Friday Night Street, Ch19-End

CHAPTER 19



Michael didn’t go to Portsmouth, or anywhere else. He told me he would wait for Alicia to come home. He only discovered the body in the kitchen after I’d left, when he’d gone to make a cup of coffee. After the death-filled night in the garage, he was too exhausted to be shocked by the sight of another corpse. Strangely, his only thought was how peaceful the body looked.

He sat down on the sofa in the living room and sighed. He’d always tried to make sense of his life, always tried to make the difficulties he’d faced have a purpose or at least an explanation. But life hadn’t played ball.

He’d done something very strange in the garage. When the shotgun blast threw the boy to the floor, the gun he’d been holding fell at Michael’s feet. In the confusion that followed, no one noticed him put it in his coat pocket. His heart pounded when the police came rushing in. They were bound to wonder where the gun that had shot Brian had got to, and then they’d search everybody, and he’d end up in trouble.

But none of that happened.

To his surprise, the police were wholly incompetent. They milled around asking questions that seemed to have no relevance. They asked him why he had come to the petrol station, and then when he told them he had a car outside they wanted to know why he didn’t park on the forecourt. He wasn’t about to tell them about him and Stuart, and he stumbled trying to give coherent answers to their obscure questions. To his amazement, they didn’t seem to notice he was obviously lying, but told him to go outside to the ambulance. They didn’t even search him. Perhaps they think I’m in shock, he reasoned, but if that was so, he couldn’t figure why they were asking such pointless questions in the first place.

He took the gun out of his pocket and thought about Alicia. What the hell had happened to her? The body in the kitchen made any further doubt about her innocence impossible. He must have been so self-absorbed for so many years that he’d never even noticed his sister had grown out of the person he’d known as a child and into someone, something, completely different. He thought about why he’d chosen to come out of the toilet at that moment, too. He’d thought that he could somehow help, that God could somehow help, as if God needed him as a vehicle to get involved and make sure nothing happened to those people. And he had been a vehicle, but one that had seemed to trigger the gunmen’s berserk behaviour, not made him into the great white saviour of a hopeless situtation. That would have been a sign, he knew; the sign which he longed for, but which he had always told himself would never come. And so it was. He had been right all along, just as he had known he always would be.

And it was that disappointment that filled his thoughts now. Michael could accept the guilt. It wasn’t the fact that he’d let Alicia down, or set off the crazed gunmen in the garage that bothered him; these were ordinary, human failings. It was something more fundamental. He’d always thought the inner turmoils that tortured him were the great dilemmas of existence, part of the epic struggle of Being, that’s what the philosophers he’d read had taught him. And he’d liked that, he could live with that. He could make sense of his life in the light of that. But the events of that evening made him realise how insignificant his interminable anxieties were in the real world. There was no great struggle, there were just bodies, alive with emotions and dead without them, and there were stupid people doing stupid things in the meantime. And here he was, one more stupid person doing one more stupid thing, waiting for the emotions to finally seep out of him.

Michael had never handled a gun before, but he’d seen enough movies to realise the gun in his hand was quite unusual. He was pressing at the catches and levers on the revolver. To his surprise, he found the gun had a hinge in the middle, and pressing a certain catch made the barrrel swing down, simultaneously raising the cylinder high above the body. He could see a single brass cartridge resting in the upper chamber. He snapped the gun back together again, and used two thumbs to pull back the hammer. He didn’t think much after that, he didn’t need to. He’d spent his whole life thinking too much; now, he’d found an answer, an unarguable resolution to his existential dilemmas.

The gun went off with a loud bang, but by the time the sound reached his ears, there was no one left alive to hear it.





20



I shagged that Natalie bird as it turned out, but nothing came of it in the end. Our history would always be defined by that night, and that was no way to start a relationship. She needed to move into the future, not remain tied to the past. Eventually, she took up with some bloke from the boozer, and they had those kids that Brian had always wanted and never got. Pity the poor fucker had to die first to make her see what she’d been missing all along. Still, it’s not her fault he wasted his time on the wrong one. Not his either, I suppose. Just fucking unlucky, nothing else you can say about it, except that Brian stuck with Natalie through thick and thin as a matter of principle, and I admired that. Even though he didn’t get what he wanted, he never resented or regretted his life. If he had any disappointment, it was in her, not in himself.

