Nine Inches

by Colin Bateman

  ‘Where is he?’

  I went to leave the living room, heading upstairs. Trish stood in the doorway.

  ‘Dan. Settle down.’

  ‘Don’t tell me to . . . The little fucking—’

  ‘Dan.’

  I had the Xbox in my arms. I blew air out of my cheeks. I sucked it back in again. In, out, in, out.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Sorry. Where is he?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘Call him down. Please.’

  ‘Not until you tell me what—’

  ‘Trish. It’s fine. Honestly. All will be revealed.’

  ‘It’s not fine if you’re going to smack him.’

  ‘He’s fourteen, I’m not going to smack him. I’m going to punch his head off. Please. Just get him.’

  She raised an eyebrow. I raised one back.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She turned for the stairs. I retreated back across into the living room and set the Xbox on the coffee table. I heard her calling him. I paced. A couple of minutes later he came into the room. He had on an old pair of my football shorts and a twenty-year-old Liverpool top. His eyes immediately went to the Xbox. Patricia leant against the door frame, arms folded.

  ‘Got your Xbox,’ I said. He grunted. He moved towards it. I said, ‘Why don’t you plug it in, we can have a game.’

  ‘There’s a TV in my room.’

  ‘I’ll come up there, then.’

  He screwed his eyes up. ‘Yeah, right. I just want to play by myself.’

  ‘Hey, son, you’re here as our guest; the least you could do is have a game. Our wee family. Go on, plug it in. I got you a game. A new one. Thought you’d appreciate it. Grand Theft Auto Remember 1690. It’s a special Belfast edition. Come on, plug it in, Bobby. Plug it in.’

  He stood where he was.

  ‘Dan . . .?’

  ‘PLUG IT IN!’

  ‘Fuck off!’ Bobby exploded. He spun on his one heel and would have fled if Patricia hadn’t blocked his path. ‘Get out of my fuckin’ way,’ he growled. His fingers bunched into fists. His head jutted forward, right up against Patricia’s. ‘GET OUT OF MY FUCKIN’ WAY!’

  He didn’t know Trish. She could have made the defenders of Stalingrad look flaky. She remained resolutely in position, even as he grabbed her blouse and tried to drag her out of the way. That lasted for all of one second; then I had him by the throat. I dragged him backwards and threw him down. He landed in a heap. I stood over him.

  ‘You ever put a hand on her again, and I’ll fucking kill you. Do you hear me?’ He said nothing. I crouched down. I took a hold of his hair and pulled his head up. ‘Do you fucking hear me?’

  Still nothing.

  Patricia knelt beside me. ‘Dan . . .’ she said softly. ‘Dan . . .’

  She took hold of my hand and eased it off his hair one finger at a time. I was shaking. She got the last finger free and he slumped back to the floor.

  I stood up. ‘You ungrateful little shit,’ I spat.

  ‘Dan . . . Dan . . . it’s okay. We all just need to calm down.’

  ‘We need to get our fucking heads examined, taking him in, looking after . . .’

  She put a calming hand on my chest, and I breathed in, out, in, out, against it.

  It eased.

  ‘Good,’ said Trish. ‘Now what’s this all about?’

  I stepped up to the coffee table. I removed the top of the Xbox. ‘This is what it’s about.’

  Patricia moved up beside me. She looked down. She looked at me. We both turned to look at the boy.

  He said, ‘If you touch me again, I’m calling ChildLine.’

  ‘If you call ChildLine, I’ll break your fucking head,’ I said.

  ‘And I’ll help him,’ said Trish.

  What a team.

  When Bobby refused to get up off the floor, Patricia asked me to leave the room. I did so, eventually, and under protest. I left them together for ten minutes. I stood in the garden, fuming. It was neater than I remembered. There was new furniture. I saw Trish through the French doors, on her knees beside him. I was disappointed with him, and myself. I’d known he was trouble, I had all the evidence for it, yet I’d still brought him into our lives. I had made the cardinal error of trusting him because he was disabled, as if that somehow made him incapable of being evil.

