The Dreams of Max & Ronnie

by Niall Griffiths

  – Aye, you have. Worried sick we were, yeah? Helen’s gone off to pick up her baby and see if she can score some amphet, bring you round, yeah?

  – Don’t need it, man. Cup of tea’ll do.

  Rhys makes tea and Ronnie goes groaning up to the bathroom and uses the toilet and swills his face. Feels alive again, or begins to. He drinks his tea and his co-soldiers tell him of their worries and their activities while he was asleep which, it seems to Ronnie, involved drinking beer and vodka and watching a lot of TV and waiting for him to wake up. He strokes the cat who offers him her arse and he eats some beans on toast and drinks more tea and then suddenly there is a hurry on the three of them, a hurry to get to their homes and see their parents and siblings before they ship out.

  – To Eye-rack, man! Kill some fucking ragheads, yeah? Gunner be the nuts!

  Rhys raises his arms above his head and the sleeves of his shirt slip down to expose his tattoos, Chinese symbols, ‘war’ on his left arm and ‘peace’ on his right because that’s meaningful and says something about the terrible duality of the human condition. Robert mirrors his movement, revealing the lion’s head on his deltoid. He’d noticed, once, that Robbie Williams has that design and he thought it looked cool and original and individual.

  – We’re the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, man, Welsh Cavalry! We’re mean and reliable! We’re a fucking Volvo!

  The three soldiers hug each other and slap each other on the back and Robert finds a piece of paper and a pen on the mantelpiece and they leave a note for Red Helen and exit the house. Into the village. Where nothing moves anymore.

  – Told you we should’ve gone to ’Beefa, Ronnie says. – Three nights, man. Can’t believe I slept for three nights.

  – Aye, well, you won’t be getting much sleep over there, man, will yeh? Rhys grins. Ronnie’s insides give a little lurch. – Not with all them sandstorms, yeah? And bombs and everything.

  No sleep or too much sleep. No sleep or an end-less sleep.

  – Tell yer what, tho, Ron, Robert says. – You was having some mad dreams, man. Twitching all over the bloody place you were. And making funny little noises. What was going on in there, then?

  He taps Ronnie’s head with a stiff finger. Ronnie looks inside his own head and sees very little. A lot of faces. A fixed grin which makes him feel a bit queasy. Limbs torn from bodies, separated limbs with ragged ends. He scratches at his left forearm with the fingers of his right hand; the tattoo’s still healing. He wanted to go to Iraq with some sign of individuality on him, some indelible sign of his own autonomy, his own uniqueness. He didn’t want to be bleached into total anonymity by the army, the great faceless machine, so a week or so ago he got himself a tattoo – a Celtic knot on his forearm. Hasn’t healed properly yet.

  – Dunno, he says. – Just dreams, yeah? They mean fuck all. Just dreams, like, that’s all.

  They’ve left the house of Red Helen and visions and now they leave the village. Soon they’ll leave their own villages and towns. Soon after that they’ll leave the country, and soon after that, Ronnie will leave the world.

  The Dream of Max

  the Emperor

  Our man Max lives and works in the capital city, which is to say that he sells illicit drugs and stolen goods to the section of the conurbation’s populace which is forever hungry for such things. He has a retinue of men who are willing, eager even, to use violence and intimidation in order to protect his business interests; sometimes, and out of Max’s hearing, they will refer to him as ‘the Emperor’, in reference half-fond, half-mocking to his aristocratic carriage and mien. The Emperor, they’ll say, he wants me to break an arm today. Or they’ll say: I’ve got to hang up now, I’ve got to keep me line clear cos I’m expecting a call from the Emperor. Max is not really in the habit of enjoying the product he pushes but sometimes he will allow himself an indulgence, and on these occasions he likes to have several of his men around him for company and protection. Whoever forms this retinue will not ask payment for the service.

  – I want to go on a pussy-hunt tomorrow, Max declared one night. – Haven’t dipped it for weeks.

