Nobody he knew would have dared to steal Keith Kinsey’s car. Like his house, his holiday villa on the south coast, his children, his wife, his space at the greyhound track, even his seat at West Ham, that car as sacrosanct. Do not touch. On pain of death, or at least torture.

Kinsey stood and looked at the spot that recalled his 1972 white E-type and went momentarily blank. Fumbling, he pulled the mobile phone from the inside pocket of his overcoat and speed-dialled Tommy Mallion.

“Talk to me”, Tommy had learnt that from a TV series, he liked it because he didn’t have to give any information away.

Kinsey could see Tommy in his boxers and T-shirt, coffee in hand, waking from his regular three-hour sleep. He heard the country music in the background mixed with the pinched sounds of the three Mallion children preparing for school; he smelt the scrambled eggs and ham flowing through the fresh, Costa Rican coffee aroma. Tommy was a man of habit; he was reliable.

“Tommo, someone has stolen my Jaguar.”

“That’s not good mate. Where was it?”

“Outside the house.”

“Your house?”

“Yes, my fucking house!”

“Cunts”

“Yes”

Their conversations were often triangular in shape, tapering to monosyllables from a reasonably informative base. They’d known each other since primary school, aged five, a gang of two that attracted a wider membership by illustration of their particular forms of rucking. Neither family solved things by talking; there was really no need when your “life-choice options” were based on wanting, finding, getting, keeping.

This end of the triangle meant that action was called for. Tommy was fuelling himself. Tommy waited.

“Tom, why would someone be stupid enough to nick my Jaguar?”, a question, strange, un-Kinsey-like. But in recent weeks the boss had been showing occasional signs of uncertainty. At Stratford dogtrack, the previous Wednesday, Kinsey stood looking into the middle distance, quietly humming the theme tune to Match of the Day – a program he’d stopped watching three years before when he had equipped the house with cable (not exactly purchased of course, more an acquisition). This was not what Kinsey did, he didn’t hum, he didn’t stare, and he didn’t wring his hands obsessively, he certainly did not wipe his eyes with the back of his hand. Kinsey looked you in the eye, sized you up, acted on instinct, and kept his hands in his pockets or at his side.

True, in the forty years that he’d known Kinsey, Tommy Mallion had seen him cry; he’d cried when West Ham beat Arsenal in the 1980 Cup Final. He’d cried once in the playground at school when he’d been burnt with a cigarette, he’d even cried when his mother was cremated. These were all acceptable situations – aside from the fag-incident, but that was soon dealt with during metalwork class.

Anyway, Stratford dog track – could have been a bit of torn bookie’s ticket, could have been some sawdust. It was the in-tune, quite delicate humming, and the blank staring that couldn’t be accounted for so easily. Still, time moves on, we change a little with age, maybe Kinsey was thinking about his mum. They’d bought more beer, got a tip for the next race and they’d moved on.

“Tommy, who would have stolen my motor? It’s not on Tom, it’s off, it’s a bad thing. For God’s sake Tommo, there’s nothing sacred any more, there’s nothing standing still. You can’t even park a car outside your own house without some ankle-biter coming along and abusing you. I love that car Tommy, you know that. I’ve had some good times in that car, and now someone’s taken it away.” The phone went dead.

Kinsey turned around, crunching the gravel, and went back under the gables, through the hardwood, metal reinforced front door and into his sitting room. He checked to ensure that all his prints of Admiral Lord Nelson remained on duty on each wall. He plonked himself down on his recliner. He flicked the TV to video and hit play to restart the “West Ham Greats” compilation he’d been watching the night before. His mobile rang and he switched it off.

Martin Peters was moving up the right wing at Upton Park, in a game against Burnley. He pushed the ball ahead of him past a defender, Geoff Hurst was moving into position just inside the eighteen-yard line. It was a classic move that ended in another Hurst goal. Kinsey, Tommy and Tommy’s dad, Chas were in the crowd behind the Burnley goal, in the Chicken Run. It was 1965… or so.

The forty-five year old Kinsey wasn’t concentrating on the game however. He was trying to see himself in the crowd. He’d been trying to find himself, cheering, looking tough, smiling, confident in that crowd for three or four nights now. He knew he was in there somewhere.

He got up and went to get his cigarettes from the sideboard, letting the tape run on, hearing Kenneth Wolstenholme extolling the values of Ron Greenwood’s footballing academy.

Tommy put the phone down and turned to his wifey, Alison.

“Keith’s motor has been nicked, right from in front of his house, his E-Type, just like that. I’ve got to go out”. He drank his coffee, tapped each of his boys on the head and went upstairs to get changed.

On the short journey over to the Kinsey’s he made some phone calls, more in hope than in expectation. The chances of anybody admitting to anything were slim.

Tommy thought about the E-Type, it was a pleasant enough motor, it came with the kind of glamour that appealed to Kinsey. It ran when it was expected to, and it was a status symbol of sorts. It didn’t seem to be worth the grief that it appeared to be giving his old friend though, and that was vexing. Kinsey had been powering down in the past six months, not starting anything new, making pacts rather than indulging in aggressive acquisitions.

He had no immediate family to worry about, his mother had died three years previously, his father thirty years before that. The Kinsey wife and the Kinsey kid were in Spain, and had been for five or six years. The kid, Stephan, was slow, not the full load, breech birth, brain damage, upsetting. Any sense of fatherhood seeped away after the first round of wetting the baby’s head. 

Everybody was raucous but in a way that suggested that the main man should be treated with due care and attention. Everybody said once drunk enough, that the advances in medical science that would be made over the ensuing years would ensure he lived forever.

Keith sliced his time in the nursery thin when he realised, on its second birthday, that any kind of relationship would be pipe-dreaming. The child, his son, the packet of his blood brought to life by him, wouldn’t say anything to him. Kinsey hadn’t been able to square the attention Stephen needed with the attention needed to keep it and its mother fed and clothed in a suitable style. He didn’t talk about Stephan a great deal. No one talked about Stephen very much.

The wife was moody.

To the beautiful, unpredictable, classy slut, Angela, the child was an epiphany. His reliance meant that she had something more to do than sit around the house looking great and feeling like she should be slopping out every morning and evening. The separation could have been a combative affair, as Kinsey had been able to convince himself that the wife and kid were off on a lengthy holiday. The sun would be good for the child.

Angela tried again and again to make him look in the child’s eyes, to take joy in the smile of recognition that warmed its face on seeing his father. Keith couldn’t be doing with it. After six months when the teething made sleep possible only in the West End flat, he’d suggested they get a nanny.

“We can get out again, people have been missing you. It’ll give you a chance to get back into shape, to enjoy yourself.”

She’d rejected the suggestion out of hand, the baby in her arms making chirrups and coos even as its father was attempting to off-lay any responsibility. Kinsey had lit a cigarette as Angela flew at him in a kind of temper he’d never seen before. He was stumped for words. He went to the club.

Now he sat in front of the video, with the kid’s photograph staring back from the gold frame on top of the TV. He wanted it in a home, away from him, away from his wife, out of the house, somewhere nice to visit, somewhere that it could dribble and mewl, cough and lie pale in the quiet with people who found that kind of thing acceptable. He wanted it gone but he could hear it now, upstairs, chattering in a hidden language that Angela appeared to understand.

He wanted to see himself. He’d thought that with a son he would be able to see himself somehow. Maybe he could. A tiny cripple unable to cope without having everything done for him, dribbling confusion and showing no fear as the rest of the world walked by. It was possible, he thought as he rewound the tape to the point where Hurst picked up the ball, that he’d deserved to be saddled with a wife who loved this damage more than the stability that he’d tried to provide.

As far as Tommy could see, Keith was sitting pretty.

Keith turned off the video, he was going to leave the TV blasting white noise, but it seemed too untidy, a little too brash sitting there kicking out chaos. He went upstairs and changed out of his suit and into a pair of dark green cords, a black polo shirt and a zip-fronted red fleece. He put his feet into loafers, brogues and cowboy boots before finally settling on a sandy-coloured pair of hiking boots. He placed his Tag Heuer chronometer on the bedside table alongside a bottle of Pelligrino, the Spanish bullfighter ashtray and the radio alarm clock, adjusted the quilt, made sure he had his wallet in his fleece pocket, sat down and began to sob.

His hands were on his knees, his feet planted firmly on the rich carpet, his upper body shaking violently. As the tears came, he began a low, dark growling moan that maintained a frequency that seemed to resonate with every thought that he was trying to block off. He looked ahead, refusing to bow his head. He saw the door with his dressing gown hanging off its single, faux golden hook. He closed his eyes and tried to picture himself in his Jaguar, tooling down the Embankment past Hungerford Bridge, on his way to his reserved spot in the NCP car park next to the Ship pub on Wardour Street.

As he drove, he had a tape of Churchill’s speeches on the CD player. The E-Type was a manual, and he had control. He drove at a constant 45mph, knowing where he was going – Soho, a bit of business, some chat, a coffee – he was prepared for familiar faces, the same old flannel, the same dance of negotiation, compromise and increased profits that he’d been engaged in since he left school.

As he drove, the river to his left parted slowly – upstream disappearing towards the sea, downstream towards the source – revealing centuries of debris, mud-filled hulks, sails and footprints. The footprints began in the middle of the river and travelled in circles, he looked again and saw the sails were covering bodies, their blood flowing out like water colour, tie-dying the fabric. Once in a while, one of the bodies turned over, as if in sleep.

There were four hulks, wooden ships, each on their sides, prows pointing up stream, masts broken. Suddenly one of them fell to pieces, leaving its ribs showing. The others followed suit, their skins sucked into the mud. He remembered a visit to the HMS Victory in Portsmouth, he’d hated it, the smell, the claustrophobia. He’d especially despised the picture of Nelson lying ready to die, surrounded by his officers who looked down on him. The battle won, they were thinking of their rewards, their glory, the career paths that defeating the French and the Spanish would offer.

As far as he was concerned, Nelson was the top boy; Hardy, Collingwood, all the rest not only lacked his skills, they also lacked his charisma. It was that which attracted him to the lord admiral. Someone, a long time ago, had told him that charisma was a quality that no one could gain; all the money in the world couldn’t buy you charisma. You could cheat and look like you had talent, but there was no way that you could make shortcuts to charisma.

He bought a postcard of the picture anyway.

Understanding that this was some kind of waking dream, he stopped the car in the middle of Parliament Square and walked back to the Embankment. The tableau was still there, the bodies moving slowly, tossing and turning, the ships disappearing, nothing making very much sense. The sun was high in the sky being refracted in all directions by the riverbed slurry. He lifted his right hand to shield his eyes, and realised that it was covered in mud and the mud was peppered with small shiny stones, glistening shards, lumps of gem which got into his eyes, right into his cornea, into the optic nerve, travelling at high speed; he followed them as they moved towards his brain. The mud and gems hit his brain, strangely with a thud that resonated out and into the river causing its bed to rupture and swallow its own contents with a deep, greasy sigh.

The traffic had started again. The river swept back in. People walked by ignoring him.

He stood up from the bed and walked to the bedside table again, opening the top drawer. He took out a small, leather-bound notebook and a child-protected pot of pills, wiped his face with the back of his sleeve and walked downstairs to the kitchen.

His address book was renewed every year so this one was coming to the end of its lifespan. He turned to the ‘S’ entries, picked the phone from the wall and dialled a number in France. While he waited for the call to connect, he lit a cigarette, and tore some notepaper from the pad stuck next to the phone. He was crying again, but this time it was more controlled, almost harmonic. Another part of him prepared the statement he was about to make.

A woman answered, took his name and went off to look for the Monsieur. Kinsey waited, tapping his cigarette, tapping his fingers. He thought about a cup of tea, filled the kettle, placed a teabag in a mug and, phone shouldered, got the milk from the fridge.

“Allo? Keith?”

“Andre, how are you? Sorry to call on a workday but something’s come up that I need to talk to you about”, the kettle boiled and clicked itself off. Kinsey started pouring the boiling water on the bag.

“Go ahead, sounds important,” Andre Salzar was a bonded importer of food and wine, based in the north of France, working out of Cherbourg, he kept a large house in a small village 20 miles east. Unmarried, hard, refined and a serious maker of money, he and Kinsey often swapped apartments – Kinsey’s in the West End, Salzar’s in Montparnasse. They’d known each other for about ten years, having met at a car auction in Spain when they both bid for a 1979 Aston Martin Lagonda. Salzar had taken the bidding to stupid heights, Kinsey had followed, Salazar had won. Things went on from there.

His English accent was good, clean, he disliked being disadvantaged with the world’s most commercial tongue. He’d spent a deal of time in Bristol and Portsmouth and was a regular visitor to wholesalers in the UK. He knew when to use the hard “aitch” and the soft “th” sounds, and he was aware that while French was sexy, it was not business to be too sexy.

Ten years younger than Kinsey, he was sartorially untidy but always untidy in the best cuts and most elegant shades. His reputation as a hard man came from ruthlessness rather than from any physical stature. He was less than five feet eight and weighed enough to be laughed at at school. Not that this mattered, as he had been born into reasonable sums of money. His father had made a franc or two in the 1950s as a supplier of halfway decent viands to some halfway decent hotels in Le Havre and Rouen before passing on his contacts, and a few tricks to Andre who built on the deal. Andre took pleasure with staying just about rightsided of the law while ensuring that his margins were always healthy and his overheads always low. To this end he employed a small coterie of regulars and didn’t appreciate the kind of natural wastage that saw many larger companies’ turnover of staff. Andre worked on loyalty and a deep knowledge of the people he came into contact with.

“I have lost a great deal of money, a bad deal Andre, a very, very bad deal. I was stupid”, Kinsey interspersed sips of tea with Rothmans drags, he made a note on the paper and waited.

“We all make mistakes Keith, we all lose money. It’s not good but it happens. How substantial is your loss?” Andre’s tone was calm, matter of fact. In Kinsey’s mind their friendship went a little deeper than the market would normally allow. He wanted to hear the Frenchman’s calm.

“Substantial. More substantial than I can think about right now.”

“More than a wound?” Andre was looking at a database as he talked. It had been delivered on CD-ROM a year previously, loaded onto a secure hard disk, and was only ever updated by him, “A deep wound then? But not fatal?”

“No, not fatal”, Kinsey didn’t know. He wasn’t even that certain that he’d lost the money, there had been a bad deal in the last month. “I have to go now, I have another call. I’ll call you back”.

“Let them wait Keith, you don’t call me up like this after six months and then want to go away again immediately. Tell me about the trouble”, Salazar closed the database, took a glass of water and sat back.

“The truth is Andre, that I’m”, he began to shake, his torso gently convulsed, he spilt tea, “I am under attack Andre. That’s the truth. There’s nobody here, I was thinking about my dad but then my phone rang and the football… can you hear me, Andre? Someone is cheating me, talking over me, behind me, my car is gone, my wife won’t come home.” He was screaming at the top of his voice.

“I can’t help you Keith. I’m sorry”, the phone went dead and Kinsey was left in his kitchen. He turned to his phone book and made another call, this time to Spain, then another to Suffolk except he dialled a wrong number but kept screaming. His voice was ripped to pieces, loud and vile to himself, so loud that he didn’t hear Tommy walking into the kitchen having let himself in with his spare set of keys. He didn’t realise when Tommy took the phone from his ear and the cigarette stub, still burning from between his lips. He didn’t register Tommy leading him into the lounge and putting the spliff into his mouth after sitting him down on the couch.

He breathed in the weed and things began to take on the familiar paranoid high – one that he could contend with because he and Tommy had spent many years winding each other up in exactly this state.

Having sat Kinsey down, Tommy wondered what to do next. The boss had obviously been crying out loud and the more he looked at him, the more he realised that the other bits and pieces he’d noticed in the last two or three months were probably, maybe, part of it. Kinsey was a thinker though, ever since school he’d been capable of doing weird stuff in order to get things done. Kinsey said, “I take leaps of faith mate, if the road looks blocked, then maybe there’s something in the obstruction that you can use to your advantage, or maybe you just take another road, or maybe you cancel the journey, it all depends. But occasionally when you’re faced with a problem with no obvious solution, you have to take a leap of faith.”

