Candleland (22 page)

Ringo, eyes blinking rapidly, head pounding, now had the wheel more or less under control.

“Stupid bastard,” he said, “you could have killed us both.”

He reached across with his left arm, trying to pull the baseball bat from Larkin's grasp. Larkin was having none of it. With his right hand he grabbed hold of Ringo's fist, felt the biker's powerful fingers trying to grip his own, bend them back, snap them. With his left hand, Larkin swung the bat as hard as he could onto Ringo's outstretched forearm, connecting with his wrist. Ringo screamed, but didn't let go. Larkin did it again. There was a cracking noise and Ringo withdrew his arm quickly.

“Bastard!” he yelled and stretched his foot out for the brake.

Larkin knew that even wounded, Ringo would best him one on one. He had more of a chance if the car was moving and Ringo was at the wheel.

Before Ringo could stop the car, Larkin lunged at him again, this time going for his balls. His hand now only an anger-driven machine of bone, muscle and adrenalin, he grabbed them and, through the filthy, greasy denim, gave them as hard a twist as he could.

Ringo let out a shriek and, on impulse reaction, stuck his legs out rigid. His right foot hit the accelerator and, with a roar and a pull, the car flew forwards again, speedo needle climbing higher.

Ringo, squirming in pain, tried vainly to prise Larkin's hand off, but his left hand was now useless and his right was needed for steering the car. Larkin gripped harder, twisted all the more.

Neither of them had control of the car now as it swung madly from one side of the road to the other, speed never dropping below eighty.

With his free hand, Larkin wedged one end of the baseball bat under Ringo's groin, the other on the accelerator pedal. He then straightened himself up, gripping Ringo's balls all the time.

Ringo flailed ineffectually at Larkin with his left hand, but Larkin caught it easily and gave Ringo's wrist a sharp twist. Ringo writhed in his seat as if he'd been hooked up to electrodes. His arms waved about uselessly. He looked like he couldn't make up his mind what to do first; get Larkin off, get the car stopped. He seemed to vacillate between the two, pain clouding his reasoning.

“Not much fun when you're on the receiving end, is it you cunt?” shouted Larkin at the top of his lungs.

Another top-register squeal from Ringo, another bitter, acrid smell of burning rubber; the car rounded another corner. They were out of the arches now. On the left side of the road was a council estate, redbrick flats surrounded by threadbare grass and stunted, anorexic trees. A pile of black bin bags at the side of the road loomed up in front of them. Now or never, thought Larkin. One way or another it was going to end.

Letting Ringo's left arm drop, but keeping his other hand gripping Ringo's balls, Larkin opened the passenger side door.

“See you in hell, fucker,” he said, reached up, and gave one last yank at the wheel.

The car pulled violently towards the left, nearer to the grass on Larkin's side, almost mounting the pavement, and bearing down very quickly on the first of a row of kerbside parked cars.

Larkin dived out, into the air, into the unknown. He was aiming for the bin bags, but he honestly didn't know if he would live or die.

He hit the bags, the force of the impact causing him to keep moving, dragging them with him, spilling rotten garbage all over the place, covering him as well as the pavement. He was hoping but not expecting them to absorb and slow down his motion.

The Jag, still at top speed, ploughed straight into the first parked car.

Larkin lay there on the hard-packed, garbage-strewn earth, breathing heavily. He assessed the damage.

He was alive, that much he knew, but he had yet to determine how alive. He tried to move and found nothing but pain down his left side. He rolled over onto his right, struggling to get up. As he put his elbow on the ground to gain leverage, a sudden pain whizzed round his upper body, as if he'd been wrapped in electrified barbed wire. He lay back down again, thinking: my ribs have gone.

He flopped back, gasping, then slowly tried again. This time he managed to make it to a sitting position. His right arm, beyond some pain in his fingers, seemed not too bad. His left arm, hanging twisted and useless at his side, told a different story. One he couldn't think about yet. He laboriously pulled himself up on to his knees, looked over at the Jag.

