Soft

Video Rapide

There was nobody to see him off, of course, why would there be, and now the rain was coming down. As he waited outside the coach station, a large drop landed on his forehead. It rounded the ridge of scar tissue on the bridge of his nose and rolled into the corner of his left eye where it collected for a moment, like a tear, before spilling down his cheek. Savagely, he reached up, brushed it away. He would never have thought of taking a bus to London, but Sandy Briggs, who worked in the local betting shop, had told him it was cheaper than a train, almost half the price, so here he was, standing on the sloping concrete with his bags. It all felt wrong, somehow. Just looking at the name on the side of the bus gave him an unsteady feeling. Suddenly he wanted to hit someone. Either that, or go to sleep.

Inside, things got worse. There was a toilet in the back that smelled of disinfectant. There were TVs screwed into the roof. A girl slouched in the aisle with a tray of Cornish pasties and cold drinks. She wore a kind of air hostess’s uniform and plain black shoes with heels that needed mending. Pinned to her head was a stripy paper hat. You could have turned it upside-down and floated it across a pond. Video Rapide. He looked out of the window. Tourists in pale-pinks and pale-greens. Children screaming. The rain still falling, running into big square drains. It was warm, though. Sticky. He shifted inside his clothes, wishing he had worn less.

As the bus moved out of the station, a voice crackled through the speaker system. He didn’t listen. He could hear the tyres on the wet road. The hiss of brakes at traffic-lights, like someone lifting weights. He stared down at the fish-and-chip shops, the red-brick churches boarded-up. The girls at street-corners, their bare legs the mottled pink-and-white of brawn. One of them, dark-haired, awkward, reminded him of Jill. When you’re lying in bed at night and somebody smashes a bottle in the alley below, it can sound delicate, almost musical, like sleigh-bells. Sometimes there’s a noise inside your body that is just like that. He heard it every time he thought of Jill.

The bus gathered speed and the dark-haired girl was hidden by a bend. To the north the sky seemed to be clearing, a thin washed light streaming down into the fields. It wasn’t long before the red-brick buildings were gone, the grey rooftops were gone, and they were on the motorway, with nothing to look at, nothing to see, nothing to remind you of anything. Motorways were so empty, the land on either side withdrawn and featureless. If you spent your whole life on a motorway, he thought, you wouldn’t remember a thing.

The Scully family had driven him out of Plymouth, that was the truth of it. They lived on the same estate as he did, a whole rabbit-hutch of them. They had wide flat spaces between their eyes, and their skin was the same colour as their teeth, a sickly blend of grey and yellow. The Scullys believed that he had killed their Steve. They had no proof, of course, though he was known to be the last person to have seen Steve Scully alive and, on that basis, the police had taken him in for questioning. Nine hours he had spent in the station, nine hours straight, telling the same story over and over.

‘He was drunk. Out of his skin.’

Three policemen watched him from different parts of the interrogation room. It wasn’t the first time he’d been questioned in that room, but it was the first time he’d been innocent.

‘I didn’t lay a finger on him. It was him laying into me that did it.’

‘What,’ a policeman said, ‘self-defence?’

Barker shook his head. Returning to the estate at one in the morning, he had found Steve Scully on the fourth-floor walkway that led to his flat.

‘You’d been drinking,’ one of the policemen said.

‘Yeah, I’d been drinking,’ Barker said, ‘but not like he’d been drinking. He was swaying all over the place, like one of those snakes when you play them music —’

‘Like one of those snakes,’ the policeman said.

‘I was tired,’ Barker said, ‘and Scully was in my way —’

‘So you pushed him,’ the policeman said.

‘And he fell off the balcony,’ said another.

‘And he died,’ said a third.

‘Murderer,’ the first policeman said. Quietly. As though he was talking in his sleep.

Barker began again. You had to be so patient. You had to have the patience of Buddha, if that was what he was famous for: you had to sit there like you were fat and foreign and made of gold.

Scully had been standing near the top of the stairwell, just beyond the rubbish chute. It occurred to Barker that Scully had been waiting for him, specifically for him, because the first thing Scully said was, ‘You don’t scare me, Dodds.’ He tried to edge past Scully, but Scully blocked the way. Stood with his legs apart, swaying from the waist up. ‘You don’t fucking scare me.’ His finger jabbing the air between them as each blurred, beer-tinted word came out.

‘Is that right?’ Barker leaned forwards until he was so close that it was hard to focus. He could smell the crisps on Scully’s breath. Beef and onion, he thought. Or it could have been sausage. He could see Scully’s attempt at a moustache, the hair straggling across his upper lip, thick in some places, thin in others, like the bar code on a pint of milk. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I just looked in your brain and there was nothing there.’

Scully took a swing at him. And missed. Barker was only inches away; it must have been a pretty wild swing. He watched the fist orbiting the sky above the courtyard. Then Scully staggered, lost his balance and fell backwards, over the balcony wall. Shoulders first, feet last. Like somebody doing the high jump. That new technique that came in during the seventies. What did they call it? The Fosbury Flop. But they were four floors up in a building on Ker Street and there was nothing soft to land on.

‘It only comes to here, the wall.’ Barker showed the policemen by placing the edge of one hand against his thigh. ‘Amazing it hasn’t happened more often.’

The policemen exchanged a long slow look. Barker had seen the look before and knew what it meant. They thought he was lying. It was a pretty good lie, though — so good, in fact, that it had almost slipped past them. And they were impressed by that.

Impressed. But not fooled.

‘You related to Ken?’ one of the policemen said.

‘No,’ another policeman said. ‘He hasn’t got the teeth.’

The third policeman smiled. ‘He could have, if we weren’t careful.’

Barker looked down, shook his head again. They had a routine going, like something you might see on TV. The only difference was, you couldn’t laugh.

‘It’s Dodd,’ he said at last.

‘Sorry?’ said one of the policemen.

‘The comedian,’ Barker said. ‘His name’s Dodd.’

The policemen looked at each other again. ‘Sorry, mate,’ one of them said. ‘Don’t follow you.’

‘My name’s Dodds,’ Barker said. ‘There’s an s in it.’

‘There’s an s in it,’ one of the policemen said.

‘Smartarse,’ said another, gripping Barker by the hair and twisting. ‘There’s an s in that too.’

From the window of the bus he watched the landscape passing, fields that weren’t really green, sky that wasn’t really blue. Everything watered down, washed out.

England.

There had been a moment when he found he was alone and all he remembered feeling was relief. At last, maybe, he could sleep. And then a sound from somewhere below. Not loud. Too far away to be loud. It could have been a person treading on a cardboard box. He walked to the parapet and peered over. Saw half a dozen cars parked in a diagonal row, their paintwork orange in the light from the streetlamp. They looked too still in that orange light. They seemed tense, as if they had muscles under that smooth, shiny skin. As if they might scatter suddenly. The way cockroaches do. Scully’s body lay in the gap between two vans. He wasn’t moving. Barker leaned on the low wall, staring down. There was no hurry. Nobody could fall that far and not be dead. You don’t scare me. Famous last words.

The motorway slid past. They were in Wiltshire now. The video had started, but Barker didn’t even glance at it. Instead, he watched Steve Scully falling, though it wasn’t something he had ever seen. A widening of the space between the eyes. A spreading of the hands, as if for balance. Had Scully realised what was happening? Probably not. He’d been too drunk. The stupid sod hadn’t even known he was about to die. You stupid sod. That’s what Barker thought as he stared down into the yard that night. Then he went inside and called an ambulance.

‘Sandwich, sir?’

Barker blinked. There was a girl standing over him with a paper boat on her head. She had appeared from nowhere, like a magician’s trick. He realised he must have been dozing.

‘What was that?’ he murmured.

‘Would you like a sandwich?’

She was holding a red-and-white-striped cardboard tray and everything on it had been tightly wrapped in cellophane. You didn’t want to touch anything in case you gave it a disease. He sat up slowly, rubbed his eyes.

‘Beer,’ he said. ‘You got a beer?’

In the end the police had to release him. They realised they weren’t going to get anywhere, not unless they beat a false confession out of him. While he was being questioned he noticed that they kept forgetting the name of the deceased. They kept calling him Kelly. They didn’t care about Steve Scully any more than Barker did, but there were forms to be filled in, procedures that had to be observed. Once they had settled on death by misadventure, though, they had no further use for him.

Then the Scullys started.

First it was the bathroom window. An accident, apparently. Some kid with a ball. Barker had the window mended. But when he came home from work three nights later, the window was broken again.

‘Twice in one week,’ said his neighbour, a jittery man in his fifties who lived alone. ‘That’s bad luck, that is. That’s terrible bad luck.’

They both knew luck had nothing to do with it. The old man was frightened, though. Two of the Scully brothers had been linked to what the paper called ‘incidents involving violence and intimidation’, not just locally, but in the south-east too, in places as far away as London, Brighton and Oxford.

During the next month lit cigarettes were pushed through Barker’s letter-box while he was sleeping. If he had bought rugs for the floor, as Jill had wanted, the flat would probably have gone up in flames — and there was no fire-escape. He would have burned to a crisp, the way Les Minty did (though Les only had himself to blame, smoking in bed like that; firemen axed his front door down in the middle of the night, brought him out rolled up in his own hall carpet, already dead). Instead, Barker woke to find half a dozen shallow holes in the lino where it had melted. And, lying by the holes, the speckled, pale-brown butts. Embassy, Regal, Number 6. Scully brands.

