Hyenas (6 page)

Chapter 8

His legs weighed down by the heavy, sodden fabric, Jay
trudged across the small deck and ducked into the boat’s cabin. It was cramped
and gloomy but it was dry and surprisingly warm. There were two small bunks
and, further back, a sink, a stove and some cupboards. Jay sat on one of the
bunks, elbows on knees, head in hands, and wondered just what he was going to
do next.

The idea that occupied much of the foreground of his
thought was this: cut the boat loose, let it drift, see where he ended up,
because anything would be better than this, better than Liverpool with its
hyenas and militia. But what if he didn’t arrive anywhere? What if he floated
out into the Atlantic and died a slow, painful death from dehydration?

But what was the alternative? To return to
Waterstones? What chance was there of finding another book that would enable
him to sail the
Jerusalem
? And what about the hyenas? The place had been
crawling with them when he and Dempsey had fled. What would it be like now? A
nest?

He couldn’t think. The pains, utterly different from
one another, in his fingers, elbow and shoulder joint were a constant
distraction, and dread had settled in his belly like the beginnings of food
poisoning. And what thoughts he
could
summon were swirling round his head like snowflakes,
colliding with one another, no help at all.

He shook himself free of his backpack, brought it
round in front of him and set it between his feet. He flipped open the lid and
took out his Discman. He put in the earphones and pressed ‘play’.

A man’s voice, Liverpudlian, soft and deep:

“
What is the
price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song or wisdom for a dance in the
street? No, it is bought with the price of all that a man hath: his house, his
wife, his children. Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to
buy and in the withered field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain...
”

Jay listened for a few more minutes and felt his head
begin to clear. And then he remembered there was
another
Waterstones, in
Liverpool One, just a three minute walk from where he’d been cooped up for five
weeks. He wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him sooner, but he knew the answer
before the question was fully formed. He hadn’t
liked
the new Waterstones.
With its escalators and over-sized coffee shop and too many computer terminals,
it hadn’t felt right, hadn’t felt like a bookshop at all. He’d been there once
only and, unimpressed, had pledged his allegiance to the older Waterstones on
Bold Street.

He stopped the Discman and took out the earphones.

He didn’t want to go back, back to where the hyenas
were skulking, but he knew he had no choice, and knowing he had no choice, he
decided he wouldn’t think about choices anymore, or consequences. He would just
get on with it, because he imagined that was how Dempsey had survived. How
Dempsey had survived before he’d had the misfortune of encountering Jay, anyway.

He searched the cupboards above the bunks until he
found a first aid kit. He bandaged his bleeding fingers, cleaned his cuts and
scrapes with cotton wool and witch hazel, then popped four ibuprofen. There
were clothes in the cupboards, too: socks, boxer shorts, t-shirts, black canvas
trousers and a thick, woollen, navy-blue jumper. He changed quickly, eager to
be free of his icy, saturated pants. The borrowed clothes fit well enough,
considering, and had been washed in some kind of floral conditioner, the
soothing smell of which almost brought him to tears.

He rifled through a drawer near the stove and found
two knives. One, a small paring knife, he put in a side pocket of his pack. The
other, a good seven inches of stainless steel blade and a heavy-duty rubber
handle, he placed on one of the bunks.

He re-shouldered the pack, picked up the knife, trying
to ignore the trembling of his hand, trying to attribute it to the cold, and
left.

It wasn’t until he was halfway back along Princes
Parade, following his and Dempsey’s backwards footprints, that he realised it
had finally stopped snowing, and he wondered if things were looking up, perhaps.

He recalled Dempsey’s instructions in Waterstones and
counted his steps, stopping at every fiftieth step to turn on the spot,
scanning for hyenas.

He skirted round the Liver Building, crossed The
Strand, weaving in between abandoned vehicles, and headed up Water Street.
Every now and then, Jay spotted evidence that Dempsey had passed by: splashes
of red; and each time, he wondered if he’d made the right decision, leaving the
boat.

As he passed the NatWest on Castle Street, he noticed
that the hand that had sat, crablike, on the keypad of one of the cash machines
was gone. A hot pulse of nausea surged up from his gut and he realised that the
thought of someone or something
taking
the hand was more disturbing by far than the severed
hand itself. He scanned about for hyenas, without stopping or slowing, turning
as he moved, suddenly convinced that whatever had claimed the hand was still
around, quite possibly watching him right now from a doorway or from behind a
snow-covered car. He was wondering if the hand had been taken by one of the
seagulls, wheeling overhead, come out of hiding now that the snow had stopped
falling, when he tripped over his own feet and fell. The knife jumped from his
hand and skittered ten feet across the crust of frozen snow, spinning.

Jay got up, dusted himself down and walked over to the
knife. It was still spinning and he remembered an empty cider bottle doing the
same thing toward the end of a party at Natalie Keegan’s house when he was
fifteen years old. He waited for the knife to stop spinning. At the party, the
bottle had pointed at Jenny Lasseter and she’d kissed him hard, pushing her hot
tongue deep into his mouth and running her fingers up the back of his neck and
into his hair. She’d tasted of cherry bakewell. Excitement had risen in him so
suddenly, he’d felt sick and dizzy, as if he was on a speeding, out-of-control
rollercoaster. Here, now, the knife pointed across the road, at a newsagent.
Behind the plate glass, between advertisements for Lotto and the Liverpool
Echo, a hyena dropped the shredded remains of a magazine, spat a wad of pulp
from its mouth and threw itself against the window. A dull chime rang out.

Jay scooped up the knife and ran.

Another dull chime. Then another. He was halfway down
Castle Street, passing the old Cooperative Bank building, with alternating
floors of red and yellow sandstone and its verdigrised onion dome, when he
heard the newsagent’s window shatter.

