by V. C. Linde
CHAPTER TWO
October
Jas had been sent to check out a guy who spent most of his time holding court in a greasy spoon cafe near the station. He and Whiplash jumped off the bus a stop early so the dog could get used to the area. They’d be back later, if his Dad let them come along. The guy he was looking for had a yard full of dogs somewhere out on the edge of the city. Jas liked coming into town. He liked to see all the morons walking around with sharp suits and puffed-out chests. Wide ties, thin ties, they were chains as much as the ones looped around dogs’ necks. He laughed as these men crossed the street, not wanting to get near Whiplash, or maybe not wanting to get near Jas himself. They hadn’t got a clue what made a real man, they’d enough money to buy the fucking world but they had no idea which side of the street to piss on. Didn’t know whose territory they were walking in. Their protection was kept in vaults with double-barrelled names and decimal points. Whiplash didn’t need interest - he kept growing no matter what the government did. Jas tied Whiplash up a couple of streets away and went and stood to watch the cafe until Teddy showed up. Jas was glad Whiplash wasn’t with him because the huge man had a nasty-looking mutt with him. He guessed that was Ace, a bolshy name even for a grand champion, but since it bore so many scars probably also the truth. Jas leaned against the bus-stop outside the cafe and watched for a while, eventually going inside and buying a cup of strong, crap tea, taking his time to pour in sugar and listen to what Teddy was saying to the woman behind the counter.
“Not gonna let anyone near the yard until we know who took ‘im.”
“Don’t blame ya. Protect what you got or it’ll be nicked.” The woman said, as she rearranged the grease on the grill.
“That’s four we’ve lost and bait’s being bought up all over the place. No bloody respect for territory anymore. Probably a bunch of pissing kids, thinking they can move in wherever they like and take what they want.” Teddy threw a dirty look at Jas as he spoke.
“Sodding kids - no respect for anything these days. We’d never have dared.”
“Well, Ben’s on it now, he’ll catch the little cunts before long. Then we can get back to business as usual. Can I have another cuppa, love?”
Jas slipped back outside and headed to Whiplash, needing to see the dog, see the teeth that keep them both safe. He threw the un-drunk tea down by the wheels of the bus as he got on, heading back home.
The kids that Thatch had hired had finished for the day and were kicking the empty paint tins around the warehouse basement. As there were no windows to ventilate the basement, the smell of paint was suffocating The sound echoed back and through the gaps in the walls. The mould had been scrubbed and painted over and the kids were just waiting to be paid for their trouble. Two big guys came with Thatch, who tossed a bunch of notes to the kids and chased them out. Hours of drilling later the room looked like a messed-up gym. Bolts had been screwed deep into the external walls with chains welded to them to keep the dogs away from each other. A series of mechanised treadmills had been set up, using old sanded wooden pallets to fence the dogs in and keep them moving. Cages were bolted to the floor around the edges furthest from the staircase. The cages were made up of mashed-together metal and wooden boxes. One was carefully spaced and nailed to the wall as well as the floor covering the hidden gap that Thatch had made the day before. A corner between two concrete supports was fitted with a set of chains and axles for when Thatch couldn’t be there to train the dogs himself. A Jenny mechanism was rigged up near to the middle of the room and several spare cages left by the side of it. Once they had finished, the three men set about building a square ring in the centre of the room. They fitted up three foot high walls of clear perspex in a fifteen-foot square box, so that from the outside it looked like a swimming pool. Once the walls were solid, carpet was laid and lines spray-painted into opposite corners.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, reputations took a lifetime to make. But a fight mansion could be fashioned quickly:a whole world built within a damp abandoned basement. This wasn’t a world where outsiders were welcomed. There were districts and the streets between them were fiercely policed. The skyscrapers were the oldest pubs and the exchanges were made with pedigrees sometimes of blood and sometimes of green. Thatch and his two lieutenants packed up and double-locked the basement behind them with brand new deadbolts and thick chains.
A murky orange darkness settled over the city. For anyone who had lived in the country it was barely recognisable as night, but the city never got any blacker. Blinkered street-lights set a background tone for the late hours. Stars weren’t seen, clouds made no difference. A smog of mixed tones coloured and covered the streets. You couldn’t hide in the shadows when there was so much light in the dark. Thatch pulled the van up to the empty lot beside the warehouse and started unloading the dogs. Fifteen dogs were caged, chained, locked inside.
Early in the morning, after several hours of wakeful listening, Scarlet started to be able to tell the voices apart. Not all of them, she didn’t know them well enough, but she had grown up on a small-holding and recognising the difference between rough vocals was as natural as her skill with watercolour. They didn’t have names, no faces and no identity, but she could sense a little personality in each.
Scarlet pulled laundry out of the machine and threw it into the basket, ready to hang on the line. She sat on the floor, exhausted from doing nothing at all, having skipped breakfast and lunch. She could hear the rocks rolling across the floor. Teeth snapping and jaws knocking against the metal cages. The noise of her phone ringing interrupted her as she tried to listen to the distant voices.
“Hey, how are you doing this morning?” Nick’s cheerful voice grates.
