Authors: Rich Hawkins
CHAPTER FOUR
In the morning he woke trembling with fragments of the dream still vivid in his mind. Like shards of glass he could not remove. He moaned with his hands over his eyes, and the sudden self-loathing he felt made him nauseous, close to tears and hopeless for the day ahead.
A short bearded man in an ankle-length coat was standing over him, looking down with a concerned expression and pale eyes set within the creases of an old face.
Still emerging from sleep, Mason raised his hands in an instinctive reaction and muttered wordlessly through a dry mouth.
“It’s okay,” the man said, holding his hands out as he backed away to the opposite wall. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
The blanket fell from Mason’s legs as he stood. He cleared his throat and looked at the man. “What do you want?”
The man made something like a nervous smile through his greying beard. He pulled at one side of his woollen hat then adjusted the strap of the satchel over his shoulder. “I was just seeing if you’re okay, lad. Last night wasn’t a good night to be sleeping rough. This is my usual spot to kip, but I spent last night at a friend’s place.” His words were softly-spoken in a Scottish accent.
“I’m fine,” Mason said. “Thanks for your concern.” He coughed and slapped his chest. His throat was dry and raw, so he drank from his water bottle while he kept one eye on the man.
“You a newbie?” said the man.
Mason returned the bottle to its place in the rucksack. “A newbie?”
“I haven’t seen you around here before. I know all the vagrants around here.”
“I’m not a vagrant.”
“Then why are you sleeping in a church doorway?”
“I think you should mind your own business.”
The man looked away. “Fair enough, lad. Didn’t mean to pry.”
Mason gathered his belongings. “Sorry to have taken your spot. You can have it back now.” He shouldered the rucksack and walked outside. He took four steps before the man spoke behind him.
“You wanna get some breakfast, lad? I know a place, if you haven’t got any food. No one should go hungry.”
He halted. His stomach groaned. He looked up at the miserable sky and the rainclouds approaching from the west. Car engines and exhausts rumbled and coughed from nearby streets. The cawing and squawking of unseen crows. The click of heels on a pavement beyond the trees at the edge of the churchyard. A dog was barking at the early morning.
Mason turned around and eyed the man warily.
The man had stepped onto the pathway, hands in pockets, grimacing at the same sky. He looked at Mason. “Don’t worry, lad, I’m not after your arse.”
*
The old man was called Calvin, and he took Mason to a supermarket down the road and led him around the back of the building. Stacks of wooden pallets stood against the wall. Cardboard boxes dismantled and piled in disarray. The smell of damp. A dripping gutter pipe.
When Mason asked, with some anxiety in his voice, why Calvin had brought him there, the old man simply smiled thinly and opened a large wheelie bin with his gloved hands. He bid Mason forward as he took a bulging refuse bag from the bin and placed it on the ground. He opened the bag and stretched the hole wide enough for him to push his hands inside.
“They bring it out every morning,” Calvin said. “A free breakfast.”
Mason peered into the bag. It was full of out-of-date cakes, pastries and bagels. Calvin began to fill his satchel with food from the bag. When he saw Mason looking, he said, “They’re for friends of mine.”
“Okay.”
Once Calvin finished loading his satchel he delved again into the bag and took a bite from a chocolate croissant. He looked up at Mason. “Tuck in, lad.”
*
After a breakfast that left Mason with a bloated stomach and a dose of heartburn, the two men walked to a nearby greasy spoon. Mason waited outside, rolling a cigarette as he watched people flock and hurry to work. The roads were busy with vehicles travelling in all directions. Buses crammed with passengers, their heads bowed towards newspapers, paperback novels, mobile phones or magazines.
A few minutes later Calvin emerged with two coffees in Styrofoam cups. He handed one to Mason. “Milk and two sugars.”
Mason nodded. “Thanks.”
Calvin blew the steam from his drink. “It’s nothing, lad.”
“Why are you helping me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. It’s not what most people do.”
“I’ve been in your position. I know how difficult it is.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you’re desperate. You wouldn’t be sleeping in a church doorway if you weren’t.”
Mason said nothing, sipped at his coffee.
“You from around here?”
“No.”
“Where you from?”
“A few places.”
“Fair enough. How’s the coffee?”
“Scalding. But good.”
Calvin snorted, wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his coat. “Best coffee in town. Puts hairs on your balls. Let’s find somewhere to sit down.”
