The Concrete Grove

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN





LANA STOOD IN front of the mirror and stared at her reflection. She was wearing her little black dress, black high-heels and way too much makeup. Bright red lipstick made her lips look swollen; the smoky liner around her eyes gave the impression of light bruising. Ordinarily, she would never go out like this, but she knew what men like Monty Bright admired in a woman: overt sexuality; the image of a whore.

“Whore.” Spoken out loud, the word lacked genuine impact. It only hurt when she thought it, when she kept it inside where it could slice her up like a razor.

She turned away from her tarted-up image in the mirror and walked towards Hailey’s room. She pushed open the door and stepped inside. The curtains were open; street light leaked through the pane, streaking her daughter’s bed covers.

She walked across the room, stepping over Hailey’s discarded clothes, and stood at the side of the bed. Staring down, her heart felt heavy and her mind began to clear. What she was about to do, she did for Hailey. She would go to any extreme to put things right, to clear the debt and start all over again. If she had found a way to turn back time, she would have done it without pause for thought, and to hell with any sacrifice time might demand.

She remembered when Hailey was born. The memory still ached inside her. Three in the morning: New Year’s Day. She’d just missed out on being one of the first New Year babies, and her sibling had missed out on everything by being born dead. Lana’s labour had been long and hard. Her waters had broken fifty-two hours before the delivery, but she had not been dilated enough for the midwife to induce her. The hospital was understaffed and too many pregnant women had been admitted… the whole thing had been horrible, a nightmare.

She recalled a scene a minute or so after midnight, with Timothy standing by the bed, repeatedly lifting and letting drop one of the cheap nylon bed sheets. Worry and lack of sleep had made him fuzzy and weird – he barely even knew where he was or what he was doing. Fireworks were going off outside to welcome in the New Year, but Lana’s gaze was drawn to her husband’s busy hands, and the sheet as it fell repeatedly onto the bed. Static electricity shimmered in the air; it was their private firework display, a show put on just for them and their as-yet unborn children – the living and the dead.

“For you, honey,” she whispered now, in another life.

Hailey stirred in her sleep, one arm coming up out of the creased mass of sheets to cover her face. The bedclothes slipped down to her waist, exposing her midriff. The skin there looked thin, like paper. Lana could almost see her insides through the semi-translucent layer: bunched intestines, and other organs that didn’t look quite normal.

When Hailey was born she was floppy and unresponsive, a condition caused by something toxic in Lana’s liquors – the fact that her waters had broken so early had led to some kind of infection. The baby’s skin was grey; she was barely breathing. They took her away and put her in the Special Care Unit, up on the top floor of the hospital, while Lana continued with her labour. Timothy followed them out of the delivery room; he was clutching one of the tiny woollen hats they’d told him to bring along for the newborn babies. A small, silent Indian doctor drifted in to stitch up Lana after she’d pushed out Hailey’s brother, repairing the wounds caused by the delivery of the twins. He worked in silence; he didn’t look up from his task once, not even when Lana began to cry. A nurse with short hair and a small tattoo on her neck had carried away a bedpan containing the waste.

“For you…” She leant over her teenage daughter’s bed and touched Hailey’s stomach. The flesh there was warm, almost moist. She spread out her fingers, forming a fan of the digits. Something fluttered inside Hailey, like a caged bird, and then went still. Her belly remained flat; it did not bulge or distend in the way it had before, when Hailey had lifted her blouse to show Lana the great secret of her anatomy.

I imagined it all, thought Lana. The stress, the sheer pressure of our situation… It caused me to hallucinate. What I thought I saw… it was impossible.

Even as she thought this, she was not entirely sure that she truly believed the theory.

Impossible…

Tucking Hailey back into bed, she straightened up and left the room. Everything seemed heavy: her skin, her bones, even the weight of her thoughts. The world was moving slower than it ever had before, as if the nature of gravity had altered.

