9

She sat on a bench in Elder Park, a couple of hundred yards from Govan public library. There was a dead air about Govan, she thought, an aura of unemployment, lives scratched out of nothing. She imagined a camera shot from high overhead, depicting the tenements along Govan Road, and the cranes perched at the river’s edge, where only a couple of small shipyards now operated.

Her grandfather had worked in the shipyards in the days when glorious ocean-going liners were built on the Clyde. Her father might have done the same if the industry hadn’t collapsed. He’d gone to Canada in search of work. He said he’d find a job in Toronto, he’d write, send money, and one day she and her mother would join him. Big shot, big promise.

Nobody ever heard from him again.

Sometimes she wondered if he’d started a new life in a Toronto suburb or wherever, and just erased the old entirely. New wife, kids, house. He disappeared inside a mist of memory, and even when she tried to bring his face to mind she wasn’t sure if the image bore any resemblance to the man. Ten years after he’d vanished, her mother – who’d indiscriminately taken a series of casual lovers, sailors, salesmen, drifters – died of diabetic complications.

The past is over, she thought. You don’t need to go there. But she could smell her father sometimes, stale tobacco hanging in his clothes, the damp stink when he took his shoes off and stuck his feet in front of the coal fire. And she could hear her mother have sex in the recess bed in the kitchen with strangers, the racketing of mattress springs, her mother hushing her partners into quiet, the eventual gasps and cries of release and intoxicated laughter. Some of these men were black. She remembered them leaving in the middle of the night, or at daybreak, faces glistening with sweat, steps stealthy. Once, late at night, she’d bumped into one of them in the narrow hallway that led to the toilet, and he’d reached out to stroke her face or pat her head, and she’d recoiled from the strangeness of his skin, and the strong odour of his sweat: from his naked blackness.

Little girl, he’d said, and laughed in a deep way. I’m just being friendly.

She’d run to her room, which was a closet containing a tiny mattress, and she’d pulled her face under the sheets and lain there trembling. A black man, black as that oily tar spread in summers by road crews, and he’d haunted her dreams for a long time after.

The sun was slipping beyond trees now. Two adolescent boys with long shadows threw a limegreen tennis ball back and forth. She thought of the man going over the balcony. Dropped into the night like a stone.

Yes. It was the right thing. The only thing.

She thought of him inside her. Fucking her. She felt unclean.

She gazed at the lights in the windows of the library. Some of her time she lived in a third-floor flat in Langlands Road, a few blocks from the park. The nameplate nailed to her door read RJ McKay, probably the previous tenant. She kept the name because it afforded her anonymity. Uncarpeted, sparsely furnished, the flat wasn’t a home. She stored a few suitcases of clothing there, but not all. Her possessions were scattered in other rooms and bedsits about the city. She liked this dispersal of her belongings; anyone trying to track her movements would find a series of false trails and tantalizing clues.

She rose, walked round the bench, felt darkness gather in the greenery. She checked her watch: 7.30. She wasn’t sure what time the park closed. She shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her blue jeans. A chill was forming in the night air. She zipped her brown leather jacket shut and kicked damp grass with her burgundy Docs. She was impatient.

7.42.

She saw him come from the direction of the library. He was looking down at his feet like a child counting his steps. You can’t always get the people you need, she thought. You take what’s available. The gullible, the lonely who wanted to belong to something, anything. Only a few had potential.

She sat on the bench, crossed her legs. She raised her face just as he reached her: it was always a rush to see the effect she had on him. He was severely smitten. His lunar white face flushed. She knew how to turn his head the full three-sixty.

‘I heard on the radio,’ she said.

‘Went like a dream.’

He sat beside her. She smelled booze on his breath. She said, I told you no drinking. Emphatically. What did I tell you?’

‘One pint zall I had. Cross my heart.’

‘Alone or what?’

‘On my tod,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘Does that matter?’ A small rebellion in his voice.

‘This is serious. The whole structure’s serious. We’re not playing some fucking game, Beezer. If I ask a question, you answer. You don’t like the rules, get on your bike.’

‘Awright. Brechin’s Bar.’

‘You talk to anybody there?’

‘Not a soul.’

‘You think I’m a bossy bitch.’

