Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  He picked up the envelope and wandered back towards Cleveland Street, where he paused to rip it open and check the contents. There was a thousand pounds in fifty-pound notes, and a phone number. He stuffed the cash in his front jeans pocket and shredded the telephone number with his remarkable nails once it was snagged in his memory. On the one hand he was happy about the money and his success so far – he must have impressed the woman – and he liked the thrill of the game, not knowing who was who, liking the sheer anonymity, the delicious dislocated feel of it all; but the fact that she was reluctant to speak to him after so much shared experience, the fact that she had sent a child to act as courier, was disappointing.

  Where was the respect? How was he to make progress if the woman who could give him the job he needed most refused to meet him? The woman who was at the same time pushing him, drawing out the perfection that sat at his centre, just anticipating its moment? She talked of protection, but nothing could save him now. If he didn’t do the job – if she took it away from him and executed it herself – then he was finished; he became a husk for the rest of his life. And if he did end up doing it, then once it was done he knew he would turn into a pillar of stone. There was nothing to come afterwards. Happiness would arrive and depart at the precise moment that life fled the eyes of the man who occupied every second of the Wire’s existence. Future had no meaning. It was true, that old saying, especially for him: Tomorrow never comes.

  * * *

  Then I had us one of those days that sticks in your memory as if it existed better there than in real life. Everything about that day was super-real. The colours that filled in the shapes surrounding us, from getting out of bed to getting back into it, could have been borrowed from a cartoon.

  It started without a plan. I went round to see if Rob and Dave were coming out. I’d vaguely thought about cycling to the reservoir and titting about there all day. But they were helping their dad build a stone wall in the garden. Rob asked if I wanted to help, but I thought, fuck that, and went off by meself.

  ‘Try Gavin,’ Dave had said as I was leaving. ‘He lives just round the corner.’

  So I did. I didn’t know Gavin James – Jamzy – that well, had been a little in awe of him, in fact, because he was a couple of years older. He was the captain of the school football team, and he was popular with girls, but he didn’t have any of the arrogance of some of the other lads in his year.

  When I knocked on his door, his dad answered. I was made to wait in a tiny hallway while Jamzy was fetched. When he arrived, he looked puzzled. He smelled of dubbin, as he had been cleaning his football boots. After every match he stuffed his boots full of newspaper and, once they were dry, he brushed the soil off. Then he rubbed dubbin into the leather. They were old boots, his Patricks, but they looked beautiful.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  ‘I was just on me way up to Walton Reservoir,’ I said. ‘Want to come?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I’m playing football this affo.’

  Maybe he saw how pissed off I looked, because he then asked us if I wanted to play too. I said yeah, trying not to come over too keen like, and he told us to be at the gas fields with me kit within the hour.

  ‘Red shirt,’ he instructed.

  I went home and changed into me kit, giving me boots a quick polish with the Kiwi so they’d look a bit like Jamzy’s, and cycled over to the gas fields. The fields were a fucking mess, but they had real goalposts on them. They were on the edge of the town, in the shadow of a couple of gasometers. Nobody knew what the fields were really called. Everyone knew them as the gas fields.

  When I got there, there was half a dozen lads playing three-and-in. I hung back and waited for Jamzy to turn up. I was startled by the green of the grass which, from the road, had not seemed as bright or as, well, green, even though the sun hadn’t come out. There was a guy hanging around near the pitch. He was a scruffy-looking twat, and I’d seen him before, sitting on the benches in town, or trying to get into pubs that he was barred from. I’d never seen him sober, and here he was now, pouring Carlsberg Special Brew down his neck, red-faced and muttering. He was Irish – Tavlin, I think his name was. At least, that’s what the kids who taunted him in town called him. ‘Up the IRA, Tavlin,’ they used to say to him, and they’d get a mouthful of abuse in reply.

  The girl from the previous night was there too, standing by the touchline. She looked fucking fine. She gave us a little wave and that made me face burn a bit, and I felt bad about how things had gone between us. She didn’t seem to be holding a grudge though.

