The Fly Guy (9 page)

He was in a big room with a high ceiling, like a warehouse. There were wooden pallets leaning against the walls, the air was cool, and the ground was hard and dusty. There was a cluster of about ten men all facing the centre of the circle. The towering black man, now naked except for his red cowboy hat and a pair of mustard socks, saw him and enthusiastically came over, a massive penis jutting out straight in front of him, waving and nodding like a thick dowsing rod.

“Yeah, man, I knew you would come, come on, come on.”

Martin put his drink down on the cold floor with a hard clink and joined the edge of the group. Some of the men were naked, some still had their pants on and had just undone their flies, some had their shirts on, some still had a drink in one hand, all were concentrating on one girl on the ground. A pair of high heels were on the ground beside her and her skirt was rolled up around her waist. A guy was between her legs, pushing into her with short quick thrusts. As Martin moved closer, he saw beyond the pale back whose skin was stretched tight over a bony spine and sharp shoulders, and saw the netted top and bleached hair.

It was Zoe.

He was seized with an urge to run to her, push the men away. He would gather her up as one would a fallen child and take her away from here.

Her make-up had run, and her black eyeliner looked smeared down one of her cheeks. Her face was in a grimace, her eyes squinted, and she panted and gasped as the big black guy moved around the circle and knelt beside her face and took her by the hair. She looked up at him and spat at him before he pushed his penis between her lips. Beneath the brim of his red hat his white smile was stretched across his face. She started to make choking sounds and lines of spit dripped from the edges of her mouth. Martin found himself getting hard.

The guy between her legs shouted and groaned and spasmed before backing away on his knees as another man took his place. The heavy breathing of the group was getting more and more intense. There was a fire burning in the men around him and now it was in him. In his head first, like a slow motion violent hypnosis. First he felt it behind his eyes, and then it spread throughout his whole body, a fiery intensity.

He joined with the group.
Their intent was totally focused and direct, like one organism with no thought, a beast with only white blind heat within. He had become one of them, or they were all different versions of him. One of the men in the group moved over her and ejaculated, spilling gloopy sperm onto her stomach. She moaned louder, and that encouraged another to do the same, his knees buckling as he squeezed a tiny penis with two fingers and a thumb, farted, and released a string of white drops onto Zoe’s chest.

Martin moved behind the guy who was between her legs and undid his pants. He let them drop and took his penis in his hand, feeling it thicken as he waited for the middle-aged overweight balding man with the hairy back in front of him to be finished. He crouched down to get a condom from the pocket of his trousers which were crumpled around his feet. He was hit by a thick sickly smell. He saw the feet of the pack. No-one was barefoot, not even the naked ones. The beast had pairs of socks, trainers, slip on shoes, scuffed heels, shined toes. His fingers found the foil packet in among the coins and keys and his phone, then he straightened up, brushed his hair behind his ear, and concentrated again. In seconds he was stiff. He started to unwrap a condom as the guy cried out a name then rested his head on Zoe’s sticky breasts before rolling aside.

Martin went to step forward, but pants around his ankles stopped him mid stride, so he took two half steps. He was starting to unroll the condom over the tip of his penis while keeping an eye on Zoe’s now exposed crotch. Her thighs were thick and pale and greasy. There was nothing underneath her, no blanket or cushion between her bum and back and the hard floor.

Zoe looked up. Zoe and Martin’s eyes met. She whipped her head to the side dislodging the penis from her mouth and hissed at him, “Fuck off.”

The other men all turned as one to Martin, all of them with their cocks in hand. He felt light-headed. They all had wavy hair and beards. He saw all of their faces as his own. His own eyes looking back at him, ten pairs of his grey eyes, red rimmed and tired, focused on him.

“Fuck off,” Zoe said again, louder this time. “You fucking creep. Have you any idea what a fucking creep you are?”

The black guy said, “Getta fuck away, you prick.”

