The Dreams of Max & Ronnie (9 page)

So Max's sadness deepens. Part of his mind knows that there should be some anger being shown here, some rage like, but it's as if that boiling geyser inside him from where such emotions spring has dried up. He lacks, now, sharp edges. This pain in him has chipped away at his flintiness, has blunted his edges, has made him soft and fluffy. He's a pillow. He's a kitten. He's a slice of bread at the bottom of a damp sink.

He asks his boys whereabouts they searched for his woman and they list some nearby cities and towns.

– And what, yew expected to find me a woman there? Max almost shouts. – Towns full-a skanks, maan, all of them. Didn't I tell yew to use your fuckin imaginations? Didn't I say that? Miss Judy's. Bet yew even looked in Miss Judy's, didn't yew?

One of his boys gives a nod, sheepish and ginger.

– Knew it! Fuck's sakes. I ask yew to go and find me a fuckin
goddess
and yew look in Miss Judy's. Heads full-a shite, maan, all-a yew.

– Still, tho, boss. One of his men spreads his arms. – We looked and we didn't find. What do we do now?

Max glares. – Put petrol in your cars. Buy some tickets for a train or a bus and carry on… fucking… looking.

This they do. They fan out beyond the city's boundaries, into the valleys that spread out there like spokes from a hub into hills and mountains gouged and scarred with spoil and ruin and disused mines from an industrialised past. Dole towns, student towns, call-centre towns. They speak to many women and find no takers, not even amongst the newly arrived Polish community. One pretty woman from Krakow, it is true, seems interested in the proposition, but her English was so poor that they weren't certain if she understood what they were asking her to do. Plus her teeth were very bad. Pretty enough, aye, but when she smiled... Cheryl Cole with a gob full of porridge.

They were getting very worried. Concern was building up in them and amongst them, less from their lack of success than the evident disintegration of the Emperor. The man was falling to bits before their eyes. The finer emotion of loyalty kept them on their quest, but that was crumbling under the necessity of survival; the boys from the north were getting bigger and louder in the city and a rumour had it that not only were they looking to stuff Max's mouth with river mud but those of his underlings too. So they needed to escape. Which meant they needed money. Which meant they needed a woman willing to do what they asked.

And meanwhile Max moped. He got flatter. One night in Rome, forcing down a drink that tasted to him of dust, the barman told him that some filming was going on in the north of the country; a film crew from the city had decamped to the place of mountains and eagles, where the people used the old tongue, in order to make a film. Something about knights. Big budget, the barman said. Loads of money. Starlets. Actresses. Fucking Hollywood.

– That's where you need to go, brar. Get yerself up there. Turn up the bling, put on the charm, give it some flash. Them actresses are gunna be surrounded by the yokels up yur, fellers with no teeth, speak no fuckin English like, only woman they've ever had goes
baaaa
and yew turn up, flash motor, giving it a bit of large. Who they gunna go for? Impressed? Phuh.
Course
they'll be impressed.

Max thinks: the north of the country. Mountains and lakes. Deep valleys. Castles and ruins and rain and forests just like in his dream. No, not a dream – a prophecy. That dream was telling him something. And that something was that he must get his arse north.

So, again, he gathers his crew in his flat and they notice an animation has returned to him, bit of colour in his cheeks like, a spark in his eye again, and they sip drinks and snort powders and he tells them what he wants them to do. He talks of beautiful actresses and filmsets and great wealth and how that should all be his.
But the north
, they say.
We're not
getting on with the north, brar
. So he takes a picture with his mobile phone of them all standing together in a group, him central with his big arms folded across his re-pumped-up chest, then he sends that picture to each of their mobiles and tells them to show that picture to anyone they met who might bear them ill will.
Them boys up there know what I look like
, he says. 
Yew just tell them yewer with me.

– But, maan...

– What?

– You've never been up there. Told us so yerself.