The front end had been completely concertinaed into a parked Cavalier. Ringo had gone through the windscreen and smashed into the back of the stationary car, spiderwebbing its glass into an artful fractal. If he wasn't dead, he soon would be.

Larkin managed to make it, painfully, to his feet. As soon as he stood, his body gave way and he was back on the ground again. His left ankle hurt when he applied pressure to it and the pain in his left side seemed, unsurprisingly, to emanate from his shoulder and twisted arm. Judging by the way it hung uselessly at his side, it had been broken, dislocated or, at a worse guess, completely shattered.

He managed to pull himself to his knees, tried to drag himself across to the car. He was amazed it hadn't blown up. Since his knowledge of car mechanics came first and foremost from Hollywood that's what he would have expected. But it hadn't happened. Yet.

Suddenly, there came a mighty sound, like a sonic boom accompanied by an intense heat on his face. The force knocked Larkin onto his back. He propped himself on his right arm, looked up. The Jag was in flames, the fire rapidly spreading to the Cavalier. Sometimes the movies do get it right, he thought.

He made one last attempt to move and couldn't. It was no good; he had been through too much in too short a space of time and his body wouldn't function any more. He knew he should try to get away, hide. The fire would soon attract attention and people would want to know what he was doing there. Too many questions.

But he couldn't move. He couldn't even keep his eyes open, they were that heavy. He closed them. Then there was a sound. Someone talking to him.

He opened them again and saw a face looking down on him. The face was battered but familiar. It was saying something to him, but he couldn't make out what. He was too tired.

Larkin began to slip away. Just as he was passing the last outpost of consciousness he managed to have one final coherent thought. He knew who the face belonged to.

Ralph Sickert.

Part Three

The corridor was strip-lit, fluorescent tubes flickering overhead, bad connections. Bare, institutional walls, plain, stark. Lit by random, constant strobing the hall seemed neverending
.

In front of Larkin was a small boy, about eight or nine, scruffy-looking, with the kind of clothes and haircut that went out two decades ago. He was walking quickly. He turned to look at Larkin and the overhead flicker caught his face. He had a cheeky grin, bordering on insolence. He raised his hand to beckon, to keep Larkin walking, and Larkin couldn't help noticing it was heavily, but raggedly, bandaged. Blood-stained, with only the thumbs exposed. The boy seemed agitated, in a hurry to be somewhere. He beckoned again. Larkin followed
.

The boy stopped in front of a set of double doors. Making sure Larkin had caught up with him he pushed one door open, awkwardly holding it back for Larkin to enter. Once Larkin had entered, the boy followed
.

The room they entered was dark, cathedral-still. In the centre were two mortuary slabs, side by side, with two sheet-covered bodies lying on them. One adult-sized, one child-sized. Larkin tried not to look at them. Instead he looked at the boy
.

“
What's with the bandages?” he asked
.

The boy gave a cheeky grin. “Every time I was naughty, or when I said something they didn't like, they cut off one of my fingers
.”

He held up his hands, shook the bloody, bandaged stumps. The bandages partially unravelled. “I said a lot of things they didn't like!” He laughed as if it was all a game, waggled his exposed thumbs. “But look on the bright side. They let me keep these. They're not all bad
.”

“
Who are they?” asked Larkin
.

“
The ones who don't like my words against them
.”

Larkin looked away from the boy towards the bodies. He didn't lift the sheet up
.

“
How did they die?” Larkin asked
.

“
Words,” replied the boy. “Wrong words. Wrong place.” He crossed to the biggest body, put the sheet between his mitts. “Want to see?
”

“
Will it bring them back if I look?
”

“
No,” said the boy, “But it'll prove to you they're gone
.”

“
I know they're gone. I have accepted it,” replied Larkin. “What I can't accept is that they've gone and he's still walking around
.”

The boy shrugged, held up his stumps again. “These have gone,” he said, waving his stumps, then waggled his thumbs. “But these are still here
.”

He gave his cheeky grin, laughed, and Larkin woke up
.

Larkin opened his eyes, looked around. He was alive, that much he knew, but beyond that, he was disorientated. He didn't know what day it was, what time it was, or where he was. He was lost.

