Still Midnight

20

When they opened the door to Shugie’s bedroom the little man was sitting as they had left him, upright on the bed, but something was wrong: the corners of the pillowcase met his corners. He looked too tidy. He’d taken it off and put it back on again, which was bad, but his posture troubled them more: he sat confidently, shoulders down, head up, facing them, not cowering. His head swivelled as he looked from one to the other through the pillowcase, his bearing so upright they both felt inexplicably afraid, as if it was a rehearsal for meeting them in court. It was creepy because his bearing made him seem human.

Eddy looked at Pat, glanced at the crack in the curtains, looked back at the confident man. Pillowcase knew the police had been there. He had been at the window and seen them or heard them downstairs and thought they were coming to save him, banged on the floor deliberately to fuck them up.

Pat could feel Eddy’s rage rise like a scream in a pitch too high to hear. Eddy stepped towards the bed, teeth bared, out of control and grabbed the man by the forearm, shaking him hard, toppling him face down into the mattress, twisting his arm up his back hard, the way the police did. The old man gave a squeal, ‘no’ or ‘ah’, but it was high anyway, shocked, not what he had expected. Pinning him face down on the bed, Eddy raised his other elbow high and jabbed a short punch into his kidney. The old man buckled and collapsed, groaning, the gush of air muffled in the mattress. Eddy punched again and again, hitting the soft skin on his back, missing the ribs deliberately, going for the soft tissue.

Pat looked away for part of the attack. Then he thought Eddy might see him looking elsewhere and forced his eyes onto the pillowcase. It twitched out a response to the blows.

Eddy stood unsteadily on the bed, over the body, saliva flecked on his chin, panting like a child on a bouncy castle. He was fighting off a smile. Pat watched as he wiped it away with the back of his hand. It was odd to enjoy it so much. A bit sadistic. You could kill a man doing that to him.

He looked down at the pillowcase, thinking vaguely about internal bleeding and the mysteries of the human body. If Eddy killed it he would have to sort out getting rid of the body, Pat wasn’t going to do it, he hadn’t laid a finger on him. But then Eddy would probably give a body to Shugie or some other arsehole and they’d get done for it.

As an afterthought the old man gave a twitch, raising his buttocks up in a futile attempt to get away, and he slumped back, face down on the bed.

Suddenly stern, Eddy gestured to the other side of the bed. Pat shuffled over and they took an arm each and dragged the pillowcase off the bed, trying to stand him up on his cloth legs. He buckled forwards. Twice more they tried to stand him up and both times his knees flopped hopelessly outwards. It was getting worrying. On the final try he took his weight, just one knee buckled, swinging a circle but coming back. Eddy nodded Pat to the door.

They dragged it on its toes out to the landing, through the mildew cloud at the bathroom door, yanking it, giving it contradictory signals about which way to go. By the time they reached the top of the stairs the pillowcase was crying and muttering, sputtering and gasping for air between sobs.

Eddy stopped, looked down to the front hall and back to Pat. Pat could feel warmth through the sleeve, human warmth, but he looked down at the hall carpet and thought of Aleesha, of the depth of her grief for her father, of slipping his arm around her shoulders and her silky hair sliding across his bare arm. His hand gliding around her shoulder, his fingertips memorising every hair, her sharp shoulder blades, vertebrae, the powdered softness of her skin. She would need him then. Desire made him peel his fingers away from the arm but as soon as he did he felt himself diminish and was ashamed.

Eddy took a step forward still holding the arm, yanking hard but the pillowcase stood firm, upright, looked at him angrily. It yanked its arm away indignantly. He knew there were stairs there.

A clatter of feet made them look down: Malki was running up towards them, lifting his knees high, smiling. ‘Brought the car round the back,’ he panted, stopping two steps down, holding the banister and swinging down a step again.

Eddy glared at him.

‘Bloke’s already heard my voice,’ explained Malki, a hand on the wall and one on the banister, barring the way. ‘I already spoke to him, when I give him the sweeties. He can’t eat them ’cause they’re not halal.’

