Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  I watched him shrug off his coat, and hailed him as he headed towards the cigarette machine.

  ‘All right there, Joel?’

  ‘Not so bad, Nev. Let me get you a pint.’

  I bought him a Guinness and got myself another pint of lager. We sat by the window, one of those thick glass affairs with lots of flaws and ripples in it, so you can’t see clearly in or out. Weird figures wobbled past beyond the glass as they stalked up and down the Holloway Road.

  ‘What brings you out here?’ I asked him. ‘You live down in Oval, don’t you?’

  He nodded and unwrapped his pack of Embassy Regal. ‘I’m supposed to be covering an eviction, but I don’t know if I can be arsed. Got a tip-off that some crusties are about to be forcibly removed from a derelict flat in Fitzwarren Gardens. Unofficial job, apparently. Some real bruisers involved. I thought it would be fun to snap some kid being hurled out of a top-floor window but I’m not so sure now. I just don’t seem to have the appetite for it any more. I haven’t taken a picture of a cheque presentation for fifteen years, and I’m actually beginning to miss it – the humdrum. You need a bit of humdrum in your life. And, anyway, your modern student type doesn’t seem to have the heart for a battle these days. Too cosseted, obviously.’

  He contemplated his cigarette as though an upsetting message were written on it. ‘I’m supposed to be cutting down,’ The light gleamed on his scalp, visible through his sparse, dirty-blond hair. ‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing at the warning that covered two-thirds of the packet in bold, black lettering. Smoking Kills.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘They might as well use bigger letters and just print the word DIE on it.’

  ‘Want one?’ he said, more brightly, as if my joining him would lessen his guilt. I shook my head. He sighed. ‘You can’t not smoke when you’re drinking. It’s the wet and the dry. It’s magical. It’s like having a cuppa without a biscuit. Anyway,’ he said, ‘what are you up here for?’

  ‘Missing person,’ I said. ‘Woman who lost her brother yesterday, thinks he’s dead or murdered, or kidnapped.’

  ‘Yesterday? Sounds like a nutcase,’ Neville said, then went outside to suck in some carcinogens. And have his fag.

  ‘You’ve been watching too many Humphrey Bogart films,’ I said, after he came back inside, ‘but, yeah, she’s fruitbats.’ I gave him a quick description of what had happened, while he extracted a second cigarette and rolled it around his fingers.

  ‘Maybe she’s lonely. Maybe she does this to get involved with someone. It’s easier than chatting up a stranger.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There’s something really not right about this. Something in her voice, in the way she looks at me – something not right, something edgy. She never blinks either. It’s like talking to a fucking owl. It’s making my shit hang sideways.’

  ‘Have another drink, then,’ he said. ‘It’s my round.’

  * * *

  Another drink or two with Nev was important, I felt. He was a good contact and he needed to be cultivated. We staggered out at a little before 10 p.m., both of us cultivated to arseholedom. The sky was the strange undark that you find in well-lit cities, a kind of white haze just veiling the limitless black beyond. The street was like the Olympia Car Show. I was trying to stop the tears from coming, but it didn’t seem to matter so much out here, in a biting December wind.

  ‘Christ, my eyes are watering it’s so fucking cold,’ I said, convincingly. Nev was fiddling with his camera bag.

  ‘Bollocks to the crusties,’ he said. ‘I’m going home. Hey, do you fancy a curry?’

  I pointed at my watch and shrugged, then I slipped off the curb and went sprawling in front of a 2CV, the driver of which leaned on his horn despite his speed being exactly 30 mph below the legal limit.

  I waved Nev goodbye and funny-walked through the mired traffic, angling up Sandridge Street and into St John’s Lane. The cold was making my cheeks numb, and my hands couldn’t get warm in the pockets of my jacket. I needed a piss and I was this close to turning back to the pub, intent on getting medievally trousered, when the tears got serious and I had to stop.

  Have you heard from Sarah?, Nev had asked. That was all. Five little words that knocked me back further than any punch or gut-kick I’ve received in the past three years, since she disappeared.

  No I haven’t heard from Sarah. Nobody has heard from Sarah. Because she’s dead. Everyone knows that, but they keep asking. They keep ripping me open.