  Trish waved me in and we took our places at the kitchen table. Between us we had the gun, the cash and the drugs, two cans of Diet Coke and a cappuccino made with a cappuccino machine for which I’d been denied visitation rights. We had one Twix. I took one leg of it, Patricia the other. Apply your own metaphor.

  She said, ‘No shouting, no storming off, no fighting, agreed?’

  I stared at Bobby, he stared at the table. Trish gave me a look, and then a second, and then, ‘Dan?’

  ‘Yes. Okay. If you insist.’

  ‘Bobby?’

  He nodded.

  ‘He needs to say it,’ I said.

  ‘Dan, for fuck . . .’ She trailed off. ‘Bobby, do you agree?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And have you anything to say about what we found in your Xbox?’

  ‘Apart from some half-arsed excuse,’ I said. ‘Own it.’

  ‘Dan?’

  ‘Okay!’

  ‘Bobby – what do you want to say?’

  His eyes flitted up to Trish. She gave him an encouraging nod.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t mean it,’ I said.

  Patricia rolled her eyes. ‘Jesus, Dan, give him—’

  ‘Okay. All right. Apology accepted. Now you need to tell us about . . . this.’ I indicated the gun. Bobby reached out for it. ‘Without touching it,’ I added.

  ‘It’s a nine-millimetre short-barrel Luger.’

  ‘O . . . kay.’

  ‘It’s semi-automatic with an eight-round detachable box magazine and—’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Bobby, I’m not really concerned about the mechanics of it; I want to know how you came to have it and why. And the same applies to the money, and the drugs. My mum used to say, if you’re going to do something, do it well. You appear to be dealing on quite a remarkable scale for a fourteen-year-old.’

  Bobby shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not . . . I wasn’t . . . only a bit . . . just some draw and pills for me mates.’

  ‘This isn’t a little . . . there’s enough here to start a bloody—’

  ‘Let him talk,’ said Trish.

  I showed her my Twix finger.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Sorry, Bobby. Continue.’

  He kept his eyes on the gun.

  ‘It’s not mine,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, you’re just holding on to it for someone? Right.’

  ‘Dan, cut the sarcasm . . . Bobby, please, everything’s going to be okay . . . Just tell us . . .’

  ‘I am telling youse if youse would just bloody listen. It’s not mine, okay, all right? The Millers, they don’t keep anything themselves, don’t want to get caught with it, so they spread it out across the boys. I was okay just selling some dope, but they made me take all this other stuff. They just kept sending people to the house. I’d more customers than the bloody Mace on the corner, and I didn’t want any of them. But I’d no choice.’

  ‘There’s always a choice,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus fuck!’ Flecks of spit sprayed from the corners of his mouth. He brought his fist down hard on the table. The gun, the drugs, the cash, Trish and I all jumped. He jabbed a finger across at me. ‘This is why I hate fucking do-gooding wankers like you, oh there’s always a choice, well it’s easy for you to say that in your fucking show-house or here on fucking Cypriot Avenue. In case you didn’t notice, they shot my leg off . . . you . . . you know nothing . . . nothing.’

  ‘It’s Cypress Avenue,’ I said. ‘Like the song.’

  ‘FUCK!’ He held his hands to the sides of his skull and pressed.

  ‘Nobody is f
ucking listening to me!’

  He cracked his forehead down on the tabletop, hard.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Trish. ‘Please.’

  ‘It’s her favourite table,’ I said.

  Trish looked daggers at me, but, most unexpectedly, Bobby laughed. He banged his head again, but not as hard. And then he laughed some more.

  ‘This is so fucking fucked up,’ he said.

  He rested his head on the surface. I looked at Trish and raised my eyebrows. She raised her own and nodded at me to say or do something.

  I said, ‘Bobby. There’s sixty grand here. I counted it. God knows how much the coke is worth.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s why they’re after you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why don’t you just give it back to them?’

