“Brace yourself.” Simon sets his body, leaning backwards.
“This is working…” Brendan peers up into the branches, trying to get a good view.
“Careful,” says Simon, as he feels the rope tighten in his hands. The panel drops a few inches, then, as he takes the weight, it is suspended for a moment above them. “Bren… I can’t hold it… it’s gonna drop!” But Brendan is staring at the plywood panel, as if he is seeing something magical.
Inevitably, the panel drops. The rope skids through Simon’s fingers, burning his skin, and the panel plummets to the ground. He falls back, stumbling but not quite going down, and Brendan doesn’t move. He just watches as the panel drops towards him, whistling as it moves through the space.
“Bren!”
Brendan begins to turn, and it is this which saves him from taking a blow to the head. Instead, the panel slices across his right forearm, taking off a swathe of skin and drawing blood, as it flashes past him. Brendan falls down, grabbing his wounded arm, and opens his mouth to scream.
Simon moves quickly, running to his friend. He goes down onto his knees and inspects the arm. Blood is running freely, and the skin has peeled away from wrist to elbow. The cut is not deep, but it is messy; Simon thinks he’ll probably need stitches.
Brendan is wailing, but he’s trying not to cry. His eyes are wide. His face is pale.
“Bloody hell,” Marty is at Simon’s side. “Bloody, bloody… bloody hell.”
“Are you okay? Can you move?” Simon is afraid to touch his friend’s arm, in case he makes things worse.
“Y-yeah… I can move.” Brendan sits up. His arm is coated in blood. The blood looks bright, like movie blood. That’s all Simon is able to think.
“You need to go home. Or to a hospital.” Marty starts to move, bending down to help the injured boy to his feet.
“No!” Brendan shouts the word. It is enough to stop the other two boys in their tracks. For a moment, they can’t move, can’t breathe. They just stand there and stare down at the third Amigo.
“You’re hurt, mate. This is finished.” Simon feels a twinge of regret as he speaks. He doesn’t want this to be over, not any of it: the day, the den-building, the summer. He wants to stay ten years old forever, staving off an uncertain future by playing in the trees on Beacon Green.
“No,” says Brendan, but softer this time. “I’ll be fine. It’s just scraped off some skin. Once the bleeding stops, we can start again.”
Simon feels a sense of admiration towards his friend. A choice has been made. Blood has been spilled. Like a sacrifice. Brendan’s inner strength is revealed.
“We can’t stop now. We have to finish what we started.” Brendan’s face is still pale, but his eyes are on fire. “We’ve gotta finish this.”
For a second, perhaps even less, nobody knows what Brendan means. Then, like water flowing through a crack in a dam, reality pours in and they realise that he means the den, the work they have been doing all day.
Now that the moment is broken, the boys feel able to move again. Marty takes off his T-shirt. “Here,” he says. “Use this as a bandage.”
Simon turns around and stares at Marty’s body. The boy already has muscles: his arms are hard; there is the vague suggestion of a future six-pack airbrushed across his stomach. There are fresh cigarette burns alongside the old, white scars on his upper arms and in the soft skin of his elbow joints.
He takes the shirt and slings it over one shoulder. He takes a handkerchief from his pocket — the one his grandmother bought him the Christmas before she died; he always carries it with him, but is never quite able to say why — and starts to scrub the blood off Brendan’s arm. The bleeding has slowed, almost stopped.
Once the arm is relatively clean, Simon uses Marty’s T-shirt to cover the wound, which under close inspection isn’t as bad as it looks. He ties it tightly, remembering from a film or a book that pressure will stop a wound from bleeding. It was probably in a war film. He loves war films. So he pretends that this is a combat situation, and he is treating a fallen comrade. In order to continue with the fight, the soldier has to get back on his feet, and it is his responsibility to make sure that happens.
“Are you sure you’re okay, soldier?” He stares into his friend’s eyes, looking for the cracks in his wall of courage.
Brendan nods. That’s all he does. He does not speak. Then, slowly, he gets back to his feet and walks over to the plywood panel, begins to inspect it for damage. “It’s fine,” he says without turning around. “Everything’s fine.”
But for some reason Simon doesn’t believe that. Deep down inside, like a big bass drum sounding some terrible beat, he feels certain that nothing will ever be fine again.
PART TWO
Localised Necrosis
“But you’re not going to be the one to save me.”
CHAPTER NINE
MARTY POURED HIMSELF a drink and waited for the phone to stop ringing. He glanced over, at the telephone table, and smiled. He knew who it was. It was her — Melanie. She wouldn’t leave him alone.
He sipped his cold beer and crossed the room, stood by the phone. He reached out and laid a hand on the tabletop, only inches from the black plastic device. He wasn’t going to pick it up, but this felt like teasing, so he allowed his hand to creep across the desk and tickle the edge of the phone.
The ringing finally stopped.
His recorded message kicked in: “It’s me. I’m not here, or I can’t be bothered to answer. Leave me a message.” Then there was a short, high-pitched bleep.
“Hi, Marty. It’s me. Again. I’ve tried you on your mobile and didn’t get an answer, so thought you might be at home. Am I going to see you tonight? I mean, if I’m not, you could at least do me the favour of telling me. I’m sitting here wondering why the fuck I persist with you. I get nothing back, so why should I keep giving you all this attention?”
Marty took another mouthful of beer. He didn’t feel a thing as he listened to Melanie’s whining voice. He supposed that he ought to feel at least something — lust, irritation, interest, resignation. But, no; he was empty. The girl inspired no emotion. She was just another warm, keen body on a cold night, a name and number in his mobile phone contact list. Nothing more than that.
When she ended the call he reached out and pressed the button to delete the message. She was history, this girl — he never wanted to see her again. Even the promise of her trim body, and the things she liked to do when she’d had a few too many Bacardi Breezers, held little appeal.
There would always be another one just like her. Women like Melanie were drawn to men like him; they couldn’t help themselves. It was a kind of self-abuse, the desperate way they clung to the kind of bloke who lifted heavy weights, took drugs, and battled in back alleys when the pubs were closed. Melanie and her ilk were addicted to Hard Men — they were like groupies following a famous rock band around the world, all too willing to lower their morals and spread their legs in return for the slightest crumb of attention, even if that attention was ultimately negative. He had never been able to understand the mentality, but had exploited it his entire life. He’d taken hundreds of these women to bed, and not one of them had ever touched him inside, where it mattered. None of them had inspired within him anything more than a blunt craving for sex.
Marty was not an evil man. He’d done many bad things, yes, but he told himself that he was not inherently a bad person. He was intelligent — unlike a lot of his peers — and he was self-aware enough to realise the error of his ways, but none of this insight had ever stopped him from doing what he did best.