Whenever Barker left the building, they would be standing on the concrete pathways, or under the thin starved trees that grew in the shadow of the tower-blocks. They were always there, in numbers, their skin the colour of marzipan in the watery sunshine, their eyes pinned all over him, like badges. They made sure he saw them, no mourning in those numb heads of theirs, just guilt, his guilt, you did it, you killed our Steve. That summer Barker had a job bouncing at a club on Union Street. Most of the time he was paired with Raymond Peacock. Ray wore wraparound sunglasses at night and never went anywhere without his mobile phone. Once, Barker saw Ray walking down Western Approach. A busy road, Western Approach: traffic-jams, pneumatic drills. ‘I can’t hear you, mate,’ Ray was shouting into his phone. ‘I can’t hear you.’ Prat. Still, they worked well enough together. He wasn’t big, Ray, but he had studied martial arts. He could coil himself into a spring and, next thing you knew, the bloke who’d been calling him a cunt was lying flat on his back ten feet away, limbs moving slowly, like a fly that’s just been swatted. Ray would straighten his collar, then take his mobile out and make another call. Three numbers this time. Ambulance. When Barker told Ray about the Scullys, Ray wanted to know where they lived. He’d torch the place, he said. Personal favour. As bouncers, they might have had an understanding, but Barker had never trusted Ray. Ray wasn’t somebody who took sides, Ray sat on the fence and waited for the most exciting offer. In this case, the excuse to burn a building. He wouldn’t be doing it for Barker, whatever he said. He’d be doing it for himself. Because he wanted to. Barker told Ray he wasn’t needed. He had to persuade Ray he could handle people like the Scullys on his own. ‘Sure, Barker.’ Ray backed away with the raised hands of a man surrendering. ‘If that’s the way you want to play it.’

One evening not long afterwards Barker walked in through the front door and saw Jill sitting on the floor in the lounge, her clothes ripped, scratches on her neck.

‘The Scullys,’ he said, half to himself.

She sat with her head bent and her legs folded under her, and her shoulders shook in what was left of her favourite silk blouse. One bra-strap showed, pale-green, making her seem fragile, breakable.

‘It was the Scullys,’ he said, ‘wasn’t it.’

She wouldn’t answer.

He moved to the window and stared out. Areas of concrete, areas of grass. You couldn’t imagine anything had been there before the tower-blocks. You couldn’t imagine all the trees. He had been reading about it in a book he had borrowed from the library. How England used to be. Just trees for miles. He turned back into the room, looked down at Jill. Her shoulderblades still shaking, her black hair drawn across her face.

The next day he found someone who had seen the whole thing. It was the Scully women who had done it. They’d set on Jill in the yard behind the building, four or five of them, like witches. Shouting bitch at her and whore and tart. And nobody helped, of course. Nobody ever does.

‘I’ll sort it out,’ he muttered.

But he could tell by the sound of his voice that he would do nothing of the kind. His anger had deserted him.

At night he felt the bed tremble slightly, as if a train was passing four floors down. He realised that Jill was crying. He faced away from her, pretending to be asleep. He focused on the gap between the curtains, which was wider at the bottom than the top. He stared at the gap until it became a long straight road that crossed dark countryside, disappearing into a distance that seemed untroubled, inviting. During the day he stayed indoors. He watched TV for hours, the volume turned up loud, but all he could hear was the steady buzz of current pouring from the wall. One afternoon, while he was shaving, he noticed a new line on his face. It was deep but fine, like the cut from a razor or a blade of grass. It slanted from his left temple towards the bridge of his nose, then vanished half an inch above his eyebrow, fading abruptly, the way a river fades on a map. Time was spilling through his fingers. How could he stop that happening? In the evening Jill moved around behind him, a ghostly presence at the edge of his vision. Because she was trying to be quiet, she often knocked things over. They no longer talked; they were like two people who had become invisible to one another. Outside, the weather sulked, even though it was June. Clouds filled the sky. Chill air blew through the broken bathroom window, smelling of bacon-rinds and gravy.

Finally Jill left.

He found her silk blouse on the kitchen floor when he came home one evening, the flimsy arms flung out, crooked, a detail from a crime scene. In the lounge, under the window, he saw the travel brochures she collected. Otherwise there was no trace of her — no shoes beneath the bed, no perfume on the bathroom shelf, no note. It wasn’t like her, not to leave a note. Gone shopping. Back soon. A circle above the i instead of a dot. Loops on p’s and k’s and h’s. He stood in the middle of the room and said her name out loud. Jill. Later, he sat in an armchair with some of her brochures, their pages slippery as fish. Every tour company you’d ever heard of, every destination you could imagine. She didn’t actually want to go anywhere, she’d always told him. She just liked looking at the pictures. He studied the blue skies and the white five-star hotels, thinking they might tell him what had happened, where he’d gone wrong. The longer he looked, the stranger the images became. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see himself waist-deep in a turquoise swimming-pool, or eating lobster in a restaurant by candle-light. That sun-tanned skin, those air-brushed teeth … He had a sudden memory of Jill in the front of someone’s car, her body clumsy, voluptuous. She was wearing a black dress with small white dots on it and a pair of cheap black tights from Boots. You could see her legs through the nylon — her curved white calves, her knees slightly chapped and red. Almost five years he had been with her, five years of his life, and yet he didn’t feel a thing. He wondered why. Though he knew she would be over at her mother’s house he couldn’t bring himself to ring her. At night he slept with a length of metal pipe next to the bed in case the Scullys suddenly got brave.

One Wednesday afternoon in August somebody knocked on Barker’s door. He took the length of pipe down the hall with him. When he opened up, his brother Jim was standing on the walkway.

Jim looked at the pipe. ‘Expecting someone?’

Barker didn’t answer.

Jim walked past him, into the flat.

Barker laid the pipe along the top of the coat-hooks and closed the door behind him. Jim was wearing a dark-blue suit, the pinstripes chalky, widely spaced. He had a footballer’s haircut, short at the sides, long and rumpled at the back, like a rug when it rucks up under the leg of a chair. A gold chain hung lazily around his left wrist. Jim sold second-hand cars in Exeter.

Barker fetched him a cold beer from the fridge.

‘Cheers,’ Jim said.

He sank down on the sofa. He had this way of sitting on a piece of furniture, knees apart, one arm stretched along the back, which made you think he owned it.

‘How’s business?’ Barker asked.

Jim nodded. ‘Pretty good. What about you? Still bouncing?’

‘Yeah.’ Barker mentioned the name of the club.

‘I know the place.’ Jim was holding the can of beer away from his body, as if he was Tom Jones and the can was a microphone and he was about to hit a high note. He didn’t want it dripping on his suit, that was the reason. ‘You ought to come in with me,’ he said. ‘It’s good money.’

Barker shook his head.

‘Ah well.’ For a while Jim stared at the floor. Then he said, ‘I hear you’ve got a problem.’

‘Nothing serious. They think I killed Steve Scully.’

‘Useless piece of shit. Always was.’ Jim coughed something gummy up into his mouth and held it there while he rose from the sofa and walked across the room. Once at the window he spat deftly through the gap. ‘Nice afternoon, thought I’d take a walk, what happens? Some fucking bird craps on my head.’ He turned to Barker, teeth showing. One of his jokes.

Barker smiled faintly.

Jim stayed by the window. ‘Steve Scully,’ he said. ‘He broke into that old lady’s place, broad daylight. Brained her while she was lying there in bed. And she was just getting over some fucking operation, cancer or something. Remember that?’

‘Yeah, I remember.’ They had run a picture of the woman in the Western Morning Herald. Two black eyes, fifteen or twenty stitches in her face. They’d used the words they always use: sickening, horrific.

‘You need any help,’ Jim said, ‘you let me know.’

Barker nodded.

‘You coming down the pub Friday?’

‘I don’t know,’ Barker said. ‘Might be working.’

Jim put his beer on the mantelpiece, then shook the condensation off his fingers.

Barker moved to the window. The city lay buried in a pale-blue haze. It clung to the tower-blocks, blurring their sharp edges. The hot weather had arrived at last. He leaned on the window-sill, looking out. ‘They say all the land used to be covered by trees.’

‘Yeah?’ Jim turned. ‘What they say that for?’

That big brown building with the custard-coloured chimneys, he knew it was famous, but he couldn’t remember the name of it. He sat up straighter, brushing the crumbs off his lap. They crossed the Thames, the water sluggish in the sunlight. Steep walls smeared with slime dropped sheer to stretches of gleaming mud. The girl in the paper hat was collecting rubbish in a black bin-liner. It wouldn’t be long now.

The passing weeks did nothing to soften the Scully family’s resolve. To people like the Scullys, time was salt: it aggravated every wound. Barker realised the vendetta could go on almost indefinitely; they seemed to have developed a taste for it. Strangely enough, he’d been noticing something similar at work. Old bouncers, that’s what happens. You get a reputation over the years and suddenly there’s some kid, nineteen or twenty, he’s heard about you. You’re hard, but he’s harder. It never stops.

His shirt had stuck to his back. He leaned forwards, lifting it away from his skin so the sweat could dry. In the last few months he had begun to feel that the odds were stacked against him. So far he’d been lucky. But prison ran in the family, like wiry hair and heart disease. Sooner or later he’d be put away for something, even if he was innocent. Either that, or he’d get badly hurt. There had been a time when he would never have dreamed of backing down. All that pride, though, it had faded like the tattoo on his chest. Was it age did that?

Some would say he was running. Well, let them say it.

The coach pulled in under a high glass roof. Lines of people waited below, their eyes flicking left and right like tadpoles in a jar. He could feel the city air, the speed of it, much faster than the air down on the coast.

Outside, the driver opened a flap in the side of the bus. He looked at Barker over his shoulder. ‘Can you see yours?’

Barker pointed at two black canvas bags. The driver gripped the handles and, grunting, hauled the bags out on to the tarmac. Then he stood back, hands on hips. ‘Christ, mate, what you got in there?’

Barker didn’t answer.

‘I know,’ the driver said. ‘You killed the bloke, but the body was too big. So you had to cut it in half.’

Barker just looked at him. ‘You tell anyone,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to kill you too.’

Drive Away Monkey

The door of the pub creaked open under his hand, crashed shut behind him. He ordered a pint of bitter and drank a third of it, then he put his glass down and glanced around. Half a dozen suits, two girls in office skirts and blouses. A scattering of old men wearing hats. Not a bad place, though. The booths looked original, the name of the brewery elaborately carved into the panes of frosted-glass. Statues of women in togas hoisted opalescent globe-lights towards the dark-brown ceiling. A polished brass rail hugged the foot of the bar. His brother Gary would have approved. Gary used to deal in antiques.

He asked the barman if Charlton Williams was around.

The barman jerked his eyes and eyebrows in the direction of the window. ‘Over there.’

