Jago (22 page)

On the porch, there was a movement. Wood creaked against wood. A shape bobbed back and forth. Someone was sitting in an old rocking chair. A man. Lytton got an impression of a face leaning towards the light but drawing away before he could get a look at it. The rocking man wasn’t alone. A woman, with long hair, stood by the chair.

Lytton had his gun out again. He heard Teddy’s curt sucking-in of breath, and signed to him to keep quiet.

Stooping low, he advanced into the hollow, taking care to keep his footing on the loose shale.

‘Evenin’, stranger,’ shouted the woman, ‘no need to creep and crawl like a snake.’

Lytton’s foot sunk into shingles. A fall of jagged pebbles shifted away from his ankle. He stood up straight, foot free, and walked as calmly as possible towards the house that shouldn’t be there. The woman stepped down from the porch to look at him. She’d been Allison Conway a long time ago. Now she was dried up and scrawny. Hair still black, eyes still sharp, her face was worn leather, her hands knuckly lumps of arthritis. Lytton would have to be cautious. The strangeness was beginning.

‘Welcome, stranger,’ said old Allison, exposed teeth rotten.

There was an explosion off in the trees behind the house, and a flashbulb burst of fire. Lytton was flat on the ground, his ears echoing, slithering forward on his elbows toward cover. That had been a shotgun.

Terry. Bloody Terry.

He’d missed by a mile. A shotgun was no use at night, except for close work. And for that, Terry would have to come out of his coward’s corner and square up to him. Of course, that would mean he would have to get near enough to be in range of Lytton’s gun. He had the Browning out again, safety off.

Shit, shit, shit, shit, he thought. But he was working around a calm centre in his mind. Lytton didn’t want to have to shoot a kid, no matter how obnoxious. He didn’t want to have to kill anybody. But he’d signed up for life, and he knew what came with the territory. There were things not in the job description, to which he had committed himself when he wasn’t much older than the bloody silly boy out there in the woods with his punky rabbit gun. A snake knows how to bite.

Lytton almost made it under the porch. But the shape got out of its rocker and came for him. He thought he heard spurs chinking.

‘Cease fire, fuckface!’ The words came out of the shape with difficulty, over a sundered palate, through shredded lips.

Lytton hoped Teddy had the sense to make a run for it. This could easily get nasty from here.

He looked up. Allison and the rocker man stood over him. A fist grabbed his hair, and jerked him to his knees. A dead rot of a face floated before him in the twilight, life in its eyes and tongue.

‘Pretty fucking ugly, huh? They call me Badmouth Ben, Mr Snake. I’m putting my mark on you.’

Badmouth Ben produced a huge blade—a bowie knife, Lytton recognized—and touched his tongue with it.

‘This is so I’ll know you later.’

The point went to Lytton’s temple, and he felt a tug at the corner of his eye as the icy steel pinpricked him. But his hands were still free. And he had his gun. Lytton jabbed the pistol—now it felt like a toy in his sweat-slick fist—and jabbed the muzzle into the underside of Badmouth Ben’s wrist, pushing the knife away from his head.

The shot was muffled by flesh and bone. The bullet burst through the back of Badmouth Ben’s hand, raising an eruption of red in the greasily overcooked skin. He let go of Lytton and howled at the pinking sky. Another howl, even more feral, answered from the wood.

Lytton was on his feet, braced squarely against the porch. He drew aim at Badmouth Ben’s chest, but the howling man was suddenly gone, twisting into the crawl-space under the house.

He was pulled away. It was Allison, young again, mad as a harpy. He pushed her off. Teddy was skipping along the side of the house, kicking boards. The structure shook and settled. Inside, nails burst from wood. Teddy was whooping. Lytton wanted this over. He wanted to put his gun away, but Shotgun Terry was still out there, whining like a dog, and Allison could still go for his eyes with her nails. The girl hissed at him, and spat like a vicious cat.

There was another blast, and a hole the size of a tea tray appeared in the side of the house. Teddy jumped away from the splintered gap, and gave the wood a V-sign. The house strained and creaked and fell in on itself. A dust cloud rose from the ruin as boards crumbled quickly, a time-lapse film of decay. The dust bubbled a little and sank into the earth.

Allison showed them her teeth and waved claw-fingered hands. Lytton and Teddy stood back, away from her darting scratches, and she looked from one to the other. Her eyes were still alight. Then, with foxlike swiftness, she was gone into the wood. There was no sign of Badmouth Ben in the fast-dispersing remains of the house.

