Raucous (2 page)

Raucous focused, saw the glint of anger in Jim’s eyes.  He took it in and made it his own.

“We’re on three,” Raucous said, using the middle rope to gain his feet.

The Kid came charging and Raucous backed off, holding up his guard to protect his head from the flurry of shots. They came fast and from all angles.  Raucous hoped for a break.  And he got it.  The Kid lent too far, reaching on a punch and Raucous grabbed him up in a bear-hug.  The Kid slipped an arm around the right of Raucous, and applied pressure, bending the elbow the wrong way.  A bicep and pectoral beat down a tricep no matter how much you train.  The ligaments bent, Raucous felt pain shoot through to his neck. Raucous dropped his head onto The Kid’s temple, and sunk his teeth into The Kid’s neck.  And The Kid, as pretty as he looked, kept hold like the only thing that mattered was his need to break the arm.  Blood popped from the teeth marks going deeper.  Raucous released his bite, and the pain in his arm stopped as he fell again.

Jim started his count. 

“You getting up?” Jim asked after he had shouted four.

Raucous couldn’t focus, Jim’s face was a blurred 8-bit pixel image.

Raucous heard the numbers, but he couldn’t respond.  His voice had been knocked out.  He had shut down anything he didn’t need.  Conversational techniques were not essential now.  He rose.   He remembered.  The beating on the first anniversary of his incarceration.  The pipes they had hidden, the thick towels they folded to leave no bruises, as they beat him until he lay, breathing quietly, ready to give up, let it go, drift away and hope in reincarnation.  Come back a better man, someone who would stay clear. But he didn’t give up then, he wouldn’t now.

He planned then too, in the hospital wing.  He made it, three of them scarred for life, one blinded.  That became his specialty.  Take the eyes.  Ruin vision.  People care about what they see, and prisoners stopped seeing the young Raucous as bait. 

Raucous saw The Kid dancing, pirouetting to a laughing public.  They were laughing at him, at Raucous.  A faded star believing he had it in him still.  A joke of a man, back from oblivion to be broken down again.  Raucous scanned the room.  Slow motion movements of jeers and drinks from men grown too fat to be scary.  They laughed at him.  Raucous stood.  Jim held his gloves.

“You are fucked, and you aren’t quitting.  This is over.  Go out like you should.  Change your plan,” Jim said. "Find another way in.”

The bell rang to end the round, but as Jim started to lead Raucous to his corner The Turk barked for the fight to continue, and Jim backed off. 

The Kid rushed in as Raucous stood with his legs buckling and his guard down.  The Kid threw a right, straight and for the chin.  Raucous moved slightly, took the glance on his ear and hugged The Kid hard, picking him up and slamming him down on his back, Raucous fell too.  He used his shoulder to drive the air from The Kid’s lungs.  Raucous was on top, clamping moving limbs and wrestling for position.

The Kid’s gloved hands gave him no means to grip.  His close quarters punches stung, but were not strong enough to push Raucous away. Raucous chopped down with pointed elbows.  The Kid blocked most, but although his technique was superior, his size was small and even if he could make the leverage, he had no position or strength to move.

Raucous drove in elbow after elbow, and The Kids face started to cut and swell.  The Kid turned his head right, Raucous drove his elbow into The Kid’s temple and The Kid lost consciousness. But Raucous wouldn’t quit.  Raucous chopped, and Jim pulled him up.  Raucous turned and threw a right hook.  Jim was still good enough to move and let the punch graze.  Then Jim threw his own.  A short sharp dig to the liver, and Raucous dropped.  He looked up, saw Jim, saw the Turk at ringside.

“I know what you did, Jim,” Raucous said.  "Parker knows.  Remember that name, Jim?  Parker.  He knows it all.  Where’s the boy?  Where’s Christian?”

“You killed him,” Jim said.

CHAPTER TWO

Ben saw the kid, saw his expression and smile.  The flash of realization as to who Ben was.  Ben the target.  Ben knew that.  He didn’t hide, not any more.  He had Jean and Mitch to protect him. But he saw what they saw. He was a slouching Geoge McFly, comic books and Sci-Fi, technology and porn.  A hunched man-boy of no social skill on his way home from the seafront comic shop wrapped up warm against the winter ice.

A sea-side town of twenty thousand people, and always one teenage delinquent hanging out on streets in early December..

Ben recalled everything.  Thirty-five and still hiding from kids.  He could put every bully in chronological order.  Here was a new entry.

Ben didn’t break stride, a swerve wouldn’t help, a quick jog would be fatal. You running away?  Memory of events told him to keep his head down, keep constant pace and ignore.  Most got bored, and this one was alone.  It was groups, fuelling each other on an escalating dare of who could go furthest that caused most pain.  Singles used a few words, bored or wanting to test just how scary they could be.

