‘What’s this amazing product?’
‘That’s a detail. I’m not doing details. I’m doing the big picture.’
I hadn’t thought Jack knew of a big picture. As far as I knew, he was strictly a colour-by-numbers man. And without any of the high numbers.
‘And where do I fit into this?’ I asked.
‘Up to you. You can drop the flirting, though. I only went along with that so you’d take me through the ritual. I know it now. I’ve been taking notes. I’ll be holding onto a copy. I’ll be giving copies to some people. Sealed and that. I wouldn’t want anyone finding out what we’ve been up to. Neither would you. It was all your idea.’
Jack was turning out to have hidden depths, when all I wanted was shallows. I sipped my drink. It tasted awful.
‘Have a drink you like,’ he said, looking at my face. ‘You aren’t going to get anywhere drinking that stuff. There you are, dreaming. Good job one of us has their feet on the floor.’
I couldn’t risk someone that close to me being clever. It wasn’t what Jack was for. Jack was for donkey work and keeping people out of the way.
‘I don’t see myself staying here,’ he said. ‘I see myself somewhere better. Another drink?’
‘I didn’t think you had any money.’
‘You cleared out Mrs Bolton’s purse. You left her bank card. And she was a pensioner. Come on, pensioners can’t remember what day it is. The number was on a piece of paper next to the card. She’s overdrawn now. As well as dead. Not her year, is it?’
‘They could trace that.’
‘The card hasn’t been stopped. It hasn’t been reported missing. She’s not going to report it missing. She’s dead. Her cats will have eaten her by now. There won’t be a smell. If there was, the neighbours wouldn’t care. The rest of them will be the same. They’re dead and no one cares. We know about it. We’re going to keep it to ourselves. Two of them had their pin numbers in their purses. The men didn’t. They had money under the mattress, though. In this day and age, can you credit it? I had to go back after we’d finished, obviously. There’s not a lot of money. They were old and they thought a fiver was a fortune. But there’s enough to start something.’
‘You can’t take something,’ I said. ‘The ritual won’t work.’
‘Obviously. None of that bollocks works. All you’ve done since I’ve known you is raise a woodlouse from the dead. And that came back all fucked up. One woodlouse. All of your books, and that’s as far as you’ve been.’
‘There were loads of them.’
‘There was one of them. I’ve read a few books of my own. I’ve got a library ticket, you know. I know the people you know. I’ve always been with you when you’ve bought books. Those people don’t care who they sell to, do they? I didn’t fuck about with the major stuff. I don’t want to piss Asteroth off. I learned illusions. I can do illusions. Here, check this one out.’
An insect crawled from his collar, chittering. He touched it and it wasn’t there.
‘I made you see them.’
‘Why?’
‘So I could make you think they were in your clothes. So you’d take your clothes off, really. And it worked. I got to see you mostly naked. Funny thing is, you looked the way I thought you would. I’d imagined you like that. I’d been thinking about it for years. But now I’ve seen it I don’t think about it. You’re not cover girl material.’
What was he talking about? I was wonderful naked. What else did he know?
‘So. The ritual won’t work, then? Because I blagged a few cash cards? You’d already swiped the money. So it doesn’t work. What does that make us? Murderers, robbers, end of story. So we ought to do something with it. We should do something with the money. If we can’t live longer, we can live better. Not if we spend it all on poncey drinks, though. I’ve got to get home, anyway. You think about it. We can be partners in the real world. That’s not so bad.’
He downed the last of his pint and handed me the glass.
‘Put that somewhere for me,’ he said, and left.
IV
I couldn’t do anything with him. I couldn’t kill him. Perhaps he was bluffing about giving copies of our exploits to his friends. Perhaps he wasn’t. It wasn’t a worthwhile gamble.
