The van smelled of fear. The fear of the driver smelled worse than the fear of the passenger. The driver had a cigar and that smelled bad too. Sometimes the driver rolled down his window to let out the smell of fear and let in the smell of the wet night.
The driver had not said a word all night. The passenger did not like that very much. The silence between them was so heavy that you could not have shifted it except with a crowbar, but neither of them had a crowbar and so the silence stayed put. There was plenty of steel in the back of the van, but none of it was a crowbar.
A road map lay open on the passenger’s knees and each time the van passed under a street lamp he saw the streets spread out on the map like veins and the big black X marked on one of them in the driver’s hand. Then the darkness would slide in again and you could not see the map any more and the passenger liked that just fine.
They came to an intersection and the driver waited.
“Left,” said the passenger.
The driver turned left and the silence came back between them and sat there going sour like a bottle of milk on a dead man’s doorstep. The passenger looked at his watch and waited for a street lamp to come along and light it. Soon the light came and his watch said one forty-five. If they did not get to the black X by two o’clock the whole operation would go to hell. The thing had to happen at two o’clock exactly and if it did not happen at two o’clock exactly then it might as well not happen at all.
They came to another turn. The passenger had his index finger on the map to keep track of where they were. The street with the black X marked on it was not very far away from them. It was two streets over to their right.
“Left,” said the passenger.
They turned left. They drove down the road and said nothing. They had been down this same road once before. Maybe twice. The passenger did not know where else to go. He couldn’t take them too close to the black X and he couldn’t take them too far away from it either. If he took them too far away from it they would wind up in the next suburb and that would not be good. The driver might notice something like that. The driver was full of liquor and God knew what else, but still the drunken fool might notice something like that.
It was one forty-seven. They had been in the right suburb for ten minutes now. They were driving round it in circles and pretty soon the driver was going to work that out. He might have worked it out already if he was not so drunk. That was funny, wasn’t it? A job like this and the driver had turned up to it drunk. Some tough guy, turning up drunk to a job like this. Or maybe drunk was the best way to turn up to a job like this, unless you did not turn up to it at all.
They came to another corner and the passenger said “Left” again. Dark houses rolled past them with dark cars parked in their driveways. Maybe the driver was drunk enough that pretty soon he would slide off the road and plow into one of those dark cars. And maybe that would be good. The night could end in worse ways than that. Maybe it could end in better ways too, but right now the passenger couldn’t think of one.
The passenger looked out at the rain. It kept falling. He wondered why the driver had turned up drunk. He wondered why the driver had not said anything all night. Maybe he was just afraid. Maybe he just did not like the idea of what they were going to do.
Or maybe the girl had talked. That would have made the driver drink all right. Maybe she had talked and told the driver what the passenger really was. It was a lousy thought, but so was every thought about the girl. Maybe she had talked and maybe she had not. It was a lousy thought either way, because the girl loved the driver and didn’t love him.
Rain kept gathering on the windshield and the wipers kept beating it away like a man trying to hold back a woman’s tears with just his hands.
The passenger kept his finger on the map to mark where they were. Stealing another man’s girl was just a bad idea and that was all there was to it. Thinking about it made him so sick in the heart that he almost wanted to stop taking them round in circles and take them right to the black X instead and get it over with. A man could get that way fast. One day you could be a man who kept to the law and waited for the lights to go green and thought of life as sometimes strange and sometimes sad but on the whole worth keeping hold of. Then the next day you were out on a road at night doing a thing like this.
The driver let down his window and threw out the root of his cigar. The night came in the window like the blade of a knife. The driver put up the window but did not light a new cigar. Maybe he thought there was no time left to smoke one now. Maybe he thought they would get to where they were going before he had a chance to smoke it.
The passenger shivered. He looked out at the road. When he had told the driver’s girl that he loved her she had not replied with words. She had spat out a sound that was part laugh and part cough and part moan but that was mainly the sound a girl made when you loved her and she didn’t love you back. The passenger kept thinking about that sound and the more he thought about it the less he liked it. It was the sound a person made when you had let him down. So it let a girl down when you loved her, did it? The passenger did not understand that. There were many things he did not understand and he was running out of time to understand them in. He remembered how one day in a room she had looked at him with all the lights on behind her eyes. You should not look at a man like that and then turn round and act all surprised when he told you he loved you. You should not look at a man like that unless you meant it.
