12

The line between obsessive love and insanity is a thin one. Who knows which side of it Fenton was lying on when he decided, one sleep-free midnight, that Gus had almost certainly, on one or more occasions during his relationship with Charmaine, taken photographs of her in the nude. It just stood to reason, Fenton felt. All the available evidence pointed to it. For a start, it was common knowledge that there existed a certain wing or sect of the male population whose members were willing, and more to the point able, to get their girlfriends to pose for such photographs – gentlemen whose key creative talent lay in their ability to keep a straight face while reeling off the time-honoured lies about how “tasteful” the exercise would be, how clean, how wholesome, how artistic. And it was frightening how snugly Gus fitted the profile of such an offender. He was, by his own admission, an avid student of pornography. He had displayed, in other arenas, a marked tendency to exploit others for his own base gain. He had a proven track record of getting Charmaine to believe grotesque untruths. Above all, he was a worthless slob who by some freak of chance had been granted temporary sexual access to somebody infinitely more attractive than himself – and the wider that differential was, Fenton reckoned, the likelier it became that acts of nude photography would be proposed. If there was a first law of men photographing their girlfriends in the nude, this was it. A man like Gus surely had to know, deep down, that a girl like her couldn’t possibly be his forever – in contrast to a nude photograph of a girl like her, which could.

There was no getting around it, then: the fat fraud had to have at least proposed such a venture by now. The only thing open to doubt was whether or not she had let him do it. And on this question, the signs were ominous. If she had no problem with letting Gus touch and violate her while they were both nude, it was hard to see why she would baulk at being nude by herself while Gus stood several metres away behind a camera.

To sum up: it was possible, it was nasty, and therefore it had almost certainly taken place.

The idea that such divine sights might be captured on photographic paper somewhere, stashed in some drawer or album, affected Fenton profoundly. A priest informed of the existence of a snapshot of God could not have been more stirred. He thought about these possible images incessantly. He wanted to see them almost as much as he wanted the real her. Unending questions about them lacerated his poor mind. How many of them were there? How large were the prints? Where in Gus’s house might they be found? What was she doing in them? How undressed was she? If she was fully naked, how immodest was her pose? Was Gus – and this question had to be faced – was Gus, or were parts of Gus, in the pictures with her?

The answers to these questions wouldn’t necessarily have made Fenton happy. Indeed there was every chance they would plunge him into a fresh and undreamt-of circle of hell. Nonetheless, he would not rest until he had them. He wouldn’t know peace of mind again until he had got into Gus’s flat alone, ransacked every square inch of it, established the existence of these depraved affronts to her trust and her womanhood, and removed from the premises as many of them as he safely could.

The afternoon of the terrorist barbecue was fiercely hot and still, and ablaze with the shriek of cicadas. The brick block of flats that contained Gus’s unit – or safe house, as the fat psycho had ridiculously taken to calling it – had the colour and squat dimensions of a wombat. Beneath its low belly lay a shady parking garage, and beyond that a yellow-grassed backyard from which a fragrant sizzling now wafted, with muted gusts of bawdy laughter – the deceptively agreeable sounds and smells of Maoists discussing homicide around a laden grill.

Unwilling to join them just yet, Fenton lingered at the front kerb and eyed the flats. On this side of the building there were a dozen or so windows. Pretty soon he would be up there behind one of them, rifling feverishly through Gus’s cabinets and drawers. He would tell Gus he needed to go up and take a piss. Maybe he would find some conspiracy stuff up there too, materials he could show her later on to prove the extent of Gus’s mania. But pictures of her in the nude would be far and away his prime objective. He wore, in addition to his standard Maoist clothing, an outlandishly thick duffel coat. The temperature inside this was infernal; but the garment had a large number of concealed inner pockets that sat flat against his person, ideal for the bearing away of standard-sized photographic prints. Already his sides were as sweat-slicked as a racehorse’s. Would the wearing of this sea-captain’s garb, this blanket with buttons, draw suspicion on a day like this? Probably, but he was beyond caring about that.

He went through the carpark and emerged blinking into the backyard. All the Maoists were present, beers in hands, grouped loosely around a hissing brick barbecue. Gus, unprecedentedly, and hideously, was wearing shorts – grey, bricklayer-style shorts, together with a dark-blue singlet. He looked like an exhibition woodchopper. His thighs and upper arms were great white pillows of flab, matted indiscriminately with sweat-drenched fur. He also wore a knee-length barbecue apron bearing a ribald novelty slogan: namely, the ornately rendered phrase Kiss the Chef, with the word Kiss struck out by a crude diagonal line and the word Root inserted above it in a jocular freehand script.

“How they swingin’, Fent?” the big Maoist called, saluting him with a pair of tongs so long that he might have used them to tend meat in the adjacent yard. Loose and heavy flesh swayed under his upper armbone like an albino sloth under a tree branch. “What the fuck is doing with that coat?”

