‘Oi, mistah …’ A tug on his sleeve. Two girls had edged up to his side from behind a parked car, both of them dark-haired, faces glossily daubed, glammed-up in short dresses, one notably prettier, neither liable to have seen their eighteenth birthday. They were whispering, conspiratorial.
‘Oi, mistah, can you help us, like? Please? Help us get in?’
‘Just past the bouncer, aye? We can be like your girlfriends.’
‘Aye, your bitches, like.’ The prettier one giggled.
‘How man, we’ll make it worth your while, promise.’
The lewd cast of her purple mouth Gore took for mere front. He had made a fast assessment, decided he had been favoured with a certain advantage.
‘Okay, alright …’ Without further deliberation he threw one arm around each of them, so drawing a breath of their cloyingly lacquered hair, and they giggled anew. Shortly the line was moving, they were up to the ropes. The bouncer wore black suit, black shirt, black necktie, like a chain-store Mafia pallbearer. He looked them over, impassive. ‘You sure you’re in the right place?’
Gore tried a slow would-be worldly grin. ‘Aw, help us out here, will you? I’ve more than I can handle.’
‘How old’s she?’ The bouncer’s terse gesture was to the plainer of the girls.
‘She’s thirty, man. Thirty tonight. I’ve promised her your best champagne.’
He earned half a smile. The rope was raised. I am an actor, thought Gore.
They passed through a foyer of bolted aluminium panels, oddly blackened by phantomic shapes as if licked by flames. A woman behind a glass grille instructed Gore that it was past ten and he would have to pay. The girls shot him hopeful looks. In for a penny, he decided. On demand he gave up his wallet to another bouncer, who poked through its folds and clasps.
Through double doors, into a warm dark bath of bodies and noise – shoving room only, a head-splitting four-time pulse. All about him were blithe and curt young faces, eyes clocking and discounting him. Draughts of dry ice oozed through the crowd, a sickly throat-clogging scent, and pink laser-light slashed the fug. Plain Jane lunged up and kissed his cheek, then both his little consorts were weaving off and away.
He let the crush of bodies carry him from one end of the space toward the bar in sight at the other. The distinction between bar and dance floor that he had thought essential to discotheques was negligible here – everybody seemed to be jiggling, their eyes wide and avid. A black man danced alone, his body shaking, trance-like. A girl with her eyes tight shut had a dummy in her mouth, her friend wore a spangly studded dog collar.
The long bar was a brawling convention of cries and cocked banknotes. Darting his head about, Gore could see two harassed girls, chilly in strappy tops, fending off the shouted orders. But no Lindy. The very idea that she could abide this pandemonium seemed fantastical. Jogged and prodded, he waited ten minutes or so to procure a small beer, pulled from a fridge stuffed with rows of bottled water, sloppily voided into a plastic glass. As he battled back out, two young males were throwing up their hands. ‘Fuck it man, let’s gan the back bar.’ He followed them, dodging the manic dancers and waving arms, into the relative cool and calm of a narrow corridor and through another doorway. He found himself in an L-shaped room, a sort of haven, alternate pools of darkness and fluorescence, clientele lounging about on low sofas. Doodling electronic music issued from near the back, and a corner bar was tended by a young male in a tight and glaringly white tee-shirt. Gore saw that his own shirt-front glowed, and his skin was as if dipped in magenta. Feeling foolish on his feet, he noticed some space on a long sofa only half-occupied by an ardent kissing couple, and so crushed himself into its opposite end.
Across the way, a crew of young men were hunched in conference, razor-cut heads ducking and weaving like the corner of a title fight. Two pairs of bare female legs swished past Gore’s eye-line. From his living-room sofa to this one – the disparity almost amused him. In this late-night haunt he felt himself a ghost among the habitués. Did anyone see him? Or might he stand up and walk through walls, vanish back from whence he had come? He decided to drain off his beer. The novelty had been short-lived, the mission fruitless, and it was past his bedtime.