Well, she would never look at him like that again, anyhow. That much the passenger did understand. There were many things he did not understand, but he did understand that. One day in a room she had looked at him with all the lights on behind her eyes and now she would never look at him that way again. The passenger did not know why his body bothered to go on living now that his head knew a thing like that. What was the good of knowing a thing like that and not being able to do a damn thing about it?
The wipers went from side to side like two men shaking their heads. The passenger watched them. When he had told the driver’s girl that he loved her, he had lost more than just her. He had lost his last chance to tell her about tonight so that she could make it all go away. So that she could hose down her idiot swain before it all went too far. And now it was too late. Now they were out here in the night in a van with no lights on. Now they were going to where they were going, and maybe it was time to start thinking about what would happen if they got there. The passenger would try damned hard to see that they did not but maybe it was time to think about it just the same. Maybe it was time to think about the man they were going to call on. The dead man on holiday. That was what the driver had called him. The dead man on leave. If it happened, the newspapers would call him a “victim.” Well, the passenger did not know about that. The way the passenger saw it the man they were going to call on had things pretty good. He was probably sleeping now. His role was very clear. He was the innocent one. He did not know what was going to happen to him and he did not have to think about it. He was probably sleeping now, just to show that he could. He was the lucky one. It was easy to sleep when your head was clear and your heart was not a river of bad cess. They said “innocent victim” like it was a tragedy, but really there were worse things than that. If you got to the end and you were still innocent that was something. Yes, that was something. That was not to be sneezed at. Maybe the man would just never have to wake up again. That was not so bad. And at least the lucky bastard was not in love with her. That was another thing. Whatever happened to him, at least he was not in love. At least the lucky son of a bitch was not in love with her.
They came to another corner and the passenger had them turn left again. They had been down this street three times now and still the drunken fool at the wheel did not know it. The passenger looked at the windshield. The wipers went on shaking their heads at him. Yes, they shook their heads, because there was still the other man to think about. The old man. The bus driver. Even if this part went okay there was still that part to think about. It was a bad business, the business of the bus driver. It was a bad business and that was all there was to it. Maybe the other two men would botch that part of it and let the old man live. If there was a way to botch the job then those two geniuses would find it. Yes, and if his aunt had cojones she would be his uncle. The truth was he had hung the bus driver out to dry. That was the truth when all was said. When all was said he’d had a whole day to save the old man’s hide and instead he had thrown him to the wolves. He had done this out of laziness and out of fear and, yes, out of some tiny grain of hope that the girl might still be his. Yes, he had chosen her over another man’s life, and that was that. Maybe the other two geniuses would botch it, but maybe wasn’t good enough, was it? Maybe was very thin twine to leave another man’s life hanging from. The passenger would just have to find some way of living with that, if it turned out he had to go on living after tonight.
They came to another corner.
“Right,” the passenger said, to mix things up some. They turned right. His finger stayed on the map and marked their place. It was ten minutes to two. The passenger had never killed a man. It was a hell of a thing to kill a man. They said it was just like gutting a fish but the passenger had never gutted a fish either. They said a dying man will call for his mother with his last breath. The passenger thought about the other man. The bus driver. Would he cry out for his mother when the two geniuses came for him? What if he did? What would the two geniuses make of it? Maybe they would think the bus driver’s mother was really there. Maybe they would think the old hag was somewhere else in the house. Waking up in her face cream and nightie, this sleepy old crone fixing to walk in on them and mess things up. Maybe that would be enough to make them hit the bricks before the job was done. Maybe. But maybe wasn’t good enough, was it?
Another corner. The passenger said “left” and they turned left down a road they had been down two or three times before.
It was one fifty-four.
At this moment the driver spoke. He spoke for the first time all night. He turned to the passenger and said, “Have you been talking to Charmers?”
The passenger looked down at the map. He felt the driver’s eyes on him and sensed they were full of heat.
“No,” the passenger said.
“Well some –— has,” the driver said.
They drove.
The passenger said, “What are you saying? Are you saying …”
“I’m saying she knows things.”
“What things?”
“Things she’s not supposed to know,” the driver said.
The passenger waited for the driver to say more than that but then he saw he was not going to.
The passenger said, “Are you saying she knows about this?” He used his hand to indicate the van and everything that was in it, and the dark road ahead.
“–— no!” the driver said. “Would I be out here if she did?”
The wipers beat on, marking time.