Usually at the conclusion of a deal-that-didn’t-look-like-a-deal, Keith would take Tommy out to a Greek or Lebanese restaurant, pull in the full mesa and explain some of what had been happening. Lately however, the boss had been keeping everything to himself, explaining nothing. He hadn’t been smiling much either, nor had he been going out except for reserve games or to visit the occasional prostitute – he phoned Tommy on his mobile to tell him whereabouts in London he was likely to be.

Now, hunched on the sofa, a rapidly dampening joint in his mouth, he didn’t look as if he could make a decision to save his own life.

“Keith, don’t you have meetings today? Aren’t you supposed to be in Wardour Street?” Tommy was standing behind Kinsey, looking down on the back of his greying hair, no bald patches yet.

“Tommo, do you remember school?” Kinsey was looking blankly at the TV but nevertheless he was sitting up.

Tommy was unsure what to say or do, “Course I do K, can’t fucking forget the place,” common ground, that was good, common ground.

“It was bollocks wasn’t it Tom? It was just all bollocks,” Kinsey sat back and took another drag on the grass, he was smiling with the corners of his mouth, bigger than a grin.

“Right it was, the sport was good but the rest of it was bollocks, that’s why I stopped going.” Tommy, sitting on the couch’s armrest, leant over to get the joint.

“You stopped going because you were too fucking thick-skinned to learn anything. That’s why we all stopped going. We stopped going because that was us. We had better things to do with our lives. We only learnt from people we fucking trusted or situations that we make a difference to. That’s why the sport was good, that’s why the business is good,” he was still smiling, his eyes were closed.

Tommy was uncomfortable but not quite sure why. He wanted to change the subject but didn’t know how.

“School of hard knocks isn’t it Tom? University of life? We didn’t even learn from our own families, we were that hard. When they tried to show us something, we had to prove them wrong, do it better, do more of it, do it larger and louder and do it more fucking certainly.

“Certainty is the thing that made us so successful. Know what we are doing at all times, in all places. Control the times and the places. Hang on to that control.

“That’s why made our territories, made certain of them, sure that we knew them better than a fucking taxi driver. We love it.  We are certain. We’re certain or we don’t get involved. Do you know Tommy,” he passed the joint to Tommy, “that some people think that our certainty is a sign that we are stupid and don’t have any imagination. We’ve always used our imaginations Tom, we live on them. Getting to the point of certainty is where we use it all Tom. Making it all make sense, that’s what I do.”

“I am trying to understand what you’re going on about,” Tommy stood up and went into the kitchen. While he rumbled around sorting out tea-making regalia, Kinsey put on the video of some West Ham game from the 1980s, the season he started to get sick of it; the away games especially. West Ham were playing someone in blue, probably Portsmouth. Keith, Chas and Tommy were in there somewhere. Coked up, a little tipsy but nothing they couldn’t handle. And this bunch of south-coast, seaside town tossers were ringing a bell and mouthing off about hating cockneys. Wankers.

Kinsey wasn’t sure that he really hated them. He’d never had a particularly good time in Portsmouth; there had been numerous rucks and minor tussles, nothing to write home about, not like Millwall, Scouse, Geordie or Leeds. He’s been celled up overnight once, D & D and “a bit naughty having that nasty cheap blow on you”. But that was par for the course, you could get that in Bristol or Birmingham. But he couldn’t, watching the video now, feel that he hated Pompey. Lying back now, full length, on his sofa, he didn’t get it at all.

Keith’s mobile phone vibrated in his pocket, he looked into the kitchen and saw Tommy skinning up on the worktop. Kinsey flipped open the phone, queried the display for a familiar number, didn’t find one. “Yes?”

“Nice cars, E-Types, lovely. Very Roger Moore, very powerful for their age. Good pullers, but nothing too shocking. I like E-Type Jaguars. However, I have too many of them and I would like to let one go for a reasonable price. It’s one of the white ones. I prefer the red or green. I wonder what a car like this one, sitting just near me, safely, would be worth to someone like yourself?”

The voice was young, late teens or early twenties. The accent was one that Keith recognised from the television, the glassy side of posh not the diamond side. 

“What do you think you are doing?” What else could he ask and expect to get an answer?

The voice harshened slightly, patronising, “I am offering, “ it stabbed, “to sell you an E-Type Jaguar automobile which I have in my possession, a white E-Type Jaguar that I have no use for any longer.”

“My fucking car,” Kinsey fought the hash-blur that made one side of his head drift away from caring about the car and the boy on the phone.

“I have no idea about that. Would you like it to be your car?” The voice had no worry in it. Kinsey should have known how to judge voices, it should have been a skill he’d acquired, but he’d always been poor at it. He needed to see people’s faces before he could gauge how much of what they said was relevant and how much of it was the performance necessary to take part in the various dances of negotiation. He couldn’t conjure a picture of this boy other than the one he always used. He often saw people as himself when he was at their particular age. This accent however, did not match him at twenty, there was no trepidation in the confidence, there was no notion that the boy was searching for words, or relaxing into cliché. Kinsey just could not see him at all. Instead he saw the river with the detritus and blackness.

Kinsey switched the phone off.

Kinsey wanted to meet the voice, just to see if they were worth a shit.

He thought about bringing him to a warehouse in Ilford for examination. The KGB used to lift people from their homes, their places of security, early in the morning, in their nightwear, blindfolded. It all helped to cause distress and maximise low self-confidence, Kinsey had seen this somewhere. He wasn’t one for too many theatrics, but occasionally he appreciated the chance to play the part. He’d invite a few guests along, people he wanted to do business with and who might appreciate a small show of strength. It would be three o’clock in the morning when the voice arrived, blindfolded, in T-shirt and boxers. 

It would be July, still air, rotting town, sweating chancers in slow cars wishing they had convertibles. There would be ten other people in the warehouse. There would be drills, hammers, saws. No, this wouldn’t be a DIY lesson, this would be a lesson in manners. This would call for pencils, papers, pencil sharpeners, chalk, rulers, a pair of compasses.

The assembled company would chat about the racing form. The voice would be sat facing a blackboard on which someone would have written:

LESSON ONE: Geography

LESSON TWO: History

LESSON THREE: Maths

LESSON FOUR: Physical Education

LESSON FIVE: Religious studies

The blindfold would be removed.

“School is in. We have taken the register and class is present. Now the headmaster would like to address the class”, Kinsey would look stern, dressed in a double-breasted, grey worsted suit with a plain red tie.

“Always know your geography. Know where the borders are, learn about local customs and taboos.”

He would walk to the boy and with a pair of compasses and carve the word: RESPECT into his left cheek. He would replace the blindfold, give the kid a slap to shut him up.

Andre Salazar’s secretary had booked flights to Gatwick, arranged for accommodation at the Dorchester, organised the currency and had the car waiting before Salazar had finished cancelling his evening’s entertainment. Normally he would drive himself to the airport, but at such short notice, and with so much to get straight, he needed all the time he had left to think.

He sat in the back seat of his Mercedes Benz and scoured his laptop for all the information he’d stored on Mr Keith M Kinsey. Kinsey was an unimaginative minor villain who lacked the basic emotional capabilities to be storm-turned by any kind of mental turmoil. Salazar looked again. The last time they’d met in London, they’d gone to some interminable musical show, eaten a Chinese meal in China Town, drank a few pints of execrable English beer at a pub called, of all things, The Red Lion and taken a black taxi back to Kinsey’s apartment. They’d drunk a reasonable brandy and Kinsey had gone home, driven by one of the gorillas who had been shadowing them the whole night.

The next day, they’d gone to a football match between two London teams packed with foreign imports and weasely looking English adolescents after which they’d visited various of Kinsey’s haunts so he could show off. Nothing out of the ordinary, even the Chinese meal smacked of Anglo repression; dry duck and salty vegetables following the statutory chicken and sweetcorn soup.

Salazar had smiled because there was nothing to worry about.

Jamie Reece sat in his flat in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, eating his breakfast, feeling ordinary, chewing slowly. He was dressed in a cheap blue and red tracksuit and expensive Nike trainers, his face was egg-oval with tiny eyes and a long straight nose over a thin mouth and a thinner moustache.

He was six feet two. He was eighteen. He was a good driver, at speed, in the dark, in somebody else’s car. He liked girls. He liked music. He liked staying in bed until he showered at five in the afternoon. He liked getting off his face in clubs. He liked rich looking women. He liked it when the sky went dark over the hills. He liked fighting with his sister who he lived with. He liked his sister’s baby, named Janet after her grandmother. He liked cutting up other people’s sounds.

He finished his breakfast, looked at himself in the faux diamante, guitar-shaped mirror with “Memories of Elvis” on a plastic plaque at its lower side. He felt the money in his pocket: £200. He inspected his hair and skin, went into the bathroom and checked again, he had to steal some exfoliant, some moisturiser, his sister didn’t care what she looked like now, she was 22. She didn’t have any stuff worth using. He splashed on some water, thought about shaving, poured the hot water on a face cloth, waited a few seconds, sat on the lavatory, leant back and slapped the cloth on his face, hard. He thought about the cocaine he was going to buy.

He shaved slowly, foaming the gel on his face rather than his hands, grooming his sideburns, making extremely sure not to nick himself with the disposable Bic razor, a new one. He thought about kissing Leticia, gently, with no tongues, kissing her on the cheek and then the mouth. He thought about lying with her in the caravan near the playing fields with the speakered-up Walkman playing Gabba tunes.

He rinsed his face, added moisturiser, returned to the lounge room, lit an Embassy Number 1, it was 5:45. He needed a chip sarnie and a tequila to get him started. Tonight was a Thursday, tomorrow he was returning to London in the car, he had to get a new mobile phone from Iain tonight.

Salazar sat on the plane, happy, scruffy in a dark blue suit with claret and blue tie, brown shoes and a black belt. Drinking champagne and coffee, he played a Doom-style game on his Sony laptop. Computer games fascinated him because of the money that they were generating. He’d seen the craze grow, gone to the occasional trade show and read magazines on the subject. He’d even tried programming a game but had given up when it began to eat up too much of his time while still looking like stick figures throwing twigs that disappeared as they arced mathematically through the air.

The game he was playing was the third in the series, and came with plot as well as thrills. Game-makers seemed to have grown bored with the idea of levels, non-linearity was the thing, so he was unsure where exactly he was in the great scheme of things. Ideally, he would have liked to have been playing online, against real people who hesitated occasionally before opening fire, or tried to message you with insults-lite. Salazar never hesitated before ramming a few rounds from a chain gun into your torso. He wasn’t brilliant at this game though, he had a great deal to learn about technique, he just had nothing to learn about instinct and desire, if he wanted you dead, he would chase you down until you were dead.

Salazar’s game had been about slaughtering priests and monks – controversy sold. He’d set it in the dark ages in Ireland, you could play monk or Viking. Or you could play the 20th Century voyager who had dropped back in time (he/she was supposed to be trying to get back by capturing one of the over-illustrated “books of the dead” that contained some incantation or other). Of course, being from C20, you brought a great deal of heavy armour as well as knowledge to realise what “Summoneth the AK-47” or “Call ye up Heckler and Cock” meant when unearthed in one of the ancient books.

He’d done a modicum of research. He’d made sure, when scripting, to ensure that the religious tower defenders had enough hot liquid, excrement and boulders to drop – as a nice touch he thought, they could also melt down the relics, chalices and crucifixes to pour on the heads of the giant Vikings. The Vikings, if they got close enough, could light fires around the bottom of the tower in order to cook the brothers alive – true friars.

He’d taken the game to a friend of his in sales at a huge French software house. They turned it down, so he got one of his techie-boys to create a website for “Sword Slaughter”. This was his fifty-first website on various subjects ranging from wine to pornography via cars and football. One in five sites made him money, the rest were there to keep his boys in practice and to have the name Salazar proselytised across a wide audience.

The plane was half-empty, first class only speckled with Hugo Boss, Paul Smith, D&G, YSL, Adrienne Landau and Hermés, most people were travelling alone, immersed in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, News Week or Cosmopolitan. However, three rows in front of Salazar were two rock star looking youngsters. Euro trash from the toes up, they were also obsessing over a computer, Salazar had seen Microsoft Excel’s familiar face as he brushed past on his way to urinate. There they sat, male/female-female/male in banzai head-scarves, tasselled black suede bum-freezer jackets half covering ironic Mickey Mouse and Futurama T-shirts, and cowboy boots for fuck’s sake. Northern-Euro-Trash, the worst kind. They were mulling over figures, drinking Evian and speaking in half whispers about pointage, dollar-crosses and below-the-line calculations at the margin.

This was a world that made Salazar very, very happy indeed. He was chuckling as he sat down in the first class lavatory, wondering if they had a column for “misc instrument smashing” or “roadie stress counselling”. He thought back to his time in a rock’n’roll band in his teens. They were good, tight, had all the equipment, fights and future they could want but they split over a power struggle concerning the bass player who looked good, played well but couldn’t take orders. The camp had split much to Salazar’s chagrin, with the drummer siding with bass while keyboards and rhythm guitar went with Salazar.

What finally did for them – aside from the politics – was performing an horrendous gig at a club owned by Salazar’s uncle in Rouen.

They were due to start with a cover of “Eye of the Tiger”, followed by originals called “Snake Eyes Woman”, “Craftsman”, “Elegant Whisper”, “Just Gotta Play”, “Be There Girl”, “Love Is The Answer”, “War Of A Lifetime” and “Retrial”, dropping in covers of “Who’s Going to Drive You Home”, “Highway Star” and “Stir It Up” before ending with the self-penned epic, “Loved Like a Cross of Thorns (My Heart is Killed by Faith)”.

They got as far as “Love Is The Answer”, before the bass players laid into Salazar with his guitar, flat-side into his chest. Everything erupted, bouncers appeared from everywhere, dragged the bass player from the stage and beat the shit out of him. After that they lost the impetus and split up, Salazar kept some of the tapes.

He’d lost track of the game and was dead, so he ordered more champagne and a double espresso and turned to the database. He organised a search for anything to do with Kinsey and discovered the following:

West Ham United:

Bobby Moore, Boleyn pub, Chicken Run, Arsenal Cup Final (1980).

These keywords were what he could remember from his conversations with Kinsey, they had each been mentioned more than ten times.

Cars:

Jaguar E-Type, Range Rover, Porsche, Sunbeam Alpine, Castrol, M1 motorway, Aston Martin Lagonda.

Family:

Angela (wife), Stephan (son), Paul (cousin), Mark (cousin), Angela (cousin), Roger (sort of nephew), Lucas (sort of nephew), Harry (sort of nephew), Marion (cousin), Jackie (cousin), Cherie (unknown).

Friends:

André Salazar, Angela Grass, Briony, Carl Potter, Degsy, Fran, George, Graeme Childs, Ian McDonald, Jaqueline Le Fevré, Jason, John K, John L, Johnny Driver, Johnny Smokes, Lillian, Luther Price, Mags the Slapper., Mallion, Marcus, Marlon, Marty Roth, Mickey Breaker, Nicky Grant, Paul J, Paul P, Paul R, Pauline Fletcher, Phil G, Phil P, Phil R, Raymond, Ronald, Scott Parnell, Steve B, Steve F, Steve L, Steve M L, Sue M, Sue R, Sue T, Tom (Tommo, Tommy, T)

Food:

Tofu (hates), Jelly, Rice Pudding, Steak, chips, turkey, sprouts, pizza, strawberry Hagen Daz, Lion Bar.

Enemies:

Angela Grass, Johnny Smokes, Luther Price, Ronald Parsons, Carl Potter, Ian McDonald, Scott Parnell, Philips, Steve M, Steve F, Richard Brown, Mr Teds, Jason-Jason, Alec Stokes, Alfred Ewing, Ron Redwood, Bobbie Bryson, Stuart Glanville, Shakar, Sulzeer Adams, Ruth Ryland, The Crawfords, Coopers and Lybrand.