  Jamzy turned up not long after, and Rob and Dave were in tow. I felt a little annoyed that they’d obviously agreed to come out with him, but had refused me own invitation, but that resentment didn’t last. Partly because they’re such good company that you forget pretty quickly any disagreements you might have had with them, and partly because loads more boys turned up within the space of a few minutes and teams were being picked, and partly because of what happened when Rob saw Tavlin stumbling around the goalposts, trying to unzip himself for a piss.

  ‘Are you all right, with him being here?’ he said to us.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ I said. ‘No harm. He’s just a pissed old bastard. He’s never done nowt to us.’ Rob had the look of someone who’s said too much and only just realised it. He knew there was no point trying to laugh it off. He watched Tavlin pissing into the grass, warbling some tune or other, and said:

  ‘Well, no, but he did something to your mam, didn’t he?’

  Rob told us, as we were lining up for the start of the match, that his dad had heard that Tavlin had gone into a pub one night when me ma was singing. He had waited till she came off the stage, bought her a drink and, as she was taking it off him, he slid his hand up her skirt and shoved his fingers into her knickers.

  It felt as though the colour from me shirt had leaked into me eyes. When I looked over towards the girl, she seemed to have frozen as if someone had replaced her with a perfect cardboard replica, but her eyes bored into us, and there was knowledge there, it seemed like, and understanding. If you could have hardened the rod of air that connected our eyes and examined it in a lab, you’d have seen nothing but me and her linked, combined, mixed up so much that it would be impossible to tear us apart. It give us a punch in me guts, but it also focused me anger, turned it into something white-hot. I took it on to the pitch with us and almost got into a fight when I scythed through the opposition’s centre forward, leaving me stud marks on his legs and tearing his shorts.

  Every time I passed the ball, or the action switched to the other side of the pitch, I turned me attention back to Tavlin. He was performing a Mexican Wave now, on his own. He was on the second of his tins, the empty having been thrown on to the pitch. He was wandering along the touchline towards the halfway line as I got the ball. I dribbled with it in his direction, then purposefully gave the ball away. When the winger who I’d passed to was three feet away from Tavlin, I steamed in, taking the ball, the winger, and Tavlin with it. He didn’t know what hit him, but as he lay there with beer foaming all over his stinking, gnarled face, I leaned over him and hissed: ‘That was us.’

  But it wasn’t enough. I felt empty as the game wore on, me anger given a direction, but no real result. The girl had gone and I felt like a bee that had lost its sting. I felt gutless, without direction. Tavlin struggled to his feet and staggered away across the field, the incident already forgotten, any pain he might have felt dulled by the beer he was constantly sinking.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Jamzy said. ‘It’s just a knockabout. It’s not the Cup Final.’

  When I could see Tavlin just as a speck against the horizon, vanishing amid the collapsed, cement-coloured rows of the housing estate that noses on to the gas fields, I told the boys that I had to get going but I’d come back later if the game was still on. It wasn’t unusual for football matches to last eight hours, dwindling away to a five-a-side or becoming engorged by passers-by in
to a full-on war but never breaking for anything so lame as half-time.

  I got on me bike and set off after Tavlin.

  I thought I’d lost him, at one point. The estate stretched out before us, one long avenue of boarded-up windows, burnt-out cars, and kids smoking fags while passing around a two-litre plastic bottle of sweet cider. A dog scurried past, eyes enlarged by the thinness of its body. Then she came out from the blind side of a hut on a patch of wasteland. She had a look on her that was as naked and pure as a one-second-old baby. It told us that I was hers and she was mine. It told us that we were as integrated and as inseparable as Siamese twins sharing one heart, one brain. I looked at her and there I saw a mirror.

  ‘He’s in there,’ she said, her voice forcing every other fragment of sound into the background.

