The Hope (25 page)

Cas, giggling inanely, clamped shut the emergency bar of the main doors, on which a sign said FIRE EXIT, and his counterpart on Lock’s side did the same to the entrance to the changing rooms through which Lock’s men had come. Cas stopped giggling and turned round with this spooky, serious look on his face.

“We’re trapped.”

Then he burst into giggles again.

“Get me some of that stuff he’s on!” declared Lock.

“Hey, dickhead, are you ready to fight or are you going to stand there with your thumb up your bum until I stick you?”

“I’m ready, Riot,” said Lock and his blade snicked open. It was about six inches long.

There were intricate rules to these scraps (as opposed to single combat such as the fight between Riot and Eddy). No one could get into the pool until first blood had been drawn by either leader. After that, it was a free-for-all. And those were the intricate rules.

Riot and Lock circled round each other, blades held forward pointing at each other in perfect symmetry. Their eyes, like lovers’ eyes, never left each other. They circled around these two points, blades and eyes, and the two of them were private worlds, deadly suns, oblivious to the slope of the pool and the water running treacherously slippery beneath their feet. They chose their steps with casual precision, laying down toe then heel softly, foot by foot, steadying their bodies to keep their balance. Small decided that this way of moving was instinctive because their minds were elsewhere, looking for weak spots, a second’s indecision, a blink in the enemy’s eye. He longed to be able to do that, to move with such lethal grace. Riot had said one day he’d make a good fighter. He couldn’t wait.

Riot lunged, testing the water. Lock snapped back his arm and returned the lunge. Riot leaped back a yard, crouching, water splashing over the hand he put down to steady himself.

“How’s your mother, Lock?”

“I don’t have a mother.”

“Funny, that’s not what she told me last night.”

“That was your own mother you were sleeping with.”

“Damn it! I knew she was too good a lay to be yours.”

“You don’t just want to be close to my mother, Riot, you want to be my mother, because you want me to suck your tit.”

“You want to look like my mother.”

“You
will
look like my mother when I’ve cut your face open.”

“You already look like my mother and she’s been dead ten years.”

“So that’s why you were in bed with her last night!”

Lock sprang at Riot and his blade was a sliver of blurred silver at the end of his arm. Riot raised his arm to ward off the blow and Lock’s blade snagged the sleeve of his patched jacket.

On both sides the combatants clustered forward.

Was there blood? Was that a scent of…?

Lock stepped back, a courtesy to allow Riot to inspect the damage.

“Nice try arsehole. No good.”

Riot ducked low and came at Lock around waist-height. To his credit Lock managed to twist himself half out of the way, but the attack was swift and Riot’s aim was perfect. He scored a line down Lock’s thigh and a second later the khaki began blooming with dark spots.

A cry went up, assaulting the whole room with hollow echoes, as the cries of children playing and adults horseplaying must have done when the pool was a place of amusement. There was pleasure in this cry, but then there is pleasure in the howling of a pack of hounds as they descend on the fox. Figures jumped down over the sides. Suddenly, the pool was crowded. Riot and Lock were soon lost in the mêlée, and maybe they were carrying on their private fight and maybe they weren’t; Small couldn’t tell for sure. He was only watching and he was pressing himself against the wall to make himself as small as possible and covering his ears against the cry of dozens of hard men (and one hard woman) as they tore into each other under the pelting indoor rain of the
Hope
.

He had to watch. He might learn something by watching, that’s what Riot had said. But what was there to watch? Acid Cas coming up behind one of the enemy and clapping his ears. The guy’s eardrums bursting and trickles of blood seeping out. Delia shouting, “Come and get me! Try and stab me, you pricks!” Bateman gargling blood and groping for the slash in his neck as if that was going to staunch the flow. Billy, eyes narrowed, pushing his blade again and again into some guy’s guts, holding his shoulder all the while as if they were best of mates, and with every push and pull of the blade a little more of the guy’s insides turning out. When you stood outside of it all and watched, you couldn’t distinguish between one side and the other. The fighters only knew to stab someone if they didn’t recognise him. To the observer it was simply random slaughter and you felt about as much sympathy for the victims as you did for your fish lunch.

