The dark confides, p.8
The Dark Confides, page 8
Bale was struck by a memory of cold rain pattering sand, softly dimpling the ripples. Nothing lovelier, nothing sadder.
‘Did you love her?’ he said.
‘She was … my wife.’
‘That doesn’t mean you loved her.’
Bale was convinced he could see something in there, a glimmer of knowing, a certain clarity. After faking for so long, he was inclined to believe everyone else was too. At this point, like clockwork, his temper rose, his back flushing with heat, his spine an iron rod.
‘Why did you hurt us?’
His father looked at him for a while before answering. ‘I’ve never hurt anyone.’ He looked away. ‘Call the nurse. I don’t feel well.’
‘Why did you hurt us?’
‘I need rest.’
‘You’re not the big man any more, are you, Dad? Eh?’ His father tried to turn over but Bale pinned him to the mattress by his shoulder. ‘Hit me. Go on. Hit me now. Remember how to? I’m your fucking size now. Go on, hit me now. You never forget how to hurt someone.’
‘Call the nurse.’
‘I thought I could forget, like you’ve done, just put on a mask and be someone else, but it’s harder than it looks, isn’t it? I’m speaking to you, cunt. Look at me. I’ve tried to bury the past and start again but it’s hard when all the past wants to do is remind you it’s there. The past is as scared of dying as we are.’
Fear in his father’s eyes. Real fear?
‘Leave me alone.’
Alzheimer’s, a blessing for those who’d do anything to forget.
‘People tell you to grow up, to change, to forget the past, not to give it any power over you, but it’s all powerful, all consuming, isn’t it? Look at me. Fucking look at me. It shapes us. It defines us. It’s a fire. Our lives are its deformities. Look at what you made.’
‘I live in a haunted house.’
‘Ghosts haunt heads, not houses.’
If it sounded like a speech, a dialogue they’d recited many times, it essentially was. When he visited his father, he went through the lines like an actor with a script, searching for any variation in his eyes, any lies around the edges, a memory spasm. Sometimes he was convinced his father really had forgot everything he’d known, sometimes not. A liar knows a liar but doubt creeps in. He used these sessions—that’s what he thought of them as, sessions, not visits—for abreactive therapy just as much as he used Elms for psychiatric therapy, if not more. He’d never told Elms about this perverse rite. He doubted she’d approve.
He’d been looming over him but now he let him go. He stepped back and looked at him lying there, at the tears trickling down his sunken cheeks into his ears. Always tears. He was consistent if he was anything. Bale leaned over and whispered in his teary ear for the eighth, the twelve, the twentieth time.
‘I want you to die in agony. I hope you’re afraid.’
He walked back to his car in tears and sat there outside the nursing home, gripping the wheel and rocking back and forth as he screamed. He pounded the wheel and elbowed the door. Then he just sat there, winded and exhausted by the catharsis. He recalled nights in bed counting backward from a thousand in threes to try to block the soothing thoughts of suicide. Hot bath and a razor, diazepam and whisky, sleeping pills and carbon monoxide. The notion of suicide calmingly close. It was the only thing keeping him going. The murder of the self is the murder of the universe.
These actions, these thoughts, were also nothing new.
They were all just part of the endless purge.
Bale had been home barely an hour when Aileen called and said to get over to the club. He sighed and rose heavily from the couch. Then sat back and finished the bottle of beer he was holding. Eyes shut, counting backward from a thousand in threes. Around nine hundred he switched off the TV, put on his coat, and left the apartment. He was on the stairs when he stopped and went back up to the kitchen and took a diazepam.
He was going to walk, it wasn’t too far to the club from his apartment, but he couldn’t be bothered. He parked his car out front of the club and as he was walking in Anton was walking out. They stared each down as they passed through the entrance. Anton was wearing a zipped khaki parka and a black bucket hat.
‘The fuck you looking at?’ Anton said.
‘Nothing. Just a big fucking zero.’
