The Cutting Crew (2 page)

Another roar. I didn't even blink.

Let's start with my flat.

The rent cost me a little under half my monthly payslip, which would certainly have been too much for me to afford if I hadn't had alternative sources of funding. By the time that Sean got in touch with me, the police had stopped paying me anyway - but the money for the flat had always come out of my savings. It was four months after I left Rachel and moved in that I finally heard from Sean, and I hadn't been to work for at least three of those.

Everything seemed to go downhill when I moved here. But we'll get to that.

The flat itself was small, but not as bad as I'd expected. I'd looked around three different places - all of them pokey little holes where you needed to turn sideways just to get from one end to the other. I was beginning to despair, and then I found this. It had three rooms - a living area with a double bed, a kitchen, a bathroom - all connected by a single corridor. Space-wise, you could swing a dead cat if you aimed right, but you didn't feel as though the previous tenant might have left one somewhere so you could try. On the downside, the ceiling was riddled with damp, there was no shower and I would discover that the boiler didn't work. But I could live with these things.

'Recently painted,' the estate agent pointed out, ignoring the deformities in the brickwork as he tapped the wall with his pen.

'Nice and clean. Close to all the local amenities and handy for the centre. All in all, it's a good property.'

All in all, it was a shit property and we both knew it, but the rent was fair and I was desperate. The day before, Rachel had said that she wanted me out. In truth, I'd probably been waiting for her to say it to save me the extra guilt of leaving of my own accord, but it meant that I needed somewhere to go and that I didn't have the luxury to pick and choose. This place, I decided, would do.

'I'll take it,' I said.

The contract would be six months to begin with, and then a month at a time, depending on how much the estate agent and I pissed each other off. I signed for it, and then went home and told Rachel that night. She just nodded. We'd agreed that our separation was temporary, but the decision to separate in the first place had been mine, and it had whacked a lot out of her. For me, it was over between us, but it had felt okay to soften the blow a little by agreeing to that word: temporary. A six-month contract was a big thing, but you could pretend that it wasn't permanent if you squinted at it and looked away quickly.

Anyway, there wasn't much to say after that. She nodded, looking pale and hollow, as though I'd killed her. When I began packing some basic stuff, I think she started crying and went out. I don't know where she went.

I didn't take much, due to the lack of space - just my favourite books, some music, most of my clothes. I took my laptop, knowing that I'd need the internet to maintain some perfunctory contact with the outside world. My guitar was broken, so I figured I'd just buy a new one. I used a wedge of the money I'd stored away to kit the flat out a little better: new covers and cloths, plates and cups and cutlery. If I was going to be living there, then I needed it to feel like some kind of home. Of course, it wasn't really living as such; it was more like existing, hand to mouth. In my head, searching for some way to occupy myself from hour to hour was like leaping between stepping stones, and I would find myself hoping that the far bank came into view before those stones ran out.

'Any problems, just give us a ring,' the estate agent said. He had a false smile, and his tone of voice suggested that he didn't expect to hear from me.

'I'm sure I'll be very happy here,' I said.

But I wouldn't and I knew it. At that point, it was like one of my engines had been shot out and I was spiralling down to earth. The flat was just more of the same. Full of my things, it still seemed empty; when I put music on, it still felt quiet. Perhaps it was just me.

Four months later, Sean got in touch. That night, I'd been out.

Most of the time in the flat I just spent watching television, reading, surfing the internet: just generally passing the time. But after a while - like anyone - I'd get bored and lonely, and so sometimes I'd go out on an evening and get drunk in company that, if not exactly better than my own, was at least plural and so better in theory.

The estate agent had told me that the flat was convenient for the centre, but what he'd meant was that I was close to the western wing of Wasp. I lived on the edge of Horse, which houses the city's university and much of its student population. On the eastern side of Horse, you have Wasp, which is where most of the city's redlight activities took place. Five minutes and I'm there.

That night, I started in Whitelocks, which is about as close to Wasp as you could get while still keeping in Horse.

Whitelocks is the oldest pub in the city. You walk in and straight away you can imagine it years back - full of navvies and engineers, all sooty and smelling of earth and smoke and steam. Most of the fittings haven't changed in the meantime. The windows are stainedglass, ancient and misty, and the building itself is painted black to about chest-height, and then white from there on up. There are benches outside, and brass rails running along the walls. Inside, more brass separates you from a raised bar, and everything else is divided into dark alcoves and occasional mirrors.

I was planning to go to a club afterwards and, since I was on my own, I wanted to be reasonably drunk when I arrived. I bought two pints of strong beer, downed one at the bar and then went and sat outside on a bench to drink the other.

It was nice - a cool night, but pleasant and fresh. The sky was clear; the stars, bright and defined. On the bench next to me, an older woman was sitting drinking wine. She was dressed in a blue suit and was smoking a cigarette - although it seemed more like the cigarette was smoking her: wrinkling up her skin; sucking something out of her and turning it into greasy air. She was staring straight in front, almost motionless, except that her hands had a bar-fly shudder. A swift sex change, I thought, and here was my future.

I checked my mobile. No messages.

I finished the beer and headed out, but stopped at the bottom of the red-brick alleyway that led on to the main street, where someone had taped an A4 sheet of paper to the wall. There was a photograph of an eye in the centre of it, and it had obviously been digitally altered because the retina was violet. It seemed to watch me as I moved past, and I wondered why it was there. Local bands often put up flyers, but it seemed too unusual for that. There was no writing on it for one thing.

I forgot it quickly.

The club I was going to was called Spooks, but I hit three other bars on the way there. By the time I walked into the club, a good kilometre into Wasp, I was light on my feet and feeling relaxed and natural.

