by Cynan Jones
Her words were desperate and broken.
“He’s dead.”
And there was just this collapsed sound. “He’s dead.” And she was quiet for a while.
“What’s your address?” he said. “Your address?”
And the strange language came again, harrowed, pleading over him in a wave, and he said, “I want to send you some money,” and then there were sounds that were not words and were like the grating of a tide going out and he put down the phone.
He kept waiting. He realized that if the phone didn’t ring he had no idea what to do with the packages. He thought of throwing them somewhere, of taking them and the phone on the boat and dumping them but he knew he couldn’t. Some definite thing had taken him. He was prepared for moments of fear. He had to hold on to one belief. He kept thinking of the solution it would be, and of how it would change everything.
At one stage he texted her number with the message: Send your address and I can send you money. I am sorry about him. He realized he should never have sent it. Hearing that desperation he went in another notch, and felt how deeply he was in this thing.
He let two calls come through on his own phone without answering and picked up the voicemails. The man was worried that he hadn’t taken out the boat, and Cara called to say the man had called her. She was worried if he was all right after knowing he was out last night. He phoned them both back and told them that he’d caught a chill.
Again, immediately, he knew it was a mistake. He didn’t get chills. He didn’t even use the word. He was making little mistakes. Simple mistakes. He should have called the man about the boat this morning. He should have called on Cara after the garage. Acted normally. He thought about the pigeon, about the falling feathers.
He forced himself to think. No more tiny mistakes. I have to think of everything.
For a while he sat there convinced they were stalling, giving themselves time to home in to the phone with some locator. That he would know nothing about it, they would track him. But he told himself that this was another phase of fear. He made himself eat. “You have to be prepared for fear,” he said. “And you have to ride it out.” He grilled the fillets he had caught yesterday and drank water and took more painkillers. The pain he could deal with but he wanted to keep the swelling down in case he had to move quickly. He was trying to think of everything. He was trying to be as methodical as he was with the gun.
When they called it was nearly dark.
“Where have you been?”
Hold waited, he felt okay. He could feel this mechanism in him.
“I have the package,” he said.
The voice said nothing for a moment, seemed to hover like somebody assessing a flavor.
“If you’re using his phone you’re an idiot. We already know where you are.”
Hold’s brain was fireworking. He had the minute sense of being in a fight. “Stick to one thing,” he was saying to himself. “Stick to one thing.”
“There’s no problem,” he said. “I have the package.”
The voice seemed to pause again, breathe in.
“Where are you?” The tone was different. Beckoning.
“I’ll bring you the package.”
The voice gave him instructions. He picked up in some of the voice that it was Liverpudlian.
“I’m closer to the other port,” Hold said.
“You’ll get where you’re told.”
Hold waited. He felt okay but the phone was slippery in his hand.
“By the way, you were seen.”
“Nobody saw me.” Hold pulled himself up. Stick to one thing. Stay on the one thing. No one had seen you. They don’t know where you are. Stick to one thing.
“Is that a risk you want to take?” said the man.
“He’s dead. I’ll bring you the package. Where you said.”
The voice seemed to wait for a very long while.
“You know we know where his family is.” There was a veiled threat in that. “If this is a setup.”
Hold repeated his instructions. Then said, “It’s not a setup.”
The voice waited again. Like it was looking through the phone. Tasting the air at the other end. Waiting.
Then Hold said it: “The money?”
There was just business.
“You’ll get the money.”
The line went dead.
PART THREE
The Scouser put the phone down and sat back in the chair.
“Who are we going to use?” said the big redheaded man. The redhead had that kind of blond-red hair and a firm, round face but his nose was messed all over it. It looked like it had never had a bone in it. He had strange, dog-like eyes almost.
The man in the chair considered and looked down at the phone as if it were a strange thing. He felt little needles of paranoia. He held everything before him, mentally, as if he were holding everything out in front of him in his hands. As if he could see everything. Was somebody inside engineering this? This was the second time parcels had gone missing recently.
He looked out of the window at the gaps in the rows of houses, like gaps in teeth since the war. He thought of bombs falling off target, something from a great height misguided and shattering into the buildings. The luck and the physics of it. What power. It would have been a better time, a clearer time. You wouldn’t have to brew this fear always. You wouldn’t have to keep establishing it.
He felt the needles. Fear is necessary. Fear is an instrument. Fear makes people so much tamer. You just have to strike with great weight at the things people can’t stop themselves caring for.
“Use the Irish,” he said. “Let’s keep this to ourselves.”
The weight of the missing packages was about a kilo. That was a street value of forty thousand and the equivalent, when cut, of a thousand odd hits, maybe more.
To the Scouser it wasn’t so much the cost but what the break in the chain represented. It showed a weakness in the process. It was a supply and demand business and he had to be competitive and commercially minded.
The consignments of drugs moved by a labyrinth of ways, but mostly, for him, were airdropped onto craft in the middle of the sea.