“No,” the driver said. “She just … she just seems to know things. Little things.”
The passenger looked at the map. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Things. Like somehow she knows I smoke cigars. Somehow she got wind of that.”
The passenger looked at the map.
“And the other day she said something that … that kind of inferred she knows about me going to that nightclub where the strippers smoke cigarettes with their –—s.”
The passenger looked at the map.
“And that information, there’s only six blokes that are privy to it. One of them’s me, and I sure as hell didn’t spill it. So one of the other five must of. One of them must be a rat. Mustn’t they?”
Front yards went by with dark letterboxes at their edges, and dark sheds and kids’ bikes and rolled-up hoses further back like props on an empty stage. It was one fifty-six.
The driver said, “Is it you?”
After a while the passenger said, “I think I’ve answered that.”
“So it’s one of the others,” the driver said. He thought about that for a while. He lifted a palm and smacked the wheel. “–—s!” he said. “You give these –—s everything. You give them everything. And then one of them sniffs round behind your back trying to –— your woman!” he said, using the vulgar expression.
The passenger did not say anything.
“That’s why I thought it was you,” the driver said. “The others, I didn’t think they were capable of it. Because he’s crafty, this guy. Whoever he is, he knows his audience. He knows women inside out. Look at the stuff he’s leaked to her. How I smoke cigars. How I don’t say no to a bit of exotic dancing. Think about it. It’s stuff that makes me look like a sexist oaf, isn’t it? Making this bloke look like … look like Clark –—ing Gable in comparison. Plus he’s slyly worked the topic of –—s onto the agenda, and as we both know that’s half the bloody battle. Make no mistake. He knows what he’s doing this –—.”
“Yes,” the passenger said.
“That’s why I thought it had to be you,” the driver said. “Them other blokes, I didn’t think they had it in them.”
“No.”
Then there was silence for a while and when the passenger could stand it no longer he said, “So she hasn’t said anything to you. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“About who it is.”
“It’s got to be Wozz,” the driver said. “It must be. None of the others could even remotely … It’s got to be Wozz.”
“She didn’t say anything to you tonight?”
“She’s covering for this –—!” the driver said.
“Earlier tonight. Before you left. She didn’t say anything then?”
“I’m losing her mate,” the driver said. “I can feel it.”
Then for a while they said nothing. The passenger looked out his window and kept his finger on the map to mark where they were. So the girl had not talked. He had told her that he loved her and she had not seen fit to tell that to the driver. That seemed like something. That seemed like something to think about. And the driver thought he was losing her, did he? That seemed like something too.
“It has to be Wozz,” the driver said again.
The passenger was looking at the map. “Right,” he said.
“Right,” the driver nodded.
“No,” the passenger said. “Right. Turn right. There.”
So the driver turned right but it was already too late and there was no road there any more to turn right into and they got two swift uppercuts from the kerb and suddenly they were driving across the wide sweep of somebody’s front lawn. A letterbox appeared in front of them like an arm sticking out of dark surf and they flattened it with a ripe ping. Then they arced across a few other front yards for a while with tree branches lashing the roof and windshield like a cheap carwash. Then the driver yanked the wheel hard to the left and they slewed back onto the road but they hit the road at a right angle and went straight across it and got two more uppercuts from the kerb on the other side. Then they were up on wet grass again and heading fast for something that looked like a kid’s trampoline. They missed it and the passenger found himself wishing they hadn’t. He looked at the darkness coming fast towards them. He hoped that very soon they would hit something big enough to make them stop but not big enough to make them die. He did not breathe. He wished he were drunk too. They clipped someone’s parked car but not very hard. In the back of the van something sharp slid fast across the bare metal floor and clanged against something else sharp. Then with two final thumps they were back on the road again and this time they were back on it for good, with rain washing over the windshield and the wipers wiping it away.
After a while the driver said: “Sorry about that.”
The passenger let that slide. His eyes were on the map.
“As much my fault as it was yours,” the driver said.
The passenger let that slide too. His eyes were on the map but his index finger wasn’t. The driving of the drunken fool had jolted his finger right off the map and now it was pointing at nothing.
“It makes you think, doesn’t it?” the driver said.
So now the passenger did not know what road they were on any more. That was swell, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that swell?
“What we’re about to do, it really makes you think. Doesn’t it?” the driver said.
“Yes,” the passenger said.
“I mean, where this bloke’s going, there’s no coming back from, is there?”