From where he was standing, Barker could only see Charlton Williams’ back. Brown leather jacket, grey trousers. Cropped black hair. Barker moved across the pub towards him, pint in hand.

‘Charlton Williams?’

The man who swung round was this side of forty, but only just. He was going bald from the front, his hair receding at both temples, leaving a round piece that looked as if it might fit into a jigsaw. He reminded Barker of a wrestler who was always on TV on Saturdays in the late sixties.

‘The name’s Barker Dodds. I’m a friend of Ray’s. Ray Peacock. He said to find you here.’

Charlton’s pouchy eyes narrowed. ‘You’re the bloke that needs a place to stay, right?’

Barker nodded.

‘So where’s the luggage?’

‘Bus station. Victoria.’ Barker drained his pint.

Charlton pointed at the glass. ‘Same again?’

‘Cheers.’

Charlton Williams. According to Ray, Charlton had been named after the football club. People used to call him Athletic, which was a bit of a laugh, Ray said, because Charlton had never played sport in his life, not even darts. Charlton was drinking with Ronnie and Malcolm, two mates from the meat market in Smithfield. When they had emptied their glasses, Barker bought another round. It struck him that he had no idea what would happen next. The pub was where his knowledge ended. He was like someone who was about to go missing. A sense of freedom, limitless and exhilarating, suddenly invaded him. He smiled and nodded at the faces that surrounded him, as if they were in on it, as if they were the bearers of his secret.

He breathed in slowly, feeling his lungs expand. The same smell the country over: spilled beer, cigarette smoke, crisps. His ex-wife Leslie used to work in a pub. The Phoenix. The first time he went in there he was drunk. She noticed him straight away, she told him later, but he couldn’t remember seeing her at all. Other things on his mind, she said with a knowing smile. She was used to that. Women came third with a lot of men, after booze and horses — or, sometimes, if the men did drugs, women weren’t even placed.

Then he noticed her.

A wet night in Stonehouse, rain blowing sideways through the streetlights. Still summer, though. His denim jacket soaked, he pushed through the pub’s double-doors. Stood at the bar and smoothed his hair back with both hands, fingers spread over his head, thumbs skimming the tops of his ears. A couple of musicians were setting up next to the Emergency Exit — one of those second-rate bands that tour the country playing other people’s songs. A scrawny man in cowboy boots and jeans was tuning a battered white guitar. Then he stepped forwards. Put his face close to the microphone. One-two. One-two. Sshh. Sshh. One-two … Nothing irritated Barker more. He sat on his tall red stool and scowled. A voice asked him if he was being served. He looked round. Freckles spattered the girl’s bare arms, and one side of her mouth seemed higher than the other when she smiled.

‘You new here?’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Why? Are you?’

He liked that — the cheek of it. The nerve. He bought her a drink. A ginger ale. And that was what she tasted of when he kissed her, about an hour later, behind the old Pickford’s building on Millbay Road. Ginger ale. Once, she leaned back, away from him, and said, ‘You’re an ugly bastard, aren’t you.’ It was one of those things women say when they like you and they’re not sure why.

She wouldn’t let him fuck her on the street, which was what he wanted, but she didn’t stop him pushing her T-shirt up and pulling down her bra so he could see her breasts shining in the raw white glare of the nearby car-park. When he reached under her skirt, though, she began to struggle.

‘Not now.’

‘When then?’

‘Tomorrow. My night off.’

Steam flowered in the sky behind her; they must have been working late at the laundry that weekend. He walked her back, just one word in his head. Tomorrow. A terrace of brick houses, drainpipes chuckling with the last of the rain. Weeds growing sideways in the walls. And the pub’s double-doors half-open, dirty red carpet, dirty golden light, and from where he was standing, on the pavement, he could see the man with the cowboy boots and the white guitar, talking his way into a song: I’d do this for Dolly Parton, only she’s not here …

At the end of the month Barker walked into Lou’s and had the barmaid’s name tattooed across his chest in big block capitals. LESLIE. Lou tried to warn him. Always a mistake, he said, to have a woman’s name tattooed across your chest. You want to get rid of it, you can’t. But Barker didn’t listen.

‘You coming or what?’

He looked round. Charlton Williams was waiting by the door and, beyond him, in the gritty London sunshine, Ronnie and Malcolm were facing each other, pointing at a folded newspaper and nodding.

From the window of his room in Charlton’s house Barker had a view of the entire estate. Built during the early seventies, the houses were neat boxes of white weatherboard and brick, their front gardens almost non-existent, their short, steep drives more than a match for the hand-brake on most cars. None of the streets followed straight lines. The thinking was, if a street dipped and twisted a bit, then it had character. Nature was just around the corner. You could almost believe you were living in the country.

The Isle of Dogs.

Each morning Barker would wake with an empty feeling in his stomach that had nothing to do with hunger and for a moment he would wonder where he was. The walls were smudged with strangers’ fingerprints. A fawn carpet curled against the skirting-board. Then he would see his bags. They lay on the floor under the window, zips gaping. Glimpses of his few possessions: the dull gleam of the weights, his bright-red bowling shirt, the edge of a history book. You’re lucky, he told himself, to have a place at all. He had Ray to thank for it. When Barker mentioned he was leaving, Ray said he would give his mate a call. They had served in the Army together. The Green Jackets. Five minutes on the mobile phone and it was fixed. Though grateful, Barker felt uneasy. He’d seen the look on Ray’s face. Somewhere deep down, below the skin, it said, You’re in my pocket now. You owe me one.

He owed Charlton too, of course — a man he knew much less about. Charlton worked nights at the meat market, but he would never say exactly what he did and Barker chose not to ask. He had to be earning good money, though, because he slept in satin sheets and drove a brand-new Ford Sierra. A shame he didn’t spend some of it on a cleaning-lady. If Charlton had a woman over, he would always try and talk her into tidying the house. Otherwise the empty pizza-boxes piled up like red-and-white pagodas, and the fridge began to smell. Charlton had given Barker the spare room, telling him that he could stay as long as he wanted. Any friend of Ray’s, etc. etc. It turned out that Ray had saved Charlton’s life while they were in Northern Ireland — or so Charlton said three or four days after Barker moved in. Charlton had just finished work and he was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of Bell’s while Barker fried some bacon.

‘I wouldn’t be here now,’ he said, swilling the whisky slowly round the inside of his glass. ‘You’ve seen Ray in action, right?’

Barker broke two eggs into the fat and watched the white appear. ‘We were working in a club once,’ he said, ‘and three blokes wanted to get in. Navy, they were. Shit-faced. Ray told them no. They didn’t like that.’ Barker turned to Charlton, spatula in hand. ‘I never saw exactly how he did it, he moved that fast. But, next time I looked, two of the blokes were lying on the ground and the third was making a run for it.’

Charlton nodded. ‘Grasp Sparrow By The Tail.’

‘You what?’ Barker said.

‘Drive Away Monkey.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘Tai Chi.’ Charlton grinned. ‘Ray’s been doing it for years. We used to take the piss out of him.’ Charlton started waving his arms around in the air, slow-motion, his fingers splayed, like a hypnotist or a magician.

‘What’s the story with the sparrows?’ Barker said.

‘It’s one of the positions. The idea is, you’re always ready. Never caught off balance.’ Charlton finished his drink. ‘What’s Ray up to these days?’

‘This and that.’ Barker flipped the eggs so as to brown them on both sides. ‘He’s got kids now.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Two boys.’

Charlton shook his head. ‘Fuck me,’ he said, and yawned.

Though Barker had put two hundred and fifty miles between himself and Plymouth, he hadn’t shaken off its influence. During his second week as Charlton’s guest, he woke from a dream — or thought he woke — to see the Scullys outside his bedroom window. They looked cold, especially the girl, as if they had been standing on the road all night, their lips dark-mauve like the lips of people with heart conditions, their faces smooth, inscrutable. Two of the men stood on the green mound opposite the house, their arms folded, their feet apart, while the third leaned casually against a parked car. The girl shivered on the pavement, under a streetlamp, both hands tucked into her armpits. All four were staring up at him, their strange, wide-spaced eyes fastened on his window. At last the man who was leaning against the car lifted a hand into the air and Barker saw something dangling from his index finger, something that was flimsy, almost transparent. In his dream Barker peered closer. The man was holding a pair of knickers that belonged to Barker’s ex-wife, Leslie. The man swung the knickers on his finger, almost as if he was teasing a dog. All the Scullys were grinning now, and their grins told Barker everything.

He lay on his back in the narrow bed and studied the pattern of smudges on the wall. Maybe he should have paid Leslie more attention — or maybe there was nothing he could have done. He remembered the smell of other people’s meals as he climbed the five flights of stairs to her tiny attic flat in Devonport. On summer evenings, during their first intoxicating days together, she would put James Last records on the stereo, then she’d strip down to her underwear and dance for him. Her breasts cupped and threatening to spill, her plump thighs curving towards that succulence above — he had never seen a woman who looked so good. He married her in September — he’d just turned twenty-four (she was twenty-seven) — and two months later he heard that she’d been seen with Gavin Stringer in the Garter Club on Union Street. He broke a pool cue on the side of Stringer’s head. That slowed him up a bit. By the time Christmas came, it was someone else — a fireman from Whitsand Bay. Barker tracked him down on a night of gale-force winds in January. The fireman’s hair kept flattening, the way grass does when a helicopter lands. Barker hit him in the stomach, feeling the organs jostle, rupture, split under his knuckles. Then he hit him in the face. Left him slumped on the pavement like a tramp or a drunk, one eyeball swinging against his cheek. ‘All this violence,’ and Leslie shook her head. ‘I just can’t deal with it.’ ‘But it’s because of you,’ he shouted. ‘It’s you.’ That wasn’t the whole truth, though, and they both knew it. The marriage lasted less than a year.

