Wild Boys
by Pat Black
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A lot of strong ones.
Description: Rab and Jonty, fresh from a busy day of drink, drugs, assault and robbery, decide to rip off an ambulance. But there's a shock in store.
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Rab and Jonty laughed and laughed, and finally the tears came. Rab’s eyes were screwed up deep in the centre of his bowling-ball head, and the look rather suited him. Jonty – thinner, yellower, with a rash of hair on his head – was bent double like a heroin addict on a bus.
“He just took it!” Rab screeched, when he was able to take a breath. “Can you believe, he just took it! Cunt’s uniform said he was in the Marines!”
“He kept trying to get up!” said Jonty. “He wanted to stand at attention! He wanted to march away!”
“On the double!” They laughed again.
“Can you believe he just took it, though?” Jonty shook his head, clearing the tears from his eyes.
“When you quick-marched over his face, man... I thought I was gonna die laughing.”
“I bet he thought he was gonna die, too.”
Jonty took a slug of the tonic wine bought with the money they’d taken off the squaddie, who might still be lying at the bus stop even now. They were down to the bitter end of the bottle, the silt and sediment of it. “Ah’m pure buzzin’, man,” Jonty said. “Why don’t we head back up the scheme and bounce some cunt?”
“That’s the game,” Rab said. Their afternoon’s schedule being decided, they both took a piss against a bare brick wall that had once been part of a shop, or a school, at the waste ground. They cast dark shadows on the drawings of sex organs and ejaculate, the tags and the insults. Rab having the honour of chasing the last of the bottle, he hurled it against the wall when he was done. It died well, with a glittery shower of shard and beetroot droplets. They both watched the last drops trickle through the mazy brickwork, stealing over the moss and staining the clay red.
They had a feral look to them, even in the comforting light of the afternoon. Old ladies with shopping trollies hurried out the way. One or two figures in shell suits and baseball caps hailed them for a distance, raised a greeting from the other side of the streets. Rab and Jonty acknowledged them with a nod. They met few people on their path, aside from the dog walkers whom they instinctively understood they should not harass, the pit bull owners in particular.
“Thing is,” Rab said, “these squaddies... they wave a gun at some manky tramp in Afghanistan, they think they’re hard. They think they’re the shit.”
“They’re not the shit,” Jonty said.
“That cunt wasn’t the shit, anyway.”
“Kicked the shit out of him.”
The shopping precinct had been left half-demolished for so long that the rubble had settled in the earth, levelled out. Only the off-sales and Rehan’s convenience store, which has also an off-sales, survived among the row of shuttered, derelict shops. A hillside was visible through the gap cleared by the JCBs in days unremembered and the late winter sun at that particular time of day had coloured the grass on the slopes an unearthly pale green. At the foot of the hillside a bent set of goalposts cast a vast, insectoid shadow mesh on the flat grasses. This sight passed without comment from Rab and Jonty, who had spied a ragged group of schoolchildren making their way down the street.
“Dinnertime yet?” Rab asked.
Jonty checked his watch. “Not sure. Might be hometime.”
“No lunch money, then. No matter.” Rab turned and crossed the road, sudden as a shark banking in the water. One lone boy who was drinking a can of coke, with his collar and school tie not quite hidden beneath his ski jacket, flinched when Rab crossed his path.
It’s almost as if they know, Rab thought.
“Hey mate, got the time there?”
The boy shook his head, eyes wide. His heart would be starting to beat right about now, Rab knew. Just like he knew his eyes would start to water, and the fear would loosen his bowels, take away all the power from his legs.
I can change his life, Rab thought. He’ll remember this.
“Why is it I can see a watch on your fuckin’ wrist then?”
Jonty appeared by Rab’s side. “This prick giving you cheek?” he asked Rab, cocking his head.
The boy held up his hands, half-smiling. “Hey,” he said, backing into a fence. “It’s cool.”
Rab laughed in his face. “I know it is, poof. Take off the fuckin’ watch.”
“I can’t. Mister, my mum gave me it.”
Rab and Jonty stared at each other. “Oh ho!” Jonty said. “He just dissed you!”
