The Unjudged_The battle for Cromer

by Phil Hurst

  “He was going to tag you, you know,” Lana said, moving closer. “They probably looked up your car registration.”

  Paige shook her head. She could not stop staring at the blade above her head, which glinted in the light. A shout from behind Paige broke the quiet. One of the reckoners had stopped beating Oliver for long enough to see that something odd was happening over at the car. The vehicle was blocking his view of his dead colleague. Lana placed a small black ball on the top of the car. She tapped the side of it in a practiced sequence.

  “Hands on the car,” shouted one of the remaining reckoners. Both were now walking slowly towards the vehicle, the one with the staff was holding it at shoulder height, ready to tag at the slightest hint of trouble. The car hid the first reckoner’s body from him. The small black ball shimmered slightly and made a tiny beeping noise.

  All the lights went out. The reckoner car stuttered and stopped working.

  “Stay where you are,” Lana repeated her warning to Paige.

  When the light had disappeared, so too had the reckoners. Paige’s eyes struggled to adapt to the complete darkness, but after a moment, she could see the outline of the two men who had crouched in anticipation of an attack that was yet to materialise.

  “Very funny!” One of them shouted.

  “The staff is dead.” Lana was now standing right next to her. Paige felt a drop of blood from the weapon land on the top of her head. The only sound was Paige’s car turning over. Next to her, she heard Lana slow her breathing as she calmed herself, waiting for something.

  In total silence, the viaduct above them lit up with small flames, as if 50 people had suddenly lit beacons to illuminate the valley. The reckoners stopped, their faces now faintly lit by the flames, all of a sudden looking extremely vulnerable. The flames flickered and cast dancing shadows down onto the valley floor. If it were not for the menace that the moment portrayed, Paige might have considered it quite beautiful. Like arranging candles around a bath.

  “Look,” one of reckoners shouted to the top of the viaduct. His voice was high-pitched all of a sudden, strained. “What’s your game? Where’s Baz?”

  Behind the reckoners, Oliver pulled himself into a sitting position. He brushed some grass from his shirt and slowly rotated his head, stretching his neck. The lad had just taken a beating that would have killed some people. But rather than focus on an injury, he spent a second inspecting a tear in his T-shirt. He held his hand to his throat and deliberately coughed.

  One of the reckoners turned and pointed at him.

  “You stay exactly where the fuck you are,” he said.

  Oliver stood up. He raised his arm in a strange salute to the viaduct. The fires moved upwards, floating in the air above the bridge.

  “I told you not to move,” the reckoner said.

  “Join us,” Oliver replied. His arm stayed in the air.

  “You’re fucking joking,” the reckoner snarled.

  Oliver dropped his arm and raised it again. One of the fires flew down from the viaduct. It made a hissing noise as it broke through the still of the night. The reckoners were perplexed, watching as the burning arrow buried itself into the ground in front of them. The fire at the top of the viaduct was replaced.

  “Is that supposed to scare us?” The reckoner said. He walked to the arrow and stamped on it, putting it out immediately. “Fucking arrows?”

  Oliver repeated: “Join us.”

  “Against Tumi? Fuck off.”

  “Yeah,” the other reckoner said. “Do your worst.”

  Paige wanted to shout out. She had seen their worst and didn’t think the men fully understood their decision. Fear restrained her tongue. Lana edged forward. She pointed the blade of the pike at the men and crouched, ready to charge. Paige took a step back.

  “Join us,” said Oliver. “Make the right choice.”

  “Fuck your choice,” a reckoner said. He turned around and pulled a pistol from a holster on his waist.

  Oliver let his arm drop. A volley of arrows flew towards the reckoners, who scattered. Before they could get far, one was hit through the leg, just below the knee. The arrow had enough momentum to continue through the bone and embed in the ground. The reckoner found himself pinned to the floor. His uniform caught fire quickly, and despite his best efforts, he couldn’t stop it spreading. Paige watched the scene with a sense of displacement, like she were watching a movie. None of it seemed real.

