It was the day she had realized the nature of her son.
The cat was a coal-black neutered torn and the family called it Soot. It was worshipped by the girls and however many bloody years Mikey had been inside it always greeted him when he came out, like he was Soot's favourite. The cat was old and could be
'caught short'. That morning, wheelie-bin day, Soot had been shut inside little Ricky's room – probably an open window downstairs had slammed the door.
Ricky had gone to his room and found that it had crapped right in the middle of his bed. He'd brought the cat down, holding it helpless by the neck, and before any of them could intervene, he had wrung the cat's neck, then smiled, like it was nothing, and taken it outside the front, where the wheelie was waiting for the bin lorry. He had lifted the lid, dropped the cat inside, then gone straight back upstairs, brought down his bedding and dumped that in the wheelie too. He'd come back in, had stood by the door and had dared them, his grandad and his nan, his mum, dad and sisters, to do something. If he had screamed abuse at them, they would have done 'something'.
Not like that… calm as anything, a little smile at the side of his mouth and no creases on his face. His eyes
– Christ, his eyes – had been so bloody cold that they'd terrified her. Not just her: Mikey, who had been a quality get-away driver for wages snatches, and Percy, who had been a one-man crime wave in burglary after his demob. All of them frightened by a boy of twelve because of what was in his eyes.
She went on with the dusting and cleaning. Because of the money her son gave Mikey, she didn't have to work, didn't have to do anything but keep the house clean and cook his favourite meals, and she doubted he even remembered killing the cat.
That day there was a harsher atmosphere on the Amersham. Malachy sensed it.
Not a new dawn, but more a day clouded with uncertainty. He walked.
Old ladies did not linger to gossip with friends as they would usually have done during the daylight hours, kids were not on the soccer spaces, young mothers stampeded with their prams, and the vagrants had disappeared, as if they were fearful of taking the blame for what had happened.
He went right round the perimeter of the area that had been, until the early hours of that morning, the territory of the High Fly Boys. He passed doorways of flats that had been deserted since they'd been torched in disputes, past windows that were boarded up because residents had fled, and along the walkways until he reached the steel barricades erected by police to prevent the pushers having free run. He walked by the empty shopfronts and the closed-down daycare centre. Ivanhoe Manners had told him, months before, that more than fifty million pounds for the New Deal for the Community programme had been swallowed by the estate. He could see no evidence of its value. He strode past the never-used garage with parking bay 286. Fear of the unknown blanketed the estate, and it was because of him.
He did his circuit and when he came back to the main entrance of the stairwell of block nine, he stopped, turned and leaned against the concrete.
Had he concern for the estate? Did he care about Millie Johnson? Was he now self-obsessed? No answers. The estate was in shock because the order of its life was altered. Millie Johnson, waiting for the anaesthetist, wouldn't have cared, not a damn. Just self-centred crap to make him, Malachy Kitchen, feel better, think he was taking a worthwhile step on the ladder.
Nothing achieved, nothing changed for the better.
As self-centred, as self-indulgent as when he had been asked to screen suspects from a lift operation and he had remarked to the battalion's adjutant: 'Be happy to – if your Jocks haven't beaten them all half insensible.' Hadn't told the adjutant, or Cherie who shared the Portakabin with him, of the email that had come in that morning. Not from Roz – he hadn't heard from her for three weeks. The email was from Major Arnold – decent Brian Arnold who might have qualified for the title of kindest old guy at Chicksands.
Hoped he was well, hoped his work was interesting, hoped he'd fitted in, hoped he would note 'There's a lot of bicycling these days round Alamein Drive. One cycle is most popular. Cheers and good wishes from all of us deskbound warriors, Brian.' It meant, in code, that Roz was the base bicycle: the Chicksands honey-pot was his home, halfway down the left-hand side of Alamein Drive. So self-centred that he had snapped the sarcasm at the adjutant, and so self-indulgent that his mind had been a country away from the village street when the ambush had been sprung and the RPG round had come in close.
Chapter Five
Feverishly, Malachy polished.
Back from his walk, the door locked and bolted behind him, he had gone to his bed, knelt and taken the shoes from the black sack.
They were his most valuable possession. His mother had said, T know it's all sand and donkey poo down in Basra, dear, but there'll be times when you need to be smart. Your father found that in Aden when he was a sprog subaltern and you were just a star in my eye. You should never be short of a good pair of shoes. I always say that a man's character is judged by his shoes.' Roz hadn't gone with him to Devon for that last lunch before he'd flown from Lyneham to Iraq. She wouldn't have gone if elephants had been dragging her – not after his father had refused to attend his son's wedding to a girl who wasn't 'suitable'. Over sherry before lunch his mother had produced the gift-wrapped parcel with a ribbon round it. When he'd opened the box, the shoes had gleamed at him, and they'd fitted to perfection. He'd gone back with them that night to Alamein Drive and had not shown them to Roz, but he'd worn them on the flight down, and all the days that he was in Brigade before his transfer to the Scottish-based battalion… and he'd worn them when they had flown him out.
Roz had hovered above him in the bedroom at the quarters. He had packed a rucksack and a suitcase, everything he would need except the helmet, the flak-jacket and the Browning 9mm, which would be issued to him the next evening when he landed. The evening sun had lit the bed. She had stood over him while he had transferred the neat piles of clothing into the rucksack and the case, and had not helped him. He had sensed the attack was coming and had not known what would trigger it. The shoes had. The strings of the sack were fastened. The photograph of her that he loved most – he had taken it at the Colosseum in Rome, the light bright on her hair and on the walls behind her, happiness on her face – in a silver frame that her parents had given them went into the suitcase and he zipped it shut. He had laid out the starched uniform he would wear on the aircraft, and then he had gone to the wardrobe and taken out the box and the shoes. The attack had gone through sarcasm to anger then on to a sneer when she had seen his mother's note and the crosses for kisses. 'Oh, that's nice. Only the best good enough. What did they cost – two fifty? Where did you find two fifty to spend on a pair of shoes? Isn't there anything here that needs two hundred and fifty quid spending on it? Sorry, sorry, a present from Mum. How touching. Be sure to send her a postcard from sunny Basra and tell her you're wearing Mummy's shoes and keeping them nice and shiny.' Her father had retired as a warrant officer (Instructor) at the Royal Military Academy; his father had retired with the rank of brigadier – he'd thought it didn't matter, and had been wrong.
He polished hard – as hard as he had worked on the boots issued him for Basic Training before his father had pulled strings and opened the gates of Sandhurst for him. Malachy sweated as he rubbed the cloth over the toes and was frenzied at his work.
When he had left Chicksands, when he had tried to find work as a civilian, he had worn those shoes. His mother had never seen them on him; his mother and father had declined to meet him. And he had worn the shoes when he had taken the train to London, when he had laid out his money on the counter of the off-licence opposite Marylebone station and had bought the two four-packs of Special Brew, then found a bench and had started, for the first time, to drink away the demons. Midnight, with nowhere to go, and he'd ended up with the derelicts – without a blanket and without cardboard – and he'd seen the eyes covet his shoes. He never took them off. If he had taken them off, that night or in the nights of the weeks that followed, they would have gone. In the hostel he had slept with them under his pillow. His watch had gone, a twenty-first birthday present from a godfather, and his wallet, and his money from begging, which had been in a cheap little purse on a bootlace round his neck, with his tags, but his shoes had stayed on his feet.