1974

Two more dark newsprint eyes, Shaw not smiling, looking already dead.

Oh fucking boy.

“The Great British Public get the kind of truth they deserve.”

And I’d got mine.

I put down the paper and closed my eyes.

I saw them at their typewriters, Jack and George, stinking of Scotch, knowing their secrets, telling their lies.

I saw Hadden, reading their lies, knowing their secrets, pouring their Scotch.

I wanted to sleep for a thousand years, to wake up when their like were gone, when I didn’t have their dirty black ink on my fingers, in my blood.

But the fucking house wouldn’t let me be, the typewriter keys mixing with that faint drumming noise, chattering in my ears, deafening my skull and bones.

I opened my eyes. On the sofa next to me were huge rolled-up papers, architect’s plans.

I laid one out across the glass coffee table, over Paula and Shaw.

It was for a shopping centre, The Swan Centre.

To be built at the Hunslet and Beeston exit of the M1.

I closed my eyes again, my little gypsy girl standing in her ring of fire.

“Because of the fucking money.”

The Swan Centre:

Shaw, Dawson, Foster.

The Box Brothers wanting in.

Foster fucking with the Boxes.

Shaw and Dawson putting their various pleasures before business.

Foster as Ringmaster, trying to keep the fucking circus on the road.

Everybody out of their league, their tree, whatever.

Everybody fucked.

“Because of the fucking money.”

I stood up and walked out of the living room, into a cold and light expensive kitchen.

A tap was running into an empty stainless steel sink. I turned it off.

I could still hear the drumming.

There was a door to the back garden and another to the garage.

The drumming was coming from behind the second door.

I tried to open the door but it wouldn’t.

From under the door I saw four slight trickles of water.

I tried the door again and it still wouldn’t open.

I flew out the back door and ran round to the front of the house.

There were no windows built into the garage.

I tried to open the double garage doors but they wouldn’t.

I went back inside through the front door.

A ring of keys was hanging by another from inside the keyhole.

I took the keys back into the kitchen and the drumming.

I tried the biggest, the smallest, and another.

The lock turned.

I opened the door and swallowed exhaust fumes.

Fuck.

A Jaguar, engine running, sat alone in the dark on the far side of the double garage.

Fuck.

I grabbed a kitchen chair and wedged the door open, kicking away a pile of damp tea-towels.

I ran across the garage, the light from the kitchen shining on two people in the front seat and a hosepipe running from the exhaust into a back window.

The car radio was on loud, Elton belting out Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

I ripped the hose and more wet towels out of the exhaust pipe and tried the driver’s door.

Locked.

I ran round to the passenger door, opened it and caught a lung full of carbon monoxide and Mrs Marjorie Dawson, still looking like my mother, a bloody crimson freezer bag wrapped round her head, as she fell into my knees.

I tried to push her back upright, leaning across the body to turn off the ignition.

John Dawson was slumped against the steering wheel, another freezer bag over his head, his hands bound before him.

“Here we go again. Reckless talk costs lives.”

They were both blue and dead.

Fuck.

I switched off the ignition and Elton and sat back on the garage floor, bringing Mrs Dawson with me, her head in the bag in my lap, the two of us staring up at her husband.

The architect.

John Dawson, at last and too late, a face in a plastic freezer bag.

John bloody Dawson, ever the ghost and now for real, a ghost in a plastic freezer bag.

John fucking Dawson, just his works remaining, looming and haunting, leaving me as robbed and fucked as the rest of them; robbed of the chance to ever know and fucked of the hope it might bring, sat there before him with his wife in my arms, desperate to raise the dead for just one second, desperate to raise the dead for just one word.

Silence.

I raised Mrs Dawson as gently as I could back into the Jaguar, propping her up against her husband, their freezer bag heads slumped together in more, more, fucking silence.

Fuck.

“Reckless talk costs lives.”

I took out my dirty grey handkerchief and started the dusting.

Five minutes later I closed the door to the kitchen and went back into the house.

I sat down on the sofa next to their plans, their schemes, their fucked-up dreams, and thought of my own, the shotgun in my lap.

The house was quiet.

Silent.

I stood up and walked out of the front door of Shangrila.

I drove back to the Redbeck, the radio off, the wipers squeaking like rats in the dark.

I parked in a puddle and took the black bin-bag from the boot. I limped across the car park, every limb stiff from my time underground.

I opened the door and went in out of the rain.

Room 27 was cold and no home, Sergeant Fraser long gone.

I sat on the floor with the lights off, listening to the lorries come and go, thinking of Paula and barefoot dances to Top of the Pops just days ago, from another age.

I thought of BJ and Jimmy Ashworth, of teenage boys crouched in the giant wardrobes of damp rooms.

I thought of the Myshkins and the Marshes, the Dawsons and the Shaws, the Fosters and the Boxes, of their lives and of their crimes.

Then I thought of men underground, of the children they stole, and of the mothers they left.

And, when I could cry no more, I thought of my own mother and I stood up.

The yellows of the lobby were brighter than ever, the stink stronger.

I picked up the receiver, dialled, and put the coin to the slot.