A Read online

  The soggy-faced man now had his arms folded on top of the passenger door and his chin resting on a wrist. He was smoking absently, observing the comings and goings of the gunmen, the crashings around through the big metal-framed ground-floor windows. Occasionally he shifted his weight slightly and glanced back to check that Sonia was still there, though not very often.

  Escape crossed Sonia’s mind, remotely; except she knew that she’d never be able to walk or do anything practical if she actually tried it. Here she was – captive of the pigs, with her friends and the man she loved in some terrible fucking predicament, their house overrun with gun-wielding lunatics – and she was paralysed by the smell of fish.

  Eventually it was too much. With shaking hands Sonia gathered the carrier bag gingerly by the handles and swung it over to the other side of the pile. The one beneath began at once to slip sideways, starting to empty newspapers and magazines across the vacated piece of seat. Panic cloyed in Sonia’s stomach. It made her want to be sick. The fish smell kept filling the air, choking her.

  – Er…

  Sonia was starting to cry. She could feel a flood around her eyeballs.

  – You alright?

  The soggy-faced man was peering over the passenger seat, looking really quite concerned. Blankly Sonia noticed he was wearing the identity badge of a soft-toy factory.

  – Why don’t you get out for a minute? he suggested. It can’t be too much fun in there. Here, have a cigarette, or – er – something… I’ve got a pack if you want one.

  Sonia was too shaken to say anything. Tears were gathered now on her lower eyelids, gleaming in the house lights like eyeball menisci. A second or two later she managed to nod, dumbly, dislodging a couple of droplets, which ran with pent-up speed towards her collar.

  Teather walked round the car and opened her door; except as Sonia pulled herself along the seat to get out the heap of bags slid with her. A box of eggs broke open on the floor – followed by a carton of milk and a pouch of processed turkey – then the newspapers and magazines fanned like cards across the seat, some falling into the slime seeping into the floor.

  – Oh, fuck, said Sonia miserably.

  – Take me from behind! instructed a hugely overweight Indian woman, her naked bosoms clenched between fleshy upper arms. Most of the other magazines said similar sort of things.

  – Ah… said Teather uncomfortably, looking in through the door. Perhaps I’d better clear those up. Here, er, you have a cigarette.

  He handed her the packet.

  Hooey felt abstracted, leaving 6 Burnell Road, waiting for an armoured straggler before turning off the lights and pulling the door closed behind him. It was how he often got after raids: philosophical, introspective. Outside, the last traces of drizzle had cleared now, ushering sparse, faint stars into their place – what few could outshine the streetlights. Hooey stood on the doorstep, looking across the yard, trying to think.

  Sometimes he just got swamped by it all. Here he was with this task, to rid the country of illegal drugs; but he hadn’t got the resources, and never would have, and no-one in the country – including him – thought that it was possible. It reminded him of a character in a film he’d seen one time: an athlete, training by swimming against a river, staying still for hours on end. Noble, Hooey might have been, but sooner or later the river was going to beat him. He just seemed to get tireder and older, and if you wanted drugs you could still go out and buy them. In the end, it did make you wonder if he was doing anyone much good. Except lawyers, of course, and judges, and drug dealers, and the drug squad itself.

  – PC 273, spluttered a radio. Accident on the A310 between Wick Road and Crieff Court is now clear. We are awaiting instructions…

  The girl was hunched against the side of Hooey’s car, her face bloodless, smoking feverishly. Teather was leaning beside her. He glanced towards the front door.

  – Alright, Hooey? he said.

  – Hhm, Hooey grunted. Well, they’ve taken it and spread a load of dust everywhere. I don’t think there’s anything left to send anyone down with, but the attic’s lightproofed and there’s a forty-watt dark-red bulb in the socket. For what it’s worth. Could be useful.

  – Ah, said Teather. Shit.

  – And apparently Steve Fisk got away. Took his car. His phone’s switched off, and so’s that Italian bloke’s we’ve got the number of – Paolo Alkalai – so we’ve not got any idea where they are, either.

