Dust and Desire

by Conrad Williams

  I was leading her out of the room, masking her with my hand against the glare of the lights, when I heard a single footstep gritting on the broken glass in the shop upstairs.

  ‘Wait here,’ I said.

  ‘Joel?’

  ‘It’s okay, Melanie,’ I said. ‘Just wait here for me. I’ll be gone a minute, that’s all.’

  I sat her on a chair, then I went up the stairs as fast as I could, going into a roll at the top and swinging my arm round towards the shape that was coming at me from the front of the shop. I knew it wasn’t the police as they’d have said something by now, so I fired at the legs. Nothing happened. Hibbert – he’d emptied the clip, the prick, the fucking, fucking prick.

  ‘Fucking prick,’ I cried, and hurled the gun at the shadow. It sidestepped it easily and waded in. Something flashed by the side of my face, connecting hard, and I went down. It felt like a hammer, or a cast-iron candlestick, but I didn’t have time to play Guess What? I scuttled backwards on my arse as fast as I could, feeling my mouth fill with blood, trying to blink away the darkness that was trying to close in. A slow sweep of headlights through the window showed me enough of her face to tell me who it was.

  ‘Kara,’ I tried to say, but my jaw felt too loose and the words turned into a wet sigh of pain. She came on, swinging the weapon in her fist, and I was running out of scuttling space. The most dangerous thing my hand fell upon was an inflatable cushion for the bath. But then the room filled with white light and the sound of thunder. I heard a bullet zing off the wall and shatter a mirror about a foot above my head. Geenan threw herself at the broken window. Another huge crash, another bullet thunking into the heavy wooden frame.

  I pushed myself upright. Melanie was slumped over the top riser, her arm outstretched. I went to her and took the gun out of her hand.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked her.

  She moved her head in the direction of the stairs. ‘Desk,’ she breathed, ‘if you know where the keys are kept.’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ I said.

  I could hear her footsteps, already distant, moving fast, very fast, across the concrete. Kara could run. Yeah, well, so could I. There are few things I can do better.

  * * *

  I took a potshot at her, to keep her on her toes, just as she was careering around the corner of Steward Street into the new development that had been built in the pocket of land directly behind the market. Office buildings, bland and grey, the kind of place you just can’t wait to get out of bed for in the morning. And there would be plenty of people getting out of bed now, double-quick, at the sound of all this gunfire. I had to get closure on this little bitch before the Sweeney turned up.

  I reached the corner just in time to see her disappear into the building site. I got after her fast, never taking my eyes off her point of entry. She flitted between two Portakabins, and I squeezed off another round. The gun was big and heavy and the shot went well wide, but I wasn’t too bothered. It was a nice feeling, knowing that she was the one being hunted for a change. The far end of the building site was protected by a tall, white wooden fence that enclosed the rear half of the perimeter. There was no way she was climbing that unless she had a pocket stepladder concealed down her strides. The only way she could get out was if she ran straight down my throat.

  I skipped down the side of the Portakabin and spotted her by a stack of pallets loaded with white ceramic toilets wrapped in shrink-wrapped plastic. She was standing with her hands behind her back, head down. It looked as though she knew she was on a loser and had decided to play nice.

  Yeah, right.

  I approached her with the gun pointing straight between her breasts. Any funny stuff and I was going to blow her chest wide open and sod the overtime she owed me. But, as I got nearer, I found she was crying.

  ‘Give it a rest, Kara,’ I said. ‘What are you expecting me to do? Melt?’ I stepped closer. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘I will fucking shoot you if you fuck about with me. I want to know where this cunt is who’s trying to rub me out. And I want to know what’s in it for you.’

  She wasn’t crying; she was chanting. Some weird mantra that I couldn’t get a hold of. It looped in the thick air between us, feeding off her fear and my suspicion, sounding like a familiar name that I’d forgotten about for years. The name of someone precious to me who had been so long gone they had almost escaped my thoughts.

  ‘What?’ I said, and leaned in closer. Her voice deepened and grew softer, becoming something lyrical that ought to be listened to while accompanied by music. The noises she was making were as alien as a foreign language, yet as known to me as the sound of my own breath as I lay in bed at night. Other notes came into the lilting of her voice, turning it warmer, more trustworthy, the kind of voice that your mother has.

