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Authors: Phillip Hunter

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BOOK: To Fight For
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We got a cab from her place just off the Caledonian Road. She told the cabbie to take us to the Fox and Globe, on the Seven Sisters Road, up by Finsbury Park. As the cab rolled along, I watched the world scrape past, remembering places I'd known years before, decades before. I remembered how it was when I was young, wandering these streets with a blank mind, a blank life, a blank future. I never would've thought then that I'd be with someone like Brenda who had no blankness at all.

I knew the pub too. It seemed like a long way to go for a drink, but I guessed Brenda wanted to make sure she avoided people.

The Fox and Globe was a place I used to go sometimes when I fought nearby. But that had been a long time before and I figured it would've changed. It hadn't. It looked just as I remembered, not dirtier, not different. It was as if the place had been kept waiting for me to return. I think it still had the same beer stains on the carpet, the same dried-in blood on the wall, the same shrivelled barman behind the same battered bar behind the same weary punters. It was all circles. The further I went from the past, the nearer I came to it.

It was one of those sixties brick things, not popular with anyone except the locals, and even then not really popular, just a boozer nearby, the kind of place people went when they didn't have anything else to do, anywhere else to go. There was a jukebox and someone had put music on, soft, slow stuff. There was a pool table in the corner and a few kids sat around it and drank and hit the balls now and then, if they could be bothered. Mostly, though, they sat and gazed at the table and chatted about something or other: girls, probably, or what they were going to do when they finally had the guts to leave this place.

Me and Brenda took a seat in the corner and the old geezer slumped at the table next to us looked up and looked down and looked up again. It was Browne, only it took me a few seconds to realize it. He looked like he'd stepped in from a storm, hair straggled, shirt half-untucked, bleary eyed. He'd hadn't changed either – not back then.

‘Joe,' he said, focusing his eyes. ‘Is that you? Course it's you. How many other people could look like that and still be alive?'

Brenda smiled. Browne stood, automatically lifted his empty glass and stepped carefully over to us. He sat and put a cold hand on my arm.

‘Good to see you, son. How are you getting along? How's the head these days?' He looked at Brenda then. ‘And is this your young lady?'

‘You met her,' I said.

‘Did I?'

‘At the fights. A couple weeks ago.'

‘Fights,' he said. ‘Ah, yes.'

He twisted some of the hair on his head around his finger and looked into the empty glass for his memories.

‘Barbara,' he said.

‘Brenda,' Brenda said, still smiling and holding her hand out.

‘Charming,' Browne said, lifting her hand and putting it down again. ‘I do remember,' he said, as if we were arguing with him. ‘You were upset, as I recall.'

‘Well …' Brenda said, glancing over at me.

‘Don't mind him,' Browne said. ‘He doesn't care, do you, Joe? You didn't like the violence, my dear. Was that it?'

‘Yes,' she said in a small voice. ‘The violence.'

Mostly what bothered her, I think, was the idea that I'd got in that ring and taken the violence.

‘All that fighting, Joe,' she'd said that night, after we'd walked out of the fight and into the warm, fume-filled night.

‘I'm glad we came here,' she'd said. ‘Thank you.'

‘What for?'

‘For showing me something of your past.'

‘Not much of a past,' I'd said.

‘As good as any.'

We'd carried on walking in silence for a while, then she'd said, ‘Tell me more about your childhood.'

‘I'd tell you if I could remember it.'

‘I don't think you were ever young. I think you were born old.'

She'd given me one of her smiles to let me know she was teasing. I hadn't minded. She was probably right.

Born old. Yeah, that was it – assembled on some factory floor, made up of broken parts of other machines. Broken machines.

After that, we hadn't talked much. She'd tottered along on her heels, still holding my arm tight. We'd passed a tramp trying to sleep in a doorway, wrapped up in layers of clothing, despite the heat, and lying inside an orange nylon sleeping bag.

Traffic had passed us, but it was quieter, slower, as if the heat was getting to the buses and taxis and lorries, making them all sluggish. Everything was grinding to a halt.

I heard Browne say something and looked up and saw that I was in The Fox and Globe.

