by Greg James
The car stopped abruptly.
“I warned you,” came the woman’s voice again, “don’t say I didn’t.”
Her voice was an edge; it could open things up and make them bleed.
The old man never spoke a word.
His head burst open.
Blood and matter hit Jim in the face. Raw copper and offal burned his eyes. The policeman and woman were outside. He heard the door beside him unlock. He threw himself out into the cool of the night, away from the red ruin clinging to the upholstery. His shoulder found the chest of the woman and made her fall to the ground. Jim heard her gasp and the man shout. Their nothing-faces had no mouths – so how could they have voices?
Jim ran into the night with one thought left circling inside his brain.
It was time to go home.
Chapter Four
The light of sunrise crept through the fog as understanding seeks to pierce the dark of an unlit mind. Jim’s muscles were hard and numb, and his bones felt worn-through like rotting wood. It had been a long time since he’d had to run and then walk for this long and this far. He moved stiffly, partially paralysed by the dawn’s cold but still his eyes wept; for the morning and for Pine. The police sirens of the night were gone, but the grounded, ceaseless clouds around him remained.
He saw the cat ahead; as beautifully black and white as she had been before, but Jim knew her better now. Her blue eyes regarded him from her perch on a garden wall. She was here for a reason; he guessed that much.
Jim had wandered lost through the terraces of the old town after fleeing from the police. He had tried to ignore the gaunt faces of the houses as they surfaced from, and drowned in, the grey, waterless sea. But still he saw them: tall figures silhouetted in the windows. Sometimes, they were turned away. Other times, not. He saw long, thin fingers stroking relentlessly at dirty glass, trying to get out, and wasted faces that were beginning to peel and crumble, showing the bone beneath. Ruined mouths moved silently in a ragged mockery of speech. They were there, he knew it, just hidden from view for now by the fog and the light of day. He moved closer to the cat, hoping that she would lead him where he wanted to be, at least. He reached for her, to grab her by the scruff of the neck. She hissed at him and spat, arching her back.
He lowered his hands and took a deep breath. He’d never wanted to harm an animal in his life before, but she had led him to the car park where the woman died; where this all began. She was a part of it. He’d have to play along until the time came when he could wrest control of the strings from whoever was behind this. When would that time come, and how would he know it when it came?
He looked at her. Cats are smart. Cats know.
“Show me the way,” he said.
The cat seemed to appraise him for moment, then she leapt to the ground, brushed past his feet and led the way into the fog.
*
Mum’s place was on Cordwell Hall Road; down past the well-to-do terraces were the council houses. Once you crossed the dividing line, there were no more garden walls – only fences hanging in disrepair and the houses were no longer red-brick but slate-grey; uninviting with their dark windows and overgrown patches of grass that would never be true gardens.
Jim had no idea what he was going to say. There was no sign of the police, which surprised him. He’d half expected to come here and be arrested on the spot.
Jim pushed open the gate, feeling the screws in the hinges come loose as he did so – still not fixed after all these years. Funny how what’s broken becomes a more comforting sign of home than what works. He walked down along the short path to the front door with creeping fingers of bindweed snagging at his ankles.
The front door was open, and as loose as the old gate. Jim realised the cat was no longer with him: looking back he saw her watching him through a gap in the fence. He pushed at the door.
“Mum? You in?”
Silence answered him.
He took a step inside and felt the lino flooring slither under his boot’s sole. His eyes adjusted and he saw the hallway was a glistening crimson slick.
“... Mum ... Mum ...”
Too late, far too late, and he should have known. He realised that now. He’d hated her for so long; been angry, talked angry, and thought angry whenever she was mentioned that he wasn’t even sure why he’d hated her anymore. The rage had become everything. A black eclipse. But his hate made him feel more for her now than when he loved her unconditionally as a child.
He looked back to the fence. The cat was gone. He was abandoned.
There were no tears. This was not like Pine. There was only understanding of what must have happened, and a space where his thoughts and feelings for his mum should be. It opened inside him until it became a swallowing hole.
It’s okay. It’s done.
He didn’t need ghosts, or the dying to say the words for him this time. Jim scraped the blood from the sole of his boot on the grass and he was about to walk away when he heard it. A wet sound coming from inside the house. He should’ve walked away then. He shouldn’t have looked back. But he did – because he had to.
She was there; an obscure shape in the dark. Most of her was gone, and what was left hanging on her bones ran freely with gore and clear secretions. She had been made this way, he could tell, unlike the tall figure with its thinness and frail bones. But the words she uttered, the sounds she made, were the same he’d come to know and feel.
“Guilty ... Guilty ... Guilty ...”
He waited for her to crawl along the length of the hall, to reach out and run her meat-fingers over the toe of his boot, moaning all the while, before he caved her skull in.
“Mercy,” he breathed.
The love you never gave, I give to you. Now, I am guilty.
And he knew it. He felt it. He didn’t wait to see anymore. He closed the door and walked away, listening to the limp, dying sound of her pawing at the doorframe. The swallowing hole inside him gorged itself on him, and Jim let it feed as he lost himself once more in the Sevengraves fog.
