Chapter Seven #2
showmen who can’t believe they’ve laid hands on the real thing,
turned out not to be helpless at all. Nor was she lovely: not in
the end stages, when her submission to capture turned into a
complex passive hunting game that lured her captors out to sea as a
grand feast for her waiting offspring. Her face distorted to a
razor-mouthed skull. Her eyes became glowing slits. Priddy curled
up in his chair. He thought about the Sweet Rose and her crew. Five of
them, three under eighteen, one of them a baby...
“Hoi. Are you gonna buy this shit off me, or what?”
Priddy
had almost managed to forget about Baz. He was surprised he’d sat
the movie out. Then, guys like Baz had a good passive-hunting game
of their own. They could wait, and let time and rising hungers do
their work. It was dark outside now, fog pressing cold flat hands
to the glass. “I want you to leave.”
“No, you don’t.” Baz swung his legs down, folded his arms and
stared at Priddy intently. “Look at you, man. You’re a friggin’
wreck. Just imagine this sweet dope undoing all those chilly little
knots in your guts and your brain.”
Priddy
was used to the automated light that began a high-beam sweep at
dusk, making his eyrie creak as the lantern revolved. What he
hadn’t yet encountered was the horn. The roar of it burst from the
air and the walls around him, combination elephant and whale call,
majestic and vast. For once he wasn’t the one who jumped hardest or
fell off his chair. He watched Baz lurching to his feet with a grim
satisfaction. “Visibility must have dropped below the critical
point.”
“How bloody fascinating. Fuck’s sake, Prid—nearly burst my
fucking eardrums.”
“You’d better go, then. I can’t switch it off. It’ll keep up
until the fog clears.”
The howl
came again. Hagerawl sang in three-tone phrases. “Don’t be a
hardarse,” Baz said into the reverberant silence. “Huddy wants me
to sell this, all right? Truth be told, I owe him a few quid. So
you can have ten grams of this for thirty. I can see that much
crumpled up by your car keys over there.”
“That’s grocery money. And half of twenty five isn’t ten,
Baz.”
Priddy
caught his breath. He hadn’t spoken. The DVD player switched off.
Fragments of reflected light from above them whipped through the
room, and then the horn cried out again. Merou stepped out of the
vibrating air behind Baz and laid a hand on his shoulder. “There’s
a special hell, you know.”
Baz
whipped round. “What?”
“A special hell. For those who put stumbling blocks in the way
of wandering feet.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Jacques Merouac.” Merou, dressed in shirt and jeans a little
too large for him, still gracious as a prince at an ambassadorial
reception, held out a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr...”
“Fuck. Is this the copper you were talking about,
Prid?”
Merou
chuckled. “Quite the opposite. Fellow villain, if you like. I’ll
take that nice lump of resin off your hands—all of it, not half.
For forty.”
Baz
grabbed his goods off the table. He began to back off, eyes fixed
on Merou. “Is this some kind of bloody sting? I know my rights, you
know. There’s such a thing as entrapment.”
“All right, all right. Fifty. Hand it over, Baz. I’m not a
copper, and you’ve got to pay your debts.”
Any
second now the horn would roar again. Priddy tried to brace against
it, to throw a net of comprehension over the scene in the room.
Merou was feeling in the pockets of his jeans. “I seem to be a bit
short,” he said, and then as the blare shook the tower once more,
held one hand up, snapping his fingers. He opened his palm like a
flower. Sitting on the flat of it was an apple, pink and gold, just
like the one he’d given to Priddy for breakfast. “Ah. Here you
go.”
Baz
snatched the fruit greedily. He tossed the foil package at Merou,
who caught it deftly. “There better not be any fucking funny
business going on,” he growled at Priddy, retreating towards the
door. “I’ve been in this game a long time. Nobody gets one over on
me.”
He fled. In the silence before that next blast, Priddy
listened to his biker boots clattering down the stairs. He wondered
how he’d react when he discovered he was clutching a
pomme de mer instead of a
fifty-pound note. “So, what?” he said hoarsely to Merou, who was
sniffing appreciatively at his purchase. “You’re a magician now, as
well as a... a monster? And a mermaid?”
“Sorry I had to dash off the other day. Did you get my
note?”
“Yeah. The missus and kids. You have a wife, Merou? Children?”
“Not in any sense that need ever concern you. Why am I a
monster?”
Not worried about the mermaid part, then. “You don’t have a boat called the Lyonesse.”
“Ah. No, I don’t. But if I did own something so utterly alien
and useless to my kind, I’d probably call her that, in honour of my
home.” He put out a hand, eyes kindling with the concerned
affection Priddy recognised but couldn’t remember deserving.
