Head Injuries (21 page)

    'Eve,' I croaked, and jogged after her.

    

    

    I had been shuffling around for half an hour or so when I realised I wasn't making any progress; merely turning blindly into any street, alley or ginnel that offered itself to me. My movements had nothing to do with finding Eve.

    I surfaced on the Marine Road. The sea was a cold slab. From here it looked as if it had accrued a layer of dust; I couldn't see a reflection on it anywhere. Exhausted, I sloped back to the guest house. There had been some dispersal but the fire engine remained, dead and quiet. A blanket concealed a form on a stretcher but I couldn't tell who it might be. I hoped the firefighter had made it out alive.

    I took the smell of smoke inside with me and felt instantly nauseous. I traipsed up the stairs and saw that the coat in the bathroom had disappeared. I went in and turned on the bath taps, poured some cheap and nasty salts in from a box that had had its brand name bleached out of sight by age and the sun. There was no hook on the back of the door, nothing to hang a coat on. I left the bath running and trotted up to my room. A door snicked shut as I approached the last few risers. Not mine: it was still on the latch. I saw a shadow shift fluidly along the bar of returned light under Duncan's door, like the slow bleed of mercury in a thermometer.

    I considered knocking, to tell him about the drama outside, but at the last moment I pulled my hand away from the door and went back to the bathroom, where I failed to wash the stink of death from my skin.

    

    

    I lay in a sweat of blankets while the vision of the dead woman revisited me. I heard leisurely footsteps pacing up and down the street and at one point I thought I heard a voice ask, in a quiet voice: 'Alex?' but when I looked, I couldn't see anyone. Just before one, I heard the gate squeal open and Eve's footsteps on the path. She didn't knock, which I found endearing. She'd wait for me. As I dressed I heard the fire engine move away, vibrating my bed with its snarling engine. With the window open, the cold air reeked of ash. I slammed it shut.

    

    

    

    On the doorstep, my landlady-wrapped in a pink dressing gown with fur collar-nailed me and pushed a scrap of paper into my hand. She was holding a spatula and tapping its broad end against her neck, which was sullied by a lovebite.

    'Dint hear you come in earlier, chuck,' she said, through the lipless puncture she sported instead of a mouth. 'But then there was a hell of a to do over the rowd, wasn't there?' She wagged a piece of paper. This un cowled et abort foivish. Oi envy yow yongsters gowin out at this toim onoit.' It took a while, and I wasn't sure I'd translated all of it, but I thanked her anyway and closed the door, hushing Eve who was trying not to laugh. 'What did she say?'

    I opened my eyes. Wasn't it obvious? She said: "The hermaphrodites have invaded Upton-upon-Severn-quick, divest the guinea-fowl of their cutlasses".'

    Through her laughter she pointed at the piece of paper. 'Telephone message. From your girlfriend.'

    'She's not my girlfriend.'

    Who's not your girlfriend?' Her eyes were egg-large, smug with the knowledge that she'd tricked me.

    'Helen. You thought this was from Helen.'

    We walked to her car, a dun-coloured Golf parked halfway down the street. All laughter gone from her voice now: 'Helen's poisonous. You're so blind. If you'd stayed clear of her you wouldn't be so sad, so threatened.' This last was accompanied by a squeeze of my hand.

    'Well I think I've got the measure of Helen. The balance of power is shifting.' Was it the guarded play of light from cracked streetlamps that made her look so pitiful as she ducked into the driver's seat? I buckled myself in alongside her.

    'I saw you last night, after you'd gone,' I said. 'You saw the fire? It was horrible.'

    'I did,' said Eve, 'although I didn't really pay much attention.'

    'I don't believe you,' I said, stunned. 'It was a terrible fire. How could you not pay attention? People died.'

    'I was in a daze. I felt I had to be near you. But I didn't know where to look for you. I can't explain. It was like I was trying to find you by means other than sight. I felt manipulated, forced to move in the dark.'

    I held her leg; the muscles responded and I stroked her, moving my hand under the hem of her skirt, between her thighs where she was sweating up.

    'I tried to find you, afterwards,' I said. 'But you'd gone.'

