Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  Waiting.

  One time, sleeping rough in Stanley Park, this old woman grabbed me toe to wake us up, and I had her down in the grass, throttling her, roaring in her face before she’d had chance to blink.

  Waiting.

  I’ve often wondered why the blood I’ve tasted is so sour, and I think it’s because the meat of the men who carry it has been spoiled by fear. I saw this programme once about abattoirs where pigs were slaughtered unprofessionally; where they were aware of their fate and ruined themselves with panic. PSE, they call it: pale, soft, exudative meat. Where the meat is lighter than normal in colour, with a sludgy texture and wet surface, often with high drip loss, and a pH below 5.6.

  O’Riordan turns to us and says: ‘What about you, Wire? You ever thought of running a club?’

  Unleashed.

  I turn to one of Wilkes’ puppets. I say, ‘What’s your pH? Lower than 5.6, you reckon?’

  He goes: ‘You wha–?’ And it’s the last sound he’ll make without some kind of synthetic assistance, because click-click-click me forefinger and finger-fucking finger disappear into his throat up to the first knuckle.

  He’s out of the game, so it’s just three left and Wilkes, who’s already backing off. Fivesy’s got his blade out and it’s stuck in the guts of another stooge who’s looking down at it and he’s got his mitts around Fivesy’s and it’s like he’s trying to help Fivesy as he slowly hoists it north, ripping a line through him that turns his crisp, white shirt into a very noisy red.

  The buzz fills me head, as if me brain has been replaced by a nest of angry wasps. It’s the sound of violence. The oldest sound there is.

  The stragglers have seen what’s happening and some of them are screaming, heading for the doors without any encouragement at all now. The staff have frozen, watching us with mouths open, thinking, ‘Do I wade in and try to stop this? For minimum wage?’

  I’m standing over one of the two poor saps that are left, and somehow I’ve transferred a great patch of his face on to me fists. I pick him up at the waist while he babbles at me about his girlfriend being pregnant, please, please, and he’s light, so criminally light it’s almost not fair, and I swing him round and down, and the back of his head cracks against the bar rail, right where there’s a lovely couple of nuts securing it to the wood. His chin snaps into his chest hard enough to give him a bruise, and I leave him on the floor where he twitches, eyes flickering, losing blood through every hole he was born with, and some new ones too.

  The last one I punch once, hard, right in the solar plexus, while he’s busy throwing kung-fu shapes and warning me about what colour belt he wears. During his fish impressions I donkey-kick him down the steps. He lands nastily on the dance floor and stays there, and I think he’s dead because there was one mighty snap when he landed, and I don’t think it was the sound of O’Riordan tucking into the free Twiglets at the bar. It’s all taken less than a minute. Fivesy’s cleaning his knife against Wilkes’s jacket. Wilkes’s crying, saying to O’ Riordan through great bubbles of snot and spit: What is it you want? Anything, I’ll sort it. I promise.

  And O’Riordan, soothing him, saying, Come on, Peter, let’s all go for a ride. And Wilkes begging now, but nobody likes a cry-baby and we get him outside and into the Merc. We’re out of the car park and heading up the Chester Road even as the first of the blue lights comes stuttering on to the scene. Couple of minutes later, O’Riordan parks up by a gate in front of a field. A pale track leads into it a few feet, and then gets swallowed up by the dark. We ignore that and invite Wilkes to walk across the road towards a wall. Beyond the wall is the golf course. We scramble over, Fivesy getting a laugh from O’Riordan when he says we wouldn’t have this problem if you was a member, and we push through the trees and the rough and find ourselves on the fairway of the first hole. The sweep of grass looks as smooth as soap.

  O’Riordan takes a hip flask from his jacket and offers it to Wilkes. Wilkes shakes his head, but then grabs the flask and has a hard drink out of it.

  What are you going to do? Wilkes asks, and then answers his own question. I don’t want to die.

  We have to make an example of you, Peter, O’Riordan says. If I let a cunt like you piss all over my operations, well, that’s just going to give the green light to any other Joe who wants to come and steal a bit of my land.