Fenton approached over the dry grass, answering that question with a vague shrug, as though he found it a little conventional, a little bourgeois.

“Suit yourself, you cold-blooded little maverick. I always knew you had ice running through them veins. Grab yourself a beer mate, courtesy of the Student Union.”

Gus levelled the tongs at a plastic garbage bin filled with fast-melting ice. Bits of grass and dirt were floating in it. The emerald smears of buried beer cans gleamed up from its depths. “I was just saying to the lads,” he went on through a humid burp, “Lego was – and is – a sensational choice of victim on your part.”

“You think so?” Fenton tried to sound flattered. Rolling up his right sleeve, he plunged his bare arm into the watery bin, and exhumed a hand-numbing beer that he had no intention of drinking. “Because I’ve been meaning to say, Gus, don’t feel obliged to stick with him for my sake. If you can think of someone else …”

“Fent mate – relax.” Gus came to his side, and draped a slippery arm around his neck. Then Fenton felt the arm forcing him forwards and down, till he was engulfed in a firm but affectionate headlock. Everything went dark. His face was pressed up against something warm and wet, which he provisionally identified as an armpit. A cold and dewy beercan brushed his cheek. A meaty hand roughly tousled his hair. “Lego’s locked in mate,” Gus said far above him, his drenched blue singlet rumbling deeply against Fenton’s ear as he spoke. “He’s a dead man on holiday. He’s a corpse on leave.”

Against folds of muffling blubber Fenton made appropriately enthusiastic sounds. He twisted his neck in quest of air and light: and found himself looking out sideways at the crowded barbecue plate. It contained an unpromising assortment of radically charred meats: desiccated sausages, heat-shrunk to the diameter of twigs; steaks like bark chips; rissoles so black and rigid they could scarcely be distinguished from the hotplate itself. On the mustard-coloured tiles behind the cooking surface lay Warren’s notebook, open to a page that had the underlined phrase Operation Lego – how we’re going to do him written across the top of it, in Warren’s strangely dignified hand. The rest of the page was still blank, save for a fine spatter pattern of black grease.

“By Christ I feel alive!” Gus declared, having finally let go of Fenton’s head. “This time last month we were a fucking joke. And now here we are, dead-set on the brink of actually doing a bloke. You can’t say we’re not earning our funding now. Which reminds me, Fent – there’s a jumbo pack of cornchips over there, again courtesy of the Student Union. I told these pigs to make sure and leave you some, so go and have a lash, mate. Rip into ’em.”

He slapped Fenton’s back towards a wooden picnic table on the far side of the yard. Fenton crossed to it through the baking air, covertly using his hanky to wipe off the vile slick of sweat that Gus had deposited on his face and neck. Christ it was hot! The peeling wooden table cringed under the indecent sun. A green cloth umbrella protruded, uselessly, from a hole in its centre. Six paper plates were laid out rather touchingly on the birdshit-encrusted wood. There was also a plastic bag full of white plastic cutlery, a bottle of home-brand tomato sauce – and the glinting wrapper of a jumbo pack of cornchips, containing a lone cornchip and a lot of orange dust.

“These blokes have left you your fair share?” Gus called over.

“Absolutely,” Fenton heartily lied, still scrubbing away at the moist Maoist’s reek. He moved around to table’s blind side. Cracking open his beer, he took one tiny swig to rid his tongue of the flavour of Gus’s armpit – then subtly decanted the rest of the foul brew onto the lawn. Then he bore the empty can back towards the barbecue, where Gus – patently not for the first time – was flipping the meat with his gargantuan tongs.

“I’ve been marinading these babies all morning, Fent,” he said, lovingly holding up something very black, conceivably a chop, for Fenton’s approval. “I tell you, nothing gets me more irate than these philistines who’ll take a quality piece of meat and burn it to a cinder.”

Fenton looked at the chop. He did not see how an object could have got so black without its having been at some point on fire. And yet Gus seemed to be speaking entirely without irony. Fenton thought: if this guy isn’t a prolific photographer of his girlfriend in the nude, I’m a Dutchman.

Now Gus did something odd, even by his standards. He placed the chop and some cauterised onion rings onto a spare paper plate, then carried this briskly off towards the flats. “Back in a sec,” he called shiftily back over his shoulder. “I’ll just go and sling this to the neighbour’s dog.” Then he disappeared into the garage, and a moment later could be heard jogging up the concrete staircase inside.

What was he playing at? Clearly he was up to something. Fenton, sipping air from his empty can, quizzically raised his eyebrows at the other Maoists. But the other Maoists proved reluctant to return his gaze. To a man, they kept looking bovinely down at their own shifting feet, as though nothing out of the ordinary had just occurred. Had Fenton ever, by the way, exchanged so much as a single word with one of the other Maoists? He thought not. Did they even know his name? Had they ever called him anything other than “mate”? Had most of them even called him that? He thought about the contempt implicit in that lone cornchip. He had the feeling they didn’t much like him, the other Maoists. Well, he didn’t much like them either. And if they didn’t care what Gus was up to, then neither did he.

