Personal Demons

by Christopher Fowler

  'Fuck me, what are they using?' Jack straightened up and looked out through the jagged hole that had been punched through the shutter by some kind of large calibre ammunition. Following its flight path he found one of the barmen clutching his shoulder as blood pumped between his fingers. The bullet had passed through the boy's T-shirt, grazing the soft flesh of his armpit, and had gone on to explode a bottle of Schmirnoff above the bar. Within moments, two customers had torn tea towels into strips and were staunching his wound. Another gunshot blast ripped through the steel sheeting on the main window of the dancefloor, but failed to find a target, smashing into the plaster ceiling rose in the centre of the room. Surprisingly, nobody screamed.

  'Everyone seems so calm,' said Woody as Bax reappeared.

  'Never underestimate the balls of a queen, honey. Half these guys grew up getting punched out by parents who won't speak to them until they're on their deathbeds.' He didn't say whose deathbeds he meant, and Woody didn't ask. The rending noise that began at the farthest window alerted them to the fact that someone outside was levering the sheet-steel away with a crowbar. 'Oh shit.'

  Suddenly the sheeting was off and the inner window was being smashed out with boots and batons. Wood and glass splintered everywhere as dark figures struggled to climb in through the gap.

  Jack swept the beer glasses from the other huge drinks table. He and Bax upended it, and with the help of four others ran it face-out at the breach. The heavy oak top crashed down over the limbs entering from outside. There were yelps of pain and rage as injured body-parts were withdrawn. Everyone fell against the back of the table, determined to hold it in place by sheer weight of numbers.

  'The cops aren't going to get here in time, are they?' said Woody, pushing with all her might.

  Another gunshot exploded the piece of window that still showed above the table edge. The bullet ploughed into the ceiling, and a shower of plaster cascaded over them. Bax wiped his hand across his neck to find flecks of blood from the fragments of glass. The guttural roar from outside sounded like football fans raging against a missed penalty. The table swayed and rocked but remained in its place. More petrol bombs were being thrown at the windows beyond the bar. The bouncer left his post at the doors and ran toward the spreading flames with his extinguisher. The room was filling with dense smoke. There was an explosion of glass on the floor above them, but they had no way of knowing whether it was caused by a rock or a petrol bomb.

  'Simon?'

  The boy drifted through the crowd and passed Woody like a wraith, staring hard ahead. He was moving quickly toward the club's temporarily unguarded entrance.

  'SIMON!' Woody left the others rammed against the great table and ran toward the boy, who was reaching up on tiptoe to release the bolt at the top of the door. He had drawn it halfway down when she barrelled into him, knocking him aside. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?' she heard herself screaming.

  When he turned his translucent eyes to hers, his serenity was the peace of inner madness. 'Let me open the door.'

  'They'll come in and they'll kill us, don't you understand? You can't reason with them!'

  'I don't need to reason with them. I have the boy within me.' He ran bony fingers across his chest. 'I reached out to him and took his pain. It's safe inside me now.'

  There was another terrible eruption on the far side of the room. Somebody fell back with an agonised yell. 'How can that be?' she shouted, shoving at him, 'how can that be?'

  'I know his suffering. I've lived with such pain all my life, I'm a fucking magnet for abuse and I'm dying from it, do you understand?' He tore himself free of her and stood alone.

  Others had seen what was happening and were moving toward them. 'They'll kill you, Simon,' she said. 'They'll tear you apart with their bare hands.'

  'Of course they will. They must have someone to blame. A whipping boy.'

  'But the real culprit – '

  'The real culprit is far away. I can't catch him. I'm not clever, all I can do is take the pain. From my father, from the crowd outside, I can absorb their darkness. It's what I do, how I survive. Feeding on the violence of others.' He held her with a look she would never forget to her dying day. 'Someone once told me about the army.'

  'What army?'