“No,” the passenger said. He looked out at the street signs and waited for one that he could read. It was not easy to read the street signs with no headlights on. It was still raining hard. If they came to the next corner and he still had not read a street sign and still did not know where they were he would have to make a guess, left or right, and maybe that would take them away from the dead man’s street and maybe it would not.
“I mean, life’s such a fragile thing.”
“Yes.”
“Reckon he’ll be asleep?” the driver said.
“Maybe,” the passenger said.
“You’d think he would be.”
“Yes.”
“I’m dying for a –—,” the driver said.
The passenger did not say anything but looked out at the rain and waited for a street sign he could read. But even if he did read a street sign before they got to the next corner he would still have to find that street on the map in order to know where they were. That was a lot to ask for. The passenger was starting to think it was no good trying. He went on trying anyway. He didn’t know what else to do.
“I’m telling you that now,” the driver said. “So if I do happen to duck off for one while we’re … you know, in the middle of …”
“Okey,” the passenger said.
“Of … it.”
“Okey.”
“Of proceedings …”
“Yeah.”
“So you won’t take it for an act of cowardice if I do.”
“No.”
It was no good, trying to pick out a street name in the dark and rain. It was just no good. The passenger stopped looking out at the road. He looked down at the map instead. The map was covered by darkness but he looked at it anyway just for something to look at. He might as well just close it for all the good it was going to do him now. Soon he felt the van slowing and knew they must be coming to a turn.
The van stopped.
The driver said, “Left or right?”
The passenger said, “Left.”
Well, the passenger had really lost his way now. But he had lost his way a long time before tonight. Any man who was out on a drive like this had to have lost himself a long way back, and no map or street sign was going to help him. There were some ways of being lost that a map couldn’t fix.
They drove along the road for a while and it was a road they had not been down before and that was not good. It was not good at all.
Then they came to another corner and again the passenger had to say something, so this time he said, “Right,” and they turned right and drove some more and the passenger looked at his watch and saw that it was two o’clock. So it was all out of his hands now. He looked ahead of them and thought that this must be what it was like to die, driving down a dark road through rain to whatever it was that was waiting for you at the other end, and not being able to do a damn thing about it.
Then they came to another street and this time the passenger could see the street sign all right. He could see it just fine. It was the one. It was the street he had been keeping them away from all night. It was the street that had the black X marked on it in the driver’s hand. It was the street of the dead man.
The driver saw it too. He slowed to take the corner. He took it. He slowed some more and started to look at the house numbers. He turned to the passenger with this big dumb grin on his face and said: “Dead on time.”
“What kind of bohemian fuck,” Gus wondered aloud, “stays up till two in the morning?”
He untethered a yeasty burp. Then he clambered without ceremony over the back of the bench seat and flopped heavily down into the Kombi’s mysterious rear. “Bear with me, Fent,” he counselled from the darkness. A series of thumps followed. Various oaths, sounds of drunken rummaging. A clang. “Fuck me, I’ve dropped the cleaver.” And then at length his hands reappeared, proffering forward over the seat the following articles: a dark woollen beanie, another beanie striped red and white, a meat cleaver, a tomahawk.
Wordlessly Fenton accepted them.
“Choose your weapon, mate,” the big man said, grunting his way back over, catching Fenton hard in the jaw with his leading boot. “Although if you’re not fussed” – he sat to regather his breath – “I wouldn’t say no to the tomahawk.”
Fenton passed him that weapon.
“You’re a gentleman, Fent. You’re a top bloke. And the Saints beanie, mate, when you’re ready.”
Fenton passed him that too. Things seemed to be moving in slow motion now. He felt the nasty gravity of fate weighing down on his limbs, his testicles, his face. Was it all inevitable now? He looked down at the items still in his hands. Why did Gus own a meat cleaver? Why? Who apart from butchers and professional chefs owned meat cleavers? Where did you even buy one? And the beanie – was he meant to put it on now? What a terrible concession that would be, to locate and position the eye holes, to drag the criminal wool irrevocably down over his face.
“You’ll find,” Gus said with some embarrassment, as if reading his mind, “you’ll find that I’ve neglected to cut out the old eye holes in these. Time sort of got away from me on that. I meant to lop off the pom-poms too. But fuck it. I’m wearing this one just for the warmth.” He proceeded to don the red-and-white beanie in the orthodox way, hem folded up, his face fully exposed. “Up the Dragons!” he said with a perverse wink, when it was on. “You’re not tempted?”
