Thicker Than Water

7

The Salisbury at night was if anything even less prepossessing than it was by day. The light of a hunter’s moon bleached the unresisting pastels from the faces of the towers, so that they looked like titanic ribs of bone, and shadows accreted like crusted blood under the walkways.

But the air was alive. While the residents slept, it seemed that the emotional miasma I’d felt on my first visit woke and stirred. It had been an annoying distraction when I’d been here before, setting my teeth on edge until I finally attuned to it and let it fade into the perceptual background. But it was in the foreground now with a vengeance, buzzing in my ears like an angry mosquito.

No, not angry. It wasn’t anger I was feeling, it was something else — but reaching for the word made the feeling disappear, the droning whine shutting down like a mosquito does as soon as you’ve got the rolled-up newspaper at the ready. And it wasn’t really in my head that the mosquitoes were buzzing: it was in my fingers and in the palms of my hands, as if there was something that I had to do that was getting more urgent by the moment.

Yeah, that was it, now that I thought about it. It was the same feeling of urgency and greed that I’d got when I’d touched the old wounds on Kenny’s wrist.

I came in from the north this time, and because I knew my way I walked more quickly. Maybe I could be in and out before this oppressive presence gave me a headache and ruined what was left of my night.

It was getting on for one o’clock in the morning and the place seemed deserted. Most of the lights in the flats were out, too, suggesting that the good people of Walworth had called it a night and turned in early. Maybe they were afraid of werewolves, although in real life it was the dark of the moon that caused most of the problems on that front: that was when the animal flesh fought back hardest against the human spirit that was riding it, resulting in some truly scary amalgamations of man and beast.

I scanned the graffiti wherever the moon shone its torchlight on a wall or pillar. I didn’t see the peculiar symbol again, but the slogan NOW IT BLEEDS was emblazoned on the wooden slats of the wheelie-bin corral, and underneath it in a different hand — or at least a different colour — GONNA GET HURT.

I found my way back to Weston Block and up to the eighth floor. It was as silent as the grave — not that that particular simile has a whole lot of meaning these days. I was half-afraid that the external door would be locked after dark. It wasn’t, but it opened with an extended, rust-stopped groan like a homage to a Boris Karloff movie. I opened it just to my own body’s width and slipped inside. Then I wedged it open with an empty Silk Cut packet that was lying on the floor so that we wouldn’t get the same performance again when it slid to.

Kenny’s door held out against my lockpicks for about a minute and a half: it would have been less than that if I’d been able to turn on the landing light, but it seemed a better idea not to. As soon as the cylinder click-clacked its laconic surrender I slipped inside and closed the door silently behind me. I could relax now. So long as I didn’t make any loud noises, I was unlikely to be disturbed.

I took the penlight I’d brought out of my pocket and flicked it on. Its strong but narrow beam showed me a dismal hallway, cluttered up with boxes and discarded shoes. Three hooks on the right-hand wall bore about sixty-three coats. The carpet, which looked to be of 1970s vintage, had a mandala pattern in a lot of vivid colours, none of which did anything for any of the others. There was the faint, sad smell of an unlived-in space ruminating on old meals, stale cigarette smoke and rising damp.

I searched the coat pockets. Since I had no idea what I was looking for, one place was as good as another. There were betting stubs in one, keys in another. The rest came up blank apart from fluff and orphaned matchsticks.

The hallway was only three strides long. At the other end of it, instead of doors leading to a living room or bedroom, there were stairs going down. I’d come across this sort of design before, when I’d lived in a council block off the Barking Relief Road: in the building trade it’s called vertical herringbone. Instead of having all the rooms for each flat laid out on a given floor of the building, you tessellate them in three dimensions: so you can have your door on the eighth floor, like Kenny, and the rest of your flat on the seventh — or if you’re unlucky, the seventh and eighth and ninth, depending on how awkward the space is and how ingenious the builders have been in not wasting any. Most people I know who’ve experienced it hate it because it means that your bedroom can be right up against someone else’s den — their TV blaring away on the other side of a thin sheet of plasterboard while you’re counting sheep with less and less conviction.

I went down the stairs, which led directly into Kenny’s living room. I was seeing it in the light from a lamp on the walkway immediately outside the window, because the curtains were half-open. I crossed over and closed them before turning on the light.