‘No, no, I don’t –’

‘I have people I answer to. The people I answer to have people they answer to. It goes on. I don’t know where it finishes. We keep secrets. You think I’m a bitch, that doesn’t matter a fuck to me. The world’s going down the kludgie and I don’t have time for your petty-arsed concerns.’

‘I don’t need lectures. Jeez-us.’ He looked offended. He stared in the direction of the boys throwing the ball. The dog was running this way and that, confused and frothing.

‘We all need reminders,’ she said. She pushed a hand through her black hair, which she wore back in a ponytail held in place by an elastic band. She snapped off the band and let her hair go loose over her shoulders. She could almost feel Beezer shiver as strands drifted close to his face. Gossamer, spiderwebs – he caught the slight updraught and liked it. She looked at his hands on the knees of his gaudy trousers. His nails were bitten down and ragged. And those shoes, those weird boats on his feet. What were they for?

‘You got the item?’ she said.

He reached into his pocket and slipped a folded hankie towards her. She peeled back the dirty linen an inch and glanced at the gun, then tucked it in the breast pocket of her leather jacket.

‘It’s the same bloody weapon,’ he said.

‘I have to check.’

‘You don’t trust me, eh?’

‘Trust isn’t the point. I have to return the gun. So it has to be the same gun.’

‘You think I did a swap or something? Where would I find a gun anyway even if I wanted to swap?’

‘Sometimes I think you don’t get the whole picture.’

‘I get it all right. I know what the fight’s about. Don’t you worry about me.’ He looked tense. He pouted, then exhaled, relaxed his shoulders. She’d detected a slight madness about him in the past; he carried a worrisome buzz around in his head. It made him useful, but also unpredictable.

‘I did the job. I carried it off.’

‘Your assignment was one target. Only one.’

‘The fuck was I supposed to know a guy was gonny come into that corridor? He was a raghead anyway. What does it matter?’

‘If he recovers and gives a description, it matters.’

‘My hood was on tight. He couldn’t see my face. I got the one that counted. I got that bitch. Clean and fast and I was out of there in a minute. Oh I was great. I was great.’

His voice rose in a disturbing way. His pendulum was out of kilter. She had to play him. She had to keep him sweet. Under control. ‘I’ll send you a new email address.’

‘You keep changing it.’

‘I keep changing a lot of things. Only a fool stays in one place, Beezer.’

‘Just don’t forget me, eh? I mean, I’m ready. Any time. Say the word. You know that.’

She let her hand fall to his shoulder. A small squeeze, an inconsequential intimacy. Give him a wee thrill. What was his life like anyway? Bare bones bleak, she thought. Look at him, the tracksuit trousers, the hooded top, the noise he made at the back of his throat as if he was trying to regurgitate something. He had hands like putty. She couldn’t imagine those hands touching the flesh of another person. Without the battle, what would he do with his time? He had the forlorn look of a man who realizes he has no great talents to sell.

She had a thought. Why not. Okay. It would either be the making of him, or the end. Take a chance. ‘You free later tonight?’

‘I’ve got nothing planned.’

‘You know the Victoria Bar in Dumbarton Road. Be outside at nine fifteen.’

‘What are we going to do?’ he asked.

‘Tell you then. Don’t disappoint me.’

She turned, broke into a run, jogged quickly out of the park, disappeared in the direction of Langlands Road. Streetlamps had come on and burned in the twilight. In the distance an ice-cream van chimed for custom; an ambitious Glasgow entrepreneur trying to squeeze a few quid out of the summery illusion created by the change in weather.

Bobby Descartes, concrete hard-on poking a puncture in his pants, watched the woman run out of his world. Face like Mona fucking Lisa, he thought: aye, Mona Lisa with a ponytail and a gun.

It took a great effort not to follow her. One day he might, oh he just might. One day he’d like to give her a good fuck. She’d do whatever he demanded. She’d suck him and he’d come in her mouth and ooh –

Magistr32. A wee bit on the thin side, not much meat to pick at, but gorgeous, and he wasn’t getting a lot of nooky these days anyway. He’d never had a lot of it, come to think of it. Some guys got all they wanted. But not Bobby. Never Bobby.

In fact, okay, he wasn’t getting any.

