Gary McMahon - The Concrete Grove

Lana reached out and grabbed her daughter’s hand, dragging her towards the car. Tom had seen them. He opened the driver’s door and set one foot outside. “Everything okay?” His voice was quiet; the slight breeze took it and lifted it above the rooftops, carrying it away like a scrap of litter.

Lana nodded. “Hurry, now.”

“Banjo!” Hailey stopped dead in her tracks. Her hand slipped from Lana’s grip.

“What are you saying?” Lana spun on her heels, keeping one eye on the unsteady fool who was still standing directly in front of Tom’s car, staring into the windscreen but clearly seeing nothing outside the theatre of his own head.

“That’s his name: Banjo. He always hangs around here. Went missing a few days ago — I remember somebody was asking around for him, wanting to know if anyone had seen him. He’s just a harmless druggie dude.”

“Come on. Let’s just go.” Lana tugged the girl across the road, to the car. Tom was now fully out of the vehicle. He was torn between watching the junkie and greeting the two women.

“Who the hell’s this?” He half smiled, half grimaced.

“Just some local druggie,” said Lana. “Let’s get in the car.”

Tom nodded. “Nice to see you, too.” The smile grew, making his face look younger, cleaner, nicer.

Lana shook her head. “Sorry. This place. It spoils everything.”

Tom opened the rear door and then walked around the back of the car to open the passenger door. He stood, balanced in a moment where he was not quite sure who would sit where.

“Fuck!”

Lana turned towards the front of the car, the direction in which the expletive had come from. Banjo was now weaving so violently that he looked like he might fall down at any minute. His feet remained fixed on the ground but he was now bending forward at the waist, as if performing a weird little dance. He was thin, snake-hipped, and able to manage a wide range of movement. It looked strange, like the beginning of some drug-fuelled urban dance recital. His fingers moved like pincers. He had long, dirty nails. They looked sharp as knives.

“ Fuck! ” He screamed the word this time, white foam flecking his lips. “Gerroff me!” His face was pale, bloodless, and his lips had peeled back from his teeth to give him a feral expression. “ Fnugh! ” Speech was deserting him; his throat was convulsing too violently to produce language. Lana watched in fascination as his Adam’s apple bobbed like a ping-pong ball caught in a python’s gut.

“Oh, shit. Get in the car.” She glanced at Hailey, who by now had moved around to the other side of the vehicle. She was closer to Banjo than any of them. “Get in, Hailey. Get in now.”

“Wait a second, Mum. We should call an ambulance, or something.”

Banjo leapt, pushing himself forward like a giant cat attacking its prey. His lower body slammed into the bodywork, and he rolled along the car’s left wing. This gave Hailey enough time to back-pedal, and Tom moved his body between her and the gibbering junkie. He stood firm, hands clenched into tight fists.

“Hailey!” Lana ran to her daughter, pulling her away from the car. She fumbled inside her purse for her mobile phone and thumbed the emergency number.

“Just stay back,” said Tom. “Keep the fuck away.” He took a single step backwards, stumbling slightly.

Banjo was wailing now, like a baby demanding food. His mouth was lathered in foam; his eyes were weeping blood. His hands were still raised in front of his face, and he turned his palms inward, twisting his thin fingers into hooks. Then, still moaning wordlessly, he began to claw at his cheeks with those long, guitar-picking fingernails.

“Oh my God. Do something. Shit, do something!” Hailey’s voice had risen to such a high pitch that it sounded like she was singing.

Lana screamed into the phone: “Grove Court! There’s a man killing himself, send help, now!” The operator tried to calm her with words she could barely even hear, and she just yelled her request over and over again in the hope that it would be answered. “Send someone now!”

Everything seemed to freeze apart from Banjo, and what he was doing. The others just stood there and stared, incapable of anything but watching the horror as it happened.

Banjo’s fingernails had gone in deep. Lana saw flashes of white tooth or skull amid the red, and the man’s cheeks already hung from his face in fine tatters, like thin slices of Parma ham. He had stopped crying and worked now in silence, raking the loosened flesh away from muscle, the thick muscle away from bone.

The man slumped to his knees, his hands still working furiously at his ruined face, as if controlled by an external force. His fingers pushed through into his oral cavity; Lana could see them wriggling in there when he opened his mouth in a gurgling scream. He tore away the flesh, hooking his bottom lip between finger and thumb and tugging it like a fattened maggot from a feast of rotten fruit. By the time the sirens were audible, wailing across the estate like a bunch of harpies, he had taken off half of his face.

Lana didn’t think it was possible to cause this much damage to your own body without losing consciousness, but somehow the fucked-up drug-head had managed it.

When the ambulance pulled up at the kerb and ejected two paramedics from its rear doors, Banjo was slumped against the side of the car and still pulling away the flesh directly under his chin. Blood decorated his shirt like a bad dye job. His legs twitched against the tarmac, his shoes slapped the kerb. His features were obscured by the dangling raw-meat mask he now wore. He had stopped screaming and worked in a strange, almost formal silence.

THEIR TRIP WAS delayed, but they were determined to continue with their plans. The ambulance crew took away the injured and sedated man, strapping him to a gurney, and they were told to wait until the police arrived. There was not much to say when the officers questioned them, just a précised version of the facts, and they were asked to call in at the local station as soon as it was convenient to give a formal statement.

Nobody seemed to care that much about Banjo; the emergency personnel went about their business in a calm, detached manner. He was just another junkie who’d lost his mind, overdosing on cheap smack, and turned his emotions inward to cut himself.

The area was full of people just like him, and the police seemed unimpressed even by the manner in which Banjo had done himself harm. They’d seen it all before. It was part of the job, another aspect of their day-to-day existence: self-harming junkies, street drugs, and common-or-garden madness. Just one aspect in a grim parade of extremity, the same as every other event they were trained to deal with.

“Are you sure you still want to do this?” Tom glanced into the rear-view mirror as he drove out of the estate. He knew what he wanted to hear, but didn’t want to prompt a reply she was reluctant to give.

Lana sat with her arms around Hailey’s shoulders, but the girl remained oddly unmoved by the experience. “What do you think, honey? Shall we still go, or would you prefer to go home?”

Hailey shook her head. “We’ll go. What have we got to go back for? There’ll be blood on the road and questions and gossip from the neighbours. I’d rather stick to our plans.”

“Only if you’re sure, baby.” Lana stroked her daughter’s hair. Her eyes remained locked on Tom’s in the mirror. Her lips formed a tight line across the bottom of her face, as if underlining the event.

“He was just a drugged-up loser, Mum. Who cares?”

Lana’s hand stopped moving on Hailey’s scalp. “Okay, honey.” She stared at Tom.