Freddy dropped them off opposite a bar with a neon sign depicting a man drinking endlessly from an unlabelled bottle of hootch, his eyes turned into plus signs. The bar was called Cunted? You Will Be.
“I could come and pick you up later. Literally!” Freddy offered.
Sex alleys away from the main drag were rotting rat-runs filled with booths where the depraved could let loose the desires that convention and legality had forced to be hidden in life. Any permutation of animal and human was available, whether it moved around on the hoof, paw, webbed foot, or flipper. An old man whose mouth was a blood bath filled with dental equipment was standing on the doorstep of one of these cess-pools, stroking his chin while a bouncer challenged him to come up with something new that he couldn’t show him inside.
Gargling slightly, the dentist’s victim said: “Shaved cat used as a dildo on a superfat woman while a black guy, who’s being sucked off by a birthing goat, slams her tits repeatedly in the passenger door of a Peugeot 206.”
“I’ll get back to you on that one,” the bouncer said.
“Christ,” Will said. “Let’s get a drink.”
Inside Cunted? barstaff were trying to clear up the aftermath of a small war. Tables and chairs had been overturned. People were hitting each other with the abandon that comes with the knowledge that it won’t make a single bit of difference. Will and Joanna found a place at the bar; a bartender slid a couple of cocktail menus their way.
“I’ll have an Eggy Chin,” Will said, picking a drink at random.
Joanna said, “Piss on Your Chips.” The bartender went about magicking the drinks from the bevvy of shakers and bottles beneath his bar.
The entertainment, as far as Will could discern any beyond the brawl that was gradually being brought to an end, consisted of topless dancers on a stage going through a number of tired routines. Weary of the constant music, Will studied their injuries, which seemed to be fairly tame, apart from in the case of one lithe blonde who was gamely trying to dance with the branch of a tree rammed through her chest.
“Have you seen any more people like the ones you left behind at Gloat Market?” Joanna asked.
“Not yet, and I hope I don’t. That was too creepy. It was like looking at a series of really old photographs of your family and seeing your own eyes replicated in a person from each one.”
Jolted into remembering what he had seen in the mirror after his experiences with George and Alice, Will fingered his lower arm and his shoulder. Both areas felt sore and much too soft for his liking. Their drinks came. Will’s was some kind of hellish nog and spirits brew, while Joanna’s looked as if it had been drawn from a dodgy tap in the toilets.
Will excused himself and made for the gents, promising to come back quickly. He slalomed around the dregs of the fight, easily dodging punches thrown by the bloodied sacks staggering into each other, and pushed his way through a door bearing a medical diagram of a cross-section of the male generative organs. Bodies were piled up in the urinals, sleeping off the violence and the vodka. In the single cubicle, slumped on the seat, a man was trying to have sex with a woman who was fading from this place. Will watched, horrified, as he saw how it happened. How it would be for Joanna if her husband carried through his promise. The man didn’t seem to notice as he thuggishly, drunkenly lunged his hips into an area that was greying out, failing, rippling to nothing in his hands. Will caught a glimpse of skeleton, little more than a dim X-ray suggestion, and then the man was alone, reality slowly dawning on a face made imbecilic with booze.
Will averted his eyes, remembering what he had come here for. He unbuttoned his shirt and gingerly tugged back the two halves, almost swooning when he saw the spread of decay. His flesh resembled bacon that had been retrieved from the back of a fridge many, many days after it should have been consumed. It glittered and flashed iridescently. The patch on his shoulder had reached over to his chest and was consuming the pectoral on the left side. His right arm was completely infected, to a point just above his wrist. But for all that, he felt fine. As fine as it was possible to be, in the middle of a fever dream shared by all the poor bastards who were walking the tightrope between life and death.
