Bleeker Hill

by Russell Mardell

  The door to the room swung open and footsteps approached the bed, two people had arrived and were standing on either side of him. Sullivan remained motionless, scrunched up as best as he could, covering the letters and waiting for the fists or the screams, but for several seconds there was just silence, an awkward silence that seemed to demand someone to clear their throat simply to help usher in some conversation. Sullivan wasn’t going to be the first to speak, that much he was sure of, for despite the many questions spinning around his head, at that precise moment he had simply nothing to say.

  ‘Mr Sullivan?’ the man to his right said in a soft, slightly clipped voice, as close to gentle as Sullivan had ever heard. ‘Are you okay, Mr Sullivan?’

  Sullivan opened his eyes and slowly rolled towards the voice. A friendly face, half smile, half smug, looked down at him from above a small body tied tightly in an expensive suit and below a perfectly groomed hairdo. Even his thin beard seemed to have been styled. He jutted his hand down to Sullivan in a greeting and Sullivan caught sight of his watch – garish and gold. Cheap in the circumstances, Sullivan thought. Yet Sullivan wasn’t beyond civility, so he smiled and nodded at the man, his numbed hands too busy guarding the letters to attempt a handshake.

  ‘My name is Joe Kendrick. Am I right in thinking you don’t know who I am?’

  Sullivan shook his head.

  ‘No, Frankie suggested you wouldn’t. No matter. The Party loves you, Mr Sullivan.’

  Sullivan mumbled the well-rehearsed response into the space between them.

  ‘We’ve tended to your bumps and bruises as best we can. We will get you some food and clean clothes if you would like. I understand it has been a stressful day.’

  Sullivan laughed and looked away from Kendrick’s face and down to his shoes – equally expensive and out of place. Sullivan wanted to spit on them to see what he would do, but he didn’t think he had any spit left. It would have to keep. Kendrick was saying something else but Sullivan had stopped listening and was staring down at the bunched up letters on the bed, desperately trying to grip them in hands that didn’t feel like his own. He started raking them up in his arms, bringing them to his nose and inhaling, looking for something in the smell that wouldn’t come, a memory that wouldn’t stir. Again and again he brought the letters to his face and breathed them in, the last time so strongly that he began a coughing fit that doubled him up. It was then that the other man spoke, a barely concealed impatience in his voice and a long sigh cushioning the words as they tumbled out of his velvet mouth, perfectly formed but short and direct.

  ‘And you don’t know me?’

  Sullivan was already shaking his head before he opened his eyes. The coughing was severe and his body was jerking back and forth, tears plucked out by the letters mixing seamlessly with tears of pain. It took every ounce of effort he had left to look at the man, and even then it took a few seconds for Sullivan to recognise him. With recognition the coughing seemed to pass, scared into submission perhaps by what the eyes were trying hard to believe. The man crouched down beside the bed and held one beautifully manicured hand to one of Sullivan’s stubble scarred cheeks, before taking it to his greasy forehead.

  ‘You’re burning up, Mr Sullivan.’

  ‘But I’m freezing cold.’

  ‘Yes, it is a very strange world, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Yes Mr…yes, Prime Minister, it is.’

  ‘Well, let’s see if we can’t fix you up good as new, Mr Sullivan.’

  Edward Davenport, Prime Minister of Great Britain, rocked back on his heels, and stared intently at Sullivan, a thin smile creasing out on his face.

  Together

  1

  Frankie Bergan walked out into the TV studio car park and stood staring at the electric fence crossing the main entrance. The huge NO TRESPASSING sign hanging off it, held up by one thin strip of wire, bobbed about in the stiff winter breeze, clanking and sighing on its last. He crossed to one end of the fence and turned the isolator switch, waited until he could convince himself he heard the gentle hum of electricity, and then, satisfied, or at the very least, willingly deceived, crossed to the small security hut next to the fence. The fence was tall, just shy of twenty feet, but it was deceptive. Back a few years, it would have been an ample deterrent for anyone, but now, now that the country had changed so dramatically, it was worthless and Bergan knew it all too well. Nothing stopped people nowadays beyond a bullet, but that being so, there was something in that light throbbing of electricity that calmed him. The fact it still worked, he had decided, was also reason enough to use it.

