by Liam Brown
Legend Press Ltd, 175-185 Gray’s Inn Road, London, WC1X 8UE
[email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk
Contents © Liam Brown 2016
The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
Print ISBN 978-1-7850797-0-2
Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850797-1-9
Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays Ltd.
Cover design by Simon Levy www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk
All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Liam Brown is a writer, filmmaker and former-life model. His debut novel Real Monsters was published in 2015 and long-listed for the Guardian’s Not the Booker prize. He lives in Birmingham with his wife and two children.
Visit Liam at
liambrownwriter.com
or on Twitter
@LiamBrownWriter
This book is for Elliot and Felix. Grow up! Stay wild!
ZERO
Peel back the skin. Beneath the well-oiled order of the world. Behind the sterile veneer of concrete, steel and glass beats something else. Something wild and animal, crouched in the shadows, just aching to shake loose. You can catch a glimpse of it now and then, if you look in the right places. If you keep very still and stay very quiet.
It’s there in the alleyways you’re scared to walk down at night, where broken bottles and discarded syringe cases glisten in the flickering street lights, crackling under foot like first frost. It’s there in the aerosol-propelled acronyms scrawled under bridges and along embankments, a smudged alphabet of affiliation and violence. It’s in the faded bloodstains spattering the pavements outside all-night bars and in the cremated body panels of burnt-out cars. It’s in the age-blackened creases of a badly photocopied missing person poster. It’s in the long shadows that slink towards your dustbins at dusk and at dawn. It’s a stirring in the hedgerows, a shriek in the wind.
It sleeps in shop doorways and it roams in packs.
Most people don’t look. They don’t want to see that world. They cross the road, avoid eye contact. They change the channel, flip the page, close the window. Hit Escape. They keep their heads down – or worse, they keep them filled up with an ever-expanding list of distractions and diversions. Politics. Football. Social media. Shopping. Things that trick them into believing they are part of something tangible. Neat. Knowable. Things that reassure them that life is a game, that it is playable and can be won. If only they follow the rules.
And so they follow the rules.
They work hard at school and attend a good university. They graduate and join a well-established firm on the ground floor, quickly catching the eye of senior management and hauling themselves up two or three rungs. Their salary doubles, triples. They enrol in a pension plan, health plan, insurance plan. They start an investment portfolio. They join a gym, play tennis at the weekends. They eat a nutritionally balanced diet and leave a column marked ‘grooming’ on their monthly expenses spreadsheet. They go for minibreaks in Barcelona, Milan, Copenhagen. They meet someone and begin viewing apartments. They get married, and within months realise they’re going to need a bigger place. Meanwhile the years roll on. Twenties slide towards thirties. Weekends at the gym make way for barbeques with friends, until suddenly they’re forty. IBS, grey hairs, an unlimited line of credit. Another promotion, a waistline expanding parallel to their salary. A bigger car, a second child, a new home, the whole story pixelated and edited into a neat, nourishing narrative to preserve indefinitely in online shrines to their own success.
They do not drink heavily in the evenings. They do not open a secret bank account in order to deposit funds for gambling or develop a cocaine habit or sleep with their twenty-four-year-old secretaries. They do not fuck everything up.
They play an active part in the local community, organise charity quiz evenings, participate in politics. They take pride in their garden, imposing an artificial order on the natural world with the sweep of a petrol strimmer and the pump and spray of carcinogenic herbicides. They stay at home at night and stream HBO dramas while tracing patterns on their iPads. They check the gas, the kids and finally the burglar alarm before they go to bed each night, happy to believe that their personal hygiene routines and their bland domesticity and their positive bank balances will deliver them from evil, will somehow inoculate them from the wildness of the world. Will keep it locked outside. But they’ve forgotten something.
You’ve forgotten something.
Because for all of your shopping and shaving and talking and texting, you’re still nothing but an animal. Fucking. Fighting. Taking what you want without asking. You can wring a tie around your neck, anaesthetise yourself with garden furniture catalogues and Internet pornography, but you can only hold it back for so long. The wildness is in you – is you – and no matter how the wooden blocks of your successes stack symmetrically on top of one another, your education, your job, your car, your wife, your kids, all it would take is for a single lapse of concentration, one fumbled false move and your entire sorry life will come tumbling down around you, leaving you thrashing around in the dirt with all the other beasts.
And who knows what you’ll be capable of then?
So I ask you – and I know after all I’ve put you through I have no right to ask such a thing – to try and remember who and what you are. Beneath the mousse and moisturiser. Under the coats of concealer and fake tan. At night, go to a dark place and look upon ancient things. Stars. Galaxies. Things that make the world seem new again. Kneel down and let your hands run through the living, beating earth. Let the filth get under your fingernails. Feel around in the cracks for the people who have already slipped between them, knowing that you could join them at any time. That the only thing separating you, one way or another, is chance. Don’t be afraid. Pick the scab. Gouge the flesh and poke around. Look. Look.
I dare you to look.
