‘I’ll give him the skull-and-crossbones. That’s what they put on dangerous stuff when they dump it – yeh, red skull with black cross-bones, right across his back.’ Wayne pushed the slide control with his thumb and the shrill whine ascended the scale to a thin screech, like the point of a steel nail being dragged across a blackboard.
The fat boy uncoiled the cable with a twist of the wrist. He placed his bandaged arm on my shoulder, using it as a rest for the hand doing the artwork. ‘Eyes down for a full house.’
‘Make the bastard have it,’ said Ray through his bloody handkerchief. ‘Make the bugger scream.’
The needle dug in. My flesh shivered. If I tried to move, attempted to evade it, the pain intensified as the needle snagged and tore. I couldn’t move my arms, they were strapped to the chair. All I could do was hang my head and shut my eyes, feeling the jab-jab-jab as the needle scrawled a burning arc across my back. Wayne hummed, happy at his work.
‘The tape,’ the blonde woman said. ‘Ask him about the tape.’
‘As if I didn’t have enough on my plate,’ Benson grumbled. ‘I’m trying to run a business. Why didn’t he keep out of it?’
‘I hope that’s a dirty needle you’re using,’ Ray said.
Their disembodied voices weaved through the crawling pain. The track of the needle felt aimless, malicious, puncturing my skin for the fun of it; Wayne probably wasn’t using ink at all, and there was no pattern or design. Just enjoying the raw jab of the dry needle for its own sake. My head ached terribly – as if the pulpy grey brain tissue was inflamed and seeking to squeeze through the orifices of my skull.
‘Ask him about the tape,’ Susan said.
Wayne pressed on, setting my back on fire. ‘You can’t beat job satisfaction,’ he breathed, his breath warm and foul.
‘There’s just no gratitude any more,’ Benson said sadly. ‘People are too damn selfish. You do your utmost, offer them chances, opportunities – you give them work, for God’s sake – and they think you’re trying to screw them.’
‘He should never have got out,’ the blonde woman said with extreme irritation. ‘What does that old fool Morduch think he’s playing at?’
‘Britain used to be the sick man of Europe, but not any more,’ Benson said. ‘Hard work and profit and enterprise aren’t dirty words like they used to be. Lean and fit, trim the fat, that’s the watchword today. This is the latter half of the twentieth century. You’ve got to keep abreast of technology, can’t let the grass grow. The Yanks, Nips and Krauts have had it all their own way for far too long.’
A cold wind blew from somewhere.
‘This is a grave setback, I hope you realise that,’ Dr Morduch said. ‘We don’t expect gratitude but we do expect cooperation. Everything is for your own good, we thought that was understood.’
His tone was sad too, reproachful, as if to imply that a patient’s recalcitrance was an insult to him personally.
‘People are too damn selfish nowadays,’ Benson said.
‘Make the bugger scream,’ Ray said through his crusted handkerchief.
Dr Pitt-Rivers tutted and shook his head. Long straggling strands of reddish hair hung down either side of his face. His drooping moustache, a paler shade than his tangled gingerish mop, gave him a mournful, hangdog look. He wore a safari jacket with bulging pockets and a woollen tie in a loose, careless knot, the collar points of his green shirt faded and wrinkled with wear and washing. His teeth, which he tried to keep hidden behind the drooping moustache, were brown, inward-sloping, congenitally bad. He sighed. ‘Our resources are stretched as it is.’
‘Indeed they are,’ said Dr Morduch, flicking invisible dust from a chair with his pocket handkerchief. He sat down, Dr Pitt-Rivers folding his tall, gangling, crumpled form into the chair beside him.
It was a bare, functionless room with hard upright chairs and a wooden table with a formica top. There were two pictures on the emulsioned walls: a Eurasian girl with a green face and large dark liquid eyes, and a herd of elephants trampling the veldt through billowing clouds of ochre dust. The room contained nothing else, no filing cabinets, no phone, no hatstand.
