The Concrete Grove

by Gary McMahon

  “Don’t start lying to me, not now. I think all we have is the truth. If we lose that, then everything will just turn into a series of fictions, all linked by whatever’s in the Grove. Like a giant spider in a web.” She didn’t quite understand her own analogy, but something about the words made sense. It was the image of a giant spider, sitting at the centre of a web made of human life lines and spinning its own stories. Somehow that seemed right: it was an apt image. She could feel it, right down in the marrow of her bones. “Just be honest with me.”

  Tom stared down at the ground. A soft wind ruffled his hair. He looked back up again, and there were tears in his eyes. “My wife. Helen. You know about her, of course, that she’s a paraplegic. She lost the use of her lower body, from the waist down, when the car her lover was driving crashed.”

  “Yes. You told me all about it.” She moved closer to him. A group of teenagers ran by on the other side of the bridge, laughing and throwing coins into the river. Several cars and a bus drove towards the Newcastle side of the river, thumping over the steel joints in the tarmac decking.

  “She did this to me.” He turned his face so that she could see clearly the bruising. “Last night, she… changed. She became something monstrous and she attacked me. She hasn’t been out of that fucking bed in years, but last night she managed to get out and drag herself after me through the house. I fell. She grabbed me and tried to smother me…” he turned away again, ashamed.

  The sunlight flashed, making Lana close her eyes for a second. Then she couldn’t stop blinking. When he had mentioned monsters, she couldn’t fail to think of Hailey: and of the things she’d been carrying inside her. The monsters – if that’s what they truly were – she had delivered. Along with these thoughts came ones about Monty Bright. The deformities on his body; the screaming faces trapped in his flesh.

  “We can help each other, you and me. If we stick together and use the strength we seem to have when we’re side by side.” She took a step back. More cars passed them on the roadside. A young couple strolled by, hand in hand; the man stared at Tom, as if he could see something strange about him. Then he looked away. “Last night I went to see Monty Bright. He and his men… they did things to me. Raped me.”

  Tom made a sound deep in his throat: half sob, half moan.

  “I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought they’d leave us alone if I went there, and did what they wanted. But it didn’t work out that way.” She kept her eyes on his battered face, refusing to look away in shame. Even though she’d kept quiet about what had happened with Hailey last night, she felt that she was being as honest with Tom as she ever had with anyone. She realised now that she’d placed her heart in his hands. All he need do was to squeeze it tight, or open his fingers and let it fall. Either way, it would hurt; but one way would cause far less pain than the other.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.” His mouth was a slit in his face. His eyes were now hard and empty.

  “I want you to tell me that it doesn’t make any difference. That you still want me, and still want me to want you. I want you to say that you’ll help me. We’ll help each other.”

  Another bus chugged by. Raised voices were carried to them from the riverbank. To Lana, the moment felt as if it might shatter like glass at any minute. “Of course I still want you. I mean, you’re the only person I know who’s as fucked up as I am.”

  It was a feeble joke – desperate, really – but in that moment she loved him for even trying to lift the mood.

  They walked along the side of the bridge, holding hands and looking up through the steelwork at the wedges of bright sky visible between the girders. Traffic grew heavier and as they approached the south side they began to see people making their way across the arching eye of the Millennium footbridge towards the old Baltic Flour Mill. There must be some kind of exhibition in the new gallery; the redevelopment of the building had raised the profile of the area and brought with it a fresh interest in the local art scene.

  “I know a little place where we can have coffee. It’s nothing flash, just a greasy spoon café where the taxi drivers go.” Tom led her sharp right off the end of the bridge, heading down Bottle Bank, where there was a row of old shop fronts, most of them boarded over. “It’s just down here.”

  A few taxis were parked at the kerb on the narrow cobbled street that led back down to the river’s edge. Set amid the timber-boarded frontages were two premises that had not succumbed to financial ruin. One of them was a taxi rank and the other was a tiny café with no name and badly whitewashed windows.

  They went inside and sat down at a low table. The place was gloomy; not much light could get in around the patches of white on the window glass. If she twisted her head and leaned across the table, Lana could catch a glimpse of the street outside. “Nice place,” she said. “How many Michelin stars does it have?”

  Tom laughed. “I used to do a lot of business round here, when these were all going concerns. I have a few clients on Gateshead High Street, too. Whenever I’m in the area I come in here for a morning coffee and a read of the papers. Nobody bothers you here. They all want to be left alone.”

  There were three other customers in the café. A skinny middle-aged man with a facial twitch sat near the toilet door reading a battered paperback novel, and two other men sat in silence drinking milky tea from large mugs.

  “They’re all taxi drivers,” said Tom. “Nobody else even knows this place exists.”

  “Except you.” She reached across the table and stroked the back of his hand.

  “Yeah, except me.” He stood and went to the counter, where he ordered two black coffees from a shapeless woman in a long grey sweater and grubby jeans who appeared from a door to one side. She went back through the door and emerged less than a minute later with two mugs filled with what looked like tar.