WINTER
ONE
It’s a well-known fact that every gambler has a tell. An involuntary twitch of the eye or a scratch at the back of the neck that gives away the anguish or elation of their hand. Even the best players in the world, those hard-bitten, card-counting, bookie-sponsored, professional poker ‘stars’. Those multi millionaires that grin and grimace for the cameras as they crow around the private tables of Vegas casinos in mirrored shades and cowboy hats. Even they can’t escape the revolt of their own bodies. An incongruous clearing of the throat, a bead of sweat on a cool autumn day. Even they can’t craft a truly perfect lie. Or so the story goes.
Me, I’m not so sure. See I’ve done a lot of gambling in my life. Not just on poker either. Blackjack, roulette, baccarat, fruit machines, football, Korean indoor women’s lacrosse – I’ve bet on almost any uncertain event you can imagine. I once forfeited a month’s salary at my four-year-old’s sports day when I caught another father speculating aloud on the odds of his own son scooping gold at the egg and spoon race. Another time I walked home – a full fifteen miles – after losing my car over a game of scissors paper stone. Like I say – I’ve gambled a lot.
And sure some people are easy to read, their spas
ms and tics like braille to a blind assassin. But the truth is those people are amateurs. No, the pros – the real pros, the ones who aren’t content with just gambling money, but with anything and everything that holds any value – those guys don’t mess around when it comes to calculated deceit. There is no tug of the ear, no clench of the jaw. There isn’t even a ‘poker face’, as such. They’re far too refined for anything as unreliable as that. No, the pros understand that the best way, the only way, to tell a lie is to swallow it yourself. Better still, you have to let the lie swallow you. You have to commit to it totally; to eat, breathe and shit the lie twenty-four hours a day until it becomes part of you, inscribed not only on each and every strand of your being, but on the genetic code of future generations of relatives yet to be born. It’s a tough trick to pull off – one usually reserved for elite politicians and tabloid journalists – but I’ve managed to master it.
Which is hardly surprising when you consider I’ve been doing it for most of my adult life.
*
Fifteen seconds. That’s how long I had each morning before I remembered the shuttle crash my life had become. Fifteen seconds to lie cocooned in the warm pocket of my family – my legs nestled into Lydia’s back, Flynn burbling beside me, the alarm only two or three squawks into its daily tantrum – before it all came rushing back with sickening clarity.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Because as I luxuriated in those fifteen freeze-frame morning moments, the world was still a generous, happy place to live, and I was able to see myself as the outside world might: Adam Britman, successful account manager at an award-winning, pan-global digital marketing agency. Attentive husband and hands-on father to two TV commercial-cute children. Keen tennis player, wine enthusiast and owner of a new BMW 6 Series Coupé, finished in Alpine White. My kitchen was large enough to warrant an island midway across it in order to break up the journey from the cast-iron Aga to the limited-edition Smeg refrigerator. I was the living, breathing, Savile Row suit-wearing embodiment of a winner.
At least I was for fifteen seconds…
That’s when my training kicked in.
Step one was to tell myself everything was normal. Swallowing down the hangover and self-loathing, I swung one leg over the edge of the bed and willed myself to get up, repeating the mantra that a solid routine was a liar’s best friend. And boy did we have a routine.
It was important to be rushing. It seemed in those days that we were always late, no matter what time I set the alarm. For authenticity’s sake it was vital every task was undertaken with a clenched jaw and a bark in my voice. Flynn’s coos had already transformed into yells for chocolate-coated Chubby Cubs, his demands spat with the spite and natural authority of a third-world tyrant in training. Lydia meanwhile was up and out of bed, blocking the bathroom with her morning cleansing ritual, despite the fact she would spend the rest of the day ensconced in her studio, stapling bits of fabric to live pigeons or sloshing red dye over a plate of raw oats or whatever her ‘art’ consisted of back then. I used the opportunity to go downstairs and intercept any unwanted mail, finding with a mixture of fear and hope that the postman had yet to arrive.
Peering over my shoulder to ensure I wasn’t being watched, I pressed my eye to the front door, checking there were no nasty surprises lurking out there for me. It was still dark, the frosty road reflecting the street light, yet from what I could see the street was deserted. At least no one I needed to worry about. I straightened up, then leapt back in terror as I spotted Flynn, crouched in the shadows behind me.
‘I want Chubby Cubs,’ he said. ‘Now.’
After I followed him through to the kitchen and poured out a bowl of what looked suspiciously like diabetic dog biscuits, I opened the fridge, spotting the bottle of vodka next to the milk.
‘Hurry up, Daddy,’ said Flynn.
Shielded by the enormous steel door, I reached for the bottle, unscrewed the lid and swallowed down a single, burning shot. Then, just to prove how perfectly normal behaviour this was, I had another.
Leaving Flynn to his ADHD-inducing breakfast cereal, I raced back up the hall, stopping only for the briefest of seconds to check the mat for letters and scan the street before sprinting up the stairs as I knock-knock-knocked on Olivia’s door. I counted to three and then burst in, hitting the light switch to reveal the groaning corpse of my daughter.