An empty feeling, lying there. He couldn’t imagine the future, what it held in store. He felt it was rushing towards him and yet, no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t see it coming. Once, when he was about fifteen, he and his brother Jim stole a Ford Capri and drove it along the main road at night with all the lights switched off. Nothing happened. They weren’t even caught. He had the same feeling now, somehow, only the excitement had drained away, the daring too, and panic flickered in its place. He imagined lightning striking inside his brain. He could smell scorched air. He thought of Ray and his Tai Chi. In the days when Barker worked on the door of a night-club, there wasn’t much that could surprise him. He was almost always two or three seconds ahead of any move that might be made. But he didn’t seem to have access to that ability at other times. More and more often he felt hurried, unprepared. He knew he couldn’t stay with Charlton for ever, yet there were days when he couldn’t even leave his bed. He had about eight hundred pounds, in cash. That wouldn’t last long, not in London. He needed to find some work — any work. He was reminded of something his father used to say. Jobs don’t come looking for you. Only the police do that.

One afternoon while Charlton was asleep Barker walked to Petticoat Lane. Rotten fruit clogged the gutters, and the sickly scent of joss-sticks floated in the air. He had the sense that, all around him, people were attempting the impossible: a thin man with a twitchy, unshaven face wedging a steel roll-door open with a piece of wood, a pregnant woman selling second-hand TVs. As he stood uncertainly among the stalls, the sky darkened and rain began to fall. He turned a corner, hoping to find shelter — a café, perhaps. Instead he saw an old-fashioned barber’s shop. The sign in the window said GENT’S HAIRSTYLIST and underneath, in smaller, less formal letters, Come In Please — We’re Open. Barker opened the door, which jangled tinnily, and stepped inside. A row of mirrors glimmered on the wall, reflecting the rain that was streaming down the shop-front window; the glass seemed to be alive, liquid. At the back an old man in a white cotton coat was sweeping hair into a pile. Barker asked him if he ran the place. The old man said he did.

‘I’m looking for work,’ Barker said quietly.

The old man looked up from his pile of hair. ‘How m-much experience you got?’

He had a speech impediment — not a stutter exactly, more a kind of hesitation as he attempted certain sounds. He would say the first letter twice and, while he was trying to make it join the rest of the word, his eyes would flutter rapidly. Then he would carry on as if nothing had happened. Barker found he couldn’t lie.

‘I was in the Merchant Navy for a while,’ he said. ‘That was in the late sixties, early seventies. After that I worked for the council as a gardener. I worked in a garage too. Mechanic. The last few years I’ve been a night manager. Well, they call it that. It’s a bouncer, really. Down on the south coast. Plymouth.’

The old man studied him, still gripping the broom-handle in both hands, lips twisting sceptically to one side of his face. ‘Doesn’t sound like you’ve cut a w-whole lot of hair.’

‘Not a whole lot,’ Barker admitted, ‘but I’ve done it.’

His father, Frank Dodds, had been a barber. The sight of that slowly spiralling red-white-and-blue pole had been one of the mysteries of Barker’s childhood. Where did the ribbons of colour come from? Where did they go? Why didn’t they ever run out? He had learned to cut hair when he was thirteen or fourteen — crew-cuts and DAs, mostly. His clients had flat noses and glossy knuckles, and their tattoos had faded to the dirty bluish-grey of veins. Sometimes they would be drunk. Other times his father had to break up fights. In those days it was more like being a bartender than anything else.

‘Tell you what,’ the old man said. ‘I’ll give you a two-week trial. If I still like you after that, you can stay on.’

‘Sounds fair.’

‘The money’s not m-much good.’

‘You really know how to sell a job,’ Barker said, ‘don’t you.’

The old man chuckled, then held his shoulder, wincing. ‘Arthritis,’ he explained. He told Barker what the hours were and what he could afford to pay. ‘Are you still interested?’

When Barker walked back into the house on the Isle of Dogs that afternoon, Charlton was standing in the kitchen, his face still swollen with sleep. Smoke loitered in a cloud above the grill. Charlton had just burned the toast. Now he was trying again. Barker leaned against the fridge and watched.

‘You seen the Nutella?’ Charlton said.

‘No,’ Barker said, ‘I haven’t.’

‘What about the jam?’

‘You finished it.’ Barker reached for the bottle of whisky. He poured a double measure into a cup and swallowed it. ‘I got a job.’

‘About fucking time.’ Charlton bit into a slice of buttered toast. Crumbs tumbled down the front of his black silk dressing-gown.

‘You’re a slob,’ Barker said, ‘you know that?’

Charlton was chewing noisily, mouth open, toast revolving on his tongue. He reached for the paper; he was always reading the financial section and quoting from it afterwards, using words like merger and foreclose.

Barker shook his head. ‘Who’s going to clean up when I’m gone?’

By late September Barker’s life had taken on a whole new shape. Six days a week he worked in the barber’s shop just off Petticoat Lane. The old man’s name was Harold Higgs, and he ran the place along traditional lines — the smell of Brylcreem and hair tonic, copies of the Radio Times to read while you were waiting; it was hairdressing the way it used to be, which suited Barker perfectly. He’d found temporary lodgings — a bedsit on Commercial Road. He had a miniature gas-ring, and a wash-basin with no hot tap (if he wanted to shave, he had to boil water in a saucepan). He had a wardrobe filled with multi-coloured hangers. All mod cons, as his landlady put it. A widow in her fifties, she wore slippers trimmed with bright-pink fur that looked like candy-floss. Whenever she saw him, she talked about her microwave — she was frightened it might give her cancer — but she didn’t bother him, not unless he fell behind with the rent.

Almost two months passed with no violence, no arrests. He was living on a small scale, within himself, his routine simple and unvarying. On weekday nights, when he returned from work, he lifted weights for half an hour. Afterwards, he showered in the communal bathroom, which was on the landing, one floor up. Later, he would cook himself a meal — something sealed in plastic, beans out of a tin. Most evenings he went to look at flats which he had circled in the paper during the day; he was always surprised by how run-down they were, and how expensive. By midnight he would be in his room again, easing the ring back on a can of beer. Through his window he could see a petrol station. The neon stained his white net curtains yellow, and, now and then, if it was quiet, he could hear a fierce, abbreviated hiss as somebody put air into their tyres. Before he switched the light off, he would read a few pages of medieval history — either a textbook or, more frequently these days, an original source like Bede or Fredegar or Paul the Deacon. He had stopped dreaming, which he interpreted as a sign of health.

Then, one evening in November, Charlton took him to a night-club in Mile End, and he was reminded of everything in his life that he had chosen to leave behind. At a quarter to eleven on a Friday Charlton called round in the Sierra, windswept aerial, no hubcaps, and they drove east with Billy Joel on the stereo. Charlton was wearing a new jacket that glinted every time a light passed over it. ‘I feel lucky tonight,’ he said, and patted his breast pocket, which was where he kept his fruit-flavoured condoms.

They left the car on a patch of wasteground near a roundabout and then walked back, picking their way gingerly through thistles, coils of wire, bricks. From a distance Barker could see the club — a low square building with a scribble of electric blue above the entrance. There was a BMW outside, there was a jeep with tyres like a tractor’s. A chauffeured Daimler dawdled by the kerb, its engine idling. On the top step two doormen stood in a deluge of ultraviolet, their faces looking tanned, their teeth freshly enamelled. Charlton stopped for a word on his way in. Barker nodded, but didn’t give his name.

They had only been inside the club for half an hour when Charlton started talking to a girl in a strapless silver dress. I feel lucky. Barker thought she was trouble — he had worked on doors for long enough to recognise the type — but this was Charlton’s territory, and he didn’t want to interfere. Once, he tried half-heartedly to steer Charlton towards the bar, but Charlton resisted and, grinning, turned and introduced him to the girl. Annabel. Or it could have been Charlotte. All Barker could remember afterwards were her pupils, which were tiny, like punctuation, and her white-blonde hair, which looked as if it had been polished.

It was a fight with fists and bottles. Barker caught somebody in the solar plexus with an uppercut. His father had taught him the punch when he was six: one brutal arc, nine inches start to finish. The man dropped to his knees and vomited what looked like a half-chewed McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese on to the tarmac. Out of the corner of his eye Barker saw Charlton shove somebody else’s face into a wall. The crunch of skin and bone on pebbledash. In the end, though, they had to run for it. Down an alley, back across the vacant lot. Charlton slammed the Sierra into first gear and raced it over weeds and potholes. The suspension floundered, winced. It sounded more like a bed with people fucking on it than a car.

‘That bloke,’ Charlton said. ‘He ought to bite his food up.’

He grinned into the rear-view mirror, his face pale and greasy, his left cheek-bone grazed, already swelling.

‘There’s one of them won’t be doing that for a while.’ Barker propped his right knee against the dashboard. He could still hear the neat snap as someone’s front teeth broke. The impact had ripped a hole in Barker’s trouser-leg and torn the skin beneath.

‘You better get yourself a rabies shot,’ Charlton said.

They stopped on Mile End Road and bought fish and chips, which they ate in the parked car. Though Barker was angry with Charlton for involving him in something so futile, so unnecessary, he could at least console himself with the thought that he had come to Charlton’s aid. His stock had risen, as Charlton would probably have said.

Barker stared through the windscreen, his bag of chips warm and damp on his lap. Wind scoured the streets. The scuttle of litter.

‘We could’ve done with Ray tonight,’ he said.

He turned and looked at Charlton, who bent his head sideways and bit savagely into a crispy orange slab of cod.

‘Sod it,’ Charlton said. ‘We did all right.’ He spoke through splintered flakes of fish.

‘Grasp Sparrow By The Tail,’ Barker said.

Charlton grinned. ‘Drive Away Monkey.’

Last Thing I Remember

One morning in early spring the door of the barber’s shop opened, the bell tingling, and Charlton walked in. Sighing loudly, he eased down on to the red plastic bench, picked up a magazine. Barker had a regular in his chair, a long-distance lorry-driver who came in every three weeks for a trim. As Barker’s scissors chattered up the left side of the lorry-driver’s head, he glanced at Charlton in the mirror. Charlton was wearing a camel coat over a dark-grey suit, and a pair of brogues that somebody had cleaned for him.

‘Got yourself a new woman?’ Barker said.

Charlton passed one hand gently over his cropped black hair, then turned and spoke to Higgs. ‘You the boss?’