  Me mouth filled with saliva. It felt as though me prick had been swapped for a broom handle and, even at the feeling of it, she looked down at me crotch and smiled. When I tried to look into her eyes, my focus slid away and fell on her hair, or the curve of her waist, or her tits, perky and tight, cupped in their white bra that was visible through the sheerness of the blouse she was wearing.

  She asked me: ‘Will you see this through?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’ She was nodding. ‘And I knew you were always going to say yes to me. And you will, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I’d have said yes to any question that popped from that soft, teasing mouth of hers. I’d have said yes if she asked us to get into a bath of petrol and play with a disposable lighter.

  She said, ‘I will take care of you, if you want it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She said, ‘I’ll help you find your mother – if you want it. I’ll help you destroy what makes you unhappy.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She said, ‘Trust me always. Do as I say and you shall come out on the other side happy.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’

  She smiled. ‘I haven’t got one. You’ll have to find one for me. And you will.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

  She said, ‘He’ll go in there. He’s pissed and clumsy and he might do himself an injury – or worse. Imagine, being pissed and trying to get warm when you’ve got nowhere to go. What might you do? How wrong could it go?’ Then she walked off around the back of the hut.

  Then I saw him, draining a can as he appeared from the hut’s blind side. Just as she had a minute ago. It was as if, in the second of her disappearing, she had miraculously turned into this fuck-up of a human being. It was like being tricked in a magic show and I couldn’t see the join. When I dashed around behind the hut, she was nowhere to be seen.

  Tavlin had been for another piss; a large black stain now covered the crotch of his trousers.

  ‘She said you’ll go in there,’ I said.

  Tavlin looked at me unsteadily. ‘Warra fogn hell?’ he said.

  God knows what the hut was. I think maybe it was a relic from an old car park that had once stood here, one of those unauthorised jobs that looks the part because of some wanker in a cap handing out tickets at a fiver a go. It had always been called ‘The Tramp’s Hut’ because a tramp had been found dead from exposure inside it one winter, trying to find shelter away from the cold.

  I cycled closer to him and asked him for a drink of his beer.

  ‘Fogn bazd,’ he said. ‘Sog may fogn dog.’ His eyes were this weird blue, like a swimming pool: bleached and wet but almost frying with hot colour. I kicked the can out of his hand and moved away on the bike before he had a chance to grab us. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out another gold tin. He was swearing non-stop now, although I couldn’t tell where one word began and another ended.

  ‘All right, Tavlin?’ I said. ‘You stupid fucking bastard.’

  He blazed at us. He threw the can and it caught me ear, making it burn, before landing and splitting on the kerb, jetting fizz all over the place.

  He ran at us and I almost fell off me bike, but he was only trying to rescue his lager. He knelt on the kerb and supped at the split in the tin, as if it were venom he was trying to suck out of a snake bite. The crack of his arse rose from his shiny, paper-thin keks. I felt the world go away for a second and the unreal colour of everything turned a dirty, dishwater grey. When it rammed back into us, Tavlin was upright again, mumbling unhappily and trying to unhook the latch on the tramp hut.

  ‘I’ll do that for you,’ I said. I got off me bike and kicked the latch free.

  ‘Thanz,’ he said. ‘Yuh fogn cont.’

  Inside the hut was a bucket full of cigarette ends and an upturned plastic milk crate. A wank mag, with all the colour sucked out of it by the sunlight, lay open on the floor. A blonde woman held her greasy snatch open for the camera. He sat down on the crate and poured some more beer from his split tin into his mouth and across his shirt.

  His tongue lolled in his mouth.

  She glistened in too many places at once.

  I felt sick… felt the hut start to sway.

  ‘Have you got a match?’ I said.

  He said, ‘Fog.’

  I kicked the door shut on him and slotted the latch back in place. He didn’t say nowt. I cycled half a mile to a corner shop and bought a box of England’s Glory and a can of Coke. By the time I got back I could hear him snoring inside.

