Jackson himself wasn’t afraid of dark alleys, he thought he prob-ably posed more of a threat himself in a dark alley than anyone he was likely to encounter, but obviously he hadn’t reckoned on Honda Man. The Incredible Hulk on steroids in all his pumped-up glory, barreling out of nowhere and staggering into Jackson with all the grace of a rugby prop.
Jesus Christ
, Jackson thought as he hit the ground, this was some kind of town. The Minotaur was out of the labyrinth.
He got to his feet instinctively, never stay down, down means kicked, down means dead, but before Jackson could even get a ra-tional thought up and running—
Why?
would have been a good one to start with—Honda Man had slammed him with a punch like a battering ram. Jackson heard the air leaving his own body with a kind of
ouf!
sound before he slumped to the ground. His diaphragm turned to stone, he immediately lost interest in rational thought, his only concern had become the mechanics of his breathing—why it had stopped, how to start it again. He managed to get on all fours, like a dog, and was rewarded by Honda Man stamping on one of his hands, a bitchy kind of move, in Jackson’s opinion, but it hurt so much he wanted to cry.
“You’re going to forget about what you saw,” Honda Man said.
“Forget what? What did I see?” Jackson gasped.
Full marks for trying to have a conversation, Jackson
, he thought. On all fours and still talking—give this man a medal. He blew out air and sucked it in again.
“Don’t try to be fucking clever, you know what you saw.”
“Do I?” In reply, Honda Man gave him a casual kick in the ribs that made him recoil in agony. The guy was right, he should stop trying to be clever.
“I’m told that you’ve been causing a fuss, Mr. Brodie.” (The guy knew his
name?
) Jackson thought about saying that he hadn’t been doing any such thing, that, indeed, he had actively refrained from saying anything about the road rage to the police and had no interest at all in being a witness, but all that he managed to say was “Uh,” because one of Honda Man’s heavy-duty boots gave him another hefty nudge in the ribs. He had to get up off the ground. You had to keep getting to your feet. All the
Rocky
films seemed to pass before his eyes in one go. Stallone shouting his wife’s name at the end like he was dying.
“Adrian!”
The
Rockies I–V
contained important moral lessons that men could learn to live by, but what did they teach you about fighting impossible enemies? Keep going, against the odds. When there was nothing else to do, all that was left was seeing it through to the end.
Honda Man was squatting like a sumo and taunting Jackson by making gestures with his hands as if he were helping him reverse into a parking space, the universal machismo mime for
Bring it on
.
The guy was twice his size, more like an unstoppable force of nature than a human being. Jackson knew there was no way he could fight him and win, no way he could fight him and
live
. He suddenly remembered the baseball bat. Where was it? Up his sleeve? No, that would be ridiculous, a magician’s trick. They circled round like street-fighting gladiators, keeping their weight low. Honda Man obviously had no sense of humor, because if he had, he would have been laughing at Jackson for behaving as if he had a chance against him.
Where was the baseball bat?
The other thing Jackson always tried to impress on Marlee— and Julia—was what you had to do if you were attacked because you’d been foolish enough to ignore his advice in the first place and go down the dark alley.
“You’re at a disadvantage,” he tutored them. “Height, weight, strength, they’re all against you, so you have to fight dirty. Thumbs in the eyes, fingers up the nostrils, knee to the groin. And shout, don’t forget to shout. Lots of noise. If worst comes to worst, bite wherever you can—nose, lips—and hold on. But then shout again. Keep shouting.”
He was going to have to forget fighting like a man and fight like a girl. Navigating like the fairer sex hadn’t worked for him, but nonetheless he went for Honda Man’s eyes with his thumbs—and missed, it was like jumping for a basketball hoop. He made it to the nose somehow and bit down and held on. Not the most disgusting thing he’d ever done, but close. Honda Man screamed— an unearthly storybook-giant kind of sound.
Jackson let go. Honda Man’s face was covered in blood, the same blood that Jackson could taste in his own mouth, coppery and foul. He took his own advice and shouted. He wanted the po-lice to come, he wanted concerned citizens and innocent by-standers to come, he wanted anyone to come who could stop the madman mountain. Unfortunately, the shout attracted the dog, and Jackson remembered that it wasn’t the baseball bat he needed to worry about—it was the dog. The dog that was making a bee-line for him, its teeth bared like a hound from hell.
