The Cutting Crew (36 page)

Tell me about Kama and Eli.'

He shook his head vigorously, waving away the names like they were curses. He was gabbling as he spoke:

'You come here on your own. You pay, you go in, you here all afternoon.'

'Fuck you.'

'You here all afternoon.'

I pushed myself away from him and let him fall down onto the step.

'Fuck you.'

He just crumpled up, ignoring me and sobbing to himself. It was grimly satisfying, but it didn't help me much. The barker was scared of someone - of Kama and Eli, their whole bastard family and because of them he'd rather die than talk to me. I wanted to start kicking him but if I did then I knew I wouldn't stop. And I needed to save my anger for the right people.

'Just fuck you,' I said.

And then I turned and headed off - deeper into the red light district, in the direction of Parker Street. Someone round here would give me some answers.

The CandiBar.

The shutters were still down and the place looked dead. It was nine o'clock, so I'd thought it might have opened up by now, but apparently not. Perhaps it was never open, or maybe you just had to catch it right. Not out of the corner of your eye, exactly, but if the path of your life had a comparable angle then perhaps that.

When I was a child, I used to imagine that if I wandered the streets of the city at night I might find a new path that wasn't there during the day. With everything that had happened today, that didn't seem so impossible. And if a path, then why not a fucking nightclub?

You get older and things change.

I rattled the metal over the front door, hearing the sound reverberate around the empty street. The security cameras were pointing straight at me, but I couldn't tell if they were working or not. Behind me, the window where Sean had taken his photographs was black and hollow: a socket that was missing an eye.

I started banging my fist against the shutter, over and over.

'Come out!'

I kept punching. Somewhere in the distance, a dog started barking in angry reply. Half the district must be hearing me, but I carried on anyway.

'Fucking come out!"

Nothing. I looked up at the cameras and they hadn't moved, but there was something different about them. I wanted to throw a brick and smash them both off the wall.

The alleyway by the side of the old hotel opposite also continued on this side of the street: it ran down the side of the CandiBar. I moved down it quickly, running my hand along the wall. Here was an old window, blocked by vertical bars; here was another shuttered door. And here, finally, was a two-metre wall at the back.

There was broken glass embedded in the mortar at the top, but I climbed it anyway, positioning my fingers carefully and trusting to luck a little as I hoisted myself up, positioned my right foot and then heaved myself over, clearing it without cutting myself or tearing anything. I landed hard in the nightclub's back yard.

It was a neat, paved area: mostly empty - just some old bins, two broken-open bags of sand and a bit of rubble. The back of the club had a solid door and a window at ground level. I grabbed a bin lid and threw it. It bounced off the glass.

'Come out.'

There were a couple of half-bricks on the ground. I picked one up and threw that instead. This time, the window shattered loudly, and I felt a surge inside me that was like the feeling I had when the barker had been on the ground crying.

I knocked the remaining glass teeth from the frame and then clambered inside. I didn't even bother drawing my gun. There was no point: if Kama's men wanted to take me then they probably would. The end result would be the same. At least I would get to talk to him, and maybe he would tell me what I needed to know.

The window led into an old kitchen, where it was clear from the emptiness and dust that the place hadn't been used in a long time.

As I looked around, I experienced a crushing sensation - that of falling away inside myself - and I moved into the dark bar area beyond somehow knowing exactly what I was going to find there.

Nothing.

I flicked a light switch. Not really expecting it to work, but then it did. Suddenly there was bright yellow light everywhere, and I stood in the doorway, surveying the scene. It was a large room with a bar at the far end, backed by a broken mirror and two long empty bottle racks. All the taps had been removed. Between me and the bar was what had once been the dancefloor; now, it looked like a large, dusty rubber mat. There were booths of tables edging the walls, and the decor was dark red leather - all the stools and curved settees were the same, and all the wall hangings too. And all of it was covered in dust and cobwebs.

It had been a long time since anyone had served or bought a drink in the CandiBar; and I couldn't imagine that anyone had ever danced. This was the only place I could think of where I might find some answers, and it was dead. If Kama didn't want me to find him then I wasn't going to.

My instinct was to collapse in one of the booths, close my eyes and sleep, but I didn't. There was something else I needed to see, just to be sure. I found the stairs between the main bar area and the kitchen and made my way up to the first floor, which consisted of a shabby main corridor running down the centre of the building and a number of rooms branching off. As I moved from one into the other, there appeared to be no real design to any of it - it was as though someone had built the top floor one room at a time, adding each on as an increasingly awkward afterthought. Most were empty, although I found a cupboard containing some old cleaning equipment, and another room had a locked filing cabinet and a desk in it.

I explored them all, but long before I finished it was obvious that this wasn't where I'd been taken this afternoon; Kama had moved me somewhere else. Sean had taken pictures of him coming here, but there must have been some other explanation. Perhaps he was looking at it as a business opportunity. But as things stood, this place hadn't been open for years.

My anger was unfolding, dissipating, and I began to realise just how tired and fucking weary I was. I just wanted to rest.