They never did this with Jean.

This one was sixteen at most.  He was wiry and dressed up in clothes a TV executive would define as street-dealer number three.  In the age of globalization, a farm-boy from Bristol could wear the baggy jeans and Chicago Bulls without being ridiculed by peers.  But real courage meant following the true you, which is why, at thirty-five Ben followed weekly comic feasts and afternoons on the internet holed up in their luxury apartment, a cocoon of security, where they were only visited by the nurse.  He wanted to be there now.

The boy stepped into Ben’s path.

“Nice Comics,” he said.

Ben stopped.  He had nowhere to go.  Blocked in, face to face.  Memory told him walking around would result in physical contact, and his new twenty-seven pounds worth of comics on the floor. 

The phrase was false, a lie, probably a joke.  At first Ben had tried to describe their beauty, their subtlety, the intricacy of story design and message.  A genuine love for Japanese Manga that more often than not resulted in ripped pages, pushes and trampled covers.

“Expensive,” the boy said.

Money, the boy wanted money.  But Jean and Mitch had told him in their different ways to never hand over cash.  Never.

Ben paid once.  The next day Jean took it back by force.  He could do that again but it meant reading everything he had tonight.  When Jean showed up, knowing as she always knows about the cash he gave away, his collection was at risk.

But the boy would get hurt.  Ben would like that.  Jean would like that.

Jean had destroyed that time.  Three years of weekly collection in a metal bin with lighter fluid and fire.  She watched pages burn and float away because Ben would remember and see for himself. 

“Rich are we?” the boy asked.

The boy placed an arm around Ben’s shoulders.  Ben smelt tobacco: rolled, smoked and choked.  No alcohol, nothing clear.  But it was early.  The hug was tighter than a friend’s.

Ben stayed limp, and let the boy talk.  Jean, he thought, is going to hurt you.

“Sure you haven’t got a wallet there?  A bit of money?” The boy asked as he patted Ben’s pockets.

“No, I spent everything on these.”

“I could do with a smoke.  You don’t smoke?”

Jean allowed Ben three cigarettes a day.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Eat then smoke.  Long slow pulls on a German brand in a black box.  Jean and Mitch let him have that.  Nothing more.

“No, I don’t smoke,” Ben said.

“No cigs, no money.  What to do?”

Ben wanted to be like Jean sometimes. She would make fun of him for that thought.

The boy let Ben’s shoulders go.  “Tomorrow, eh?  We’ll see each other tomorrow.  Go to the shops together, right?”

Ben smiled.  He hoped the boy would show.  Tomorrow he would meet Jean.

CHAPTER THREE

She watched Jim get into his immaculate ten year old VW Golf and drive away.  She was five hundred meters distant and could see no details.  But she knew it was Jim, she had followed him, and his old stiffening gait.  The car she had watched hundreds of times.  Its straight edge shape seeming ancient against the rounded contours of the modern car.  Street lights provided illumination to the side street in which she stood.  She glanced into one of the front rooms, its veiled curtains not present.  An old couple watched TV, a soap opera about a false square in the centre of the city they lived.  Realistic, she thought, in that it depicted misery and depression and the need for everyone to cheer up through alcohol in the local pub.  She shook her head at a miserable old couple watching misery based on their existence.

Raucous had arrived unexpected, taken the difficult shot at getting back into the business he was destined to lead.  It had paid off and now Jim made his move to make sure at the very least that the start would roll forward without obstruction.  She tried to believe in her own strength, in her own ability to reach an end.

She would never see him again.  She was sure of that.  He would come back to the city, it was the place he had to be when it all came to an end.  This was his life, the place he never left.  She would never speak to him again, never have the opportunity to sit down and tell him what she needed to say.  He never gave that opportunity before, and he would not have time to change his ways.  She had rushed here when she heard of Raucous winning the fight.  She thought she would be too late, that Jim would have moved fast.  But he slept for a last time in the flat he had rented for sixteen years.  She watched him leave, watched him lock up, watched him take a final look.  She wanted him, if she were honest, to look at her.  But she had hidden as she always did when she wanted to see him.  She thought that he could sense her, that he would turn.  But he never did and now never would.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Hey, retard,” the teenager shouted.

Jean looked up, smiled and hunched forward without breaking her jog.  She was imitating Ben because that’s who he thought she was.                She was wearing Ben’s clothes, unwashed as they always were.  Sports clothes he used to sit around the flat.  She was finding it difficult to slouch.  She preferred standing straight.  She hated the bland unclean clothes.  No brand, originally grey.  Stained.  No style.  Rocky Balboa running Philadelphia steps.

