Pariah

by Thomas Emson

  Faultless gave him a long, hard look that appeared to make the youth’s knees buckle. Then he lifted the Gucci bag and said, “You know what I’ve got in here?”

  “No, but I’m having it,” Paul answered, not backing down.

  “You think so? Tell you what’s inside. It’s your mother. Your fucking mother. Her fucking head right in this fucking bag.” The lad’s eyes were widening, his jaw dropping. “And if you don’t fuck off,” Faultless continued, “I’ll rip your fucking skull off too, and stuff it in here so you’re mouth to mouth with fucking mummy dearest, her cold, dead lips on yours. See what I’m saying, Paul?”

  Paul saw. He looked Faultless up and down. He backed off, still staring, still not entirely sold on the retreat option.

  “Come on, Paul. We’ll get him later if he’s around,” said the lad’s mate. “Let’s go find the fucking cunt who nicked the PS3.”

  They legged it, Paul giving Faultless the finger before he and his buddies scarpered down an alley next to the wasteground.

  “Should bring back the lash. What do you say, chief?” Faultless turned. It was the old man, swigging from a can of Carlsberg. “Time we make ‘em pay for their indiscretions, eh?”

  “They wouldn’t be the only ones paying,” Faultless said. He stared at the old man, certain he’d seen him before.

  He would’ve bet his life on it.

  Chapter 12

  SETTLING IN

  Home. At least for the next few months. A one-bedroom hovel on the tenth floor of Swanson House. The letting agent had promised great views of London and accessibility to all local amenities. Bollocks. You could see the city sprawling east towards Barking and Dagenham—lovely—and you had Costcutter with its metal grilles and CCTV, the culinary delights of the kebab shop, Ray’s café, and a pub with boarded up windows. But you’d have to run the gauntlet of the three wise men—and probably a few of their mates—before you got your shopping done, picked up your supper, or had a quiet pint.

  Yes, thought Faultless, studying the flat, it’s going to be perfect.

  A shit-pit. Damp darkened the walls. The paint peeling. The floorboards rotted. A musty smell hung in the air. There was a red couch, sunken and sad-looking. By a window that provided smashing vistas of far-distant estates sat a table with two chairs tucked under it.

  Faultless placed his MacBook on the table. This flat would be his base while he wrote the book. He’d spend his days researching and the evenings writing. After all, there wasn’t much to do around here. Lucky he had a hobby.

  He unpacked the rest of his overnight gear—a change of clothes for the following day and bathroom stuff. He’d left his suitcase at his agent’s office in Holborn. He wasn’t going to walk into Barrowmore with it at night, telegraph the fact he’d moved in—that’d make his flat a target for yobs. Best to sneak in as quietly as possible and get his agent to send the case over tomorrow.

  He ate a ready-meal spaghetti bolognese, heated in the dusty microwave. The floor of the kitchen was covered in mouse droppings. He studied them as he ate standing up, wondering if he should get a cat.

  With everything done—unpacking, eating, washing—he sat at the table in front of his computer and thought things through.

  The noise of the estate drifted up ten floors. It was muffled, but he could still hear it. Wheels screeching. Girls screaming. Boys laughing. Hip-hop throbbing. Babies wailing. Footsteps pounding. Dads leaving. Mothers crying. A cacophony compressed into a tiny ball of noise that was being constantly tossed at his window and his front door.

  Good to be home, he thought. Good to know nothing’s changed.

  He took his notebook out, laid it on the table, and opened it to the first page. Her photo stared out at him, and he saw red. He always did. The fiery rage erupting. In the past, he would’ve burned someone with it—doled out a hiding, a stare enough to provoke him. Now, most of the time, he could master the fury.

  He looked into her eyes and breathed, clenching his jaw, bunching his fists, letting the anger seep out of him.

