To Fight For

by Phillip Hunter

  It was over. I was dead. I knew it.

  It didn’t matter.

  I think I was happy. I understood what Browne was talking about; the need for nothingness, the need to not exist. Only he did it slowly, piecemeal, falling nightly, drifting into the warm blanket of oblivion that he craved and out of the cold real world. He let himself slip into the darkness.

  Me, I could never go that way. This was always going to be my end, or something like it – this brutal, thuggish thing. Mine would not be a slow death. It would be this; smashed into pulp between machines. And that was fine. That was what I wanted.

  But not yet.

  I saw the sky, grey and lifeless, and I wondered if that was what death was, just the same greyness. Forever.

  Then the tarmac was scraping my body and every bone jarred with impact. The sound of crunching metal tore through my head, and seemed like some great beast tearing the cars apart in its teeth. I felt my spine bend sideways, felt my legs flail as I rolled over and over.

  Then I stopped rolling. There was silence.

  Something was pressing against my shoulder. There was pain in my side. I felt cold. I felt hot.

  I heard a voice.

  ‘Are you alright? God.’

  I opened my eyes and saw concrete. It took me a while to remember where I was, what had happened. The voice was there still.

  ‘I’ve called an ambulance,’ the voice said. ‘I saw him. He must be drunk.’

  I turned my head. It felt light, numb. That was bad. She came into focus. She wore a baggy jumper. I’d seen her before, hadn’t I?

  I was lucky. If I hadn’t blacked out, I probably would’ve been dead. As it was, my body was relaxed when I crashed into the ground. Now I lay in a crumpled heap, my head up against the curb.

  I tried to stand. I remembered the pain in my side.

  ‘Oh, God,’ the woman said. ‘You’re hurt.’

  Hadn’t she said she’d called an ambulance? Fuck. That meant law.

  I let the pain push its way through my body. That was good, the pain. It was something I could hold onto.

  I felt her hand on my arm. I pushed her away. When I stood, I had to wait a while, just long enough for the world to settle back again.

  He was a jug-eared bloke, with dark skin and deep-set eyes. He was trying to crawl away when I caught up with him. I grabbed the back of his shirt and lifted him up.

  He was a small boy, half my size. All I had to do was give him a right cross to the jaw and he’d go down and stay down. But he knew something. He must’ve done to come at me like that.

  He tried to hit me and missed by a mile. I wasn’t a hard target to hit. I let go and he crumpled to the ground. He must’ve been as bashed up as me. He looked alright, except for his blood-covered face and the blue shirt turned purple by all that claret that pumped from a gash three inches long on his forehead.

  I heard sirens. I looked at the cars. His was mashed up, the front gone. Mine was bad at the back, but the boot was big and had taken the force. I dragged him over.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘NO.’

  I clipped him and his head snapped back then fell forward. I threw him into the back and fell behind the wheel.

  ‘What are you doing to him?’

  The woman moved a hand to try and hold me. I pushed her aside and slammed the door. Then she was by the window. I started the car, put it into first and let my foot slowly off the clutch. There was a tearing, wrenching sound. The car shuddered and stalled. I tried again. The woman opened the door.

  ‘I said, what are you doing to him?’

  ‘Hospital,’ I said.

  That stopped her for a moment. I pulled the door shut and locked it. I put it in gear again, let the clutch out, punched the accelerator and tore loose, half a ton of metal scraping behind us. I saw the flashing lights round the corner as I pulled out. It was the ambulance. If it’d been the law, they’d have come after me, and caught me.

  The car was fucked. The steering wheel was loose in my hands, the car going too far left, then way over right as I corrected it.

  I heard the kid moan.

  I didn’t know where I was. I was just driving away from the crash scene, through more residential streets where the houses all looked alike, and then onto another main road, past shops and pubs. People were looking at the car as we went past. It must’ve been a sight.

  ‘I know who you are,’ the boy said, hoarsely. ‘I know what you did.’

