‘I’m–’ he began. ‘I’m — not — where am I? Who are you? You keep the fuck away from me or I’ll lamp you. What did you do to me?’
‘I stopped you from jumping,’ I said. It sounds a little brutal, put like that, but I’d just realised why Bic had looked at his hands — and where the muffled reports were coming from. He was bleeding: thick, sluggish liquid pooling in each palm, looking pure black in the leprous moonlight, before it overflowed and spattered down onto the concrete like oil from a leaky carburettor.
‘No way,’ Bic said, without conviction. ‘No — no way.’
I got to my feet and walked across to where he sat, his back against the parapet and his frightened eyes raised to stare into mine. I took hold of his hand and turned it so I could see the wrist. It was unmarked: no wounds there, old or new. The blood was welling up from the centre of each palm, and it was falling like sticky red rain. He still had the bandages wrapped around his hands but they were already saturated, not even slowing the flow now.
I unwrapped the bandage, since it was doing no good in any case. I figured that if I saw the wound I could maybe decide what ought to be done before the kid passed out from loss of blood. But mainly I was acting on instinct: the prickling in my own palms was a lot stronger now, as though I was holding a mobile phone, set to vibrate, in each hand.
There was no wound in Bic’s hand: there was just blood, welling up from under the skin of his palm and wrist and fingers like water soaking and spreading through the fibres of a paper towel. I saw this in a split second, in the light from the lamp directly overhead: then he snatched his hand away and scrambled back from me, glaring.
I swallowed hard, because the sight of the non-wound had shaken me. ‘How long has this been going on?’ I asked Bic, as gently as I could. He didn’t answer.
‘I’m going home,’ he muttered, looking away along the walkway. But he didn’t move, and actually he was looking in the wrong direction. Weston Block was behind us.
‘That sounds like a good idea,’ I said. ‘It’s right here. Come on.’
‘Okay,’ Bic said automatically. He was still looking off in the same direction. I followed his gaze and saw a group of people walking towards us, just coming out from under the shadow of the next tower along.
There were seven or eight of them: still kids, technically, but a lot older and a lot bigger than Bic. Old enough to think of themselves as men. They were walking in a ragged line, spread out across the full width of the walkway. The one at front and centre was almost as skinny as Bic, but he was bracketed between two serious bruisers who might as well have had lapel badges reading ENFORCER. The rest of the gang kept a pace or two behind these three as they marched, knowing their place: it seemed like not much had changed since the days when I ran with the Arthur Street posse. Maybe some things never do.
‘What are
‘I’ve fucking told you!’ the bigger kid said severely. ‘You don’t go out after it gets dark. Why the fuck can you never do what you’re told?’
So this was Mrs Daniels’s other son: her John, whom she’d described as an IOU. He reminded me more of one of the small bomblets from a cluster munition: they’re both promises, I suppose, but one’s more likely to be kept than the other.
He turned his attention back to me again, and we played at staring each other out. He was dressed in a Ben Sherman I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-leather jacket, black jeans and the obligatory DMs, and his fists were clenching and unclenching as though he was itching to take a swing at me. His eyes didn’t track together, which I took to be a bad sign. Whatever he was on, if it was taking nibbles out of his nervous system it was bound to be having an effect on his mood, too.
‘Was this fucker copping a feel or something?’ he demanded.
Bic shook his head emphatically, either in disagreement or just to clear it. ‘I was falling, Johnno,’ he said, ‘over–’ He finished the sentence with a graphic gesture, pointing out past the parapet wall. ‘He grabbed hold of me. Pulled me back. I think I was — walking in my sleep or something.’
‘In your sleep?’ The alpha puppy — Johnno — repeated, incredulous.
‘Yeah.’
The answer didn’t seem to satisfy anyone. One of the rank-and-filers pulled Bic away out of the line of fire as the others closed in on me, following their leader. There was something wrong with all their eyes, now that I was looking for it: they were too wide, and when the light from the lamp caught their faces at the right angle I could see that their pupils were hugely dilated. Methamphetamine? Special K? Or maybe they were just high on life.
That momentary lapse of attention took me past the point where I could have made a run for it. The gang had me enclosed in a hollow semicircle now, and a metallic
‘What are you doing on my soil, you fucking queer?’ Johnno demanded, but his voice was dreamy rather than aggressive.
‘This?’ I said, making a circular gesture with my raised index finger. ‘This is your soil?’
‘That’s right.’ Johnno nodded twice, slowly, almost like a genuflection.
‘How far?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘How far is it yours? I mean, where does your soil begin and end?’
Johnno raised his hand, letting me see the knife for the first time. The blade was long and slender, barely tapering at all towards the point because it was more or less an ice-pick to begin with. He tapped the point of it against my chin.
‘I own the fucking blocks.’
‘All of them?’ I asked.
‘Johnno!’ Bic’s voice, calling from the distant outskirts, where he was invisible behind the wall of his elders and biggers. ‘He didn’t touch me.’
‘Shut up, Bic. Yeah. All of them.’
‘So you’d be the one to ask about anything that was going down here?’
The briefest of pauses. ‘You don’t ask anything, cunt,’ Johnno said, and again his mild tone was at odds with the words. ‘I ask, and you answer. You sneak around here in the middle of the night. Touch up my fucking brother–’
He shoved me in the chest with his free hand to emphasise how pissed off this made him. My back was already to the parapet, so there was nowhere to go but down. Pity. Down was the one place where I was determined not to go.
I tried one last time. ‘I was looking for some information, ’ I said. ‘But if you’d rather I came back another time . . .’
Johnno laughed softly and suggestively. ‘Come back when they take the fucking stitches out,’ he suggested, and his hand drew back. In the gap between conception and execution I brought my head forward and nutted him on the bridge of the nose with all the force I could bring to it.
The decapitation technique is meant to work well in a dictatorship, where a lack of orders from the top can paralyse a political or military organisation not used to acting on its own initiative. But the rules for a rumble are simple, and these boys had clearly been in a few. They were on me in a second, the lad on my left grabbing me around the throat and the one on my right landing a hard punch on my chin before Johnno had even finished falling to the ground. I got in a couple more punches myself, but it was anybody’s guess where they landed. Then the sheer press of bodies made it impossible for me to do anything at all. My arms were caught and pinned: two fists gripped my hair and forced my head back.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Johnno climb to his feet, the lower half of his face masked in blood, like a red bandanna. He stared at me with impossibly wide eyes. At the same time, not breaking that gaze for a moment, he held out his hands, palms up. Someone put a knife into each of them. Oh great. I was about to be carved up by
