The Blueprint (25 page)

‘Charlie’s
being a dick,’ he says, firmly and loudly, as though he’d been
rehearsing this for some time, trying to pluck up the courage to
say it.

‘How so?’ I
reply, the calm façade back across my brow. Johnny directs his
answer at Charlie himself, though Charlie appears not to
notice.

‘I mean, how
hard is it to walk outside if you want to have a cigarette?’ he
asks.

‘What does it
matter?’ Charlie replies, in a dull, vacant kind of voice. He
continues to look off into the distance.

‘It matters
because it makes the house stink! Because it makes the fire alarm
go off! Come on, Freddy, back me up here! Because it shows that he
doesn’t give the slightest shit about any of the rest of us!’

At these
words, Charlie smiles. A vein is popping in Freddy’s forehead, but
he remains stubbornly silent.

‘You don’t
show any consideration to me, making me stand outside to have a
fag,’ he replies. ‘It’s cold out there.’ It’s clear that he doesn’t
want a rational debate; he just wants to poke at Johnny’s temper
with a stick.

‘Don’t fucking
smoke, then! It’s not hard!’

‘We just
happen to live in a time where it’s fashionable to be offended by
smoking,’ Charlie replies. There’s nothing dancing in his eyes.
‘The fire alarm can be unplugged, and no-one found the smell
unattractive fifty years ago, just like how no-one found the smell
of sweat obtrusive until some cunt started marketing
deodorant...’

‘So that’s why
you never fucking shower,’ Johnny interjects with a relish that
I’ve never heard in his voice before.

‘My nihilism
has its limits, Johnny,’ Charlie recites airily. His soul seems to
have escaped out of a side door, leaving just a sequence of voice
recordings behind. ‘But that isn’t one of them.’

‘You’re not a
nihilist, Charlie,’ Johnny replies. ‘You’re just an arsehole.’

‘Maybe so,’
Charlie mutters, thoughtfully. He turns to me, and suddenly we’re
the only two people in the room. ‘Do you want to know a terrifying
thought?’ he asks. ‘What if turns out that God not only exists, but
that he was right all along?’

I smile,
mostly to myself. I half understand what he’s talking about. Even
that much has to provide the grounds to have me sectioned. ‘What if
the sun really goes around the earth, but they knew we’d never
bother to check?’ I reply.

Charlie looks
back at me for a few moments like a puppy trying to work out a
sleight-of-hand, then he nods in a way that could be described as
enlightened were it not for the thick veins of drunken
self-loathing branching through it. ‘What does that make us?’ he
asks the air. ‘Stuck choosing between being arseholes and being
slaves?’

He goes quiet
for a moment, then he mutters:

‘Fuckin’
organic tomatoes. Jesus.’

At this point
Johnny sees fit to pipe back up:

‘What the fuck
are you two talking about?’

‘I lost track
somewhere around “organic tomatoes”,’ I shrug.

‘Right.’
Johnny’s pupils flick momentarily to the rucksack in the corner. As
far as I’m concerned, Charlie can play Dostoyevsky fan-fiction
around Johnny as much as he wants, as long as there’s no evidence
lying around for the latter’s suspicions to lead him to. It’s for
this reason that I suggest we all go up to bed and discuss it
tomorrow, when Johnny’s calmed down and Charlie has lost interest
in horticulture – and when the bag, along with its contents, is
safely out of the house. Murmurs of dissent arise from either side
of the sofa, what with it being only ten o’clock, so I shoot Freddy
a significant glance – one which I’m sure Johnny picks up on – and
he stands up and announces that this is a very good idea. Johnny
picks up on Freddy’s strange tone, as well, and as he files out his
gaze locks on to the incriminating backpack. I’ve seen him hold Liz
with a similar gaze numerous times before.

Four hours later, I’m
sitting in the same armchair I was sitting in, watching the same
film I was watching when Charlie first set this ball rolling, weeks
and weeks ago. The TV is blasting light and colour into the room,
but the volume is so low that it might as well be on mute.

I check the
time. It’s still too early to go and wake the other two. I remind
myself to ask Freddy for one of the plastic storage crates he uses
to ferry his books home for the holidays. Now we’ll be keeping our
secret in it.