Higgs nodded.

‘How much are you paying him?’

‘About two f-fifty an —’

‘Good,’ Charlton said. ‘Because that’s all he’s worth.’

Barker smiled as he reached for the clippers and began to shave the hairs at the base of the lorry-driver’s neck. Higgs was bewildered, though. Blinking rapidly, he folded a towel and draped it over a chair.

‘Does he get a lunch-break?’ Charlton asked.

‘One-thirty,’ Higgs said without looking up.

Barker glanced at the clock above the mirror. Quarter-past.

Charlton spoke to Barker for the first time since he’d walked in. ‘There’s a café down the street, the something Grill. I’ll see you there.’

Barker nodded. Bending low, he watched the scissors closely as he steered them round the top of the lorry-driver’s ear. Short white hairs dropped through the air, thin as the filaments in lightbulbs. He hadn’t seen Charlton for at least a month. In February they had met in a pub in Stepney and drunk pints. Later that evening they had dropped in on a friend of Charlton’s, a stand-up comedian, who had offered them cocaine. Charlton did a couple of lines. Barker said no. He listened to them talk for half an hour, their eyes fixed, glittering, their thoughts fascinating and important to each other, then he walked back to his room in Whitechapel.

‘Friend of yours?’ Higgs said when Charlton had gone.

Barker dusted the lorry-driver’s neck with talcum powder and whisked the few loose hairs away with a soft brush. ‘He did me a favour when I first moved up here. He’s all right.’

Higgs turned away, shaking his head.

In the café Charlton was eating toast, his pale lips shiny with butter. He was still wearing his coat. Barker sat down opposite. When the waitress came, he ordered a chicken-salad sandwich and a Coke.

‘You still in that shitty little bedsit?’ Charlton said.

Barker didn’t answer.

‘I’ve got a business proposition for you.’ Lowering his head, Charlton reached out with his lips and drew the top half-inch off his cup of tea. It was a strange sound, like something being played backwards.

He told Barker he had heard about a flat. It was five minutes’ walk from Tower Bridge. Good area, he said. Central.

Barker waited.

‘Only one problem,’ said Charlton, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. ‘There’s people in it.’

‘You mean —’

‘That’s right. Can you handle it?’

Barker looked at the table.

‘You were a bouncer, right?’ Charlton said.

‘How many people?’ Barker asked.

‘Three.’

Barker looked up again. ‘And if I do the job, the place is mine?’

‘For a while.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Six months. Maybe longer.’ Charlton lifted the two fingers that held his cigarette and pressed them to his mouth, the back of his hand facing outwards, the thumb and little finger spread. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked the smoke into his lungs. ‘You’d have bills to pay, but no rent. You could even have a phone. Just like a normal fucking human being.’

On his next day off, which was a Sunday, Barker walked south through Shadwell, crossing the river at Tower Bridge. The few people who were out looked at him oddly. It must have been the sledgehammer he was carrying. By ten-thirty he was positioned opposite the building Charlton had told him about. Behind him stood a warehouse that had once belonged to a leather company; the loading bays had been painted a sickly orange-brown, and the hoists lay flush against high walls of inky brick. It was a quiet street. To his right, he could see green metal gates, some early roses. Trees rushed in the wind.

Can you handle it?

A scornful noise came out of him, half grunt, half chuckle. He didn’t know what Charlton had ever done, but he knew what he himself had done, sometimes for money, sometimes for the joy of it, the buzz. He used to have a temper. A short fuse. Someone only had to look at him the wrong way, or look at him too long, and he was in there with his forehead, his boots, the bottle he was drinking from. The worst thing he ever did? One night, in Stonehouse, he looked up to see George Catt’s face floating towards him through a fog of cigarette smoke. The sagging, bloodhound slant of Catt’s eyelids. Almost as if he’d had a stroke. George Catt. Owner of the night-club where he worked, his boss. How would you like to earn yourself five hundred quid? When Barker asked him what he’d have to do, Catt tapped a cylinder of ash into an empty glass. ‘Knowles,’ he said. Knowles was Catt’s accountant. Young bloke, going bald. But cocky. There were rumours he’d been skimming. Catt pinched his pitted, pulpy nose between his fingers. ‘Do the knees.’ Catt nodded to himself. ‘You want someone healthy to look after your money, don’t you. Someone lucky. You don’t want some cripple.’ Two days later Barker and another man by the name of Gosling took Knowles to the basement of a derelict hospital. They hung him from the pipes on the ceiling, hung him upside-down, and then they beat him with chair-legs, not the rounded ones, the ones with edges. There were all the usual sounds, but what he remembered most was the drip of fluid down on to the concrete — blood and urine and saliva streaming past the accountant’s ears, which had turned bright-red, streaming through his last remaining wisps of hair. A right old cocktail on the floor. At one point Barker leaned over, turned his head the same way round as Knowles’s. It reminded him of a film he had seen once, a documentary about men in space, and how their tea had drifted out of their cups and up towards the ceiling …

Trees rushed in the wind. Trees rushing.

He shifted the sledgehammer from his right hand to his left. Knowles. Somehow, it surprised him that the memory was his, not someone else’s. Of course it was a long time ago, ten years at least — but still. He crossed the street and rang the top bell. Nobody answered. He rang again. At last a window screeched open on the third floor and a girl peered down. She asked him what he wanted. He gave her the bad news, showing her the piece of paper Charlton had handed him. She told him what he could do with his piece of paper, then she slammed the window shut with such force that fragments of white paint were shaken loose, came spinning through the air like snow. Barker stood back, took a breath. Then swung the sledgehammer at the door. The wood buckled almost instantly, splintering around the lock. One shoulder-charge and he was in. He climbed slowly to the third floor, his mind empty. He noticed the silence on the stairs, which was the silence of a Sunday morning.

The inside door was even flimsier — a piece of simple plywood, one Yale lock. He knocked. Voices murmured on the other side, but no one came. He knocked again, waited a few seconds, then aimed the sledgehammer at the lock and swung it hard. After just two blows, the door was hanging off its hinges. That was the thing about squatters. They couldn’t afford decent security. He heard a movement behind him and looked over his shoulder. A woman in a pale-pink quilted house-coat had appeared on the stairs below him, her eyes wide with shock, her mouth tight, as if elasticated. A neighbour, presumably.

‘It’s all right, love,’ he said. ‘Bailiff.’

When he shoved the door open, two girls were standing at the end of a corridor, their shoulders touching. The girl who’d sworn at him wore a long yellow T-shirt. It had a picture of Bob Marley on it. Her legs and feet were bare. The other girl had dyed her hair a dull green colour. He thought they must both be in their early twenties. A boy stood behind them, roughly the same age. They were all perfectly still, almost frozen, like a scene from that TV programme he used to watch as a child, what was it called, that’s right, The Magic Boomerang.

‘Get your stuff packed up,’ he said. ‘You’re moving out.’

The girl with the green hair started screaming at him, but he had learned, during his years as a bouncer, to turn the volume down on other people’s noise. He was only aware of a girl with her mouth open, her throat and forehead reddening, the veins pushing against the thin skin of her neck. Her hands were clenched at hip-level, the inside of her wrists turned towards him. She wasn’t holding a weapon. He walked past her, into the kitchen. Opened the fridge. Yoghurt, orange juice, half a tin of baked beans. He picked up a carton of milk and sniffed at it. Seemed fresh enough.

‘Whose side are you on?’ said the girl in the T-shirt.

Barker looked at her. ‘I used to listen to Bob Marley.’ He thought back to the early seventies. ‘“Crazy Baldheads”,’ he said, and laughed. He drained the carton of milk, crushed it and dropped it on the floor. Then glanced at his watch. Ten-forty-nine. ‘I’m going to be generous,’ he said. ‘I’m going to give you twenty minutes.’

Two faces stared at him blankly from the kitchen doorway. The girl with the green hair was probably still screaming in the corridor. He cleared his throat. His mouth tasted sour. Squatters’ milk.

‘You hear what I said? Twenty minutes.’

He opened the door to the small roof terrace and walked outside. A bleak day, mist softening the shapes of the trees. Not a bad view, though. His view now. Maybe he could buy one of those barbecue contraptions with spindly legs, the ones that look like spaceships. He could invite Charlton round for hamburgers. On summer evenings he could sit here with a cold beer, his feet propped on the railings, and look out over the backs of houses, the rows of narrow gardens. Standing with his hands in the pockets of his jacket and his feet apart, Barker began to sing ‘Hotel California’ under his breath. He had no idea why that particular song had come to mind — unless perhaps he’d heard it on the radio that morning while he was waiting for his saucepan of water to boil.

On a dark desert highway

Cool wind in your hair …

He had to hum the rest because he couldn’t remember the words. When he walked back inside, the squatters were huddled by the front door, their possessions crammed into two black bin-liners. Who would have thought it would be so easy? Charlton had offered him the use of a Rottweiler that morning, but he’d said no, and all the way over he’d been regretting it. Because he’d had no idea of what he might be up against.

He followed the squatters down the stairs, the words of the song coming back to him. Last thing I remember …

From the doorstep he watched them drift disconsolately away, three figures dissolving into the mist at the end of the street. It seemed unlikely they’d be back.

Upstairs again, on the third floor, he began to look around. In the two main rooms, the bedroom and the lounge, they’d left a lot of rubbish behind — silver take-away cartons, dirty clothing, cigarette butts, empty bottles. The ceiling in the kitchen looked as if it leaked, and the toilet wouldn’t flush at all. Otherwise, the flat was in reasonable condition. He took out the mobile Charlton had given him and dialled Charlton’s number. Standing in the middle of the room with the phone pressed to his ear, he had a flash of what it must be like to be Ray Peacock.

‘It’s me,’ he said when Charlton answered.

‘How did it go?’

‘All right.’ Barker moved to the window, the floorboards wincing under his weight. He peered up into the sky. Grey. All grey.

‘Any problems?’ Charlton said.

‘You might need a couple of new doors.’

