The Way Out (9 page)

I break a stray wing of crispy batter from the edge of a fish and pop it in my mouth when Dino goes through the back for the sausages, then have to turn away and swallow quickly when he reappears. Eating behind the counter is absolutely Not On, and most especially not from any of the stuff on display.

We're stocking the hot cabinets, me and Dino. Mental hour is about to start. You'll have heard of happy hour in the pubs? Well this is nothing like that. Everything's the same price, just the customers are all mental cases. Not in the usual walking-around-like-a-normal-person-with-a-job-and-a-family-while-being-secretly-mental kind of way, but really properly mad, enough to have to stay in the hospital. What most folk, least of all the mental cases themselves don't appreciate is, they're the lucky ones. Mostly they're in there because someone is bothered enough about them to see they get locked up safely, instead of just leaving them lying in a pool of blood and sick in some doorway. If you've nowhere to go and no one to care, you've got
to be a murderer or worse before you'll get a safe bed for the night.

The cases we get down here are bad enough to be in hospital but not scary enough to have to keep the doors locked
all
the time. So every Thursday at 6pm, they're allowed out to trail down the road in ones and twos and come in here to us. Sometimes I feel like a social worker or something, probably do more good than most of those arseholes, all those Fionas with their scarves and their earrings, and their ‘self-esteem' and ‘opening up' bollocks. If I had real problems, which I don't okay, the last person I'd want to talk to is a social worker. The very last person. You'll not get your dinner off any of them either.

I'm starting to feel a bit spaced out with hunger as I line up the scotch eggs and pies and I'm thinking about how my head sometimes feels a bit like a scotch egg.

My mate Gordon comes in. He's not my boyfriend, nothing like that, but we sometimes go out drinking and dancing, there's no law against it. He wants to know if I'm coming out tonight after my shift. I'd like to. A few beers would go down just nice but I don't get paid till tomorrow and don't have any money. Gordon says he'll sub me but I say no. Even when you're mates, if you let a guy buy you stuff, it gives them ideas, like they're owed something back at the end of the night and things can get nasty if you don't want to pay up. So now I always take my own money, safer that way. Me and Gordon stand outside the shop and smoke a cigarette together but I have to get back to work straight away. Gordon goes off in a huff. He doesn't say anything but he's got his hands pushed hard down into his pockets and he glares at his feet as he walks. Doesn't matter though, he's not my boyfriend or anything. I lift the hatch in the counter and go back to the staff side, close it behind me and flick the snib along.

The mental cases are harmless enough, once you get used to
them. There's the guy that mutters all the time, just a string of swear words and filth, but his order will be in there too so you have to listen to all of it really carefully. Some of it'd make your hair stand on end, but there it'll be, hiding amongst all the fucks and bastards, a little ‘sausage supper, just salt,' and even a ‘please, ya dirty hoor.' Then there's the Snow White couple who look like brother and sister, both with pure white skin, rosy cheeks and lips so red it seems like they must be wearing lipstick. They tiptoe up to the counter holding hands, stroking and reassuring each other, whispering their order and never looking anyone in the eye. The drooling man took a bit of getting used to. He just stares into nowhere with his mouth hanging open, a long thread of gluey dribble hanging from his lower lip and going down all the way to the floor without breaking. He shuffles forwards, his feet hardly leaving the ground and blubs out his order like a zombie, like someone else who's not even there is working his mouth for him. When he hands over the money it lands in my hand in slimy wet coins and I have to try hard not to look grossed out and just drop the coins in a paper cup next to the till for rinsing out later.

Anyway, I'm used to all of them now, and they don't faze me, I just get on with it. Live and let live. These folk have got enough shite in their lives. Tonight though, after the regulars, there's one I haven't seen before and I can tell straight away he's something different. He has patchy burnt-looking ginger hair and a beard to match and there's old yellow bruises on his face, but it's his eyes that bother me. They're black and he doesn't blink, just stares straight at me from the moment he comes in the shop and when he gets close, I can see behind them, like looking through smoked glass. It's like every strong feeling you could ever imagine having, and some you've only ever heard about, are all drunk and partying hard in the front room of his head.
I can see them all right there, fucking and fighting, crying and laughing and one figure in the middle of it all stands with his arms spread out on either side and his head flung back, covered in white fire, burning, screaming and burning.

