When I woke up, the hotel room was dark and I felt disorientated. Something was wrong. It wasn’t the light: I remembered turning it out, half-asleep, when it became obvious I was dozing off. And it wasn’t the dream I was having either, which had been cut short. It was the door.
A creak of floorboards.
Fuck – the door was open.
I swung myself upright and pulled the gun up from the side of my leg. A figure, which had been creeping into the room from the bright hallway beyond, stopped moving immediately, and then moved its hands up slowly.
I clicked off the safety catch and said:
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘Easy.’ It was the guy from the counter downstairs. ‘Don’t shoot.’
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I said again.
The silhouette shrugged.
‘I heard a gunshot. It sounded like it came from in here.’
I frowned to myself in the dark. From what I could remember I’d been dreaming about gunfire – I remembered loud shots and bright lights. I’d been in a front room, watching a television.
‘I knocked, but there was no answer.’ He shrugged again, sounding more confident now. Obviously deciding that I wasn’t going to shoot him, he turned away and moved back into the doorway.
‘Got to look out for myself.’
‘Right,’ I said, as he closed the door.
The darkness felt uncomfortable, so I switched on the light and rubbed the bad dream from my eyes. The memory of it was fading, and I couldn’t remember too much of what had happened in it. But I knew that, just before I’d jerked awake, I’d been a young boy, sitting in an armchair in a dark front room. I was watching a pale blue television, which was flashing and banging away in the corner, but I didn’t like what I was seeing at alclass="underline" it was pictures and sounds of people being hurt by somebody. I knew that there were other people in the room who were watching me for my reaction, and so I wasn’t allowed to look away from the screen. These other people were just vague, dark shapes in the other chairs; I couldn’t make them out, or even tell which one was speaking to me. But I remember asking:
‘Why is he doing that?’
One of them said, ‘Because if he didn’t, there wouldn’t be a story.’
I found it too frustrating. ‘That’s a stupid answer.’
The same voice: ‘It’s the only reason anyone does anything.’
And then the guy from downstairs had disturbed me.
I didn’t want to go back to sleep, so I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, feeling sick. Whenever Amy used to wake me up in the night with one of her bad dreams, it felt like this: a kind of awful, sleepy nausea. It always passed, but never quickly. Now, as I waited to feel better, I saw that there was a screwed up ball of paper on the floor in front of me. I put down the gun and picked it up, unfolding it carefully.
Thirty names. Thirty addresses.
I put the paper down on top of the gun and held my head in my hands.
Five minutes later, I went down to the shared bathroom at the far end of the hall, with the gun tucked into my trousers. The whole room seemed strangely sterile: walls of white porcelain; garish lights overhead; and water everywhere – hanging in clean beads on the wall tiles and mixed into muddy footprints on the floor. I ran some into a sink the width and depth of a small well and splashed my face a few times, and then leaned on the edge, inspecting myself in the mirror.
I looked normaclass="underline" a little tired and rough around the edges, but still me. My standard face. Neither good nor bad looking, neither smiling nor frowning – just weathered and slightly beaten, but not as much as I’d expected. I was my normal tune, played in a minor key. Water dripped down my cheeks and I saw my eyes watching it. Looked back up, only to catch them doing the same.
Thirty names.
The choice was made easier by the fact that I didn’t actually want to kill myself tonight. It felt too soon, somehow. I had a deep, aching pain inside me whenever I thought about Amy, but at the same time I felt like if I died tonight I would have missed something. There was also the small matter of cowardice; I’d be able to do it, I thought, but it would probably be easier if I surprised myself.
So, the choice was made: I wasn’t going to kill myself here in this shithole.
Three men dead in the last forty-eight hours, all by my hand. Suddenly, that didn’t seem so bad. I figured I could give myself another week, check out the names on the list, and maybe add one or two more to that tally.
CHAPTER FIFTEEEN
The first name on the list – number one – turned out to be an old man. I watched him for all of ten seconds, from a bus shelter on the other side of the street, and he could barely get down his front path. He was tapping a stick on the paving stones for support. As he opened his gate and turned down the street, I caught a glimpse of his body from the side: he was as bent as a letter ‘r’.
Five minutes later, when the bus came, he was still in sight. I got on it, and didn’t even look at him as we drove past.
Number two.
He was younger than number one – not by much, admittedly, but it was enough to keep him upright when he was walking, and he didn’t need a cane for support either. But there was still an awkwardness to him. I only saw him walk once – from his seat to the toilet – and he had the slow, skewed gait of an old builder: someone who’d hurt his back but still had enough muscle left to power himself around.
I caught his face as he passed: cheeks as bright as sunburn and an exploded nose the colour of fire. He was wearing old slacks, and a chequered shirt beneath a beige pullover, sleeves rolled up to knotty elbows, revealing the white hair on his arms. I turned back to the bar, downed what was left of my drink and then left.
Numbers three and four were related to number two: his sons. They were more the right age, but they were still dead ends. Both of them were blond. I saw the first one on a construction site, wearing a cement-spattered sweater and jeans, carrying a black bucket over uneven ground. It wasn’t him. The second was in his driveway, clanking tools beneath the shell of a Camaro. He pulled himself out after a second, blinking at the sun behind me.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
I said no, and walked away.
The next six names were all a dead loss, and I was beginning to despair. And then, number eleven was actually dead. I called it a day, determined to start fresh the morning after.
Let’s back up just a little.
After deciding I wasn’t going to kill myself, I figured the best thing to do was get some sleep, so I jammed the chair beneath the door handle, placed the gun within easy reach and dropped off with surprising ease. I had more bad dreams, but I didn’t remember what they were. In the morning, I handed my keys back and made my way out of Downtown: back into the real world, or what passes for it. It was strange to see the sky again – blue-white and cloudless – and to hear the sound of cars and people going about their business without a threatening echo announcing it to the world. Monday morning. The air smelled fresh, clean and cold, and for a while it felt as though the heat and damp of Downtown were oozing out of my skin, like some kind of sweaty disease.