The Concrete Grove

by Gary McMahon

She was willing to do anything to guarantee Hailey’s future. Even this: allowing a crude and vicious man – and possibly his friends – to use her body as a plaything. If she thought of it in mechanical ways – she had had a coil fitted a few years ago, so would not become pregnant; she would demand that they all use condoms in case of disease; she would refuse to kiss anyone on the mouth – then she could pretend that it was a job of work. She had grown accustomed to stifling her emotions, and this would simply be one more situation to lock up inside, throwing away the key.

  She could think of worse things… like death, or mutilation. Rape – no matter if she went there willingly or not – was better than being maimed or crippled or killed. These men, she knew, were easily capable of all three acts. Penetration she could probably handle and come to terms with, even if it meant losing something of her soul; but losing a physical part of herself would be a lot tougher to accept.

  But then again, she knew that physical scars healed. Blood stopped flowing; cuts and lacerations sealed themselves shut. Emotional scars, though, never went away: they just faded.

  Could she do this? Could she really go through with it?

  She glanced over her shoulder, at Hailey’s bedroom door. She remembered how that fat bastard, Monty Bright’s enforcer, had caressed her daughter’s photograph, licking it with his obscene tongue.

  Then she asked herself the only other question that mattered under the circumstances: did she really have a choice?

  She grabbed her leather jacket and handbag and walked briskly to the door, refusing to look back over her shoulder. She paused at the mirror hanging on the wall by the door, looking again at her doll-like image. She took a packet of baby wipes from her purse and washed off the lipstick, the rouge, the eye make-up.

  “No,” she whispered. “Not for you.” That bastard didn’t deserve to see her at her best. She would go to him unadorned, making her sacrifices without the use of war paint.

  She kicked off her stripper heels and put on a pair of flat-soled pumps. She would make no concession to eroticism. Let the bastard take her in her most ordinary state, looking like she was on her way to the shops.

  Lana opened the door and walked out onto the landing, barged through the fire door, and then stepped briskly down the stairs.

  She was on autopilot; her body felt empty, as if she had relinquished all control. She didn’t want to do this, but she could see no other way out of her predicament. She did not want those bastards coming anywhere near her daughter. If they touched Hailey, she would kill them all. It was that simple.

  The air outside was cold and sharp. Lana tugged her bomber jacket tighter around her body, feeling more vulnerable than ever before in her life. She wished that she’d changed into a pair of jeans. Her bare legs were already feeling the chill. Her body didn’t feel as if it belonged to her, and her mind was locked up inside, unable to control what was happening. She knew that she had imprisoned herself in this situation, and the only way out of the jail cell was by doing something terrible… but sometimes, she thought, terrible things can release you.

  But hadn’t Timothy thought the same? His actions, when he had been pushed into a corner, were surely the seeds of the terrible thing she was contemplating doing right now. Horror begat horror; bad deeds created even more badness. It was a simple rule of the universe, and one that could never be ignored or forgotten.

  Her trapped mind was racing, but it was powerless to intervene. Only the body could perform a meaningful action. The physical Lana was in control now: the flesh-and-blood woman that encased the spiritual being, the shell around the hidden self.

  She crossed the road outside the flats, glancing down to inspect the blood stains from that mad junkie, Banjo. The blood had dried to a dark hue; a series of splatter patterns on the roadside and against the kerb. The local news had reported the event earlier, and according to the newsreader Banjo – his real name was Bernard Clarkson – was currently in the LGI, strapped to a bed in an overcrowded ward. They said his mind was wiped. That was the word they’d used: wiped. Like a tape recording or a computer’s hard drive. There was nothing left of the person he’d been; the man had vacated his shell, leaving behind nothing but meat.

  Lana began to make her way along the long curve of Grove Road. It was the first of the concentric circles that spread out around the Needle. She hated these streets, even more than the outer edges of the estate. They were cold, unwelcoming, and there was always some kind of trouble brewing. Yet here she was taking a roundabout route to her destination – ‘going round the houses’, as they said in this part of the world. She supposed that she was simply putting off her inevitable arrival at Bright’s gym.