Chapter Five
There was no further sign of the cat in the fog. Jim didn’t need her anymore. He walked on to a place where he didn’t want to be, but where else was there left for him to go?
He walked until he ended up outside the house he needed. The fog knew. It brought him here. He wanted to stop thinking, stop feeling, to just blow it all away, and this was the place to do it: Pas’s den. There were lights on inside and the sounds of people echoed out.
He went up and knocked on the door.
It opened.
Pas towered over Jim; long-limbed with a shaven head. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt with the word SPECTATOR spray-painted across it in flaking off-white curls. His eyes were grim marbles with the whites painted on. Jim could smell the party on his flesh.
Their eyes met.
“Hey, Jim, man! Long time no see, bruv. Get in here and get something inside you. Come on!”
The walls were throbbing with the deep pulse of a bass-line and there were bodies in corners, on the stairs and sprawled over the carpet. The refuse of a hard day and night was everywhere to be seen: pizza boxes, empty bottles and the twisted silver of Chinese takeaway cartons. The air was warm and close; it clung to Jim with intimate fingers, drawing him further into the house. He breathed and tasted nothing but skunk, hash, glue and semen. It had been a big one – but then Pas never did things less than large.
“Get this down you.”
A long-fingered hand materialised out of the marijuana fog, making Jim flinch before he remembered it was only Pas.
Only Pas – there was a statement with a number of meanings.
“You all right, mate? You already on something, or what?”
Jim shook his head and took the proffered bottle. He cradled it in his fingers, uncertain. I’ve been off the booze for years, he thought, what the fuck do I do with this? I’d sooner have a puff on something or huff something. Get out of my head for a bit. Forget Mum. Forget
Pine. Forget them all.
“You got any glue, man?” he asked.
Pas’s shaven head split into a yellowed grin missing several teeth, “Sure do, man. Not a problem for mes amigos. Follow me.”
Jim followed Pas over the bodies of fallen party-goers to the kitchen where the smell of pure fumes was at its most potent. Darkness danced with light here. It coiled up to the cracked and peeling ceiling where it spread out as boneless limbs trailing threads of unreal web.
“Good shit cooking up in here, man,” Pas said, “good fucking shit. You got here just in time.”
“Top notch,” Jim said, without conviction.
Pas dealt in whatever was going; and he had no standards when it came to cutting his product. Jim knew people had died from taking the shit Pas dished out at his parties. He cut it with bleach, powdered glass and petrol amongst other things. It was like he enjoyed causing people pain – like he was testing them, seeing how far they could go before it became too much. That was what worried Jim about this man who was supposed to be his mate. Pas seemed to live for one purpose, to suck people into the black-hole of his existence, and spread as much misery around as he could. And then, there were the other stories about him. Nothing Jim could verify from being witness to, but most of the stories agreed that Pas had been living with this girl a while back and she’d become pregnant. The baby was born and it didn’t survive long in Pas’s care. The word was that Pas was something much worse than a cunt. The word was he’d become a nonce.
“The good things in life came to me too late,” Pas said to Jim, resting a hand on his shoulder. “The parts of me that could’ve been saved were already dead and cold. I learned that love could only do so much for me. There’re wounds that don’t become easier to bear, never mind heal, man. Christ’s wounds are nothing compared to mine. So you gotta live for the lighter moments. Because this world and its people will only consume you and tear you apart, man.”
Jim nodded, watching the guests get the new shit ready. Some were staring at pools of shallow brown sizzling in battered pans on the hob. Others were sat at the kitchen table, using spoons to crush iodine pills down into powder, and scraping red phosphorus from the heads of matches. They worked in methodical silence. The best bunch of workers this country’s ever had, Jim thought.
Pas was still talking.
“Your memory’s the first to go with this gear. You just clue out into this dark dream, man. Don’t remember a thing ‘cause there’s nothin’ to remember; just this feeling. Then your teeth start to sing, your liver joins in with the bass-line, and your nerves become a fucking choir. It’s fucking unbelievable shit. It’s not a drug. It’s way of life, of being. Peace through addiction, man, you get me? Peace through fuckin addiction–”
Pas carried on talking. Jim wandered away to the kitchen window and wiped the condensation from it with his sleeve. He looked outside at the fog clogging the black artery of a back alley which ran behind the terrace. A movement, over there. A shape, something given form, waiting, dead skin fluttering like old hair, holes for eyes, watching, fingers carved from gristled bone, beckoning.
He looked back at Pas – and knew he wasn’t going anywhere, not for a while.
Might as well try some of the new shit.
It was cooked and ready.
Jim strapped his bicep up and injected.
And it did everything Pas had promised.
Jim could taste the black meat on his tongue. The hours in the house ran by; stinging with solvent tears, tasting of a finely-rotting, white metal. The fog outside refused to abate and Jim refused to return to it. It thickened and flowed towards him whenever he approached the glass of a window, so it seemed. There was a hunger out there; an appetite denied. But it could not enter the house and take him; like all such things it needed to be invited in first.
And Jim wasn’t about to do that.
