Utterly Monkey. Nick Laird
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and stood on the cistern. I don’t know why I didn’t lock the bathroom door. If I’d locked that fucking door…I’m wriggling out through the window, the wee one. We only have a wee window in there, and it’s awkward because I’m going head first and I’m about to fall onto the scullery roof on my face and break my fucking neck. It’s about ten feet or so. But it doesn’t fucking matter anyway because I hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. And I hear my dad shouting my name. He’s screaming it. Geordie, Geordie. Over and over. And I’m halfway out the window. Caught in the window really, like in a mousetrap’ – Geordie slides the first two fingers of his right hand between the thumb and index finger of his left, and wriggles them to show the swimming of a man caught in a window – ‘and I feel this whack on my left leg. They don’t pull me in. They just stand there beating the tripe out of my fucking legs. I’m screaming at the top of my voice, I’m waking the whole fucking estate.’
They break stares, both a little embarrassed. Odd how intimate it is to look into someone’s eyes. Like staring at the sun. You can only do it for a second. Danny is feeling relaxed now, forthright, made in Ulster. Geordie’s story’s reminding him of differences and how he doesn’t have to wake in the night to find four thugs coming for him like the apocalyptic Horsemen. He waits for Geordie to go on and glances round the pub. No one’s near enough to hear. Or young enough. There’s only two old guys sitting up at the bar, huddled, with stares that stall in mid-air. It’s like a care home in here, he thinks. With Gerard pickling the residents in order to preserve them.
‘So there’s four of them. And I know them. In fact you know one of them too. Jacksy Hewitt, from out past Fairhill.’
Danny nods but can’t think of the face. ‘From McMullen’s class?’
‘That’s the cunt. Well, Jacksy sticks a blue pillow case over my head and I’m standing in my own bathroom and I piss myself. I actually piss myself. On my legs and the floor. And one of them is saying to me. Not so tough now sweetheart, not so tough now. And they push me down the stairs, I’m stumbling, and one of them is pinning my da against the wall with a baseball bat. And he says to him We’ll he back for you granddad. And they tape my hands behind my back with that silvery gaffer tape and lead me out through my own garden and trip me on the pavement. I’m lying on my face in my fucking keks in the middle of the estate with a pillow case on my head. Two of them lift me and dump me in the boot of some crappy wee Astra or something and I can hear them hooting and laughing as they start her and tear off. We take a right out the estate so I know we’re going towards Ardress or round the back of the town.’
Eyeballing Danny now, Geordie’s showmanship is giving way to something hard like fear. He slows right down as if he’s suddenly exhausted.
‘It was the industrial estate…That’s where it was. Behind Harrison’s Meats…I know. You used to fucking work there. Could have done with you there then, Danny boy. You and a big meat cleaver. You and big Mungo and me with a cleaver each. We could have done some damage.’
‘What had they got? I mean, what else apart from the baseball bats?’
Geordie shakes his head, and sets his mouth as if he’s disappointed.
‘Pack of stupid bastards. Idiots. Eeeeeejitttts.’
He shakes his head and elongates the word like an Englishman doing an impression of an Ulster yokel. A seahorse of smoke rides out from the cigarette tip.
‘Bats, yes, and a shotgun, it was an old farm gun, double barrelled, and the pistol. And they had a children’s torch. A fucking children’s torch. Green, with a wee purple dinosaur on it. Couldn’t even get proper torches. And the batteries were shit in it or whatever so they had to reverse the car and put the headlights on me…You’ve heard this bit before haven’t you?’
Danny had. Everyone in the county had, he figured, seeing as his mother’d rang him to tell him.
‘Aye but go on.’
‘So that fucker Jacksy? You know who I’m talking about?’
Danny nodded.
‘He takes out the wee peashooter pistol. And two of them are kneeling on me back and I’m squealing, absolutely squealing like a pig. And it’s against my calf, I can feel the barrel of it, cold, pressing into my calf, and he tries to fire it and it fucking sticks. Unbelievable. So they work at it, blaming each other, bickering, and one kneels down by my face. And my face’s all cut, mouth full of gravel from the car park.’
He pauses. He can tell a story, Danny thinks.
‘I’m fit to be tied. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going so one of them slaps me. Hard. And he says Wake up sunshine.’
He does this clipped, chirpy little voice.
‘Now, we’ll let you choose. Either we wait for another shooter or we use the hats to break your legs. Your choice. What’ll it be? Well you know the score, I’d probably never run again and maybe never walk if they use those bats. Smithereens. You’re completely fucked. So I waited. And I knew they weren’t going for my knees. I knew they were going to do the calves. I knew them and they knew I knew them. It was a warning really.’
He pauses, does a little stoic sigh. ‘The pain’s gone nearly completely. Only a stiffness now. And a wee limp. A wee limp for Hopalong Wilson.’
Danny’s annoyed he’s skipped the main bit.
‘So what did you say, when they gave you the choice?’
‘I think I said Fuck off. Maybe more than once. Maybe more than twice.’
Geordie emits a little mocking, breathy laugh through his long nose. Then stretches his upper lip down over his teeth. It looks for a second like he’s wearing a gum shield. Then he opens his mouth with an audible puck.
‘And then, when they started messing around, swinging the bats, I said I’d wait. So Jacksy got in the car and left, spinning the tubes and swerving round me. I was begging them, then, to let me go. I was like a kid. Screaming that I’d learnt my lesson. That I’d leave the fucking country. That I’d marry Janice. That I’d never deal a thing. That I’d deal everything they wanted. That I’d skin myself and make them coats. Anything, anything at all I thought would work. It seemed like hours. Me lying there crying and whingeing, stinking of piss, and the three of them left are kicking me and telling me to fuck up. And then that cunt comes back. And then two get down across my back again and I feel another barrel against my calf again, the left, and I black out.’
‘Fucking hell mate.’
‘Yeah…One of them telephoned my da from a phone box somewhere and told him where I was. Da was sitting there in the living room, crying apparently, with the police round making him cups of tea. I woke up in the Royal…’
Geordie looks up and grins. Danny can see a practised line coming.
‘…with the world’s worst hangover and the best kneecapping surgeon in the Northern Hemisphere sitting on my bed. He was just sitting grinning at me like he was my fucking uncle.’
Geordie leant back on the stool and gripped it with his hands, keeping his arms straight, like a man on a rodeo. Danny turned his empty glass in his hand, as if tuning in for the correct response. He looked Geordie straight in the eyes for maybe three, four seconds, and then said, with a slight shake of his head, ‘Your round.’
Later, Danny and Geordie were sitting staring at two tidemarked pint glasses and Danny asked him again, serious now, ‘So, how come you’re here?
‘Well, I stopped the anti-social behaviour, the joyriding. But I was still seeing Janice, and still dealing a little and then, yesterday evening it was, I got the word to get out.’
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