Frowning, Dr Morduch touched the small, precise knot in his tie, patterned with tiny blue rosebuds. The dome of his head seemed to thrust itself through his white hair, the glimmer of pink scalp beneath. He laced his manicured fingers together and put them on the table in front of him where he could keep an eye on them.
‘Have you nothing to say for yourself?’
‘Whatever I say you’ll think I’m mad.’
Dr Morduch winced slightly and lifted his hand. ‘We don’t employ such terms in behavioural psychotherapy, you should know that by now. You’re not mad, any more than I am, or Roger here. You suffered an emotional shock, the death of you wife, for which you blame yourself, with a consequent loss of self-esteem and personal worth, leading to a feeling of estrangement from the community, believing yourself to be superfluous and of no value. You entered a state that a lay person would regard as a deep and prolonged depression, but which we term “externality”. That is to say, the patient feels himself to be at a distance, separate, isolated from his fellow man. He ceases to function as an integrated member of society, loses his sense of purpose and identity, and becomes – or feels himself to be – alien, externalised. You understand what I’m saying?’
There was a silence. Dr Pitt-Rivers took a naked Polo mint from one of his bulging pockets and slipped it under his moustache.
It seemed as if time had stopped. We all waited for something, anything, to happen – the millenium, an event to jerk us onward.
In a subliminal instant, quick as a lightning flash, I saw the bare jagged arms of a tree reaching across a starfield. The cold wind blew.
‘We can’t expect him to fully understand,’ said Dr Pitt-Rivers in an aside.
‘Of course not. I don’t expect it.’
‘He’s been off the medication.’
‘That shouldn’t make any difference. If anything it should sharpen his recall.’
‘Well – I think it has. Don’t you?’
‘Perhaps. Yes,’ said Dr Morduch cautiously. ‘But possibly to the detriment of self and in favour of the regressed memory. He has a choice, you see, and he’s chosen the other.’
‘Another sign of extended externality?’
‘More than likely.’
‘At the moment his strongest feeling is probably one of guilt,’ Dr Pitt-Rivers speculated aloud. ‘Is that an accurate assessment of how you feel?’ he asked me hopefully, raising his eyebrows and smiling, while keeping his mouth closed.
I nodded. ‘Yes.’
Lying bastard
‘Well, at least, that’s progress of a sort, I suppose,’ said Dr Pitt-Rivers with a smile of quiet satisfaction.
‘You think so?’
‘Why yes, I should have said so. Getting him to admit it.’ He sucked hollowly on the Polo mint.
‘He may not be telling the truth.’
‘Why should he lie?’
Dr Morduch pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger, a mannerism which seemed to indicate that he had a wearisome duty to perform.
‘Don’t you remember – the two selves in opposition, one past, one present? He renounced his previous self, cast him out, in a wilful act of externalisation. The invented second self was therefore free of all blame – had done no wrong – while the previous self was made to carry the burden of guilt.’ Dr Morduch gave a small shrug. ‘When the facts don’t accord with one’s wishes and desires one constructs, or borrows, an alternative reality and a new set of facts to fit it.’
‘The plot to kill his wife, tamper with the brakes …’ Dr Pitt-Rivers tried to fathom it out. ‘What about that? True or false?’
‘No, I butted in. ‘That wasn’t me. I didn’t do it …’
You little sly
Lying bastard
You know
Damn well
It was you
‘It wasn’t,’ I said. ‘I loved her!’
In a pig’s eye
You loved her
You wanted rid
And you did it
‘Disentangling fact from fiction in cases like this is a minefield,’ said Dr Morduch, his face hollow and austere. ‘Who can say? The plot to kill her exists in the same frame of reference that incorporates the invented other self. It all depends which form of reality he chooses to believe in.’
‘Another manifestation of externality.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But I didn’t kill her,’ I said. ‘Benson did.’