“I’m fine. Are you working today?” she asks.
“Yup, I was expecting to see you today. When is your next shift?”
“I’ve got a lot of work on. I’ve told the Boss that I won’t be able to go in for a while. He’s said I can come back if I get time.” Scarlet said.
“Surely you can do a shift or two a week.”
“I’ve got to go, Nick”
“No, wait! Can I pop around later?”
“I’m pretty busy - some other time. Bye, Nick.”
Scarlet hung up. She could still hear Nick on the other end of the phone but couldn’t listen to him anymore. Hopefully he would stop badgering her to meet up. The conversation with Nick left her irrationally angry. He lived too far into the city that she couldn’t visit anymore. The stares and the questions and all of the people. There was so much noise from everything - all she wanted was to take control of the volume. In the flat, music was often playing but it was hers and her choice and she could silence it whenever she wanted. The grime of the streets seeped through into the noise that the people made as they walked around. It even infected you by being close to it. She retreated into her corner and barely left the house anymore. She was still doing an illustration a month to send to California for the café and that was keeping her busy, because she spent so much time exhausted, not moving, finding it not worth the effort.
Her heart began to race when the doorbell rang. Her stomach turned to water and her legs didn’t want to support her. Nick. She panicked, tried to see if the lights were out, if she could hide, but the bell rang again and she snuck towards the front door. She could see through the glass that he was standing right outside and would undoubtedly have been able to see her getting closer to the door. Angry and afraid at the same time she yanked the door open, pulling it hard against the foot that she had put in the way to stop Nick forcing his way into the house.
“Hi.”
Scarlet had been on five dates with George after they had met at the bookshop when she was working the month before. She had stopped answering the phone to him and just replied to his text messages as she moved further and further into her own world. And he was standing on her doorstep, his curls matching her own,
his mouth an inversion of hers.
“I thought I’d come and see how you’re doing,” George said, smiling down at her from his gangly heights. Scarlet’s eyes wandered over his neat clothes and smart shoes. She did a mental inventory of what she looked like. Unbrushed hair, probably with a few patches missing from the last couple of days. Pyjama bottoms and an oversized hoodie from an ex-boyfriend. Miss-matched socks and a scarf. She wanted to shut the door on his screaming normality and go back to cleaning the house with old re-runs of The X Files on in the background.
“I’m fine, thanks.” A beat late she realised that wasn’t enough “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m great. Haven’t seen you in the store and I missed you, so here I am. I brought cake.” George held up a plastic bag from her favourite cake shop - the one she had taken him to for afternoon tea. They had had a two hour conversation with tea, coffee and the best cakes in the city. She remembered laughing so hard that her head was often tilted back, looking at the beautiful teapot lights above her.
Then she remembered trying to reach home afterwards. People everywhere their actions too loud for her eyes and she hadn’t wanted to go out again.
Scarlet let George in and led the way to her kitchen. She pulled out plates and made tea automatically, never saying a word. After a few minutes she realised that George wasn’t speaking, either. She turned her head cautiously, trying to see what he was doing, but without making eye contact, without starting a conversation. He was leaning against the counter and looking at her without watching. He smiled gently, but didn’t try to get her to talk, just picked up the cakes and carried them to the coffee table by her sofa. When she had settled into the corner of the sofa with a cup of tea he turned and slipped her hair out of the neck of her sweater. She winced, visibly.
“Sorry, you looked all closed up,” he said apologetically.
“Yeah. I know. I’m sorry too,” Scarlet said, shocked that she really was sorry that she hadn’t seen him, not just because it invited more questions and not because it was a signal to George that she wasn’t okay, but because she missed him. She relaxed, her spine losing some of its tension for the first time in weeks as she settled back into the cushions.
“Better,” George said, smiling. He grabbed the plate of cakes and balanced them on the sofa between them. The next couple of hours were full of light marshmallows, rich cakes and icing sugar covered kisses. Scarlet relaxed.
She had forgotten that it wasn’t always so bad. Everyone was making her so angry. She was annoyed almost as soon as she left the house. Nothing ever went quite the way that she planned, buses were early and the next ones too late. Suddenly the pavements everywhere seemed to be covered in dog-shit. She was given coins instead of notes for change and then the bus was so crowded she couldn’t breathe.
CHAPTER THREE
November
Scarlet was holding the small piece of card that George had given her. He had arranged to meet her for lunch afterwards even though he was supposed to be working. She was half an hour early so she sat on one of the benches in the square and looked at the building she was supposed to be entering. She knew the man inside was supposed to be able to help her but she didn’t know if she would be able to get through the door.
The receptionist had looked down her nose. Scarlet walked up to one chair outside one door on one floor. She clutched onto the piece of card with her name and time and the sheet of paper recommending her. There was a small table next to her knees holding helpful brochures with slogans such as ‘How to be Your own Hero’; ‘Combating Negative Thoughts’ and ‘Making Your Action Plan’. After a while the door opened and a suitably nondescript head poked through, smiling and extending the hope of a path between the two places she was currently living in.