“We’ve got a fighter here,” Rab said, nodding. His tongue flicked over his lower lip.
“Aye. I reckon he’s starting.”
The boy shook his head, and his eyes were watering now. “No,” he said. “I don’t want any trouble. It’s just that I can’t give you my watch.”
“It’s okay,” Rab said. “I was only messing with you. I don’t want your watch. Don’t panic. I just want to take some of your juice. Is that alright?”
The boy nodded.
“You can hold onto the can, okay? I won’t take if off you, I promise. I just want a wee sip. I’m thirsty.”
The can trembled while the boy held it up to Rab, who gripped the slippery metal. While this went on, lots of people passed them by on the same side of the street, heads lowered. Others, across the street, glanced over but looked away when Jonty’s red-threaded eyes met theirs.
Rab moved his head down to take a swig from the can, but at the last minute he bit the boy’s finger, hard. The boy moaned and snatched his hand away, letting go of the can.
“Thanks, awful kind of you,” Rab said, before gulping from it. “You’re one of they Good Samaritans. A real saint.”
Jonty punched the boy just the once, a cracker just beneath the eye that spun him around into the fence and left his lower jaw slack with shock. The boy said “Ooof,” like he might have done had he been a character in a comic.
“Wee cunt,” Jonty said. “That’s what you get for not doing what you’re told, first time.”
“Lucky I’m in a good mood,” Rab said, “or I’d take the watch as well.” He pointed at the boy as they moved off. “You. Remember this.”
“Why didn’t he run?” Jonty said, accepting a swig of the plunder.
“Knows better.”
“If I was him, I’d have poured the juice away and then ran like fuck.”
“Know why he didnae? He knows we might be waiting here for him. Every day for the rest of his life.” Rab grinned at this idea.
“Here! You two!” An old woman with enormous glasses was standing next to the boy, who was picking up his schoolbag.
“What’s that?” Rab said, cocking a hand beneath his ear.
“You two! Come back here!”
“Sorry madam, my hearing aid isn’t working,” Rab said. “You’ll have to shout. What was that?”
“...Mind to call the police! Damned disgrace!”
“What? ’Do I want to shag you?’” Rab turned to Jonty in mock horror. “Is that what she asked? Have you ever heard the like? I’m not impressed.”
“That’s very fruity language,” Jonty agreed. “From one so mature, too.”
“No madam, I do not wish to shag you,” Rab yelled, teeth and lips still purplish with the tonic wine from earlier. “But if you would like to make an appointment with my secretary, perhaps we might have lunch some time?”
“She had a bag of messages with her,” Jonty said, his narrowed eyes keen little arrowheads.
Rab shook his head. “It’s just a craggy auld bitch. Seen her coming out of the chapel on a Sunday. There’ll be no bevvy in her bag.”
“Probably would call the busies, too. And there goes the parole.” Jonty sighed.
They turned off the main street onto Fullarton Road and took little notice of the ambulance double-parked there, the lights flashing but the siren silenced. Their immediate goal was securing more provisions from the convenience store and off-licence at the bottom of the street. Jonty came out of a shop with a half-bottle of vodka.
“I got some extra goodies as well,” Jonty said, reaching inside his shell suit jacket. He pulled out several foil-wrapped eggs. “Look, Kinder Surprises!”
“How many did you get?” Rab laughed. “You fuckin’ lay these yourself?”
Behind the mesh grille on the front of the shop, a tiny Asian woman watched them, mouth downturned in a bitter crescent.
Rab nodded at the ambulance. The stark luminous yellow and the green checks seemed to burn in the sunlight, while the lights were an insistent, almost subliminal pulse across the sandstone flats that made them blink. “What you reckon to that?”
“I reckon it’s worth checking out,” Jonty said.
“What do you reckon’s the problem?”
Jonty cracked the seal on the vodka and took a gulp. “It’s right beside the old folks’ home. One of the coffin dodgers has probably coughed it,” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Why don’t we see if we can help out?” Rab said, wiggling his eyebrows.
Cheezy shook his head. “Look, I’ll take the credit cards off you, but what in Christ’s name is that?” He pointed at the machine.
“It’s a zapper,” Rab said.
“What do you mean, a zapper? A microwave?”
