The Concrete Grove

In reality, of course, it turned out that she recognised him from years ago, when he’d worked in the FastFilm video rental shop on the Arcade, his first job after leaving school. His only job after leaving school, if he was honest: working a nine-to-five had never appealed to Banjo.

He’d considered leaving the Grove then, fleeing the area and perhaps heading south, to London. That’s what they always did in the movies — all the ones he’d watched free of charge in the back of the rental place where he’d once worked, his face bathed in the light of their reflected glory. But in those movies they always seemed to have more than five-hundred quid in their back pocket, and even if they didn’t, they always managed to pick up some additional pocket change along the way to fund their adventures.

Again, the reality was miles away from fiction; the truth, life’s truth, was never quite as promising as the truth of VHS.

The room was bare. The walls were covered in timber panelling, and the varnish was peeling. His mind was racing; his body was rushing from the drugs. The floor was concrete, hard and cold and uneven. The only furniture in the room, apart from the chair into which he was tied, was the coffee table with the lamp on it. There was nothing else, just two doors, facing each other from opposite walls.

The bloke with the leather gloves — what was his name? — had given Banjo a few slaps, back and front- handed, as if he were hitting a woman. The violence had been demeaning more than painful, although the blows had stung at the time. Now all he felt was a slight hot sensation across his cheeks, which moved around as his drug-rush developed. His eyes watered. The ball gag was drying out the inside of his mouth.

The lamp flickered. There was a slow, dragging sound from behind one of the doors. Nothing else. Just silence. Had he imagined it, or was somebody there?

Banjo had no idea how much time had passed, or whether it was night or day. They’d come for him at around two in the morning at least a couple of days ago, kicking down the door of the squat he’d been using as a bolt-hole and a shooting gallery to use the smack he’d spent a large portion of that five-hundred quid on. They dragged him outside, where they pushed him into the back of a car. He knew where they were taking him; everybody on the Grove was aware that Bright had rooms beneath the gym on Grove Lane, and he used them not just for storage but for other, less conventional functions. Even the police had knowledge of Bright’s underground lair, but they just left him alone to go about his business. As far as they were concerned, he kept the Grove under control.

There were rumours that he had bodies buried down here, in the foundations, under the concrete floor, even inside the walls. Banjo couldn’t be sure how much truth was in these stories, and had always doubted them, but right now, strapped into the chair, they had never seemed so real.

The lamp flickered again. He saw colours bursting behind the sudden glare.

Banjo closed his eyes to stop them watering. He tried to swallow but his throat was dry and his tongue felt as big as a side of beef in his mouth. His rush continued, gifting him a strange sense of ease. They’d been pumping him full of drugs — pure, uncut — since he got here. It felt like he hadn’t been clean and sober for weeks.

Footsteps approached from the other side of the door — which door, again he couldn’t be sure.

Somebody knocked, three times.

That was an odd thing to do, knocking on the door, as if whoever stood out there was a visitor and Banjo were not being held captive. He waited, listened, and the knocking came again. Three times, like a charm.

Then there was the sound of a key being inserted into the lock, moved around in the barrel; and finally the locked clicked. The door swung open without a sound. Banjo strained to turn his head and peer around at the door, to see who was coming in and hopefully appeal to their sense of pity. He flexed his hands behind him, making fists and opening them again, and tried to move his legs against the chair, maybe tip the whole thing over.

Darkness surged towards him, clashing with the drugs in his system. He knew that he wouldn’t come down from this sweet high for hours, and somewhere at the back of his mind he realised that by then it might be too late to make a difference.

“Be still.” The man who drifted towards him was not tall. He was broad, and his familiar face hung in the dimness like a ghostly apparition. There was nothing overtly threatening about the way he looked. Yet he was terrifying.

“Calm down or I’ll kill you right now.”

Banjo stopped struggling. The man’s voice — low, even, rather bland — acted like a physical restraint, even more so than the plastic ties which bound him to the chair.

