50

Haggs spoke into his cellphone: ‘We need to meet, Twiddie.’

Twiddie asked, ‘Something up?’

‘I want a chat.’ Haggs was aware of a happy bunch of golfers walking past, toting their bags. A birdie at the twelfth, somebody said. When did you last see a birdie at the twelfth? One of the players laughed and said, It’s not nice to toot your own horn, Archie.

Haggs waited until the party had gone inside the clubhouse before he spoke again. ‘Bring Rita.’

‘Name a place,’ Twiddie said.

‘The usual,’ Haggs said.

Twiddie powered off his cellphone and looked at his sausage sandwich. Brown sauce oozed out between the two pieces of bread and dripped on to the table. Rita, dressed only in a pair of pink panties that matched the glitter she’d applied to her nipples, smoked a cigarette and leafed the pages of one of the glossy magazines she so enjoyed. Other lives. Glamorous ones. Big houses with gardens, bright flowers and kids. Places where it never rained. You never saw rain in any of these glossy journals. People fried in eternal sunshine. I want to go there, she thought. Out of here. Away from these streets.

‘He wants to see us,’ Twiddie said. He sucked brown sauce from the back of his hand.

‘What for?’

‘He sounded sharpish. Mibbe it’s about that … van.’

Rita tossed the magazine to the floor. She dropped her cigarette inside a beer bottle and it sizzled briefly. ‘The van, the van, I wish this bloody van would just go away.’

‘You’d better get dressed. Haggs wants us. We’ve been ordered. Our Lord and Master has spoken.’

Rita stood up, stretched her muscular arms. ‘And we obey.’

‘I think I’m turning into one of them – what do you call them – an atheist.’

‘An atheist?’ Rita made a mocking ooooeee sound. ‘Mother Philomena always told us atheists go to hell.’

‘There’s no such place.’

‘If you’re a dried-out old Mother Superior there is.’

‘My nose still hurts,’ Twiddie said, and touched his reddened nostril gently.