Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  O’Riordan’s was just a couple of hundred square metres of a warehouse up Prentiss Lane. The rest of it was closed, windows boarded up, falling to shit. Used to be a wire factory; there was a lot of that round here, a big industry in these parts. The entrance was up a fire escape. The girl on the reception desk didn’t say one word to us, just pushed a clipboard at us for us to sign, and pointed at the entry fee, which was laser-printed on a sign behind her chair: £1.50 per hour. We gave her three quid each and moved into the gym proper. A short, bullish guy, whose neck was disappearing into the ledge of muscle rising from his shoulders, gave us our induction lesson. He was all right, as it turned out. Name of Bobby Jepson. What was left of his hair was dirty blond, cropped short. He made up for that with a thick moustache. His skin was dark from the solarium, his eyes blue as the stone on me mum’s engagement ring. He showed us the free weights and the bench presses, the exercise balls, skipping ropes and treadmills. We warmed up with a fifteen-minute ride on the exercise bikes, and then worked our way around the machines.

  ‘What is it you want from this place?’ Bobby asked us.

  ‘I just want to get fit,’ Jamzy said.

  I said, ‘I want to build up me body and get strong. But I don’t want to lose any mobility, like you have.’

  Bobby looked at us hard, and I smiled as if to show I was joking.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, slowly, not taking his eyes off us. ‘Okay.’

  He taught us how, if you want to build up mass, you do lots of reps at a low weight. If you wanted to improve your strength, though, you had to up the weight.

  ‘There’s no point doing lots of reps on a high weight,’ he said. ‘What you’re looking to do is put lots of little tears in your muscles, and you can get that from one set of 15 reps. When the tears heal, it forms a new layer of muscle. That’s what body-building is all about: doing yourself damage.’

  So that’s what I did. Jamzy stuck to the treadmills to build up his stamina and try to burn off the beer belly he was getting. The gym started filling up after half an hour, as workers came off the 6–10 shift. The air was filled with the clank of iron and the grunts of men, and a few women, pushing themselves through the resistance of the machines.

  About fifteen minutes before the gym was due to shut at 11 p.m., a man in a smoky-grey suit came through the doors. One or two of the men on the machines nodded to him as he strode right through the gym towards the door at the back with a sign that said Staff Only. He flashed his teeth at them. Bobby cut him off as he was about to open the door, and they shook hands, swapped verbals for a few minutes. The man in the suit then clapped Bobby on the back and went through into an office.

  We left soon after, and I could hardly walk. Me legs felt as weak as a foal’s and me chest burned where I had been using the bench press. We went to the pub across the road for a couple of glasses of water, and necked them double-quick while the staff were emptying ashtrays and putting stools up on tables. I felt amazing. I felt cleaned out, reassembled.

  ‘That was fucking brilliant,’ I said. I couldn’t stop feeling me arms. They felt thick and powerful, pumped up as though someone had been inflating them on the sly.

  ‘Yeah, let’s go again tomorrow.’

  ‘Day after,’ I said. ‘You have to go every other day, because you need to let the muscle recover.’

  Jamzy didn’t come with us, next time I went. He was seeing some girl he’d chatted up at the bus stop. Fair enough, so I went on me own. I was aching something chronic by then, but I went. And I kept going. Every other day. Couple of miles on the bike. Stretching. And then I zoned in on various areas of me body. One day I’d work just on me arms. Next time legs. Next time back and chest. Next time abs. Moving the weights in different directions to draw the potential from me body. I put on weight. I started eating lots of carbohydrates the night before a training session. I ate steak and eggs for protein. I ate so many greens, I thought I’d start shitting pure spinach.

  ‘You’re looking all right, Wire,’ Bobby said to us one night, maybe six weeks after I’d started. Blokes down the gym started calling us Wire because I was thin and full of sinew. And tough. I was getting on all right with everyone because I kept me mouth shut unless I was talked to. There was Bobby, who I could call a mate now. And Fivesy, who lived round the corner and bred pedigree Burmillas. And Colin ‘Garden’ Rakes, who ran a taxi firm and would give us a lift home in his Lexus. I still saw the man in the suit, either the smoky-grey one or a black number. Always with a white shirt, and a tie in a solid colour, no patterns ever. Turned out he was O’Riordan. He was built like a brick shithouse, very thick through the chest, a face like a block of wood, heavily tanned, and lots of lines but it looked good like on an actor, a little bit like Willem Dafoe maybe.

