It was disgust. I was disgusted with myself.
I’d been put to the test. Yes, it was the dirtiest of jobs, but I had to rise to the awful challenge and take my medicine in order to save five lives… and I’d bottled it.
Don’t be hard on yourself, you might be thinking. You’ve been asked to kill someone, for crying out loud, are you really supposed to go and do it just like that? Plus, it didn’t sound to me like Neil particularly deserved to die. Go have a nice lie-down, you need to give your mind a rest.
All of which is well and good, but that realization—that I couldn’t do it alone, that I didn’t have the strength of will to force myself to do it—somehow, that was hard to take. Yet another rubber stamp in my passport to being a Confirmed Useless Dropout Fuck.
You thought it yourself. You need someone worse. That’s all.
Maybe so. But at that moment, it seemed to me that a real man would just pick a target and get on with it. There were people to save. Fucked up thinking? You disagree? Again, you might be right. But I was the one running this particular show.
I realized that Klaus was staring at me.
“What?” I asked, wearily, undoing my shoe and taking my sock off to inspect my foot. Klaus’ gloved hand raised to his eye level, and then his thumb and forefinger came together. They began to rub against one another.
“Yeah, thanks for that,” I said, dropping my head backwards against the car’s headrest and trying to calm my breathing. That reminder hadn’t helped though. Three hundred fucking quid! A week and a half’s wages for me! All for some dope that I’d probably never get around to smoking! Fuck!
“What do you care?” I gasped, suddenly feeling very thirsty. I was starting to get a feeling that, as long as I didn’t try to attack Klaus or out his role in public, I didn’t have to worry too much about the way I spoke to him. True badasses in life—unlike the more insecure, less-tough wannabes of the world—don’t actually care what less-threatening people do or say. They don’t need to. They’re probably shit at doing their tax returns, though.
Klaus shrugged in response – it doesn’t matter to me, I’m just saying – and sat back in the driver’s seat, awaiting instructions. My foot was bright red, with a small, dark purple spot at the point of impact, but the bones didn’t feel cracked. I screwed up my eyes and took a deep breath, feeling pathetically sorry for myself and trying to be aware of just how much worse the girls had it. I still felt worse for myself though. Fucking little arsehole. I remember that kid. I used to be him, even though I can’t imagine it now. I hate him.
What now?
I suddenly realized that I had no idea what time it was. I looked at the clock on the Fiesta’s dashboard: 12:32 pm. In just under two and half hours, Olivia’s arm would be amputated.
Try and think. Try and be cool. Remember, it’s better she loses an arm - all her limbs - than someone being killed who doesn’t deserve it.
But it had to be someone worse than Neil—someone bad enough to give me the cojones that I needed to actually do the deed, to feel justified enough to break that mental ice surrounding my supposed killing arm—and I was out of ideas.
What makes you angry? If you have to want to do it, what makes you angry enough to come close?
The question came out of nowhere and the immediate answers that followed were just stupid.
People that park inconsiderately. Pretentious trust fund hipster twats. Aaron at work. Darren at work. Melinda at work. Fucking Harry at work.
Harry. His smug, grinning face with his jokes that weren’t actually jokes, comments carefully prepared to have enough barbs to let you know what they were, but wrapped in a sentence mild enough to a: make you the dick if you took offence, and b: mean that you would be the one in trouble with HR if you did. A weasel. One of only two men that I’ve ever wanted to take a swing at, and one of only four people that I’ve ever actually hated.
Could you kill him?
No. I hated him, but he didn’t deserve to die.
Are you sure?
I realized that it was actually an option. It was a shocking thought, discovering that I was going through my mental rolodex of personal beefs and evolving it into a potential hit list.
I’m pretty sure he’s off the list.
And then the rolodex clicked around onto the next entry – the only other guy that I’d wanted to swing at – and a very heavy penny dropped. The bowling alley story. It might not have had a real ending, but it did have a coda.
It wasn’t the actual Bowling Alley Guy. You were unnerved by him and you didn’t know what to make of him… but it was the other guy, his friend, that stung you.
We were leaving the bowling alley. While we put on our own shoes, Rat Boy had moved away, gone back to his mates who had moved to another part of the building. We couldn’t see them anyway. We’d been going through our deconstruction of the situation, telling ourselves that we’d done the right thing and whatever else we could think of to make ourselves feel better as we left. My Mum walked with us and listened, tutting in the right places. As we walked through the door, we saw two of Rat Boy’s mates standing outside, dressed almost identically to him and smoking. They stared at us as we walked by and our conversation fell silent, proof if proof were needed that all of our words of bravado were just empty. Or were they? I’ve certainly learned that instinct is a very, very hard habit to break. If flight is your ingrained response, is that your fault? Even when you know afterwards that it was the wrong thing to do?
The silence continued, and we thought that we would leave the situation without further incident. Inside, my relief was total. Then one of them said something, deliberately just loud enough to be heard, and another instinct took over when the words reached my ears:
“Fuckin’ nigger.”
