The boy was running away from the house and down the path. He didn’t need to rise out of his body now. In spite of the bag’s shifting weight at his shoulder he felt lighter than air. His senses came alive, overwhelming him with information in one generous rush of blood to the head. The night, the moon and the stars. The cold air, stabbing in and out of his lungs.
He stopped when he saw a man, a shape, sitting on the car bonnet. The shape threw its cigarette and rose up, detaching itself from the shadows. It drew closer to the boy, meeting him in the middle ground between the car and the house.
‘Is that it?’ said Bateman, stepping into a patch of moonlight. The soft blue hue of his stubble looked like the flame from a blowtorch. The boy nodded. Bateman let out a breath and reached a hand behind the boy’s ear. He retracted it, holding a coin out for him to take. ‘Fucking gold mine,’ he muttered, reaching for the bag. He froze then, staring over the boy’s shoulder at the house, the smile on his face twisting into a grimace.
There was a skeleton standing in the doorway. The figure was uncomfortably tall, like a thing on stilts, and its emaciated, stick-insect legs didn’t look like they could support even the frail body on top of them. It ducked under the doorway, transforming from something unreal into a pitifully tall, slender man. The man moved towards them, walking with the frightening, illogical gait of an arachnid. When he lifted an arm there was a flash of steel and the gun was suddenly visible. Bateman placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder, his grip tightening as the figure took a final step into the light.
He was barefoot and his clothes were the rags that might once have been a suit. There was no shirt beneath his haggard, balding jacket, and his torso, a series of tight, grey double knots, was exposed to the elements.
There was something wrong with his hands.
It looked like he was wearing dark, sloppily applied nail polish, but the boy realized he was bleeding. The man’s fingernails had been removed. The skin on his face was pulled tight, and his eyes were buried so deep inside his skull that they were just two black holes.
‘Bagh …’ he said.
The boy recognized the voice from behind the door that he’d unlocked. He saw that the figure’s lips were loose, hollow and caved in. That what he’d taken at first for stubble was a beard of dried blood. Someone had pulled out the man’s teeth. When neither Bateman nor the boy moved, the man threw his head to the other side and shouted.
‘Bagh!’
‘All right,’ said Bateman, drawing the boy towards him. ‘We’re going back …’
‘Bagh!’ screamed the slender man, spraying red spit. ‘Bagh! Bagh! Bagh!’ Bateman and the boy stopped, hypnotized by the gun, which was drifting from side to side. With a frown of concentration the man raised his free arm, so both hands were wrapped around the grip. Breathing deeply, focusing his attention, he swung the gun barrel downward, pointing it at the boy.
‘Bag,’ he said with effort.
Automatically, the boy started to slip the strap off his shoulder, but Bateman’s hand moved on top of it, gripping it into his skin. They stood like that for a moment until a woman’s voice, tired but gloating, came from the forgotten car behind them.
‘Give him the bag, Bates,’ said the boy’s mother. ‘Face facts.’
Bateman’s grip on the boy’s shoulder tightened.
‘No chance,’ he whispered.
The boy’s mother raised her voice. ‘Give him the ba—’
‘No chance,’ screamed Bateman. He pushed the boy forward and projected himself at the thin man. ‘Gonna smoke a kid, are ya?’ The boy stared into the gun barrel. Felt the ground sinking beneath him. After what felt like forever, the gun started to shake, finally drooping down at the ground in answer. ‘Didn’t think so,’ said Bateman, touching the boy’s shoulder.
As he did so, a new light emerged. Waves of pulsing blue, washing through the trees.
The sound of sirens.
The figure’s head turned in their direction and his body started to convulse. ‘Hur,’ he said. ‘Hur-hur-hur.’ His laugh revealed blackened, bloody gums. Bateman’s mouth fell open, watching the lights draw closer. A mechanical roar surprised him and he turned to see the Skoda starting up, its headlights flashing momentarily. The boy’s mother made a three-point turn and drove in the opposite direction to the sirens. He saw his sister, wide-eyed, pressing herself into the rear window as they got further away. After a moment Bateman laughed, squatting down like he’d forgotten the thin man, the gun, the police.
‘Wally, mate,’ he said to the boy. ‘Them trees. Go as far as you can, hide that bag, remember where you’ve gone and mark the spot. Tell no fucker. We’re coming back for it.’ He stood and looked at the figure. The boy didn’t move. ‘Go,’ said Bateman, without looking at him. When the boy still didn’t move the man stepped between him and the gun.
‘Run, Aidan, you little shit!’
At the sound of his real name the boy started across the road, breaking towards the woods where the car had been parked. He felt the gun like a pair of hateful eyes, burning into the back of his head, and burst through the foliage, feet beating wet ground.
The sirens were on top of him, louder now.
He smashed into clawing thorns, thumping through bushes and tree trunks. He saw blue lights from the road, illuminating a possible path, and threw himself down a bank, clearing the way with one hand, holding the bag with the other.
The sirens were going off in his head.
He crashed down into a dirty stream, and felt the cold water up to his waist, tasted the blood and soil in his mouth. He started to crawl backwards, out of the mire, breathing hard, holding the bag up over his head. The sirens were screaming.
Then a gunshot cracked, unmistakably, through the trees, and everything stopped. Everything but the boy. He pulled himself on to dry ground and staggered deeper into the woods. Away from the house, the thin man and the gun. Towards anything as long as it was away from Bateman. He could still hear him like a broken record in his head.
‘Run, Aidan.’
* * *
VII
Ultraviolence
1
You forget things after a while, and I pieced together my understanding of that night from three main sources, none of which were entirely reliable. The first was from my own memory, which I’d consciously felt morphing throughout my lifetime, starting as a series of facts featuring people I’d known, and ending as a story filled with characters, infected by my imagination. My memories had become unreliable on the subject through years of drug and alcohol abuse. Over time, they absorbed the violent, menacing tone of my nightmares, until they were entirely transformed from a linear sequence of events into a swollen dream sequence that grew with me. Warping and altering like my face in a mirror. They were important for understanding the feeling, though, which had never changed or gone away.
The wide open, panoramic fear.