Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (22 page)

‘Aye,’ Ross replied. ‘Payphone. But it’s on the ground floor.’

‘Bugger.’

‘Well, I think if I went to the landing and peed, I might wash it out the door.’

‘I reckon we should just all make a run for it,’ Simon ventured.

‘You reckon you could outrun an alsatian?’ asked Ross.

‘I wouldnae need to. I’d just need to outrun you.’

‘Charming.’

Simon looked at his watch.

‘Christ. The guy’s probably got umpteen folk lined up to buy that thing. Let me out.’

‘You goin’ for it?’

‘Just gaunny have a wee look.’

Simon exited the room, Ross waiting a less than valiant few seconds before returning to their banister vantage point. Ray wasn’t feeling very brave either, but the fear of exploding like a urine‐
filled balloon was urging him forward. By the time Ray got there, Simon had made it to the first landing, where the girls were peeping out of their doorway. The alsatian was nowhere to be seen.

‘I think it’s away.’

‘Is the front door open?’

‘Cannae see.’

Woof.

‘Jesus,’ said Ross.

Simon stayed where he was, tentatively looking over the banister.

Whine.

‘Can you see it?’ asked one of the girls.

‘Aye. It’s kinna cowerin’ at the bog door, right at the back. I think it’s more scared than us.’

‘That’ll be right,’ Ross doubted.

‘I’m goin’ for it. I need that amp.’

Yes, go, go, thought Ray.

‘Christ, is it worth dyin’ for?’

‘Ross, it’s a dug, no’ a fuckin’ lion.’

‘I cannae watch this.’

Ross stepped back from the banister as Simon began walking slowly down the last flight of stairs, Ray’s bladder stretching thinner and tauter with every step. Behind Simon, the girls kept their door open in case he needed a handy exit. Ray moved delicately around the banister to get a clearer view of the bottom hall, in time to see Simon reach the door and calmly pull it open. There was a brown flash accompanied by a flurry of canine footfalls as the animal immediately bolted out of the house.

‘Tell Ross I died well,’ he called up the stairs.

‘Up your arse.’

‘You headin’ out the now, Ross?’

‘Aye.’

‘C’mon then. We’ll be safer from the wildlife if we walk in pairs.’

Ross rolled his eyes at Ray and popped back into his room for his essay, then trotted down the stairs.

‘Thanks, Simon,’ said the girl in the dressing gown.

‘De rien,’ he replied, holding the door open for Ross with an exaggerated bow.

‘See you in the bar later, Ray, awright?’

‘Oh fuck, don’t mention beer.’

‘Aye, sure.’

The front door closed, and with it the need to retain any semblance of cool was gone. Ray bounded down the stairs in his bare feet, but was only halfway to the next landing when the girl in the dressing gown nimbly stepped into the bathroom, now able to perform her ablutions without fear of being gored.

‘Aw fuck.’

There was another bog in the bottom hall, Ray remembered, and tore down the remaining flight as though the dog was indeed at his back. At the bottom, he grabbed the end of the banister and pivoted around it, eyes fixed on the mercifully open and unoccupied second bathroom door.

As opposed to the carpet.

He didn’t go quite the way of Jesus in Connolly’s crucifixion; merely slid a little, almost but not quite toppling. The first thing he was aware of was the sensation of something underfoot that was not textile. It was soft, clay‐
like and disturbingly above room temperature. And it was between his toes.

‘Aaaaww fuuuuck. Awww naaaaaw.’

Ray wobbled on his clean foot, face contorting beyond his control, skin having a determined go at leaving his body. Outside of pain, there can be fewer less desirable sensations than lukewarm alsatian jobbie squirming through the gaps around your little piggies. If he’d had a chainsaw handy, he’d have been tempted to lop the foot off just to make it stop.

He hopped through the door, holding his befouled leg at the knee so that it didn’t brush against anything, in particular other parts of his person. Once inside, he discovered that it was a bathroom merely in the euphemistic application of the term, containing as it did only a toilet and a minuscule wash‐
hand basin. There followed a difficult moment of pondering which to use first, before he decided that he could tolerate the vile clinging sensation just a little longer than he could tolerate the pain in his bladder.

