by James Craig
Whatever he hoped, he knew that all this green business wouldn’t fade this side of the election. So, in the meantime, he was stuck with the harsh reality that they had set the bar too high for him, bike-wise. Now every time he stepped into a car, even his much trumpeted hybrid, he faced cries of ‘ hypocrite! ’. The bike thing had become a complete liability, but Edgar insisted that he couldn’t give it up. Even though he was followed every morning by a chauffeur-driven limo containing his suits and papers, he still had to get on the bike. It was ridiculous that he couldn’t just jump in the back of the car and have a well-earned snooze or read the Sun. It wasn’t like the cycling image-wise was risk-free; there were several videos of him on YouTube breaking basic traffic laws and almost mowing down pedestrians. He had been dubbed ‘ The most dangerous thing on two wheels ’ and some joker had started an online petition to get him back in his car. Xavier had signed it himself, using twenty-five fake names, in a failed attempt to get Edgar to relent.
At one stage, almost inevitably, the bike had been stolen. Xavier had been ecstatic but to his horror, in defiance of statistical possibility, it had been found again. He couldn’t believe it; he owned the only bloody stolen bike in the whole of London ever to be safely returned to its rightful owner. It was just his rotten luck. Xavier dropped the book in his pannier, sticking a bulky fleece underneath, so that enough of the title was visible for the photo op. With gritted teeth, he grabbed the machine and pushed it towards the front door. It was light as a feather and an object of genuine beauty and craftsmanship, but the first thing he was going to do, after their election victory, was to throw the sodding thing under a bus and jump back into his official Jag.
FOUR
Ian couldn’t believe his luck. Naked and sated, he stretched out on the bed and savoured the cool white crispness of the hotel sheets beneath him. Hooking up with people in chatrooms was, he knew from bitter experience, hit and miss at best. But tonight had been an epiphany. Closing his eyes, and grinning like an idiot, he recalled the gentle but insistent pressure of cool, unyielding enamel on tender flesh and the demented explosion that followed. His heart rate was only now beginning to return to something like normal. Looking down, he ran his left foot over the nine-inch ‘Heart of Glass’ ribbed dildo lying on the bed and felt a shiver of anticipation. But even here, even now, he was a pragmatist. He didn’t want to push his luck. There would be other times. For now, he told himself that he should be happy to let the mixture of endorphins and champagne bliss him out as he waited for sleep.
‘Turn over.’ He felt playful fingers on his warm, damp balls, and the cool, wet probing of a tongue on his penis.
‘I’m done,’ he croaked.
‘Turn over!’ The voice was half laughing, half ordering. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet.’
Ian opened his eyes and smiled. ‘Oh, well,’ he sighed, ‘if you insist.’ Rolling on to his stomach, he buried his head into a plump pillow, groaning slightly in anticipation of the pleasure to come. Immediately, he felt his legs being moved gently apart. He let his mind drift off, thinking about nothing in particular. A few moments later, he was brought back to the present as a pair of fingers slipped between his buttocks and began gently probing his arsehole. He grunted in anticipation.
‘Be my guest,’ he mumbled into the pillow. ‘It’s clean.’
Under the slow, steady caresses that rippled up his spine, he finally dozed off. After what could have been a few minutes, could have been half an hour, he woke with a start as cold oil was poured over his shoulders and trickled down his back.
‘Ahh!’
‘Sorry. It’s just geranium and orange oil. I should have warmed it first.’ The voice was solicitous, calm, mature, compelling. ‘Go back to sleep.’
‘OK.’ He relaxed back into the pillow and felt the oil turn warm as it was rubbed into his shoulders. Once again, his eyes closed and sleep came quickly.
‘Ian?’
He was woken for a second time, with a whisper in his ear. At the same time, a pair of hands gently lifted his hips off the bed, pulling his buttocks apart. Smiling, he automatically tensed his cheeks. Buns of steel, he thought. Not bad for a man my age. Sleep fell away as a hand grabbed his cock and the ‘Heart of Glass’ was pushed firmly up his backside. Cool and insistent, he felt the skin stretch and threaten to tear. He gasped, unable to distinguish the pleasure from the pain. Pushing the hand away, he grabbed his now firm member and began pumping furiously.