  I told Nev what I knew. The police, as far as they could be bothered to look into a hopeless missing-persons case, had come up with no clues. My own hunt had reached plenty of dead ends, but I was always on the job, always sniffing her out. It was the longest case I’d ever undertaken and I was paying myself a piffling amount, but I would never stop. Even though she was dead. Especially as she was dead.

  ‘She’s not dead.’ I stopped on the pavement, half suspecting that it hadn’t been me who said the words. It was beginning to snow. I blew my nose and wiped my eyes. Astonishing what a sob can do to your drunkenness. I breathed in deep some of that shockingly cold, polluted air and crossed the road, trying to rub some feeling back into my face. Number 13, St John’s Way, this guy Phythian lived at, according to his jelly-head sister. Thirteen was how old Sarah was when she went away. It seemed I had thought about the events of 16th August 2012 for more time than I had ever actually spent with her, but that couldn’t be the case. Not yet. She would be sixteen now, and a young woman. She should have been in her first year at college, studying A-levels… Art maybe, or Music. Or maybe she didn’t fancy academe and was starting work instead. Or maybe she’d taken a year off, gone travelling, picked up a few skins and tried them on for size, tried out some different people, seen how her edges fitted in with those of the world. She might have done that… but not if she was dead. I couldn’t work out if I wanted her dead or not. It all got too much. If she wasn’t dead, she surely would have called to let me know she was all right. I wasn’t so bad a father as not deserve at least that. If she was dead, and I didn’t know about it, was that any better? I’d be searching for the rest of my life, but at least she’d be at peace, that was what was important. I’d rather not know. I’d rather keep searching, but maybe not too hard, in case I actually found her. In case I found her and she was dead after all.

  I crossed the road and thought about how it had gone, that day she had disappeared. Or I might have done, were it not for the fact that a light had come on inside the house.

  I tried to see in through the window of the ground-floor flat, as I swung the gate open, but there was a slatted blind concealing the front room. Maybe I should just ring Kara, I thought, tell her to come round, because her brother was home, presumably bored already of running away, and I was suddenly angry at being jerked about like this, money or not. I rang the doorbell. The light went out. Something smashed. I cupped a hand around my eyes and leaned against the door to try to see through the stained glass into the hallway. When the door swung inwards, almost causing me to trip over the threshold, I found myself in a deeply unusual situation.

  I have only ever been scared – really, truly, hey-there-go-my-nuts scared – maybe three times in my life. Two of those times were when I was around seven or eight years old, and I had suddenly discovered that the dark was a pretty unpleasant place to be, especially when you were certain that something with big teeth was living inside the lampshade. The third time was when I went with a married woman whose husband found out about me, and he kept me awake all night with a phone call in which he detailed very specifically what he was going to do with my head once he’d cut it free of my shoulders.

  And here was that old feeling again: my tongue and lips like a few curls of used sandpaper.

  I stood in the hallway, listening for the other guy. For Phythian.

  ‘Jason?’ I called out. ‘I’m here to help out a friend. Your sister, Kara Geenan, she’s worried about you. Thinks you’ve gone missing.’
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  How crazy it can be, doing these private jobs. How fucking out there. It dawned on me that all my life was made up of standing in the dark, trying to make out the shape of whatever was up ahead. I wished I’d taken up Nev’s offer of a curry. I’d rather a chicken jalfrezi was now responsible for my runny guts.

  I reached for the light switch but there was no bulb in the socket. I had better luck once I reached the living room, where the light had been only recently doused. I spent less than a second in there, but long enough to know that the occupant wasn’t too keen on decoration but liked skin mags, Pot Noodles and Heineken beer. There was also a cot with a cheap paper mobile hanging over it. Kara had said nothing about her brother being a dad. A recent dad, at that. Further along the hallway, my boot crunched on to what had smashed earlier: a white plate. I bent down and picked up a few of the larger pieces: just pointlessly cheap china, of the kind you find in a Poundstretcher. He’d scarpered, it seemed.

