Kemp saw his advantage, and went for it with both hands, the sludge of the adjusted time sloughing off his shoulders as he reacted lightning-fast. The curtain rod snaked out a second time, thundering up from under Duke's bloody jaw. The Doberman's head snapped back, its forelegs giving way for it to slump while the rear legs remained locked and standing. Kemp slammed the stave down across the centre of Duke's skull, splitting the bone above the eye line.
The Doberman spasmed and collapsed under the weight of its dying convulsions. A mixture of goo, like blood, burger relish and egg mayonnaise dribbling through its ears, puddling on the floor around its head.
Kemp pushed himself to his feet, sucking in great whumps of air as he scanned the tenebrous gloom for the dog's master, his heartbeat a loud boom, faster boomboom double beat in his ears.
“YOU WANT TO HAVE A GO?” He screamed, “YOU WANT TO HAVE A GO? COME ON THEN! COME ON AND I'LL STOVE YOUR FUCKING SKULL IN!”
His white-knuckled grip on the length of curtain rod was so fierce cramps had begun to shockwave up through his forearm, but he wasn't about to allow his hold to loosen any more than it already had, not now he had the man behind the shadow in his sights.
Just inside the mouth of the alley, caught like a rabbit in that crazy second when the car's headlights lock on its face and root it to the spot.
“COME ON THEN YOU SHEEPFUCKER!” Kemp bellowed, closing the gap between them. Staring him down.
The man balked, tearing away out through the alley's maw and away through the warren of nameless streets and side streets on the other side.
Kemp watched with grim satisfaction as the jemmy clattered to the ground ten yards on, his nerves juddering as the shivers hit, the roller-coaster tying loops in his stomach with the residue of the sudden adrenaline hit.
Bent double, Jack Kemp vomited into the dead weeds along the side wall.
* * * * *
Kemp wiped his mouth, and then wiped his hands on his trousers.
The dosser had backed off out of the alley, but was back and making himself interested in the contents of the overturned bin. Beyond his three-coat stooped shoulders the shadows were lengthening and darkening, coiling thickly around on each other as a deeper darkness overtook the night.
The pounding of the bass-heavy music had returned, slower than before, but no less muffled. Already, moths and flies were settling on the Doberman's carcass.
A hedgehog walked out from one shadow, stopped to fix its panicked gaze on Kemp, then sauntered on into another ball of shadow, continuing its nocturnal rounds.
Kemp took a second to catch his breath, taking a deep breath to fill his heaving lungs, and letting it seep out again, drawing air once, twice, and then a third time, deliberately trying to suffocate the adrenaline high with mouthfuls of oxygen.
“Three-Seven to Control,” he said, talking into his radio.
Crisp static.
“Control. Go ahead, Three-Seven,” the controller's voice sprayed out of the tiny two-way speaker. Another hiss, then a small, almost burst, of a connection.
“In pursuit of suspect. Six-one, six-two. Baseball cap. Denims. Fleeing north along,” Kemp paused, looking for the small wall-side plaque with the street name. “Ferndale Avenue, on foot. Request assistance.”
“Roger, Three-Seven.”
A vehicle roared into life somewhere in the night, though not too far distant for Kemp to miss the screech of wheels spinning.
“Negative, Control. Suspect has acquired wheels.”
“Identification of vehicle, Three-Seven? Make, Model and Year?”
“Negative, Control. The bird has shot the coop,” and to himself, “What a waste of fucking time that was.”
He had to take his frustration out on something, and right at that moment the wall fit the bill just fine and dandy. He slammed the heel of his hand into the wall beside his head. Twice. It was a trick Kemp had picked up relatively early on during his apprenticeship with Todd Devlin. Walls made good pressure valves, and as Devlin liked to joke, who had ever heard of a wall filing assault charges?
Taking his handkerchief, he wrapped it twice around his hand like a bandage-cum-glove, and picked up the jemmy. The wino seemed intent on keeping his distance as Kemp walked by on his way back to Kristy French's flat.