I was already turning before he’d finished the N-bomb, something about the poisonous delivery of even that first consonant letting me know exactly – psychically - where this asshole was going. If it had been just me there, I think I would have let it go, you know. Just not worth it, and it really wasn’t. I’d been called it enough times in the past—kids learn taboo words and use them against each other—but never really as an adult. I think normally I would have just been more stunned than truly angry.
But my mother was there. And while the word was aimed at me, that vermin knew it would burn her as well. It was the principle.
Anger made the difference. Instinct firing in a different way. All logic went out of the window, and I wanted to tear this scumbag’s eyes from his head. He was about my size. Would it have made a difference if he was bigger or badder-looking? Probably. I can admit that. The subconscious registers all of these things and responds accordingly. We’re just animals.
Either way, I didn’t get to know if I could have taken him—didn’t get to know if I could take a real punch or not, or how effectively I could give one—because Carl caught me around the waist. My token white friend, as I always called him. He was tall, remember, and stronger than I was. He had to struggle to hold me, but hold me he did.
I screamed at Rat Boy’s fellow Rat, telling him to come and say it to my face and whatever other abuse I could think of. I remember how he just stood there, smoking. He didn’t respond, he just watched. He wasn’t laughing either, I must add. If he had been, I think I would have chewed through Carl’s arms to get to the dickhead.
It was my mother softly talking to me that snapped me out of it. It was like a switch. To hear her having to sully herself by getting involved in this bullshit… it was embarrassing. Bad enough having her witness the incident inside. Bad enough she had to hear that word. And having to see her son having a screaming fit—even if she probably wanted to do the same—made it worse. She’d kept her dignity, and I let that nothingness of a person make me lose mine. I calmed down, and we left, but not without loudly promising to find out where Rat #2 lived. I disgusted myself by actually crying later than night. I was never sure why. Frustration?
You wanted
to kill him. If you’d had a weapon, would you have done it before you realized?
Maybe. And maybe I’d been going about this all wrong. Maybe the Man in White’s boss, or bosses, had picked the wrong guy; flight was my threat response, not fight. I wondered if maybe that was why I was picked in the first place, their stupid personality test confirming it. The only way I was ever going to override that instinct was with another instinct, a Magic Because that came way before any kind of useless logic. I’d been thinking along moral lines, but only moral lines as a reason to pick someone, carefully and deliberately leaving out anything that I felt would make it something that I wanted to do rather than something I was doing under duress. I didn’t want it to be anything that could ever make me think how much of that was your ugly side? I didn’t want it to be an excuse to take out some long pent-up anger against the prejudices I’d dealt with all of my life, crap I’d had to deal with even though my family had money. Money helps, but hatred like that still slips through the cracks. You still got burned, even if you could comfort yourself with a family holiday in the Maldives.
But maybe some of that personal anger actually needed to be used. Maybe some of it was required to get the job done.
Not having access to a rapist or pedophile database—and now that low-level drug dealers were also apparently out—all I had left were people who were assholes. Hell, even The Man in White had said something along those lines. Technically, the person I picked only had to be enough of an asshole to deserve to live less than a humanitarian. But the reality was that wouldn’t be enough for me to do the deed. Neil proved it. He wasn’t exactly Pablo Escobar, but was enough of an asshole compared to the humanitarians that the girls were. Yet I couldn’t kill him, and something as bullshit as an unwanted iPhone case proved that.
So if mere assholery wasn’t enough, then I would have to be truly angry, too. And who did that to me?
Someone with a contempt for human life… and in the absence of any serial killers on tap, you need someone with contempt for at least some elements of human life. Someone full of genuine hatred.
I’d justified it. It wasn’t perfect. Nobody would be perfect, but this was enough. I couldn’t find a rapist, but I could find a racist, and I knew exactly where to find one.
***
As sick as I felt—and obviously, as terrified as I felt—I still kicked myself. I should have thought of this earlier. I could have started this plan hours before and saved Olivia’s arm in the process. The image of a bloodied stump where a finger had been—her screaming face filling a sharp Retina Display and screams emanating from tinny tablet speakers flashed across my mind—and I gripped the hammer in my sleeve tightly. I didn’t plan on using it for several hours, but in this situation, it made sense to have it handy in case of problems. Several hours. That was the problem. With the new plan, it looked like Olivia was definitely going to lose at least one arm, and more likely, two.
Klaus had his headphones and other paraphernalia out again and was still sitting patiently in the driver’s seat. I made sure that we’d parked the car in the most obscured part of the small car park, worried that the building it was attached to was the kind of place in which people kept an eye out for any surveillance. The police had to know about it, even though there was never a lot of trouble here. The pub had its clientele and everyone else stayed away.
