The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime, Volume 8

Another Life Roz Southey

I’D ALWAYS KNOWN it was either me or Keeg. Mates then enemies. One of us was going to have to die.

It was never fucking well going to be me.

The flat is dark, full of shadows. As I walk naked across the room, moonlight stripes the floor. The polished-wood, paid for with my hard-earned. Floor to ceiling windows, velvet curtains. Chrome and glass furniture, plasma screen TV, pictures worth a fortune. We used to look up at blocks like this, me and Keeg, back when we were fourteen. Ponsy fuckers, we’d yell. Fucking fat-cats. And pudgy-faced wankers in posh suits would peer out at us in a mixture of fury and fear.

Now I’m the one looking out.

Down below, in the courtyard, there are four yobs, toting beer cans, shadowboxing. Keeg’s there, doubling up in mock agony at a play kick to his guts. One of the yobs lumbers over to an ornamental tree, hikes down his zip and pisses. My mates. Twenty somethings who still think like fourteen-year-olds. Who spend their lives stoned out of their minds. Drink or drugs, who cares. We started with glue nicked from Woollies then bought E on street corners then moved on to the hard stuff. Okay, so I have that kind of stuff now, stashed at the bottom of the biscuit tin. But I earned the cash to buy it with; Keeg and his mates just pinched something.

Keeg’s shouting up at me. He sees me. Our eyes meet. And hate. He hates me for going over to the other side. I hate him for reminding me what I once was.

I let the blind snap back into place. How the hell did they get through the security gate? You have to show the guard your ID, look into a camera, that sort of shit. And why are they here, anyway? To piss me off, that’s why.

There were five of us, and me and Keeg were top dogs. Kev and Keegan — unbelievable — we thought it was meant. We bossed the gang, we said what fucking went and we fucking did it. Go to school? What the fuck do you learn at school? You’ve got to be out there, grabbing the world by the balls and letting it know what’s what. Want some money? Take it. Want some drink? Steal it.

We lived it up like crazy. We had the entire neighbourhood shitting its pants when they saw us. Standing outside the supermarket with our hoods up, kicking at the walls, leering at the kids in their prams, running straight at the oldies, swerving only at the last moment so they’d totter and shout.

Christ, it was good.

Except.

Except for those lousy evenings when it was pissing it down and no one would let us in the pubs, and even the students in Kentucky Fried Chicken chased us out. Bizzy cars cruised past, winding their windows down and the pigs taking a good long insolent look at us. Those were the nights we’d break windows, to hear the glass break and alarm bells howl. The nights we wondered what the fuck we were doing here, what the world was all about, and who cared anyway. Bored as hell.

I dress. Jeans, T-shirt, leather jacket, trainers. Only the best. The guy who stares back at me from the mirror looks good. Good face, good body. Not your average wanker. And all the clothes’re top quality, none of your mass-produced shit. I’ve left all that behind. Way behind. Only the best.

Particularly when you’re going out to kill.

First time we did it, we were scruffy. Worse than scruffy, we looked shite. Keeg’s T had more holes than shirt, I’d spilt beer down my hoodie, hell, I’d been sick down it. And my jeans. Frayed to start with and I wore them right down on my hips so I could get the crotch real low. Keeg said they made me waddle and he could see my underpants and they weren’t clean. Not pretty at all.

He was a kid, the one we found. Homeless. Huddled in a doorway, with big eyes full of tears and a nose dripping snot. Eighteen maybe. We were fourteen. And there were five of us — that made up for him being bigger than us.

“Hey, mate,” Keeg said. “Want some beer?” He held out the half-full can, the kid grabbed for it. Keeg upended the can and poured it over his head.

The kid went mental. He screamed and shouted and kicked out with his feet and flailed around with his arms. One of his feet caught Keeg on the shin and he swore. “Fucking fucking fucking shit,” he yelled. “What the fuck are you doing?” And he kicked back.

Then we were all doing it. Kicking and stamping and jumping up and down and hearing cloth tear and bone crack. And I stomped, and went on stomping, and on and on until there was only blood, and the shrieks subsided into groans. And all the anger went into my feet and came out again with every jump and in the end there was nothing left except the kind of relieved emptiness you get after wanking.

And you know why we didn’t get caught? Some fucker had smashed the CCTV. We washed off the blood in puddles, then lit a bonfire under our clothes in one of the sheds on the allotments and burnt the whole place down. Vandalism, they called it. Fucking cops didn’t have a clue.

The next one, me and Keeg did on our own. This time we went looking. Maybe three weeks later. Fucking truant officer had been round and my mum’s boyfriend gave me a beating for skipping school. As if he’d never done it when he was a kid. Doesn’t like me around all day, that’s it, not since I walked in on him and mum fucking on the sofa. Christ, that was horrible.

