Slaughter's hound

Saturday
26

There was a time when twenty grand was a lot of money. Used to be, you went along to a play called Twenty Grand, you could be pretty sure it was about something more than the stamp duty someone was paying on an upmarket kennel.

She was desperate, sure.

But still, twenty grand, cash. Just like that.

Way too easy.

I plodded down the staircase to the gloomy great hall with that nape-tickling sensation of being watched. Eyes everywhere. Hardly a blank space on any wall. Dead eyes, unseeing, no more than swirls of oil, but I felt disembodied under their pitiless gaze, a soul descending into Hades through malign vapours, not only watched but judged as well. I half-expected Simon to materialise out of the shadows with a thickly muttered threat against double-crossing the Iron Queen, but he didn’t show. Maybe he was too busy manning a phone somewhere, hoping I’d make another call. Or out on the balcony squirting oil into her joints.

Outside it was already warm, a fresh new day. I patted my pockets as I crossed to the Sierra, just to be sure I hadn’t missed a message from Dee, then remembered Tohill had taken my phone. I sat into the Sierra and got it sparked, giving it more rev than it needed and sorely tempted, as I reversed back to the Hamilton fleet of cars, to plough on, do some damage. A harsh crunch of gravel as I skidded to a stop, and then I punched into first and took off, wheels spitting stone. For a split second I was blinded, jamming on as the dazzle of the rising sun caught the rear-view mirror, and then I realised where the violent impulse was coming from.

Bell jars away …

I’d been here before, at this time, the sun coming up. There’d been a marquee pitched on the front lawn then, the once perfect lawn that by dawn had been strewn with streamers and confetti, crushed paper plates and broken glass, a prone body or two. The night of Paul and Andrea’s wedding, the next morning if we’re keeping score, Paul bliftered to the point where he’d almost forgotten he needed a cane. Finn being best man, he’d hosted the reception under canvas in the sheltered dell in front of The Grange, although by then those still standing, most of them the hardcore surf crew, were straggling towards the woods and the path that led down to the little cove below the house. Paul out in front in white tails, waving a bottle of Chateau de Piss ’95.

Fun and games to come. Finn’s gift to Paul.

What a waste. All that energy and grace, gone. Snuffed out in the time it takes to plummet nine floors.

And all the while a little boy lay still in a hospital bed, dead to the world, his own body conspiring to shut him away in order to preserve the bare minimum of life.

I got out of the Sierra and tossed away the More, crossed the gravel to the woods, falling in again with Finn’s cabal as they wound down through the woods, tripping on bare roots, stumbling and staggering, the expectant air an electric current on the salty breeze. The pants of Paul’s tux sandy at the cuffs as he shuffled barefoot across the rock outcrop overlooking the cove and its tiny jetty, the fingernail of sandy beach, the boathouse that had been carved from the base of the cliff. High tide, the sea snapping at rocks bared in a snarl.

Showtime.

They settled in to wait, some rolling spliffs, others spreading blankets and pouring the last of the champagne. Paul scanning the rocks above, then rearing back stiffly from the waist, pointing his cane at a spot about twenty or thirty feet below the balcony that crowned the half-pipe of ragged cliff.

‘Cometh the hour,’ he declared.

Heads swivelled to follow Paul’s wavering cane. Most of them, more used to beaches by day than at dawn, instinctively shaded their eyes as they glanced up, so that it looked like they were engaged in a mass salute. Finn was spotted, awkwardly perched like some wing-broke hawk, hunched beneath an overhang with one knee bent up into his chest, the other leg trailing.

Behind me, horrified, a woman asked in a stage whisper if Finn was going to like actually jump?

‘No,’ Paul said without taking his eyes off Finn, ‘he’s going to dive.’