  I saw a building site and swung around and rolled in past the temporary fencing. It was a housing development, half done with skeletons of buildings along a rough road. I didn’t see anyone working, no vehicles parked. I pulled into one of the brick shells.

  I got out the car and opened the back door. He kicked at me, opened the other door and tried to scramble free. I grabbed his foot and hauled him out. He hit the dusty ground face first. The wind was out of him. I checked him for weapons and found a phone, which was locked.

  I rolled him over. He focused on me, swung a fist at my leg then coughed and rolled back over and spat dry, dusty spittle mixed with blood.

  ‘Who’d you work for?’ I said, when he’d finished retching.

  He breathed heavily and looked at me sideways.

  ‘No one.’

  I kicked him in the ribs, not hard, just enough to wake him up. His face crunched in pain.

  ‘NO ONE.’

  ‘How did you find me then?’

  ‘I followed you from my mum’s.’

  I didn’t know what that meant. I couldn’t work it out.

  ‘My name’s Marriot,’ he said.

  Now I remembered Green had told me Marriot had a son. Somehow, it hadn’t sunk in, hadn’t seemed real. I suppose I would’ve had to think of Marriot as a father, as a normal person and not as the dying animal I’d left him, blood pouring from his gut as he’d tried to crawl away from me.

  Now I understood why this kid was such a lousy tail, why he was such a fucking lousy killer, missing a sitting duck, missing a mountain. Still, he’d almost wiped me out. I was getting old, dumber by the hour.

  I tried to think of something to say. I said, ‘Uh.’

  He pulled himself up to his knees, resting on the palms of his hands. He waited there.

  ‘Well?’ he said to the dust. ‘You going to kill me now?’

  It was a good question. I thought about it for a couple of seconds, but the will wasn’t there.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He stood slowly, keeping his eyes on me all the time. When he was upright, he was no higher than my chest. I could’ve killed him with one blow. I probably should’ve done. It was stupid to let him go, wasn’t it?

  The thing is, I just didn’t care about him. He was nothing to me, just some nuisance. Sure, he wanted to murder me, and I cared about someone trying to kill me, but now that he was there, below my chin, I just wanted him to go away. That he wanted to avenge his father didn’t bother me. It should’ve done. It would’ve, once.

  Maybe, too, I understood what he was after. I’d killed his old man. That was something. That was pain, maybe the same as the pain I felt.

  I told him to fuck off. He looked at me like he suspected a trap of some kind. I turned away from him and went back to the car. I wiped the steering wheel, the gearstick, the handbrake, the door handles, and tossed the keys into a pile of sand.

  When I’d done that, I saw the kid was still there, staring at me.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said again.

  He was deflated now, the anger gone, the fear too. He had guts, I suppose. I had to admire that.

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘You just told me.’

  ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

  ‘Yeah. Now go.’

  He wasn’t what I would’ve thought of as Marriot’s son. He had a plummy voice, like he’d gone to a public school. And there was no violence in him. There’d been anger, su
re, but that had gone. Probably, it was because I’d been to see his mum and she must’ve called him and he’d panicked, thinking she was in danger.

  He started to leave, then stopped and turned back to me.

  ‘I want to kill you,’ he said.

  ‘Join the queue.’

  ‘You killed my dad.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I was waiting for him to go. Then, I’d go too, in another direction. But he wasn’t budging. I stood and looked at him. He was skinny, and his clothes didn’t fit him well, as if he’d been bigger and had been ill. There were creases in his face that shouldn’t have been there. Yes, he’d felt pain. Maybe, he’d imagined coming face to face with his father’s killer, and exacting revenge. And now, failing, and yet still living, he didn’t know what to do.

  ‘He was a good man,’ the boy said. ‘He loved me and my mum.’

  Now I was getting tired of him.

  ‘Your dad was a cunt.’