‘Terry,’ Teddy called out, angry, puzzled, i’ll ’ave ’ee for this.’

There was no answer from the woods.

Dawn broke the sky. Somewhere, in the village, a dog barked. Even the dust of the house was gone now. There was just the familiar Bomb Site, shingles and grass, a few bits of weathered rubbish.

Teddy looked at him, then down at the Browning, eyes wide enough to show white around the irises. ‘Fuck, James, wha’ss this game?’

Lytton had no answer. Self-conscious, he put his pistol away. A tear of blood ran from forehead to chin. He smeared it away.

‘Now we go home,’ he said.

H
e was a foot shorter than Clint Eastwood, but he’d practised that dead look about the eyes. It didn’t really fit his thickeyebrowed, thick-lipped ventriloquist’s-dummy face, but it could help get him what he wanted. His clothes were copied faithfully from Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda in Hell’s Angel films, his language picked up from his favourite writer, Richard Allen. His bike began life as a sleek Kawasaki, but he’d jazzed it up. The front wheel was forward and the banana seat back, the handles curved like the Devil’s horns and the petrol tanks had red flames painted on them. In the panniers, he packed everything he owned. The bike was more than his home, it was a part of his body.

He heard about Rivendell in the village pub. The old turds were bitching about it in Welsh, but the lads he played darts with and bought pints for translated and embroidered the stories. Rivendell was a hippie hideaway. Girls with no bras, longhairs trying to grow dope. Kids who’d thrown away everything except their stereos and started all over again. Arseholes, basically. They had moved into three adjoining cottages, derelict until they did them up, and played Robinson Crusoe until they had a farm going. The locals hated them, but Gareth, the boy he was talking to, had stories of girls and grass and generosity that made Rivendell sound like just the roost for Badmouth Ben.

That night, while America was celebrating its bicentennial, he slept by the road, a mile or so from the village, hiding his bike behind a pile of slates that might once have been a wall. Before crashing out, he reread a few chapters of
Skinhead,
his favourite book, admiring the way Allen had life sussed. This summer, he could camp in the open as much as he wanted, not even using his sleeping bag. He thrived on the drought that yellowed the country, turning fruit on the bough to clumps of prunes. Dope would be good this year if the Rivendell folk had watered it properly. So far, he’d stayed cool by keeping on the move. Still, the idea of a real bed with someone else in it, and real food at regular intervals, was getting prettier and prettier by the hour. He’d been from festival to festival, and everybody was saying that was the best summer since 1967. Now, he wanted somewhere to make the summer his own for a while.

At first, the Rivendell crowd were suspicious. He took off and buried his swastikas before tootling up on his bike, but still had to overcome the bad publicity bikers had been getting since the year dot. The hippies gave him wholemeal bread and home-made jam, no butter, and horrible herbal tea, but didn’t want to form an opinion until their chiefs had made up their minds. Jeff and Conrad were the chiefs, oldies in their late twenties. He talked to them. Jeff didn’t like him straight off, but Conrad was won over by the bagful of mushrooms he had been toting since Stonehenge. He was invited to crash for a couple of nights. The first night, he wound up fucking one of the spares, a tall and skinny girl called Vanda with long eyeteeth and flowers tattooed all up one arm.

Three nights later, he passed round some of his own dope, and took Jeff’s girlfriend Nad upstairs. He made her like it. Conrad was well off Jeff now, and had long, stoned conversations with Ben about negative vibes. Conrad liked to talk about the old days before it all got fucked up, and Ben knew he could easily handle him if he had to. Within a week, Jeff was gone. Nad took off after him in a beat-up Mini, the only car the Rivendell folk had, and neither came back. Nobody cared much except a fat cow called Wendy, who whined and cried until Ben had to get her away from the others. He belted her where she couldn’t show the bruise. She was outraged, a little kid finding out for the first time that not everybody keeps the rules. She looked as if she was going to go red and stamp her feet and shriek, ‘It’s not
fair!’
Conrad had gone on a long trip now, and Ben knew where there were some more mushrooms. Ben started sitting in Jeff’s old place at the table. One night, he had a ceremonial burning of Jeff’s album collection.

