by Mark Pearson
A round platter of a moon was shining as brightly as it had done for a long while. Geoffrey was wearing red tartan pyjamas, but no slippers, and he shivered as he looked upwards. His long, narrow feet should have been frozen on the bare stone of the kitchen floor, but when he shivered again it was not from the cold.
Unaware that he was doing so, he made a sign of the cross on his chest. Then rubbed his hands. His arthritis seemed to have become progressively worse over the last few months. It was always bad when the weather was cold, and it had indeed been very cold of late that winter. Bitingly cold. But this aching seemed more than just that. The pain was eating into his bone marrow and not just his joints. He looked down at his hands, thin but swollen, the knuckles like small deformed walnuts on his twig-like fingers.
He rubbed one hand over the other again as he looked at the moon and winced.
‘Geoffrey, what are you doing out here? Come back to bed.’
He turned round, startled to see his wife standing in the doorway to their kitchen. She was just a few years younger than him, but she looked younger than that, even though her hair was pure white and the concerned expression that she wore on her face had settled into permanent lines from familiar usage. She had pale-blue, innocent, almost child-like eyes. Eyes that were large with concern. She was dressed in a pale-green dressing gown with matching slippers and held her arms wrapped around her body to comfort herself against more than the cold night air.
‘It’s dark, Geoffrey,’ she said again, ‘and it’s freezing down here.’
‘Yes,’ he nodded, but didn’t seem to register what she had said.
‘You could at least put something on your feet – where are your slippers?’
‘I don’t know, dear. Probably upstairs. Why don’t you get back to bed?’
‘I can’t sleep, with you down here.’
‘I won’t be long.’
‘But you haven’t even got your slippers on, you’ll catch your death of cold!’
Geoffrey nodded at the window. ‘Another full moon.’
‘I can see.’
Geoffrey Hunt looked back at his wife and blinked. ‘It would have been his birthday tomorrow, Patricia,’ he said.
His wife crossed over to him and wrapped her arms around his frail body.
‘I know,’ she said, and then again, ‘I know. I didn’t mention it. I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.’
Geoffrey nodded as he stroked her hair and looked up at the full moon. He shivered again and Patricia took his hand.
‘Come to bed now. There’s nothing we can do. There never was.’
‘I wish I could believe that.’
‘It’s true.’
Geoffrey nodded, but his eyes belied the gesture. He stroked his wife’s hair gently, kissed her on the cheek and let her lead him from the kitchen.
8.
Edgware Road. Ten o’clock, Friday night
THE WHISKY WAS doing the trick now.
It always did, when he could get enough of it. And that was bloody rare. Sodding London! Too many fake immigrants with dogs and babies messing up the game. Only for him it wasn’t a game. People took him for a scammer too, though. Bloody Eastern Europeans – he’d spit on them. He’d blood their noses! Them and the bloody Big Issue nonces. Spoiling it for Bible. Spoiling it for all the real people. The civilians didn’t know better now. They couldn’t tell the Pharisees – the separated ones – from the Pharaohs, and who was to blame them! But it was he and the rest of them who suffered. Separated, right enough. They might be beloved of God, but you couldn’t tell it on the streets of London.
‘For I tell you,’ he shouted and waved his grimy fist in front of him, the people on the streets parting around him like waves before a prow, ‘that unless your righteousness exceeds that of scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven!’
He slumped against the window of McDonald’s and took a ragged breath. There was a buzzing in his head building now, and he half-mumbled, half-sang along to the rhythm of it. He moved his head slightly from side to side as he did so, bloodshot eyes peering through nearly closed eyelids. He liked it when his head buzzed. It blocked out his thoughts and his feelings, such as they were. Truth to tell, Bible Steve, as he was known on the streets, didn’t feel a great deal any more. Except cold. The last couple of winters had been brutal, and this one looked like it was going to be no better, before it was done with him. Maybe would do for him, because the worst of it still lay ahead, if he was any judge. He tilted his head and looked up at the night sky, his singing turning into a gurgle as he took another sip of medicine and grunted as he stumbled further down the road, heading in the direction of Marble Arch. The snow that had been promised all week might come at last. Which at least meant it would be warmer than it had been for a good long while. Last week it had been too cold to snow, people had said – a ridiculous thing, but seemingly true. And cold it had been right enough, cold so that friends of his had died right there on those very streets. Frozen solid and immobile where they lay in doorways and alleys. Curled up like rimed leaves, their eyelashes white and brittle, their lips blue.