He couldn’t help but look back. The hyena, clad all in
black — black jeans, heavy black boots, black t-shirt — its face and hands
bright with blood, was picking itself up off the pavement, mad eyes fixed on
Jay. It cut diagonally across the street toward him, vaulting from the bonnet
of a windowless, snow-filled Fiesta.

Jay crossed in the opposite direction, angling away
from the hyena, toward Cook Street. He risked a backward glance. The hyena
tried to change direction, but too abruptly, and it lost its footing. It fell
back, its head hitting the ground with a crunch that might have been lethal had
it not been for the relative softness of the snow. It lurched back to its feet
almost immediately but appeared disorientated from the impact, scouring the
vicinity for its quarry.

Jay, spurred on by this crumb of good fortune, picked
up the pace and turned on to Cook Street. Halfway down, he threw a glance over
his shoulder. The hyena was still coming. As Cook Street became Victoria Street
at the junction with North John Street, Jay took a right then cut across toward
Mathew Street, aiming to break the hyena’s line of sight, just for a second or
two, and give it the slip. A quick backward glance told him he had failed and,
at that moment, a stitch like a brutal stab wound tore through his left side
and he let out something very much like a whimper.

He considered going down Mathew Street, cutting
through Cavern Walks, but what if that was a dead end? What if there were more
hyenas in there, skulking amongst the Vivienne Westwoods, Roberto Calvallis and
Diors? Then he remembered the next street along, Harrington Street, had a
little side street breaking off it, about halfway down.

He passed the Hard Day’s Night Hotel, with its
gleaming granite pillars and huge Beatles faces in the windows, then turned
onto Harrington Street. It wasn’t much more than a glorified back alley, a
place for deliveries and rubbish collections that sliced British Home Stores in
two. Above the street, at first floor level, a glass walkway reconnected the
two halves of the department store. Jay could see the side street on the right,
about a hundred and fifty feet away.

The pain in his side was approaching unbearable, as if
something hot and jagged was sinking deep into his muscle, rotating slowly as
it went. He didn’t look back now, despite the almost overwhelming urge to do
so. He could hear the hyena, its crunching footfalls and rasping breath. He
willed his legs to move faster. His thigh and calf muscles burned and a rusty
blade seemed to saw into his shinbones, but he felt himself speed up.

He turned onto the side street so fast that he slammed
into a shuttered door then pinballed diagonally into the opposite wall. But he
didn’t stop moving. Above him, pigeons clattered skyward. He knew the hyena
would have seen him change direction but he was praying that he would make it
to the opening onto Lord Street, a hundred or so feet away, before it
re-established its line of sight. Then — please, God — he could wrong-foot it
and duck into a shop, stay quiet, stay still, be safe. And if he didn’t manage
to outsmart the hyena, he knew, knife or no knife, he’d have no energy left for
the fight; he’d just fall to his knees, close his eyes and wait for the
inevitable.

As he flew out onto Lord Street, he looked back. No
hyena. He attempted a sharp right but the manoeuvre was too ambitious by far
and suddenly he was rolling across the snow, feeling like a cowboy who has just
leapt from a moving train in some old western. On the third or fourth roll, he
sprung up, amazed to find himself still gripping the knife, momentarily
considering the possibility that he might have stabbed himself but probably
wouldn’t know about it until his adrenalin levels had dropped back to something
like normal. He turned to face the side street and, as he heard the hyena slam
into the metal shutter at the other end, he thanked God that momentum had
carried him over to the right and hadn’t left him in full view of his pursuer.

He only had a few seconds to find a hiding place.
Right in front of him was an open door and a narrow staircase leading up to a
gloomy landing. A neatly scripted menu on a blackboard accompanied by
cartoonish illustrations of sandwiches, bowls of soup and slices of quiche,
told him that the stairs led up to a cafe. He darted in, turned to close the
door, then saw the frozen drift of snow, about a foot deep, occupying the
threshold and realised he wouldn’t have time. He bolted up the stairs. The pain
in his side was suddenly too much and as soon as he reached the landing he fell
onto all fours, crawled out of sight and, shrugging off his pack, rolled onto
his back, trying to gasp for breath as quietly as possible.

A few seconds later, he heard the hyena burst from the
side street, snarling and panting. For what felt like a full minute but was
probably just a few seconds, he heard it turning on the spot, then, unable to
locate its prey, it let out a strangled shriek of frustration and set off down
Lord Street toward Whitechapel.

Jay waited until he couldn’t hear its panting or
snarling or crunching footfalls or anything that might be construed, even
loosely, as panting, snarling or crunching footfalls, before getting to his
feet. Even then, he peered around the newel post and down the stairs, a
substantial part of him convinced he’d see the hyena framed by the doorway,
laughing silently, its shoulders bouncing up and down. But there was no hyena.

He gave it another minute.

He was about to set off, when it occurred to him that
he was planning to embark on a sea voyage that might, given his novice status,
take a lot longer than it ought to and he wasn’t sure how much, if any, food
was squirreled away on the
Jerusalem
. He was almost certain that Dempsey would have taken
care of that side of things, but still, here he was standing in a cafe. He
could stock up on a few supplies and pretend it had nothing to do with the fact
that he was more than a little reluctant to venture outside again.

He looked around. The landing where he stood formed a
red-carpeted T with the stairs. There was a doorway at each end. The door to
his right was open, revealing a dining lounge in some disarray. Cutlery,
crockery (most of it broken) and trampled food covered the floor. Some of the
tables and chairs were overturned. A pair of bare legs, horribly bruised,
extended out from beneath one of the fallen tables; nearby, a pair of shredded
and bloodied jeans seemed eager to create a narrative that Jay refused to think
about.