  – What have they taken? said Sonia.

  – Oh, for God’s sake, said Hooey wearily. You know what was in there. I know what was in there. We’ve got bigger fish to fry than you round here so, look, if you’re not going to be nice to us, we will just do you for something, okay? We just want you to cooperate.

  Hooey sat on the edge of his driving seat, frowning and trying to concentrate.

  – Shit! he said suddenly. Hang on! Just there, where the van was… Of course, there was an ambulance there! An old ambulance! A, er, Transit!

  – Er… said Sonia.

  – Okay. So what’s the registration?

  – How the hell…? Sonia’s mouth stayed open a moment. I mean, I don’t know! Why would I know that?! I don’t even know what was supposed to have been in the attic!

  – Well, said Hooey, if that’s how it’s going to be, we’re just going to have to begin at the beginning. Aren’t we?

  He reached mechanically into the glove compartment of the Fiat Punto and pulled out a clipboard with a multiply subdivided A4 piece of paper on it.

  – Name? he said.

  – You are skating on very thin ice, young lady, Hooey observed. I’ll ask you again: what’s the full name of the owner of the ambulance? He looked at Sonia, quivering in the back.

  – Peter, er, Parsons, said Sonia miserably.

  – Er? echoed Hooey. What’s that? An initial?

  – No, said Sonia. His middle name’s Damien.

  Hooey looked at her.

  – Okay, he said at last, and picked up the radio handset from its socket on the dashboard. HQ Kingston, come in, HQ Kingston, this is Inspector H. Hooey. Do you receive me?

  White noise filled the car, fusing with the smell of warm haddock. Vague through the steamed-up windows, the only other police officers still around were sitting in an Astra a few feet away, listening to pop music, sharing a can of Coke. Teather was standing in the yard on his own, talking to the radio. The phone in his pocket was ringing insistently.

  – Hooey, this is HQ, the radio coughed. Receiving you, over.

  – HQ, we have one PARSONS – as in… more than one parson – PETER DAMIEN. Twenty-six years of age. Place of birth: Middlesbrough. Try the General Hospital… He is the owner of a decommissioned Ford ambulance, possibly C or D reg. Try anything – insurance records, road tax, vehicle registration, whatever – just get me the licence number. Did you get that, over?

  – Copy, Inspector. Over and out.

  Hooey sighed and rubbed a hand through his hair.

  – Alright, he said. That’s it. We know where to find you, so you might as well go there.

  Sonia opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again and pulled herself defeatedly along the seat, back into the yard. A single length of inscribed yellow ribbon was draped around the house. It fluttered in the rising breeze. Bits of orange cloud were skipping through the trees.

  – Yes, okay, Teather was saying. Okay, I’ll get some bread… No, really, I’m on my way back this minute… I know, dear. Yes, it’s very important.

  For a moment or two, Hooey watched the stars and the nearly-full moon edging its way from the copper beech; then he climbed back into the Punto. The tyres sucked at the ground as it rolled towards the gate.

  Sonia reached into a pocket of her jeans for rizlas and tobacco, and, shakily, rolled herself a cigarette for the walk back.

  j: belle, or the burning

  Angus was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, formulating the next part of his story. He’d given up trying
not to about half an hour earlier. It was there, ready, wanting to be written. Upstairs a squirrel was creeping across the roofspace. Outside the moon was working its way northwards, its impression of a small dusty window sliding across the floor towards the chimney.

  Finally Angus furled a blanket around his shoulders and went to sit cross-legged on the rug between the bed and the low, small westerly window. The moon was huge, near enough to Llandefalle to throw shadows down the hillside towards him. The top left of its face had a sliver missing – like it had suffered in a minor celestial collision – but its light was quite uniform, like a more manageable form of daylight.

  Amami O-shima. Tokuno-shima. Okinoerabu-shima. For some time now the islands had been visible before us, like patches of algae on the smooth curved surface of the Pacific. Now the day had moved on: clearing and ageing. The islands were beneath us. Okinawa lay long and uncertain through the propeller blades, an hour distant, its colors confused by those of the evening.

