“Make him stop, Baz.” Denny covers her mouth.
“Shut the fuck up!”
No one says anything. They’re watching me. I take a step forward and whisper to Baz. “Use your white cells, Baz. I just want my wallet.”
Denny interrupts, on the verge of tears, “Just give him his fucking wallet. I want to go home.”
Ozzie turns to Carl. “C’mon.”
Baz doesn’t know what to do. He could carve me up like a wisp of smoke, but now he’s on his own. The others are already disappearing, loose-limbed and hooting with laughter.
He pushes me hard against the fence, pressing the knife to my neck and his face next to mine. His teeth close around my earlobe. White heat. Pain. Ripping his head to one side, he spits hard into a puddle and shoves me away.
“There’s a little souvenir from Bobby!”
He wipes blood from his mouth and tosses my wallet at my feet. Then he swaggers away and kicks at the door of a parked car. I’m sitting in water, braced against the fence. In the distance I see navigation lights blinking from the top of industrial cranes on the far side of the Mersey.
Slowly, pulling myself upright, I try to stand. My right leg buckles and I fall to my knees. Blood leaks in a warm trail down my neck.
I stumble to the main road but there is no traffic. Glancing over my shoulder, I worry about them coming back. Half a mile down the road I find a minicab office with metal grille over the door and windows. The inside is saturated with cigarette smoke and the smell of takeout food.
“What happened to you?” asks a fat man behind the grille.
I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the window. The bottom part of my ear is missing and my shirt collar is soaked with blood.
“I got mugged.”
“Who by?”
“Kids.”
I open my wallet. The cash is still there… all of it.
The fat man rolls his eyes, no longer concerned about me. I’m just a drunk who got into a fight. He radios for a car and makes me wait outside on the footpath. I glance nervously up and down the street, looking for Baz.
A souvenir! Bobby has some charming friends. Why didn’t they take the money? What was the point? Unless they were trying to warn me off. Liverpool is a big enough place to get lost and small enough to get noticed, particularly if you start asking questions.
Slumped on the backseat of an old Mazda 626, I close my eyes and let my heart slow. Sweat has cooled between my shoulder blades, making my neck feel stiff.
The minicab drops me at University Hospital where I wait for an hour to get six stitches in my ear. As the intern wipes the blood from my face with a towel, he asks if the police have been informed. I lie and say yes. I don’t want Ruiz knowing where I am.
Afterward, with a dose of acetaminophen to dull the pain, I walk through the city until I reach Pier Head. The last ferry is arriving from Birkenhead. The engine makes the air throb. Lights leak toward me in a colorful slick of reds and yellows. I stare at the water and keep imagining that I can see dark shapes. Bodies. I look again and they vanish. Why do I always look for bodies?
As a child I sometimes went boating on the Thames with my sisters. One day I found a sack containing five dead kittens. Patricia kept telling me to put the sack down. She was screaming at me. Rebecca wanted to see inside. She, like me, had never seen anything dead except for bugs and lizards.
I emptied the sack and the kittens tumbled onto the grass. Their wet fur stood on end. I was attracted and repelled at the same time. They had soft fur and warm blood. They weren’t so different from me.
Later, as a teenager, I imagined that I would be dead by thirty. It was in the midst of the Cold War when the world teetered on the edge of an abyss, at the mercy of whichever madman in the White House or the Kremlin had one of those, “I-wonder-what-this-button-does?” moments.
Since then my internal doomsday clock has swung wildly back and forth much like the official version. Marrying Julianne made me hugely optimistic and having Charlie added to this. I even looked forward to graceful old age when we’d trade our backpacks for suitcases on wheels, playing with grandchildren, boring them with nostalgic stories, taking up eccentric hobbies…
The future will be different now. Instead of a dazzling road to discovery, I see a twitching, stammering, dribbling spectacle in a wheelchair. “Do we really have to go and see Dad today?” Charlie will ask. “He won’t know the difference if we don’t show up.”
A gust of wind sets my teeth chattering and I push away from the railing. I walk from the wharf, no longer worried about getting lost. At the same time I feel vulnerable. Exposed.
At the Albion Hotel the receptionist is knitting, moving her lips as she counts the stitches. Canned laughter emanates from somewhere beneath her feet. She doesn’t acknowledge me until she finishes a row. Then she hands me a note. It has the name and telephone number of a teacher who taught Bobby at St. Mary’s school. The morning will be soon enough.
The stairs feel steeper than before. I’m tired and drunk. I just want to sink down and sleep.
I wake up suddenly, breathing hard. My hand slides across the sheets looking for Julianne. She normally wakes when I cry out in my sleep. She puts her hand on my chest and whispers that everything is all right.
Taking deep breaths, I wait for my heartbeat to slow and then slip out of bed, tiptoeing across to the window. The street is empty except for a newspaper van making a delivery. I touch my ear gingerly and feel the roughness of the stitches. There is blood on my pillow.
The door opens. There is no knock. No warning footsteps. I’m positive that I locked it. A hand appears, red-nailed, long-fingered. Then a face coloured with lipstick and blusher. She is pale-skinned and thin, with short-cropped blond hair.
“Shhhhhhhh!”
A person giggles behind her.
“For fuck’s sake, will you be quiet.”
She’s reaching for the light switch. I’m standing silhouetted against the window.
“This room is taken.”
Her eyes meet mine and she utters a single shocked expletive. Behind her a large disheveled man in an ill-fitting suit has his hand inside her top.
“You scared the crap out of me,” she says, pushing his hand away. He gropes drunkenly at her breasts again.
“How did you get into this room?”
She rolls her eyes apologetically. “Made a mistake.”
“The door was locked.”
She shakes her head. Her male friend looks over her shoulder. “What’s he doing in our room?”
“It’s his room, ya moron!” She hits him in the chest with a silver diamanté clutch bag and starts pushing him backward out of the room. As she closes the door she turns and smiles. “You want some company? I can piss this guy off.”
She’s so thin I can see the bones in her chest above her breasts. “No thanks.”
She shrugs and hikes up her tights beneath her miniskirt. Then the door closes and I hear them trying to creep along the hall and climb to the next floor.
For a moment I feel a flush of anger. Did I really forget to lock the door? I was drunk, maybe even partly concussed.
It is just after six. Julianne and Charlie will still be sleeping. I take out my mobile and turn it on, staring at the glowing face in the darkness. There are no messages. This is my penance… to think about my wife and daughter when I fall asleep and when I wake up.
Sitting on the windowsill, I watch the sky grow lighter. Pigeons wheel and soar over the rooftops. They remind me of Varanasi in India, where the vultures circle high over funeral pyres, waiting for the charred remains to be dumped in the Ganges. Varanasi is a sorry slum of a city, with crumbling buildings, cross-eyed children and nothing of beauty except the brightly colored saris and swaying hips of the women. It appalled and fascinated me. The same is true of Liverpool.