Magistr32 and her long black hair; he’d take strands of it and weave it round his dick –

Aye, right. He didn’t even know her name, only the one she used on her emails. And that wasn’t a real name. Nobody was called Magistr32, for Christ’s sake. How did you even pronounce it? Majister? Did you drop the numbers?

He’d met her in Maryhill on a wet night last January. He’d been drinking alone, and she was standing beside him at the bar, and they just sort of drifted into conversation; she listened more than she spoke – at first anyway. She listened to his views on the state of the nation. She was sympathetic, even when he launched into a long beer-fuelled rant, the memory of which embarrassed him.

The more she listened, the more attractive he found her. She was quietly lovely. No flash, no eyeshadow and warpaint, but definitely a face you’d look at a long time because the features – green eyes and thick black hair and an expressive mouth – were a delight to him.

Despite the slender body and the sweet face, she was as gentle as a howitzer. She had firm views about the world, and a way of expressing them that silenced Beezer, and made him feel inadequate. He was transported by her passion and the funny manner she had of chopping the bar with her small clenched hand when she had a point to make.

There were solutions to the sickness in Britain, she told him, but they’d take time and courage. Did he have that courage?

And he’d said, Fucking right.

She’d asked if he wanted to meet a few people who felt the same way. Kindred spirits, a kind of loose group.

I’m in, he said.

A few nights later, in a ground-floor flat in Garnethill, she introduced him as Beezer – a name she bestowed on him for no apparent reason –to a long-haired cadaver of a man she called Swank, who wore a beaded choker. By candlelight, Swank spoke of revolution and blood in a serious monotone. Bobby Descartes thought he looked completely wasted, a doper. Swank created a dire picture of the future: the United Kingdom would be plummeted into third-world chaos. Total breakdown. Nightmare. Bloated corpses floating in rivers. War in the streets. The last great battle, Swank said. Do you want to be a soldier, Beezer?

Bobby was overwhelmed by Swank’s gloomy vision. He said he’d gladly be a soldier. Just point the way. Swank told him it wasn’t that easy, the movement needed to evaluate potential recruits, he’d be observed and assessed, and when the time was right – maybe, maybe – he’d be given an important task. Swank stared at him red-eyed for such a long time Beezer felt uneasy, sort of spellbound.

A week later, Magistr32 took him to a pub near Bridgeton Cross. At a corner table in the lounge bar, she introduced him to a man by the name of Pegg, who wore an eyepatch and talked in a buzz-saw rasp about how the heavy guns were going into action. People would die. But somebody had to take a stand. Pegg raved about the number of illegals now in the country, and how they were draining the system dry; decent people were being taxed all the way up the anus so that black and yellow and brown immigrant scum and an assortment of unwanted unwashed foul-smelling asylum seekers could ride the Great British Gravy Train. Hello, newsflash. This train was out of freebies. This train wasn’t running any more.

We must fight the good fight, Pegg said.

Beezer said Jesus, he’d fight. He’d be at the barricades. By Christ, he wouldn’t let anybody down. Suddenly he belonged to something, a cause, he was meeting like-minded people – even if he’d never seen the men called Swank and Pegg again.

But that was how it worked: the less you knew the better. The fewer faces you remembered, the better chance the organization had. Magistr32 said the organization was big, even she didn’t know many members; he accepted that.

An organization. I belong to an organization, he thought. He cherished the notion.

A tennis ball came bouncing towards him. He caught and squeezed it. He enjoyed the feel of crushing it in his hand; it was like demolishing the swollen testicle of somebody he hated.

A kid shouted to him. ‘Can you toss the ball back, mister?’

‘Fuck off,’ Bobby Descartes said. ‘Fuck you and your fucking ball.’

He turned away, swung his arm, launched the ball in the other direction. It rose into the last light of day and vanished as it fell against the backdrop of darkening trees. It must have gone up a hundred, a hundred and twenty feet, he thought.

‘Yer a shite,’ the boy shouted. ‘A total shite.’

‘That’s me,’ Bobby Descartes said. ‘That’s what I am. A total shite.’

He flashed a vigorous V-sign at the boy. You don’t know the half of it, sonny. I have killed. I have killed another human being, and I’m ready to do it again.

Any old time.