One of the men pushed him. Someone grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back. His pants around his ankles caused him to shuffle back, his arms outstretched and rotating as he tried to keep his balance and then failed, falling onto his bum on the cold hard floor. The circle closed, immediately disregarding him and focused again on Zoe on the ground. He could see that she was turning on to her front. As he watched, his penis shrank and shrivelled. The condom hung from it like an old snake skin. Through legs and buttocks he saw another man kneeling behind her, thrusting, red faced, as the circle of men ejaculated onto her back, her shoulders, her hair. She had her face pressed to the cold ground of the warehouse floor.

Martin pulled up his trousers and stood up. He turned and went back through the door into the hallway.

The noises around him now sounded threatening. Each connection being made was hurting, and the long wordless groans and thumping grunts were not of pleasure but of agony. Martin walked quickly back down the stairs and through the doors and curtains and the black corridor with the red neon strips and the big windows. Back through the thick musty red curtains to the dark shadowy bar where a woman carrying drinks, wearing Ozzy’s red bandana, passed him, out through the ticket booth and past the bat-faced bouncer and onto the deserted street.

Without stopping or slowing down, he walked away from the club down a street he did not know. He caught sight of his reflection in a car window. Check shirt, faded at the elbows, belly straining at the buttons, an unkempt beard, and thick wavy hair. His reflection slid off the glass as he kept going. He passed a take-away, greasy clumps of meat revolving around a spinning pole and a thick-set man in a dirty white apron standing bored behind the counter.

He had to find a taxi that would take him home, back to the carefully measured streets of his clean new estate. He wanted to look out his window at the familiar identical houses, see the cars pulled up safely in the driveways, watch as the televisions were switched off, and see the lights in the windows go out before midnight.

He was getting further away from the Sugar Club. The streets were terraced, rows and rows and rows of front doors. The next turn led him down another street of houses and shop fronts, parked cars on one side of him and closed doors and metal shutters on the other. He kept walking.

The scenes from the club kept running through his mind and he picked up his pace, to put as much distance between him and what had happened as he could. The warmth that was in the air earlier in the night was gone, and a gust of cold wind rolled with him down the street, pushing past him, through him, as he hunched his shoulders.

At the next junction he saw a gap in the houses across the road. It was a wire fence with a playground inside. The steel of the slide and the iron frame of the swings reflected the street lights and glowed in the dark silence of the street. Martin crossed the road and went through the gate. Behind the wire fence the ground was softer than the footpath, softer than the floor of the Sugar Club, softer than the floor that Zoe’s face was pressed against.

The cold breeze blew again, pushing the swings. A false telescope on top of the climbing frame started to spin slowly. Martin sat on one of the swings and pushed himself forward. As he swung back, his feet dragged along the ground and he came to a stop. He heard the sound of rain hitting the steel of the slide. The iron fence started to rattle. He knew that it was going to rain hard. He wanted to stay at the playground longer. He remembered that feeling as a child, not wanting to go home. But he always had to leave. Now the rain was bouncing all around him; all he could hear was the sound of the water falling against metal and stone.

Headlights of a car approached and Martin saw the taxi light on its roof. He stood out on the road and waved. Already there were puddles for the wheels to splash through. It stopped. Martin’s clothes were wet and the rain poured down his brow and into his eyes. He opened the door and sat in. It was the same one, the zombie that had dropped them to the club. His skin was even paler than before.

“It’s you. Hello, again,” Martin said.

The driver turned his yellowed eyes and said, “Excuse me?”

“It’s me, from earlier, you know, the question?”

“Where to please?”

“Oh. New Acre.”

The rain on the roof of the car and the splashing of the water on the road were the only sounds washing around the car on the journey home.

***

Chapter Twelve

Lucy’s hair is cut short, ragged, and spiky, and is dyed bleach blonde. Her beautiful pale neck is exposed, smooth and delicate with the symmetry of a classical statue. The white of her hair has brought out the sparkling of silver in her eyes.