  A second arrow struck the man in the chest. This one didn’t cut through him entirely, but neither did the fire go out once it was inside his body. Paige saw the outline of his ribs as he began to burn from the inside. He screamed once, lost his breath, struggled and then lay still.

  The other man fared better, at least to begin with. He ran in the opposite direction to his colleague and avoided the worst of the barrage. One arrow almost hit his shoulder, but he dodged it at the last second. The archers on top of the viaduct reloaded. The reckoner continued to run, edging closer to the houses that would make him a more difficult target.

  Leaving Paige, Lana began to run. The reckoner was moving quickly, but she was faster. She caught him and drove her pike into his lower back. He made no sound as she held him in place. Then with a single flick she pulled the weapon back, and he fell forward. Lana pointed the pike at the back of the man’s head and looked at the viaduct.

  Three arrows thudded into the man’s skull.

  By the time the second reckoner had died, Paige had already started running. She didn’t know where she was running to, but the row of houses on the other side of the road seemed like a good start. She pulled her display out of her pocket but saw it was dead, killed by whatever had killed the reckoner’s weapons. She threw it to the floor.

  She ignored the first house because, even in the half-light, the walls looked like they might cave in with the slightest of touches. The second one still had a roof, though, and it was in that one she hid. Paige had hoped they would all move on, that she was just incidental to them. Wrong place at the wrong time and all that.

  But the noise outside contradicted her hopes. They were determined to find her.

  Paige crouched in a cupboard in the basement of one the abandoned houses. There was a hole where the wood had rotted away, and through that she could make out what she thought were rats inspecting her footprints. She rested her cheek on her knees and listened to the shouts of annoyance from the attackers as they tried to figure out where she had gone.

  The room outside was briefly illuminated as someone shone a torch in through a window. The rats scattered. In the brief light, she saw a blood stain on her jeans. She touched her face and discovered she was covered in the reckoner’s blood.

  Different voices echoed down to the basement from the floor upstairs. They were breaking anything that wasn’t already broken. Paige looked through the gap in the cupboard door and saw three torch beams appear in the room, heralding the arrival of three men dressed in dark T-shirts and jeans.

  They all held axes of some type, but none of them looked comfortable. Their movements were awkward and slow. One swung his torch beam around in quick, nervous movements whenever he a heard a drip of water or the scuffle of an animal. The others peered into the darkness as they looked for her.

  “Here look,” said one of them, and he swung his axe into a pipe on the wall. The impact failed to break the metal pipe, and the vibration from the impact echoed down his arm, causing him to shout in pain.

  “Dave, what did you do that for?”

  “Fuck!” Dave said, holding his shoulder with his free hand. “That hurt.” He doubled over and began to breathe deeply, “I thought it’d go through that.”

  “You’re an idiot,” said the one with the torch. “Bob, check that cupboard.”

  He crept forward slowly.

  Paige realised that she had a choice to make. If they found her in the cupboard, they would most likely kill her. Or they would take her upstairs and that idiot Oliver would kill her by accident a
s he tried to remove her implant again. She thought back to a self-defence lesson her mother had insisted on giving her before she left for London. Those skills hadn’t helped against Oliver because he’d surprised her. But this time, the element of surprise was on her side. It wouldn’t happen again.

  She clenched her fists and said a silent prayer.

  Sam

  S am asked Nartez to make him a sandwich (ham, not crab—the ham was quite good) and took it down to the beach to eat. The sun had gone down by now, and the chill of the April night kept the footpaths of the town mostly empty.

  He vaulted onto the sea wall, walking along it until he found a space where he felt he could jump down onto the beach. There was always the risk that he would land on something metallic or concrete that would cause a twisted ankle or puncture wound, but Sam had been hopping down on to the beach for most of his life without suffering a major injury.

  He picked up stones with his free hand as he walked towards the sea, filling his pockets. When he felt the cold water lapping at his boots, he began to skim the stones into the darkness, one by one. He listened for the splashes as they disappeared into the night.