  So the next morning he set out with his crew to the pub-lined thoroughfare in the centre of the city that terminates in an old warehouse, now a night-club called Rome, in a dark and secret corner of which Max liked to, as it were, set up shop. All day they drank in that road’s pubs and bars and it was the height of summer and hot and, whilst some of his men partook of the pills and powders that would counteract the soporific effects of the alcohol and heat, Max on this occasion did not, on the lookout for sex as he was, so it was a sleepy Emperor that sat hidden in the corner booth of Rome at dusk, and, despite the pounding music and flashing lights, fell asleep. His boys sat around him to protect him from any thieves or malice-hearted rivals and one rolled up his gold-piped Kappa jacket into a pillow and slid it, with care, under the Emperor’s slumbering head.

  And there he had a dream, Max did, a detailed and vivid dream. He dreamt that he was travelling through the country that lay beyond his city’s borders, a place he’d never visited, and had never had any wish to, but that he knew existed because of the stories he’d heard and pictures he’d seen. It was a place of mountains and crags and lakes and water-falls. He was moving over a plain towards a jagged rim of blue mountains and he stopped at an estuary over which he could see a walled town with a great castle and many tall towers. Between himself and the town however was a large group of men who he knew to be enemies; they looked like him, a little, and wore the type of clothing that he was familiar with, and stood around or leaned out of vehicles of a type that he’d himself been in many times over, but they spoke a language that he’d heard yet did not know and they eyed him warily and with aggression and exuded a general air of fierce unwelcome. Then the dream flipped and he was in a car traversing a bridge onto an island, through crags so high they had their heads in clouds and which seemed to him repellent, accustomed as he was to his city with its reliable roads and solid buildings. He saw a plain and a forest. He saw a river and another castle. This was the country that lay beyond the boundaries of what he knew and the country, he’d been told time and time over, to which he belonged; yet it felt to him wholly alien. His dream-self entered the castle. A golden hall. Golden gleaming tiles, which his dream-self thought must be valuable and wondered if they could be prised away and flogged on. Everything was golden. He was dazzled and had to squint. He saw two shaven-headed lads on a couch playing on a games console and whilst he couldn’t see the screen he noticed that their handsets shone golden too. He wanted this wealth. He deserved this wealth. In the real world, his docklands flat and his designer clothing and expensive accoutrements and appliances meant nothing here. This was where he belonged. The lads were wearing fine clothes, silk shirts and huge sovereign rings, thick gold ropes around their necks with little gold boxing gloves attached. Trainers so white and pristine they hurt the eye. At the end of the hall, on a throne, sat another man festooned with golden ropes and rings and trinkets; he was grinning, and even his teeth were gold. There was a quality of great success about him; a quality which the two lads (the dream-Max intuited), and Max himself, had sought all their lives to achieve, were in fact desperate to achieve. The man seemed to know this; the dream-Max felt that the man knew this. His throne was surrounded by recording equipment and he was pushing buttons and twiddling dials, and Max wanted to do that too, knew that all his life he’d been yearning to do whatever it was that the man on the throne was doing.

  And then he saw the woman. And the dream-Max thought: Jesus fucking Christ. She, too, dazzled his eyes like the gold had done, was doing, like the sun would if he ever gazed directly at it. She was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. She was Beyoncé, Alesha Dixon, Lisa Maffia. She was the kind of woman he deserved to have on his arm, the kind of woman whom the papers should carry photos of hanging off his arm and caught in the flash as they both exited a white limo. She was everything he dreamed of in a woman. She wore
white, and the bits of gold that adorned her were tastefully, not trashily, done; bling beautified her still further, enhanced her features rather than overshadowed them. She got up and came to him and he put his arms around her. He groaned and started to thrust. The dream-Max was as horny as the real-world one, the one from whose overheated head he leapt all sweaty and atremble. Her tits pressed against him. She smelled sooooo good. Her thighs were around one of his legs. He was thrusting and moaning. Her slim brown fingers with the perfect nails wrapped themselves around his dick. He felt the warm and precious metal of one of her rings against his hot and hard flesh. Christ, he was…

  – Wake up, maaaaan!

  Waking up. Someone was shaking him. He let out a little shout.

  – All kinds of noises you were making, bruv. Some fuckin dream you were having, maan, ey?

