‘
Let’s
go!
’
As I’m
dragging her over to the door, my coat flailing from my trailing
hand, I see that Charlie has gone to talk to the Maitre d’, who is
standing behind the bar. He opens his wallet and removes a large
stack of notes from within.
‘This is for
the bill;’ he says, slapping a good couple-thousand pounds down
onto the bar. ‘This is for the tip.’ A grand or so more. ‘This is
for the damage.’ A further couple-thousand is laid down next to the
second pile. He appraises what is left – three notes – slaps two
down on the bar and puts the last back into his pocket. ‘And that’s
for the pint I’m going to swipe on my way out.’
With that, he
strides off towards the door, picking up a grey-haired gentleman’s
half-full pint glass as he passes his table. Pushing Liz through
the exit ahead of me and ignoring the noises she’s making about her
coat, I stalk after him.
I see Charlie
amble off down a side street ahead. I make chase, partly because
I’m concerned for his mental wellbeing and partly because, if we go
our separate ways, it’ll be me and not him who stumbles into the
lights of a police waggon. Liz is peculiarly quiet, and lags behind
me as I trot after my drunk, possibly insane housemate. She still
holds on to my hand, but the tightness with which she clasps it has
nothing, I fear, to do with affection.
‘Sorry about
that,’ Charlie mutters as I pull up alongside him. ‘Just wanted to
prove my point.’
‘Why use
words, when a grand gesture will do?’ I reply, in an attempt at
humour.
‘Exactly.
You’re still getting the speech, though. What I was trying to say
was that there are no real laws; there are only people who tell you
what to do, and people who make you afraid to not do as they
say.’
‘What about
your conscience?’ I ask, sarcastically.
‘Like a
quadruple amputee thrown in a river, who convinces himself that
he’s swimming,’ Charlie replies. Suddenly, his eyes lock-on to a
girl with a ponytail tied at the top of her head, who is lurking
under a streetlight flanked by two teenaged boys built out of fat,
muscle, acne and barely-suppressed rage. ‘Oi!’ he calls out to her.
‘Just because I’m pretty, doesn’t mean you’re allowed to stare at
me like I’m some kind of sex object!’
‘What the fuck
did you just say?’ asks the larger of the two large male
companions.
‘Ah, the
lawmakers of a very specific sub-section of our society,’ Charlie
says, striding up to meet him. ‘Tell me; did you actually not hear
what I said, or are you just looking for an excuse to beat me
up?’
It’s the
latter. The quiet
Crack
of the boy’s forehead hitting the
bridge of Charlie’s nose has none of the panache of a wine bottle
hitting the wall of a restaurant. Charlie lands against the floor
with a thud. The other boy, who has come over to join in the
festivities, pulls the pint glass out of Charlie’s hand and slams
it against the side of his face. Charlie doesn’t make a sound. A
white light appears beside me – Liz is keying ’9-9-9’ into her
phone.
‘No!’ I
demand. ‘Go home, Liz; I’ll sort this out.’
‘No!’ she
replies, with even more force, and presses the call button. I
snatch the phone out of her hand and slam it shut.
‘Leave, now!’
I tell her.
‘No! They’re
going to kill him! He’s your friend! Call the police!’
‘What the fuck
did this bitch say?’ screeches the girl with the ponytail on the
top of her head. I look away from Liz, and see the two boys taking
it in turns to kick a prone Charlie. I look at the young girl
advancing towards her and hate bubbles up in my soul. Almost
outside of myself, as though I’m playing a videogame, I watch my
fist slam into the side of her face. She hits the deck.
‘What the fuck
did you just-’ the larger boy says, as though that’s the trio’s
catchphrase. He advances on me. My hand goes into my coat pocket,
and pulls out the revolver. Charlie wasn’t the only one who kept
hold of some of the evidence. The moment he recognises what I’m
pointing at him the teen freezes. The colour drains from the few
acne-free areas of his face. His snarl disappears, and suddenly his
youth becomes much more pronounced in his features. His hands raise
and his knees slump involuntarily. With one hand I grab the back of
his neck and with the other I thrust the gun into his mouth.
‘You taste
that?’ I ask him. ‘That’s gunpowder, from the last bullet I fired
out of this gun. The next one’s going straight out the back of your
head.’
The other boy
has stopped hurting Charlie, now.