  She passed a few boarded up houses – security shutters at the doors and windows, graffiti crawling across the brickwork. These abandoned dwellings were flanked by homes in which people still lived. Television light flared behind the windows. Shadows passed by on the other side of grey net curtains and slatted window blinds. Lana felt a deep sense of loss, a strange kind of grief for something that she had not yet given away. She had no idea where this feeling had come from, but it hurt. The pain was like a blade drawn across her chest.

  For you, Hailey.

  Once again she thought about the tiny baby her daughter had been. It seemed like yesterday. Intense. Immediate. Such a small infant, and she’d been kept in an incubator for two days. When, finally, Hailey was allowed to take her daughter home from the hospital, both she and Timothy had no idea what they were meant to do. They’d stood over her Moses basket, holding hands and crying together, filled with relief that they’d had at least one child to bring back with them. Watching their baby sleep; looking to the future.

  Or so they had thought.

  Because the future had not turned out so lovely. Instead it had become a bad dream, a series of absurd events that had ended in murder and Timothy’s suicide.

  Walking now along harsh streets, perhaps even watched by hungry eyes, hidden eyes, Lana realised that those events had been the beginning of her downfall. Like a trigger, Timothy’s decision not to talk to her about his problems, to get hold of a gun and try to solve them in the most insane way imaginable, had been the moment when her world had started to crumble. Their daughter – their beautiful, bright, lovely girl – had suddenly been cast out into a darkness through which she was still stumbling, looking for an exit.

  Lana reached the corner of Grove Street West, where there was a patch of ground upon which a corner shop had once stood, and next to that the Unicorn pub – perhaps the roughest drinking den in the area. She paused for a moment, glancing at the pub lights and its bright yellow windows that spilled illumination onto the cracked pavement. She could hear music, laughter, raised voices. Somebody was singing a football song, while other voices cut in with another crude ditty.

  She turned onto Grove Street West, leaving the light behind. Darkness shifted around her, massaging and grasping her like a huge, soft fist. She fought the urge to turn around, run back to the Unicorn, and drink herself free of this debt to darkness. But if she did, her problems would still be there when the hangover cleared. None of this was going away; it was here forever, unless she made a move to rectify the situation.

  Bright’s Gym was a hundred yards along the street, pushed back from the pavement and with its back to a small gathering of willowy trees which bordered the no-man’s-land of Beacon Green. Many years ago, when the area was less poverty stricken, she’d heard that a warehouse depot with its own siding and station had stood on the Green. The old railway line still ran along the eastern edge of Grove Rise, at the bottom of the Embankment, but the old timber sleepers had long since been reclaimed and all that survived were some half-buried metal cleats and a rough trail where people walked their dogs by day but were afraid to visit after dark.

  The gym was a small, squat two-storey building that stood alone on this part of the street, opposite a row of derelict houses. Its windows were always covered by metal grilles, with
faded, out-of-date posters advertising historical bodybuilding competitions stuck to the glass behind. Nobody could see inside from the street; and nobody inside was able to see out through those windows. The gym wasn’t exactly open to the general public, but the regular clientele consisted of local hard men, amateur boxers and paunchy nightclub security staff. These meatheads would go there to pump some serious iron and ingest whatever steroids Bright could supply them with. It was the loan shark’s base; he operated every bit of business he dealt with from the shabby premises.

  It was his castle, his secure hideaway from the world. The centre of the spider’s web.

  The police never bothered with Monty Bright. He had the whole area sewn up, and Lana suspected that the local constabulary were of the opinion that they’d rather deal with the shark they knew than the devil they didn’t. It all went to prove her beliefs that everyone and everything was either corrupt or in the process of being corrupted. Timothy’s actions had formed the basis of this theory, and her experiences here, in the Grove, had merely helped it evolve into a working hypothesis.

