David Peace - 1974

“Go on,” I said, thinking of pens and paper, cassettes and tapes.

“We’d stopped off for a few coming back and so she said she’d better drive last bit because I’d had more than her like. Anyway, we were coming down the Dewsbury Road and, I don’t know, we were mucking around I suppose, and next news some bloke just steps out into the road and, bang, we hit him.”

“Where?”

“Legs, chest, I don’t know.”

“No, no. Where on Dewsbury Road?”

“As you come into Wakey, near Prison.”

“Near them new houses Foster’s building?”

“Yeah. Suppose so,” smiled Johnny Kelly.

Thinking everything’s connected, thinking there’s no such thing as chance, there is a plan, and so there is a god, I swal lowed and said, “You know they found Clare Kemplay near there?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Kelly was looking beyond me. “I didn’t know that.”

“What happened then?”

“I reckon we only glanced him like, but it was dead icy so the car started to spin and she lost control.”

I sat there in my polyester clothes, on the vinyl settee, staring at the Formica tabletop, in the concrete flat, thinking of the rubber and the metal, the leather and the glass.

The blood.

“We must have hit the curb and then a lamppost or something.”

“What about the man you hit?”

“I don’t know. As I say, I reckon we only clipped him like.”

“ Did you look?” I asked, offering him a cigarette.

“Did we fuck,” said Kelly, taking a light.

“Then what?”

“I got her out, checked she was all right. Her neck was not too clever, but there was nothing broke. Just whiplash. We got back in and I drove her home.”

“The car was all right then?”

“No, but it went like.”

“What did Foster say?”

Kelly stubbed out his cigarette. “I didn’t bloody wait to find out.”

“And you came here?”

“I needed to get out of the road for a bit. Keep me head down.”

“He knows you’re here?”

“Course he bloody does,” said Kelly, touching his face. He picked up a white card from the Formica table and tossed it across to me. “Bastard even sent me an invite to his fucking Christmas party.”

“How did he find you?” I said, squinting at the card in the dark.

“It’s one of his places, isn’t it?”

“So why hang around?”

“Cause at the end of the fucking day, he can’t say so bloody much can he.”

I had the feeling that I’d just forgotten something very fucking bad. “I’m not with you?”

“Well he’s been shagging me fucking sister every Sunday since I was seventeen.”

Thinking, that wasn’t it.

“Not that I’m complaining.”

I looked up.

Johnny Kelly looked down.

I had remembered that very fucking bad thing.

The room was dark, the gas fire bright.

“Don’t look so fucking shocked pal. You’re not the first who’s tried to help her and you won’t be last.”

I stood up, the blood in my legs cold and wet.

“You off to the party, are you?” grinned Kelly, nodding at the invitation in my hands.

I turned and walked down the narrow hall, thinking fuck them all.

“Don’t forget to wish them a merry bloody Christmas from Johnny Kelly, will you?”

Thinking fuck her.

Hello love.

Cash and carrying it.

Ten seconds later, parked outside some Paki shop, the last of my cash in bottles and bags on the floor of the car, radio rocking to a Harrods bomb, a cigarette in the ashtray, another in my hand, pulling pills out of the glove compartment.

Drunk and driving.

Ninety miles an hour, necking Scotchmen, upping downers and downing uppers, scattering Southern girls and seaview flats, ploughing through the Kathryns and the Karens and all the ones that went before, chasing tail-lights and little girls, scrambling love under my wheels, turning it over in the tread of my tyres.

Fuhrer of a bunker of my own design, screaming, I’VE NEVER DONE BAD THINGS.

Motorway One, foot down and taking it bad, sucking the night and its bombs and their shells through the vents in my car and the teeth in my mouth, trying and crying and dying for one more kiss, for the way she talks and the way she walks, offering up prayers without deals, love without schemes, begging her to live again, live again, HERE FOR ME NOW.

Tears soft and cock hard, screaming across six lanes of shit, I’VE NEVER DONE ONE SINGLE FUCKING GOOD THING.

Radio 2 suddenly silent, white motorway lines turning gold, men dressed in rags, men dressed in crowns, some men with wings, others without, braking hard to swerve around a crib of wood and straw.

On the hard shoulder, hazard lights on.

Bye-bye love.

11 Brunt Street, all in black.

Brakes to wake the dead, out the green Viva and kicking the fuck out of the red door.

11 Brunt Street, the back way.

Round the houses, over the wall, a dustbin lid through the kitchen window, taking out shards of glass with my jacket as in I went.

Honey, I’m home.

11 Brunt Street, quiet as the grave.

Inside, thinking, when I get home to you, I’m going to show you what I can do, taking a knife from the kitchen drawer (where I knew it would be).

Is this what you wanted?

Up the steep, steep stairs, into Mummy and Daddy’s room, tearing up the eiderdown, ripping out the drawers, tipping shit this way and that, make-up and cheap knickers, tampons and fake pearls, seeing Geoff swallowing the shotgun, thinking NO FUCKING WONDER, your daughter dead, your wife a whore who fucks her brother’s boss and more, spinning a chair into the mirror, BECAUSE THERE COULD BE NO LUCK WORSE THAN THIS FUCKING LUCK.

Giving you all you ever wanted.

I walked across the landing and opened the door to Jeanette’s room.

So quiet and so cold, the room felt like a church. I sat down upon the little pink bedspread next to her congregation of teddys and dolls and, dropping my head into my hands, I let the knife fall to the floor, the blood on my hands and the tears on my face freezing before they could both join the knife.

For the first time, my prayers were not for me but for everyone else, that all of those things in all of my notebooks, on all of those tapes, in all of those envelopes and bags in my room, that none of them were true, that the dead were alive and the lost were found, and that all of those lives could be lived anew. And then I prayed for my mother and sister, for my uncles and aunts, for the friends I’d had, both good and bad, and last for my father wherever he was, Amen.

I sat for a while with my head down, clasping my hands together, listening to the sounds of the house and my heart, picking the one from the other.

After a time, I rose from Jeanette’s bed and, closing the door on the room, I went back into Mummy and Daddy’s room and the damage I’d done. I picked up the eiderdown and put back the drawers, gathering up her make-up and her underwear, her tampons and her jewellery, sweeping up the mirror’s shards with my shoe and righting the chair.

I went back down the stairs and into the kitchen, picking up the bin lid and closing all the cupboards and the doors, thanking Christ no-one had called the fucking cops. I put the kettle on, let it boil, and brewed a milky mug with five large sugars. I took the tea into the front room, stuck the telly on, and watched white ambulances tear across the black wet night, ferrying the bombed and blown this way and that as a bloody Santa and a senior policeman both wondered what kind of person could do such a thing and so near to Christmas.

I lit a cigarette, watching the football scores and cursing Leeds United, wondering which game would be on Match of the Day and who’d be the guests on Parkinson .