Andrea the only one not watching. She sat her with her back to the cliff, staring out to sea and the flickering whitecaps. In her retro-mini ’60s wedding dress, sitting on the edge of the outcrop, she wasn’t unlike a whitecap herself. Thinking about marrying a twenty-nine-year-old who needed a cane, maybe, who wore a neck-and-back brace in the shower, a drummer who still sat behind his kit even if his drumming was now reduced to pressing buttons on a laptop, manipulating the pre-programmed rhythms.

A low chant began. ‘Finn-Finn-Finn-Finn.’

Hands clapping, feet pounding sand. The rhythm funnelling up the half-pipe cliff.

Maria looked across at me, rolled her eyes. ‘Christ,’ she drawled, ‘it’s not like he needs the fucking encouragement.’

But they adored him. They adored him because they wanted to be adored themselves, and had they been Finn they’d have expected no less.

Citius, Altius, Fortius: Finn Hamilton was a one-man Olympics, and for all their gnarly argot they understood, consciously or otherwise, that he was a throwback to the ancient games, the man who becomes a demigod, semi-divine, by dint of his superhuman feats, and in their chanting, their witnessing, they celebrated his courage, endurance and daring.

They knew nothing.

Had he been a lightning bolt Finn couldn’t have been less interested in their praise, the champagne toasts, the backslapping. His was an instinctive philosophy, generated by a mind perversely wired to self-destruct, a brain marinated in a chemical soup long ago soured and poisoned by misfiring synapses.

They knew his history, of course. The switchback moods, the arson, the rubber rooms. Paul, when called upon, could recite from memory Finn’s A amp;E rap sheet of broken bones and concussions, a twice-fractured skull, a detached retina. Awed tones when they spoke of the cruelly irrepressible energy that crackled in his veins as it burnt off caution and fear, driving him up the sheer cliffs, down the blackest runs.

They knew nothing.

What Paul thought he knew, and was anxious now that everyone else should know, this particular offering being in his honour, was that Finn wasn’t just another overgrown kid with an ego deficit. That jumping off a cliff into the rock-fringed surge below wasn’t simply the dumb bravado of an early mid-life crisis, and nor was it Finn’s perverse take on tossing the bouquet. In fact it was a ritual, Paul claimed, an ancient, ageless testing.

He rather spoiled the rococo tone by pausing to take a toke. ‘Behold the man,’ he exhaled, squinting through the haze, ‘pitting himself against the fundamental elements.’ A few croaky cheers, not all of them ironic. ‘Pitting himself against the void itself, the triumph of life and time snatched from the very jaws of, of …’ He’d faltered then, frowning as he tried to recall the specifics of Finn’s best man speech, when he’d lauded Paul with the very same words. His shoulder stiffened, which was as much of a shrug as Paul could muster, then he swigged from the neck of the Chateau de Piss in his other hand. ‘Anyway,’ he mumbled, ‘it’s all good,’ and then inclined his head, bowing to accept the good-natured raspberries and boos, pounding his cane on the rock to start the foot-stamp drumming again.

He was wrong, of course, but then Paul was the kind who was nearly always wrong, stumbling along through life piecing together answers from second-and third-hand information and choosing the wrong option every time and never realising it until it was too late, if at all. Christ, the guy was a drummer.

Finn wasn’t just another endorphin junkie. His was a compulsion that scorched the wings of any adrenaline addict unthinking enough to flutter too close to his flame. He was textbook Freud, the unsettled soul shattered by too harsh a light and ceaselessly beating back towards some shadowed peace.

One time I asked Paul why he still hung around when he couldn’t surf anymore, couldn’t drum. How he could stick the sight of Finn.

His shoulder stiffened. ‘When you’re in,’ he’d said, ‘you’re in.’

I couldn’t fault him on that.

From above, faint but clear, came Finn’s cry.

Bell Jars awaaaaaaay …

The drumming ceased. The chanting shushed.

A nervous giggle. Surf washing on sand.

Finn rose from his crouch. For the longest moment he hung poised on the ledge, cruciform, face raised to the rising sun.

Then he pushed off, arms arrowing, and sliced into the light.