by David Logan
… because of the small green Ford Focus approaching from his left.
The van ploughed into the side of Linda’s car. In the split second before impact, Paul stamped both feet down into the well of the passenger’s side with as much force as he could muster. His unconscious was trying to brake, trying desperately to stop the car.
Linda did the same thing on the driver’s side. The difference being that she was able to press down on the brake for real. It made no difference. The car was lifted up off the tarmac by the snub nose of the van. A kind of clarity settled in Linda’s mind. She knew she was about to die and she wanted very much to kiss her little boy one more time.
‘Goose …’ she said, and then everything went black.
2
THIS CHRISTMAS
Mick, the landlord of the Three Witches pub, had a great sense of humour. Or at least that’s what he thought. He prided himself on his entertaining quiz nights. If they weren’t rolling in the aisles, he wasn’t satisfied. The problem was that Mick just wasn’t funny. It wasn’t the material, it was the delivery. Mick would steal jokes from the best. There’s an old gag by the comedian Tommy Cooper that goes, ‘Apparently, one in five people in the world is Chinese. And there are five people in my family, so it must be one of them. It’s either my mum or my dad or my older brother Colin or my younger brother Ho-Chau-Chou. I think it’s Colin!’ The problem was that Mick would always forget to name the brothers, and then when no laughs were forthcoming for several long, excruciating seconds, he would remember his mistake and then try to explain that one brother was Chinese. Then he would remember it’s saying the names that’s the funny bit, but by then the joke was dead and Tommy Cooper was cringing in his grave.
Frank Lester emptied his glass and looked up at the large clock behind the bar. He struggled to focus and his tongue felt like it was coated with very small mushrooms. He definitely shouldn’t have had that last whisky. Or probably the two before it. Or the first three for that matter. But, hey, it wasn’t Christmas Eve every night. Technically it hadn’t been Christmas Eve for the first four and a half hours Frank had been in the Witches, but now it was ten past midnight, so now it was Christmas Eve. Frank tried to say ‘Merry Christmas’, but it came out as ‘Mirtle Kism’ followed by a wet burp and he trailed off halfway through.
He slid off his stool and took a moment to steady himself while still holding on to the bar. Frank was a tall, willowy, pale man. His strawberry-blond hair was shaggy and needed both a trim and a wash. He wore a long, scruffy leather coat that had looked shabby when he bought it. Now it looked like a miracle of stitching that it was still together. But Frank loved that coat and wore it all year round.
Frank looked to the door. There was an alarming expanse of open space where there was nothing to hold on to. Frank really didn’t want to take a tumble in front of everyone. Not that there were that many of the regulars left. Just Mick the barman, old Dr Clarence, sitting in his usual spot at the end of the bar, a face like he was chewing a particularly sour wasp, his nose in a book as always, and a handful of others Frank knew well enough to nod at in the street.
‘You off then, Frank?’ asked Mick, coming up to swipe Frank’s empty glass. He didn’t give Frank a chance to answer. He said: ‘Got a Christmas joke for you, to send you on your way.’ Mick was laughing before he had even started.
‘There’s these two cats, right? One of them’s called One-Two-Three and the other one’s called Un-Deux-Trois. You know, like, numbers in French.’
Frank managed the smallest of nods to show that he understood and was keeping up with the gag.
‘So, anyway, they have this race, right,’ Mick continued. ‘Which one do you think wins?’ He was straining to hold back a snigger. All Frank could manage was to shrug and shake his head. Mick hit him with the punchline: ‘One-Two-Three, because Un-Deux-Trois cat sank.’ And, with that, a rambunctious belly laugh bubbled up out of the depths of Mick’s throat. His whole body juddered with the unbridling of his mirth. Frank frowned, playing the joke over in his head. He didn’t get it. ‘Un-Deux-Trois cat – Oh, wait a minute!’ said Mick, remembering a fairly integral part of the joke he had forgotten. ‘The race, it’s across a river. The cats are swimming across a river. So Un-Deux-Trois cat sank into the river. It’s brilliant, innit? French cat sank. Probably drowned.’
