From under the door I saw four slight trickles of water.
I tried the door again and it still wouldn’t open.
I flew out the back door and ran round to the front of the house.
There were no windows built into the garage.
I tried to open the double garage doors but they wouldn’t.
I went back inside through the front door.
A ring of keys was hanging by another from inside the keyhole.
I took the keys back into the kitchen and the drumming.
I tried the biggest, the smallest, and another.
The lock turned.
I opened the door and swallowed exhaust fumes.
Fuck.
A Jaguar, engine running, sat alone in the dark on the far side of the double garage.
Fuck.
I grabbed a kitchen chair and wedged the door open, kicking away a pile of damp tea-towels.
I ran across the garage, the light from the kitchen shining on two people in the front seat and a hosepipe running from the exhaust into a back window.
The car radio was on loud, Elton belting out Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
I ripped the hose and more wet towels out of the exhaust pipe and tried the driver’s door.
Locked.
I ran round to the passenger door, opened it and caught a lung full of carbon monoxide and Mrs Marjorie Dawson, still looking like my mother, a bloody crimson freezer bag wrapped round her head, as she fell into my knees.
I tried to push her back upright, leaning across the body to turn off the ignition.
John Dawson was slumped against the steering wheel, another freezer bag over his head, his hands bound before him.
“Here we go again. Reckless talk costs lives.”
They were both blue and dead.
Fuck.
I switched off the ignition and Elton and sat back on the garage floor, bringing Mrs Dawson with me, her head in the bag in my lap, the two of us staring up at her husband.
The architect.
John Dawson, at last and too late, a face in a plastic freezer bag.
John bloody Dawson, ever the ghost and now for real, a ghost in a plastic freezer bag.
John fucking Dawson, just his works remaining, looming and haunting, leaving me as robbed and fucked as the rest of them; robbed of the chance to ever know and fucked of the hope it might bring, sat there before him with his wife in my arms, desperate to raise the dead for just one second, desperate to raise the dead for just one word.
Silence.
I raised Mrs Dawson as gently as I could back into the Jaguar, propping her up against her husband, their freezer bag heads slumped together in more, more, fucking silence.
Fuck.
“Reckless talk costs lives.”
I took out my dirty grey handkerchief and started the dusting.
Five minutes later I closed the door to the kitchen and went back into the house.
I sat down on the sofa next to their plans, their schemes, their fucked-up dreams, and thought of my own, the shotgun in my lap.
The house was quiet.
Silent.
I stood up and walked out of the front door of Shangrila.
I drove back to the Redbeck, the radio off, the wipers squeaking like rats in the dark.
I parked in a puddle and took the black bin-bag from the boot. I limped across the car park, every limb stiff from my time underground.
I opened the door and went in out of the rain.
Room 27 was cold and no home, Sergeant Fraser long gone.
I sat on the floor with the lights off, listening to the lorries come and go, thinking of Paula and barefoot dances to Top of the Pops just days ago, from another age.
I thought of BJ and Jimmy Ashworth, of teenage boys crouched in the giant wardrobes of damp rooms.
I thought of the Myshkins and the Marshes, the Dawsons and the Shaws, the Fosters and the Boxes, of their lives and of their crimes.
Then I thought of men underground, of the children they stole, and of the mothers they left.
And, when I could cry no more, I thought of my own mother and I stood up.
The yellows of the lobby were brighter than ever, the stink stronger.
I picked up the receiver, dialled, and put the coin to the slot.
“Hello?”
I dropped the coin in the box. “It’s me.”
“What do you want?”
Through the double glass doors, the pool room was dead^
“To say I’m sorry.”
“What did they do to you?”
I looked round at the brown lobby chairs, looking for the old woman.
“Nothing.”
“One of them slapped me, you know.”
I could feel my eyes stinging.
“In my own house, Edward!”
“I’m sorry.”
She was crying. I could hear my sister’s voice in the back ground. She was shouting at my mother. I stared at the names and the promises, the threats and the numbers, scribbled by the payphone.
“Please come home.”
“I can’t.”
“Edward!”
“I’m really sorry, Mum.”
“Please!”
“I love you.”
I hung up.
I picked the receiver up again, tried to dial Kathryn’s number, couldn’t remember it, hung up again, and ran back through the rain to Room 27.
The sky above was big and blue without a cloud.
She was outside in the street, pulling a red cardigan tight around her, smiling.
Her hair was blonde and blowing in the breeze.
She reached out towards me, putting her arms around my neck and shoulders.
“I’m no angel,” she whispered into my hair.
We kissed, her tongue hard against mine.
I moved my hands down her back, crushing our bodies closer together.
The wind whipped my face with her hair.
She broke off our kiss as I came;
I woke on the floor with come in my pants.
Down to my underpants at the sink of my Redbeck room, luke warm grey water slopping down my chest and on to the floor, wanting to go home but not wishing to be anyone’s son, photo graphs of daughters smiling in the mirror.
Crosslegged on the floor of my Redbeck room, unravelling the black bandages around my hand, stopping just short of the mess and the flesh, ripping another sheet with my teeth and binding my hand with the strips, worse wounds grinning from the wall above.
Back in my muddy clothes at the door of my Redbeck room, swallowing pills and lighting cigarettes, wanting to sleep but not wishing to dream, thinking this’ll be the day that I die, pictures of Paula waving bye-bye.
Chapter 12
1. AM, Tuesday 24 December 1974.
Rock On.
Christmas bloody Eve.
Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?
I drove down the Barnsley Road into Wakefield, homes switching off their Christmas lights, The Good Old Days finished.
I had the shotgun in the boot of the car.
I crossed the Calder, went up past the market, and into the Bullring, the Cathedral trapped in the black sky up above.
Everything was dead.
I parked outside a shoe shop.
I opened the boot.
I took the shotgun out of the black bin-bag.
I loaded the gun in the boot of the car.
I put some more shells in my pocket.
I took the shotgun out of the boot.
I closed the boot of the car.
I walked across the Bullring.
On the first floor of the Stafford the lights were on, down stairs everything dark.
I opened the door and went up the stairs one at a time.
They were at the bar, whiskys and cigars all round:
Derek Box and Paul, Sergeant Craven and PC Douglas.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Part 2 was on the jukebox.
Barry James Anderson, his face black and blue, dancing alone in the corner.
I had a hand on the barrel, a finger on the trigger.
They looked up.
“Fucking hell,” said Paul.
“Drop the gun,” said one of the coppers.
Derek Box smiled, “Evening, Eddie.”