Somehow the moment had passed. They couldn’t do it in front of Malki. In front of Malki would risk a long conversation about right and wrong, a dispute; he would ask about their motives, talk about the pillowcase as a person. Foiled. Pat felt proud of his wee junkie cousin.

Eddy motioned for Pat to take the stairs ahead of him and followed him down, pinching the old man’s elbow tight as he led him roughly down the steep steps.

Shugie was dozing on the damp settee. A second blue plastic bag was sitting open and next to him with three new cans in it. The previous bag of cans lay empty, the tins discarded on the floor.

‘Dunno if three be enough,’ said Malki. ‘But it’s all they had left in the shop.’

Pat shrugged. He didn’t want to speak too much in front of the pillowcase. Carefully he reached around to his wallet and took out a twenty quid note. He looked at it, calculated that it was probably enough for an alki to buy drink but not enough for a really greedy drinker to spend a night in the pub with other people. He sat it on top of the cans in the bag.

They formed a strange parade, passing through the living room to the kitchen and out the back door: Malki ahead with his hurried junkie speed-walk, Pat behind him, the pillowcase puffing and jerking as he was prodded and shoved by Eddy following behind. Malki hesitated at the kitchen door, waiting for Eddy’s signal. Eddy nodded and Malki opened it, letting fresh air into the festering corridor of bin bags.

They had been in the house for almost ten hours, breathing in every nuanced smell a human being can make without dying and the back garden seemed impossibly lush and fresh. Each in turn stopped on the back doorstep to take a grateful breath.

It was a jungle: grass grew long and dark here, an enclosing wall of deep green waxy hedges exploding upwards, bursting in every conceivable direction, swallowing the light. As the wind caressed the blades the grass winked its silver undersides.

The Lexus had been driven into the long grass so that the boot was facing the kitchen door and Malki had left a trail through the grass from the driver’s door to the back step, from the boot to the passenger door as he emptied anything from it that might be used as a weapon. Pat followed the path to the boot, popped it and stepped back.

Eddy took his time, glancing spitefully at the old man. He seemed unsatisfied that the pillowcase was walking stooped, that he was limping on one foot, flinching at the pain in his back. Swinging him by the elbow Eddy turned the pillowcase so that his back was to the boot and punched him in the groin, winding him so that he doubled up. Eddy stood up with a snigger and looked at Malki and Pat. Malki looked away. Pat smiled weakly. Oblivious to the animosity, Eddy smirked again and, as if telling a joke, put his hand flat on the old man’s head and, with the smallest push, dropped him into the boot.

The excellent suspension echoed the fall of the old man’s body. Eddy looked around for support, smiling, lips parted. Pat and Malki were from a wild sprawling family, composed mostly of ineffectually worried mothers and bad apples, a model of complex social problems, but it took a special kind of man not to empathise with a punch in the balls. They wouldn’t meet his eye. Malki even tutted at the car.

Angry at having measured his violence wrong, yet again, Eddy picked up the feet in dirty slippers and dropped them into the boot, swinging the old man onto his side, and slammed it shut as if hoping to trap some small something between the metal lips.

Malki looked for Pat to say something. ‘In the car, son,’ said Pat and Malki obliged, shutting the door carefully behind him.

Eddy looked angrily at the back of Malki’s head. ‘Your Malki’s a twat.’ Pat glared at him. ‘OK, I know he’s your cousin, but he fucking is a twat.’

Pat’s eyes were open wide in warning. The pillowcase could hear them. The wind hissed through the grass as Eddy looked away and blushed. He couldn’t seem to stop fucking up. Pat turned away and walked around to the passenger door. The pillowcase knew two names now; Eddy had said them out loud and told him that two of them were cousins and so now Eddy couldn’t let him walk, he’d have to kill him and leave Aleesha fatherless, rudderless, looking for love in all the wrong places. Pat could be one of those places.

As he opened the passenger door and slipped inside the car his chest was warm, full of thoughts of sunny places and hair on pillows.