Gregor is standing in the hallway dressed in a black tuxedo, looking up the stairs, waiting to take her out. When she appears, she is wearing an elegant floor-length dress, an opulent blue shimmering material. There is a single embroidered strap running over her shoulder, leaving her other shoulder bare. The embroidery runs across her chest, following the contours of her breasts and curving in a wave down to the side and finishes in a point at her hip.

As she walks down the stairs to him, Gregor tells her how magnificent she looks. From his suit pocket he takes a black velvet-covered box and steps to her with it in his hands.

“I want you to wear this,” he says. Inside is a diamond encrusted collar, sparkling. She turns around and watches in the hallway mirror as he fixes it around her neck. She shudders slightly as he clips the clasp in place. He looks in the mirror too, and they stand for a moment regarding each other’s reflection, his so dark and hers so pale. Then he says, “Let’s go.”

When they go out together, he tells her it’s business first.

They sit in the corner of an exclusive restaurant at a table with six seats. The owner comes and greets them. Gregor introduces her, and the owner bows low, saying how lucky he is to have such a beautiful woman in his restaurant. Expensive wines and dishes of food are brought to them. Plates of freshly-steamed mussels and oysters, bowls of baby eels, a platter of sardines and whole shrimp, and the main dish is octopus paella, cooked in its own black ink.

Three men in suits come and join them. They all make a fuss of Lucy when they first meet her, and then within minutes she is forgotten. Soon the table is full of half-empty dishes, shells sucked dry and piled, discarded eel, fish and shrimp heads, baskets of broken bread, full glasses, and talk. The octopus oil has stained everything, and the men’s lips and teeth are black and grey, their fingertips inky and they continually dab around their mouths with white napkins which become more crumpled and soiled as the night goes on. Lucy just sits and listens.

When Gregor talks his hands stay still. He leans into the table, his hands on the table in front of him, but does not raise them. He talks of shipments and purity ratios, about setting up kitchens and moving cooks.

“So we’ve got it now. There’s nothing from outside the country, it’s all in-house. How many kitchens are ready?”

One of the men is overweight and wears glasses. His hands are chubby, his fingers are short. He speaks now. “We have three ready to go, all with cooks in place. The Ashfield site is already in production, we should have a batch by the end of next week.”

“Who’s the cook at Ashfield?” Gregor asks.

“It’s the ex-teacher.”

“Well, we need to keep an eye on him. If he was dipping his dick in his students, he might be tempted to have some sleep-overs. They were under-age too, weren’t they?”

“Under-age boys,” says another of the men. He is big and brawny with dark skin and a gold tooth. He has long thin dark hair on the backs of his hands. He squints his eyes when he talks and waves his hands around, as if he’s trying to push the words away from himself as he speaks. “But it never went past the school authorities, so he’s not on a register or anything. He’d be a fool to fuck this up with the money involved, he’s broke. He won’t fuck it up.”

“It’s obviously his dick that makes the decisions. Spike, you need to talk to him, tell him anyone else in the house and we’ll break his back.”

Spike is sitting with his back straight on his chair. He nods. He’s the biggest of the men, shaved head with huge broad shoulders and a thick neck, on which is a tattoo of a scorpion with its tail running up behind his ear. His face is hard and unforgiving. He glances at Lucy; she looks away. She can imagine this huge man picking up a skinny teacher and breaking his back over his knee, snapping him in half like a branch. Gregor keeps talking.

“The compounds are in place, ready to move, we just have to get the ingredients to the kitchens this week. The main thing is, once they’re up and running, can they be dismantled quickly? I want to know how fast it can all come down, it needs to be mobile. Quick, quick, you know what I mean? How about the drop-off for the ingredients? Is everything set up?”

“We’ve got the drop-off in place.” The dark skinned man talks again. “We could have picked up ingredients cheaper abroad you know, Gregor. There’s a whole raft of contacts out there we could’ve called in.”