Mick chortled and guffawed some more, oblivious to the fact that Frank hadn’t so much as cracked a smile. After several moments, the power of articulate speech started to return to Frank. He nodded. ‘Have a good one, Mick.’
‘And you. I’ll see you tomorrow,’ said Mick. Frank took a deep breath and turned towards the door.
The freezing cold night air had a decent enough sobering effect and pretty soon Frank felt confident enough to start walking home. He buttoned up his coat, though it made absolutely no difference, and headed off down the street, weaving a little here and there.
At the end of the street Frank took a corner a little too wide, lost his footing and slipped over into the gutter. He gathered himself up and carried on, thinking about maybe singing. He could feel an almost overwhelming urge to start singing, which was strange because he was neither a man who liked to sing, even when alone in the shower, nor one who thought he could sing. Most people say they can’t sing, but deep down inside they think they have an amazing voice. Frank opened his mouth and was about to launch into a rendition of the Oasis song ‘Wonderwall’ at the top of his voice when he realized he didn’t know any of the words.
Frank stopped at a lamp post. He had to pee badly and this was as good a place as any. As he started, a sense of relief coursed through him.
Suddenly, he heard a Phhrruppp! sound and the bulb above him went out. He looked up at it and belched loudly.
Did I do that? he wondered. Then the neighbouring lamp, some ten metres away, went out too.
‘Hmm,’ said Frank, out loud.
A lamp across the road died. And then in quick succession, one by one, all the lamps in the street went dark. Within just a few seconds, the only light was coming from the moon.
Frank buttoned up his fly and was about to hurry on home when a cloud drifted across the face of the moon. He was plunged into complete darkness. He thought this was particularly spooky. Then he realized that there were absolutely no sounds around him. That made the spooky much worse and goose bumps prickled Frank’s arms and the back of his neck. He was unnerved. So much so that he actually acknowledged to himself that he was unnerved.
I’m unnerved, he thought. It was too dark. Unnaturally dark for the city, where there was always light coming from somewhere, but Frank couldn’t see any. No cars around, not even any lit windows in the surrounding houses. It was as if Frank was completely alone. The only person in the whole of Manchester.
Then he spotted a small blinking red light on the dashboard of the parked car next to him. It was a security light, blinking to inform would-be thieves that the car was alarmed. That little red light made Frank feel a bit better and a little less alone. Someone somewhere owned this car and cared enough about it to fit it with an alarm system. Or at the very least a little blinking red light. He relaxed.
Then he looked up at the lamp post again and was now sober enough to think it odd that all the lights had gone out like they had. As he was contemplating this oddity, all the bulbs in the street came back on, all at once and much brighter than before. Ten, twenty times brighter. Frank was blinded. He cried out and covered his eyes, but it was just a little too late. As he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, he could see shapes and specks drifting past his pupils, varying shades of dark and light coruscating behind his eyelids.
The lamps dimmed, returning to their usual benign luminance, but it took the best part of a minute before Frank was able to open his eyes again. Even then, he couldn’t see very much. Gradually the streaks and blobs of blurred detritus swimming in his field of vision began to dissolve and his retinas ceased to sting. Frank blinked twenty-three times in quick su
ccession and his eyes started to feel normal again.
He tilted his head to one side, frowned and squinted. There was a mound in the middle of the road that, he was pretty sure, hadn’t been there a few moments before, prior to all the street lamps going supernova. The more he concentrated on it, the more he realized it was a human-shaped mound. Cautiously he moved towards it.
