The Concrete Grove

by Gary McMahon

  This was the sound he heard now, on the other end of the line. It drew closer and closer, getting louder and louder, until all he could think of was those friends and the long bike rides they enjoyed. It was like a calling – an echo from summers now long dead – and part of him wanted to answer. He listened to the clicking noise, allowing it to reach inside him and grasp his heart, but once it had him he began to doubt its authenticity. It seemed false, faked: a sound fabricated to lure him elsewhere.

  He thought of Helen lying in bed, her face blue, vomit on her chin. He thought of punching her saggy sea cow face until the bones broke and the flesh tore beneath his knuckles. The clicking sound seemed to encourage these thoughts, to embellish them and make them even more vivid in his mind.

  “No,” he said, pulling the phone away from his ear. “This isn’t right.”

  As if on cue, the clicking sound began to fade, leaving him behind. Part of him wanted to follow it, to get on his bike and pedal after the sound through summer lanes and across sunlit fields. But the part of him that mattered – the strong part, the undefeated fragment of his humanity – held back.

  The clicking sound diminished, absorbed into the digital static, the black-hiss voices undulating through the ether. For a moment he could have sworn that he heard a snatch of laughter, followed by the mumbled word “Soon.”

  Tom put down the phone and grabbed his coat from the hanger at the bottom of the stairs. Still barefoot, he took his keys from the pocket and unlocked the door. Stepping out into the cool night air, he took a breath and allowed his legs to carry him to the car. He reversed out of the drive, spun the car in the road, and set off to the place he had been thinking about all day.

  He drove to the Concrete Grove.

  Passing through Far Grove, he saw a police car parked outside an all-night kebab shop. One uniformed officer was holding a young man across the counter, cuffing his wrists, while his partner radioed a report in to the station. The boy’s eyes locked onto Tom’s as he drove by; the boy smiled at him, and went limp.

  The waste ground adjacent Far Grove Way was burning. Someone had set light to a sofa, and black smoke and yellow sparks rose from it like ugly phantoms, dissipating into the black night sky. Tom slowed down as he passed the blaze, staring at it through the side window. There was nobody around. The fire continued as if the fuel had been laid out and ignited for his eyes alone.

  A fox crossed the road as he put his foot down on the accelerator, its eyes blazing red as they caught the light from his headlamps. It was an example of his mental instability that he thought the fox, too, was smiling – just like the boy in the kebab shop. He felt like everything was turning its gaze towards him, waiting to see what he would do, how he would respond to this situation. The area, and everything within it, was ripe with expectancy.

  Paranoia, he thought. I’m fucking paranoid. It was a feeling he knew all too well.

  He cruised along Grove End, past the terraced houses on one side and the primary school on the other. He stared between the school railings, hoping that he would not catch sight of that strange human-faced dog. He knew the beast was a fantasy, a fiction, yet still he was afraid of seeing it again… and part of him desired just that: a single glimpse of a thing that could not be, another look at the numinous, just to prove that there was something else beyond the life he was leading now.

  He parked the car at the end of the street, beside the mini roundabout. Sirens wailed far off, like banshees, and he heard the sound of breaking glass. A dog barked, disturbed by the sound, and he listened to its rhythmic cadence.

  He watched Lana’s window, wondering if she was in there, sleeping, or possibly out for the evening. There was no way of knowing whether or not she was home, but he felt that she was safe in her bed. More than a feeling, in fact, it was a certainty. No doubt she slept lightly, like most people who lived in troubled neighbourhoods, and all of her dreams would be bad ones.

  It came to him like a light going on inside his head: he could help her, if he liked. He could possibly even save her. He didn’t know what kind of trouble she was in, or how serious it was, but if she would only let him he could help her out of the mess.

  If he’d been asked, he couldn’t say how he knew this: he simply did. Sitting here, in the car, outside her building, he felt closer to her than he ever had to another human being – closer even than he had ever felt to his wife. He gripped the wheel with his hands and stared out through the windscreen. Then, overcome with an emotion he could not name, he lowered his head and began to weep. His hands still gripped the wheel, tighter, tighter, until his fingers ached.