“No, I mean, a zapper. You know . Zzzzzz!”
“Like in the films. ‘Clear!’ Zap! One of them.”
“A defibrillator?” Cheezy frowned.
“Aye! One of them. That’s what I meant. A defilibuster.”
“Where did you get it, exactly?”
“They had one spare,” Rab said.
“Yeah, it fell off the back of an ambulance,” Jonty said, and they all laughed.
“Hmm. Not exactly a big market for those.” Cheezy puffed through the side of his mouth, blowing a strand of greasy hair away from his face.
“Suit yourself,” Rab said. “You said the credit cards were good, though?”
“The credit cards are always good.”
“Excellent. You got any puff for us, mate?”
Cheezy had. While he was cutting the cake for Jonty, Rab sat back in a well-picked armchair and imagined that he was having a conversation with Cheezy’s bird, Pamela. She had been a total ride once upon a time but she’d gone a bit saggy since she’d had the wean. Hair a bit scraggy, clothes a bit baggy. Big diddies on her, though. He was halfway through asking her how the wean was doing when he realised he was actually having a conversation with her in real life.
“Oh, he’s fine. Getting to be a handful now,” she said. Rab nodded, then realised that the wean was actually on Cheezy’s living room floor, crawling across this ancient psychedelic carpet made up of orange lines and brown squares. It looked like the brickwork he’s seen earlier that day. The child burbled laughter at him.
“Oh, he likes your funny face!” Pamela said, delighted.
Rab smiled, although he hadn’t been making funny faces.
Much later, Rab slept in the ruins of his flat. The sun had long since vanished and the streetlight was a halo through the off-white curtains. The hash was a constant haze in the air, Venusian marsh gas; on the table, beer cans formed patterns, some askew, some bent, some fallen, like an ancient stone circle. Jonty reached for one instinctively, was satisfied with the weight and heft in it, and took a swig. Then gagged, and slammed it back to the table; a fag dowt had bobbed up against his lips.
Jittery and bored, he finally got the defenestrator going. It was like blind luck, a happy accident; somehow the lights had blinked on and thing had given a sharp, angry whine, like a smacked puppy. He grabbed the paddles, then tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet and fell full-length; the handles touched, striking sparks off each other, the sudden blue shellburst blinding him momentarily. He laughed at his own good fortune, struggling back to his feet and holding the paddles out in front of him.
“Rab... mate,” he said, struggling for balance as he crouched before his friend. “Mate, I don’t think you look too good, there.”
“Uhnz... fack off...” Rab breathed.
“It looks terminal. We need to take emergency action.” Jonty laid the paddles down on the fag-scarred coffee table and unzipped Rab’s shell-suit top. Bare skin, that’s what they said in all the films. He took up the paddles again. “I think this is for your own good, man.” He tittered, almost tipped over again.
“What’s... what’s the score?” Rab’s eyes seemed to take an age to open, the crescent edges ungluing. It was like dawn slowly breaking across the earth.
“Clear!” Jonty yelled, then jammed the paddles down on Rab’s flabby whitebread chest.
“Jonty. Jonty. Jonty.”
Jonty wasn’t sure when he’d woken up, or opened his eyes. He was only aware of it being daylight again, and that Rab was standing before him.
“Jonty. Jonty. Jonty.”
“Alright, fuck’s sake!” Jonty almost screamed. An appalling, perhaps record-breaking headache squeezed his brain in and out in time with his rapidly increasing pulse.
“Jonty, wake up. We have to go.” Rab had his shellsuit top back on. It smelled of melted plastic, with a hint of bacon. This set off a faint alarm somewhere in Jonty’s brain. Over in the corner, the debussyator was packed away neater than a parish priest’s packed lunch. Then he noticed Rab’s eyes.
“Fuck, man,” Jonty said, rolling off Rab’s couch and scattering two beer cans at his feet. “You been on the charlie? What’s up with your eyes?”
They were like saucers... no, dinner plates. No, tureens. “Nothing’s wrong with my eyes. Come on, hurry. We’ve got to go.”
“Go where? Christ, man, give me a break here!”
“There’s no time to waste, come on.”