Hates:

Homosexuals, reggae music, new agers, Muslims, Guardian newspaper, psychologists, Millwall football club, Chelsea football club, disloyalty, absentmindedness, Christmas, Japan, creosote, celery, alternative comedy, income tax, The Sex Pistols, National Insurance, Anthony Wedgewood Benn, computers, child molesters, Hasidic Jews, Picasso, Ken Livingstone, Germans, Minis, subtitles, religion, Spike Lee, the media, Paparazzi, beggars, students, the Irish, public transport (makes him feel poor), reading.

Loves:

Dog racing, eating out, Norman Wisdom, Will Hay, West Ham United, game shows (“The Price is Right”, “Family Fortunes”, “Catchphrase”) It’s A Knockout, Jaguars, Elephants, Crocodiles, England, Old Speckled Hen bitter beer, Easter, his mother, Tommy Mallion, Tom Jones, Bill Cosby, Robert Cray, The Commodores, Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, Princess Diana, Admiral Nelson, The Bee Gees, cleanliness, hashish, cocaine, stamps, “Bridge Over the River Kwai”, “The Longest Day”, “The Italian Job”, “Zulu”, driving long journeys, books on tape, history, geography.

It was a hazy database at the moment, he had to make more links, right now it was broken up data, far from being information. Salazar found that frequency analysis always seemed to throw up unexpected, but useful results and was keen to harvest what he had so far. It was annoying to him that he didn’t know Kinsey’s birthdate, it was generally irritating that he didn’t know how often Kinsey ate out, whether he did so mid-week or only at weekends. But one thing did stand out, Kinsey talked a lot but never gave anything away.

He lived alone, didn’t even – to the best of Salazar’s intelligence – have a housekeeper. He never mentioned girlfriends. Obviously, he was homosexual. Obviously.

The rock stars in the forward seats were arguing loudly about points off the top. One was standing, his CD-Walkman or WalkCD was still plugged into his head, and he was screaming at the top of his voice in bad English. The stewardess drifted over to them, offering calmness and serenity, attempting to reseat the tall blond man.

“Percentages, for fuck’s sake, forget the capital input and concentrate on the percentages you dumb mutha-fucka man!”

The stewardess, exhibiting immaculate technique, got as close to the standing trash as possible without seeming to aggressively invade his space, she offered friendship and smiles. Salazar watched her, directly, not pretending in the English way to avoid becoming involved in the situation, he was enjoying it immensely. The rocker slowly sat down.

“He doesn’t fucking understand you know man. He doesn’t get the big picture. We’re here, travelling in First Class, going to London, to play in London, to play a big fucking gig, and he doesn’t understand,” he was trying to gain her support, strange as he was sober. All Salazar could see from his position of the smaller guy was the back of his head shaking slightly from side to side, then turning to his companion now seated near the window.

Seconds later, the smaller guy rose, took the computer and moved to an empty seat adjacent to Salazar. He sat and muttered to himself as he flipped away from Excel and launched what looked like a C programming application but turned out to be a sequencer. Salazar looked on, the small guy turned and smiled, looked back at the computer, looked along the plane to make sure that his compadre was still sitting, and deleted the song that was on screen. He shut down the laptop, closed its lid, and folded his arms.

“That guy is a real pain,” he told Salazar in a reasonable accent.

“We all know one”, Salazar offered back.

Kinsey was skinning up now. It was good grass, fresh and herbal. He had decided not to tell Mallion about the phone call. Rather he hadn’t decided, he was pretending that it hadn’t happened. He couldn’t decide anything.

“I’ve been trying to find us in the crowd at West Ham Tommo. I’ve been watching those videos for weeks trying to see if we were in there. There are games that I know we went to, but I haven’t been able to see us. I am starting to think that maybe we didn’t go”, he formed a roach from the cardboard backing on the packet of kingsized red Rizzla paper and placed it on the lefthand end of the proto-spliff. He sat looking at the weed, it looked sumptuous, it seemed to be oozing oil, he didn’t want to add the tobacco, when he was in the USA he’d smoked tiny joints, free of tobacco, passed around within a roach clip. He didn’t like it, the joint got too ragged but he did like it because it was quick.

Tommy was sitting on the floor, leaning on one of the armchairs to the right of the TV, his head turned slightly to look at Kinsey who was lying full-length on the sofa. He’d poured himself a Scotch, it was 1:30. The floor was scattered with funsize packets, empty of their Mars, Snickers and Bounties, there were crisp packets, some orange peel and a huge bar of fruit and nut ready for eating. He was very stoned and wanted to get the giggles, but Kinsey kept going off on strange verbal marches, which knocked Tommy back into himself.

Kinsey started to cry again, filling Tommy with a confused feeling that he should do something. Frankly, he wanted to run, to get away, go to a pub and stoned sit reading the sports pages, drink a pint of lager, maybe buy a bottle of something and spend some time in a betting shop. He tried to find something to talk to Kinsey about.

“What about the car mate? What are we going to do about the car? We can’t have this kind of thing happening, if this kind of thing happening gets out, well we can’t have this kind of thing happening can we? What’s the plan?”

“There is no plan Tommo. There’s no plan. I don’t want the car back.”

Tommy reached out for the fruit and nut and snapped off eight squares.

Kinsey hadn’t been eating, he had no munchies, he was used to an empty space inside him and didn’t want to fill it. Tommy recalled the last time they’d come across anybody who had the front to steal from them, on their own turf.

“It was sweet, sometimes I think we should have taped it, sort of a corporate video production. I remember one tall kid, we broke his legs. We broke his knees with the corner of that blackboard.”

“And the black kid?”

“Yes, fucking yes”, this had given Tommy the biggest buzz. He knew that in the new world you couldn’t be a racist, it made limited business sense, all that NF and BNP stuff was fine in the 1970s but time had moved on even for Tommy Mallion. However, this black kid didn’t benefit from Tommy’s new capitalist liberalism, he caught the full force, he cried his eyes out.

“I don’t remember what you did. What did you do Tommy?” Kinsey stretched further not comfortably, but as if he was trying to push out some pain or other from his chest. His tone was honest, but he’d stopped crying.

“His six-fucking-pack stomach. We unpicked it. With those compasses, we unpicked his stomach muscles, we gave it some more definition.”

“We killed him didn’t we?”

“I don’t know about that Keith. We got him to hospital, we didn’t touch anything else about him”, Tom stuffed more chocolate in and wondered whether Kinsey was going to finish rolling the joint.

“He was bleeding all over the place. Did that teach him a lesson? He was bleeding.”

“For fuck’s sake Keith, that was fucking ages ago, and we’ve whacked people since then. What’s the difference? It’s not as if we didn’t know what we were doing. You planned it out, you took hours.”

“We don’t ‘whack’ people Tommy, we’ve never ‘whacked’ people. Al Pacino whacks people, Robert De Niro whacks people. We killed people.”

“Five or six people, people like us, people who would have killed us if…” Kinsey finalising the joint, cut Mallinson off knowing how the sentence would end.

“…we didn’t kill them first. Not really the fucking point is it Tommy?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake Keith, if this is all about your fucking conscience then we may as well fuck off to the boozer and get it out of our systems there. I’m sorry mate but this is bang out of order, it’s too late, you can’t change it, you can’t undo any of the damage, alls you’re doing is damaging yourself and that will damage the rest of us. This is stupid.”

Kinsey was really not concentrating on any of this, he’d had this conversation before many times. This was one of things that was dragging him down, over and over again, repeating the arguments, looking for where the strength would come from the weaknesses. Living alone since the death of his mother, and being bored with the television, he’d been reading a great deal. His mum had a wide selection of detective fiction, thrillers, books that made him laugh, books with detective priests, hard-bitten American private eyes, drunken English academics, old women.

He’d moved onto true crime, a topic he enjoyed, reading and re-reading the Krays’ biography, Hyndley and Brady, the Richardsons. From there he’d found her collection of stranger, unclassifiable books, mostly unreturned library editions – she gave a false name, address and ID to the library – books like “American Psycho”, “Trick Baby”, “A Rage in Harlem”, “Last Exit to Brooklyn”, “Suedehead”, “Fever Pitch”.

In fact he’d found out a great deal about his mother when snuffling through her books, he’d never realised that she read so much. She didn’t seem the type, she liked a drink, went out, wasn’t a wallflower, didn’t hide what she felt, liked to get involved, drove his father away, tapped him with her wooden stirring spoon, organised the finances, took the hard line on most things. But somehow throughout all of this, she read books.

All of her extensive library were well thumbed, gone over again and again, occasionally with pencilled margin notes in an untidy hand that slid from left-slant to right, from capitals to joined-up lower case, from strong to hardly visible. The notes were often followed by exclamation marks, small doodles of faces, knives and stars, and the word “No” appeared a great deal.

All in all, Kinsey calculated, his mother must have stored up to five hundred books in her room, in the loft, scattered around the house, even in the garage. But until her death, Kinsey never had her cracked up to be a reader. She’d certainly never forced it on him, anything but, she was keen that he got out of doors, active, playing sport, climbing trees, riding bikes.

She never allowed him time to himself, it was almost a sin in her book for him to stay inside the house save to watch sport on the television. They would always sit together on FA Cup day, especially back in the 1970s when the day would begin at some ungodly hour with “It’s A Knockout” and “Top of the Form”, the opposing sides made up of fans of the teams that were going to compete in the afternoon’s game.

Every year would see presents of cold meats, lemonade-heavy shandy, pickled onions, eggs and gherkins, chocolate pudding, maybe a crafty drag on one of her Benson and Hedges, always the chance to swear at the TV.

Kinsey’s mother would pretend not to understand the game, the players or the occasion itself, but Keith knew that when the Wembley suits had been shown off, the final pre-game interviews carried out with old heads and young star-eyes whose dream it had always been to play in a Wembley FA Cup Final in the unnatural sunshine that always came with the game, his mother would come in from the kitchen, perch on the armrest of the sofa and say: “I’ll just watch the kick-off, then I’ll have to be getting on. Who do we want to win?”

Keith would always plump for the side from the south or failing that, for the underdog. His mother would always opt for the other side when she eventually sat down, inevitably with fifteen minutes gone. Just as inevitably, she rose from her seat at half-time, disappeared to the kitchen to return with more shandy, sandwiches and rice pudding with strawberry jam and a crisp, cinnamon skin which he would save until last.

To Kinsey, FA Cup day meant more than Christmas and birthday where other people would involve themselves, randomising the course of events outlandishly, causing stress with their enjoyments. FA Cup day finished with Kinsey and all the other kids on the street, rushing outside as soon as the Cup had been raised, to replay the game in the park. Except their game lasted until the fading daylight gave way to the lights from the overlooking tower blocks. Keith, Tommy, Marcus, Stevie B, Lawrence Golder, Mickey D, strange Sarah who went on to a job in the city, Paul McGuigan (who died at sixteen) Ian Ford (who joined the army and died in the Falklands), Hughie Parks, (the musician who moved the Canada), Stuart Barlow (who never shut up) everybody. Sometimes thirty kids.

FA Cup day 1962, the Double-winning Spurs team from the previous year defeated Burnley. Kinsey was in two minds, Burnley were dirty Northerners, Spurs were glamorous London rivals, Burnley played in claret, Spurs were from London. Burnley could stop Spurs from winning the Double. Spurs could keep London on top. It was confusing, Kinsey opted, as did most of his mates for Burnley though. One kid didn’t, obviously didn’t.

Stuart Barlow had been mouthing off about Spurs this and Spurs that, he was 12, the son of an insurance salesman, all airs and graces. He’d been to see Tottenham-poncing-Hotspur twice that season, he had programs and a scarf that he wore occasionally and should have known better. As far as he was aware, everybody had been supporting Spurs that afternoon, so out came the scarf and the brags about how his Dad could have got him in to see Jimmy Greaves, how Bill Nicholson was a personal friend, how he was going to play for Spurs. Give him his due, he was a neat little player, quick feet and a good left peg, he played for the school and area teams, but he wouldn’t shut up about it. Nor would he shut up about how he was going to college. So they broke his left leg. With a brick, with several bricks.

Kinsey was an observer. Barlow was taking a breather, it was seven o’clock in the evening, he’d already scored six and made about ten. He was sitting on a pile of planks on the building site that had emerged over where The Feathers used to be a few yards from the park itself. Kinsey had been decked by a bigger kid, taken out in a two-footed, sliding, plimsoled challenge that had brought tears to his eyes which he quickly dried while limping off to squat far enough away from play to be assured of not getting the ball.

He looked up from his grazed shins and saw four or five older lads walking over to Barlow. Smart kids, very slick, all mohair three-button suits, parkas and early evening speed. From the look on Barlow’s face, it seemed as if he was pleased to see them, he was figuring that they’d come over to congratulate him on his victory that afternoon at Wembley. He held up his scarf with both hands, arms spread over his head waving it reverently, he was a dickhead thought Kinsey who could see it coming.

One of the parka’s grabbed his right arm, another his left, each tied the scarf tight around Barlow’s wrists. Kinsey moved a little closer, being careful to avoid the chance of inclusion – you could never tell how these things would turn out. Once in earshot he resumed his examination of his injuries, looking up every so often.

Barlow was still sitting down, his head arched back trying to stop the tips of his shoulder blades from touching and his back from cracking. He was almost looking behind himself, he looked like a circus freak or a still photograph of Greavsey celebrating one of the 37 league goals (a Spurs record) he’d scored that season. Kinsey recognised the 14 year old standing in front of the contorted boy as his cousin Colin Jeffers, so thin that his nickname was Razor or Razor, made even more emaciated by the speed that he guzzled in neckfulls most days. He was extremely wired, screaming at Barlow to “fucking shut up you fucking girl, you fucking Yid girl, you fucking snobby little Jew-boy cunt girl!”

Barlow wasn’t Jewish, a lot of the lads there were Jewish, Martin Miller was Jewish and he was holding Barlow’s left wrist, tugging it every so often then ensuring that Stuart didn’t topple over. Martin Miller didn’t bat an eyelid.

Razor Jeffers was stamping his left foot in some rhythm, up and down, up and down, down, spitting at Barlow about how he was always lying to everybody and how a little Yid bastard like him was only ever picked for anything because of his left foot. It seemed that Razor had a real, substantial problem with that left peg and its effectiveness. He was a clogger himself, when he wasn’t being brushed off the ball by younger kids, kids like Barlow.

But his family was strong, stronger than Barlow’s; wider, more together, louder, more popular, more accepted, more connected. They didn’t want to move away from the area. Kinsey was part of that family on his mythical father’s side, he saw the way that Razor acted at home, how his father indulged his elder son’s tempers and demands at the expense of his three sisters, two brothers and mother. It was if one child was all the man needed, the others were dragged in behind when he wasn’t looking, distractions.

Colin was his lad and Colin knew it from early on. The Jeffers were well off in their way, they made their cash in the business athletics of ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving, picking things up here, “investing” them there, helping out bigger mobs, taking fees from smaller. They took up three houses on the street, spreading gently like a thick fog that you only noticed when you were in the middle of it.

Kinsey had stayed with a chunk of the Jeffers clan in their caravans down at Bracklesham Bay for two weeks every year since he was four. He got on with Colin when the older boy could be bothered to make an appearance, usually to get some cash, or get away from somebody or other.

Despite the age difference – five years, vast, an entire school career – Razor decided early on that little Keith had more spunk (as he called it then without sniggering) than any of his brothers. They’d talk, well Razor would talk, Kinsey would listen, about music, football, sex, clothes, anything that came into his mind. They’d even talk about reading; magazines and that. They tortured the odd seabird, having shot it down with Razor’ dad’s air rifle – maybe six, maybe seven over the years. It became the event that confirmed the holiday.