The woman from the cubicle lodged in his thoughts. How her face had aged and crumbled as she fled towards death. The rictus of her mouth leered behind Will’s eyes. This was how Cat had gone. And the others, no doubt. He remembered his grandfather dying. It had been a dignified death, the doctors had said, something Will’s father had repeated whenever the subject came up. A dignified death. Did any such thing exist? After witnessing this, Will doubted it. Death was a down and dirty affair. You could wear a freshly pressed suit and your nicest tie as you prepared for the end, but your bowels didn’t give a fig for that when it came. A death during sleep, in a comfortable bed with the family holding hands around you, was the best way, he had thought. But someone would have to wipe the sputum from your face as the death rattle took hold of you. Someone would have to take the shitty sheets and burn them after you were carried out in a box or a bag. Death wasn’t dignified. Ever. It wore a joker’s costume and slipped a whoopee cushion under your backside as you relaxed into it. It shoved an exploding cigar in your mouth as you struggled for those memorable last words.
Will washed his face as best he could with the foul water in the basins and dried himself on the sleeves of his shirt. The light in here wasn’t the best kind, hardly flattering, but he knew he would never be able to look at himself again without being able to see that grinning loon pressed against the flesh, trying to break free. The harlequin, the skull beneath the skin.
“HAVE ONE OF these,” Joanna said, reeling against him as he fought his way back to the bar. “They’re really very good.”
Will sipped some of her cocktail and ordered a fresh one from the bartender.
“He must be wondering how he got the raw deal when it came to coma existence,” Joanna whispered, drunkenly. “I asked him his name. ‘Emperor Hirohito’, he says. I like that. I like that you can be whoever you want to be here. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be Ava Gardner, I think.”
A congenial buzz was spreading around the cavernous bar. People were righting seats and using them to sit on for a change. The glazed dancers scurried off the stage as a big band blare stormed from the speakers. A small man with oiled hair came onto the stage holding a wireless microphone with a huge blue muffler at the end, his red, velvet suit garnering a chorus of wolf whistles from the audience. Through squeals of feedback, his voice came at them in crescendos of sleaze. Will found himself wiping his palms on his jeans for the duration.
“Laze ’n’ gennermal. Thanoo, thanoo verr mudge. I’ve been Brad Pitt and you’ve been a wunnerful aujence. Abzlootlwunnerful.” The mic never left his lips. He strutted prissily around the stage, peering into the audience like a long-sighted passenger trying to read the number on a bus. “We’ve got a big, big treat for all you lovely, lovely folks now. All the way from wherever you want her to be, the delectable, the adorable, the you’ll wanna take her home in your pocketable, the one, the only, SiiiiiiiGOUrrrrrney WEAverrrrrrrrr!”
The MC backed off into the wings, his arm outstretched. From the other side of the stage, struggling with her balance thanks to the embryo that was hanging in a sac from her waist, Sadie emerged.
Will watched, spellbound, as she prowled around the stage in a slashed, tight black dress, filleted to allow the watery sac and its hideous progeny to depend comfortably from her abdomen. The foetus within turned slowly in the fluid, its ill-formed face and hands bumping against the membrane, dimpling it. Sadie sang a seductress’s song, baring plenty of flesh, pouting and winking at the shadowed heads dusted with a corona of soft, violet light at the front tables. She swung the umbilical cord that joined her to her baby as if it were a microphone cord. She bumped her hips against it provocatively. When the song ended she bowed and motioned to the bouncers at the back of the bar. Will saw them close the doors from outside and heard the heavy clunk of lo
cks being slid into the place. He eyed the bartenders nervously. They were backing out of the bar and closing doors behind them. Joanna had passed out, her head resting against the chrome handrail.
Sadie walked to the edge of the stage and put her foot up against the highlight deck. Calmly, in the same velvety voice in which she had sung the song, she said: “Every man jack of you get on your knees now and worship your queen.” She whispered, “I want satisfaction. I want a show of loyalty. I want a sacrifice. And I want it now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: KEV
THE ALLOTMENTS ON Longshaw Street were a sad sight in late winter. Some of the rows had not been raked over since the cold snap; the dregs of last year’s crops lay like severed tongues on the soil, withered and brown amid the frigid lines of white. Some hardy vegetables were clinging on: sprouts, chard, leeks, but the majority had given up to the hard frost that had attacked the town in recent weeks.
