The Concrete Grove

his bike and pedal after the sound through summer lanes and across sunlit fields. But the part of him that mattered — the strong part, the undefeated fragment of his humanity — held back.

The clicking sound diminished, absorbed into the digital static, the black-hiss voices undulating through the ether. For a moment he could have sworn that he heard a snatch of laughter, followed by the mumbled word “Soon.”

Tom put down the phone and grabbed his coat from the hanger at the bottom of the stairs. Still barefoot, he took his keys from the pocket and unlocked the door. Stepping out into the cool night air, he took a breath and allowed his legs to carry him to the car. He reversed out of the drive, spun the car in the road, and set off to the place he had been thinking about all day.

He drove to the Concrete Grove.

Passing through Far Grove, he saw a police car parked outside an all-night kebab shop. One uniformed officer was holding a young man across the counter, cuffing his wrists, while his partner radioed a report in to the station. The boy’s eyes locked onto Tom’s as he drove by; the boy smiled at him, and went limp.

The waste ground adjacent Far Grove Way was burning. Someone had set light to a sofa, and black smoke and yellow sparks rose from it like ugly phantoms, dissipating into the black night sky. Tom slowed down as he passed the blaze, staring at it through the side window. There was nobody around. The fire continued as if the fuel had been laid out and ignited for his eyes alone.

A fox crossed the road as he put his foot down on the accelerator, its eyes blazing red as they caught the light from his headlamps. It was an example of his mental instability that he thought the fox, too, was smiling — just like the boy in the kebab shop. He felt like everything was turning its gaze towards him, waiting to see what he would do, how he would respond to this situation. The area, and everything within it, was ripe with expectancy.

Paranoia, he thought. I’m fucking paranoid. It was a feeling he knew all too well.

He cruised along Grove End, past the terraced houses on one side and the primary school on the other. He stared between the school railings, hoping that he would not catch sight of that strange human-faced dog. He knew the beast was a fantasy, a fiction, yet still he was afraid of seeing it again… and part of him desired just that: a single glimpse of a thing that could not be, another look at the numinous, just to prove that there was something else beyond the life he was leading now.

He parked the car at the end of the street, beside the mini roundabout. Sirens wailed far off, like banshees, and he heard the sound of breaking glass. A dog barked, disturbed by the sound, and he listened to its rhythmic cadence.

He watched Lana’s window, wondering if she was in there, sleeping, or possibly out for the evening. There was no way of knowing whether or not she was home, but he felt that she was safe in her bed. More than a feeling, in fact, it was a certainty. No doubt she slept lightly, like most people who lived in troubled neighbourhoods, and all of her dreams would be bad ones.

It came to him like a light going on inside his head: he could help her, if he liked. He could possibly even save her. He didn’t know what kind of trouble she was in, or how serious it was, but if she would only let him he could help her out of the mess.

If he’d been asked, he couldn’t say how he knew this: he simply did. Sitting here, in the car, outside her building, he felt closer to her than he ever had to another human being — closer even than he had ever felt to his wife. He gripped the wheel with his hands and stared out through the windscreen. Then, overcome with an emotion he could not name, he lowered his head and began to weep. His hands still gripped the wheel, tighter, tighter, until his fingers ached.

“What am I doing here?” he said, looking out at the sky, the depthless dark beyond the fine grey skins of clouds. There came no response — just as always. Even if the universe knew the answers, it was not telling. It would never willingly divulge its secrets to the likes of him.

Tom waited there until the sun turned the sky in the east a light shade of red, like blood smeared along the blade-edge of the horizon. Then, his face still wet with tears, he started the car and set off towards home, the place where he now realised his heart had never truly belonged.

CHAPTER NINE

BANJO SAT IN the chair, shivering. He wasn’t cold; it was warm inside the room, despite being located underground, in a section of the huge cellar directly beneath the gym. No, it was not because of the temperature that his body was jerking and spasming repeatedly, like a series of tiny orgasms. It was because of fear.

Banjo was tied into the wooden dining chair. His hands had been pulled back, around the back of the chair, and secured with plastic ties, like the kind some people used to keep their expensive wheel trims on their posh cars. He’d also seen police detectives in the American cop shows he loved to watch when he was stoned use similar ties to cuff prisoners, rather than using traditional steel handcuffs.

He struggled to get his body under control, tensing his muscles and taking a deep breath — which was difficult in itself because of the PVC ball gag someone had stuffed into his mouth and belted tightly at the back of his head. On top of all the drugs he’d ingested, the situation was enough to make him think that he was finally losing his mind.

The room was dim. There was one light — a small lamp in one corner, which stood on a low wooden table. The lamp was missing its shade, and the low wattage bulb cast a meagre illumination. Shadows crawled around the walls, grouping in the corners. When Banjo looked up, straining his neck because of the ball gag straps, it looked as if the ceiling was covered in a wet black substance. He knew his eyes were creating narcotic-phantoms, but it was a disturbing image just the same.

The attempt to calm down was failing. Fear filled him, turning him into a repository for terrors he could not have imagined only days before. Why had he done it? There had been no real reason for his crime, and everyone knew what a bastard Monty Bright was, how he dished out his own brand of punishment to keep the Grove under his control. So why the fuck had Banjo taken the loan shark’s money?

He remembered everything so clearly, all the little details. It had been cold, crisp, and the stars were unusually bright, like little isolated lamps across the sky. He’d had the idea weeks before, when he was smoking spliffs and dropping cheap acid with an old girlfriend. They were bemoaning the fact that they were always skint, couldn’t ever afford to do anything interesting or buy any decent drugs, and Banjo had decided right then that he needed to do something to alter the course of his life, even if it was for just a weekend.

He thought it would be easy to pose as one of Bright’s collectors, and target some unsuspecting biddy who owed a payment on her loan. He even knew who to choose: old Mrs. Waits, from Grove Rise. Everyone knew she’d come into a bit of money, that when some distant cousin had died he had left her a few grand in his will. The old bird was so dotty she’d probably forget that he’d been to visit, and think nothing of paying twice… Alzheimer’s or something. Her memory was shot to shit.

But things hadn’t quite worked out the way he’d planned.

Yes, he’d gone round there, wearing his long leather coat, with his game face on, and acting like some TV tough-guy, and Mrs. Waits had given him the cash — five-hundred quid, right in his hand. When he’d walked out of her house, heading for the Unicorn to enjoy a couple of pints, score some quality coke and reflect on the success of his mission, he had even felt good about things. For once in his life, Banjo had made something work. He had bettered his situation.

Then, several days later, when the real collectors had gone round to see Mrs. Waits — the guy who always wore those leather gloves and the big fat one with a chip on his shoulder — the old bat had been able to give a good description of Banjo, and, when pressed, had even known his name. Turned out the estate gossips were wrong and she didn’t have Alzheimer’s after all. She was just old and slow, but her mind remained sharp.

That was the fatal flaw in Banjo’s plan. He had not even realised that the woman knew him, and her supposed mental condition had made him lax. He knew who she was, of course, but as far as he knew he was unknown to her.

As far as he knew.