Charlton laughed for longer than was necessary. Relief could do that to people. So could fear. Barker held the phone away from his ear and thought he could see Charlton’s laughter bubbling out of the tiny holes. Then, suddenly, a plane went over and it seemed as though everything he could hear had just been buried in an avalanche.

The quality Barker appreciated most in Harold Higgs was the fact that he didn’t talk more than he needed to. It could have been the direct result of his speech impediment — a kind of self-consciousness, a deliberate attempt to limit the amount of embarrassment he caused — but somehow Barker doubted it; the barber’s sparing use of words seemed in character, along with his neatness and his punctuality. One morning, though, as clouds lowered over the rooftops and rain slanted across the window of the shop, Higgs started telling Barker about his years in the Air Force. He had served as a navigator in Lancaster bombers, he said. He had flown over Germany, more than twenty missions. His stammer, that was when it started.

Although he was interested, Barker didn’t understand why Higgs had suddenly decided to talk to him, and it was another half an hour before it became clear. That morning, as he walked to work, Higgs had been attacked by three white youths, and he was feeling furious and bitter and disappointed. After all, he said, and Barker could sense that he found it distasteful having to resort to a cliché, he’d probably done more for the country than they’d ever done, and yet, there they were, telling him that he was useless.

‘You’re not hurt?’ Barker said.

Higgs shook his head. ‘No.’

‘My father was in the Navy,’ Barker said. ‘Destroyers.’

He told Higgs a story his father had often told him when he was young. One night in 1942 — this was during the time of the convoys — Frank Dodds had been swept overboard by a freak wave. Only one man noticed, and that man had managed to raise the alarm. Frank Dodds survived.

‘It was December in the North Atlantic,’ Barker said. ‘You didn’t last long in that water.’

Higgs watched him from a chair by the window. Though it was dark in the shop, neither of the two men had bothered to turn the lights on. From outside, the place probably looked closed.

‘I’m going to tell you something,’ Barker said, surprising himself a little with the announcement, ‘something I don’t tell many people. It’s about my name.’

‘I w-wondered about that.’

‘But you never said anything. Some people, they think they’re clever. They like to crack jokes.’

Higgs shrugged, as if jokes held little interest for him.

‘I was lucky,’ Barker said. ‘I could have been called Jocelyn.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s what my father always said whenever I gave him a hard time about my name. My two brothers, they’ve got ordinary names, but I was the oldest, I was named after the man who saved my father, the man who saw him fall into the water. Jocelyn Barker.’

Higgs scratched his white hair with one long finger. ‘I think your father m-made the right decision.’

Barker laughed at that, and Higgs laughed with him, and the rain fell steadily outside, a constant murmur under their conversation.

‘He was a hairdresser,’ Barker mentioned later.

‘Your father was a hairdresser?’

‘That’s how I learned.’

Higgs smiled to himself, as if Barker was only confirming something that he had known all along, or guessed, and then the bell above the door jangled and a man in a grey raincoat walked in, cursing the bloody weather and shaking the water off his clothes.

The days passed evenly, without excitement, without disaster. Barker would leave his flat at eight-thirty every morning, returning at six o’clock at night. Though he now lived further from the shop, he chose to walk to work. It took half an hour, but he felt it did him good. And besides, he had grown fond of the streets; he liked the way their names gave you clues as to their history, the fact that you could turn a corner and smell rope or cinnamon or tea. Most days, he crossed the river at the Tower. He noticed how the buildings seemed to crouch and huddle to the east of Tower Bridge, and how the sky seemed to widen, to expand. There was the sudden feeling of being close to an estuary, a foretaste of the sea. The sight of HMS Belfast moored against the south bank never failed to remind him of his father. He thought Frank Dodds would probably have stopped and leaned on the bridge and stared down at the battleship with a look of approval on his face; he would have told Barker what size shells the big guns fired, how many men were in the crew.

Only Charlton knew where Barker could be found. On spring evenings, just after sunset, Barker would often hear the silver Sierra pull up in the street below. Charlton would take him to Brick Lane where they would eat meat curry and drink beer out of stainless-steel beakers. Or sometimes they would drive to a pub in Bethnal Green. Otherwise, Barker lived on baked potatoes, toast and Hofmeister lager, which was cheap that year. Though he had bought paint wholesale from an ironmonger’s down the road and though he had almost no furniture — he kept his clothes in a filing-cabinet he’d found in a skip and slept on a bed Charlton had lent him — it had still cost him money to turn the flat into a place that was fit to live in, and there were times when he didn’t know how he was going to get by. Only thirty-five pounds remained of the eight hundred he’d arrived with, and he knew Higgs couldn’t afford to pay him any more than he was already paying. In general, Barker could look on his life with a certain satisfaction. It didn’t amount to much, of course, not by other people’s standards, but at least nobody was pushing lit cigarettes through his letter-box in the middle of the night.

Still, sometimes he felt strange, lying on a borrowed mattress in an empty building, thirty-eight years old. He had dismantled one life, and he had yet to construct another in its place. He did what he could with his limited resources. He knew it was temporary, though, a kind of quarantine, and there was a sense in which he was waiting for the health of his new existence to be recognised, but he couldn’t imagine how exactly that might happen, or when.

Not long after Barker moved in, a man appeared at his front door. The man was in his middle to late fifties and he wore a dark-green anorak and a scarf. He seemed anxious and ill-at-ease, constantly glancing over his left shoulder, as if he was expecting an ambush.

‘I’m looking for Will Campbell.’

Barker remembered the two girls, and the boy who’d stood behind them, not saying anything, a skinny white kid with dreadlocks and a ragged sweater.

‘There’s only me here,’ he said.

The man passed one hand over his forehead and up into his thinning hair. ‘Someone gave me this address.’ He studied the scrap of paper he was holding, then looked up at the building. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this is the address.’

‘He must have moved.’

‘Oh.’ The man stood on the pavement, unsure what he should do but, at the same time, unwilling to leave. He had reached a dead end and if he left he would be forced to admit that to himself. While he stayed outside the building that matched the address he had been given, he could still feel that he stood on solid ground, that there was hope. ‘You don’t know where he went?’

‘No idea.’

‘I rang up, you see. About a month ago. I was told the phone had been disconnected. So I thought I’d come down …’

‘I live here now.’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing I can do. Sorry.’

‘He’s my son.’ Spaces seemed to open in the man’s face, between his features.

Arms folded, Barker leaned against the door-frame. He was into overtime with this conversation, and yet he didn’t want to be more brutal than he had to be.

‘He was squatting here,’ the man said suddenly. ‘I didn’t approve, of course.’ He was staring at the pavement, frowning. ‘He had a girlfriend. Vicky …’ He looked at Barker hopefully. Barker shook his head.

After the man had gone, Barker stood in his bedroom and stared out of the window. Rain fell lazily through the lamplight. He could still see Will Campbell, the way he had lurched up the street, a black bin-liner in one hand, the other clamped over a ghetto-blaster, which balanced, like a pet monkey, on his shoulder. He remembered how Will Campbell had thrown him a couple of V-signs — but only when a good distance had opened up between them, only when it was too late to make any difference. Shaking his head again, Barker walked into the lounge and sat down on a swivel chair he had taken from the old printer’s studio in the basement. In his mind he returned to Plymouth. Nineteen-eighty, eighty-one. Years after his marriage fell apart. One afternoon he happened to pass through Morice Town, which was where Leslie had grown up, and he suddenly remembered being told that she’d moved back into the area. He asked around on the estates. Eventually he found someone who had heard of her, who knew where she was living. A ground-floor flat in a drab four-storey block. He knocked on the door. His throat felt thick, and he could hardly swallow. What was he doing there? What did he want? Perhaps it was simply that no woman had replaced her in his life and sometimes, when he lay awake at night, he thought of how she used to dance for him, in that two-room flat she had in Devonport, in her red underwear.

Her mother, Diane, opened the door. Diane had dyed her hair a dark cherry colour, and she wore a big pink T-shirt over a pair of black leggings. Somewhere behind her, inside the flat, Barker heard a baby crying.

‘How are you, love? Give us a kiss.’

He leaned down, kissed her cheek. She smelled of deodorant and cigarettes. She had always been fond of him, Diane. She said he reminded her of her youngest brother, who had died in a car crash when he was seventeen. He stood outside her front door in the sunshine, answering her questions. It was a beautiful day — a blue sky and a fresh wind blowing from the west, the clothes on the communal washing-lines below them horizontal in the air.

While they were talking, he noticed a pigeon moving awkwardly along a low brick wall. It was huge, this pigeon, almost the size of a pheasant, and it only had one leg. When he pointed it out to Diane, she slit her eyes against the sun and lit another cigarette.

‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Seen it all now.’

They watched the pigeon in silence until it spread its wings and heaved itself into the air. Barker remembered being surprised that it could fly.

‘I suppose you’re looking for Leslie,’ Diane said eventually.

He nodded.

‘She’s down the pub. With Chris.’

‘Chris?’

‘Well,’ Diane said and then she sighed, ‘you know Leslie.’

He walked to the pub, which stood on the crest of a small hill not far from Dockyard Station. With one hand on the door, though, he hesitated, thinking it would probably be a mistake to go inside. As he stepped back, passing the window, he saw Leslie through the glass, her back half-turned, her feet in a square of sunlight. She had a Human League haircut, which must have been the fashion then, and she was wearing a skirt that was too young for her. A man with shoulder-length black hair stood next to her. In his jeans and faded blue tartan shirt, he had the look of a builder. Chris. They were in the middle of an argument. Barker couldn’t make out what Leslie was saying, even though her voice was the louder of the two. He thought he heard the words two hundred quid and bastard. Turning away, he walked down the hill to Saltash Road and caught a bus back to the city centre. He could remember nothing else about that day.

When Barker left his flat in the early evening, he half-expected to see Will Campbell’s father waiting outside the old warehouse, under the hoists, or on the corner by the corrugated-iron fence, but there was no sign of him. The rain had stopped. To the west, above the public gardens, a wall of cloud lifted high into the sky, glowing with an unearthly peach-coloured light. In medieval times, he thought, this would have heralded some terrible event — the murder of a king, for instance, or an outbreak of the plague. Death of one kind or another. He paused at the end of the street, wondering if the man in the dark-green anorak believed in omens. Then he turned left, making for the nearest phone-box, which was on Tooley Street.