‘And who is this Benson?’ inquired Dr Morduch indulgently.
I floundered. I couldn’t answer. Benson was somebody I didn’t know, had never met. I knew only that he lived in Brickton. And that he and Susan had had an affair, of course.
There was another lull, another empty period of timelessness in which the cold wind blew, as if the actors in the scene had forgotten whose line came next. It happened to be Smith’s.
Stop lying
Murdering Bastard!
You killed her
I know
Because I was there
I saw
You do it
And for that
You will pay
With your life
I tried to move, to get away, but the restraining straps held me fast. They chafed my wrists. I twisted and bucked. I shouted, ‘Let me out, please, he’s coming for me, let me go!’ and the blonde woman who was called Susan said, ‘What was that? What did he say?’
‘First self?’ said Dr Pitt-Rivers, slipping a Polo mint under his straggling moustache.
Dr Morduch nodded. He said wearily, ‘And I had such high hopes. Better ring for the orderly and prepare an injection.’ He chewed his lips. ‘When did this personality regression start, I wonder? Before Holford arrived at the Clinic or after?’
‘Is it important?’
Go on
Tell them
‘I won’t,’ I screamed, ‘because it isn’t true.’
Confess it
Cleanse yourself
‘I won’t confess to something I didn’t do!’
‘It might be, it might be,’ said Dr Morduch, musing. ‘Tampering with his food was the first indication of contra-identity fixation. You want to destroy the self, but naturally the self objects, rebels. So you switch horses in mid-stream, as it were, and fixate on something, or someone, external, which transfers the guilt and relieves the pain.’
‘But he’s never blamed Holford for his wife’s death – has he?’ asked Dr Pitt-Rivers, blinking, crunching the mint, getting lost.
‘No. At least not to our knowledge. All right, orderly, take him back. Roger, will you go along with him and calm him down. Up the dose or he’ll disturb the entire unit.’
‘Of course.’ Dr Pitt-Rivers rubbed his palms together. ‘Nothing better than a man in love with his work.’
The needle dug in, deep. It hurt me.
‘Make the bastard have it,’ Ray said. ‘Make the bugger scream.’
‘The tape. Ask him about the tape,’ Susan said.
‘Why didn’t he keep out of it? All I’m trying to do is run a business,’ Benson said plaintively. ‘As if I didn’t have enough on my plate. There’s just no gratitude any more.’
My back felt cold and wet. My head throbbed. If I refused to tell them where the tape was they would continue to torture me. But if I told them they would kill me. By not telling them I would ensure that the agony went on and on. The fat boy and his mindless malicious scrawling.
Dig deeper
Deeper
Deeper
Deeper
‘He wouldn’t have done anything with it anyway,’ Benson said derisively. ‘His sort never carry out their threats. They agonise but they never do a thing. You never get anywhere by just thinking about it.’
‘Another candidate for the mud,’ Wayne chuckled.
‘Ask him about the tape,’ the blonde woman said.
‘Why can’t we all pull together?’ Benson asked forlornly. ‘There’s no place for strife in a modern market economy. In some ways the Nazis had the right idea. They knew they were up against it and they transformed their country by a massive effort of will. There’s no reason why we can’t do the same, given the right incentive.’
The cold wind blew.
I shivered and opened my eyes. The moon was a cold hard veined balloon balancing on the branches of a tree. My overcoat was sucking in moisture from the misty damp grass. There was the raucous clamour of dogs. I raised my hand and gingerly touched my forehead, which was swollen and inflamed. Demons with bells were on the rampage: the echoes of the slamming blow still ringing inside my skull. I levered myself up, then dropped flat to the earth again as silhouettes tumbled through the bright rectangle of the kitchen door and merged into the greyness of trees and shrubbery. I saw a nimbus of light around the woman’s silvery blonde cap of hair. She was stabbing her finger, pointing frantically – ‘The gate! Watch the gate!’