So we were out in the frost and the hail, and it was a Monday night in November and we’d already been thrown out of three pubs for being too young. We’d tried nicking beer from the off-licence but they’d run us off. So we pissed around the city centre, getting stared at by bouncers and sniggered at by girls wearing damn all.

“Hey,” Keeg said to one of them. “Fancy a bit of something, then?”

She was twice his height and six times his weight and I bet she’d never pulled a bloke in her life. But she just looked down her nose at Keeg and said, “I bet your willy’s no bigger than my kid sister’s pinkie.”

Keeg went for her.

She screeched and kicked out and grabbed at his hair. His head smashed into her boobs and she bullied him back against the shop window, then kneed him in the groin. Then she marched off with a sneer and a swagger.

“Bitch,” Keeg spluttered.

So we went looking for someone to kill. Keeg was raging. “I’ll find a bitch somewhere and fuck her and fuck her and then I’ll slice her tits off and fry them up for my supper!”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said not believing him.

“I will. I fucking will!”

We found someone at last, an elderly bloke by a cashpoint, peering with rheumy eyes at the huge letters and trying to fit his card into the slot with a shaking hand. We leapt on him from behind and he threw up his hands and went down at once with a great gusting sigh that scared the shit out of us. And then he lay still and never moved again.

“What kind of fucking fun was that?” Keeg said. So we went and killed a dog as well. And that wasn’t much fun either.

I reckon we killed four maybe five people all told. I don’t remember exactly. We were stoned half the time, or pissed. No one ever got near us, not cops, not neighbours. I remember me mam saying once how dirty my jeans were — we’d had to roll around in the mud with this wino before we could finish him off. Accidental death, they said that one was — fell in the river and drowned. Anyway, it was only a tramp — who cares about them?

But somewhere along the line I stopped enjoying it. There wasn’t any anger left to come out. Or maybe it got changed into fear and that was scary in itself. I kept thinking it couldn’t last. The cops aren’t stupid. They’d catch us. Maybe they were on to us already and we just didn’t know it. And then we’d spend the rest of our lives in jail and everyone would forget about us. There’d be nothing to do except kick the shit out of the walls.

I got stressed out about it. I kept looking over my shoulder. Every time a bizzy car went past, I thought they were playing with us and would just drive round the corner and catch us. So when Keeg said, “Let’s go get a wino,” only a couple of weeks after the old guy, I puked in the gutter.

“You’re scared,” Keeg said.

“Don’t talk crap.”

“You’re shitting your pants.”

“It’s that fucking burger,” I said. “It’s giving me the runs.”

“Fuck the burger,” Keeg said. “Let’s go get some fun.”

“I’m going home. I’m sick.”

“Scaredy cat!” he said contemptuously.

“Fuck off.”

I went home. Keeg went off by himself but didn’t find anyone. Later, he said it hadn’t seemed right without me.

Then he broke his leg. Running to get out of the way of his old man when he was beating up everyone in sight. Ended up in hospital for a month. Like he said, it wasn’t fun on my own. So I got into the way of going to the library and mucking around on the internet. Then mam threw out the boyfriend cos he slapped her and we went off to live with her sister down south. And that was that — I didn’t see Keeg for ten years.

It wasn’t any better down south. No one in my new school wanted to know me — I had a stupid accent and didn’t know anything. So I stopped going and went down the library to surf the internet and then mam won a bit on the lottery and gave me a games station.

And it took off from there really. All the games were stupid. Fantasy stuff, dragons, and aliens and other dull shit. I reckoned I ought to make up my own games, based on what me and Keeg had done.

You don’t wanna hear all of this — the bits about how I got myself sorted. I found this guy who taught me how to do the computer stuff — he made me pay of course but it was worth it. Faggot. I went to school to keep everyone off my back, but I didn’t do anything, I just kept scribbling away, planning the games. Okay, so the first game I made up was shite and anyone playing it would have known exactly what me and Keeg had done and we would have ended up behind bars for the rest of our natural, but the later stuff was better. Much better.

I got it made in the end. I got a job with this small firm, just three of us. Made a name for ourselves and pulled in a mint of money. And that’s how I’m here, in this flat, with all this cash, and these clothes, and girls queuing up for fucks. And Keeg’s out there, swigging beer and still wearing a hoodie and trainers he bought years ago. Sod all in his pockets and he’s probably fucking the barmaid in the pub. That’s why he hates me.

I saw him last week. First time in ten years. In the street outside Smiths. Still the same Keeg, the same tatty jeans and holey T-shirt. He looked me up and down and laughed.

“Wanker,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, at least I’m not a loser.”

We stood toe to toe, face to face.

