GBH

by Ted Lewis

  And she’s smiling at the scene, her icy smile.

  The interesting thing is, she’s come back.

  I hadn’t expected her to come back. I’d expected her to phone.

  She’s either very stupid or very cocky.

  I go down the steps and operate the window. It slides open, she walks in, the window slides back. Cold night air hesitates at the edge of the room’s warmth behind her.

  “An evening at home,” she says, surveying everything.

  I walk back up the stairs.

  “You really don’t believe in doorbells, do you?” I say to her.

  “I’m just not very lucky with them,” she says. “I did try, but like the other time, it didn’t seem to be functioning.”

  “Odd, that,” I say.

  “Isn’t it?”

  We look at each other.

  “A drink?” I say.

  She nods. I make her a drink and hand it to her.

  “You’re not in all your splendour,” I say.

  She shrugs her Afghan off and shakes out her long black hair, but the dark glasses stay on.

  “I’m not working tonight,” she says.

  “Aren’t you?” I ask her.

  “I’m not with you?”

  I smile and sit down.

  “Funny,” I say. “That’s what Eddie said.”

  She sits down opposite me, indicates the movies.

  “It’s true what they say, then?” she says.

  “What?”

  “That too many off the wrist sends you barmy.”

  “I don’t think it’s me that’s barmy.”

  She shrugs. I watch her as she sips her drink.

  “Aren’t you going to put one on then?” she says.

  I don’t say anything.

  “A movie, I mean,” she says. “I mean, don’t let me spoil your evening for you.”

  I drink some of my drink.

  “I didn’t find you yet.”

  She looks blank, then looks at the gear. She laughs.

  “You didn’t think you would, did you?”

  I stay quiet.

  “Jesus,” she says. “You believed me. You really believed me.”

  She continues laughing.

  “What made you think I’d let you out alive?” I said.

  She stops laughing.

  “You what?”

  “If you came back, what made you think I’d let you walk out again?”

  She just looks at me.

  “How much were you thinking of?” I say. “Just as a matter of interest.”

  She still doesn’t answer.

  “Money,” I say. “How much money?”

  Her expression changes to amused contempt.

  “What,” she says, “you mean to sleep with you?”

  “Don’t be fucking stupid.”

  “Well, I mean, I know you’re a watcher, but I thought you might fancy a change. Silly of me.”

  “You’re being very silly.”

  “Look,” she says, “I know I’m thick, I must be to be in this dead-and-alive hole, but just what the fuck are you talking about?”

  I stand up and refill my glass and when I’ve done that I turn to face her again.

  “You know who I am. Somehow, some way. Whichever is unimportant, but you’ll tell me, anyhow. You’ve known for quite some time. And as nothing’s happened to me since you’ve known, I’m still walking about, my picture hasn’t been all over the papers, I figure you’d like some money not to tell various people who I am.”

  She just looks at me, expressionless. Then she leans back in her seat.

  “And you are?”

  “I’ve told you,” I said. “Stop being silly.”

  She inclines her head and takes her dark glasses off. Something familiar again. Her expression is now one of exaggerated incredulity, an expression that under different circumstances could appear to be registering pain.

  Pain.

  I look at her.

  Pain.

  The last time I saw a girl register pain.

  The last time before Jean.

  Remember the last time.

  Remember.

  THE SMOKE

  IT HAD BEEN LUCKIER for her than it had looked. They’d only got her in the upper legs. Although she’d never dance with Nureyev, if that was her ambition.

  “Who are you?” I said, holding her torso upright.

  She tried to move her legs and screamed.

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “It’ll only hurt you. I’ll call for an ambulance. Just tell me what happened.”

  She stared up into my face, like a rabbit in a snare.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Then I’ll get you help.”

  “It hurts,” she said. “Christ it hurts.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll help you. If you tell me what happened. All right?”

  She bit back some pain and tried to speak. I waited until she tried again.

  “They wanted me to give you something,” she said. “They wanted me to dress up like this. In these clothes.”

  I undid the coat. The dress was Jean’s, as well. I looked down her legs. And the boots.

  “What did they want you to give me?”

  “An envelope.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I—Christ! I dropped it. It’s over there.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not. Help me. Please.”

  “What did they tell you to do?”

  “What I did. Walk to you. Give you the envelope. I was to—I was to tell you, ‘This is from Jean.’ And then when they started the car I was frightened. They hadn’t said they were going to do that. They were going to wait.”

  “Where’s Jean?”

  “I don’t know any Jean.”

  “You’re wearing her clothes.”

  “Christ. They gave them to me. I don’t know any Jean.”

  I laid her flat on her back and went over to where the envelope was and picked it up.

  “Help me,” the girl said.

  The envelope was manuscript-size and sealed. I ripped open one end.

  A spool of eight-millimetre film clattered down onto the ground.

  I bent down and picked up the spool and looked at it.

  Then I straightened up, put the spool in my pocket and walked past the girl and over to the Granada.