He knew how to kill a dog, in theory anyway—you got hold of its front legs and just pulled it apart, basically—but a theoreti-cal dog was different from a real dog, an enraged real dog, packed with muscle and teeth, whose only ambition was to tear your throat out.
Honda Man stopped screaming long enough to give the dog its orders. He pointed at Jackson and yelled, “Get him! Kill him!”
Jackson watched in mute, paralyzed horror as the dog leaped in the air toward him.
R
ichard Mott woke with a start. He felt as if an alarm bell had gone off in his head. He had no idea what time it was. Martin hadn’t had the decency to provide a clock for his guest room. It was light outside, but that didn’t mean anything, it hardly seemed to get dark at all up here. “Jockland”—that’s what he’d begun to call it. Edinburgh, the Athens of the North, that was a fucking joke. He felt as if a slug had crawled into his mouth while he slept and taken over for his tongue. He could feel a trail of snail drool on his chin.
He hadn’t got to bed until four, and dawn was already struggling to make an appearance by then. Tweet, tweet, fucking tweet all the way home. Had he got a taxi or had he walked? He had been drinking in the Traverse Bar long after midnight, and he had a vivid, bizarre memory of being in a lap-dancing club on the Lothian Road—“Shania,” if he wasn’t mistaken, sticking her crotch in his face. A real skank. The showcase had gone okay, those kind of middle-of-the-day BBC things always attracted an older, well-behaved audience, the kind that still believed the BBC was synonymous with quality. But the ten o’clock show ...wankers, the lot of them. Bastard wankers.
The sun poked its dispassionate finger through the curtains, and he noticed Martin’s Rolex on his wrist. Half-past five. Martin didn’t need a watch like this, he wasn’t a Rolex man. What chance was there that Martin might give it to him? Or maybe he could “accidentally” take it home with him.
The alarm in his head went off again, and he realized it was actually the doorbell. Why the fuck didn’t Martin get it? Again, longer this time. Jesus. He staggered out of bed and down the stairs. The front door was on the latch rather than fastened with the usual endless series of bolts and locks and chains that Martin barricaded himself in with. The guy was such an old woman about some things. Most things. Richard Mott pulled open the door and was hit by the daylight, knew how vampires felt. There was a guy standing there, just a guy, not a postman or a milkman or anyone else who might have claimed the right to be waking him at this hour.
“What? It’s half-past five in the morning. It’s still yesterday, for fuck’s sake.”
“Not for you,” the man on the doorstep said, pushing him roughly inside. “For you it’s tomorrow.”
“What the—?” Richard Mott said as the man shoved him into the living room.
The guy was huge, his nose swollen and ugly, as if he’d been in a fight. He was very nasal, English, a bit of something flat, Nottingham, Lancaster, perhaps. Richard Mott imagined himself giving a description afterward to the police, imagined himself saying, “I know accents, I’m in the business.”He had tried his hand at acting in the early nineties, there’d been a bit part on
The Bill
where he’d played a guy (a comic so he wouldn’t have to “stretch” him-self) with a crazy female stalker who wanted to kill him, and one of the Sun Hill detectives counseled his character that to be a survivor you had to
think
like a survivor, you had to picture yourself in the future,
after
the attack. This advice came back to him now, but then he remembered that his character had actually been killed by the crazy stalker.
The insane stranger was wearing driving gloves, and Richard thought this probably wasn’t a good sign. The gloves had holes from which the guy’s knuckles protruded, little atolls of white flesh, and Richard thought there was a joke in there somewhere, perhaps you could reference those classic yob knuckle-tattoos “love” and “hate,” but try as he could he couldn’t render this thought into anything remotely coherent, let alone funny. From nowhere the guy produced a baseball bat.
What followed ought to be in slow motion, no sound, a music track instead—Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” or perhaps something poignant and classical—the cello—Martin would know. Richard Mott’s legs buckled suddenly and he fell to his knees. He’d never experienced that before, you heard talk about it but you didn’t think it happened.