  It was a color photo, taken when she was sitting at the kitchen table. He remembered taking it. The camera had been nicked. Some tourists had lost their way and decided to photograph the tower blocks, only for a seventeen-year-old Charlie Faultless to swagger over and say, “Take a shot of me, mate,” the tourist mumbling, “Heh?” and furrowing his brow—and seeing the camera snatched from his grasp. Faultless swaggered off, the tourist and his wife shouting at him. When he got home, she’d been sitting at the kitchen table, smoking.

  “Over here,” he’d said, and she’d turned and flashed a smile saying, “No, Charlie, I look a right mess, darlin’.”

  “You look gorgeous, Mum,” he’d said.

  She did—long, dark red hair, mahogany eyes, and a face that had once appeared on the front of a teen-mag. That had been when she was a kid—just fifteen. A photographer spotted her at Oxford Circus with her mates. He’d handed her a card, told her to come to his studio. “Get your mum’s permission.” She said she would but never did. Her mum was a drunk who nicked the money her daughter made working weekends at Ray’s greasy spoon.

  So she’d gone to this photographer’s studio with a mate.

  “This is my mum.”

  “Looks young, your mum.”

  “Yeah, I was a kid,” her mate said, grinning. “You know—modern Britain and all that.”

  The photos were taken. She got paid. Well, her “mum” got the check. A month later her picture was on the cover of the magazine, and the photographer said: “You’re going to be a star.” Three months later, she was pregnant. The star waned. Her skies darkened. Her future faded. Her boyfriend vanished. The child died.

  But another came along. A little miracle. A 7 lb 10 oz bundle she named Charlie.

  His murdered mother smiled at him from the photograph. It was how she would always be to him, and how he wanted to remember her. Smiling and beautiful. But the picture had been corrupted by another image—the police photos of her mutilated body.

  As Charlie stared at the photo, both images mingled—the swishing hair, the glance over the shoulder, the cigarette, the half-smile, the open throat, the cleaved abdomen, the cavernous belly, the pile of intestines . . .

  Faultless cried out, venting his wrath.

  Anger’s no good, now, he thought. This is not about vengeance.

  At least that’s what he told himself, in his suit and his tie, with his middle-class manners and the cut of his dinner-party jib. That’s what he told his agent. “Closure, Mike, not revenge.”

  Closure . . .

  He turned the page of his notebook. Another photo, Sello-taped there, looked up at him.

  Rachel. Beautiful Rachel.

  His heart felt as if it had shattered.

  Fuck closure . . .

  Chapter 13

  BLOOD BROTHERS

  Three of them. Michael and Paul Sharpley and Luke—known as “Lethal”—Ellis. They strutted around the underpass, not letting anyone walk by without giving something up—your phone, your wallet, or if you were a girl, you give them a feel.

  The underpass. The gates to hell. ADHD central. Stinking of piss. An obstacle course of thugs, dog shit, and litter. Graffiti splashed over the walls.

  Kids gathered here in the day to drink and fuck and mug. They gathered there at night to drink and fuck and mug again. It was twenty-four-hour drinking and fucking and mugging.

  The underpass stood on the path that snaked round the estate. The bridge overhead walked you from behind a street of houses, along a public footpath, across the common ground, through some back alleys, and into Commercial Street.

  Paul, sixteen and with a swastika tattoo on the back of his hand, kicked the grass verge, taking clumps out of it. A rhythmic kick-kick-kick-kick . . .

  He stared at his Adidas trainer as it thumped into the e
arth—thump-thump-thump-thump . . .

  “Should’ve let me shank that cunt,” he said.

  Michael, a year older and wiser—wiser defined as knowing better how not to get caught—bicep-curled a rusty petrol can loaded with soil and rocks, topped off with water to make it heavy.

  He said, “His fucking eyes said fuck off, Paul. Don’t mess things up. I’m fucked off with Spencer. He’s a fucking twat, and he nicked my PS3. I don’t want nothing else getting in the way. We do him, we get our fucking property back.”

  “I want to”—thump-thump-thump-thump—”do that fucker. Don’t care who he was—don’t give a shit about his eyes or anything.”

  Michael swapped arms—curl-curl-curl-curl . . .