For ten, fifteen, twenty seconds, they established a rhythm. Rapidly reaching the point of no return, he dismissed the idea of holding back and gave one final stroke, before coming for the second time. There was less semen this time, but still a respectable amount. With a grunt of satisfaction, he collapsed back on the bed, taking care to avoid his own mess.
Still well embedded up his arse, the dildo came to a stop. ‘Ian? I’m not finished yet.’
‘Do what you will,’ he said yawning, as he stuck the pillow over his head. ‘I am spent. Take me as you please.’
With more than a hint of petulance, the dildo was thrust roughly further inside him.
‘Gently!’
‘I’m not hurting you, am I?’ A hand gently stroked the back of his neck.
‘No… Well, maybe just a little. Be careful. Don’t damage the nerve ends.’
The dildo probed a little deeper and resumed its steady movement. The hand began rubbing his neck more firmly, as if to provide a distraction from the increasing pain. Ian’s eyes darted from side to side but, so close to the pillow, could see nothing. He could feel his heartbeat thumping against the mattress and a sudden spurt of adrenaline reignited his earlier feelings of pleasure. He tried to push himself up, but the hand on his neck forced him down, kept his face firmly into the sheets. Just as the sense of panic threatened to overwhelm him, the dildo slid out of him. The trapped wind made a farting noise, and they both laughed. The pressure on his neck was also released, and he felt a gentle kiss descend behind his left ear. Relaxing back into the sheets, he closed his eyes and waited for his heart rate to slow.
‘Don’t worry.’ Another kiss. ‘If that dildo is too much for you, I have something else.’
‘Just be gentle,’ he murmured. From deep in the pillow, he could see that the bedside clock read 1.05 a.m. He had to be at work in just over four hours so this time he really did have to get some sleep. ‘It’s late, and maybe we’ve had enough for tonight,’ he said, sounding as casual as possible. ‘We can do this again some other time. I need to get some rest now, but you can stay if you want to.’
‘That’s OK.’ He felt the mattress shift and heard the sound of bare feet padding across the thin carpet. ‘I will have to get going, but, first, I’ve got something to round the night off nicely.’
Whatever. Having called time, Ian had already moved on in his mind, and was thinking about the people that he had to meet in the morning. They were Chileans, dealers in ‘specialist’ technology, and very nice clients. Happily, they were also undemanding types, which would be just as well on this particular occasion.
He was just dreaming about demolishing a full English breakfast when he felt a sharp, burning pain explode through his abdomen. ‘What?’ he cried, his eyes welling up before he could even open them. This time, the flesh was definitely tearing. There was another blow before he could throw off the pillow and flip over on to his back. The sheets beneath him were turning red. Then he saw the blade, dripping with blood, his blood, being waved in front of his face. I should scream, he thought as he watched the knife scything through his cheek, extending his mouth all the way to his left ear. Help! his brain screamed, but all that came out was a gurgle.
A series of blows rained down on his face, neck and torso. Even as he was bringing his arms up to his head in a futile attempt to defend himself, he was mesmerised by the weapon. It was almost as if it was working on its own. Once, twice, three times, he tried to grab it, simply attracting gashes to his hands and arms. Grabbing a pillow, he
tried to hide from the attack, but a swift knee to the balls sent him sprawling. As he fell off the bed, his head bounced off a side table and he landed on the floor.
Dazed, he tried to curl up into a ball but found himself being dragged back on to the bed. Maybe he cried for his mother; or maybe he just imagined that he did. For what seemed like an eternity, the blows kept descending. Even the repeated moaning, as metal penetrated flesh, and the occasional grunt of his assailant could not drown out the whirr of the air-conditioning.
As he drifted out of consciousness for the last time, Ian could not believe his bad luck.
FIVE
Yorkshire, June 1984
‘Sit still, sunshine. This is going to hurt.’ The voice was tired, bored, provincial. Not friendly, not interested.