A stair
creaks. Reflexively my hand goes to the ‘off’ button on the TV
remote, and the room goes dark. The door handle squeaks, and a
figure shuffles into the room. Suddenly the shuffling stops. My
eyes haven’t had time to adjust to the darkness yet, but I can
still feel him looking at me.

‘Go back to
bed, Johnny,’ I intone. For ten seconds or so, he doesn’t move; I
imagine him glancing back and forth between me and the bag,
wondering if he should grab it and run, knowing that his looking
inside is an act that, once done, can’t be undone.

The handle
squeaks as he shuts the door behind him. The same stair squeaks
under his foot on the way back up.

Thankfully for the
burgeoning length of this chapter, we didn’t have any unscheduled
encounters on our way to the moor. The lack of encounters is also
handy because the cover story we came up with for any policemen we
met on the way – that we were carrying equipment home after a
session of circuit training, after midnight, in jeans – was so
hideously unbelievable. A less favourable circumstance, however, is
that if we aren’t the types to have a pair of jogging bottoms spare
to shore up our alibi, we’re hardly the types to have a shovel
knocking about on the off-chance that we need to bury a chest full
of evidence. To make things worse, this is December, in the north
of England, so the only things stiffer than the ground are my
nipples. The plastic crate which me and Freddy are carrying between
us – Charlie is walking on ahead – contains a wide variety of
kitchenware, with which we hope to pierce the Geordie permafrost
and dig a grave for all the cash, clothing and weaponry that
represents our crime.

‘What do you
think’s up with him?’ I ask Freddy as we’re climbing up the grassy
hill towards the cover of the woods. The words come out as fog. Out
of reach of the streetlamps, I can barely make out Charlie’s figure
up ahead.

‘Probably got
high to take his mind off things,’ Freddy replies. ‘He’ll be fine
tomorrow.’

‘You know
something weird?’ I say. ‘It’s much less worrying to hear you say
the dumb things you actually believe than the sensible things you
don’t.’

‘What dumb
things do I believe?’ Freddy hits back, with a sudden spark of
anger.

‘How about the
part where you’re going to the Middle East to start revolutions?
That was pretty dumb. Also, while I’m at it, kind-of racist.’

‘That’s not a
belief; that was just a plan,’ he explains, drawing himself up to
full height. ‘We’ve all had our share of stupid plans lately. The
only difference is that I didn’t put mine into action.’

I aim my snort
of laughter upwards at him.

‘You put that
plan into action every bit as much as the rest of us did.’

‘I was just
saying, it wasn’t my plan,’ Freddy shrugs.

‘So that makes
you innocent? No one put a fucking gun to your head; you put a gun
to other peoples’ heads, remember?’

‘I didn’t pull
the trigger, though.’

I could tell
him that the blonde girl walked out of the front door without a
scratch on her, but my neck is beginning to ache from pointing my
face up to meet the condescending bastard.

‘We’re all
arseholes; how’s that for a compromise?’ says Charlie, suddenly
appearing out of the fog. He’s wearing a smile, and his arms are
stretched wide in a parody of embrace. ‘You’re not a racist,
though,’ he adds, kindly, to Freddy.

‘Well thanks a
fucking lot,’ he mutters, back, sarcastically.

‘But you
are
an arsehole,’ Charlie reiterates, sounding positively
gleeful about it, ‘and a hypocrite, and a murderer, and, if not
exactly stupid, then, at the very least, more forgetful than all
those quotations on your on Twitter feed would have us believe.
Remind me: How was it that I managed to con you into taking part in
this stupid escapade? Because I’m pretty sure it was just by
repeating back to you some of the things you claim to believe. What
were they, again? The things you believe?’

‘That we’re
better governed by ideas than laws, and that the idea of ownership
necessarily leads to exploitation,’ Freddy retorts. His eyebrows
are knit defiantly, but the words come out as though he’s reading
from a manifesto. Which I suppose he probably is, albeit one
scrawled into the back of a schoolbook.

‘Look where
our ideas got us,’ Charlie replies, still wearing that curious
smile. I’d imagine that Freddy is now feeling the same way about
Charlie as I did about him a few sentences ago, when I called him a
condescending bastard.

