Crusher (16 page)

I lurked on the front step of the shut-up unit with a
cigarette cupped in my hand, trying to look like a minor executive having a crafty fag. I didn’t take a drag from it—no need to go that far, the mark wasn’t here yet. In fact, he was late. Not a way to make a good impression, if he wanted the job I’d detailed on the phone.

Three cigarettes past the appointed time the grinding of gears and whistle of a diesel engine told me an articulated lorry was approaching. When it appeared around the dogleg in the street I realized it was not an artic as such, but just the tractor. That figured, of course, as supposedly the job was to pick up a trailer. The tractor unit was a shiny, freshly-scrubbed crimson, with three air horns mounted above the windscreen, but no chrome flourishes or badges or fairy lights behind the windscreen—nothing whimsical or cute about it. It slowed as it approached and finally pulled up at the kerb. I could dimly see the figure up behind the wheel check a notepad and lean over to peer out at the unit I was standing outside.

I took a quick drag of my cigarette and wished I hadn’t—I’d forgotten how much they made me want to puke. As it was I had to swallow a hacking cough. Maybe Jonno Kendrick thought it was the hack of a smoker who overdid it rather than a total amateur, because he ignored me totally as he swung himself down from his cab and walked up to the locked door, giving it
a shove before looking around for a doorbell. Not finding one he turned to me, frowning.

“Anybody on reception, mate?”

“Nope.” I tossed the cigarette away. He was a big man—not tall, but stocky, and half as heavy again as me. A lot of that was beer and pies, but he had forearms like Popeye, if Popeye had gone for Maori tattoos instead of anchors.

“Have I got the right address—Canal Market Road?”

“Yep.”

“What the fuck’s going on?” he muttered to himself, and he rattled the door again.

“They went out of business two weeks ago.”

“Two weeks? Then who phoned me?”

“I did.”

“You? Is this some kind of joke?”

“Yeah. The kind that’s not funny.”

“Fucking right it isn’t. I’ve come all the way from Kensal Rise, you little prick. On a bloody wind-up?”

He took a step towards me. I stayed where I was. He was working himself up, which suited me. The jowls wobbled on his fleshy hairless face, and he sprayed spittle when he spoke.

“Not a total wind-up,” I said. “I needed to talk to you.”

“Fuck that, I came down here for a sodding job!”

“You know a pub near here, the Weaver’s Arms?”

“What the fuck?” Indignant, baffled, getting angrier. Pale in the face rather than red. Danger sign.

“You called in there a few weeks ago, looking for my dad. Noel Maguire.”

When he heard the name he hesitated, staring at me, breathing deep, his eyes bulging. I saw him measure me up, his eyes flicking over my shoulders. He raised a finger and poked it at my face.

“Listen, son, where I go and who I talk to is none of your
fucking business
.”

I noticed the fob of the keys to his truck poking from between his chubby fingers. That was careless of him. I’d snatched them out of his fist before he even saw me move. He swiped for them clumsily.

“Give me my fucking keys.”

“Don’t want you rushing off, Mr. Kendrick.”

“Give me my fucking
keys
!” he roared, and tried to snatch them back. I dodged, and he stumbled, and he turned, and came for me again, moving faster, and I ducked away. I needn’t have worried about his weight; yes, he was big, but he was slow, and you could tell where he was headed before he’d even changed direction. I had to hang about and wait for him to come after me, mostly so he’d get himself all worked up and frustrated, clapped-out without me having to raise a finger.

But he wasn’t as green as he looked, because he swung a backhand at me that I only just dodged, and I smelled the sweat off his knuckles as they whistled past my nose. He turned again more nimbly than I thought he could and threw all his weight with a low punch that would have bust my gut if it had connected. I diverted it, stepped inside his guard and landed a couple of quick jabs to his face. Light and fast, but he staggered back clutching his nose as if I’d whacked him with a wrench. When he pulled his hand away and saw blood he finally broke, roared like a bull and came charging at me. I sidestepped and smacked him square on the jaw. The blows barely made him flinch, so I made sure the third landed right on his ear. Not under it—I need-ed him to talk, which meant not breaking his jaw, not yet. He roared again and staggered away, and bent over, cursing and clutching his throbbing head, and I knew I had him.