Figures ran off.
‘Turn Sheba and Che loose.’
‘What? Are you mad?’ Benson halted indecisively in the trapezium of light sprawling across the gravel. He looked back at her. ‘For God’s sake, you know what’ll happen. They’ll tear him to pieces.’
‘You’d rather he got away, would you?’
‘There – who’s that!’ Benson said suddenly.
‘Me,’ a voice called back, crashing about. ‘Gaz.’
‘Get across to the churchyard wall,’ Susan said. ‘If you see him, shout.’ Gaz crashed away through the shrubbery, cursing.
‘Shouldn’t we call the police?’ Ruth Benson said.
‘Don’t be so bloody—’ Benson began and checked himself. ‘Get inside, Ruth. We’ll take care of this. Fetch me a torch.’
I turned over onto my stomach and crawled behind the tree. Benson came forward, peering left and right, his elongated shadow reaching over the gravel and across the grass to where I lay. He crept onto the grass, crouching a little. Like a child playing Hide and Seek I concealed my face inside my folded arms and pressed the insides of my legs together to keep within the shadow of the tree trunk. I could hear the whisper of his shoes in the grass and the wheezing rasp of his smoker’s breathing. Footsteps ran nimbly across the gravel, and I heard Ruth Benson say, ‘Here you are,’ followed by a click as Benson switched on the torch – the metallic snap so close and loud that I thought he must be standing directly above me. But when I raised my head the torchbeam was dancing away over the grass to my right.
Ruth Benson had returned to stand with the blonde woman in the spill of light from the kitchen door. I squirmed nearer to the tree. Benson was behind me now, moving through the trees, the torchbeam making systematic sweeps. I had only to lie completely still, hidden in shadow, and let the circle of searchers widen and spread and ebb into the outer darkness; then if I waited for the right moment I could approach from behind, pick the weakest spot and slip through. That was the plan. But it wouldn’t work while the blonde woman and Ruth Benson remained where they were, less than ten yards away.
I rolled onto one elbow and squinted over my shoulder to where the beam flashed over the grass. Benson was almost at the churchyard wall. I heard the snatch of someone’s voice say, ‘… can’t have got this far,’ and Benson muttering something back, which sounded gruff with anger or fear or both. Very slowly I drew my legs up and hunched myself into a kneeling position. The blonde woman had wandered round towards the front of the house, keeping an eye on Benson’s progress, and Ruth Benson drifted after her, clasping and rubbing her upper arms as if chilled to the bone.
In one slow, stealthy movement I brought my leg up and put my foot flat on the ground and eased myself erect. For a minute I just stood there, swaying, as wave after wave of dizziness and nausea swept over me, pressing my hands for support against the smooth bark of the tree trunk. My head throbbed atrociously. My forehead was running with ice-cold sweat. I sucked in air, breathing deeply and evenly, and gradually the dizziness receded.
Wits collected, I tensed and got ready to run …
And just at that precise moment, as luck would have it, a passing car slowed to take the bend in the road next to the church, its headlights slowly raking through the trees and exposing me as in the beams of searchlights.
The blonde woman was very quick and quite fearless: she saw me and charged straight at me, eyes glittering in fury, shouting at the top of her voice and waving her arms. Benson and Gaz came running through the trees. From another direction Ray appeared, Wayne panting and puffing behind him. I tried to ward Susan off, but it only took Gaz a matter of seconds to get his favourite hold on me, arms behind my back and locked in the crook of his elbow, his thick wrist hard against my Adam’s apple. Ray’s one-dimensional shadow circled round, darted forward, and kicked my shin. As in my concussive delirium he was holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose.
Gaz had no choice but to support me as my leg gave way. I heard Benson say, ‘All right, cut it out, that’s enough. Not in front of my daughter.’
We moved as a group across the gravel and into the kitchen. Once inside, Ruth Benson rounded on her father. ‘I don’t get this. Are you going to tell me what’s going on? Why don’t you call the police?’