– No, but I've been on the telly up there, haven't I? That documentary last year, remember? Gareth, y'know that goofy lad from up there? All talking about it up there, they was, he told me. So them boys know what I look like. They won't mess, brar. Now go on, bugger off.

They grumble and shuffle in a group. Max grabs the shoulder of a man next to him, a man who has been with him a long time and who he trusts yet whose given name he has never known, referring to him only as Thirteen due to that number being tattooed all bold and black and in Gothic figures on the back of his left hand. This man's shoulder, his deltoid muscle, feels like a melon in Max's grip.

– Thirteen, he says. – I'm putting yew in charge, brar. I'm trusting yew with this. And I'm trusting yew to keep
these
fuckers out of the pubs and away from the sniff. This is your thing, maan. I'm giving it to
yew
. Don't let me down, bruv. Find me the woman I deserve and yew
know
there'll be a big fat sweetener coming your way.

Thirteen gives a firm nod. – No worries, boss. Count on me. Yew know you can.

And they scurried off. Well, I say scurried, but it was more of a collective pounce, really, a darting away to cars, eagered as they were by the ‘sweetener' word. There's excited jabber and loud laughter and an almost palpable keenness yet Thirteen asks them what the
fuck
they think they're doing, tells them they need to sleep off the Baileys and bugle, that the bizzies'd be on them – state they're in, driving all over the shop – before they left the city. He was taking responsibility, Thirteen said, tapping himself on the chest. He'd been given that. And besides, who knew where they were going? The north, aye, but whereabouts in the north? The north's a big place. Someone get on the internet and find out where this fucking filming is going on. Bollax. Shooting off like kids on their first toot of amphet. Grow up. Serious business, this. Bollax.

Ah, but there's a dissenting voice. – ‘Serious'? Yew mean ‘stupid', brar. What does he think this is? Wants us to find him a woman? What, and slay a few fucking dragons on the way? Man's proper lost it. Shite on this. I'm stopping here.

– Aye, you are that, said Thirteen, and punched him in the face with the tattooed fist. The speaker instantly became a non-speaker, flew back a few feet, smacked the back of his head on the doorframe of a car, slid unconscious to the rain-slippery pavement.

Thirteen boots him a few times in the ribs and then looks up.

– Anyone else staying here?

Of course not, no.

– Right then. Go home. Meet at station car park at nine and not one fucking minute after. Yeah? And
someone
find out where the fuck it is we need to go.

Nods. And
then
a scurrying off. And then a turning of the planet so that they come to face the sun again, bright as it is in this mid-year month, casting shadows at 9 am across the pitted and oil-pocked tarmac of the station car park and Thirteen counts them off and receives information about where the filming is taking place: some castle or something, unpro-nounceable name even though it belongs to the country of which Thirteen has been told repeatedly he is a citizen although he's never really believed it. The capital city is his, aye, but the country beyond it and to the north belongs to someone else. It's not his, or the Emperor's. Never has been. Foreign land.

And they roll off, this group of messengers. Errant fellers. Questers in Kappa and with cellphone swords. They travel out of the city limits and each one feels a small falling-off as they enter a land they don't recognise, through valleys between dark slag-mountains and past heaps of refuse and rotting industrial machinery, past rusting pitheads and smelters and quarries and all of it a-crumble. Over a plain. Across big green bumps on the world's face. Through small towns and larger towns but none of them in any way comparable in size to the city they have left, just bundles of buildings that do not hold the questers' interest nor even initially draw it. Alien land, this. Strange place. Up through the centre of the country they move. Following a line, north. North, which word evokes in them images of ice and winds so strong that they blind men in seconds, scorch raw their eyes. Huge white bears and sea monsters and things. No buildings. Nothing even of any green just ice and snow and more ice and more snow and winds like razors and that's the north and that's where they're heading.