Snapping off a beak here, twisting a wing, slitting the dirty white body open with a penknife, shooting out the eyes from greater and greater distances (having first pinned its wing-tips to a “No Swimming” sign with kitchen forks), removing feet, burning feathers with matches, trying to find the arsehole to split it with a Stanley knife blade (sometimes letting red ants crawl in after they’d shoved some chocolate in the widened hole), trying to locate the sex, tying it with fishing twine, rolling it in sand and petrol, lighting it, burying it up to its neck  in the low-tide mud (or upside down or sideways so one wing flapped – they’d removed the other), drowning it in crabbed rock pools, holding it to the exhaust pipe of one of the two Morris Oxfords that took the happy summer family to the coast (Razor would ask his dad for the keys, his dad would give them and then return to the Daily Mirror), frying it slowly on the engine. Hours they’d spend, “better than ants” was Razor’ comment, “better than torching ants, you can’t hear ants, you’ve just got to imagine them. Bollocks to that”.

Keith threw up the first time, Colin was surprisingly understanding, explaining that this was how humans showed that they were better; birds and animals were here to show people that they were superior. Colin told Keith what they put in sausages, how he thought it all got there. And weren’t sausages Keith’s favourite? Keith, acid throat, told him that he preferred steak and kidney pies, Razor said: “Same thing, same thing, it’s all meat, it’s all from animals, Christmas turkey is from birds, even the brown meat”.

Kinsey also had nightmares the first time, the bird came back (“they do that, little fuckers, won’t leave you alone for ages, they try all the stuff on you that you did to them, then they go away, but you’ve got to make them,” said Razor.) But the bird didn’t try the same things. It was sad, it sat at Kinsey’s feet in his kitchen at home, looking up at him and moving its head from side to side slowly.

Colin was right about one thing at least in dreams, you could hear the bird. It told the five-year-old boy about its family out at sea on a secret island that only seagulls and their friends could visit. It told him that injured and dead seabirds were carried there by their friends and families who went looking for them if they hadn’t returned after two days.

It looked up at Kinsey, its wings still punctured by forks, one eye gone, it even gave off that smell of burning feathers. Boy Keith looked down, he was sitting in his high chair, like he had as a baby. Then the bird was joined by others, weeping birds, wan birds, and smaller, chick-child birds all of whom went to work mending and comforting Keith’s bird who continued to explain that the wonderful, magic island was sunshiney and clear, full of laughing, playing, chicks and bird friends like lions, tigers, cows, bulldogs and elephants.

The other gulls would pick single feathers from each other and use these to replace those that had been tugged out of the tortured seagull’s body, they used grass to mop and tie its wounds, they patched its missing left eye with a glass bead, and in seconds it was complete once again.

“Would you like to come to our island?” asked the renewed creature.

Kinsey nodded, eager to get out of the chair and visit the magic place.

“Well you can’t. You never will be able to. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t”, very sombre, very harmonious, very definite. And then they all left, flying out through the walls, together in a line, wing-tips touching, feathers linking and intertwining, noiseless and effortless, they all disappeared, leaving Keith in his high-chair unable to get out, looking after the birds as they moved across the sky, dirty white, together, silent.

Kinsey looked up from his knees and saw Colin looking at Barlow in the same way as he used to look at the gulls – all of which were buried in the same place in a box under the “No Swimming” sign.

“…life isn’t fair you cunt. For fuck’s sake, hasn’t anybody ever told you that. What planet are you and your Jew Boy family from? Course it’s not fair but fair doesn’t come into it. I do not like you. No one likes you. You stink, you get lucky, you fucking get everybody else’s stuff, you goal hang, you nick goals. And with your left foot you wanker. This left foot”, he leant down and, removing Stuart’s plimsole and sock, pushed down on the toes until the entire foot seemed to be a straight line extension of the leg.

Stuart was moaning, Kinsey discovered that many people do this under physical duress, they don’t scream much, they moan, almost as if screaming would add to the pain while moaning would soothe it. Until Razor cracked his big toe, broke it with pressure, Stuart looked him in the eye. When the toe snapped however, he threw up, the puke bubbling in his upturned mouth.

“Bend him forward fast,” snapped Razor, and then to Stuart, “I really fucking despise you, I told your mum that when I was fucking her last night and she agreed. I really fucking hate everything about you. I hate you. We all hate you. Everybody. All of us. Do you know why?”

Stuart was choking on tears and sick.

“I said, do you know why?”

Stuart made a noise, a childish noise, a whining “No”.

“Neither do I. Funny that. Neither do I. I don’t really care either.”

Kinsey figured that it was about time that the other lads had a word with Razor but none of them showed the slightest signs and recognised that this might be approaching the “Too Far” sign. The two standing behind Jeffers were looking around, eyeing up the area, ensuring that nobody would interrupt. This, realised Keith, was an ambush from the start. This was no off-the-cuff (spurs of the moment) action born from boredom or the game. This had been in planning for a while. So when Jeffers knelt down and picked up a half brick and passed it to his lefthand lieutenant, then passed another to the right before taking one himself, it came as no real surprise.

“I think it’s because you’re so fucking rubbish at everything else. Maybe it’s because you’re, I don’t know. I don’t really care either,” now standing, he lifted his half-brick over his head, “Crack or thud? Thwock! Or Pow! Zap! or Thump!? What’s it going to sound like?”

Keith couldn’t really see Stuart Barlow. He was there all right, right in front of his eyes, fifteen yards away, being held – his arms, neck and back must have been killing him – but Keith couldn’t see him. It was like his mother said about looking for something, that sometimes it was right in front of your face and you still couldn’t see it.

What he could see was the building site, the park, his knees, he could see his supper – toast, Marmite, tea – more clearly than Barlow. He could see Barlow’s legs, his arms, his chest and neck, his feet, his ears, his mouth, chin, cheeks, thighs, calves, his scarf, his grey short-sleeved shirt, his blue jeans, his socks, his vest, his pants, his nipples and genitals. But none of these elements were connected, they didn’t make a whole. It was like Keith had opened a kit for a boat and had lost the picture from the box and had no interest in finding the instructions.

The sound of the bricks hitting the boy was also disconnected. It didn’t sound anything like the suggestions that Razor had put to his prey, and it followed Kinsey like a pop song and the seagull’s scream. It was that simple, over that quickly. Once it was done, Razor wandered over to Keith and told him to go and get some help for the poor lad who had come a cropper on the building site, “I was going to cut his tongue out to stop him talking, but I don’t think he’ll say much. Go and get your mum or someone, quickly”, he pressed the penknife into Kinsey’s hands having first wiped it clean on the black and white Spurs’ scarf.

Salazar wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do when he got to London. He was aware that he wanted whatever it was that enabled Kinsey, a man of such limited talents and non-existent style, to live the life he did. The paucity of fact meant that he was going to have to busk the coup rather than map it out in advance. If he was honest with himself, the improvised nature of the adventure held some appeal in itself.

He was honest with himself as often as his concentration would allow. It was a valve for him, it ensured that no extraneous information would seep out when he wasn’t expecting it. Being naturally undisciplined, he had learnt to develop a number of tricks and exercises to impose some sense of order.

What he did know was that Kinsey felt close enough to him to call from the depths of some kind of breakdown. Had Kinsey called when drunk or high on the drugs that he insisted on taking at the least opportune moments, Salazar would have noted it, saved it for later but this was different, it was a sniff of a chance. Combining the assumed breakdown with the assumed friendship was enough for now.

After a quick tour up and down the Tottenham Court Road to check for bargains – a new hard disk, some RAM, a copy of Norton Utilities, some games and a mouse – he checked into the Stakis on the Edgware Road. Up in his room he picked up his messages, assured himself that his mobile phone was working properly, logged into one of his email accounts, checked two of his websites for access times, made a phone call to his chide one of the code monkey’s and praise another, sat back with a mineral water and phoned his usual escort agency.

He wasn’t going to contact Kinsey until tomorrow, it wasn’t as if the thug was going to snap out of things before then, let him stew for a while. Salazar thought of him as a large pig, pock-marked, overfed and past the point where it could be served to any decent company. To cook a pig of such pedigree, you would have to add plenty of alcohol and spices and then simmer for a long while to get rid of the many impurities. Once you’d melted all of those off, you might if you were lucky, have enough for a half decent meal.

The escort agency, based locally and very discreet – one of Salazar’s companies provided web space for it – was busy but could always fit in a client of Mr Salazar’s reputation. He ordered up a pair of blondes, tall, one silent, small, wiry and tanned, the other muscular, French-speaking (school French), pale and tall. They came to his room fifteen minutes apart and both took showers while Salazar described them to his copy of Microsoft Word. He’d booked both for the evening and could extend his purchase of their time for as long as need be.

He asked whether either was hungry, making it apparent that he would like to eat, and both acquiesced quickly. While phone-shouldered and ordering club sandwiches, two bottles of non-vintage champagne and some chocolate, he changed into a bathrobe, indicating that he would like the taller of the two to lie on the bed while the other was to stand, naked, in the window of the 8th floor suite, back to the street.

“I would like you,” he looked toward the window, “to go down on you,” he looked at the bed, “quietly please, I would like to watch the news. Do not cum. If you think you are going to cum, stop and swap. Do you understand?” Both escorts nodded in assent.

Salazar watched the news on Sky, then switched to CNN. He didn’t bother watching the whores, merely offering up volume-control orders every so often. After ten minutes he turned back to the bed and said: “Stop now. I would now like you to have an argument about the sex. You,” he talked to the taller one,” are upset that you were not able to come, while you are exasperated about the constant whining. I will join you when I see fit. Do you understand?” They did and they acted out the scene but before Salazar could slip in between acting as the peace-maker, room service knocked on the door.

Every so often, Salazar would have asked the young hotel servant into the room, right into the melee, you never knew when it would pay off. This time however the tray was wheeled in by such an unattractive figure that Salazar merely took the cart himself, not even bothering with a tip – you could do that in England and he liked that.

“It’s time to eat now,” he ordered. Both rose from the bed, the smaller one acting the coquette much to Salazar’s disgust, ”nothing kinky, just eat please. No wine either. Both of you drink water from the tap in the bathroom.”

As he ate he thought about enabling Kinsey to destroy himself while simultaneously ensuring that he could maximise his profit from the endeavour.

While Salazar enjoyed himself, Jamie Reece was halfway down the M1, the new Motorola phone sitting on the seat beside him. He was going to meet Jake B in his flat on Berwick Street, parking had been arranged in advance. The E-Type Jaguar had a new CD player fitted, it had been resprayed to an even whiter white. Its chrome had been polished, its tyres changed, its plugs cleaned, its oil changed, its bearings greased, its alternator upgraded, its wheels balanced, its windows cleaned and its timing improved. Jamie was going to be sad to give it back, but for £1,000 purely to take it up to Dewsbury, garage it, ensure that the work was done on time and then drive it back down, he wasn’t complaining. He was thinking about the money and being in London. He’d already decided to get a new flat in Leeds, somewhere near the Corn Exchange. He was going to take the DJ’ing seriously and had already tried to get some dates set up. For the first time he could remember, he was feeling young and contented.

He’d met Jake B at a rave near Stevenage six months ago. Jake seemed to be in charge of the event and was doing the rounds, geeing everybody up, checking what sounds were working, what tunes were called for, finding out where everybody had heard about the gig. Jamie had picked it up at another club in Coventry then bounced around the service stations and phone boxes with his mates. As usual he’s brought a few Gabba mixed cassettes with him to play in the car. He suggested that Jake might like to check them out for later and they got into a debate about the relative merits of Trance versus Gabba, one extreme to the other. Jake had to move on but suggested that Jamie join him and see how things happened.

Jake was called all manner of names by the people they met along the way: Alfie, Bateman, Mac, Hunter, even Maggie and he answered to all of them. He could speak to anybody from hardcore crusties to upper-class slummers, never changing his tone. After half an hour, they “repaired” to Jake’s Renault Espace and out came the cocaine. It was unbagged and packed tight in a KFC family bucket, reaching a quarter of the way up. It glistened.

“Cocaine”, explained Jake B as they sat down, “plays with the dopaminergic synapses. Dr Kim Janda of the Scripps Institute in San Diego however, thinks that he has come up with a method of stopping the effects of cocaine, including may I add, crack cocaine. He has been experimenting on rats. Despicable man. Rats are excellent animals, very intelligent, not in the way that we think about intelligence, not the kind of intelligence that MI6 go after, or Alan Turing was trying to discover when he cracked the Enigma Code, of course Turing didn’t adhere to the codes that you should adhere to. Turing was homosexual. Are you homosexual? It doesn’t matter to me if you are, I have experimented with it but I don’t like it, I prefer women, there’s something about women that sparks my circuits. Women enable me to synthesise dopamine. I like that. I’ve known people from the North who are very, very wealthy. You are from the North aren’t you? Yorkshire?”

Jake spooned out a measure of coke and leant over to Jamie, putting the spoon to his nose. Jamie, already jagging out on the cheap E that he’d bought at a service station, sniffed.

“Is it any good?” Jake seemed genuinely concerned, “I bought a great deal of it from someone in Leicester, I gave her some Heckler and Cock semi-automatics and a bootleg of John Lennon and David Bowie recording Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds with obscene lyrics, they were very high. You don’t believe any of that do you? Where would I get semi-automatic guns from? Is it any good?”

“It’s fucking great man. Smooth,” Jamie was impressed.

“Have you done very much cocaine? How do you judge it?”

“I don’t get hold of much. When I do though, I go mental with it, it’s fucking great. I love it. It’s my favourite outside of E. Have you got any E?”

“I don’t like to have the stuff around, far too inorganic. It also dims the judgement somewhat. I’m glad the cocaine is good though, I was a little worried about it to be honest with you. Thank you for being my taster. What do you do for a living?” Jake helped himself to a smaller spoonful and sat back, he was enveloped by his fake-fur parka, its hood up. He pulled his knees up so he could rest his chin on them and looked intently at Jamie waiting for his answer.

For his part Jamie was numbing up quite nicely, starting to feel a little god-like, with the same kind of paranoia that gods must have.

“Do you reckon that God gets pissed off with everybody wanting stuff and that from him? If I was God, I’d have fucked off to a different solar system and invented people who couldn’t talk.”

“What do you do for a living?” Jake was chewing, his chin still on the platform of his knees so the top of his head bounced up and down inside his hood.

“I’m going to be a DJ, going to Ibiza next year.”

“What do you do for a living now?”

Jamie pulled a quarter bottle of White Cane rum out of his jacket pocket and opened it, took a swig and offered the bottle to Jake who refused it by not taking it. The last job that he’d had was babysitting for his sister for which he was paid £5 off his rent. Before that, after leaving school he’d worked in a computer shop but was sacked for fighting with his manager at a party. Right now he was circling work, checking things out, running errands for people.

“I’ve got to get my decks sorted out and mix up some tunes. Mixing tunes is taking up most of my time.”

“That’s excellent, for my sins I’m tone deaf, couldn’t tell a good song from a bad one. I rely on my people to advise me of that kind of thing. You should think of me as brutally crippled, missing out on one of the sheerly wonderful senses. But that’s what I have people for. What do you think of me?” He sat up at this point and pulled down his hood. He was wearing a cerise T-shirt with “Metal Merchant Jam Buster” written across it in gothic script, the neckline was dayglo green, he had necklaces of multicoloured beads strung on leather thongs, three of them, and a silver outlined fish on a gold coloured chain. He was looking Jamie straight in the eyes. His eyes were brown.

“I don’t understand man?” Jamie was feeling teeth-grittingly high now, he didn’t want to be sitting down, he wanted to be going mental out there in the open, by a big speaker.