‘Ruth, darling, I’ve already told you, this is business—’
‘Stop treating me like a bloody child!’
‘Neville.’ Susan glared at Benson, her face taut and hard under the harsh lighting. ‘Please make your daughter go to her room now, this instant. Will you do this small thing for me?’
Benson nodded grimly and practically manhandled his daughter across the kitchen to the door. She struggled and tried to turn round to look at me, and as I started to say something Susan gave Gaz a quick flashing glance that brought his wrist hard against my throat, making me choke and cough.
Benson got his daughter out of the kitchen. Ruth Benson’s voice could still be heard, faintly but querulously protesting, through the connecting door. She was, or had been, my last and only hope, and now that hope was dead and gone.
The blonde woman went out and came back a minute later lighting a cigarette with a gold lighter. She pushed back her sleeves and leaned against one of the island units, taking in deep lungfuls of smoke. ‘Christ what a mess,’ she murmured to no one in particular. ‘What do you want out of this?’ she asked me. ‘Money?’ Are you trying to blackmail us or what? And why go around calling yourself after somebody who’s dead?’
She blinked several times and opened her eyes very wide. Something that almost resembled a smile flitted across her smooth face.
‘You were in the clinic, weren’t you – but you didn’t have a beard then, and your hair was different, it was cropped and grey … I remember now, when I was visiting Peter, I saw you!’ Then she did something that was unexpected and completely out of character: she threw back her head and gave a shrill peal of laughter, her teeth small and white against the red roof of her mouth. ‘Christ, that’s it – that’s how you came to know Peter. You’re one of Morduch’s head cases …’
‘Why don’t we just dump him then and get shut?’ Wayne said. ‘If he’s a nutter nobody’s going to miss him. Another swift harbour job.’
‘Not without first getting the tape back. Suppose the police get hold of it, or that old buffoon, Councillor Potter? That’s all he’d need, and we can kiss the EC grant and the marina development goodbye. And my dear departed husband’s name crops up on it too, remember? The man who was going to blow the whistle before you gave him a terminal tattoo.’
Gaz held me close, breathing down my neck. Susan smoked her cigarette and looked at me narrowly across the bright kitchen as if deciding and debating with herself what to do. Benson came in, white-lipped and angry, and listened as she repeated more or less what she had just said. Benson twitched as if shrugging off the whole miserable business; he seemed distracted, almost disinterested.
‘Do what you bloodywell like.’ He turned his back on her.
‘All this is for your benefit,’ Susan said contemptuously. ‘If you were half a man you’d do it yourself.’
Wayne unzipped the soft leather pouch, and Benson said rapidly, ‘Not here, not in this house, I won’t have it.’
‘We mustn’t disturb poor Ruth, must we? Of course not. Let’s keep her pure and unsullied.’
For a moment they stared at one another, the blonde woman’s gaze like a laser beam. Then she tossed her cigarette into the sink and walked past him, ignoring him, speaking to Wayne. ‘All right, put him in the Mercedes. We’ll take him to the shop.’
It was very strange, because it bothered me less what was about to happen to me than that this wasn’t the woman I thought I had loved. Not the same woman. Those years of marriage had happened not to me but to someone else. Susan wasn’t Susan and I wasn’t me. She was a stranger, and I was stranger to myself, inhabiting my own body. The marriage had been between two other people we didn’t know: the unfamiliar stench of her perfume told me that.
The blonde woman, Susan, Holford’s wife, Benson’s mistress drove, Ray next to her, with me in the back between Wayne and Gaz. After driving for a while in hushed pneumatic splendour along dark country lanes we arrived at the main road. As the car turned onto it, surging smoothly forward with muted power, Ray leaned his sharp face towards the windscreen and said, ‘Shit and corruption, what’s that? What’s going on?’