*
They sat on a low wall at the edge of a car park and drank their coffees under the skyward-reaching bough of a sickly birch tree. Mason smoked the thin cigarette and stared at the ground, while Calvin hummed a tune under his breath and fingered the tiny cross on a silver chain around his neck. He watched people waiting in line at a ticket machine.
“Poor bastards,” Calvin said.
Mason looked up, blowing smoke from his mouth. “Who?”
The old man nodded towards the queue of people. “Them. They do that each morning. Buy an overpriced ticket so they can park their cars on property already paid for by the money they pay in tax. Then they spend the rest of the day working for companies that regard them as nothing more than numbers on a payroll, easily replaced if they don’t meet the made-up requirements of their jobs. They’re lost souls, like the rest of us.”
“You’re not trying to convert me, are you?” said Mason.
Calvin smirked and tucked the silver cross back under his jumper. “I try not to do that.”
“That’s a relief.”
“You’re not a believer?”
“Not since Sunday school.”
Calvin laughed. “Did you have a job, lad?”
“When?”
“Before you came here.”
“Not for a few years.”
“Couldn’t find any work?”
“Hard to find a job when you’re in prison.”
Calvin turned his head towards him. “I see.” He looked back at the slowly-dwindling queue of people. “Well, we all make mistakes, lad.”
Mason scratched one side of his mouth. “It was a bit more than a mistake. What I did was unforgivable.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“You don’t even know what I did,” replied Mason. “I could be a child molester, for all you know.”
“Are you…?”
“Of course not.”
“I thought so. You don’t look the type, lad.”
A man in a business suit strode past, checking the expensive watch on his wrist. His gleaming black shoes clacked on the tarmac. Overhead a flock of pigeons wheeled in the air and vanished beyond the roof of a tall apartment building.
Calvin said, “So, if you’re not a kiddie-fiddler, what are you?”
Mason almost laughed. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“Not this early in the morning.”
“What does it matter to you?”
“I’m just making conversation.”
“So you buy me a coffee and expect me to give you my life story?”
Calvin looked at him without a trace of humour. “That’s the deal.”
“Fuck you.”
Calvin smirked. “I already told you, I’m not after your arse.”
“I’m hanging out with a fucking comedian…”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Really?”
“Yes. In another life. Used to do the working men’s clubs. Tough crowds. Drunken hecklers. Hard men. Loose women. My wife caught me getting a blowjob in the ladies’ toilets.”
Mason inhaled smoke through his nostrils and coughed until his eyes watered. “Oh…”
Calvin folded his arms and looked at Mason. “Now it’s your turn to tell me something.”
Mason finished the cigarette, dropped it by his feet and stamped it out. He felt his heart fluttering as he ran through memories of the last few years. Blinked to cure the stinging in his eyes. All he could taste in his mouth was smoke and coffee. He bowed his head a little against the chill breeze and breathed into his hands to warm them. The juddering of his heart was all he could hear.
“I’d been driving home drunk from a night out. Most of it’s a blur apart from a memory of singing along to some shit Nineties pop song on the radio. I hit another car, a little Ford Fiesta, travelling in the opposite direction. My car hit it side-on. There was a family inside. A little girl…”
Mason put his hand to his mouth. He felt his face crumple. He bit down on his lip and looked at the ground.
Calvin said nothing.
Mason blinked rapidly and folded his arms. He spat by his feet. “One count of causing death by dangerous driving, and driving with excess alcohol. My wife left me while I was in prison, and moved here.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Calvin’s voice was quiet and solemn.
“You probably think I’m condemned to Hell, don’t you? Do you believe in all that?”
Calvin looked at him. “I’m not sure. That’s not for me to know and not for me to say, lad. It’s out of our hands. We do what we do, and then the Big Man decides.”
Mason nodded. “No offence, Calvin, but I hope you’re wrong and there’s only oblivion waiting for us.”
“We’ll all find out one day.”
“True.”
“How long were you inside?”
“Four years. Let out early, three weeks ago, because of good behaviour. Spent some time in shitty bedsits, trying not to get beaten up by pimps and crack addicts. I’ve spent most of my money. I arrived here yesterday and went to my wife’s house, but she told me to leave and never come back. Said she’d call the police if I pester her again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Calvin.
Mason looked at the sky. “So am I.”
CHAPTER FIVE
They walked the backstreets and travelled through underpasses until they reached the outskirts of the city. Then they crossed a stretch of wasteland to a derelict house partially hidden behind a copse of gnarled trees. Calvin led the way. Mason kept thinking about Ellie. There was a bad taste in his mouth.
