It opened on the latch, only a little pressure needed. He stepped inside, a smell of sticky dry beer, damp laundry and cigarette smoke on the air. Once the place had held a family, two parents, two kids, three at a squeeze. Now every room had been subdivided, padlocks put across the doors, nine people to a toilet. People liked to claim it was where the scroungers went, the traitors who couldn’t get a job and had lived off the charity of the state, before the Company had moved in and sorted things out, businesslike, making sure people who didn’t try couldn’t get.
No one admitted that the enclaves held the bin men, cleaners, waiters, janitors, porters, shelf-stackers, carers who wiped the old women’s bums, bus drivers and health assistants too skint to afford anywhere else. Everyone has to make a choice, the Company said. You have to choose success.
From the back of the building a lilt of guitar, played by a woman singing to herself, a glow of candlelight from beneath her door. From a door to the left the low grey buzz of a TV, playing through the night to the sleeping couple tangled in each other’s limbs across the rustled mattress. Theo felt his way up the stairs, carpet giving way to lino, squeaking like an arthritic rat beneath his feet. A light beneath the door on the first floor, from which a woman’s voice, hushed, spoke on a phone. He approached slowly, knocked once, barely brushing the painted chipboard with his knuckles. No answer, but the door was not locked or bolted, and the woman’s voice continued, so he pushed it open.
The woman inside was tall, unusually so, with short yellow hair cut to a soft fall one side of her face.She wore a black T-shirt, black jeans and a pair of red wellington boots. Her arms were gently toned from light exercise, her neck was long and unadorned, her eyes were grey, her lips were pale, she held a mobile phone pressed against her ear and a 9mm pistol in her other hand, a silencer on the end. A light freckling of blood stained her face and bare skin, and probably her clothes, though Theo wasn’t sure. A larger stain of blood and brain matter covered the wall behind the loosely made single bed in the centre of the room, still warm, still seeping down. A pair of feet stuck out from behind the bed, on the side away from the door. They were bare. They could have belonged to anyone. They belonged to Dani.
He couldn’t see her face.
He couldn’t imagine there was much of her face to see.
A little mass of matter, grey brain, shards of white bone, brilliant crimson blood, no bigger than a pinball, went schloop and detached itself by its own weight from where it had stuck to the wall, splatted onto the bedside table. The wardrobe, its door hanging by one hinge, was open. There was a bloody handprint on the handle. Clothes had been torn from their hangers and lay across the floor. A syringe, empty, sat on the sheets, small with a tiny needle point. A laptop stood open, the screen bright blue and welcoming.
The woman with the gun smiled at Theo in the door, a flicker of recognition not of familiarity, but of an awkward situation in need of a little resolution
tilted the gun a little, not threatening
requesting a moment of patience while she finished her conversation on the phone, so sorry, terribly rude, if you don’t mind just holding on a moment…?
She said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes. That’s right.” She spelled out a postcode one letter at a time, “Sierra, echo… yes, echo…”
Theo stood in the door, the light from a single bedside lamp skimming across his feet and knees before fading into shadow behind him.
“Homicide. Yes, that’s right. Yes, I am the killer. No, you’re my first call. Yes, I can wait. What do you estimate as being your response time? That’s fine. Thank you. Of course I can hold. Thanks.”
This done, she turned the phone to one side, pressed it so the mouthpiece was buried in her shoulder, tilted her head the other way and, smiling at Theo, added, “So sorry—the police are on their way. Now if you just make like a heron, I can be with you in a mo.”
Theo stands in the door, and wonders what a heron would make like. One leg high, one leg in the water, frozen in the act of catching a fish.
The woman went back to the phone. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes, two to the head, two to the chest. No witnesses but someone has just… Oh…”
Theo walked away.
Three women wait by the entrance to the estate
one holds his bike, his mobile phone, wallet
“That was quick,” she says.
“Dani is dead,” he replied, taking his bike.
“You kill her?” A flicker of anger, but it’s deep, beneath the resignation, expectation. This was what happened.
“No. The killer is still in there. She’s just called the police.”
“Fuck. Mum’s gonna kill me if the cops wake her tonight.”
“Thank you for looking after my bike.”
“The cops, for real?”
“Yes.”
“And Dani’s dead? Oh this is just the total fucking…”
Theo on his bike, pedalling into the night.
There are the streets
this is the city
these are the darknesses that seemed to threaten but turned out to be merely void, a place where
this is what brain sounds like as a bit of it peels away from the wall, schlooop, and drops, splat, onto a carpeted floor. If the floor was not carpeted it might have sounded different and if anyone bothers to clean it then they’ll probably use a vacuum cleaner, something specially designed to get at the dried bits basically it’s like cleaning meat but really you need a new carpet and
this is the man called Theo, riding away, at the centre of the universe
these are the times when the night is
these are the words that
bang! Who’d have thought that the gun wasn’t loaded with blanks after all and splat down he goes breathing breathing not breathing any more it’s not your fault you know that it’s not your fault that
this is the day Dani realised that dreams were for children
the news when the government announced that corporations ran things so much better than civil servants and it’d be better for everyone if the MPs focused on important things like
like
well, whatever was left when the teachers, doctors and judges were gone
this is the dream where Theo still dreams of his father dying, though he wasn’t there, he never saw all he has is imagination of the prison and the end