  A spectrum was evolving across the ocean: from the bloody darkness of the east, through Okinawa itself, Ie-jima – where the summit of Akari-Ue might still have seen some trace of the sun – to the sky-high conflagration in the very corner of my right eye. From four kilometres’ altitude, of course, the sun remained some way above the horizon. And, while I was unable to turn towards it myself, for some minutes yet bolts of light glanced affirmatively from the panes and panels of the other four aircraft.

  It had been a half-hour since the second departure, his fuel tank bleeding and his bomb for an instant filling the hole in the configuration as it fell away beneath him. Yet now, even in the absence of our 250-kilogram burdens, return to Oita would have been impossible for any one of us. It was a condition of which we must all, in our separate ways, have been aware.

  I could not say for sure whether the sun and the moon were opposed. The one had risen without my knowledge, eclipsed by the other’s descent, and invisible besides, my head being fixed. But it happened suddenly that the plane of the windows – around 70 degrees – brought images of both into the cockpit. Pure, if inverted: a sun to the left and a moon to the right. Both within the field of my eyeballs. Red and white respectively.

  Could it be, I wondered, that every one of us was witnessing this phenomenon? Our levels and positions being accurate as ever to one another, it did appear likely. My eyes grazed across the laden Zeroes passing south between the sun and the moon, the tiny clouds in the distance haloed in the day’s dying light, and – there, for the first time, off the southwest tip of Okinawa – I saw Kerama-retto: the enemy, basking in its victory.

  The moon was sinking at last behind Llandefalle. Its impression – Angus’s head cut black from the middle – was fading, shrinking, approaching a point where it would vanish altogether.

  He turned back towards the bed, ragged bits of mattress dangling beneath it. Emptiness was flowing cold and heavy in his stomach. If he ran to Llandefalle, he thought, he would see the moon for another few minutes. But the thought of watching it sink again made the emptiness flow more heavily. And besides, he’d have to cross the river.

  So Angus refurled the blanket around his shoulders, donned a pair of moccasins with most of the soles missing and headed towards the stairwell.

  The stairs were in a tight, steep half-circle spiral. Cobwebs stuck to his hands as he felt his way down, trying not to trip on the blanket, fumbling for a matchbox in the last beams of moonlight that were sneaking through the kitchen window.

  The room issued suddenly from the flame, stabilising a little as he transferred it to a candle on the table – a circle of shadow shuddering over books and a three-month-old copy of the Brecon and Radnor Express. He picked up the glass and the vodka bottle and carried them over to the woodburner.

  The bottle clinked as he set it down on a cold damp flagstone, shimmering reassuringly. For a moment he watched the tiny distorted candle burning inside it, then he removed the cap and filled the glass.

  – Big Ben, he said, by way of a toast.

  Relief fanned instantly through his stomach, diluting Belle or whatever else wasn’t down there, deadening the edge of his own refracted burning.

  There were embers still glowing at the back of the woodburner, visible through coatings of ash that exploded into clouds when Angus blew on them, breaking into flames as he heaped on newspaper and pieces of the broken pallet that he used for kindling.

  He sat cross-legged on the hearth-rug, looking into the fire, allowing words and thoughts to drift until finally they settled on Ipswich: childhood, his family, their neck of the suburbs, their street, their house.

  They’d lived in a place with four bedrooms, in a close he’d called Too Close, with a car and a half and a garden with a tree at the end. Too Close was in an arc, its ends drooping towards a junction and a main road. If you had a ball or a toy with wheels, it would always, sooner or later, take off and vanish into the traffic. Angus’s stabilised bicycle had once caused a minor pile-up. He’d never quite grasped why this problem hadn’t occurred to someone at the design stage.

  There were a lot of things Angus had never quite grasped about Too Close. Why anyone lived there was one. Why he lived there was another. For as long as he could remember he’d had this terrible sense of being blinkered, as if incalculable wealth was beyond the drab things around him.