  'Everyone has an army in their heart, an army that rallies when its host is most in danger, an army that fights back with all its might until every last one of its soldiers is dead. But I don't. I have no army. There's nothing inside me fighting back, there's just a black hole.' He smiled at her. 'Don't look so worried. I know how to make the most of it.' As he had been talking to her, he had raised the entry-door's floor-bolt with his boot, and now he shrugged himself away to release the top bolt in one swift, simple movement. The door suddenly opened inwards and he slipped through it before anyone could realise what was happening.

  Woody screamed after him but the others had crashed forward to slam the door shut once more. She begged them to open it, screamed and pleaded until her throat was raw, but they carried her away to the side of the room, where Bax gave her water and sat her down. She regained her breath, stopped crying and waited.

  They all waited.

  Outside, Simon stood before the seething crowd with the placidity of a medieval child-saint, a sickly hermaphrodite that raised its arms in preparation for final absolution. His moon-blanched face was tense with sexual anticipation, his body illuminated by dozens of flashlights as the figures around him surged and erupted forward. In the distance the riot vehicles could be heard arriving. The mob took the sound of their sirens as a call to action and fell upon the boy, slashing and punching at him with everything they were holding, machetes and carpet-cutters, butchers' hooks, bread knives, daggers and carving-forks. Obviously those inside the club were unwilling to take the rap for the murderer and had forced him to step out in the open. They had no loyalty to one another and probably all deserved to die but this one, this one had to suffer properly for what he had done.

  But then the swinging boots and arcing knives slowed their rhythm. Gradually the shouts died down and stopped. For a few moments total silence descended on the neighbourhood. Then a few of the women started to scream. The crowd slunk back from the grotesque remains of their victim, slipping in crimson mire. A sense of shame and horror descended over them as they listened to those inside the building putting the remaining fires out. Weapons were released from bloody hands as men began to cover their faces and weep. Some fell to their knees. Others stumbled into the arms of their women like lost children. As the police disembarked from their grid-covered vehicles, one of the wives came forward and laid her coat across the shattered skull of the boy who had drained their rage away.

  Inside the club, the sudden silence was eerier than anything they had heard so far. Woody put her eye to one of the bulletholes and watched as nearly three hundred men, women and children were herded back to the far side of the street. At the corner of her vision she could see the edge of the pavement, and a pale leg lying in a pool of blood, its foot severed at the ankle.

  Bax had been standing up at the window. He had seen the boy hacked apart, and was crying uncontrollably. Jack and the bouncer were opening the club's main entrance doors, trying to clear away the suffocating smoke. Woody stepped numbly down and walked off through the guttering fires of the club, toward the chill clean air outside. She pulled her vest over her head and let it drop, then tore away the strips of tape and released her breasts from their confinement. She looked back at Jack, who returned her rueful smile. They both knew that she wasn't one of the boys any more.

  She didn't need to be.

  She had her own army.

  FIVE STAR

  Celia wiped her forehead and checked her watch again. Sweat was dripping in her eyes. 'If the worst comes to the worst,' she said, 'we could go down to the crossroads and wait for the local bus. They're apparently quite reliable.'

  'Don't be ridiculous,' said Trevor, 'the whole point of booking a cab is to avoid havi
ng to mix with the locals. I've seen enough locals to last a lifetime. All those deformities.'

  Celia shuddered. A drip of sweat fell from the tip of her nose. 'That blind man with the flying snakes. Ugh.'

  'Exactly. That's the whole point of staying in a five star hotel. They make their ice cubes with Evian. They have French chefs. Showercaps. Fruit baskets. Slippers under your bed. If it wasn't for the outside temperature you'd think you were at home. The beach and the bar are for the use of residents only. Safety is not in numbers, safety is in five stars. Ah.' Trevor looked up at the sound of the vehicle and tilted back the brim of his straw hat. 'Better late than never.'

