“But you’re not going to be the one to save me.”
CHAPTER NINE
MARTY POURED HIMSELF a drink and waited for the phone to stop ringing. He glanced over, at the telephone table, and smiled. He knew who it was. It was her — Melanie. She wouldn’t leave him alone.
He sipped his cold beer and crossed the room, stood by the phone. He reached out and laid a hand on the tabletop, only inches from the black plastic device. He wasn’t going to pick it up, but this felt like teasing, so he allowed his hand to creep across the desk and tickle the edge of the phone.
The ringing finally stopped.
His recorded message kicked in: “It’s me. I’m not here, or I can’t be bothered to answer. Leave me a message.” Then there was a short, high-pitched bleep.
“Hi, Marty. It’s me. Again. I’ve tried you on your mobile and didn’t get an answer, so thought you might be at home. Am I going to see you tonight? I mean, if I’m not, you could at least do me the favour of telling me. I’m sitting here wondering why the fuck I persist with you. I get nothing back, so why should I keep giving you all this attention?”
Marty took another mouthful of beer. He didn’t feel a thing as he listened to Melanie’s whining voice. He supposed that he ought to feel at least something — lust, irritation, interest, resignation. But, no; he was empty. The girl inspired no emotion. She was just another warm, keen body on a cold night, a name and number in his mobile phone contact list. Nothing more than that.
When she ended the call he reached out and pressed the button to delete the message. She was history, this girl — he never wanted to see her again. Even the promise of her trim body, and the things she liked to do when she’d had a few too many Bacardi Breezers, held little appeal.
There would always be another one just like her. Women like Melanie were drawn to men like him; they couldn’t help themselves. It was a kind of self-abuse, the desperate way they clung to the kind of bloke who lifted heavy weights, took drugs, and battled in back alleys when the pubs were closed. Melanie and her ilk were addicted to Hard Men — they were like groupies following a famous rock band around the world, all too willing to lower their morals and spread their legs in return for the slightest crumb of attention, even if that attention was ultimately negative. He had never been able to understand the mentality, but had exploited it his entire life. He’d taken hundreds of these women to bed, and not one of them had ever touched him inside, where it mattered. None of them had inspired within him anything more than a blunt craving for sex.
Marty was not an evil man. He’d done many bad things, yes, but he told himself that he was not inherently a bad person. He was intelligent — unlike a lot of his peers — and he was self-aware enough to realise the error of his ways, but none of this insight had ever stopped him from doing what he did best.
It was too late for Marty to change; the world had moved on around him, but he’d been stuck here in one place for twenty years. His chances were all used up. There was nothing left for him but how things were now, how they’d always been, and how they would remain until the day he died.
“Sorry, Melanie,” he whispered. “But you’re not going to be the one to save me.” He smiled; he drank; he turned away from the phone.
Marty walked over to the window and looked out at the Baltic Flour Mill and the river beyond. Gateshead had changed a lot since his youth, when he’d cross the river to buy drugs, fight in amateur boxing bouts in local working men’s clubs, and crack skulls on a Saturday night in the rough pubs along Low Fell before heading off into Newcastle to catch a late club and score with some orange-tanned slapper from Walker or Byker, or perhaps a single mother from Fenham or Benwell.
Yes, things had changed a lot around here.
Redevelopment money had turned the old flour mill into a magnet for the region’s artists, and people from all across the country came to visit the gallery and spend their money in the pubs and restaurants along the Quayside on both sides of the Tyne. All that cash, it meant good times for a lot of people — especially the criminal fraternity. And Marty had always been well enough connected to skim a lot off the top. His old friend Francis Boater had introduced him to a few people, and they’d vouched for him to others higher up the food chain, until Marty had become part of their world.
He’d fought for them, these people. He had entertained them by knocking men unconscious in social club boxing rings, and then, when he was unable to get a license because of his injuries, in abandoned warehouses after midnight. It made his wallet fat and his body hard; he was a born fighter, and there was always someone ready to exploit that in a man, and money to be made off the back of it.
He turned away from the window, the sound of skidding rubber tyres ringing in his ears. The soft thump of impact, the sound of breaking glass, a girl’s screams… it had happened a long time ago, but the accident had changed his life. The girl — Sally — had died from her injuries, and he had been damaged enough that the British Boxing Board of Control had revoked his boxing licence on medical grounds.
His fists, however, did not recognise the board’s authority. So he’d carried on fighting. It was all he knew, what he was. If he peeled back his skin, there’d be steel beneath. He was solid all the way through, and no man had ever put him down.
He stared at himself in the mirror above the fireplace. He was not wearing his shirt — he’d been ironing a clean one when the telephone rang. He looked at the muscles in his shoulders, the toughened pectorals, and the solid slab of his upper abdominals. He had avoided the crappy fashion tattoos that blighted the flesh of most of his peers. He didn’t have a six-pack; didn’t need one, in his game. Six-packs and absurdly defined guns were for gym bunnies. Fighters simply needed to be ironclad.
The old scars along the inside of his biceps were clearly visible in the lamplight. The ones on his wrists he saw every time he took off his watch. Faded burn marks, from the tips of lighted cigarettes. When he was younger, he had become fascinated with body conditioning. If he toughened his body to accept and absorb pain, then no one would ever hurt him. Not his father, not the men he fought for money, not the bastards he battled for fun.
Nobody.
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…” He whispered the old nursery rhyme, staring at his lips as they formed the words; “…couldn’t put Humpty together again.” It was his mantra, the way he summoned strength from the dismal depths of his rage. Memories bristled behind his eyes, threatening to spill out into the mirror. Fear pushed the glass, like a hand pressing against it from the other side.
He turned away from the mirror and went to the ironing board, forcing away his dark thoughts and the snippets of bitter recollections. He finished ironing his shirt, watching the muted television. There was some kind of talent show on, but he wasn’t really interested. He just watched the bright, eager faces as they scrolled across the screen, mouths open, he supposed, in song, but they looked to Marty more like silent screams.
He switched off the iron and left it to cool, and then put on his shirt. Feeling calmer now, more in control, he enjoyed the feel of the warm material on his skin. He turned off the television and went over to the iPod docking station. He put on his favourite playlist and hit ‘shuffle’. It was the one with all the old blues singers: Aretha, Billie, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Most of the people he mixed with liked drum ’n’ bass, techno, or stomping euro dance anthems, but not him. Marty liked the blues, especially when they were sung by a strong female voice. He knew the blues well.
Billie Holiday sang about Strange Fruit and Marty Rivers closed his eyes. He thought about those black bodies swinging from the trees, and then, as if a channel had been opened, his head filled with second-hand images of death: fleshless Jewish prisoners, liberated and staggering out through the sagging gates of Nazi death camps; the hacked-up victims of machete-wielding Rwandan death squads; a young Russian soldier beheaded by laughing Chechen rebels; nineteen-year-old British squaddies blown apart by Taliban devices in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan. Bullets strafed the space inside his skull, and he accepted them, knowing that he had spent his entire life dodging the same shots. He lived below the line of gunfire, always ducking and moving, bobbing and weaving, trying to remain in one piece.
