Still Midnight

29

They both knew it. Of all the grim fucking nights they had spent together in the past ten years, this would be the longest.

Pat couldn’t bring himself to ask about the birthday Eddy had forgotten, or nod that it was the wife’s fault because she didn’t remind Eddy in time. That he hadn’t asked about it meant that a fight was brewing. They’d had fights before, when they were drunk, over money, but they were both angry those times. Only Eddy was angry now. Without discussion, without warning, Pat had shifted away.

Eddy ground his teeth as he drove, his nostrils flared, a distant look on his face, as if he was daydreaming about hurting someone. Pat wondered if Eddy had his gun with him. His own was still down the back of the bin in Shugie’s kitchen.

The Lexus pulled slowly through the moat of gravel around Breslin’s, crossed a grassy bank and onto the concrete runway. Eddy stopped in front of the loading bay entrance. It was open, big enough for three lorries to back up for loading at the same time. Eddy pulled on the handbrake, leaned over the wheel, snorted at the dark mouth of the door, and looked at Pat expectantly.

Pat blinked. The plastic bag on his lap was burning the skin on his thighs. It was a Chinese takeaway. Oil had leaked out of a bag of spring rolls and puddled in a corner of the blue plastic, burning into his lap. Even though they hadn’t eaten since their morning roll and the cabin was saturated with the delicious aroma, Pat didn’t want to eat. He stared hard at the door, blinked, looked out of the passenger window. He wanted to throw the passenger door open and run, to run away across the dark fields, run through the knee-deep marshes, away to the fast road and hitch a lift back to the city.

‘Malki’ll be hungry,’ said Pat, blinking faster now, as if he could wipe the night away. Eddy opened his door and Pat did the same. They stepped out into the dark.

Breslin’s had been shut down twenty or so years ago and the building was disintegrating. The cantilevered lintel above the loading bay door had snapped off and now barred the doorway, the metal struts sticking out of the concrete, twisted and rotted orange. The whole of the building had been colonised by defiant vegetation, bursting through the cracks, easing the slabs apart in geological time.

Leading the way ahead of Eddy Pat carried the takeaway reverentially, as if he was leading an offertory procession. He ducked under the collapsed lintel, stepping into the wall of blackness inside. His footsteps sounded dead as he took the stairs up to the loading platform, and through the door into the packing hall. He stopped, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark, but it was too thick.

Eddy stepped in front of him, holding up his mobile phone high for the light from its face. The blue gleam barely made a dent in the dark, the phone was old, so he supplemented it with a pen torch he kept on his keyring.

Holding the mobile high and the pen torch low, they picked their steps into the room. Pat followed Eddy, clutching the takeaway to his chest for warmth. It seemed very quiet. They expected Malki to have a wee radio on or something, to have a wee light on, they’d left him a couple of candles and knew he’d be off his nuts anyway. Junkies were like cats or foxes, they could make themselves comfortable anywhere.

Silently, Pat and Eddy made excuses to themselves all the way through the packing bay, but at the mouth of the works room they could see that there was no light on, no whispery radio, no bed made of newspaper, no snoring. Pat stuck his face through the doorway, into the absolute dark, listening.

The works room had a metal floor, metal tables bolted to it, some of the legs bent where someone had tried to lever them off the ground but failed. Metal steps at the back led up to the big circular boiler where they had left the pillowcase. The whole room was metal, a leaf couldn’t pass through without making a noise. But they heard nothing.

Malki wasn’t sitting where they’d left him. The candles weren’t lit, there wasn’t even a sound of him hiding from them, if he thought they were the police or something. Malki had fucked off. It was going to make everything worse.

Pat whispered before he even realised he was going to, ‘Malki?’

Eddy muscled in the doorway next to him, held the torch up. The pinpoint pierced the room, dimming twenty feet away, casting a narrow canal of glow, helping hardly at all.

‘Malki?’ Pat spoke louder, telling himself he’d feel foolish when Malki walked in at the back of him. ‘Where are ye?’

Holding the mobile and torch in one hand Eddy reached into his pocket and took out a bag of five tea light candles, bursting the plastic with his teeth, taking out a lighter and bending down, emptying the candles on the floor. He set them up right, lit the lighter but it was draughty. The first couple of times he tried the wind blew the flame out. Purposefully he crab-walked into the room, his feet clanking on the metal floor, the sound booming around the empty space. He set the candles up at the base of the wall inside, in a line, each dropping to the ground with a little ‘pup’ that echoed around the metal room. His lighter took, successfully catching the wicks with the flame.

Pat watched Eddy crouching, rolling forward rhythmically over and back, over and back, like a man up to his waist in rough seas, and he knew then that Eddy was so angry he was on the brink of going absolutely fucking mental.