  The faces of his boys in his. The concern in them, and something a little bit like embarrassment. The club’s lights bouncing off the shaven scalps of some and the hairgel of others and their little earrings and their single gold teeth and their pitifully small sovs and neck-ropes and oh God this is the real world. He’s back in it. This poor, imperfect excuse.

  – Freaking right fuckin out you were, Maxie-boy. Worried about yew, see. Think you should eat something? It’s been a long time, maan.

  And our man Max aches, he’s aching, in body and elsewhere; his dream has put in him a pain, has infested his entire body to bone-joint and fingernail with an anguished longing, a terrible yearning for the beauties of that dream, the beauties that he felt were his by right and which he was somehow, and cruelly, being denied. The castle, the gold, the woman, it should all be his. Especially the woman. He’d be complete, with a woman like that. The howling hole in him would be filled with a woman like that at his side.

  The Emperor Max is sad. And this is unusual because, in him, sadness has heretofore tended to undergo a rapid mutation into rage, or contempt, or a mixture of the two, and a concrete manifestation of that on some other human being’s face and body; but now, here, he’s just sad. There’s a heavy pocket of pain in his chest. He feels, for fuck’s sake, that he might, for fuck’s sake, cry.

  He points across the table to one of his boys. – Goan start the car, brar. Wanna go home I do.

  – I’m banned, Maxie. Three years.

  – Well call me a fuckin taxi then. Wanna go home I do.

  He slips some small packets to one of his men and instructs him to sell them for him and look after the shop and then he leaves the club, the saddest man on the planet, and takes a taxi home with one of his boys as bodyguard but he does not speak to this man and once home in his docklands flat he just stands there in his living room looking out of the huge picture-window at the bay’s twinkling lights and his huge flat-screen plasma TV and his sound system and his games consoles and his racks of hanging clothes and walls of shoes mean nothing at all to him. He takes a bath. As he’s in the water his phones ring several times, or if they’re on silent mode they buzz and vibrate like irate insects on the work surfaces, but he ignores them. Lets them ring and chirrup. Shuts his ears to the entreaties that come through on voicemail. From nicking car stereos in multi-storey car parks to this, he thinks, this shining flat and everything in it, and the journey has brought him nowhere. He’s on his own. He needs a woman. Our man Max is very, very sad. Clinically depressed, a doctor might say were he to go and see one, which he won’t.

  For a week he remains isolate in his flat, visiting Rome with his boys at night, peddling his wares and scanning the strobed crowd for the face that was in his dream. Whenever his crew find their pleasures in drinks and powders, he does not join them. Whenever they surround themselves with loud music or jerkily dance in the flashing lights, he does not join them. All is funless to Max. During these days, in fact, Max does little but sleep; he knocks himself out with temazepam and he lies in a still heap on the sofa as the sun sinks across the bay. Once, he tries Zimovane on a recommendation, but although it helps him to sleep an afternoon away it puts a taste in his mouth of urinous ashes so he decides to stick to the temazzies. As he sleeps, the woman of his dreams re-visits him, in that golden hall; she presses herself against him. He invariably wakes to a small and sticky mess.

  One evening, a barman in Rome took him to one side and told him to be careful. He’d heard things.

  – What kind of things?

  – Some things.

  – Aye and what fuckin kind, maan?

  – Your boys reckon yewer losing it. Reckon yewer going soft. Pickled, like. Yewer not picking up your voicemails, yewer blanking them, and there’s some boys from the north looking to step in. That’s all I’m saying, bruv. Be careful, maan.

  – What boys from the north?

  – Can’t say anything more, Max. Have a word, tho, aye?

  So Max makes some calls and one afternoon he gathers his men around him in the kitchen of his flat, the kitchen that has never been cooked in, full of blades and machinery and slate worksurfaces that have never seen a crumb or even a used teabag. He chops up some lines of powder on a mirror and pours some glasses of chilled Baileys and they all sniff and sip and sit wiping their lips and nostrils and looking expectantly at Max. Lethal Bizzle plays in the background.