  He said, “If he’s around, we find him after we do Spencer.”

  Lethal Ellis, sitting on the arch of the underpass and dangling his long leg over the edge, said, “We going to shank him?”

  There was a puppy-dog eagerness in his voice.

  Michael said, “Yeah, bleed him.”

  “It’s fucking shit without my PS3, man,” said Paul.

  “Yeah, well get it back, though,” said Michael. “That Spencer, man—he is so fucked.

  He’s going to bleed for what he did, bruv. Bleed.”

  “Yeah, that’s excellent,” said Lethal. “Bleed, man, bleed.”

  Laughter up the path made Michael stop curling.

  “Stop kicking the fucking ground,” he told his brother, and shouting to Lethal, “Who’s that?”

  “Bloke and a bird.”

  “We do ‘em,” said Michael.

  Chapter 14

  NEW DAY, OLD WOUNDS

  7:20 AM, FEBRUARY 26, 2011

  Breakfast at the window. A gray sky spitting drizzle. Those residents with a Saturday job off to it. Driving away in cars and vans, lucky if they hadn’t been burned, stolen, or damaged overnight.

  I wouldn’t keep a car there, thought Faultless.

  Too much of a target for kids—a kid like he used to be.

  From his window, he looked down into the square of concrete hemmed in by the tower blocks. It was a car park. It was somewhere to have a kickabout. A place to hang out, smoke, and drink. A battleground to settle differences.

  It was anything you wanted it to be because here, on Barrowmore, there was no one to tell you what it shouldn’t be.

  He tuned in to the headlines on the radio. Murder, betrayal, and corruption. War, famine, and plague. Sex, celebrity, and sport.

  He yawned and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept well. It was cold in the flat. The mattress was hard, his sleeping bag thin. And when someone tapped on the front door at 6:32 am, he sat straight up and came completely awake.

  It was an assistant from his agent’s office. He looked twelve. He might have been fourteen. But he was clearly scared and cold, standing on the threshold with Faultless’s suitcase. A youngster on work experience who’d been landed with the a job because a top client needed looking after at the weekend.

  “Mr . . . Mr Faultless?” said the youth.

  “You’d better hope so,” the top client said.

  “Oh . . . are—”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Oh yes, I . . . I recognize you now. From the cover of . . . of Graveyard Of Empires.”

  “Nice. Is that my case?”

  He offered the kid a coffee with a caveat. “I guess Mike will want you back at the office, so I better not hold you up.” And then with sincerity he added, “When you’re walking out of the estate, try not to look like a potential victim.”

  The youth gawked.

  “You look like the proverbial rabbit, son. Try looking more like a wolf. Swagger, don’t slump. Head held high. Shoulders back. You should be okay.”

  The youth left, still looking frightened despite the advice

  Faultless sorted his clothes before sitting down for coffee and toast.

  Now dressed in a hooded top, low-slung jeans, and trainers, he carried the dishes to the sink and left them to soak.

  Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he left the flat and looked right and left along the walkway. He locked the door, double-locked it, padlocked it, and then gave it a wrench—just to check.

  A man in his thirties ushered a child out of the flat next door. He wore a Motorhead t-shirt, and mythical beast tattoos decked his arms. The girl was six or seven, wearing a pink coat and pink ribbons in her hair.

  “Put your hood on, darlin’,” said the man. Then he looked up and saw Faultless, and he froze. “All right,” he said, suspiciously.

  “Good, thanks,” said Charlie.

  The fella was looking Faultless in the eye. Fifteen years ago, the little girl might have been an orphan by now. Her dad’s eyes narrowed as he stared, and then he said, “Do I know you?”

  “I don’t know, do you?”

  “The eyes . . . ”

  One blue, one brown. Once seen, never forgotten.

  The dad said, “You moved next door?”

  Faultless nodded.

  The child said, “Dad, please . . . ”

  The dad said, “Okay, darlin’,” then to Faultless, “Lots of families on the tenth floor, mate.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “We don’t want trouble.”