  He caressed the butt of his pistol and entered the hut. A window was smashed and blood caked the wooden walls. Files and bits of paper lay about soaking up the mess and at his head flies investigated the worth of everything left. Pulling up a small stool he slumped down and stared back through the jagged glass in the window to the empty street beyond. He liked the quiet but he feared it. Ever since things had collapsed and the country had broken, he knew that silence was more often than not just a prelude to chaos. The attacks were frantic, and deadly, but they always came through the most unearthly quiet. There was no rhythm, no timetable and no plan. They just came, whenever they came – in groups, often in armies – attacking on sight and devouring whatever gave sustenance to their fury. For the last however many months, the only answer had been to keep moving, trundling towards that last safe place, and to keep one step ahead. He had led his merry band of misfits back and forth and kept them alive, most of them, but there was something in his bones that made the next step, the journey to come, seem like one of hopelessness. For the first time he had found himself questioning what he was doing. He was a man who played the odds and a betting man knew that they couldn’t get away with it forever. Not with an enemy this size. He had considered that the feeling may be born simply from his dreams and was nothing that belonged in reality. Yet how many times can a person die in their dreams before it starts to feel like fate? He would always find himself asking his subconscious that particular question whenever he looked like brushing the feeling off. He took one giant hand to his throat and rubbed the fingers against the beard line. The choking feeling that came to him in his dreams was there again, just for a second.

  The road ahead was lined with chestnut trees either snapped at the base or shorn of their branches and leaves. The pavements intersecting the main road to the studio were dotted with rubble and charred car parts, and the buildings that still stood within eyeshot were all but defeated. In the distance a blackened warehouse, looking to Bergan like a rotten chocolate cake, stood across the tip of the road swallowing it up. He let his eyes rest there for a moment, gently sweeping across the warehouse’s wide body and then darting up and down at the many blown through windows, before finally stopping at the beams that poked out of the battered roof and then returning to the start and taking it all in again.

  Everyone, even his wife, would always say that he had dead looking eyes, but there was no one whose vision was more alive. Davenport used to joke that Bergan could see through walls, such was his ability to sense danger before it chose to show itself. Whatever it was that so primed Bergan’s instinct, it was in play again now as those black eyes landed with a graceful swoop at the top right window of the warehouse and waited. Something was in that warehouse; somehow to Bergan it was obvious, so very blatant indeed that it may as well have hung a sign over its head and given him a wave. Pulling his pistol from its holster and resting it in his lap, and plucking his walkie-talkie from its pouch on his jacket, he waited, stock-still and calm, his body ready for the reveal his eyes had already seen.

  Seconds became minutes and the gloomy clouds above bloomed together and seemed to press down on the road ahead making him squint his eyes as they burrowed deep into the darkness of the window. He didn’t move, not an inch, one hand cradling the walkie-talkie, the other on the pistol. He could see a flash of light, something in the increasing gloom; he convinced himself he could hear
voices, low scratching growls of voices, inhuman and angry. He willed the window to show its secrets, his eyes threatening and encouraging in one blank stare, and then, finally, almost as if dragged forcibly into the fading light by his sheer command, a small dark cloud of pigeons erupted clumsily from the window on the top floor and scattered like buckshot into the sky. Bergan shot up from the stool and trained his pistol from the broken window of the security hut, the walkie-talkie at his lips, thumb on the button. As the pigeons scattered in their graceless formation and the silence fell once more, he took a step back and walked out of the hut, crossing to one side and staring out between the wires of the fence. The pigeons hadn’t quelled his senses. He wasn’t satisfied. A coward would be relieved; Bergan wanted to know what had made the pigeons fly away.