Scarlet had explained to George that she was living in two cities. She lived in the same city as he did, with its restaurants, train stations, shops, art galleries, taxis, offices and houses. She also lived in her own city, the one that was walled like in mediaeval times with few gates and lots of dangers. She couldn’t get out of that one - everything ended up being tucked away inside the walls. An urban life full of potholes. The further that she moved into The Other City inside her head, the less she was a part of the city that he lived in. It all felt so real: it was hard to decide where the lies were and which parts of reality to hold on to.
Scarlet spent a lot of time nodding her head as the Doc spoke. Everything he said was making perfect sense. A lot of the time Doc said something and a memory was triggered and everything that she had felt came back as if she was reliving each separate part.
“Do you ever feel irrationally annoyed? Do you ever feel intense anger without any reason?”
Scarlet was late heading home from A Piece of String. The Boss had wanted her to stay back and help him to catalogue some of the more expensive pieces. It had involved, pizza so she didn’t need to cook dinner, but it also meant getting the bus home in rush hour. She was crammed into the middle, right by the second set of doors, an exit only but still part of the push and pull. The bus was packed, the windows were sweating. People kept putting their clammy hands on her as the bus lurched. Her shin was hurting from being kicked by a kid in a pushchair that was taking up most of the aisle. A guy in a suit sat at the very back, earphones in, bag between his feet, his legs spread wide, crushing the young Polish girl next to him who was trying to read. In the rows in front of them wannabe gang kids were blustering their way through insults, experimenting with new swear words and subconsciously touching their hair. Young mothers and old matriarchs were scattered around, flesh pushed together across the boundaries of the seats. It felt like the whole city had been crammed into the 257. Scarlet had visited the city when she was a kid, her parents had found someone to watch the farm and the three of them had spent two whole days exploring. She didn’t think that going back would be like this. She knew how much worse her anxiety had become, but until she started talking about it with George she hadn’t noticed the extent to which it affected her, and how different it was from a normal reaction to everyday situations. The pushchair with the restless child had finally been extracted from the aisle and exited through the doors in the middle of the bus. Still annoyed, Scarlet had stepped out of the bus with it so that she didn’t get trampled by mother and child. Getting back on some stupid fat bitch had tried to have a go at her for getting on without paying, not noticing or not caring that Scarlet had been there the whole time, hadn’t seen that she had stepped outside for a moment only to fulfil a life-long habit of courtesy. Scarlet could still remember exactly what she had said to the woman when she had gotten back inside and the bus was moving again.
“Yes.” Scarlet’s fists clenched and her jaw set tight, tense as she answered.
“Have you ever avoided a situation because you thought you wouldn’t be able to cope?”
Scarlet curled up under her desk, the phone buzzed closer and closer to the edge of the desk above her. She needed to answer. It could be the contractor calling about fixing her plumbing. It could be the landlord about the broken back door. It could be the Boss. It could be a new freelance job. It could be Nick. It could be her parents. The idea of having to deal with any of them made her wrap her arms around her head. Her nails scratched grooves into her forearms long after the phone had fallen silent.
“Yep.”
Scarlet left his office with an action plan, a date for another appointment and a feeling of disconnect. There was a sense of relief that some of the bad feelings were actually normal. It was miserable and harmful to go through every tiny thing that made her feel so freakish, but with the Doc talking calmly and not belittling her she felt like she might get some control back one day. George bought her coffee and got them a taxi back to her flat so that she didn’t have to walk home. It was still early and when they got to her flat there was a large group of young lads hanging around in the empty lot a few doors down. They al
l had short, heavy dogs which scrapped and snarled while the boys laughed and shoved each other. Chained up right next to her building was a huge Doberman, almost completely black; it growled and snapped at them. George put a protective arm around her and led her inside. He left the next morning after they had eaten breakfast together.
The flat was quiet once she was on her own again. The thoughts rushed back in and she went to sit down by the other voices. They were quiet and had been waiting for her to come back. She started whispering to them until the door slammed shut and she was locked out.
A joint task-force has been launched today by the RSPCA and the Police to crack down on dog-fighting throughout the city. There has been a marked increase in the number of dog fights reported within the city in the last five years. Operation Scorch seeks to deal with the epidemic of illegal organised dog-fights and spontaneous chain-fighting in the city, as well as the import and breeding of illegal breeds.
Last week officers from the Dangerous Dog Unit found a pair of pit bull puppies caged under the stairs in a house. The dogs were taken into the care of the RSPCA and have been name Harry and Potter. They were lucky, as one of the officers from the Status Dog Unit explained: “The actions of a minority of dog owners is giving entire breeds a bad name. Most of the dogs who have been involved in these fights have suffered serious injuries and often have to be destroyed.”
The RSPCA has prosecuted over a hundred people in the last five years, but this so-called sport continues to thrive. New tactics are being employed; no longer are the dogs cared for as prize fighters, but treated as disposable items to be flung together in conflict and then thrown away. One officer from the RSPCA made it clear that there are no ‘evil’ breeds, only cruel owners. “It’s the owners that need disciplining, not the dogs themselves. The owners are not feeding or controlling their dogs properly and when the dogs have served their purpose, either for fighting or breeding, they are killed or left in the streets.”
