If he is honest, he also doesn’t think Brendan’s in the right frame of mind. He is stronger than he looks, but Marty is stronger. Marty has always been proud to call himself a bastard, and it is a bastard’s errand upon which he finds himself.
The train pulls into the station. Marty disembarks, throwing his rucksack over his shoulder, and makes his way along the platform. The jostling hordes remind him of some of the crowds at the fights he’s been in, and it makes him feel slightly nauseous to be surrounded by so many people.
He has only vague memories of the mutant Humpty Dumpty creature emerging from the wound in his side, and of fighting it on the ground in that…
He knows this now. It makes things easier to deal with.
He also knows that Simon Ridley somehow managed to save them all. The details aren’t clear, but the feeling that Simon has been a hero is embedded deep inside him, like a seed in fertile ground. And he hopes one day that seed will produce the flowers of memory. Then he can pay proper tribute to his friend, his saviour: the boy he wishes he could have known better as a man.
Marty turns left outside of the station, and follows the route he has memorised from Google Maps. The address was in Simon’s notebook back at the flat on Grove Court. Marty was forced to break in to salvage Simon’s belongings, because he had not been able to find the keys on the body.
The kid who murdered Simon is still out there somewhere. When he returns from this short trip to London, Marty has plans to track down the bastard himself. He’s already spoken to Erik Best, and there are a couple of good lads on the case. Hopefully, by the time he gets back to the Concrete Grove, they will have found him.
Then it will be Marty’s turn to play Humpty-fucking-Dumpty…
He finds The Halo easily. It is on a street corner, and the sign outside the pub is pretty hard to miss — a tiny transvestite angel with a big glowing circle around its head. He smiles as he glances up at the sign. Then he steps inside and heads straight for the bar.
“Excuse me,” he says to the man standing behind the bar reading a paperback thriller. “Are you Mike?”
“Depends on who’s asking,” says the man, grinning.
Marty decides that he likes this man. He can see already why he was Simon’s best — only — friend. “I’m Marty. We spoke on the phone.”
The grin falls away. “Shit, yeah. Fuck… Marty. Good to meet you.” He sticks out his hand and Marty takes it, gives it a quick shake.
“I’m sorry I had to break the news to you that way. How’s Natasha taking it?”
Mike shrugs his narrow shoulders. “Not good. I’ll go and get her. Like I said on the phone, she’s been staying upstairs, in my spare room, for a few days. She hasn’t had any visitors, or even spoken to anyone she works with. She needs to get her head together before the funeral. We both do.”
Marty sits at a table and looks at his hands. His scars are livid today; his knuckles look like conkers in a bag.
“Hello…”
When he glances up from the table, she is there, standing at his side. He was not even aware of her as she moved across the room. Perhaps it is part of her training as a model, that ability to
“I’m sorry,” he says again. It is something he finds himself saying a lot lately. “I tried to help him… but… but he died.”
“In your arms.” Her face is thin and pale, the skin of her cheeks as delicate as paper, fluttering as she speaks. Her pronunciation is slow and deliberate, as if she is trying desperately not to stumble over the words. Marty likes her accent.
“In my arms,” he says, trying not to cry. “This is why I came here. To tell you face-to-face that… that I tried to save him. And that he saved me.”
He stares at her impassive face for a little while longer, and then his gaze wanders down to her belly. She isn’t showing, not yet; but Mike told him the news when Marty telephoned the previous day and arranged to come over and see her.
“How many months are you gone?” He nods at her stomach.
“Not long. Just eight weeks. I was going to tell him when he got back. I could not tell him something like that over the phone. That’s why I was so desperate to see him. I almost came up there, to the northeast. I nearly came to see him before… well, you know.” Her eyes are shining. Tears look good on her; she wears her grief well. Natasha is a true model; a natural.
Marty doesn’t know what else to say, so he falls back on small talk, hoping that some day he can speak to this woman properly, tell her the truth — or at least as much of it as he can understand. “Do you know what you’re having?” He flexes his hands on the table. They’re stiff; his fingers ache. “I mean, would he have been the father of a boy or a girl?”
Natasha licks her lips. Her left eye twitches slightly. Not much, but it is a crack in the facade, a gap through which the depth of her grief can be glimpsed, like fire, if only briefly.
“Both,” she says, her voice as low as a whisper. “I’m having twins. There are twins on my mother’s side of the family, and it seems I got them, too.”
Marty closes his eyes. Darkness floods in, drowning him.
Now, at last, he realises what Captain Clickety must have sniffed out on Simon, and what had happened right at the end, when a deal was struck.
He knows why the sacrifice was accepted, and how it might now be claimed.
“Twins,” he whispers, and in that black moment the word becomes forever associated with absolute horror.
Also by Gary McMahon
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks always to Emily and Charlie for giving me a reason to fight; to Ross and Katarzyna Warren for checking and correcting my pitiful attempts at the Polish language; to John Probert for the medical advice regarding stab wounds; to Michael Wilson, Jim McLeod, Jason Baki, Colin Leslie and many other kind reviewers and bloggers who supported the first
‘The Concrete Grove’ by Gary McMahon
IT KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE…
Imagine a place where all your nightmares become real. Dark urban streets where crime, debt and violence