‘Don't blame you,' he was saying to Brenda. ‘Not nice, the violence. Civilized people can't take it. Not supposed to. Not for the likes of us. For the likes of him, brainless, dead from the neck up.'

Brenda's eyes flicked from Browne to me, then back.

‘Well …' she said again.

‘You're too civilized for that kind of thing,' Browne was saying. ‘Too tender for the tenderizer.'

I had no idea what that meant.

‘You're drunk,' I told him.

‘Bloody glad to hear it. I've been working on it long enough. It's quite an art, you know. Scotch is my medium, like oils to a painter. You have to drink to a certain level of inebriation – just enough to keep the effect of the alcohol from dis-uh dis-pating – and then maintain it for as long as possible. Fine balance. I've been in this state now for …' He lifted his arm and gazed at his watch. He gave up with that and dropped his arm. ‘Well, for a while.'

As Browne was letting his mouth loose, Brenda was nodding like she agreed with him. But I'd seen what booze did to her. She thought the drink would numb her, sock her into unconsciousness. Instead it turned her thoughts into acid, twisted her memories until they split and bled again.

She glanced at me, half smiled. Browne raised his glass to the light – what light there was in that place – and stared at the dribble of copper-coloured stuff in the bottom.

‘Of course,' Browne was saying to his glass. ‘The trick is to know by how much and over what period the alcoholic effects of … uh … alcohol will dissipate. One has to remember also that alcohol is a disinhibitor, an unleasher of the darkness in people, the anger, the spite. It is the freer of deranged thoughts kept in check in sober moments. And one has to remember too that one is inclined to go too far and become pissed out of one's brain.'

Brenda laughed. Browne looked at her, smiled, put a hand on top of hers.

‘Take no notice of me, Barbara,' he said.

Brenda nudged me and made eyes. I said, ‘Huh?'

‘Oh, for God's sake,' she said. Then she looked at Browne and said, ‘Can we get you another?'

She nudged me again and I had to go the bar and fetch him some more of his fucking medium. While I was up there, I saw the two of them leaning close to each other, gabbing about something or other. Every now and then Browne would touch her hand and she'd laugh. Browne seemed good for her. I stayed at the bar a bit longer.

When I got back, Browne said, ‘Hold onto this one, Joe.'

I said, ‘Yeah.'

‘You old softie,' he said, smiling.

I didn't mind him taking the piss out of me if it made Brenda laugh. But when I looked at her the spark had gone from her eyes, the smile had gone from her mouth and something inside me tightened up, got colder.

Browne noticed it and made a show of taking the glass from me and holding it up to the light.

‘I'm the van Gogh of drink,' he said.

He glanced at Brenda, his eyes roguish. But she wasn't buying it any more, and he could see that and he became serious and put the glass down and said, ‘Oh well.'

She was lost in her thoughts, tracing a line on the table with her finger, the long fingernail wiping the spilled alcohol into spikes and swirls. Me and Browne watched her do it, watched her watching the light hit the shining liquid. I realized I was still standing. I sat. Brenda didn't look at me. I had a pull of my pint and put the glass down and wiped my sleeve over my mouth. Browne sniffed. Still she didn't look up.

Finally, her hand stopped and she just gazed down, her eyes empty. Everything became still, everything stopped, as if her hand had been the only thing keeping it all moving. I waited. Browne waited. We looked at her finger and waited for it to move again.

I think we both felt it, Browne and me. The world had stopped moving – our world, anyway, whatever that was; some part of some part of some pain that we called our own.

I listened to the hum of chatter around me, the clack of the pool balls, the quiet music. Why the fuck was I here? Why had I let her bring me to this place? I knew what it would be like. I could've taken her to the West End to see a film. I could've taken her to some posh restaurant. I could've taken her to the country for a weekend, by the sea, maybe. Instead I'd let her bring me here, to my lousy past.

Brenda pulled her finger in and made a fist of her hand and looked at Browne and said, ‘Why?'

‘Why, my dear? Why what?'

‘Why is it better to drink? Why do you drink?'

He took time to answer that. He peered at his glass.