Let me tell you about Spooks. Every city has one: clubs that aren't exactly rough so much as cheap and nasty. They have a reputation for being full of older, slightly desperate women: housewives out for a fling; hard divorcees that have been aerobicised and tanned until they resemble fruit. The men all sport barrel chests that have spilled out at the bottom, and shirts a decade too young for them. Basically, it's a meat market - except that everything is offal. You would very possibly kill a minor relative before admitting to going there.

Why was I here? Like I said, I spent a lot of the time in the flat feeling lonely, and sometimes I just wanted some company. Not necessarily anything serious, but if that happened then I could live with it. And it did happen every now and then. I was younger than most of the men in here by quite some distance, and although I wasn't particularly good-looking I didn't break the mirrors either.

But it didn't happen often: I never actually made a move on anyone, because sly lounge lizard wasn't really my style, and so I tended to just stand there, watching the dancefloor, drinking beer after beer and killing time.

Once I'd relaxed about it, there was something quite therapeutic about pretending to be above it all. I'd always been a people watcher for one thing. Even though at some vague point in the last four months I'd stopped being a cop, it was partly a leftover from that, and partly just the way I was. And in Spooks you had people in all their dull glory to watch to your heart's content.

That was what I was doing, perfectly happily, until about half eleven when the trouble flared up.

There were some guys over on the far side of the dancefloor that were a hell of a lot younger even than me, and probably too young to be in here. Some part of me - and this was mostly cop leftovers had clocked them the first time I saw them, and I'd subconsciously kept tabs on them ever since. There were five of them - three skinny guys, one wiry athlete and a chunky amateur weight-trainer - but basic shape aside, they all looked the same: neat shirts and smart-casual trousers, short hair, sweaty faces. Each was holding a bottle of designer lager against his solar-plexus.

I knew their sort, and it was trouble. It wasn't because they were evil or anything; they were just too young to have figured out the way to behave. If you caught my eye by accident, for example, I might smile at you; if you caught theirs, there might be a fight. You just needed to avoid them until they grew up enough to be at ease with themselves. At that age, it's all image. Too many films; too many magazines. Being anywhere near them was like being in a Mexican stand-off where nerves might cause someone to open fire at any moment.

They were standing in a rough circle. Occasionally one of them would turn to look at somebody - checking out a girl - head twisting around. Nodding and laughing.

I saw the poor guy bump into them before he got anywhere near; it was a Titanic-iceberg situation. I tracked him across the floor as he headed back from the toilets towards the bar: early thirties, neat haircut, glasses. He was wearing a jumper and smart trousers. One look and you knew that there was nothing physical about him: you could beat three of him up on half a cup of coffee. In a place like this, he might as well have had 'victim' tattooed on his forehead.

One of the skinny kids laughed at something and stepped back, but the neat guy was heading to the bar and wasn't watching; two seconds later, he smacked into the kid. Just a slight jostle; nothing much. But beer slopped out of the kid's bottle, and immediately all of them turned. Faces hard as stone. They knew how they had to act.

I moved a little closer, leaning against a pillar.

The neat guy held his hands up to say sorry, and paused there, looking at them and waiting for his apology to be accepted. But the skinny kid was pissed off; he shook his head and gestured at his shirt, which seemed to have caught some of his beer.

I couldn't hear what he was saying, and I didn't need to. My shirts ruined; look what you've fucking done.

The neat guy just seemed helpless and unsure. It was there on his face: what was he going to do - reverse the flow of time? As nervous as he was, he certainly wasn't going to buy the kid another beer to replace the mouthful he'd just lost. So there was an awkward couple of seconds, and then the guy said sorry again and walked away.

The kids conferred amongst themselves. Their heads kept craning just like before - except that now they were all hunting out this disrespectful bastard. Where had he gone? Who was he with?

How many of them were there?

I saw what they did: the guy arrived at the bar and met who I imagined must be his girlfriend. She looked a little alarmed as he leaned in and spoke to her; and then she glanced up, saw the boys watching and looked away quickly. She said something to the guy and he nodded, and instead of buying a drink they headed off around the other side of the club. The exit was round that way.

I checked my mobile.

Still no messages.

When I looked back up, the boys had started moving: swigging their beers back and walking in the same direction as the couple.

Three of them were just following - ambling along - but the two in front were actively stalking, watching the undergrowth for signs of attack as they went. I noted those two for future reference. The three behind were buoyed by them: consequently, they would be deflated along with them.

I let them get past me, downed the last of my beer and headed off. I was pretty drunk at that point and didn't know what exactly I was going to do. A small, sober part of me was telling me to leave it alone and not bother. After all, my brain knew full well that I invariably let myself down in any situation that demanded heroism, moral gravity or much in the way of considered, rational thought.

This, it told me now, would turn out badly.

You're not a cop anymore*, it said. And that was true, but I kept walking anyway.

The crowds were sparse near the double doors at the exit. The bouncers there were bulked up in long, punch-proof black coats, watching what was unfolding outside with professional interest, the way a security expert might examine a lock-pick he'd found on the street. It was obvious, even before I walked out into the sharp night air, that they were going to do precisely fuck all about what was happening. Why would they? Outside is outside. There were a fair few other people, as well - couples and groups - all standing and watching. I saw a girl wince, just as I started to hear the sounds of the fight: grunts and blows, and someone calling for help, sounding frightened and angry and upset. Other people were walking past, looking back, pausing to see. Some of the guys were smiling. Others looked nervous, disgusted. A whole range of human response, but no real action.