Anton squared up to him. Bale was a couple of inches taller but he’d known enough hard men to know height didn’t mean much, it was all about intent. And that look in Anton’s eyes. A look that saw only the world burning down around him.
‘What was that?’ Anton said.
‘You heard.’
‘Sean Bale, come on down,’ Aileen called from inside the club.
They continued eyeballing each other. Then Bale walked off without giving Anton a second glance. Anton watched him walk into the club, towards his mother. He sniffed and spat on the floor and left the club.
The place was dark and empty but for a barman bottling up. Aileen sat at a table near the ring with a lunch of grass-fed hanger steak and a red wine. Stacks of cash and leather logbooks on the table.
‘Anton’s in a lovely mood,’ he said.
He was sitting down when she stood up.
‘Don’t get comfy, we’re not staying,’ she said.
He stood back up and pushed the chair under the table. She dabbed a napkin on her mouth, careful not to disturb her thickly applied red lipstick, rolled the napkin into a ball between her palms and dropped it on the bloody plate.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she said.
‘What are you talking about? I came straight here.’
‘I mean today. I swung by earlier but you weren’t home.’
A moment passed.
‘Well,’ she said.
‘You swung by? What time?’
‘Where were you?’
He finally said, ‘I went to see my dad.’
‘At the nursing home?’
‘Yeah. I think he’s dying.’
She put on a jaguar-print Moncler jacket and said, ‘Everyone’s dad is dying.’
He waited in vain for elaboration.
After watching her for a month to pick up her habits and routines, he’d appeared a warm October morning at one of her gyms. He made a circuit of the gym, using the running machines, lifting dumbbells from an A-frame rack, smiling affably to patrons between sets. All the while watching Aileen across the room doing deadlifts before a wall mirror. He attended on the days Aileen attended and eventually struck up a conversation with her about weightlifting, though he was an amateur and just starting out at thirty-three after a couple of years inside—he was out early on a technicality. At fifteen years his senior, maybe she felt a maternity towards him, some kind of leftover surrogate love after the slaughter of her eldest. He never got a sexual vibe. Not really. The occasional glance, but that could have been the slitted eyes of mistrust. Whatever the reason, they got along cloudlessly and soon he was hinting that he was looking for work. She said she might have something coming up and in less than twelve weeks he’d been ‘tested’—getaway for Anton and one of Heywood’s lads during an illegal poker game robbery in Sheffield—and had become one of her bagmen, a reluctant getaway driver, and eventual confidant.
She drove them east through the city in her Bentley and on to the M6 heading north. Engine heat flowing up the windscreen melting snow as it touched the glass. The late afternoon roads lay dark and quiet. The rich smell of the leather made him feel sick, a sudden headache pulsing in his eyeballs. He pressed a button and the window went down a few inches. A wall of sickening pain behind his forehead and down one side of his neck. He couldn’t tell if was a side effect of the meds, a stress headache, or something else, something worse, something malignant. While taking antidepressants he suffered nightmares, nausea, cluster migraines, restless legs syndrome, maladjustment, weak libido, passivity and both suicidal and murderous thoughts. He’d told Elms that his depression was simply someone starving to death, an insatiable hunger for serenity, and these little pills were just rocks in his belly, having none of the nutritional value of contentment, merely giving an impression of repletion. Elms said it was time for a change, recommending he see his doctor. She had also said, however, that she believed these symptoms were not all related to the antidepressants.
‘Søren said it went well,’ Aileen said.
‘You’ve spoken to him?’
She frowned. ‘Yeah. I’ve spoken to him.’
‘Did you know what he wanted?’
‘What do you think?’
‘You don’t seem fazed.’
‘Wasn’t me they asked. You knew the day would come. We’ve all been there. You knew.’
‘You vouched for me. Your word means nothing to them?’
‘Sometimes they expect more than words. Sometimes they expect actions.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘What about?’
‘I don’t know.’ About your daughter and me. ‘About anything.’