  The kitchen smelled of nicotine and old bacon, the open back door swinging on its hinges, plastic streamers swishing around like some exotic dancer’s straw dress. I flicked the light on and looked around. If pigs ever evolved to the point where they started using kitchens, this is what they’d look like. Every pan was thick with half-moons of solidified lard. The washing-up bowl was rammed full with crockery. I moved to the door and looked out at the amorphous reaches of the garden, a scrubby mess filled with the skeletons of old bicycles, a washing machine, an upended wheelbarrow lacking its wheel.

  I stared down at the pieces of china in my hand. Spotlessly clean. Maybe the guy had dropped it in shock at how spick it was. But what was he doing running around in the dark with a dish in his hands, for God’s sake? I was about to answer my own question, one of those questions that has an answer so simple that you smack your head with frustration, when you realise it. Too much to drink, Joel, far too much to drink. You’re slowing down. I actually thought that: You’re slowing down, you sitting duck, you no-mark wanker, in the moment that he surged up behind me, wrapped his gloved hand around my throat, and started hammering open my skull.

  5

  Maybe it was a warning. A friendly warning.’

  I looked at Neville, really gave him one of my best Paddington Bear stares, but he wouldn’t let it go. I was lying in a hospital bed in a ward with five other pyjama cases. I had been ‘very lucky’ according to the nurse who swept by about half a dozen times every hour, her nylons shushing like a cineaste with hearing difficulties. Everyone who survives a murder attempt seems to be ‘very lucky’, but I begged to differ. I would have been ‘very lucky’ if I’d decided to wear my Kevlar bobble hat before I’d gone out. I would have been ‘very lucky’ if my assailant had developed a fatal allergy to coshes a second or so before he stuck it on to me. Or decided that he didn’t want to hit me after all, but shower me with kittens instead.

  ‘I mean,’ Neville was continuing, ‘if he meant to kill you, I’m sure he would have done a better job on you. Used a knife, a gun.’

  ‘Nev,’ I said, ‘he smacked me twice on the braincase with what felt like a steel bat. Surely, if it was a warning, he’d have just shown me the cosh, said something a bit sinister like, ooh, I don’t know, “This is a warning”.’

  But I knew he was right. He would have finished the job off if Neville hadn’t reappeared. He’d had a change of heart about the crusties and hurried after me to ask if I wanted to go and join in the fun. The guy then ran off and Nev found me dragging myself back on to the pavement, calling out for someone called Melanie, while painting the pathway with my own blood.

  ‘Who’s Melanie?’ he’d asked me, soon after arriving for his hospital visit. I didn’t say.

  Nobody brought me grapes or chocolate or disappointing flowers from a petrol-station forecourt. Nev very kindly agreed to feed Mengele for me while I was out of it.

  When the police came to question me I didn’t mention anything about Kara Geenan or her brother. I recognised the prick who sat at the end of my bed. We’d been at training college together, up in Bruche, and his name was Mawker. When he’d made it to plain clothes, he took it literally: you’ve never seen a more depressingly grey individual. He could wear blinding red with acid-lime polka dots, and after a while the pattern would disappear and slowly turn into something the colour of porridge. He wore a side parting that looked as if it had been applied with a set square. His moustache had a bit of previous and was to be found in the mugshot folders. His eyes were so close together that they probably swapped tears whenever he looked in the mirror.

  ‘I think,’ Mawker said, rotating his pencil between his fingers, ‘that you know who attacked you. I think that you’re protecting someone.’

  ‘Interesting methods I deploy, losing all that blood to protect someone. Your hunches aren’t fit to sit on Quasimodo’s back.’

  ‘Gary Cullen,’ he said.

  ‘Or his,’ I said, thinking Who?

  ‘It was his flat you broke into.’

  ‘I didn’t break into any flat, Mawker. The fucking door was open.’

  ‘What’s the story with you and Cullen? Why did you want to see him?’

  ‘I didn’t want to see him. I don’t know who he is. It was a mistake. It was just bad luck.’

  ‘As liars go,’ Mawker leaned forward, giving me a kipper whiff of what he’d had for breakfast, ‘you’re about as bad as they come.’

  ‘Am I coming or am I going?’ I said. ‘As grammarians go, you’re a cock-end.’

  ‘Gary Cullen escaped from Summerhead eight weeks ago. We’ve been trying to find him ever since. The man is dangerous.’

  ‘Nooooo shit,’ I said.