Standing, he glanced again at the male group sitting opposite. At its centre, locus of attention – Notorious, boldly emblazoned in Gothic script upon a sweatshirt. Gore knew the face before he had made eye contact, and he ducked his chin to his chest. Then a pair of bouncers were barrelling into the space, his exit barred, and they hustled smartly toward the youths’ table, squaring up, obscuring Gore’s view.
‘You, son, on your fucken feet.’
Gore realised he was sick of these identikit thugs, the sight and sound of them, their thuggish funereal chic: they wanted barcodes on their fathead necks to distinguish them. And now Jason was being dragged from the couch, hard hands on him, and he was being aggressively frisked. Were they after his wallet? His teammates seemed to wish to disrupt and interpose, get their bodies in the way of the back-up bouncer – a limp effort. For now the lead bouncer was lifting Jason bodily by the underarms, his kicking and cursing all for naught as he was manhandled toward the door, the second bouncer seizing his feet. As they rammed past Gore, Jason’s wild eyes met his. They had him in a chokehold, the bulging crook of an elbow round his neck, and he writhed, red-faced.
‘You’ll kill him,’ Gore heard himself shout.
‘Fuck off, man, I’ll kill you.’
He weathered the snarl, for the second bouncer’s face he suddenly made out through the gloom – Robbie, the Smoggie, youngest of Coulson’s mob, he of the chippy attitude. There was no more favour in the look thrown at Gore before he vanished.
Gore’s feet spurred him forward, in pursuit, down the dark corridor and through some FIRE EXIT doors that the bouncers had kicked apart. What did he imagine he would do? He was bent on nothing but what the boy’s mates had tried – to get in harm’s way, whatever the cost. It seemed to him his only strength. He was in a backway alley behind a high wall, a private parking spot, and at its dead end he saw Jason, shaky on his feet, attempting to spit in the general direction of the bouncer planted squarely before him. The heel of a palm thrust out and the boy’s head cannoned back, he clattered against the brick wall and fell. The bouncer delivered a kick into his flank, bringing forth a piteous howl.
‘Oi,’ Gore shouted, striding toward them. ‘Come on, there’s no need for that.’
‘Fuck off out of it,’ barked Robbie, standing apart as if refereeing a bout. Gore was past him and poised to lay a hand on the aggressor when an elbow was thrown back, unruly, and he was clouted. He reeled and fell hard onto the cobblestones. Not again, was his only pained thought on the ground as he groped to shield his skull, feeling a graze on the torn knee of his trousers. Then he was being hoisted, up and away, the grip almost reassuring, even if by the lapels. ‘How man, I’ll sort this fucker,’ he heard Robbie. He had been set rightways up, dragged yards hence, now he was being prodding and shoved in the chest.
‘Come on, take it easy, please …’
‘The fuck you doing here, idiot?’
‘It’s Robbie, right? Isn’t it? Robbie?’
‘What you playin’ at, man?’
‘The boy. I know him, just wanted to help the boy.’
‘Keep your fucking nose out of it, I’ll sort him out.’
‘No, look, please, don’t hurt him.’
His lapels were seized again, the hard face right up in his own, breath sour, voice low. ‘He’ll not get fuckin’ hurt, man. I’m police. Alright? Got it? I’m a copper. Now when I let go of you, you run, you fuckin’ disappear, right?’
And Robbie turned and jogged back down the alley. Gore wiped his mouth, his blood beating at his temples, then he turned and found his feet beneath him, carrying him clear of the chaos.
*
Near three in the morning Gore woke up gasping, feeling a weight on his chest as though something squatted there. He knew
at once that his dream had been lucid, that he had roused himself by force of will, so as to cease the stream of upsetting images laying siege to him.
He was prone awhile in the dark, hands clasped on his chest. The house was cold, yellow light from the alley leaking under the curtains. Oakwell was uncommonly still. Fragments of the bad dream were returning – some version of himself stood before a long mirror in a dowdy room, but pulling a slip-dress free of his shoulders. For the face, the shape, reflected in the mirror’s murk was female, blonde, with a doll’s vacant prettiness. He pushed a button beneath a nameplate, a door opened to admit an indistinct shape – something like a man but more akin to a blur of darkness, an evil vapour, full of malediction, forcing him back onto the candlewick spread.