  He came at me, head down, charging again, as he’d done in his car. I swatted him aside and he crashed into a stack of bricks. He tried to stand, and staggered and fell back to the ground, landing on his knees. He put his head down, so that it looked like he was trying to kiss the ground. I heard him sniffling. He wiped his eyes and stood and faced me. There were grazes on his hands and face, his jeans were torn at one knee, blood darkening the denim.

  ‘You didn’t have to kill him,’ he said. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’

  I said, ‘He killed someone I knew.’

  I thought he’d get angry again, deny it all. But his shoulders dropped and his face turned to the ground. He wasn’t like me. He wasn’t a killer, an avenger. He wasn’t ruled by the rage that burned his blood, or by the murder that wrenched and twisted at his heart, darkening the blood with its darkness. He was just a kid who was the son of a man I’d killed, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

  He turned away. I think he knew what I was telling him was the truth. I think he just hadn’t wanted to believe it.

  ‘Who was he?’ he was saying to the air. ‘The man he killed.’

  ‘She.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Will you go after my mum?’

  ‘I don’t care about your mum. Or you.’

  Now he started to walk away, but something came to me and I called after him. He stopped, but still wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘Your old man,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t in it alone. There was someone else, a copper, called Glazer. Remember him?’

  Now he looked at me. I don’t think he’d heard my question. He said, ‘He loved me.’

  Then he was gone. I suppose I could’ve gone after him, shaken the information from him, if he even knew it. I could’ve done, but I only watched him walk away. I think I envied him. He’d tried and failed. And that was enough. He’d tried and failed and was back to his quiet, ordinary life. Christ, what I wouldn’t have given for that.

  But trying and failing wasn’t enough for me. Blood was enough, anyone’s blood, everyone’s blood. And nothing less.

  TWELVE

  It took me a couple of hours to get back to Browne’s. I had no idea where I was, and I didn’t want to ask anyone; that would put me in their mind and if the law were around investigating a car crash, someone might remember me.

  So I walked, the pavement moving from time to time, getting further from me, then closer until I had to stop and wait for it to make up its fucking mind.

  I found a bus stop. When I saw one for Walthamstow Central, I got on and took a seat at the back and closed my eyes.

  When the bus terminated, I got a cab.

  London went by in a waking dream, a group of shadows, each blurring into the other, all a million shades of black. I saw people’s faces, old and tired and as blurred as the rest of it. I saw buildings that looked as if they’d been washed in dirt. I saw traffic stall and move and stall again, as if the street was coughing it all up like it was some clot.

  Brenda. The name ran through my mind, but I couldn’t put a face to it, to her.

  Brenda.

  I sat with my forehead against the window and saw it all as it slid past. And saw my life slide along with it, being coughed up by time, coughed up and spat out. Browne was right. I was killing myself. And I didn’t much care.

  I’d done this before, hadn’t I – been like this, felt like this? I didn’t seem to be living a life. I seemed to be reliving it.

  I opened my eyes. I was in a car – in a cab. I was heading back somewhere, heading back to someone. Wasn’t I?

  I heard Brenda, speaking softly, her voice not even a whisper, more the echo of a whisper.

  ‘Joe,’ she said. ‘Joe.’

  But when I looked, she wasn’t there, and I felt cold, although I didn’t know why. I was all mixed up. I felt like I’d just come from some operating theatre. They’d cut me open and taken everything out and stitched me back up.

  When the cab stopped, I bunged the driver a fistful of notes and staggered out. I heard him telling me I’d given him too much, but it didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t even work out what it was I’d given him too much of.

  I had trouble getting the key into the lock. The fucking lock was moving as much as the ground was, and the door was worse. I must’ve made a racket because I saw the living room curtain twitch and then the door opened and I fell in. Browne heaved me along the hallway enough to close the door. I heard him curse me under his breath.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Is it your head, Joe?’ she said.

  She put a hand up to my cheek and let it rest there. It felt cool and soft and seemed to take the heat from my face, the pain from my head. I wanted her to never move her hand.

