Cheb walked slowly, feeling the point of Cardiff’s knife hurrying him along but too bruised to take longer steps.
In the bathroom, if he looked to his left, he could make a fresh examination of his face. How were his ears today, still monstrously swollen? Was his nose still flattened, was his smile still missing its teeth? Was his dome still swollen up like Brainiac?
Cheb’s shadow swayed across the white porcelain tiles. Cardiff stayed one step behind him. Cheb fumbled at the buttons on his jeans. Cardiff stayed close, knife in hand, only stepping back when Cheb let loose with a powerful jet.
Cheb said, “Do you want a pissing contest? You think you could piss like a fucking horse after someone’s beat the shit out of you?”
Cardiff said, “Shut up and get on with it.”
He shook his dick, turning around to let Cardiff see it waggle. Cardiff was only two paces away and should never have looked down. When Cheb launched himself head first, he moved like a battering ram. His face was a mess but it was still solid bone. The first lunge caught Cardiff square between the eyes. He carried on butting until the man was on the floor. Even then, he climbed on top of him, headbutting the fat bastard unconscious.
Cardiff occasionally came around, Cheb butted him right back into Dreamland. His head had stopped registering pain. It could be smashed to pieces, it probably was, but he felt nothing and carried on butting whenever Cardiff’s eyelids fluttered. He had work to do. It was lucky that Cardiff brought his own knife.
*
Cardiff woke feeling cold. That was the strongest sensation; he was cold and he was empty. His head was ringing, louder than any other noise around him. He could barely see. Black gauze clouded the long room.
His ears picked out a scratching sound. A multiple scratching. Light returned to the room, oddly dispersed like drapes of a flapping white cloth with dense black sheets in between.
A bent figure crept into resolution. Someone working away with a brush. The unintelligible sounds he’d heard earlier grew captions: the scratching of stiff bristles pushing across a cement floor.
Cold and wet and empty. Cardiff was soaked to the skin. The brushing figure sluiced water across the floor towards a drain. Another black haze floated in front of his eyes, Cardiff tried to wave it away with his hands. He could barely see his hands although he knew they were there, right in front of his face. It was an effort to focus, to keep on focussing. His palm prints flickered into resolution. And the pain began to grow insistent. He felt empty and could only think that the pain was a part of the feeling of emptiness.
A basket case of old clichés: his stomach had dropped, he was drained, he was gutted. Another dry old dog of a phrase to mix with the pain: he was coming round. He’d been clobbered and that was why he felt drained, why he was belly up.
He smelled the ferrous oxide of blood and the farmyard stench of shit. He’d cacked it. He was empty and he’d cacked his load.
The brushman came over, lisping slightly through fat lips as he said, “You’re back from the dead?”
The bald kid, a vivid red blob of a face leering out of his still-dazed b/w vision.
The bald kid said, “I can throw another bucket of water over you. That should perk you up.”
There was blood dripping out of the kid’s mouth. His face loomed into deep focus. Cardiff saw cuts in his lips, the kid had drained his bruises to keeping the swelling down. An amateur surgeon.
He said, “I’m cold.” He was freezing, the fingers he waved in front of his face were chilled insensible.
“You’ll get colder. But I could warm you temporarily. There’s a space heater on the other floor.”
The kid walked off, dragging his brush behind him.
Cardiff tried to move. Another phrase: rooted to the spot. He was sitting down and he couldn’t move, neither up nor backwards nor forwards. He couldn’t even fall over. He was planted and there was nothing he could do.
He looked at his two white legs, straddling the steel beam he’d just discovered he was sitting on. He wasn’t wearing trousers. He fought waves of sickness and reached out to feel for his dick It was still there, cock and balls. He’d had this sudden crazy thought but his tackle was still there.
The clanking of wheels travelled across the floorway. The kid was wheeling a huge gas cylinder, one of those things that look like the jet propulsion burners that fasten to the underwings of aircraft. He set it up next to Cardiff and walked away.
