Silent Voices (13 page)

He’d fought for them, these people. He had entertained them by knocking men unconscious in social club boxing rings, and then, when he was unable to get a license because of his injuries, in abandoned warehouses after midnight. It made his wallet fat and his body hard; he was a born fighter, and there was always someone ready to exploit that in a man, and money to be made off the back of it.

He turned away from the window, the sound of skidding rubber tyres ringing in his ears. The soft thump of impact, the sound of breaking glass, a girl’s screams... it had happened a long time ago, but the accident had changed his life. The girl – Sally – had died from her injuries, and he had been damaged enough that the British Boxing Board of Control had revoked his boxing licence on medical grounds.

His fists, however, did not recognise the board’s authority. So he’d carried on fighting. It was all he knew, what he was. If he peeled back his skin, there’d be steel beneath. He was solid all the way through, and no man had ever put him down.

He stared at himself in the mirror above the fireplace. He was not wearing his shirt – he’d been ironing a clean one when the telephone rang. He looked at the muscles in his shoulders, the toughened pectorals, and the solid slab of his upper abdominals. He had avoided the crappy fashion tattoos that blighted the flesh of most of his peers. He didn’t have a six-pack; didn’t need one, in his game. Six-packs and absurdly defined guns were for gym bunnies. Fighters simply needed to be ironclad.

The old scars along the inside of his biceps were clearly visible in the lamplight. The ones on his wrists he saw every time he took off his watch. Faded burn marks, from the tips of lighted cigarettes. When he was younger, he had become fascinated with body conditioning. If he toughened his body to accept and absorb pain, then no one would ever hurt him. Not his father, not the men he fought for money, not the bastards he battled for fun.

Nobody.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men...” He whispered the old nursery rhyme, staring at his lips as they formed the words; “...couldn’t put Humpty together again.” It was his mantra, the way he summoned strength from the dismal depths of his rage. Memories bristled behind his eyes, threatening to spill out into the mirror. Fear pushed the glass, like a hand pressing against it from the other side.

He turned away from the mirror and went to the ironing board, forcing away his dark thoughts and the snippets of bitter recollections. He finished ironing his shirt, watching the muted television. There was some kind of talent show on, but he wasn’t really interested. He just watched the bright, eager faces as they scrolled across the screen, mouths open, he supposed, in song, but they looked to Marty more like silent screams.

He switched off the iron and left it to cool, and then put on his shirt. Feeling calmer now, more in control, he enjoyed the feel of the warm material on his skin. He turned off the television and went over to the iPod docking station. He put on his favourite playlist and hit ‘shuffle’. It was the one with all the old blues singers: Aretha, Billie, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Most of the people he mixed with liked drum ’n’ bass, techno, or stomping euro dance anthems, but not him. Marty liked the blues, especially when they were sung by a strong female voice. He knew the blues well.

Billie Holiday sang about Strange Fruit and Marty Rivers closed his eyes. He thought about those black bodies swinging from the trees, and then, as if a channel had been opened, his head filled with second-hand images of death: fleshless Jewish prisoners, liberated and staggering out through the sagging gates of Nazi death camps; the hacked-up victims of machete-wielding Rwandan death squads; a young Russian soldier beheaded by laughing Chechen rebels; nineteen-year-old British squaddies blown apart by Taliban devices in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan. Bullets strafed the space inside his skull, and he accepted them, knowing that he had spent his entire life dodging the same shots. He lived below the line of gunfire, always ducking and moving, bobbing and weaving, trying to remain in one piece.

The Holiday song came to an end and was replaced by Janis Joplin. Her broken heart flooded the speakers.

Marty left the room and went into the master bedroom. He wasn’t quite ready to treat this place as his own. He’d only been living here for a couple of months, and was due to move out when the owner returned from New York in another couple of months’ time. He was house-sitting; none of this stuff was his. Even the iPod was borrowed, and he’d downloaded the music on his landlord’s computer. Marty owned nothing, and in turn nothing owned him.

He went over to the bed and went down on his knees. The carpet was thick and soft; the bed linen was expensive. He reached beneath the bed and pulled out his suitcase, then stood and placed the case on the bed, opened it and stared at what was inside. The acorn had appeared a few weeks ago. He’d woken up still wearing his clothes, feeling hung-over and strung out way past his limit. He remembered that it had still been dark, probably the early hours of a Sunday morning. He put his hand in his jacket pocket to check if he had any money left, more out of habit than anything else, and his fingers had closed around a small, hard object.

The acorn. The acorn with his initials scratched into its surface.

He had no idea where it had come from; anyone could have slipped it into his pocket. He’d been all over the night before: working on a pub door in Jesmond, then to a house party in the Concrete Grove, and finally he’d staggered back here with some woman whose name he didn’t even know. Glancing over at the other side of the bed, her memory was still there. The skin of Melanie’s’ bare shoulder glowed in the darkness. Her arms were thin and pale.

But now Melanie was gone and the acorn remained. It was a fair trade, he thought.

He didn’t know what the acorn represented, or why his initials had been scratched into the flesh, but something inside him told him that it meant more than he was ready to confront. It had something to do with what had happened to him and his friends twenty years ago – of course it did. Marty wasn’t stupid. He’d taken the tests; could even join MENSA if he wanted. But Marty had never been much of a joiner.

The acorn was from one of
those
trees, the oaks that had appeared inside the Needle... at least that’s how it happened in his dreams, the ones he’d suffered back then and the ones that were still with him now, clinging to the inside of his skull like dirt. The trees that shouldn’t have been there, but were there anyway, surrounding them like sentinels. Marty, and Brendan, and Simon: the Three Amigos.

