by David Wood
I let the tune dance in my mind before I started to play, hoping Aimee and Van Morrison would forgive me the wrong notes and faltering voice as I changed the song from Brown to Blue Eyed Girl.
She joined me for the sha-la-la's and the la-te-da's, her voice honey next to mine. Jonesy danced in her lap, both of us thinking about making love in the green grass as the sun went down.
I let my fingers play the gentle opening of Dancing On The Edge Of A Broken Heart. It was the first real song I ever wrote. I had just turned fifteen and was in love with the idea of being in love. I originally wrote it for a girl called Rachel, a girl forever entwined with the aromas of wet grass. She moved on to some other easy come easy go love and never got to hear it. Her loss. I have played it a few times since, fiddling around with differentarrangements mostly, but it's not one of the songs I have tried too hard with. The lyrics are still a bit on the cheesy side. A lot of the personal stuff no one else gets to hear.I like it that way.
I didn't think Rachel would mind me playing it for someone else, after all her claim on it had slid away a long time ago.
'It's not finished,' I apologised, my fingers toying with a refrain from the second chorus. It sounded clumsy. Definitely needed work.
'It's perfect,' Aimee contradicted, tears in her eyes.
I lied then, a little white one, but it made the moment into a perfect moment, and all I wanted was to make her happy. To heal the rifts that kept her muscles tense when we lay next to each other. 'I wrote it for you.'
Two
Chaz had left a message for me to meet him on the embankment, urgently. No time, just that he would be waiting.
I put the phone down on Ciaran and grabbed my coat off the chair. What could be so urgent? Nothing good, I reasoned, hurrying myself. Aimee was in the kitchen making bacon and scrambled egg for a late breakfast. I could smell the cholesterol thirty feet away.
I didn't say good-bye.
Three
It was ten days since we had parted at the Greek burger bar on High Bridge Street. Ten days on the streets, living hard. A lot can happen in ten days. However little I knew, Chaz's face swore testimony to that single fact. A lot can happen.
He sat with his back to the wailing wall, his eyes turned out across the Tyne. He was watching a display of naked savagery between gulls, one stealing food from the mouth of another. Fighting and squalling. I wondered if he saw the irony in the frenzied war dance. Bitter as it was, I did.
I settled down beside him. 'You okay?'
'Do I look okay?' he said, simply. He sounded close to exhaustion. I couldn't begin to imagine what he had been through. We had stuff we needed to talk about. I wanted him to tell me. To answer his question, he didn't look good. The thirteen year old boy beyond the surface of grime and torn clothes looked haggard. Beaten. But that wasn't all that was wrong. He looked deeply frightened. Fidgety. He had lost weight and his eyes had developed these ugly yellow cataracts that weren't really cataracts but some sort of glaze that left them jaded. There was bruising around his jaded eyes and loose flaps of slowly healing razor-pared skin within the bruising. Three in the soft flesh beneath each eye. If I closed my eyes I could see the Oz Parasite with his razor-embedded thumbs. It took no great intuitive leap to tie the two together. His left ear bore teeth marks that had gone septic where someone had tried to bite it off. 'Do me a favour and don't answer that,' he said, seeing my slow appraisal. His watch was gone and there was no sign of his rucksack.
'You want to tell me what's been happening?'
I could sense his discomfort. His eyes kept darting, roving, across the embankment, the length of the river, across the rooftops of the Quayside warehouses, to the Baltic Flour Mill and the Ovaline Petroleum Stores, never settling in one place or on one object for long.
'I found a squat in the West End, with a couple of dossers, Mac and Dutch, and this kid called Stevie – he's another runaway, couple of years younger than me. It wasn't much. A garage beneath the Railway Arches, really. A couple of mattresses and army of wood lice that shared the scraps Mac and Dutch scavenged. You could hear the trains rattling by every five or six minutes. It sounded like thunder. I kept thinking the ceiling was going to collapse every time a train went over the top. Still, Mac and Dutch took me in after I left you. Said they'd show me the ropes, make it easier for me to get by.'
'Did they?' I pressed, torn between concern and a need to know, Mac and Dutch a door to another world. A world that I desperately wanted to become a part of. One I needed to become a part of if I was going to be able to help Malachi and his kind.
