To Die For Page 10
The larger bedroom, at the end of the hallway, had probably been Beckett’s. From the state of the double bed, I guessed he’d had a girl there. I saw a canvas bag by the side of the bed and made a grab for it. It was empty. I found another empty bag underneath the bed. The money, probably, had been in these bags. I threw them away. Then I made a mistake – I decided to be thorough. I went over to the large wardrobe and threw open the door.
At first, I didn’t know what I was looking at. It came to me in pieces. Eyes, large, scared. A smooth dark face. A young face. A girl’s face. A small body crouched in the corner of the cupboard.
She was twelve or so. She was thin. She had hair braided in what they call cornrows. She didn’t move. She stared out with such a look of fear, with such terror in her eyes that it paralysed me. She lifted a hand upwards. And then she shot me.
11
I was sitting at her table one morning, drinking coffee, eating an omelette, reading some book about John Hawkwood, the fourteenth-century English merc, who was smart enough to make himself rich in a plague-infested, war-ridden, fearful, religiously insane Europe. I’d been up an hour and had had a long cold shower and my head had only just about cleared. It was a day off for me and I was going to spend it doing nothing except reading, if I could keep my eyes focused that long.
Brenda was out, had been out all night. Every now and then Marriot had her do some kind of hostessing gig, usually for Middle Eastern types. She’d given me a kiss on the cheek late the night before and told me she’d be back in the morning, told me not to wait up, told me she’d miss me. I didn’t sleep too well that night. Already I was getting used to her body next to mine, and when I woke and found myself alone in the bed I’d wonder if I’d been dreaming or remembering something from long ago. It got like that, sometimes, my mind, wandering back and forth so that I didn’t know when I was, or where, or who.
So I was sitting at her table, reading the book, my torso bare and still damp from the shower, my head clearing. I had the window open and a cool breeze brushed over me, soothed my aching muscles. I didn’t hear the door, but I heard her steps. She came up behind me and I felt her hand stroke my neck.
‘Miss me?’ she said.
‘Sure. You want coffee?’
I could smell stale cigarette smoke on her clothes, and alcohol on her breath.
‘Why, Joe,’ she said, ‘you old romantic.’
I could tell, now, by the tone of her voice, when she was taking the piss out of me.
I made to stand up but she pushed me back down. I waited for her to say something, but instead she traced a line down my back with the tip of her finger. She did it softly, so that it felt like a teardrop slipping slowly away. I felt her finger move left, then right, zig-zagging. I knew what she was doing. I knew what was coming.
‘Where did you get these?’ she said.
‘An old job.’
‘An old job? An old job. Just that? That simple? An old job.’
‘Yeah. That simple.’
Her hand dropped away and she put her handbag on the table and walked to the kitchen.
‘Shall I do you a coffee?’ I said.
‘Forget it.’
She spent a few minutes bashing things about and then I heard the kettle boil. After that, she was quieter and I figured she wasn’t so pissed off with me. When she came back, she carried her mug and a plate of biscuits, which she put down on the table. She took a seat opposite me and sipped her coffee and watched me.
‘For someone so smart, you’re bloody stupid at times,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘Tell me, Joe,’ she said. ‘Tell me your story. How did you end up with those scars?’
I finished eating the omelette, mopped up the juice with a piece of bread, and pushed the plate away.
‘What does it matter?’
‘It matters to me. Surely that’s all you need to know. Tell me, from the beginning. Tell me a story. Tell me about the first scar you got. It was that one on your thigh, wasn’t it? The one I touch at night. Start with that. Start from the beginning.’
She reached behind her for an ashtray, then leaned back in her seat and lit a cigarette and sipped her coffee and waited. I shifted a bit in my seat, not knowing what to say or how to say it. And then I thought, fuck it.
‘When I was seventeen,’ I said, ‘I worked in Wembley, on a large building site next to the North Circular.’