It must still have been morning. Jonty gurned all the way down the street, trailing after Rab. He’d never seen Rab move so fast before.
“You’ve been on the charlie,” Jonty muttered. “Man, hold up, I need to be sick.”
“Look at this morning,” Rab said. “Look at it!” He stabbed a finger towards an uncertain skyline, dark clouds showing on the horizon.
“I take it back. You’re tripping.”
“Not today, mate, not ever again. Come on, we’ve got stuff to do.”
“What stuff?”
There was an old dear waiting at a pelican crossing. Rab strode over to her.
“Can we help you across?”
The woman blinked, suspicious. “No, that’s quite alright, son.”
“You sure? That’s a heavy trolley you’ve got there.”
“I’ll be fine, son, it’s alright. Thank you for asking.”
“No trouble at all,” Rab said, then rejoined Jonty. “She was nervous, I could see that. I could see that.” He nodding to himself. “I need to change...” he patted down his clothes, rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. “I need to change.... I need to change everything.”
“What? Get a grip, man. Come on, back to the flat.”
“I can’t,” Rab said. “I can’t go back there. I want to stay out here.”
“What for?”
Rab seemed puzzled. “Can’t you see them?”
“See what? Ah, come on man, it’ll rain.”
“Don’t care if it does,” Rab said. “It’s a gorgeous morning.”
Jonty considered doing a runner when Rab strode up to the cop shop. Just cutting and running. “Oh no, no you don’t,” Jonty said, pulling him back. “Look mate, I know you’re wasted, but enough is enough, here.”
“This is important. We need to... good God, this is amazing!”
“Oh, man. Whatever you’re doing, you’re on your own.” Jonty took a step back and left Rab to stroll in the door of the cop shop. He waited in a close across the road, his escape route planned out if the busies should swarm out of the door.
He tapped a cigarette on the edge of a packet. “Mental,” he said. “Absolutely mental.”
Rab came out, unscathed. Worse than that, he was grinning. Jonty had never seen Rab grin before, not properly. Just like he’d never actually heard him laugh.
“What did you do? What the fuck did you do in there?”
“I gave them the stash,” Rab declared.
Jonty’s knees buckled along with his mind, and he sat down hard on the steps of the close. “You what? You what?”
“I gave them the stash. All of it.”
“The money. Rab, the money. That was business money.” Jonty dropped his cigarette and it barrelled across the pavement, spilling tiny licks of flame. “That was fucking savings.”
“It’s better off there. I turned it in. Told them I found it.”
“Oh my God. Rab, oh Jesus Christ.” Jonty buried his head in his hands. “You better be joking.”
“Nope. It’s better with them. But, don’t worry... I was thinking about making a full confession, but I thought it was better if we’re free for the minute. To do our work.”
“Work?” Jonty moaned.
“Yes. Our work. Making it all right. Everything we did.”
“Work, you say. Making it right. Remind me to stab that cunt Cheezy next time I see him. Whatever he sold us yesterday, he has to pay for it, man.”
“Come on,” Rab said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Let’s go for it. So much to do. We have to listen to them.”
“Listen to what?” Fury surged in Jonty, swallowing the shakes, the panic, the nausea. “Listen to what, ya freak?”
Rab followed the flight of some birds as they streaked across the sky, serene as the Blessed Virgin. “The angels. Don’t you see the angels? They are everywhere. And I never knew. They’re all around us. There’s good things to be done, everywhere. Good people, with nothing bad in them, too.
“And I’d never have known it; I’d never have listened to them if you hadn’t used the machine on me. I know, I know I should be angry at that. It burned. But you woke something up. In me. In here.” He beat his chest. “You brought something back to life.”
He beat his chest again, a second before Jonty catapulted himself into his body. Rab went down on one knee, a hand upraised, as Jonty rained down the blows. There were flashes of Jonty’s rotten rat teeth, the worn soles of his training shoes, the rustle of his shellsuit.
And Rab just took it, smiling as the world tilted at a strange angle and then the light outside faded.
Swearwords: A lot of strong ones.
Description: Rab and Jonty, fresh from a busy day of drink, drugs, assault and robbery, decide to rip off an ambulance. But there's a shock in store.