“That’s good,” the man said, “get down on the floor where you belong.”
“What do you want?” His mouth was so dry he could hardly speak. “Take anything, everything. Take everything in the house.” Richard Mott flipped desperately through a mental inventory of everything in Martin’s house. There was a good stereo, a fantastic wide-screen TV over in the corner behind him. He tried to gesture with a nerveless arm in the direction of the television, spotted Martin’s Rolex on his wrist, tried to bring it to the man’s attention.
“I don’t want anything,” the man said (quite calmly, his calmness was the worst thing).
Richard’s phone rang, breaking the strange, intense intimacy between them. They both stared at it, sitting on the coffee table, a bizarre intrusion from outside. Richard Mott tried to calculate whether or not he could reach for it, flip it open, shout down the line to whoever was phoning him at this hour,
“Help me, I’m with a crazy guy,”
prove he wasn’t joking, give the address (like someone in a movie, a sudden remembered image of Jodie Foster in
Panic Room
), but he knew it was no good, before he could even touch the phone, the crazy guy would have brought his baseball bat down on his arm. He couldn’t even bear thinking about the kind of pain the crazy guy could inflict. He started whimpering, he could hear himself, like a dog. Jodie Foster was made of sterner stuff, she wouldn’t whimper.
The phone stopped ringing and the crazy guy pocketed it, laughing, taking up the
Robin Hood
theme song where the phone had left off. “Bunch of faggots if you ask me,” he said to Richard. “Don’t you think?” Richard felt a warm trickle of urine working its way down his thigh. “I didn’t like what you did today.”
“The show?” Richard said in disbelief. “You’re here because you didn’t like the
show?
”
“Is that what you call it?”
“I don’t understand. I’ve never met you before. Have I?” He had gone through his life indifferent to whether or not he offended people, it struck him now that maybe he should have taken more care.
“Stay down on your knees and face me.”
“Do you want me to suck your cock?” Richard offered desper-ately, trying to make himself sound eager despite his cotton-mouth, despite the warm stain on his boxers. He wondered what he would do to save himself from being hurt by this man. Proba-bly anything.
“You filthy bastard,” the man said. (Okay, he’d read that one wrong.) “I don’t want you to
do
anything, Martin. Just shut the fuck up, why don’t you?”
Richard Mott opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t Martin, that Martin was asleep upstairs in his room and he would very happily show him the way so he could hurt Martin instead of himself, but all he managed was to croak, “I’m a comedian,” and the man threw back his head and laughed, his mouth open so wide that Richard Mott could see the fillings in his back teeth. He felt a sob break in his throat.
“Oh you fucking are, there’s no doubt about that,” the guy said, and then quickly, quicker than in Richard Mott’s imagination, he
brought the bat down, and Richard Mott’s world exploded into pieces of light—little filaments, like in old-fashioned lightbulbs— and he realized he had told his last joke. He could have sworn he heard applause, and then all the little filaments burned out one by one until there was only darkness, and Richard Mott floated into it.
His last thoughts were about his obituary. Who would write it? Would it be good?
J
ackson woke in the tailspin of a nightmare. Someone, a shadowy figure he didn’t recognize, had handed him a package. Jackson knew that the package was very precious, and if he dropped it something unspeakably awful would happen. The package was too heavy and awkward, though, it had no fixed center of gravity and seemed to move around in his arms so that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t hold on to it. He woke up with a start of horror at the moment that he knew the package was about to slip out of his arms forever.
He hauled himself up and sat on the edge of what passed for a bed. He felt dog-rough, as if his body had been fed through a giant mangle during the course of the night, and his eyes seemed to have been poached—or possibly fried—while he slept. His ribs ached and his hand was throbbing, it had swollen up nicely, the imprint of a boot clearly visible on it.
The seawater that had sluiced through his body yesterday had diluted his blood, and it was going to require gallons of hot, strong coffee to restore its viscosity, to restore Jackson to some semblance of life. He wondered what kind of toxins and pollutants swam around in the water. And sewage, what about sewage? Best not to think about that.