  “Help me,” the girl said.

  Charlie and Rich lay beneath the Granada’s open doors. I looked beyond the bonnet, to where the Mercedes had been. Jimmy had been the one who’d been trying to get into that. I walked over just to make sure he was dead, like the others.

  When I’d done that I went back to the Granada and took Rich’s handgun from its holster, and walked back to where the girl was, carrying the gun.

  “Help me,” she said.

  THE SEA

  I LOOK DOWN AT her, as she reclines there, the dark glasses dangling from the tips of her fingers.

  Could be.

  A reasonable motive.

  Not necessarily involving money.

  I’d not killed the girl in London, at the brickyard. I’d shot her, but she hadn’t died.

  Normally I would have shot her through the roof of her mouth. But I’d wanted her to look like one of the casualties, as random as possible. Using Rich’s gun.

  So instead of getting up close I’d stood back, and to one side, and shot her in the head, once, with Rich’s .38 revolver.

  Unreliable at the best of times. And in the dark.

  But I’d had to do it. I couldn’t send for the ambulance so that they could get her all well to give them a description.

  After I’d shot her, I hadn’t stayed to check.

  She’d stopped whimpering.

  I should have done. I should have stayed to check.

  But all I was thinking about was Jean.

  And getting to Walter, so that I could get to her.

/>   But I hadn’t got to Jean, and the girl had lived.

  But she hadn’t talked. They’d sat round her bed for weeks, but there’d been nothing they could do. She’d just told them she’d been hired to deliver a parcel and pick up a holdall. Couldn’t do her for that, could they? And she’d been injured. She hadn’t seen a thing after she’d been injured.

  No, she didn’t know any of the people involved. No, she’d never seen them before.

  They’d got her into court, sure, but they couldn’t make her change her tune.

  Not, for some odd reason, that they’d pressed her too hard.

  At the time, as James hadn’t been able to get to her, her being on the other team, I’d assumed Walter had seen her well set up; that was why she’d kept quiet.

  But now she’d run across me, and Walter had gone.

  There was more to life than money when it came to getting even. I know that more than anybody does.

  She puts her dark glasses back on. The scar wouldn’t show, not the way she did her hair, it’d be deep beneath the shiny black tresses. And on occasion, beneath a wig.

  Perhaps, unseen, her optic nerves had been affected.

  But the other wounds would show.

  The ones on the legs.

  “You’re mad,” she says. “I’ve never seen you in my life before.”

  “Stand up,” I say to her.

  “You what?”

  “Stand up.”

  She stands up. I swallow some of my drink.

  “Take your jeans off.”

  Faint amusement from behind the dark glasses.

  “Oh, so that’s what you want to pay me the money for. Just to look.”

  “Do it.”

  “When I was a kid I used to do it for sixpence,” she says. “What’s the going rate these days?”

  I take the gun out. The amusement doesn’t quite disappear.

  “Do it.”

  “You know what they say about men who like guns,” she says.

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “Sure,” she says. “Why not?”

  She undoes the broad buckle of her belt and unbuttons the metal button at the top of her fly and unzips herself and slides the jeans down her thighs.

  I look at her thighs. Her knees.

  “Turn round.”

  She turns round, full circle.

  Not a mark. Not the trace of the smallest of scars. Not even a bramble-scratch.

  I stand there, just staring at the sheerness of her.

  “That it, then?” she says. “Only, it’s getting a bit chilly.”

  Convulsions begin to surge up my body from the base of my stomach.

  I turn away and run for the bathroom, knocking into the cardboard box as I go, tipping films out all over the floor.

  THE SMOKE

  I GOT INTO the car and slammed the door and sat there.

  Where would he go?

  I had to think. He was the only way I could get to Jean. However slim the chance that she was … however slim the chance.

  But where would he go? He hadn’t banked on all this going down. So there would have been no contingency plans, not with him. And now, he’d know there’d be nowhere public he could go. He’d have to go to ground. Eventually somebody would grass, but the grasses didn’t even know what had gone down yet. And I didn’t have time to wait for them.

  I switched on the engine and negotiated the girl and the Granada and Jimmy’s body and lurched the motor on to the track that led out of the brickyard.

  What I hadn’t banked on, with his three brothers lying dead back there, was their unavenged bodies being more important to Walter than the holdall containing the three hundred grand.

  I only survived the first blast because the tire bounced off a rut in the track and I was lower than he’d expected me to be when he’d squeezed the trigger. But it was still good enough to take the windscreen out completely.

  I threw myself across the passenger seat and lay there and managed to get my hands on my own shotgun.

  But I didn’t want to kill him. Not while there was a chance.

  “Fowler?”

  The voice came from a long low tile shed that ran alongside the track, a shed with empty tile shelves instead of walls.

  “If you move you’re dead. If you don’t move you’re dead. Have it whichever way you like.”

  He laughed, and fired another broadside into my motor. The car rocked.