  Her hands came out from behind her back. They were holding a beautiful crown made of some astonishing silver metal that absorbed all of the light and made it appear liquid. Glittering seeds swam all around the circumference, blazing here and there like polished jewels. It drew the light and colour from my eyes.

  ‘Can I wear that?’ I asked, and a great mouthful of spit and blood washed across my chin. I couldn’t see her eyes behind the crown. Her face was a black nonsense. And then it all went wrong. The noises from her mouth stopped sounding like aural honey and were spiked by awful jags of rage. I stumbled back as the crown spoiled in her fingers, turning into a rusted length of thick iron with a vicious claw on the end. The whoop of the police siren twisted through the air like a fantastic creature taking flight for its dinner. I staggered some more and a couple of large staples in the plastic wrap punched through the skin of my outstretched hand.

  I swore and went down, a headache ripping through me. I found myself trying to work out what was hurting more, and awarding points for pain quotient. Headache = 7 points; staples in hand = 6 points; mullered jaw = 9 points. Any advance on 9 points? You, madam, with the fucking crowbar, got a 10 on you?

  I rolled away as the jemmy came down. My face went straight into a hill of sand, and I came up spitting grains. I shot her through the stomach and she staggered back, dropping the crowbar. Blood, a lot of blood, fell with it, giving the day-shift’s cement an interesting tinge.

  ‘Fuck,’ I yelled. I didn’t want to do that. I went after her but she was gamely staying one step ahead, the pain and the shock, like me, trying to catch up with her. Death was strolling somewhere behind us, picking its teeth. It didn’t need to hurry. It had as long as it took.

  She got to the works entrance and staggered through it. A lorry clipped her and she went down hard. Her foot snagged in the lorry’s rear wheel, as it braked and slewed across the road. She was dragged under the wheel and vanished for a moment, as she was fed through the axle. When she came out again, she was all mangled to fuck and back. I got to her as her last breaths turned to scarlet froth on her lips. Her body was split up the side and what looked like yellowish cheese was piling out of her; her guts were grey ropes unravelling on the road. There was no point trying to get them back inside. Her left leg was bent backwards and hiked up so far that if she turned her head a little, she could have bitten her own heel. The lorry driver was wailing like a seal who’d lost its pups.

  ‘Where is he?’ I yelled at her.

  ‘I was just trying to protect him,’ she said. Her eyes twitched spastically. ‘I never wanted him to take it this far. My kid brother, I never…’

  I wasn’t going to get much else out of her. She was in her own cocoon of random thoughts now, as the switches were being flicked off all through her body, shutting down.

  I was intending to put one through her brain, but there was no need. She was beyond suffering. I envied her that.

  19

  She’d tried it on me before, I realised that now, right at the very start of things. At the coffee shop in Soho. Maybe I’d been too tired or too drunk to notice, to respond, to go under but, thinking back, her voice had been the same: soft, persistent, deeper than yo
u might expect from such a willowy woman. I hadn’t cracked, then. Well, not in the way she’d expected me to.

  I hurried back to the Elegant House and wrapped Melanie in a large fur rug. She’d gone back down the stairs and was sprawled over the desk, trying to collect the books in her arms. I carried her out on to the street. She was mumbling something into my ear, but I didn’t pay attention because I was trying hard to think of what I’d done to deserve this kind of grief.

  Jimmy Two had left the car where he said he would, parked on a little one-way avenue called Wilkes Street that runs parallel to the main drag. I made a mental note to drop round a couple of big bottles of Grant’s for him. As I nosed out on to Commercial Street, three police cars and a riot van drew up on Lamb Street, and a slew of officers piled into the marketplace. We bypassed an ambulance heading for the accident scene. I was confident the lorry driver hadn’t stagged me; he’d had his face in his hands the whole time. He was blaming himself for this one, at least until they told him about the bullet that helped her on her way.