    'I'd gone, yes.' She moved her legs so I could reach down and curl my hand beneath her thigh. Her skin was soft and smooth, tight against its cargo of flesh. 'I felt very distant. It's happened before. At the party. While you were lying right next to me, I was trying to find you. I felt sick and dreamy and lethal. I felt like a beacon, calling danger towards me. And yet, at the same time, I wanted to protect you. I knew you were in my arms, but I was blind, snuffling around the house in the dark, trying to find your scent.'

    'A girl died that night,' I said. 'She was murdered in the kitchen.'

    'I know. I could almost believe that it was this sense of violence following me around that did it. I felt as though I was attracting it to you, then deflecting it away. Eve Baguley, a right old push-me-pull-you.'

    I rescued my hand, but not before Eve thrust herself against my retreating fingers. She wasn't wearing underwear and a streak of fluid painted my little finger.

    'I want you, David,' she said. 'I feel sick with the need for you.'

    Excited by her admission, I leant over to kiss her neck. I felt twisted and uncertain inside, an alien passion fuelled by the shock of the fire and her strange talk of stalking me in her unconscious. For the first time I saw Eve as a threat, but a vague one, without a specific agenda, powering through life with all the arbitrary destruction of weather.

    She parked in virtually the same spot Seamus had chosen that first night we went out together and led me, at speed, up Moor Lane past the Dukes Playhouse and Cinema on to a narrow road. Thin sounds of a band tuning their instruments clung awkwardly to the air: the tattoo of a snare drum, the glissade of an electric guitar and a toad-like fart of bass.

    'Their current single?' I asked and Eve kicked me gently.

    We angled into a backstreet suffused with light. People were spilled on to the cobbles like strange litter, necking wine bottles and beer cans. A dog on a rope leash regarded the gathering with weary, cataract eyes. Everyone had remarkable hair, be it shaved (with or without pony-tail), dyed or teased into dreadlocks. I felt ridiculously conservative, settling my backside against a brood of wheelie bins while my eyes grew accustomed to the splintering light. We numbered perhaps a dozen but it seemed like many more.

    'What
are
those things?' I asked Eve, whose face was bleached, free of any shadow. 'Arc lights? Isn't all this a bit over the top? The neighbours are going to go doolally, it's two in the morning!'

    She shrugged then smiled and waved as a bearded figure emerged from the glare: Deep Pan. The chain between his nose and ear gleamed like a weeping scar.

    He waved back before grasping the microphone which squealed its feedback protest. 'Shut the fuck up,' he growled, butting the mike, which sang even louder. 'We're The Front Bottoms. And
this-
Deep Pan raised his arms as a chord vomited from the speakers (the vibrations of which were enough to spill an empty gallon can of Duckham's Hypergrade to the cobbles)-is "My Fat Arse".'

    'Oh my God,' The lights went down, replaced by a garish flood of purple. 'They've done a good job of it. But
The Front Bottoms?'
I said. 'My Fat
Arse?'

    But Eve couldn't hear me. The intro was coming to an end, Frank and Tonka suddenly statuesque as their chords reverberated to silence, arms raised, steel plectrums glinting. Then, over feeble harmonics:

    
What I lack in pitch I make up for in punch What I eat for breakfast I bring back up for lunch You might hate my haircut You might think I suck Well come and kiss my fat arse 'Cos I don't give a fuck

    This last syllable was strung out for as long as Deep Pan's lungs could accommodate it. The song went on in a similar vein, ending abruptly. They went on to sing songs where only the titles seemed different: 'Prostitute You', 'Bone', 'Milk My Love Udder'. When the neighbours started howling complaints from upstairs windows and the police made their presence known at one end of the alleyway, The Front Bottoms turned to acoustic guitars and played a passable cover of an old Lou Reed song, Deep Pan's voice surprisingly melodic now it was devoid of any anger.

    The floodlights killed, I sat with Eve towards the back of the alleyway, behind the modelled heads capped with vague light falling in from bathrooms and pale silvery streetlamps that had escaped a bricking. She leaned against me.

    'You'll stay with me tonight, yes?' Eve asked, the words hot against my neck.

