Sam Thompson - Communion Town

I stood in the centre of the stifling box for a minute, then two, then five. Every scrap of the precious metal you’d given me I loaded into my pockets, and the weight settled into me like something of my own, some burden I’d been missing. Then I wrenched the old nine-iron from where it was holding up one end of the window blind, and beat up my chair and my clients’ chair. I smashed my desk lamp, hacked divots from the plaster, slashed the fins off the ceiling fan and bludgeoned in the fronts of the filing cabinets. I cleared the glass out of the window frame and the frosted pane out of the door, and I didn’t stop until there was nothing unbroken and the muscles across my shoulders ached with heat like the tarmac in the streets outside.

7. The Heart is a Crime Scene

Eleven-seventy-four Lorenz Drive was out in the hills beyond the city limits, one of the winding high-banked avenues that ran for miles with now and then a big villa set far back above the road. The final scrap of dawn-time cool was cooking out of the air as I steered my coughing, bucking jalopy round the curves. Most of the gates were chained and padlocked. In spite of the splendid seclusion, the folks who lived out here found it too close to the sickness stewing down in the city. Same as always they’d cleared out to their country retreats until the heat was off.

The last of the dawn evaporated, the sun flicked itself clear of the hills and got straight into burning, and the curves went rolling past, the gatepost numbers rising at a crawl. The aspect began to change. Soon the gates were rusted and broken in, and the paths beyond them choked with dark greenery. Then nothing for a stretch. I drove on.

When I found it, the place turned out to be only half there. Some time back they’d begun construction of the last in the necklace of hillside villas, but work had stopped at the bare structure, leaving an abstraction of a house in concrete and brick, which had since been crumbling. The doors and windows were bare rectangular gaps.

I zigzagged up the steep driveway and braked to a stop in the dish of dust out front of the house. What did you want to bring me here for? I clumped the jalopy’s door shut, settled my hat on my head and shot my cuffs. I didn’t like it. It was seven-oh-two a.m. precisely. Why had I agreed to come? There was no sign of you. There were no other vehicles. I squatted and eyed the dust fruitlessly.

Inside, the house was an undivided space, still wide open at the back. A stack of breeze blocks had partly fallen over in the uncompleted aperture. An approximation of a staircase led nowhere. All at once I was on the point of calling your name out loud.

Then I heard an engine snarl and tyres in grit.

Anyone could tell it was time to disappear out the back and wait to see how things unfolded. But I paused an unforgivable moment, there in the open of the half-made house. Doesn’t that tell you everything, kid? Doesn’t that tell you how much trouble I was in? More than anything else, what I wanted was to see a certain shape outlined in that doorless doorway, so I bought into the sudden lift of excitement in my chest, and I paused.

And the light was blocked out. Don Cherub shouldered into the room, followed by his brother.

‘Hal. Seems you ain’t given up.’

‘Where is she?’ My head felt as hard, angular and hollow as the heaped blocks. ‘Where is she?’

‘That,’ said Don, ‘is what you ain’t going to find out.’

‘Tell me where she is.’

‘You should have listened in the first place, Hal, and turned down the case. But you ain’t a man to take friendly advice. So here we are again.’

Don was holding something close to his leg, something blunt and leaden. Brass glinted at Dave’s fist. I lifted my chin. No one quite seemed to know what to say next.

‘Come on, then,’ I offered at last, and, shyly, the brothers moved towards me.

… mid-morning sunlight angled through the holes and tracked across unfinished floor. Dust moved in small whorls, the motes buddying up and falling out again. I stirred. I was spread on the ground all ready for outlining in white tape. I moved a hand to find out what shape my head was, then sat up, full of regrets. From the precipice of the staircase you’d have seen me feeling my skull, surrounded by scattered gold bits. They had burst from my pockets and the Cherubs had left them where they fell. Those boys and their professional ethics.

You hadn’t been here. I gave it to myself straight: she wasn’t here, it was them instead. I was in no state not to despair. There were no leads, there was no way forward. I knew nothing about you except what wouldn’t help.

With my thoughts cramped tight as my jaw I gathered up the thin coins, restoring every last one to my pockets. I knew their weight, now, to the penny. I thought I’d head back into the city then inter myself at the back of Meaney’s and see how many whiskies I could swap them for. Then I noticed something else in the dust. I picked it up. A business card: a name, unknown to me, was printed on the front, and the name of a trade, and an address. But when I flipped it over, the pale-pencilled handwriting there nearly floored me again. The characters were already fixed in my mind. Four words. Take care of yourself .

8. Tough Guys Bruise Easy

I pounded the streets. I’d have driven but the Cherubs had cut my tyres, so the jalopy was beached up on Lorenz Drive and I’d slogged it back into the city on foot, parched, earning blisters. The cheap business card was in my pocket, its edges already rubbed soft by my fidgeting thumb. My thinking was, you’d slipped it into my pocket back in the office. I didn’t like that but it was something to go on. It took me all afternoon to find the address. It wasn’t a district I knew, and I kept having to turn back, making detours with my handkerchief clutched to my nose and mouth, because the red sigils clustered ever thicker and just out of sight the bells were ringing. Plenty of streets were too far gone for containment. The doors hung open and bodies lay half in and half out, kinked across doorsteps and kerbstones, able to crawl so far and no further, or perhaps in some confused attempt to cool down. In these murky trenches the air lay like piping hot asparagus soup. They moaned to each other, lifting mottled limbs, the ones that could. Here and there daring entrepreneurs, their bodies robed and their heads swaddled in herb-stuffed bandages, slung the still and the still-twitching alike on their carts before hauling them off to collect a few pence a head at the burial pits. I hurried past, monitored by the rats that laced themselves in and out of the mounds blocking the alleys to the first-floor windowsills.

The address on the card turned out to be a sullen door a couple of steps below pavement level. I had to shove to reach it because the street was obstructed by a crowd of young boys and old women clustered around a pair of dogs fighting over some raggedly round, bloodied object. The spectators slashed at the frantic animals with sticks and shoes, and called out bets to each other.

I consulted the card again –

DOCTOR S. DOGG

MYSTERIES OF SCIENCE

97 DAPPER STREET, GLORY PART

— and was none the wiser. So I tightened my greasy half-windsor, rasped a palm across my jaw, and battered the wood with the heel of my fist. At once, locks tumbled and bolts shot on the other side. I was all ready to go in hard and force some answers out of there. But when the door opened I was struck stony.

She folded her arms tight under her bust. It didn’t look so friendly as sometimes. She spiked me with that challenging look she had, kohl-ringed for emphasis. The tough guy act is all very well for scaring up information from the unsuspecting, but what are you meant to do faced with a flimsy who’s looking at you like she’s seen all your tricks before? Worse, she had, and I knew it. The angle of her chin was saying she’d been more impressed by her puppy the last time it left a damp patch on the floor. I spluttered and found my tongue.