Her plan was simple, but it was also repellent. She would go to Monty Bright, allow him to do whatever he wanted with her, and then walk away, back to her life. She had been through so much, experienced such horrors because of Timothy and the things he had done, that she believed she could detach herself from the moment and just let it happen.

It might hurt; it would probably haunt her for the rest of her life. But at least the debt would be cleared, and she and Hailey could move forward, make plans to leave this horrible place.

She was willing to do anything to guarantee Hailey’s future. Even this: allowing a crude and vicious man – and possibly his friends – to use her body as a plaything. If she thought of it in mechanical ways – she had had a coil fitted a few years ago, so would not become pregnant; she would demand that they all use condoms in case of disease; she would refuse to kiss anyone on the mouth – then she could pretend that it was a job of work. She had grown accustomed to stifling her emotions, and this would simply be one more situation to lock up inside, throwing away the key.

She could think of worse things… like death, or mutilation. Rape – no matter if she went there willingly or not – was better than being maimed or crippled or killed. These men, she knew, were easily capable of all three acts. Penetration she could probably handle and come to terms with, even if it meant losing something of her soul; but losing a physical part of herself would be a lot tougher to accept.

But then again, she knew that physical scars healed. Blood stopped flowing; cuts and lacerations sealed themselves shut. Emotional scars, though, never went away: they just faded.

Could she do this? Could she really go through with it?

She glanced over her shoulder, at Hailey’s bedroom door. She remembered how that fat bastard, Monty Bright’s enforcer, had caressed her daughter’s photograph, licking it with his obscene tongue.

Then she asked herself the only other question that mattered under the circumstances: did she really have a choice?

She grabbed her leather jacket and handbag and walked briskly to the door, refusing to look back over her shoulder. She paused at the mirror hanging on the wall by the door, looking again at her doll-like image. She took a packet of baby wipes from her purse and washed off the lipstick, the rouge, the eye make-up.

“No,” she whispered. “Not for you.” That bastard didn’t deserve to see her at her best. She would go to him unadorned, making her sacrifices without the use of war paint.

She kicked off her stripper heels and put on a pair of flat-soled pumps. She would make no concession to eroticism. Let the bastard take her in her most ordinary state, looking like she was on her way to the shops.

Lana opened the door and walked out onto the landing, barged through the fire door, and then stepped briskly down the stairs.

She was on autopilot; her body felt empty, as if she had relinquished all control. She didn’t want to do this, but she could see no other way out of her predicament. She did not want those bastards coming anywhere near her daughter. If they touched Hailey, she would kill them all. It was that simple.

The air outside was cold and sharp. Lana tugged her bomber jacket tighter around her body, feeling more vulnerable than ever before in her life. She wished that she’d changed into a pair of jeans. Her bare legs were already feeling the chill. Her body didn’t feel as if it belonged to her, and her mind was locked up inside, unable to control what was happening. She knew that she had imprisoned herself in this situation, and the only way out of the jail cell was by doing something terrible… but sometimes, she thought, terrible things can release you.

But hadn’t Timothy thought the same? His actions, when he had been pushed into a corner, were surely the seeds of the terrible thing she was contemplating doing right now. Horror begat horror; bad deeds created even more badness. It was a simple rule of the universe, and one that could never be ignored or forgotten.

Her trapped mind was racing, but it was powerless to intervene. Only the body could perform a meaningful action. The physical Lana was in control now: the flesh-and-blood woman that encased the spiritual being, the shell around the hidden self.

She crossed the road outside the flats, glancing down to inspect the blood stains from that mad junkie, Banjo. The blood had dried to a dark hue; a series of splatter patterns on the roadside and against the kerb. The local news had reported the event earlier, and according to the newsreader Banjo – his real name was Bernard Clarkson – was currently in the LGI, strapped to a bed in an overcrowded ward. They said his mind was wiped. That was the word they’d used: wiped. Like a tape recording or a computer’s hard drive. There was nothing left of the person he’d been; the man had vacated his shell, leaving behind nothing but meat.

