Philip Nutman - Cities of Night

He got up from the couch in the dimly lit living room, swayed slightly as a residual of the fainting vertigo flared in his head, and reached the receiver on the fifth ring.

The line was dead.

Balls. He hated that, not knowing who was trying to call, the tone mocking with its electrostatic hum. He sat beside the phone, shaking uncontrollably, his heart trip-hammering.

What’s wrong with me?

He jumped as the phone rang again, picking up with a knee-jerk reaction in the middle of the second ring.

“Hello?”

Static. An echo of a voice. More static.

“I can’t hear you.”

It sounded like the voice said “Alex.” Then the static faded, followed by a click.

Silence. Marred only by the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. He looked at the peach floral wallpaper and felt sick.

The pattern took on a hypnotic aspect, flowers rotating, blending rhythmically.

The vision came.

It rolled over him with the relentlessness of a tsunami, a devastating sensation that rose up from his chest, pushing air from his lungs as his ribs cried out in agony as he felt them splinter. By the time it reached his head, his world was coming apart, the floral print fragmenting, leaves falling, petals scattering in a whirlwind of motion….

and he was flying backward through cold, black air, arms backstroking wildly

(Oh God!)

legs pumping at nothing, he felt himself thrown into the black, up, upward, onward. All he could see was the dark and a smear of orange.

Then rolling

tumbling

with a bone-jarring crash and something inside him burst something else snapping spine shattering

(Oh my God!!)

skin ripping muscles tearing organs coming apart as he saw stars constellations galaxies nebulae unfolding in celestial majesty as his eyesight exploded.

(OH GOD! THE PAIN!!)

in a swirl of pink puce blood dark purple and then—

Nothing.

He heaved in a deep lungful of air

(I can’t breathe!)

crying out like a baby taking its first taste of oxygen.

“No!”

Jamie’s sense of balance went, and he collapsed back into the armchair still holding the phone, dragging it from the table, the bell jingling loudly as it hit the floor.

Rivers sounded The Bitch’s horn as they reached the roundabout, a long, loud, blaring burst as he handled the bike with the tenderness of a lover on a first date, taking her around the traffic island twice before heading away from Keynsham and back toward the dull lights of Bath. Fourth gear and they were doing eighty. Fifth and the speedometer was nudging ninety-five.

The mile of carriageway was eaten up in seconds. Alex saw that the far set of lights were red as Staff dropped speed, decelerating rapidly.

Come on, change.

Seventy… sixty… fifty…

Come on!

The lights turned green.

Yeah, push it.

As if reading his thoughts, Staff twisted hard on the throttle,

The Bitch whining in protest. They cut through the lights at seventy, veering to the left, taking the humpbacked bridge where the Upper Bristol Road crossed the Avon in a stomach-lifting jolt. The Bitch cleared the tarmac a foot and dropped into the right-hand curve in one smooth-as-silk switch. Before them lay Lower Weston: on the hill above, Newbridge. Way ahead was the city center and it looked like that was where Staff was taking them before heading up to Sion Hill and Tully’s.

Alex’s eyes narrowed unconsciously at the thought of the numbnutted dickhead. Phillippa had made the wrong choice there. Whatever Staff had in mind, it was going to be a party Tully would never forget.

By 8:50 PM Harry Bledsoe was pissed off. The drive from Bath had taken nearly an hour because of heavy traffic compounded by a three-car pileup outside Keynsham. But now he was in Kingswood and he would finally reach the Forbes warehouse in another ten minutes or so.

He wondered how little Mark was doing. The poor kid had looked like he was at death’s door, the measles at its worst, when Harry’d left this morning. He’d give Kath a call as soon as he got to the yard to see how the four-year-old who looked just like his mother was doing. Marrying Kath had been the best move he’d ever made, and at that moment, as he sat in the truck at a set of lights in Kingswood, all he wanted was to be at home with his woman, seated in front of the TV with his kids asleep in bed, happy in the knowledge that little Mark was doing fine.

The bus behind him honked its horn and he put the truck in gear, moving slowly as the road was narrow, the traffic still heavy.

“I’ll be home soon, darlin’,” he said, smiling.

After an hour riding round the city, they pulled into Sion Lane around nine o’clock and were met with the sight of a police car outside Tully’s house. Staff idled The Bitch’s engine, hesitating, then killed it.

Loud music rolled out into the chilly night air as Alex lifted the helmet visor, surveying the street for signs of the Boys in Blue. Staff popped the bike’s stand, removed his helmet, and turned to Alex with a disgruntled expression. He’d had too many run-ins with the pigs.

“I’ll see what’s up.”

Alex dismounted, placing his skid lid on the seat. Staff grunted.

As Alex drew near the house, the music died, Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” cut in mid-chorus, a faint sound of indignant voices following a beat of silence. He paused, then continued toward the detached house, his boot heels clocking along the pavement. When he was about two hundred yards from the house, a second police car drove up from the other end of the horseshoe-shaped street. He ducked into the bushes fronting the nearest house, watching as two cops got out and plodded flat-footed toward the other cops, who were now emerging from the garden with three teenagers behind them. One of the kids was Alan Birch, from King Edward’s, a dealer who made Dawson look like the amateur he was in the dope stakes.

He looked back up the road. Staff was nowhere in sight.

The two cops took the guys Alex didn’t recognize, and roughly frog-marched them to the car. Tully and a small group of kids, Phillippa among them, appeared at the garden gate and spoke with the senior cop, but he couldn’t hear what was said. He hoped Staff couldn’t see Phillippa. Words continued to be exchanged. Tully looked disturbed. The cop shook his head, placing a heavy hand on the short teenager’s shoulder, gesturing toward the other car. Phillippa started to protest, a delicate blond bird who’d suddenly found her wings clipped. Tully turned, took her hand, said something, then walked off with the cop, the other teens standing with lost, confused expressions on their faces.

Alex jumped behind the privet hedge as the patrol cars pulled away and headed up the hill past the bike. Once they were at the top, he ventured another look toward the house, but Phillippa and her crowd were gone.

Staff was nowhere in sight as he ran back to The Bitch.

“Hey,” he hissed.

Staff appeared from behind a high garden wall bordering a large modern house.

“Looks like—”

“Saw it.” Staff’s face was a mask of frustration. He flipped a cigarette into the gutter as he walked over to a green Metro parked nearby. He swung his right foot into the off-side rear end — once, twice — then switched to the other foot, pounding dents into the body work.

“Fuck.”

He turned to the elm tree near the car, its branches reaching over the wall to down near the pavement. He leapt, grabbing a low branch, pulling down with his full weight. It broke with a dry snap, and he swung the limb in an arc at the car’s windshield.

Again.

And again.

When the branch did little more than break off a wiper blade, he threw it to one side, resuming his kicking assault on the paneling.