“First impressions are, to my mind, pointed and exact most of the time. I think you are an unemployed young man from the North of England who is reasonably well tapped into the zeitgeist. You probably have a wide experience of this country, at least in comparison to your peers. This means that your fears are not of experience. You weren’t much interested in school, as an aside you are a Taurus, you like tunes because of their immediacy, you’ve tried to learn a musical instrument, probably the guitar but have had your ambitions deflated through lack of funds. You are a youth of ambition blocked by an accident of birth that has financially disabled you. You are keen to extend yourself. You are not homosexual. You like Gabba. Your name is Jamie. Your taste in clothes is again limited by your ability to pay for them. You are not afraid to use your fists to make a point, but only as a last resort. You have never been in prison. Now, what do you think of me? It’s a very un-English question I know, but we’re all young Europeans now aren’t we?”

“Fucking hell,” this kind of directness was astonishing to Jamie who was used to answering questions with single words, and was not used to anybody asking him that one. When he thought about it in the split seconds that the cocaine allowed his brain to use, he’d spent a great many years among people whose main activity in life was to avoid that question except to ask and answer it behind its subject’s back. This was a “fucking hell” moment.

“You’re called Jake”, Jake nodded, smiled.

“You’re from the South”, again, nodding.

“You’re rich”, a shake of the head.

“You’re tone deaf”, nod.

“You’re not homosexual but you’ve tried it”, an energetic nod.

“You’re a young European”, a broad grin.

“You own a Renault Espace,” a shake of the head.

“Very good. Very well played indeed. I don’t own this Espace, I am borrowing it from my sister’s husband. Wealth is relative, poverty is absolute though, I live somewhere in the middle. I would like you to do some work for me, how does that sound? I would like you to nanny a very special car for me. It’s my uncle’s car, he loves it dearly but is busy. His birthday is approaching and, because he has been so good to me ever since my parents died in America when I was young, I would like to restore it to a state that suits my uncle’s reputation. Because it’s his birthday, this has to be a secret. If you would like to meet me in Colindale’s KFC – that’s a northern suburb of London, I will give you directions – next Wednesday at seven o’clock in the morning, I will give you all the relevant information and some money. Could you do this for me? I want the work done outside of London you see. I hear that there is an excellent specialist in Jews-bury. Do you know Jews-bury?”

“Dewesbury”, Jamie corrected.

“You see, I would look like such an idiot. It’s excellent that we met. Will you help me out? Does it sound good?”

It sounded so good that Jamie was now approaching London, trying to remember how he got to Soho.

Kinsey felt like he no longer had the faintest idea what had been happening. Teletext said that the time was four in the afternoon, and he was stoned, unable to stand up even though he wanted to get to the loo. The room was small, full of fluffballs, the carpet apparently shredding itself in front of him. He looked around him in disbelief that all the work he’d put in over the last twenty years had been for this. Tatty china, a dusty television, pastel, fading wallpaper, packets of various fast food and cheap confectionery, overflowing ashtrays and a few videos spread out amid the lads mags and juice-filled glasses. He was so stiff from having lain in the same position, leaning on one arm, pretending to look interested either in the TV or Tommy, that it was painful to sit up straight.

He wanted to do something but didn’t want Tommy to come with him, but it looked cold, windy outside, although it wouldn’t darken for another three hours he felt that three hours could pass very quickly. But he still wanted to do something even though he didn’t want to instigate it, he didn’t want to prove himself to anything any longer, he didn’t want to have to make a point about anything. Better that he lay on the sofa until they went to sleep, then they’d wake up and whatever passed for normal would remerge. Still he wanted to do something, eat something maybe, put some music on, have a bath despite the effort required, he needed not to feel that he was lying there, dying, slipping away, not making an effort, not keeping his end up, no showing good form, not playing the game, not being one of the boys, not being fit, not being ready, not being eager for it, not being up for it, not being ready to head it, touch it on, push it out, large it, leg it, peg it, fuck it, love it. As usual, he’d lost his train of thought and found himself half-sitting, half-standing, preparing to go somewhere or re-comfort himself. Teletext said 4:15, he still wanted to do something, he needed to retain this numb feeling rather than wasting it on the couch, watching a wall, listening to Tommy humming to himself as he watched another football video, occasionally passing a split and asking: “You alright Keith?” before hitting fast forward, chuckling, rolling another spliff, farting, snatching some crisps from the bag. He wanted to carry it out with him to the world and let it see that nothing could touch him, nothing at all, everything would bounce out, away from him, nothing would stick. He realised that he was wearing his shoes, this would save time, conserve effort. He knew his jacket was in the hall, hanging off a brass hook embedded in a lacquered mahogany panel screwed into the rawlplugs and then to the wall by brass-topped, tungsten screws. He knew he hadn’t dry-cleaned his jacket in six weeks or so, and it was starting to look scruffy which meant it would not keep the cold out as well as it should. He could feel the cold coming into the house, the central heating wouldn’t click on until five, so autumn was creeping in like a voyeur. He was chilly, down to his fingernails, he was icing up and all he could imagine was that any heat there was must be bouncing off him, and that it would continue to bounce off him from now until he got straight again, or got even more stoned; Tommy was into the second quarter of the South African, all buds and oils sweating away in the snap-top plastic bag. Kinsey wasn’t sure, however, if he could get any more stoned, so he was condemned to get colder and colder.

There was nothing else for it, he would let himself die of the cold, maybe his body would be preserved, maybe even his brain. He could come to consciousness decades later and start all over again. He could know who he was by finding himself in entirely alien surroundings. With only blank faces and new things to stare at, he could reinvent himself as an entirely new human being. They wouldn’t know, nobody had ever written anything down about him or for him. He hadn’t been recorded, except maybe once in a band he’d played in at school but that would tell them nothing other than he enjoyed music, even in the future, people would still understand music. He hadn’t been filmed, and his family photographs were run-of-the-mill, giving away nothing but seasides, birthdays and Christmas. He wasn’t a photograph keeper either, he lost them or gave them away. He didn’t know how he was going to begin again. Even into the future, he would know nothing, he would be a freak, he would be studied and assessed, examined and explored until they knew everything about him. They would be able to find out things about him that even he didn’t know, or didn’t admit to himself of knowing.

And his fingers had gone numb, the chocolate he was trying to eat was cracking in his mouth when he could negotiate the silver paper. He was shaking again, and he was starting to feel very sick. He wanted to warm up, but he felt that if he did, he would hurl. He looked at the faux-fire, scanned the radiators, he knew how to set them, make them work. He wanted them to work, but he couldn’t see himself doing it. He buried himself deeper into the white leather settee and looked at the television which was showing Monty Python repeats; the best bits visually sampled and then stapled together to make compilations. It made him feel ill as they danced around dressed like Gumbies. He never understood Monty Python, he couldn’t get it. He didn’t find it funny, he found it confusing and disquieting, it disturbed him. But now he couldn’t take his eyes off it.

Tommy was warm, he was wearing an open necked, dark purple shirt tucked into his light-coloured jeans which stopped just above his white Nike trainers. But he was concentrating so hard on Kinsey that he realised that more heat was called for. He didn’t bother Tom, he loved the heat, Barbados, Jamaica, Ibiza, Florida, he loved them.

“Fancy a coffee K?”, he asked as he made his way over to the artificial real-log fire, “cup of tea? I’m going into the kitchen to sort out the central heating anyway.”

Kinsey grunted, he was controlling his stomach and even a slight effort took valuable brain time away from the task in hand. Tommy meandered into the kitchen, the speed he’d taken as insurance was slicing away at him, cutting into the hash haze. He was aware that Kinsey was stoned immobile, incapable of doing any damage to himself, or the business, and this was a comfort to him as he prepared tea and toasted cheese sprinkled with dried oregano. He had decided to get Kinsey away from town for a week, take him over to Las Vegas for a locked-on good time, the flight would relax the man, and then the sheer life to be lived out of the MGM Grand would wipe away any cobwebs that remained. Also, it would enable Tommy to arrange for things to be tidied up at work. Who knew what Kinsey had been up to in the last day and a half? But getting K to do anything that he didn’t want to was always going to be a battle. He walked back into the sitting room to find Kinsey foetal, scrunched into the corner of the sofa, his head buried in his hands, sick pooled in front of him.

“Let’s get you up mate, let’s clean you off. Time for bed I reckon,” Tom was relieved, it was ten thirty, there was going to be football highlights on the box in ten minutes, which was all the time he needed to get Kinsey up the stairs, washed and dried and into bed. He looked down and realised that they’d all felt that way from time to time. Incapable. 

No one else was supposed to see these moments, moments when everything fell into nothingness, when all you wanted was for someone else to come along and make everything work. People didn’t get that stoned on grass or booze without wanting this. Tommy had been like that just after his second was born. He went out to wet its head, got caught up in a birthday bash, went on to a house party and found himself unable to do or to want to do anything the next day when he should have been playing football. He lay around for the day and couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed. That was how he assumed Kinsey felt.

It took him slightly less than ten minutes to get everything sorted out, Kinsey was capable of walking, of climbing the stairs. Tommy showered him down, and wrapped a dressing gown around him before lying him on his side, facing away from the wall. He could feel Kinsey shaking as he shoulder-led him to bed. He left the hall light on and went back downstairs where he skinned up another joint, put his feet up on the coffee table, and sipped his tea.

Jamie made heavy work of getting to Wardour Street and the car park. He was nervous about driving around the centre of London, and his fear was turned into aggression as he rushed amber lights, ensured that no one cut him up and generally voiced his concerns to all and sundry. All the time he was soaking up the London that appeared around him and the Jag. It was raining when he drove through Hampstead, the colours were saturating, apparently talking on all the water they could before the street lamps took over from the weak winter sun. 

Everything was crawling along the roads until the junctions when everything split at speed, looking for lanes. It seemed to Jamie that everybody else knew where they were going and had their lane jumps timed to the last possible moment. 

He found himself retracing his steps several times having missed his exit, he found himself ferreting down side streets, all of which were so parked up that travel at more than 10mph was impossible. The rain came on heavily just as he popped out in Camden Town, he checked his directions and realising that there was still a hell of way to go, pulled over and parked up next to the markets.

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McDonald-Sayer turns away from his dream ‘Dapper’ Dale’s death Fat Man