As for Junior, I never saw that little runt again, lucky for him. I heard through Natalie that he had counselling to get over the whole escapade, then pretty much cut himself off from his dad and the business and left the country for Thailand. He was going to teach English in a private school, apparently. Last she heard of him, he was doing time in a Thai jail for cannabis-running. I guess he went chasing that life of adventure he’d been craving after all.

As for Alicia, well, there’s a thing.



I’m at the cemetery where they’ve just put away me mum. The small crowd, including my three useless elder brothers, have all dispersed. I’m standing alone looking at the plot of earth holding her in its dank arms, wondering what people are supposed to think at a time like this.

Then she’s standing beside me. I turn to see her staring at the open grave.

“I promised to come” she says, “so I’m here.”

“After last night, I’m not holding a lot of faith in your promises, Alicia.”

“I always liked your old dear, anyway.”

“The police are looking for you,” I turn back to look at my mum’s resting place.

“It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it.”

“Might as well have. Where’ve you been?”

She shrugs. “Nowhere. Just walking around. Went to the caff’ for some breakfast. Then I come here.”

I give her a long old stare then.

“I don’t know what to say to you. I can’t figure you out.”

“Well figure this out, Johnny. I knew what I wanted. And now I can’t have it. So what’s the point, if none of it makes any sense?”

And then she slips the knife in my back, just under the ribcage. My body spasms, and my head goes all light and dizzy. I fall to my hands and knees, breathing in painful gulps of air.

“I’ll tell you this,” I hear her say, though my bowed head can only look at the dirt below, “your hard muscles don’t make you stronger than me, and your smart mouth don’t make you cleverer than me.”

Then I hear the sound of her two-inch heels clicking on the concrete as she calmly strolls away.



I’m a bit of a walker, did I mention that? Pisstakers call it rambling, but I don’t care what anyone says. I’ve done the Lykewake Walk, the Three Peaks, and the Thames River Path from start to finish. The morning of the game when England beat Germany five-one, I was on the South Downs Way. I walked twenty-seven miles in eight hours, from Winchester to Salisbury. I got onto the campsite just in time to see a right old rare event: that donkey Heskey scoring a goal for England.

The thing about walking is you’re free, totally independent. You’ll see. Take a car. Soon as that tank’s empty, it’s not going anywhere, you know that. No amount of cajoling, kicking, determination or willpower is gonna make that car move. Only juice from the pump will do it. Walking is a different story. You can always get to where you want to be just by putting one foot in front of another. Obviously, you’ll want to stop for a sit down when you’re tired or hungry, but the point is you don’t have to stop, do you? You can just keep going if you want. And the reason you can just keep going is that walking is as simple as putting one foot in front of the other. That’s all it is. One foot in front of the other.

The sound of Alicia’s heels on the concrete pathway reminds me that even when you’re not in a car, you’ve still got to look out for other idiots on the road. Still, you can’t change the past. I’ve got to focus on the present. Put one foot in front of the other. Simple. Only it’s just one hand, and then one knee. Just one in front of the other.



What I like about walking is the sense of power it gives you. Trust me, simplicity is unbeatable. I’m not one for all the scenery and real ale pubs and all that shite. And I don’t kit myself out with a thousand quid’s worth of North Face nylon and overpriced miniature pots and pans, either. Well, why would I, just to put one foot in front of the other? I’ve walked through shit weather, cramped muscles, blistered feet, fog on the fells, gale force winds on Exmoor; none of it matters. When there’s still eight miles to go and it’s already dark, that doesn’t matter either because you know that just taking the next step is all you have to do to beat whatever it is that’s trying to grind you down. You don’t think about how much farther you have to go or how hungry you are, you just think: doing this will get me there, and I can do this for longer than it will be dark, or for longer than it will rain or whatever it happens to be, because I can do this forever. Nothing can stop me. It’s just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. It’s simple, and it’s more powerful than anything the world can throw at me.