As he got closer he saw that the human-shaped mound was indeed a human. It was a man. Broad, with big features. A large jaw, a wide forehead. The man’s hair was a dirty blond colour, and while he didn’t have a full-blown beard, he clearly hadn’t shaved for more than a week or maybe two. His beard was mostly the same colour as his hair but with wisps of red mixed in. He was dressed oddly: baggy cargo pants, frayed at the hems; heavy work boots, extremely worn; fingerless gloves on his hands and three dog collars around his right wrist. However, the reason Frank thought he was dressed oddly was mostly because of his jacket. It was a strange-looking jacket in itself, but it was the contrast between the jacket and the rest of his clothing that made it stand out. It was maroon with yellow horizontal stripes and matching yellow trim. On the left breast pocket was a badge. The badge read: ‘My name is Anthony. How can I help?’
Frank edged closer, peering down at the prostrate man, wondering if he was alive or not. He could see his chest rising and falling so he decided he was alive. Frank nudged him with his toe. ‘Hey … mate …’
No response.
Frank’s eyes flicked down to the name badge: ‘Anthony … you awright?’ He prodded him again, a bit harder this time. More a kick than a prod really. Still nothing. Frank crouched down, wobbling a bit, looking over him closely, his face just a few centimetres from Anthony’s.
‘You alive?’
Suddenly Anthony’s eyes pinged open, taking Frank by surprise. He lost his already shaky balance and toppled over backwards with a cry.
Anthony sat up, blinking, and looked around. It was clear from his furrowed brow that he had no recollection of how he had got there.
‘It was snowing,’ said Anthony, articulating the first curious thing that occurred to him. Half a dozen other curious realizations also flitted through his mind at the same time, but the lack of snow seemed to be the one at the forefront.
Frank turned himself around and with some difficulty managed to sit up. Any talent he once possessed for balance had deserted him.
‘Snow! Not in Manchester, mate,’ he said. ‘In Manchester it rains.’
Anthony turned to look at Frank. He wondered who he was but decided not to ask because there was the more pressing matter of that absent snow. Anthony looked up at the mostly cloudless sky. Frank looked up too.
The one cloud that had recently obscured the moon was on the move. It settled above them, and as Frank squinted up at it he caught sight of something small and white drifting down towards him. With marvellous precision, a snowflake floated down in a tight spiral and landed on the tip of Frank’s nose. He crossed his eyes to try to look at it. He plucked it off and it dissolved between his fingers. He couldn’t be sure what it had been.
However, before he could generate enough brain activity to formulate a question about what had landed on him, another snowflake entered his field of vision. Then another and another and then a million more. It was snowing. In Manchester. Where usually it only rained.
‘What the … ?’ Frank couldn’t believe it. It was really snowing. Fast now. Collecting on the surfaces around him and on him.
Somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, memories of Christmases past whirled and elided, moments from his childhood flashed past his mind’s eye like images on the old slide projector his father had cherished. Frank remembered waking up on Christmas morning at his grandmother’s little house in Kent and looking out of the window of his bedroom to see a blanket of snow stretching out over the fields surrounding the house. He remembered the smell of her kitchen as a turkey roasted in the oven and his grandmother arranged mince pies on a plate, sneaking sips of port and thinking no one knew. She would be drunk by lunch.
The fire crackled in the living-room hearth and his big sister sprawled on the sofa watching The Wizard of Oz. He remembered being scared of the flying monkeys and he remembered the sing-song tinkle of the little silver bells that hung on the Christmas tree. And then suddenly he was back in Manchester, a short time after midnight on Christmas Eve. Frank shivered, but not from the cold.
‘How did you … ?’ Frank turned to look at Anthony, but he wasn’t beside him any more. He turned his head in time to see Anthony striding away, vanishing into a swirling, whirling wall of snow. Slowly Anthony faded from view, and Frank wasn’t sure if he had ever really been there.
3
A CIRCLE OF COBRAS
The wall was high but someone had dumped an old suitcase in the alleyway and Goose was able to position it in such a way that he could stand on it, though it smelled like a family of stray cats had been squatting in it until recently and Goose didn’t want to find out what was inside. If he reached up as high as he could, there was still a gap of the best part of half a metre, but he was an athletic kid. He jumped and was able to snag his fingertips on the lip of the wall. Fortunately, no glass or other defences were embedded in the top and he was able to pull himself up, his feet scraping against the brickwork, the edges of his Converse finding a little purchase here and there where the dusty mortar had worn away over time.
