Slammer (32 page)

He swallowed half a dozen painkillers.

Watt lay still, slumped on the floor. Glass had struck him a fierce blow with the butt of the gun, but he could wake up at any moment.

Glass tucked the gun in the back of his waistband, bent over Watt, dug in his pockets, found his car keys and a cassette tape.

Only two things on Glass's mind. Get out of here. Get home.

*

He found Watt's car no trouble at all. He was shaking too badly to drive, but there was no choice. He climbed inside, shivered in the seat.

The engine started. The radio came on. Late night jazz. A lonely piano played a series of aching chords over a tired bass, while a drumbeat fluttered and spat.

He drove off. Slowly. Thinking of Mafia. Felt like he was abandoning him. Knew there was no logic to the thought. Mafia was gone. Strangled and shot. All Glass was abandoning was a body.

The piano punched out a sequence of crazy chords, the bass plucking a rapid melody that stood alone, fighting the piano. Underneath, the drums brushed and tapped, tapped and brushed. Then all three instruments broke off to play a fast sequence of syncopated notes, ending with a crash in the lower registers backed by a cymbal roll and a rapid heartbeat stamped out on the bass drum.

Glass heard everything and it was too much. He switched off the radio.

The headlights bore holes in the darkness. Tall buildings rose in front of him, came closer. He veered away and turned onto the main road.

In the distance, taillights retreated. He followed them, heading for home.

The silence was worse than the radio.

He turned it back on. The music was dissonant and grating, pulled at his insides, unravelling him, whisking his brain.

A repeated high note on the piano merged into a thin spear and the point slid into his finger, made him cry out.

He smacked his knuckles into the driver's window.

The road moved from side to side.

He clicked the radio off again. Quiet was better. He could live in the quiet. But there was no longer any quiet. The noise of the engine separated into sharp slices that rammed themselves into his ears.

He dug the tape out of his pocket. Slid it into the cassette player. That fucking pop song.
Ebeneezer Goode.
He ejected the tape, tried the other side. More shite.

Too much to have hoped that the tape was the one Horse had made. Didn't matter though. Didn't make any difference now.

He wound down the window, tossed the tape out.

He wiped his nose with his hand. Wiped his mouth. Wiped his eyes.

He didn't have far to go.

It was just over there. Over that way. Home was close.

*

Lights in the garden. Cars, other vehicles. Bustle. People. Too much to take in.

He pulled up twenty feet away, jumped out of the car. Broke into a run.

A man in uniform shouted. Glass ignored him, carried on running, ran right past him.

'Hey,' the guy said, chasing after him.

Glass bumped into someone. Bumped into someone else. Sent him sprawling.

'Stop him!'

A hand on his shoulder. The good one. Firm grip. Something ripped. Not firm enough.

Fuck that.

Then another hand grabbed him.

He pulled the gun out of his waistband.

Shouts and cries.

'It's him,' someone said.

He ignored them. Ignored them all. Walked into the house, gun drawn, made his way through a hushed cordon of cops and upstairs.

The landing and bathroom were crammed with people in white suits.

'Get out,' he shouted.

They looked at one another.

'Get the fuck out.' He raised the gun.

They left in a scurry, squeezing past him, hands held aloft.

He looked around. The bathroom door stood open. He stepped towards it.

The shower curtain was pulled all the way back.

Lorna was lying in the bath in her nightdress. Caitlin was on top of her, face pressed into her mum's neck, a purple blanket tucked round them.

'Thank Christ you're okay.' He dropped to his knees on the floor. 'Thank Christ.'

Lorna stared at him.

'What?'

She said nothing.

'Talk to me,' he said. 'Please talk to me.' He looked at Caitlin. 'Caitlin, babygirl. Say something.'

'Drop the weapon,' Lorna said. Her voice sounded deep.

Glass didn't mind how it sounded. 'Of course,' he said and placed the gun on the floor.

'Kick it over here.' Her voice came from behind him.

He shoved it with the side of his foot and it slid along the bathroom floor towards Lorna's voice. 'Don't worry, Caitlin,' he said. 'It'll be okay. I can tell you a story if you like.'

'Shut the fuck up.' A man with Lorna's new voice walked into the bathroom. He was dressed in a uniform and holding a gun. Another man crouched behind him. 'Get on the floor,' the first man said. 'Face down.'

Glass did as he was told. No sooner was his cheek touching cold tile than he felt something dig into his back.

'What I don't understand,' Lorna said, 'is why the fuck you came back.'