  She approached the front door and waited, still unsure whether she could go through with her plan. She heard the infant Hailey crying inside her head; her mind was filled with images of Timothy’s victims and that of his pale corpse on the mortuary table when she’d been called in to identify his body. A portion of his skull, just above the right eye, was missing. She had glimpsed a blue-grey swell of brain matter through the hole.

  “For you,” she said, not knowing who she meant: Hailey, Timothy’s ghost, or herself.

  She lifted her hand, made a fist, and knocked hard on the door. It was opened before she even had time to lower her hand.

  “Hello, Lana.”

  It was the fat man from the other day – the one who’d pinned her against the wall and attempted to invade her with his knee.

  She swallowed but her mouth was dry. “I’m here to see Monty… Mr. Bright.”

  The large man smiled. Oddly, it was a gentle smile, as if beneath the layers of fat and muscle this man might just have a heart after all, hidden within the folds of his cruelty. “I know why you’re here, Lana. And, please, call me Francis.” His lips were wide and wet. His cheeks were ruddy.

  “Okay, Francis. Can I please see Monty? He’s expecting me.”

  The door opened wider, and Francis stepped back into a long, narrow hallway. There were old boxing posters stuck to the walls, promoting fights between combatants whose names Hailey didn’t recognise. Dust hung in the air like a light mist; small motes danced before the fat man’s retreating form, making him take on a ghostly aspect, as if he were barely there at all.

  “This way,” he said, turning slowly in the cramped space. His thighs brushed against the wall, unsettling yet more dust, and he moved ponderously, like a whale cruising through the deeps. “He’s been waiting for you. We all have.”

  Following him through the murk, Lana felt the first strands of real fear brushing against her cheek. Like cobwebs, the fear stuck to her skin, drawing her in. They came to a large open space, and to her right Lana could see a dimly lit arena. A boxing ring was positioned at the centre of the room, and along the walls were hung heavy sand-filled punch bags, battered leather speedballs and all kinds of metal bars and brackets meant for performing strength exercises. She’d been in gyms before – in fact, she had once attended exercise classes regularly, back in her old life – but she had never seen such primitive equipment as this. A lot of it looked medieval: crude and cruel and meant for inflicting pain upon the human body, rather than working out the muscles for the sake of physical fitness.

  A small man in a white vest and baggy shorts was dancing in the shadows. She had failed to see him at first because of the weak light and the fact that he was positioned in the corner furthest from where she stood. The man’s hands were covered in protective wrappings and he was shadow boxing. Each move, every combination, was carried out a lot slower than it would have been in the ring: it was stylised, almost like a silent mummer’s play, a weird performance dense with ritual. She watched for a while, entranced, and was only able to move away when the fat man touched her arm and whispered her name.

  “We can go up now,” he said. “That’s Dennis. He comes here every night. Never gets in the ring, just shadow boxes for hours. We leave him in peace. He pays his dues so we let him do his thing.”

  The man kept moving; he was never still. His feet shuffled across the smooth floor, shushing like the delicate touch of a drum brush against a hi-hat cymbal. His face was stern, almost grim, and his eyes were focused on a single point on the wall. Whatever he was fighting, he would never be able to beat it. The man’s private bout would last forever, or at least until the moment when he shadow-boxed into his grave.

  “Shall we go now?” Francis increased the pressure on her arm. His fingers were wide, his grip insistent. It was not a question.

  “Yes,” she said, looking at his face, concentrating on his small, piggy eyes. “Yes, I’m ready now. Let’s go and see Monty Bright.”

  The silent boxer didn’t even acknowledge their presence as they passed from his view. She doubted he even realised they’d been there. The thought filled her with a deep sadness that made her flesh tingle.