Most of the plots were in some kind of disarray, except for one. Sean and Emma trudged along the tamped soil pathways towards it. A brief smell of peppery soup laced the chill afternoon air. To the west, over the dead airbase at Burtonwood, the sun was being teased into bloody ribbons by a thin raft of cloud. An upturned wheelbarrow rested against a compost heap enclosed by discoloured sheets of corrugated metal; off-cuts of carpet prevented the rotting matter from drying out. An old plastic bath was being used for water storage. Old window frames, complete with their thin glass squares, were a pauper’s greenhouse making the best of whatever sunshine was available. Halved plastic bottles improvised as cloches. Rolls of chicken wire and endless lengths of cane leaned against scruffy old sheds.
Restive eyes glared out from these retreats. The coals of cigarettes showed when the gloom within proved too great. Wirelesses played bland music or muttered dully. A man in a deckchair with deeply pitted, leathery skin sipped tea from a flask and turned the pages of a newspaper, refusing to acknowledge Sean and Emma as they walked by him. Somebody was leaning into a distant bonfire, feeding it with sticks and paper. Its smoke drifted across the allotments, making them insubstantial, enhancing their wasted appearance. It was hard to believe that this no-man’s land, this demilitarised zone, could cultivate anything so fancy as life. A slumped scarecrow stood sentinel, watching over a strip of ground choked with weed.
Plot number twenty-seven was a tidy strip of land tucked into the centre of the allotments, an exception to the utilitarian rule. The soil here had been cared for; it had been raked over and sieved for stones. Trimmed lengths from black binbags had been weighed down with bricks to protect something growing in one corner. A metal box contained non-biodegradable waste: packaging for organic slug pellets, tomato fertiliser, discarded seed trays, emptied cartons of Murphy’s tumble bug.
The shed was brightly painted and its window possessed a pair of curtains. A weathervane in the shape of a chicken rotated slowly on the roof. From within came a cough, a painful, damaged sound.
Sean called out. “Kev?” The name was brittle in the cold, a non-name, a pointless sound. Nevertheless, it drew a figure from the shed. Clad in a heavy blue greatcoat, a man of around sixty emerged, the bottom half of his cadaverous face swathed in a thick, bottle-green scarf. He looked at Sean first, then Emma, before casting a look further afield, at the allotment that was deserted but for the refugees from fracturing, loveless homes. The eyes came back to them, shadowed and hangdog.
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice little more than a shifting of tortured air over dead or mangled vocal cords.
“I’m Sean Redman. This is Emma Lavery. Are you Kev?”
“Yes.”
Sean stepped a little closer. “It’s just that I was expecting someone younger.”
Kev allowed himself a dry little chuckle. “I was younger,” he said.
Sean said, “We wondered if we could talk to you.”
“About?”
Sean was about to answer when Emma stepped in front of him. “Is that a bird’s nest up there, mister...?”
“Blackbird,” Kev rasped.
“Mister Blackbird?”
Sean thought he saw a slight crinkling of the other man’s eyes, but if there was any humour there, it wasn’t reflected in his voice. “Mister Lovesey,” he corrected, briskly. “That is a blackbird’s nest.”
“I see,” Emma said. “Sorry.”
“No need to apologise. Now, what is it you want? How did you know I was Kev?”
“A friend of yours told me about you. Guy called Preece. Nicky Preece.”
“Nicky. Oh yes?” None of the suspicion was leaving his words, or his posture. He hovered at the doorway to the shed, cupping a plantpot in his hands. “What else did he tell you?”
“He told me how you used to work for Vernon Lord.”
The mention of the name made Kev step back into the shadow of the shed door, which obscured Sean’s view of him. “Oh? What of it?”
Emma touched Sean’s arm. “Mr. Lovesey, can we buy you breakfast? We understand you’re a bit of a connoisseur of English breakfasts.”