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Rab and Jonty laughed and laughed, and finally the tears came. Rab’s eyes were screwed up deep in the centre of his bowling-ball head, and the look rather suited him. Jonty – thinner, yellower, with a rash of hair on his head – was bent double like a heroin addict on a bus.
“He just took it!” Rab screeched, when he was able to take a breath. “Can you believe, he just took it! Cunt’s uniform said he was in the Marines!”
“He kept trying to get up!” said Jonty. “He wanted to stand at attention! He wanted to march away!”
“On the double!” They laughed again.
“Can you believe he just took it, though?” Jonty shook his head, clearing the tears from his eyes.
“When you quick-marched over his face, man... I thought I was gonna die laughing.”
“I bet he thought he was gonna die, too.”
Jonty took a slug of the tonic wine bought with the money they’d taken off the squaddie, who might still be lying at the bus stop even now. They were down to the bitter end of the bottle, the silt and sediment of it. “Ah’m pure buzzin’, man,” Jonty said. “Why don’t we head back up the scheme and bounce some cunt?”
“That’s the game,” Rab said. Their afternoon’s schedule being decided, they both took a piss against a bare brick wall that had once been part of a shop, or a school, at the waste ground. They cast dark shadows on the drawings of sex organs and ejaculate, the tags and the insults. Rab having the honour of chasing the last of the bottle, he hurled it against the wall when he was done. It died well, with a glittery shower of shard and beetroot droplets. They both watched the last drops trickle through the mazy brickwork, stealing over the moss and staining the clay red.
They had a feral look to them, even in the comforting light of the afternoon. Old ladies with shopping trollies hurried out the way. One or two figures in shell suits and baseball caps hailed them for a distance, raised a greeting from the other side of the streets. Rab and Jonty acknowledged them with a nod. They met few people on their path, aside from the dog walkers whom they instinctively understood they should not harass, the pit bull owners in particular.
“Thing is,” Rab said, “these squaddies... they wave a gun at some manky tramp in Afghanistan, they think they’re hard. They think they’re the shit.”
“They’re not the shit,” Jonty said.
“That cunt wasn’t the shit, anyway.”
“Kicked the shit out of him.”
The shopping precinct had been left half-demolished for so long that the rubble had settled in the earth, levelled out. Only the off-sales and Rehan’s convenience store, which has also an off-sales, survived among the row of shuttered, derelict shops. A hillside was visible through the gap cleared by the JCBs in days unremembered and the late winter sun at that particular time of day had coloured the grass on the slopes an unearthly pale green. At the foot of the hillside a bent set of goalposts cast a vast, insectoid shadow mesh on the flat grasses. This sight passed without comment from Rab and Jonty, who had spied a ragged group of schoolchildren making their way down the street.
“Dinnertime yet?” Rab asked.
Jonty checked his watch. “Not sure. Might be hometime.”
“No lunch money, then. No matter.” Rab turned and crossed the road, sudden as a shark banking in the water. One lone boy who was drinking a can of coke, with his collar and school tie not quite hidden beneath his ski jacket, flinched when Rab crossed his path.
It’s almost as if they know, Rab thought.
“Hey mate, got the time there?”
The boy shook his head, eyes wide. His heart would be starting to beat right about now, Rab knew. Just like he knew his eyes would start to water, and the fear would loosen his bowels, take away all the power from his legs.
I can change his life, Rab thought. He’ll remember this.
“Why is it I can see a watch on your fuckin’ wrist then?”
Jonty appeared by Rab’s side. “This prick giving you cheek?” he asked Rab, cocking his head.
The boy held up his hands, half-smiling. “Hey,” he said, backing into a fence. “It’s cool.”
Rab laughed in his face. “I know it is, poof. Take off the fuckin’ watch.”
“I can’t. Mister, my mum gave me it.”
Rab and Jonty stared at each other. “Oh ho!” Jonty said. “He just dissed you!”
“We’ve got a fighter here,” Rab said, nodding. His tongue flicked over his lower lip.
“Aye. I reckon he’s starting.”
The boy shook his head, and his eyes were watering now. “No,” he said. “I don’t want any trouble. It’s just that I can’t give you my watch.”