  The filthy taxicab that hoved into view was Russian in origin. It looked like a child's drawing of a car, a grey tin box with squared-off corners and bashed-up fenders. The dashboard was filled with every kind of gaudy religious icon imaginable, the centrepiece being a barebreasted madonna with a pale green wobbly head that looked suspiciously as if it might glow in the dark. The vehicle slewed to a stop in a spray of brown dust and its driver alighted. He batted his sweat-stained shirt with his cap and opened the trunk so that their Louis Vuitton luggage could be stowed beside the greasy pumps and jacks, then stepped back to watch while the couple struggled to fit their cases. He spoke good English but had no intention of revealing this talent, for if he did so he would inevitably be drawn into arguments about lateness, overcharging and the unavailability of change. Instead he picked his teeth with a match while the skinny pale English lady fussed and tutted around her useless-looking husband.

  He knew at once that they were upper class. They had that pinched look the posh English so often had, a look created by a lifetime of making false economies. The upper-class English always found new corners to cut while clinging to the lavish lifestyles they felt were their birthright, as if a reduction in the porter's tip would somehow pay for their next trip to Gstaad or Glyndebourne. The woman was bitching at her husband now, something about getting grease on her dress, and he was just nodding apologetically. Poor bastard. If he was any kind of a man he'd shut her mouth with a slap. Wearily the driver reached in and adjusted his wooden-beaded seat cover before heaving himself back into the car. They trundled off and around the corner, surprising a goat who was searching the road for a cool spot to give birth.

  'Well, check-in time is two hours before departure, which already makes us over half an hour late,' said Celia, checking her compact mirror for facial anomalies.

  'That's for passengers in Economy,' said Trevor, staring from the window as they passed a herd of perilously undernourished cows. 'We can turn up mere minutes before the flight if we wish. They have to wait for us. We're the ones who keep the airline running by paying full fare, not those lager-swilling chimps you see on the bargain package tours. Christ, it's hot.' The sea was a wall of blue at their backs, the air stagnant and still beneath the sun. The taxi wound its way inland, past derelict mills and bleached fields of dead brown crops. 'If only we could have gone to the house in St Raphael,' said Celia, fanning herself, 'instead of having to come here.'

  'You know very well we couldn't do that. The press would have been expecting it. We'd have had no privacy.'

  'Do you honestly think things will be better back in England?' she snapped. 'I've had people come up to me in the street and make accusations to my face!'

  'Darling, you'll be surprised how quickly people forget. They have the attention spans of goldfish. We're yesterday's news. Trust me.'

  He knew he was right. Twenty-four days ago his name had been dragged across the front pages of all the national dailies, but by now the press had already moved on to the next big scandal. He'd been in some tight squeezes before, but damage limitation was easy if you knew the right people, and no minister worth his salt got far in the cabinet without making decent connections. He made sure that the rumours about his private life could never be confirmed. The call-girl who had sold her story to the press about their sexual escapades had been paid to recant her version of events, and the whole thing had been parlayed into a photo opportunity featuring Trevor Colson, stalwart Conservative MP, hugging the loyal wife who stood by him. There had been the exposure of his vested interests with the nuclear lobby, the accusation of insider trading, and the homes-for-votes cover-up, but all of it had remained innuendo, and any journalist who had dared to suggest otherwise was vigorously pursued into the courtroom.

  But this last business was a little more serious. Colson had acted as financial adviser to a banking syndicate that had run foul of international trading barriers. As an MP he had been expected to foresee such problems and remove them for his partners. But he had failed to read up on the new laws and take appropriate action in time to prevent the bank at the centre of the syndicate from going bust overnight. Investors had lost fortunes, institutions had collapsed, and the Right Hon. Trevor Colson and his wife had decamped to the sun, to spend three weeks incognito in their five star hotel waiting for the fuss to die down.