  Sam completed this strange ritual whenever a shift ended after dark. He loved concentrating on the blackness of the sea for a while. It seemed so complete. Behind him neon signs would be advertising amusement arcades and chippies. Cars would be moving along the coast road too quickly, lighting up old buildings in various states of disrepair. Women would be sat in bars, trying to enjoy a drink while avoiding the advances of men old enough to be their fathers. He turned around. In front of him, the sea was dark. It was full of life but seemed devoid of anything. Punished and manipulated for centuries but forever unconcerned.

  A noise made him look to his right. In the distance, the Cromer Pier Show was on interval. The outside spotlights clicked on, turning the sea around it into an island of fluorescent light. Sam could see the silhouetted profile of the pier against the dark sky. He saw tourists streaming out onto the pier to finish their drinks and have a smoke in a ritual he’d seen many times before. Most would declare it was too bloody cold and that they needed to get back inside.

  None of them could see Sam as he watched them from the dark beach. And to him, they were all just skinny shapes that occasionally blocked the light from the bar. Sam ate his sandwich and observed them in silence as they drank their drinks. He wondered what it was like to be able to enjoy entertainment like that. Since his mother returned to Cromer, he’d been recognised almost everywhere he went. People in the town had begun to treat him with mistrust or reverence. For no reason. Apart from Nartez, but that man didn’t show any emotion at all.

  When the interval bell rang, the shapes slowly vanished. Sam walked back to the pier and along the wooden walkway to the bar next to the theatre. As he pushed open the door, warm air rushed over him. It was clammy, with the room holding some of the closeness that can only by created by a crowd of people.

  Jules, the barman, reached for a pint glass and began pouring Sam a drink the second he saw him. It was something of a routine for the two of them. Jules was a short man, probably in his late 20s, and he had shaped his blond hair into a parting on the left of his head and a long sweeping fringe that constantly fell across his restless, curious eyes. He wore thick-rimmed glasses, although Sam had seen him operating perfectly well without them. Sam had always figured the glasses were more a fashion statement than a necessity.

  Jules put the golden pint down on the bar and wiped the sides with a bar towel. “Evening, Samuel,” he said. “Busy day?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “I’m sure I don’t.”

  Sam pulled up a stool at the bar and sipped from the pint glass. He gestured at a sign above the bar. “PERFORMANCE IN PROGRESS” glowed red. Muted laughter floated into the bar, muffled by the 100-year-old soundproofing hidden in the wooden walls.

  “How many tonight?”

  “Almost a full house, would you believe.”

  “I would not,” Sam said as he drew a trio of lines in the condensation on the glass.

  Jules poured himself a half and came around the bar to join Sam. Jules had been working the bar at the pier show almost the whole six months he’d been in town, and Sam enjoyed their chats before the show ended. Although it meant his reading had suffered, Sam had found that the little blond bloke was decent entertainment, at least until the show ended.

  The noise of the show filtered through the wooden walls of the pier. “Rule Britannia” marked the midway point of the second half. As the audience began to sing along in earnest, the two friends shook their heads in unison.

  “Rule fucking Britannia,” said Jules. “Go fucking figure.”

  “Some of us are proud of our country.”

  “I’m proud of this country, Sam,” Jules asserted before he took a gulp of his drink. “Just not that clusterfuck of a variety show.”

  “I’m just going to peek my head in,” Sam said.

  Jules nodded.

  Sam walked to the right of the bar and the entrance to the auditorium. Cromer Pier had been the last theatre of its type for almost 30 years. The building had survived fires, floods and thunderstorms. Every night (apart from the slower winter months) there was a show. Even if the audience consisted of a solitary old-age pensioner and a confused dog, the show went ahead. The performance changed every year but always kept the same vaudeville-style spine. A washed-up stand-up comedian would introduce a selection of acts that varied in quality, with a handful of dance numbers being thrown in to add a bit of energy to the proceedings.