The train remained empty or near as damn it. I played a disco compilation that reminded me of good times before when my hips fragmented, back when I shimmered and moved like molten crystal, when I was “an impossible achievement of grace and instinct”. Neil O’Neil, doctor of medicine so he claimed, said that last bit one night in Berlin or Buenos Aires, somewhere cool anyway. He wanted me so badly back then. I thought it was all a bit twee and heavy handed. Give me a ride in a private jet, a chug on some Juglar Cuvée, a snort of coke and I was probably yours for the night.
I wouldn’t have known true admiration if it had lapped at my fingers and died for me.
As the train rocked along, I drowsed, and rain started to pour down. I remembered the last thing my probation officer had said to me before I left the house. I’d told them I was going to Ireland to reconnect with my roots, relive beloved memories of family holidays. He reminded me that I needed to check in with the Garda Síochána every day. I’d said yes of course I would.
“Oh, you’re going to Ireland, I’m very envious”, he’d enthused. “What a magical island. All the marvellous characters you meet. Wonderful, just wonderful”.
He stamped and signed the documents that I needed to be stamped and signed.
“God yes”, I said.
“Magical, magical place”, he sighed dreamily, “I’ve been there once”. I looked deeply into his eyes, which he always enjoyed. I saw a weekend in Dublin. I saw the Book of Kells and Trinity College, the GPO, The Guinness Storehouse, St Patrick’s and Christ Church cathedrals, for Christ’s sake I even saw a snap of the white of Kilmainham Gaol where bad things had happened but let’s not start another fight over that.
I saw him ordering a Guinness and settling down near a roaring fire to listen to a group of relentless musicians bloating out rank Victorian folk music with fiddles, tin whistle and a bloody bodhrán. I didn’t hear mentions of ye Black and Tans, of The Boys of Kilmichael, of The Valley of Knockanure and definitely not The Men Behind the Wire. He’d never been in any danger of hearing rebel songs, so he was unable to imagine them. Fair play to Dublin’s tourist industry and its extraction of the pounds sterling.
I missed Ireland. I’d had good times there by the sea. Neil O’Neil had family there. He called them family anyway. Down between Cork and Waterford on the coast. Nice family. Lots of fine, fit lads.
A father and mother you didn’t ever want to get on the wrong side of. Especially came to the lads.
Shame I couldn’t go back, but people get murderously angry for all sorts of reasons in countrysides the world over. Culchies, Westies, Hicks and Bumpkins have spacious memories for even the slightest of grudges, and passing murderous grudges from generation to generation is both sacred and very, very popular; like watching soap operas or sports.
I woke up gently and easily as the train pulled into Crosschester. I stepped off the train into what I remembered as an inelegant, soot black bricked minor Edwardian railway station.
Crosschester station was brighter and cleaner than I remembered as a teenager when I’d hide there. Now I walked past shops selling socks, and other ones selling ties, and other ones selling books, sandwiches and drinks. Even the lavatories seemed from the outside at least to be hygienic and unexciting. Quite unmemorable.
My cloudy, or clouded I should say, recollections of Crosschester were drenched tediously in cheap beer, cider and spirits, all of it wreathed in cigarette smoke. Everything was soundtracked by pop songs, three minutes, sediments of sentiment sucking down bonfire smoked autumn afternoons into evenings into nights until all time folded into no time at all, no time left. A school for all the other cities and towns I eventually lived in. The tunes and the flavours changed. I tried to keep my head down. I wanted to get out of the station fast, as I didn’t want to be recognised by people, unlikely, or by ghosts.
“You toothsome little morsel” either that or the sound of the train pulling out. Every town has a voice doesn’t it? Someone’s voice, ancient or modern. I was shocked if this was in Crosschester though. I put it in Porthampton, down by the sea looking to France, not this backwater looking into itself. So, as the new fall bonfires of Crosschester draped damp smoke on me, I walked down Station Road towards town and to the Four Crosses Hotel. This was the address on the letter given to me by Jimmy the Phoenix in prison. I summoned up Dr Neil O’Neil’s voice.
“It’s cruelty to spend a day out in the harsh light of the world when you could be with your pals in the warm glow of a bar”.
Crosschester station was on a hill so I could see the cathedral that dominated the area and gave it its status as a city. Nearly a thousand years old; spiky and arrogant like the Normans who had designed it, it retained the martial glamour it had been designed to project. As I got out of the station, a gentle rain began to fall. As is usual with remote English stations, there were no taxis congregating outside. I did not have to wait, instead I set off in a brisk walk down town. This took me past brick built houses colonised by strangely coloured mosses and lichens. Their walls sweated onto pavements that were already saturated. I walked by several churches that looked warm and dry inside and I heard hymn-singing parishioners whose harmonising voices rose into the evening reminding the singers and me of childhood assemblies.
I was not tempted to join in.
I am tall so I strode down Station Road at what must have been a comical angle to a humorous observer. All tall people stride, it’s bestowed on us in the same way as portly people roll, and lithe people pirouette. I must have looked like a back-slash in the falling water. Just about retaining uprightness. The opposite of my real life.
The rain descended into a cloying mist. No thunderous drenching downpours for this city. There’s nothing so déclassé as a loud, invigorating drama in the seats of country gentlemen, circuit courts and storied cloisters, towns and cities like Crosschester that dotted the English countryside impregnated with the upper classic stench of Norman conquest. I pulled up the collars of my camel hair coat and pushed on, thankful for my sturdy boots – the kind that never went out of style. I was actually happy to be outside and walking.
There I was, a Modigliani misplaced in a Whistler painting, striding past a school that had maintained its signs for Girls and Boys. I walked past a sweet shop with colourful plastic candy jars in its wide bay window, something from a Charles Dickens’ postcard, something for the tourists, it hadn’t been there when I was young enough to care. Over the road I saw a policeman looking into the window of a florist, a damp romantic. He didn’t see me. The early fall evening was doused by orange street lamps. Unfit for brightness they only hinted at safety as the night drew in. In other words, it was getting dark. I was scared of one thing in this tiny town that always acted above its station.
If I needed to avoid going into the next pub I came to for a stiffener, and subsequently socialising and consequently going back to prison. I needed to find The Four Crosses hotel with ‘Owner, Mrs Maeve Morgen’. I vaguely remembered where a building with that name had been when I was growing up so, head-down against the rain, I sped up.
I strode past a woman walking with her small dog up the hill against the rain. Both of them looked extremely happy with their endeavour. I walked past three pubs, any of which I could quite happily have spent the rest of the night in. Very smart they were. Down and down into the guts of the town. I love going down: stairs, rollercoasters, escalators, even in planes I love the bump of landings. Going down and going down fast just works for me.
I should have said ‘The City’ because, despite its having become a tributary of the mainstream of English history centuries before my wet descent, the cathedral granted it the right to call itself ‘City’. Crosschester was and is a city in the same sense that the lady with the dog were mountaineers.
Station Road ran into Great Hall Road into Jewry Street and St James’s Lane, which terminated in a square of commercial buildings. The Four Crosses stood on its west side. Four storeys and a well polished, deep red set of double doors were guarded by two fat white pillars, tapering at the top and bottom rather like two giant porcini mushrooms.
It looked like the kind of place where you’d expect a doorman dressed like a Generalissimo to be stamping his feet and blowing into his white gloved hands. Instead there was an A-board that read: “Visit our **** restaurant – family deals assured – eat alone or with a friend!” I was hoping those symbols were supposed to be stars and not redactions. In I went.
There was nobody at the front desk of The Four Crosses so I headed into the bar. It was an amalgam of familiar places. The bar was made of highly polished oak with a brass foot rail that was a stage to anger or anxiety. It had four unpadded, high-stools in front. It reminded me of several small, ‘members-only’ bars. One was up a tight flight of filthy stairs in London’s tawdry Soho. Heterosexuals, homosexuals, pansexuals, asexuals, too-often-drunk to be sexual, and a very grey man in a very smart suit, rumoured to be ex-MI6, all fused with the furniture.
They drank Dubonnet and gin, maybe whisky and soda, which they called a Tom Collins and drank in dirty highball glasses. One or two of them still drank port and lemon. These drinkers were deeply acquainted with each other. A perfectly loose knit family. A before or after friendship to be treasured. They reprised the performances of characters they’d judged wanting when they first stumbled into the bar. A long time ago they were young and curious about the hidden dangers of a capital city. Sooner or later, with the inevitability of rotting apples into cider, they ended in each other’s arms or at the end of each other’s fists. Then they did it all again the next day.
The Four Crosses had the same turgid energy without the excitement of the city outside.
The general layout reminded of another members-only club, under the ground of Sydney’s Macquarie Street. Used and abused by lawyers, tabloid hacks, Japanese businessmen, elderly gay Kiwis, and people like me: tasty and gratifyingly expensive accompaniments to someone who dabbled forgettably in elicit sex.
That it was subterranean combined with its thick Hawkesbury sandstone walls to make it a cool place to have a few quiet ones in the heat of a Sydney afternoon. You entered its gorgeous, deep red gloom down a steeply spiralling staircase. Signed in a velveteen covered book using any old name. Paid five dollars to a tall, elegant, beautifully spoken Vietnamese-Australian, maybe a man, maybe a woman. Sometimes they’d stop you for a soft chat, during which you found out that they were definitely Vietnamese, and came over as a refugee. He discovered all sorts of things about you that you never really knew you were letting on to. Then you walked through a crimson and cerulean beaded curtain that shushed and sizzled behind you. You were in the perfectly square bar.
It had no sex to it, no musk. Instead it had cigarette smoke and low volume horse racing commentary on one TV. It had a betting booth, a T.A.B., lurking and ready to pounce in a corner near the rest rooms, perfectly placed for the desperate.
You could also get absolutely wonderful Japanese food there. The menu changed according to whatever went through the cook’s mind. No one ever saw the cook. No one ever heard the cook. Rumours riddled the walls that he had Michelin stars but was shamed from Europe for reasons of Bisto. Or she was a humble but miraculously talented Japanese okaasan; old, wise and once a comfort woman who kept to the shadows feeding strangers with all the love she herself had never felt.
I loved that food served in plastic bowls on low, square formica-topped tables. I loved its selection of wines, spirits, beers and poppers. It sighed with gossip, gossip; gossip that I didn’t understand but nevertheless listened to. A pick-up was almost guaranteed. What a place! What a digression.
Finally it took me to a bar with crumbling, honey coloured walls on a corner near the canal in Villette, Paris. Card players, newspaper readers, solitary shady men and women, shades, low voices, a magic jukebox. You were left alone no matter who you were or who you were in the company of. There were none of the characters that proliferate in other dives. People didn’t drink there as a performance or as a last resort, a replacement for love. Dr Neil O’Neil was a character. I drank in Villette to escape him.
What set the bar in The Four Crosses apart was that embedded in each wall, north, south, east and west were the heads of animals. All in beautiful condition. A fox to the east, a rabbit to the west, a deer’s head behind me to the south. The eyes of each animal were wide open and bright. Except for one. On the north wall behind the bar, with her left eye shut in mid-wink was the head of hare.
I breathed it all in, like it was a broken home to me. I wished I still drank alcohol.
One of the men at the bar looked me up and down and said in a tobacco gravelled voice, “Don’t you worry. She’ll be down toute de suite to check you out”.
“Check me in?”
“Yes, that too”, he returned to his conversation.
I was tempted to buy a drink. Just to see, and because the bar and all the bars before it insisted. It would have been so easy to join those others at the bar. They would have found a stool for me and my money. They would have slotted us in. Drinker was my first adult identity even before smoker, and quite a way before druggie. It tipped me over the lip of innocent adolescence into hellscape escapades. Sodden memories. Sodding memories. All the best places, all the best people, the best sex, the best stories, all of those are glamorous cocktails or dregs of other people’s glasses. I had no blood, sweat, spunk or tears. I was drink. I was drugs. I was wasted and I was waste.
I didn’t take a drink. I wasn’t open to death.
“Mrs Maeve Morgen, landlady, hotelier, entrepreneur, very pleased to meet you”
A middle aged woman appeared behind the bar. She wore a fitted green dress made of a fabric like tapestry. She had jet black hair built up like Elizabeth Taylor’s. Her face was peach-fuzzed. Her sharp blue eyes were made up like Cleopatra. I noticed that her hands looked beautifully, frighteningly strong.
“Here, this is for you, on the house, to say welcome to The Crosses”, her accent was Welsh. Her voice had authority.
She handed me a vodka and soda with ice and three thin slices of fresh and unwaxed lemon.
“I don’t drink, I’m sorry”, I added the apology because I was in England.
“Oh, treat yourself, you’re in a hotel; you’re on holiday after all. Cin! Cin!”
“When I say I don’t drink, I mean that I’m an alcoholic”, this usually lead to embarrassed mumbling or even silence.
“You only live once”, said one of the locals gaily.
“Enjoy life while you’re in it!”, said another.
“I’ll have it if you don’t want it, eh Maeve?”, croaked a third from the chorus.
Vodka and soda with three perfect slices of unwaxed lemon; three clear ice cubes. A pristine highball glass. It was so perfectly hateful. Trapped in the ice cubes were hours of rage, mayhem and regret waiting to escape via the medium of me.
“I really can’t go back now, not after all the work I’ve put in”, I said firmly.
Mrs Maeve Morgan took the drink back and said, “Of course you can’t. Once that grey prison pallor’s gone, you’re gorgeous. I respect your decision.
I didn’t bat an eyelid at her prison barb. Jimmy the Phoenix had given her the heads-up on me, obviously. I just nodded.
“Course you can’t drink it. Not after all the work”, said the first drinker.
“That would be a waste of time and energy”, said the second.
“Can I have that now, Maeve?”, chorused the third.
Maeve tipped the drink away, lifted the bar flap and stepped into the room. She had legs from the golden age of Hollywood. “Now let’s get you booked in”, she said. We walked into the foyer and to the front desk.
She stood behind the front desk and pulled out a blue velveteen covered guest register. My name was already there on the top of the page.
“You have a room at the top with a lovely view over the town, sorry, the city. Everything is paid for. And you have something for me.” Not a question. I handed over the envelope I’d been asked to deliver.
“Oh, very good, very good. Many thanks.” Maeve sliced it open with a stiletto knife she had too readily to hand. She read the contents, a single sheet of thin paper with writing on one side, handwriting, thin and large, it showed through. She replaced it in the envelope.
“We can talk about this later”, she said. That surprised me. I had no idea the contents concerned me in any way. I nodded anyway. She nodded back.
She rang a small bell. A very short, stocky woman dressed in classic red bellhop uniform shot diagonally across the chequered floor at speed, and picked up my suitcase.
“This is Little Cartey, she does everything around the place. If I passed away tomorrow, no one would notice the slightest difference to the running of The Crosses as long as Little Cartey was still around”.
The two women smiled at each other, and Little Cartey walked over to the elevator.
“This way, off we trot”, she said over her shoulder.
I walked over to the elevator where Little Cartey was waiting. She pressed the Up button and turned to me.
“What do you do?” She was direct during our first meeting. She had a Crosschester accent, north side. She said, “Traat” not “Trot”. It reminded me of nights out, gigs, kissing, fingering, cider.
“I travel, mostly for business.”
She nodded and pressed the button again.
“Come on now you old bastard”, ‘baarstard’, she was talking to the lift.
I heard the elevator grinding its way down apparently in a mechanical agony. Little Cartey looked up at me. She had brown eyes, wide and inquisitive. They didn’t look like they’d seen many tears.
“Travel must be interesting. Not done much myself”. She sounded wistful. We waited. I expected her to whistle a tune. She didn’t know I liked her. The elevator groan got closer to us. I was drawn to Little Cartey almost immediately. Back then I didn’t know if this was self-preservation, a prison trait; or true love. I fall easily.
Eventually the tortured grinding stopped and the lift ground to a halt. Little Cartey slid back the protective metal grill.
“That’s supposed to stop drunks falling down the shaft”.
We got in and while we travelled, Little Cartey continued interrogating me.
“Do you enjoy what you do, then?”
“Mostly. It’s been a long day for me”
The elevator continued to rise like an old man from an over-stuffed armchair.
“You’re not a lawyer then? We get a lot of lawyers in for the crown court”, she paused, “and the ecclesiastical court too, obviously”.
I shook my head and tried to look tired.
“Thought not, you don’t look like a lawyer. Anything but actually. You’re on your holiday then?”
I really wasn’t used to questions. Questions happened before you went into clink. Questions got you in there. While you were in there, no questions were good questions. Curiosity was frowned on. If someone had questions, you knew you couldn’t trust them. Or they already knew the answers, and you really didn’t want that.
“How do you mean, I look like anything but a lawyer?”
“Oh, you know what I mean.”
She had a pleasant smile. I liked it.
“Oh, I think maybe I do”, I smiled back.
“Come to see the cathedral, the college, Mizzmaz Hill, the lido, all the historical gubbins?
I shook my head.
“Really? Not work? Not touristing?”
I shook my head again. Smiled. It was a game. I was out of prison.
“Oh! You grew up didn’t you? You’re from Crosschester! You’re doing nostalgia!”
I might have flinched a little.
The elevator was taking forever. Its groaning was painful. It was technology but old technology, it lived in two worlds.
“People come to do funny things in hotels don’t they?”
“Hilarious things.”
“Sad things.”
“Tragic things.’
“Filthy things”, she grinned.
We stood waiting like a pair of old hospitality sages. We smiled broadly at each other like good old friends. We’d made a definite connection although we didn’t know quite what kind.
Finally the elevator came to a spine taunting halt.
“Off we traat then”, said Little Cartey.
She picked up my suitcase and turned left outside the elevator. We walked down or up a spectacularly long and garishly carpeted corridor: poppy red, daffodil yellow, the purple of the orchid called Dead Man’s Fingers she told me. Finally, she opened a door and we went into to my room. I offered her what I considered to be a very reasonable tip. She pocketed it eagerly and left, shutting the door behind her.
“If you need anything, just yell… for me, just me”, she called through the thick wooden door.

More stories:

McDonald-Sayer turns away from his dream The Assumption The little man

A few months after Jimmy the Phoenix gave me the letter and I reminded him to give me the money, I stood looking at the front door of what had very briefly been my home: the half-way house. It was a cold Wednesday morning in October with the wind coming in from the east whipping salt into my hair. This would have been a year after we all heroically fought the sickness off. It was around the time when most people were getting off to work in the morning. 

 I had been there to re-acclimatise to things like actual food, going outside, and not sleeping alone. It was a well appointed building, tall, thin, with lots of depth. I liked it. It was very much like me. It was a gothic, red brick; imposing and still mundane. Victorian. It stood in a row with others of its ilk in the middle of the once grand navy town of Porthampton – now gone to seed since the sailors left. Buildings like recollections are never entirely the same even if they’re built by the same group of people, they’re only similar. This one had been a family home, with rooms upstairs for staff. In my room, under a loose floorboard, I’d found a diary written by an over-educated maid. I looked under the floorboard because that is what any sane person does when encountering a loose floorboard. Not doing so shows a distinct lack of curiosity, therefore imagination. Unimaginative people are not fun or useful. You’re one hundred times more likely to find yourself kidnapped if your bodyguard lacks the imagination. Unimaginative muscle isn’t even any good for sex most of the time.

As I write this section of my story using pen and paper. I am looking out of a window overlooking Dublin Bay – like the Bay of Naples but with fewer calories – and I’m hoping it will relax me. This process is supposed to be cathartic. So far, however, it is anything but. I swear to fuck that I will start drinking and drugging again unless something good comes from this. 

“Calm down, love”.

The voice is coming from the other room, no not in the feeble analogy to death, but from the kitchen probably. The voice cheers me up. My love is back from the market with all the ingredients for tonight’s meal. Such a beautiful love. I will move away from this hard seat at my writing table. I will sit and warm in the red leather armchair, drink some camomile tea and try to remember the half-way house, which I should never have been allowed to leave.

In each of the rooms, in the hallways and staircases some good-hearted person had hung framed prints of famous paintings to raise our consciousness or spirits or eye-lines. 

I had Ophelia by John Everett Millais in my room opposite my bed so the evening light from the window fell on it. She was floating in a river or pool, ‘incapable of her own distress’. She was either dead or soon to be dead. By suicide or having fallen from the broken branch of a willow tree, the debate rages about that. I often looked at her and thought how good it would be to join her in there, just floating down stream, staring up at the sky keeping company with daisies, poppies and Dead Men’s Fingers. It calmed me right down. 

Anyway, there I was looking at the thick dark blue door of the half-way home. Someone had pasted an electric pink A4 poster with a picture of a blond man and the words, “He’s Right. Free Him Now!” on it years or months before. No one had bothered to remove it so it had faded so much that the hair was almost invisible while the dark eyes and small, fat lips gave the appearance of a badly made-up clown.  I had no idea if the man was right or free. I hoped he was. I was ready to go. Love crimes and death crimes had all played out inside that building, and a small, cowardly part of me wanted to go back in because it was familiar and about as familial as I’d ever known. That was no longer an option though. I’d agreed to a deal, I had the travel money and the accommodation.

It was time to forge ahead. 

That was life in those days.

Lots of forging ahead away from the sickness of the past.

I had a few nest-eggs tucked away around the world. Nothing too showy but enough that I was clear of money worries for a while. I’d said my goodbyes and packed up my belongings and the mysterious envelope. I travel light and buy what I don’t have when I get where I’m going. I’d never settled anyway, which made prison life less unbearable for me than for many other people who cried their eyes out with fear, indignation and home-sickness. Home is where the heart is, wherever I buy my hats.

As I stood there, everything I was wearing was out of date, which rankled slightly. I was wearing a long, camel hair coat, my stoutest, brownest, leather jackboot style boot boots, a dark purple cotton weave suit, with a slightly yellowed polo shirt, long sleeved, Fred Perry. I wiped my right cheek dry. I made sure my wide-brimmed hat was dust free and at a sensible angle. I wore my grey-framed spectacles for clear vision and because of the distinguished air they lied to other people about. I was ready. I was ready for anything.

