps Cas just went crazy and stuck everything that moved. He was a bad man to have against you in a fight. Then again, he was a bad man to have on your side.

There were about thirty of them all told. Riot and Eddy had done a good job whipping up a frenzy against Lock and rounding up the resident fighting talent. The charges against Lock were many: that he and his gang had raided the cellars of the Trident and stolen half the booze; that they had raped three girls from the area (nothing enraged the hard men more than the idea of their women being raped – all of a sudden, it brought the chivalry out in them); that they had damaged property; that they had killed Popeye and Jones a couple of days ago when they were out with Billy on a scavenging trip (Billy said there were at least ten of the enemy but he had done for every one of them single-handed); and the list of crimes went on and on. By the end of Riot’s exhortation, which was just over an hour ago, there was bloodlust and fury worked into the crowd that left the Trident and headed for the pool, and the air rang with threats and boasts and the promise of violence.

“Hey, Riot!” a sneering voice sang echoing clear across the empty pool. Lock. “I didn’t realise it was a poofs’ evening. I’d have brought my boyfriend!”

“Which one?” Riot yelled back.

Both remarks achieved the desired laughs from each of the opposing camps. Small didn’t like that kind of laughing, but it was something you had to do as a hard man, make a laugh an insult. He couldn’t quite manage it yet.

“I don’t see Eddy,” said Lock.

“He didn’t think it was worth his while coming.”

“Oh, dear. We’ll have to prove him wrong, won’t we, lads?” This was a cue for a roar of approval from Lock’s men. Lock was wearing khaki and green, his shirt rolled up at the sleeves and open at the front. Big General. He was tall and Small thought his muscles were vast, like barrels strapped to his arms and chest under liquorice skin. He had never seen Lock before, although stories about him, apparently exaggerated, had been rife these past few days. However, the truth lived up to the fiction. The guy was a giant. Compared with him Riot didn’t look as impressive as usual, just an ordinary white guy in a patched and tattered jacket. But Riot was ace with a blade, Small knew. Riot knew it, too.

Small remembered when he had asked Riot if he could come along to the scrap. They had been in Riot’s cabin. Every inch of wall space was covered in dog-eared posters of old movies. Small had never been to see a movie. The ship’s cinema had closed down a few years after the voyage began, long before Small was born. People had tired of seeing the same old movies again and again, even one called
The Sound of Music
. Riot said the movies were cool, especially the ones with actors called Marlon Brandon and James Dean and Harry Dean Stanton and Robert de Niro, and he could have watched those again and again without ever getting bored. He said the cinema had been closed down because “they” didn’t like kids seeing those sort of movies, the ones with the cool actors in. “They” thought they were a bad influence.

Small had just popped the question.

“Yeah, OK, you can come along,” said Riot. “But you stay at the side and you watch. You watch. You don’t join in. You’ll be safe if you don’t get into the pool because everywhere outside of the pool is neutral territory. Got that? You might even learn something by watching. You’re a good kid, maybe a good fighter, who knows? Maybe one day you’ll take over from me.”

“No, I want to survive to see the other side.”

“You cheeky bugger!” laughed Riot. “I’m going to live that long too. I’m the best with a blade.”

“What about Eddy?”

“I’ll tell you about Eddy. We had a scrap a few years back, I think over some girl. Either I was screwing her and he wanted a bit or the other way round, it doesn’t matter. So we got down into the pool with everybody watching and got out our blades, and we danced around for a bit, testing the water, so to speak, and it was like poetry, Small. The best knife-men on the whole fucking
Hope
, playing to the crowd. He gave me this.” Riot showed him a white line down his arm, red and pinched at the edges where it had not healed properly. “And me, I sliced him from neck to dick, right down his front, here. And that was it. We’d both drawn blood, end of scrap. I’d drawn more, so the girl was mine. Now you tell me, isn’t that much easier than going to the Captain and asking him to decide for you like law-abiding people do? I mean, our sort wouldn’t even get in to see the cocksucker! So how are we supposed to get anything done unless we do it ourselves? It’s common sense, isn’t it?”

Small had felt a strange emotion listening to Riot talk like this, a charge of static electricity in his heart that he would have been hard pushed to name, but it was like standing at the outer rim and staring down at the ocean until your head went woozy and wondering how it would be to jump and what you would think about on the way down. He had this idea he would think about doors, a whole corridor of them, one opening on to the next and closing behind you, never to open again. At the end of this corridor something waited, something like a knife, only sharper and deadlier, and it was crouching. Small didn’t know where the idea had come from. It just happened into his head, accompanying the idea of falling over the side of the
Hope
. Was that dying? A corridor of doors?

But that strange emotion was nothing compared to the surge of pleasure he felt when Riot said: “If I die, you can have my blade, Small. But wait until I’m dead, all right?”

With that, he took the knife out to show Small. It had a mother-of-pearl handle, which gleamed with rainbow flecks of colour against cool ivory white. Small turned it over in his hands, ran his thumb over the fake silver stud.

“Hey, careful. This is how you do it.”

Riot pressed the stud and the blade flicked out.

“You’ve got to keep it sharp,” Riot continued, “or it won’t cut shit. This is sharp.” He took a pencil and laid the cutting edge over it. Exerting the slightest pressure, he sliced the pencil in half. Small gasped.

You see, Riot wasn’t a bad guy either, if you got to know him.

Small seemed to know all the hard men better than they knew each other. He learned how they feared each other and threatened each other. It wasn’t much of a way to live, but Small wished he also could threaten and fear his friends. You might never sleep easily in your bunk, and you might have to keep looking over your shoulder, but it meant you were a hard man.

Riot and Lock were lowering themselves over either side of the pool. Droplets pattered into their hair and on to their shoulders, falling from fine-line cracks and the joints of the pipes that criss-crossed the high ceiling. The ceiling was painted with clouds like thought-bubbles on a glaring blue background, one cloud with a bold sun staring out from behind. Four out of the six overhead lamps had shorted out and the last two were swinging steadily, pendulums hung with weights of feeble light. More light, steam-grey and uninspired, came in from the portholes along one wall.

The leaders of men faced each other wordless with the ringing chatter of falling water all round them. Lock spoke first.

“I’ve been hearing some lies about me, Riot. And I hear you’ve been spreading them.”

“I don’t spread lies. The truth, however…”

“Truth, my arse! You wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and fucked you.”

“Well, at least it would have the good taste to want to fuck me. It wouldn’t even give you a blowjob.”

The insults were a litany, the breaking of bread and the pouring of wine before the communion of battle. The rest of the combatants stood or sat beside the pool and radiated nonchalance, ignoring the leaders and their sabre-rattling business, which was nothing to do with them, just prolonged the time before the violence began in earnest. Billy yawned. Cas picked his nose. Delia was there, the token woman, also known as the Chorus Girl because she was supposed to turn her opponents into choirboys. And Joe Portside. And Bateman. And many others Small couldn’t put a name to. Riot’s men looked exactly the same as Lock’s men: ragged, mean, careless, here because they couldn’t find anything better to do. Lock’s men, he assumed, had fears and secrets too. They couldn’t just be the crazy killing machines Riot had said they were.

“Are the doors shut?” asked Lock. “Don’t want any interruptions. Don’t want anywhere for your wounded to go.”