“What’s the matter? Did you hear something bad about
me?”
“What happened to the crew of the Sweet Rose? Did you...” The question
in Priddy’s throat was ridiculous, but so was everything else going
on in this strange night, whose fog had suddenly cleared to
glimmering stars, silencing the horn. “Did you eat
them?”
“Oh, good grief. What have you been watching?”
“The She Creature,” Priddy said
honestly. “She made the people take her out to sea so she could
feed them to her daughters. All except the girl. She liked the
girl.”
“It’s a very good film. Based on inaccurate research, of
course. Eating people’s not practicable these days.”
“Did you punch my dad in the face at Rosewarne
Cove?”
“I did do that, yes. You have to agree he had it
coming.”
All Priddy wanted was to throw himself across the room and
into Merou’s arms. He didn’t care if he’d eaten the crew of
the Sweet Rose or
not. Instead he wiped away the tears that had risen and spilled
down his cheeks unnoticed. “Those clothes aren’t yours, are they?”
he demanded roughly. “They don’t fit.”
“Well, there’s a limit to what you can get off a washing line
on a wet night in Hagerawl. And I saw you had a guest, so I didn’t
want to show up exactly
as nature intended. Don’t worry, I’ll put them
back! And, er... if the fate of the Rose crew’s of such concern to you, I
should have news for you shortly. It all depends.” He smiled,
tugging at the front of his gaudily patterned shirt. “I tell you
what—these rags aren’t half as nice as yours. Can I have your
Weeverfish T-shirt back?”
Priddy
threw it at him. He didn’t want Merou to see the mix of fear, joy
and confusion making pea soup of his thought processes. Baz’s mug
was still on the table. Anxious to expunge all trace of him, Priddy
grabbed that and his own and began to run water into the
sink.
When he
turned around—less than thirty seconds later—Merou was sprawled in
the armchair in front of the stove. He was wearing not only
Priddy’s T-shirt but the jeans he’d borrowed before. From somewhere
he’d acquired rolling papers and a box of matches, and had just lit
up what looked like the most majestic joint Priddy had ever seen.
He met Priddy’s disbelieving stare. “Oops,” he said unrepentantly.
“Couldn’t resist. You know how I said doing two-legged things was
nice when you haven’t been topside for a while?”
“Yeah.” Priddy managed to smooth the incredulity out of his
voice. “I remember.”
“Well, lung stuff is nice too. Smelling the flowers. Smoking a
fatty.” He coughed, waved smoke away and reached to pick up
Priddy’s medicine box, the one Kit had made and decorated for him.
He shook it playfully, like a maraca gourd. “None for you, I’m
afraid, not on top of this lot.”
Priddy
took one deep breath and then another. They were meant to be
calming, but only carried the pungent scent-symphony of the pot
into his starving marrow. “What was that you were saying to Baz
about stumbling blocks?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I don’t expect anybody to wrap me in cotton wool. But is that
not a little insensitive? Even for you?”
“Looks to me like you’ve wrapped yourself. Not in cotton
wool—in this big tube of white stone. I bet you were surprised to
see Baz Dingwall here tonight.”
“Yeah. It’s part of why I came here—to get away from men like
him. Do you know him?”
“Not yet. I will, though. In 2019 he and Huddy Jones try to rip
off an incoming supply boat from France. The owner ditches
overboard and leaves the pair of them holding the baby—ten grand of
cocaine—just as Airborne Surveillance arrives. They get fifteen
years apiece, though Baz swings time off for good behaviour and has
to spend his next five springtimes planting daffs along the edge of
the A30.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“As a side note, and because I thought it might make you feel
better about Baz. But to get back to my point—what’s the good of
being able to say no when you haven’t got anything to say yes
to?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, you do. You’ve been such a good lad, locked up in your
tower. I bet there’ve been a few nights when you’d have plaited
your hair and let Baz Dingwall climb up it, if he only brought some
good shit with him.”
“Fuck you, Merou.”
“It’s easy to say no to thin air. I bet saying it now is
hard.”
He held
out the joint. Priddy backed up against the sink, head spinning.
Merou watched him for a long, thoughtful moment, then took another
deep drag. He arched his spine, ran his hand into his hair and
shuddered in pleasure. “Oh, God, I feel so sweet. Yes, really hard,
eh, Priddy? And the fact is, it wouldn’t hurt you to say yes to
this good weed. There’s nothing in it to harm you. But it’s bloody
good practice for saying no to something that would.”
“You bastard.”
“Yep. And yet here you are.”
Yes, there he was. That was something he could choose to say
no to, as well. He could choose not to stand around and be
head-fucked by a lunatic. The owner of the crack-boat had had the