He asks for a white pudding supper, salt and sauce on it, hands me the money. I give him his dinner wrapped in two layers of newspaper along with two pound change.

‘I gave you a twenty,' he says, his voice like a knife. Some of the party animals behind his eyes stop what they're doing and stare out at me, like they're interested to know if they'll have to jump in.

‘No,' I check the notes at the top of the till, there's no twenties, just an old crumpled five, ‘that was definitely a fiver you gave me.' His face starts to change colour, blood rising up from under the old bruises, his eyes straining out of his head and suddenly there's a loud bang that makes all the pies in the hot cabinet jump. He's kicked the counter, just lashed out with his foot without taking his eyes from mine. The bang's so loud I'm wondering if he's wearing steel toe-capped boots. Has to be or he'd have broken something, he kicked out that hard. Dino comes out from the back of the shop wiping his hands on his apron.

‘What's going on here?' he asks, looking between me and the mental case for an explanation.

‘This little bitch is trying to cheat me is what's going on here! I gave her a twenty and she's pocketed it or something and is trying to fob me off with two quid, saying I only gave her a fiver.'

Dino looks at me, raises his eyebrows. He knows me well enough, so doesn't believe the guy for a second but his expression tells me we have to be careful and find a way of calming the guy down, or at least getting him out of the shop. Opening the till, Dino makes a show of poking through the contents, even
looking underneath the grubby fiver. ‘No mate, sorry, you must be mistaken, there are no twenties in here. I emptied the till myself just five minutes ago and there are none in here now so you can't have given her one.'

The guys just explodes. ‘Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you both!' Spit flies from his mouth and he kicks the counter again, both feet this time, one after another, BANG BANG BANG.

Then he's jumping up and trying to reach over the counter towards me. I'm not sure if he's trying to grab me or hit me and I'm not keen to find out so I move sideways behind the hot cabinets. He follows me round on the other side but he's no hope of getting at me there since the cabinets are as tall as he is. Still, he's jumping up and pulling himself up on them. I can see his face through the greasy glass, all stretched and mad looking, reflecting off the sides of the case like his head's actually inside it, wedged between the onion rings and the jumbo burgers, his eyes glowing red and black like little round coals.

He starts in with his feet again. One of the panels on the customer side has been loose for ages. Dino keeps sticking big wads of blu tack behind it to keep it in place until it gets fixed properly but it can't stand up to this kind of treatment, tips forward and lands on the tiled floor with a hard crack, exposing the back of the deep fat fryers. The mental case looks like he can't believe his luck and starts laying into the stainless steel tanks with his feet, each kick making a deep booming noise. The hot fat inside the fryers leaps and splashes up from the open side next to me.

The attack on his fryers is too much for Dino. He lifts the hatch and moves around the counter, taking the guy by the elbow and saying firmly, ‘Okay, pal, time to go. Come on, out.' He steers him out of the shop before he knows what's happening and when he does figure out what's going on and swings back
round to push through the door again, Dino slams it shut and turns the snib so he's locked out. This really pisses him off and he shouts at the door for a while then takes a step back and to the side, opens the newspaper wrapper on his white pudding supper and starts picking chips out and chucking them hard as he can at the plate glass window. They bounce off leaving little splodges of brown sauce steaming on the glass. Dino waves him away but this just makes him even more angry. He grabs the white pudding and starts battering it against the window, all the while shouting.

‘Bitch bitch bitch stole my money my fucking money my fucking money bitch burn you'll burn you'll fucking burn in hell for this thieving fucking bitch.'