  The relief when he left for London was indescribable. London was like a light for him. It was a place of possibility, even if the university he arrived at was as concrete and anodyne as everything he was trying to escape.

  NO TUITION FEES! the signs were saying in the halls of residence. NO STUDENT LOANS! EDUCATION FOR EVERYONE!

  They were tacked to trees and notice boards, little letters at the bottom instructing people to congregate in Parliament Square on Saturday. Having arranged his concrete cubicle – pinned up his posters and put his dope smokers’ techno on the record player – he wasn’t really sure what to do next. When he looked outside, everyone somehow seemed to know one another already. His nervousness revived his self-disgust. It was only chancing across Pete in the corner of a bar – twenty-five, dreadlocked, shellshocked – that he wound up knowing anyone at all.

  So the two of them found themselves in Parliament Square, cross-legged in the road, streaks of red in Angus’s shoulder-length hair, a seamless wall of riot shields around them and Big Ben rearing over the top. There were four hundred or so in the enclosure – ravers, indie types, hip-hoppers – the people, Angus found himself thinking, who still gave a shit!

  Then, looking towards some excitement behind him – a couple of people were trying to get out, a fight beginning with a policeman – he saw the most beautiful girl that he’d ever seen in his life: blonde, mascaraed, lissom, curvaceous. Everything!

  His mind came alight.

  – Alright, Belle? said Pete, turning to see what Angus was looking at. I didn’t know you were here.

  It was magic! A little shuffling and they were sitting next to each other. A few sentences and they were kissing.

  Around them, the protest was splintering, beginning to reveal itself. People were checking their watches against the last train home. Others were braving the clubs, vying for escape. The songs – Give Peace a Chance – were rendered verseless, petering too soon.

  But it wasn’t as if any of it mattered: London, the yearning. All Angus had ever wanted was to reach that light, to find whatever would finally make him complete. And that was Belle, the moment he first saw her: clear and brilliant, to be sailed by and aimed towards.

  k: steve

  Sonia patted the pockets of her jeans until she heard the clink of her house keys, then pulled herself up from the doorstep. Glancing around, she reached beneath her waistline and rearranged her clinging underwear. Damp and cold seemed to have made it to her skin the entire way down her body. She felt wretched.

  There was a car across the road, its lights on and – complicated by shrubbery – what seemed to be two men inside it. Now she came t
o think of it, the engine was running as well: a catlike purr audible above the traffic on Richmond Road.

  Sonia relit her cigarette. Somehow she couldn’t make herself move. She exhaled and thought about Nick, then the ambulance pulling away without her, then the Jaguar, which was still across the road, the passenger door breaking from the panelling.

  They were looking at her as they approached: two well-built, deliberate figures with the streetlight throwing shadows across their faces. The one to the left was huge – built and moving like a boxer – the other was about Nick’s height, his shape owing more to shoulder pads. Both were wearing jackets, with open-necked shirts and vaguely casual trousers. They stepped indifferently through the puddles in the gateway. Their feet crunched on the chippings.

  Sonia looked around her several times. She considered throwing herself round the corner of the house, heading for the garden and making a getaway down the towpath; but both of them were plainly better runners than she would ever be. So Sonia smoked, and couldn’t move, and hoped desperately that the men would turn out to be friendly.

  – Hello, said the smaller one, stopping in front of her, his hands in his trouser pockets.

  The huge one just stood there.

  – Er, alright? said Sonia hesitantly.

  She held the smouldering cigarette butt in her hand for a few seconds, then threw it awkwardly into the flowerbed.

  – Would you mind telling us something? asked the man, without moving.

  His hair was outlined against the streetlight: a tidy, parted style with a few bits sticking up towards the back. His accent was South London. His eyes were bulbous, Sonia could see that much.

  – Perhaps we could go inside, he suggested.

  – Well, like, why? asked Sonia, after a moment. What good would it do?