Strip the Willow (24 page)

– I’ve no idea, said Guy to his lapel.

– I’m going to shoot!

– You can’t shoot, we’re on world TV.

– Guy, I’ll shoot—!

– Great, said Alison, as a second, third and fourth bird plunged home, leaving Pushees squirming behind each other, pierced in their punctured cell.

– Go down and check it out pronto, said Guy. I’m calling for horses and Tasers. TV will work flat-out to edit—

– TV will love this, thought Alison as she came off the balcony, totally love it.

And banged straight into Lucy arriving.

Peem was surprised to find, as he reached the top of the Shiprow, knots of police unravelling in four directions, crossing each other. They were jabbering about AllMart, Safesburg, Bestco. Some booze heist was on. Dozens of police went hurrying off to the city fringes to protect the super and the hypermarkets.

Cheers!
thought Peem. He toasted his masked acquaintances of the day before. He imagined shop floors flooding, the expensive fumes rising.

Plenty commotion now as he came full out on the Plainstanes and smelled chestnuts, the same savour that was wafting in Oriente the day before, on their way home.

Folk were pressing all round him for a better view of the
shambles
developing. Few had patience to queue for chestnuts.

There was a tallish guy, he stood behind him.

– Fit the
fuck
ye daein here—?

– Alison, Alison love, said Lucy. I’m over all that, I’ve gone beyond.

– Fit! Ower aa fit? screamed Alison. We havena even startit yet, fuckin mither!

Bing Qing looked across her spring roll and salad table, and felt quite sad.

None of this was according to script, the Leopard knew. So the Leopard decided he would act. Nobody had a better view. If Guy, that pervert, was determined to frustrate him, he would take Guy out; these birds could not be allowed to foul things up.

– Tricksters, infiltrators, these birds are shits! he screamed. Where are the tanks, when you’ve paid good money for them?

Nobody reminded him he paid no tax. The Principal Taster, a taxpayer, kept his head down and left the room, without even asking. He was the last to go.

Even from on high, with the best of scopes, from his slit window, the Leopard could not zero in on Guy’s head, because of all the flap around him. He focussed, piece by piece, on the chaos below, without comprehending.

Burst balls, or balls where the flesh was huddled in bloody fear, were becoming impossible to push, so lumpen. A few, far too few, police were deploying, trying to tackle stilted birds round their non-existent knees. Some were successful with their Tasers, and got showered in feathers, and one got skewered too.

The mounties arrived. The mounties did what they did best, they multiplied the panic. You needed no great insight to realise that a steel-shod stallion and a Montenegran handball player would not be evenly matched.

The balconies went rogue too. There would be no
cobble-throwing
,
this was no Paris. The street had been torn up months ago, to make way for pavementette. Instead they were lobbing lumps and blobs of complimentary icecream. Hint of Mint and Hint of Mango and Hint of Pistachio were running off the flanks of horses, down sponsors’ bibs, smearing the membrane of the balls, and further stickying the bloody bills of attack storks and kamikaze flamingoes.

The fact of panic was bad enough. The result was worse, for The Leopard.

Not a single LottoBall had yet reached its allotted destination. His world was on hold, the world itself on a massive loser. He stopped the pavementette with his remote. He reversed its
direction
, to give any surviving balls a sporting chance of reaching the Hole. A heaving mass of débris, squashed horseshit and bright detritus began to move forward, into the world’s view.

A hundred yards away or less, the Leopard saw a face laugh up at him, laugh directly at him, throwing his head back to give one big guffaw. That man had a half-mask on earlier, a scarf, he’d noted that, but the mask had slipped.

A sneering ringleader if ever he saw one.

Rookie Marr swung and drew a bead with the SAD 3 on the
ringleader
, the forehead. He steadied, and let rip.

– Total cunt, said Alison. Ye kent aa alang ye were ma mither.

– What! What? What you on?

– Aa these years, aa these years. Fit did ye dae, sell me aff, or rent me oot? Yir ain dochter, ye absolute cunt!