  I checked on Melanie every time I came up against a traffic light, or a tangle of cars stalled at a junction. Her face was very pale, apart from the scorch marks left by the bleach. I spoke to her, and I don’t know if what I said got through to her, but she seemed to respond to my voice, rocking her head slightly, moving her busted mouth, frowning. I was going to take her straight to hospital, but the more I thought about that, the less I fancied it. St Bart’s was crawling with police by the time I reached it and I worried that everyone from the Spitalfields incident was going to turn up there, rather than cross the river to Guy’s. I blinked first in that particular little game of chicken, and took off up to Holborn Viaduct. I couldn’t see any major injuries on Melanie’s body. She was in shock and she was exhausted, but she hadn’t been seriously harmed. She needed rest: that seemed like the picture to me. There was only one place to go.

  * * *

  I parked the car and fed a few pound coins into the meter, wishing for the first time that I didn’t have such an easily identifiable motor. Surely Mawker would have his peelers looking out for it? Well, that was just tough. I was so strung out that I didn’t trust myself not to start firing at him and his goons, when they inevitably came my way. It didn’t matter so much to me what happened now that I was sure Melanie was safe. I helped her out of the car and we staggered over to the door of the apartment block. I leaned on the buzzer but there was no answer. She must have gone to work. Essex Road, right. I was about to drag Melanie back to the car, when the main door opened and Lorraine Tokuzo was standing there in a bicycle helmet, struggling to get her Marin outside.

  ‘You didn’t need to bring me a present,’ she said, assessing Melanie. ‘I put you up out of the goodness of my heart.’

  I could have cried, but that wasn’t going to help anyone. She secured the bike, with a combination lock, in the entrance hall before helping me get Melanie into the lift. Going up, Lorraine studied my face as if she couldn’t quite place who I was. I must have looked rough compared to the guy who’d crashed at her pad a few nights before. I hadn’t had a shave for days. My Diesels could have performed stunt jeans in Zombie Denim-Wearers. I smelled like something you could grow mushrooms out of. And my jaw looked as if it had just gone fifteen rounds with a peckish Mike Tyson.

  I drained the best part of a litre of orange juice from Lorraine’s fridge, while she put Melanie to bed. She didn’t say anything to me after she came out of the bedroom; her face was pinched tight shut, like an old woman’s purse. She was at the door and picking up speed, when I called her name.

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ I said.

  ‘So am I,’ she said. ‘I don’t want trouble here. Just sort it out, whatever’s going on, and sort it out quick. Then you can explain it to me.’

  Thunk. Door shut.

  Through the window I watched as she cycled slowly off towards York Way, her long, tanned legs subtly gleaming in the morning sunlight. I was distracted from memories of those legs – in other positions, in other times – by Melanie who was babbling again. I poured her a glass of water. In the bathroom I dug a tube of lignocaine out of the medicine cabinet, along with a couple of soluble codeine pills that I had missed on my last visit. Melanie had thrown off the duvet and was writhing like a cut worm on the sheets, sweating them up. I put the glass down and sat at her side, gently grasped her close. Slowly she came out of it, becoming still beneath the motion of my hand as it stroked the acid-white shock of her hair.

  ‘Did she do this to you?’ I asked her gently, too gently for her to hear. ‘Or was it him?’

  Images of the head I’d found in that Liverpool bedsit grinned out of the black museum in my mind. The blonde, matted hair rising free of the puckered scalp, as if it were trying to escape. The crude slashes of make-up. I rubbed the cream into the blistered areas of Melanie’s forehead and her chafed wrists, and got her to swallow some of the dosed water. Her eyes were all over the place as she fought to stay awake.

  She said, ‘She was so nice. She knocked on my door. She said her car had broken down. Her eyes…’

  She said, ‘He was in the car. He pulled me in. A kid. Strong.’

  She said, ‘The woman turned to him in the car, told him he could play with me for a while. He told me he didn’t know what would hurt you more. If he killed me or if he just hurt me. He asked me for advice. He said: “What do you think would cause him most pain?”’

  She said, ‘He stroked my hair and leaned over. “Not in that colour, love,” he said.’

  I pulled the duvet up around her naked body and waited until sleep smoothed away the lines from her face. Then I got up, returned to the living room and, in absolute silence, lost my mind for a few moments. When I came to, my knuckles were white and I’d gouged nail marks in the soft leather of Lorraine’s sofa. Slowly, I came back. I calmed down.

