Slip of the Knife

I

Maggie, the social worker assigned to his case, came in the morning and sat with Callum in the living room. She asked him questions about how he felt and he guessed the right answers: scared about the press, ashamed of his offenses, happy to be free. She waited long after they had run out of things to say to each other, drank a cup of tea Elaine gave her, and then said she’d come back next week, same time.

Elaine avoided him. She spent most of her time in the kitchen. It was two in the afternoon and she was no longer strained but nippy now, sniping at the two babies, waking them when they fell asleep, trying to make them sleep when they were awake.

Callum hadn’t moved from the sofa since watching Count Duckula with the kids before school, because no one had told him to and he didn’t want to just wander around the place. He went to the toilet a couple of times, accepted a cheese sandwich from Elaine and a cup of tea when Maggie came, and watched the television all day while the toddler came in and out. Sometimes she approached him, curious, pawing at his trouser leg, but she always went away. He didn’t know how to play with her.

Finally Elaine came back into the living room.

“Right.” She had her purse open and was looking through it. “Here’s two quid. Could you go three doors up and get me four pints of milk and a loaf?”

Callum looked around. She couldn’t mean the toddler. “Me?”

“Aye. Save me going.” She held the notes out to him and he took them. They looked at each other. She went into the hall and came back with his coat. “Just out the door and to the left, three doors down.”

He stood in the close and looked across the road to the door where he had seen the rat feet hiding. He could see straight through to the dirt in the backyard, to the bin shed and next to it a big puddle with two small children crouched on its shore, playing. Women bustled past the close mouth, hurrying down the street, summer tops and jeans. Old women wore overcoats.

He stepped out of the close, one, head down, keeping close to the wall, two three four five steps, slipping along to the left until he came to a shop door with stickers advertising cigarettes and bananas. Nineteen steps outside, alone, and nothing bad had happened.

The door jingled as he opened it. A small Asian man looked up from the counter and then looked away again. Callum hurried over to hide behind the shelves, struggling to catch his breath. Twenty-six steps outside and nothing had happened. No one had looked at him twice. No one had recognized him. Maybe he wasn’t as famous as Mr. Stritcher said he was.

The radio was on in the shop, a jagged song with an insistent fast beat that the cheery DJ announced was by somebody Hammer. Callum liked it. He played another one, a slower song with long notes and a sad way about it.

Callum stood still, staring at the bread and the boxes of cakes, and listened to the end. Wonderful. A mind can only hold one thought at a time and his mind now was full of beautiful music. He could feel the beat on his face, the stirring, sweeping notes through his chest. He wanted to dance, to sway and move his feet.

“Ay, you there, are ye going to buy something?”

The shopkeeper was talking to him. Callum stepped around the stand and looked at the man. He was tiny really, wore a turban and that made him look bigger, but he was less than five foot four and skinny, comical. “Eh?”

“Are you going to buy something or just stand there?” The man was so small and so angry. He wouldn’t have lasted a minute in prison. Men that slight couldn’t get that angry in prison unless they had a knife or a minder, and then, Callum realized, even if they had a really big argument it wouldn’t come to blows. That was why he was so angry, because it was safe to be angry. He poked his finger at Callum rudely.

“Yeah, son, I can see the top of your head over those shelves there. What you doing standing so long? You’re not stealing from me, eh?”

Callum held his jacket open to show he had nothing, hadn’t hidden a loaf in there. “I was listening to the radio. Forgot what I was doing.”

“Aye, yeah, you like those tunes nowadays, bang bang bang? You like them, you young ones, at your discos. Load of old rubbish, man, garbage.”

The tiny old man and Callum smiled at each other. You young ones. I am young.

“What you come in for anyway, eh?”

“Milk.”

“Over there at the back.” He waved Callum towards a fridge with a glass door. Cartons of green and blue were stacked up on top of each other.

“I don’t know which one to get.”

“Who is it for? For you?”

“No, a baby.”

“Blue.”

Callum put it on the counter and held out the two pound notes. “And a loaf, please.”

“You get that off the shelf. White, brown?”

They gave you a choice of white or brown in prison but they tasted the same. He thought he remembered the cheese sandwich being white.

“White, I think.”

The old man punched the price into the till and charged him one twenty. He gave him his change. “Where you from?”

“Just moved near here.”

“Good,” he said, still sounding angry, but half smiling as well. “You be a good customer to me, yes? Don’t give your money to those bastards in supermarket.”

“OK.” Callum smiled, taking the change from him. “OK.”

Outside he smiled all the way along the road, swinging the loaf by the neck, thinking about the music he had heard and the funny man. He was at the close mouth before he realized he hadn’t been counting.

Smiling, he turned back to the street and saw the leather shoes. They were parked in the close, same as they had been the night before. Brown, sleek, a pattern punched out on the toe. The bloke looked up. A young one, like himself. Long blond hair pulled back from his face, glasses, wearing a red-checked coat, watching down the road the way Callum had just come.

The children who had been playing in the puddle in the back court pushed past the shoes. He let them through, smiling, touching the top of a head, and looked down the street again. He must have watched Callum coming out of the shop. Must have watched him swinging the loaf, off guard, smiling about the funny shopkeeper.

Callum leaned his back against the close wall.

They were coming for him.

II

Pete had finally settled in bed after only six trips back into the living room to ask for water, a bit of bread because he was hungry, a cuddle after a particularly badly feigned nightmare, the horror of which dissipated as soon as Dub smiled at him.

Paddy and Dub were alone in the living room, sloped at either end of the settee, and Paddy told him about Kevin and the police. He agreed with her: there was no way Kevin Hatcher had been quietly taking drugs while living a relatively normal life. Could it have been his first time, though? Dub’d heard of people dying the first time they took an E and maybe it could happen with cocaine. They both considered it and decided that Aoife was right: no one swallowed and snorted at the same time.

Paddy was tired, worried about Mary Ann and frightened for Kevin. She’d phoned the casualty wards again in the early evening, when the night-shift receptionists who knew her would be on. There was still no trace of him.

Dub knew what would cheer her up: he put on an old tape of Evil Dead II. They already knew it by heart. They’d watched it a hundred times and knew all the jokes already but it was still comforting.

Bruce Campbell had sawn halfway through his own wrist when she suddenly thought about Fitzpatrick and the folder.

“I’ve been left a house,” she said, and told Dub about the folder with her name on it. He laughed at her.

“That’s ridiculous, he can’t make you choose between a folder and a house. It’s a will, not a quiz show. Go back and ask him what the fuck he’s on about. Better yet, get another lawyer to look into it.”

Paddy nodded, watching the tape. A woman in a bad mask was menacing the hero. Dub stretched out on the settee, his foot making contact with her leg. He flinched, withdrew from the electric touch until she smiled at him and wrapped her hand around his toes, pulling his foot onto her lap and holding it.

They watched the TV, both smiling, as the Deadites came to claim the world of men.