So I thought.

The weather was crisp and clean. The sky is crackling blue. I could feel the weak sunshine on my back as I looked at my crazed reflection in the cracked paint of the door. I made a decision that even now after everything that’s happened I remain proud of. I decided not to look back. 

Not that I had any choice but you have to make things yours don’t you? You have to own things.

The envelope was as light as a letter and nothing more. Maybe a love letter. Maybe blackmail. I figured that I’d probably get the chance to steam it open en route but for the time being I just let the possibilities stew in my juices.

It was addressed, rather formally for a love letter, to Mrs Maeve Morgen, The Owner, The Four Crosses Hotel, Little Minster Street, Crosschester, CR14UX. It edged towards blackmail over love.

Wrong again.

I took one last look at the door and its faded poster of the blond guy, I smiled, turned on my heels and off I went. I was going to whistle a happy tune as per the instructions but the avenue was quiet. I had learned to love and respect quiet.

So, yes, I was off to see Julianna and the other one. The immutably fabulous Julianna Górecki in the house that overlooked the park near a small, shabby memorial that was clumsily inscribed with a commemoration to seven young lads who had died on a beach in 1918. 

As I set out, my aunt Bernadette was ill. Not her usual, “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine all on my own here in the dark, just leave me here”, kind of ill. She was terminally ill. Julianna hadn’t bothered to let me know during a recent phone call. She was resigned rather than upset about it. 

“She’s quite ok”, Julianna calmly. 

“Well, thank Our lady, Holy Mother Mary of Sorrows”, I said sarcastically.

“My dear Laurie, that is cruel of you”, she was serious. 

I walked away from the halfway house, past the prison, which looked like a child’s idea of a castle, towards one of Porthampton’s railway stations. The first person I met in my licensed freedom was a petite, dapper gentleman with a white moustache and a flat cap. Trotting ahead of him was a small, loudly ugly dog with a twig in its mouth and its tail down. The old man and his dog did not respect the quiet.

“Buster! Put that down! Buster!”, screamed the old fella.

The dog stopped, planted all four paws on the pavement and stared back at him. The old man, bent down, removed the twig, threw it away and put the dog on a lead. The dog struggled for its freedom, and barked back. 

I was obviously feeling bright and breezy, “Good morning sir, your dog seems full of the joys”, I said with as much amiable politeness as I could remember.

“Fuck off and mind your business, he’s a little cunt”.

They walked on. The dog looked back at me and I swear it shrugged as if to say, “Such is life my friend, such is a life of safety in chains”.

I hated mornings. At night cold weather like the unnecessarily biting wind I was walking through has some drama to it. First thing in the morning, the cold wind was as unpleasant as a begging drunk in your favourite bar. So, as I turned the corner at the top of the avenue and was glad of my thick coat. The wind, canalised by the tall, Victorian buildings, bodied me and took some of my breath for itself and screamed away with it. I put my head down and continued to make my way. 

The station was sparse, a glorified level crossing with a place to buy a newspaper and cigarettes. Over on the other platform I could see a middle aged man with wild blonde hair. He was wearing a brown, double-breasted suit that was fashionable when I went to prison, and was now shabby. His expensive shoes were clean. He was prancing from one foot to the other in a shuffled dance. He reminded me of  Doctor Neil O’Neil seen through a fisheye lens pasted with Vaseline. A proper doctor, a doctor of medicine, so he said. Neil had qualified in London as a wunderkind. It couldn’t have been Neil though. Neil was dead. 

Watching the man on the other platform reminded me just how much terrifying fun the combination of Neil and a big city used to be. Back then we read fashion fanzines that used Mao and Lenin as cool pinups. We listened to Post Punk and Hip-Hop and 1950s bebop jazz because it was obscure and obnoxious to the people we didn’t care for. 

We had all kinds of nefarious joys and they never wore us out. Drugs were always cheap. I thought that was miraculous rather than a simple case of supply and demand. We experimented with everything. We are quite obviously immortal.

Memory is just a jigsaw. Time is just a slide down the stairs. We spent good, bad, solid, fluid time in bars where something great was playing out of battered speakers. I’d get  ‘lightly minded’ as Neil’s friend Nana Adé (one of the loves of my life) put it. We’d get something to eat or we’d head to a party or a club to do unforgettable things that I no longer remember. I was practising high level cynicism at the time, so of course I didn’t understand the joy I was experiencing for what it was: a battery to help power through later life. The fun felt ephemeral, which in retrospect, is the most insane thing. 

(Or a rapidly draining battery, yes, don’t tell me.)

One night we were slumming it in a decent bar in Queens or Flatbush or somewhere not Manhattan. It had some terrible rock’n’mock’oirish tunes blasting away in the background and not a sight nor the gorgeous smell of Nana Adé for days. We were drinking heavily and so unstylishly as to be very cool if any of the cro magnon men and women there could have noticed. I’d been modelling some awful designer jeans. He’d been out with his new passion, his camera, being Vivian Maier or Robert fucking Doisneau, snapping street pictures. I doubt he ever bothered to get the pictures developed. He probably gave the camera away in return for anal or drugs. 

He touched my fashionably bare knee and asked:

“Do you think animals have a sense of history? When your pet’s sitting there watching an old black and white Lassie movie on TV with you do you reckon she thinks, ‘That dog there, she’s definitely dead’”?

“Dogs only see in black and white don’t they?”

I thought about it some more and told him that it was a stupid fucking question, because I didn’t have any pets, never had. And anyway, history was bunk.

“What’s the world to be without stupid questions?”

“That wouldn’t be a sense of history anyway, it’d be a sense of time”, I said thinking I was making a good point.

We drank and pretended to think profoundly when we were really thinking about where to get drugs or laid or a fast car. But had there been any silence in that bar, Neil would have broken it.

“Time just happens all the time, history has to be repeated”, he said.

“Sure”, I said signally for another round of drinks.

Just then Nana walked in, turning heads and giving them the long, elegant finger. She took the drink from Neil’s hand, knocked it back, kissed him gently on the lips, smiled at me and said.

“It’s over, Neil. We’re done”.

And she walked out. 

Dr O’Neil pretended not to care. He cared. You could see he cared. Not only was it a direct and public insult to his big-dick energy, he also loved Nana like a friend, he cherished her company. 

“I loved her”. He told me this in the professionally tacky bathroom where badness happened with exhausting regularity. 

“I loved her more than my own mother and sister”, he said as we set to drinking highball glasses of J&B and San Pellegrino on the rocks. 

“I know”, I said because I loved her in the same way.

One after the other and the other and the other, highballs then straight shots, tequila of course. By the time we left we were coke lipped and bent crazy.

He wept as I drove his black Buick Grand National GNX fast and way too straight back through Flatbush and to Manhattan. We hit a bump, I kept driving. Not my car. Probably not even Neil’s. On we went, my god I drove that thing hard. Next afternoon when we got up to go and get brunch there was a dent in the car. We went for pancakes with lots of coffee. I left for a culturally offensive modelling job in Egypt the next day. Dr O’Neil told me he’d sold the car to an Arab he knew from Williamsburg or somewhere. It was a fun car. 

Back on the platform of the Porthampton suburban station I wished I’d stayed in touch with Nana Adé before she’d left New York for Kinshasa and all points in between.

“Stop staring at me!”

The man on the other platform was shouting and pointing at me.

“It’s making me very anxious!” he yelled.

“I’m sorry! You remind me of someone I used to know!” I yelled back with what should have been a lame excuse.

“That doesn’t make any difference to me! Stop staring why don’t you!?” he sounded distraught rather than angry.

He turned his back on me. He looked nothing like Dr Neil from the back.

“I’m sorry! It won’t happen again I can assure you!”

The man on the other platform smiled, his train arrived and he got on. A few minutes later mine pulled in and I boarded. He left a bad, no not bad, more strange impression on me. I realised that this was due to the fact that he reminded me of an aged Dr O’Neil. I had never met old Neil. He was a ghost. The ghost of some high times when Neil and I would share everything, every experience, every deed no matter how dark or how joyous. A short but intense period in New York, London, Paris and all points in directions that I can’t – don’t want to – remember. I tried to shrug my strange impression off as my train pulled out on its way to Porthampton Central station and beyond. It had taken a long time for me to fall for my own lie that I’d moved on from Neil O’Neil. I hadn’t.

More stories:

McDonald-Sayer turns away from his dream The little man The Assumption – Chapter 4 The Four Crosses Hotel

Dr Neil O’Neil’s voice was in my head. Stuck there like a fog stuck fast to a lighthouse. “It’s a shame to miss a day like this with the sunshine burning you dry when you could be drinking with your pals in good bar, so”, he’d tease through the screaming clamours of the prison landings.

His basso combined with his thin as shoeshine pretence of an Irish brogue irritated me. He always had it at the ready. He had several brogues that he muddled up and deployed sometimes in the same sentence.

“Everyone loves the Irish”, he said, referring to everyone in the United States, because not even the Irish love the Irish all the time. I learnt in prison and similarly from my family that it was considered that you had ‘notions above yourself’ to talk about that sort of thing. “Don’t go playing the martyr, you”, was the purest and most unanswerable admonition.

“Will you not just come for a small one, I have the thirst on me?” he would say.

“Would you have a few dollars to spare, I’m temporarily without funds for now, so”.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph but I’ve the poor mouth on me!”

“You’re a good man yourself, so you are”, he’d say.

He adopted the theatrical Irishman when he needed a little extra charm. Born in New York, he’d never visited what he liked to call The Emerald Isle, The Auld Country, Eire. Any Irishness in him had been diluted by the Atlantic during his ancestors’ boat journey and escape from either starvation or incarceration. The American Dream. Dr Neil’s well-rehearsed accent was enough to fool most people outside Ireland. Actual Irish people weren’t so gullible. Or they were confused by a single O’Neil sentence that travelled up from Cork via Kilkenny before veering off to Ennis, then back across to South Dublin, finishing in Derry.

As I say, Dr Neil O’Neil came from New York; born, bred, educated, deflowered and lost his mind there. We’d met in Manhattan where and when I was modelling for the Austin-Rodney-Reed Agency. Mostly doing magazine fashion shoots, cocaine and anybody who fancied a go on me. Neil and I had been inseparable for a few years after recognising each other’s opaque charms. We weren’t other people. Like teenagers we were certain of this. Teenagers with stacks of disposable cash and limited imaginations as to how to spend it.

I had snogged him in Shalford by St Eades church when we returned to the UK for my parents’ funeral. We’d been on a bench surrounded by gravestones. Had we not been swallowing each other, we could have looked across the river Icene, clement to the many people who had lost themselves in it over the centuries, the millennia. 

Shortly after that snog, he had disappeared and I realised what a toadman he was. When Aunt Bernadette had met him, she had huffed at the sight of him. He’d tried his charm on her to absolutely no avail. At the Afters with the quiches, the white bread sandwiches, warm beer and cold red wine; after the bodies had gone into the soil under a hazel bush, I heard her telling him what he was.

“You’re an utterable conman of the worst kind. You’re an unnatural being. Suffice to say that Laurie deserves you. You deserve each other. Now fuck off”, she rarely swore back then.

So, as I walked across the massive concourse to look up at the departures board, his voice and the memories it dragged along were with me. 

That “so” just dribbled off the end of his sentences for the sake of his authentic Oirish masquerade, so. The thing is: I was never bored around Dr O’Neil. You’d never hear him moan. He could be laying in the middle of the road outside the Black Cut Lounge & Bar in Flushing, New York with blood running down his cheeks and he’d still be trying to order a cab to the next place. He just never complained. He left that to everybody else.

“Life’s too short, so it is”, he told me once in a pub called the Beehive one late evening after a very bad day at the races – we’d got into a fight and had ran away. We’d chosen the other side of Porthampton in the drabbest of all suburbs to get drunk in. Actually, we’d followed someone sexy who had disappeared, but there we were and it was there that he uttered that drabbest of cliches.

Oh, Julianna my love

Enough history, what about me? My name is Laurie Gonne and I like to float above it all like an angel, a toy balloon, a thrush with a snail in its beak. I was beautiful once, physically. Now I am statuesque, striking, even handsome. When this part of my story began I was a convicted criminal. Convicted, you could argue, for a crime I didn’t really commit. When some professional people did in fact argue this, it resulted in a lengthy prison sentence.

I liked to read, watch and listen to the same things most other people do. This means that people relate to me even if I can’t or won’t  relate to them. I can talk with normal people for ages and I still seem to be interested. Reading, watching and listening to obscure stuff gets you nowhere. I know, I tried it when I was a model in Paris. It means nothing. Take Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven for example, she read a lot of stuff and still died obscure, young and broke. Where’s the incentive? 

I make sure to keep up with popular sports – soccer mainly. If you can speak a little soccer, you can get by in most parts of the world. It’s the only true lingua franca, vastly outweighing food.

Anyway, there I was in my cell. My cellmate, as thin and scratchy as someone who has been malnourished since birth, was below me. In their own bunk. My eyes were closed but I was not asleep. The landings were quieter and less violent than usual. The occasional dramatic scream or pan crash, nothing more. 

I was reminiscing to myself about one of the great loves of my life, probably the greatest; the remarkably beautiful Julianna Górecki. Tall as a cedar. Elegant as a hazel branch. French as a guillotine. She lived in a massive, crumbling Georgian country house in the village I grew up in. It was a house I knew well. It should have been my house. Our house. Me and Julianna. Julianna and I. Instead it was infested by my aunt Bernadette Theresa Glaister. A hypocritical shill for the Holy Roman Church (and also with you) and the three faces of God. A constant charlatan, bully and drunkard. My aunt. My remaining blood relative.

Bernadette was the sister of my mother who died alongside my father two days after I was born. Some people said they’d been drinking and drugging heavily to celebrate. Other people said they’d been flying away from the sight of me. Bernadette had been presented with my pink, screaming, over animated, starving hungry self. She had given me away for my own good and for hers. I don’t blame her for doing that. I would have done the same thing. Not all of us have that parental twitch.

We met afterwards. Bernadette’s Catholic Christianity forced her into that, so she demanded it. Back then the authorities just weren’t that bothered. Especially not in the face of a wannabe nun in full, red-haired, righteous fury, driven by Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and guilt.

Bernadette and I did not like each other. We hadn’t since the first time I’d been introduced to her by my ineffectually loving parents. I was four weeks old. My mother left me with her for ten minutes while she went out to get my father to hurry up and come in. Bernadette shouted at me for getting between her and her ashtray. I remember that shout to every analyst and in every dream I’ve ever had.

“You little shit! Where are you fucking parents, you tiny, useless little cunt! For fuck’s sake”

My mother heard the shouting and rushed back in. 

“Take it away. Take it away or I’ll probably damage it by accident”, I distinctly remember Her saying.

Julianna had lived with her for a long time. Her and the house. She managed to bring a hint of humanity to the house, which looked down on Shalford village where I grew up.

Wonderful Julianna, cool and warm, torridly tactile and terrifically remote. I adored Julianna like only a few other men and women I’d encountered. She made me a teen all over and inside. She made me self-conscious in a wonderful way. That’s love isn’t it? A kind of love. I have still never met anybody as satisfyingly distant as Julianna, and I’ve worked extensively in the high-end fashion industry. Julianna then. Julianna now. Julianna forever. 

Talking of abandoning children, Bernadette loved the Roman Catholic Church. She still referred to it as that. Despite this, she was also puritanical if you excluded the drinking and smoking and the lesbianism, all of which of course she denied. This habit of fearsome and absolute denialism was a gift from her terror of a father, my bloody grandfather. That old ghost of a bastard had also passed down to her that grand old mad old big old house. As soon as I got out, I decided that somehow I was going to dislodge her from my and Julianna’s house.  I didn’t care where or how she went. I didn’t care if was in a taxi or a box. That was my original plan.