  And Max tells them that he’s lonely, and that he’s sad, although he doesn’t use those words. He tells them that there’s a void inside him that needs filling although they are not the words he uses. He tells them that he’s sick of slappers and gold-digging bitches, and he does use those words, skanks, slags, dull fucking no-mark whores, those are the words used by our man Max. He tells his men that he wants them to find him a woman, a good woman, a woman worthy of his companionship and support. He can see her, in his mind – the dream-woman, the perfect One. But he can’t describe her to his boys. He’ll know her when he sees her. When, if, they bring her to him.

  – So, what, one of his boys says, his right nostril ringed with red and slightly scabbed. – This is, what, a pussy-hunt? Max, get yerself on the internet, boy. Few clicks and you’ll have yewer pick. S’like a shop of prozzies, maan. Done it meself loads-a times, I yav. Even pay by fuckin credit card.

  No no, another man says and grips tightly the first man’s forearm. – Leave it to us, Maxie-boy. I know what yewer after. Understand perfectly, I do, see. If yur’s a woman out there good enough for yew, Maxie, we’ll find her, bruv.

  Max smiles and turns to take another bottle of Baileys out of the Smeg fridge and as he turns his back to the boys the second one to speak twiddles his index finger at his temple and whispers to the man closest to him:

  – Man’s lost it, he has. Leave this to me.

  Max turns. – What?

  – Just saying, mun, saying we’ll split up like so’s we’ve got a better chance. We’ll look everywhere, maan. Anywhere there’s women, we’ll look. Won’t stop neither till we’ve found one. Only-a best for yew, brar. Haven’t yew looked after us all these years?

  – You know I have.

  – Then we’ll do what needs to be done. No bother, bruv.

  They drink and snort. The boys wait for Max to go to the toilet but he doesn’t and as the powder and potions start to work he insists that they go to Rome which they do and it is too noisy in there to talk out of Max’s earshot but two of them find a way, out on the fire-escape used as a smoking area.

  – Yew believe this shit, maan?

  – Telt yew. Cunt’s proper lost it. His mind’s pickled. He’s off his bean. This could be the easiest wedge we’ll ever make. Yew get out there, find a woman, classy, like, tell her you’ve got this rich fucking brar who’ll pay her to be his missus like and split the wedge with her. Cos he’s gunna reward yew, maan, yew find him the woman he wants. And yew and the bird take the money and leg it or no, even better, get her to get access to his bank account or something, nick a load of his stash, whatever. The man’s proper lost it and them boys from the north are gunna move in so we’ll be better off out of it. Gunna have to exploit th
e sitch somehow, brar. Cos the man’s fucking lost it and he ain’t getting it back. Got to look out for ourselves here. Too right we do. Starting tomorrow. Look for a woman who’ll do this.

  – Where, tho?

  – What?

  – Where do I look?

  – Fuck, maan, I don’t know. Clubs, bars, wherever. Other cities. I don’t know. Use yewer fuckin imagination, boy.

  And the next day they do precisely that: they visit bars and clubs and even brothels in the city, street-walker areas too, in which they approach women and outline for them their proposal and listen to responses ranging from I’m married to don’t be daft to sounds dangerous to me to fuck off, this last the one most heard. Two of the boys trawl cyberspace but there are no takers even there, in that realm of the lost and lonely. Their proposal reeks of peril. They are thought kid-nappers, rapists, perverts when they make it. Fine to meet up solely for physical fun, no-strings-attached like, but this? Meet a man, befriend him, rob his plastic and cash? What kind of suggestion is this? What’s going on? The boys meet indifference, hostility, mocking laughter. One beautiful woman in the chill-out zone of an exclusive club, skirt up to here, boobs nearly out, a face to make fathers weep with worry, listened with gorgeous and seemingly-serious intent to their proposal then stirred her drink with a swizzle stick and roared with laughter. On your own, boys, she said, and that about summed the entire situation up. Hopeless hopeless hopeless.

  After about a week of this they returned to Max’s flat. There was Max, dressing gown, hair grown out of his usual number-one crop into sordid hedgehog spikes, skin grey, eyes insomnia-red, a stink coming off him the boys can barely believe. This is Max: the man whose shit smells of CK One. And here he is walking around in a cloud of his own BO, a fetid forcefield of pong. Not right, this. Proper lost it. They keep their distance, discreetly of course, breathe through their mouths and have no news to give him when he eagerly enquires.