His dog, now no longer a puppy, sat obediently below, watching his master scaling the wall. He was called Mutt. He was sleek, white and brown, and had big, expressive eyes that missed nothing. He glanced quickly left and right as if he was keeping lookout.
Goose peered over the top into the dark garden beyond. The light of the moon reflected off the snow that was lying all around and still falling. The garden was small, like all the backyards in this part of Manchester, but unlike most of them this one was lovingly maintained, with narrow pathways that traversed bushes and rockeries from which unusual statues looked out. The statues were of Hindu gods but Goose didn’t know that. There were areas of lawn and gravel separated by small evergreen border hedges. He could see strings of dormant fairy lights were strung around the whole garden.
His breath clouded as he exhaled, sitting on top of the wall. He looked different. Older than the year that had passed since the crash. His wild, all-over-the-place hair was long gone. In its place was a military-style buzz cut. He had lost weight from his face and he looked sullen. He still had huge green eyes, but there was no joy behind them any more. He had nothing to be joyful about. A near-permanent frown pushed his thick eyebrows closer together.
He could see into the neighbouring yards on both sides. A large, circular trampoline dominated the one on his left. The safety net around the trampoline was tatty and torn. The ground was littered with junk. The yard on the right was decked and there was a two-storey playhouse in one corner. Clearly children lived in both of these houses. Goose looked up at the house to his right: three windows on the first floor. He imagined one of the children waking from a bad dream and crying out, the father jumping out of bed and hurrying across the hallway, kneeling down and stroking his son’s brow, pushing the hair out of his eyes and telling him to go back to sleep because everything was all right.
Goose felt weight in the pit of his stomach, as if a jagged ball of stone was expanding within him, pulling him down. He knew, for the rest of his life, there would never be anyone to comfort him like that. He tried to convince himself that he didn’t need it, but the lie didn’t fool him for a second. All he could do was choose not to dwell on it. Mutt yapped once, breaking Goose’s train of thought and pulling him out of his brooding. The stone ball contracted once again, but it would be back sooner or later.
‘Sorry, Mutt,’ whispered Goose.
He looked down and could see a bench in the garden beneath him. He pushed himself off the wall and landed in an empty flower bed. The snow crunched under his feet. Crouching down, Goose observed the house. Th
ere was no movement or sign of life. He moved swiftly across the yard to a pair of French windows and retrieved a small torch from his jacket pocket. He switched it on and shone it through the glass.
He was looking into a living room. The beam from the torch landed on a chunky, antiquated television set and a stereo. Neither was worth very much, if anything, and Goose rarely stole bulky items like that. Too heavy to carry, too hard to conceal if stopped by the coppers.
Goose was close to deciding to call it a night when the beam from his torch hit something that glinted. He stopped and moved back slowly. As the beam crossed the arm of an old worn leather chair, there was another glint of light. Goose squinted and saw a gold bangle sitting there.
Goose heard Mutt bark softly once again from the other side of the wall. He pulled an old Swiss Army knife that had once belonged to his dad out of his pocket and forced the blade into a gap by the lock. One quick, much-practised flick of his wrist and the door opened. It always shocked Goose just how easy it was to break into most houses. He opened the door and stepped inside.
The house smelled a little musty. Someone elderly lived here. For a split second Goose thought about his nan at home alone right now. He quickly pushed those thoughts out of his head and concentrated on the job at hand.
He crossed to the armchair and directed the beam of his torch on to the bangle. He picked it up and examined it in the light. It was beautiful. It was gold. Old gold. Goose could tell the difference. There was weight to it. The bangle was in the shape of two cobras in a circle, each biting the other’s tail. The detail was exquisite. Every scale on the snakes’ skin had been individually outlined and the torchlight surged through the minute fissures like flowing lava.