“That’s better.” He walked around to stand before Banjo, his movements slow and deliberate. He was wearing a short black bomber jacket zipped up to the throat and dark denim jeans. His black hair was slicked back against his skull with some kind of product, as if he were stuck in the 1980s or had seen the film Wall Street too many times. To Banjo, in his messed-up state, that hair looked painted on, like some kind of lacquer. It glistened like a beetle’s carapace in the dimness. Banjo wanted to laugh.

“Now we can talk, like a couple of good old fellows. Yes?” His lips didn’t move much when he spoke: his teeth remained clenched, like those of a ventriloquist throwing his voice.

Banjo nodded his head, kept nodding it. The drugs they’d been feeding him had taken control of his actions. He couldn’t stop even if he tried.

“Stop that. You might hurt yourself.” Monty Bright smiled, and it was like every last bit of light in the room rushed towards his mouth, smearing against his small, white teeth.

Banjo stopped nodding. It was strange how this man’s energy seemed to cut through even the tremors of the drugs to make Banjo do as he wished.

“You took something from me, son. You robbed me, and that isn’t nice. I now find myself in a position — one I’ve been in many times before — where I’m forced to make an example of you.” His voice remained low. There was nothing particularly aggressive about his tone, but Banjo sensed his violence, even saw it moving snakelike behind the mask he wore. Bright didn’t waste words; everything he said had a purpose, and that purpose was usually dark.

Banjo felt tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Poor boy,” said Bright, taking a couple of small steps forward so that he was directly in front of his captive. “Wasting tears on this life… your life. It wasn’t much, you know. Your life. Not really. You were ejected, bloody and screaming, from your mother’s gaping cunt, and then you were raised like an animal, a sacrifice for whatever dark gods rule places like this.” He smiled again: quick, tight, like a wound opening up on his face for one brief moment. The lamplight quivered. “You fucked a few girls, smoked a few drugs, and made a few casual friends. You wasted your time at a shitty state school, learning nothing and dropping out before you’d even dropped in. Then you were ejected again, from a different cunt this time, to stand bloody and screaming before the jaws of society.”

Banjo could do nothing for crying. The ball gag was making him choke; his throat ached. He was sobbing now: deep, heartfelt, half-choked muffled sobs that shook his entire body. He felt no grief; something else, an entirely unnameable emotion, stirred within his depths.

“It’s such a fucking waste — a waste of everything, son. Do you see that?” Monty Bright bent forward. He smelled of an enclosed room after heavy rain, a dark corner where water seeps in to cause rot. “But let’s not waste these tears.” His tongue, long and rough and pointed, slid between his thin lips and he licked Banjo’s cheek, lapping up his tears like honey. This perverse and intimate act lasted only a couple of seconds, but it made such a great impact on Banjo that he felt his heart break. Here was a man — a strong, powerful man — who thought so much of Banjo’s regrets that he would feed on his tears. It should be horrendous, a concept so inhuman that it was monstrous, yet Banjo felt nothing but love.

He loved Monty Bright like a father.

Banjo smiled around the ball gag, tasting plastic. The drugs raced through him, changing him, making him malleable to the consciousness of this other.

Bright nodded, reached up, and removed the gag. “Are you ready to redeem yourself, to make sure that the rest of your life isn’t wasted?” Then, producing a small knife, he cut the plastic ties, freeing Banjo’s arms and legs.

“Yes,” said Banjo, still smiling, his voice raw in his dried-out throat. “Yes, I’m ready.” He rubbed his arms, trying to get the blood flowing. His legs felt like wooden stilts, stiff and unresponsive.

Bright took him by the hand — no man had ever done that before — and led him across the room, to the other door. Banjo’s legs grew stronger, the muscles remembering how to walk. Soon he was moving more easily, his body becoming more responsive and the drugs in his system flowing freely now that he was unbound.