  “That’s nice, too.”

  “Okay, well . . . I’m—”

  His daughter said, “Come on, Daddy,” and tugged him away before he could introduce himself. The dad nodded a farewell. Faultless was glad he didn’t have to say who he was. The guy might have recognized him. And who knew who he saw down the dole office or on the building site? Gossip galloped round Barrowmore. And if the Graveney’s still had their ear to the ground, it would have quickly been filled with tales of Charlie Faultless.

  It took him twenty minutes to make his way to Monsell House, the northeast tower block. On the seventh floor, he stopped outside her door.

  Rust caked the number. Red paint peeled. He swallowed, his throat dry. His palms were wet with sweat, and he wiped them on his jeans. He knocked on the door. Her words reached him before she did. “Hurry up, Jasmine, I want you ready.”

  But when she opened the door, she stopped talking. Her mouth fell open. Her sapphire eyes blinked, and she said, “No way.”

  Chapter 15

  THE WRITER

  “A book?” said Tash Hanbury. “What, with words in it, not just pictures?”

  “Real words,” said Faultless. “Some of them quite big words.”

  “Who’d’ve believed it?”

  “Not you.”

  “No way. Charlie Faultless a writer? Writing books? Do people pay you for doing that?”

  “I’ve got an advance, yes.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “Not a lot, no. Enough to live on for six months.”

  “I don’t know how much that can be, because I live on dust for six months, honestly.”

  “Can I help at all?”

  She blushed. “I’m not begging.”

  “I know, but ask if you want.”

  She nodded. “What books have you written?”

  He took a sip of coffee. “I wrote one called Graveyard Of Empires about Afghanistan.”

  “The war?”

  “The country. The war. All the other wars that have been fought there.”

  She raised her eyebrows and sliced her hand over her head. “What else?”

  “Couple of years ago I had one called Scapegoat published. It was about a British soldier who got drummed out of the Army for murdering a civilian. But it wasn’t a civilian. It was a suicide bomber. The soldier was a hero, but the authorities didn’t want to know.”

  She looked at him. Her blonde hair was piled up on top of her head. Her eyes were wide. She had pale, smooth skin and long, delica
te fingers. She was beautiful—just like Rachel.

  His heart ached.

  Tash considered him and said, “I never thought it would be safe for you to come back.”

  “I don’t know if it is.”

  “Have you seen my . . . ” she trailed off.

  He shook his head.

  She said, “Hang on a sec,” and called out. “Jasmine, you are late. I am not amused, now.”

  “How old is she?” said Faultless.

  “Eleven.”

  “The dad around?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Would I know him?”

  She blushed.

  He said, “That’s a ‘yes.’ Who?”

  “Pete Rayner.”

  “Jesus. Rayner?”

  “Don’t laugh,” she said and then: “Jasmine, this is an amber warning.”

  “What happens when it gets to red?”

  “A ruck,” she said, smiling. It made her even more gorgeous.

  Christ, she looked so much like Rachel. He’d never noticed before.

  “So how did Pete Rayner happen? I mean you—you’re—you know . . . ” he said.

  “What? What am I?” She was fishing.

  He smiled. “You and Pete Rayner.”

  They were sitting at her kitchen table. Everything was clean and white. It smelled of disinfectant and flowers. Nothing was broken inside her flat. It was tidy and aspirational.

  She said, “There was no one left. I was nineteen. My friends were mums already. He, you know, the old man—he was behind bars. Rachel was—” She stopped. Her lip trembled. Her eyes became glittery. “But Pete was around. He was kind. I was having a bad day. Must have been a very bad one, because they were all pretty shitty back then. Well, I thought, why not—one night. And . . . Jasmine.”

  “Where is he now?”

  She laughed. “Where they all are, I hope—the bad dads’ graveyard. What about you? Girlfriend? Wife? Both?”

  “I was married. It didn’t work.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I did.”

  “You did what?”

  “Work. I worked. I worked like a fool. We never saw each other. You know . . . ”