‘I want to hand myself in,’ I said. ‘It’s me you’re looking for. I killed the king.’
He became flustered, calling excitedly for the police. I felt sorry for him. His big chance and he was making a muck of it.
A crowd gathered around us, backing off when they realised what was going on. There was no abuse this time, no angry recriminations, maybe because they hadn’t yet had the chance to go home and read their information packs and shoot up whatever drugs the City fed them. It took about three minutes for the police to turn up. I was pushed roughly into the back of a van and driven away. One officer sat in the back with me, restraining a dog. When the van turned a corner, we all lurched in one direction. Eventually the driver braked sharply, I heard footsteps and then the doors were flung open. The dog chased me out into the midday brightness. I blinked, rubbed my eyes.
‘Where is she?’ I demanded. ‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me where she is.’
Ignoring me, one of the guards grabbed me by the arm and led me through a large open doorway. We walked down a long, green-tiled corridor, my guard’s heels snatching metallically at the paved floor. He pushed me to the left through a set of double doors and I stumbled into a reception area. Trophy cabinets stood empty in the middle of the floor. I smelt disinfectant and other institutional smells that made me think of hospitals. A group of people stood waiting for me. Their buckles and buttons gleamed in the harsh light of a single fluorescent strip. A small figure ran out of the centre of the group towards me. The guard let go of me, I opened my arms and Annie Risk bowled headlong into me, almost knocking me over.
They allowed us a few moments. The smell of her hair was instantly familiar despite the fact I’d known her for such a short time. She looked up and I wiped her tears away. And then mine.
‘Carl,’ she said. ‘Carl, Carl.’
‘Don’t cry, Annie,’ I said.
‘Carl, you’re sick. You’ve got to get better,’ she said, brushing her lovely long black hair out of her eyes. ‘All this running around…’ she said. ‘You’ve got to get better.’
‘Yes, Annie,’ I said, not letting her see my confusion. ‘I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. I’m feeling better already.’
Had they drugged her? Brainwashed her? Perhaps it wasn’t the end of the world. Better she didn’t know what was about to happen.
‘You’ve got to go back now, Annie. You can go back. Go back and wait for me.’
I had to tell her something. Over the top of her head I could see the belted-and-buckled advancing towards me as a group.
‘You have to let her go,’ I said. ‘That’s the deal.’
They nodded as one man, still moving forward but slowing down and suddenly looking all fuzzy and colour-saturated like a weird music video. They took Annie from me and propelled her towards the door I’d come in by.
‘Where are you taking her?’ I asked.
‘She’s going back,’ one man confided into my ear as the door to the corridor was pulled open and Annie stepped out. I ran to the door to watch her go. Already she was impossibly far away, vanishing in the distorted perspectives of the green corridor. I felt a hand on my shoulder pulling me back into the bare room.
‘It’s time,’ said a man in a white coat who wasn’t White Coat, and suddenly I thought the execution was going to take place in a small private room, perhaps a lethal injection administered by this man. But the buckles and buttons in the large group took control of me and ushered me out into a tunnel. My own footsteps and those of the group behind me echoed around the walls and ceiling. My heart was pumping faster and faster, my mouth drying up like a rose in the desert.
The tunnel sloped upwards and natural light leaked into it from somewhere ahead. The footsteps behind me seemed to speed up, forcing me to do the same and, before I realised fully what was happening, they had faded away while I carried on to the end of the tunnel, where I emerged out onto the pitch. The gates were locked behind me.
It was a big old-fashioned ground with seating areas and terraces. Every available place was occupied. As I walked, blinking in the bright light, into the middle of the vast pitch, the hush that had fallen at my appearance became a murmur that soon grew to a roar of deafening volume. Those who were sitting rose to their feet, tens of thousands of them, wronged citizens, they believed, whose King had been assassinated in cold blood by this bizarre-looking individual now brought to face justice before them.
What would happen to their City once the execution was over? A city whose raison d’être seemed to be the relentless search for their ruler’s assassin.
In an instant the crowd fell silent and my ears picked up the insistent rushing beat of a beast’s paws upon close-cut grass like a drum roll. I even knew exactly what drum roll it was. The opening bars of ‘Shave Your Head’.
I turned around and looked straight into the starved dog’s eyes as it sprang at my throat.
But the animal twisted in the air, caught by a single bullet whose report I heard a split second later as it reverberated around the stands. I stared uncomprehendingly at the felled executioner, a single smoking hole torn in the side of its mottled skull. My death had been snatched away from me.
An announcement was made over the PA but it boomed too broadly for my spinning head and the muscles and bones in my legs turned to black night and stars and I collapsed, an approving roar from the crowd battering me finally senseless.
Chapter Sixteen
‘You were away a long time, Carl,’ Annie said, taking my hand as we skipped down the last of the steps out of the ground. Behind us the Maine Road faithful could still be heard celebrating City’s eighth win in a row. From the Kippax they gave full voice to time-honoured Blues songs and jeered the visiting fans filing out dejectedly from the North Stand.
‘I know,’ I said, relishing the taste of the November night air, a tang of gunpowder mingling with the petrol fumes and hot dog clouds. It was all real.
We walked beneath the mist-shrouded orange lamps of Moss Side’s grid of streets, linking arms and talking quietly. I glanced down back entries and Annie reassured me each time something seemed to shift in the shadows.
‘There’s nothing there,’ she’d say, or, ‘It’s just a dog.’
Just a dog.
We headed towards Rusholme, our goal a relaxing beer and curry. On Great Southern Street a police van crawled along in the traffic snarl-up and I tensed when barking erupted from the back of the van.
‘It’s all right,’ Annie said, putting her arm around my back.
The van rocked from side to side. As we overtook it I looked in at the policemen in the front. They looked complacent, unconcerned about the restless dogs. I shuddered as I pictured the carnage that would be inevitable if the doors were to spring open.
‘We’re quite safe,’ Annie said. ‘They’re on our side.’
‘They don’t look like it,’ I said, eyeing the officer in the passenger seat, the way he ran his nail-bitten finger over his lip.
I hadn’t been as lucky on the motorway as I’d thought I’d been. I never saw my car after the crash, but apparently it looked less like a motor vehicle than an abstract sculpture. Although I had only broken a few minor bones, I lost a lot of blood from lacerations in my neck and side. There had been a dog in the car that hit mine from behind and somehow as our two cars meshed together and cartwheeled across the three lanes the dog had become entangled with me. The shock of the impact and the ordeal I went through waiting for assistance and being cut out of the wreckage took its toll in other ways. As Annie said, I was away for a long time. In a coma, thanks to a substantial blow on the head.