His thoughts turned instead to his own impending trip up the same stairs. The sensible moment to do it would be just after the meal was served: when all the others would be sitting down, and too caught up in the challenge of eating Gus’s steaks to notice the exact duration of his absence. Yes, that would be the sensible option. But his whole body twitched to be up there now, probing drawers, scoping cabinets, pulling the place apart for porn.

After about five more minutes Gus reappeared, minus the chop and plate, and mysteriously divested of the apron. His lips and beard bore suspect traces of blackened foodstuff. The fly of his shorts stood at about half-mast, blocked from further ascent by the massive torsion of his gut. He slapped his palms together and said:

“Right Wozzer. Grab that notebook. We’ve still got a few minutes left before I dish up. Let’s start kicking round some ideas. The way I look at it, we’ve got ourselves a quality target now. He’s locked in, courtesy of Fent. So what we need now are some broad-stroke ideas on how we’re going to take him out. Fent, mate – you put the arrogant turd in our sights. Why don’t you get us started, champ? How do you see him going down?”

Standing there in the absurd, the indefensible heat, Fenton tried hard to focus. He knew that this moment demanded his full attention. He was damned if he was going to supply Gus with Lego’s mode of execution as well. Running through the most laughably impracticable proposals he could think of, he came up with this: “Well, there’s a team of shooters, obviously.”

Gus threw back his head with relish. “Start at the top why don’t you Fent! A hail of triangulation crossfire!” His face went suddenly grave. “Seriously, mate, it’s not a bad option. I’ve toyed with it myself. But let’s ask the money question. Has anyone got access to a gun?”

“I’ve got an air rifle,” offered Smithy.

“I was thinking more along the lines of a Chinese assault weapon,” said Gus.

“You’d be surprised what an air rifle can do Gus.”

Sweat lay on Gus’s pinkened forehead in visible beads, like dew on glass. His matted hair stood up at the front. “Smithy, we’re looking to rub the bastard out, not leave a little red mark on his ankle.”

“If we fired it up his nose,” Smithy said, “we could send a chip of bone up into his brain. That can be fatal.”

“Smithy …” Gus squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed the lids. “We’re not sticking anything up the bloke’s nose.”

“How about a bomb?” said Warren.

Gus rallied, straightening a finger at him. “That might be more like it, Wozz.” He looked guiltily at Fenton. “No offence, Fent. But a bomb – it might be more the go at this stage. In practical terms. You’ve got to walk before you can run, as my old man used to say. Make a note of it, Wozz.”

How Fenton yearned to be upstairs, rummaging through Gus’s personal effects. But the moment was not yet right.

“How about a nail bomb?” offered Col.

Gus said, “Again Wocker, write it down. But I tend to think not. I like to think of myself as a bit of a gentleman bandit. A nail bomb, that’s the type of thing could give us a bad name.”

Blue said: “What about a suicide bomb?”

“Expand,” Gus said.

“You know. You just drive right up to him in a van packed with explosives.”

“I’m listening Blue – provided you’re not referring to my Kombi.”

“It doesn’t even have to be a van, Gus. You can do it in a ute, whatever. I’ve even heard of some freak doing it on a motorbike. The bomb was actually strapped to him.”

Gus was still interested. “You’ve got a bike, Blue. You volunteering to be the freak?”

Here Blue’s enthusiasm tapered off. He looked solemnly down into his beer. “I can’t Gus. My licence got suspended mate. I took a joyride while I was pissed.”

Gus chuckled dismissively, moving back over to the hotplate. “As if that matters, you spastic.” He shot Fenton one of his customary winks. He was turning the steaks again. How many sides did he think a steak had? “Mind you,” he said thoughtfully, “your bike’d most probably lead the pigs straight back to us. And your body, for that matter. Of course we could always claim you were rogue, I suppose. Acting off your own bat. Or maybe – I’m thinking aloud here – but maybe we could just strap that much gear to you that you just get fuckin’ vaporised.”

“Then they’ll just use his dental records,” Col pointed out.

Blue looked on with mounting concern.

“Not necessarily,” said Gus. “What if we broke into his dentist’s beforehand and taxed all his X-rays? I’ve often wondered why nobody does that. That way they’d have nothing to go on to make the i.d., would they? Or you could – and I’m just talking speculatively here, Blue. I’m just thinking out loud. But you could knock all his teeth out, couldn’t you, before he strapped on the gear …”

Gus fell into a ruminative silence. He tapped his tongs rhythmically against the hotplate. Blue watched him with deep unease, saying nothing. Apparently his fear of displeasing Gus outweighed, for the moment, his fear of becoming a strap-on motorcycle bomber.