  I won’t bother you again, I promise, Wilkes says.

  O’Riordan: I know you won’t.

  He looks at me and I take Wilkes by the arm. Fivesy hands me his hunting knife, and I pause for a moment before accepting it. O’Riordan starts screaming, but I give him a slap and he shuts up fast. He’s looking at me as I drag him along the fairway. He’s looking at me, and looking at the green, and looking back at O’Riordan and Fivesy who are sharing the hip flask and looking up at the stars.

  Wilkes licks his lips and turns his black eyes on me again. How do I get out of this one, hey, Wire? Name your price.

  I don’t say a word. Me at work, I make Marcel Marceau seem gobby. But as we get nearer to the green and the bunkers that surround it, I’m thinking about the way things have gone tonight, and starting to worry.

  What if I have a glass jaw? I think. What if I’m unable to take a hit. One day I’ll come up against someone as quick, or as hard, or as nasty. And if I can’t sustain an injury, I’ll be in danger. I’ll be bound for the cemetery. Tonight you come of age, I thought. Tonight you reach a new gear.

  He’s getting wobbly on his feet, now, knowing what’s coming, so it comes as a surprise to him, I’m sure, when I goes: Here’s your price. Here’s what it will take to get out of this.

  And he’s all, What? What? Anything. And his eyes are big and round and interested.

  Me: I want you to show us what pain means.

  Silence from Wilkes. He thinks I’m pissing with him, pissing on a dead man.

  I say: Can you do it?

  He goes: Yes.

  I take me jacket off, then me tie and me shirt. I hand him Fivesy’s knife and he unsheathes it slowly, as if he still can’t quite believe what’s going on here. I tell him to hurt us. I tell him to slash at the biceps of me right arm. I tell him to not get any funny ideas about trying to kill us, because I will know. I will know instantly, just by the positioning of his feet, and his angle of attack, and I will stop him.

  He hacks at the muscles for thirty seconds until he’s out of breath and we’re both covered in me blood. I gritted me teeth for what I thought would come, but it didn’t grow beyond a manageable heat.

  You call that pain? I ask him, and it’s nothing. He’s nodding desperately, but what does he fucking know? What do you fucking know about pain? I demand. But he’s not speaking. He doesn’t have a clue. I goes, I’ll tell you about pain. And I tell him about me ma and her dying and how much that hurt, how it felt like a million scissors being opened and shut inside us all at the same time. I talk and I talk, and Wilkes doesn’t say a thing. I’m so enraged that I don’t know what I’m doing with the knife, or Wilkes, until I’m no longer sitting in sand, but a kind of gritty black mud. His head flops against us, looking up at us like some doting lover dozing on me lap. He’s still listening, even though is ears are no longer attached to his head. I keep talking, I keep telling him about pain until O’Riordan and Fivesy turn up, and they ask us very gently to put down what’s left of him, it’s time to go.

  * * *

  Neil Lever said, ‘She had a song, your mum, she used to sing in the pubs when they had open mike sessions. She didn’t have much of a voice, but people stopped yakking in order to listen to her, maybe because she sounded so genuine. It was her own song, her own tune. It was the only song she knew.’

  A part of us remembers that, or wants to remember. She used to take us to the pubs in a basket and put us on the table among the pints, while she got up to sing Sorry Boy. Some pisshead would look after us for three or four minutes, give us a stout-soaked pork scratching to suck on, until Ma returned, the place roaring. I do remember
the applause, if nowt else.

  Where have you gone? My sorry boy, my sorry boy?

  How can I go on? My sorry, sorry boy?

  Lever met her at one of them pubs. She was damaged goods by then, putting on weight from drinking too much, face bloated and bloodshot. She was taking pills to get her to sleep at night, and pills to keep her awake during the day. The school where she worked had sacked her. Some of the pupils had complained about the way she nodded off during classes, or her mood swings which could turn her from the placid creature she was into somebody who snapped and glared. I read about it in her diaries. She made a list of the girls who had gone to complain to the head about her. I’ve got that list now.

