Into the Darklands (18 page)

CONAN WAS 12 GOING on 25, and in all the years I’ve worked with killers, gang members, armed robbers and the like, he’s one of a very small group of clients I’ve ever really thought was going to hit me. It was like sitting in a room with an unexploded bomb.

It wasn’t really his fault. Conan the Barbarian never really had a chance.

He grew up in a house where his dad beat the living shit out of his mum from the day he was born until she finally left when he was about four. After she went he was pretty much raised in an environment more like something from prehistoric times. If they made a movie about his life it would have been called
Once Were Cavemen.
The house was regularly filled with drunken violent strangers who did all the things you’d expect them to do to a bunch of kids. Abuse and neglect were the staples of his diet.

Conan’s dad did everything he could to raise his son in the same vein. This was a boy who was taught to fight by his old man, and rewarded for giving other kids hidings. The bigger the other kid the better. As you’d expect Conan was also punished regularly and severely.

Conan knew nothing of tenderness or warmth. He never had anyone to ask if he was OK, or cuddle him, or tuck him into bed. No one read him stories or wiped his nose. No one ever told him he was great, or special, or anything other than shit. He didn’t cry because crying only made them hit him harder.

Not surprisingly, Conan was a little fucked up. There are nicer ways you could put that, words you could use that would sound far more psychological, but in Conan’s world ‘fucked up’ does it about as well as anything else could.

When I saw him he’d been in care for quite some time, and was in a residential programme for kids with severe behavioural problems. He wasn’t doing all that well. Conan was regularly absconding, stealing, fighting, doing drugs and generally being incredibly difficult.

What do you do with a boy like that? Well, first off you try not to get punched. He looked angry right from the start. Truth be told he looked positively unstable. There was a restless unpredictability about him that I’d rarely encountered in a kid so young. It literally made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

‘So,’ I ask him, slouching down in my chair. ‘What have you been told about me?’

‘Amanda said you were a fucking egg,’ he responds with a generous twist of fuck-you. He’s playful and intimidating all in the same breath.

Amanda was another girl in the same family home I’d seen previously. She didn’t like me because she liked me. It sounds weird but it makes perfect sense in the world these kids live in.

‘Really?’ I reply, nonchalant. ‘Did she say I was hard-boiled or fried?’

‘You’re fucking munted,’ he says, but there’s a slight hesitation to it, like he’s trying to decide exactly how big an idiot he thinks
I am. In such cases, always tip the balance is my philosophy. Size matters.

‘So, my understanding is they sent you here to talk to me about your plans to assassinate the Queen.’

He sneers. ‘What?’

‘Look, Conan,’ I say, ‘give it up. They caught you red-handed. We got pictures, surveillance tapes, T-shirts, everything.’

‘What the fuck are you on about?’

‘You were arrested outside Buckingham Palace with three pounds of C4 explosive hidden in a Bob the Builder lunchbox, and an Amazonian Indian blow gun. The darts were coated in poison from those little frogs. We got you, Conan. Things’ll go better if you talk.’

He frowns. ‘What the fuck, man?’

‘Give it up, Conan. We got pictures of you buying the blow gun from the Indian in a little village in the Amazon two weeks ago. Plus we got a frog naming you as the guy who took his cousin from a tree last Wednesday.’

Conan leans back in his chair, and there’s something dancing around in his eyes that could be humour or homicide. ‘You’re full of shit.’

I shrug. ‘That may be, but denial isn’t going to help you now. We know that you’re the secret leader of an international organisation of terrorists and drug smugglers. We know you tried to kill the Queen.’

He just frowns more, trying to decide whether to laugh or be pissed off. All the time he’s giving me these looks which are all about intimidation. He’s a player, that much is obvious. Still, the worst thing to do with a kid like Conan is back down. This kind of a game is like two mongrels seeing who can piss the highest up the pole. It’s not a game you want to lose or you may as well pack up and go home.

‘What was it? The dogs? You wanted to get back at her for the whole corgi thing? At least if it was that I could understand. Corgis are dirty little rats. If it was about those bloody dogs I could understand it.’

He’s still looking, except now he’s sliding more towards the homicide end of the scale. I do a quick calculation and decide that he’s smaller than me so I’d probably be OK. Probably. Besides, if you’ve dug a hole, it’s always best to dig a little bit deeper just to show you’re not chicken.