Kev moved out of the shadow of the door once more. He appeared even more pale and diminished. “It’s nice of you to offer, but I don’t eat much these days. No doubt you know why.” He moved the scarf around his neck, so that it sat more comfortably. “You’d better come in,” he said, “seeing as you’ve come all this way to talk to me.”
Sean and Emma stepped over the corrugated iron fence into the well-manicured plot. They followed Kev into the shed, which was frugally furnished: a wooden stool, a fold-away table, a camping stove. The remains of a game of patience were spread out on the table. Garden tools made a homely jumble in the corner, a fresh, edaphic aroma rising off them. A sleeping bag was tightly rolled up and stored on a shelf over the door. A broken shotgun hung from a large hook beneath the window. A box of shells sat on the sill, open, ready.
“Sorry I don’t have more chairs,” Kev said, in a voice that was anything but. “The floor’s clean though, if you want to park yourselves.”
Kev went on with his game of cards. At close quarters, they could hear the wheeze of air in his throat as he took breaths.
Emma said, “How come you don’t have a scarecrow, Mr. Lovesey? Aren’t you worried the birds will take your crops?”
“None of us here has a scarecrow. Bloody worthless things. And it’s not crop-sowing time anyway. Nothing to take.”
“But there’s a scarecrow out there. Someone’s stealing a march on you.”
Kev grunted and shook his head. “No scarecrows here.”
Emma stepped outside and pointed. As soon as her arm was outstretched, she dropped it. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sure I saw one in that plot over there.”
“Nicky was fond of you,” Sean said, giving Emma an irritated look. “I think all of the lads were.”
“How do you know ’em?”
Sean spoke of the softstripping contract and the time he had spent with the crew. He stopped short of divulging that his relationship with the others had ceased, that any friends he had made during his time there were enemies now.
“And Lord?” Kev asked, his hands now still on the deck of cards.
“I went with Vernon on a few jobs,” Sean explained.
“A few jobs,” Kev said, and this time his blasted voice managed to carry a trace of sarcasm.
“You know what I’m here for,” Sean said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“People are dying. You were nearly killed for what’s going on.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Sean persisted. “It’s still happening, what Vernon is doing. He’s still collecting. Sometimes he takes... sometimes it’s unborn babies. Did you know that?”
Now Kev swivelled on the stool. His eyes were raw and flat: oysters on the half-shell. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“He needs to be stopped. I think he killed a girl I used to know. Or someone working with him did. I want you to help m
e.”
“How?”
“You know all about him. You’ll have seen things. You know his weaknesses.”
Kev shook his head. “It isn’t Vernon you should be worried about.”
“Oh really?”
“Why don’t you just leave me alone? I don’t want to get back into that nonsense. I’ve got too much to do.”
Sean hitched around on his seat to get a view of the allotment. “Yeah. You’ve got a hole in your wheelbarrow needs mending and a rake to clean.”
“It suits me,” Kev said, quickly.
“I heard you were a good guy for Vernon. He rated you, I heard.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care any more.”
“I heard you were loyal and wouldn’t ever lie down for anyone. Hundred per center. Hundred and ten per center.” Sean leaned over and picked at the dried mud on a trowel. “Will you at least tell me what you know? And tell me why you bailed out? It wasn’t the gunshot wound, was it? At least tell us what happened with that.”
Kev sat across from him, staring at the younger man while Emma stood by the doorway, looking out at the pockets of mist in the rowans and the hawthorn. Chickens in a coop squabbled among themselves for a few seconds. The smell of the bonfire drifted through the open door. Kev’s stony face broke open to reveal a smile.
“Have a drink,” he said, pulling open a drawer and removing a half-bottle of whisky. “A nip, to keep out the cold.”
He poured three measures into three mugs and passed them around. They took sips. They nodded at the agreeable flavour, the migration of warmth through their bodies. A robin landed six feet away from the door and eyed them coolly.
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