Sonata of the Dead (29 page)

‘Just get the fucking door open,’ I said.

Inside three women unfolded from a sofa in front of a small TV. They were wearing fishnet stockings and push-up bras. They looked at us with a mixture of defeat and amusement.

‘Who’s this?’ asked one, in an accent I couldn’t place. She looked European at least. There was a smell of peppermint tea and scorched hair.

‘Where’s Sarah?’ I yelled.

‘Whichever one you want,’ said the guy. ‘You let go of me you’d better be ready to pay double or I’ll paint the fucking walls with you.’

I broke his arm and left him pale-faced, cradling himself in the corner of the room while the girls huddled together. One of them pulled a Taser out of her bag and aimed it at me.

‘Get out,’ she said.

I left.

I ordered vodka and a Kronenbourg chaser in a bar where the walls were decorated with what looked like cow hides. It was the last drink I managed that night. The woman sitting next to me was vaping on something that looked like a steampunk sonic screwdriver. She frowned whenever I spoke to her.

‘Warsaw?’ she said. ‘Warsaw? What the fuck are you on, mister?’

I blacked out.

When I revived I was outside. I’d pissed myself and I was wearing a bib of vomit. The smell of undigested alcohol hung in a pall around me. The sky looked like a funky bandage removed from an infected wound: all ochre and deep purple; there was even a soft band of green in there.

I struggled upright and recognised where I was. Welbeck Street. At least I’d been heading home in vaguely the right direction before my gas ran out. The area below my left eye was stiff; I reckon someone had punched me at some point. Just the one person? Bonus. All things considered I’d got off lightly, although the evening wouldn’t return to me in glorious Technicolor. I got little snippets and excerpts granted me by the fear editor in my head.
Look at what you did, you arsehole. Remember this? You did this too, look. You complete twat-meister.

Another fifteen minutes and I was turning into Homer Street. All my gauges were at zero. Needles shivering in red zones. I was going to have a bath and sleep it all away.

‘Hey.’

Another stranger. I’d had enough of strangers. It was folded into itself, crouched in my doorway, hooded. I saw the faintest spots of light where its eyes must have been. I hung back. I don’t like strangers who know where I live, strangers waiting for me.

The figure stood up. It was Niker. His posture spoke of defeat. He looked finished.

‘What do you want?’ I asked. Despite my fatigue I felt myself instantly back on guard. I was on my toes. I was fight or flight.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘You look like a mop in the gastroenteritis ward.’

‘Save it for your fiction,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m scared,’ he said. ‘I think I’m being followed.’

‘So you came here?’ I said. ‘You fucking legend.’

‘I had nowhere else to go.’

I was sizing up the cars parked on my street, deciding if I recognised them or not, deciding if they were empty, or containing shadows of intent. ‘Where’s Kim?’ I asked. I shook the door keys from my pocket. A taxi pulled up at the end of the street and two men got out. They stood together, talking in hushed voices, while the taxi driver pulled away.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think… I think shuh-shuh-she’s… I think…’ His voice was cracking and crumbling all over the place. I thought,
Clever cover, good talent
.

‘Get inside,’ I said, and stepped past him, got the door open. The figures at the end of the street were still huddled together, but they were watching me now. I felt the familiar scuttle of adrenaline as it charged up and down my spine. I was drunk and exhausted, but the needles were rising out of the red zone for a while.

We went up to my flat. Niker’s skin was pale enough to light the way. His eyes wouldn’t focus. I thought maybe he’d taken something, or drunk too much, but it was just the thousand-yard stare. I see that a lot. I’ve worn it a couple of times. It was shock, and seeing too much of what was bad for you. It was a combination of terrible memories and a future that wouldn’t resolve itself no matter what decisions or choices you made. The stare was an incremental shutting down.

Mengele had fallen asleep on the sofa, but not before dragging a stack of papers to the floor. I eyed the vodka bottle on the floor and thought a return to oblivion would be great, but I didn’t have the energy to lift it. Niker sat by the cat and pressed a hand against its flank. Mengele jerked awake.

‘You might want to retreat a little if you want to leave this place in one piece,’ I said. ‘He has a trophy room filled with the limbs of those he’s bested in the past.’

But already Mengele was purring like a two-stroke engine at full throttle. He turned over and showed Niker his belly.