‘OK then,’ I continue. ‘What about the drugs?’

This gets him. ‘What drugs?’ he asks.

‘Last year you were arrested at LaGuardia airport in New York trying to smuggle fifteen kilos of uncut heroin into the States. You were sentenced to one hundred and seventy-eight years in a federal penitentiary and then promptly escaped by disguising yourself as a parrot and cleverly being chased out the front gate by a cat.’ I pause, returning his stare. It’s hard to tell if he’s feeling playful or he’s about to explode. If in doubt, do something stupid is my rule. ‘We know the cat was really Pablo “No-nuts” Sanchez, your long-time partner in crime. Anything you want to say?’

Nothing apparently.

‘Well, what about the wildlife smuggling? What about the international black market you personally run trading rare and endangered turtles?’

Nothing.

‘And the seven-billion-dollar securities fraud set up by you in London in 1978?’

Nothing.

‘What about the Second World War? You think we didn’t know it was you under the little Hitler moustache?

Not a thing.

‘And the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs? Anything you want to tell us about that one?’

‘Are you for fucking real, man?’

I sigh. ‘Nope, I’m pretty much full of shit.’

‘This is supposed to be fucking counselling. What the fuck kind of counsellor are you anyway?’

‘The full-of-shit kind.’

‘You got that right.’

‘At least I’m honest about it. All counsellors are full of shit, it’s just not many of them admit it.’

‘What do you mean?’ And all of this is filtered through his ever-present sneer.

‘Well, look, I could have said all the usual shit about how I’m going to help you and how talking about your problems makes you feel better, but that’d just be a waste of both our times, right? I mean, you’re not going to tell me diddly-squat about your life today. I could see that in your eyes before you even sat down, so why arse about? If I was you I wouldn’t talk to someone like me.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m just another do-gooder, right? Just another one of the fifty-gazillion people passing through your life all saying how much they want to help you. Give me a break.’

‘So why are you talking then?’ he asks, and I can hear the I-know-what-you’re-doing tone. He’s smart, this kid.

‘It doesn’t matter what I say. You’re going to see anything coming a mile off. You didn’t make it this far without being a survivor. The kinds of tricks that might work on other kids won’t work on you. Even right now you can see exactly what it is that I’m doing. So now we both know that it makes it easier on both of us because I know you know I know I’m going to get bugger all out of you. Which makes it easier because now neither of us needs to expect much.’

‘You’re still talking.’

‘Of course I’m still talking. Talking’s what I do. You beat the shit out of people, get wasted and run away. I talk. You got your thing, I got mine. That’s how it works.’

‘You’re just a fucking dick, man,’ he says in this offhand, dismissive way.

Now one thing you have to do is learn the language of the people you work with. If you’re dancing with a mongrel dog, you got to dance the way he does. If you don’t then all you’ll come away with is a few new fleas.

‘And you’re a particularly clever shite, which means we’re both about even.’

He shoots me this quick stare, and the violence is right there. Except it doesn’t feel like it’s an out-of-control violence, it feels more instrumental. He uses this look like a mugger uses a gun. We’re back pissing up the pole again. ‘What’s a shite?’ he asks.

‘It’s Scottish for shit.’

‘Are you calling me a shit?’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you fucking did.’

‘No I didn’t, I called you a
particularly clever
shite, which is completely different.’

And just like that, he’s up and out of his chair, fist raised, towering over me. It’s so quick my hands are still clasped in my lap. My pulse rate, on the other hand, is nicely elevated.

‘You want a fucking smash, man?’

How exactly does one respond to a question like that? A lot of things went through my mind rather quickly. The first was that—if he decided to hit me—there was a pretty good chance I was going to cop at least one decent punch in the face, and up close Conan looked a lot harder than he did from across the room. So given that
I was at least partially screwed, the next question was, what to do?

In such moments I tend to fall back on the belief that everything will be fine. What else can you do? Either the angels are with or you or they aren’t; either way it’s better to jump and take your chances.

‘You got any strawberry ones?’ I ask, sounding way calmer than I actually feel.

Conan looks down at me, hard as nails. In my mind I imagine the bones of my face splintering. Then, to my immense relief, he drops his fist, laughs and plops back down in his seat. It would seem that the angels are with me today.