“Take this, will you,” he asked one of the Scene of Crime boys. “There's a Doberman in the alley about a hundred yards down and on the left. You want to send someone out to take care of it. Don't worry, it's dead.”
“Okay, sir.”
The gash in his arm was beginning to sting now, an angry redness matching the swelling on both sides. “It'd be just my luck if the bugger had rabies,” he commented to one of the WPC's.
“It's going to need a tetanus shot,” she agreed, seeing him roll up his shirt sleeve.
“Where's Devlin?”
“He took off with Miss French about five minutes ago. He's had us trying to get through to Hexham General Hospital since then, but the lines have been jammed solid.”
“I.C.U.” Kemp muttered, shaking his head. “Have you tried going through the switchboard?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Better get to it, then. If anyone wants me, I've gone to the RVI for a jab. You folks can clean this place up while I'm gone. It'll be a nice surprise for the lady. Okay?”
- 41 -
Two things.
Dettol and Ammonia.
Shellagh Cramer busied herself with the drugs trolley, laying out the swabs and syringes and measuring out the ward's medication by the pill. Green curtains were drawn around six of the eight beds, keeping a whole host of secrets under wraps. Her body’s sensory adaptability never ceased to amaze Shellagh. Two months ago, the heady blend of disinfectant and ammoniacs would have had her light-headed and feeling sick, but not so now. Things change. People change. An introduction to Violent Delights has a way of goading those changes out of a person. Getting under the skin and worming all the way up into the brain like a cancer.
Bren had called the basement club an addiction all in itself, and Shellagh was coming around to his way of thinking. But nothing about it was so simple, clean or clinical. Mistakes get made along the line and people fall in with the strangest bedfellows. Enter Violent Delights.
Bren also said stuff about how it came down to faces and acceptability. She liked the way he had of looking at things like addiction and abuse, describing them from the inside out, so to speak. It had a topsy-turvy logic she enjoyed wrestling with, and through it all, he showed her such violent delights, and for no reason beyond the pleasure of satisfying appetites she had never known she possessed.
And it all stemmed from the goings on behind a door between two bike shops in the West End of the city. Taking her there for the first time, Bren had assuaged her doubts by promising to show her intimately what dreams (what love) were made of. He presented the basement club like a free anatomy class on the dissection of the human psyche. And, of course, there was the picture of the fallen angel beneath the bank of monitors, with its face that looked a lot like her own.
Shellagh the fallen angel. That was about as apt a name tag as nurse or put-upon crisis handler. Shellagh the fallen angel had come crashing down with her halo around her knees, and all for Bren. It wasn't a question of whether it was worth it, people fell by the wayside every day. It all came back to making the most of it. Savouring the extremes offered by the many-fold delights, violent or otherwise.
She went through the process of pill distribution on automatic pilot, humming a remembered snatch of Pound cake while her attention wandered back to the run up of hours before her shift had started.
Violent Delights took up so much of her life outside nursing.
The people there enjoyed her being around, and she enjoyed being around them. They were all so alive. So physical in everything they did. Their desires. Their needs. They gave themselves over to living with powerful abandon.
The crowd was the usual bunch with some notable new
faces; a police chief someone or other, a nightclub owner from south of the river, and a voice she recognised immediately as an ex-radio jock.
Cuban prime, grade 'A' white was on offer, a service provided for gratis by the management. The same went for other cuts. The dip dishes along the bar kept the good feelings flowing. The bank of monitors showed a blonde police woman masturbating with a truncheon. The girl who had done the modelling for the loop was in the corner with three Rambo clones, slowly getting stoned while they felt their way around the merchandise.
The music was a loud acid house mess, the violently strobing lights pulsing rapidly enough to offset the feeling of a bad trip without inducing epilepsy-style fits from either the dancers, or the girls.
Impure, but desperately hot notes swamped the cramped confines, massaging the gathering of sweaty bodies. The musks of sweat and drink fused around the scents of sex and desire. Need. Everything about the dance floor was carnal. The movements. Expressions.