‘Look where
your fucking girlfriend got us!’ he spits back. His hissing words
sing out across the open moor. My mind starts to place policemen
lurking out just behind the fog, ready to pounce on us now that
we’ve given our position away. I’d say my blood suddenly runs cold,
but it’s the middle of the night in the middle of December and
we’re on a moor in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, so my blood is too cold in
the literal sense for me to worry about anything figurative.

‘We were
governed by ideas,’ Charlie says. ‘Ideas made us do this, despite
it being illegal. Or maybe
because
of it being illegal. We
couldn’t give her any reason why it wasn’t wrong to walk into the
shop carrying a gun, but why it
was
wrong to pull the
trigger. We allowed a murder to happen, so we might as well have
pulled the trigger ourselves. So, Fred, yes: you are an arsehole, a
hypocrite and a murderer.’

‘Am I only an
arsehole, still?’ I ask, in an attempt to lighten the mood.

You know something
that movies have over real life? Editing. If this was a movie, you
would only see my first three futile attempts to pierce the frozen
earth with the rusty trowel, I’d say something withering, like,
‘This is gonna be a loooong night,’ in voiceover, then we’d cut to
me lying dirty, shivering and exhausted with a deep, square grave
carved into the ground beside me. That shit might be economical,
but it doesn’t come close to giving an accurate impression of what
it’s like to spend over four hours digging a
three-by-three-by-three-foot hole in frozen ground with only
kitchen utensils. I’m half-tempted to give you a minute-by-minute
account of the whole endeavour: of all the times my hand slipped as
the trowel thudded ineffectually against the ground and the blunt
metal raked up my palm and cracked into my knobbly wrist bone,
replacing dull, cold numbness with seething agony; of the
uncontrollable shivering, which made me feel as though my body was
conspiring to prevent the task being finished; of the knowledge
that, no matter how much I wanted to go home, the task had to be
done, and done before the sun rose; of the knowledge that Charlie
and Freddy were feeling just as miserable as I was, but still
hating them for slacking off and for giving me shirty looks because
they thought I was slacking off; of the feeling of elation when I
felt the rain start to break through the treetops, thinking that it
would soften the soil, then the realisation that merely being cold
is downright comfortable compared to being cold and wet. By the
time my socks were finished soaking through, I was ready for them
to throw me in the fucking hole along with the evidence. But, since
I’m a slave to narrative economics myself, I’ll leave it at that
and skip forward to the part where it gets interesting.

It all began
when the low, distant hint of a ‘
woof!
’ slithered out of the
fog and into our midst. I guess the incident with the arms-dealer
left me with some kind of conditioned response, because I knew at
that first ‘
woof!
’ that we were in big fucking trouble.

‘
Get in the
hole!
’ I hiss at them. The dog barks again, but Freddy and
Charlie remain oblivious. Apparently their hearing isn’t as good as
the dog’s - either that or they’re less inclined to listen to me. I
sense an opportunity to unburden myself of the frustration which
has been steadily brewing over the last couple of hours, and
stealthily position myself behind Freddy. I’m aware of the vast
gulf in strength between the two of us, so rather than simply
pushing him I spring from the knees and thrust my shoulder into his
thigh. He gives a dumb ‘eh?!’ as he crumples and twirls around on
top of me and we go tumbling over the lip of the hole. My lungs are
squeezed empty as I crash through the freezing water and hit the
hard earth behind it. Freddy’s massive bulk then thumps on top of
me, forcing my face under the water. Icy liquid churns into my
throat as I reflexively gasp for air. I start to freak out, which
only means I choke more of it in. I can feel myself turning cold
from the inside. My eyes snap open in terror, and I can make out
the blurry pinpricks of stars, framed by the sides of the hole I’ve
just dug. The inference is not lost on me.

At the very
moment when I start believe I might actually drown in half a foot
of water, Freddy sits up and the pressure on my chest is eased. I
thrust my chin upwards, desperately coughing out rain and gulping
in air. I wipe my eyes with my numb fingers, and see Charlie and
Freddy squatting in the hole alongside me. Well, Freddy is
squatting, at least; Charlie is sat cross-legged in the puddle with
the plastic crate in his lap. The crate is open and he’s digging
through it.

‘What are you
doing
?’ I ask. The words have to force their way out through
my chattering teeth.