  Bobby finally sat back. There was a spot of blood right in the middle of his forehead. He was looking across the table, but not at me, somewhere way beyond. When he spoke, his voice was tired, almost a monotone: ‘I can’t give it back, because my mum found the coke. And before I could stop her, she flushed half of it down the bog. Maybe forty grand’s worth. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just go to them and say, sorry, I’ve lost half your stash. So I tried to raise the money myself, but y’know . . . Christ . . . I was cutting it weaker and weaker and the Millers heard about it and thought I was ripping them off, so they did my leg and said get us the money, get us our gear, or you’re fuckin’ dead. One of me mates got the gun, we was going to do a post office or fucking Marks and Spencer’s even though I could hardly walk and they’re fucking useless anyway. But we would have done it, except me mum started all that shite on the radio, and it made it ten times worse. I couldn’t even leave the house. She kept at it and kept at it, like she was daring them, so they came for me, and that would have been okay, but they didn’t get me, they got my ma instead. They killed her.’ He shook his head violently. He looked to Trish, and then to me, his eyes big and red. ‘I don’t want the Xbox back for the money or the drugs. I want it for the gun. I want it for the Millers. They killed my mum. And I’m going to fucking kill them.’

  He was fourteen, for fucksake, and Patricia was in tears.

  29

  Never underestimate the ego of a self-published poet. Boogie Wilson, brigadier general of the Ulster Volunteer Force, safe in his east Belfast stronghold, couldn’t resist the temptation to travel outside his comfort zone to read at a poetry slam event held upstairs in the Errigle Inn on the Ormeau Road with not a bodyguard in sight.

  Boogie was one of dozens of poets who stepped up to the mike. Success at a slam has more to do with performance, projection and personality than actual content, and at this at least, Boogie Wilson was an old hand. He was well used to addressing large groups of people, although they generally wore balaclavas. By all accounts, he went down extremely well, although to be fair, who was going to heckle a man with such easy access to death and destruction? Afterwards, he stood his round and talked iambic pentameter with the other poets. When he was leaving at the end of the night, slightly tipsy but elated, someone stepped up to him and blew his head off. Those critics, they’re lethal.

  Maxi McDowell was still laughing about it when he ambled into the Singing Kettle. He sat down and poured himself a cup of tea from the waiting pot. We didn’t have to regurgitate the facts. It was sufficient for me to say, ‘Any wild guesses?’

  ‘The Millers were at the movies,’ said Maxi. ‘They have stubs.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Something like that. The stupid, stupid bastard should have known better.’

  ‘So is this a coup?’

  ‘Could be. What’d you call that . . . y’know . . . when Hitler took out all his enemies?’

  ‘The Night of the Long Knives.’

  ‘That’s it. They might want to be taking out every rival while they’re at it, or they might be working the phones, see where people are going to stand. Either way, you’re not going to be their major concern.’

  ‘Well that must be good.’

  Maxi raised his cup and sipped. He made a face and added more sugar. ‘Thing is, I’ve known them since they were wee lads; shit, I was kicking their dad up the arse when he was a wee lad’n all. So I don’t doubt I can get you in to see them, get you in safe and out safe, but with everything on their plate, they’re not going to give you much time.’

  Maxi was a big guy, with a corrugated forehead. He had that older-man thing of appearing to struggle for breath.

  I said, ‘I appreciate you coming alone.’

  ‘You don’t like him much, do you?’

  ‘It’s not him so much as his boss, Springer.’

  ‘Springer? How do you know him?’

  ‘They came to see me at my office.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Bobby Murray.’

  Maxi nodded to himself. ‘He didn’t tell me that. Not that he has to. What’d you make of Springer?’

  ‘He was doing the bad-cop thing.’

  ‘Yeah, that would be him. Don’t know him well, don’t want to. Bit of a cold fish. What’d you tell him?’

  ‘As much as I’ve told you.’

  ‘That much?’ Maxi smiled. ‘So he tried to turn the screws.’

  ‘Sticks and stones.’

  ‘Yeah, I think you’ll find he’s only getting started.’ Maxi set the cup down, and slowly turned the saucer. ‘They’re very keen to get your boy.’

  ‘They were trying to say he might have set the fire himself. That’s shite, right?’