Cardiff’s teeth were buzzing so loudly, he’d thought it was the sound of a drum machine, weaving through the music on the floor below. He was wrong, this was the kind of chattering that could end only in hypothermia.
He wondered if he’d blacked out again.
The kid was setting up a gas bottle, taller than himself, and screwing a brass valve into its top. He began twisting it around with a spanner.
A click. The whoosh of gas and a blast of hot air like a mother’s hug, a warm bed, an oven baking all day long—a thing to make you forget that you were ever cold. When his teeth chattered they sounded a whole lot less bebop.
The kid began speaking. “I want to talk about corn. There’s no real alternative. Wheat, for instance, makes for a twisted society: nothing but beer boys and bread heads. Rice just makes you stupid. Can you imagine? Waist-deep in a paddy field, aiming for total inertia, your central nervous system functioning at ground fucking zero? All the greatest civilisations are corn-fed: all of them, Mayan, Aztec, Inca.”
The kid was talking slowly, overcoming the ghastly swelling that days of beating had wreaked on his mouth. But the kid was still talking shit. Cardiff tried to concentrate—he felt he had to.
“Corn—fed. I love that phrase, it makes everything sound so tasty. Corn is beautiful. Plant it and it grows so fast you can hear it move. And rice and wheat grains all have to be dehusked but with corn all you do is strip away the outer leaves and you got a fat juicy cob. Barbecue it, boil it, roast or bake it, mash it or dry it out and grind it up for flour. It’s got versatility fucking nailed.”
The kid sat on the beam next to Cardiff. He stuck his squished red face right up to Cardiff as he said, “How do you like your corn?”
“I don’t know.‘
“You don’t know?”
Cardiff tried to wriggle, pain shot through his empty body, rooted him to his seat. He said, “What’s wrong with me?”
“You haven’t figured it out yet?”
Cardiff shook his head, the pain drilling him, bewildering him.
The kid said, “Keep working at it, you’ll get it. I’ll just keep on talking, keeping you informed. The beauty of corn is that it’s both reliable and flexible. It grows so fast and in such abundance that every corn-based culture grows at an astronomical rate. One minute, they’re cavemen. The next, they’re building a city of gold in the middle of a fucking lake. Corn breeds. It speeds up the natural life cycle. You reach puberty early, you reproduce early. You die young.”
The kid was grinning and nodding, “It’s the perfect fucking food for the perfect fucking society. Listen…
“There’s no shit about reverence for age, there’s no respect for tradition. Everything is pre-programmed, corn produces a society hooked on expansion, reproduction and death. It’s built into the technology-
“You have to understand the agriculture technology behind corn. It doesn’t need rich soil to grow, all it needs is basic fertilisation. The Mayans lived by the coast, so they’d cast a spell and bury a fish head under every plant. The Incas, they traded guano over the Andes. Either rotting fish or bird shit, they’re both perfect, both rich in nitrous-fucking-goodies. But all you really need is blood and shit…
“You could kill all your enemies or you could sacrifice your neighbour’s family and, hey-presto, you’ve got another blood-soaked field ripe for cultivation. It doesn’t matter that half the society’s dead, corn-eaters breed like germs so there’s always twice as many babies the next year. That’s the secret: blood, shit and sun. The su
n beats down on the heads of corn and the heads of the people, it drives them out of their fucking trees. There’s blood and there’s shit dripping from the bowels of the living and the disembowelled corpses of the dead. The sun at one end of the equation, shit out the other.”
Cardiff said, “Disembowelled?”
The kid grinned, “I knew you’d guess it eventually.”
Cardiff was sat on a low steel beam, an RSJ propped on concrete slabs. He couldn’t move and now he knew: somehow, some—fucking-unearthly-how, he was tied by the arse.
“It’s a mesoamerican trick. You’re strung down.”
The kid was holding his knife.