“Fuck!
Fuck!
You little prick, what do you fucking want?”

“You went looking for my dad, didn’t you? In the Weaver’s Arms?”

“Yes! Yes, I did, so what? I never done nothing to him.”

“No, you got someone else to do it for you, didn’t you?”

“Fuck this, I think you’ve broken my nose—”

“Why did you go looking for him?”

“He’d been shagging my wife, that’s why! Look at it!”

“It’s not broken, not yet. You mean your ex-wife.”

“I mean my
wife
. We’re still married.”

That threw me.
Dad!
I thought.
You didn’t. You … berk
.

Kendrick straightened up, glanced down and saw the blood splattered down the chest of his grey hoodie. He groaned. He seemed more worried about his laundry than me.

“What were you going to do when you found him? My dad.”

“Give him a warning, that’s all. Tell him to stay away.” He sniffed and coughed.

“Or what?”

“Or he’d be sorry. Fuck this …”

I’d promised myself I’d watch my temper, but I had to clench my fists to stop my arms shaking, and having clenched them I really wanted to hit something with them.

“Why would he be sorry? Were you planning to slap him around a bit, the way you slap her? Only you couldn’t find him, so you hired some German scumbag?”

Kendrick stared at me as if I was mad, turned his head away and spat a long gob of bright red spit onto the pale concrete of the forecourt.

“Smacking my wife? You been speaking to Elsa? Fuck …! Not you as well.” He looked like he was trying to laugh. “You know I wanted to divorce her. Years ago. Said she’d top herself if I left. She’s such a fucking liar.”

“Bollocks,” I said.

“I was going to warn your dad about
her
. She’s a nutter. A pisshead. A whatsit, a fantasist. How old are you? Twenty?” I didn’t answer. “Christ, you have no fucking clue.” He spat blood again.

Elsa Kendrick a pisshead? Shit. The way she’d necked that chardonnay, that smell in her neat little living room—spilt wine gone sour. Not hard to get rid of, but she probably didn’t even notice it. Jesus, that’s why she’d been suspended from her job.

“I wasn’t going to smack him. I was going to tell him to stay away. She’s tried to poison me, pushed me down the stairs … afterwards she claims she can’t remember any of it, that she has blackouts.”

“Did you ever tell the cops about this?”

“Fuck, you’re not even twenty, are you? More like twelve. Look at me, look at her. She claims it was self-defence—who do you think the cops believe?
You
fell for it. Jesus, even I fall for it sometimes. She rings me up and tells me she’s sorry and she’s going to get help. Then it starts all over again. Anyway, one way or another, your old man must have got the message.” He
glanced at me as if he was embarrassed to be confessing all this to a kid.

“What do you mean?”

“He dumped her, didn’t he? Two weeks ago. I knew as soon as she rang me up, crying and saying she was sorry, that she wanted me back, could we start again. I knew he’d dumped her. You can tell him it’s not me he has to worry about. Stupid sod.”

“My dad’s dead,” I said. Kendrick had been about to spit again but the gob stayed in his mouth. “The service was this morning. Someone came into our house a few days ago, hit him over the head while he sat at his desk.”

“Fuck,” said Kendrick. “And what, she told you I must have done it?”

“It’s your word against hers,” I said.

He hesitated a moment, then pulled up his hoodie to reveal a rumpled T-shirt underneath, and started to yank that out from under his belt. For a moment I thought he was going to strip off and streak down the street to protest his innocence. But he merely hoisted up his T-shirt and top to reveal his pale, hairy pot belly, and even in the cold yellow light of a distant sodium streetlamp I could see the puckered scar that stretched diagonally from his waistband nearly to his ribcage, just missing his navel.

“Butcher’s knife,” he said. “She’d spent all weekend
sharpening it for when I came home, one Monday night.” He tucked his shirt back in. “Sorry about your dad, yeah? You can believe me or not, I don’t give a fuck. You can find out the hard way. Like he did.”

I tossed him his keys. He snatched them out of the air, walked past me and climbed into his cab without another word. I stood there staring into the misty night as he fired up his engine, wheeled around, bumped over the pavements and sped back down Canal Market Road.