Fenton shook his head. He looked up at the house, at the lit upper window. “Shouldn’t we wait till he’s asleep?”
“Fuck that, Fent. Are you forgetting the time factor?”
“Him being awake though. That wasn’t part of the plan.”
Gus laid a comforting hand on Fenton’s shoulder. “It’ll add to the fun, mate. Anyway, we’ve still got the element of surprise, haven’t we? And frankly, if the two of us can’t overpower a bloody philosopher, we’re in the wrong bloody game …”
He let that thought drift into silence. His hand was still on Fenton’s shoulder. He looked into Fenton’s eyes in an odd way. His breath smelt like a pub’s carpet. Rain lashed the roof. Then Gus was sliding further towards him … and was hugging him, enfolding him clumsily in a warm and beery embrace.
“I love you, Fent,” he said. He clapped Fenton’s back with the hand that wasn’t holding the tomahawk. “I wouldn’t normally say that, mate. But tonight … tonight there’s a real chance one of us might not make it back.”
He choked up a little on these words, holding back the full sweep of his emotion.
“Anyway mate, there it is.” He tightened the embrace. “I’ve said it. I love you mate. You’ve been a hell of a comrade.”
The hug went on in silence. Maybe Gus thought Fenton had something similar to say back to him. But Fenton refrained. You had to draw the line somewhere. Anyway, he had already said those words once tonight. That was more than enough. He gave the ample futon of Gus’s back a wordless pat or two. Rain washed down the windows.
“I was going to bring along some boot polish,” Gus mused, still holding him. “To smear our faces with. But the only colour I had was Regal Fawn mate. Which is roughly the colour of pale baby shit.” He laughed mellowly in Fenton’s arms, working through some of the old pre-death nerves. “I draw the line at turning up to a hit looking like Marcel Marceau.”
Finally he pulled back. He looked Fenton in the eye and said: “Let’s do it.”
And then Gus was out in the night, slamming his door with moronic force.
“Let’s rock and roll!” he hollered to the neighbourhood, while dealing a series of rough spanks to the Kombi’s side.
Alone in the van, Fenton allowed himself a quiet moment of pure self-pity. He looked at himself from the outside: as a figure of pathos, a green young man in way over his head, a flawed but essentially decent fellow who deserved a much better fate than this. Next time he was alone like this it would be done, one way or another. He laid the useless beanie at his feet. How he wished he could lay the cleaver there too. O Lord, how had he let it all come this far? Why hadn’t he taken a stand much earlier, much, much earlier, back when it had all been just a plan, back before it had come to the cold reality of rain on steel?
Then he too was out in the night, cleaver in hand, rushing to catch Lego’s front gate before Gus could let it bang shut. The big drunken maniac swayed purposefully on ahead of him, beanied, tomahawk-bearing, a giant and eccentric woodsman. Fenton followed. They were on a stone path slanting up through an austere-looking garden. Wet lawn was on either side of them. Stone figures seemed to stand on it at wide intervals. Their shapes were unclear in the rain. They looked to be ironic in intent.
Ahead the great inebriated back swayed on, setting an urgent pace up towards the house. Well, if killing Gus was a serious option, this was the moment to implement it. So: was he prepared, right now, without another second’s hesitation, to use the cleaver on the big man? To run up there and bury its blade deep in his drunken back? Was he seriously ready to do that? No. Not even close.
So there it went, another answer gone, another option floating off into the night.
Now Lego’s house was properly emerging from the slope. But it remained hard to visualise, to grasp. It was all angles and shadows. Everything about it looked artificial, half real, rendered only in black and white. A wide roof of corrugated metal slanted down its front in a stylised way. Two thirds of the way up this were the top-storey windows, three of them in a row. The two on the left were dead black squares. The one on the right was still lit. A filmy off-white curtain was visible behind it, and a portion of off-white ceiling. Was Lego in that room right now, doing some Hatha yoga and eating very little dairy?
Below the windows, the roof sloped down to shelter a narrow veranda or porch that ran along the front of the ground floor. Gus was under there already, dripping dry in the darkness. Lego with a veranda or porch? Lego with a galvanised iron roof? Again there had to be an element of irony at play here, some wry theoretical comment on the fetishes of suburbia.
Then again, the man had to live somewhere.