“But let’s think about this properly,” Gus said. “Let’s think about the whole logistics of it. For one thing, we’d have to be dead sure the bomb went off at the exact moment the bike hit the bloke. Wouldn’t we? I mean, we wouldn’t want it go off early, would we? Not even by a few seconds. Because then you’d have the farcical situation of this flaming fucking skeleton just rolling towards Lego at about two miles an hour. And what sort of statement would that make? Frankly, I doubt the bike’d even stay upright. Even if it did, Lego could just step out of the way of it.”

He pensively tapped the hotplate. He was vexed. “By the same token,” he slowly went on, “we wouldn’t want it to go off too late, either. What would we be looking at then? This guy on a motorbike just ploughs into the wall of Lego’s house or office or whatever … And then he just sits there waiting to explode. Assuming he’s survived the stack. And then maybe ten minutes later or so he blows, by which time Lego’d pretty obviously be well out of there. Or is Blue meant to dismount from the wreckage and just sort of run after him till the thing goes off? Fuck me. This is actually a lot more complicated than it sounds, isn’t it? It’s fair dinkum giving me a headache.”

He laid down the tongs and massaged his troubled skull. Fenton felt a little spasm of sympathy for him, the compassion one instinctively feels for a fellow man in obvious distress. He reminded himself firmly that Gus didn’t merit it. But still, he looked so helpless there, the big man, slouched in confusion next to all that blasted meat, his head bowed in worry, his gut shamefully large, his shorts perilously tight, his fly silently howling under terrible lateral strain …

Finally Gus sighed with resignation. “You might be in luck here, Bluey. I’m starting to think we might have to shelve this one. There’s too many imponderables. I mean, what exactly are we meant to prang the bike into, for starters? Just the front wall of his house? It doesn’t vibe right. There’s no class to it. His office? How do we get the bike up there? In the lift? It’s fucking two storeys up. But what other option have we got? I mean we can hardly just mow the guy down as he’s walking along the street, can we? That’d be ludicrous. Why bother with a bomb at all, if you’re already going to be creaming the bloke with a motorbike at top speed? You can’t kill the guy twice. But then if you’ve got no bomb … If you’ve got no bomb, the whole political element of it goes out the window. Basically you’d be looking at an everyday hit and run. The only political ingredient being that the bloke on the bike has maybe got no teeth. Fent? I’m floundering here. I just can’t see making this one work. What’s your analysis? Talk to me, brother.”

Fenton said: “Actually, could I just pop up to your place for a minute? I need to use your can.”

“Fuck that,” Gus said bluntly. “Piss on a tree.”

“It isn’t a piss,” Fenton improvised.

“Oh you’re joking mate.” Gus’s features crumpled with anguish. “We’re building up some quality momentum here …” He scanned the trees at the perimeter of the yard, as if seeking one lush enough to shield the modesty of a defecator. Then he said, without much hope: “I don’t suppose you could suck it in?”

Ruefully, Fenton shook his head.

Gus sighed. “All right Fent. If you must. But who takes a shit at two in the afternoon? 3C mate, top floor. The door’s unlocked. The dunny’s up the hall, second on your left. Make it a swift one – within reason. And while you’re at it, see if you can’t devote a bit of quality thought to this motorbike thing. I’m starting to think it might be a non-starter.”

“Will do,” Fenton said, strolling into the garage, and breaking into a noiseless trot when he gained the stairs.

He was in. His limbs were feathers, his lungs a void. His heart hammered like a car stereo in the night. Ahead: a brief dark hall terminating in a shut door. To his left: a chaotic kitchenette. To his right a living room: worn couch, television, stereo. Shelves? No. Drawers? No. Probability of concealed photographs: minimal.

His senses were primevally honed, reduced to an animal knack for the hunt. They told him to go straight for the shut door: it had to be Gus’s bedroom. Do it, fast. He took the hall in six quick strides and was in. Yes, it was the bedroom, sweet-smelling, steeped in day-darkness by a shut blind. A rumpled bed off to his right, but what interested him more was straight ahead: a two-door wardrobe built into the wall. It screamed stashed erotica.

He went to it without pausing, yanking open both doors. A musty breeze hit his face. He was looking at a rail of dangling shirts and jackets. Above: a shelf full of junk. To the left a deck of drawers. He opened the top one, his breath coming in noisy and intense gusts. A jumble of white cloth: Gus’s heinous Y-fronts. He plunged a hand into them, wrist-deep. His fingers probed the drawer-bottom … and struck something hard and plastic. A videotape!

He pulled it out. A black cassette. The label on the spine said, in Gus’s slovenly hand: “Gang Bang Face Bath III (Pirate Copy)”. Pornography, yes – but not the right kind. He was about to reconceal it when a voice behind him said,

“Looking for something?”