  ‘It’s not impossible, Dan. Do you know where he is?’ I stirred my Coke. The ice clinked. ‘Okay, fair enough.’

  ‘I’m just trying to sort it out.’

  ‘His family paying you?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘What do they call that in America, when you do something for nothing, like a public service? Bleeding heart, is it?’

  ‘I think you mean pro bono.’

  ‘Really?’ He smiled. ‘Dan. What are you really up to?’

  ‘What I say. Just trying to help the wee lad out.’

  ‘It’s your call, but if you really want to help him, help him out of the country, because this place is all fucked up.’ He pushed his cup into the centre of the table. He raised his hand and rubbed two fingers together for the waitress to bring the bill. ‘God knows, I’ll be glad to be out of it.’

  ‘How long now?’

  ‘Hours rather than days.’

  ‘You’ll miss this place.’

  ‘Like a hole in the head.’ He laughed. ‘Yeah.’ And then he looked almost wistful. ‘There are good people on the Shankill. They just don’t get much of a chance to blossom.’

  ‘Because of the Millers.’

  ‘There have always been Millers.’ He glanced up at the waitress, puzzling over the correct change, and then leaned across the table and lowered his voice. ‘Dan,’ he said, ‘Jack Caramac is right, of course he is, it’s obvious to anyone with half their head screwed on. We go softly, softly so the war won’t start again. It’s policy, from on high. But this much I know: those Millers, they don’t give two figs about politics or religion; they care about their own power and they care about money. If you rip them off, if you challenge them, they will put you down. They were evil kids, and they haven’t changed. Bobby Murray is just another fly caught in their web; don’t you get stuck there with him, because the Millers will devour you too. If I can’t talk you out of it, then fair enough, I’ll get you in to see them. But don’t go appealing to their better nature. They don’t have one. If you go in, go in with something they value, or don’t go in at all.’

  30

  Sucker, that’s what I am. I went back to Bill and Ben, the Repair Men, and bought a reconditioned Xbox and a clatter of de-scratched games off Billy so that Bobby Murray could sit in my former home shooting zombies in the head all day while Patricia went out to work and I paced my office trying to decide what I could bring to the Miller meeting, what
I should be doing with the sixty thousand quid, a bag of cocaine and a revolver, while only occasionally allowing the subject of Macedonia to enter my thinking. Maxi said it would take a couple of days for the heat to fade off the Boogie Wilson killing, and only then would he be able to take me in to see them.

  Trish’s opinion was, ‘Give them the sixty grand and the drugs; it may not be everything he owes them, but it’s a start, and maybe it’ll put you in their good books.’

  It did seem the most obvious thing to do. Except for the fact that they had made it clear to Bobby that they wanted everything back, and not only that, they wanted him out of the country or dead for even daring to deal watered-down coke behind their back. So even if I did hand it to them, they’d still be angry. No, I would hold on to it. In fact, I decided to make it work for me. Nothing crazy, like putting it on a horse. But I thought that a few extra missing pounds weren’t going to make any difference, and I had certain needs. Every man has them. For example, I paid for the Diet Coke and the pot of tea in the Singing Kettle. I sent off for my car tax. I purchased new tyres. And I got several quotes for a paint job to remove the hideous slander from the side of my vehicle, just like a fully fledged grown-up would. These were significant sums of money for someone who wasn’t earning any, but insignificant for someone who could afford to stash sixty thousand quid with a fourteen-year-old. It did cross my mind that until the situation was resolved I could invest it in a series of guaranteed fixed-rate ISAs with tax-free returns, or even Premium Bonds. And then I thought, maybe not.

  I was still left with the problem of where to keep the cash, the drugs and the gun. Trish was doing enough for me without running the risk of her being busted for cocaine and drug money. But both my apartment and my office were too obvious: I needed somewhere unlikely, but with easy access. Until I could work it out, I packed it all back into the original Xbox and took it with me when I locked up the office.

  As I turned from the door, Joe the butcher called over: ‘How’s business?’

  ‘Fair to middlin’. You?’

  ‘Same,’ he said, stepping out on to the pavement. ‘You ever get that boy sorted out?’