The car slowed almost immediately, coasting down to walking pace. There were flashing blue lights, a striped barrier, figures in yellow waterproofs laying out cones. Distantly a siren wailed.
In a panic, Ray gabbled, ‘Go back. Turn round. It’s the fuzz.’
Headlights from behind illuminated the interior of the car.
The blonde woman in the driving seat said calmly, ‘I can’t turn now, they’ll think something’s wrong.’ She spoke over her shoulder. ‘Keep him quiet. I don’t care how you do it.’
A hand waved us down and the car rolled to a stop in front of the barrier. A policeman in a cape and chequered cap stepped forward. Susan operated the electric window. Gaz’s arm was like a sandbag across my shoulders. But they couldn’t shut my mouth, not without at least a struggle. I waited for the policeman to approach, getting ready to yell, scream, anything, and then I heard a soft metallic chink, and Wayne was holding my hand in his bandaged hand and murmuring confidentially as between friends, his breath like sewer gas, ‘Can you feel that against your wrist, squire? Loaded up and ready to squirt. A full dose into the artery and straight to the heart if you so much as squeak.’
‘Accident half a mile down here, madam. A petrol tanker on fire, road completely blocked. Where are you heading for?’
‘Brickton.’
‘Bear left and follow the cones. Detour via Blindcrake. It’ll bring you back onto the A595 north of Granthelme.’
In the reflected glow of headlights from the car behind the point of the needle glinted against my exposed wrist. I was incapable of sound or movement. I listened to the blonde woman thanking the policeman, who was stepping back and waving us through, and the window purred shut as the car gained speed, following the slanting line of cones. We slid past the barrier and the flashing blue lights into the dense blackness of a country lane, on the way to Blindcrake, the caterwaul of an ambulance siren rising in the distance.
‘Jesus fucking Nora,’ Ray said in a shuddering breath. He slumped back in the front passenger seat.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Susan said, her voice like a slap. ‘Keep your gutter language to yourself or get out and walk.’
Wayne said: ‘Shame about missing that. I enjoy a good blaze. Tankers burn great.’ Grinning fatly, he held up the syringe for me to see, which had been empty all along.
There was nobody at all on the streets of Brickton. The traffic lights signalled to imaginary traffic. A burglar alarm above a discount jeweller’s steel-meshed window drilled on heedlessly. The Mercedes turned off the main road and glided down a side street. On the corner the E GA FOO S ORE was in darkness. I wondered whether Mrs Patundi and her remaining child were still living in the barricaded hole of their tropical basement.
Wayne unlocked the door and Gaz pushed me inside. I could hear Wayne fumbling behind the partition, and then the light came on, and blinking painfully I saw his amoebic shape rippling across the frosted glass, an alchemist in his lair, scuttling amongst his magic potions and secret powders and jars of bats’ viscera.
‘Get that overcoat off,’ Wayne said, and when I made no move Ray took great pleasure in grabbing my collar in his pale hairless hands and dragging the coat off my back. His nostrils were clogged with blood, the breath whistling through his teeth. He had a lumpy brownish swelling on his left cheekbone.
Gaz pushed me into the chair. The walls were a vibrant gloss yellow, a ragged patchwork of colour magazine pictures breaking up the terrible glare. Underneath a dusty anglepoise lamp, on a bench covered in newspaper, a mottled mirror with a broken edge was propped against a shelf, and next to the mirror a tray of instruments attracted the light and flicked it across the room in tiny splinters.
‘Shove his sleeve up.’
Gaz unbuttoned my shirtsleeve and pushed my coat sleeve and shirt up to the elbow. Ray started hopping about. ‘Hang on, I’ve got to go for a slash.’ He grinned sheepishly at the blonde woman and crept out through the door at the back.
