Still Midnight

11

‘I am not sitting down anywhere here.’ Pat crossed his arms and looked around the living room. There was not a surface on floor, walls or ceiling without a suspicious stain nearby.

Sitting in the least damp corner of the balding brown corduroy settee, Shugie looked up at him, tipping his head back to compensate for the puff on his eyes, and whispered, ‘OK then.’ His smoke-fucked voice was barely a rasp.

‘Because,’ Pat, leaned in to provoke him, ‘it’s fucking ginking.’

Shugie blinked, sanguine about the charge. ‘OK.’

Foiled, determined that Shugie would be as upset as he was, Pat looked around the floor, at the settee, through the door to the kitchen. ‘ You live like a dirty fucking animal.’

But Shugie was unperturbed, distracted, perhaps by the profundity of his hangover. He shut his rheumy eyes to sniff, the violent action disturbing the delicate balance of forces behind his eyes, and he cringed with pain. ‘Oooh.’

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Oh aye. OK.’ He kept his eyes shut, awaiting equilibrium. ‘You’re saying it’s dirty and that’s fair enough.’

‘Look at that.’

With supernatural effort Shugie peeled one swollen eye open and followed Pat’s finger to a distant meeting of floor and wall. He squinted at it: something small and brown had grown its own white fur coat.

‘Wit the fuck is that?’

Shugie shrugged at the distant object. ‘An orange?’

‘An orange?’

‘Or a tangerine?’

‘It’s a shit.’

Dropping his feet heavily on the stairs they heard Eddy coming downstairs from keeping guard outside the old man’s room.

‘There’s a fucking dog shit in your living room.’ Pat raised his voice, restating his case so that Eddy could hear.

‘Naw,’ Shugie sighed with the effort of talking, ‘there hasnae been a dug in here for three month, man.’

‘Then it’s been here for three month. Look at the bloom on it.’

Shugie did as instructed. ‘Nah,’ he said unconvincingly, ‘that’s just an old tangerine or something.’

Pat looked accusingly at Eddy but didn’t get the chance to speak.

‘Your watch,’ said Eddy, thumbing over his shoulder to the stairs.

‘This place…’ Pat found himself lost for words. He pointed at the furry white intruder by the wall.

Shugie threw his hands up and rasped an appeal to Eddy. ‘He’s going mad over an old orange or something.’

In a gesture of solidarity Eddy flopped onto the settee next to Shugie. He sat suddenly straight, his eyes widened. He jumped to his feet again, turning to look at the damp seat of his trousers, moving his hand to brush the urine off and then thought better of it, flapping his hand at it instead. ‘Oh, ya dirty fucking…’

Pat grabbed his arm and pulled him roughly into the kitchen. ‘Come in here.’

The kitchen looked even worse in the weak morning light. The window above the sink was broken, a triangle of glass missing from the bottom corner, the rest of it documenting every splash of dirty water that had ever hit it, a thick layer of grey dots emanating from behind the mixer tap. Beyond the lace of dirt the very tip of the Lexus’s silver bonnet shone in the sun.

The wall of bin bags blocking the passage to the back door were not just leaking sticky mess onto the floor, the ones on the bottom were stuck in a pool of white.

‘I can’t stay here,’ said Pat.

Eddy was standing too close to him, chewing his bottom lip.

‘It’s not…’ Pat looked around the floor, ‘healthy.’

‘Pat-’

Pat pointed into the living room. ‘There’s a shit with mould on it in there.’

Eddy pinched his nose, paused, and shut his eyes. When he spoke it was with forced patience. ‘The trouble I had to find this place-’

‘Trouble?’ shouted Pat. ‘The cunt drinks in your fucking local. All ye did was buy a pint and turn around.’

Eddy’s eyes were still shut. ‘I looked at a number of places as possible-’

‘Oh, “A pint o’eighty”,’ shouted Pat, flailing his hands about indignantly, ‘“Aye, you, you seem to smell of pish, have ye a house? Can I hold a hostage there? Would that have a shit in the corner?”’

Pat looked up for a response and found the barrel of Eddy’s gun pointing at his eye. Eddy spoke quietly to the tip of his gun. ‘Patrick,’ he told it, ‘I’ve went to a lot of trouble and you’re not really appreciating that.’

Pat was hypnotised by the circle of deep blackness.

‘I have tried reasoning with you,’ whispered Eddy, a tremor in his voice as the enormity of what he was doing sunk in. He was looking at Pat’s mouth, quite close, as if afraid to look at the eye he was about to shoot. They were wet again, the eyes, the bastard fucking eyes brimming with panic.

‘I’ve tried so fucking hard…’

‘Edward.’

‘I’ve really fucking tried.’

