Desmond Barry - London Noir

He sat back on his heels and gently, carefully, pulled his left hand from his pocket and his right from his hooded top. Both palms were wet: the left with the white of his sperm, the right with the red of congealing blood. He looked down at them for a moment, feeling the power of what lay in his hands, all of birth and life right there for him to hold. He saw the red and white of the boys at Mass and the football strip of the boys in the park. He saw the white of the wolf’s teeth in the flesh. He weighed them in his hands and then slowly squeezed them together. He looked once more at his palms, and the white lay on the red like a blister, a pinkish tinge in the place where they had mixed. Life was this color. It caused things to be born.

That day, when the man had gone, Enzo had reached behind him to touch where he’d been hurt, and his hand had come back covered with the white and the red. He’d wiped his hands in the earth to bury it. Now, he bent down to the ground and wiped his palms over the dirt at the base of the tree. He pushed his hands hard into the mud, his fingers clawed at the earth, coming up black under the nails. He tried to bury it again, but this time he was planting it in the earth of the park, making it grow.

Enzo sat back, breathing heavily. The mud was caked onto his hands. Beyond the pond, the routine of the park was continuing. The boys were still playing football. Dogs chased the cyclists. A kite of red silk throbbed in the sky. Enzo watched it, thinking how good it would have been if he’d been able to open his eyes to this afterwards, how it would have been almost perfect. It had become his place now, this park, he ruled it like a kingdom. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t this park where it had happened, that first time. It didn’t matter that Enzo didn’t really know where he’d been, that it was all in pieces, all sharp and bright in his head, like the upturned broken bottles they cemented into the walls to stop the kids climbing over. It didn’t matter that Enzo didn’t really understand the ritual of it. All he knew was that he had to do this, and keep on doing it, because if he fed the land with the red and the white, then maybe he’d grow stronger and one day he would be the wolf.

Later, Enzo walked around to cross the stream and head back over Church Street, back home. He passed the aviary as he crossed the bridge by the side of the house, and another lady jogger came pounding toward him, her blond hair wound up tight on her head. Enzo didn’t even look at her, but the birds started shrieking in their cage. Enzo smiled. The birds knew that he was close to them. They knew what was about to come.

A tree had blown down. It had fallen over from the churchyard at the back of the park, bringing with it a section of the cemetery wall. Enzo stopped for a moment and looked down at the top of the tree, the leaves and shoots and buds. He felt like only a god could, seeing the tree like that, he felt like a giant. One day, he knew, it wouldn’t be the storm that would blow down the trees. Enzo would tear through the city like a wolf, a great creature the size of a storm. Trees and houses would fall in front of him, and all the people would scream, a great noise rising toward him like a choir. And they would feel his breath upon them, and it would burn with the heat of the red, it would stink with the heat of the white.

King’s Cross

Dougie arrived at the concourse opposite the station just half an hour after it had all gone off. He’d had the cab driver drop him down the end of Gray’s Inn Road, outside a pub on the corner there, where he’d made a quick dive into the gents to remove the red hood he’d been wearing over the black one, pulled on a Burberry cap he’d had in his bag so that the visor was down over his eyes. That done, he’d worked his way through the mass of drinkers, ducked out another door, and walked the rest of the way to King’s Cross.

The Adidas bag he gripped in his right hand held at least twenty grand in cash. Dougie kind of wished it was handcuffed to him, so paranoid was he about letting go of it even for a second that he’d had trouble just putting it on the floor of the taxi between his feet. He’d wanted it to be on his knee, in his arms, more precious than a baby. But Dougie knew that above all else now, he had to look calm, unperturbed. Not like a man who’d just ripped off a clip joint and left a man for dead on a Soho pavement.

That’s why he’d had the idea of making the rendezvous at the Scottish restaurant across the road from the station. He’d just blend in with the other travelers waiting for their train back up north, toting their heavy bags, staring at the TV with blank, gormless expressions as they pushed stringy fries smothered in luminous ketchup into their constantly moving mouths. The way he was dressed now, like some hood rat, council estate born and bred, he’d have no trouble passing amongst them.

He ordered his quarter-pounder and large fries, with a supersize chocolate lard shake to wash it all down, eyes wandering around the harshly lit room as he waited for it all to land on his red plastic tray. All the stereotypes were present and correct. The fat family (minus dad, natch) sitting by the window, mother and two daughters virtually indistinguishable under the layers of flab and identical black-and-white hairstyles by Chavettes of Tyneside to match the colors of their footie team. The solitary male, a lad of maybe ten years and fifteen stone, staring sullenly out the window through pinhole eyes, sucking on the straw of a soft drink that was only giving him back rattling ice cubes. On the back of his shirt read his dreams: 9 SHEARER. But he was already closer to football than footballer.

Then there was the pimp and his crack whore; a thin black man sat opposite an even thinner white woman with bruises on her legs and worn-down heels on her boots. Her head bowed like she was on the nod, while he, all angles and elbows and knees protruding from his slack jeans and oversize Chicago Bulls shirt, kept up a steady monologue of abuse directed at her curly head. The man’s eyes where as rheumy as a seventy-year-old’s, and he sprayed fragments of his masticated fries out as he kept on his litany of insults. Sadly for Iceberg Slim, it looked like the motherfuckingbitchhocuntcocksucker he was railing at had already given up the ghost.

Oblivious to the psychodrama, the Toon Army had half of the room to themselves, singing and punching the air, reliving moment-by-moment the two goals they’d scored over Spurs — well thank fuck they had, wouldn’t like to see this lot disappointed. They were vile enough in victory, hugging and clasping at each other with tears in their eyes, stupid joker’s hats askew over their gleaming red faces, they might as well have been bumming each other, which was obviously what they all wanted.

Yeah, Dougie liked to get down among the filth every now and again, have a good wallow. In picking over the faults of others, he could forget about the million and one he had of his own.

Handing over a fiver to the ashen bloke behind the counter, who had come over here thinking nothing could be worse than Romania, Dougie collected his change and parked himself inconspicuously in the corner. Someone had left a copy of the Scum on his table. It was a bit grubby and he really would have preferred to use surgical gloves to touch it, but it went so perfectly with his disguise and the general ambience of the joint that he forced himself. Not before he had the bag firmly wedged between his feet, however, one of the handles round his ankle so if anyone even dared to try...

Dougie shook his head and busied himself instead by arranging the food on his plastic tray in a manner he found pleasing: the fries tipped out of their cardboard wallet into the half of the Styrofoam container that didn’t have his burger in it. He opened the ketchup so that he could dip them in two at a time, between mouthfuls of burger and sips of chocolate shake. He liked to do everything methodically.