He rose and went to the bathroom, urinated, sidled down the stairs to the kitchen, poured a glass of water from the tap.
It came to him anew that his life was a toy, an indulgence, a special dispensation for the weak. He had never tried – never even begun – to fathom the depths, the true dark. He knew nothing about nothing, and everything about him was, by his own reckoning, risible – even this, his sorry dolour.
When he woke again nearer six, he was stunned to find a sort of calm had descended, his depression dissolved as if by a drug. He recognised anew his own worst habit – a seeming need, when in the doldrums, to lash himself harder, deepen the gloom to pitch black. With so much to do, it was self-doubt and low spirits that were the true indulgence, the devil’s work. At the same time, he knew, such knowledge behoved him to take action – strong, plain, and remedial – against the arch enemy.
Chapter V
ABSENTEES
Sunday, 17 November 1996
Hunched inside his elderly anorak Bill shuffled up and down the length of the scuffed school hall, peering critically at the windows, chewing a thumbnail, occasionally scratching with a pencil into a small ring-bound notebook. He had to be indulged, Gore knew, but his presence was a bother on a morning pre-booked for some awkward business. The usual volunteers traipsed about with chairs and prayer books, looking at them oddly, Gore felt – clearly uninterested in meeting the vicar’s old man. Such was the odour of decline and dysfunction about the place.
Cogitations seemingly complete, a familiar furrow on his brow, Bill sidled up to where his vestured youngest stood tapping his shoe. ‘What I’d do, son? Close all them curtains, then put some up-lighting at the sides with gels on, colour filters? Then up the front, behind where you stand, a couple of cross-lights either side and one on your back. So you stand out a bit.’
‘Sounds a bit amateur-dramatic.’
‘Whey, not at all. Not when you see it proper. I’ve got a bit gear in the car, I’ll hoy it in and show you.’
‘You need a hand?’
‘Not to worry, you just crack on with your work.’
For some moments Gore stared absently at the doorway through which his father had departed – until through it anew came the dog-and-pony show. A now familiar sight, a now familiar galumphing struggle, Steve Coulson and lackey Simms heaving through the double doors and across the linoleum, bearing between them some manner of broad wooden table.
Greeks bearing gifts, thought Gore, rubbing at one tender temple, starting to feel the intestinal clench in his bowels.
They plonked their offering down before him. Coulson, though hardly exerting himself by what Gore took to be his normal standards, was looking poor. What was the expression? Ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag?
‘What you reckon to that then, John?’
Stolen goods, was Gore’s instinct.
‘It’s an altar table, aye? Better be. Bloke telt us it was.’
The table was smaller than was usual or wholly desirable. Nevertheless the oak retained polish, the legs were stout, the tabletop panelled all around its sides. It was a handsome piece, 1920s or 30s, one over which he would have purred were it not now impossible for him to credit Coulson with any authentic kindness.
‘No,’ Gore murmured. ‘He wasn’t wrong. Which bloke is this?’
‘Lad I knaa deals antiques down in Cleveland. He gets all reclaimed stuff in. Says he’s always got people wantin’ churchy stuff. For their homes and that? Cos of all the churches getting shut down, like. Their gear sold off.’
Gore felt his lips curl into a smile. The irony was sour, but then why else was he here, in his new model church – downsized, no-budget, made from recycle and scrap?
‘Any road. It’s all yours, man. Gotta be better than that ratty owld pool table.’
Gore patted his pockets. ‘What do I owe you?’
Coulson shrugged. ‘You divvint owe us owt, John.’
In reply Gore only grimaced, noting the perplexity this caused.
‘Naw, man, I won’t have it. You just call it a donation.’
‘Well, I don’t know what to say.’
‘Needn’t say owt, man.’
‘I hope it’s tax-deductible. I’m not sure how much more of your generosity I can take, Steve.’
