Authors: Niall Griffiths
Alastair nods.
—I mean it, Ally; you blab off about what’s in this fuckin bag an I won’t wanner do it but I’ll fuckin rip yeh. Believe. Don’t go doin mad things like takin too
much
coke and get mouthy or tryna impress some berd.
—I won’t, man, I won’t.
I
want the fuckin money too, doan I?
—Yeh, well. We’ll divvy it tomorrer, back in town. Until then just keep it fuckin buttoned.
Again those black beams at Darren’s back directed as he heads off down the path. Still there blackly blazing as he pounds on the door five times hard enough to rattle the jamb. Still there still there then instantly extinguished as the door is opened by a tall man very thin with spiky hair, a red Carlsberg shirt on at which Alastair smiles although it represents Wrexham Football Club and not his own Liverpool.
—Deano, my man.
—Darren! Fuck’s sakes!
You
doin ere?
—Need somewhere to crash for the night, lar. Help us out, mate.
—Aye, no worries, no worries.
Dean steps aside, lets Darren and Alastair into the noise and the heat, slapping Darren on the back as he passes.
—Need a bevvy?
—
Fuck
yeh. This is Alastair.
Dean turns to Alastair, shakes his hand. —Alright, Alastair.
—Not bad.
People pass between them in the cramped hallway, boys and girls of school-leaving age carrying alcopops and spliffs. Darren watches them pass and raises his eyebrows at Dean who smiles and shrugs.
—Kid sister’s party, mate. All schoolies, like. Come
ed
upstairs, havin me own wee private do for the grown-ups, like. Wanner put that bag anywhere?
—Keep it with me.
—Sound.
He leads the way up the stairs, stepping over two gothy girls sitting on the third riser, white faces and black braids and one with a contact-lensed eye all red. Alastair grins at them and they grin back. Surprised they seem. A bit pleased.
Dean talks over his shoulder as he climbs: —Did I tell yiz I was in New York?
—Stega said summin about it, yeh, Darren says. —Said yiz were under the Twin Towers when thee were hit, like.
—Stega said that?
—Yeh.
—Nah, I was friggin miles away, man. Coming down in New Brighton, fuckin miles away.
—New Brighton? Wha, on the Wirral?
—Nah, in NY, man. There’s a New Brighton over there, as well.
—Is thee?
—Aye, yeh. Saw all the smoke tho, an the fires, like. An me brother, y’know the one lives over there, he rolls a giant skunk spliff for us to appreciate the view more, like, an stoned as a cunt
that’s
when the towers fell, like. Believe that? Thought I was trippin. Only really believed it’d happened when I switched on the telly and saw it, like.
—Yeh. Is right.
Girders twisted S-wise in Alastair’s head and the black smoke and the red flame and the little distant
figures
kicking as if to fend off the void around them. And the collapse itself all collapsing he watched it in the pub with the sound turned down thought it was a movie only the rustle of people’s unbelieving breath like the old woman that old woman it all comes down in silence as if nothing we could say. As if we finally learn the fatuity of our words even before the wreckage stuffs our dry mouths.
—Still, tho, Dean says, —friggin Septics. Think ther thee only country it’s ever happened to, like. Only place that’s ever been friggin bombed. Shoulda seen it, Dar, people all over the place in tears like goin ‘Why, why?’ Said to em, I said, ‘Look at fuckin Palestine.
There’s
yer friggin
why
.’
—Got
that
right, kidder.
—Yeh. An fuckin Yank bizzy overheard me in Central Park, like, didn’t he? Interrogation room six fuckin hours, I was.
—Bastards.
—
Six
fuckin hours! Missed me flight home an everythin.
They are standing on the landing now, Dean telling his story disbelieving, distressed. Alastair is watching his face, the eyebrows seesawing, the pupils dilated and the wet lips rearing back over the long teeth.
—Interestin story an all that, Dean, lar, but what I need right now is a bevvy and a snorter bugle, Darren says, rucksack clutched to his chest. Alastair nods agreement.
—An that is what you shall have, my friends, that is exactly what you shall have.
There is a gurgling behind them where the landing
dog
-legs and they turn to face it. A baby in a buggy, sucking its sleeve, kicking its legs, gurgling up at the big people.
—Me sister’s kid, Dean says. —Keeps im up here like where it’s safer. All them pissed-up schoolies downstairs, like.
Darren smiles. —Gorrer lot to say for imself, dozen he?
The baby grins and gurgles. Darren bends and squats, somewhat awkwardly because of the rucksack.
—What did yeh say? What did yiz just call me? Call me a cunt, did yeh? Wanner step outside then, lar? Fancy a fuckin straightener then, do yeh, gobshite?