“It’s okay,” Rab said. “I was only messing with you. I don’t want your watch. Don’t panic. I just want to take some of your juice. Is that alright?”
The boy nodded.
“You can hold onto the can, okay? I won’t take if off you, I promise. I just want a wee sip. I’m thirsty.”
The can trembled while the boy held it up to Rab, who gripped the slippery metal. While this went on, lots of people passed them by on the same side of the street, heads lowered. Others, across the street, glanced over but looked away when Jonty’s red-threaded eyes met theirs.
Rab moved his head down to take a swig from the can, but at the last minute he bit the boy’s finger, hard. The boy moaned and snatched his hand away, letting go of the can.
“Thanks, awful kind of you,” Rab said, before gulping from it. “You’re one of they Good Samaritans. A real saint.”
Jonty punched the boy just the once, a cracker just beneath the eye that spun him around into the fence and left his lower jaw slack with shock. The boy said “Ooof,” like he might have done had he been a character in a comic.
“Wee cunt,” Jonty said. “That’s what you get for not doing what you’re told, first time.”
“Lucky I’m in a good mood,” Rab said, “or I’d take the watch as well.” He pointed at the boy as they moved off. “You. Remember this.”
“Why didn’t he run?” Jonty said, accepting a swig of the plunder.
“Knows better.”
“If I was him, I’d have poured the juice away and then ran like fuck.”
“Know why he didnae? He knows we might be waiting here for him. Every day for the rest of his life.” Rab grinned at this idea.
“Here! You two!” An old woman with enormous glasses was standing next to the boy, who was picking up his schoolbag.
“What’s that?” Rab said, cocking a hand beneath his ear.
“You two! Come back here!”
“Sorry madam, my hearing aid isn’t working,” Rab said. “You’ll have to shout. What was that?”
“...Mind to call the police! Damned disgrace!”
“What? ’Do I want to shag you?’” Rab turned to Jonty in mock horror. “Is that what she asked? Have you ever heard the like? I’m not impressed.”
“That’s very fruity language,” Jonty agreed. “From one so mature, too.”
“No madam, I do not wish to shag you,” Rab yelled, teeth and lips still purplish with the tonic wine from earlier. “But if you would like to make an appointment with my secretary, perhaps we might have lunch some time?”
“She had a bag of messages with her,” Jonty said, his narrowed eyes keen little arrowheads.
Rab shook his head. “It’s just a craggy auld bitch. Seen her coming out of the chapel on a Sunday. There’ll be no bevvy in her bag.”
“Probably would call the busies, too. And there goes the parole.” Jonty sighed.
They turned off the main street onto Fullarton Road and took little notice of the ambulance double-parked there, the lights flashing but the siren silenced. Their immediate goal was securing more provisions from the convenience store and off-licence at the bottom of the street. Jonty came out of a shop with a half-bottle of vodka.
“I got some extra goodies as well,” Jonty said, reaching inside his shell suit jacket. He pulled out several foil-wrapped eggs. “Look, Kinder Surprises!”
“How many did you get?” Rab laughed. “You fuckin’ lay these yourself?”
Behind the mesh grille on the front of the shop, a tiny Asian woman watched them, mouth downturned in a bitter crescent.
Rab nodded at the ambulance. The stark luminous yellow and the green checks seemed to burn in the sunlight, while the lights were an insistent, almost subliminal pulse across the sandstone flats that made them blink. “What you reckon to that?”
“I reckon it’s worth checking out,” Jonty said.
“What do you reckon’s the problem?”
Jonty cracked the seal on the vodka and took a gulp. “It’s right beside the old folks’ home. One of the coffin dodgers has probably coughed it,” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Why don’t we see if we can help out?” Rab said, wiggling his eyebrows.
Cheezy shook his head. “Look, I’ll take the credit cards off you, but what in Christ’s name is that?” He pointed at the machine.
“It’s a zapper,” Rab said.
“What do you mean, a zapper? A microwave?”
“No, I mean, a zapper. You know . Zzzzzz!”
“Like in the films. ‘Clear!’ Zap! One of them.”
“A defibrillator?” Cheezy frowned.