The Bonnie Minstrel was a National Front pub. It was just a known thing, so much a tiny part of the city’s tapestry that most people didn’t even think about it. Every city has a place like this - a dirty old throwback of some kind that is either so titillating, debauched, or poisonous that it’s pretty much seen as a joke. Every now and then, someone will ask is that place even still open and that will be it. The Bonnie Minstrel, however, was neither titillating nor debauched.
Let me be clear before I say this next part: I don’t want to give it more gravitas than it deserves. It’s still there today, I believe, and no doubt is still the same grotty old shithole that it’s always been, frequented by scared, violent, angry idiots. It’s nothing to be scared of, and it’s nothing to be talked about in hushed tones. It is a joke, and I take no small degree of satisfaction in knowing that with every year the number of patrons dwindles that little bit more. Soon, it will be out of business, and with its reputation, even Weatherspoons wouldn’t want to take it over. It’ll be turned into a Tesco’s.
Now. That being said… if you were a young black man, you absolutely did not want to ever go there, especially on a Saturday lunchtime. Even when, as was the case that day, Coventry were playing a late kickoff away (that was a funny time for the team; back then, we didn’t even have our own stadium for a while, let alone a place in the top four of the Premiership and a Champions League win like we have today). I couldn’t be picking a busier or worse time to be going into the lion’s den.
Some of my friends had gone to that game. I was only just realizing that they hadn’t asked if I wanted to go.
Yes, I had a plan—and it certainly didn’t involve committing murder inside a busy pub—but I had no idea if things would play out the way I needed them to. I froze as I put my hand on the car’s door handle. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. A few years before then, when I was 16, I was sneaking into town for the first time. I’d told my Mum I was going to Carl’s. I was getting ready, and like a dickhead, I’d put on my going out clothes at home. My plan had been to sneak out with my jacket on over my going out shirt, all zipped up. Idiot.
My dad had walked into the bathroom not realizing I was in there, and despite the standard teenage cry for privacy (Daaaaad!) he hadn’t turned around. He’d just stood there for a moment, seeing the gel in my hair, the shirt, the open bottle of Issey Miyake, and smelling the overpowering fragrance of it filling the air thanks to my more than generous application of the stuff. I froze. It was absolutely obvious what was really happening.
My dad then quietly closed the bathroom door behind him and crossed the tiled floor. His face was inscrutable… but he didn’t look angry. He just looked like he was in deep thought. Then he put his hand on his shoulder and his finger in my face.
“Where did you tell your mother you were going?” he asked, calmly.
“Carl’s,” I said, shitting myself. Despite his calm demeanour, my Dad could be scary, and repeating the lie like that felt like I was writing my own grounding sentence.
“And are you going to Carl’s?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer. I just looked at the floor.
“Or rather, are you going to Carl’s before you go wherever you’re going after that?” he continued. I looked up quickly. He wasn’t smiling. He just stared at me with his big, serious eyes.
“Well… yeah,” I said.
“Did she ask what you were doing the rest of the night?”
“No,” I replied. He nodded.
“Then you didn’t lie to your mother,” he said. “If you had, you wouldn’t be going anywhere.” He reached into his back pocket, pulled out a twenty pound note, and held it out to me. “You Skype call me on your phone at midnight, and you do it from living room so I can see you’re back at his house. I’ll know how drunk you are too, because you’re a teenage punk and you wouldn’t be able to fake sobriety if your life depended on it. If you don’t do all that, you’re going nowhere at all for a month. Got it?”
I nodded rapidly, wondering if perhaps Dad had just come back from an early night out himself. That was the only explanation I could think of.
“Yeah, yeah Dad… thanks,” I wanted to say more, but I didn’t dare in case it broke whatever trance someone had put my Dad under. Maybe Carl had done it. He sighed then, and a small, sad, but wry smile crept up on one side of his mouth.
“Your mother worries,” he said, “but we can’t lock you up all the time, and you’re going to find a way to do this kind of thing regardless. At least this way you do it under my rules.”
I hugged him then, without realizing that I was going to do it. He chuckled
. “Oh no, don’t make me the Good Cop,” he said, patting me gently on the back. “Your mother’s rules are right, and I back her all the way. This is just one thing she wouldn’t understand. She was never a teenaged boy. Or if she was, she’s kept that very secret.” I laughed then, but when my Dad gently took my shoulders and stepped back slightly, his face was serious once more.
“But listen,” he said. “One more rule. For your own safety. And I want you to promise this, ok? The other stuff is up to you—you choose if you want to be grounded or not—but this is something I want you to promise me.”
I nodded, confused.
“Don’t go in The Bonnie Minstrel. You’ve heard of it, right?”
Ohhhh. That was it. I’d heard of it, for sure.
“Yeah. Yeah, I have.”
“You know why I don’t want you to go in there?”
I pulled a slight face and nodded. My Dad returned it, looking very sad for a moment, sorry for his son who had to know these things.
“Ok,” he said. “Say I promise.”
“I promise.”
“Say you promise that you won’t go in there.”
Kill Someone Page 8