You know in those old Frankenstein movies? The way everything is fucked over by the villagers at the last minute? I’d been forgetting. Long before the villagers turned up with their pitchforks and attitude, the assistant – Igor, usually – would have dropped the brain or spliced the wrong wires or done some other stupid thing. The villagers only got into the picture because the project had gone wrong.
And it went wrong – every time, without fail – because the good doctor put his trust in an untrustworthy assistant. I went home. I almost had a kebab. I didn’t see how things could get any worse, and that’s the time to have a kebab. It’ll show you the error of your ways. With fish and chips you might get a bone; with a curry you might get a missing pet.
With a kebab you can get anything: hepatitis B, Ebola, leprosy, toenails, you name it.
I didn’t have a kebab. I’d already pushed my luck far enough. I went home instead.
V
A few days later Uncle Mickey turned up. I used to like him when I was younger. He seemed dangerous and strange. He didn’t work in an office. He didn’t work at all. My father told me that Uncle Mickey used to work in an office but he got the sack and never got work anywhere else.
‘He got work in the army,’ I argued.
‘Like they’re fussy,’ said my father. ‘As if.’
The army might not have been fussy, but I was. I liked Mickey Payne. I didn’t think he was an uncle in the real sense of the word. He was an uncle in the sense of, a friend of your parents. Except that neither of them seemed to like him. My father made it obvious, and my mother would go to another room when he visited. I used to like him. He had his scarred face and hands, and you wondered how far the scars went. He had stories of shooting Argies and being on the dole. He seemed happy to be doing nothing. He seemed happy to see me. Then I got older, and I went through puberty. I reached it a few years before Jack, because women do. Perhaps that’s why men spend the rest of their lives trying to catch up with us.
Things changed. I went off my parents. They went off me, too, but they had more reason. I also began to feel that Uncle Mickey had other things on his mind. He seemed to be taking a personal interest in me.
‘Growing up, aren’t we?’ he’d ask. He’d have his little tobacco tin – he couldn’t afford to smoke cigarettes anymore, so he was on the Amber Leaf and Rizla diet – and he’d roll thin cigarettes and smoke them, eyeing me up. ‘Getting to be a young lady.’
It didn’t feel lecherous. It felt worse than that. He seemed to be waiting for something. He seemed to think something would happen. He’d look at me, sizing me up.
He didn’t come round as often. He’d come round and talk to me and then go. He’d say things that might have meant something. He’d say, ‘Been keeping an eye on the papers, then?’ or, ‘seen that little mate of yours recently?’ or, ‘been up to anything?’
He knew something. He’d talked to me about magic, a long time ago.
I got into the habit of going out when he came round.
A few days after Jack had sprung his surprises, I was at home. My father had a day off, and he was doing something to the garden. I can’t be a full adult yet, because I don’t care about the garden. Perhaps the ritual did work. I try to spot myself getting older but I don’t know what the symptoms are. I still look young, if you take away the shadows under the eyes. The doorbell rang. It used to play a little tune but the mechanism had a breakdown and now it just does odd notes. I opened the door and found Uncle Mickey standing there.
‘Mind if I come in?’ he asked, coming in. ‘Thought we could have a chat. You’re never in to chat to.’
‘I’ve got to go out,’ I said.
‘Oh? Anywhere nice? Down by the old railway lines,
say?’
I didn’t say anything. I let him in and sat as far from him as the living room allowed. We sat and looked at each other.
‘You still telling your little friend you’ve got a parchment, then? From the olden days?’
‘I do have one,’ I said. I thought about saying I didn’t know what he was talking about, but it wasn’t going to work. He knew what we were talking about. I wasn’t going to be able to fool him.
‘Have it your way,’ he said. ‘You want it to be a parchment, so be it. They’ll catch you, you know.’
‘They can’t. No one knows.’
‘I know. If I know, someone else knows. I can think of three people straight off. Four, if we include your apprentice.’
‘Who?’
‘You don’t know them. You’ve done five people, yes?’
I nodded.
‘I could tell you the names and addresses. Stop me when I get one wrong.’