He smiled. He had not thought of that name in years.

Was that what the acorn was meant to tell him? That the Three Amigos would ride again?

He closed the lid of the suitcase and slid it back under the bed, then straightened and glanced out of the bedroom window. The blinds were open; the river gleamed like a road of razorblades beyond the pane. A bird, tiny and fragile, hovered on the other side of the glass. Marty went over to the window and stared at it. It was a hummingbird.

There had been hummingbirds then, too: twenty years ago, darting above them, in the trees. Impossible creatures, they were not meant to be here in the cold, desolate north-east of England.

The hummingbird flew directly at the glass, colliding with the transparent surface. Then the bird backed up and tried again. Like an oversized bluebottle fly, it made several clumsy attempts to fly through the window, but each time its tiny body simply slammed into the glass, too light and insubstantial to break through.

Marty watched in slow-dawning horror. He didn’t understand why he was so afraid, but the sight of the hummingbird slamming into the glass made him feel sick with anxiety. It was a sight that should not be real; an image from a dream that had invaded the waking world.

After a short while, the hummingbird gave up the fight. Its wings blurred as it flew slowly backwards, away from the window, an illusion of stillness hiding frantic activity. The bird kept moving that way, facing him, looking him in the eye, until it was swallowed by blackness. To Marty, it seemed like it had simply vanished into the enveloping night air.

He ran from the room, into the bathroom, bent over the toilet and threw up. Again and again, until there was nothing left in his stomach, and then he kept on retching and dry-heaving, until finally he slumped sideways onto the cool, tiled floor. His stomach ached; the pain was cyclic, wave upon small wave of cramps.

Marty realised that his fist was closed around something. He forced it open, as if the fingers belonged to someone else and were reluctant to budge. There, at the centre of his palm, was the acorn. He had not put it back in the suitcase. For some reason that was beyond him for the moment, he’d kept it with him, unwilling – or perhaps unable – to put it away.

He closed his eyes, closed his fist, and waited for the cramps to pass.

Once the pain had subsided, he was thirsty. He set down the acorn beside the sink and filled one glass after another with cold water straight from the tap, using it to wash out his mouth and his insides. Soon he felt a lot better. He was thankful for that. Tonight’s work needed a clear head and a fit body. If he was to beat his opponent, he needed to remain focused, and his reactions would have to be perfect.

He stared at himself in the mirror. His long, lean face was mean; the skinhead haircut accentuated the look. His grandmother always said that he looked like the kind of man she should be afraid of, and then she’d throw her frail arms around him and beg for reassurance that he was okay, that he was living a decent life.

He lied to her every single time. He couldn’t bear to tell her the truth – he was unable to admit to her that he was a bastard, just like his father. That he hurt people for fun and for money. He fought to find catharsis. Each punch he threw, and every kick that made contact with a stomach or a thigh or the side of a head, made him feel better about himself. These acts of violence allowed him to forget his own failings, if only for the length of time it took for his opponent to recover and retaliate.

He smiled in the mirror, but his face felt rigid.

He head-butted the mirror, hard, and cracked the glass without shattering it. When he pulled back his head, there was a tiny cut along the front of his brow, just beneath the hairline. A speck of blood glistened under the harsh bathroom light. He lifted a hand and used his finger to smear the blood across his forehead. Marty was unbreakable: even sharp glass did him no lasting damage. He gritted his teeth and raged silently at his own reflection, and at the face of his father crouched behind those tensed features.

Glancing down at the acorn, he began to feel dizzy, drunk on his own anger.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall...”

He tasted the promise of battle on his tongue, like an electrical charge.

Tonight, he would make another man pay for his own sins, and for his father’s sins before him. This night, just like many other nights, Marty Rivers would draw someone else’s blood in his quest to understand what it meant to be a man.

“...Humpty fucking Dumpty had a great fall.”

CHAPTER TEN

B
ANJO WAS LOST
in the Needle. It happened to him all the time, especially lately. He would start wandering, going slowly from room to room, floor to floor, and eventually find himself standing in an area he did not recognise: a small, cramped hallway, or a large room with only one door and no windows. It was strange, like a prolonged dream. Sometimes he would sit down and wait to see if the interior would change again, this time with him watching. It never did, though; it never altered in front of his eyes, only when he wasn’t looking.

He remembered the fire. The burning gym and the horrible men who’d died in the flames. He had no idea how he had managed to get there from the hospital, or why most of the skin of his face had been removed. When he slept, he dreamed of creatures emerging from the broken screens of old televisions, and voices in his head that told him to hurt himself.

His mind had been empty for so very long. Then, gradually, it began to fill with thoughts and images; vague recollections of a life that may or may not have been his. Drugs and parties and a nagging hunger. A few women, a few men: a lot of empty relationships. Then there was a room, a chair to which he’d been bound. And a bullish man who had been kind to him, and then led him into great harm...

There was not much else until he woke up in hospital, and then another blank spot which ended in him being in a room filled with flames. Following this there was the Needle.

And then, of course, there was the girl. The girl and the chores she’d asked him to carry out – the deliveries he’d made to three men on her behalf.

The pretty, pretty girl, with her pretty, pretty wings. She’d told him her name once, but he couldn’t remember it right now. He forgot a lot of information this way, as if his thoughts were leaking out through holes in his head, like water from a colander.

He walked along a short hallway with an exposed concrete floor, his arms held out at his sides and his fingers scratching the walls. It was dark in here; the windows were covered with security shutters.

There was an open door at the end of the hallway, and he could not fight the urge to enter whatever room lay beyond. He knew that it might lead him into trouble, and that he would probably regret following the impulse, but he was too weak to turn around and walk away.