  The torn grey T-shirt was filling out. It no longer flapped on us when I walked to the gym in the evening. I started spending days in the woods, driving my fists, and the edge of my hands into the gritty loam, toughening them up. From a standing start, I’d take off through the wet, getting up to sprint speed as soon as I could. Then I’d stop. Short sprints, quick turns, again, again, till I was moving so quickly it was as if it was happening before I even decided to do it. I was bulking out, but the running and the bikes and the sprint work kept me lean.

  I was working the rope one night when Bobby came over and said that O’Riordan wanted a chat with us.

  I went up to his office and walked in without his say-so, but he didn’t mind. Said he expected it. He told us he was shutting the gym for the weekend for refurbishment, but he wanted me to come in and use the machines for free, as long as I’d make a cup of tea for the workmen, let them in and out, that kind of thing.

  ‘Why me?’ I said.

  He was looking at his nails, which were buffed to a high shine, nicely shaped like a lass’s. ‘Because I don’t trust any of the other cunts in here,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you do it yourself, then?’

  He stopped preening and looked at us. He had hard, grey eyes. He also gave us a look at his gnashers. They seemed bigger than they ought to be. ‘Because I run this outfit. And because I’m asking you to do it.’

  ‘What if I say no?’

  ‘Find another gym.’

  ‘There in’t another gym.’

  ‘Then say yes.’

  I said yes.

  I came in the next morning in my kit, letting meself in with the key O’Riordan gave us. I brewed up in the staff room and listened to the radio for a bit, then did some stretching. I was twenty minutes into a bike ride when the door opened, and Boardo come in. Paul Boardman worked on the wagons, driving freight up and down the motorways. When he wasn’t on a job, he was in here, pissing everyone off with his pushing in on equipment when everyone else was waiting patiently, or banging the gear around, no respect for the weights. But he got away with it because he was O’Riordan’s minder. He talked to you while you were concentrating on your reps, telling you in detail about the birds he licked out in his cabin the night before, picked up from some service station or other: how he had to clamp his hand over their lipstick because his prick was so big he made them scream, and he didn’t want people thinking he was killing tarts inside his rig.

  He didn’t look at us once as he walked over to the free weights and started curling the kilos. Which told us plenty: he knew I was going to be here. O’Riordan hadn’t let on about Boardo being around. So I kept vertical, working on the chin-up bar and the bike and the rope, waiting for him to make his move. There were no refurbishments taking place today. No cups of tea to make. No banter with the carpenters.

  He took his time about it, sidling along the workout mats, checking himself out in the full-length mirrors, till he was close enough for us to smell the sweat off his armpits.

  ‘All right, Wire?’ he said, voice low, his back to us. I tensed up. It was coming.

  When he twisted around, quicker than a man of his bulk deserved to be, I was ready. He had a Stanley knife, the handl
e wrapped in insulation tape. I watched it move past the spot where me cheek had been a second earlier. I stepped back and passed the handle of the skipping rope into me right fist, freeing me left, me best hand. He launched himself at us and I stepped aside, sweeping the loop of the rope under his foot and tugging hard. He went down awkwardly, his ankle folding under him, and he shouted. He rolled on to his back, the Stanley knife pointing at us all the time, and rubbed at his ankle. His face was very red. I put the rope down and picked up a dumb-bell, about twenty-five kilos piled on to it. The weights chinked and clinked on the bar as I moved towards him.

  He levered himself upright and slashed out at us as I broke into his space. I met the blade with the weights, knocking his arm to one side. Unbalanced, he put out his other hand to stop himself from going down again, and I sent me left foot steaming into the centre of his chest. His face went pale. He knew it was the beginning of something very bad. Twenty minutes later, when O’Riordan and three of his cronies were pulling us off him, I couldn’t see any expression on his face any more because most of it was dangling between me teeth. One of his ribs was poking out of a hole in his vest and he seemed to be breathing through it. The top of his head had a dent in it you could have filled with a large apple. I thought it was an improvement.