Finally Small tried shutting his eyes but he wasn’t able to keep out the screams, the yells, the swishing of water…

Don’t let me piss myself, he thought. Jesus! I’m scared. I’m scared.

He realised his clothes were soaked and clung coldly to his skin. It was possible he had been sweating too much, but when he opened his eyes his vision seemed hazy, the scrap in the pool somehow distant, and he knew it wasn’t sweat. It was raining, a monsoon from the ceiling. The puddles at his feet were growing and flowing into each other. The fighters in the deepest part of the pool were already wading knee-high. A corpse was covered, its eye-sockets drowned, its hands floating clumsily on the surface as if it was fumbling in the dark. The water was streaming, wheeling, sheeting down, gathering speed, gathering weight. The pipes and cracks in the ceiling gushed water. Water poured down over the lip of the pool in glossy, glassy, shimmering waves.

And Small was more scared than he’d ever been. He seemed to be the only person to have noticed what was going on. For the others, there were only notions of blood and battle occupying their heads. The water fell in cataracts.

Jesus, it hurts! he thought. It hurts my head and it hurts my eyes.

He made a blundering dash for the door and slipped and fell and found himself slithering towards the pool. He didn’t want to go in, he didn’t want to go in there! But his clutching fingers raked ineffectually across the slimy wet poolside tiles and his kicking legs got him nowhere, and then they were kicking over space and he felt the rim beneath his groin. Water – the enemy – tugged at his trousers playfully, teasing him into the pool: “Come on in! I’m fine, really, once you get used to me.” Small made a last, desperate grab for the side, knowing there was nothing really to hold on to, and then finally resigned himself to going over. He could get out. He could get out again, easy-peasy. Let’s fall, then.

Hands grabbed his waist and he was being pushed back.

He managed to turn his head as he floundered on to the poolside and he glimpsed Billy’s sailor’s hat and Billy with his blade clasped shut in his shirt pocket laughing and saying: “Back you go, shrimp. I always throw the little ones back.”

There was someone behind Billy – another helper?

Small tried to scream: No! Leave me, Billy! Get your blade out!

Billy was laughing.

“Don’t…! cried Small. Billy was laughing.

Billy was still laughing as the guy behind him grasped his face with one hand and drew a red grin across his throat with a knife. The image of Billy’s two laughing mouths scored itself into Small’s mind. The joke was on Billy.

Billy’s eyes weren’t twinkling any more and his real smile had gone all sad.

“Run,” said Billy, and fell backward to the bottom of the pool.

Small did not want to run. He only wanted the last ten seconds over again, so that he could warn Billy properly and save him. He wanted to see Billy laugh once more and say, “I always throw the little ones back.”

The water had risen to belt-height in the deep end and it was beginning to filter through to the fighters that another enemy had wandered into the scrap and joined in, even though it was against the rules. They carried on trying to stab one another but this was getting harder to do properly. They kept falling over, their legs splashing heavy.

Small crawled on all fours towards where he thought the doors were. He could only see the slick tiles on the floor. The rest was a fluid blur.

The pool was filling quickly now, water boiling up from its filters and drains and deluging down from the ceiling. People staggered, bowed under their soaking clothing, and groped for the sides and fell and tried to get up again. Their panic had a gaping mouth and a screaming tongue and streaming eyes. It was hard to tell which were swimmers and which were corpses.

Small found the doors and clung to the bar as water drenched down on him, trying to wash him away back into the jaws of the pool. He pulled at the bar, which was slippery in his hands and would not budge.

The pool was pink with blood and clogged with corpses and the water was up to its rim.

Small beat at the doors. Because he was still a kid, a snotnose kid, his fear became pure fury and he battered and battered until his fists ached.

The water welled up over the rim and spilled out. The living thrashed amongst the dead, old animosities thrown aside. Enemies gripped on to each other to survive. Acid Cas floated on his back, going, “Oh God, oh God.” He thought he was a corpse already.

The doors stood resolutely shut.

The water gulped at Small’s feet, engulfed his knees, swallowed his lower body.