  “What am I doing here?” he said, looking out at the sky, the depthless dark beyond the fine grey skins of clouds. There came no response – just as always. Even if the universe knew the answers, it was not telling. It would never willingly divulge its secrets to the likes of him.

  Tom waited there until the sun turned the sky in the east a light shade of red, like blood smeared along the blade-edge of the horizon. Then, his face still wet with tears, he started the car and set off towards home, the place where he now realised his heart had never truly belonged.

  CHAPTER NINE

  BANJO SAT IN the chair, shivering. He wasn’t cold; it was warm inside the room, despite being located underground, in a section of the huge cellar directly beneath the gym. No, it was not because of the temperature that his body was jerking and spasming repeatedly, like a series of tiny orgasms. It was because of fear.

  Banjo was tied into the wooden dining chair. His hands had been pulled back, around the back of the chair, and secured with plastic ties, like the kind some people used to keep their expensive wheel trims on their posh cars. He’d also seen police detectives in the American cop shows he loved to watch when he was stoned use similar ties to cuff prisoners, rather than using traditional steel handcuffs.

  He struggled to get his body under control, tensing his muscles and taking a deep breath – which was difficult in itself because of the PVC ball gag someone had stuffed into his mouth and belted tightly at the back of his head. On top of all the drugs he’d ingested, the situation was enough to make him think that he was finally losing his mind.

  The room was dim. There was one light – a small lamp in one corner, which stood on a low wooden table. The lamp was missing its shade, and the low wattage bulb cast a meagre illumination. Shadows crawled around the walls, grouping in the corners. When Banjo looked up, straining his neck because of the ball gag straps, it looked as if the ceiling was covered in a wet black substance. He knew his eyes were creating narcotic-phantoms, but it was a disturbing image just the same.

  The attempt to calm down was failing. Fear filled him, turning him into a repository for terrors he could not have imagined only days before. Why had he done it? There had been no real reason for his crime, and everyone knew what a bastard Monty Bright was, how he dished out his own brand of punishment to keep the Grove under his control. So why the fuck had Banjo taken the loan shark’s money?

  He remembered everything so clearly, all the little details. It had been cold, crisp, and the stars were unusually bright, like little isolated lamps across the sky. He’d had the idea weeks before, when he was smoking spliffs and dropping cheap acid with an old girlfriend. They were bemoaning the fact that they were always skint, couldn’t ever afford to do anything interesting or buy any decent drugs, and Banjo had decided right then that he needed to do something to alter the course of his life, even if it was for just a weekend.

  He thought it would be easy to pose as one of Bright’s collectors, and target some unsuspecting biddy who owed a payment on her loan. He even knew who to choose: old Mrs. Waits, from Grove Rise. Everyone knew she’d come into a bit of money, that when some distant cousin had died he had left her a few grand in his will. The old bird was so dotty she’d probably forget that he’d been to visit, and think nothing of paying twice… Alzheimer’s or something. Her memory was shot to shit.

  But thing
s hadn’t quite worked out the way he’d planned.

  Yes, he’d gone round there, wearing his long leather coat, with his game face on, and acting like some TV tough-guy, and Mrs. Waits had given him the cash – five-hundred quid, right in his hand. When he’d walked out of her house, heading for the Unicorn to enjoy a couple of pints, score some quality coke and reflect on the success of his mission, he had even felt good about things. For once in his life, Banjo had made something work. He had bettered his situation.

  Then, several days later, when the real collectors had gone round to see Mrs. Waits – the guy who always wore those leather gloves and the big fat one with a chip on his shoulder – the old bat had been able to give a good description of Banjo, and, when pressed, had even known his name. Turned out the estate gossips were wrong and she didn’t have Alzheimer’s after all. She was just old and slow, but her mind remained sharp.