Sodden, cleaver-wielding, Fenton too arrived under the roof. The rain switched to a rattling din overhead. There were two windows and a French door under here, all dark. Steam rose from Gus’s excited body. A puddle was forming around his feet, darkening the dry concrete.
“I swear Fent, I’m pumped for this!” he yelled over the din.
“Keep it down you fucking fool!”
“What?” Gus shouted. His breath was whitely visible.
Fenton stepped closer to him. “Keep it down, for Christ’s sake!” he harshly whispered. “You’re shouting.”
“Sorry Fent. I was just saying, the excitement level of this, it’s starting to get to me. An hour ago, I won’t deny it, I was fucking shitting myself. But now … now I’m primed, baby. I’m pumped-up. I’m in the zone.”
“Really?” Fenton said. “I was just thinking it’s all a huge mistake.”
Gus grinned. He clapped Fenton’s wet shoulder with relish. “The clown prince of terrorism, mate. That’s what we should call you. The clown prince of terror.”
Shaking his head, chuckling with aftermirth, he moseyed over to the French door. He inspected it briefly. He came back, chuckling no longer.
“It’s fucking locked,” he said.
“Oh,” said Fenton.
“Christ,” Gus said. He twitched and shifted in troubled thought. “Don’t suppose you know how to pick a lock Fent?”
Fenton looked towards the door. “Not that kind, no.”
“Christ,” Gus said again. “Any thoughts?”
Fenton screwed up his features and gave the matter some quasi consideration. He let about half a minute go by. Then he tilted his cleaver outward to indicate that he was stumped. Had Gus really been banking on an unlocked front door? How bad at terrorism could one man be ?
Restlessly Gus tapped the back of the hatchet against his denimmed thigh. “I mean we can’t just smash a window, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“And I mean time’s a fucking factor here, Fent. It’s a factor.” A note of panic had entered his voice. He looked at his watch. He recoiled from it in frustration. “Jesus. I mean if we can’t figure it out, what bloody hope have Col and Smithy got?”
“Well,” Fenton said ruefully: “we did our best, didn’t we?”
“And how does a ratbag like Aggot manage it, more to the point?”
Fenton shrugged, and looked at his watch, and moved away from Lego’s door, and generally sought to foment the idea that these things could be discussed further once they were both back in the Kombi.
But Gus stayed put. Now he seemed to have a dreadful thought. He stepped resolutely out into the rain and peered up the slope of the roof at the top-storey windows. And there he remained, hands on hips, gravely evaluating the pitch of the drenched steel, face screwed up against the rain, waiting for Fenton to come out and join him.
For as long as he decently could, Fenton declined this mute invitation. Then he stepped out under the black sky. The rain was much colder than he’d recalled.
“You can see what I’m thinking, mate,” Gus said.
Fenton could. And it was madness. The windows were about two-thirds of the way up the roof’s face. A brief sill or ledge ran along the bottom of them. And from there, the great slope of steel came down on a rampant grade of considerably more than forty-five degrees, sluicing an endless flood of rain into the gutter that ran along its near edge. In some places the guttering was full, and rills of overspilling water surged from it to the sodden turf.
Gus went to one of the metal poles that held up the veranda. He gripped it, tried to shake it. He seemed pleased by the results. He came back over to Fenton’s side.
“If one of us clambers up there,” he said, “we could gain access through one of them windows.”
“It looks,” Fenton said, “a little dangerous.”
“You could be right.” Gus looked up again, soberly regauging the slope. “For a biggish bastard like me, it could be a little hairy.”
Oh no. Fenton wasn’t having that.
“For a biggish bloke like me,” Gus repeated.
He just wasn’t.
“More a job for a lither bloke,” Gus said.
“Yes,” Fenton deadpanned.
“A bloke like yourself.”
Fenton looked at his watch.
“Jesus, Fent. How many hints do you want me to drop?”
“Sorry?”
“I reckon you should get up there mate.”
“Oh.” Non-committally. “Right.”
“Fair dinkum, Fent! You can see why I can’t get up there, surely?” Gus’s smile was forced. Time was a factor. Rain matted his beard. “I’m heavier than you, mate. And I’m carrying a frigging axe. And I’m meant to be the fucking boss.”
Here Gus reasonably paused.
But Fenton simply wasn’t having it.