  “You expect me to drink that?” She took the cup Tom offered her as he sat back down, peering into the contents and pretending to be disgusted.

  “Just think yourself lucky I didn’t ask for it with milk. At least black it’s drinkable. Just about.” Tom added sugar to his mug from a chipped bowl on the table. The end of the teaspoon was frosted with an off-white crust and the discoloured clusters in the bowl looked like singed crystal meth.

  Someone turned on a radio – probably the saggy woman who’d served them coffee – and a droning traffic report filled the empty spaces in the room.

  “I have to ask you something.” Lana curled her fingers around the mug. The coffee was hot, but she liked the way it made her skin hurt. “Something important.”

  Tom took a sip of his drink and put down his mug. “I’m listening.” His swollen face looked better in the dim light. Not so damaged.

  “I plan to-,” she licked her lips. “I plan to kill Monty Bright. It’s the only way out of this I can see now. I have to kill him.” Just saying the words in daylight, even at such a low volume, forced Lana to fully consider their true meaning. It didn’t sound so bad, she thought. Not in terms of the chaos invading her life. What was a little murder to add to the mix, especially when the proposed victim was no longer even human? “I need to know if you’re willing to help me do that.”

  Tom stared at her. His face went pale beneath the fresh contusions. He swallowed. The radio droned on. “If you’d said this to me a few days ago I would’ve run a mile. But now – after everything that’s happened – I’m still here. I’m still listening.”

  Lana paused for breath, took a drink of the scalding coffee, just to drive the moment home, and then continued. “He isn’t a man. I think he used to be, a long time ago, but he isn’t now. Not anymore. Prolonged exposure to whatever’s festering in the Grove has changed him into something else.” She examined Tom’s face for signs of doubt, or possibly a hint that he might stand up and leave.

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “He showed me something that I still can’t quite get my head around. He has these tumours all over him – on his ches
t, mainly. But they aren’t tumours. They’re not cancers. I think they’re the remains – or maybe even the souls – of the people he’s bled dry with his debt. He doesn’t stop at money. What he wants from them – and what he wants from me – is everything. Everything his victims have to give. He wants it all. He starts with the money, and then the possessions, and then moves on to the flesh. Finally, all that’s left is the spirit, and he wants that, too.”

  Tom leaned back in his chair. The legs scraped loudly across the floor, drowning out the radio newsreader’s voice. A fragment of the report caught Lana’s attention: “…the prisoner, known locally as Banjo, last night escaped police custody. He is not considered dangerous, but if anyone knows of his whereabouts they are requested to…”

  Lana knew the man they were talking about – it was the drug addict they’d seen trying to rip his own face off in the street. God, she thought. Right now, that seems like it happened a lifetime ago.

  She returned her attention to Tom.

  He was looking up at the dirty ceiling, as if inspecting it for cracks. Without moving, he began to speak. “Last night my wife physically turned into something else. I meant it literally when I told you that.” He lowered his head and looked at his hands, which he laid out flat on the table. He looked like one of those old-time circus sideshow performers, just before they start to slam a knife into the table top through the gaps between their fingers. “She turned into a creature and attacked me. If it wasn’t so scary it would be funny,” he dipped his head, exposing a tiny bald spot at the centre of his scalp that she’d not noticed before. She wanted to reach out and touch it, to penetrate his armour.

  “I think we’ve both moved way beyond the normal now,” she said. “The decisions we make here, the way we act, will define how this all ends. If we ignore the obvious – that there’s something, well, supernatural, happening, then we’re fucked.” Talking about these things made her feel that she was actually doing something to fight against the situation. In all the books she’d ever read and all the horror films she’d seen, the main characters only ever admitted far too late that the supernatural had invaded their lives. That was the thing that usually got them killed: a refusal to accept the obvious, no matter how insane it might seem.

  Lana was not willing to make the same mistake.

  “There’s some sort of power in the Concrete Grove and, for whatever reason, it’s noticed us. Killing Monty Bright won’t send it away, but it will get rid of an immediate threat and give us a chance to think about what we do next.”

  Tom rubbed a hand through his hair. He winced as he did this, causing his injuries to flare up in fresh pain. “After what happened to me last night, I’m willing to believe that anything is possible.”

  The radio broadcast changed to a music chart show. The woman behind the counter turned up the volume and began to hum along to the tune. Her feet shuffled dryly across the dusty, crumb-littered floor.

  Accompanied by the soundtrack of the latest number one record, playing from a tinny little radio on a shelf in a cheap riverside café, the deal was sealed, the pact was made. Such were the circumstances under which two ordinary people became murderers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  TOM’S CAR WAS parked on the Gateshead side of the river. They left the cafe and headed up the hill, away from the water, to the small parking area behind a row of terraced houses that had been converted into shops and offices: a solicitors, a print shop, a DVD rental outlet.

  They sat in the car and stared through the windscreen, across the short cobbled lane at the tall wall guarding the yards at the rear of the buildings. The wall was topped with razor wire and there were No Parking notices painted across the garage doors.

  “I’ll drop you back at your place,” said Tom.

  Lana gripped his hand on the steering wheel. “Thank you.”