Small thought: I am going to die after all, although I’m only small and young and a little tosser and a cheeky bugger and a snotnose kid.

The roar of the pool was punctuated with the screams of the drowning. Small was forced to let go of the bar and found he had to tread water to stay above the surface. It was rising so fast now that he was pulled this way and that by powerful currents. He swallowed water and sputtered and choked.

Was this dying?

He was sucked under in a gush of bubbles and could see the bright patterns of the surface.

Was it really so bad?

He wished he could speak, empty his lungs and tell the whole ship: “My name is Thomas but I am Small and I am beautiful.”

But the
Hope
knew anyway and didn’t much care. Small felt the current take his legs and guide him downward in a rush that made his head whirl so much he had to shut his eyes. His chest ached with the words he had to keep inside himself, but it would not be long before he screamed them out loud – such release! The current dragged him along with it, faster and deeper, and there was a rushing sound in his ears like a howling gale on a stormy sea.

Small wanted only to drift and flow, ebb and rise, but the water was rushing him along.

There’s plenty of time, he thought. No hurry.

But he was racing and rushing and the roar was increasing.

Air!

Small exhaled and sucked in. It was clean on his face and sweet in his lungs. This must be the afterlife. He had gone to heaven, as all kids did (snotnoses and cheeky buggers and little tossers alike). He was gliding, sliding, flying on a wave.

No, it wasn’t heaven, but the corridor that led to the pool. Flotsam, pieces of door and clothing and rubbish, rushed along with him, some fetching up against the walls and some rolling over and over. Small rolled over and over and fetched up with a bang against a bulkhead, which he grabbed and held fast while the wave carried on down the corridor to splash into the doors at the end and lap back, spent.

He clung there for a long time, breathing deeply and shivering.

The flood that had been trying to drown him had in the end proved his salvation. Its sheer weight had burst open the doors and sent him hurtling out. His legs and back were a tender mass of bruises and one arm didn’t like moving very much where he had banged it against the bulkhead, but this wasn’t heaven. No, sir. This was life.

Small got unsteadily to his feet, leaning against the wall for support, and shook sodden hair out of his face. The water had receded, leaving only a glaze on the tiles of the floor, and this was already drying in patches.

He heard voices coming from the pool. He wasn’t the only survivor. His shoes squelched as he approached the hole where the doors had been – jagged hinges peeling out from the frame to mark their passing – and then he could hear what was being said.

“…gone like they weren’t ever here.”

“Shit! All those corpses don’t just disappear! Shit! Thank God we got out when we did.”

“Where the buggery fuck are they then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they got washed away somewhere.”

“Like down that drain, eh? Grow a brain, Lock!”

Small hovered in the doorway. He could not believe anything he saw. Where were all the dead people? Where was Billy’s body? The pool was empty, its sides dripping and its tiles wet, and it no longer seemed like a hungry mouth. Not hungry. And there were Riot and Lock, standing at the poolside talking like mates. Riot was saying: “It’s a bit more drastic than planned but it’s done the trick. No one to challenge us. Christ only knows how it happened.”

“Leak, probably.”

“Yeah, big leak. I mean, look at the plumbing up there. Primitive, that’s what it is. We’ll tell them to seal this place off for safety’s sake. We don’t want the same thing happening to kids playing here.”

“Right. How’s your arm?”

“Fine, dickhead. You only cut my jacket.”

“My leg hurts like fuck. Couldn’t you have been a bit more careful?”

“It had to look good. I am the best knife man around, you know.”

“Second best.”

“After Eddy?”

“After me.”

“Piss off! You couldn’t cut a pilchard with that thing.”

“Want a fight about it?”

“What’s the point? We’ve got rid of all the competition.”

“Riot…” It was barely a whisper. Riot and Lock swung round in surprise. Riot’s jaw fell.

“Who is it?” asked Lock.

“Small. You’re alive,” said Riot, deadpan.

“Riot,” said Small, coming forward, “give me your blade.”

“Eh?”

“Your blade. You said I could have it.”

“I said you could have it when I was dead. As far as I can tell, I’m not dead yet.”