  I took a long, searingly hot shower and carefully hacked off the week-old growth on my face, grimacing whenever I moved my jaw to accommodate the blade. At least it didn’t feel as though any bones were broken, but it was going to swell up till I looked like the bastard offspring of Desperate Dan and Jimmy Hill.

  I threw my clothes in the washing machine and eased myself into Lorraine’s ratty, but much-loved, towelling bathrobe. Then I fixed myself a tuna sandwich and bolted it down with some fresh coffee. I took a handful of painkillers and lay back on the sofa. Then I thought, nuts to that, and crawled into bed alongside Melanie. I fell asleep smelling the magical, warm scent from her skin.

  You couldn’t change that, I thought. You and your bottle of bleach, you fucker. You couldn’t chase that out of her.

  * * *

  Erased. Rubbed out. Retired. Topped. Whacked. Blown away…

  No, you’re not getting away with any of that playground talk. What you did… what you did, Joel, is that you fucking killed someone today.

  That was the first thing I thought of as I opened my eyes. It didn’t seem to mean much that she wanted me dead for some reason that was currently beyond me. I had pointed the gun at her and shot her through the guts. I had killed a person. A human being. My first. Somewhere, maybe, a father and a mother were sitting together watching television, wondering if their daughter was going to call them soon. And she wasn’t. She wasn’t going to call them soon. She wasn’t going to call them ever again.

  On my right, Melanie was in deep sleep. To my left, Lorraine was lying on top of the duvet, but covered with a blanket, her eyes open and fastened on the play of light from the city, curving across the cool blue shadows of the ceiling.

  Melanie rolled over and her eyes opened. She then went very still but said, very clearly: ‘Ghosts between the shelves.’ Then she shut her eyes again, and it was difficult to believe that she had ever been anything but fast asleep.

  Lorraine must have felt me tense up, because her hand came over to take mine. Her hand was warm. Its warmth flooded into the cold iron of my own, and induced it to soften.

 
; I said, ‘Will you look after her?’

  ‘Who is she?’ she asked. Our voices sounded calm and breezy, like any ordinary couple indulging in a little pillow talk before sleep.

  ‘Melanie’s my vet. Well, my cat’s vet. She got dragged into some bother.’

  ‘That I can see,’ Lorraine said. ‘Me too, hey, if I’m not careful?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I won’t let that happen. That was the first and last time.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her, but you should take her to see a doctor.’

  ‘I will, when I’ve finished.’ She was going to ask me another question, but I wasn’t sure how I could answer it. I didn’t even really know what it was that needed finishing. Maybe it was me: maybe that was the answer.

  I said, ‘Give her plenty to drink. Water. She’s pretty dehydrated.’

  I let go of Lorraine’s hand, even though I wanted nothing more than to keep hold of it, to roll over and have her engulf me in warmth for a while, to lie there and absorb all her heat and understanding into me. I was a loner, and I preferred my own company, but nobody can stay sane like that. Even the most aloof, isolated individual needs a hug now and then. We wither and die without such contact. That was me then, stuck in bed between two beautiful women, and lonelier now than the kid who’s just been sick on the back seat of the bus.

  I left them in the bedroom and gathered together my gear. The jeans were still a bit damp, but it didn’t matter. I felt like a new person, by wearing fresh, clean clothes for a change. I checked my watch: it was a quarter to six in the evening. God knows what day it was. Wednesday, I think. On the floor by the bathroom was the rug that I’d wrapped Melanie in. Next to it were the books she’d rescued from KayGee Karma. I picked one of them up and studied the cover. Mind Medicine: Hypnosis for All by some barefoot-hippy quack called Dr Saffron Twohy. Why did Melanie want this so much? It seemed a bizarre comforter even for someone in her state. Maybe she had been made a convert to Kara’s methods and fancied it as a career change – I don’t think. I was dumping the book in the bin when I noticed the little sticker on the spine. Inside the front cover was a stamp for St Pancras Library. Okay, so what was Kara doing in Spitalfields with a copy of a book from a library in King’s Cross? Couldn’t get it at the library on Commercial Road? Possibly. Possibly.