‘Well, I’ve never seen that before,’ I said. ‘You have The Touch, I’ll give you that.’

But Niker wasn’t paying attention. He was staring at the wall, and shivering from time to time, the way I sometimes do when I’ve remembered something cringe-inducing from a night of too much sauce.

I left them to their mutual masturbation session and checked the street from my bedroom. The guys were still on the corner. One of them was on the phone. A couple of minutes later and a van pulled up. They got in. It left. Just guys waiting for a lift. Not everyone wanted to fill me full of holes.

Relieved, I went back to the living room. Mengele was sitting up now, a possessive paw resting on Niker’s knee. He shot me a look with those green, coin-slot eyes as if to say,
Can we keep him, Master?

I went to the bathroom and peeled off my crust of sick. I showered and shampooed. I put on some jogging pants and a T-shirt. In the kitchen I made a pot of nuclear-strength coffee. ‘You hungry?’ I asked.

‘I can’t eat,’ he said.

I dumped sausages in a pan anyway, and served them to him in a sandwich with plenty of ketchup and English mustard.

‘Best hangover cure I know,’ I said, wolfing mine. ‘This or pho made with tons of hot chillies.’

‘I don’t have a hangover,’ he said.

‘Maybe you need one,’ I said.

‘You drink too much,’ he said.

‘Define “too much”. Personally, I think I don’t drink enough.’

‘You found Solo yet?’

‘Her name’s Sarah.’

‘Getting warm?’

‘I’m working on it,’ I said. I waited for him to get to what it was he wanted from me. ‘Have you heard from her?’

He shook his head. ‘No. I don’t think she liked me very much. I heard her telling Odessa once that she thought I was a gobby cuntbuster.’

I winced. ‘Well she didn’t get that language from me,’ I said. I finished my sandwich and fetched the coffee. He was more enthusiastic about that than the food. After a few hefty swigs he closed his eyes and leaned back on the sofa. ‘My God, that’s better,’ he said.

‘Who’s Ronnie?’

‘Who?’

‘That’s what I said. Who is he?’

‘I don’t know any Ronnie,’ he said.

‘Name cropping up in this freak’s manuscripts. Along with your initials.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Mine and probably ten million other people.’

‘It could be a coincidence. Or it could be you.’

‘It isn’t me.’

I believed him. The angriest thing about him at that moment was the crease in his trousers.

‘I always knew there was something screwy about you,’ he said. ‘Right from the off.’

‘How so?’

‘You weirded me out. That first night. The way you threw yourself at that tower. I knew we weren’t dealing with some wannabe short story writer. That there was something more to you than that. And I was right.’

‘Just a dad trying to find his little girl.’

‘Maybe.’

‘And who are you? Behind the cocky look. Full of cum and attitude. What’s behind all that?’

He bowed his lip. ‘I want to be a writer. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. All the other stuff. It was nearly compensation. I pushed myself. I did things. I experienced. The others thought I was reckless. Thought I was pushing the self-destruction button. But that’s me. All or nothing.’

‘You submitted work?’

‘Yes,’ he said. He looked sheepish, hunted.

‘I mean to agencies. Publishers.’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘What do you think? Everything bombed. I wrote, redrafted dozens of times, I honed, I polished, I read all the “How to” manuals. I read fiction like oxygen for the lungs. A novel – sometimes two novels – a week for years. I sent it in and it came straight back. Form rejection.

‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to knock on the door in your Sunday best every day of your life only to find nobody ever opens it? Nobody ever
sees
you?’

‘I can think of parallels,’ I said.

‘Not many,’ he insisted. ‘Not nearly as crushing. And what’s worse…’ He sat up, sat forward. The thing that was pissing him off the most was also making him the most animated. ‘…is that I wouldn’t be happy even if I did get a taste of it. If I sold a story I’d be buried in the contents. I wouldn’t open the fucking book. I wouldn’t close the fucking book. I’d be lost amid the
names
. I think it would be worse to be one of the “many others”.’