'You could say that. They showed me the bins they got their food from. Showed me the shops with the cheapest booze, showed me how to bum a fag and, get this, they explained how even the fucking begging is organized in this place. There's these factions in the city – it used to be every bugger for himself until this one bloke came along. He calls himself Crohak, though most people call him The Bird Man, 'coz he paints these pictures of birds to mark his territory.' I nodded to show that I had an idea what he meant. 'The deadbeats are gathering like flies on a turd,’ he went on, ‘trying to get close to him. He controls maybe half of the streets, vets new arrivals – if he likes them he assigns patches for them to work, makes sure they have a blag that's all their own, sympathy trips, that sort of shit, makes sure they don't get turned over and gives them a place to stay in The Rookery.'
'The Rookery?' I interrupted, sure the name should mean something to me. It didn't.
'It's a warehouse on the Quayside, absolutely massive it is, six storeys high, each one bigger than a couple of football pitches end to end, and a basement that goes way beneath the river.'
'I'm with you,' I said, picturing the old bonded warehouses that lined the banks of the Tyne. We could see some of the tarred roofs from where we sat.
'Mac and Dutch took me back to the squat and told me get some shut eye before they presented me to Crohak. I couldn't say I fancied the idea much, but I didn't see what alternative I had.’ He shrugged. ‘If I tried to make my own way without Crohak's go ahead Mac and Dutch promised me a watery grave. Nice guys. Said Crohak had taken over and anyone who wasn’t on his side was on a limited life expectancy. Stevie told me to run. Mac kicked the shit out of the kid for that. It's like he was schizophrenic, nice as your favourite grannie one minute, off his box the next. I kept quiet and tried to get some sleep while Stevie cried his eyes out in the corner of the garage. I didn't see how I could help him and stay on Mac and Dutch's good side, so I left him be. It was hard, mind, not doing nothing. Hard to fall asleep.
'And the thieving bastards stole from me while I was out. Took my money, my watch, the chain from around my neck, everything in my sack they thought they could get cash for. The only reason they didn't get the twenty with your number on was because I stashed it in the collar of my cap and kept it on my head while I kipped. When I came to they were sharing a fresh bottle of whiskey my stuff had paid for. Stevie was huddled in the corner, a complete wreck and I felt like total shit.
'Mac and Dutch gave me ten minutes to get my act together while they downed the whiskey, then they dragged me to meet this Crohak, not caring who saw two tramps dragging a kid through the streets. They took me down to The Rookery and presented me like I was some fucking gift they were offering to their god. I was kicking and screaming because I could see what the bastard was doing to another kid the dossers had dragged in. He drove metal spikes into the kid's kneecaps so he couldn't walk and had him dumped in a corner. To think about everything else he had to lose, the bastard said, like he was preening. Then he turned on me. Mac came over all humble and said where they had found me, and how they had helped me. Dutch backed him up with occasional nods of: "Yeah, yeah. . ." when the alcohol allowed.
'Crohak just looked at them, like he was humouring a couple of retards, then he turned on me. He wanted to hear my story. I told him everything up to getting on the train, kept you out of it 'coz I wasn't sure. He was like a judge decidin
g whether I was worthy to join his troupe. If I failed I imagined I would be joining the kid in the corner with spikes through my knees. Fear must have made my story all the more convincing because he welcomed me with open arms. Said he could always use a man with my particularly fiery talents.'
'Jesus. . .'
'That's not the half of it. He's had me starting fires every night – more than one a night some nights. The first day it was mainly dustbins and threats, more inconvenience than danger, but then he had me torch a couple of cars in the underground car park behind The Swallow, some derelict houses on the estates up in the West End, Rye Hill and Arthur’s Hill, and an old department store down by the Central Station. The buildings were all empty, but I don't think he cared. Every time I argued, one of his stooges cut me.' Chaz traced the outline of the razor wounds. 'Gentle persuasion, he called it, so I wouldn't forget what happened to the kid with metal spikes instead of kneecaps.