It was a lousy job, I told her, hod-carrying, cement-mixing, all that shit. I’d wanted to be a carpenter but the site boss wouldn’t let me give it a go. He’d taken over from some other bloke who’d been sacked for taking backhanders to employ illegals. That other bloke was all right. When he’d been site manager, he’d let me watch the chippies, let me try it out. He’d given me a chance, at least. The new geezer didn’t like me, wouldn’t let me near the wood.
‘That’s a shame,’ she said.
‘Yeah. So I’d just about had it with the building trade. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to carry bricks for the rest of my life.’
Anyway, I told her, one night, as I walked back to my rented bedsit, I passed an Army Recruitment Office. It might have been a Navy Recruitment Office in Portsmouth, or an unemployment office in Romford. I might have been a fireman or a gardener.
‘You might have been a carpenter,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. I hadn’t thought of it before. ‘I might’ve been. Who knows? That’s the way things happen. As it was, I walked in and that was that. I joined the fucking army.’
She looked angry, her eyebrows angling in.
‘That’s not how to tell it,’ she said, flicking ash into the ashtray.
‘What?’
‘Don’t just say, “I walked in and joined the army.” Tell me what happened.’
‘Fine.’
The sergeant behind the desk asked me some questions, I told her, and then he looked at me carefully. At that age, I was big, but still fresh-looking, still clear-eyed. The sergeant hesitated. He listened to the answers I gave him, weighed me up, my size, my ability to fight and take hardship. ‘I won’t lie to you,’ he said, ‘we could do with men like you. Have you thought it through?’
‘He asked me what my girlfriend thought,’ I said to Brenda. ‘I told him I didn’t have one.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No.’
‘Never?’
‘No.’
The sergeant asked about my parents. I shrugged. He struggled on, asked me what I saw myself doing in five years’ time, if I thought I’d stay in the army. I didn’t know the answer to that. It seemed a stupid question. How did I know what I’d be doing in five years? I might be dead. But I played along and said I’d like to have a career in the army. ‘It’s a good life,’ he told me, ‘if you’re prepared to work. I’m a Para, myself,’ he said. I told him I’d always wanted to be a Para, not caring one way or the other. He brightened up. ‘Smart man,’ he said. ‘The Paras can give a lot to someone like you.’
‘I didn’t know what he meant by “someone like you”,’ I said to Brenda, ‘and I didn’t give a shit what the army could give me. I just wanted something else. The army was something else.’
Just to make it look good, this sergeant asked me what I thought I could do for the army, what I could offer. I looked at him, bright and smart, ribbons and stripes and all. I looked at the posters of neat uniformed soldiers. What could I do for the army? What could I offer?
‘What did you say?’ Brenda said.
‘I told him I could kill people.’
The sergeant’s face lost its smiliness and I saw him for what he was. ‘Perfect,’ he said.
Brenda took a biscuit from the plate and looked at it and put it back. She took a drag of her cigarette and watched the smoke coil.
‘Did you mean it?’ she said. ‘About killing people?’
‘I told him what he wanted to hear. That’s all.’
She nodded, but I don’t know if she believed me.
Eighteen months later, my company was spread out on a place called Mount Longdon. I was with a couple of men from my platoon and we were taking cover in a ditch while dug-in Argentinian conscripts and regulars sprayed the area with Browning M2s. It was dark and icy cold, and the damp grass and mud had made my clothes wet and heavy, and the smell of stale sweat was mixed with a musty earthy smell. My body ached with fatigue, but there were too many threats of death, too much adrenalin, too much fear to feel anything but a kind of edgy, tingling aliveness.
The bloke next to me stuck his head up and a round pinged off his helmet. The man said, ‘Fuck was that?’
And I felt a burning in my hip, as if someone had pushed the tip of a cigarette into it. I knew I’d been hit. It was unmistakable. I couldn’t do much about it.
‘And that’s the scar,’ Brenda said.
‘That’s it.’