He steadied himself with one hand on the wall as he pissed, the extended duration made even less welcome by the whiffs of alsatian keech that kept wafting up and threatening to make him gag. After that he had to execute a gymnastic manoeuvre inexplicably missing from the Olympic compulsory programme: that of plonking one foot in a tall but tiny basin while keeping the other one flat on the floor and having two hands free – not touching any walls for support – so that he could operate the taps and do … well, what he had to do.

The single mixer tap was a brilliant, invaluably useful and ingeniously simple innovation. It allowed you to regulate the water temperature merely by balancing the flow, so that you didn’t have to scald yourself or wash your face in freezing‐
cold water. This pygmy’s christening font, of course, didn’t have one. Nor did it have any soap. On the plus side, the cold water did dull the smell a little, and after a few minutes his toes were so numb that he could barely feel the sensation of canine faecal matter grudgingly peeling away from his skin.

Maybe he should have read the signs. Perhaps if he’d been brought up religious he’d have sought a semiology in every event, as though trying to hack the code for the preset programme of his life. But even if he didn’t believe in signs, he knew retrospectively that it was definitely an overture. The first night he’d spent with Simon Darcourt, he’d ended up literally in the shit.

There’d been other signs too, genuine evidence, as opposed to symbolic moments. The one that most stuck in his mind wasn’t in any way dramatic, but it was the first time he could remember alarm bells ringing. He’d chosen to ignore them, and if he had his time again he knew he’d ignore them still. It took a particular brand of sociopath to operate a ‘one strike and you’re out’ social policy of identifying fatal character flaws.

Simon, Ray and two or three others – he couldn’t recall who – were sitting in the Grosvenor Cafe on Ashton Lane, a popular spot for a coffee and cheap, generous grub in between (and as often instead of) lectures. They were talking about The Young Ones, which had by that time gone through both the trendy‐
to‐
like‐
it and subsequent uncool‐
to‐
still‐
like‐
it cycles and was therefore ripe for rehabilitation. It was one of those gut‐
wrenchingly funny coffee‐
time discussions, seemingly all the more savourable for the clock counting down to a class that conscience dictated he must attend. Everyone was contributing classic moments, provoking cumulative laughter round the table. Sharing their recollections somehow rekindled how hilarious the scenes were first time around, before their impact was dulled by irresistible repeat viewings.

‘Mind the bit when Vyvyan’s heid got knocked off on the train, an’ he ended up kickin’ it along the railway line.’

‘“You took your time, you bastard.”’

‘An’ that time he was diggin’ for oil, nuttin’ the floor.’

‘An’ the pickaxe went through his heid, aye.’

‘Don’t worry, Neil, it was bound to happen … sooner or later.’

‘Wallop!’

All that stuff. You had to be there. Then Simon said:

‘Remember the party one. The best one.’

This immediately struck Ray as an odd thing to say, and he was sure it wasn’t just Simon’s figure of speech. He didn’t offer it, he pronounced it. There was something in the way he said it that invited – no, assumed – agreement, and as he spoke he looked around the table, meeting every eye in a sweep that was expecting rather than seeking approval. He didn’t say ‘my favourite one was’ or even ‘the funniest one was’ with its implicit, unspoken ‘imho’ qualification. ‘The best one.’ It was as though it didn’t actually occur to him that anyone else could have a different opinion. This wasn’t the case, of course. Simon knew fine that there were people who had different opinions from his own. He even had collective terms for them.

A less impressionistic warning came on another late night in the QM, when the pair of them were really hitting it off, setting the world (or at least The Smiths) to rights. In a rare departure from the comfortable common ground of standard subject matter, Ray mentioned how a girl in one of his classes had thus far failed to return some lecture notes he had lent her. Ray just wanted to let off steam, maybe hear Simon go into one of his entertainingly colourful rants about the girl in question, preferably including details of some sexual involvement he might have had with her.

Instead he said merely: ‘I find people really disappointing, don’t you?’ Ray got the impression he would join their number if he answered in anything but the affirmative. Again, to paraphrase the playground rhyme, ‘it’s not so much the things he says, it’s the nasty way he says ’em.’ He had heard plenty of weary and embittered or merely posturing misanthropy even by that age, but never spoken with such a cold certainty, such irredeemable condemnation. Ray was talking about some daft lassie much remarked to have a mind like a colander, and Simon sounded ready to wipe out the entire species.

