‘I’m sorry,’ she said sympathetically.
No, I’m sorry, Beth thought, for what my family helped do to you, but she just nodded.
Beth wondered if it was as simple as pretending that you were just like everyone else for long enough that you eventually became so. She sat on the sea wall just outside the amusements, looking out at the water towards the Isle of Wight. To her left along the front was some kind of tower, beyond that was Old Town and then Gosport. It was ridiculous how exotic Portsmouth felt to her, but then she’d never really been anywhere except Bradford and prison. Well, Leeds as well, she supposed.
It was a cloudless day, bright blue sky but fresh and windy. She had her leather zipped up tight, her hat pulled down over her ears. She took another sip from the mug of hot sweet tea.
This would be okay, this would be enough, she thought. Time for a change. She wanted to get away from Bradford and live by the sea. Stay away from the clubs, the bouncing and all the violence. Live in a place where not everyone knew you and your business.
The work was menial and repetitive but that didn’t matter. When she was finished she could see a clean floor, or an oiled ride, or a happy punter, well more or less, and could measure what she’d done.
She would have to go back and tell her dad face to face what had happened first. It would devastate him and he already needed care, but he had made his choice. He had made it clear that he didn’t want her around, that he blamed her for something, though she’d never known what.
She heard his huffing breath as he shuffled towards her a long time before he said anything.
‘I’m not paying you to eye up the Isle of Wight,’ Ted said sternly.
‘I’ve done all the floors in the arcade and the caff before it opened. I helped Jimmy with the ghost train and I’ve worked the tombola all morning. I was just having a quick tea break.’ When she turned around, however, Ted was smiling.
‘I know. I know when people work and when they slack. I know everything. It’s the rides themselves – they talk to me. I’m like a fairground shaman,’ he said. Beth was smiling, trying not to laugh and shaking her head.
‘You’re so full of shit.’
It was Ted’s turn to laugh. With difficulty he manoeuvred himself onto the sea wall and offered her a cigarette. She was about to take one when she realised that she didn’t smoke and didn’t need them to buy stuff and trade for favours any more.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The sea,’ he said.
‘Isn’t that the Solent?’
‘Have I ever told you about my time in the merchant marine?’
‘It’s my first day,’ Beth protested. Ted’s chuckle was a rasping wet noise that threatened to become a cough. ‘You shouldn’t smoke so much.’ Or eat all the shit you obviously do. He had the look of someone who had a full English breakfast every day of the week.
‘This is what a real man looks like,’ Ted said, slapping his belly. It was avoidance but Beth had to grin. ‘I heard you had some trouble this morning?’
‘Just some kids trying to tip one of the machines.’
‘Little shits.’
‘Nah, I was worse when I was their age. Just bored and skint. I don’t like those tracksuits they all wear though.’
When she looked back up she saw that Ted was studying her intently. Beth wasn’t sure why. Ted had worked the amusements for many years. When punters came to the stalls he had learned how to read them. He knew people. Beth didn’t realise it, but how she responded to kids was a test. She didn’t hate them or resent them, she just saw them for what they were.
‘Lot of people try hard their first day, their first week, their first month and then slack off.’
Beth shrugged. ‘You don’t think I’m working hard enough, just fire me.’
‘You keep this up you can stay as long as you like,’ Ted told her and pulled out his wallet. He took a fifty out of it. Beth started to protest. ‘I told you I won’t have desperate people working for me. It comes out of your pay, but it’ll tide you over until the end of the week. Understand?’
‘Thanks.’ She finished her tea and Ted watched her head back towards the amusements.
He hung in the murk, the particulate matter floating all around. He could not imagine how once he had thought that this was not a good place to come. He did not feel the coldness now. He did not care about the lack of visibility. He did not need to see her to know that she was there. He could hear her sleeping song calling to her lost daughter somewhere in the city he and the others had forsaken. Lost for generations but so close.
He was but a child to her. A servant. The daughter would bring freedom. The daughter could wake her. The water felt warm, quiet and subdued like the womb. Everything was loud, painful and so dry on the land, in the city. In the city every street was a reminder, fragmenting memories played out like an old film. They might as well have belonged to someone else. On dry land it felt like you could reach up and touch reality, pierce through it like a membrane to where madness and hate waited.
He swam down. He would do his duty, but first he needed to touch her, be with her, join with her, and inside her he would try to cease to exist so there was only her.
Heavily sedated and on as much pain relief as he was, Arbogast couldn’t stop the tear trickling from his eye as he saw McGurk, resplendent in shell suit and bling, the cane, the latest phone in hand, flanked by muscle, making his way through the ward towards him.
The other patients and the staff watched him walk by. If they didn’t know who he was, then they knew what he was. The constant chewing and the wild amphetamine stare didn’t help.
McGurk walked into Arbogast’s room and stood at the bottom of the bed, looking at him with contempt. Trevor remained behind McGurk while Markus went and pulled the curtain shut across the window that looked out onto the ward. Then he closed the door.
McGurk looked down at the bandaged stumps where Arbogast’s fingers used to be and then back to the tear running down the pimp’s face.
‘Do you know what I hate most?’ he asked. Arbogast dared not answer. ‘Fucking weakness.’ McGurk moved quickly but with the jerky movements of a habitual speed freak. He grabbed Arbogast’s wounded hand and got up close to the pimp’s face. Over the sterile and sickness smell of the hospital and through the fugue of sedatives and painkillers, Arbogast could smell spearmint over something rancid on McGurk’s breath. McGurk put his hand over Arbogast’s mouth. Arbogast wet himself. He was sure it was over.
‘I want to test the limits of modern medicine’s ability to relieve pain,’ McGurk told the pimp. It was something cool to say that he’d thought of on the way over. McGurk squeezed the stumps of Arbogast’s fingers. The dressings turned red. ‘Don’t you cry! Don’t you fucking cry, you bastard! You owe me an explanation.’
McGurk was wiping his hands with a paper towel when the doctor burst in flanked by security.
‘It’s okay. We’re leaving,’ he told them.
‘We’ve called the police,’ the doctor told him. McGurk turned to look at the whimpering ball of pain on the bed that used to be William Arbogast.
‘He doesn’t want to press charges, but you do what you think is right.’
Trevor made a path for them through the security and they left.
‘You believe that shit?’ Markus asked as they made their way through the ward.
‘City’s getting weirder.’
‘What do you want to do?’
‘I want to know who the fuckers in the masks are. I don’t want any of the cunt with a gun – he sounds like some super-plod, Special Branch, something like that. Find me where the sister is, though.’