‘There’s not a price on friendship, John.’ Coulson seemed blithe again, taking a cigarette and a light from Simms. ‘Naw, you couldn’t put one on it if you tried, man. Any road, like I telt Simms’ – he grinned through curling smoke – ‘you’re black-and-white. You enjoy the match, then?’
‘It was an eye-opener. Thanks for that.’
Gore looked about him, saw the customary hard looks coming his way from those volunteers who doubtless felt themselves less-favoured. For what he was about to do he hoped they would be truly thankful.
‘No little helper today?’
‘Say again, John?’
‘Mackers not with you today? The lad?’
‘Naw.’ Smoke didn’t mask Stevie’s slight wince. ‘Naw, he’s let us down, that one.’
Bill was lurching back down the hall toward them, the handles of lamps in each hand, gels and barn-door-shutters jammed under each armpit. Simms made a motion as to unburden the older man, but Bill’s brow crinkled. Gore chose not to effect introductions, and so Bill stood blinking impatiently at the trio before turning to business. ‘Naw, they’re not right, these uns I’ve got here. But I’ll just rig ’em and give you a look and you’ll get the idea. It’s ten o’clock you start, aye? I’ll be out your road before then.’
‘You won’t stay for the service?’
‘Aw no, John, I’ll not stop.’
He hoisted up his load and set off toward the nearest sockets. Coulson threw Gore a mocking look and waggled a sly finger at the side of his head. Gore pursed his lips.
‘Simms, man, gan and fetch John that bit paper come with the table, will ya? It’s in me glove compartment.’
Simms lumbered away. Coulson pinched the tip of his fuming cigarette between two fingers, and slipped the dead butt into his coat pocket.
‘Steve,’ Gore said to his feet. ‘There’s something I’ve wanted to say.’
‘Aw aye? Spit it out then, Reverend.’
‘I want you to know I’ve appreciated all your help here.’
The big head nodded. ‘Nee bother, that, John. All in a good cause.’
‘Yes. I wonder, but’ – Gore felt himself take air onboard – ‘if we maybe haven’t reached a point where the usefulness is – done, really.’
‘Useful what, sorry?’
‘What I mean is I don’t feel I should trouble you any further. It’s been a burden. I’m sure you’ve happier things to do of a Sunday. So maybe you should get back to your thing and I get back to mine.’
‘It’s only how you want it, John. That’s all this is.’
‘Well, I just think that’s probably how it should be.’
He couldn’t quite read Coulson’s immobile expression. There seemed no umbrage there, but a possible displeasure round the narrowing eyelids. And yet a forearm was being raised and a fat open hand came down at him. Gore took it, and they shook briskly.
‘You’re maybe right. Maybe so. We’ll see. I’ll not han
g about then, John.’
And he turned heel. Gore watching him clump down the hall, passing a quizzical Simms. Relief arose in him, for he had pictured one or two other possible outcomes. This one seemed nearly too easy.
*
He made his head-count, somewhat sickened. Thirty-three bodies, but these including his stock helpers – plus Simon Barlow, sauntering in just prior to the start of proceedings, as welcome as the tax inspector. Distraction had been the colour of Gore’s day, and it was uncommonly late when he clapped a hand to his pocket and realised that his sermon was not there. So be it – he had the King James at hand, he would simply have to extemporise.
*
‘In the Gospels – three out of the four, Mark, Matthew and Luke – we read the same story of a certain incident that happened not long after Jesus had chosen his disciples – his twelve good men, the team for the work he had before him.
‘He had made camp in a town by the sea with all his followers, a multitude of them by then. But he was sought out there by his mother, Mary, and some other relatives – his “brethren”. They stood outside the place where Jesus and his followers were gathered, and they called for him to please come out and speak with them.
‘So you can imagine, I’m sure, a rather plaintive scene.
‘And the disciples inside, they grew uneasy and said to Jesus, “That’s your family out there, they want you – your own mother, she must need to speak with you very badly.” But Jesus only stared them down. He said, “Who is my mother? Who is my family? You are. You’re my family now. Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother.”
‘That’s rather a stunning remark, isn’t it? Jesus was basically saying he would hold no one person dearer than another just because of blood.
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