The drugs would be retrieved and fed off to smaller boats that put in to coves and inlets too remote to properly police. Then, passed on to one of his mules, they would come inland.
Broken down into diminishing packages, the drugs spread out, finding passage in unnumbered ways, splitting up from the first conglomerate crop into parts ever smaller, like the filaments of a firework, until the tiny shrapnelled portions landed home in some user to burn out.
Trying to stop this thing was like trying to catch all the pellets from a cartridge. The authorities had only a certain time in which to catch them after the charge was struck before the pattern got too wide and they were gone into whatever bodies they would hit. The important thing was pace, and the missing packets disrupted this.
When the system worked, it was as if the packets were hurled directly from Colombia into the waiting sack of the Scouser’s organization. And that was the word. Organization. This wasn’t the formless violence of the street gangs. It was as organized as any other import business, an efficient setup with slick logistics. There were myriad little clowns out there playing out their hatreds against each other with no particular plan, but that was emotional. This was business. It worked on all the same principles, supply and demand, customer service, superior product, cost effectiveness, and paying the rent.
The Scouser had the restaurant, which could always launder money, could even explain with falsified takings the sudden boosts of income if the Scouser chose, as he sometimes did, to declare them. The webcam business provided another front, and his legitimate employee register made it easier to hide his key men, one highly paid as a computer technician, another as a chef, men more peripheral as waiters, barmen. All paying their stamp, staying off the Social, appearing, on the outside, to be ordinary working citizens.
The web
cam girls were perfect couriers. While there were plenty of housewives earning a little extra this way, some of his girls worked on the streets, off the books, and constantly brought in new customers.
The cockle-picking racket he’d started on the Wirral and that had since spread south put him in the perfect position to attract desperate men, and get a look at them physically. To pick his mules. People who were down on their luck, sometimes who shouldn’t be here, people who were expendable, many already with criminal records who would work like red herrings if ever they were arrested, the police following the endless threads of their pasts back to all the wrong places, away from him. Not many dogs could smell cocaine through shellfish either, and from his base, the drugs fractaled out across the country.
It was growing and growing. As long as the organization held, the sky was the limit. He just had to make sure he held it together. And the glue was fear.
Hold got the gun and checked it over and took it apart and cleaned the barrel and re-oiled it, and wiped off the old oil where the cordite had mixed in. He wiped down the silencer and oiled the thread and put the whole gun back together again and again checked it. Then he stood it by the wall.
He went round the trailer with a wooden crate and put all the things he thought might matter into it and set it on the kitchen work surface. He didn’t quite know why he did that. Maybe he didn’t want anyone else trying to decide what would have been important to him. Or maybe he just wanted to reduce himself right down, so there was nothing but the absoluteness of him going to do this. He went out to the van and got his driver’s license and the superstitious five-pound note and put them in the box. What he told himself was that he did this so that all the things he cared about were in one place, so he could take them quickly if he had to.
He went back to the van and took down the rabbits and laid them on the grass then he got the old metal detector from the annex where he had put it and swung it over the rabbits and it registered nothing. There’s no tracking device, he said.
He drove into town and paid a guy at the hardware shop ten pounds to unlock his mobile phone and then he took it back and put in the SIM card from the other phone and checked it worked. He’d asked, “Is it possible to track a SIM card?” and said his mate and him had a bet. “If you’ve got the hardware. Police can,” said the guy.
He smashed up the other phone and took it out and put it in an old wheelbarrow and poured in some gas and lit it up. He thought of the pictures he was burning, as if each one of them burnt individually, like photographs, like they were some last possessions of the man. The phone curled fetally and he thought that he was burning some amnesia into the dead man, as if he had erased something the dead man could still be in touch with, could remember by.
If they can track the SIM card, they can track the SIM card. “That’s everything,” he thought. “That’s everything I can do.”
He went to the annex and unlocked the gun cabinet and took out the shotgun and checked it and took it back to the trailer. He closed the orange curtains round the three sides of the living space and took his coat and propped it up with the rubber mop with its hood up like a man’s head and set the table lamp before it so it looked like a man sitting from outside. Just the shape of him.
He took the box and put the rifle license from the gun case in and his passport and took the shotgun and the rifle. Then he lay down in his clothes with the shotgun loaded and breached on his bed with him and the rifle rested against the wall.
Perhaps he was half asleep but something jolted him. He was up, the gun snapped shut, and swung, sitting, holding the gun at the open door. It was as if his senses followed him after the act. It was like some long borne device in him, some ancient spring reactant. Nothing moved.
He stood up and went from the room. The coat had fallen, the mop had clattered onto the floor. The need to sleep hit him again.
He turned off the table lamp and lay down on the long cushion in the living area. Then he breached the gun again.
