Sam Thompson - Communion Town

When the old fellow came over I told him to bring me the special and a hair of the pitbull. But a minute later the curtain scraped back and I found myself looking not at a nutritionally trivial breakfast but at the faces of the Cherub brothers. They grinned in unison.

‘Wotcha, Hal.’

None too pleased to see them, I nodded back.

‘Hello, Don. Dave,’ I said. They pushed their way into the booth, their trouser-seats squealing on the leatherette. Don pasted me up against the wall. Ever had a refrigerator share your seat? Dave sat opposite, looking about as reassuring as a vending machine in a lift. The table complained.

I ignored the special as the potboy slapped it down in front of me. Don Cherub snagged the glass from the old man and tossed the spirit away in one pop-eyed swig. Dave sniggered at a high pitch.

The potboy withdrew. By the door the bouncer was perplexed over the small ads. Don twitched the curtain shut.

‘You look well, Hal,’ he said, pressing me flatter against the inside wall. ‘Tie goes lovely with your shirt. It don’t match that hanky in your top pocket though.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to overdo it.’

Don’s eyes slid over to his brother and back to me.

‘Anyhow, Hal, we stopped by in hopes of finding you. And what do you know. First time lucky.’

‘Hur hur,’ said Dave, picking a mushy pea off my plate.

Don lit a cigarette. Dave pulled the plate over to his side of the table, doused the peas in ketchup and started forking them into him. Sweat was crawling down my chest and my arms were pinned to my sides. I waited for the Cherubs to get to the point.

Then Don said a single word. It was your name. That was the first time I heard it: it meant nothing to me then. I gave him a blank look and he repeated it, making the syllables careful and clear, his eyebrows hitching up.

‘Don, you’ve lost me. Your diction’s really come on, though.’

Dave’s snigger started up again.

‘I’m talking about the girl,’ said Don, slowly, watching me. ‘You telling me you don’t know her?’

‘Like I said. Can’t help you.’

Dave licked the plate, his eyes above the white disc rolling from me to his brother and back again. Don sizzled his cigarette down to the filter in one draught. My ribs felt him inhale but were in no position to raise objections.

‘Don’t signify,’ he said. ‘Fing is, we know this certain brass is looking for you. Got a job she wants done. We come here to tell you you ain’t doing it.’

As it happened, it was true what I’d said. I didn’t know your name, back then, and I didn’t know what the Cherubs were talking about. But of course that made no difference. There are rules in this business. There’s decorum.

I hauled an arm free, fished out my own crushed cigarettes, knocked one from the pack and lit up. I tugged the bitterness down into my chest, then, with the burning paper twist bobbing on my lip, I gave Don my coolest eyeball.

‘You’re wasting your time, boys.’

‘Awful sorry to hear that, Hal.’ Don’s brows were kissing caterpillars. ‘I always fought you was a sensible man.’

I shrugged as well as I could. Then, reckoning it couldn’t hurt to try, I tipped my head so much as to indicate that the civilised move would be to let me out of the booth.

‘You know it don’t work like that,’ Don said.

Dave reached across the table. Next thing I was on my way out of the joint, the fist of a Cherub brother clamped on each shoulder like it meant to separate ball from socket. On the up side, the journey cost me nothing in shoe leather. Those boys move fast when they want to. We were through Meaney’s in a single lurch of mirrors and bottles, the bouncer’s bored sweaty face and the powdered, surprised faces of the whores, then we were out in the frying-pan street, and down an alley where I was pinned against hot brick, my toecaps waving clear of the tarmac.

2. A Street Named Pain

I glanced down at my shirt-front, bunched in Don’s fist. Laboriously, Dave unbuttoned his cuff and began to roll up his sleeve. I noticed a big lizard, black with gold stripes, on the lip of a bin opposite, motionless and wilting in the heat. I’d never seen one like it in the city.

‘This is the way it works,’ Don was saying, ‘as you well know. We give you a friendly warning. You got to say something clever. We end up out here.’

Dave’s fist coasted at my face. Everything went haywire. My eyes were swingballing in opposite directions but I was aware of the fist, at the end of its trajectory and beginning to fall back, a wrecking ball on its return to the ragged gap in the masonry. He clocked me again. Either that or the alleyway turned a somersault all by itself. Beyond the silent splashes of black and blue, he was shaking out his fingers and rotating his shoulder.

I was still suspended against the bricks. Dave wound up one more time and opted for the solar plexus. I dropped off the wall, curled up and took some time to myself. Footsteps receded.

At length I rolled over and opened my eyes.

The alley walls were two cliffs of clay-red shadow, leaning towards a strip of acid bronze sky, burning and still, far and close all at once, hard-pencilled with the lines of fire escapes. Rubbish sizzled softly all around me. I drifted off. When I looked again the shadows had ticked a few degrees across the brickwork and Dolly was leaning over me, her lower lip bulging in the gap between her front teeth.

‘Dammit, Moody,’ she said. ‘This is how you handle your problems?’

She made me sit up. My jaw didn’t seem to fit together. Something began to flow freely in my nose.

She clicked her tongue. ‘Looker this.’ She rummaged about her person and pulled out a big piece of white cotton, which she folded up and pressed to my face. She tipped my head back. I meant to tell her to leave me alone but I couldn’t seem to get around to it. She sat away on her haunches.

‘Why’d you make trouble with the Cherubs, Hal? I don’t know what business you got between you but I know it ain’t worth it.’

She eased the sticky cotton off my face, and brushed damp strands of fringe out of my eyes. Her big features kinked sympathetically. The sweat had cut through her powder, leaving a runnel of dewed skin down the side of her neck.

I stared at her. Then I stumbled to my feet, lurched into the opposite wall, and blundered away through ripe milk cartons and a drift of deliquescing vegetables. As I turned the corner she was getting up, the heel of her shoe twisting under her.

3. Beauty with a Concealed Blade

I headed towards the quays. A couple of blocks that way, the stink of fish rose up like the neighbourhood was getting sick to its stomach.

On the opposite pavement, among the jumble of tenement fronts, I passed a white door just as two figures ducked out. They wore duster coats which dragged on the ground, close-fitting leather skullcaps and leather masks with elongated snouts. Their hands were gloved to the elbows. I sweated harder just looking at them. They rummaged in their kitbag and one of them did something to the door. When he moved, I saw he had painted a cross, two diagonal red streaks. This house has been visited . Next, he got to work on the door with a nail gun, while the other figure began to swing a hand bell up and down, shoulder to hip, up and down. I pulled my handkerchief from my breast pocket and held it to my nose and mouth as I went by.

All I wanted right now was to soothe that throbbing you only get from a week-old weapons-grade hangover followed by a meaningful discussion with the Cherub brothers. I wished to be where others were not and I knew just the place. A few doors further along I ducked off the street and down a constricted staircase into a cellar room.