CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: ROPE

 

 

ALL OF HIS horizons seemed the same, of late. Viewed under an ochre smog at dusk, the crenellations of tower blocks provided different backgrounds to the same story. Faded clothes fluttered on balconies. The ghosts of piss clouted him at the thresholds of those lifts that worked. His boots created a brittle symphony from the insect corpses underfoot. It was hard to find any comfort in the routine. His composure was found in the simple succour of his tools. That and the friend in his head.

Maybe the wood, over the years, had been eroded by his grip; that was why the baseball bat felt so comfortable as it was hefted. Ditto the blade, which might as well have been knitted into the flesh of his palm: he had to look into his hand to make sure he had remembered to pick it up. He loosened the buttons on his leather coat and stretched, forcing the tension of three hours on the road out of his spine, which crackled dully, like the sound of a dog gnawing a bone.

The estate reached above him in a series of black blocks against the night, punched through here and there with holes of television light. Only in the dark could these towers look clean, pretty, even. By dawn they would revert to sooty, scorched piggeries growing out of the city’s shit and grime. Lice and rot worming up every wall. Asthma was rife here, beating the national average by a fair whack. There had been a case of TB last year.

He approached the first of the towers, Brook Acre, gently whistling a tune he had heard on the radio that morning and swinging the bat in his fist. Grey net curtains tongued the sky from a dozen open windows. The howls of dogs were a strange, distorted surge of noise through the ginnels and stairwells of the estates. From a pall of cigarette smoke, kids watched him enter the lift and then leave it again in favour of the stairs. Laughter followed him, and couched in that was an insult: “Asshole!” uttered when he had gone beyond the point where he might catch them if he turned back.

“It’s arsehole!” he bellowed. “Arsehole! You’re not Americans! If you’re going to badmouth somebody, do it properly!”

He hated the influx of American influences. It was in the clothes kids wore nowadays; it had changed the pubs and restaurants he frequented; it was television’s primary language. He clenched his jaw when he looked down at the baseball bat. It even coloured his violence.

Whitby lived, after a fashion, on the sixth floor. There was a wife, a daughter, a son. A dog. A mistress for him on the fifth floor who scurried round to polish his knob whenever the wife was stretching pennies at the market. Cosy.

He strode into a poorly lit corridor, boots gritting on glass phials, dry vomit, stripped chicken bones. He caught an old man wanking himself off through his neighbour’s letterbox. A woman with a grubby, greenish bandage around her shin offered to fuck him in return for a quid. A child with diarrhoea had been locked out of his parents’ flat and was sitting in puddles of his own waste, crying silently, exhausted.

“All life is here, hey?” he said to the child as he walked past. “Such colour. Such spirit.”

He reached Whitby’s door and smoothed down his long hair and righted his shirt collars. He reached out a hand for the bell but never got as far as depressing it; he just wanted something to lean against, give him leverage while he kicked the flimsy thing in.

Whitby was in the hall between kitchen and living room, dressed only in a pair of beige Y-fronts. A jam sandwich in one hand, mug of tea in the other. “What the fuck? Who the fucking fuck? Fuck.”

It was all he managed before his sternum caved in under a massive blow from the baseball bat. Blood blackened his chest and piled into his face on his way down, as the internal trauma sought egress. A woman came clattering along the hall from the bathroom, holding a towel to her freshly showered body. Mistress or missus? She was squawking enough for both of them. “Leave him alone, leave him alone,” she crowed, an unpleasant, nasal voice. He lashed out and took her jaw off. She staggered away, clumsily trying to keep her face in place, her hands filling with red, towel dropping to reveal hubbie’s slap marks.

The dog was predictably big and nasty; a German Shepherd. He held out his arm, always padded on jobs like these, and waited until it had hold before slitting its throat with the knife.

“He isn’t here! You should just go away! I’ll give you money!” The daughter now, Honey (what a name for these parts, Jesus!), yelping at him, her big eyes flicking to her choking mother and her senseless father as she held out a blunt letter opener to defend herself. He decked her with a clip from the bat to the top of her head. “Keep your money,” he said.

He found the old man in a sleeping bag in a bedroom filled with cigarette ends and beer cans, soiled underwear, and towers of foil cartons.

“Excellent,” he said, noticing that the man hadn’t tried to make a noise. He regarded Sean calmly with the black, shark’s eyes they all possessed; even held out his arms when he was reached for. He had been waiting for this. Perhaps he had been wishing for it.

The old man didn’t cry when he saw his damaged family. As they left the flat he seemed to sigh with contentment.

“Too right,” growled Sean. “Anything you come to now is a blessing. Consider this a rescue.”

At the car he paused a while to search the horizon. No lights anywhere. Once this place had been a riot of colour and bright windows containing families watching television or eating supper, laughing or fighting, but always together. Now the population had thinned out. Those who had survived had run or tried to protect their dead. Those who were dead were directionless, without anchor. They wheeled around like seagulls playing on thermals, or like a confused compass. When Sean came to call, they pretended they were normal human beings leading normal lives. Normal people, with pieces of them dropping off while he chatted amiably with them in a doorway, the rope coiled around his shoulder burning with intent.

After the man was hanged and the shaved fibres from the rope deposited between his ash-grey lips, Sean dumped the body over a fence separating the rear gardens of a terraced house from a stream which dribbled along at the bottom of a deep gulley. Back in the car, he had barely started the engine before the next one came through to him.

It lives alone, Will said. It’s lost. It’s lonely. It’ll go without a struggle. It needs this. And it’s this way, Sean. Come on...

He powered the car too quickly for an hour and a half until he had reached the outskirts of a conurbation hanging on the edge of Birmingham like a wart on a scarred face.

Make a left here, Sean. Keep going. Just keep going...

There had been months of this. Closed doors, lonely motorways, miles and miles of self-doubt and nausea. He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He asked Will once, do the dead breed? and Will had laughed hard and for a long time without answering him.

...keep going...

He knocked at the door this time. He knew he didn’t need to break it down. He waited for an age, but that was okay. He didn’t mind waiting. It gave him something else to do. Something different. He clenched the rope in his fist as he heard footsteps approach the door.

She opened it wide. Late at night, all alone, but what did she have to be frightened of? He gazed at her for a long time.

“I wondered if it might ever happen,” she said.

“I have something I need to do,” he told her.

“I know. I know.”

She didn’t fight him, or plead with him. She even helped him to get the rope over a branch of the ash tree in the garden. He kissed her beforehand because she asked him to, and he would have backed out of it if she hadn’t coaxed him to carry the job through.

As she swung, just before the end, she reached out her hand and he took it. He held it until it closed and shuddered into a fist. Lifting it to his face, Sean pressed his lips against the tiny aperture that her forefinger had made behind the curled thumb, and whispered a message and a promise.

A proposal.