A dream from his childhood, absent for years, returned now at the beck and call of anxiety in his body. A lane of trees. The pheasant chicks he came across, a nine-year-old walking through lanes magnificent and bewildering to that child, between the ruined buildings of a farm netted with honeysuckle. Flycatchers clicking from boughs in their pretty ambushes. The roots, beside that collapsing, unused lane, bursting from the fallen bank like branches of some backwards trees searching for their light. And the child walks for the first time alone there, and there is the capacity for treasure in everything. And in that gone farm there is some sense of settlement, but he goes on.
In the darkening lane, the pheasant chicks. First, the lost, micking noise of them, then they are before him on the trail. And there is no discrepancy in their call, that peeped micking that is their lost attempt to be found. He tries to catch the chicks for their safety, and they scatter before him like a shoal of fish. One pheasant chick, egg yellow, the dead bracken stripes upon it, smaller, left as the others bunch off the bank with peeping calls and are gone like blown seed. And now the child beneath the crowding pines recognizes his part in this abandonment, in his need to intervene, and he tries to herd the chick, to undo this diaspora. All this was true, and truly happened, and the chick in its blind instinct ran into a hole. Like a bird hitting a window.
And he is that chick, as blind as silence; is in that passage of wet soil walls wherein he cannot turn himself around, in that tunnel of rats or snakes or some such things present or presently returning to come upon him there, as casual instruments of his fate. To stay or push on? Or else, within these tons of soil, sightless, he lies down and starves.
Once, he half woke. He lay waiting, half-real. Unfeathered, unfleshed, never found by rat nor snake, the perfect form of a bird, just the pile of bones in the tunnel.
He pushed sleep away like a weight from him. There was the tiredness and the swelling of the battering and the ache of not sleeping in a bed and all the light was orange and unnatural round him through the curtains. It was like sleep had turned into something tangible, clung heavily to him like wet clothes.
He got up and showered with the gun next to him and after he dressed he swallowed some pills and ate something and took the gun out to the annex and locked it up in the cabinet. “What am I going to do with it?” he asked himself. “What am I going to do? Shoot people?” He looked for a long time at the locked cabinet as if he was looking through it to the gun inside. Think of one thing. That’s all you have to do. Just do one thing. There’s no reason why they should hurt you.
He called and left a message with the man to say he wasn’t well and that the pots should be okay; and that he would go out and bring them in tomorrow or the next day.
He’d waited a while, and then phoned Cara. Straight, flat-out lies. He said “I didn’t have a chill, I had a hell of a lot of fish. Hit this shoal. I had to keep going back and forth for the fish; I was knackered in the morning. Over eighty big fish. I don’t want to tell him about it.” He could hear that part of her was excited for him. It would explain the cuts and bruises, the marks on him, if she saw them. And as he was speaking to her, something in him wanted overwhelmingly for her to look on his cut body. They could all be saved by this thing he was to do and he felt it could be the beginning of a new stage. If he got it right. He could say the bag kept cutting into me up the path. He could say he had to work partly with the tide coming in around him. Had wet feet, had to walk up and down like that. And he wanted very much that she would kneel and wrap his blisters as he was about to go and do this thing. And there was a great need in him to tell her everything about how he felt, as if the sides of the tunnel he had built had slipped and crashed into the water. “Think of one thing,” he kept telling himself. “But think of one thing.”
He said “I’m going to take the fish up myself to the market, go direct.” He told the lies strongly and truly: “I’m driving up to Liverpool to sell the fish. I should be back tomorrow.”
&nb
sp; He took ice packs from the freezer that was in the annex and put them in the new cooler and put the rabbits in and the bag would not close fully. He wished he’d slept more. “My body got the rest,” he thought. “That’s the important thing. I need to stay physically strong.” He was aching from the battering of the rocks. “It was my body that needed the rest. My mind is okay for now.” He heard the words going round in his head, prosser checkham. Checkham. They were like a repetitive tune. In his tiredness he couldn’t shake them out.
He went outside and looked out. “Well,” he thought. He’d figured on four hours or so to the port. He put the box of things and the rabbits in the van. Then he locked up and went. He thought once more of the gun and thought, “No, don’t take it.” Then he drove.
They went out in the trawler to pick up an airdrop worth one point three million street and weighing around thirty kilos. It was the first time Grzegorz had been on a boat so small and the night was disorienting, felt spaceless. To the sides of the boat were strapped eight unpumped inflatables, and there were motors lined up on the deck.
The men crowded into the back of the boat and held variously on to the rails and the stanchions trying to find room amongst the motors. There was no sense of how fast they moved in the night, just this sound of progress, this persistent hiss through the water and the sound of the engine.
The men who had before been jocular and open were taciturn now, introspective. “There’s nothing to it,” thought Grzegorz. “There’s just driving the boat.” He watched the black line of the coast disappear, and watched until even the lights were too far off to see.
“Mam nadzieję, ż e nie gniewasz się za bardzo.” I hope you’re not too angry, he thought, about his wife.
The skin-headed Pole was up front with the crew and the pilot and one of the older men among them, in the back, spoke carefully.
