Gary McMahon - The Concrete Grove

She kicked off her stripper heels and put on a pair of flat-soled pumps. She would make no concession to eroticism. Let the bastard take her in her most ordinary state, looking like she was on her way to the shops.

Lana opened the door and walked out onto the landing, barged through the fire door, and then stepped briskly down the stairs.

She was on autopilot; her body felt empty, as if she had relinquished all control. She didn’t want to do this, but she could see no other way out of her predicament. She did not want those bastards coming anywhere near her daughter. If they touched Hailey, she would kill them all. It was that simple.

The air outside was cold and sharp. Lana tugged her bomber jacket tighter around her body, feeling more vulnerable than ever before in her life. She wished that she’d changed into a pair of jeans. Her bare legs were already feeling the chill. Her body didn’t feel as if it belonged to her, and her mind was locked up inside, unable to control what was happening. She knew that she had imprisoned herself in this situation, and the only way out of the jail cell was by doing something terrible… but sometimes , she thought, terrible things can release you .

But hadn’t Timothy thought the same? His actions, when he had been pushed into a corner, were surely the seeds of the terrible thing she was contemplating doing right now. Horror begat horror; bad deeds created even more badness. It was a simple rule of the universe, and one that could never be ignored or forgotten.

Her trapped mind was racing, but it was powerless to intervene. Only the body could perform a meaningful action. The physical Lana was in control now: the flesh-and-blood woman that encased the spiritual being, the shell around the hidden self.

She crossed the road outside the flats, glancing down to inspect the blood stains from that mad junkie, Banjo. The blood had dried to a dark hue; a series of splatter patterns on the roadside and against the kerb. The local news had reported the event earlier, and according to the newsreader Banjo — his real name was Bernard Clarkson — was currently in the LGI, strapped to a bed in an overcrowded ward. They said his mind was wiped. That was the word they’d used: wiped. Like a tape recording or a computer’s hard drive. There was nothing left of the person he’d been; the man had vacated his shell, leaving behind nothing but meat.

Lana began to make her way along the long curve of Grove Road. It was the first of the concentric circles that spread out around the Needle. She hated these streets, even more than the outer edges of the estate. They were cold, unwelcoming, and there was always some kind of trouble brewing. Yet here she was taking a roundabout route to her destination — ‘going round the houses’, as they said in this part of the world. She supposed that she was simply putting off her inevitable arrival at Bright’s gym.

She passed a few boarded up houses — security shutters at the doors and windows, graffiti crawling across the brickwork. These abandoned dwellings were flanked by homes in which people still lived. Television light flared behind the windows. Shadows passed by on the other side of grey net curtains and slatted window blinds. Lana felt a deep sense of loss, a strange kind of grief for something that she had not yet given away. She had no idea where this feeling had come from, but it hurt. The pain was like a blade drawn across her chest.

For you, Hailey.

Once again she thought about the tiny baby her daughter had been. It seemed like yesterday. Intense. Immediate. Such a small infant, and she’d been kept in an incubator for two days. When, finally, Hailey was allowed to take her daughter home from the hospital, both she and Timothy had no idea what they were meant to do. They’d stood over her Moses basket, holding hands and crying together, filled with relief that they’d had at least one child to bring back with them. Watching their baby sleep; looking to the future.

Or so they had thought.

Because the future had not turned out so lovely. Instead it had become a bad dream, a series of absurd events that had ended in murder and Timothy’s suicide.

Walking now along harsh streets, perhaps even watched by hungry eyes, hidden eyes, Lana realised that those events had been the beginning of her downfall. Like a trigger, Timothy’s decision not to talk to her about his problems, to get hold of a gun and try to solve them in the most insane way imaginable, had been the moment when her world had started to crumble. Their daughter — their beautiful, bright, lovely girl — had suddenly been cast out into a darkness through which she was still stumbling, looking for an exit.

Lana reached the corner of Grove Street West, where there was a patch of ground upon which a corner shop had once stood, and next to that the Unicorn pub — perhaps the roughest drinking den in the area. She paused for a moment, glancing at the pub lights and its bright yellow windows that spilled illumination onto the cracked pavement. She could hear music, laughter, raised voices. Somebody was singing a football song, while other voices cut in with another crude ditty.

She turned onto Grove Street West, leaving the light behind. Darkness shifted around her, massaging and grasping her like a huge, soft fist. She fought the urge to turn around, run back to the Unicorn, and drink herself free of this debt to darkness. But if she did, her problems would still be there when the hangover cleared. None of this was going away; it was here forever, unless she made a move to rectify the situation.

Bright’s Gym was a hundred yards along the street, pushed back from the pavement and with its back to a small gathering of willowy trees which bordered the no-man’s-land of Beacon Green. Many years ago, when the area was less poverty stricken, she’d heard that a warehouse depot with its own siding and station had stood on the Green. The old railway line still ran along the eastern edge of Grove Rise, at the bottom of the Embankment, but the old timber sleepers had long since been reclaimed and all that survived were some half-buried metal cleats and a rough trail where people walked their dogs by day but were afraid to visit after dark.

The gym was a small, squat two-storey building that stood alone on this part of the street, opposite a row of derelict houses. Its windows were always covered by metal grilles, with faded, out-of-date posters advertising historical bodybuilding competitions stuck to the glass behind. Nobody could see inside from the street; and nobody inside was able to see out through those windows. The gym wasn’t exactly open to the general public, but the regular clientele consisted of local hard men, amateur boxers and paunchy nightclub security staff. These meatheads would go there to pump some serious iron and ingest whatever steroids Bright could supply them with. It was the loan shark’s base; he operated every bit of business he dealt with from the shabby premises.

It was his castle, his secure hideaway from the world. The centre of the spider’s web.

The police never bothered with Monty Bright. He had the whole area sewn up, and Lana suspected that the local constabulary were of the opinion that they’d rather deal with the shark they knew than the devil they didn’t. It all went to prove her beliefs that everyone and everything was either corrupt or in the process of being corrupted. Timothy’s actions had formed the basis of this theory, and her experiences here, in the Grove, had merely helped it evolve into a working hypothesis.

She approached the front door and waited, still unsure whether she could go through with her plan. She heard the infant Hailey crying inside her head; her mind was filled with images of Timothy’s victims and that of his pale corpse on the mortuary table when she’d been called in to identify his body. A portion of his skull, just above the right eye, was missing. She had glimpsed a blue-grey swell of brain matter through the hole.