  Thumbing the button of the walkie-talkie, he spoke into it in a low whisper. ‘Maddox? Get on the roof. Eyes on the warehouse to the east. Get ready to move.’ Without waiting for an answer Bergan put the walkie-talkie back into its pouch, and with one final look down the road, entered the building and mounted the stairs to Davenport’s office, three at a time.

  2

  Bend Lane television studios had once been home to the great and the good, or at least television’s version of the myth. Like a permanent reminder of worth, framed photos lined the walls as far as the eye could see. Almost every side room Sullivan walked past seemed to be a dressing room of sorts; dismantled self-worship holes each with a huge mirrored heart. There were so many mirrors. So many smiling faces. Even without all that was happening, had happened, and threatened to continue, the sight of the photos and the stench of the cheap would have turned Sullivan’s stomach. Sullivan was not much of a one for TV but even he recognised some of the faces staring back from the walls; magicians, comedians, soap stars, singers and the curious tuxedoed jack-of-all-trades known simply as entertainers. Some of the photos were autographed, some foxing, some ripped and smashed, but all had the same vulgar pang of a trapped desperation, caught in a moment for generations to see. He saw a photo of the old comedian that his wife loved so much hanging over the door to one dressing room and struggled to recall his name. He’d stood in line at a book signing to get him to sign his autobiography for his wife, many years ago – monosyllabic, drunken, self absorbed old fool, Sullivan remembered vividly – but the name escaped him, the ultimate insult for this parade of fading whores.

  The squat man with the hat led Sullivan past the last dressing room and turned into a cafeteria where he presented, with pride, two bowls of leek and potato soup and a broken, brittle baguette. The room seemed to stretch for a mile, never ending wooden benches splitting the cracked tiled flooring, sitting under a fug of smoke and the horrid congealing smell of burnt food. The man took a seat opposite Sullivan and watched intently as Sullivan devoured both bowls, stopping only to belch and nod an occasional thank you, and then began mopping the dregs clean with the stiff bread. It was the satisfied smile on the man’s face and the questioning eyes that made Sullivan realise the man was in fact the chef. The chef’s hat on his head was so flat and squashed that Sullivan had thought it were a beret.

  The chef was called John Delmarno, but was Turtle to his friends, and Sullivan was told that was how he should refer to him too. As Turtle watched him eating, Sullivan was put in mind of a parent on sports day watching their child come first in the sack race; the beaming smile, the clasped hands, the expectant excitement in his eyes. Cooking, for Turtle, was a fine art, the finest maybe, and he was quick to tell Sullivan that he had complained to Bergan from the start about what he was expected to work with. As the food supplies had dwindled, so Turtle’s temperamental artistic rage had flourished. No one liked to sit near Turtle when they were eating, and not just because he had been serving twenty years for poisoning his former employers when Bergan happened upon him, they also found the fact he wouldn’t stop talking rather an unhelpful aid to satisfactory digestion.

  ‘How many have you met? You met Maddox yet?’ Turtle asked, as Sullivan finished the bread and began attacking the plastic bowls with his tongue. ‘We’re a sorry bunch of bastards, but it’s not all beyond hope.’

  ‘I met some guys. Bergan. A kid. There was some short bloke in a suit. And the Prime Minister, y’know? This is really great soup. Thanks.’

  ‘Limp leeks, lacks bite. But you’re lucky it’s not a chicken night.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘I’ve been with Frankie almost from the start; after all, a chef is about as important a role as there is to any team and Frankie knew that. He didn’t deliberate long, he didn’t have the luxury, and he took to me as easily as he takes to anyone, which is to say I didn’t question anything and so Frankie felt able to tolerate me. Don’t ask him too many questions, okay? He doesn’t like that, it gets him riled. Just be grateful you aren’t still banged up, that’s the way to look at it. I reckon that’s why Frankie sprung most of us from prison, at least this way we have a purpose, right?’