‘Okay, so what happened next?’
‘I left.’ Brenda sighed. ‘Okay. If you want to know – ’
‘You were a good soldier, I bet,’ Brenda said, taking a biscuit from the plate and pushing it into her mouth.
‘I was okay. I even liked it. But then people were trying hard to kill me and I didn’t like it any more.’
‘Don’t blame you,’ she said around her biscuit.
Of course, I’d never been fooled by the reasons they gave me for fighting: for Queen and country, or for honour, or for your regimental colours, or for your comrades or your family or your way of life or whatever. I knew that was all bollocks. I knew the reason I was there: I was a tool of my government. I was paid to destroy the tools of other governments because those governments disagreed about something and they sure as fuck weren’t going to be destroyed themselves. But as I ran forward into the night in a painful limping motion and with tracer rounds zipping past me and getting closer, I realized another thing: I was being paid to be shot at. You can’t have a war if the enemy hasn’t got anyone to shoot at.
‘So, that was that.’
‘That was that,’ Brenda said, throwing her arms out. Some of the coffee sploshed from her mug and I caught a smell of it and realized she’d laced it with vodka. I wondered what kind of night she’d had. I wondered if that was the reason she wanted me to tell her these stories, any stories that kept her from thinking about real life. The stories I was telling her were real, but they weren’t real to her. That’s what mattered.
‘I’d joined the Paras because I couldn’t think of anything else to do,’ I said. ‘When I thought of something else to do, I left. The government called it desertion. I didn’t care what they called it. I had to avoid the law for a while and then get a new identity, but that didn’t matter.’
I’d been lucky with that bullet, I told her. It had fragmented when it hit the other bloke’s helmet, and only a part of it had entered me. It had nicked the bone, chipping it, but that was nothing. It was so long ago now that I hardly thought about it. Whenever I saw the scar, something of the past flickered in my mind, but that was it.
I’d learned two things from my time in the army:
One: I was good with violence. I could take it and not mind. I could handle bad situations and not panic. I could kill.
Two: I wasn’t earning enough money.
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘That’s all there is.’
‘The End,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
She put another biscuit in her mouth and chomped on it and pulled her arm across to wipe away the crumbs. She drank some more of her coffee and pulled on her cigarette.
‘Tell me about the other ones,’ she said finally.
‘Which ones?’
‘All of them.’
‘It would take hours.’
‘I’ve got hours.’
‘You’ve got to sleep. You’re tired.’
‘Yes. I am tired. But I don’t want to go to sleep just yet. Okay?’
‘Okay. Which scar do you want to know about?’
‘Tell me about those ones on your back. The ones I kiss at night. I know them so well, and yet I don’t know a thing about them. I don’t understand them. I want to understand. Tell me a story, Joe.’
She used to say that to me sometimes. Tell me a story, like I could tell her something sweet and happy, something to lull her to sleep with.
‘After I left the Paras,’ I said, ‘I ended up in Sheffield, bouncing at a club, doing the odd strong-arm work, repoing, debt collecting, stuff like that. It wasn’t bad work. It paid okay, but it wasn’t enough. So I started putting out feelers, asking questions, making contacts. Soon, I met a man.’
Michael Sloane had done six years in Strangeways for armed robbery. That should have tipped me off, I suppose. Still in his twenties with a stretch behind him. Usually, the ones who get sent down are the ones too stupid to avoid it. But I was dumb and fed up with everything.
I was introduced to him by a man called Griggs. Griggs had said, ‘Bloke I know needs someone for a job. You interested?’ I’d said, ‘Yeah.’
And that was that. Easy.
‘Easy,’ Brenda said, a slight smile in her eyes.
It was a balaclava job, I told her.
‘A what?’
‘A balaclava job. A post office in Hemsworth.’
‘Right. Balaclava. Got it.’
She was starting to slur her words now.
Sloane had said, ‘We go in Tuesday morning, before the pensioners’ve collected their money. It’ll be ripe.’