  Her thoughts and feelings were corrosive. She felt like she was on the verge of losing her mind, and she welcomed that madness, wishing that it would hurry up and take her away from all this. Hoping that it would help her to get through whatever happened next.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  TOM WAS STANDING on the landing outside his room. He could not remember how he had arrived here, or even when he had woken and climbed out of bed. The last thing he could picture was the bedroom ceiling as he closed his eyes to try and sleep.

  He felt like a little boy, dressed in his pyjamas and wandering after midnight through the family home. His fears were those created by a broken childhood; his desperation not to be seen was born of the fact that his father was home and he had been drinking.

  He was unable to sleep; his mind was racing with unfocused thoughts that he wished he could suppress. Lana Fraser, Hailey with her strange biology, and a debt that must, at some point, be repaid. He was gripped by a sense of urgent panic, as if he knew that somewhere someone important to him was in trouble, but he couldn’t do a thing to help them. Events were racing to some sort of conclusion, but he had no idea how to stop them or even what those events might be.

  He padded across the landing to the bathroom and stared at his face in the mirror. His jowls sagged; his eyes were small and narrow, like piss holes in the snow. His skin had taken on a slight yellow hue, as if it were jaundiced. He could not recall ever looking so worn out. He was exhausted yet he could not sleep.

  The book he’d been reading earlier was on the shelf by the basin. He must have left it there before going to bed. Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment. He was attempting to wade through the classics he had not looked at since school, when a strict English teacher and his dry methods had rendered them cold and turgid and lifeless.

  The title of the book had taken on a resonance that made him feel uncomfortable. Thoughts of Lana and her loan shark floated in his brain, bobbing on the surface while darker, more complex thoughts ran in the deeper currents of his subconscious mind.

  He thought about the sea cow downstairs, lost in her paraplegic dreams. Then he thought again of Lana: her dark-sparkling eyes, her hair, her smooth, pale skin.

  “I love her,” he said to his reflection. The reflection smiled, completely unsurprised, but Tom didn’t feel his own face take on the same shape. It was like another person was looking at him, placing him and his emotions under scrutiny.

  “I love her,” said his reflection, belatedly; but he didn’t feel his lips move in harmony with those in the mirror and the voice sounded deeper than normal. He was two people now, or one person split down the middle. His life had been cleaved, as if someone had taken a large axe and brought it down at a point rig
ht between his eyes, separating the two opposing sides of his brain.

  Was he awake or dreaming? He didn’t feel as if he were asleep; the world was solid around him and his senses were alert. No, this was not a dream. He was caught in a space between sleeping and waking, an interstice in which the rules of both of these states battled for supremacy. The imagery of dreams was bleeding into his waking world, and it felt like a drug trip: intense yet hazy, a blend of fact and fiction, a whole new world of contradictory sensations and images. For a moment he smelled wet grass; then the odour became that of rotten meat.

  He’d read somewhere that people with brain tumours often experienced phantom smells.

  But no, he wasn’t ill. Perhaps the explanation was as simple as insanity. Maybe he was losing his mind.

  In an attempt to wake himself up, he brushed his teeth. Whenever he looked down, at the sink, he had the impression that his reflection was staring at the top of his head. But when he looked up again to check, his reflection seemed to move with him. He felt twitchy and paranoid; he needed to relax.

  He put away his toothbrush and moved over to the bath, where he put in the plug and turned on the hot tap. Soon the room began to fill with steam. He stripped off his T-shirt and pyjama bottoms and sat naked on the edge of the tub, staring at the plumes of water vapour as they rose and gathered in the air. He began to see shapes forming: clenched fists, compressed faces with knotted features. Rudimentary heads shifting in the patterns made by the steam.

  He twisted the hot tap off and turned on the cold, adding some bath oil. Testing the water first with his hand, he then turned off the cold tap and climbed into the tub. Despite the addition of cold water, the bathwater was too hot. It burned his skin, turning his legs red, then his belly. He sucked in his breath sharply as he lowered his upper body into the water. This was a small yet pleasurable pain; a brief and biting agony that soon faded as his body became accustomed to the temperature of the water.