– What! said Lucy. Where you getting all this?

– Oh, there’s sicna thing as DNA. There’s sicna thing as A&E, div ye nae mind? Yir bleed, ma bleed – the same bloody bleed! They askit if I kent aboot a
coincidence. Come and see what we found,
they said.
Coincidence,
by fuck! Div ye nae mind, mither—?

Lucy was groping for a chair when Bing Qing slid one in below her.

– I’m saying it, listen, listen, écoutes! said Amande. He is— Help him, he’s Andy.

Peem sank to his haunches and began panting. The body had struck across him as it fell; the blood was on him.

– What, what—?

He could hardly hear himself speak for all the commotion in the street.

– Shut up, everybody! he screamed. Just shurrup! What did you say?

– I know you, Peem, said Amande. Oh, so awful. Terrible, terrible.

It was the accents, still strong, that brought him to his senses.

– It is your own father, loon, said Ludwig. Oh, loon, it is Andy there.

– Da, said Peem, as hoarse as anything.

– Speak to him, said Amande. He’s listening for you.

Peem knelt to whisper in his father’s lug.

– Na, na, Da, na – Da, ye canna go, I luve ye. Dad—

– He can nicht mehr, said Ludwig.

He couldna see for the weet in his een for lang eneuch.

When he saa, he saa there was a sma, sma merk, aboot the bigness o an auld farthin, drillit in ees faither’s broo. The aft side o his heid wis smush.

– Has naebuddy gotten a tissue, naeboddy gotten a tissue handy? he said, tendin.

It wasna a tissue they brocht in the end. He liftit and laid his faither’s heid on a foldit coat that somebody brung and offert.

Hunkered doon, he strokit his faither’s chowk till it lossit the warmth that had aye been there, an startit tae grow cauld.

Bye an bye he spread anither gift o a jeckit ower the strange, estranged, auld familiar face.

Bye an bye he stude up.

An there wis Amande staundin aside him, weel on in years, a bonny time tae be meetin her. She needit every last tissue tae hersel. Trusty auld Ludwig wis in aboot as weel, wi a gey shak o ees heid. His ayebidin, communistic heid. Nae folk tae greet that muckle, Ludwig and Amande, in the usual wey o things. But greetin noo.

An here wis an angert young chiel he didna ken, ees finger
poke-pokin
at North Turret, ettlin tae tell him somethin—

– Fae up abeen cam the shot. I saa the glint. It cam fae up there.

Rookie Marr guessed the line of the shot would be traced and there might be a question or two, so, hoping to publicly shepherd a few surviving GrottoLotto balls into the Hole or Grotto, he made his way down.

The Leopard left the building, not by the front door, but through the bowels. Having passed, smoother than peristalsis, down the stainless steel oesophagus of his private lift, he was handed in by a guard to a silver capsule, and slung through a new-tiled tunnel on monorail.

Dismounting the Leopmobile, Rookie Marr took three steps and attained his underground throne. Luna he left behind in her plasma zone.

He beckoned for the cup of
Bon Accord
he had been gifted. He would have the best view possible of the giant balls, as they dropped like fate into the crevasse and funnelled into their final placings.

The first three now struggled to the lip, and toppled in short order, jolting and juddering their cargo, the beautiful, bruised Pushees. It was Tosh, Ciel and UCKU, smeared and asymmetric. They had to snip with giant snips from lid-hole to lid-hole to free the Pushees lumped within.

Three balls only.

Every ball else had slid backwards and forwards to no effect – going nowhere on a pavementette slick with sweat, blood, and free ice-cream.

The Leopard waited. No more balls hove into view. So it looked like no gold bonanza from GrottoLotto for a global winner anywhere tonight. Just a trickledown of tinsel in prospect now.

Then the Leopard heard and felt the beginnings of a rumble, not just a rumble, something seismic—

He looked up from the Hole, and, from the comfort of his trap, stared up towards the surface for what might soon befall. He could see one building, a bank, with four vibrating pillars. He feared them. He saw a blue-cloaked statue, high on the shuddering architrave of the same building. He thought it was Britannia, a horn of victory under her arm. In one corner of his stunned eye, service staff and Pushees were fleeing up a stair.