“I know stuff about you,” he said, softly. “I know about homeless kids and winos, and old gits whose hearts go pop the first time you say boo. Don’t you piss me off!”

“I know things about you too,” I said.

Maybe I’ve lost my accent a bit, being away. A huge grin cracked his face and he said in a prissy precious voice, “Know things too? Can’t speak proper any more, right?”

That got to me somehow. Like saying I wasn’t real. “Sod off,” I said.

He muscled in on me, till we were nose to nose. I could feel his hard-on.

“This is my town,” he said. “You sod off!” And he added, whispering, “You were the one that chickened out, remember. You were the one who sicked his guts up rather than tackle a pansy pervert.”

“Sod off,” I said again, and walked away.

And ever since, he and his mates — once my mates — have been prancing around outside my flat. Fuck knows how they found me. First couple of nights they tossed stones into the courtyard and against the wall of the flats. The security guard went out and yelled at them; minutes later a bizzy car cruised by. By then Keeg and his mates had gone.

But tonight they’re in the courtyard and the guard’s nowhere to be seen. Course, I could call the law, but if I did that, Keeg could land me in the shit. That’s what he’s betting on, that I won’t dare do anything. Shop him and I shop myself. Of course someone else in the flats is probably calling the cops. That’s why I’m going to have to sort it. Now.

Keeg doesn’t stand a chance.

I take the lift down. From the glass doors in the foyer, I can see the security booth at the gate, which I couldn’t see from above. I can see feet in polished black shoes, toes up on the floor. That takes care of what happened to the security guard, I guess.

They come for me the minute I walk out the door but Keeg roars at them; they give him sour looks but stop.

“Me and you,” I say, hands in the pockets of my leather jacket.

“Yeah,” he says, and the others jump on the low walls of the ornamental flowerbeds and sit there, beer cans in hand, legs swinging like they were at the football.

“Make it fast,” Keeg said. “Someone’ll have called the cops.”

“Sure,” I say and swagger up to him. He stinks of beer and piss and vomit, and once I stank like that too. This is what I left behind, this is what I could have been. And what’s he seeing? A smart guy, with looks and brains, the kid he once was, who made it out of here and who got everything life has to offer. And what do I feel?

Sick to the heart. It’s all shit and show. Nothing but nothing.

Nothing like what Keeg and me had. Why am I here? Because I left him behind. I walked out on him, and left him to the shit and the crap and the boredom and the beer, and all the rest of the nothing we had when we were kids. I let him down. He was my mate and I walked out on him. He’s shit but I’m shit too, just shit covered with a fine coat and we both know it.

We stand nose to nose, face to face, chest to chest and Keeg’s not the only one with a hard-on. And I’m thinking: this is it, this is real. All that other shit is just pretend. The only difference is that it pays, and means you can stand up and say look at me. I’m an executive with my own internet business. I’m respectable.

Yeah. Right. I let him down and that makes me worse than him. Ten times worse.

And that’s the way it’s going to stay. If I can’t be better, I’ll be worse. No way he’s going to get the drop on me. No way he can take me down. And I slip the kitchen knife between his ribs and he stares wide-eyed and gives an odd little gurgle and slips down the length of me, like an old pair of jeans shucking off. And then he’s lying on the ground and there’s a smear of blood down my T-shirt.

Simple as that. No big deal. And you know — no fun at all. It’s all shite. But at least I don’t feel guilty any more. What’s to feel guilty about? Keeg got left behind and I didn’t. I look at the three yobos. They’re still staring at Keeg’s body with the knife in it.

“So he got in and killed the guard,” I said. “Then he panicked and did for himself. Right?”

They hop down from the walls, pause, nod. Then they’re sauntering away towards the gate as if nothing has happened. So long, Keeg. So long, mate. No offence, but you’re just history.

I bend to wipe the knife clean of my fingerprints and close Keeg’s hand around it.

And why didn’t I get caught? Keeg took the cameras out of course, when he did for the guard. Just like I knew he would. So no one would see what happened. He knew tonight was the night we sorted it.

In the dark room, the moon stripes the polished floorboards. I look out of my window at the courtyard. Empty. Just a new guard in the security cabin, a cat prowling round the flowerbeds.

Empty.

I did what was necessary. It was always going to come down to me and Keeg facing off. And there could be only one winner.

But that’s the point. He’s dead, just a pile of ashes scattered for the dogs to crap on. And without him, I’m nothing. Just another fucking bag of shite with nowhere to go. We were two sides of one coin and I destroyed it.

In a way, he won.

I’m going to go get myself someone. A wino maybe or a Big Issue seller, or a foreign student who doesn’t know where the hell he is. Someone to kill some time. Someone to kill.

Hey, Keeg, this one’s for you.