‘I don’t feel well,’ she said, her voice muffled by the layers of duvet wrapped around her head.
‘Of course you don’t feel well, Ollie,’ I said, tearing back the curtains. ‘It’s Monday morning and, spoiler alert, nobody feels good on Monday morning. That’s what Monday’s were invented for. But you need to get up, now. Before you make us all late.’
Olivia leant forward just long enough to shoot me a look that would freeze helium before collapsing back onto the mattress and pulling the covers over her head. ‘What’s the point?’ she said, her anger escaping the layers of hypoallergenic microfibres. ‘We spend all day learning things we’re never going to use in the real world. When am I ever going to need to calculate the third side of an isosceles triangle? Or quote from Act Three, scene one of Hamlet? Why can’t they teach us something we’ll actually need, like social media, or how to choose a mobile phone tariff. It’s all so… futile!’
It was sad really. At just twelve years old she’d already figured out something that took most of us at least half a lifetime to realise – that school wasn’t really about filling your head with practical knowledge to prepare you for a journey of success and personal growth. It was simply a production line designed to turn out a legion of obedient, identikit consumers; a method of ensuring the next generation doesn’t think too hard or question the established order of things. It was all just a way of breaking you.
Of course, I didn’t say any of that to Olivia. After all I had a role to play – a lie to uphold. So instead I marched forward and forcibly yanked back the covers, threatening her with all manner of irrational punishments if she didn’t rise and bloody-well-shine, all the while staring at the shivering almost-woman and wondering what the hell happened to the plump, pink bundle of unconditional love I’d held to my chest and promised the world to a quarter of a lifetime ago…
But there was no time, no time, NO TIME for any of that. Not when we were so busy pretending to be late.
Fleeing Olivia’s wrath, I nearly bumped into Flynn, who was standing on the landing, a Batman figurine clutched to his chest.
‘Have you finished your breakfast?’ I asked.
‘Pew-pew-pew,’ he said, pretending to shoot me.
‘Have you finished your breakfast?’ I asked again.
‘You’re dead,’ he said. ‘Dead people can’t talk.’
‘Batman doesn’t have a gun,’ I countered, then pretended to die anyway, crumpling to the floor and attempting to stem the imaginary blood flow from the imaginary bullet wounds while Flynn stood above me, laughing, until Lydia emerged from the bathroom, smelling like a tropical storm.
‘Time to get dressed,’ she said, scooping Flynn into her arms. ‘You’re going to make Daddy late.’
‘No, I won’t!’ he said, kicking his legs as he tried to work his way free. ‘Daddy doesn’t have to go to work anymore.’
This time I stopped breathing for real, rigor mortis instantly setting in.
‘What do you mean?’ said Lydia.
Flynn paused, catching perhaps the fear in my eye. Had he said something bad? Was he about to be banished to the naughty step?
‘Flynn?’
I felt my consciousness clambering to escape as I teetered on the brink of an out-of-body experience. This was it. Game over.
Flynn shrugged, deciding to risk it. ‘He’s dead. Dead people don’t have to go to work.’
How we laughed at that.
Rising from the grave, there was just enough time for one last check of the doormat, along with – for the sake of staying in character – a final visit to the fridge, bef
ore I dived into the sanctuary of the bathroom, sliding the latch behind me. I hit the taps and paused for a moment to inspect my waning smile in the full-length mirror.
When I was starting out in the marketing game, back in my early twenties, I remember somebody bought me a self-help book, a sort of a joke present. Make it Happen: Seventy-Seven Steps to Sterling Success. Now, for the life of me I can’t remember what seventy-six of the steps entailed. But I do remember the first page. And right there, in the author’s introduction, there was an instruction I followed unwaveringly for the next two decades. It was about positive visualisation. According to the book, the key to health, wealth and eternal happiness was to stand in front of the mirror each morning and picture the trappings that success would bring – the sports car, the model home, the perfect wife – the idea being to meditate on it, to lust after it. To vow you wouldn’t stop until all of it was yours.
For years I took this advice as gospel, filling my bathroom mirror with all manner of earthly treasures, until eventually there was no need any more – if I wanted to see a sports car all I had to do was go down to my garage. The reflections were real. That morning though, I felt the need to summon up a mirage in the mirror.
Stepping out of my dressing gown, I surveyed my greying temples, my crow’s feet, the paunch of my gut, the flaccid droop of my penis. I took a deep breath and tried with all my might to conjure the future as it should have been. The winters in Barbados, country bolthole, the twenty-something mistress. Yet as I stood there shivering, the glass frosting with steam, I watched as the ghosts of my future life warped and ran, taking on a nightmarish quality. A skeleton with my face cowered before me, while the ghoulish figures of bailiffs, tax inspectors, magistrates and prison wardens formed an unbreachable circle, queuing up to first flay then fuck me while my family looked on, Flynn keeping time with the beat of a toy drum.
I dived for my dressing gown and fumbled in the pockets until I found a small cling film wrap. Then I chopped out a line on the cistern and inhaled deeply, the white-cold numbness that followed resembling something like peace.