Jesus Christ! He span around, tape still in hand. How had he not seen her there? She was half-sitting and half-lying on the dark bed, propped against the wall on a stack of pillows. The real her, and not too far from nude either. She wore a large collared shirt, presumably one of Gus’s. If she was standing up, it would have come down to about her knees. Because she wasn’t standing up, it came down a lot less far than that, covering just enough of her upper thighs to keep alive the question of whether she was wearing anything underneath. The thigh closer to him was dimpled near the top, as though an invisible finger was pressing on it hard. Beside her on the mussed doona was the paper plate Gus had borne away from the barbecue. It had half a chop on it, and a smear of black grease where the onion rings had been.

“What are you doing here?” he found himself asking her.

“What are you doing here?”

A valid reply. But he liked her tone. It was one of exaggerated horror, as though she was only playing at being scandalised.

“Oh you know,” he said airily, sensing an opportunity to get a bit bold, to haul things one step closer to intimacy. “The usual. Planning a spot of terrorism. At the moment, Gus is trying to work out how to make Blue explode while he runs over Ivan Lego on a motorbike.”

“You know what I mean,” she scolded. “What are you doing here? In my boyfriend’s bedroom. Looking through his stuff.”

The word ‘boyfriend’ ruined his fun, like an elbow to the teeth. He said: “You heard what I said, did you? The part about your ‘boyfriend’ being down there planning a suicide bombing?”

She sighed. “Fenton, we’ve talked about that. It’s just his way of having some fun, remember? It’s just his way of showing off.”

“Oh that’s right. In fact, didn’t you say he’d use this barbecue to call the whole thing off? Didn’t you? And now he’s down there talking about how we can get our hands on a Chinese assault rifle.”

He must have evoked Gus too well here, because instead of looking appalled she broke into a broad grin. “Make up your mind, Fenton! A second ago you said he was talking about a suicide bombing!”

“What can I say? He’s torn between the two.”

“Anyway, the way I remember it,” she told him feistily, pointing a stern index finger at him, “I said that if you tell him you disapprove of the idea – ”

“Which I have, repeatedly.”

“ – then eventually, don’t interrupt me, mister, eventually he’ll find some way of backing down on it.”

“Which he hasn’t.”

“Which he hasn’t yet.”

“I must say you’re taking this all remarkably well. The fact that your ‘boyfriend’ is a psychopath.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You could look worried about it for a start.”

“If I was worried about it, Fenton, I’d talk to him about it. Is that what you want me to do? Go down there and ask him about it right now?”

She said this bit with a mischievous grin, well aware that Fenton found the notion unacceptable. Fenton played along, got into the spirit of it, by opening his palm towards the door, indicating that she had his full permission to go. She swung her feet to the floor as if to stand. And here Fenton yielded the point with a knowing smile.

“Okay,” he conceded. “It might be a little premature for that.”

She beamed triumphantly, and returned her feet and legs to the bed. As she did, he received an electrifying glimpse of her white panties. So she was wearing some. He wondered if she’d caught him looking. She was smiling in a way that suggested she hadn’t – or else, better still, that she had but didn’t mind.

“Admit it,” she said, making some casual rearrangements to the shirt’s lie. “You know perfectly well that he’s harmless, don’t you? Otherwise you’d want me to talk to him, wouldn’t you?”

Fenton found himself unable, for the moment, to furnish a reply to this. His mind was otherwise engaged. In the act of chivalrously not looking at what she was doing with her shirt and thighs, he had happened to catch sight of an object down on the floor, just beside the bed. It looked oddly familiar. It was a garment of some kind, crumpled and white, with strings attached …

It was Gus’s barbecue apron. Root the Chef.

And now some kind of lift cable snapped in Fenton’s mind, and his thoughts plunged straight towards hell. He re-saw Gus coming back to the barbecue with his fly half down, and now knew exactly what it meant. Suddenly he comprehended everything: Gus’s cryptic five-minute adjournment, her current semi-nudity, the rumpled doona, the whole lot. Gus had come up here to fuck her! Why else would he have made the effort? Just to give her a chop? Of course not. What was in that for him? No, he’d fucked her, damn it! In a window of about five minutes. That’d be about right. That’d fit the sexual modus operandi of a barbarian like Gus.

Desperately Fenton tried to shake these thoughts, to recapture his bantery mood of a few moments ago. But it was no good. He was an empty husk now, an upright skeleton with the wind moving through it, dark birds picking at the dry flapping meat of his heart.

“Of course,” she cheekily went on, “you could always call the police, if it all got too much for you.”

“You know what he told us about that chop?” Fenton asked her, with audible bitterness. “He told us he was giving it to a dog.”

She frowned, mystified by this change of tone.

“You’re not bothered by that?” he demanded.

“Should I be?”