So long as you know where you’re going, that is. My head is so fucked up I don’t really know which way I’m facing, or which way is out. The only thing I’m still conscious of is the fading sound of Alicia’s heels. I screw my face up against the pain and follow the sound, hoping she’s going to the exit, and not for a casual stroll around the graveyard after stabbing her ex-boyfriend. One hand in front of the other, one knee in front of the other, that’s all it is. Simple.

One in front of the other.

I can do this forever.





21



And that’s how he found me. On my hands and knees in the street, bleeding, breathless, and unable to speak.

I’d made it to the gate, where Buddhist George of all people, stumbling home from the all-night party, spotted me unconscious but still on all fours, my head almost, but not quite, touching the pavement.



22



I made a promise to myself to calm down a bit after that. It wasn’t that I’d lost my bottle: I’d never been one of those who thought he was indestructible anyway. I just started to see something of the pointlessness of violence. It‘s easy to use it as a comfort. It’s a mental trick, a certain psychological knack of immersing yourself in your self, of blocking out any emotional connection or responsibility to others.

Don’t get me wrong, I always knew punching and kicking were selfish acts, but it never bothered me before. Of course its bleeding selfish, I would have told you, because its about defending yourself, isn’t it? But Scratch, Dickie, Brian, even that big idiot with the shotgun, they all died out of the selfishness of themselves or someone else. Yeah, people die everyday, you don’t need to tell me; but I could see now that Brian had got it half right, and half wrong: he was dead right that living has got nothing to do with worrying about when you die, whether you have done this, been there, or got that. None of that shit matters. But he was wrong about needing a family. You don’t need anything that can be taken away from you by others.

For the second time that day I was in the hospital and the police wanted to talk to me, but I had nothing to tell them. I’m a man of honour, a man of principle. If people abuse your trust, dishonour your loyalty, try to fuck you over and trip you up, it’s all the more proof that it’s them that’s in trouble, on the wrong path, on the way to unhappiness and self-destruction. You don’t give up your principles and become like them. If Alicia was going to get her comeuppance, it would have to be by her own hand, not mine.

Lying in that hospital bed I finally found the answer to what had been bugging me on the way home from the nick that night You see, it came to me that I don’t need the promise of a pension plan or a heavenly afterlife to make me feel secure or self-important. I already posses something both concrete and above and beyond the natural order of things: a code of honour. I act according to my own set of rules, not some poxy morals imposed on me by others, but according to what I think is right and wrong. Nobody can take that away from me unless I choose to let them: not Alicia, not Scratch nor Dickie, and not the fucking police and any bizarre events that might befall me. The more fortitude I possess in the face of adversity, the greater a man I am.



The porter is pushing me down the corridor in a wheelchair. As we pass the hospital chapel, I see a priest talking to a patient, and I get this urge, like an alternative missionary or something, to stop and tell them both what’s what. Luckily, the porter just keeps doing his job till he wheels me up to the exit. He asks if I want a taxi to take me home.

“No thanks, mate,” I tell him, “I can walk from here.”





Epilogue



Pepsi’s not happy cos Chelsea only pulled off a draw. Good match as far as I’m concerned though, four goals either end.

“We’re not that different then,” she says to me.

“You won’t catch me hopping into the loo for a quick prayer at lunchtime, love.”  I say.

“Funny,” she says without a smile. “I mean, you got your principles. I got mine. We don’t let no one tell us how to interpret the mystery of life, our place in the world, or our relationship with God – even if you don’t believe there is one,” she adds quickly.

“True, I suppose. I still can’t square this religion lark with the rest of you though. Just doesn’t add up, somehow.”

“That’s cos you don’t know my shit, what I’ve been through, where I come from, or how I’ve learned to deal with it all. If you did, you’d see it makes perfect sense of every ounce of me.” She gives me the kind of smile that makes me want to know every ounce of her.

I give her a long look then, and figure I must have been boring the arse off her ever since last night talking about nothing but myself; I realise I don’t know anything about her at all. I decide it’s time I stopped talking and started doing a bit of listening, so I go to the bar and get another round in while Pepsi puts our names up for the next game of pool.



THE END

(C) Dick Todd

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