She was talking to me. ‘It’s OK,’ she was saying, her voice shaking. ‘… it’s OK.’ But something snapped in my ears and all I could hear was ringing. My mouth watered and white-hot, electric sunspots roared down in front of my eyes. Sian moved her hand on to mine but I was already rising, lifting up out of my body.
I picked up the bottle of Jack Daniel’s by the neck, followed Bateman and swung it with both hands like an axe, in the highest possible arc. I felt the whisky, glugging out on to my wrists, before bringing it down on the back of his head with every ounce of strength in my body. The bottle exploded in a red mist of blood and broken glass, and an incredible shock wave travelled up my arms. He didn’t go down. He put both hands out to steady himself on the wall then turned, touched his head and gave me his flesh-wound smile.
I was still holding the broken bottle by the neck.
I heard a guttural scream and I was charging it at him.
His arm belted out like a piston and struck me the hardest blow I’d ever felt. I crashed back through a table and into the couple who’d been sitting there. Bateman threw himself at me. I rolled to the side and he flattened the man I’d landed on. I was still on my knees when he turned, and I swung an uppercut for his groin. He moved in time and it caught him in the thigh, knocking him off balance rather than off his feet. He leaned back on the upturned table and swung a kick at my head. I felt my body travel up and back down again in a perfect arc, then he dropped on top of me with all his weight.
He gripped me by the jaw and started banging my skull into the concrete. I struck two blows to the back of his head but he didn’t even notice. His grip tightened. His body felt like one enormous taut muscle, crushing me to death. I spread both hands wildly along the floor, searching for purchase, for anything that would help me roll away.
Anything I could hit him with.
My right hand found broken glass from the destroyed table. As he brought my head down on the concrete again I wrapped a fist around the shards, feeling the blood bursting out from my hand. Then I forced my palm into the good side of his face. Pressing the glass into him, into me, as hard as I could. He threw back his head in an animal scream, let go of me and lifted himself to a crouch. This time when I kicked him in the groin I didn’t miss, and I saw the pain climb all the way up his body. I got to my feet on another overturned table.
He was bleeding out of his good eye, and his face turned the colour of old money.
I buried a fist into his stomach and he doubled up, retching over my shoulder. I linked both hands behind his head and kneed him so hard in the face that my entire leg went numb. I stepped back, holding my own head, watching him falter. He drooled out a long stream of blood on to the floor and collapsed into it, face first. I fell down on top of him, tears blurring my vision, and hit him, repeatedly, in the face, the neck, the chest, until I couldn’t breathe.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and slapped it away, then another and another, until I couldn’t move my arms any more and I was being lifted up from the floor. When they pulled me off him I had both hands inside his mouth, trying to rip it apart, and I was screaming incomprehensibly. As the hands pulled me upright and dragged me backwards through the room I saw that the bar was destroyed. Terrified men and women pressed themselves into walls, covered their mouths. Some consoled each other. Some were sitting on the floor, holding injuries. And at the end of the room, growing smaller as I got further away, was my friend, Sian. She had both hands over her mouth and she was crying.
9
By the time they turned the key on me I’d painfully re-set my jaw, but it was too late to start a conversation with the desk sergeant, or to request a phone call. I couldn’t think of anyone who’d pick up anyway.
I couldn’t think of what I’d tell them.
I’d been thrown into the back of a squad van by four stompers. During the drive I’d felt the bumps in the road like pneumatic drills at my temples, with the pain reaching an almost transcendental pitch. At the other end I imagined for a moment I might wake up out of a nightmare. Instead I was arrested, booked and detained.
A fresh arrival in hell.
The stompers were subnormal men kept on continual call. They scored non-existently on tests of IQ, emotional intelligence or intuition, so of course there was a place for them in the modern police force. They spent their shifts drinking protein shakes, lifting weights and shit-talking each other. When they got the call, they burst on to scenes of ongoing violence and brought them rapidly to a close.
Almost always by taking it up a notch.
I was probably lucky to be alive, but that depended on how you saw things. The mingling smells of blood, sweat and bourbon turned my stomach. I was dragging one leg from where I’d driven my knee into Bateman’s face and my head felt like it had been cracked open, then glued back together again in the dark. It was unfamiliar to the touch, with a whole new terrain of ridges, scars and bumps. I could almost see the concussion stretching out in front of me like an enormous, never-ending skyline, and my hands, when I looked at them, were unrecognizable with deep cuts and grazes, those of a psychopath, I thought, a madman. My right palm still glistened with the shards of glass I’d forced into Bateman’s face, and I was still picking them out when I heard the bolt go.
‘Stand away from the door, please,’ said the desk sergeant. He was smooth and chinless. Literally the most humourless man I’d ever met, and I could never remember his name. He looked like a stage of evolution we’d had to go through to reach humanity.
‘Give me a minute,’ I said, with some difficulty. I almost didn’t want to know who was outside. Superintendent Parrs would probably send me into the main population with a sign on my back that said ‘police officer’.
‘Stand away from the door, please,’ the desk sergeant repeated.
‘Give me a fucking minute.’
It sounded like I had cotton wool in my mouth.
I was lifting myself up off the bunk when the door opened anyway and Sutty stepped inside. Next to me he looked pretty together, and I was actually glad to see him.
‘Don’t get up on my account,’ he said. ‘Give us a minute, yeah?’ The door slammed shut behind him and I slumped back down.
‘Get me out of here, Sutts …’
‘No can do, pal,’ he said, working alcoholic sanitizer into his hands.
‘I haven’t had a phone call.’
‘Unless you’ve got God Almighty on speed-dial, it’s not much use to you. You’ve been locked up with your belt and shoelaces, though. What’s that tell you?’
‘That they don’t expect me to be here long.’
‘In a way …’
I looked at him. ‘What? They think I’m going to hang myself over a bar fight?’
‘More than a bar fight from what I heard. What was it, Aid? Is the hit back on?’ I didn’t say anything. ‘Or is it drugs again? Always multiple choice when it comes to you …’
‘It’s neither.’
‘Anyway, do they think you’ll hang yourself? They’re counting on it, pal.’ He laughed. ‘No, really. They’re running a book from the front desk, taking bets. They all think tonight’s the big one.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘I was outraged. Said that’s my partner you’re talking about, there. Put a tonne down on you seeing daylight.’ He smiled. ‘Hanged? Not your style. Not your style at all. When a guy hangs he kicks out the stool, shits his pants and presents himself to the world. Here I am.’ He shook his head. ‘That doesn’t sound like Aidan Waits to me. If they’d locked you up with something messier, a chainsaw or a shotgun, that’d be different …’ When he saw I wasn’t in the mood he changed the subject. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’