It wasn’t Britannia, it was Ceres. She clasped no horn of imperial victory, but a tipping, low-slung, cornucopia. From Rookie’s angle he couldn’t see the round-cheeked apples, stopped by art in
mid-roll
, and the other bulges of spilling goodness.

The rumble gripped the city deeper, and shook him in his crevasse.

From quite another angle or airt, from deeper-down, from the new oil harbour, rolling not on spheres but on wheels, had begun to throb a score of dark pantechnicons. They had no carnivalia nor masks, neither costumed driver nor painted number. Even where
Leiper Lorries
would normally be illumined, above the cab, they were, for tonight, specially dark. No-one could tell whether they were the lorries from hell or had any sponsors.

Bumper-to-bumper, on double axles, trailing lines of fluid as they climbed, on came the twelve-wheelers. Along Market Street, Virginia
Street, the continuation of Commerce Street, then sharp first left up Justice Street, Leiper’s lorries came. There were barriers, cullises, all along the route. The lorries broke through them like lollipop sticks. At Virginia Street, the road patrol radioed Command in North Turret, but only a strange girl answered. At Commerce Street a team of police tried to deploy a Viper, an arthritic, steel, cross-road snake, mediaeval with spikes. It was soon as flat as a strip of tin.

On the wide roundabout, saucer-eyed guards looked up at the
darkened
, remorseless cabs, and wisely forgot to draw their pistols.

Peem hugged Amande and Ludwig both, a good long hug, and was off, blundering.

He was spraying
sorry, sorry,
and
I’m affa sorry
as people parted in front of him, they must know what he was about, he was taking on their burden at last, they need not doubt it. He would get whoever or whatever was in North Turret, if he did nothing else.

There was heavy revving, arriving, leaving, all round him. Smells assaulted his nose, slitherings assailed his shins.

For centuries there been fish-hawkers there in the Castlegate, each ekeing a living from a wicker creel on a bent, unmendable back.

Now it had come to this. A pure mass of fish was piling around Rookie’s crevasse – unstable, toppling, and sliding in. A score and more of lorries were opening their doors remotely, and pulling away in low gear, to let the herring outspew. Spermy had vowed, since he got the news,
Tae gie The Leopard his due. I’ll bury that bastard.
Cascades of carcases, a heavy chute, a great rasp of scales, came silvering out of each Leiper lorry and into the Leopardeen night.

He was in an agility of fish. The first downsweep carried him into a hall already combed with waves of buckling, bucking, bright,
mortified
herring. As he felt his wellies slotting full, he flicked and kicked
them off. Just as the second wellington loosened, another massive wave of dead fish poured in.

Whummled, bouleversé, nigh-on kaput, he tried to swim upwards, with the spading hands and frogging legs of consummate panic.

He gasped up clear. He was six feet away from two beady eyes. There was nothing liquid in a beady eye, nothing to melt, or be receptive. The two beads made a triangle inverted on the business end of a small black pistol. Much of the rest of Rookie Marr was concealed. Because, pinned against the back of his throne, he was up to his neck.

Maybe it was the intonation, probably just the words—

– Save me, said Rookie Marr, or I’ll shoot.

Peem stared back at him, offering nothing, perfecting the while the steadiness of his breast-stroke.

– So that’s what you killed him with?

– No.

– The man you shot was my father.

– Been here, said Marr. Down here. All the time.

– Who was up in the Turret, then?

– Nobody. The others.

Peem put in a couple of amphibious leg thrusts. Now he was three feet away.

– You, he said. You have no
others
. If truth be told, you’ve none of those.

Dead herring rippled past, just under Rookie’s lower lip.

– A million, he said, I’ll give you a million.

– Two, said Peem.

– Two, said Marr.

– A hundred, said Peem. A hundred million.

– I’ll give you a hundred, said Marr.