He could feel his resentment threatening to run riot now, to smash out of its pen and go loco. He considered making reference to the chop’s quality, to the Neanderthal standard of Gus’s cooking. Then he remembered what he still had in his hand. He held it coolly aloft: Gang Bang Face Bath III – the motion picture. “I notice you haven’t asked me about this,” he said. “It’s an odd place to keep a video, don’t you think? Hidden under clothing. A lot of people find it more practical to keep them in the same room as their VCR.”

“Yes, I suppose they do,” she said indifferently.

“Gang Bang Face Bath III,” he quoted out loud from the spine, with the air of an intrigued cineaste trying to place an obscure example of early noir. “I wonder who’s in it?” he pondered. “Farley Granger? Sir John Gielgud? Dame Peggy Ashcroft?”

“Boys will be boys,” she said. Disapproval had entered her tone now. Not disapproval of Gus, mark you. Disapproval of Fenton.

“Oh come on,” he shot back, infuriated by the injustice of this. “I’m a boy, and I don’t own a pirate copy of Gang Bang Face Bath III. Just because Gus is a degenerate bloody oaf …”

The sentence petered out. He lacked the will to complete it. Turning, he shoved the controversial tape back under Gus’s Y-fronts. He closed the drawer slowly, putting off the moment when he would have to turn back and face her. Regret and self-disgust were descending on him now, like a parachute settling over the victim of a sky-dive gone horribly wrong. What the hell was he doing? His sole task here was to establish his moral superiority to Gus: a humble enough goal, but one he was deep in the process of botching.

Steeling himself to utter words of apology, then, he turned. He found her looking straight back at him. She was frowning but at the same time smiling, as though she found him inexplicable but essentially harmless. And now something remarkable happened. Their gazes just locked, slipped into congress, and for several long and thrilling seconds they were looking straight into each other’s eyes. Fenton felt as if he’d grabbed a live cable and was arcing and bucking on the end of it, frying to death but unable to let the thing go. Her eyes shone. He hoped his did too.

When the moment was over she smiled and said: “I have told you you’re weird, haven’t I?”

He inclined his head to acknowledge the fairness of the epithet. He felt a grin forming on his face that might never leave.

“Now,” she said mock-sternly. “Don’t you think you’d better get back down there? He’ll be starting to wonder what the two of us are doing up here!”

Christ he liked the sound of that phrase! He wanted it to hang there forever.

“Off you go then,” she chided. “You don’t want him coming up to look for you, do you?”

“You won’t mention to him that you saw me up here then?”

“Of course not,” she matter-of-factly said, as if deceiving Gus in that way went without saying. “Now: go!”

She pointed bossily to the door. Somehow she knew that she was allowed to order him around like this, in the manner of a schoolmistress. Somehow she knew he would always obey. Maybe she didn’t know what this meant yet. But she sensed it, and acted on it, and that was good. It was very very good. Fenton almost felt that it wouldn’t hurt to tell her, right now, that he loved her.

He didn’t, though.

But he did say this: “You deserve much better, you know, than being left up here alone.”

“Go! ” she ordered once more, and this time he went.

Lunch was served. The Maoists were at meat.

Fenton took the last berth at the table. The hot wooden seat seared his guilty thighs. An empty paper plate was before him, flanked by a plastic fork and knife. In the shade of the central umbrella sat a great steel platter stacked high with cremated meats. Next to it stood the bottle of home-brand tomato sauce – and that was it. Not for Gus the foreplay-like irrelevance of salad, the veganish faggottry of bread.

“You’ll be happy to know,” Gus informed him, through a mouthful of mummified steak, “that we’ve given that whole kamikaze motorbike thing the flick. I could sense your contempt for that notion, Fent. And you’re dead right. This is no time for fancy stuff. Your first time out, you’ve got to stick to the basics. You’ve got to walk before – ” A sharp cracking sound made him fall silent. Warren had just snapped his plastic fork while trying to penetrate a rissole. Gus longsufferingly closed his eyes. “You’ve got to walk before you can run,” he resumed, while Warren rustled sheepishly in the cutlery bag for reinforcements. “So anyway, Fent, the plan we’ve been kicking around in your absence – and obviously mate this is subject to your approval – is we just get a regular no-frills bomb and plant it right outside his office. We just park it there in a sports bag, and we walk away. And an hour or two later it blows him to kingdom come. Real straightforward stuff. What do you say?”

For the first time all afternoon, Fenton felt genuine alarm. A bomb in a sports bag: it sounded horribly feasible. Off to his left, Col or Smithy doggedly rasped his knife against a sausage’s impermeable hide. It sounded like a nail-file being taken to a leather boot. A bomb in a sports bag: even Gus might be able to bring that off.

“Outside his office?” Fenton said, pretending to weigh the notion up.

Gus winked. “Exactly. No suicides, no wacky little complications. Just a classic bomb in a bag.”