  ‘He looks much better, doesn’t he?’ I said, and the cronies backed off. One of them was swallowing against a tide of vomit that kept surging into his mouth. He gave up fighting it and sprayed over one of the treadmills.

  ‘The cleaning bill for that comes out of your wages, Eddie,’ O’Riordan said. When I was calming down, the cords on me neck going back to sleep, O’Riordan told the others to fuck off. He got bored waiting for Boardo to snuff it, so he cut his windpipe open with the Stanley. He kept saying, ‘Your hands… your fucking hands.’

  He told me what to do with the body and I followed his instructions to the letter. When I came back, he had us in his office again and he told us he had a job for us, if I wanted it. Shadowing him in the clubs. Chauffeuring for him. Being the bite to his bark.

  I said, ‘Yes, I’ll have your job, but if you set us up like that again, I’ll give you cause for concern.’ I said it just like that, as calm as you like, something I heard on the telly. He wasn’t expecting it, and it took the tan out of his face for a few seconds. And then he said: ‘Deal.’

  * * *

  A neutral voice answered when he rang the number in the morning. It was raining heavily and it was difficult to hear what the voice was saying. Buses and taxis were turned into a blurred mess of reds and blacks, through the foggy windows of the phone booth. –‘I did what you asked,’ he said. ‘Can’t we meet?’ –‘Very soon,’ the voice said. ‘I’m happy with the way you went about your business. There’ll be another job for you.’ – ‘The job?’ –‘Maybe, but darling, I am so worried about you.’ –‘When?’ he asked, hating the wheedling tone of his voice, hating that he cut across her while she was speaking from her heart. –‘You will be contacted. You will have the details. Cold now, distant.’ –‘When? When?’ The line died in his hand. She must have many contacts, the Four-Year-Old thought, and some of them must be watching him, to see how he conducted himself. He must keep himself calm and focused at all times. He mustn’t give her cause to doubt his ability.

  He dashed across the street, fast and light, powerful and invisible, hunching away from the deluge, feeling so nimble that he might have dodged each and every drop of rain. He bought a newspaper and took it inside. It was less busy, it seemed, today. The coffee bar where he had found Linda – where Linda had found him, where he had drawn her to him – was very slow; three or four customers sitting at tables, sipping from their cups. Her smoothie stall was now closed, while the flowers, the croissants, the handkerchiefs on the other stalls were for the benefit of nobody but the staff today, it seemed. The platforms were populated by people who didn’t appear to be getting on or off the trains. It could have been a tableau of pointlessness and apathy, arranged specially for his eyes.

  Wire watched some of them as they strolled around the concourse. He bought a cup of coffee and sat at the counter, blowing on it till it was cool enough to drink. His eyes settled on the scars on his arms. He flexed his muscles slightly and the scars writhed like livid snakes.

  * * *

  I worked on me third birthday. My last birthday before I decided it was time to make me move down to the Smoke. O’Riordan needed some help in dealing with an ex-colleague called Wilkes who was muscling in on the club scene, offering his own bouncers, what he called ‘professional, no-nonsense doormen’, and undercutting O’ Riordan something mental. That way we’d already lost our business with Echoes, and Flight, and Mirrors. We’d had word Wilkes was going to be at Blue Storm on this particular night, and we got in O’Riordan’s Merc, just me and Fivesy with O’Riordan himself driving like a mad bastard, running red lights, clipping kerbs. He was frothing at the corners of his mouth, swearing constantly; you could just about hear it under his breath: cunt… cunt… cunt… cunt… Me blood was up, too. I was thinking, I become a man tonight. I prove to meself, and I prove to the girl, that I can cut it. I would reach a new gear tonight.

  O’Riordan wanted us tooled up for the evening, but I said no, I didn’t want anything that was going to slow us down. Fivesy had a compact hunting knife he’d bought in Kentucky on holiday the previous year which he’d smuggled in to the country in a giant jar of Smucker’s peanut butter and jelly. O’Riordan had his piece on him, a Derringer with a pearl handle – a lass’s gun, but nobody was going to tell him that. I didn’t want nothing, because I wanted me hands free. Me hands could do more damage than Fivesy’s knife or O’ Riordan’s toy shooter. What was the point of filling your hand with something that your hand could do itself anyway?