I walked slowly back downstairs, and then into the main bar area. The sound of my feet echoed slightly on the dirty wooden floor, and it occurred to me without warning that there was something familiar about the place. I couldn't work out what: I'd certainly never been here before. I figured that it must have just reminded me of somewhere else, and shrugged the feeling off. But as I turned out the lights and headed towards the back yard again, it hit me - stopping me in my tracks for a couple of seconds. Not for long, because I wasn't all that surprised; it made the same kind of sense as everything else that had happened. The CandiBar was laid out in exactly the same way as Spooks is.

Back out on the street, a dog was still barking and somewhere - a street or two away - I could hear a car idling along. But as I stood in the centre of the road, wondering what to do, neither of them bothered to make an appearance.

There were things I could follow up, I supposed. There were Jamie and Keleigh, for one thing. Or else I could make another effort to contact Rosh or Lucy and at least say something - and I knew that I probably should. Unfortunately, I didn't have the slightest inclination to do any of it. Apart from anything else, I'd barely slept the night before and I was feeling it badly now. But I also felt beyond all that - segregated from everything and everyone, and utterly on my own. Perhaps the lack of sleep was colouring my thoughts or making them misty, because I didn't seem to be able to think of much. What I wanted to do - all things considered - was collapse and maybe die.

And so I decided to do the next best thing: go across the road and break into Sean's hideout again. It would be damp and cold, granted, but at least I would have a roof over my head and a mattress to sleep on. And maybe there was some detail in Sean's research that I'd overlooked: something that might point me towards Eli. I could read through it again, and fall asleep as and when necessary.

There didn't seem to be any better options, so I crossed the street and made my way down to the back yard, and then in through the window. It was so dark that it worried me for a second, but I had a vague memory of the layout and managed to make my way into the hall and up the stairs without tripping and impaling myself on anything. Made it to Sean's room. I found the torch and turned it on, resting it on its side near the wall, so that light splayed upwards, creating the effect of a fireplace, or perhaps an altar; and then I sat down on the mattress and stared into space.

Not into space, actually. After a few moments, I realised I was staring at the rifle case that Sean had left here. After a few moments more, I stood up and went over and opened it. It was all there.

And as I looked down at it, something strange happened: I felt a huge roar inside my head, as though I was remembering the noise of many people shouting at the same time. I shook my head to clear the sound away, and then I closed the case and went back over to sit on the mattress again. I stared across at it for a little while longer. Thoughts I couldn't focus on properly were fluttering in my head, like birds disturbed among the rafters. I shook my head one last time, unsure exactly what I was thinking, and then I looked at the papers on the floor.

On top, nearest to me, was the photograph that Sean had cut out of an old book and had enlarged. I picked it up and ran my fingers over the closest shot. There were the brothers, up on their balcony, watching the boxing that was happening below them.

Of course they were there. They would always be there.

Another flash of a memory I'd never had: an arched window at the far end of a dusty room. Outside, the sky was so bright that the edges of the windowframe seemed to be dissolving into the light.

Beyond it was the sandy, fractured tapestry of our city.

I put the photograph down, understanding now where I would be able to find Eli and what it was I was going to do. The ringing in my ears had returned, but I did my best to fight it down and keep it out of my mind. Instead, I picked up one of Sean's notebooks and began to read what he'd written. And this time, I understood.

Imagine you're walking on a long road. You can't see where it leads but you know it must lead somewhere, and to find out where you just have to carry on walking. While you're on this road, you're only ever experiencing a small portion of it at any one time, but you know that it's just a question of dimensions: that every metre of it exists already, and that if you took yourself up into the sky you'd be able to look down and see the whole thing, laid out from one end to the other. You just need to go up a dimension roughly, from two to three. Well, that's what time is like too.

Because you're stuck in it you can only experience it one footstep at a time. But if you could move up another dimension, just as with the road, you'd be able to see every moment laid out in turn.

You can't visualise it properly, but if you could see time from a distance in this way then you'd notice tendrils of life running through it: little glowing ribbons of existence, like swirls in a marble. Every moment of your life would be there for you to see, all lying next to one another. To you right now, everything feels momentary and transient, as though you're travelling through life from one end to the other, but from the outside you'd be able to see that everything was laid out from the beginning. All the points on the road are there already. From a perspective like that, there's no such thing as death. There's only the fact of your life, hanging there - pulsing with everything you've ever done and ever will do.

From within, life can feel arbitrary and pointless: a series of random events that send us into collisions with others. There's no real meaning or explanation to it beyond the fluttering dust of physical laws that waft around us. But who knows? Perhaps from the outside it looks different. You might notice that all these bright strands of life form a pattern - that sections repeat and spiral around their neighbours with more regularity than we can see from within. It's possible that from the outside, despite how it feels to us now, everything is very ordered and beautiful.

Chapter
Twenty One

I woke up with the memory of crunching glass. My eyes flicked open.

It was still night time and it took me a second to remember where I was. There was something surreal about the room: it was all floorboards and paper and dust, lit from an ungainly angle.

Sean's hideout. I'd fallen asleep with the torch still on. It was pointing at the wall beside me, and the light was stretching up the plaster like a candle-flame. It was also doubling back on itself, pooling around the torch and then cascading across the floor and out into the hallway. How fucking stupid was this?

I propped myself up on one arm and listened carefully. No more crunching glass.