  ‘Yeah.’

  She leaned in close to me. I could smell her perfume, warm and sweet, mixed with the smell of cigarettes and the wine on her breath. She smelled like comfort and all I wanted to do was sink into her and stay there.

  But I had things to do. It was ten o’clock and I had to be out at midnight to meet a bloke. It was a protection job, nothing much, but he was an Arab and liked to cruise dodgy places. He wanted someone frightening with him and I’d get half a grand for a few hours work. I couldn’t turn it down. I hadn’t told Brenda. I don’t know why. I think because I knew she wanted company that night.

  She’d called me up in the afternoon.

  ‘Will you come over tonight?’ she’d said.

  I knew she needed me. She’d usually say something like, ‘Are you coming over tonight?’ Or, ‘What are you up to, Joe?’ Or, sometimes, ‘Hey, Joe, pop over, if you’re not robbing any banks.’

  She’d been drinking and was half-cut by the time I got there. Before either of us had said anything, she was in my arms, holding me tightly.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, thinking someone had hurt her and that I was going to have to pay Marriot a visit and settle this thing once and for all, get Brenda off his books. I think I just wanted an excuse to do that.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong,’ she said into my chest. ‘I just wanted to see you.’

  There was a lie in there, maybe two. Anyway, something was wrong.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She took my hand and pulled me into the flat. I could feel how unsteady she was. Her hand was loose in mine, as if she barely had the strength to hold on.

  She pushed me down onto the sofa and then sat herself across my legs so that she could lay her head on my chest.

  I wanted to ask her what was wrong again, but I’d learned that sometimes there was no answer to that question – or, rather, that she wouldn’t give one. So, I just held her while she put to rest whatever horrors were assaulting her.

  I don’t know how long we were like that.

  I kept thinking about the job. These rich Arabs splashed the money about like they were kicking dirt off their boots, and they drank when they were away from their embassies and families. If he had a few drinks and I pushed a couple of blokes around, made l
ike they were acting dangerous, he might splash some more of his dosh my way. I could use it.

  Meanwhile, I held Brenda and felt her body heat, felt her softness, felt her breath touching me. It was good. Her body was like a drug making my head clear, pain free, making me forget things.

  I think I slept. I think we both did. At some point, though, I felt her shuddering. At first I thought she must’ve been cold, I pulled her tighter to me. Her body was limp, except for the shaking.

  She looked up at me, and I never saw any adult look so like a child.

  ‘No way out, Joe,’ she said. ‘No way out.’

  She was still drunk, but in a sober way, not quite slurring her words, just desperate and failing to hide it, like drunks get sometimes. It was like Browne said, I suppose; alcohol, the unleasher of the darkness, the freer of deranged thoughts. Only, with Brenda, it was the freer of fear and failure.

  I pushed the braids of her hair back so that I could see her face. She was looking at me, in that unfocused way, so that it seemed like she was looking at something a few inches behind my eyes.

  I was starting to think I might not make the job that night. It was a lot of money to blow. Worse, it would give me a bad rep. If another job like that came up, they’d think twice about it. I didn’t care. Fuck them.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  She put her head back against my chest. I knew she wouldn’t say what was tormenting her. At the time I just thought it was her work, the johns, the films, the dirt of it all. But we’d been over that and she wouldn’t quit.

  I heard her speak, but it was so quiet I couldn’t hear the words. I thought she must’ve been asleep again. But she wasn’t.

  ‘I never told you,’ she said, looking up at me.

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘I can’t have children.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, not knowing what else I was supposed to say.

  ‘Haven’t you ever wanted children, Joe?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I’d never thought about it before. It was just one of those things that I never connected with myself. Kids, a woman, a home. All that stuff was for other people, normal, average people living their normal, average lives. Some of them might’ve been happy. It meant nothing to me. It was like asking someone doing life in the nick what he’d do if he was free; it didn’t do anything except remind him he wasn’t free.