‘Well, you see,' he said, ‘I feel reasonably happy most of the time, and then I remember. Then I drink.'

‘Remember what?'

‘Myself.'

‘You drink to forget yourself?'

‘Not really. I drink to forget what I've remembered, and to remember what I've forgotten. Understand?'

I said, ‘No.'

I don't think either of them heard me. They'd both forgotten I was there. I didn't count. I wasn't in on this thing, whatever this thing was.

‘Yes,' Brenda said. ‘I understand.'

Browne turned his head slowly to look at her, and the expression on his face changed. His eyes got softer, his brow lost its creases.

‘Ah,' he said. Nothing else, just ‘Ah.'

And I knew that he understood, and that she knew he understood.

And I knew too that it was something I couldn't understand. And that hurt, deep, deep down.

I wanted to say something, to join in their conversation. I couldn't. I was out of it. Cold.

By now they were chatting about different stuff. I forget what. Brenda had a few drinks and lightened up. Browne was the same as always, dishing out his usual drunken bollocks.

The mood in the pub changed slowly as the day got older. Some people drifted out, some drifted in and took up their places, as if it was all staged, an act. Maybe it was. Maybe nothing had changed after all, except me and Brenda and Browne. The more we drank, the more everything seemed different. I don't know. Maybe nothing fucking changes.

I remembered how, after we'd come out of the fights, she'd pushed herself into me, gripped my arm, shivered.

‘Are you cold?' I'd said.

‘No.'

‘What's wrong?'

‘Nothing … it's just … it hurts me, sometimes, that's all.'

‘What hurts you?'

‘Everything. All of it. Life.' She'd pulled on my arm. ‘But I have you.'

A few days later, I'd taken her to the West End and we'd walked along, her slim hand in mine. We'd walked along like all the rest of them, like the evening-dress-and-dinner-jacket mob, like anyone else. We'd walked along and looked in the windows at the Swiss watches and old oil paintings and diamond rings. People had looked at us oddly but Brenda had been too wrapped up in the glamour of it all to notice.

So, we'd walked along and tried to pretend everything was alright. Well, for a while, maybe, it was.

Later, sitting in the Fox and Globe, it was getting too hard to pretend anything at all.

Now, years later, as me and Browne sat slumped in our seats and waited for whatever was going to happen, I saw that he was thinking of something, remembering, and his eyes went soft and sad, and he lifted the glass to his mouth.

I asked him what was on his mind.

‘Oh,' he said, sniffling, ‘I was just remembering that time in the pub, you and her and me. That's all.'

I was beginning to understand what Browne meant about needing to drink – the need, as he'd told Brenda, to forget what he'd remembered, to remember what he'd forgotten.

Now I wanted to tell Brenda that I knew too. But I couldn't tell her. And thinking that brought me back, and I started to lose myself again, trapped between now and then, between rage and peace, and I wanted to stop understanding and just kill.

FIVE

My head was singing when Bobby Cole came over. He swam before my eyes and, for a moment, I thought he was Dunham come to kill me. I reached for my Makarov, but, of course, it wasn't there.

He'd been in before, the day after I'd killed Paget, but I didn't remember that at the time. I was losing track, my mind slipping through the cracks between now and then and never. I didn't want to let Cole know that, though, so I sat up and let Browne do the talking while I waited for my head to stop spinning. Cole took a seat opposite me and twiddled his thumbs.

The trouble was, Cole had seen me go for my gun and he knew straight off that I was fucked up. He didn't make a thing of it, though – not then, anyway. First, he made with the chit-chat. ‘How are you, Joe?' ‘Take your time recovering, my son.' Shit like that, all nice and friendly. I told him I was okay, everything was fine.

We were in the lounge, and the light was dull, and Cole's brown eyes looked black. After a while, he stood and started pacing, making fists out of his hands. He'd tried the concerned visitor act as much as he could and now his patience had gone. He went over to the window and stood with his back to me, staring out. His blocky frame was dark against the light.

‘We need to talk,' he said to the window.

‘He's in no fit state for this,' Browne was saying.

BOOK: To Fight For
12.8Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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