Not that Bible Steve had friends, as such. Just people like him. Living rough. Inner-city flotsam and jetsam. Human beings washed up on the tide of indifference, to seek shelter where they could and oftentimes finding none. Their bodies like the frozen statues in Narnia, only no shaggy lion’s breath was going to bring them back, thought Bible Steve. Then he blinked and the notion had gone from his mind. He shook his head again angrily and grunted, looking behind him suspiciously as if some thief of thoughts had stolen his memories.
‘Wassat?’ he said, but there was no reply. Steve looked forward again, but no one was there, and the person who had been speaking to him in his thoughts was from a time long before. A lifetime ago.
He shivered his shoulders a little to generate some warmth and took another hit from his bottle.
The whisky helped. The whisky always helped Bible. Some said it made him violent, but if it did, he could never remember anyway. Maybe it was the wild Celtic ancestry in him as much as the rough liquor? Sometimes he did feel himself getting angry for no reason, rageful. The buzzing in his head turning from a melody into a storm of locusts, their wings chittering and chattering. It would come out of the blue, the anger building in him like steam in an engine, so that he would explode if he didn’t do something. Maybe that was why he drank? Maybe that was why he turned to the stuff in the first place? Did it dull the rage or fuel it? He couldn’t remember. What he did know was that the alcohol made him oblivious, untouchable, eventually blissfully unconscious. He held the cold bottle to his lips once more and felt the harsh liquid burn down his throat like a cleansing fire. He coughed and shivered, the shiver turning into a trembling that he couldn’t stop. He dragged the rough fibre of his coat sleeve across his mouth and sat down on the pavement, his back propped against the cold brick of an empty building.
‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,’ he said and took another sip of whisky, but it did nothing to stop the tremors of his battered body, and even less to stem the darkness that was building now in his mind.
‘Vengeance,’ he said again. Then he looked up at the moon and shook his fist at it. ‘Vengeance!’ He shouted it a third time and then stumbled to his feet once more. ‘An eye for an eye, a life for a life!’
9.
White City Police Station, west London. Ten-fifteen, Friday night
DR LAURA CHILVERS was a striking-looking woman.
She was just under five foot nine inches tall in her flat-heeled shoes. She had her hair cut in a platinum bob, with a muscular, fit, but womanly figure; she wore little make-up, but didn’t need to. She had a luminescence to her skin and a natural beauty that shone. Her eyes were Nordic blue and her smile dazzled. When she walked into or out of a room all eyes turned on her. If she was aware of it she made no sign. Few men dared to ask her out and, if they did, they were wholly unsuccessful. Laura Chi
lvers was gay. One hundred per cent all-the-way sister. The waste of it was often the subject of frustrated speculation by most of the male policemen at the station (never the bastion of political correctness), over their breaktime cups of tea and bacon sandwiches. And by quite a few of the women too, but not all.
As it was, Dave Matthews, a happily married man, just smiled warmly at Laura when she handed some paperwork over to him as he stood behind the custody desk. ‘Busy night again,’ he said.
‘Friday as well,’ agreed the police surgeon. ‘Which means it is only going to get worse. A lot worse.’
‘How late are you on?’
‘Couple of hours, then off.’
‘Home to bed?’
Laura circled her fists and shimmied her hips a little. ‘On a Friday night? You’ve got to be joking, Sergeant!’ she said. ‘Friday night is down-and-dirty night, it’s clubbing night. You better believe I’ll be seeing the dawn in.’
‘Who’s she, then? The new girlfriend?’