“In-house. Right from the start, I’ve said it, everything in-house. If it’s picked up that this shit is being moved around in bulk outside pharmacy companies they’re going to legislate against it in a heartbeat. At the moment, they don’t know it exists, let’s keep it that way for as long as we can. Once it’s on the streets it’s a countdown to a crackdown, so this time is precious to us. Get your mind off how you would have got your European bum chums involved. We need a protocol for taking down a kitchen. If there’s heat, then the first thing out are the ingredients. We got to keep them ahead of legislation as long as we can. If they can’t be moved in time, then they need to be destroyed. The cooks need to know the drill; they need to have something ready twenty-four seven that can burn those ingredients quickly and safely without burning the whole place down.”

“We gonna have to fit a wood-burning stove in each kitchen? How else are they safely gonna get rid of compounds quickly?”

“We don’t have to have it inside. Put it out back. All of our kitchens have a back yard or a garden, right?”

They continue talking.

Lucy sips from her glass. Spike hasn’t said anything yet, just nods assent. She looks at his face again. He’s attentive, his eyes follow who is talking, and every now and then his eyes flick over to her. She gets the feeling that he’s on the outside too, as if he ended up here by chance and is now having to concentrate to keep in position. She waits until he glances at her again, then smiles gently when their eyes meet. He does not, but she sees that his eyes soften, just for a second, before switching back to a steely hard set.

The way his eyes change remind her of her father. Late at night, she would wait up for him, trying to stay awake until she heard the back door latch click and the sound of him putting his saxophone case in the space beneath the stairs. Then she would creep downstairs and put her face around the kitchen door. It was like this, late at night, after he had been singing and playing all night, that his eyes were different, softer. He always looked happy to see her, and he would beckon her into the kitchen and make her a hot chocolate and pour himself something dark and strong-smelling.

They’d sit at the table in the low light and she’d ask him about where he had been playing and about the people dancing and he’d smoke and tell her stories about what the music did to people, or about his drummer or bass player, or his beloved saxophone, or about his homeland and how different it was to here. How he wouldn’t be able to earn any money doing this job back home.

Once, when she said to him how much she loved their late night chats, and how he seemed more relaxed than during the day, he said,
That’s the music. That’s swing and rhythm and blues. You can’t play that all night and still be uptight.

There were times when her mummy was out for the day and when the rain was coming down hard, leaking through the window frames and coming in under the back door, and he would pull out some records and put them on the old battered turntable. They’d move the chairs aside and take each others’ hands and dance around the kitchen to the sound of scratchy big band swing.

He showed her the basic dance moves, spun her around, passing hands around his back, counting time with her and showing her when to kick her feet.
It’s good to dance together, but you don’t need someone if you want to dance.
He would pour himself a glass and tell her that music was a place you could lose yourself, leave the world behind.
That’s what I use it for,
he said.
So if you really want to dance, it doesn’t matter about the moves. Let yourself go, let the music move you. There’s not many places in this life, this tough life, that you can totally lose yourself, so when you get the opportunity, then do it.
They would dance on the creaky floor, changing records, while the rain threw itself against their crumbling walls and crept further and further under the back door. They would dance until her mother came back and his eyes hardened up again.

Lucy takes another sip from her glass and empties it. Spike sees this and picks up the bottle and holds it out with a raise of his eyebrows. She nods and he stands and leans over the table. He pours, emptying the bottle. His shirt is tight across his chest. His hand holding the bottle is clean and his fingers are long and slim with clean nails. The fat man’s nails are bitten to the nub and the dark man’s nails are long, not far off claws at the end of his hairy hands.

Gregor is talking about the market for Spiral. He wants to find the hands of the middle class, the money, not the street kids selling themselves for the next pathetic rocky hit or whatever else they can get their trembling hands on. When he speaks about addicts the edges of his mouth turn down. “This is a party drug, for people who can afford to party. Really strong, the rush feels like it never ends, goes on for hours and hours, a good six hours of thinking you’ve hit the top only to find yourself higher again. Once the word gets out, this will be the most demanded party drug. The street kids and prostitutes can stick to crack and smack
.
”

The fat man drinks some wine and wants to talk again about what happens when a kitchen gets busted. “Detection risk,” he says, “we’ve got to break the line back to us.”