‘Get the gun away from my face or I will kill you.’

‘Oh, you’ll kill me,’ and Eddy waggled the end of the barrel in Pat’s face, afraid to drop it now, in case Pat did kill him. ‘I’ve got a gun on you and you’re threatening to kill me, is it? You’re threatening me? Who are you tae fucking threaten me?’

They both knew who Pat was. Pat was a Tait, and he didn’t need to threaten Eddy. Being a Tait, even an estranged Tait, meant that he was a walking threat. The barrel was pointing at Pat’s ear now. ‘Point the gun at the floor,’ he said carefully.

Eddy didn’t know what else to do. He lowered the barrel, spluttering a sob of relief.

Calmly, Pat reached over and, hand over hand, took the pistol from him. He held it away from Eddy and flicked the safety on, took a deep breath and spoke: ‘This is a fuck-up from start to finish. We both know it.’

‘Aye,’ whispered Eddy urgently, tears rolling down his face. ‘Aye, I know it’s a fucking mess, I don’t know what to… I just sat in that old cunt’s pish.’ He rubbed his eyes with the ball of his palm, smearing tears into his hairline.

Pat reached out and touched Eddy’s back with his fingertips and Eddy covered his face like a girl and cried, high pitched, helpless. Beyond the kitchen door Shugie crossed his legs and Pat saw that he was wearing trainers with the wrong laces, brown laces from brogues. I don’t belong here, he said to himself, knowing that he really meant that he didn’t want to belong here.

‘If she hadn’t taken the fucking kids, man,’ squeaked Eddy. ‘If she’d only let me see my fucking weans…’

It wasn’t the wife stopping him from seeing the kids. This lie had developed slowly, like a lot of other lies in Eddy’s life. Pat went along with it but now, abruptly, he looked at Eddy and saw a man refused access to his children by the courts because he was an unreliable moody arsehole, a man who brought Shugie in so that people in their local would know he was up to something big, a man who, over the course of today, would misremember last night, rewrite events so that Pat was the nervous one who fucked up. He looked at Eddy, self-pity seeping out of him. Eddy wasn’t capable of being honest. I do belong here, Pat admitted, I do belong, but I don’t want to.

As Eddy bubbled, Pat calmly took himself away, back to the pink hall of the toast-smelling house. He wasn’t in this kitchen, wasn’t in the house with a disputed mouldy shit in the living room and fossilised bin bags in the kitchen. He was back in the pink hall, watching a lock of perfect silky black slide over a young shoulder. He was back in the clean, where bad smells elicited disgust and a shit on the floor wouldn’t even get the chance to get mouldy. That’s what he wanted.

She had just brushed her hair before they came in, he realised. Sat in front of the telly and brushed her long hair. The image made him smile, made him warm, until Eddy’s shrill sob shattered the image.

Pat reached out to still him. ‘Don’t…’

‘That Irish cunt… I don’t know what to do…’

‘Let’s go and get some toast or something.’ Pat’s voice was expressionless.

‘We can’t leave that pishy cunt to mind him,’ said Eddy looking out to the living room.

‘OK. We need to get moving.’ Aleesha’s hand came up and touched his face, the hand that was no more, but he wrote that part out. Her fingertips touched his face, her pretty gold rings glinting in the corner of his eye. ‘I’ll call Malki, get him over here to mind Shugie.’

‘How are we, how are we gonnae do that? I mean, we can’t move now, that fucker’ll go and get pissed and tell everyone.’

‘Malki’ll come, I’ll get him to bring bevy for Shugie, get him to stay in the house, say we’ll be back any minute. You and me, we’ll go get some toast or something-’

‘Toast? What ye on about toast for?’

‘And we’ll phone the family.’ Pat imagined himself arriving at the door of the Anwar family home, being greeted by the brothers as a long lost friend, being offered tea as he slipped his jacket off in the pink hall. ‘Ask about the money. I’ll sort it out, man, don’t worry.’ He pointed to Eddy’s pocket. ‘I’ll speak to the Irish.’

Eddy took his phone out and selected a number, pressed call and handed the phone over.

Irish had been asleep. His voice was an angry, startled bark. ‘Whit?’

‘We’ve got the father and we’re calling them this morning.’

‘Who’s this?’

‘The other one.’

Pat could hear the Irish consider the angles. ‘I don’t know you.’

‘I’ll call you after,’ said Pat and hung up.

Eddy took the phone back, dropping his chin so he was looking up, puppyish, ‘Pal…’ he said, meaning thank you, meaning to express affection, hinting at words he would never say.

Pat was thinking words he would never say too.

Pat was thinking that the world would be better off if a cunt like Eddy wasn’t in it.