His head felt groggy, his thoughts vague, but he forced himself to concentrate and gather his senses. He was in a bed, but it was either an unusually hard bed, or he'd been there so long his body had gone numb. His head was resting on what felt like a very thin pillow and there was a sterile smell in his nostrils.

He blinked his eyes, looked up. A pale, sloping ceiling met his gaze. From this he deduced that he was in an attic room, but not Faye's. What he could see of the room matched the smell. Clean, bright and airy but impersonal. Another couple of beds occupied the bare-boarded floor space with small, mismatching cupboards at the side of each. Not a hospital, then.

Needing to find out more, he tried to sit up. A sharp, stabbing pain travelled immediately round his torso. It felt like a charge from a cattle prod. Gently, he lowered himself back down again.

Larkin decided to take it slower, one thing at a time. First, a body inventory. Gingerly, he flexed, lifted, tensed and untensed. Apart from his painful torso, he felt a similar sensation of a few hundred volts jolting through his frame in his left ankle and his left shoulder and arm. Both were too painful to move more than a centimetre or so. On his right side he felt, then saw, a tube running from his wrist to an IV bag suspended from a portable metal frame.

On the wall at the right side of the bed was a red switch with a plaque underneath which read: Please Ring For Attention. Larkin pressed it. He felt like some attention.

While he waited for someone to arrive, he tried to think where he might be, how he had got there. He closed his eyes. All he saw was a boy with bloody, bandaged hands, opening a door to … His eyes burst open again. That wasn't a memory, that was a dream, a nightmare. He tried to forget it and force his mind back further. It was difficult, nothing was very clear. He could see flashes of images, hear snippets of sentences, none pleasant but all meaningless, with deep, black pools in between. It was as if he had reached blackout drunk stage while on a very nasty bender.

He remembered pain … heat … fire … rage … and something else. Someone else.

At that moment there was a knock at the door.

“Yeah?” Larkin managed to croak. His voice sounded rusty, as if his vocal chords had seized up from disuse.

The door opened and in walked Darren.

“Oh, you're back in the land of the living, then?” Darren aimed for flippant but it was clear he was relieved.

Larkin grunted.

“I'll go and get Mickey.” Darren turned and exited, leaving Larkin alone once more.

Not for long, though. Darren soon returned, and with him was Mickey Falco.

Mickey Falco smiled as he entered, puffing and red-faced, and reached for a straight-backed chair. He dragged it to the side of Larkin's bed and plonked himself in it with a great sigh of relief.

“Those stairs,” he said, getting his breath back, “be the death of me. So, how you feelin'?”

“Confused,” managed Larkin. “Hurt.”

“Yeah? Well you're lucky to be here.”

“D'you mean here here?” asked Larkin, his voice creaking and drawling like Lee Marvin at the wrong speed. “Or here anywhere?”

Mickey Falco smiled. “D'you want anythin'? A drink?”

“Whatever.”

“I'll have the same, Darren,” said Mickey Falco.

Darren nodded and left, shutting the door behind him.

Larkin gestured feebly with his right hand. “Chest hurts, left arm, left foot. Headache.”

Mickey Falco nodded. “That's about what we reckoned. We've had a doctor look you over. We have a couple of local ones do voluntary work for us. She said you had bruised ribs, twisted ankle, dislocated shoulder and concussion. Other than that, right as rain.”

“And I'm in Candleland, I take it?”

“You are.”

“How long have I been here? How long have I been out?”

“Couple of days now. You were unconscious when they brought you in. You've been that way until now. Any longer and we'd have been worried, put you in hospital.”

“Why didn't you?”

“Because we thought we could cope with you here. And we didn't want to involve the police, of course.”

“Where was I?” asked Larkin. “How did I get there? How did I get here?”

“You were in Bermondsey. There was a car crash and it looks like you threw yourself clear. The other guy wasn't so lucky.”

At that, the memory unfolded. Larkin fighting with Ringo in the car, diving out. He remembered lying on the ground, litter strewn around him, in pain, too spent to move. There was something else. Someone else.