*
He was in the living room sitting on one of Pas’s old settees; coming down hard, trying to make sense of it all. The settee was a stained, patched and sagging mess. He guessed it was stolen from somewhere or other. Everyone else in the room was slumped in a half-sleep. There were occasional whispers and snores to punctuate the induced lull that’d come over the festivities.
She came in and sat down next to him.
“Hello Jim.”
It was Wendy.
“Hello.”
“How’re you feeling?”
“Fucked. How about you?”
She worked in the town centre at the Whumpy’s burger restaurant. She was still wearing the uniform; red-and-white striped blouse with burgundy trousers. They looked like they could do with a good wash. She was clued out on something, unable to notice how functional the conversation between them was. She began to tell him her story anyway.
“So it was late, yeah, and this bloke who was meant to take over from me hadn’t turned up, right? I was knackered and just rested my head on the counter for a minute or so. No-one was in. It was about midnight. The pubs had emptied out ages ago. I just put my head down for a sec to get some shut-eye, and next thing I know I’ve come over all cold. Bloody freezing. I wake up. Some wanker’s pulling at my hair. Got a proper handful, and he’s tugging away. I shout and scream at him. Felt like it took ages to get his fingers out of my hair. His fingers were greasy and cold like the old burger patties we have to chuck out sometimes. It was only then that I got a good look at him. I bloody screamed the house down.”
She stopped, ran her fingers through her greasy hair, and then snatched them away, shivering.
“His face was all old and wrinkled up. He didn’t say nothing. He just stood there. I asked him what the bloody hell he thought he was playing at. I told him to get the fuck out. He didn’t. He just stood there, staring at me with these eyes and breathing heavy, like he was having trouble breathing. Like he was asthmatic, or something.”
“What happened next?” Jim asked.
“So, yeah, he was there and I told him to leave, and he didn’t. So I got out from behind the counter, thinking I was going to have to throw him out.”
“And then he turned nasty,” Jim said.
Wendy looked at him and nodded. “Yeah, man. His face. Fuck. It was horrible. It twisted like there were all these worms moving about underneath his skin, and then he went for me. Really fucking went for me. I got out of there and ran for it. The bloke who was coming on shift could deal with him. Once I got outside, I decided to come here. Didn’t have anything better to do, and I needed something after dealing with that bloke.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Jim said, thinking of a lone figure he’d met at a bus stop who kept coming back to see him. “I’ll bet.”
He looked at Wendy; pie-eyed and drifting off into her own world. He slipped an arm around her shoulder. She didn’t react. Her dilated eyes had found a spot on the far wall and they were there for the night now – until she conked out, anyway. Jim unwound his arm from her shoulder.
Waste of time.
Bang – Bang – Bang
Jim jolted to his feet. The sound came again. It didn’t take him long to find the source of the pounding. He could see shadows moving on the glass of the windows. The insubstantial heads and shoulders of a crowd outside; all tall, all thin. They were growing hungry and impatient with him, it seemed. No-one else in the room was reacting. Eyes wandered. Mouths sighed. Fingers picked at black scabs and injection wounds. None saw. None heard. None cared. And so, it went on.
Bang – Bang – Bang
With the palms of their wasted hands, they were beating against the glass in unison.
Not hard enough to break it but hard enough for me to hear it, Jim thought, to make sure I don’t forget. If he closed his eyes, he could feel himself out there, amongst them. His flesh as their flesh. His breathing as broken as theirs. His heart no longer working as it should. Hate and emptiness. Rage and loss. No love left. All gone. Dried up. He opened his eyes. Pine was sitting on the settee next to him. Her small body drai
ned of blood by the colourless kisses of the figures outside. Her eyes were bright in the dark. Her bare breasts, which he’d never touched, were textured over with that single damning word.
Guilty – Guilty – Guilty
He’d killed Mum. He hadn’t killed her. It’d been an accident but he felt like he failed her somehow, because a life is not so easy to take or to lose. Not like you think it should be. There are consequences. Feelings that come afterwards. Words are too small for them, and they make you feel sick to your stomach at the thought of what’s gone, lost – and never coming back.
Jim didn’t sleep. He stayed awake until sunrise came, the fog lightened and the figures at the window dissolved; old ashes drifting away on the wind. Beside him, Wendy groaned into wakefulness. Pine was long gone. He was left with reality; its body odour and raw breath.
“You pull a night shift, Jim?” she asked, peering at him with red pisshole eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Well, the sun’s up.”
“Yeah, it’s up.”
“I wanted to stay, y’know,” she said.
He looked at her. “You don’t need to stay here for me, Wends.”
“Nah, I stayed for me.” She grinned, showing teeth grown scabby from too many tweaks.
“What d’you mean?”
“You never came back with that milk, did you?”
Chapter Six
The rest of the day passed in a chemical blur. Jim wasn’t even sure what shit he was trying, but he knew how much he wanted to forget what was out there waiting for him.
“What’s this new shit then, Pas?”
“Latest export from the good old USSR,” the skinhead said with a grin.
“Innit something else now?” Wendy asked, groggily. “Innit the United Federation of Russians or somethin’?”
“That’s Star Trek, you daft cunt,” Pas said.
“No, it isn’t,” she whined, “and don’t call me that. I’m not a cunt.”