'I couldn't leave you,' he said.

'Fuckhead,' she said, and something exploded in his skull.

PART THREE

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

TUESDAY, 16 FEBRUARY 1993

'Run that past me again, would you?'

'Again?' Glass looked at Riddell.
Scotland
was a small place. Riddell was everywhere. He'd been at the Hilton. Now he was here. In fact, he'd always been here. This was his base and he'd only visited the Hilton on Mondays. Here he had a proper office with a carpet and window (barred, admittedly) and bookcases lining the wall.

Apparently this was the perfect spot to ask Glass to go over the story again and again. Day after day after day.

Glass was tired of it.

'Just the end. From where you arrive home.'

Pressure built in his head, like it always did, as if he was being choked. He felt that rope round his neck again. 'I can't.'

'But you just did.'

That was true. He'd never got that far before. But he couldn't go back.

'Try again.'

'It's like trying to reverse a car into a wall.' He'd described it like that before.

'Give it a shot. Maybe you've dislodged a few bricks and that wall will come tumbling down.'

Glass doubted it, but he concentrated, pictured a wall in his head and took a sledgehammer to it. Light appeared through chinks in the mortar, but when he struck the wall again, the hammer bounced off the bricks and he felt sick. The harder he struck the bricks, the sicker he felt. He shook his head, turned away, glanced round the office, hoping he might find the answer in the room's familiarity.

But the room told him nothing. It was just an office. Neat, tidy.

'Shadows in the dark?' Riddell asked him.

Glass had explained it that way once or twice too. He couldn't be bothered explaining about the wall.

'There's something there but you don't know how to turn on the light?'

And he'd explained it like that too. Different images for different days. It all amounted to the same thing. There was something he couldn't see and trying to see it made him physically ill.

Riddell fiddled with his pencil, pushed a sheet of paper around on the desk. 'But this is good, Nick,' he said. 'You've managed to piece events together from the start to the end. Twice is maybe pushing it.'

The nausea came back again and Glass swallowed. 'The drugs,' he said. The medication switched him on and off. Sometimes so fast he could feel himself flickering. Sometimes he buzzed as he flickered. 'I'm better. I don't need them.'

'We already cut down your dosage. I'm going to cut it further.'

A sharp pain bore through Glass's right temple. He wanted to be angry, knew he should be. He didn't want to do drugs; they were dangerous. 'Take me off them.'

Riddell adjusted his specs.

Glass said, his head throbbing, 'I'd remember better if I could think straight. I know I would. They don't help any more.' He got to his feet. 'I don't want drugs. You know the damage they can do to you. People get up to mental shit when they're on drugs.'

'Sit down,' Riddell said. 'Sit down, please, Nick. This is prescribed medicine, you know that. Not illegal drugs you buy on the street to get high. I'm a doctor.'

'You're a
shrink
.'

'Okay. And how does that make you feel?'

Glass didn't laugh like he was supposed to. Or at least he thought he was supposed to. A layer of fuzz had covered his brain. It happened like that. One second he was fine, the next he could hardly remember a thing. Made concentration almost impossible. He had a book in his room,
Pilgrim … Pilgrim on the Hill
, that was it. He must have started it fifty times and never got beyond page ten.

'I've forgotten the question,' he said.

'Take a seat, Nick.'

He was still standing? So he was. He put his hand on the back of the chair, moved it, sat down. He said nothing. Saying nothing seemed like a good tactic.

Riddell turned his pencil upside down and scratched the back of his hand with the eraser. 'Do you mind if we go over something you were talking about before?'

'Can't we move on?' Glass had had his fill of this. He'd thought enough about the past. He'd been here for three months and every day for the past couple of weeks they'd talked about the bloody past. What was wrong with the present? The past was over. Nothing anybody could do to change it. Why did it matter if he recalled exactly what happened or not?

'Remember how you were when you first arrived?'

Yeah, he remembered that. The blow to the head had knocked him out. Apparently they'd been worried about internal bleeding. But he came to, no problem, just groggy and confused. Until he remembered what he'd seen in the bath.

Then he'd gone berserk. Tore up the hospital room. Broke everything that would snap and shatter. Ripped everything that would tear. Including his own wounds. Once that was done, he smashed his head off the wall hard enough to make it bleed. Rocked him backwards and he fell on his arse but it didn't knock him out. Maybe the bone in his skull had hardened since the whack in the bathroom with the policeman's gun. He'd scrambled back up and was aiming for a second attempt when a couple of male nurses rushed into the room and pinned him to the floor.