Mean Spirit

bloody funny — Britain’s most hated man.

The great British public.

‘Lewis!’ Marcus pushed through, wondering why the silly bastard didn’t wind up his window. Then he saw an elderly chap with his walking stick jammed in the gap. Over the heads of two jeering women, he glimpsed Lewis hunched down in his seat, the stick waggling back and forth over his ludicrous mauve hair, Malcolm barking furiously, bumping around on the back seat.

‘You should give this lady her twenty quid back,’ the old bastard shouted. ‘Least you can do. Go on, get your wallet out, you bloody cream poof!’

‘Now look-’ Marcus stopped. He’d heard a long, rending squeak. He turned to see the teenage boy’s fist juddering down the Honda’s flank.

Lurched at the kid. ‘You little sod!’

The kid stepped back and the penknife dropped into the road and Marcus flung out a foot and kicked it under the car.

‘You leave him alone!’ the harpy in the leather coat shrieked. ‘He’s off school with his asthma!’

‘Don’t you worry, madam,’ Marcus snarled, veteran of a hundred confrontations over the castle walls, ‘if he’s having trouble breathing, I shall be delighted to perform an emergency tracheotomy with his own bloody knife. Now get back, all of you. Are you insane?’

Noticing then, to his alarm, that his own breath seemed to be jammed in his chest. Legacy of the bloody flu.

‘Hello, his boyfriend’s turned up now.’ Some oaf from behind. Laughter. Marcus’s fists tightened, nails digging into his palms; he tried to turn, but he was wedged between the car and two youths in reversed baseball caps.

‘You want your money back, love? We’ll shake it out of him, shall we do that? Nathan?’

‘Just get out of my way, sonny,’ Marcus snarled. ‘I have to find a police-’

Hands seized him from behind. ‘That’s right, mate, don’t turn your back on the bugger,’ the old man crowed. ‘Bloody ole shirt-lifter, bloody arse-bandit.’ Marcus, flailing, was prodded and jostled as the Honda began to move. Four of the bastards bumping it up and down.

‘Shake him out of there, boys!’ The pensioner joyfully wagging his walking stick through the window of the bouncing car. Malcolm standing in the back with paws on the front seat, snapping at the stick until the old bastard jabbed it to the back of his throat and he squealed in rage and pain and fell back.

Marcus leapt. ‘I’ll break that fucking stick over your fucking-’

The sentence dying as he was pushed back against a streetlamp and the breath seemed to congeal in his chest. He sank down the lamp standard, down to his knees, as if a great force beyond gravity was pulling him into the pavement.

He thought, Broad bastard daylight on the edge of a respectable English spa town.

His glasses had gone. He heard them click and rattle on the pavement, the world a grey haze of hostility. He scrabbled around, encountering dust, a pebble … glass … yes. The first thing he saw as he fumbled the glasses back on was a bloody advertisement, outside a newsagent’s, for the National bastard Lottery, and he heard what he thought was Lewis yelling, ‘Marcus! Marcus!’ before his senses were savaged by the enormous pain which spread through his chest like a jagged lightning tree with many hard, bright branches and his vision closed down on the Lottery sign.

Maybe … it wheedled.

Just maybe …

Part Six

From Bang to Wrongs: A Bad Boy’s Book,

by GARY SEWARD

Religion, eh?

No doubt, the way I was going on before, about trashing that church and everything, you all probably reckoned Gary Seward was dead against the very idea.

Not so. The only word I have a problem with is ‘faith’. It don’t wash with me, never has. You go through life, everybody’s telling you you got to ‘Stand on your own two feet’, ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’, ‘Get a life.’ Everybody except the Church. The Church is bleating, ‘Put your trust in the Lord’, ‘Let the bastards kick sand in your face and turn the other cheek’ and ‘Forget life … Get a death instead.’ Leastways, that’s my understanding of theology: if you don’t go through life as a total mug, you can expect to get the shit kicked out of you in a big way after you turn belly-up.

I had many an argument with prison chaplains about this. I say, Listen, mate, you give us all this old toffee about the sinner what done a U-turn being guaranteed a special place at the top table, but HOW DO YOU KNOW? And he’ll say, I got faith, Gary, and I say, But suppose you’re WRONG … suppose you got it all COMPLETELY TO COCK … you’ve wasted your life, ain’tcha? He says, That’s very narrow thinking, Gary, if you don’t mind me saying so … on account he knows he ain’t got an answer.

And all the time I’m thinking, I bet I could get a bleedin’ answer …

XLII

‘Is he harmless?’ Kurt Campbell caught the question with both hands. ‘Well, of course he is, Alice. How anyone could think otherwise is entirely beyond me.’

White-suited Kurt leaning back in the leather chair, dropping his left ankle on to his right knee, throwing his arms out and his head back as though it was surrendering to the pull of his lion’s mane of golden hair. Bobby Maiden went down on the soft pile carpet of Kurt’s hotel suite and took a picture of him like that, like he was intended to, with arms out, expansive St Kurt.

‘Look … Yes … all right … on one level he’s this absurd anachronism, an old-fashioned mumbo-jumbo man. Do you know anything about Shamanism, Alice?’

‘A little,’ Grayle said, her tape machine spinning on the low yew table between them. She’d told Kurt she was doing a major article for The Vision and filing a shorter piece to the New York Courier.

‘The shaman used to “contact the spirits” on behalf of his tribe,’ Kurt said. ‘Shaking bones and banging drums and all that rubbish.’

‘You think it’s rubbish?’

‘It was for effect, it was to overwhelm people, it was saying, “Hey look at me, I’m a big magic man and you’d better be scared of me, you’d better be in awe, because I’m different.” So, what you had was this funny, unbalanced, psychologically screwed-up guy who, instead of skulking on the fringes of his society, was projecting his skewed sexuality and his strange fetishes upon an ignorant and superstitious public only too ready to-’

‘So you think this is what Cindy Mars-Lewis is doing, with the cross-dressing and stuff?’

‘Oh, hey,’ Kurt said good-humouredly, ‘I was talking about the primitive old tribal shamans. Cindy’s a modern-day entertainer, a comedian, this is part of his act. For many people, he’s just a very funny guy, and when I was on the Lottery Show with him I was expected to play along with that, play the straight man, and I was happy to do that and pretend to hypnotize him …’

‘Yeah, but aren’t you-?’