I sit there for a minute, but now I’m starting to feel a little pissed off. Still, there’s time for that later. ‘You do that much?’ I ask.

‘What?’

‘That whole intimidation thing?’

He laughs. ‘I don’t fucking intimidate, man, I smash people.’ He laughs again. ‘You were fucking scared, man. You nearly pissed your pants.’

Now here’s where the game takes an interesting turn, because you can’t lie and say you weren’t scared, and you can’t just do the same macho posturing, but you have to piss as high up the pole as you can. ‘What did you expect? Maybe you get smashed a lot but I don’t. I’ve only ever been in two fights in my entire life and I lost both of them. In one of the fights the kid was a year younger than me.’

He laughs again. ‘What a fuckin’ faggot.’

‘You better believe it. Whereas you on the other hand look like you’d smash any motherfucker who crossed your path, right?’

He laughs. ‘Yeah.’

‘And it wouldn’t matter how big they are, because you don’t
feel any fear. Maybe a little at the start, if the other guy was a monster, but when you’re in it, when the juice is flowing, you don’t feel anything except the need to smash him all the way into the ground.’

He nods, smiling, proud.

‘And you been fighting people your whole life, so you’re good at it.’

‘Hell, yeah,’ he says. ‘Everyone knows me. I’d smash anyone. Me and my boys are fucking hard.’

‘And you had to learn that somewhere, didn’t you? You don’t get as good as you are without a good teacher. Who was it, your old man?’

He nods again. ‘My old man used to give me money if I smashed over someone bigger than me.’

This time I nod. ‘That’s right. You know how to smash people and it makes you feel good. There’s a power in that, a power that comes from knowing you could smash someone if you wanted. If you decided you wanted to smash me right now my face would be a bloody pulp before anyone could pull you off, right?’

He does that little eyebrow-raise thing; he’s loving this.

‘So you’re right, I was scared. But answer me this, if being so hard is so great, why is your life such a pile of shit?’

He stops smiling and the look is back in his eyes again. ‘What the fuck do you mean?’

‘You heard me. If everything’s so great, if you got the whole thing wired, how come your life is such a pile of shit?’

And
bang,
he’s out of his chair again, fist raised.

‘What the fuck do you know about my life?’ he says.

I just look at him. ‘I know you don’t get to be in my room unless things are pretty bad. What do you think, I spend my days talking to whiny little babies who feel sad? You only get into my room if
you’re way out on the edge. I see the worst of the worst, Conan, and that’s what you are. You’re the hardest of the hard and you’re so messed up you think punching me is going to make you feel better. You punch me and all you’re going to feel is shrink snot and blood on your hand. All the shit that chases you round is still going to be there.’

He backs down a little. Who says flattery gets you nowhere?

‘This is bullshit,’ he says.

‘Well, go then,’ I say, waving at the door. ‘I’m not twisting your arm.’

He frowns. ‘What?’

This time I frown. ‘I mean if you wanna go, then go.’

‘You’re not going to make me stay?’

‘Hell, no. I lost every fight I’ve ever been in, you think I’m going to try and stop you? I might be a shrink but I’m not stupid.’

It’s a high-stakes game with kids like Conan. I’m betting that I’ve got him hooked. I don’t know why I feel that way, but I do, so that’s where I’m laying my chips.

‘Fuck,’ he grunts and then slumps back down into his chair.

‘So what do
you
want?’ I ask him.

‘Nothing.’

‘You want something.’

‘Nah,’ Conan sneers.

‘So why’d you stay?’

‘Aahh, man,’ he says. ‘You’re fucking with me.’

I shake my head. ‘No I’m not. You can leave any time you want. I’m not sticking your butt in that chair. So what do you want?’

‘I don’t want nothing.’

I shrug. ‘Bullshit, you’re still here.’

Now, I’m not trying to piss him off, but I
am
trying to
provoke
him. If I was to play the touchy-feely counsellor role he’d chew
me up and spit me out in a second. He’d think I was just another do-gooder, and he’d be right. Junkyard mongrels and poodles ain’t never going to be a good match. Like I said, it’s a high-stakes game, and you gotta piss about as far up the pole as you think you can get.