Chapter 11

 

Hal’s Place was mainly a takeaway but it also served as a small cafe thanks to a limited number of tables and chairs positioned at the front of the shop. It was on the same row as Edgerton’s Hardware, but it remained opened until late, taking advantage of the bus route outside that led straight into the heart of the city.

When Andy stepped inside, there were a couple of older student types in there, both eating overflowing kebabs of some description. The smell of stale lager and spiced meat drifted from them, polluting the air. Behind the counter a hunk of meat roasted on a spit. It glistened with a coat of red-hot grease.

Andy wasn’t hungry. He had barely eaten since Grandpa died, but he couldn’t get an idea out of his head on the walk home, and that was why he stopped at Hal’s Place. He needed to scratch the itch.

“Could I have a fizzy orange, please?” Andy said to the bored-looking server in the striped uniform. The man, haggard and in his mid-forties, grunted and fetched Andy a perspiring can from the chiller.

“Thirty pence.”

Andy smiled and passed him a handful of silver. He glanced at the plastic holder filled with plain white napkins, grabbed a few and stuffed them in his pocket.

“Do you have a pen or pencil I could borrow?”

The server glared at Andy as if he had asked for a blowjob. Muttering something to himself, he produced a pencil with one end chewed so badly the wood looked like mulch.

Andy took it and thanked him. He retreated to the table farthest from the two drunks eating kebabs. They ignored him, speaking loudly about a fight they had witnessed in the city. He hesitated, considered the bad things that happened when he painted. He wrestled with the desire to please Nor.

The tickets aren’t life or death. They’re just a pair of tickets.

Before he could change his mind, Andy purposefully took out the napkin and unfolded it. He pressed it flat and started to draft the Oasis tickets, gripping the pencil maybe a little too hard. He told himself to relax and tried a smile. He needed to be positive. He had never seen a concert ticket before but he imagined they weren’t unlike cinema tickets. He pulled the crumpled stub from the film he had earlier slept through, then smiling distractedly, drew a rectangular outline. He scripted the word Oasis in the way it was drawn on the cover of the Definitely Maybe album. Next to it he wrote the venue–Maine Road, followed by Saturday’s date and then the time the concert started. For credibility he created a ticket number. When he finished he repeated this so he had two tickets.

Andy sat back. Two tickets for the concert, but something was missing. It didn’t feel right. The sketch felt broken. He looked across at the server who was slicing through the hunk of meat with a cleaver, as easily as he might have run the blade through warm butter. Hot fat dripped from the stainless steel as the man worked.

Andy considered his problem as he watched the server grip the cleaver, and tried to understand what might be missing. An idea popped into his head.

He positioned his left hand as if he were holding the tickets. He noted the angle of his fingers, of how the light fell against the shape of his hand, and how it showed off the small freckle at the base of his thumb.

It didn’t take Andy long to draw and he made it so the freckle wasn’t obscured. That was the key. In the picture he held the tickets. They belonged to him now.

Andy trembled with expectation. Something happened inside him, something soared. If this worked, then material things would never be beyond him. Still, he felt a terrible unease, as if he had done something very, very bad.

“They’ll never pass as fakes!”

Andy sat upright sharply. The two drunken students had wandered over to him, leaving a mess of unwanted kebab on their table for the unhappy server to clear.

Andy politely smiled to acknowledge the joke as the taller of the pair guffawed.

“You going to the gig, mate?” said the other student, fat, maybe twenty, with acne-ridden skin and thick brown hair styled in a long, sweeping side-parting. Andy blinked. For a second the fat student looked familiar–brain-achingly so.

Andy stared at him, trying to make the connection.

“He’s talking to you, dipshit,” said the taller one, his eyes perhaps double in size behind the thick lenses of his brown-rimmed glasses. He looked familiar too and Andy shuddered with creeping deja vu when he studied them both.

The two drunks swayed dramatically and Andy couldn’t be sure whether their movement was in his head. He leaned forward and gripped the table hard, trying not to vomit.

“You pissed, mate?”

Andy shook his head. The drunks were caricatures, distortions of Mark Horne and Stephen Pritchard. It was like looking at them through a circus mirror, the type that stretches and widens. They were older, uglier, drunker. Different and yet strangely similar. He shuddered as he watched them, doubt seeping like ice-water into his brain.

Andy blinked and they were just two leering drunks again. He steadied.

“So are you going to the gig?”

“I hope so,” he said quietly.

“You got a ticket then?”

At first Andy didn’t answer. They stood over him and didn’t take the hint.

“No,” he said eventually.

The pair exchanged looks and burst out laughing. Andy shrank, wishing the anonymity he suffered at college was with him tonight. He missed his invisible shield.

“Shame,” the fat Horne said. He fished around in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a crumpled green ticket. He straightened it in front of Andy. It displayed the Oasis brand but also showed the stadium where the concert would be played. Andy’s drawing had been way off. “Because I’m going. Heh heh heh.”

The taller Pritchard produced a ticket of his own and both students started to flap them in front of Andy’s face.

“Me too. Sorry kid. Maybe you can listen to the gig on the radio!”

They both laughed and gave each other a badly coordinated high-five, before stumbling out of Hal’s Place. The anger Andy wanted to feel wouldn’t come. He watched numbly as they continued to wave the tickets at him through the cafe’s large window. Fat Horne held both tickets above his head, thrusting his arms high as if he raised a trophy.

Andy slumped and stared at his improvised sketch. He sank. It was always the way, his despair never far from assuming control. A terrible nervousness gripped him, then anger, cold and cruel.

A screech sounded outside the cafe. A sickening thud followed it. Then screams. Lots of screams.

Andy started at the noise, looked up and saw a shimmer in the window. Something blue and large moved out of view before he could focus on it.

He staggered from his seat in a daze and wandered past the man who had served him, into the street. He hardly felt the cold of the night despite the goose bumps that rippled on his skin.

The bus was stationary. Blood was smeared beyond the back tires, two terrible dark wounds spread along the road.

Andy noticed the dirty white Reebok first, upside down, laces trailing. Then he saw the hand, torn clear from the arm it belonged to, positioned as if it held something, like the hand he had earlier drawn on a napkin. There was so much blood. He stood over the mess and saw the freckle on the base of the thumb, the sinews twitching from the dismembered wrist. He took a faltering step back, tripped on the curb and fell to the ground. The screams amplified as if they were inside his skull. He pressed his hands against his temples, the pressure growing and the smell of blood overpowering. He was too close.

His vision cleared unexpectedly. The severed hand held two tickets, spattered with drops of blood.

Andy scrambled to his feet in revulsion. The Oasis tickets screamed at him from the carnage. He took a step away from the madness. The pain in his chest was severe, debilitating.

He left the tickets and fled.