  Turtle continued talking for another quarter of an hour – his machine gun rattle of a voice something Sullivan knew he was going to tire of quickly – firing off names of people Sullivan didn’t recognise, places he’d never heard of and recipes for food he didn’t care about. When Turtle finally shut up and gathered the bowls on the bench, Sullivan felt like he’d been woken from a dream. Coughing away a touch of heartburn he stood and followed Turtle to the kitchens at the back of the cafeteria. They were chatting lightly about some large breasted singer who was hanging in a lopsided photo frame next to the freezer – her Hollywood smile now more a post-box to an empty house – when Sullivan saw Hudson sitting alone at the other side of the cafeteria, eyes fixed down into a coffee mug, his hands clasped around it as if it were holding him anchored to the world.

  ‘What’s the deal with him, Turtle?’

  ‘I don’t know how Frankie expects me to keep any kind of standards when he keeps changing things,’ Turtle sighed as he scratched one chubby hand against a hotchpotch beard of black and grey. ‘He didn’t want anything anyway, but I gave him a coffee, don’t think he’s going to drink it. He’s been looking into it for nearly an hour. Don’t know what Frankie was thinking.’

  ‘He was supposed to leave him there?’

  ‘Well, yeah. I suppose.’ Turtle was at the sink now, his hands working away at the bowls beneath a small field of bubbles. His eyes never left Sullivan as he spoke, never once ventured toward the subject of the conversation, he seemed almost unable to acknowledge him. ‘I did a spin at Thinwater when he was starting out. Between you, me and the kitchen sink, I don’t care for the man. I got no beef with screws, a man’s gotta earn a crust whichever way he sees fit to do it, but your man Hudson is a bastard of the first order. Seen him beat a man to a pulp. Man with a family. Man with kids. You gotta be tough these days, you gotta have the steel, man, you really do. But there’s no one that should enjoy it. It’s survival. Not entertainment. Fuck him. Frankie should have left him to burn. C’mon, I will give you the guided tour.’

  Sullivan turned back towards Hudson and watched him gazing down into his mug. His face was rigid and stony, his hands much the same. He was so pale Sullivan wasn’t sure where his face ended and the curdled cream coloured walls of the cafeteria began. ‘Give me a minute, Turtle, will you?’

  While Turtle hovered at the door to the cafeteria, flashing looks to the clock on the wall above him and strumming the doorframe with his fingers, Sullivan approached Hudson. The nearer he got to the former jailer of Thinwater prison, the more inhuman he started to look; his pale skin made Sullivan think of a chalk cliff face, the deep furrows on his forehead, of leaking ink.

  Sullivan suddenly didn’t know what to say. ‘Mr Hudson, are you okay?’ The very words made Sullivan scrunch his face up in contempt at himself. ‘I mean…can I get you another coffee? That one seems to have gone cold.’

  Hudson didn’t move. Behind them, Turtle coughed and knocked loudly on the cafeteria door. Sullivan
moved across to Hudson’s side and bent down to him. ‘Hello? Mr Hudson?’

  ‘Where’s my wife?’ The words came in a whisper but still took Sullivan by surprise. ‘She’s late.’

  ‘Do you know who I am, Mr Hudson?’

  ‘Sullivan. Five years, two months. Shot a man. Bang. Bang. Bang.’

  ‘Do you know where you are?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter where I am. Where are we going?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you ever…do you ever feel like…you remember at school, the kid that always got picked last for sports? Do you ever feel like that kid, Sullivan five years, two months?’

  ‘I don’t understand, Mr Hudson.’

  ‘Where’s my wife?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Hudson’s words were dreamy and distant, a weedy mimic of the barking brute that had ruled Sullivan’s life for so long. ‘I always used to get picked first for teams. But I think we’re losing, Sullivan five years, two months. I think we’re on the wrong team.’