‘The goalposts are always moving,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well, I’m finished. I thought I was good at it. I thought I was a stand out. I used to love writing, just love it for the fun of it, for what it was. I loved it before I knew you could be published or paid. But once you get on that conveyor belt… it gets so you can’t think of anything else. You forget why you were doing it in the first place. All you ever seem to do is hear of younger writers landing big deals and film adaptations and “Hey, everybody, just finished another one…” and it all looks so easy and effortless and you sit alone in your room grinding out some piece of shit that took months and months and it’s bad, it’s derivative and clunky and… just… bad.’

‘Where’s Kim?’ I asked him.

He looked at me and there was terror in his eyes.

‘She’s dead,’ he said.

‘What happened?’

‘I think she’s dead.’

‘Sean,’ I said. ‘Back up. Relax. Tell me.’

‘We were together. Last night. This morning. Late. We had decided to stick together until this was over. This morning we were going to catch a train to stay with my mother in Leeds. We caught the Tube at Leicester Square. She went through the barriers but my ticket didn’t work properly. She was on the escalator. She turned to me and I saw her sink out of sight. By the time one of the staff let me through the escalator was empty. I couldn’t find her at the bottom. She wasn’t on the platform. A train had just departed. I guessed she’d caught it – I mean, what else could she have done? – but when I got to Tufnell Park she wasn’t there either. I tried calling her but she wasn’t answering her phone. A little later I received a text from her number.’

‘What text?’ I asked. ‘What did it say?’

He slipped his phone from his pocket and fiddled with the screen, passed it over.

New experience

‘She’s playing with you,’ I said. ‘She’s teasing you.’

‘She wouldn’t tease me about this. She was scared rigid. Me too. We talked about it for hours after President died. We knew we were being targeted. I’m the only one left now. Well, me and Solo, if she’s even—’

‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ I said, and counted to ten. ‘You don’t know for sure. Kim could turn up. You’ll feel such a prick when she does.’

‘Come on,’ Niker said. ‘You know who sent that text. You know what “new experience” he was referring to.’

I sighed. ‘The kind you can never write about.’

‘You said it. And I’ll be next. Me or—’

‘I told you to leave it.’

‘So what now?’

‘Go to Leeds,’ I said. ‘Right now. Get out of Dodge. But be careful. Don’t get a taxi. Walk. Take the Tube. But don’t go direct. Mix it up. Make sure at every step that there’s nobody at your back. Stay among crowds. Keep moving. Go to Leeds. Stay there until it’s over. Write a classic.’

‘You make it sound easy.’

‘Stay then,’ I said. ‘Die. Like I give a shit.’

I stared at him until he stood up. He pulled his jacket closer around him. I saw the child beneath the stubble, in the wide-eyed shock of people who become what they never thought they’d be.

‘I thought he was you, for a while,’ I said. ‘The initials. And when you showed up here I thought you were reacting to the come on we put out on the TV and radio.’

He seemed a little confused, then he seemed a little angry, but he couldn’t sustain it. He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Tough guy.’

‘Wannabe tough guy. One step away from needing a hug from Mummy.’

‘Whatever, Sorrell,’ he said. He pressed his lips together, looked around my flat. ‘I saw the broadcast. I thought it was… desperate.’

‘We
are
desperate.’

‘He’ll know that.’

‘I want him to know that. I want him to react. If he reacts because he’s narked, great. If he reacts because he thinks he’s untouchable, superior, that’s great too. We need him to make his move.’

‘He’s made plenty. We’re all dead.’

‘Not all,’ I said, but it was a whisper he didn’t hear, or chose to ignore.

After he’d gone I dunked my head into a sink full of iced water and kept it there until it felt as if my skull was beginning to compress my brain. Pain ricocheted all around, but it felt great. It felt as if it was zapping all the bad stuff in there; slapping the drunk molecules awake and telling them to get a grip. I surfaced and let out a blast of air mingled with a strange trumpeting that felt like triumph and despair mixed.

‘Hi,’ I said to my reflection. ‘My name is Joel Sorrell and I have a drink problem. The problem is this: I can’t drink as much as I need to get rid of the frighteners in my mind. Please send help. Or if not help, more booze.’

I blew a kiss and towelled myself dry.

The living room was a tip. Mengele sat imperious at the centre of it all. If he knew the gesture he’d have been giving me the Vs. ‘That’s right, clean it all up, bitch,’ I imagined he was saying, probably in a James Mason voice, as I began scooping up magazines and books and stacked plates that his paws had disturbed.