Nothing much here, either: an ageing three-piece, an aquarium in which a rainbow fish and a few neon tetras circled, a bookcase that held only a dozen or so books, a magazine rack stuffed to bursting with old copies of TV Quick, and a huge widescreen TV. I searched perfunctorily, then more thoroughly, looking under cushions and down the backs of chairs. Nothing of a remotely personal nature surfaced, and a fortiori nothing that gave me the slightest idea of what Kenny had been trying to tell me: assuming — and I was feeling less certain of this now than I was when I’d walked out of the Uxbridge Road lock-up — that he’d been trying to tell me anything at all.

Only one other door out of the room, and it led to a second hall from which all the other rooms opened off. The first one I opened was a bathroom, decorated in light and dark blue with a striking missing-tile motif. The second was a bedroom: large double bed, unmade; wardrobe and vanity table, the latter suspiciously bare; a cross hanging on the wall over the bed, which made me think — involuntarily and with a grimace — of my mum and dad’s room back in Walton, where the crucified Christ stared down on all their goings and comings. More than enough to give you functional impotence, in my opinion. Like the living room, the bedroom had a window that looked out directly onto the walkway linking Weston to the block next door.

If the flat held any clues as to what Kenny had tried to tell me, this was where I was going to find them: but something made me check the last door, too. It was another bedroom, and I stared in from the doorway with a cold prickle of recognition. It was a room I felt I knew, even though I’d only ever seen it once: and the once, needless to say, had been when I’d pressed my fingertips to Kenny’s wound back at the Royal.

It had all the hallmarks of a teenaged boy’s room. In addition to the hi-fi tower and profusion of CDs (mostly death metal and heavy rock) there were posters of Vin Diesel and Abi Titmuss on the wall — mercifully not together — and a lamp on the bedside table bearing the Manchester United logo. There were differences, though, between this room and the one I’d glimpsed in Kenny’s memories: the CDs were neatly stacked now: the general leavening of socks and boxer shorts that had graced every horizontal surface in the remembered room were gone, the bed was stripped, and the hi-fi had a thick, unblemished patina of dust on top of it. Nobody had lived here for a long while.

You’d always wonder if there was anything you could have done, Mrs Daniels had said. About what? Where was the kid who’d slept in this bed? What was it that Kenny had never got over?

I was aware that anything I touched in here was going to leave marks in the dust. Not fingerprints, because I was wearing gloves, but even so it seemed like a bad idea to advertise my visit too blatantly. I retreated with a slight feeling of unease, and went back into the main bedroom: Kenny’s room and, judging from the double bed, his wife’s room too. But she clearly wasn’t around, and nobody had mentioned her. In fact, Coldwood had already told me that Kenny lived alone.

I started with the chest of drawers. It contained mostly socks and underwear and tee-shirts, and they were all in the left-hand drawers: the drawers on the right of the cabinet were empty. Evidence was mounting up: Kenny had had a family, and he didn’t have one any more.

He didn’t have any photos of them either, annoyingly: the bedroom and the living room were as void of personal memorabilia as a hotel room. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a Gideon Bible in one of the drawers.

After half an hour of methodical but unproductive rummaging, all I’d come up with was Kenny’s porn stash tucked away on the top shelf of the wardrobe and a shoebox behind the porn that was full of old decks of playing cards, all apparently well used. Sometimes I can get emotional resonances from objects, too, although they tend to be more muted and tenuous than the ones I get from touching people. I took off one glove and touched the inside edge of the box, very lightly. It echoed with pulses of old excitement, anticipation, pleasure, layered very deep and very strong. Evidently Kenny had enjoyed the odd game of poker.

Thinking about the absence of photos I realised that I was ignoring the obvious. I went back through into the living room and checked the bookcase, where I’d suddenly remembered that one of the book spines was a lot bigger than the rest: yeah, there among the Jeffrey Archers and the Wilbur Smiths was a photo album bound in red leather-effect plastic. Slipping my glove back on, I drew the album out with a feeling of muted satisfaction. This might at least give me a feel for what was going on in Kenny’s life: probably not a smoking pistol, but maybe something that would point me in another direction. At the very least, I’d get to meet the elusive wife and kid.

In fact, I got one out of two. The album started with baby photos of a chubby, wrinkled Winston Churchill-alike baby who progressed over the space of ten or twelve pages into a much less chubby toddler and then into an increasingly tall and gangly boy with riotously unruly brown hair and a sheepish grin that seemed to be his default option when facing a camera. I flicked a few more pages and watched him grow into an even more gangly, longer-haired teen. And in the process I found the first mutilated photo. After that there were many more.