Pat put the takeaway down on the floor and looked around. The candles tried but failed, their poor light struggling against the blackness, seeping into it and being swallowed, deepening the shadows. Pat looked up to the boiler. The steps were empty, the platform at the top of the ladder beyond the thin reach of the light, a black void. He stepped towards it, calling softly for his wee cousin, pleading with him to come out, hoping to Christ that Eddy didn’t have a gun in his pocket, certain that he would be looking for an excuse to use it. Pat couldn’t let Eddy shoot him. Malki wouldn‘t fight back. Like his long gone father Malki was a rogue, but a gent. He wasn’t even a fast runner.

‘I’m going to look outside,’ snarled Eddy, the glow from his mobile phone lighting his chin, making him resemble a Halloween ghoul.

‘No!’ Pat’s voice snapped back from the cold metal floor. ‘Just,’ he held a hand up, ‘just wait a minute. Give us the fucking pen torch.’

He took the keys from Eddy, holding the torch steady, not looking at his hurried hands as he fitted the spokes of the keys on it through his fingers to make a weapon in case Eddy went for Malki.

He headed to the ladder, hoping to find warm foil or a burnt spoon on the landing. Maybe Malki was outside pissing; he was like that, had nice manners, ideas about how to do things, keeping things clean. He put his foot on the first step and pulled himself up.

The narrow beam of torchlight spilled over the landing step to the boiler door and Pat saw that it was open. Thinking Malki had let the pillowcase go and had run off himself, he took the next step and the light swept into the round belly of the boiler. A white leg, a blue cap, squinty, a blue stripe, wet. Red.

Pat dropped his hands to the dusty step, scrambling up the remaining steps, across the landing, into the black dark of the boiler.

Still as a waxwork. Malki was lying flat on his back, arms outstretched like Jesus, one knee pulled up to his side, a dancer in mid flight. Pat reached forward and took his hand as if he was going to shake it. Rigid, skin cold. The mouth was open, lips pulled tight across his teeth. Dry. The teeth were dry.

A crash from behind heralded Eddy running towards him, jumping up the steps, pointing his phone, the dull gleam whipping around the inside of the boiler, then steady. Eddy stood in the doorway, shining the brutal light at Malki’s face. Scarlet freckles were splattered all over his face. It came from his neck, at the side, a ragged mess of skin, like something had burst out of it, a cut like lips, only an inch or so long, but the redness came from it. A puddle had formed underneath Malki and soaked into his white tracksuit, it was working its way up through the material. He looked old, skullish, but Pat knew he was just a wee boy.

Eddy: ‘How did the cunt get overpowered by a midget Paki?’

Slowly, Pat stood up. He stared straight into the beam of light, an expression on his face that made Eddy’s feet falter. ‘My phone…’ said Pat flatly.

Eddy tipped his head quizzically, as though he had never seen Pat’s face before. Pat pushed past him, down the ladder. His steps fell loud as cannons as he crossed to the door.

‘Um, Pat?’ Eddy called after him, his voice small, ‘are ye off to phone his ma?’

With wide purposeful strides Pat passed through the packing room to the light at the loading bay door. Eddy’s voice was thin and far away.

‘I’ll wait here then, eh?’

Through the loading bay, under the lintel, into the broad concrete road, Pat burst into a run, faster and faster until he got to the car and then a sudden burst of adrenalin made it impossible to stop. He sprinted the three hundred yards to the end of the concrete strip, dropped to touch the edge for reasons he would later find bewildering, and bolted back to the car. He was by the door, jogging on the spot, knees up to his chest, faster and faster and faster, trying to keep time with his heart, lifting his fists in time, punching his chest. He panted like a woman in labour, trying to breathe the pain out, trying to burn it up.

Twenty-three years ago Pat had sat on a settee with his feet not reaching the end of the seat. Auntie Annie sat next to him, her hands hovering beneath the baby’s back and head, and Pat holding the baby for a photo. Pat grinning, the baby turning away from him, secretly making an ugly face that no one knew about until they got the picture back from the chemist’s. They’d ordered two sets.

Malki once had a girlfriend who looked like a monkey. Big jaw. She chucked him and he cried for a week.

A car door, blue, new, swinging open in a street in Shettleston as Pat yomped the five miles home in shitting icy rain one Hogmanay night and Malki’s gleeful face grinning out from the driver’s seat. ‘Lift?’ He was thirteen.

Pat kept running on the spot until his lungs felt like they might burst. The energy left him as fast as it had come. He slumped over the roof of the car, pressing hard against the cold metal. Pat pushed his face into the roof, pushed until the bridge of his nose clicked.

Standing up, he drew in a breath and held it. The marsh smelled of rotting things, of dead grass melting into the water. Without a thought in his head Pat pressed the button on the car key in his hand, opened the door and climbed into the driver’s seat. He shut the door and locked it, adjusted the seat to fit him, pulled the seat belt over himself.

He flicked the headlights on just as Eddy’s face appeared under the lintel. Eddy’s mouth was open, eyes wide as the headlights crossed him. Swinging the car in a wide circle on the concrete, Pat turned around and drove away.