  Edging the door open so as not to disturb the audience, Sam peeked at the sketch. It was a comic interlude from Kris Kapple, a 40-something former YouTube star. In his prime—only a few years ago—he had played the part of an anti-establishment punk struggling with the contradictions of the Tumi implant. Now Kris was battling with alcoholism, and each night was becoming a race between his professionalism and his addiction. Would Kris’ jokes grow old and start boring the audience, or would he get so drunk the audience would be entertained but be totally unable to understand a word he said?

  “They say entertainers do the Cromer Show twice in their careers,” he declared with anger that seemed totally inappropriate for what Sam thought was a good joke. “Once on the way up, and once on the way down.”

  Kris swung his arms to stage right.

  “Here for her second time at the Cromer show,” he paused and pulled a ridiculous grin in the direction of the audience. One or two laughed. A few sniggered. Many more asked the person they’d come with what he’d just said. “Please welcome the fabulous, beautiful and talented Fiona Futures!”

  Sam smiled with a knowing anticipation as Fiona walked on stage wrapped in a long parka coat. It was impossible to tell who she was or what she was on stage for. When she reached centre stage, the lights all dimmed and a small laser show of greens and reds cut through her in the darkness. Sam could just about make out Steve, the MC and piano player who had worked the Cromer Pier Show for almost 40 years, as he began the first few chords of “Chasing Pavements” by Adele. In one moment, Fiona threw back her coat to reveal the face of a 62-year-old and the figure of a 25-year-old. Tonight, she wore a shape-hugging red dress. Sam exhaled.

  The crowd didn’t go wild. In fact, very few of them seemed to notice what was going on. Sam felt a shiver of anticipation go down his spine as Fiona began to sing. He ducked out of the room.

  “Fiona’s starting,” he told Jules, who was back behind the bar fixing himself another half. He always drank his halves twice as fast as Sam drank his pint, making a mockery of the apparent moderation he had imposed upon himself. “So you’ve probably got another 10 minutes.”

  Jules nodded and returned to his place at the bar. They talked for the 10 minutes about nothing in particular: football, work, the Royal family. Sam was waiting for the show to end so he could sneak backstage. Jules glanced at the clock every five minutes, counting dow
n the minutes before he could go home. Sam didn’t find him rude—he knew that theirs was a relationship of convenience.

  The show finished to a polite round of applause. Jules stood up straight and dusted off his trousers. When the doors opened, he began to pour drinks for the audience members who stayed behind to discuss the show over a cheeky glass of wine—or ordered shots to wash away the memory of what they had just seen.

  Sam stood up and gave a small wave to Jules, who missed the gesture completely as, at the request of a grey-haired tourist, he dug around for the last pack of salt-and-vinegar crisps. By the way the old boy was insisting that Jules dig deeper until he found a pack, it appeared the crisps were a medical requirement.

  Sam entered the empty auditorium. With the lights on, the age of the theatre was more apparent. Flimsy metal poles reached to the roof that they had held up for over 100 years. The whole room was painted a dull claret colour that matched the old stage curtains. From behind the curtains, Sam could hear the bustling of the set manager getting everything reset for tomorrow’s show. The chairs were spotted with cigarette burns from when people were able to smoke during the show.

  Two ushers pushed failing vacuum cleaners up and down the aisles, watching the machines struggle to pick up bits of popcorn and pork scratchings. They looked up at Sam for a second and then returned to their chores. Sam walked to a small door to the right of the stage, but as he reached it, it swung open and Kris Kapple appeared in his way.

  In Sam’s opinion, Kris should have had more common sense than to be wandering around with only a towel around his waist. His rotund body was covered in thick black hair that glistened with sweat. He smelled like unwashed gym towels soaking in a stale bucket of beer.

  “Where you going?” he demanded of Sam, even though he knew.

  “I help out with the costumes,” Sam lied. They both knew it was a lie.

  “Stay away from that Fiona woman’s dressing room,” Kris warned, even though they both knew that was where he was going.