'Everything this Crohak does is vindictive. Scares the shit out of me. It's like he's trying to bring the place down stone by stone and he won't be happy until it's so much rubble at his stinking feet. And he knows things, man. Things there should be no way of him knowing. . .
'He's got other kids he sends around with spray cans and shit that he supplies, makes them draw murals and stuff on the walls. Nothing pretty though. Big black birds and crazy slogans, anti-this and anti-that stuff that's deliberately provocative.'
'I've seen the kind of stuff. I always thought it was misguided kids trying to be clever,' I said, a thought bobbing evasively just out of reach. I tried to snag it, but it drifted away. I knew better than to chase it; the harder I thought about it the more elusive it would become, so I let it go. It would come back in its own time. 'I can't leave you in the middle of this. . . Look, maybe it’s best if you went home.'
'I can't go home,' Chaz said, leaving little room for argument. I knew enough of what going home meant to him to know there was no going home, but I didn't see a hell of a lot of options on the table and I was still stubborn enough to hate any kind of defeat.
'Somewhere else then?' I said, clutching at straws.
'What makes you think it'll be different anywhere else? Right now I've got a roof over my head and the landlord doesn't hassle me for rent, okay? We got stuff to talk about.'
'It's your call, kiddo,' I said, grudgingly admitting it was out of my hands. 'Talk to me.'
Four
He knows who you are. . .
He knows where you live. . .
Chaz's last words before we parted echoed emptily within the confines of my skull. Sickness, as cold and bitter as any pill, washed over me while, inside, venoms targeted on my tender places. Dark thoughts cluttered my mind, vulgar fragments of Chaz's warning spinning round and around and around, words piecing themselves together in a jigsaw of fear. I wanted to scream but I couldn't get a sound passed the tightness in my throat. Chaz had put the fear of God Crohak into me. I didn't want to believe him, but what choice did I have?
No way to calm myself with his words ringing in my ears.
He knows who you are. . .
He knows where you live. . .
He knows where you live. . .
Aimee was at home, alone. I couldn't shake the thought of her being alone in there. The bastard had wormed his way into my life, maybe even into my home now. And what the hell could I do?
Please God, let me get to her before he does. . .
That was all I wanted, to get to her first.
To have a chance.
Heart racing, I ran up the dark alley and hurdled the rusted iron railing that separated the traffic from the footpath, not caring if the black cab bearing down on me had the time it needed to stop. I hit the road at a run and kept on running. Car horns blared in my wake. I didn't care. My eyes and path were fixed.
Quickly the Central Station was looming above me like some grimy gargoyle, locked up and forgotten in daylight, drowned in pigeons. Hundreds of pigeons. Their clamour was unbearable. They were everywhere, in every nook, in every cranny. As I charged on, I heard them talking to me, in one of those seconds of unreality: Look at him go. . . Look at him run. . . Too late. . . Too late. . . Look at him go. . . Look at him run. . . Look at him. . . Ain't gonna make it. . .
I skidded around the next corner onto Westgate Road and into the TheatreVillage itself and stopped dead in my tracks, heart hammering. There, ringing the perimeter of our block, was a legion of tramps, all overcoats and tousled hair, whiskers and dirt. Their vigil was eerily silent. I forced myself into motion, my legs a curious mix of lead and jelly, if that makes any sense. I expected them to stop me, but they didn't. Their filthy bodies parted like the Red Sea to let me through their number. My pulse was beating a tattoo in my temple. My heart in my throat. The rank mix of stenches dizzying. Fumbling with the security key, I forced the gate open, trying not to think about what the legion of tramps meant.
Aimee. Her named popped inside my head. I forced myself not to think. The intercom had been broken by a screwdriver, the blade of which jutted out of the mangled panel. No way to call up.
The parking lot was a blur of car shapes.
Somehow, sweat running down my face, I made it into the foyer.
I didn't want to go up. I didn't want to see what Crohak had done to my Blue Eyed Girl.
Five
The air cloyed with that sickly sweet smell of his, smoking hickory wood. Oh, God, please no, please. . .
I pushed open the door to our new flat, sickly certain. The smell was stronger inside than out. Leaving the door open, I collapsed against the frame. I knew the name of that smell now; it was the smell of being too late; it was the smell of heartache; loss.