She didn’t answer. Instead she played album after album and held up a hand whenever he tried to speak. For almost two hours. They entered Cumbria and the sun splayed its heatless light across the seamless sky, the windows becoming a blinding whiteout as if they were driving inside a table tennis ball. She put on Linda Farrow sunglasses and turned up the music. All he could so was squint against the glare, his brain hot and throbbing. He pictured his blood washing up the curved inner walls of his skull and lapping about the coast of his brain.
‘There was a cop there last night,’ he said. ‘A biker cop.’
‘Never mind him.’
‘You know him?’
‘He’s Søren’s inside man. Keep your distance.’
‘You think I’m scared of him? I’m not scared of some pig scumbag.’
She laughed. ‘I get it, you finally got your hands dirty and feel twelve foot tall, but now’s not the time to start feeling invincible. It’s good to see you’ve got the patter down though.’
‘Finally got my hands dirty? I was inside two years. That’s two years longer than most of the goons in your unit. My hands have been dirty a long time so don’t give me that shit. By the way, how long have you done inside?’
She removed the sunglasses and dead eyes slowly turned on him, her face vacated of emotion. ‘I’m not the soft cunt who got caught, am I?’
He picked at his side teeth with his thumbnail and looked out the window as if he hadn’t heard. They drove through most of the Lakes without speaking. He was looking through the blurred rush of trees, catching silvery glimpses of the great lakes dotted with cormorants and geese, an otter on the shores, kestrels hovering. The man he’d killed arose. He couldn’t help but think about the tender resistance of his stomach as the knife had sunk in. He shuddered and pulled his hands up into his sleeves. His revulsion was soon eclipsed by rage at what Søren had made him do, what he’d made him become, and what he now had over him: his murder of a UCO and knowledge of his affair with Wren.
‘Fuck Søren,’ he said. ‘Fuck him. Let’s just go over his head and talk to Carney ourselves. Nothing I despise more than a fucking middleman.’
She indicated and calmly pulled across the lanes in a cacophony of blowing horns and screaming brakes, bringing them to a stop beside a rubble wall that enclosed an old hotel bearded in ivy. She dead-eyed him again.
‘Now why would you say that?’
He held her gaze, not ready to back down.
Then he did.
He needed to cool off and start thinking rationally.
Later they were parked on a quiet stretch of cliffy coast east of the Lakes. Rough-hewn bluffs and the Irish Sea beyond covered in gauzy pale mist. He wondered how life sustained itself down there in the cold and lightless depths. A frightening mass of constant movement and mystery. She turned off the engine. After hours of driving the silence seemed to vibrate. She opened her window and looked out. A cold and briny wind rippled gently into the car, the smell reminding him of the gritty, vinegary seaside cockles he abhorred as a kid.
‘Marcus was murdered while visiting his parents in Jamaica, leaving me alone with three kids as a final fuck you. Christopher was a good boy, but I wanted to drown the twins in the bath. What I put them through… unspeakable. It was a dark time. Then when Christopher was killed…’ She trailed off and looked out across the sea.
She needn’t go into detail regarding the murder of her eldest, Bale knew it on a forensic level. Six years ago a call girl had found Christopher floating naked in his lap pool, massacred, the pool entirely red. His ribcage had been pried open. Organs strewn about the tiles, some bobbing in the water. The same word slathered in his blood across every mirror in the house. Mother. Then a video of the murder surfaced on the dark web. In the video three men wearing red coveralls and black three-holed executioner hoods opened him up with a surgical rib-spreader while he lay chemically paralysed on the poolside tiles, kept conscious throughout with smelling salts, tears running from unblinking eyes. Another person behind the roving camera, never seen, never heard. No one arrested for the murder.
‘But you’re happy now, right?’ Bale said.
‘Happy? How old are you? Happiness is for kids and idiots. No sensible, intelligent adult can honestly believe such a thing exists. The word’s an insult to the rational.’
‘What about contentment?’
‘That’s something else altogether.’