  Another blast. At the same time I slipped the lock on the passenger door and rolled out of the car on the opposite side to where Walter was under cover. Then I crawled to the rear of the motor and tried to peer beyond the darkness, into the deeper darkness of the shed.

  Another blast and I ran across the track, quietly. I stopped at the shed’s open end. The shelving wall stretched away from me, into blackness. But I knew where he was from the shot gun blasts. I moved forward, soundlessly.

  “Fowler?” he shouted.

  I moved closer.

  “Fowler. You’re a dead man. Like—”

  I trod on an old tile. It snapped in two as if I’d hit it with a hammer.

  I threw myself to the ground as Walter whirled round and blasted in my direction. I was completely without cover. The blast had lit up where I’d thrown myself. He knew where I was. I heard him pump two more up into the breech.

  There was nothing else I could do.

  I fired a second before he did. His shots finished up in the ceiling. Mine finished up in his chest and his neck.

  When I got to him blood was pouring from a hole in his throat, like wine from a punctured goat-skin.

  I looked down at him.

  “Where is she?” I screamed at him.

  But there was nothing, just the sound of the wind drifting through the empty tile racks.

  I found the Mercedes parked up behind the tile shed. The holdall with the money in it was lying on the passenger seat. And even though there was no longer any glass in the rear window, perfume still lingered in the Mercedes’s interior.

  But it wasn’t Jean’s perfume.

  THE SEA

  WHEN I GO BACK into the lounge from the bathroom, she’s kneeling by the box, putting the films back.

  “Does it really make you feel that bad?” she says.

  I don’t say anything.

  “You really are a mess, aren’t you? I mean, how do you manage to stand looking at the movies if what happened just now made you feel physically sick?” she says. “Still, maybe when it’s on the screen, celluloid, not reality …”

  I look at her legs. She is wearing her jeans again. She clocks me looking at her.

  “I figured I could put them back on,” she says. “No point in not, so to speak.”

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “I’m Lesley,” she says. “Remember? I’m the one who’s supposed to know who you are.”

  I pick up my glass and take it over to the drinks and almost fill it to the top and drink and then fill it up again.

  I turn to face her.

  “What do you want?” I ask her.

  “I just came round to help you pass the time,” she says. “To be pleasant I even took my jeans off for you. Now what could be nicer than that? And all you keep asking is, what do I want, who am I, and if I know who you are and pointing guns at me. I mean, I came round for a drink. It’s Sunday night. What else am I going to do on a Sunday night in Mablethorpe?”

  I stare at her.

  “I mean, I’ll go if you want.”

  “No,” I tell her. “No, don’t do that.”

  “Looking at me like that, I’m not so sure I oughtn’t. Can’t you put that fucking gun down?”

  I’ve forgotten I’m still carrying it. I put it down on the piano lid, where Jean’s photograph used to stand.

  “Why do you keep it?” she says. “Frightened of intruders?”

  “You weren’t frightened of it.”

  Faint amusement.

  “Does that make me a guest then?
And not an intruder?”

  I nod.

  “Yes. Yes, it does,” I say. “It does make you a guest.”

  “In that case, am I entitled to another drink?”

  I nod.

  She stands up and picks up her glass and goes over to the drinks.

  I shake my head, and my whole body seems to shake, too, like an enormous shiver.

  I must have been mad; I’d made it all up. I’d had all the pieces as I’ve seen them and I’d had the time to make them fit, as I’ve seen fit, to conform to my preconceived pattern, the pattern caused by my present state of mind. And as they say in the play, that way lies madness.

  I nearly blew it, because of a pattern I’d woven myself.

  Jesus.

  Nearly blew it with her, and with Eddie.

  She’s just what she appears to be.

  A talented girl who knows a good thing when she sees it. That’s why she hasn’t let my antics send her off. She knows the kind of score I can add up to. She’s not going to be frightened out of that kind of count.

  As far as Eddie’s concerned, I can square him properly tomorrow. Give him more than he expects, explain again.

  As for Lesley, for the moment, I can smooth her by just behaving normally. For the moment.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “For behaving like that.”

  She shrugs.

  “Nobody can help the way they are,” she says. “Although I could have done without the gun, even though you were only pissing about.”

  “Yes. Look—”

  “I mean,” she says, “that was a figure of speech, wasn’t it? About me leaving here alive?”

  “Of course. I mean—”

  She stands in front of me and puts a hand on my shoulder. Faint amusement.

  “I’m joking,” she says. “You’ve got to understand. I’m joking.”

  I manage to smile.

  “I bet you even believed me when I told you I was frigid,” she says.

  “Well, I—”

  She sits down and looks up at me.

  “Although, the way you are at the moment, I don’t suppose it makes any difference whether I’ve even got one, or not, does it?”

  “I—”

  “What happens? Is it different if you’ve watched a movie? Does that help? Or do you just watch the movies and that’s that?”

  “No. It’s nothing like that. It’s—”