Suddenly stern, Eddy gestured to the other side of the bed. Pat shuffled over and they took an arm each and dragged the pillowcase off the bed, trying to stand him up on his cloth legs. He buckled forwards. Twice more they tried to stand him up and both times his knees flopped hopelessly outwards. It was getting worrying. On the final try he took his weight, just one knee buckled, swinging a circle but coming back. Eddy nodded Pat to the door.
They dragged it on its toes out to the landing, through the mildew cloud at the bathroom door, yanking it, giving it contradictory signals about which way to go. By the time they reached the top of the stairs the pillowcase was crying and muttering, sputtering and gasping for air between sobs.
Eddy stopped, looked down to the front hall and back to Pat. Pat could feel warmth through the sleeve, human warmth, but he looked down at the hall carpet and thought of Aleesha, of the depth of her grief for her father, of slipping his arm around her shoulders and her silky hair sliding across his bare arm. His hand gliding around her shoulder, his fingertips memorising every hair, her sharp shoulder blades, vertebrae, the powdered softness of her skin. She would need him then. Desire made him peel his fingers away from the arm but as soon as he did he felt himself diminish and was ashamed.
Eddy took a step forward still holding the arm, yanking hard but the pillowcase stood firm, upright, looked at him angrily. It yanked its arm away indignantly. He knew there were stairs there.
A clatter of feet made them look down: Malki was running up towards them, lifting his knees high, smiling. ‘Brought the car round the back,’ he panted, stopping two steps down, holding the banister and swinging down a step again.
Eddy glared at him.
‘Bloke’s already heard my voice,’ explained Malki, a hand on the wall and one on the banister, barring the way. ‘I already spoke to him, when I give him the sweeties. He can’t eat them ’cause they’re not halal.’
Somehow the moment had passed. They couldn’t do it in front of Malki. In front of Malki would risk a long conversation about right and wrong, a dispute; he would ask about their motives, talk about the pillowcase as a person. Foiled. Pat felt proud of his wee junkie cousin.
Eddy motioned for Pat to take the stairs ahead of him and followed him down, pinching the old man’s elbow tight as he led him roughly down the steep steps.
Shugie was dozing on the damp settee. A second blue plastic bag was sitting open and next to him with three new cans in it. The previous bag of cans lay empty, the tins discarded on the floor.
‘Dunno if three be enough,’ said Malki. ‘But it’s all they had left in the shop.’
Pat shrugged. He didn’t want to speak too much in front of the pillowcase. Carefully he reached around to his wallet and took out a twenty quid note. He looked at it, calculated that it was probably enough for an alki to buy drink but not enough for a really greedy drinker to spend a night in the pub with other people. He sat it on top of the cans in the bag.
They formed a strange parade, passing through the living room to the kitchen and out the back door: Malki ahead with his hurried junkie speed-walk, Pat behind him, the pillowcase puffing and jerking as he was prodded and shoved by Eddy following behind. Malki hesitated at the kitchen door, waiting for Eddy’s signal. Eddy nodded and Malki opened it, letting fresh air into the festering corridor of bin bags.
They had been in the house for almost ten hours, breathing in every nuanced smell a human being can make without dying and the back garden seemed impossibly lush and fresh. Each in turn stopped on the back doorstep to take a grateful breath.
It was a jungle: grass grew long and dark here, an enclosing wall of deep green waxy hedges exploding upwards, bursting in every conceivable direction, swallowing the light. As the wind caressed the blades the grass winked its silver undersides.
The Lexus had been driven into the long grass so that the boot was facing the kitchen door and Malki had left a trail through the grass from the driver’s door to the back step, from the boot to the passenger door as he emptied anything from it that might be used as a weapon. Pat followed the path to the boot, popped it and stepped back.
Eddy took his time, glancing spitefully at the old man. He seemed unsatisfied that the pillowcase was walking stooped, that he was limping on one foot, flinching at the pain in his back. Swinging him by the elbow Eddy turned the pillowcase so that his back was to the boot and punched him in the groin, winding him so that he doubled up. Eddy stood up with a snigger and looked at Malki and Pat. Malki looked away. Pat smiled weakly. Oblivious to the animosity, Eddy smirked again and, as if telling a joke, put his hand flat on the old man’s head and, with the smallest push, dropped him into the boot.
The excellent suspension echoed the fall of the old man’s body. Eddy looked around for support, smiling, lips parted. Pat and Malki were from a wild sprawling family, composed mostly of ineffectually worried mothers and bad apples, a model of complex social problems, but it took a special kind of man not to empathise with a punch in the balls. They wouldn’t meet his eye. Malki even tutted at the car.
Angry at having measured his violence wrong, yet again, Eddy picked up the feet in dirty slippers and dropped them into the boot, swinging the old man onto his side, and slammed it shut as if hoping to trap some small something between the metal lips.
Malki looked for Pat to say something. ‘In the car, son,’ said Pat and Malki obliged, shutting the door carefully behind him.
Eddy looked angrily at the back of Malki’s head. ‘Your Malki’s a twat.’ Pat glared at him. ‘OK, I know he’s your cousin, but he fucking is a twat.’
Pat’s eyes were open wide in warning. The pillowcase could hear them. The wind hissed through the grass as Eddy looked away and blushed. He couldn’t seem to stop fucking up. Pat turned away and walked around to the passenger door. The pillowcase knew two names now; Eddy had said them out loud and told him that two of them were cousins and so now Eddy couldn’t let him walk, he’d have to kill him and leave Aleesha fatherless, rudderless, looking for love in all the wrong places. Pat could be one of those places.
As he opened the passenger door and slipped inside the car his chest was warm, full of thoughts of sunny places and hair on pillows.
21
Morrow and Bannerman were parked in Alison Street, looking across the road to two big shop windows.
The restaurant didn’t have a name painted above the door, it wasn’t listed in the phone book, but everyone knew it as Kasha’s. It didn’t even look like a restaurant; it looked more like a community centre because of the modest furnishings and utilitarian decor. The seats were moulded grey plastic, the tables wood effect tops with steel legs. Even the wallpaper was slightly grey, a dado rail hinted at a different pattern but mirrored the dull colours in the rest of the room. The food service area was a modest four-foot sandwich bar, a fridge full of cans of mango juice, bottles of water and glass jars of mango lassie.
Morrow knew that later in the evening it would be full of men eating, sipping coffees and drinking fresh lassie out of long glasses, but it was Ramadan and the men were sitting around empty tables, keeping each other company but not eating.
One table was conspicuously eating, though. The four men were sitting at a table away from the window near the dimly lit back of the shop, their table shamelessly strewn with plates of food. A fifth man stood in the doorway, dressed like the others. He stood with his hands crossed over his groin, watching the street. He wasn’t the biggest of the men but Morrow knew him from his reputation. King Bo was a nasty, cold boy. He could break bones to order: one finger, two legs, even a thumb, which is a hard bone to break, did it without a flicker and he was fast too. But King Bo was a sideshow, a soldier. The men at the table were the main event.