“Mmm. But that’s a public area, though. Wouldn’t there be other people there? Students, secretaries?”

Gus stopped chewing and frowned at him.

“I mean,” Fenton elaborated, “a lot of people might get hurt.”

Gus threw his head back and burst into lusty laughter. The other Maoists joined him, spraying blackened cuisine.

“Ah Fent. Don’t change, mate. Don’t ever change. Don’t ever lose that ready bloody wit of yours. You’ve almost made me spit out a prime bit of steak there.”

“But I’m serious,” Fenton said. Away to his left another knife or fork went off. A shard of flying plastic struck his neck. “If a bomb explodes outside Lego’s office, won’t a lot of innocent people get hurt?”

“Oh I get you. You’re saying they might just get hurt, as opposed to getting full-on killed. Jesus, you are a stickler for the rulebook.”

“No, Gus, what I mean is, we’re supposed to be targeting Lego, right? But an explosion outside his office, that might take out a lot of other people instead. Different people. Bystanders. People who aren’t Lego.”

Gus affectionately smiled. “Christ – you really do hate this fuckstick, don’t you Fent? You really do want him to see him dead. But what can I tell you, mate? If we miss him this time, we’ll get him next time. We can only do our best. Anyway, if someone else happens to cop it instead of him – well, we’ll still be spreading mayhem, won’t we? And at the end of the day, that’s what we essentially want, isn’t it? Now hoe into that meat, champion – it isn’t getting any warmer.”

“But mowing down people at random, Gus – is that really us?”

“Bombs are messy, Fent. It’s the nature of the beast.”

“I thought you said we were gentleman bandits though.”

“Within reason, Fent. Within the confines of a terrorist framework, obviously.” Gus uttered a short guffaw. “Take that principle too far and we wouldn’t be able to kill anybody at all!”

“Well maybe,” Fenton said, looking down at the wooden table, “that’s something we should look at.”

There was a long and uncomprehending silence. Eventually Fenton looked up again, and found Gus looking back at him as though he, Fenton, had gone thoroughly insane. And then before anything else could happen the afternoon was rent by a terribly explicit crack: Smithy’s knife and fork had shattered simultaneously, showering the table with tinkling little splinters of white plastic.

With a roar of pent-up rage Gus cried: “Aw for fuck’s sake just eat ’em with your fingers!”

The hot yard flinched. A startled magpie flew hurriedly off the fence. Up in the flats, an aggrieved resident pointedly slid shut a window.

In the churned silence, Gus turned to face Fenton again. His face was flushed. He waited a long time before speaking again. When he did, his voice was quiet but worryingly firm. “Fent, I appreciate how much you hate this cunt. I do. But you’re letting that cloud your perception of the bigger picture, mate. The hate’s twisting you up inside. It’s fucking up your grasp on reality. This thing isn’t just about Lego. Sure, he’s our prime target. But at the end of the day, anyone else who’s walking through that building is fair game too. I take it we’re agreed on that? They’re all oppressors of the people, right?”

“But they are the people.”

“They’re people, Fent, I’ll grant you that. But they’re not the people. I never thought I’d have to say this, mate – to you of all blokes – but you really need to brush up on your theory.”

“Be that as it may, Gus – ”

“Are you still on about a triangulation crossfire, Fent?” Gus snapped. “Is that what this is about? Because if you are mate, I seriously have to ask you what kind of fantasy world you’re living in. Where’s a mob like us going to get hold of a scoped rifle? Hey? Let alone three of the things. Honestly. You’ve got to scale down these highfalutin’ fucking ideas of yours, mate. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice. Christ! But let’s be honest – it’s not going to happen, is it? So every minute we spend talking about it’s just another minute down the toilet.” His anger was seeping slowly away, entailing a gradual loosening of his facial muscles. “You’ve got to be a bit sensible about these things, Fent. You’ve got to stick to what you can realistically pull off. And in our case, a plain old bomb in a bag is about it, I reckon. Short of kicking the bloke to death, a bomb in a bag is pretty much the only option we’re left with.”

An uneasy calm had returned to the table now, a provisional peace that Fenton decided he would be a fool to trifle with any further. The magpie had flown back down onto the fence.

“We’re passionate men, Fent,” Gus said reasonably.

“Yes.”

“Sometimes our passions get the better of us.”

“They do, Gus,” Fenton agreed.

Gus regarded him with bruised but unbroken affection. Then he said: “How are you on explosives, Fent?”

“Sorry?”

“Explosives. You’re not an explosives expert, by any chance?”

“Not really. No.”

“Okay, maybe expert’s the wrong term. Forget you heard it. I’m not asking if you’re Alec Guinness. All I’m saying is, this plan of ours. The bomb in the sports bag. Would you have any idea of how … You know. How you’d go about making it. How you’d actually get it to explode and that?”