Gregor says, “That means getting stooges in place. Who have we got?”

The dark man with the hairy hands says that he knows a guy who should be in the ring.

“Rocky, black guy, he’s got connections up north. He runs out of—”

“No,” says Gregor, “not him.”

“He’s worth considering if we want to move stuff fast. And once we use his connections, he’s disposable. He’s not that bright. Young, ethnic, they’d pick him up in a flash.”

“No,” Gregor says again, “no, don’t touch him, and if you have any contact with him now, break it.”

“Why? What do you know about him?”

“He does runs for Stranstec.”

For the first time Gregor moves his hands up to his face. They are clasped as if he is about to say a prayer. The air has suddenly tightened, there is a tension. The others round the table are fixed on him, motionless.

“Stranstec will pounce if he knows about Spiral. And when Stranstec is on your back, you’re never going to get up again. No. If we are going to put stooges in place it’s got to be someone who’s already in the ring. Someone who’s already in the ring but doesn’t know it.”

The fat man says, “Stranstec runs girls, doesn’t he? Why should he be?—”

“I said no, and that’s it, damn it!” Gregor slams his hands down on the table. There is a shocked silence, which is broken by Gregor waving a waiter over and ordering another bottle of wine.

The talk goes on and on and Spike keeps topping up Lucy’s glass. Another plate of food arrives. Gregor’s hands are back on the table now, relaxed, and he talks about purity ratios again and distribution channels. The other men answer deferentially, look to one another, listen and chew, drain their glasses and agree.

She wonders why he has brought her. She looks around at the men at the table. They all carry the confidence of men who are used to telling others what to do and how to do it. They have expensive watches on their wrists, large rings on their fingers. Gregor is not the strongest, nor the biggest, and certainly not the most threatening, but he is the leader.

She thinks of her time with Archie, of the lines and lines and lines of cocaine, the constant flow of speed, meth, and poppers for the ups, the roofies and ketamine for the come-downs. Long stretches where days and nights lost their meaning, when the traffic of people through the flat was so much that she would keep herself locked up in the bedroom, not because she was afraid of anyone coming in, but because she was confused by the changing faces, the friends of friends and hangers-on, the revolving conversations, and the swell of hysteria which some would bring with them. When Gregor had come along she had been on roofies for days, feeling momentum drain from every moment, like heavy time being pushed uphill. Since she’s been at Gregor’s she’s experienced more silence than she can remember.

When the talk’s over the fat man stands and brushes himself down. He smiles at Lucy and says how lovely it was to meet her. His teeth are still stained from the octopus ink and there are still bits of food in the folds of his shirt as he turns and walks away.

The dark man is next to go. He does not acknowledge Lucy at all as he stands and says to Gregor, “This shit is taking its time. I want to see some return. I want to see it soon.”

Gregor doesn’t stand. He extends his hand across the table.

“Ali, you know it’s got to be right before it goes. We all have a lot riding on it. When it hits it’s going to hit big. Don’t get nervous now.” They shake. Then he goes and there are just the three of them.

Gregor finishes his wine and beckons to the waiter for the bill. After he signs for it, he says to Spike that he needs him to keep an eye on Ali. Spike nods and leans forward. Spike speaks, and for the first time Lucy hears his voice. It’s not what she expected. It’s got a high tone and the words land lightly in the air between him and Gregor.

“He’s changed?”

“Something about him has changed, I just don’t know yet what it is,” Gregor replies.

The waiter comes back with their jackets. Gregor takes Lucy’s, saying as he puts it on her shoulders, “That must have been boring for you. Let’s go to church.”

* * *

The club is an old church, restored and renovated. The DJ is in the pulpit. They pass a full dance floor and go to a table on an upper level. Gregor watches as Lucy, who has been drinking quietly all night, comes alive.