“All right you fucking woman,” Gus said savagely. “I will get up there.” He stalked petulantly back to the metal upright. Shaking with rage and hurt, he tucked the hatchet under his arm, and grasped the pole at head height. He raised the sole of his right boot and held it bitterly aloft.
“You can at least give me a boost, cunt!” he yelled through the rain.
If Lego hadn’t called the police by now he had to be stone deaf.
Fenton went to Gus’s side. He inspected the metal upright. Its surface was all high-gloss paint and clinging rainwater.
“There must be a better way,” he said.
But Gus just waggled his raised boot.
Fenton gave a last shake of his head, a final putting-on-the-record of his disapproval. Then he stooped, dropped the cleaver, and offered his laced fingers to the vast wet sole. Immediately his hands were filled with an unbelievable wobbling weight. He felt himself sinking into the earth like a stake. He bent and strained. His arced spine quivered like a fishing rod.
“Fucking lift!” Gus grunted from above him.
Lift? It was all Fenton could do to stay on his feet. He was now bent almost double. In an unpleasant flash of thought he sensed that this must be what Gus was like when making love to her, all shifting mass and snorts of strain. He drove his front shoulder into the cold metal pole for support. The weight on his mashed fingers intensified, and something large and black began to levitate past his face. It was Gus’s other boot, trembling slowly upward through his field of vision. Then on his exposed rear shoulder Fenton felt an outrageous blast of pain. Gus had placed that upper boot there, and transferred the full searing burden of his weight onto it. And then the whole shoulder simply exploded in trauma, as if Gus had actually launched himself from it, and Fenton was sent sprawling to the ground, scrambling urgently clear of the place where the big man would land.
But there was no landing. Gus didn’t come down. Fenton, clutching his flaming shoulder, looked up to see why not. He saw only Gus’s legs and buttocks, hanging from the roof’s rim like trousers on a clothesline. The rest of him had vanished over the threshold of the gutter. His dangling legs spastically exerted themselves. The tomahawk clanged out of his possession and flipped to the wet ground.
Fenton, feeling strangely calm now, got to his feet. His clothes were soaked. He moved out onto the lawn to get a better look at Gus’s situation. Somehow the pumped-up fool had managed to hook both his forearms into the gutter’s mouth. They were buried in it laterally up to the elbows. Possibly they were inextricably wedged in it. Gus kept working them, squirming from side to side on them, making the gutter flex like a trembling lower lip. But whether he was desperately trying to get them out of it or desperately trying to keep them in it in was unclear. Either way, they appeared to be the only thing that was keeping him up there. His face and upper torso were jack-knifed forward over the roof, ardently pressed to its dark plane. His gut, crucially, was up and over the tipping point. But his striving legs and buttocks still hung awkwardly in the balance, writhing to climb the air.
It appeared seriously unlikely, from where Fenton stood, that Gus would ever complete the ascent. Nor could he see how he was going to get down without doing himself major injury. If anything he was already slipping south, already losing the battle. His boots moved obsessively against the slippery upright, probing for purchase or leverage. Fenton’s natural impulse was to go over there and help him. It felt like the right thing to do. And yet one had to remember what Gus intended to do if and when he got fully up there. The longer he stayed stuck in his present position, engaged in this silent tussle with gravity, the better it would be for humanity. Therefore Fenton just lingered there on the grass and watched, a voyeur in the rain, while Gus wriggled urgently on the roof’s brink, his elbows pinned, his buttocks flailing and vulnerable, his worried feet scrabbling at the wet pole with steadily mounting verve.
Presently the rapid-fire squeaking of Gus’s soles was joined by a second sound: the ominous creak of thinnish metal under great stress. The gutter was bending slowly outwards, lowering its lip under the pull of Gus’s weight. With increased violence and span of backswing Gus lashed his boots against the upright. And then one of the boots hit it far too fast, at far too flat an angle. The boot glanced off the slick metal and shot back into the darkness under the awning, bringing his other leg and buttock after it with a fatal momentum. With a rich bang, some vital component of the metalwork above him gave way, and a great section of guttering, without actually parting company from the roof, nevertheless swung out and down through ninety degrees like an opening hinge, with Gus still fervently gripping it and swinging backwards correspondingly. So now he was lying face-up in mid-air with his spine suspended many feet above the turf and the open trough of the gutter pouring a dark wave of foul leaf matter over his strangely stoic-looking face. The gutter swayed and Gus swayed with it – calmly, without complaint, as if too proud to scream for aid or acknowledge the extent of his plight. His bobbing feet loudly kicked the roof’s underside. Gingerly he turned his spattered face to get a look down at the grass. From his point of view it must have looked like an awfully long way down. Even from Fenton’s point of view it looked like that.