It wasn’t the boy’s image that was being mutilated: it was that of a woman who was sometimes with him — holding him as a baby, cuddling him when he was older — sometimes alone and sometimes posing beside a man who was unmistakably Kenny. In every photo where she appeared, the woman’s head had been excised with angular slashes from a knife or razor blade — usually in situ, creating holes that went right through to the other side of the page and cut out irrelevant wedges from the photos that backed onto them. It was always and only the face that was taken: usually the thick, lustrous blonde hair remained untouched, along with a micrometer-thin stretch of forehead. Kenny and the ever-growing little boy smiled and smiled, standing beside and linking arms with this woman whose eyeless absence stared out at me like an unspoken reproach.

More and more uneasy, I put the album back on the shelf. Then I went back into the bedroom to clear away any traces of my presence there. I put the shoebox back on its high shelf, then started to stack the porn mags up in front of it as they’d been stacked before. The incongruity of this struck me as I was doing it. What needed hiding more than two years’ back issues of Barely Legal? What do you keep behind your porn stash?

I took the shoebox down again and gave it another look. The sides of it were decorated with geological strata of stickers: characters from some manga cartoon, band logos, football players in identical head-and-shoulders poses. It had belonged to a kid at some point, and probably for a long time.

I carefully unpacked its contents onto the bed. Underneath the fourth layer of Waddington’s Number Ones there was a slender black box that was too long and thin to contain a deck of cards. It was made of plastic and bore the Lorus name and logo, so it seemed fair to assume that it was intended to hold a wristwatch. I clicked it open and found myself staring at a heterogeneous collection of objects.

The razor blades were what caught my attention first: a half-dozen or so of Wilkinson’s finest, still in their wrappings and held in place with a red elastic band. Next to them were some sticking plasters and a styptic pencil, a small vial of pale yellow liquid that turned out to be cologne, and the shiny steel business end of a dart with the flight removed. There was also a single razor blade that was out of its wrapper and embedded in a wine cork: the cork in turn had been neatly spiked on one of the plastic brackets inside the box that had once held the wristwatch in place.

Everything was clean, with no trace of blood and the only smell the very faint floral-alcohol whiff of the cologne. I knew what I was looking at, though, and I knew what it was for. I touched the bare blade gently and confirmed what I’d already guessed. It wasn’t the playing cards that were associated with that old and frequent feeling of joy and excitement: it was this little hurt-kit.

I closed it up again, put it back in the shoebox and the shoebox back where it belonged. I was piling up the porn barricade again when out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement from outside the window. Too late now to turn the light off, or to duck down out of sight: I’d just be advertising the fact that I didn’t have any right to be here. Instead I finished what I was doing, closed the wardrobe as slowly and casually as I could, and then turned to look out into the night.

I couldn’t see what had moved at first, because everything seemed still now. Then, as my gaze panned from left to right across the scene, I finally saw the small figure standing on the concrete balustrade of the walkway on the side furthest away from me. It looked like a boy, far from fully grown, with his shoulders hunched and his head down, staring at the ground sixty feet or so below. He was standing absolutely motionless, which was why he’d been so hard to spot: the movement that had alerted me at first must have been when he climbed up onto the balustrade.

Nothing in his posture suggested that he was about to jump: he might have been waiting for a friend, or for a bus, except for the insane place he’d chosen to do it. But somehow I could see in my mind’s eye how this was going to end: the shapeless, half-exploded blood-and-bone sack that had once been a human being, on the pavement below. I was seeing it as though I was remembering it, looking straight down from the spot where the kid was now standing.

Maybe that flash of false memory galvanised me. I don’t remember thinking it through or reaching any kind of rational decision. I was suddenly caroming out of the bedroom, across the lounge and up the stairs, taking them three at a time. I hauled Kenny’s front door open and let it slam against the wall, heedless of the noise: then I was out through the spavined swing doors and onto the walkway, in all maybe twenty seconds after I’d first sighted the kid standing there.

But once there I came to a sudden halt, uncertain what to do. The boy was still standing in exactly the same place, about fifteen feet away from me, and in exactly the same posture. There was something unnatural about his stillness: anyone in that position, standing over a drop like that, would sway slightly as they unconsciously adjusted their balance. This kid was as rigid and immobile as a statue.

I took one step, not towards him but towards the parapet, thinking that if he looked like he was going to jump I might have a moment in which to tackle him from the side and push him back onto the walkway before he could fall. I kept my stare fixed on him the whole time, and that movement brought his face into profile so that I suddenly realised who it was: the blond boy who’d given me directions the first time I’d come here.

‘Bic,’ I called softly. He didn’t respond, didn’t seem to have heard. His eyes were wide and staring, and he didn’t blink.