Feathers and blood.
They were my first impressions. A crazy Pollockesque splatter-montage. Part of me had been expecting carnage, I realised as the tension fled my body, to find pieces of Aimee littered around the huge room, the devastation complete. But it wasn't like that. There was no sign of Aimee that I could see, but Crohak had been here. I was left in no doubt about that, he had been here. Touched our things. Violated our home. That second, all I could feel was that I had been raped. The feeling was that fundamental. The implicit threat: If I can do this once. . .Every flat surface in the room was glazed by a patina of a thousand feathers; dull greys and whites, some splattered with a wash of red that seemed too dark to be blood. He had smeared shit across the icy face of my Hugh Syme picture. The invasion was made all the more horrific by the coldness of the threat. The knowledge of what it meant. That he had been here was bad, but much worse, was that — seemingly — he could come back whenever he wanted.
I remembered the few words he had for me in the hospital: Are you afraid? Yes, yes. . . I can taste it. . .
Understanding, true understanding, of fear stole through me like a gypsy's wanton curse. Nauseous acrobats turned gambolling loops inside my gut. I was afraid. I knelt, taking the feathers between my cold, cold fingers. They felt brittle. I raised them to my flaring nostrils and smelt it, that smell; smoking hickory wood, haunting me.
Faint light seeped under the bathroom door.
The flat was utterly silent, the feathers deadening any vibration that might have been noise. I couldn't make myself cross the threshold. I looked up at the ceiling instead of moving, my mouth opening as my neck arced back, and I loosed an anguished cry embittered by my frustration and my own incapacity. I punched the wall beside the door frame hard enough to leave a hole gaping through the plasterboard where my fist had been. It hurt, but the pain did me good, brought me back to myself. Tears stinging my eyes, I went through to discover just how brief our mortal flirtation with paradise really was.
Six
My scream rent the deep, dirty silence that smothered the soft-edged flat. Desperate, terrible and long, long, long. The scream of a man finally thrust face to face with everything he has ever dreaded.
Aimee was in the bathroom, naked, her broken arm hanging over the lip of the tub
. The soft, discoloured flesh was scored with deep-flapped lacerations that could only have been made with a razorblade. Her smooth skin was scolded, laced with a rash of pinkish weals and welts, burned from head to toe and left to soak in the bloodied water of the bathtub. But that wasn't the worst of it. Her body was open, rent with a legion of evil slashes where the Parasite's razor had wrought its vile torture. One breast was carved away, sliced clean through. . .
Her head was tilted back, forehead mashed into the black ceramic tiles where the bath met the wall beneath the tap heads. . . Some sort of grim parody of Jesus in declination. . . The skin from her forehead down, across her brow and the plane of her cheeks had been peeled away like a mask. . .Stealing her beauty as if the look of horror, anger, pain, sorrow, fear and that last and worst of all, betrayal, in her eyes was not enough to haunt me they had to take her face from me. Rob me of it all.
What was one more scream in this vile city? I thought, falling to my knees. I touched her cold cold skin and felt nothing. Too suddenly she was wrenched away from me. Her face, the smiles and the frowns that were uniquely hers, the twitch of her lip, the slight dimple, gone. I was ripped inside. I reached into the bathtub not knowing what the hell I was doing. Hooked my hands under Aimee's dead armpits and heaved, trying to get her out of her enamel coffin, some crazy idea in my mind that if I could get her out of there I could bring her back.
Tears were streaming from my eyes but nothing came out of my mouth. All I could think of was that first night we kissed, and that we would never kiss again. No matter what I did, how I changed, how I tried, we would never touch like lovers. Desolation tasted bitter like salt on my tongue.
Death made her heavier than I ever could have imagined; it took everything I had to heave her into a kind of sitting position, her blood soaking into my clothes. Tears stung my eyes; made it harder to look at her. I shifted my hold, one arm snaking beneath her arm and around her cold cold back, the other beneath her legs to make a cradle to rock her. 'But I love you,' I screamed as I lifted her; what should have been our future together pouring out of me in that one desperate sound.