  ‘His wife has gone walkabout, too. They used to live in the flat on St John’s Way but she, her two nippers and now Gary Cullen have all disappeared.’

  ‘He got a sister?’

  He frowned. ‘Not that I know of. Why?’

  I shrugged. I was trying to put it all together in my head, but my head needed putting together first. I needed some bastard-strength painkillers and some decent kip. I needed some vodka, too. Hang on, I’ll make a list…

  ‘You doing all right, Joel?’ he said. I was taken off guard. All this sledgehammering about, and I wasn’t ready for the little stiletto slipped between my ribs and finding the coldest part of me.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked, hating the hunted whine in my voice.

  ‘Just that you seem a bit pale.’

  ‘So would you if you’d just had someone use your nut for a gong.’

  ‘No,’ he said, and he moved his face closer, as if he was seeing something beneath the skin that he couldn’t quite make out in this light. ‘The other stuff, Joel. I mean Rebecca, Sarah. How do you feel?’

  I wanted to lean over and bite his nose off, spit it back in his face. But I sucked all the rage back in and just stared him down. He wasn’t a bad man, Ian Mawker, but when he tried to be one, he just became something to be pitied. Keep hold of that thought, I thought. Even if… especially if your head is filling with snapshots of Rebecca in every different shade of dead.

  ‘Working much?’ he asked, breezy as you like.

  I put up with it, joshing him about his inferior marks during training back in the late ’90s, and the time I walked in on him in his room while he was trying to persuade a girl, visible through her bedroom window opposite, to take her top off for him. He left, but not before comically warning me to think twice about ‘leaving town’. I could still hear him tapping his pencil against his teeth long after he’d taken himself and his grubby Columbo mac outside.

  I dialled Kara Geenan’s number and got a long, uninterrupted tone. I don’t know what was worse: wishing that the guy had hammered me another five times and done the job properly, or realising that I was going to have to speak to Barry Liptrott again. I swung my legs out of bed. Not too shoddy. I stood up. Pain crawled up and down my back but it was manageable.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
/>   She must have put a silencer on those nylons. ‘Nurse Ratched,’ I said, ‘what a pleasant surprise.’

  ‘It’s Nurse Rasheed,’ she said flatly, not getting it at all. ‘Get back under that blanket.’

  ‘You’ll have one hell of a bedbath on your hands if you don’t let me go where I need to go.’

  ‘We have special implements for that.’

  I eventually talked her out of it, but she accompanied me to the toilets and told me to hurry up. I was about to announce that I was going to discharge myself, but behind her, standing on the other side of a pair of swing-doors, I saw that Mawker had left behind a police guard. I wouldn’t be able to fart without him making a note of it.

  I looked out of the window. There was a drop of ten feet or so, but it would be into a drift of snow. I couldn’t see how thick it was, but it was better than nothing. I squeezed out through the gap and jumped into a patch that looked the most forgiving. What could be the worst that lay under that white blanket? It wasn’t as if hospital security had planted landmines.

  I disappeared up to my knees in water.

  It’s not the easiest job in the world to flag a cab when you’re dressed in pyjamas, less so when those pyjamas are sopping wet and streaked with mud. Eventually though, a taxi driver pulled up in front of me and took me home. He was violently anti-hospitals, due to his mother having to wait for a replacement hip that was inserted the wrong way round, so he had no problems about me trying to escape. When we arrived at my flat, I nipped inside to get some money to pay him. I found the door was hanging off its hinges. Just outside the front door is a hatch that leads into the attic. This too was gaping. Inside the flat there was a hole in the ceiling and a pile of plaster and floorboards on the floor. The footprints from a pair of trainers were smeared on the wall where the burglar had reached to gain purchase as he dropped in from above. Because the door had been locked from the outside, he’d had to break out; so a number of knives, including my favourite – an eighteen-inch Japanese vegetable knife that I used for chopping everything – had been snapped in his desperate attempts to get the door open. Mengele was nowhere to be seen. Nev, when I called him, was as shocked as I was. The place had been fine when he came to feed the cat as recently as the previous afternoon. I thanked him and rang off, grateful, at least, that he hadn’t walked in on the loonies while they were redecorating.