The sky faded as he walked and by the time he reached the phone-box it was almost dark. He put some coins on the shelf in front of him, then lifted the receiver and dialled his mother’s number. Bella Dodds lived in a tower-block in Mount Wise. He used to be able to see her bathroom window from the walkway outside his flat. She had moved in fifteen years ago, after Frank died, and nothing had changed since then, her two imitation-leather armchairs in the lounge, her collection of china Alsatians, and the wind howling and moaning, eight floors up. At this time of day she would be drinking tea with a dash of Captain Morgan in it, or else a glass of Bols. There’d be a plate of Digestive biscuits on the table. She’d always liked her biscuits.

She picked up the phone on the seventh ring. ‘Yes?’

‘How are you, Ma?’

‘Oh, it’s you.’ Her voice sounded gravelly and rough, as if she had been sleeping. Perhaps it was simply that she hadn’t talked to anyone all day.

He asked her again. ‘How are you?’

‘Not so good, son. Not so good.’

It was the angina. She had chest pains and she was often short of breath. Sometimes the lift broke down and then she couldn’t get to the shops. None of the neighbours helped her, of course. They weren’t the type. Single mothers, petty thieves. Kids doing speed and glue. She had to live on what she’d put by in the kitchen cupboard: tins of Irish stew, cream crackers, Smash.

‘How’re Jim and Gary?’

‘Jim’s all right. Talked to him Wednesday. Gary’s not so good. That girl he was seeing, Janice. She left him.’ She paused and he could hear her lungs creak and whistle as she breathed in. ‘I don’t blame her,’ she went on. ‘He wasn’t nice to her.’

Barker thought of Jill sitting on the floor of his old flat, her legs folded beneath her, her bra-strap showing through the rip in her blouse.

‘I got a job,’ he said. ‘I’m cutting hair.’

‘Just like your father,’ she said, but it was just a statement of fact, and there was no nostalgia in it.

‘I got a flat too.’

‘You eating, are you?’

Barker didn’t answer.

‘I went to London once,’ she said. ‘We saw the soldiers parading up and down, those black hats on, all furry. What’s it called, when they do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Anyway.’ She sighed and then said something he didn’t catch.

‘What’s that, Ma?’

‘You coming home for Easter?’

A sudden burst of laughter startled him until he realised it must have been the television. He glanced at his watch. Seven-thirty-five. He should have known she’d be watching TV. The soap operas, the shows. Des O’Connor was her favourite. A lovely man. Bob Monkhouse, she liked him too.

Not long afterwards his coins ran out. He told her he would call again soon, but he was cut off before he could say goodbye. He put the receiver back on its hook, then stepped out of the phone-box and stood on the pavement, watching cars hurtle through the orange gloom towards Jamaica Road.

Thank You, Ray

Across the bridge and down on to Tooley Street, bleak and gleaming in the rain. Barker walked quickly, eager to be home. Just before he reached the entrance to The London Dungeon he turned right, into a tunnel that burrowed under the railway. Clinging to the curving walls were vents and cages fouled with grime and oil and dust. A steel roll-door lifted to reveal a mechanic wearing loose blue overalls, a car with two flat tyres. Barker passed an air-filter whose high-pitched howling set his teeth on edge. Then emerged into the daylight once again. It was summer, and his eyelids stung. The weather was humid, the sky yellow and light-grey, too bright, somehow, the green of the trees too pale. By the time he had climbed the stairs to the front door of his flat he was breathing hard.

He had been living there for almost five months and no trace of the squatters now remained. Thanks to Charlton’s aunt, who’d died recently, he now had proper furniture. ‘She didn’t have no diseases or nothing,’ Charlton said when Barker inspected her settee suspiciously. ‘She died of like, what’s it called, natural causes.’ He’d had a phone installed in the hallway. In the two main rooms he’d fitted pieces of red carpet, which had come from an office building that was being redecorated. On the walls in the lounge he had hung several pictures — shiny colours on a background of black velvet. He liked the subjects: chalets in the Swiss Alps, gypsy women, junks. He had also found one that had been made out of the wings of butterflies. A seascape, with islands. One day he would travel. Not like in the Merchant Navy, where you had to go where they told you to. Really travel.

Closing the front door behind him, he walked into the lounge. His dull silver weights looked sweaty. Christ, mate, what you got in there? As he lifted one and drew it automatically towards his chin, the phone rang. It was Ray Peacock.

‘Barker,’ Ray said, ‘I’m calling long distance.’

Behind Ray’s voice Barker could hear shrill laughter, the clink of glasses. Ray liked nothing better than to sit in some seedy south-coast cocktail bar and shout into his mobile. There would probably be a girl beside him. Short skirt, white high-heels. Someone he was trying to impress.

‘How did you get this number, Ray?’ Though, even as he asked, he knew.

‘That’s nice,’ Ray said, ‘after all I’ve done for you.’

Barker had been hoping he could leave Ray behind, along with almost everybody else in Plymouth, but Ray nurtured his connections, Ray let nothing go. Grasp Sparrow By The Tail.

Barker waited a few seconds. Then he said, ‘What do you want?’

‘I just thought I’d ring you up, see how you were —’

‘Bollocks.’ He’d spoken to Ray once before, in Charlton’s house on the Isle of Dogs, and he’d suspected even then that Ray was only phoning because he wanted to be punching buttons.

‘How long’s it been anyway? Six months?’

All of a sudden Barker didn’t like the feeling of the receiver in his hand. He felt as if he’d just eaten some seafood that was bad and in three hours’ time his stomach would swell and then, an hour later, he’d throw up.

‘Listen, Barker,’ and Ray’s voice tightened, ‘I heard about a job …’ The background noise had dropped away. He must have left the room where he’d been sitting. Walked out into a corridor. A car-park. He’d be pacing up and down like a caged animal. Like something in a zoo. Five paces, turn. Five paces, turn again. That’s what people do when they’re using mobile phones. They can’t stand still.

Barker closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, the scar tissue lumpy between his finger and thumb. Through the open window he could hear rain falling lightly on the trees. Beyond the rain, a siren.

‘This is big,’ Ray said in the same tight voice. ‘It could set you up.’

Still Barker didn’t say anything.

‘I had a chat with Charlton the other day,’ Ray went on. ‘He said you were skint.’

‘What is it?’ Barker said at last. ‘What’s the job?’

‘They wouldn’t tell me. You’ve got to meet someone.’ Ray dragged on a cigarette. ‘Must be big, though. There’s six grand in it.’

Six grand?

‘So why aren’t you doing it, Ray?’

‘That’s what I’m asking myself. Why aren’t I doing it?’

Barker laughed despite himself. He knew Ray wasn’t trying to be funny. It was just the way things came out. Ray used to have a girlfriend called Josie. A big girl — forearms the size of legs of lamb. One lunchtime Ray was sitting over his pint, scratching his head, when something fell out of his hair. Landed on the table, kind of bounced. Bright-red it was, shiny, slightly curved: a woman’s fingernail. Ray looked at it for a moment, then he looked up. Me and Josie. We had a fight this morning.

‘Seriously, though,’ Ray was saying, ‘you think I wouldn’t do it if I could? I mean, six grand. Jesus.’

‘So why can’t you?’

‘I’m out on bail. I can’t risk it.’

‘You’re a fucking menace, you are.’

‘Yeah.’ Ray sounded resigned. ‘Listen, you’ve got to help me out on this one. I’m counting on you.’

Barker stared at the blank wall above the phone. You shouldn’t ever let someone do you a favour. You shouldn’t get into that kind of debt.

‘Barker? You still there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘They’re going to phone you. Probably tonight.’

Barker couldn’t believe it. ‘You gave them my number?’

‘Well, yeah. I thought you needed the money.’

‘That’s great, Ray. That’s fucking great.’

‘How else are they going to phone you, for Christ’s sake?’

Barker stood in his narrow hallway with the receiver pressed against his ear. Tiny white-hot holes burned in front of his eyes. It wasn’t that Ray was stupid. No, he just saw things from a different angle, that was all. Barker could hear Ray’s voice raised in his own defence. I was only trying to help you, Barker. Thought I’d see you right. It’s not my fault. Ray was always only trying to help, and nothing was ever his fault.

When the phone rang again two hours later, Barker could have ignored it. Equally, he could have answered the phone and said he was unavailable; there were any number of excuses for not getting involved. And yet he had the sense that something was beginning, something that he was part of whether he liked it or not, something that couldn’t take place without him. Afterwards, he would remember his right hand reaching for the receiver as the decisive moment, the point of no return.

He listened carefully to the voice on the other end as it provided him with details of the meeting-place, a Lebanese restaurant near Marble Arch. No accent, no inflections; it might have been computer-generated to give nothing away. And the man’s face when he saw it, at one o’clock the next day, had the same lack of individuality. The man was sitting at a table in the corner with his back against a wall of shrubbery; lit by miniature green spotlights, the foliage looked rich and fleshy, almost supernatural. The man introduced himself as Lambert. It seemed an unlikely name. Barker took a seat. In the space between his knife and fork lay a pale-pink napkin arranged in the shape of a fan. He picked it up, unfolded it and spread it on his lap.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Lambert said.

They were the only people in the restaurant. Soothing music trickled from hidden speakers, instrumental versions of famous songs: ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’, ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’, ‘The Green Green Grass of Home’. Barker noticed that there were colours in all the titles and he wondered if that was deliberate, if it had some kind of significance. Then he recognised the old Rod Stewart favourite, ‘Sailing’, and his theory collapsed. A waiter appeared at his elbow.

‘Please order,’ Lambert said. ‘Anything you want.’

Barker chose two dishes randomly and closed the menu. Lambert told the waiter he would have the same, then he opened the briefcase that was lying on the seat beside him. He took out a brown envelope and, moving a small silver vase to one side, placed the envelope on the tablecloth between them.

‘It contains everything you need to know,’ he said. ‘It also contains half the money in advance. Three thousand pounds.’