“No,” Fenton said again.

“Fuck. Because we’ve been discussing that too. And frankly, none of us do either.”

“Really?” Fenton said.

“None of us have got the foggiest.”

“Ah.”

“Which could,” Gus said, “be a fucking problem.” He gazed down at his half-eaten plate of meat, and fell into an unhappy silence. He lit a cigarette and studied the cigarette box for a while, rapping it tensely against the wooden table. Watching him, Fenton again felt a curious twinge of sympathy – and something more. He also felt shame: shame over the progress he’d made upstairs, shame over the whole question of what he was going to do to the King Gee’d fool – what indeed he was already in the process of doing. Yes: it was all going so well now that he could afford to start feeling ashamed of himself.

Finally Gus said, in a tone of general lament: “It’s all so bloody hard, isn’t it? Why does it have to be so hard? It’s not like we’re asking for much, for Christ’s sake. We’re only looking to take out one man. One man. If a troppo little bastard like Neville Aggot can manage it, why should we have any dramas with it? But I suppose life’s pretty easy when you’re a nutcase, isn’t it? You just stroll into your local hardware and buy yourself a twelve-inch knife, no questions asked. But try doing something with a bit more flair, something with a bit of theory to it, it’s one bloody hurdle after another. Like, a bomb. A bomb just doesn’t put itself together, does it? The way the media goes on, you’d think any nong could make one. But the fact is, you’ve got to know how. It’s not like you can just light a wick that’s sticking out of a barrel of gunpowder any more, is it? Them days are well and truly gone. These days it’s all fucking fuses, isn’t it? Fuses and detonators. Multicoloured wires. Freezers full of play-dough. Briefcases full of some kind of pink fucking liquid. It’s madness. You dead-set practically need to be an electrician to put a bomb together. Smithy,” he said with sudden hope: “Your old man’s an electrician, isn’t he?”

“He’s a carpenter mate,” said Smithy.

For a few glum seconds Gus continued to eye him anyway, as if half-ready to entertain the concept of a wooden bomb. Then he sighed. “And timers,” he said wistfully. “Fuck knows how they fit into the picture. I mean okay, you set the alarm for three o’clock, and then it starts ringing. I can see that. But why that should make the bomb go off … I don’t see the connection. How does the bomb know what time it is? And then you’ve got these bloody fertilizer bombs. That’s right: fertilizer. You can hardly switch on the news these days without hearing about one. And they say it like it’s all so bloody straightforward, don’t they? Meanwhile you’re sitting there on your couch like a moron wondering to yourself: are they, or are they not, talking about cow shit? What is the fucking go here? I mean, obviously you don’t just plonk down a bag of shit and wait for it to explode. Obviously there’s more to it than that. But what that is, they never fucking say. They just talk like you’re some kind of cretin if you don’t already know …”

He looked at Fenton like a drowning man looking up from the bottom of a well. “Do you want to be our explosives expert, Fent?”

Fenton looked back at him.

“If you don’t, Fent, just say so.”

“I think I’d better not, then.”

“Fair enough, mate. Understood. Frankly, I didn’t see you in that role either. I think of you more as an ideas man. Like myself. I was just giving you first refusal on it. Wozzer: I was really thinking more along the lines of you.”

Warren looked up from his steak. He had it up to his mouth in both hands, like a harmonica. “As what? Explosives expert?”

“Yeah,” Gus said.

“But I’m not an explosives expert.”

“Wozz, are your ears painted on? None of us are a bloody explosives expert. This is what we’ve just spent the last twenty minutes establishing. That’s why one of us has got to become one, mate. Fast.”

“Can I just say no?” Warren said hopefully.

Gus heartily chuckled.

“But you let him just say no.”

“Wok, I know you mate. You’ll warm to this. Don’t look so worried about it. It’s just a matter of common sense and gumption, champ, like everything else. You think explosives men just pop straight out of their mums knowing all there is to know about blowing stuff up? Of course they don’t. It’s a question of picking things up, isn’t it? It’s a matter of building up your expertise gradually. Or in your case, rapidly. You did Chemistry in high school, right?”

“General Science,” Warren swiftly corrected him, as if this shameful fact might get him off the hook.

Gus winced. “In that case you’d better hit the library, mate, pronto. Look into this fertilizer thing first. It sounds like a red-hot possibility. If the library’s no good, try the grapevine. If you’ve got somebody on the street, use them.”

“Somebody on the street!” Warren cried. “What the hell is that?”

Gus raised a soothing and reasonable palm. He instructed Warren not to panic. He informed him that he, Gus, was not expecting any miracles. He assured him, in an eminently prudent and understanding tone, that he was not about to set any unrealistic deadlines.

He told him that he had a whole month, a full thirty days, in which to produce a workable bomb.

Fenton, looking on, thought about how little he had savoured his old life, the one in which nothing much had ever happened.