She went on to tell him about an incident a few years back when Anton was called a ‘half-breed’ by some ‘roided up Essex cunt’. Bale had heard the rumours.
‘Instead of having it out there in the car park like Marcus used to if someone pissed him off, Anton grabbed the cunt the next day, tied him to a chair and hammered his balls.’
‘Fuck. Is that true?’
‘Would’ve doubted it myself if it wasn’t for the video he made. He killed himself not long after. Threw himself in front of a train. Anyway, this is the new way of doing things. It used to be about moving the cargo with as little attention as possible, then splitting and enjoying the cash. Then the bouncers muscled in and brought a new wave of violence. Then the kids came and started shooting everyone. You got a shooter, doesn’t matter if you’re five-foot-nothing and the cunt you’re up against is built like a brick shithouse, he’s going down. Fearless little pricks hitting everyone in the crossfire. Each generation losing sight of what we’re in this for—the filthy lucre. So now we have Anton and his kind. A new chimera. They’ve got the muscle, the fearlessness, the sadistic streak and zero respect for one and all. They swear allegiance to no one. And every act of violence has to be crueller than the last to prove who’s cruellest of all. Guns don’t mean shit any more. How can a bullet inspire horror when we’ve got the media force-feeding us decapitation videos and nail-bomb suicide attacks? We’ve got to compete. There it is.’
He just nodded, taking it all in, until he realised that she was showing him something outside, down below on the water. He leaned forward and looked out the window.
‘What am I looking at?’
He followed her stare down the precipice and saw it. Anchored beside a jetty perpendicular to the coast was a black and red handysize tanker bristling with cranes and stanchions and cased in snow.
‘Carney’s oil,’ she said.
He looked again, closer. ‘You serious?’
‘It’s only a sample. Carries about twenty thousand deadweight tons.’
‘It’s big.’
‘Small compared to what he normally uses.’
‘What does he normally use?’
‘Imagine toppled Empire State Buildings crossing the oceans, cutting through walls of waves. But sitting right there, under everyone’s nose, is twenty thousand tons. Right there.’
‘Shouldn’t it be in a dockyard or something?’
‘This is all private land, far as the eye can see. No one comes here.’
‘What about the depth of the water?’
‘What about it?’
‘Is it deep enough for the draft of the tanker?’
She looked at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘The draft of the tanker?’
‘What?’
‘The draft of the tanker?’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘Someone’s been reading up.’
‘Books aren’t kryptonite to all of us, Aileen. You’re just too used to working with savages to realise we’re not all illiterates.’
She continued watching him.
He needed to change the subject, quickly. ‘How’s it so easy for him?’
‘Who, Carney?’
‘Yeah.’
She finally turned away. ‘He keeps the competition high among interested parties, and because we all want the contracts, we’re cutting each other’s throats to get ahead. It’s just a matter of how much we’re willing to lose to gain.’
‘What are you willing to lose to gain?’
‘What are you offering?’
‘I’m serious.’
‘So am I.’ She angled the rearview at herself and checked her teeth. ‘Line up in a row everything that means anything to me and then ask me that question and see what falls. You might be surprised.’
They sat watching the anchored vessel hang senselessly in the water.
‘You’re only seeing this because you’ve been evaluated by those above. Even Anton doesn’t know its location. That thing with Søren, that was the price of your admission. You’re now on a ride that cannot be stopped.’
‘Why show me it at all?’
‘Why? Søren said so.’
‘You’re only showing me it because Søren said so? I don’t get it.’
‘We’re all in thrall to someone. I’m in thrall to the lord as the lord is to the king. Sometimes I wonder who Carney’s in thrall to, but I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll never know. And sometimes I wonder something else.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Sometimes I wonder who you are in thrall to.’
‘Me?’
‘You.’
He took the gamble. ‘I’m in thrall to no one. I respect you, Aileen, and I’d do most things for you, you know that, but to tell you the truth, I’m not really down with the whole feudal pyramid scheme he’s got us cutting each other’s throats over. Sorry to disappoint.’