“Aye! One of them. That’s what I meant. A defilibuster.”
“Where did you get it, exactly?”
“They had one spare,” Rab said.
“Yeah, it fell off the back of an ambulance,” Jonty said, and they all laughed.
“Hmm. Not exactly a big market for those.” Cheezy puffed through the side of his mouth, blowing a strand of greasy hair away from his face.
“Suit yourself,” Rab said. “You said the credit cards were good, though?”
“The credit cards are always good.”
“Excellent. You got any puff for us, mate?”
Cheezy had. While he was cutting the cake for Jonty, Rab sat back in a well-picked armchair and imagined that he was having a conversation with Cheezy’s bird, Pamela. She had been a total ride once upon a time but she’d gone a bit saggy since she’d had the wean. Hair a bit scraggy, clothes a bit baggy. Big diddies on her, though. He was halfway through asking her how the wean was doing when he realised he was actually having a conversation with her in real life.
“Oh, he’s fine. Getting to be a handful now,” she said. Rab nodded, then realised that the wean was actually on Cheezy’s living room floor, crawling across this ancient psychedelic carpet made up of orange lines and brown squares. It looked like the brickwork he’s seen earlier that day. The child burbled laughter at him.
“Oh, he likes your funny face!” Pamela said, delighted.
Rab smiled, although he hadn’t been making funny faces.
Much later, Rab slept in the ruins of his flat. The sun had long since vanished and the streetlight was a halo through the off-white curtains. The hash was a constant haze in the air, Venusian marsh gas; on the table, beer cans formed patterns, some askew, some bent, some fallen, like an ancient stone circle. Jonty reached for one instinctively, was satisfied with the weight and heft in it, and took a swig. Then gagged, and slammed it back to the table; a fag dowt had bobbed up against his lips.
Jittery and bored, he finally got the defenestrator going. It was like blind luck, a happy accident; somehow the lights had blinked on and thing had given a sharp, angry whine, like a smacked puppy. He grabbed the paddles, then tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet and fell full-length; the handles touched, striking sparks off each other, the sudden blue shellburst blinding him momentarily. He laughed at his own good fortune, struggling back to his feet and holding the paddles out in front of him.
“Rab... mate,” he said, struggling for balance as he crouched before his friend. “Mate, I don’t think you look too good, there.”
“Uhnz... fack off...” Rab breathed.
“It looks terminal. We need to take emergency action.” Jonty laid the paddles down on the fag-scarred coffee table and unzipped Rab’s shell-suit top. Bare skin, that’s what they said in all the films. He took up the paddles again. “I think this is for your own good, man.” He tittered, almost tipped over again.
“What’s... what’s the score?” Rab’s eyes seemed to take an age to open, the crescent edges ungluing. It was like dawn slowly breaking across the earth.
“Clear!” Jonty yelled, then jammed the paddles down on Rab’s flabby whitebread chest.
“Jonty. Jonty. Jonty.”
Jonty wasn’t sure when he’d woken up, or opened his eyes. He was only aware of it being daylight again, and that Rab was standing before him.
“Jonty. Jonty. Jonty.”
“Alright, fuck’s sake!” Jonty almost screamed. An appalling, perhaps record-breaking headache squeezed his brain in and out in time with his rapidly increasing pulse.
“Jonty, wake up. We have to go.” Rab had his shellsuit top back on. It smelled of melted plastic, with a hint of bacon. This set off a faint alarm somewhere in Jonty’s brain. Over in the corner, the debussyator was packed away neater than a parish priest’s packed lunch. Then he noticed Rab’s eyes.
“Fuck, man,” Jonty said, rolling off Rab’s couch and scattering two beer cans at his feet. “You been on the charlie? What’s up with your eyes?”
They were like saucers... no, dinner plates. No, tureens. “Nothing’s wrong with my eyes. Come on, hurry. We’ve got to go.”
“Go where? Christ, man, give me a break here!”
“There’s no time to waste, come on.”
It must still have been morning. Jonty gurned all the way down the street, trailing after Rab. He’d never seen Rab move so fast before.
“You’ve been on the charlie,” Jonty muttered. “Man, hold up, I need to be sick.”