Dean laughs. The baby grins gummy and coos and gurgles again and Darren extends a finger and the baby clutches it tight.
—You’re a funny little fat feller, aren’t yeh, ey? Funny little fat chookie chookie chookie …
Alastair swallows. Darren is making baby noises, here. Alastair is watching Darren Taylor chuck a baby under the chin and make ‘coochy-coo’ noises at it. This isn’t right.
—He’s nearly one, Dean says to Alastair. —Maddy ad im last year. She was fourteen years old. Believe that? And the dad, fuckin bad beast him, was twenty-five. Did a runner soon as he found out she was up the duff, like. Believe that shit, man? What’s happenin to the kids today, man, eh?
Alastair shakes his head. Dean leads them up another flight of stairs to the attic conversion at the door of which a crustie stands, scabby guardian in camouflage kex. As they pass he gulps at his tin of Spesh and asks: —D’yew
wanner
go faster? Any of yew lads wanner go faster?
Darren looks him up and down and sneers: —Faster than you already, yeh jippo twat. Get downsters with thee other binlids an fuckin be’ave yerself.
Dean laughs and opens the door. They walk into a blast of bass.
People in this room in a hovering purple light. The music is loud and a TV is on with the sound turned down, some local news programme or something showing a concerned councillor in a yellow hard hat on a building site, bulldozers and cranes around him and he besuited and whiskery. Nothing comes from his mouth. He talks but makes no noise. The real people talking in the room glance once at the newcomers then resume their conversations in the smoke-choked room within this odd and hovering lilac light, two women and a man on the bed and others on the floor and one man squatting at the stereo with his fleece ridden up to reveal the top of his arse-parting and the scribble of hair there. He smiles and nods at Alastair over his shoulder; goatee beard, Kangol hat. Alastair nods back unsmiling and takes a seat at the side of the room on the floor with his back up against the wall and Dean goes over to a small fridge at the foot of the bed and takes out cold tinnies, Heineken, and hands them out.
—Ta, lar.
Darren has taken a seat on the bed, between the two women, the rucksack on his knee. Slurps long at his can.
—The beak, Dean. Fuckin dyin for a snort I am here, mate.
—Comin up, feller.
—Been a long hard day, likes, knowmean?
Dean looks around.—Who’s got the charlie?
A figure on the floor holds up a bag of white powder and Darren pounces and snatches it.
—Oi! Haven’t ad
my
line yet!
—Yer’ve ad too
many
fuckin lines by the looks of yeh, lad. Eyes like pissholes in the snow, man. Give irrup for those in need, unnerstand?
—Fuckin …
Dean looks at this man and shakes his head quickly, eyes serious and big. Darren smirks and makes a loose fist and tips a small mound of powder out on to the fleshy pad between bent thumb and forefinger and inhales it nasally with an abrupt snort that can be heard even over the music.
—Aw fuckin ell … bliss man …
He does another line, murmurs, and hands the baggie over to Alastair.
—Ally. Yeh deserve this, lar.
Alastair takes it and does the same. Hears as he bends to snort one of the women ask Darren what he has in the bag but catches no reply as his head gets lost in the buzzing, the deep basso buzz. Returns the bag to the pissed-off man on the floor and nods thanks and swigs at the cold beer to swill the cocaine down his throat and leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes languid but then the small sound of his head on the wall registers. A quiet contact only this but it resonates in his skullbowl behind his eyes and above his teeth and somewhere also in his throat, grows in his ears to clang and clatter too big, too loud.
Everything has changed.
Of course that woman. That poor old woman. Terrified she was and Darren was screaming in her face showing her the hammer and she was pleading don’t hit me don’t hit me and calling for her husband and Alastair too with the pleading don’t hit her Darren don’t hit her lar and did Darren hear? No difference if he did. Wrenching the floorboards up, the trapdoor there and roughly shoving the collapsed woman’s slippered legs out of the way and opening the safe and after the THUNK with the code she’d babbled at him before the THUNK or rather between the THUNKS, the second one louder than the first the thunk followed by the THUNK and the safedoor surrendering and Darren hoisting it open and all that money inside. In bricks. Tied up in elastic bands in what amounts but large ones. Never seen so much money. And Darren roaring and ordering Alastair to take a rucksack from the wall display of such items by the postcard rack and then stuffing it to bulging with the cash bricks and in his fever to leave the shop not even stepping over the woman where she fell but actually walking
on
her, across her hips and chest and she unconscious and Alastair automatised just following all stunned, the THUNK the fall the massive money all unquestioned orders.