Barker reached for the envelope, thinking he ought to check the contents, but Lambert rested one hand on his sleeve. ‘Not now. When you’re at home,’ and Lambert paused, ‘in Bermondsey.’

‘You’re not going to tell me what the job involves?’

‘It’s nothing you can’t manage.’

‘And if I decide not to do it?’

‘You’ve already decided. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.’

‘But if I change my mind,’ Barker persisted.

‘Then you’ll be here tomorrow at the same time. With the envelope, of course.’ Lambert looked down at the pale-pink tablecloth and smiled almost wistfully. ‘But I don’t think you’ll be here tomorrow.’

Barker stared at the envelope, the brown paper seeming to expand, to draw him in. When he looked up again, the food had arrived and Lambert was already eating.

‘This is good.’ Lambert pointed at his plate.

‘It’s not your first time, is it,’ Barker said.

Lambert looked at him.

‘You often come here,’ Barker said. ‘To this restaurant.’

Lambert was eating again. ‘You know, this really is very good.’ A few moments later he glanced at his watch, then touched his napkin to his mouth. ‘I must go.’

He pushed his chair back. Barker half-rose from the table.

‘Please,’ Lambert said. ‘Finish your lunch.’

Afterwards, Barker couldn’t recall his face at all. His eyes, his nose, his hair had vanished without trace. Lambert was the kind of man who had no habits. Who did not smell. Of anything. When you had lunch with him, time passed more quickly than it did with other people. Not because you were having fun. Not for any reason you could think of. It just did. Perhaps it was a technique Lambert had mastered — part of his job, his brief. Later, it felt as if you’d only imagined meeting him. It had never actually happened. You’d eaten lunch alone, in a restaurant somewhere just off Edgware Road. It was the shrubbery that you remembered. Those leaves. Too big and shiny. Too green.

At home that evening Barker took a shower. As always, he noted the contrast between his legs, which seemed too thin, and his torso, which was almost as deep as it was wide, his ex-wife’s name tattooed in muddy grey-blue capitals across his chest. Mostly he chose to see the shape of his body as representing some kind of efficiency. The type of work he’d done in the past, legs didn’t matter. It was the other people who needed legs. To run for it. To scarper. He dried himself thoroughly, then put on a black T-shirt and a pair of faded black jeans, pulling a thick leather belt through the loops and fastening the Harley Davidson buckle. He smoothed his hair down with his hands till it lay flat against his skull. In the kitchen he opened a can of lager, which he carried into the lounge. He sat on the settee with the TV on. The red numbers on the video said 7:35.

After his meeting with Lambert, Barker had returned to work. He had asked Higgs for a three-hour lunch-break that day. He hadn’t bothered to invent a reason, an excuse, and the old man had been too discreet to ask for one. Once, though, when the shop was empty, Higgs had looked across at him and asked him if everything was all right. Barker nodded, but didn’t speak. Outside, the sun was shining, which made the interior seem gloomier than usual. Bad news? Higgs said quietly. Barker didn’t answer. Later, he walked home under a bright-blue sky and lifted weights until his skin glistened.

The brown envelope lay on the table by the wall, its surface blank, its contents still unknown. If he thought he still had a choice he was fooling himself. You’ve already decided. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. He had answered the phone and he had appeared at the restaurant. He had eaten a meal. Most ways you looked at it, he was already in. As he reached for the envelope he heard the man’s voice again, dispassionate and neutral. When you’re at home, and then a pause, in Bermondsey. The bastards. They even knew where he lived. He tore the envelope open lengthways, almost carelessly, and emptied it on to the cushion next to him.

It was the photograph he noticed first. A standard colour print, one corner bent. He’d been expecting a photograph, given the amount of money involved, given the secrecy, but he hadn’t thought about the face, what it might look like. Usually it didn’t matter. You treated it as a guideline. They gave you a name, some kind of visual reference. Parts of the body were mentioned too. Do the right hand, do the knees. Somehow this felt different, though. As he’d known it would. He was holding a picture of a girl who was in her early twenties. She had hazel eyes, the look in them direct but, at the same time, vague. Her bright-blonde hair fell below her shoulders, out of frame. One of her ears stuck out slightly. She didn’t look like anyone he had ever known. He could imagine meeting her on a street-corner. She would be lost. She would ask him for directions. When he had helped her, she would thank him, then turn away. And that would be the last he saw of her. He couldn’t imagine meeting a girl this pretty under any other circumstances. Certainly he would never have imagined circumstances like these. He put the photo down and picked up the money, a stack of twenties and fifties held compactly with a rubber band. He ran his thumb across the notes, but didn’t count them. Three thousand pounds. He turned to the two typed sheets of paper, which had been stapled together for his convenience. He skimmed neat rows of words, looking for a name. He found it halfway down the first page. GLADE SPENCER.

For the next two hours Barker watched TV, only getting up to fetch more beer. From time to time he thought of the barber’s shop — the red leather chairs, the mirrors with their bevelled edges. Propped in the window were pictures of men’s hairstyles from the seventies, at least fifteen years out of date. Above them, a faded notice that said Come In Please — We’re Open. He saw Harold Higgs sweeping the lino floor at closing-time, his shirtsleeves rolled, the skin on the points of his elbows thin and papery. Always gritting his teeth a little on account of the arthritis in his shoulder and his hip. Forty years in the business. Forty years. And still struggling to break even. But wasn’t he the same as Higgs when it came down to it? That afternoon he had seen himself through Lambert’s eyes. The man had recognised him — not personally, but as a type. Someone who’d do what was required. Who wouldn’t shrink from it. That was all he remembered about Lambert now, that moment of recognition. When he would rather have seen doubt. Was that the reason he had agreed to the meeting, even though all his instincts had advised against it? Had he secretly been hoping that he might look unlikely, that he would not be trusted with the job? In that version of events Lambert would never have parted with the envelope. Instead, he would simply have stood up and walked out, leaving Barker in the empty restaurant, humiliated, alone — yet, at the same time, redefined somehow, confirmed in his new identity. It hadn’t happened, though; Lambert hadn’t even hesitated. Barker remembered the strangely wistful smile that Lambert had directed at the tablecloth. Lambert had been waiting for him to realise the truth about himself. Barker’s fists clenched in his lap. Of course he could still say no. He could hand the envelope back. But then, at some point in the future, somebody would come for him with a broken beer glass or a Stanley knife or whatever they were using now, and afterwards, when he was discovered on the floor of a public toilet, or on the pavement outside a pub, or in an alleyway, passers-by would peer down at him, they’d see his face all cut, blood running into his eyes, his teeth in splinters, and they wouldn’t be surprised, no, it wouldn’t surprise them at all, because that was what happened to people like him, that was how they ended up — which meant, of course, that they deserved it. He remembered the night when he got hit across the bridge of the nose with a lemonade bottle. He had been in the chip shop with Leslie. They were waiting at the counter, watching George pour the vinegar, sprinkle on the salt. Leslie would probably have been talking. She used to do a lot of that. Talked her way on to his chest, didn’t she, in letters two inches tall. Talked herself under his skin. At some point the door opened and cold air flooded against his back. He didn’t look round, though. Perhaps he thought it was the wind. That chip-shop door was always opening by itself, the catch no longer worked, and George had never got around to fixing it, the lazy sod. In any case, he didn’t look. The next thing he knew, he was on the floor, his head split into sudden areas of brilliance and gloom, and somebody above him screaming, screaming. They hadn’t even said his name. They just came up behind him, swung the bottle. To this day he didn’t know what it had been about, whether it was something to do with Leslie and another man, or whether it was someone’s way of getting back at Jim, his brother — Jim was always pissing people off. Not that reasons mattered, really. Violence seemed to follow him around regardless; he could feel it snapping at his heels like a dog. The scar above his nose, the puzzled look it gave him, that was a reminder. That was proof.

At ten o’clock he dialled Ray’s mobile number. He could only hear Ray faintly through a cloud of static. Still, he didn’t waste any time in coming to the point.

‘You know what they want me to do, Ray?’

Ray didn’t answer.

‘That job you got me, Ray, you know what they want me to do?’

‘They didn’t tell me.’

‘They want me to kill someone. Did you know that?’

‘I told you. They didn’t tell me.’

‘Well,’ Barker said, ‘now you know.’

An image came to him suddenly, another fragment of the past. He had been standing outside a club a year ago, Ray on the pavement beside him wearing a shiny black jacket with the snarling head of a tiger on the back. ‘I heard you did one of the Scullys,’ Ray had said. Barker asked him where he’d got that from. Ray shrugged. ‘The word’s out.’ Barker pushed Ray up against the wall, knowing Ray could throw him ten feet whenever he felt like it. ‘I’ll tell you what the word is, Ray. The word is bullshit. You got that?’ Ray had nodded — OK, OK — but he obviously hadn’t believed what Barker was saying. Which meant he could be lying now.

Why, though? Why would he lie?

The static cleared and he could hear Ray breathing on the other end. He could hear a TV in the background too. They were both watching the same channel. It gave Barker a peculiar feeling. The feeling, just for a moment, of being everywhere at once. Like God.

‘You see, strange as it may fucking sound,’ he said, ‘I never killed anyone before. Not even by accident.’

Ray began to talk. ‘Jesus, Barker, if I’d known what the job was, do you think I would’ve —’ and so on.

After a while Barker just cut him off. ‘Got any ideas, Ray, for how to kill a girl?’

Barker listened to Ray breathing, the TV in the background and, beyond that, the eerie hollow space inside a phone line.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think so.’ He lit a cigarette and bounced the smoke off the wall above the phone. ‘Tomorrow, Ray,’ he said, ‘tomorrow you should go down the Job Centre and ask them to take you on. They should stick you behind those fucking windows. Because you’ve got a real talent for finding people work, you know that? A real fucking talent. And something everybody knows, Ray, everybody knows, talent should not be fucking wasted. All right?’

Barker slammed the phone down. From the quality of the silence that descended all around him he guessed he must have been shouting. Towards the end of the call, at least.

He walked back into the lounge. On the table he saw the photograph of Glade Spencer. He picked it up and tore it into pieces. Dropped the pieces in the bin.