He went through them. He didn’t make a mistake, and he went through them in the order in which we’d killed them. I couldn’t imagine how he knew so much.
‘I caught a live one, once,’ he said. ‘I might have told you the odd white lie about that. I told you the essence of it, though. I was going along, then bosh, in comes a live one and I end up like this.’ He pointed at his scarred face with his scarred hands. ‘Wasn’t a hand grenade, though. It was a man, in a state. You have to watch out for a man in a state. You trust your friend? Little whatsisname?’
‘Jack,’ I said, shaking my head. I didn’t trust him. I’d trusted a much dimmer version of Jack. The new bright one was somewhere far ahead of me. ‘No. I don’t. I thought I could.’
‘Old story. Couples are like that. You can’t trust them. Someone will turn up and change it all. Someone will walk out. That’s how couples are.’
‘We weren’t a couple.’
‘I know. But he didn’t. And now he’s calling the shots, isn’t he?’
I nodded.
‘Happens. Happened to me, as it happens. You trust someone, you get this.’ He held out his scarred hands. ‘Doesn’t make any difference,’ he said. ‘The thing is, they’ll catch you. Your friend there will go to one prison, you’ll go to another. He’ll come out all right. He’ll turn in evidence. You’ll go in for longer. There’s a lot of talk about law and order these days. You’ll do well, I think. You can be famous for what you’ve done. You’ll get an agent. They’ll do you book rights, film rights. You can get through it.’
The back door opened. I heard my father making his way through the house. He looked at Uncle Mickey.
‘Mick,’ he said.
‘I was just saying,’ said Mickey. ‘I was just telling your firstborn here. You can’t rely on trust. Not in a couple. People behave badly sometimes. People go astray.’
‘They do,’ said my father. ‘Don’t they just?’
‘Family things,’ said Uncle Mickey. ‘Well, best be off. I need to be somewhere.’
‘I hope they want you there,’ said my father.
‘I shouldn’t fucking think so. And let’s not be telling me not to swear in front of your daughter. She knows words I’ve never fucking heard of. And you wouldn’t believe what she’s been up to. I swear.’
He gave me a wink. My father walked him to the door. I watched him walk down our road, smoking another anorexic roll-up. That was the last time I saw him.
My father came back, trailing dirt from the garden through the house. I couldn’t say what his expression meant. There were several emotions involved, and I couldn’t identify a single one of them.
‘Is he really my uncle?’ I asked.
‘Him? Hard to say,’ said my father. ‘He’s really my brother. I’ll give him that.’
‘So he’s my uncle?’
‘Ask your mother,’ said my father, and I spotted two of his emotions; anger and sadness.
VI
A week later I was sitting at home, watching the news. I had got into the habit of checking the news. If any bodies were found, I wanted to know about it. There was news on all day long, I’d discovered. Most of it wasn’t interesting. I would watch it and drift. I didn’t know where Mogadishu was, and I wasn’t planning on going there. The new cure for AIDS would turn out not to be a cure. I was more interested in the ecological problems. This was selfish. I planned to live long enough to see what global warming would do and I wanted to know what I was in for. My best guess was that it would do nothing. In another decade or so there’d be evidence that the world was getting colder, and we’d all have to go out spraying CFCs into the air. And then they’d tell us that an asteroid could hit us any minute, which would wipe us all out just like the dinosaurs, give or take an inconvenient couple of hundred millennia.
That’s the thing with scientists. They get a theory and they’ll run with it for years. No amount of contrary evidence will worry them. Until one of them says, hold on, this is rubbish; how about this for an idea? And off they all go again, proving nothing and getting nowhere.
I have a downer on scientists. I would do, being inclined to magic. We don’t get on. Those urban myths that get put around, the ones about the Kremlin hiring psychic warriors? They’re myths, false, full stop. Science and magic don’t mix. They don’t get on.
Neither side believes the other can be right. It’s a left-brain/right-brain thing. It’s a schism.