They stopped outside the house, in an overgrown garden of nettles, weeds and yellowing grass. The windows were covered in lengths of wood or chipboard. Whitewashed walls strangled by pale ivy that entwined around the crumbling guttering and spread onto the underside of the roof. Mason was surprised to see the chimney still intact, squat and weathered against the grey sky.
“What is this place?”
“A friend of mine squats here,” Calvin said. “He’s ex-army. Served in the Falklands. Not all of him came back, in a way.”
“Poor bloke.”
“He’s a bit unstable.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“That’s true.”
*
Calvin knocked on the door. Mason stood behind him, wondering who lived behind the boarded windows; he pictured a human representation of a deep sea fish dwelling in the dark.
The door opened little more than an inch. A lone eye appeared and appraised them, flicking from Mason to Calvin and then lingering on Mason, all watery and bloodshot like its owner had been crying. The eye narrowed in its bone socket and the pale skin around it.
Then the door was pulled back and a man emerged, tall and thin in a ratty brown overcoat. Mason reckoned he was in his late fifties or early sixties. When he frowned, the skin stretched tighter across his face. He nodded at Mason.
“Who’s this, Calvin?”
“Someone in need of help.”
“We all need help, brother. Some of us more than others.”
“He’s sound,” Calvin said.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
The man raised his eyebrows at Mason. “Are you sound?”
“What?”
The man rolled his eyes. “Are you sound?”
Mason looked at Calvin and back to the man. He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I think so.”
A thin smile broke across the man’s mouth. “You haven’t converted him, have you, Cal?”
“Just let us in,” said Calvin. “It’s fucking cold out here.”
The man stood to one side of the doorway and gestured inside the house. “I was just making some tea. You were lucky to get here before nightfall.”
*
The downstairs floor had been stripped of any furnishings and utilities, leaving only exposed floorboards and bare walls. Plaster flaked from the ceilings of the downstairs rooms. The wind moved through the hollows and recesses of the house, sounding like distant voices. The air smelled of autumnal decay and bad feet.
“Wipe your feet,” Zeke said, as they stepped into what had once been a living room. He looked at Mason and grinned with a mouthful of yellow teeth. When Mason had entered the house, Zeke eyed him up and down then, after a few seconds of awkward silence, grabbed Mason’s hand and shook it warmly. He greeted Calvin with a hug, wrapping his long arms around the little man.
Two candles burned on porcelain saucers in the middle of the room. Grey daylight slipped through the thin cracks in the boards over the outside of the windows. Cobwebs trembled in the corners between the walls and the ceiling.
“Cup of tea?” Zeke asked them.
Mason nodded and tried to smile. “Thanks.”
Zeke took a large flask from underneath some old clothing. “Make yourselves comfortable, lads.”
Calvin reached into his satchel and began pulling out the pastries he’d taken from the bin behind the supermarket. “I got these for you.” He handed the pastries to Zeke, who thanked him and eyed an apple turnover with something like adoration.
“You’re a good bloke, Cal.”
Calvin sat and slumped against the section of wall under the boarded up window and pulled his trainers from his feet. His socks were filthy. The big toe on his left foot was poking through a hole in the fabric, and its nail was pale yellow and brittle-looking.
Mason removed his rucksack and sat down nearby.
Zeke poured tea into two chipped mugs and handed one each to Mason and Calvin, then sat on his bedding in the corner with the apple turnover in his hands. He took little bites, like a small mammal, chewing slowly. Calvin watched and shook his head, smiling over his steaming mug.
Mason sipped at his tea and sank into his coat. The air inside the house was warmer than outside, but not by much, and he shivered at a draught that ghosted across the room and into the cracked walls.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” said Calvin.
Zeke chewed the last mouthful of apple turnover and swallowed. “I have to be careful the police don’t find me here. They don’t take kindly to squatters, for some reason.”
“He doesn’t like the police very much,” Calvin said to Mason.
Zeke frowned. “Neither would you if they gave you hassle all the time.”
“It doesn’t help that the last time they stopped you, you tried to kiss both officers. And they were blokes.”
“I was only messing around.”
Calvin laughed. “You were high as a kite. Lucky they didn’t throw you in a cell for the night.”
“Whatever. Fuck you.”
Calvin laughed again, and Zeke joined in.