7.20am. Thursday, 9th November
North stirred, blinking his heavy eyes as names and numbers swam in and out of his vision. Beer delivery Thursday. No lager. Noughts and crosses. Strings of credit card numbers with names against them. Katya can’t do Fridays. Hangman with a dangling stick figure, its face blank under the half-finished word “DANG-R”. Drawings of pendulous breasts, flowering vulvas and immense penises. More drawings of copulating couples in intricate poses. Jess’s name over and over like a graffiti tag.
Across the room the green-shaded lamp lit Stella as she worked at the desk, her hunched shadow huge and monstrous as North struggled to bring the room into focus. She put down the phone and turned to scrawl something, and the chalk shrieked, hurting his ears, insinuating itself into his brain. He closed his eyes then opened them again.
His name was North, he reminded himself, and he had a job to do. He raised his head from the scoop of the pillow and a grenade went off inside of him, throwing him back into the dark. Hours passed – he didn’t know how many but when he opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was his watch – the green figures in the gloom, it was past noon, and Stella was gone. He hadn’t dreamed it – the breasts and the hanging man were still there, chalked up on a wall which had been painted with blackboard paint. Cardboard boxes lined the other three walls. Gin, whisky, cigarettes. North fought the urge to open a box, then a bottle, then another bottle and blot it all out like he did five years ago when he left the Army and tried to drown the voices in his head. Peggy’s notebook? He lifted his head again. There was no notebook anywhere close. It had burned along with Peggy’s house and Jimmy the Sniff.
The truckle bed was lumpy and narrow but it beat the cold hard ground he hit a few hours before. As did the sight of Jess in red leather trousers and a hot pink halterneck in the doorway.
“Mam says you attract trouble like dead meat attracts flies.” The girl sauntered towards him, the scent of popcorn and temptation coming with her. The red curls were loose now, artful and dishevelled, like she’d lifted them off the nape of her neck to shake them before she made her entrance.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” North eased himself up in bed which rocked precariously, revealing his nakedness. Naked that is aside from a bandage wrapped tight around his stomach, and he thought of Honor’s bandaged wrist, wondered if it was healing. He covered himself over with the sheet and blanket.
“Stella brought me back to the club?”
“She says you promised her money and she doesn’t want you dying before you hand it over. But I think she likes you.”
Perched on the edge of the bed, her warmth against the length of his thigh, North did his best to ignore the sensation.
“Mam doesn’t usually like men.”
“She must have liked your father.”
“Nah. She shagged a bull or a swan or the Holy Ghost. Her story changes depending on the drink and the moon. When I was younger, I decided she liked a man once but changed her mind after, and ate him like a fat hairy spider.”
She moved a fraction closer – dimpling as she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead as if to check his temperature. Her fingers were cool. “We should get married before she gobbles you up. We’d make beautiful babies. A girl and a boy, one for you and one for me.”
He removed her other hand from beneath the tangle of sheet and blanket at the exact moment Stella appeared in the office doorway, bringing with her a smell of smoke and burning.
“Out,” she barked, and Jess eased herself up from the bed, her legs impossibly long.
“Cheryl for the girl,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “And Sting for the boy. Or Bonnie for the girl and Clyde for the boy. Or…” Her voice wailed in protest as Stella shut the door on her.
North heaved his legs over the edge of the bed, his skull filling with blood. Pain screaming out through his eyeballs as he swung himself around, all the while attempting to ignore his shrieking bones. He allowed his fingertips to graze the bandage.
Thought of the New Army ambulance which drove Peggy away into the unknown.
Peggy’s notebook.
The rending noise of the jacket.
Falling.
“It didn’t go that deep. It’s clean and I put a stitch in it,” Stella tossed a bundle of clothes laid over a bent elmwood chair towards him. “It won’t be that kills you. And I’m adding the costs of the new outfit to your bill by the way.”
“What will it be then?” North eased himself into a long-sleeved black jumper as she pulled at a chain and the dusty roller blind snapped open – streetlights glaring in through the narrow grimey window.
“Me – if you mess around with Jess.”
Gingerly he pushed his legs into the jeans, pulling them up his legs and over his hips. “I don’t chase tornados.”
“But do you set light to houses?” Stella’s arms were folded across her considerable chest. “Do you kill no-marks?”
North shook his head. “Not my style.”
She was staring at him. Hard.
“If you didn’t burn down that house and kill Jimmy, that means someone else did. Whoever you’re up against, Michael North, isn’t messing. Ned had no street-smarts. People like you and me though, we know how to get through. And this isn’t the way.”
North thought about everything he’d done to survive. The Army. The Board. The sins and crimes. Enemies he killed before they killed him. Those he killed because he was told to kill. He didn’t know what Stella did, but he was guessing – bad things. It was in the eyes. Always. Right at the back.
She had him all worked out too. At least who he used to be, but he wasn’t that man any more.
Honor was in London in the arms of the man he had failed to warn her against. If she wasn’t cold and dead already. Her chutzpah on the park bench as she smoked the cigarette and waited for him. Stretched out in the bath scrabbling at the hands of an assailant who wasn’t distracted by her beauty, someone who hadn’t seen her as anything but a job to be done. A line to be drawn. The memory stick they risked her life for that he lost in the deep blue sea. Peggy’s notebook in ashes.
“Give it up, North. This isn’t your fight and it only ends one way.”
He smiled at Stella. Not the courteous smile he spent on strangers. Not with the easy charm he used on easy women. But the smile of one pal to another. Stella came looking for him when she didn’t have to. Not for ten grand. She rescued him when she could have left him to lie on the ground and die there. There were no silk-ribboned medals in it for her. But you didn’t leave a friend, wounded and bleeding out in the field whatever the cost to yourself. You went the distance. Risked everything. Regretted nothing.
“Can you get Fang over here?”