Mark Billingham - Lifeless

Thorne sat bolt upright, breathing heavily. His tongue was thick and vile against the roof of his mouth. He couldn’t tell New York from New Year, let alone the difference between concern and contempt on the faces of the young couple staring at him. So he shouted at them, calling them cunts and telling them to fuck off, before dropping back hard against the door behind him and then down.

For a while he stared out at the street through a curtain of drizzle. Then he closed his eyes. Hoping there might be some way back into that room filled with laughter and smoke.

For Robert Asker it had begun with the simple, overpowering conviction that there were people living beneath the shower tray…

He’d heard them, their voices muffled at first by the rush of the water and then a little clearer, but still indistinct, once he’d turned off the shower. He’d stood stock-still and dripping wet above the plug hole and stared down. He’d seen the faintest orange glow, a light of some sort, way down in the pipes. He knew what it meant: they had to be living in the pipework, which meant that they could travel quickly and talk to him from almost anywhere in the house.

It wasn’t long before they were using the network of major drains and sewer pipes to follow him when he was outside, when he was away from home. Then he began to hear the voices at work and in his car. It was like several voices at once, each canceling out the others, so that he could only make out one word in ten and could never really get the gist of what they were saying. What they were trying to tell him.

Of course, it really began when he told his wife about the voices. That’s when he lost control of everything. It all began to fall apart from that moment onward…

It wasn’t long after he told her that he got laid off. From then on it was hard to know whether her attitude stemmed from anger at his getting himself sacked or frustration at his ramblings, at his insistence on what he was hearing. Either way, he was damn sure that she was withdrawing from him and that she was taking his daughter with her. He noticed that she was keeping the girl with her more and more, that she would always take her along, even if she was popping out for just a few minutes.

She was afraid for their daughter to be left alone in the house with a madman.

He wasn’t sleeping. They spoke loudest of all at night, and he paced the house with his hands over his ears and with the music turned up so loud that people several houses away would phone the police at regular intervals.

She made him talk to people, to half a dozen different doctors, but nothing they gave him made any difference, except for making him moody, which meant that he started to shout. He shouted because he was sick of not being listened to and he shouted to make himself heard above the constant chatter of the voices. Once he’d started shouting, it was only a matter of time before she left.

It all happened quickly enough. Job, wife, child, house…

There was hospital for a while after that, several of them, but the drugs only made him unresponsive, almost catatonic, and the voices were still there, growing in number and urgency. Barracking as he plummeted toward the tender mercies of the community. Toward the net he was destined to slip through.

It wasn’t until he was on the street that he discovered the radio. Left to himself, he found out how to tune in the voices to make their messages clearer. He also learned how to turn down the volume of the voices when he needed a break, and most importantly of all, he found out how he could talk to them. He never actually turned the radio off; he couldn’t do it, even if he’d wanted to. The best he could manage was to tune it out for a few minutes at a time, but he was loath to do that in case he missed those transmissions he was always hoping to hear: the message offering him his job back; the message from his wife saying that she understood now, and that she was coming back; a message from his daughter…

Robert moved slowly past the design stores and clothes shops on Long Acre. Listening, then talking. Laughing every now and then.

He felt all right now, despite everything. It was shitty and he got ill with his guts, and with leg ulcers sometimes, but he was on the air. Radio Bob was as happy as he’d been at any time since he’d first seen that small circle of light, liquid and winking in the belly of a waste pipe.

“There are three basic types of begging,” Spike said. “There’s a couple of other odd ones, there’s the specialized varieties, like, but at the end of the day you’ve got your three main types. I’m not talking about getting cash-there’s loads of ways to do that. I’m talking about just asking people for it, right?

“There’s your simple hungry-and-homeless style, which is what I do most often, which is what we’re doing now. It’s the best if you’re a bit out of it ’cause you can just nod off sat there, and people will still chuck a few coins down if you look pathetic enough. That’s the pity approach, like.

“Then there’s the hassle approach, which involves a bit more spiel. You can chase after people on the street, which they’re trying to clamp down on ’cause it’s antisocial or what have you. Or you can do what Caroline does sometimes, which is to blag a tube ticket and wander through the carriages making a bit of a speech and holding a cup out. You’re appealing to the punters’ better nature with that one, or else they might just give you the cash to make you fuck off, but either way that can be a good earner.

“Or you can just go for the straight-up, in-yourface way of doing things. None of this ‘I need some money to get into a shelter’ or ‘Please help me get a hot meal’ or shit like that. You just look someone in the eye and ask them for a bit of change because the truth is that you’re fucking gagging for a can of Special Brew. Some people prefer that…”

Thorne thought about it and decided that, as the person being asked to hand over the cash, it was definitely his favorite approach. Like most people, though, his normal reaction, however he was being asked for money, was to look away and mutter nonsense, or pretend that he hadn’t heard. He’d certainly ignored his fair share of beggars in the tube.

“Right, thanks,” Thorne said. “I’ll bear all that in mind.”

They were sitting against the wall just inside the entrance to Tottenham Court Road tube station. The sign scrawled on a strip of cardboard in front of them said please help and the small plastic bowl in front of that contained a handful of coins. One-, two- and five-pence pieces.

“Tell me about some of these other ways,” Thorne said. “Loads of ways to get cash, you said…”

Spike leaned his head back. A poster for a new Brad Pitt movie was backlit behind him. “Yeah, well, there’s a few. Busking, Big Issue, whatever…”

Busking was out of the question, but Thorne had wondered about selling the Big Issue. He wasn’t sure how many of those who made money selling the magazine slept rough.

“Don’t you have to register or something to do that? Get a badge?”

Spike shook his head and leaned forward. He straightened the cardboard sign that was already sodden around the edges. It was chucking it down outside and the floor around them was becoming increasingly wet as rush-hour travelers brought the rain in on their way down from the street to the ticket hall.

“Look, there’s selling the Big Issue and selling the Big Issue, like. Some people just get hold of one copy and sell it over and over again. You tell people it’s your last one and most punters won’t have the heart to take it. It’s a good scam.”

“I might give that a go.” Thorne looked up at a young black woman coming down the steps toward them. She looked quickly away and stayed close to the far wall as she moved past them and on down the next set of stairs.