Take astrology and astronomy. Astrology is clearly bullshit. I’ll believe in a lot, but that’s nonsense. The only thing you can say in favour of astrology is that it keeps men who were raised by their mothers in jobs. Obviously it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference whether Mars was in the ascendant when you were born. How could it? And why only bother with the stars that make nice patterns? Astrology is rubbish, one point to the scientists.
Except that astronomy is also rubbish. Astronomers have discovered that there isn’t enough mass in the universe for the maths to work. There needs to be more mass, otherwise the universe would collapse. It’s not just a little more mass, either. It’s sixty per cent more than there is. So near enough two-thirds of creation is missing.
Astronomers explain this by saying that the missing sixty per cent is comprised of dark matter, which we can’t see or measure, but which is there. Because if it wasn’t there, the maths wouldn’t work.
The obvious conclusion, to everyone else, is that the maths don’t work. Get back to your drawing boards. Go back to the start and give it another go. You’ve forgotten to carry something. If you have a theory that says two plus three equals eight, all well and good. But when someone gives you two apples, and then another three, and you end up with five apples, you have to rethink. It’s no good claiming that there are three mysterious dark apples, which are there although they can’t be seen or measured. The thing to do is hold up your hands and admit that the theory was bullshit all along.
One all, then.
And that’s before you even start on all the parallel universe crap.
So I was prepared to wait and see what happened with global warming. I thought it’d turn out to be another little scientific fad, like the global freezing that preceded it. If I was wrong, too bad. We could manage without the London Underground.
That day, while I was waiting for my deeds to make the news, my father sat next to me.
‘I don’t think your uncle will be round again.’
‘You don’t like him much,’ I said. My father looked at the ceiling.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose I should. He is my brother. I suppose I should like him regardless. But I don’t.’
‘Is that because he doesn’t work?’
‘He used to. He tried. He’s brighter than me, that’s the thing. That’s what makes it upsetting. I had to work like hell to get this.’
He looked around the room.
‘There’s worse than this,’ I told him. He smiled.
‘I know that,’ he said. He let his gaze drop from the ceiling onto me. I felt it land.
‘
So what’s wrong with him?’
‘He got in with the wrong crowd. He got mixed up in something. Nothing was proved. In the end it turned out that he hadn’t done anything. It was too late. He lost his job. He didn’t apply for another one. He ran off. Changed his name and ran off.’
‘Mickey Payne isn’t his real name?’
‘Of course it isn’t. Does it sound like a real name? He’s my brother. He’d be called Haines. He used to be. I told him to leave us alone, and he did for a while. For a few years.’
‘Because of the job? Or the other stuff?’
‘Because of something else,’ he said. ‘Because he did something unforgivable. Unforgivable to me, anyway. Your mother wasn’t so sure. Looking at you now, I’m not so sure either. None of his genes seem to have got to you.’
‘His genes?’
‘Family things,’ said my father. The words sounded like a code, like the public version of something that couldn’t be made public.
He looked at the ceiling again.
‘Family things,’ he said again.
‘So he joined the army?’
‘No. That’s another of his stories. The army didn’t want him. They knew about his history. He made it to the national news, you know. Got his five minutes of fame. Lot of good it did him. He was never in the army. Anyway, he’d have been too young to go to the Falklands. Didn’t you do history at school?’
‘Not much. You saw my report cards.’
‘I’d steer clear of history, if I were you. You think it’s all gone away and it hasn’t. It’s there every day, all of the mistakes and lies. It’s there every day.’
He seemed close to tears.
‘What happened to him?’ I asked, to turn the conversation somewhere more comfortable.
‘His best friend did that to him. His hands and face. Parts of his body. I don’t know the details. I don’t want to know.’
I thought about that. I didn’t think it made any difference. Mickey Payne hadn’t been trustworthy. Even his name was false.
Seeing the Wires Page 23