  He nodded. Started the car.

  They drove back across the bridge and along the bypass, heading towards the Cramlington exit. The traffic was heavy but it moved freely.

  “How about driving past your street on the way? I want to see where you live.”

  Tom glanced at her, and then returned his gaze to the road. “Why? It’s just a normal house on a boring street outside boring old Far Grove.”

  “Because it’s a part of your life I know nothing about. I’ve only seen one side of you – the side that comes to visit me and takes us on day trips.”

  “And agrees to help you kill people.” He said it without a trace of sarcasm. He wasn’t making a joke.

  “Yes. That part, too. The part of you that wants to help me, no matter what the cost.”

  They both fell silent for a while, and only when they saw the first road sign for Far Grove did Tom break that silence: “Okay. We’ll swing by my place first, just so you can see how dull and tragic my life really is.” This time he smiled, but it seemed slightly forced, as if he was trying just a little bit too hard to act normal.

  Lana watched the streets go by. The houses were mostly suburban new-builds, residential boxes made by development companies to house people who didn’t care about period detail and a sense of history. Red bricks, plastic window frames, double glazing. A small plot of garden, a garage and a concrete drive. It was all so strained that Lana felt as if the image might crack, like something painted onto a sheet of glass.

  “This is mine. Ours.” Tom drove slowly along his own street, not even looking at the houses. “Number Sixteen.”

  “I didn’t really have you down as a new-build man. I thought you might live somewhere a little more… well, interesting.”

  “It was Helen. Her dream. She always wanted to live in a nice middle class area, with a new kitchen and a driveway. Flowers in all the borders and a fucking rotary washing line on the back lawn.” His voice was filled with bitterness. Lana could hear it, like a whining sound behind the words. “Her cosy little fantasy.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to bring me here.”

  “No.” Tom stopped the car and then turned it around in the road to face the way they’d come, performing a neat three-point turn. “It’s good that you see all the sides of me.” He still hadn’t looked at his house. The curtains were closed. None of the windows were open even a crack. “There are things in that house that I never want to go back to, but I know I will. I can never leave for good.”

  She knew that he meant the memories, and the elements of the life he and his wife had stored there behind the closed doors and windows, but somehow she got the feeling that there was another layer to what he was telling her, a subtext that she couldn’t quite grasp. It was puzzling, and slightly disturbing. He seemed to have changed from the last time she’d seen him. Nothing major, just subtle details about his character that she couldn’t even attempt to isolate without feeling that she was simply reading too much into his reactions.

  But something about him was different. She could feel rather than see those changes, but nonetheless they were there.

  “I’ll take you home,” he said, as the car approached the end of the road. “We can talk more there, away from this mess that I’ve made.”

  From one mess to another, thought Lana. But at least this one’s of your own making.

  She felt guilty for pulling Tom into her problems, yet at the same time she was grateful that there was at least someone she could turn to for help. Other than Tom, she had no one. Her life had emptied of real friends as soon as Timothy had taken it upon himself to use murder and suicide as a solution to his problems.

  But wasn’t that now what she was about to do? Wasn’t it exactly the same as Timothy had done?

  No, she thought. It’s different. But in what way it was different she couldn’t tell. Was she more justified in murdering a rapist loan-shark than he had been in killing people-trafficking gangsters? Could you even define crimes in this way, deciding which was worse and calculating what would represent a right and just punishment? Wasn’t it all just vigilante justice, l
ike some absurd Death Wish film? If that were the case, then she suspected she made a shitty Charles Bronson substitute.

  “What’s so funny?” Tom’s voice pulled her out of her thoughts.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realise I was smiling.”

  “You laughed. I was wondering what the joke was. I could use a joke right now.”

  “I think we both could.” They were entering the Grove now. A group of teenagers dressed in gaudy tracksuits and hooded sweatshirts were standing on the corner of Far Grove Way, staring down the passing traffic. Tom glanced at them. He smiled.

  “Jesus, there’s always kids hanging about.” Lana turned away.

  “Little shits,” said Tom. Something hit the side of the car – a stone, a bottle – and Tom slammed on the brakes. The kids ran off in the direction of the skateboard park, laughing and pushing each other as they moved as a pack along the middle of the street.

  “Cunts.” The amount of venom in his voice shocked her. This was the first time Lana had heard him use such extreme language.

  “Forget it,” she said. “It isn’t even worth getting upset about.”

  Tom put the car into gear and it moved forward, but at a slower pace than before. He kept glancing into the rear-view mirror, looking for someone upon which to take out his frustration. This was another change: the anger, the barely repressed aggression. It frightened her more than she could say.

  Tom parked the car outside the flats but made no move to get out.

  “Are you coming in?” Lana took off her seatbelt and waited for him to respond.

  “Sorry,” he said. His voice sounded rough and hoarse. “My head’s all over the place right now. I’m finding it difficult to stay focused. Everything that’s happening… it’s just confusing me.”

  “Everything with us?” She placed her hand on his knee and squeezed lightly. Just a small gesture; it was all that she dared.