  ‘We didn’t do anything that normal people do when they get together,’ Lever explained. ‘No cinema or restaurants. No take-outs in front of a video. It was as if I’d come into it a couple of years after the start. We sat together in silence mostly. I went to all the pubs with her when she was singing. I picked up her prescriptions from the chemist.’

  Lever had left the chip shop and was working as a rides operator at a shitty little theme park off the M62, called Wowland. Once we’d got to know each other, I used to pick him up when he’d finished his shift and we’d drive around, visiting all the pubs and clubs where Ma used to perform, or other places of note. Sometimes I’d get there early and watch him from the fence as he pressed a big green button to get his ride started – some feeble roundabout of spaceships with chipped paint and slashed seats – and a big red button to stop it. Every four weeks, the staff were rotated. The worst job was in the mere, helping the punters get started in their pedalos, and then parking them after they returned. Lever had to wear thigh-length waders, and the water was never anything other than dead cold. He had to smile like a madman whenever the kids splashed him, which was all the time. The best job was driving the miniature train around the perimeter of the theme park.

  There was a gap in the fence at the top end of the grounds, and I’d nip through it and hop into the cab with him. He had a hip flask and a small FM radio to make the journey even better. I found meself wishing that he had been around when I was growing up, then. Things might have turned out different.

  Trundling along under giant plastic dinosaurs turned white from years of sunshine and bird shit, the excited giggles and yelps of the kids in the carriages behind, he told us how he’d found her hanging from the ceiling light in her bedroom, six feet of copper wire wrapped around her neck like one of them fancy African necklaces. I had been in the room next-door, playing with a toy, reading a book, crayoning on the windows. I must have heard her kick the chair away, then her frantic efforts to rescue herself when the brain’s instinct for self-preservation was triggered, the choking sounds in her throat as she strangled. They were there somewhere in me head, and I never wanted them unlocked.

  I felt sorry for Neil Lever, finding her like that. After a couple of weeks, I ran out of things to ask him and he ran out of things to tell. Except, on the last day I saw him, he took us to one side and looked at us for a long time.

  ‘You look like her, you know,’ he said, ‘same eyes. And you both have this… sadness about you. Don’t be sad. Don’t be bitter about what happened. She needed something that nobody could give her.’

  ‘One person could have,’ I told him. ‘There was one, but he fucked off out of it not too long after I was born.’

  He also said that there was something else there, too, a desperation in me eyes that also haunts every photograph that features me ma. A hint, perhaps, of something hideous: a craving, famished aspect. ‘Yeah,’ I said, turning it on for him now, making him look away under the intensity of me stare. ‘There’s a word for that, mate. Love.’

  He couldn’t come back with anything, so I said goodbye.

  I did try. I did try to hold back the sadness and the anger. But she had been driven to kill herself, being rejected by the man who she had invested so much time and money in. Someone who had just walked, who started her on her path into that dark little area of the garden that nobody comes back from. The tangled area that doesn’t smell too good, where the cats go to die. Where the footballs vanish and nobody wants to go and retrieve them. The bastard who did that, legging it after I was born, because he couldn’t hack it: he couldn’t hack all the responsibility because he was so young. And, all right, he wasn’t me proper dad, but me ma needed him and he fucked off. Too young. Needed his freedom. Didn’t want to be tied down to an older woman with kids. Well, boo-hoo, fuckhead, I want you. Because you sent me ma over the edge. I want to take you down to the shattered little corner of the garden and force you to have a fucking good, long look at it. I want you to fucking move in there, permanent.

  See her now, I can, in her pressed jeans and a chocolate-brown pullover fraying at the sleeves. The clearest image I will ever carry: grey morning, dew on the grass. Everything soft. A mug of coffee in her fist. A ciggie in the other. Smoke ghosts. She moves across the overgrown lawn so smoothly she might have been gliding. She’s talking to me but her voice is all wrong. It’s full of blood and gristle. Air is squealing out of her. A drag on the fag, and smoke escapes from the gashes in her throat. She tosses me the copper wire, hacks up something about not needing it any more. She disappears into the fog.

