‘Ah, fuck it,’ I said, sitting back in the seat and lighting a cigarette.
As Elliot drew level with the car, I was mentally setting the odds as to what he was going to do. Evens, he’d just stand there waving the hammer around, shouting and cursing at me from the pavement; 2–1, he’d try to yank the door open; and 3–1, he’d give the car a whack or two with the hammer, probably going for the bonnet or the door.
As it turned out, I was wrong on all counts.
He just walked up to the side of the car, stopped by the door and stared at me for a moment or two, and then — with an air of almost admirable nonchalance — he swung the hammer and smashed it into the side window. There was a loud CRACK! as the window shattered, showering my face with chunks of safety glass, and then all at once the car seemed to explode in a fury of noise and chaos. The wind came gusting in, blowing loose papers all over the place; the cold rain hissed in through the broken window, stinging the side of my face; and Preston Elliot’s raging voice bellowed in my ear.
‘I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE FUCKING DOING, YOU NOSY FUCKING CUNT! WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM? YOU THINK I’M FUCKING STUPID? HERE, GIVE US THAT FUCKING THING …!’
‘That fucking thing’ was my camcorder, and as he reached in and grabbed it off the ledge above the dashboard, I tried to snatch it back off him. But he was too quick and too strong for me, and before I could do anything else to stop him, he’d yanked the camera out of the car and thrown it down on the rain-sodden pavement. As I heard the expensive crack of shattering metal and plastic, my immediate thought was, ‘Shit, there goes the best part of a grand.’ But Elliot hadn’t finished yet. And as he started pounding away at the camcorder with his hammer — smack, smack, smack — smashing it into a thousand little pieces, I felt something flash through me, some kind of unfamiliar passion …
I still don’t know what it was.
I definitely wasn’t angry. Or aggrieved. And I wasn’t even that bothered about the camcorder. It was just a thing … a piece of equipment. It didn’t mean anything to me. And besides, I knew I’d probably claim the cost of it back from StayBright’s insurers anyway. But there was just something about the way Elliot was smashing it up that galled me … it offended me. The sheer stupidity of it, the pointlessness, the unnecessary level of violence …
Whatever it was, I found myself getting out of the car and approaching Elliot as he leaned down again and gave what was left of the camcorder another hefty thump with his hammer, and before I really knew what I was doing, I heard myself saying to him, ‘Hey, come on, Preston … there’s no need for that …’
He froze in mid-hammer swing, stayed perfectly still for a moment, then slowly turned to face me. His staring eyes reminded me, oddly, of the eyes of a porcelain donkey that my mother used to keep on the mantelpiece.
I gave Elliot my best placatory smile, holding up my hands to let him know that I wasn’t a threat, and I was just about to say something else to try to calm him down, when all of a sudden he stepped towards me and said, ‘I’ll give you “there’s no fucking need for that.”’ And then he swung the hammer at me.
I moved quickly enough to avoid the worst of the impact, and thankfully Elliot had gone for me with the handle of the hammer instead of the business end, but it still caught me a glancing blow on the side of my face, and although it didn’t really hurt that much, it was enough to send me staggering back against the car.
And that was enough for me. Holding the side of my face, I just stood there in the rain, leaning against the car, and watched in resigned silence as Elliot went back to the remains of the smashed-up camcorder and began stomping the broken pieces into the ground.
Over at the house, his two colleagues were watching him as well, both of them standing in the doorway, smoking cigarettes, neither of them showing much interest. I could see other spectators as well — residents watching from their windows, little kids on bikes pointing and laughing … an old man with an old dog, the old man disdainfully shaking his head — this kind of thing never happened on the street in his day — while the old dog impassively lifted its leg against the back wheel of a parked car. They were all just watching. No one wanted to get involved. It was just something to look at, that was alclass="underline" a small-headed man angrily smashing a camcorder to pieces in the rain.
It was something to talk about later on.
Eventually, after about a minute or so, Elliot either ran out of energy or decided that he’d done enough damage, and after a final cursory kick at the shattered mess on the ground, he straightened up, took a couple of deep breaths, and turned to me.
‘All right …’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘Now you can fuck off. And if I ever catch you following me again, if I ever see your fucking face anywhere, it won’t be bits of your camcorder in the gutter, it’ll be bits of your fucking brain. D’you understand me?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
‘You’d fucking better.’
I smiled at him.
I thought for a moment he was going to hit me again, but all he did was stare at me for a couple of seconds, the hammer swinging gently in his hands, then he spat on the ground, wiped his mouth, and began walking back to the house.
I watched him all the way.
I watched his colleagues grinning at him and patting him on the shoulder, I watched him light a cigarette, and then I watched them all get into the Transit van and drive off slowly down the street. I waited until they’d turned the corner at the end of the road, waited a little more, and only then did I fetch an empty carrier bag from the back of my car, get down on my knees, and start gathering up all the bits of smashed-up camcorder from the ground.
I found the memory card in a shallow brown puddle. It was soaking wet, of course, and there was a bit of hammer damage to the top left corner, but apart from that it didn’t look too bad. There was a chance it might still work. And if it did, Preston Elliot was fucked.
And if it didn’t …?
Well, I could always get more evidence against him. Or someone else could. Or maybe no one would, and he’d get away with conning some money out of his employers. But in the end … well, it didn’t really matter, did it? It didn’t mean anything.
Not to me, anyway.
Nothing means anything to me.
Not any more.
Back in the car, I put the carrier bag full of camcorder bits on the back seat, lit a cigarette, and checked myself out in the rear-view mirror. There was a small cut above my right eye where a bit of broken safety glass had nicked me, and the side of my face was marked with a raised red welt from the hammer handle. Blood was running from the cut, mingling with the sheen of rain on my face, and there were pale pink spots on my shirt collar. As I took a tissue from the glove compartment and started cleaning myself up, my mobile rang again. I gave my face another wipe, rested the cigarette in the ashtray, and put the call on speaker.
‘Hi, Ada.’
‘John?’
‘Yeah, sorry about that, I got a bit — ’
‘What the hell’s going on?’ she interrupted. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. It was nothing — ’
‘It didn’t sound like nothing.’
I picked up my cigarette and took a long drag. ‘Really,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.’
‘Are you coming back now?’