The boys ignored him, grinning as the TV pumped out a hard rattle of cheers and applause.
“How did you get in?” said Coughlan, stepping further into the room.
The boys continued to grin and ignore him.
“I said, how did you get in?” repeated Coughlan, stepping in front of the TV.
“Your boy gave us his key, man,” replied one of the boys at last, scowling, his pale face shrouded in the hood of his sweatshirt, arching to look around Coughlan at the TV.
“You mean Pete gave you his key?”
“If that’s what his name is,” sniggered the boy.
“Well, he shouldn’t have done that,” said Coughlan, reaching down to turn off the TV. “So I’d like you all to leave.”
“I was watching that,” complained one of the other boys.
“Yo, he gave us his key, man,” said the first boy. “Gave us his key and told us to wait here for him. Said he had to do some shopping for you or something. You can’t ask us to leave.”
“Yeah, what’s he going to say when he gets back here and finds us gone?” said the second boy. “What’s he going to say when he gets back here and finds you kicked us out?”
“Well... that’s different then,” said Coughlan, taken aback. “You should have said.” And all at once he felt shrunken, as if he had betrayed Pete. He felt all the boys looking at him, judging him, making him out to be the villain of the piece. He did not know what to do, feeling like even his breathing was further condemnation, and after a few moments of just staring into space, he turned and walked through into the kitchen to look out across the estate, a terrible weight hanging in his chest.
Pete at last turned up half an hour later, but the next time that Coughlan came home to find a group of his friends watching TV in his living room, Pete was again not with them. There was still no sign of him an hour later, either, and so Coughlan climbed down from his stool in the kitchen, shuffled through into the living room, and asked them to leave. This time the boys did so without much bother, clucking tongues and dragging feet, but it left the old man feeling confused and hurt.
The time after that the lads had the TV up loud and, despite Coughlan asking them a couple of times to turn it down, the noise remained constant. Coughlan did not have the strength to argue with them and kept to himself in the kitchen. After waiting for Pete for over an hour, he could take it no longer. He slipped on his jacket and headed out into the night.
He sat on a bench in the center of the estate, watching people come and go. It was a warm evening and he felt comfortable out there, more comfortable than he did in the light, the twilight hiding the geographical sins and scars of the estate.
He sat for another few minutes and then decided to go for a walk. When he got home again about half past 10, the gang was gone but had left a mosaic of trash behind in his front room: crushed beer and Coke cans, fried chicken boxes, cigarette butts, neon bottles with chewed straws poking out of their lips. He tidied up as best he could and then went to bed, determined to confront Pete and ask him to give him his key back.
But Pete did not appear the following afternoon, or the one after that, and when he had still not turned up on the third afternoon, Coughlan felt his fragile resolve start to waver. Then one lunchtime, as he was looking for some tinfoil to wrap a half-eaten sandwich in, the ongoing tension had made him lose his appetite, he found something that fired him up again.
Standing on a chair in the kitchen, he was reaching into the top cupboard where he was sure there was some tinfoil, when he felt a cool plastic bag there. He could not see into the cupboard so he shifted his arthritic fingers around, attempting to make out what it was. An old carrier bag, stuffed with some linen napkins, perhaps. He tried to find purchase on the bag but his fingers kept slipping off. After a few failed attempts, he managed to catch hold of a corner of the bag and started to ease it out of the cupboard. Moving it a couple of inches at a time, he pulled it toward the edge of the shelf. And then there was a shift and a tumble, and a cascade of small plastic bags and little foil envelopes fell out onto the floor in a solid splash. A black bin liner followed like a winded kite. Coughlan looked at the mess in astonishment. There must have been at least two or three hundred little bags and envelopes spread across the kitchen floor.
It took him a minute to get there, but Coughlan had seen enough police shows on TV to know that he was looking at drugs. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of pounds worth of drugs. He climbed down from the chair and sat for a moment looking at the hellish pile on the floor, wondering what to do with it all. He checked his watch and saw that it was almost 5 o’clock, Pete’s usual time for coming around. Sighing at the situation, he levered himself down onto the floor, scooped all the small packets back into the bin liner, and hefted it up onto the table.
Fifteen minutes later he heard Pete’s voice out in the hall, and then another voice behind the first. Coughlan held his breath, his heart beating loud in his chest, as he waited for them to walk along the hall and into the front room. He heard the TV being switched on, a quick pulse of canned laughter, and then seconds later a kid with black hair stepped into the kitchen. He saw Coughlan sitting at the table with the full bin liner in front of him and his pupils went dark and wide in anger.
“What the fuck d’you think you’re doing with that?”
“I might ask you the same question,” replied Coughlan.
“It’s none of your fuckin’ business.”
“It’s my flat,” said Coughlan. “It’s my home.”
At that moment Pete walked into the room, lured in by the raised voices.
“Did you know anything about this?” asked Coughlan, pointing at the bin liner.
Pete glanced at the other boy, looking for the right words.
And then without warning, the other boy stepped up to Coughlan and punched him hard in the face.
Coughlan felt a great bolt of pain shake his spine and nail him to the chair. Tears sprang across his face and diluted the blood that bubbled from his nose. His head spun for a second, and then he fell unconscious face-first across the bag of drugs.
“You’ve killed him,” squealed Pete. “You’ve killed him.”
“He’s not dead,” said the other kid, poking Coughlan hard in the shoulder so that his head lolled back and forth. “Look, he’s still bleeding. Dead people don’t bleed like that.”
“But he might be dead soon,” said Pete, his face turning white and his tongue sticking in his throat.
“Don’t be fuckin’ stupid,” said the other kid, stepping forward and giving Coughlan a hard shove. The old man slid off the table and dragged the bag of drugs onto the floor with him, spilling its contents across the battered linoleum.
Pete just stared at the old man, the spread of drugs.
“Well go on then, pick ’em up,” said the other kid.
Pete hesitated for a second, his limbs telling him to run, but then did as he was told. He gathered the drugs together and tried to see if Coughlan was breathing all right.
“Come on, come on,” snapped the other kid, tapping Pete in the side with the toe of his trainer.
Pete hurried to scrape up the remainder of the packets and stuff them back into the bin liner. He gathered the neck of the bag together and then tried to hand it to the other kid. But the other kid just told him to put it back in the cupboard.
“But what about Mr. Coughlan?”
“He’s not goin’ to be telling no one,” came the response.
Coughlan came round moments later, more shocked than hurt. Drifting back into the here and now, he remained on the kitchen floor for a short time, listening for signs of other people in the flat. It all appeared to be quiet, and he was sure that it had been the slamming of the door that had stirred him. He ran a hand across his upper lip, wiping at the blood there. It had started to harden and it felt like his nose had stopped bleeding. He climbed to his feet and shuffled across to the sink. He turned on the tap and let it run until it got as cold as it was going to get. Cupping his hands together, he filled them with water, and then held his nose in the water until it had all leaked through his hardened fingers. He repeated the action. As the center of his face started to numb, the numbness spreading out from his nose, he felt his strength returning and his mind clearing. He knew that he should go to the police, but he also knew that would be a mistake. He had seen what had happened to people who stood up for themselves, and he did not want to go through that himself. Rather than bringing an end to their torment, it had more often than not meant an escalation.