  We get to Blue Storm at just gone midnight, and the place is humming. Cudge and Dobbo on the door, as usual, and we give them the nod from the Merc as we cruise into the car park and find a dark corner. Come 2 a.m., kicking-out time, we see Wilkes turn up in his gunmetal Lotus, followed by a black BMW. He gets out of the Lotus with a tall red-haired slut in a glittering, tight green catsuit. Four of his no-nonsense doormen get out of the car too, and I think: in the bag. They’re soft fuckers: all buffed fingernails and cleanse, tone and moisturise. I bet they wore gloves in the gym. I bet they took bottles of Powerade in with them. Spent more time waxing their French-crop hairstyles than they did pressing metal.

  We saunter over, while Wilkes is amiably chatting to Dobbo, maybe trying to get him to turn coat. Smiles all round. Bigger smiles when Wilkes sees O’Riordan. But not when he sees us. That smile dims a bit, the way the reflection of bright sunshine on a wall will fade suddenly when thin cloud passes in front of it. It was the look of someone who recognises madness when he sees it. He’d heard talk of what I could do. He had an inkling that the rumours of what happened between us and Boardo were anything but. He had a feeling that, were he to take a spade to some of the soil around Alderley Edge, he might find Boardo or at least pieces of him.

  Wire, he says quietly. There’s none of that shouldn’t you be in bed shit. Shouldn’t you be doing your homework. Nineteen or ninety, it makes no odds in this business. Violence couldn’t give a toss how tight your skin is. Wilkes’ boys are looking us up and down like a bunch of farmers at a meat auction. I don’t blink. I don’t smile. I don’t say a word. I don’t meet anybody’s gaze. I slowly flex me fingers, that’s all. I’ve got long fingernails, like a classical guitarist. I soak them in vinegar every night. I can puncture the top of a tin can with them. Click-click-click they go now, as I stretch and massage each one against its neighbour. Click-click-click.

  O’Riordan says: Let’s go inside, shall we? Let’s all have a drink.

  We file in. I take up the rear. I don’t want them to see us. I just want their sense of something animal padding after them. I want hackles rising.

  The club is still emptying. Staff dip into shadowy booths, first asking, and then tell
ing the pissheads to drink up, let’s have your glasses. The music’s stopped playing, but the system hasn’t been switched off yet; the hum and crackle might easily be the tension leaping off our little posse as we head to the bar. Everyone orders bottles of San Miguel. O’Riordan pours tequila for him and Wilkes. I shake me head. I don’t want nowt. I’m assessing the lie of the land: how the stairs down to the dance floor are edged with protective metal strips. I’m looking at the brass rail running the length of the bar. Me eyes are assessing this grainy club light, getting chummy with its shadows. I see the booth with the bottles that have been missed by the barmaid collecting empties. I see the cigarette in the ashtray that hasn’t been put out properly. I see a thousand things that I can maim you with, a dozen things that will kill you. I slow me breathing. I feel me heartbeat levelling out, so it would keep time with the second hand of a watch. I wait for it. I wait.

  The suits unbuttoning. Laughter. Wilkes saying, This town can be big enough for the both of us, Walter. We could clean up if you throw your cap in with us.

  O’Riordan: If I throw in with you? How about the other way round?

  Some of Wilkes’s puppies joking now, relaxing. Wilkesy and O’ Riordan getting on like best mates. No bloodletting tonight. Take advantage: have a few beers. Enjoy yourselves. Think Liverpool can win the title this season, now they’ve got a bit of width? How’s the car? Seen the new de Niro film? Flirting with the women cleaning up behind the bar. Look at the Tangas on that. And Fivesy joining in, but tipping me a look every now and then, his hand in his pocket. Me, I’m waiting, eyes on O’Riordan.

  Sometimes I wonder what I would look like if I let this rage inside us take over for good. Would I have fangs? Red eyes? Would me hands twist into claws? The hate fills me every waking moment so that I have to force meself to calm down before I let fly on the first fucker to cross me path.