Bodies moved close, touching, hands exploring. And further.
The loop going through on the monitors changed, the police woman giving way to a two-girl close up with a grotesquely erotic ice-prick dildo holding the camera.
Shellagh watched, savouring the frission the girls generated, her own heat rising with their increased tempo.
Laughter.
Lights.
Music.
Pretty soon the ex-radio jock had made his way over to where she was. He looked ten feet out of his depth, a minnow swimming with the barracudas, but to give him his due, he wasn't colouring and the girls had certainly hooked his attention. He'd be back.
Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. That was how the addiction began, like the old smack advert everyone took the piss out of for so long: So, I do a bit of Violent Delights? So, I can handle it, can't I?
Like hell. This place was contagious. Once it got its hooks in you that was it and the angels were falling from every little piece of heaven. It should have its own thirty second advert: Violent Delights screws you up!
Bren was late, but that didn't matter. Shellagh had come in uniform. It was surprising how many of the old boys liked to see her come as a nurse. It really was true what they said. She had made her own loop in her work clothes, enjoying the attentions of four men handpicked for the twenty minute set.
Shellagh got a double take from the jock when her own film came up on the screens, as well as a roar of applause from back by the bar as she took care of Rick Rocket or Rodger Ramrod or whatever his name was. She could see the jock didn't know how to take it, so, goaded on by the little devil on her left shoulder, she wandered across to pour salt on the wounds.
“How're you doing?” She asked lightly, leaning in close enough to taste the splashes of his designer cologne on the back of her throat.
The jock sort of half shrugged without actually taking his eyes off the screen. 'Jeezuss. . .' was about the sum of his contribution.
“You like?” Shellagh asked playfully. “I can do private shows if you're interested?”
It made her laugh to think back at just how corny she must have sounded. God, next time she'd be coming out with something trite like “Why don't you come up to my place, big boy?” or some such drivel.
He'd bitten, nevertheless. Shellagh got the impression he was a little bit more than just shell-shocked by the whole kit and caboodle. She had been the same way herself, that first time when Bren had bullied her into working baby oil into one of the dancer's stiffening pricks. But that sort of innocence soon wears off, like the plating on a nugget of fool’s gold, as it had with Shellagh herself, and when it does the thirst for more Violent Delights becomes intolerable.
By the time the live act was getting underway she had the ex-radio jock on his knees and eating out of the palm of her hand, literally. He seemed to think subservience was part of the deal, which was fine by her. Anything for kicks.
When Bren finally showed his face, Shellagh had booked her pet personality for lead role in a threesome and was struggling to come up with a good enough excuse to phone in sick with. He scotched that with four brutal words.
“You make me sick.”
That was rich, coming from him. Dr-fucking-Kildare himself. She made him sick. All Shellagh could come up with in return was, “But you made me this way, Bren.” And he had at that, by dragging her down into the pit and feeding her addiction with his own special form of nose candy.
“And now I don't need you anymore. Say goodbye, Shellagh. I have a feeling our paths won't be crossing again.”
So, when she saw him coming up the corridor from Intensive Care and the High Dependency Unit, her first and immediate thought was that Bren had come looking for her. Come to say sorry and that they could work things out between them if they tried.
She smiled tentatively, palming three pills, two co proximal and a phenobarb, for the patient in bed number six.
He didn't even spare her the curiosity of a look as he breezed by.
Well fuck you, Dr Frankenfucker, she thought, suddenly deflated by his unthinking rebuff. You made the fucking monster, not me. I didn't ask for any of this shit. “Bren?” she called after him, hating herself for being weak.
“What?” he snapped, obviously irritated by her calling him back.
“I just thought we could talk-” she said, knowing even as she said it she sounded quite pathetic. She was going to cry. She knew she was, but that didn't mean she could stop herself from doing it regardless.
