flammable.’
Silence.
‘Shifty? Hello?’ Only just bought the damn phone and already it was—
‘What do you think I’ve been doing while you’ve been sodding about with your new mates? Got us a Mondeo. One careful owner, who’s got no idea it’s missing.’
Ah … ‘Sorry. It’s …’ I rubbed a hand across my chin, making the stubble scratch. ‘Been a while, you know?’
‘This isn’t my first rodeo, Ash. We’ll be fine. Trust me.’
Alice struggled half a dozen carrier-bags from the back seat of the tiny red Suzuki four-by-four. The thing had a big dent in the passenger-side door and looked more like a kid’s drawing of a car than an actual real-life vehicle. Drove much the same way too. She’d parked it beneath one of the three working streetlights, between a rusty white transit and a sagging Volvo. ‘Mmmnnnffffnngh?’ She nodded at the Suzuki, the keys dangling from the leather fob gripped in her teeth.
‘Yeah, no problem.’ I got the last of the shopping, and the bin-bag they’d given me when I left prison, then took the keys from between her teeth and plipped the locks.
‘Thanks.’ Her breath streamed out in a thin line of mist. ‘We’re just there.’ She nodded towards a front door two-thirds of the way down the terrace.
I shifted the bags from one hand to the other. Leaned on my cane.
Ladburn Street had probably been attractive once – a cobbled road lined with tall trees and cast-iron railings. A sweeping row of proud sandstone homes with porticoes and bay windows …
Now the trees were blackened stumps, surrounded by litter and vitrified dog shit. The houses all converted into flats.
Three buildings on this side were boarded up; four on the other, their gardens thick with weeds. Rock music belted out of somewhere down the row, a screaming argument a few doors up. Sandstone turned the colour of old blood. Railings blistered with rust.
Alice shifted from foot to foot. ‘I know it’s disappointing, I mean let’s be honest it’s not far off being a slum, but it was cheap and it’s pretty anonymous and we can’t stay with Aunty Jan because they’re having all the wiring ripped out and—’
‘It’s fine.’
Her nose was going red. ‘I’m sorry, I know Kingsmeath’s not great, but it’s only temporary and I didn’t think you’d want to stay in the hotel with Professor Huntly, and Bear, and Dr Constantine, and Dr Docherty, and—’
‘Seriously, it’s OK.’ Something scrunched beneath my shoes as I limped up the path towards the house. Broken glass, children’s teeth, small animal bones … Around here, anything was possible.
‘Right. Yes.’ She lumbered along beside me, the bags banging against her legs. ‘You see, a lot of people think Kingsmeath was thrown up in the seventies, that it’s one big council estate, but there’s bits of it go back to the eighteen-hundreds, actually, until the cholera outbreak in 1826, this would have been all sugar barons, of course the whole industry ran on slave labour plantations in the Caribbean, and can you get the lock, it’s the Yale key.’
I leaned my cane against the wall, picked my way through the keys. ‘This one?’
‘No, the one with the red plastic bit. That’s it. We’re on the top floor.’
I pushed through into a dim hallway that had the eye-nipping reek of a pub urinal. A small drift of leaflets, charity letters and takeaway menus spread across the cracked tiles from behind the door. ‘CAMMYS A WANKA!!!’ scrawled in magic marker on the peeling mildewed walls.
Not far off being a slum?
The stairs creaked beneath my feet all the way up to the third floor, walking cane thudding on the mangy carpet.
Alice dumped her carrier-bags on the floor and took the keys back, working them through her fingers like a string of rosary beads. Then undid each of the door’s four security locks – their brass casings all shiny and un-scratched. Newly fitted.
She tried on a smile. ‘Like I said, it’s not exactly great …’
‘It’s got to be better than where I’ve been for the last two years.’
Then she opened the door and flicked on the light.
Bare floorboards stretched away down a short corridor, lined with gripper rod, little tufts of blue nylon marking where the carpet had been, exposing a dark brown stain that was about eight pints wide. A single bare lightbulb hung from a flex in the ceiling – surrounded by coffee-coloured blotches. It smelled meaty, like a butcher’s shop.
Alice ushered me inside, then closed the door behind us, locking and snibbing each of the deadbolts. ‘Right, time for the tour …’
There wasn’t enough room for both of us in the kitchen, so I stood on the threshold while Alice clattered and clinked her way through making a pot of tea for two. Cardboard boxes formed a wobbly pile next to the bin – one for the toaster, one for the kettle, another for the teapot, cutlery …
She unpacked two mugs from a box and rinsed them under the tap. ‘So, is there anything you want to do tonight, I mean we could go to the pub or the pictures, only it’s a bit late for the pictures, unless they’re doing a late-night showing of something, or there’s some DVDs I could put in the laptop, or we could just read books?’
After two years of being stuck inside, in a little concrete room with the occasional accident-prone cellmate, there should’ve been no contest. ‘Actually … I’d rather stay in. If that’s OK?’
The living room wasn’t exactly huge, but it was clean. Two folding chairs – the kind sold in camping shops – sat on either side of a packing crate in front of the fireplace. She hadn’t taken the price-tag off the rug, leaving it to flutter like an injured bird in the draught of a small blow heater.
The curtains were a washed-out blue colour that still wore the chequerboard creases from when they were in the packet. I pulled one side back.
Kingsmeath. Again. As if last time hadn’t been bad enough.
Mind you, it didn’t look quite as awful in the dark, just a sweeping ribbon of streetlights and glowing windows stretching down to the Kings River – the train station on the other side of the water shining like a vast glass slug. Even the industrial estate in Logansferry had a sort of fairy-tale mystery to it. Security lights and illuminated signs. Chain-link fences and guard dogs.
To be honest, most of Oldcastle looked better at night.
And then a trail of gold streaked into the sky. One … Two … Three … BANG – a glowing sphere of red embers punctured the night sky, throwing a pair of gravestone tower blocks into sharp relief, washing them with blood.
It slowly drained away until everything was in darkness again.
Alice appeared at my shoulder. ‘They’ve been letting them off for a fortnight. I mean don’t get me wrong I love fireworks as much as the next person, but it’s nearly a whole week after bonfire night and soon as the sun goes down it’s like Beirut out
