Slowly, he removed the newspaper from the boy’s mouth. The boy promptly threw up.
Lamb could walk away. It wasn’t like the boy would follow, seeking vengeance. But on the other hand, he didn’t have far to walk. The kid would see which house he went into. Lamb’s life was built up of moments in which he decided who should know what. In this particular instance, he decided he didn’t want this kid learning anything new. So he waited, right hand clutching the kid’s collar. The left had discarded the Standard, which had reached its use-by date even more swiftly than usual.
At length, the kid said: ‘Jesus Christ—’ Lamb let him go.
‘I was mindin me own business.’
Lamb was interested to find that he was only mildly out of breath.
‘You some kind of fuckin lunatic?’
Except that, now he thought about it, his heart was racing, and he could feel a strangely unpleasant heat pulsing at his forehead, and through his cheeks.
The kid was still speaking. ‘Not doin any harm.’
There was a self-pitying twang to this assertion, as if it were a temporary victory.
Lamb rode over his body’s complaints. He said, ‘So what are you doing?’
‘Hangin.’
‘Why here?’
A sniff. ‘Everybody’s gotta be somewhere.’
‘Not you,’ Lamb said. ‘You go be nowhere, somewhere else.’ He found a coin in his pocket: two quid, two pee; he didn’t know and didn’t care. He tossed it over the kid’s shoulder. ‘Okay?’
When the kid had disappeared from view, he waited a few minutes more.
His heart slowed to its normal rate. The sweat on his forehead cooled.
Then Jackson Lamb went home.
Not everyone was so lucky that night.
He was nineteen years old. He was very frightened. His name didn’t matter.
You think we give a toss who you are?
He’d parked the car two streets away, because that was as close as you could get. This area of Leeds was slowly overcrowding—too many immigrants, his father had laughed; too many Poles and East Europeans, coming over here, ‘taking our jobs’: ha ha, dad—and as he’d walked back he’d been working on a riff about how it was a funny thing with cars: there wasn’t anything else you owned which you’d leave overnight two streets away and expect to find in the morning. There was something there, he knew. Throw in a two-beat pause …
‘Mind you, round our way, that’s gunna happen.’
The thing about punchlines, they had to slide into the socket. No room for ambiguity. And never use two words when one will do, but that one word had to do its job. That’s gunna happen. By which he meant: of course, round our way, if you leave your car out overnight, it’ll get stolen. Would an audience pick that up straight off? It was all in the delivery.
‘Mind you, round our way, that’s gunna happen.’
Pause.
‘Round our way, you leave your house on the street overnight—’
And then the first shape appeared, and he’d known he was in trouble.
He was in the back lane. He shouldn’t have taken the shortcut, but that was what happened when he was riffing: his feet took over while his brain went AWOL. Creativity was like being drunk, when you got down to it. He should make a note of that, but there was no time now because the first shape had stepped out of a garage doorway where he could have been taking a leak, or lighting up, or doing anything essentially innocent except for this one detaiclass="underline" he wore a stocking over his head.
Fight or flight? Never in question.
‘If you ever find yourself in trouble … street hassle?’ Something his father had once said to him.
‘Dad, don’t even try.’
‘Aggro?’
‘Dad—’
‘A rumble?’
‘I know what you’re trying to say, dad. Use your own words to say it, okay?’
‘Run like hell,’ his father had said simply.
Words to live by.
But there was nowhere to run, because the first shape was just that: the first. When he turned there was a second. Also a third. They too wore stocking masks. The rest of their wardrobes faded into insignificance.
Run like hell.
Trust this: he tried.
He got three yards before they put him on the ground.
Next time he opened his eyes, he was in the back of a van. A foul taste in his mouth, and the memory of cotton wool. They’d drugged him? The van’s bouncing went on forever. His limbs were heavy. His head hurt. He slept again.
Next time he opened his eyes, there was a bag on his head and his hands were tied. He was naked, except for his boxers. The air was damp and chill. A cellar. He didn’t have to see it to know. Or hear the voice to know he wasn’t alone.
‘You’re gunna be good, now.’
It wasn’t a question.
‘You’re not gunna make any problems, and you’re not gunna try to escape.’ A pause. ‘No fuckin chance of that anyway.’
He tried to speak, but all that came out was a whimper.
‘You need to piss, there’s a bucket.’
And this time he managed to find a voice. ‘Wh—where?’
His reply was a tinny kick over to his left. ‘Hear that?’
He nodded.
‘That’s where you piss. Shit. Whatever.’
Then something was dragged across the floor; something he couldn’t see but which sounded monstrous and punitive; a device they’d strap him to before applying sharp tools to his softer parts …
‘And here’s a chair.’
A chair?
‘And that’s your lot.’
And then he was alone again. Footsteps receding. A door shutting. A lock being thrown: that was the verb, thrown, as if any chance of opening that door had been heaved out of reach.
His hands, tightly bound, were at least in front of him. He raised them to his head and pulled the sack off, nearly throttling himself in the process, but managing it. That was one small victory at least. He threw it to the floor, as if it were responsible for all that had happened these last—what? Hours?
How long since they took him in the lane?
Where was he now?
And why? What was this about? Who were they, and why was he here?
He kicked at the rag on the floor. Tears were running down his cheeks: how long had he been crying? Had he started before the voice left the room? Had the voice heard him crying?
He was nineteen years old, and very frightened, and more than an audience—more than a roomful of people laughing at his routines—what he wanted was his mother.
There was a chair in front of him, an ordinary dining-room chair, and with one swift kick he laid it flat on the floor.
And there was a bucket in the corner, exactly as promised. He might have kicked that too, if the phrase didn’t have disturbing connotations.
Wh—where?
He hated himself that he’d said that. ‘Where’s the bucket?’ As if he’d been asking about the amenities in a guest-house. As if he’d been grateful.
Who were these people? And what did they want? And why him?
That’s where you piss. Shit. Whatever.
They were going to keep him here long enough he’d need to take a crap?
The thought buckled him at the knees. Crying took it out of you. He sank to the cold stone floor.
If he hadn’t kicked the chair over, he’d have sat on it. But the task of putting it back on its legs was beyond him.
What do they want from me?
He’d not spoken aloud. But the words crawled back to him anyway, from the edges of the room.
What do they want?