  I’ve still got that wire.

  * * *

  He closed his eyes and listened to the platform announcements. The voices from the tannoy were soothing somehow. He liked it here, liked its anonymity and lack of character, he liked it much more than the pissy little room in that brown house, in the endless row of brown houses, where he was staying in Liverpool; the house which was much too small, and smelled of clothes washed with cheap detergent that hadn’t dried properly. Waiting to grow, waiting for the accretion of years. For maturity. –‘You’ll need to get a job,’ she said, and this time he wasn’t startled, even though he wasn’t looking her way. He sensed her nearby, that was always the case, even when she was miles away. Sometimes he looked at her, or thought of her, and it was so much like looking at himself that he didn’t believe he could be who he was. But that was good. That was okay. Because if even he wasn’t sure, then what chance did anyone else have of working him out? He looked up now, straight into those dizzying eyes of hers. –‘I don’t understand. I have a job. I have the job.’ She was carrying a mug of coffee and she made a gesture with her hand, maybe to see if the seat on his table was free. She sat down before he could say anything. –‘Don’t look so pained,’ she said, and sipped at the froth on her coffee. –‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  He knew very well, this woman who talked to him on the phone, this woman who had saved him from himself all those years ago, but whenever she was there in the flesh, it made him feel awkward, on the edge of being lost, a child again, and he was crushed into his seat by something close to guilt at the knowledge that she knew who he was and the terrible things he had done. He had to retreat into the game, and she understood that. She knew it protected him. And she wanted nothing else but to protect him. She’d promised that half a lifetime ago, it seemed. She promised it to him again now, as she reached out to stroke his forearm, to hold his chin with her small, gentle hands. He stole glances at her through the steam coming off their cups. He wished he smoked, so that he might have something else to do with his fingers.

  She was wearing large glasses, tinted burnt-orange, a beige corduroy skirt, a boatneck top and a brown, cropped leather jacket. Every time he saw her in his dreams, or like now, she looked different, but enough like his mother that he wanted to cry out and lift his arms to her, as he must have done in the cot when his mother came to him at the peak of his nightmares, or when hunger upset him. She watched him for a second, then quickly turned away. She didn’t look at him again. –‘You have to get a job,’ she said again. ‘It won’t do, you moping around, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for a signal that might never come. We have to pretend we don’t know each other. You might think you’re blending in b
ut you’re not. You’re like blood on a wedding dress. If I’m found out, then you’ll be found out. We have to put some distance between us.’ –‘But it’s all I know,’ he said. ‘It’s all I can do.’ She nodded slightly. Lipstick scalloped the rim of her cup. –‘I know someone.’ She slid a piece of paper across the table. He didn’t pick it up immediately, but instead watched her hand retreat like something startled. ‘He’ll give you work, and in time I will get messages to you, when I feel it’s right. When the time is right for you to make your move. I’m doing this because I love you. I love you.’ –‘But I don’t have an address. No references. Nothing.’ The wheedling tone was returning to his voice. He was small again, frightened, alone. –‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll sort it,’ she said. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you? You need to fade away for a while. You need to step back.’

  He waited until she was ten minutes gone before opening the piece of paper and reading the address written on it. He pushed back his chair and walked over to the steps leading to the Underground, wishing that he had told her that he loved her, too.

  Anyone watching him from by the platforms would have seen a young, fit man, perhaps an athlete, pause at the top for a few moments, looking down into the tiled throat as if composing himself for a long, unpleasant journey. Then they’d see him straighten slightly, and run a hand through longish black hair that was in need of a wash, before sinking slowly out of view.

  Turn and face. Turn and face.

  Find your man.

  Mark him.

  10

  She came to me in a dream I was having, in which I was eating a plate of roast lamb in a meadow filled with violently red poppies. She came to me and hijacked my dream. That was her way. She could inveigle her way into your life, anything you were doing, until you were suddenly doing something else, the thing she wanted you to do, and you couldn’t see the join of where or how it had happened, only her impish grin as she celebrated another victory over her gullible dad.