‘He seemed to know what he was talking about,’ I said.
‘Did he?’ Brenda said. ‘Know what he was talking about, I mean?’
‘No.’
At 08.00, we pulled up outside a corner store along a small, grim, grey shopping parade. It wasn’t busy, but it wasn’t as deserted as Sloane had said it would be. Griggs was driving the car. Sloane got out, pulling down his balaclava. I followed. Sloane was carrying a shotgun. Nobody told me I needed to be tooled up. I’d thought someone would mention it. I’d thought they knew what they were doing. Sloane fished a crowbar out of the car boot and gave it to me, told me to stand there, told me he’d do the business and if anyone gave us grief to smack them with the crowbar.
We walked into the shop and along the aisles of canned goods and chocolate bars and dusty magazines. We reached the meshed-in cubicle at the back. Some old geezer with a cloth cap and a young pregnant woman with bags of shopping at her feet were waiting for service from a middle-aged Asian woman. The Asian woman looked up and saw Sloane and I saw straightaway that she wasn’t going to play ball. Her eyes widened with shock, and then anger kicked in. She waved her arm back and forth. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Not again.’ Sloane raised the shotgun and told her to give him the money. She started to gather her till and collect the cash into a safety box, all the time waving a finger at Sloane.
Brenda was smiling.
‘She had guts, that woman.’
‘Yeah. More than Sloane did.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Threatened her, shouted at her, waved his shotgun about.’
Then the old bloke lifted his stick and started beating Sloane over the head with it. ‘Fucking bastard,’ he called Sloane. ‘Scum, the lot of you.’ Sloane covered his head with his arms while the old man pummelled him. Then the lady with the shopping bags started on him.
Brenda laughed.
‘I would’ve liked to have seen that,’ she said. ‘What did you do?’
‘I thought about helping him and decided, fuck him, and fuck Griggs too. The whole thing had been bodged. I was no professional at the game but even I could see that Sloane was an idiot. I turned and started to walk out. I heard Sloane shouting to me to help him, but I carried on walking.’
And that was how I got shot the second time. Sl
oane let off both barrels at me. It was a sawn-off and he was being knocked about and I was a good twenty feet away, so the scatter pattern of shot sprayed half the window and shopfront. But some of it hit me in the back and I ended up sprawled over the magazines and by the time I was outside the back of my shirt was soaked in blood. I reached into the car, pulled Griggs out, and drove off.
‘God,’ Brenda said. ‘You were lucky you weren’t killed.’
‘Damned lucky.’
‘What happened to the others? Sloane and Griggs?’
The cigarette burned between her fingers, the mug sat on the table, her hand holding it loosely. She seemed to have forgotten about all that. She seemed to have forgotten everything for a moment, caught up in the sad story of a sad fucking life that I was telling her. I suppose she at least forgot about her own sad story while I was telling her mine. Maybe that’s what stories are all about, forgetting. I guess she knew this better than I did.
‘I don’t know what happened to them,’ I said. ‘They probably ended up doing long stretches somewhere – they must have done – but they didn’t have my real name so they couldn’t grass me up. I’d been stupid, but I was clear. Like you say, I was lucky.’
And that was that.
‘That was that,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
Afterwards, I came back to Tottenham. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I’d learned my lesson.
She mashed her cigarette.
‘Promise me you won’t get shot again,’ she said, flattening the cigarette, squashing it too much, concentrating all her effort on it.
‘I can’t do that,’ I said.
She finally abandoned the cigarette. After a while, she looked at me.
‘I don’t want you having any more scars. Please. Promise me.’
‘I was stupid before. I worked with idiots. I promise I won’t do that again.’
‘Promise me you won’t get shot.’
‘How can I?’
‘I don’t care if you don’t mean it, Joe. I don’t care if you lie or pretend. Just tell me, promise me. Promise me that I won’t have to see any new scars on you.’