Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

“What are we doing?” Arthur asked plaintively. “What is this place?”

Virtue and Mercy rolled out the back of the car, short of breath even at this mild exertion, their exhalations fogging the air, their boulder bellies swaying in sweaty sympathy.

“I’m going into the club for a bit,” Streater said. “Gonna do a bit of business. Gotta shift the last of the ampersand.”

“The last of it?” Arthur despised himself for not being able to keep the panic from his voice. “Surely it hasn’t run out?”

“Don’t worry, chief. Not long now and everyone’s gonna have more of the stuff than they know what to do with. That sound good to you?”

Poleaxed by another surge of pain and self-pity, the prince was unable even to gasp out a reply before the door was slammed in his face. Mr. Streater took out his key ring and pointed it at the car. All the locks on all the doors slammed down. Arthur struggled with the handles to no effect.

His window was open a little and he called out to his tormentor: “Let me out.”

Streater strode away but one of the fat men turned back.

“Stay here, son!”

The other one growled. “Keep an eye on the motor.”

The next few hours passed like a fever dream, in a whirl of lucid hallucinations, fantasies of sexual envy and sporadic, doomed assaults a the Standard crossword.

The prince was interrupted twice — first by a gaggle of revelers teetering past, all of them dressed, improbably, in some strange parody of school dress. This Arthur shrugged off merely as ampersand phantasmagoria and returned to his descent.

The second time he was disturbed by the car being noisily unlocked. Virtue and Mercy clambered in the back, settled into their seats, greeted Arthur with a belch and began to munch anew of the remnants of their kebabs.

“Where’s Streater?” Arthur asked.

The fat men gave their answer through mouths full of pita bread.

“Still inside,” one of them said. “You know how he gets when he’s shifting that stuff…”

The other one sniggered. “Birding it up.”

After this, for a long time, there was just the sound of mastication — rhythmic chomping echoing in the prince’s ears like the approaching stamp of some still-distant army — until:

“Oi oi!” Vince Mercy wore the look of a gambler whose horse has just romped home to an easy victory.

A young couple, dressed like the others in a lascivious parody of school uniform and in the latter stages of inebriation, had tottered up to the car, leant against the bonnet and proceeded to extravagantly grope one another. The girl’s skirt rode up almost to her hips and the policeman was whooping his appreciation when the lady (who seemed to the prince to be placing herself at serious risk of hypothermia) pushed away her beau, stumbled a few steps and let fly a stream of lumpen vomit. Her companion merely laughed and hit her joshingly on the back, and as soon as she was done, the girl joined in the laughter. The pair wandered away into the night, spattered with puke yet still cackling.

In the back of Mr. Streater’s Nova, Virtue and Mercy were laughing with them.

One of them jabbed a sausagey finger in Arthur’s face. “Reminds me of your missus!”

“Way I hear it, she wouldn’t even brush her teeth afterwards. She’d just get straight back down to it.”

“Please…,” whimpered the prince. “Please don’t…” But this only made the detectives laugh all the harder, their flabby bodies shaking with hilarity, halted only when someone smacked down hard on the car roof.

A couple of middle-aged men stood outside, both grinning wildly. They too were dressed as schoolboys.

“Good Lord!” one of them was shouting. “I know that face!”

“It’s the best boy!” the other man called back. “It’s teacher’s pet.”

Desperately, Arthur turned around to his companions, but, impossibly, both Virtue and Mercy had disappeared.

Arthur quivered in his seat, wondering what fresh indignity was about to be visited upon him, when there came a righteous cry from the other side of the parking lot.

“Abominations!” A disheveled man in a brown raincoat was pointing a gun in the direction of the schoolboys. “Wretched pieces of putrescence!”

“I say, Boon,” said one of the men in a tone of mild, pleasurable surprise, like one trainspotter to another on noticing a particularly uncommon diesel chugging toward them up the track. “Do you think that’s us he’s talking about?”

“I rather think it might be, Hawker. Anyway, isn’t that old Barnaby?”

The grizzled man gestured at them with the gun. “Get on your knees!”

The schoolboys laughed. “Do you ever go back, sir?”

“Go back?” said the man they had referred to as Barnaby. “What do you mean?”

“Back to your old college, sir.”

“Back to your alma mater.”

“Don’t suppose they’d let you in now, sir. Not after what happened.”

“Cruel, wasn’t it, Mr. B? The things they said.”

“They must have really hated you, sir, to make up all those stories.”

“And they were stories, weren’t they, sir?”

“There wasn’t any truth in them?”

Barnaby shouted: “Shut up! Just shut up, you lying monstrosities!” But even as Arthur slunk down in his seat, trying his best not to be noticed, he could see that the man was severely rattled, tripping and stammering over his words.

It was no great surprise, then, that as the schoolboys ambled over to the stranger he did nothing to halt their progress. They walked so close to him that they were almost touching, as though, under different circumstances, they might be on the precipice of a kiss, a tender and mutually respectful exchange of saliva.

“Still collecting stamps?” the little man shouted, and stamped brutally down on Barnaby’s foot. This shouldn’t have hurt all that much but Barnaby winced, gasped and staggered backward, his arms windmilling uselessly in the air. Boon stamped down again whilst Hawker shouted out encouragement.

“Still collecting stamps, sir?”

“Still collecting stamps?”

The bigger of the two schoolboys grabbed the man by the ears and stretched them out. “Haven’t seen you for ears and ears!” He cackled and the ginger-haired one joined in.

“Ears and ears and ears!”

Pinioned to his seat in terrified fascination, the prince nonetheless found time to ensure the doors were really locked.

Outside, as Barnaby fell to his knees, the schoolboys were laughing.

One of them thrust his hand into his blazer pocket, tugged out a fistful of black, faintly volcanic-looking powder and flung the lot of it in Barnaby’s face. The man looked up in bafflement. His nose twitched cartoonishly for a second or so before he unleashed a gargantuan sneeze. Then another. Then, inevitably, another.

Barnaby mewled. “What have you done?”

The ginger-haired man released him, gave him a hearty slap on the back and bellowed: “Keep up, sir! It’s sneezy powder.

The other one snickered in complicity. “Wizard Wheeze!”

Barnaby was still sneezing. One of the schoolboys produced a grimy handkerchief and passed it to him. He clamped it to his face and sneezed and sneezed and sneezed. When the rag was taken from his face it was splattered with red.