Lana began to make her way along the long curve of Grove Road. It was the first of the concentric circles that spread out around the Needle. She hated these streets, even more than the outer edges of the estate. They were cold, unwelcoming, and there was always some kind of trouble brewing. Yet here she was taking a roundabout route to her destination – ‘going round the houses’, as they said in this part of the world. She supposed that she was simply putting off her inevitable arrival at Bright’s gym.

She passed a few boarded up houses – security shutters at the doors and windows, graffiti crawling across the brickwork. These abandoned dwellings were flanked by homes in which people still lived. Television light flared behind the windows. Shadows passed by on the other side of grey net curtains and slatted window blinds. Lana felt a deep sense of loss, a strange kind of grief for something that she had not yet given away. She had no idea where this feeling had come from, but it hurt. The pain was like a blade drawn across her chest.

For you, Hailey.

Once again she thought about the tiny baby her daughter had been. It seemed like yesterday. Intense. Immediate. Such a small infant, and she’d been kept in an incubator for two days. When, finally, Hailey was allowed to take her daughter home from the hospital, both she and Timothy had no idea what they were meant to do. They’d stood over her Moses basket, holding hands and crying together, filled with relief that they’d had at least one child to bring back with them. Watching their baby sleep; looking to the future.

Or so they had thought.

Because the future had not turned out so lovely. Instead it had become a bad dream, a series of absurd events that had ended in murder and Timothy’s suicide.

Walking now along harsh streets, perhaps even watched by hungry eyes, hidden eyes, Lana realised that those events had been the beginning of her downfall. Like a trigger, Timothy’s decision not to talk to her about his problems, to get hold of a gun and try to solve them in the most insane way imaginable, had been the moment when her world had started to crumble. Their daughter – their beautiful, bright, lovely girl – had suddenly been cast out into a darkness through which she was still stumbling, looking for an exit.

Lana reached the corner of Grove Street West, where there was a patch of ground upon which a corner shop had once stood, and next to that the Unicorn pub – perhaps the roughest drinking den in the area. She paused for a moment, glancing at the pub lights and its bright yellow windows that spilled illumination onto the cracked pavement. She could hear music, laughter, raised voices. Somebody was singing a football song, while other voices cut in with another crude ditty.

She turned onto Grove Street West, leaving the light behind. Darkness shifted around her, massaging and grasping her like a huge, soft fist. She fought the urge to turn around, run back to the Unicorn, and drink herself free of this debt to darkness. But if she did, her problems would still be there when the hangover cleared. None of this was going away; it was here forever, unless she made a move to rectify the situation.

Bright’s Gym was a hundred yards along the street, pushed back from the pavement and with its back to a small gathering of willowy trees which bordered the no-man’s-land of Beacon Green. Many years ago, when the area was less poverty stricken, she’d heard that a warehouse depot with its own siding and station had stood on the Green. The old railway line still ran along the eastern edge of Grove Rise, at the bottom of the Embankment, but the old timber sleepers had long since been reclaimed and all that survived were some half-buried metal cleats and a rough trail where people walked their dogs by day but were afraid to visit after dark.

The gym was a small, squat two-storey building that stood alone on this part of the street, opposite a row of derelict houses. Its windows were always covered by metal grilles, with faded, out-of-date posters advertising historical bodybuilding competitions stuck to the glass behind. Nobody could see inside from the street; and nobody inside was able to see out through those windows. The gym wasn’t exactly open to the general public, but the regular clientele consisted of local hard men, amateur boxers and paunchy nightclub security staff. These meatheads would go there to pump some serious iron and ingest whatever steroids Bright could supply them with. It was the loan shark’s base; he operated every bit of business he dealt with from the shabby premises.

It was his castle, his secure hideaway from the world. The centre of the spider’s web.

The police never bothered with Monty Bright. He had the whole area sewn up, and Lana suspected that the local constabulary were of the opinion that they’d rather deal with the shark they knew than the devil they didn’t. It all went to prove her beliefs that everyone and everything was either corrupt or in the process of being corrupted. Timothy’s actions had formed the basis of this theory, and her experiences here, in the Grove, had merely helped it evolve into a working hypothesis.

