The Secrets of Pain

77

The piece of concrete fell short. Inevitably. Even desperation hadn’t produced the necessary strength.

Jane watched it landing on the edge of the bench, rolling into the gulley at the same time as the torch rolled off and died, and the only light was from the Roman lamp on the altar, the air thick and fetid with hot animal fat. One small lamp had done that.

But Jane was bone-achingly cold, looking down at Cornel lying in the gulley with his knees drawn up, foetal.

Kenny Mostyn was standing slightly away from Cornel, quite calm with his arms by his side. But loosened up, springy, watching as Cornel began to roll away, and his hand came out and even Jane could tell what he was trying to reach and knew he wouldn’t make it.

Kenny’s knee rose up and his foot cracked down on the clawed hand, and Cornel screamed hideously, rolling helplessly onto his back as Kenny kicked something away.

‘We don’t need this, do we, mate? We’re men.’

‘I was just-’

‘What?’ Squatting down. ‘Tell your Uncle Kenny.’

‘Just trying to scare you, that’s all. That’s all it was.’

‘Course it was,’ Kenny said softly.

Cornel was sobbing. Jane hated anybody sobbing. A sob was not something you could fake, and she could feel his fear.

‘Kenny, listen, it really was just a joke. Like one of your tests, one of your exercises, where you’re thinking you’re gonna die, and at the last second…?’

‘Sure.’ Kenny crouched down next to Cornel. ‘You’re all right, mate. I understand.’

Jane saw Kenny’s face for the first time – actually, not for the first time; she realized she’d seen him several times in Hereford, maybe among the Saturday scrum in High Town or sitting outside one of the pubs where they had tables. Short, round-faced guy with a moustache and the hint of a beard which made a dark circle around his mouth.

He was looking up towards the gloss-painted metal ceiling but saying nothing, no expression on the face, and his eyes were white, like a blind man’s eyes. He seemed to be stroking Cornel’s hair, calming him down, then abruptly he turned his head away, looking up. Not at her, perhaps at the smears of movement which she could see as though through old, speckled glass.

Jane shook her head and the glass brightened and then fragmented and then coalesced and broke apart and coalesced again, like migraine lights, and there were human forms, wet naked men, glowing greasily like in some rugby team’s communal bath, a fatty stew of nudging, squirming, white-eyed men around her, touching her skin, and she like shrank into herself in disgust, all her senses full of the steam and the stink of sweat and the disconnected cries from a long way down in her mind, and then one man stepped out of it and became Kenny Mostyn.

He was holding up a short blade which he briefly inspected before nonchalantly folding it and putting it away in an almost military fashion, not once looking down.

But Jane did.

She saw Cornel move. Cornel was lying bent like a burst pipe, and it was as if he was laughing. Shaking with laughter. Just another scary exercise, a test for a hard man. What happens is anything you want.

His body jerked once, in spasm, that big chin jutting out like a shelf of rock over a waterfall. Jane felt the pressure of a scream in her throat, but no sound came out. She just stood there, watching from the gallery, watching all the blood belching out of the hole in Cornel’s long neck, filling up the gulley.

Kenny Mostyn was sitting down now, on the concrete bench opposite, wiping his forehead with the back of a hand. Blank-faced as the blood ran past his boots, spreading almost the width of the gulley but never quite reaching the other face on which Cornel’s glassy eyes were focused.

A face without a head or a body. A straight nose, a petulant twist to the mouth and a hat like a caterpillar.

The face sculpted into the shard of concrete that Jane had grabbed from the rubble after Cornel had attacked the altar-piece with his lump hammer. She thought a smile formed for a moment on the face in the concrete, as her scream passed into echo and all she could hear was the thin, wet sound of Cornel dying.