‘Then the one
after that’s going right between your tits, you fat fuck,’ I call
to him. ‘That is unless all three of you cunts run away from here,
right this second.’
By the time
I’ve finished the sentence, the girl and the smaller boy have faded
away into the dusk. I know the bigger one will do the same the
second that I take my hand off the back of his neck, but I can’t
quite bring myself to let go.
‘You ever
touch anyone I know again, and I’ll kill you,’ I spit at him.
Twenty years of being the little-guy parade through my jugular. He
coughs and splutters and tears flop down his cheeks. I increase the
pressure on the back of his neck, and force the gun past his
tonsils. ‘Your friends ever touch anyone I know, and I’ll kill
you
. A friend of mine gets hit by a bus and I just want
someone to blame for it, I’ll kill
you
.’ I take a deep, hard
breath and scream: ‘ARE WE FUCKING CLEAR?!’ He tries to nod, but
can’t do much more than tremble and gag on the barrel.
‘Then off you
fuck,’ I say to him, allowing my lips to curl at the corners.
I pull the
phlegm-drenched revolver out of his mouth and he staggers
backwards, awkwardly turns, stumbles, and scrabbles off into the
darkness, tripping over Charlie’s body and falling over once more
in his haste to escape. I turn to hand Liz’ phone back to her, but
she, too is gone.
ON THE LAM
At first Charlie tried
to refuse my help in getting home, but it wasn’t long before the
effects of a probable concussion and twelve solid hours of alcohol
abuse got the better of him and he staggered into my arms. A
frankly embarrassingly long time later, I’m finally slouching on
our doorstep with him draped over one shoulder, fumbling for the
keys with my spare hand. After much scraping against the lock I
eventually get the key into the hole, the door open, and Charlie
deposited onto the sofa.
‘I’ll have a
whiskey,’ he slurs as I head to the kitchen.
‘As long as
you don’t throw it anywhere,’ I whisper back. Hoping that there’s
some orange juice left in there for me, I open the fridge. It’s all
champagne. Cheap, Tesco-brand champagne, but what Charlie neglected
in quality he made up for in quantity. There’s not a single inch of
shelf-space left. I would even go as far as to suspect that he
threw out any food we had in there, to make room for more booze.
This suspicion is compounded by the only non-alcoholic item in the
fridge, a post-it note stuck to the inside of the door, which
says:
Dear Charlie,
What the actual
fuck?
Johnny
I go to the
cupboard, hoping to find some squash, but the cupboard is full of
whiskey. It’s not as jam-packed as the fridge, but – despite my
lack of education in the language of liquor – I can tell that it’s
here, and not on the contents of the fridge, that Charlie really
splurged. Two of the eight bottles are near-enough empty. I pick up
the unopened one with the Japanese label, peel the foil off the
neck, and pull out the cork. Feeling vaguely classy, I waft the
bottle under my nose. It wrinkles reflexively, so with a gleeful
sense of abandon I put it to my lips and throw my head backwards. I
immediately come to regret this decision. Through coughs,
splutters, dry heaves and finally vomit, I ask the plughole:
‘What the fuck
is wrong with rich people?!’
Deciding then
and there that I don’t want Charlie polishing off a third bottle of
this repugnant shit, I pour the tiniest sliver into a glass, for
flavour, and top it off from the tap. I pour myself a glass of
pure, god-fearing tap water.
As I turn the
living room light on, it becomes clear exactly how much damage
Charlie absorbed down that alleyway. His left eyelid is a deep
purple and sags halfway down his cheek; the right half of his face
is a mess of grazes and cuts, probably from where it scraped
against the pavement each time they kicked him; his bottom lip is
near-enough torn in two, and there are dark scabs clogging-up
either nostril. I examine my own face in the window. By comparison,
I don’t look half bad.
‘What a pair
we make,’ I say, plonking the ‘whiskey’ down on the table in front
of him. I sit down and take a sip of my water. I can’t quite work
out if I’ve got our drinks the wrong way round or whether the
aftertaste of the slug of whiskey is coming back to haunt me.
Charlie knocks back half his glass, surveys the remaining liquid
for a moment, then says:
‘You know, I
think I prefer cheap vodka to this stuff.’