It was so hot everyone went around in shorts and sandals or nothing but hair. But Ben kept his leathers on, and always wore his shades. He was still cool. He had long, stoned talks with them all, individually or in groups of two or three. It was like taking sweeties from kiddies, finding the weak spots and working on them. He could smell out the long-term relationships about to reach the boredom and irritation phase. He could spot the middle-class moaners who were starting to miss inside toilets and electric fans. Then there were the hard workers who resented the slackers, the hoarders who didn’t share, the girls who didn’t fuck enough. Any group breaks down like any log, along five or six different grains. Everybody can find something to dislike about everybody else. But Badmouth Ben was everybody’s friend, his own most of all.

There were arguments every day now, fights, even. Never actually in them, Ben always got a ringside seat. Conrad got sick one night while he was tripping, and couldn’t keep his food down any more. Ben thought if he was being fed that vegetarian crap he’d want to puke it up again too. As a joke, Ben made Stodge the leader. Stodge needed a lot of advice, and Ben was pleased to oblige. Fed up with the wholefood produce they’d been raising or bartering for, Ben sent Chris and Phil into town to rip off stuff from the supermarket. When Phil got caught, Ben told the rest to forget about it and act shocked when the pigs came round. Ben told the constable Phil must have been keeping the money they gave him for groceries. He hoped the bastard would go to jail. The constable looked at him in a funny way, a way very few people looked at him. It was as if the pig knew exactly what Ben was about, but wasn’t going to step in and do anything because, deep down, he approved. Someone at dinner that night seriously suggested Chris be given a suicide pill to take on his next raiding mission, and Ben called them a bunch of fucking useless kids.

* * *

‘The good thing about sheep,’ Ben said once, ‘is that you can shag them, kill them, eat them and wear them.’ Nobody laughed.

* * *

There were fewer of them than there had been when he showed up. Mostly, it was guys who left. One or two had to be persuaded to go with more than Ben’s favourite tool, whispered words. The first, Marius, Ben had taken care of himself. He kept the teeth, planning to have them strung on a bracelet. Richard Allen would have appreciated it. After Marius, he left heavy stuff to Chris and Gareth. He was a good hard boy was Gareth, the lad from the pub, and Ben could count on him to do what he was told so long as there were girls and grass going his way.

Ben started to make collections, and sent the girls to town to pawn the things he found. When Rivendell ran out of surplus saleables, he sent the girls out to beg spare change from passers-by, claiming they were Krishna kids. He had Chris or Gareth go with them to make sure they came back, though. In the early days, one or two of the girls walked away in the night. The ones that were left would stay. He’d had them all by now, even that poor, miserable Wendy. He’d made them like it. But the commune could do with more girls. There was washing and cooking and fucking needed doing. Ben sent Chris, who was a bit of a pretty boy, to Liverpool to hang around the coach station and see if he could scare up some likely gash. He came back with Carole and Tacey, and Ben soon had them in harness.

* * *

Autumn was a long time coming. Farmers complained. The local paper ran reports that sheep and goats and chickens were going missing. There was a lot of grumbling, and the pub put up a
NO HIPPIES
sign, in English and (needlessly) in Welsh. Ben had his swastikas back now, and he started to wear a shaggy sheepskin waistcoat. Despite the heat, he was cool. That Carole turned out to be a right little scrubber, luckily.

Although there were other girls, especially Carole, Ben got off on sticking it to Wendy as much as possible. He couldn’t possibly want her for herself, but she was the most difficult, the most unhappy. It was necessary to keep establishing power over her. She’d stopped crying and complaining, and just lay there like a sack of potatoes as he pumped her whichever way he wanted. In the end, fucking wasn’t enough and he started working her over. No one said anything about the marks on her face and arms. He frightened her completely and started telling her things. He told her what he’d learned about the others, and how he used it and would keep on using it. He got a bigger charge out of telling her things than he did from anything else he could do to her.

Wendy had a witless boyfriend called Derek. Chris stamped on his hand once, breaking most of the fingers. Despite Ben, Wendy and Derek were together a lot of the time, plotting and scheming like officers in a prisoner-of-war film. They tried to run away, but Stodge, still the school sneak under his blubber, told on them. Ben punished them in front of the rest, cropping their hair with sheep-shears. It was what the French Resistance used to do to girls who slept with German soldiers. They looked awful, with patches of scalp showing, a few not really accidental cuts and the occasional long tuft he’d missed. He tried to get them to fuck in front of the others but Derek couldn’t, even when Ben made threats with the shears. Instead, Ben dragged Wendy upstairs and stuck it to her until his dick was raw and she’d given up crying.