I took another step, and then another, trying not to make a sound. If he was in some kind of a trance, waking him up was probably the last thing I wanted to do.

When I was almost close enough to touch him, he spoke. ‘Gonna get hurt,’ he murmured, his tone mild and contemplative.

I didn’t know if it was a warning or a complaint. I didn’t much care, either. If it was a warning then I was going to ignore it: if he was lamenting his own situation, then he’d probably thank me when he woke up. If he woke up.

As his knees flexed, I lunged. His feet were already off the ground when I caught him around the waist, but he weighed nothing and my momentum more than made up for his. We went sideways, not out and down, and I rolled as I fell so that I didn’t squash the breath out of the boy or slam him head-first into the concrete. As a result I landed awkwardly, my forearm and elbow making jarring contact with the ground so that for a moment I was focused only on my own pain. In that moment, Bic struggled free with a yell of surprise and alarm. He scrambled away from me on his arse and his elbows, his face making up for its earlier immobility by running through about a dozen expressions in as many seconds. Then he looked down at the cold concrete he was sitting on, at his hands and at the livid moon staring us down from over the shoulder of Weston Block. Something made a pat-pat-pat sound, very close, like soft applause, but there was nobody on the walkway except the two of us.

‘Shit,’ Bic said, in a tone of simple, stunned disbelief.

‘You’re okay,’ I said, unnecessarily. ‘You were sleep-walking. ’ It wasn’t enough, but maybe it would cover the basics.

‘I’m–’ he began. ‘I’m — not — where am I? Who are you? You keep the fuck away from me or I’ll lamp you. What did you do to me?’

‘I stopped you from jumping,’ I said. It sounds a little brutal, put like that, but I’d just realised why Bic had looked at his hands — and where the muffled reports were coming from. He was bleeding: thick, sluggish liquid pooling in each palm, looking pure black in the leprous moonlight, before it overflowed and spattered down onto the concrete like oil from a leaky carburettor.

‘No way,’ Bic said, without conviction. ‘No — no way.’

I got to my feet and walked across to where he sat, his back against the parapet and his frightened eyes raised to stare into mine. I took hold of his hand and turned it so I could see the wrist. It was unmarked: no wounds there, old or new. The blood was welling up from the centre of each palm, and it was falling like sticky red rain. He still had the bandages wrapped around his hands but they were already saturated, not even slowing the flow now.

I unwrapped the bandage, since it was doing no good in any case. I figured that if I saw the wound I could maybe decide what ought to be done before the kid passed out from loss of blood. But mainly I was acting on instinct: the prickling in my own palms was a lot stronger now, as though I was holding a mobile phone, set to vibrate, in each hand.

There was no wound in Bic’s hand: there was just blood, welling up from under the skin of his palm and wrist and fingers like water soaking and spreading through the fibres of a paper towel. I saw this in a split second, in the light from the lamp directly overhead: then he snatched his hand away and scrambled back from me, glaring.

I swallowed hard, because the sight of the non-wound had shaken me. ‘How long has this been going on?’ I asked Bic, as gently as I could. He didn’t answer.

‘I’m going home,’ he muttered, looking away along the walkway. But he didn’t move, and actually he was looking in the wrong direction. Weston Block was behind us.

‘That sounds like a good idea,’ I said. ‘It’s right here. Come on.’

‘Okay,’ Bic said automatically. He was still looking off in the same direction. I followed his gaze and saw a group of people walking towards us, just coming out from under the shadow of the next tower along.

There were seven or eight of them: still kids, technically, but a lot older and a lot bigger than Bic. Old enough to think of themselves as men. They were walking in a ragged line, spread out across the full width of the walkway. The one at front and centre was almost as skinny as Bic, but he was bracketed between two serious bruisers who might as well have had lapel badges reading ENFORCER. The rest of the gang kept a pace or two behind these three as they marched, knowing their place: it seemed like not much had changed since the days when I ran with the Arthur Street posse. Maybe some things never do.

‘What are you up to?’ the alpha puppy demanded, giving me a stone-faced stare. Then his glance went to Bic and his eyes widened in surprise. He bent down and hauled the younger boy to his feet, roughly enough that Bic staggered and almost fell again.

‘I’ve fucking told you!’ the bigger kid said severely. ‘You don’t go out after it gets dark. Why the fuck can you never do what you’re told?’

So this was Mrs Daniels’s other son: her John, whom she’d described as an IOU. He reminded me more of one of the small bomblets from a cluster munition: they’re both promises, I suppose, but one’s more likely to be kept than the other.