Meanwhile Wayne was busy with his preparations, leaning his belly against the bench as he unzipped the leather pouch and laid out the syringe, needles and ampoule on a shallow enamel tray. He did this very neatly and carefully, with professional pride. I could feel the tremor of panic building up in my chest. What would happen if I screamed? Would anyone hear? Would anyone come running? And Gaz would choke it off at once with the crook of his elbow. Still I knew I would start screaming the instant Wayne turned and came towards me with the needle. Just as I screamed when Dr Morduch turned and came towards me with the needle in his gloved hand, his waxy yellow face looming over me and growing larger and larger like a vast yellow moon with black craters for eyes. I screamed then all right, and kept on screaming, until they taped my mouth shut and muffled my screams.
No
Not this time
The voice had come back. I wasn’t alone any more.
Not this time
Never again
‘What is that stuff?’ inquired the blonde woman, watching as the fat boy fits the needle to the syringe, withdraws the plunger, and begins to draw off rose-coloured fluid. She is standing further along the bench, her hands in the pockets of a loose sea-green satin or silk jacket.
‘One of my special brews,’ Wayne tells her, smiling his brown and red smile as he drains off the last of the fluid. ‘It’ll give him the screaming hab-dabs.’
‘He’ll tell us?’
‘Oh yeh, he’ll spill his guts. He won’t know what he’s saying.’
‘Afterwards?’
‘After what?’
‘What happens afterwards?’
The fat boy shrugs. ‘Dunno. If he’s got a bad ticker he might snuff it.’ From the back room comes the noisy gush of a lavatory. Wayne places the loaded syringe on the tray and wipes his fingers on his shirt-front. He says briefly over his shoulder, ‘Okie-dokie, strap him down.’
Come on then
Murdering Bastard
Come on
Just try it
And see
What you get
This time
I beg you
Gaz loops a leather strap over my left forearm, threads the end through the buckle and jerks it tight. The fat boy turns from the bench with the enamel tray, the broad back and whale-blubber neck reflected in the mottled surface of the mirror leaning against the shelf. Like a surgeon requiring the assistance of a nurse for a tricky operation, he hands the tray to the blonde woman to hold, then flexes his fingers, relishing the moment. ‘You’ll hardly feel a thing,’ he says throatily, as in the mirror I see him reaching for the man’s wrist. ‘Just a tiny prick.’
Also in the mirror I see that the man in the chair has a frozen smile on his face, and it strikes me that he must know a secret that no one else knows. I wonder what it is.
I watch him rear back in the chair and bring his leg up. The chair spins round on its mounting and his swinging kick sends the tray flying. There is a soft thud as the loaded syringe impales itself in the shiny leather arm of the chair, where until a second ago his hand had rested. Gaz is quick to see the danger. He regains his balance, planting his bulk solidly behind the chair, and hooks his arms around the man’s neck, using all his muscle to drag the man’s head off. I feel the man start to gag and choke, and then see him pluck the syringe from the leather arm and hold the point to the hairy wrist tight against his throat, the point of the needle pressed against the skin, his thumb on the plunger.
He feels Gaz stiffen, go still and quiet as a rock.
The fat boy takes a lurching step forward, fists bunched, and the man croaks through his tingling throat, ‘Tell the fat lump of lard to back off or I’ll use this.’ He digs the point of the needle a little deeper, almost but not quite puncturing the skin.
‘Get away,’ Gaz says huskily. ‘He’s got the fucking thing stuck in my hand.’
In a low, venomous voice the blonde woman says, ‘Hit him. Why don’t you hit the bastard!’ Though whether this is meant for Wayne or Gaz, or perhaps both of them, isn’t clear. But neither one of them makes a move. Somebody’s heart is thumping, jarring the man’s skull; it might be the man’s or Gaz’s, the man isn’t sure, nor am I.
I feel the man swallow to ease his cramped throat. ‘Undo the strap, Gaz. And do it slowly.’
