Thicker Than Water

I took my tin whistle out of the inside pocket of my coat, laid it down on the seat and walked away with my hands in my pockets.

I made a sortie to the dining car to buy a styrofoam container full of coffee-coloured beverage. Then instead of going back to my seat I loitered by the door in the little non-space between the carriages, leaning against the wall and looking out through the open window at the fields and trees strobing by. I had one hand on the window frame, the other holding my coffee cup.

After a few moments the door at my back hissed open. The ontologically challenged youth stepped through, the door sliding closed again behind him, and stood watching me, at the edge of my field of vision.

‘The whistle is your thing?’ the loup-garou snarled. His voice had a dry rasp to it, so loud that it sounded as though he had a skiffle board in his throat.

‘Yeah,’ I said, not looking round. ‘Music, generally, but the whistle’s the best medium I’ve found to work in. Key of D. I’m sure you understand.’

A half-second of silence, heavy with incomprehension.

‘Then why’d you leave it behind? You think I care two fucks about killing an unarmed man? Or was that your way of waving a little white flag?’

I gave him a look, keeping my expression more or less neutral. ‘Look,’ I said, mildly, ‘I’m off duty. Good news for both of us. Why don’t you buy yourself a few more beers, work on doing your liver a bit more damage, and at Lime Street we’ll wave each other goodbye? No harm, no foul. Sound good?’

The loup-garou stared at me. His lips peeled back from his teeth, which is never a good sign in a werewolf. I noticed that they consisted entirely of incisors.

‘You’re a toaster,’ he said, spitting out the word as if it was something unpleasant that he’d swallowed. I could have called that hate-speech, but exorcists coined the term themselves to describe their core business: ghost-toasting. Banishing the dead, with malice aforethought, whether they were threat or nuisance or just a drag on property values.

‘And you’re a fuckwit,’ I said, without heat. ‘Go and get drunk.’

‘I think I’d rather kill you,’ the loup-garou observed, leering. His face was flushed and his eyes, like animal eyes, had no whites. Part of that was just the animal and the human trying to reach a tense accommodation about what their shared body should look like, but I think he was substance-abusing too. I mean, besides the alcohol.

‘Have you done it before?’ I asked.

He laughed shortly — a single exhalation pushed out through his still-bared teeth. ‘Killed? Oh yeah.’

‘Taken on an exorcist,’ I said, with heavy emphasis. His face registered the word in a micro-momentary flicker of some emotion that I couldn’t quite pin down.

But he ignored the question, or at least fended it off by throwing one of his own. ‘You got any money?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ I pretended to take a sip of the coffee.

‘You pay me — a hundred, or a couple of hundred — maybe I’ll let you live.’

I sighed and shook my head. ‘You died young,’ I said, trying one last time. ‘The first time around, I mean. Probably because you got yourself into some stupid pissing contest like this one. Learn from your mistakes, eh? Let it lie in the long grass for once, and see if there’s another way besides the hard way.’

The loup-garou’s fingers were curved like claws now — and actual claws had slid into view at the tips of them. He took a step back, presumably because whatever animal his flesh had originally belonged to liked to go for the run-and-jump approach, and a train carriage barely gave him room for it.

I dumped the coffee in his face. I’d asked to have it scalding hot, and I’d made the girl at the counter in the dining car put it back in the microwave twice, until it was almost too hot to hold even through the styrofoam and the cardboard sleeve. This was why I’d only pantomimed drinking it earlier on: it was for offensive use only.

The loup-garou gave a gargling scream, ducking and covering reflexively even though it was too late. He must have been in agony, the near-boiling liquid blinding him and filling his exquisite senses with the roaring static of pain. I knew exactly how he felt, but it didn’t affect my game plan.

I let go of the door, which I’d already unlocked and was only holding closed with my free hand. As it swung open in the train’s slipstream, slamming against the flank-wall of the carriage, I kicked the loup- garou in the place where nothing male, whether living or undead or anywhere in between, likes to be kicked. Then I grabbed him by the shoulders, two-handed, and pitched him forward. A hooked foot in front of his made sure that he kept right on going, falling head over heels out into the rushing noise and the world we were leaving endlessly behind us.

It was over inside of five seconds. It had to be, because if I’d let him get those claws into play even once, this would have been my arterial swansong. Leaning out precariously I caught the window frame again and pulled the door closed, just as the connecting door to the carriage swung open and the Asian woman with the laptop poked her head out.

She stared at me in some surprise. ‘I heard a noise,’ she said, without much conviction.

I pointed to the door. ‘It wasn’t locked properly,’ I said. ‘It swung open, but I managed to get it closed again.’

She hesitated for a barely perceptible moment, perhaps noting my flushed face and trembling hands — or perhaps just seeing the spilled coffee on the floor. But she nodded and withdrew at last, if not satisfied then at least not wanting to make an issue of it. I waited a few moments, until my hammering heartbeat had returned almost to normal, and then went back to my seat.

The rest of the journey was without incident. I couldn’t shake off a sombre mood, though. I was thinking about kids: about Mark Seddon, and about Bic. Even about the cocky little bastard I’d just tangled with. I hadn’t picked the fight; and once I was in it, I’d won it in the only way I could think of. And he might even have survived, because loup-garous are as tough as weeds. If not, his spirit could find another animal host and start the make-over process all over again in its own sweet time.

I still felt like I’d just pulled a switchblade on a puppy dog. But then again, I hadn’t had the option of a rolled-up newspaper.

Pulling into Lime Street for the first time in so long gave me a peculiar kind of double vision.

Three years. Not so very long, really, if you count it in calendar terms: but in terms of what I’d lived through since, it was about two ice ages ago. The last time I’d walked out through those oversized doors and got the Mersey’s gusty, vinegary breath full in my face, it had been before Juliet. Before Rafi, even. Back when banishing the dead for fun and profit had seemed like a reasonable way of making a living.

Coming north had taken me a piddling two hundred miles closer to the Arctic circle, but the afternoon air had a slight chill in it all the same. A green double-decker in the livery of the MPTE rolled past me, and as I crossed the road I glimpsed first the tower of the Playhouse rising above Forster Square and then, off to the right, the heroic frontage of St George’s Hall. Amidst the welter of new roads and shitty poured-concrete frontages, they were like old friends standing on the fringes of a party where they didn’t know anybody.

I waited at the bus stop, out of sheer force of habit, for the number 93. I could have grabbed a cab, but I’d always gone in and out of town by bus. Neither of my parents had ever driven, and I hadn’t even taken lessons myself until I’d moved down to the Smoke.

I checked my itinerary off in my mind. I was looking for Anita, first and foremost: notwithstanding my own bad example, those born and bred in Liverpool 9 have a strong homing instinct, and this was my best guess as to where she would have come after life with Kenny lost its lustre. I was thinking that I’d shake down her brother Richard — Dick-Breath — and see if he knew where I could find her. If not, I’d get what I could by putting my questions to him instead.

I was also thinking of talking to some of the other Seddons if any of them had hung around in Walton. Kenny’s brothers Ronnie and Steven might know something about Kenny’s state of mind in recent weeks, and it was always possible he could have let something slip in a phone call or an e-mail.

Two women talking behind me in the queue disrupted my thoughts. After so long an absence, it was impossible not to tune in to the nasal poetry of Scouse.

‘He loves the bones of her, he does.’

‘Oh, aye. You’ve only got to look, haven’t you?’