“Look at this morning,” Rab said. “Look at it!” He stabbed a finger towards an uncertain skyline, dark clouds showing on the horizon.
“I take it back. You’re tripping.”
“Not today, mate, not ever again. Come on, we’ve got stuff to do.”
“What stuff?”
There was an old dear waiting at a pelican crossing. Rab strode over to her.
“Can we help you across?”
The woman blinked, suspicious. “No, that’s quite alright, son.”
“You sure? That’s a heavy trolley you’ve got there.”
“I’ll be fine, son, it’s alright. Thank you for asking.”
“No trouble at all,” Rab said, then rejoined Jonty. “She was nervous, I could see that. I could see that.” He nodding to himself. “I need to change...” he patted down his clothes, rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. “I need to change.... I need to change everything.”
“What? Get a grip, man. Come on, back to the flat.”
“I can’t,” Rab said. “I can’t go back there. I want to stay out here.”
“What for?”
Rab seemed puzzled. “Can’t you see them?”
“See what? Ah, come on man, it’ll rain.”
“Don’t care if it does,” Rab said. “It’s a gorgeous morning.”
Jonty considered doing a runner when Rab strode up to the cop shop. Just cutting and running. “Oh no, no you don’t,” Jonty said, pulling him back. “Look mate, I know you’re wasted, but enough is enough, here.”
“This is important. We need to... good God, this is amazing!”
“Oh, man. Whatever you’re doing, you’re on your own.” Jonty took a step back and left Rab to stroll in the door of the cop shop. He waited in a close across the road, his escape route planned out if the busies should swarm out of the door.
He tapped a cigarette on the edge of a packet. “Mental,” he said. “Absolutely mental.”
Rab came out, unscathed. Worse than that, he was grinning. Jonty had never seen Rab grin before, not properly. Just like he’d never actually heard him laugh.
“What did you do? What the fuck did you do in there?”
“I gave them the stash,” Rab declared.
Jonty’s knees buckled along with his mind, and he sat down hard on the steps of the close. “You what? You what?”
“I gave them the stash. All of it.”
“The money. Rab, the money. That was business money.” Jonty dropped his cigarette and it barrelled across the pavement, spilling tiny licks of flame. “That was fucking savings.”
“It’s better off there. I turned it in. Told them I found it.”
“Oh my God. Rab, oh Jesus Christ.” Jonty buried his head in his hands. “You better be joking.”
“Nope. It’s better with them. But, don’t worry... I was thinking about making a full confession, but I thought it was better if we’re free for the minute. To do our work.”
“Work?” Jonty moaned.
“Yes. Our work. Making it all right. Everything we did.”
“Work, you say. Making it right. Remind me to stab that cunt Cheezy next time I see him. Whatever he sold us yesterday, he has to pay for it, man.”
“Come on,” Rab said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Let’s go for it. So much to do. We have to listen to them.”
“Listen to what?” Fury surged in Jonty, swallowing the shakes, the panic, the nausea. “Listen to what, ya freak?”
Rab followed the flight of some birds as they streaked across the sky, serene as the Blessed Virgin. “The angels. Don’t you see the angels? They are everywhere. And I never knew. They’re all around us. There’s good things to be done, everywhere. Good people, with nothing bad in them, too.
“And I’d never have known it; I’d never have listened to them if you hadn’t used the machine on me. I know, I know I should be angry at that. It burned. But you woke something up. In me. In here.” He beat his chest. “You brought something back to life.”
He beat his chest again, a second before Jonty catapulted himself into his body. Rab went down on one knee, a hand upraised, as Jonty rained down the blows. There were flashes of Jonty’s rotten rat teeth, the worn soles of his training shoes, the rustle of his shellsuit.
And Rab just took it, smiling as the world tilted at a strange angle and then the light outside faded.
About the Author
Pat Black is a thirtysomething writer, journalist and bletherer, born and raised in Glasgow. He says he has made that difficult transition from aspiring novelist to failed novelist, although he has had a couple of short stories published. He’s the author of Snarl, a completed novel about a monster that tries to mount the Houses of Parliament. Holyrood emerges unscathed, for now.