‘That’s funny, Dave,’ she said, deadpan. ‘You’re not a clubbing man, I take it?’
‘What, with these bunions? Why do you think they put me behind a desk so often? Too many years pounding the streets. Tough on crime – tough on feet!’
Laura laughed. ‘Rubbish! You play rugby for the Met. I bet you could still work the dance floor.’
‘I wouldn’t be putting your mortgage on it. The last disco I went to was at school when I was sixteen and copped off with the future Mrs Slimline. You couldn’t pay me to dance.’
‘You wouldn’t want to,’ said Kate Walker, laughing, as she came into the custody area holding three mugs of tea. ‘You didn’t see him at the talent contest a few months ago.’
‘This the one when Smiling Jack Delaney did his Johnny Cash impression?’
‘That’s it.’ Kate smiled herself at the memory. ‘Dave here was trying to bust some moves on the dance floor. Ended up busting the table he landed on!’
‘I was not dancing, I was being jostled by a group of overexcited WPCs! Quite a different matter.’
Laura laughed as her mobile rang. She fished it out of her pocket and answered it. ‘Laura Chilvers?’ she said and her smile vanished. ‘No! I can’t do that. Look, I’ll see you later, okay?’ She snapped the phone shut.
‘Problems?’ asked Kate.
‘Nothing I can’t sort.’
She turned and walked over to one of the police surgeons’ offices.
‘What about your tea?’ Kate called after her, but Dr Chilvers waved her hand dismissively and closed the door as she went into her room.
Kate Walker looked at Dave Matthews and raised an eyebrow.
The sergeant shrugged. ‘Wrong time of the month?’
Kate laughed. ‘If I didn’t think you were being ironic, Dave, I would tell Laura you just said that. I reckon she’d do more than jostle you!’
The sergeant held his hand up in mock-surrender. ‘No, thanks, I wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of that one!’
‘Or me,’ said Kate, throwing him a look.
‘There’s something about Dr Laura Chilvers,’ the desk sergeant continued. ‘I reckon, push comes to shove, she could handle herself pretty well.’
‘Best you don’t find out then!’
The sergeant nodded thoughtfully as Kate headed to her office. Then took a sip of his tea and looked over at Dr Chilvers’ closed door. He’d seen the look in her eyes as she took the call. And it wasn’t a kind one. There was trouble coming for someone tonight, he reckoned.
And he was right.
10.
BIBLE STEVE TOOK a look at his bottle of whisky, half-empty now.
He held it to his lips and poured himself another small glug, felt his body shiver uncontrollably once more as the rough alcohol burned his throat. He looked to his side at the young woman who was sitting next to him. She was five foot six inches tall, with long, blonde hair, a stick-thin body. Innocence in blue jeans. Her skin was stretched tight over the bones of her face with fine, translucent veins showing through. She could have been an anorexic or a supermodel.
She was neither.
She had been abused by her father, an unemployed sheet metal worker, since she was twelve years old. Her mother, an undiagnosed manic depressive self-medicating on meth amphetamine, had added physical to the sexual abuse and she did what tens of thousands of children a year did. She ran away from home.
The young woman sitting next to Bible Steve would have rather walked in front of an Intercity express train than return home. She had come to London when she was fifteen, lived rough on the streets for two days before falling into prostitution, shoplifting and petty crime. Recruited into it by a girl a year younger than her and already six months into the life. She had had two abortions from back-street clinicians and had recently been released from Holloway prison, serving a year of a two-year sentence for fencing stolen goods, amongst other charges. She had been out two months. Two weeks out and she had left the supervised accommodation she had been provided with and was back on the streets. She was an alcoholic and drug-dependent. She was in her early twenties. An old hand. She had the mind of a child. Her name was Margaret O’Brien but anyone only ever knew her as Meg.
Bible Steve looked at her for a moment more, squinting his bloodshot eyes again. ‘Whoever was the father of disease, an ill diet was the mother!’ he roared and handed her the bottle. The girl muttered some thanks, her words slurred, her eyes unfocused. She took a sip and would have let the bottle slide from her grasp as she slumped backwards, but Bible Steve took it from her and held it towards a couple sitting on the other side of him. All four of them huddled together and against the wall for the warmth coming from the heated building.