  I took a match and struck it. When the flame had settled, I set fire to the cardboard box and tossed it through the window. The box landed on the wank mag, obscuring the blonde’s snatch. I felt enormous relief and a sudden sense of utter correctness. Of poetry.

  The box flared up and the mag caught fire. Tavlin didn’t move a muscle.

  I cycled away. I was maybe a hundred metres away from the tramp’s hut when I heard the first shouts.

  ‘Fogn helpuzz,’ I whispered. ‘Fogn bazd.’

  I was nearly home when I heard the sirens. He was on the news that night, Tavlin.

  I went to sleep and I dreamed about him coming out of the hut. When he opened his mouth to speak, fire flew from between his teeth. His clothes were burnt off him and he had the girl’s body. I went to him and twisted his head off, as easily as loosening the screw-cap on a bottle of pop. Inside his head were the words MADE IN CHINA. When I looked at his face, he was the girl from the wank mag. She winked at us and peeled herself open. I stepped inside her and fell asleep for a thousand years.

  When I woke up in real time, in real life, I realised what the smell of blonde was. But it was gone just as quickly. I didn’t see the girl again for a long time, but it didn’t matter. I was getting into other things then. I was growing up.

  * * *

  He stopped now in front of an Indian restaurant and looked at his reflection in the window. He noticed that he was idly stroking the small diary in his chest pocket. He got it out and flicked through the pages almost tenderly, his fingers soft and delicate, not wanting to damage the paper, tracing the patterns worn into its leather covers. The names written in here were added many years before, and his handwriting reflected that: it was the handwriting of a child, of someone who was just learning to join his letters together. Three of the names – there were thirty in total, the size of her class – had been neatly ruled out, but the pencil that had scored through them was recent, its lead shiny across the old, dull names. Putting a new layer on top of those names was like closing an electrical circuit; he felt a jolt leap through his head as if he was at home again, a child in those lazy, hot days in a Liverpool classroom as the summer holidays chased him down.

  Some of the names he could put faces to, some he had trouble remembering at all. But it didn’t matter: those names would continue for as long as he kept his book. It was the names, not their owners, that justified him. He had already put a line through the three names that had conspired to take his mother away from him, and the most important name of all didn’t need to be written down. It was so well known to him, it might as
well have been carved into the meat of his brain with a knife. That name sat on his tongue every minute of every day. The shape of its vowels and consonants were as well known to him as those of his own.

  He bought a ham-salad roll from a sandwich shop – no mayonnaise, no salt, a multigrain roll, extra tomato for the antioxidants, the lycopene – and ate it on the way back to his secret hideaway. Once he arrived, he spent ten minutes picking the blood from under his fingernails. There was a lot of it, dried and black now, and removing it was a sad job. Getting rid of any trace of what he did upset him, because then it felt as if it never happened, as if he was never involved. Rubbing away the signs of his work was like rubbing away the work itself. Sometimes it was an effort to convince himself that he had ever killed.

  * * *

  It was Jamzy got us into body-building. He told us that birds wouldn’t look at you unless you had some meat on your biceps, a six-pack under your shirt. I told him I didn’t like beer and he looked at us as if I was joking. But I don’t like it. I don’t like any alcohol. I wasn’t interested in birds either, apart from the girl I’d seen at the footy that time, but I didn’t dare tell him that in case he thought I was queer. I wanted to improve meself, make the best of us that there was. I wanted to find the full capacity of the power in me arms and legs. I wanted to reach that brink, and stay there – go beyond it if I could. I wanted to be a mirror to all that compacted violence I saw leaning over me mam. I wanted to reflect that go away in their eyes. I wanted to return a little bit of the fear they’d put up me.

  We went to a gym called O’Riordan’s one night, when it was teeming, cold winds tearing up and down the streets like invisible drag racers made of winter. I was wearing a torn grey T-shirt and jogging pants, a pair of weight-lifting gloves. The T-shirt flapped around us like a sail that was going to take us off into the sky if I wasn’t careful. I tucked it into me waistband and bent me head against the wind and rain.