Jessie Keane - The Make

This bastard was going to kill him, and he wasn’t even going to care. The man came up on to his knees. Fuck this, thought George as the knife whooshed down, slitting open the sleeve of his jacket. It was sharp. He had time to think that. The knife was extremely sharp. Lucky it hadn’t slashed deeper, caught the skin.

He’d ruined his best jacket.

That realization, the silly thought that the man had ruined his best jacket with that fucking knife, galvanized George. He swung the scaffolding pole round in an arc. It hit his opponent’s head with a solid clunk.

The man seemed to freeze there on his knees. Then a slow dark line bloomed along his hairline and cascaded down over his face. His eyes turned up in his head. The hand holding the knife released the blade, which clattered on to the cobbles. His mouth remained open until blackish blood poured into it, staining his pearly-whites a dingy scarlet in the cold light of the streetlamp. Almost in slow motion, like a dynamited building, he lurched sideways and collapsed.

Suddenly, there was silence.

George knelt there, gasping for breath. He stared at the man. Not a movement. Nothing. George sank back and threw the scaffolding pole aside. It hit the wall at the side of the alley with a metallic thonk, then clattered down on to the cobbles.

Maybe he was going to be sick. He felt sick. He was built like a brick shithouse but he was not a violent man. Tonight, he had surprised himself.

Then the man on the ground groaned.

All George’s senses sprang to their feet and started dancing a panicky fandango.

The fucker wasn’t dead, anyway. And George didn’t want to be here when he came round. No way.

George stumbled to his feet. The alley spun around him. He had to sit down again quickly. He slumped against the wall of the building beside the alley. The girl was three feet away, and still crying.

‘S’all right,’ panted George. ‘S’all right.’

He scrambled to his feet again. This time, he managed to stay up.

‘Hey,’ he said to the girl, trying to keep his voice gentle because she was huddled there, arms over her head, scared out of her skin. Poor little bitch. ‘Hey, come on, let’s get out of here.’

He reached down, touched one thin arm.

She flinched. Looked up. George saw a curiously an drogynous face, tear-streaked, staring up at him; big wide eyes beneath thick, strongly defined brows, a neat nose with flaring nostrils, a pouting sweet mouth, a well-defined jawline.

‘Come on,’ he said again. ‘Let’s move, right?’

He clasped the arm, feeling the silken skin, the long stretch of muscles underneath, and he thought, wait a minute, and then the girl got to her feet, and he saw the shoulders, the hips, the . . . well fuck me, thought George.

He hadn’t rescued a girl at all.

It was a boy.

* * *

The boy sat in the back of the taxi that George had flagged down, hugging himself, his teeth clattering together like casta-nets. George kept glancing at him, wondering what the hell he was going to do now. The words ‘where can I drop you?’ had been met with silence. So George had given the driver his own address.

The boy was in shock. That much was obvious. He couldn’t just leave the kid out on the streets at this hour of the night. Look at what had been happening in that alley.

Yeah, look at that, George.

George thought about it. Something was off here, something was wrong.

He glanced again at the boy. Big, blond, overlong thatch of hair. Elfin face. The boy was tall and long and thin. Not like him. He’d been heavy, solid, robust, just about forever. The boy had only been wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, no coat. It was perishing out there, bitterly cold.

‘What’s your name?’ George asked, and he saw the cab driver’s eyes flick to the rear-view mirror, saw the judgement in them. He obviously thought that this was a pick-up, a meeting of two strangers heading home for some hot and impersonal sex.

The boy didn’t answer. He was shuddering, although it was warm enough in the cab. George took his jacket off and thrust it towards him. He flinched back. How old was he? wondered George. Fourteen, fifteen, around there?

‘Go on. Put it on, mate. You’re cold.’

After a moment’s hesitation, the boy grasped the jacket and slipped it on. It was miles too big for him. He looked lost in it.

Poor little sod, thought George.

‘You can stay the night at mine,’ said George. ‘If you want. It’s not a problem.’

The boy looked at him with limpid blue eyes. Slowly, he nodded.

What is he, deaf and dumb? Or just demented? Hell, what am I inviting in here?

He caught the look from the taxi driver again.

Pair of queers, said the look.

But it wasn’t like that. Not at all.

Chapter 7

Harry’s booking was a divorce party in a pub. There was a three-tier cake set up on the buffet table, red and white balloons suspended on either side of it. On top of the cake was a prone, headless, bloodstained groom, and an upright, rather pleased-looking bride, all in white, holding a shotgun to her shoulder. There was an inscription, too. Happy Divorce, Laura! The minute Harry saw the cake, he thought oh shit, because he knew what he was in for.

Laura Dixon, fashion designer, may have looked demure, dark-haired and solemn in her photo, but in the flesh she was nothing like that. She was wearing a skin-tight sheath of pink satin and four-inch-high gladiator sandals. Her skinny arms and legs and her over-made-up face were all dyed orange. Above her dress, the top halves of two over-inflated pale fake boobs were exposed. As Harry arrived at her front door in Lambeth, neatly suited and booted, and announced himself, a chorus of shrieks went up and a bevy of semi-clad women descended upon him like he was a prize boar in a pig sale or some fucking thing.

‘Ain’t he gorgeous?’ said one.

‘Fuck me, just look at the arse on that,’ said another, circling him.

He was pinched, prodded, and then the limo arrived and he was somehow swept along on a bevvied wave of oestrogen. In the car, they drank champagne, leered at him and squeezed his thighs. He kept smiling but he was glad when they arrived at the venue, until he saw the cake and understood that he was the token male at this shindig, and all men were bastards, up to and including him.

Oh happy days, he thought glumly.

They’d started the evening drunk, and as it progressed the twenty-strong group of women grew rowdier still. After the cake had been cut and the food consumed, an oiled and muscled male stripper came on to hoots and catcalls, and Harry – so glad that he’d been paid up front; that was always the deal and thank god for it – grabbed his chance to slip away to the Gents. From there, he was planning to slip away home, but when he turned from the urinal to wash his hands, Laura was standing there, watching him with a predatory glint in her eye. The thump and grind of the stripper’s music – it was Relax, Frankie Goes to Hollywood – was a distant, heavy, background beat.

‘Hi,’ he said, smiling brightly because that was what he was paid to do, after all.

‘Hi yourself,’ she said, and without another word she popped both enormous white tits out of the top of her dress, and launched herself at him.

Harry got back late to the flat. He let himself in, worn out, shagged out, quite literally, wanting only a shower and then bed, to find George sitting in the lounge with a good-looking blond teenager.

‘Oh!’ he said in surprise.

George looked up and said: ‘Hiya Harry. We’ve had a spot of bother.’

Harry would remember that later. George, master of the huge understatement. A spot of bother.

‘Who’s this?’ asked Harry.