Dino looks at me. Neither of us knows whether to laugh or be scared or both. The pudding is holding up pretty well considering how hard it's been whacked off the glass but after a while bits of fatty oatmeal start flaking off and sticking to the window, looking like bits of brain and the whole pane is shaking in its frame. Dino frowns and says, ‘Think I better phone the police.'

They must have been close by because it's only a couple of minutes before two of them show up in a meat wagon. By this time, the guy has gone through the whole pudding, greyish lumps of it are sliding down the window leaving greasy trails. He's screwed up and thrown the empty wrapper and looks like he's squaring up to stick the head on the window instead when one of the uniforms collars him from behind and marches him into the waiting van.

Dino lets his pal into the shop and gives him a few chips while he asks us what it was all about. He nods and he tells us this isn't the first time they've taken this guy in for pulling the same trick. ‘He's from the mental hospital up the road,' he tells
us, ‘and we know the hospital only ever gives them a fiver at most. Any more and they'll do something stupid, like buy booze or take a bus to somewhere and have to be brought back. Last time we picked him up he was trying to get on the overnight coach to Newcastle by holding the driver at gun point, only it wasn't a gun he had, it was a potato. And not a very big one at that. Poor sod.'

The rest of the evening is pretty dull. Dino puts the counter back together and cleans the window and we shut up shop. As I head down the road it starts to rain and the wind blows it right in my face. I pull my collar up and try to squeeze my head down between my shoulders. I'm thinking about the mental case with the white pudding supper and how he's probably nice and dry and warm by now in the day room, someone making him a cup of tea and asking if he wants to talk about it.

I phone Gordon when I get in. ‘You still going to the club tonight?'

‘Yeah,' he says, still sounding a bit huffy, but I can tell he'll get over it quick enough. ‘I thought you were skint.'

‘Well, I am but I think I'll come out for a few anyway. See you in half an hour.'

Round the back of the fire station, the neon club sign blurs red into the rain as I walk under it, Disco Inferno in big letters and a chalk board by the door reading ‘Happy Hour 9 to 10pm'. Just made it. A bouncer with a shaved head and no neck, more fat than muscle, asks me for the entrance money. I reach into my back pocket and pull out a crisp twenty and hand it to him. I'm going to burn alright.

Human Testing

As if the space of a decade is no more than an arm's span across rumpled sheets, Ari reaches for him. And he is helpless. In exactly the way he always was with her, and precisely the way he should no longer be.

He struggles to remain in the present, where his new wife's voice now seems to come from far away although she's standing right beside him, breathing the same air filled with the smell of unpainted plasterboard. ‘Maybe we should go for something more definite, more positive, like a nice bright blue,' she says.

His hands flap hopelessly over the colour swatches spread out before him as Ari reaches again from the past and draws him back across the years. Neutrals. Naturals. Warm Earth Tones. He is appalled at his own weakness. At how easily Ari accomplishes this trick of prizing him from the present, leaving his body dumb and empty-headed while his thoughts fly back to the past. He whimpers as he realises he will always be this way with her, defenceless, and she'll always be able to reel him back to her side whenever she pleases. His weakness bothers him especially because he does not consider himself weak. He plays centre back in football, is a tough negotiator of business deals, a stalwart friend and, most recently, a loyal husband. But with Ari… With her… weak as a baby. His lip trembles and he fears he may cry actual tears.

‘These are all too wishy-washy, too vague,' his wife says, her voice receding as the distance in time between them increases.

His memory is definite. He sees Ari standing in the half-light
of their bedroom, her arms raised above her head as she peels off her t-shirt. She hadn't meant for him to see the grid of small coloured rectangles above her left breast, like the rows of medals adorning the pocket of an implausible pastel General.

‘What the hell is that?'

‘Don't be annoyed.'

‘I'm not.'

‘Look, it's only a tanning lotion test. Nothing dangerous. It's easy money.'

He hated that she did that. Selling herself as a human guinea pig at that creepy lab. Most of all he hated that with him studying full-time, they needed the money.

‘You don't know that. The fact they're doing tests means they don't know it's safe. How can you be so definite?'