The gutter groaned like a rusty swing. Then a new noise began: a steady smack, smack, smack, as of scattered rifle fire. Nails or rivets were breaking ranks, popping free of the doomed structure. By now Gus had entirely stopped struggling, as if by ceasing all movement he could prevent any further deterioration of his position. But between the gutter and the roof an undeniable fissure had already begun to appear. It broadened like a grin as the gutter buckled slowly downward, a deepening hammock with Gus clinging staunchly to its underside.
For a second or two it seemed possible that this gradual sagging would simply go on till Gus was lowered gently to the earth.
But then it abruptly halted, with his hanging vertebrae still sickeningly far off the ground.
And then with a sound like a car crash the whole gutter shore finally free of the roof and Gus plunged down still clutching it and landed spine-first on the yard with a horrendously frank thud.
Somewhere off in the night a disturbed dog indignantly barked.
A second dog joined it.
Fenton found that his eyes were closed. He didn’t want to open them. He didn’t want to see what Gus had become. The thud of his landing had sounded dreadfully final. It had sounded like a full stop. It had sounded like the sort of thud you didn’t get up from.
A third dog joined the chorus.
And then from the vicinity of Gus/Gus’s corpse there proceeded, thank Christ, a faint but perceptible moan.
So he wasn’t dead. He was alive and presumably conscious.
Right. Whatever happened next, it had to happen fast. Operation Aggot was over, patently. That much was deliciously clear. There would be no wet work here, not tonight. All that remained was to get very quickly out of here, preferably with Gus in tow. No sirens filled the night yet, but give them time. Give them another minute or two. In a brisk but squeamish arc, then, Fenton sort of approached Gus’s body, skirting the head end, keeping his distance, not really looking yet, not wanting to see something that would take the situation irrefutably beyond the pale – a limb twisted at an impossible angle, a prong of snapped bone poking through skin.
Finally, from a timorous vantage point near the feet, he had to look. He had to know what he was dealing with.
The big Maoist was laid out flat. There was no apparent limb trauma. None of his visible orifices leaked blood. His huge feet were stirring, but not with much vigour. The gutter lay like a broken lance across his chest. His hand ineffectively pawed at it. His eyes found Fenton and looked up at him pleadingly. “Fuahhhh …” he began to say, but even that simple oath was too much for him. The rictus on his mud-spattered face told of profound sorrow, of pain beyond tears.
Later, in the lonely hours that followed, Fenton would revisit this moment many times. And he would swear to himself that he’d had, at this stage, every intention of going to the big man’s aid. Yes, he had been right on the brink of rendering assistance. He had been just about to stride manfully over to him and get the gutter off him and do whatever else it took to get him swiftly and safely from the scene. Unquestionably, he’d been fully intending to do these things. Perhaps, indeed, he had already begun to do them. Perhaps he had already taken one or two steps towards him, with the hand of succour already extended …
But then he had seen the look of horror in Gus’s eyes. Panic had hijacked his face. His lips and tongue were twitching frantically, as if wanting to impart some lifesaving piece of information. And his gaze was directed not at Fenton, but at something behind him, beyond him. Something back at the house.
Fenton turned – and saw Ivan Lego standing there in the lit French window, wearing a velvety-looking dressing gown with a tasselled sash. With the ironic detachment that had long been the hallmark of his thought, the robed post-modernist stared straight back into Fenton’s eyes. In one hand he held a pair of scissors. In his other hand he held a pot of glue.
This telling detail was the last thing Fenton saw before he ran away. Yes: he ran away, at remarkable speed. He turned tail and ran, past the cleaver, past the hatchet, past Gus, across the lawn, down the path, out the gate, past the Kombi … and out into the sheltering night. And it felt good. For the moment, for now, it felt exceptionally good. It felt like staying home from school when you weren’t even sick. It felt as though at last he was doing something right.
Behind him, far behind him, forsaken on the wet ground, Gus finally refound his voice.
“Fent!” he cried simply. “You clit!”
His tone was almost uncomprehending. Almost, but not quite.
If he shouted out anything more it was smothered by distance, and by the shameful pounding of Fenton’s feet.