Fresh out of Hendon training college, Constable John Carlyle felt a long way from home.
‘You’ll feel just a little sting. Move around and it will get worse.’
‘Shit!’ Carlyle screwed up his face and closed his eyes tightly. The sweat trickled down his forehead from beneath his recently refreshed number-one buzz cut, mingling with the TCP liquid antiseptic that had just been rubbed into the gash above his right eye. Although barely two inches long, it felt massive and deep, and Carlyle could feel it opening and closing as he wiggled his eyebrows. He was sure that his skull was now exposed to the elements. Maybe my brain will slip out, he thought. Assuming that he still had one.
‘Sit still! Surely you London boys can take a bit of rough-and-tumble, can’t you?’ The pasty paramedic, dressed in a green jumpsuit, his gargoyle face looking washed out in the glare of the intense sunlight, stood back to admire his work. He pronounced himself satisfied, then quickly slapped a plaster the size of a cigarette packet on Carlyle’s forehead.
‘You’re done,’ he said.
Carlyle opened one eye. ‘It hurts.’
‘I told you it would.’ The gargoyle took a quick swig from the TCP bottle, swilled it around his mouth and spat it on the ground. He offered to share a taste. Carlyle shook his head and looked away. Wiping more sweat from his forehead, he felt the heat rising from his face and felt the snot desiccating and solidifying in his nose. This was not where he wanted to be, stuck in the middle of a row of terraced houses in the middle of some hapless, downtrodden, down-at-heel village in the middle of the north of England.
Even the weather was wrong. In the middle of his dark mood, summer had finally arrived, exploding on the scene in all its glory. What little breeze there had been earlier had vanished. The sky was a deep blue of infinite promise, suggesting long summer holidays, vanilla ice cream with strawberry sauce on top, and deckchairs on Brighton beach. Across the street, a radio began blasting out ‘Electric Avenue’ by Eddy Grant. Think long enough and hard enough, Carlyle told himself, and maybe you could think yourself somewhere else. Maybe… but not for very long.
According to the weather forecast, it was supposed to reach thirty-one degrees this afternoon. Sitting here in the sun, it felt a whole lot hotter. Inside the various layers of his riot gear, it was probably well above 40 degrees, possibly even 45. Up since 4 a.m., he had spent four hours sitting on a bus, and then more than six hours standing around in the sun, with the PSU (the Police Support Unit, the riot squad) ranged in front of him, and the mounted officers lined up behind. Their horses were ready to go into action at the sound of the Commander’s whistle, bolting towards the strikers whether Carlyle and his colleagues got out of their way in time or not.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Fucking waiting.
Nothing to do but stand around, with only the occasional hurled insult and the promise of a ruck offering some diversion.
This was nothing new. More than three hundred police officers bussed in from around the country had been living in a hangar on the airbase at RAF Syerston for almost a week now. Syerston was an hour down the road, in Nottinghamshire, where only twenty per cent of mineworkers were on strike. Here in Yorkshire, where Carlyle was currently pressed into service, the figure was more than ninety-seven per cent. That meant dozens of pitched battles up and down the county; and thousands of arrests. The working day consisted of fourteen-hour shifts, with the rest of the time divided into six hours’ sleep and four hours of wishing you were either working or sleeping.
Apart from the minor head injury, today was a fairly standard day. Peeling his tongue off the floor of his mouth, Carlyle tried to swallow. His head throbbed viciously, nastier than any bastard hangover he had yet managed to inflict on himself during his first two decades on the planet. Behind the pain, ‘I Fought the Law’ by The Clash was playing on a continuous loop deep within the mush of his brain. Under different circumstances, the irony would have made him smile. Now he just wished that Joe Strummer, Mick Jones et al. would kindly shut the fuck up and get out of his head.
Carlyle looked up at the gargoyle. ‘Got any aspirin?’