That fucking Darren.
Everything has changed.
That fucking money.
Everything has changed.
That woman with the grey hair and the specs and the kind face and the accent all like his grandmother,
his
nain in hospital and when she can talk that is what she sounds like. Don’thitmepleasedon’thitme. These women falling, sliding off this earth and not just from violence but the one commonality that turns life to a wreck – age. Just getting old. And, too, all the world’s fiendish imperatives issued mainly from the society of men, the drawn-out demands of men aimed at their own impossible satiation, the virus of their terrible dissatisfaction. Anything to thaw the inside snows, whatever to warm the winters within and there is one lesson that remains unlearned; that inside as without these freezings follow a cyclical pattern and the one returning constant is ice.
THUNK the desperation. THUNK the never-learning. THUNK the constant failure and THUNK as her scalp unzipped. Very little blood from that desiccated flesh.
Alastair opens his eyes, looks across the room towards Darren. He is now nuzzling the neck of the skinny girl next to him, his chunky sov-ringed hand creeping up her shirt and she is laughing and quarter-heartedly pushing him away, her face charlie-bright, sweat-sheened and flush. Her pulse can be seen fluttering in her neck and her blouse has slipped off one shoulder revealing a black bra strap and a deep dark pit behind her collarbone and a knot in that bone where it has broken and healed badly and two hickeybruises on her neck like squashed plums. As Alastair watches, Darren’s fat and ring-glinting hand creeps up from underneath the shirt like some huge white spider, the fingerlegs tickling the shoulder and the neck as if seeking a vein to puncture or bone to snap and Alastair shudders and
looks
away. The light has changed now, become darker. A couple in the corner are kissing with limbs entwined. In the compressed shadows between them something pale lollops and Alastair squints and realises it’s a penis. On the bed Dean is cooking up while the other skinny girl in a white Stetson hat slaps her withered arm and curses as a vein fails to sound. The music still pounds on although somewhat lower and on the TV is a weather forecast showing a map of Britain covered in stylised dark clouds.
The door opens. A stranger comes in. He has a face like a once-muddy field baked into ruts and ridges by a parching sun and knees which shake beneath his tracksuit trousers and hands that tremble below his cuffs.
Dean looks up at him. —Help yeh, Pughey?
Pughey approaches the bed. —Need somethin, Deano.
—Do yeh? Thought you were dryin out?
—Aye, I yam, that’s why I need somethin, mate. I’m eatin the fuckin carpets, here.
—What yiz after?
—Librium, methadone, fuckin
anythin
, man. Yew’ve got to help me out here, Dean.
Darren has been watching this exchange with amusement. He asks Pughey: —Dryin out, are yeh, lar, aye?
Pughey nods.
—Then why come to a fuckin party? Makes no sense to me, that, like.
—Came to see Dean. Need some calmers, don’t I?
Darren laughs, rises to his knees on the wobbly bed
and
waves his opened can under Pughey’s nose.—Aw, smell that, man? Best smell in the fuckin world, that, innit? Go on, lar, taker good deep sniff.
Pughey does. And his head flops back on his neck and he groans and his mouth hangs open and Darren laughs again and pours beer into that opened mouth. Pughey gulps. His eyes are tightly closed and his body stands loose, simply a receptacle for the beer which Darren continues to tip laughing and the others watch beginning to laugh too.
Thunk. There will soon be an echo of that sound a reverberation several times over and it will come from the world and it will be the world this noise of yielding, of surrendering, of an enforced descent. It is all around. It is the sound of the human heart weakly knocking against its cell.
There is a notion in Alastair that goes: FUCK THIS. Not in words, no, nor any conscious verballing, it takes the form of the image of an antelope pelting across grassland towards a high and humming sun but what it means to Alastair is FUCK ALL THIS and then he’s standing then he’s out of the room on the landing where the crustie has curled up in a corner to sleep, his camouflage gear useless against the stained grey carpet and the stained yellow walls. Everyone can see him. His face is turned upwards, snoring, his mouth slightly ajar and dribbling into his matted beard. Alastair stares down at him for a moment then also at the baby in the buggy who is sleeping too then he descends the stairs where the noise of the party is louder, shrieks and shoutings, on to the lower landing where he goes into the bathroom and pees and swills his face at the
sink
then stares at himself in the mirror with his hands cupped over his lower face from chin to bridge of nose so that only his eyes are visible. He regards himself like that for some time then he leaves the bathroom and enters the room opposite, a brightly lit and toy-strewn bedroom with bunks against one wall, the top level occupied by a small boy maybe seven or eight years old playing on a GameCube. Alastair can hear the Tetris tune.