I laugh. He
doesn’t know how right he is. I stretch my neck out until it clicks
and slide down into the armchair and play with Liz’ mobile,
flipping it open and closed in my pocket, and a realisation
suddenly strikes me.
‘Have you seen
my phone?’ I ask Charlie. ‘I haven’t seen it in the last couple of
days.’ He shakes his head. ‘Can you ring it for me?’
‘What did your
last servant die of?’ he asks. His grin pulls the sides of his
split lip open, and a trickle of blood slips down his chin. He
doesn’t appear to notice. The grin makes me uneasy.
‘Some unfunny
cunt called; he wants his joke back.’ I try to deliver this line
with a wry smile, but I can’t quite manage to paint over the
grimace that his frenzied glare and blood-tinged teeth provoke.
‘Seriously, though, I need to find it. I need to tell my mum I’ve
added a lawyer to my Christmas list.’
‘Maybe I
should’ve put you on my Find my iPhone, too,’ he remarks, digging
the hand that isn’t holding his whiskey into his jeans.
‘It’ll be
around here somewhere,’ I reply, dismissively. He throws over his
phone; it sails through my outstretched hands and bounces off the
arm of the chair, into my lap. As I pick it up and press the home
button, I see that Charlie’s screensaver is a photo of the back of
Phoebe’s head. ‘Is that the best picture you have of her?’ I
ask.
‘She was never
fond of photographs,’ he explains. I shrug.
‘Figures.
What’s your PIN?’
‘Don’t have
one. As was made so abundantly clear this evening, I don’t have a
girlfriend, which means that, unlike you, I don’t have anyone to
hide anything from.’
‘Except the
police,’ I mutter back, barely audibly, fiddling with the phone as
I do so. ‘Fuck. Straight to voicemail.’
‘Ah, well,’
Charlie replies. ‘At least you can afford another one, now.’
I throw the
phone back at him, slump further down in the chair and stretch out
my spine.
‘Look at the
state of us. What a fucking pair,’ I say, being unable and even
less inclined, by now, to muster up any original conversation. He
smiles at me.
‘You shouldn’t
have stepped-in, you know.’
‘What? I
wasn’t going to let them do that to you.’
Charlie stares
airily at the ceiling.
‘Because Liz
was there?’ I press, confused. ‘I think that bridge was well and
truly burnt by the time they started going after you.’
‘Not because
of Liz. You just should’ve let them finish the job.’
I sigh.
‘Just because
you’ve got a death-wish, mate, doesn’t mean that I’m going to stand
there and watch it come true.’
‘You and your
gun can’t protect me for the rest of my life.’
‘Maybe not,
but-’ I start, but he interrupts.
‘Did I ever
tell you I had a sister?’ he asks. The sudden change of subject
takes me aback.
‘What’s with
all the secret family members crawling out of the woodwork today?’
I wonder out-loud, but Charlie’s already begun to narrate his
flashback.
‘She was
fucking cool, Penny,’ he says. ‘Or, at least, she was whatever
passed for cool in 2009. I always thought she was, anyway. I mean,
there’s not much about me to be proud of, but I’d say I’m pretty
good at shit-talking, aren’t I?’
I’m forced to
agree.
‘I got that
from her. Gave no quarter, took no quarter. There was no fucker in
high-school, and certainly not in fuckin’ university, who could say
anything that will make me feel bad about myself, because I know it
all already, and I’m ready with a fucking comeback. Having someone
like Penny in your life; it feels like a curse when you’re twelve,
but it’s not, it’s a blessing.’
He puts the
empty glass to his lips. Realising its emptiness, he holds it in
front of his eyes for a couple of seconds and places it back down
onto the table. With nothing left to imbibe, he leans back on the
sofa, raises his busted face to the ceiling and takes another deep
breath.
‘I’m a junky
scumbag?’ he asks no-one in particular. ‘If you were forced to hang
out with you, you’d need to be fucked-up, too. I’m a sleazy whore?
At least I don’t find my own company so fucking dull that I have to
stretch out every one night stand I have over two years.’
His eyes are
more focused than I’ve seen them since he started drinking
yesterday.
‘You know, I
used to think that I didn’t care what people thought of me because
one day I was going to write a pop song so fucking good that
nothing else I ever did in my life would matter, not in the long
run. It turns out I don’t need it; I never gave a shit in the first
place. I got that from Penny. I thought she was the same way.