The paramedic grunted and tossed him a small foil-covered tray of pills pulled from his pocket. Carlyle popped two, and then another two, shoving the remainder into the inside pocket of his overalls. He grabbed a bottle of water from the low wall on which he was sitting, and took a cautious sip. His throat felt raw and it didn’t feel as if the pills would stay down. He felt the aspirin fighting their way back up, and swallowed hard.
‘Will I need stitches?’ Carlyle asked hopefully. Naturally squeamish at the best of times, he wasn’t a big fan of hospitals, but a couple of hours spent in one this afternoon would do nicely. He was in the market for some sympathy, and some hands-on care from a nubile nurse would go down a treat.
‘You’ll be fine,’ the gargoyle said, as he stripped off his rubber gloves and groped for the packet of cigarettes in the breast pocket of his uniform. ‘The brick, or whatever it was, basically bounced off your helmet. You should have a nice scar though. I’m sure it will look good for the girls.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ Carlyle grimaced, filing the comment away for future reference, all the same. Anything that helped with girls would be more than welcome. He wondered if he would have to pay for a new helmet. The old one had gone flying when he went down, and was now probably destined to become a trophy in someone’s living room.
‘Leave the plaster on for a couple of days,’ advised the gargoyle in a detached tone, sounding as if he was reading from a book of instructions. ‘If the cut opens up again after you take it off, go to the hospital.’ He glanced back down the road, whence the noise of the crowd ebbed and flowed. It was like listening to the spectators at a football match when you were standing two streets away from the ground itself. ‘I wouldn’t visit one round here, though, if I were you,’ he added, grinning.
‘No,’ Carlyle nodded. Round here, the police weren’t exactly popular.
‘You wouldn’t want another crack on the head,’ the medic added.
‘No.’
‘And you wouldn’t want to get yourself lynched.’
‘No.’
The gargoyle pulled an unfiltered cigarette out of his packet of Capstan. Carlyle smiled as he recognised the sailor logo. Capstan Full Strength (For men who feel strongly about cigarette taste!) had been his grandfather’s chosen brand. Ever since Carlyle could remember, his granddad’s fingers had been stained yellow from the nicotine and his cardigan pocket marked with cigarette burns. He’d always have a cigarette in one hand, often with a glass of Johnnie Walker Red Label in the other. Carlyle was no expert, but reckoned that the cigs and the booze didn’t do much for the old fella’s health. He had died two years previously, having barely made sixty but looking as if he was twenty years older.
Lighting up, the gargoyle ran a hand over his shaven head to wipe away a sheen of sweat that reappeared almost immediately. After a deep drag, he took the cigarette from his mouth, lent over and coughed up a large lump of brown phlegm which he deposited into the gutter, before plonking himself down on the back step of the ambulance. In the front cab, a radio chattered away, but he paid it no he
ed.
Along the road Carlyle counted another three ambulances where various policemen and strikers – coal miners who had been engaged in an increasingly messy and bitter industrial dispute for several months now – were being attended to for their minor injuries. One of the policemen was busy arguing with a photographer who had just taken his picture. Rather than wait to get thumped or, worse still, have his camera smashed into the tarmac, the snapper turned on his heels and marched off as quickly as he could manage, without quite breaking into a trot. The copper obviously thought about going after him before deciding that it just wasn’t worth the effort.
Further in the background, the hum of the afternoon’s struggle continued: five thousand police versus five thousand strikers. The scuffles that had been raging all across a worthless couple of acres of scrubland – outside the coking plant in an exhausted village called Orgreave, about five miles south of Sheffield, in the self-proclaimed Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire – showed no sign of abating.
Smoke rose lazily into the sky from a car that had been cremated, by accident or design, on the edge of the skirmishes. The gargoyle took a final monster drag on his cigarette and tossed it next to a discarded yellow Coal Not Dole sticker lying on the pavement. Stubbing it out with the toe of his liver-coloured Doc Martens boot, he wandered into a front garden a couple of doors down, to take a piss behind a bush.
Carlyle looked around, wondering what to do next. This wasn’t what he had signed up for. Pouring most of the last of the water from the bottle over his head, he promised himself that, once this nonsense was finally all over, he would scuttle back to London and bloody well stay there.