A favour

A week before I was due for release, I was chatting away with with my cellmate, a slight and crispy hooligan called Joe. He like to be called The Phoenix but no one ever called him that. Mostly he was called ‘Rat’ or ‘Weasel’. He called himself a safe-cracker but lacked the self-confidence and dexterity to be anything other than a sneak thief at best. He was a slight man. He’d talked to me about his wife and daughters who never came to visit him. He wanted to know why I had no family visitors. 

I told him that the last remaining family member I knew of was my terrible Aunt Bernadette – I went into some detail because, what the fuck, I was in prison. I told him that the mad old bag lived in a mad big old house being looked after by sweet Julianna. 

“It’s a massive Georgian house all elegant angles outside and a messes within. It overlooks a vast green space with two cricket pitches and a place to play soccer. It has a putting green. It was bestowed on the villagers of Shalford by a retired rear-Admiral had bought it so he could fish from the back garden into the private trout and pike stream. He had died in the house along with his secrets. By rights it should be my house. Mine and Julianna’s”, that’s the way I talked to Jo the Phoenix.

“You should definitely go and see her”, said Jo sniffing the foetid air for a chance. 

I sighed a bit too dramatically. I’d been planning just that for years, all through my appeals, during every phone call I’d had with Julianna, always.

“Nah”, I dismissed him out of hand. 

“Why not?”

“You should never revisit your past”, whatever, blah, blah.

“Never mind that. Look at you. You’re gorgeous”.

I did. I was. I still am. 

“What’s that got to do with it?”, I pretended to be cross. Not angry, just cross.

“Your aunt over in Crosschester, right?”, Jo wouldn’t give up.

We both knew Crosschester. Although it was two different cities when we talked about it.

“Just outside. Shalford, the village, on the way out to the coast”.

“I know it. Nice place. Nice people. Doors always open. Trusting people. Very trusting people”.

They were trusting people all of them apart from my Aunt Bernadette who had stopped trusting anything since the Latin Mass was vandalised into intelligibly native tongues.

“I suppose”, I had different memories of the place.

Thankfully, Jo interrupted my train of thought with some pointless advice.

“You should visit them, make a go of it, you only live once. Use your charm. You’ve always got a shot. Is your auntie in good health? Maybe not. Maybe she’s close to the end. She’s got to have left to house to someone, right? Maybe she’s made no will. That’d mean you’d be up for the lot. Maybe she has made a will and left everything to a cats’ home. That’s mean you’d need to put a stop to it?”, they paused, thinking.

“Maybe she’s left it all to Julianna. That definitely means you’ll need to get in with her for sure unless you want to lose everything”.

“That’s all so completely heartless, you’re really cold”, I snapped. Of course they was completely correct.

I swear to god I heard the Phoenix shrug. 

“Sure thing. But you should go anyway”.

I rolled over on my bunk and faced the wall, feeling my own warm breath on my face and pretending it was one of my lovers. I was intrigued by Jo’s insistence though. No one in ‘the joint’ as some of them insisted on calling it, no one kept at you unless there was something in it for them.

The Phoenix mocked the silence.

“Make it up with Bernadette. You’re blood after all?”

I reserved comment.

“Go on, you never know. Love and all that, family and that, it’s got to be worth a shot, and when all’s said and done, you’re worth it”.

“What do you want, Jo?”, I sat up, swung my long, bare elegant legs around so my feet were planted on the cold floor.

There was a lengthy pause. 

“Can you take a letter to Crosschester please? I mean, you’re going anyway? It’s in your way. I mean in your direction”.

My first thought was, The Phoenix can read and write?

“What’s in it?”

Of course I meant, ‘what’s in it for me?’ and Jo knew that. That was one of the great things about prison in those days: the honesty. Every interaction was a transaction.

“I’m not telling you what’s in it. I’ll tell you where it’s going though”.

“Useful information”, I said,

“It’s going to The Four Crosses Hotel, you know it?”

I didn’t. So I said I did. 

“Your travel will be paid”, a strange formality had crept in.

“OK”

“It’s good. A good hotel. Very good”.

“You can also pay for a few night’s accommodation then”, I pushed.

“I thought you were staying with your darling Julianna”, The Phoenix pushed back.

Negotiation is such a fucking bore, which is why other people specialise in it. Boring people. Nevertheless, I didn’t miss a beat. 

“You want a mysterious – so probably nefarious – letter delivered. That’s worth the fare and one night’s accommodation in anyone’s money”.

“Fair enough, one night, single room”.

“Dinner and breakfast thrown in”.

“Why the fuck not. Just make sure the letter gets there. And do not read it. They’ll know”.

“One final question”, I said.

“Go on then”.

“Why are you called The Phoenix?”

“I fell into a bonfire once and it didn’t kill me”.

“Singed you?”

“A bit”.

I decided against further conversation, and against dinner and instead went to the gymnasium to people watch.

More stories:

McDonald-Sayer turns away from his dream The little man The Assumption

A novel that never quite made it. It was about love, hope, self-image and memory’s false constructions.

The Assumption is a novel I worked on, I struggled with, for three years before I decided not to proceed. I killed it. I killed it because it was growing fat and indigestible. It wouldn’t just stick at being a simple story of misplaced love, of memory stews, of revenge.

All well and good except new lines of narrative, new social dynamics, new characters kept appearing and making a mess of each other. The book refused to bed anything down to a reader-friendly line in its beginning, middle and its several unsatisfying endings.

Worse still, the book became an exercise in showing off my own researches, not entertaining the reader. Clarity. Clarity. Clarity – the oppposite was true.

Magazine writing and editing since 1988, I found myself re-reading drafts only to red-pen the drafts. My old editor head just screamed:

“What the fuck is in it for the reader? Are you going to provide a sodding directory? Maybe a few maps? Some way to help the poor reader work out what’s going on?” I yelled at myself.

How it began

The Assumption began as a story about a man fresh out of prison for a crime he may or may not have committed. He decides he will travel on the new and highly dangerous Mars Colony rocket but first he has to travel around the country and say ‘sorry’ and ‘goodbye’ to his past and the people who inhabited it.

A straightforward enough plot, the story of a recovering addict saying their farewells and making their peace before embarking on the interplanetary journey from which they will probably never return. Unless, of course, they find true love.

Bloating

From its inception – a short story that bloated – to its death, it was a struggle. Love, false memory, self-delusion and redemption fell into and out of each other.

It lost its way when too many characters became involved in too many situations. Everything was inchoate and refused to evolve into much more than character and location interactions with little dramatic tension. It became bloated and without focus. Therefore, it had to die.

Or rather it had to be stopped and made an example of right here. The example is not to let my writing grow fat, lazy and plotless because there was just too much or too many plot and plots.

Confusion

This story was about a man/woman (I never made my mind up) who had left gaol where they’d been banged up for an unnamed crime they may or may not have committed. They go in search of true love, a house of their own, and ideally the demise of Aunt Bernadette.

Our protagonist, called Laurie Gonne, is a vain person – once a model – who doubts their own past but also other people’s perceptions of them. The first name was suitably genderless. The second name derived from Maude Gonne.

The I.R.A. get involved

The initial drafts were set between Crosschester – a city that readers of my first novel will recognise – and Fethard-on-Sea in Ireland – a town most people will not recognise.

The old, pre-Provisional, Irish Republican Army (IRA) became involved and turned the plot from Laurie’s search for their one true love (they have many of these), called Julianna Górecki into something more complex.

IRA diamonds are the McGuffin as historical (acts of memory) barbs begin entering the flow of the book. Laurie is given the task of liberating the gold or diamonds or bonds for a crew of mysterious old people. Threats are made, incentives are laid bare.

The I.R.A. came into play for two reasons:

1. I wanted some derring do, some John Buchan, some Erskine Childers. Some action-adventure to keep the audience energised.
2. I wanted to use all the information I’d gathered about my own Irish family to get my Irish passport (thanks Granny Murphy).
   • I’m also learning Irish – my new passion for this took over from my better judgment.

I then proceeded to get lost in the history of the Irish Republican Army (not the Provos), the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Jim Larkin’s Irish Citizen Army, The Irish Volunteers, and many others.

Research is all well and good. However, as any historian who has ever got carried away in an archive will tell you, not every avenue of research leads to revelation and a strong spine to their thesis. Much archive/research, no matter how much it glisters, is a long way from on topic.

The characters who might live on

Lovely Julianna

Let’s see what Laurie has to say about Julianna:

“The remarkably beautiful Julianna Górecki. Tall as a cedar. Elegant as a hazel branch. French as a guillotine. She lived in a massive, crumbling Georgian country house in the village I grew up in. It was a house I knew well. It should have been my house. Our house. Me and Julianna. Julianna and I.

“Wonderful Julianna, cool and warm, torridly tactile and terrifically remote. I adored Julianna like only a few other men and women I’d encountered. She made me a teen all over and inside. She made me self-conscious in a wonderful way. That’s love isn’t it? A kind of love. I have still never met anybody as satisfyingly distant as Julianna, and I’ve worked extensively in the high-end fashion industry. Julianna then. Julianna now. Julianna forever.

“Julianna brings a hint of humanity to Bernadette’s house.”

That hypocrite Bernadette

One character who has to remain and probably be used in a new, stripped down novel is Aunt Bernadette, an alcoholic, a heavy smoker, she is religous despite hating almost everything and everyone in God’s creation. She is a vicious and hypocritical harridan but she’s Laurie’s remaining blood relative (or is she? See, that’s how the book veered off in yet another direction). She’s possibly a lesbian who is also a devote Catholic.

She is being cared by Julianna in a grand country house. She is Laurie’s aunt. She maybe Julianna’ lover. Either way Laurie wants her gone. Bernadette has no reason to go. Julianna always knows that she will be getting it in Bernadette’s Will. Could Laurie be in love with a woman who has no need for that love?

What follows is how the book looked after I killed 90,000 additional words in a vain attempt to achieve some cohesion. To make The Assumption a book for the reader, and not just an act of writing my own cleverness or (as my internal critic would have it) a revelation of my own mediocrity, at best.

Anyway, I’ll be adding chapters as this blog of failure unfolds. For now, let’s look at the prologue. This was supposed to give an idea of Laurie’s ability to observe without inclusion.

That monster O’Neil

The novel’s most impactful make presence: Dr Neil O’Neil spends a lot of time in Laurie’s memory. You might even think that Neil is Laurie’s real love interest. He’s is a grandiose, sleazy and charismatic monster born of the 1980s. I knew people like Neil in the UK and in Ireland back then – all cocaine, champagne and lies.

The more I thought I was writing a story about Laurie, Juliana and Bernadette, the more Dr O’Neil threatened to take over. Maybe see you again elsewhere, Dr O’Neil?

Little Cartey

Little Cartey works at the Four Crosses Hotel (so many crosses, it’s got to be a bit dodgy, right?). This is where Laurie must hand over a letter to the landlady, Mrs Maeve Morgen, so the journey can continue.

Cartey, with her sibling Big Cartey, are the handypeople at the Four Crossses. They know the city of Crosschester and its outlying villages of Shalford, Commiton, and Bursley deeply and through time.

Little Cartey is also hugely empathetic, easy to trust, and useful. I’m sure I had Jean Passepartout in mind when I began writing Little Cartey.

At first Laurie, a natural snob, snobbish by fear, and doesn’t really care much for the help. Because of Little Cartey’s charm, obvious care for people, and growing care, Laurie is able to find the ground, is able to finally see other people.

It’s, of coures, possible that Little Cartey, not Julianna, not Dr Neil O’Neil is the real love of Laurie’s life. This love story between Little Cartey and Laurie was going to provide an ending to the book itself in fact.

What did I learn from this failure?

Writing in the first person is much harder than it seems. It’s a really technical skill to be able to drive the story forward from a single point of view (POV).

How can Laurie see what is going on elsewhere? How can Laurie read their minds? See their motivations? Without some way of achieving these things what I ended up with was a single character surrounded by people seemingly without motivation. Without any inner lives at all.

This conundrum could have been solved by switching to a multiple POV narrative with a non-character narrator who could observe and report back on everything and everybody.

The book, however, didn’t want this this. Not at all.

So, in the struggle between me the author, and the book itself, I always had the final say right up until that final say was “Enough! Time to move on”.

I hope you enjoy these fragments of years of work.

Too many voices not enough depth or action

Another mistake I made was to be lead by too many characters, and their concomitant plots no matter how small. Creating and growing characters is an immense pleasure for any author. Then the realisation dawns that differentiating between the troops in this army of undifferentiated voices, faces, motivations and subplots adds nothing other than stress to the reader’s time.

This took me quite some time to come to grips with. No matter how evil or oily or stupid a character is, the author still loves them. However, they must each have clear and cleanly outlined personalities and behaviours. If not, you’re just adding the same characters suffused and obscured by each other.

Imagine a bar full of drunks and you’re sober, you’ve just walked in. All the drunks are sure they’re being original and have great, pissed-up, stories to tell.

“I’m not drunk!” they all chorus, all believing this is true.

It’s time to go elsewhere before they all start talking about themselves because all they have to say will be how interesting, individual, and sober they are.

Fewer, more tightly written, more compelling characters are more likely to drive the plot forward. The opposite has the effect of flooding and therefore diluting the backbone plot so that the book itself becomes a self-indulgent scrap book not an interesting novel.

So, after all that, here’s what’s left of The Assumption.

(After you’ve read this, you might like to read my novel The Water Meadow Man, which I have published.)

More stories:

McDonald-Sayer turns away from his dream The Assumption – Chapter 4 The Four Crosses Hotel The Assumption – Chapter 1 Leaving

New York! New York! Dr Neil O’Neil’s inhuman conclusion about a street robbery

He was dressed in a light coloured, linen suit with an open-necked pale blue, cheese-cloth shirt. He was wearing brown sandals. He had a beard and his blue eyes were weeping although he didn’t feel sad. He was a lovely man, everybody said so. He was called Brendan Carthy. He was 45 and he was already dying anyway. The Irishman was in no more pain than anyone else though.

The gunman wanted to take his wallet. 

No time had passed.

Most passers-by were frozen into the scene. No longer passing by, their inaction now part of the action.

Someone called the police. The NYPD. Those boys.

Other people felt for their handguns, realised this isn’t fucking Texas, this is New York fucking City motherfucker, we’re civilized people. Let go of their fat pistol butts, and just looked on.

Two police cars arrived. New cars that weren’t messed in memories and the smell of bleach. 

One young person in the crowd began a slow handclap that didn’t catch on.

Brendan, the Irishman, closed his eyes, which released Jimmy, the addict, who squeezed the trigger and fired. He’s never so much fired a gun in anger let alone killed another human being. A second later he was demolished by police gunfire from three young officers with the same experience. Jimmy went down smiling in no pain.

I started to pass-by again, took a photograph and continued my walk to meet my good friend Dr Neil O’Neil in a favourite bar. 

I told him what I’d seen. He shrugged and ordered two beers bottled and two vodka highballs.

“It’s a big city. Shit like that happens in big cities. It is what it is.”

That was Dr Neil O’Neil all over. He took things in his stride. He compartmentalised and prioritised. He was a stoic or a sociopath, depending on your own pretensions.

“You Knew I Was A Scorpion” tattooed on this right thigh. 

“When You Hitched a Ride”, was on his left.

On this chest he had ‘Shit Happens. It Is What It Is’ in white text on a black bar.

He had a garish peace mandala on his back.

I was never quite sure what it was he did for his money but he was tremendously great fun. For the most part.

We were close for a few years. He would spend his money freely on all the things that you, sensible as you are, have been warned about and heeded. One day, he disappeared. Presumed dead. Assassinated or fell off a dock or choked to death on a sandwich or his parachute failed. That was decades ago.

So, when I got out of prison for a crime that many people said I probably didn’t even commit, Dr Neil O’Neil was the last person on my mind. My hateful Aunt Bernadette and my sweet Julianna – a love of my life –  were at the top of my list.

But shit happens.

More stories:

McDonald-Sayer turns away from his dream The little man The Assumption – Chapter 2 My Journey Began