‘Em, sometimes, aye.’ Ray left it at that, figuring a Capraesque advocacy of the human capacity for warmth and goodness was unlikely to melt Simon’s heart.

People did ‘disappoint’ Simon, individually as well as generally, though their (sometimes unknowing) transgressions were often subject to a somewhat singular interpretation on his part. ‘He/she disappointed me’ was, in Ray’s frequent experience, the phrase that heralded their being airbrushed out of the official records and ignored with a Stalinist dedication.

This social totalitarianism was in ironic symbiosis with an unmatched faculty for liking and being excited by people. In short, when you were in, you were very, very in, and when you were out, it was final. When he met someone new, he had the ability to make him or her feel like the most interesting person on the planet, perhaps because to Simon, at that precise moment, they were (behind him, of course). Any time you ran into him, he gave the genuine impression that the day had just improved immeasurably, simply because you had shown up. The effect was doubly charming because the feeling was reciprocated, in spades. Simon was someone towards whom interesting people and exciting events just couldn’t help but gravitate, and yet he could still make you feel like you were the one brightening up his universe. Until you disappointed him.

Ray could feel the truck slowing down again. It had stopped several times, presumably at junctions, but hadn’t done so for at least an hour. He couldn’t hear anything from outside, which would have suggested they were somewhere remote and secluded if it hadn’t been that he couldn’t hear anything from outside at the point he reckoned they were bombing along the motorway through the city. He was dying for a pee, the combination of caffeine, travel and fear having a powerfully diuretic effect, further exacerbated by not knowing when or if he would ever see a lavvy again. Whizzing on their front upholstery had seemed a temptingly vengeful recourse, but in opposition, as well as the smell, there was the thought that they could mete out vengeance too, and they had the option to piss lead. He’d decided to hang on for another ten minutes, after which the driver’s seat was getting it out of sheer necessity.

The truck came to a standstill and the engine cut out. Ray enjoyed a millisecond’s feeling of relief that the journey was over, before his thoughts turned to what might be about to happen next. Better to travel hopefully, indeed. Better to travel shit‐
scared and bursting for a single‐
fish, in fact, than to arrive in the custody of pistol‐
packing bampots.

The rear shutter rolled open. Boyle and Thorpe, or whoever the fuck they were, strolled purposefully into the container, Boyle carrying something black in his right hand. He opened the door and gestured to Ray to get out.

‘Face the front.’

‘Yes sir,’ Ray said. It was meant to sound defiant, but his voice cracked up. Daft, really. There was no point in pretending he wasn’t terrified.

The black something turned out to be a bag or a hood. It was passed over his head and tightened around the neck. Boyle placed his hands on Ray’s shoulders and turned him around.

‘Walk.’

Ray moved slowly, his feet picking cautiously at the ground before each step. A hand grabbed his shirt around the chest and pulled at him to go faster. He was led down the ramp and over what felt like grass, then inside a building, the floor underneath smooth like lino or tiles. It felt cooler inside the building than out, and there was a fusty smell about it that suggested Mister Sheen and his pal Ajax hadn’t dropped by for a while. The smell was that of abandonment and decay, to which Ray could add hopelessness, isolation and fear.

A door was opened for him and he was nudged through it on to bare floorboards, dust and traces of rubble rolling between the wood and his shoes. He was thrust down on to a chair and had his hands pulled behind him, where they were tied tightly together. His feet were then secured to the metal chairlegs, before the hood was finally removed. He saw layers of peeling wallpaper, bare plaster and a fireplace, the ceiling a diseased‐
looking plague of blistered paint and crumbling cornicing. There was one window, broken and partially boarded up, allowing a shaft of weak sunlight to illuminate the room, but affording a view only of thick bushes and trees beyond.

Boyle and Thorpe stood on either side, Thorpe removing a packet of cigarettes from his inside jacket pocket. He offered one to Ray.

‘I don’t smoke.’

Thorpe shrugged and popped the proffered fag into his own mouth.

‘Too bad. Any other requests?’

Ray felt tears forming in his eyes as the question and the significance of the offered cigarette sank in. He wished he knew what he had done, wished he could get down on his knees and beg forgiveness before whoever had sanctioned this, promising any and every restitution within his ability. But most of all he wished he could see Kate and Martin one more time.