She approached the front door and waited, still unsure whether she could go through with her plan. She heard the infant Hailey crying inside her head; her mind was filled with images of Timothy’s victims and that of his pale corpse on the mortuary table when she’d been called in to identify his body. A portion of his skull, just above the right eye, was missing. She had glimpsed a blue-grey swell of brain matter through the hole.

“For you,” she said, not knowing who she meant: Hailey, Timothy’s ghost, or herself.

She lifted her hand, made a fist, and knocked hard on the door. It was opened before she even had time to lower her hand.

“Hello, Lana.”

It was the fat man from the other day – the one who’d pinned her against the wall and attempted to invade her with his knee.

She swallowed but her mouth was dry. “I’m here to see Monty… Mr. Bright.”

The large man smiled. Oddly, it was a gentle smile, as if beneath the layers of fat and muscle this man might just have a heart after all, hidden within the folds of his cruelty. “I know why you’re here, Lana. And, please, call me Francis.” His lips were wide and wet. His cheeks were ruddy.

“Okay, Francis. Can I please see Monty? He’s expecting me.”

The door opened wider, and Francis stepped back into a long, narrow hallway. There were old boxing posters stuck to the walls, promoting fights between combatants whose names Hailey didn’t recognise. Dust hung in the air like a light mist; small motes danced before the fat man’s retreating form, making him take on a ghostly aspect, as if he were barely there at all.

“This way,” he said, turning slowly in the cramped space. His thighs brushed against the wall, unsettling yet more dust, and he moved ponderously, like a whale cruising through the deeps. “He’s been waiting for you. We all have.”

Following him through the murk, Lana felt the first strands of real fear brushing against her cheek. Like cobwebs, the fear stuck to her skin, drawing her in. They came to a large open space, and to her right Lana could see a dimly lit arena. A boxing ring was positioned at the centre of the room, and along the walls were hung heavy sand-filled punch bags, battered leather speedballs and all kinds of metal bars and brackets meant for performing strength exercises. She’d been in gyms before – in fact, she had once attended exercise classes regularly, back in her old life – but she had never seen such primitive equipment as this. A lot of it looked medieval: crude and cruel and meant for inflicting pain upon the human body, rather than working out the muscles for the sake of physical fitness.

A small man in a white vest and baggy shorts was dancing in the shadows. She had failed to see him at first because of the weak light and the fact that he was positioned in the corner furthest from where she stood. The man’s hands were covered in protective wrappings and he was shadow boxing. Each move, every combination, was carried out a lot slower than it would have been in the ring: it was stylised, almost like a silent mummer’s play, a weird performance dense with ritual. She watched for a while, entranced, and was only able to move away when the fat man touched her arm and whispered her name.

“We can go up now,” he said. “That’s Dennis. He comes here every night. Never gets in the ring, just shadow boxes for hours. We leave him in peace. He pays his dues so we let him do his thing.”

The man kept moving; he was never still. His feet shuffled across the smooth floor, shushing like the delicate touch of a drum brush against a hi-hat cymbal. His face was stern, almost grim, and his eyes were focused on a single point on the wall. Whatever he was fighting, he would never be able to beat it. The man’s private bout would last forever, or at least until the moment when he shadow-boxed into his grave.

“Shall we go now?” Francis increased the pressure on her arm. His fingers were wide, his grip insistent. It was not a question.

“Yes,” she said, looking at his face, concentrating on his small, piggy eyes. “Yes, I’m ready now. Let’s go and see Monty Bright.”

The silent boxer didn’t even acknowledge their presence as they passed from his view. She doubted he even realised they’d been there. The thought filled her with a deep sadness that made her flesh tingle.

Her thoughts and feelings were corrosive. She felt like she was on the verge of losing her mind, and she welcomed that madness, wishing that it would hurry up and take her away from all this. Hoping that it would help her to get through whatever happened next.