“I said all I had to say last night. You were a good enough fuck, Shellagh. What else do you want me to say? That I loved you? Oh please, don't make me laugh at you. Not here. People are suffering and they manage to retain their dignity, so why do you find it so difficult?”
She didn't know what to say to that. She was shaking.
He looked at her hands.
Her arm.
“I don't much care for addicts of any variety, no matter what their merits may be, between the sheets or otherwise.”
That hurt.
“Why? Tell me why. . ?” Shellagh whined piteously, not caring that the two of them had subverted a ward's worth of attention from the early morning re-run of yesterday's Australian soap. Right then she hated him for his calm, reassured poise and his sugary east-coast American drawl.
“It's no great riddle, Shellagh. You entertained me, but I seem to have lost the urge to sample any more of the manner of entertainment you offer. I don't need a whore.”
She stood for a second, mouth open, unable to comprehend what her ears were telling her.
“You bastard,” Shellagh spat, shocked and angry and more than anything else, betrayed. This is where it gets you, girl she heard an echo of her mother say, smug and self righteous as ever. A tidal swell of anger fumed as the Shellagh that was everything her precious Bren had strived to create warred for control of the gutted girl’s limbs, and won out. She slapped him across the face.
“Feel better now?” he asked after a moment, massaging the sting out of his cheek.
Something deep inside Shellagh snapped then, severing all ties with the innocence of yesterday. She back handed Bren across the face a second time, hawked and spat into his eyes.
“Bitch,” he hissed, wiping the phlegm away. She didn't feel any better for goading a reaction out of him. She still wanted to cry, but as of now she wouldn't allow herself the luxury. Tears were a part of the past. Instead, she found herself smiling. Maybe, if she really was a hard-arsed bitch, she could get through this whole thing in one piece.
The geriatric in bed seven clapped then, offering her his encouragement to firm her resolve.
“That's right,” she hissed, moving around so the trolley was no longer between them. “I'm a bitch and you're a fucking manipulative bastard, so who gives a fuck what you think anyway? No me, that's for sure. Another minute looking at your ugly mush is a minute more than I can stand, buster. Now get the fuck out of my face before I get the orderlies to stand on you.”
Bre
n held up his hands defensively, rusty circlets ringing both wrists. Shellagh laughed, a giggly laugh that was more a release of tension than any humour. Weak man. All mouth and no trousers. Everything was turned on its head. She was weak; but if she was weak, he was weaker. The new, galvanized Shellagh grabbed him by the lapels of his pristine doctor’s smock, shaking him like she would a banana-daiquiri. 'Got a problem with your ears?'
He seemed about to say something, and then thought better of it. After extricating himself from Shellagh's clumsy grasp, he backed off, shaking his head, not wanting to stay any longer than was absolutely necessary in a ward where too many eyes were watching him and taking in every last detail.
“Go on,” she bellowed in a laugh at his back. “Do what you're so fucking good at. Run away.”
* * * * *
Dettol and ammonia and something else.
The new odour clung to the more abrasive chemical reeks, out of place in the sterilized confines of the wards, and yet, paradoxically at home in them, too.
She had finished up on the ward and headed back to the staff canteen for a piping hot cup of frothy chocolate from the machine, feeling sick, empty. Sipping from the plastic beaker she had reached a decision, but that is not to say any other addict could have come to a different decision given the same set of circumstances. Come clocking off time for the swing shift, she would head on over to the club and see if she could hitch up with the ex-radio jock. He hadn't looked so bad, and from the way he had distorted his slacks, he had evidently felt the same way about her.
It didn't matter that she was simply fanning the flames of her latest addiction, only that she was doing something positive to get over Dr Brent so-bloody-perfect Richards.
Jimmy, one of the hospital porters, flashed her a mischievous wink as she pushed her school style plastic chair back on its two back legs. He was busy puzzling out a not so difficult Spot the Difference in the morning's News of the World, the sound coming from his iPod headphones barely recognisable as the Rolling Stones.
Sufferer's Song Page 21