    'I'd love to.' I felt her lips curl into a smile, her tongue press against my throat and move there. When she pulled away, cool air shaped the journey her tongue had made. She was looking directly at me. In this uncertain light her eyes were black.

    I stared into them until nothing else mattered: the band became a meaningless dull constant; the people might as well be somewhere else. Eve's tattoo threatened to bloat and fall from the V of her bottle-green jumper. And then a scrape and a click and I was distracted from the kiss I was about to plant. I knew the noise-that scuff of boots with good, solid soles. She was walking away from the band, her half-length leather jacket catching the light poorly in its battered material where it gleamed like a skin of wax.

    'I'm just going… for a piss,' I said, fighting to keep my voice even. Eve's hand took an age to free itself from mine; her nails clung to my cuticles with cattish tenacity.

    I ran after the girl, who had already rounded the corner. The cobbles reduced my speed to an ungainly limp and threatened to send me sprawling into a bed of tired nettles running adjacent to the alleyway.

    
Our past keeps coming back,
(sang Deep Pan)
You know she'll do for you. His face is burning black, There's nothing you can do.

    I cast a glance back and Deep Pan was standing outside the garage, watching me. The audience were smothered in darkness but it seemed they were looking too: eyes glinting like chips of coal in a thick, black seam.

    I could see Eve, wrestling with something that was spreading, stain-swift, across her chest. Or was she just dancing in and out of the shadows? The music seemed to cut off as soon as I put the corner between us. The girl was standing on the main road, looking up and down, as if checking for traffic. As I approached, she turned round and favoured me with a crooked smile. She looked just as I'd dreamed her, down to the shallow arch of her eyebrows, the burnished sheen of the buckles on her leather jacket. It was the woman who had died at the party. She showed me a number of deep wounds on her stomach and thighs. Out of her jacket pocket she pulled a claw hammer, which she buried, without ceremony, into the meat of her left eye. Then she-or rather, the driving force behind the illusion-came for me.

    I ran back to the gig to find the audience vanished and a handful of people sitting on bins, smoking and sucking on bottles of beer. A cymbal shivered as it was put away.

    'What took you?' asked Tonka, his eyes underlit by the orange rind of his cigarette.

    'I went for a piss,' I said.

    Eve lurched into me. She was thick with the smell of cider. 'David, where have you
been?
You were gone for an hour and a
half.
'

    'Some piss,' said Tonka and shuffled away.

    'Oh,' I said, trying not to display my shock. 'I ran into a friend and we got talking. You know.'

    'Take me home, David.' She pushed a knot of keys into my palm.

    'Just a sec,' I said, pushing past her. Deep Pan was alternating between fastening his mouth to a can of Red Stripe and the mouth of a girl in a catsuit.

    'Pan?' I said. And then, 'Um, Deep Pan? Those lyrics, the line-'

    Deep Pan's hand rolled like the closing slatted lid of a writing bureau over the jut of the girl's breast. He whispered something in her ear which made her nostrils flare and flatten as she snorted laughter.

    'The line, Deep Pan, where you go-'

    'Which song? Tell me the song.' His voice was oily and rough at the same time. Smooth bastard.

    'Well, I don't know. I heard it as I went after… as I went off for a piss.'

    Deep Pan flicked something or nothing from my lapel. Either way, the gesture surprised me and then filled me with a kind of diluted panic; I was suddenly in the night club again, surrounded by threatening people with non-committal faces. 'What song? How can I tell you if I don't know the song, Daveness?'

    ' "She'll Do For You", or something like that. You sing a line that goes, "Our past is coming back", or something. And "You know she'll do for you".'

    Deep Pan eyed me indulgently, smiling like a father watching his son achieve something almost impressive or worthy of comment. 'Me know no song of that description. It not in
my
repertoire, chumly.'

    'But-' I said.

    'No.' He squared up to me and his face screwed slo-mo into a moue of incredulity. 'You fucking hear me?'

    Frank leaned over and touched Eve on the arm. 'Stick around. We're having a party. It wouldn't be the same.'

    'I'll stay if David wants to stay.'