“It was easier than you’d think: first off, I had to grease your arse and work the knife up there. I got my fist a good five inches inside before I severed the rectum and hauled out your intestines. How many yards of gut do you reckon you had, all curled up inside you? I pulled it out straight and used it to strap you down to this beam. I have got to say, you were absolutely full of shit but there was very little blood involved. Once I’d pulled the intestines out of your arse, they sealed the hole. Even when you were unconscious, the tension pulling on your guts kept you upright, like one of those puppet toys that has a string running from the top of its head and out between its legs. You just sat there, docile, for around two hours.”
Cardiff’s hand went down to the beam. The touch of slimy like frog skin against the RSJ made him retch, the retching produced a tightening that he felt all the way through his body: like an elastic band wound up inside of him.
“The Mayans would pin people out like this, tied to a heavy log for the vultures to get them. They couldn’t think of running. If they tried they’d rip out their own stomachs. I couldn’t find a log, I had to use this steel joist but I guess it’s an acceptable update.”
Cardiff felt himself slipping under again. He was dead.
Cheb caught him and slapped him back to life: “listen you fat cunt. You’ve got one chance and that’s fucking slim. If you get swift medical attention, if you get a synthetic intestine, you might live. I’ll tell you, you are not going to lose any more blood. You’re stoppered-up water—tight, and while that holds you’re stable.
“What you have to do, you have to convince your cunt boss Frankie to call for the paramedics. You’ve got to give him something, strike a deal, so he’ll reward you and save your life. You got it?”
Cheb slapped him again.
“You got it?”
The fat freak nodded.
“Tell Frankie that those boys he’s so gaga over killed his son.”
“Liam and Sean?”
“Whatever they’re fucking called. Just tell him.”
Out of a sick daze, Cardiff‘ grunted, “If I tell Frankie, he won’t save me. He’ll kill me himself.”
“It’s your only hope. Once it’s laid out, even he can’t be so stupid he won’t see it.”
Cardiff wasn’t so sure. Even the state he was in, he knew it wouldn’t help. “He’ll still come after Susan and your mate.“
“Well that’s their problem. Hogie used to diddle my mother so my feelings towards him are a little ambiguous. You just worry about yourself, leave the thinking to me.”
Cardiff slipped under again. Cheb gave him his last slap.
“You got it, you fat cunt?”
Cardiff nodded.
TWENTY FOUR
Cheb stood on the stage of the old loading bay, looking out to the river and feeling the weight of the warehouse above his head. He wondered where he could find some painkillers although he wasn’t sure he was in pain. Talking had been an effort, his lips were so huge he couldn’t seem to slip them around the words he wanted to say.
He looked around. It was strange but where he was standing seemed to be hugely busy. Two pantechnicons were parked at the foot of the bay and black T—shirted roadies milled around, wheeling speaker stacks or lighting rigs up the ramp to the warehouse. As they passed by, they looked him over. From their faces, it seemed they’d never seen anything like him before but they didn’t get involved. A fat biker-type huffed past, carrying a spotlight in each hand like they were carrier bags. He was the first to speak, asking Cheb if he was “Okay, mate”? Cheb waved the guy away, “You don’t worry about me, mate.”
He limped down the ramp and slipped between the sides of the lorries. Once round the corner, there were fewer people to stare at him.
When he reached the front of the warehouse, he rested at a window and watched a team of men working a scaffold The system was four storeys high. Another crew were inflating a giant plastic Sumo wrestler from a gas bottle, holding it steady with guy ropes as it unfolded towards the ceiling.
Cheb shook his cabbaged head. Where was he?
He stumbled out along a cobble road towards a humpback bridge. At its crest, he looked down to a black slug of water toting garbage debris round a distant curve. Over his shoulder the redbrick warehouses squatted low, dumping over the water. Ahead of him the road staggered like a suicide into a diesel strand of dual carriageway. Cheb walked on past a sign he read as Three Mile Island. He seemed to know the name.