Gaz reaches forward with his free hand and unbuckles the strap. His fingers leave damp stains on the leather. From the corner of his eye the man becomes aware that Ray is standing in the doorway, his face pinched and twisted. He is stupid enough, filled with enough hatred, to make a blind rush. The man realises he has perhaps ten seconds before he does, and then he sees the expression in Ray’s eyes and knows he has five or less.
Somehow he has to get up and out of the chair, but he doesn’t know how.
It is the blonde woman who decides it for him.
He has been too busy concentrating on holding the needle steady, on the threat of Wayne lurking near, on Ray’s savage expression, so that he nearly misses the blur of movement as Susan swings at him, all the lines of her face seeming to converge in a single focal point of fury. Twisting in the chair the man lets go of Gaz and grabs her flailing wrist and slams it down hard on the leather arm of the chair, holding the point of the needle above the fine tracery of veins. She gasps with the suddenness and the shock, her body bent at an awkward angle as he holds her there, wrist upturned, needle poised.
For a moment nothing at all moves, and then Wayne’s tongue creeps out like a pink nervous worm and slithers over his upper lip.
‘All right, Gaz.’ The man is panting as if he’s run a marathon. ‘Move away. Slow as you like.’ The plastic syringe is slippery in his fingers, and I’m afraid that any second he’s going to lose it.
Gaz sidles back towards the frosted glass partition. During those few seconds the man knows the syringe is starting to slide through his fingers. He waits for Gaz to get clear and then jerks the blonde woman forward in front of him, and in the same movements brushes the sweat off the syringe on her silk or satin jacket, and brings the point of the needle up to touch the side of her neck, near to where he judges the main artery lies.
He eases in close behind her, getting a firmer hold on her thin shoulder, feeling the bony projections underneath the shoulder-pad of the shiny jacket.
Wayne is slowly shaking his head, his eyes puffy slits. ‘If you hurt her, squire, you’re dead. Believe it. You’re dead meat.’
‘That’s okay then,’ the man says, ‘because by then she’ll be dead too. Just make sure you don’t bury us together.’
This is glib and flippant, but understandable, because he feels giddy with fear, and so weak that had Susan thought to reach up and take the syringe away from him he couldn’t have stopped the unfaithful, conniving bitch from doing it.
But she is shaking too – he can feel tremors down her spine as they move backwards, pressed close together. Something snaps under his heel, and he scuffs a broken needle out of the way, searching with his foot for the enamel tray so that he doesn’t slip on it, and in this crabbed fashion the two of them retreat over the cracked linoleum until they’re behind the partition. The frozen silhouettes of Wayne and Gaz loom on the frosted glass – though not Ray’s, he notices, because Ray was further back in shadow, beyond the arc of the lamp, and the man begins to imagine Ray creeping along the passage and out the back door and padding silently round the block, scheming a sneak attack. He’ll have to be damn quick though – bloody quick – because it takes less than ten seconds to get Susan through the door onto the pavement and into the car. He bundles her across from the passenger side into the driving seat, the needle aimed at her throat. Her skirt becomes entangled with the automatic shift lever, and the man wrenches it free, splitting the seam.
The savagery of his movements spurs her into life, gives her back some of her icy defiance. She even glances at him pityingly. ‘How far do you think you can run? And where to? You’re finished—’
‘I’m not running anywhere,’ I hear him tell her. ‘I’ve stopped running, Susan, darling.’
‘What?’ she says quickly.
‘There’s no need to run anywhere, now that I know what I have to do.’
She gazes at him with an odd mingled expression of fearful curiosity and vivid bright alarm. ’What do you mean – what you have to do? Do what?’
Suddenly there is a huddle of figures in the shop doorway. The pale smear of Wayne’s face stares out, a glaze of impotent hatred in his slitted eyes. The three of us in the car leave him staring and drive slowly down the empty street past the darkened windows of the E GA FOO S ORE and turn left at the corner into another empty street. This one goes more steeply downhill, becomes part of the labyrinth of back-streets leading eventually to the harbour.