‘Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Luke 6,37–38,’ said Bible Steve, grinning and revealing teeth rotten with neglect.
The older woman took the bottle gratefully, drank some, coughed and handed the bottle over to her husband. They were in their fifties and had been homeless for over a year. Unemployment, debt, gambling, loan-sharks. Theirs was not an unfamiliar story. Rare, however, that they had stayed as a couple and moreover had stayed together on the streets. The winter was going hard on them. You could see it in the cracked skin of their ravaged faces, and the hopelessness that dulled their eyes. The man took a drink of the whisky and handed the bottle back.
‘You’re a good man, Bible,’ he said.
Steve took the bottle, scowled as he looked at its diminishing contents – barely one-third left now – and had another small slug. He dragged the back of his coat sleeve across his mouth. ‘That, sir, I am not,’ he said. ‘The Lord has looked upon my blackened soul and He has seen that it is not good.’
‘I don’t know about the Lord, but there’s not many as would share whisky,’ said the older woman.
The younger girl snuggled into Bible Steve and he put his arm around her and roared again. ‘But if at the church they would give us some ale. And a pleasant fire our souls to regale. We’d sing and we’d pray all the livelong day, nor ever once wish from the church to stray!’
‘Too fucking right!’ said the young girl and Bible Steve pulled her in tighter to him. ‘Cuddle up, my lovely, old Bible’ll keep you warm. Warm as toast,’ he said. ‘Warm as buttered crumpet.’
The woman nodded, her eyes half-closing again.
‘I’ll make Christians of the whole heathen, ruddy lot of you,’ he said. He stood up, the girl’s face falling into his crotch. He held it there for a moment or two. ‘Business first though,’ he said. ‘Nature calls.’
The hairy man put a hand to the side of the rough brickwork to steady himself, he had to blink for a moment or two to remember where he was. All memory of the last two hours had vanished from his mind again as soon as he stood.
This happened to him often. Whole hours of blankness, days so
metimes. He remembered early evening. A drunken Japanese tourist had handed him a twenty-pound note some hours ago when he had asked for any change. A mistake by the tourist, presumably, being unfamiliar with the currency, or else to impress the loud and overly made-up women who accompanied him and his business colleague.
Hired women no doubt, Bible Steve thought at the time. But if you were to ask him now what he thought he wouldn’t have been able to remember where the money he had spent had come from. Strong lagers and a bottle of whisky. He had passed a slug or two of the whisky around, but not much and the bottle was severely depleted. He looked at it, confused, and down at the people he had been talking with.
‘Have you been at my whisky?’ he snarled.
But the other three were huddled into each other and didn’t reply.
Bible Steve patted the young woman on the head. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, darling. Don’t worry, Bible’ll see you all right. He’ll see you snug,’ he said with a wink.
He took his hand off the wall and staggered a little further down the alleyway. Bright light spilled from a lone restaurant further ahead.
The Lucky Dragon restaurant. Cantonese. Bible Steve staggered towards it and put his hand on the glass, peering in as he fought to keep steady. The nearly finished bottle of whisky swayed in his left hand as if to counterbalance.
He didn’t recognise the figure staring back at him, reflected palely in the glass of the restaurant window. It had the face of a wild-haired and heavily bearded man. A French rugby player came to his mind. But he couldn’t remember his name. This man’s hair, though, was lank, greasy and matted. The beard covering most of his face was like a tribal shaman’s mask. He had on a battered and soiled army greatcoat with layers of equally filthy clothing beneath. His eyes were like coals. Sore, cracked and flickering with residual heat, but near to winking out as his eyelids closed. He shook his head and growled. He peered in the window, scowling at the diners within, who regarded him with an equal mixture of horror and disgust. An elderly Chinese woman shook her hands, gesturing at him as if to shoo away a large rodent.