  That was the fatal flaw in Banjo’s plan. He had not even realised that the woman knew him, and her supposed mental condition had made him lax. He knew who she was, of course, but as far as he knew he was unknown to her.

  As far as he knew.

  In reality, of course, it turned out that she recognised him from years ago, when he’d worked in the FastFilm video rental shop on the Arcade, his first job after leaving school. His only job after leaving school, if he was honest: working a nine-to-five had never appealed to Banjo.

  He’d considered leaving the Grove then, fleeing the area and perhaps heading south, to London. That’s what they always did in the movies – all the ones he’d watched free of charge in the back of the rental place where he’d once worked, his face bathed in the light of their reflected glory. But in those movies they always seemed to have more than five-hundred quid in their back pocket, and even if they didn’t, they always managed to pick up some additional pocket change along the way to fund their adventures.

  Again, the reality was miles away from fiction; the truth, life’s truth, was never quite as promising as the truth of VHS.

  The room was bare. The walls were covered in timber panelling, and the varnish was peeling. His mind was racing; his body was rushing from the drugs. The floor was concrete, hard and cold and uneven. The only furniture in the room, apart from the chair into which he was tied, was the coffee table with the lamp on it. There was nothing else, just two doors, facing each other from opposite walls.

  The bloke with the leather gloves – what was his name? – had given Banjo a few slaps, back and front-handed, as if he were hitting a woman. The violence had been demeaning more than painful, although the blows had stung at the time. Now all he felt was a slight hot sensation across his cheeks, which moved around as his drug-rush developed. His eyes watered. The ball gag was drying out the inside of his mouth.

  The lamp flickered. There was a slow, dragging sound from behind one of the doors. Nothing else. Just silence. Had he imagined it, or was somebody there?

  Banjo had no idea how much time had passed, or whether it was night or day. They’d come for him at around two in the morning at least a couple of days ago, kicking down the door of the squat he’d been using as a bolt-hole and a shooting gallery to use the smack he’d spent a large portion of that five-hundred quid on. They dragged him outside, where they pushed him into the back of a car. He knew where they were taking him; everybody on the Grove was aware that Bright had rooms beneath the gym on Grove Lane, and he used them not just for storage but for other, less conventional functions. Even the police had knowledge of Bright’s underground lair, but they just left him alone to go about his business. As far as they were concerned, he kept the Grove under control.

  There were rumours that he had bodies buried down here, in the foundations, under the concrete floor, even inside the walls. Banjo couldn’t be sure how much truth was in these stories, and had always doubted them, but right now, strapped into the chair, they had never seemed so real.

  The lamp flickered again. He saw colours bursting behind the sudden glare.

  Banjo closed his eyes to stop them watering. He tried to swallow but his throat was dry and his tongue felt as big as a side of beef in his mouth. His rush continued, gifting him a strange sense of ease. They’d been pumping him full of drugs – pure, uncut – since he got here. It felt like he hadn’t been clean and sober for weeks.

  Footsteps approached from the other side of the door – which door, again he couldn’t be sure.

  Somebody knocked, three times.

  That was an odd thing to do, knocking on the door, as if whoever stood out there was a visitor and Banjo were not being held captive. He waited, listened, and the knocking came again. Three times, like a charm.

  Then there was the sound of a key being inserted into the lock, moved around in the barrel; and finally the locked clicked. The door swung open without a sound. Banjo strained to turn his head and peer around at the door, to see who was coming in and hopefully appeal to their sense of pity. He flexed his hands behind him, making fists and opening them again, and tried to move his legs against the chair, maybe tip the whole thing over.

  Darkness surged towards him, clashing with the drugs in his system. He knew that he wouldn’t come down from this sweet high for hours, and somewhere at the back of his mind he realised that by then it might be too late to make a difference.

  “Be still.” The man who drifted towards him was not tall. He was broad, and his familiar face hung in the dimness like a ghostly apparition. There was nothing overtly threatening about the way he looked. Yet he was terrifying.

  “Calm down or I’ll kill you right now.”