Outside a Tesco superstore. He took the disabled ramp up to the automatic doors. The all-seeing eye recognised him, the doors slid open. The foyer was full of shoppers pushing trollies but their wheels seemed to seize as he passed through. No one said anything but they all stared. An old woman, bent over a tartan bag and trying to fix a broken strap, straightened as he came by. She screamed out loud as his face loomed into her short field of vision. He thought, Yeah, but what do you look like?
Cheb found the pay-phone bracketed next to the cigarette concession. He felt over his pockets and found a credit card no one had thought to take off him. He slipped it over the lip of the appropriate slot and the machine sucked it in.
He got an answering machine. He needed to clutch the wall for support He kept himself conscious by staring at the LCD screen as the call-charge scrolled upwards.
“Answer, someone answer. Answer, answer, answer.”
Someone snatched the phone. Naz: “Cheb, we thought you were dead.”
He’d assumed he was dead, too. Was this a beyond-the-grave kind of joke?
“Where are you?”
He didn’t know. “Near some kind of warehouse. There’s a river, I don’t know what else.”
“Are you alone?”
“I was with a fat bloke called Cardiff. He’s arseing around back there somewhere. To tell you the truth, Naz, I’m feeling a bit weird. Could you pick me up?”
Cheb looked over his shoulder, the girl at the cigarette stall was staring in his direction. He held the telephone receiver out to her, saying, “You, tell this guy the address.” She slipped out of her booth and took the phone from his hand. Cheb felt himself slide down the wall.
*
George, said “Serious days” and pushed at the door of Hogie’s flat. Wind chimes sounded for Susan as she pushed through.
“Frankie is convinced we’ll come mob handed.”
Susan nodded. She could imagine Frankie farting and sweating and sorting out a pile of weapons. He’d got Callum killed by involving him in his menopausal gangster fantasies and now he was going to see them through to the end. It would be a joke if it wasn’t so sick and so dangerous. They had wanted to clip him and now he was tooled up and ready to repel all invaders. They were left with no plan, no hope…
She followed George through to the front room and met the boys. Naz she already knew. The next one was called Mannie. She caught both their eyes briefly but it was Cheb she really stared at. He was so beaten he would have been unrecognisable, a match for a spud-boy but nothing human. But it was how Susan had expected someone to look after a stay with Frankie, it’s how she felt on the inside.
Cheb looked up. Maybe he had a wry smile, maybe he was dumb or stoned.
Naz said, “It’s fucking barbaric. And that’s what he looks like after we patched him up… before he was a real mess, isn’
t that right?” ‘
Cheb nodded slowly, trying to get his mouth round a phrase but failing. His lips had disappeared into the black crusted bruises of his swollen face.
Naz said, “But now we know where they are, we go in and kill them.”
He was nodding vigorously, staring first at George then at Mannie. Mannie nodded back at him but the boy looked scared to death.
George said, “Just like that?”
Naz kicked a bag at his feet Susan hadn’t noticed it before, now she saw it was full of guns.
George had given her a brief rundown in the car, all the latest information, but she wanted a re-cap. She said, “My husband’s teamed up with the people who killed our son?”
Naz nodded, looking over to Cheb for confirmation. The boy’s botched head moved slowly, up and down.
George said, “Come on, think this thing through. It’s the worst place to try and get him. At a rave.”
Naz said, “There’s only four of them. There’s more of us.”
George wasn’t having it. Pointing to Cheb, he said, “He says there’s four, but look at him. I doubt he can even count to four. What about the bouncers, the security, the road crew. It could be as many as thirty, perhaps more.”
“We can do it.”
“No we can’t. Look at us.”
Susan listened to them argue, the three boys and George Carmichael. Naz seemed insane, Cheb was almost dead and Mannie was paralysed with fear…
George continued the list, “I’m a fucking accountant, she’s a housewife. Hogie’s not even here—he’s still in fucking bed.”
He shrugged over at Susan, like he was sorry for the dig but surely she could see it was stupid. She tried to think of something to say but before she opened her mouth, Mannie had begun speaking.
“I’m up for it. I know how to shoot… targets and that.” His voice trailed off.
Jello Salad Page 20