He turned his attention back to me again, and we played at staring each other out. He was dressed in a Ben Sherman I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-leather jacket, black jeans and the obligatory DMs, and his fists were clenching and unclenching as though he was itching to take a swing at me. His eyes didn’t track together, which I took to be a bad sign. Whatever he was on, if it was taking nibbles out of his nervous system it was bound to be having an effect on his mood, too.

‘Was this fucker copping a feel or something?’ he demanded.

Bic shook his head emphatically, either in disagreement or just to clear it. ‘I was falling, Johnno,’ he said, ‘over–’ He finished the sentence with a graphic gesture, pointing out past the parapet wall. ‘He grabbed hold of me. Pulled me back. I think I was — walking in my sleep or something.’

‘In your sleep?’ The alpha puppy — Johnno — repeated, incredulous.

‘Yeah.’

The answer didn’t seem to satisfy anyone. One of the rank-and-filers pulled Bic away out of the line of fire as the others closed in on me, following their leader. There was something wrong with all their eyes, now that I was looking for it: they were too wide, and when the light from the lamp caught their faces at the right angle I could see that their pupils were hugely dilated. Methamphetamine? Special K? Or maybe they were just high on life.

That momentary lapse of attention took me past the point where I could have made a run for it. The gang had me enclosed in a hollow semicircle now, and a metallic snikt sound from waist height told me that at least one of these likely lads had a flick knife. That first insidious sound was followed by several more from the same stable, and I could see blades sliding into hands in glittering profusion. It was as if a switch had been pulled somewhere. This had just stopped being a general for-form’s-sake intimidation and become something else: something more ritualised and more inevitable. If I couldn’t talk these little sods down this was going to get really messy.

‘What are you doing on my soil, you fucking queer?’ Johnno demanded, but his voice was dreamy rather than aggressive.

‘This?’ I said, making a circular gesture with my raised index finger. ‘This is your soil?’

‘That’s right.’ Johnno nodded twice, slowly, almost like a genuflection.

‘How far?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘How far is it yours? I mean, where does your soil begin and end?’

Johnno raised his hand, letting me see the knife for the first time. The blade was long and slender, barely tapering at all towards the point because it was more or less an ice-pick to begin with. He tapped the point of it against my chin.

‘I own the fucking blocks.’

‘All of them?’ I asked.

‘Johnno!’ Bic’s voice, calling from the distant outskirts, where he was invisible behind the wall of his elders and biggers. ‘He didn’t touch me.’

‘Shut up, Bic. Yeah. All of them.’

‘So you’d be the one to ask about anything that was going down here?’

The briefest of pauses. ‘You don’t ask anything, cunt,’ Johnno said, and again his mild tone was at odds with the words. ‘I ask, and you answer. You sneak around here in the middle of the night. Touch up my fucking brother–’

He shoved me in the chest with his free hand to emphasise how pissed off this made him. My back was already to the parapet, so there was nowhere to go but down. Pity. Down was the one place where I was determined not to go.

I tried one last time. ‘I was looking for some information, ’ I said. ‘But if you’d rather I came back another time . . .’

Johnno laughed softly and suggestively. ‘Come back when they take the fucking stitches out,’ he suggested, and his hand drew back. In the gap between conception and execution I brought my head forward and nutted him on the bridge of the nose with all the force I could bring to it.

The decapitation technique is meant to work well in a dictatorship, where a lack of orders from the top can paralyse a political or military organisation not used to acting on its own initiative. But the rules for a rumble are simple, and these boys had clearly been in a few. They were on me in a second, the lad on my left grabbing me around the throat and the one on my right landing a hard punch on my chin before Johnno had even finished falling to the ground. I got in a couple more punches myself, but it was anybody’s guess where they landed. Then the sheer press of bodies made it impossible for me to do anything at all. My arms were caught and pinned: two fists gripped my hair and forced my head back.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Johnno climb to his feet, the lower half of his face masked in blood, like a red bandanna. He stared at me with impossibly wide eyes. At the same time, not breaking that gaze for a moment, he held out his hands, palms up. Someone put a knife into each of them. Oh great. I was about to be carved up by the two-blade kid.

But as he stepped in towards me the eager crowd moved, reluctantly, to let someone else squirm through. It was the kid, Bic. He stepped hastily in front of me, blocking his brother’s path.

‘I’ll tell Mum,’ he said.

‘Fuck off, Bic,’ Johnno yelled, brandishing the two knives over his head like a picador.

‘I’ll tell Mum,’ Bic repeated, and collapsed at my feet. His head made a hollow sound as it hit the concrete.