I’d hidden Dad’s ashes round the side of the industrial unit before Kendrick arrived. Now I retrieved the vase, still in its box, and headed home. It wasn’t a long walk, and as I turned into our street my mind was still ping-ponging between Elsa Kendrick’s version of events and her husband’s. I didn’t want to believe Jonno Kendrick, but he’d looked genuinely surprised when I’d told him Dad was dead. Elsa Kendrick had lied to me the first time we met, the day after Dad died, when she’d been so eager to know if my mother was about. And now my mother had come back. Was that a lucky guess on Elsa Kendrick’s part, that my mother was back in town? Or had she known something I didn’t?

Through the half-closed curtains of my front room a single side-light cast a homely glow into the night street. I didn’t remember leaving a light on. I normally made a big deal about switching everything off when I left the
house, but then today had hardly been a normal day. I put my key into the front door, turned it, and froze on the threshold.

There was someone here, I could feel it. The place was warm, for one thing, and there was a faint scent of soap, classier and subtler than the cheap crap Dad used to buy.

I stepped inside and shut the door, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, my whole body tense. I hugged the box closer under my arm and entered the living room as quietly as I could.

My mother stepped out of the kitchen, clutching a mug of something. “Hello, Finn,” she said, as if I’d just come home from school, and Dad’s ashes were my Show and Tell project.

She sipped her tea. She was wearing the same coat she’d worn at the funeral that morning, and her delicate little hands were cupped around the chipped china mug; I remembered how she used to moan about this house always being cold, and how Dad would flinch and whoop when she stuck her hands under his shirt to warm them.

“How did you get in?” I said at last.

“I still have keys. Your dad never changed the locks. Maybe you ought to, after what happened.”

“Yeah. I will now.”

“Can I make you something? The kettle’s just boiled.”

“No thanks,” I said. I stood there with my coat on, trying to decide whether I should walk out again. But she would just stay here and wait for me, and I’d have to come back at some point. I felt anger well up like lava in my heart. It’s my bloody house!
Or maybe it’s hers
, said a little voice.

“Hard to know where to start, isn’t it?” said my mother. I didn’t look at all like her; my eyes were blue, hers were brown. I was big and hulking, and she was tiny and birdlike, with the bones of her slender hands almost visible through her pale skin. She had a pixie’s face with high cheekbones and delicate little ears. I didn’t remember her hair being blonde, but maybe she was hiding the grey.

“Start what?” I said. I was going for nonchalant but it came out petulant.

“Catching up,” she said. She moved into the room and sat down, her legs neatly folded to one side. It came back to me in a rush, how she always walked and sat as if she was modelling.

“You left, I quit school, Dad got murdered,” I said. “There, we’ve caught up. Goodbye.”

She didn’t move. I hadn’t thought she would.

“I’m sorry, Finn,” she said. “It was never about you. It was me being selfish and insecure and … it’s no fun growing old and having no money and no future.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, in a tone of voice that warned her not to try. My mind was tilted like a sinking cruise liner, the thoughts in my head running around in panic and colliding with each other while the carefully composed notes for the speech I’d been planning all these years were dropped and scattered and trampled underfoot. I placed Dad’s ashes on the table, shrugged off my jacket and chucked it at the sofa. Opening the cardboard box I took out the urn and placed it on the middle of the tiled mantelpiece. It looked ridiculous and lumpen and ugly, advertising death like those decaying petrol-station bouquets that pile up near accident black spots.

“I can’t stay,” my mother said, before I could. “But there are a few things I wanted you to know, and you might need time to think about them, before you decide whether … if we should talk again.”

I tried to focus on the urn. Maybe I could stick some flowers in it. Dad wouldn’t have minded.

“Your father and I had been in touch. Before he died. We were talking about getting back together.”

That made me turn and stare.

“I was so mixed up when I left.” Her composure had slipped, I noticed with some satisfaction, and she was starting to babble. “I was in this weird place and my career was going nowhere and I’d got involved with this charity …” She paused, trying to slow down. “It sort of, took over. Maybe it was just another pathetic mid-life crisis, but I thought if I left, I could start over, with a clean slate.”

“A clean slate?” I was trying to sound cool but even those three words betrayed the tremor in my voice.