  Banjo stopped struggling. The man’s voice – low, even, rather bland – acted like a physical restraint, even more so than the plastic ties which bound him to the chair.

  “That’s better.” He walked around to stand before Banjo, his movements slow and deliberate. He was wearing a short black bomber jacket zipped up to the throat and dark denim jeans. His black hair was slicked back against his skull with some kind of product, as if he were stuck in the 1980s or had seen the film Wall Street too many times. To Banjo, in his messed-up state, that hair looked painted on, like some kind of lacquer. It glistened like a beetle’s carapace in the dimness. Banjo wanted to laugh.

  “Now we can talk, like a couple of good old fellows. Yes?” His lips didn’t move much when he spoke: his teeth remained clenched, like those of a ventriloquist throwing his voice.

  Banjo nodded his head, kept nodding it. The drugs they’d been feeding him had taken control of his actions. He couldn’t stop even if he tried.

  “Stop that. You might hurt yourself.” Monty Bright smiled, and it was like every last bit of light in the room rushed towards his mouth, smearing against his small, white teeth.

  Banjo stopped nodding. It was strange how this man’s energy seemed to cut through even the tremors of the drugs to make Banjo do as he wished.

  “You took something from me, son. You robbed me, and that isn’t nice. I now find myself in a position – one I’ve been in many times before – where I’m forced to make an example of you.” His voice remained low. There was nothing particularly aggressive about his tone, but Banjo sensed his violence, even saw it moving snakelike behind the mask he wore. Bright didn’t waste words; everything he said had a purpose, and that purpose was usually dark.

  Banjo felt tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “Poor boy,” said Bright, taking a couple of small steps forward so that he was directly in front of his captive. “Wasting tears on this life… your life. It wasn’t much, you know. Your life. Not really. You were ejected, bloody and screaming, from your mother’s gaping cunt, and then you were raised like an animal, a sacrifice for whatever dark gods rule places like this.” He smiled again: quick, tight, like a wound opening up on his face for one brief moment. The lamplight quivered. “You fucked a few girls, smoked a few drugs, and made a few casual friends. You wasted your time at a shitty state school, learning nothing and dropping out before you’d even dr
opped in. Then you were ejected again, from a different cunt this time, to stand bloody and screaming before the jaws of society.”

  Banjo could do nothing for crying. The ball gag was making him choke; his throat ached. He was sobbing now: deep, heartfelt, half-choked muffled sobs that shook his entire body. He felt no grief; something else, an entirely unnameable emotion, stirred within his depths.

  “It’s such a fucking waste – a waste of everything, son. Do you see that?” Monty Bright bent forward. He smelled of an enclosed room after heavy rain, a dark corner where water seeps in to cause rot. “But let’s not waste these tears.” His tongue, long and rough and pointed, slid between his thin lips and he licked Banjo’s cheek, lapping up his tears like honey. This perverse and intimate act lasted only a couple of seconds, but it made such a great impact on Banjo that he felt his heart break. Here was a man – a strong, powerful man – who thought so much of Banjo’s regrets that he would feed on his tears. It should be horrendous, a concept so inhuman that it was monstrous, yet Banjo felt nothing but love.

  He loved Monty Bright like a father.

  Banjo smiled around the ball gag, tasting plastic. The drugs raced through him, changing him, making him malleable to the consciousness of this other.

  Bright nodded, reached up, and removed the gag. “Are you ready to redeem yourself, to make sure that the rest of your life isn’t wasted?” Then, producing a small knife, he cut the plastic ties, freeing Banjo’s arms and legs.

  “Yes,” said Banjo, still smiling, his voice raw in his dried-out throat. “Yes, I’m ready.” He rubbed his arms, trying to get the blood flowing. His legs felt like wooden stilts, stiff and unresponsive.

  Bright took him by the hand – no man had ever done that before – and led him across the room, to the other door. Banjo’s legs grew stronger, the muscles remembering how to walk. Soon he was moving more easily, his body becoming more responsive and the drugs in his system flowing freely now that he was unbound.