The boy had brought three friends.  All teenagers, all in their uniform of sports casual. All with baseball caps.  One of them asked, “Is that the one, Jon-Jon?”

Nice to know your name, Jon-Jon, and yes, I most certainly am.

Jean analyzed what Ben had experienced with her own deductive sense.  Jon-Jon was a city boy moved to a seaside town.  The fact he was from London had meant the locals looked upon him as something hard.  He was wearing street gangster clothes from a ghetto where he had never been.  He had confused a winter-street in small-town England with a crack-den in 1980s Detroit.

Jean had heard them speak as she jogged along the pedestrian road from their apartment.  She hadn’t heard the other three exchange greetings, but she was guessing they were Azzers: Gazza, Wazza, Dazza or some variation on the Neanderthal theme. Skinny pale kids, acne not quite gone, with tracksuit bottoms, white socks and trainers.  A gangsters uniform bought by their parents from a high-street knock-off sports-store.  Jean smiled, knowing that they all had an England football top for every year of their lives, to go with the white baseball caps they wore to individualise themselves from the bare-headed masses. 

Jon-Jon needed to show his strength.  He wasn’t going up against one of his new friends, an attempt to take his place in the pecking order by force.  He wanted to expand their number, be one of them, be accepted.  He had, using the massive brain of a habitual school shit, created his own initiation ceremony. 

Jon-Jon had met Ben.  Ben had gone, today was Jean.

Jon watched Jean jog toward the apartment.  He pushed himself away from the wall and group with a push of his buttocks.

“You?  Again?  You got the money?,” Jon Jon asked.

Jon’s head twitched, a small shake as if his brain needed a quick clean.  He squinted, unsure of what he saw.

“I was hoping you would be around,” Jean said.  “Shall we talk about yesterday?  You weren’t so nice to my friend Ben.”

“What?”  Jon-Jon asked.

“The man you bullied yesterday.  That wasn’t nice.”

Jon-Jon shook his head like he had water in his ears.  He mouthed “what?”

“It was you,” he said.

“It was Ben.”

Jon-Jon tightened up, clenched muscles in his shoulders that needed to be loose.

Jon-Jon started to move closer.  He moved slow, but not natural.  He forced a limp into his stride like a TV gang punk.  She never understood this don’t fuck with me because I have gout mentality.  Just like a Michael Jackson music video where gangland Killers were portrayed as leather clad effeminate, stud-wearing queens who liked make-up in a never possible attempt to make MJ look bad  Jon-Jon, she was sure, was going to end up with a miss-spelt tattoo on his neck and a few home-made words like DAD in Gothic lettering on his forearm. 

She had every intention of beating the little fucker’s face about, because as much as she despised Ben and his sloth habits of doing fuck-all each day of his existence, he was part of her.  She figured the other three would bail as soon as Jon-Jon squealed, but kind of hoped they wouldn’t.

She had checked their stature and bulges.  They were all carrying knives, they all did nowadays, no straight-up, square-go fistfights, not that there had ever really been fair.  Knives now, glass before.  Chains, bars the lot.  Knives were in fashion.  But if you didn’t know how to use one, and the majority of the little pricks who had raided their Gran’s kitchen drawers for anything with a pointed blade, couldn’t even conceal the things let alone parry, slash and stab.

Jon-Jon moved his right hand toward his pocket.  He touched with the tips of his fingers like John Wayne about to draw.  It was still there.

In groups they were dangerous; alone they were half-starved, etch-a-sketch tattoo, pin-bags of blathering nonsense.  All sweary, potty mouthed, cowards with the occasional exception of a genuine head-case.  But these were easy to spot as they were invariably in prison.

Jon stepped forward, his right leg following as if from the hip down it was made entirely of solid teak.  Jean checked her step; she was getting too close too fast.  Jon-Jon opened his mouth as he blocked Jean’s path.  The word he attempted, a homophobic insinuation about where Jean likes to place her penis, was lost, just like the air in Jon-Jon’s lungs.  Jean struck the heel of her hand directly under the ribcage and into the solar-plexus.  And Jon-Jon dropped.

“Breathing will be painfully difficult for a while,” Jean said. But on a positive note it is impossible to suffer hiccups.”

  Jean, showing off, and attempting to goad the three boys into more fun physical stuff, cart-wheeled.

“Do we know each other,” she asked as she landed on her feet facing them.

The three boys looked at her, at each other and spoke no words.  They stared at Jean for ten seconds and moved into a line and walked away.  Jon-Jon tried to speak, but he found he couldn’t create sound without control of his lungs.