Squat and stocky mono-browed people regard them as they pass. Some towns have names that some of the questers remember from Sunday school, from the Bible like, and the small but hulking people that inhabit them suggest crucifixion, hysterical punishment for sin and transgression, slow and secret torture as a gift to a God who sits and seethes in the thick silver mist on the remote peaks. Scowling and silent and slow-moving, these people glimpsed out of the windows, yet carrying something in their bearing of what Thirteen and his boys imagine to be a horrible rapture. They can see it; the gathering in the forest clearing in blue moonlight, the demented chanting in that odd old tongue, the clutching hands, the kicks and the spittle, the collective orgasmic bellow as the first nail is hammered through.

And then there's a mountain that seems to touch the sky. Each quester clutches his mobile phone, thinks of the image stored, the proof of affiliation that would give them protection, the Emperor's avatar kept in their memories. Touch me and
he'll
come looking. Even the old gods would turn away. Tiny in their vehicles they skirt the mountain that gulps them in shadow, steals the sunlight from them, and with that mountain behind them they see the great spread of a plain below, silvery-ribboned with rivers and grey-plated with lakes. Cold and harsh and unwelcoming. This is the north and now they're in it.

Coast road. Rounding estuaries and tracing rivers, the roads matching the waterways curve-for-curve as if in imitation of such vermiform patterns. Here, distance as it corresponds to mileage is an unknowable quantity; straight roads do not exist, so short distances necessitate long journeys. Confusion. Time and space inhale and exhale. Contract and expand. Dreamland, this. Conforms to no known physical laws.

There's a town on the edge of the sea, on the banks of a river that flows into that sea. A colossal castle in that town, dominating it so that the town seems to be just the castle, all castle, or as if those buildings that are
not
castle are just chunks of masonry fallen from the tall towers and battlements. At the castle's main entrance, the side closest to where the estuary widens into open sea, many pleasure boats are moored, some of them huge, floating houses. A blare to this marina of wealth and luxury and available adventure.

– Fuck me, bruv. Bigger than my house, some of these boats are.

– Look at that one, there. It's got an upstairs and everything. Swimming pool, look! These all film stars' boats, Thirt?

Thirteen doesn't know but says: – Probably, aye. Do this right and you'll be mooring yewer own yacht in there as well this time next year.

– Do what right?

– What we've come yur to do, boy.

This is a thing they've dreamt about, if not in sleep then in their diurnal reveries. This is why they duck and dive and deal and steal and dodge, so that they can earn money, a lot of money and quickly, so that they can achieve the life that these shining boats represent, a-bob on the peaceful waves in the calm marina before them at the foot of the big castle. A boat. A boat on the sea, away from land. In the hot sun. Long iced drinks and women – not just women but
women
– in bikinis or wearing nothing at all on the deck of that boat far away from land under the hot sun on the blue sea.

– What's the point in having a swimming pool on a boat? Yew can just jump off, can't yew?

– Aye.

– Don't see the point, meself.

They drive through the tight-walled streets of that castellated town and over a bridge onto a flat island from where they look back and see over the water the mountainous region through which they have just passed, all huge peaks and sharp serrated edges like the blades of immense saws. If they feel any relief at having successfully navigated their way through that jagged place they do not show it because the land they are on now is generating a new unease, with its hammered-flatness and peculiar yellow light and strange silences. This, too, is a part of the country to which they have often been told that they belong. This, too, is their land. Yet each of them to a man wishes to be off it and back in the city they know.

– Fuck's this place?

– It's where they're doing the filming. Look for a big castle.

– A big castle? There's one. And there's another. And oh look, there's another one.
Which
fucking big castle are we looking for, brar?

Someone digs a scrap of paper out of his pocket and consults the scrawled writing on it, frowns, then passes the paper to Thirteen in the front seat.

– That's what it's called. Don't ask me to pronounce it, like.

Roadsigns point to a place the letters of which correspond to the words on the piece of paper that Thirteen now holds. They follow those signs to another castle. They park at some distance, on top of a hill looking down on the castle and its grounds and they see there all the stuff of a filmset, trucks and cameras and lighting rigs and everything else and many people, some of them dressed oddly in suits of armour or wimples or flowing cloaks. There are some horses.