  The taxi swerved on to the two-lane blacktop leading to the centre of the island, and the airport came into view. It consisted of little more than one runway, an oblong white box which housed arriving and departing passengers, a few concrete sheds and an unfinished air traffic control room with rusted iron rods sticking out of one end. There was also a dead pelican. It had been lying on the verge of the runway when they arrived, and was still there.

  As the cab pulled up behind a cluster of hotel minivans, Trevor watched the disembarking passengers with a scornful glare in his eyes. Looking at their sunburned faces, their smutty-joke T-shirts, their shoddy luggage, their hideous screaming children, he almost felt glad that many were returning to find their savings wiped out. It would teach them to invest more wisely in future.

  The collapse of the bank had affected the common man in the street, about whom he cared not a jot, but it had also damaged some businesses it didn't pay to annoy; the collapsed bank was, after all, built on Russian and Sicilian money, and the further back you followed the paper trail the murkier the finance connections became. Still, he was confident that his long-term prospects were unharmed; a few lunches with the right people had seen to that.

  There were holidaymakers sitting on the airport steps, which seemed odd. It looked as if they'd been there for quite a while. Inside, Trevor's worst fears were confirmed; their plane had failed to arrive, and the ground staff had no information as to the current whereabouts of the inbound flight. Stephanie, the hard-faced little airline representative who was striding around the check-in area with her clipboard, informed him in the most extraordinary nasal voice that it was likely the flight had not yet left London, so the delay would be considerable, and as there were no other flights available they would just have to sit tight. Leaving the vicinity of the airport was impossible once they had checked their bags, and if the plane failed to turn up within the next three hours they would probably all have to stay overnight as the airport was not licensed for flights during the hours of darkness – but, she promised, they would be issued with vouchers for a free lamb stew and complimentary glass of house red.

  Stephanie had a tough time making herself heard before the Economy passengers, several of whom had stripped down to shorts, climbed up on the roof of the departure lounge and were now dancing to blurred techno from their portable music system. The island had a healthy rave culture that attracted clubbable youngsters from across Europe.

  'Look at this shower,' spat Trevor. 'The roof's covered in pirouetting queers. Presumably they have no future appointments arranged in their empty lives and don't need to worry about reaching Heathrow on time.' He mopped his forehead angrily. 'Stay here, Celia. I'll find out what the hell's going on.'

  'You're entitled to a complimentary sandwich from the buffet,' promised Stephanie, her hard little face and voice hardening still further as Trevor glared at her. 'And a Sprite.'

  Trevor looked suddenly lost. There was no social order here in the airport. There seemed to be no-one with overall
authority, and there was no foreseeable escape route that could be accessed with the wave of a credit card.

  'Well, we can't stay here,' he snapped, and found he was talking to himself. Celia had wandered over to the gift shop, which was selling mutated ceramic donkeys, headsquares printed with out-of-register pictures of the island's hotels, phallic bottles of sickly yellow liquor and week-old copies of El Pais. 'Celia, for God's sake!'

  'I was looking for stomach pills. If we're going to be eating- '

  'We're not going to be eating anywhere,' hissed Trevor. 'That stupid girl has no idea what's going on.'

  'So what do you suggest we do?'

  'Excuse pliz?'

  A short, overweight taxidriver was standing behind them in a sweat-stained tropical shirt. 'Are you speaking to me?' asked Trevor, horrified.

  'There will be no plane here tonight.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'This happen every week.' He held his thumb and forefinger together, counting out the words. 'There – will – be – no – plane – tonight. It come in morning, eleven or twelve, not before. Never before this hours.'

  'Are you quite sure?'

  The taxidriver smiled, revealing an unbroken row of gold teeth beneath his ratty moustache. 'You smart gentleman. Would I lie to you?'

  Trevor queued to use the only pay-telephone that was working, and eventually managed to speak to their hotel manager. 'But you must have a vacancy,' he shouted, 'if my plane doesn't turn up, you'll have no guests arriving on the incoming flight, will you?' The argument ended with Trevor slamming down the receiver.