Armour

By John Cray

The flight of three: a woman escaping the impotent arm of the law, a pseudo-assassin fleeing from a job, enlisting protection from the Order of the Book, and the last of the trio, Ahmed—the leader of the Castaway Revolution—is seeking a new life; a car-bomb has shattered his old one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483528700

Book preview

9781483528700

Chapter One

I

Handsome, well previously. Look at those digits pressed to the mug: some hands; sum hands; an accountant. He crunched his sandwich like numbers. A pair of eyes appeared at the window. They watched the man with dirty boots, the familiar corduroy trousers, the shirt and blazer combination; indicating a desire to modernize but not the know-how. She walked in, trying to look disinterested, but trembling knees gave her up. Her manner of locomotion fell short of the expected frames-per-second; each step, each gaze was jerky, intriguing. She recognized his face from the Album, and from before. Her change spilt onto the counter, drawing a look of closeted disapproval from the oily employee,

Sugar at the end.

Laura marched ‘to the end’ placing boot after boot (these were not dirty), coaxing creaks from the wooden floor. She was very thorough with her sugar opening stratagem; she didn’t want to affirm the fat-thumb-fumbling tendency she had so recently exposed. Two well measured sugars later she arrived at her chosen perch. The choice had been as strategic as the sugar battle plan; the table at just the right angle; the coffee board hanging over the man’s head—she could look at it if he looked at her.

The Album: moth-eaten, faded, a sepia-scape. She’d found his face buried within it, the fossil, the bastard. The number cruncher was just as much a meal for moths as the photographic mausoleum in which he’d been found. He looked at her. She stared hard at Christmas one-offs. Hazelnut, Praline: she had the whole chalk landscape surveyed by the bottom of her cup. I hate him in person too, she thought. She had been afraid he would have hidden his viciousness cleverly behind age. She left pleased with her lack of sympathy. It was 5 o’clock, early but dark, just how she liked it; the type of girl who stares into moth-eaten photo albums is at home in dusk-laden, snow-covered high-streets. Dirty slush accumulated on her boots as she navigated past street lamps, headlights and backlit shop facades. She found the sickly light, the mannequins—even the slogans—reassuringly fake. She arrived home. The flat was nestled, facing a backstreet, on top of restaurant kitchens. Mr Banner, the restaurant’s rotund head honcho, was the landlord, head-chef, husband, failed-father, not-so-failed-businessman, and much more besides. (His stomach unhappily attributed its mass to the ‘much more besides’ part.) Laura was concerned only with the scrawling of a letter under the scented candlelight that bathed her kitchen surface. It wasn’t long before screwed up paper was heading for the bin at regular intervals. The television screen fizzed into life: ‘Twenty-eight dead, twenty-five released, thirty-four still being held.’ They had eaten the wrong meat, spoken the wrong words, offended, offended, offended. After dinner (salmon steaks, sweet-potato mash, tender-stem broccoli) she ran a bath. The lavender tides washed gently into her, only to be softly rebuffed by the perfect structure; doll-skin bereft of porousness. She had operated frame by frame as always: Coffee/Vendetta—High-street/Nostalgia— Flat/Letter—Bath. She blew out the candles, accepting duvet’s embrace.

Laura awoke to another snow-laced day, it was cold despite her overwrought bedclothes, and stale breath hung aggressively in her bedroom, taunting her icy feet and crystal fingers. It was no use, a letter could never be enough. She couldn’t sink him through the recommended channels, and so her black thought had broken from its cage. Thick bars had served as a screen behind which the stalking bulk could be made out in relative safety, but it was now untrammeled: she could do it now, she knew she could. She cut the day into snapshots once again, took a trip to the supermarket; her kitchen needed a refit. Knives. Pots and Pans. She reneged on the supermarket, she needed items of a better quality: she’d something to carve up.

She could do it now, she knew she could; acquiring the tools for the job.

Pacing past stalls. Damascus steel? They looked shiny.

Sharp are they? she enquired; the burly marketeer looked briskly at her, his tattooed forearms bulging; Popeye’s spinach-fed pupils grasping the wares,

Er, yeah, got a sharpener too if you ever need to get ‘em back up to scratch.

She could do it now, she knew she could;

I’ll take them, thanks.

II

A tall dark affair. His house. The house of the photo-crypt’s best kept secret: the man with dirty boots. Here, a map of his crimes. He knew what he’d done; it was laid out as news clippings. Though—I’m sorry to disappoint—there were no developing photos, no darkroom in this house. He loved horror movies, even had urges to carry certain plots across the cinematic divide. You might ask, ‘If he had loved horror movies so much, why didn’t he invest more in their hallmarks? That darkroom? A mask?’ He had to live without those luxuries I’m afraid. Laura arrived under a cloud-ridden sky. She tiptoed up the path, casting the rickety gate aside. As her slush-coated boots hammered on the dismal concrete, her eyes began darting, believing in ghosts that formed themselves out of a plant, a rake, a ladder.

She could do it now, she knew she could; it was in her hand,

ready.

An open window. What a stroke of luck. More ghosts; fireplace, table, chairs, stairs. Up each one, silent thirteen times, then . . . Creak. Stillness. The upstairs landing extended forever, a vast river of beige carpet with a new trap under every step; spikes, arrows, rolling boulders. There was a door at the end of the expanse, slightly ajar; shadows seeped around it like the excretions of a hot pan, surging upwards in a kitchen with a defunct extractor fan, and she knew the inevitable consequences: too much smoke, too much heat—smoke alarm—then everybody in the street would know, everybody in the world. No, it was just a landing; the beige returned, the blaring alarm swallowed by silence.

She could do it now, she knew she could; yards away.

She wasn’t blanketed by arrows, nor crushed by rocks; she didn’t set off any alarms; the man was too disgustingly confident to have feared intruders. She eased her way up the corridor, that familiar dust caked the generic Ikea-framed pictures, forming funeral mounds, tributes to the dead flesh that adorned the wonky sleepers; epitaphs sculpted from lymphatic skin.

Rather than explain the scene any further, by jumping from point A to point B both over complicatedly and far too simplistically, I’ll let the newspapers explain. Don’t mistake this for a trite interlude; my point is merely this: if I am never to be allowed to write for them, the least they can do is write for me. This is part of the story that appeared a week later in the local rag:

‘Arthur Kane, 74, was found stabbed to death in his home yesterday morning. The man who discovered the body, a Mr Paul Thompson, said he pushed open Mr Kane’s Already ajar door upon Smelling a horrible stink. Mr Thompson, who has been the milkman serving the area for twenty-seven years, then alerted Police. Detective Mills made a statement last night in which he warned local people to be extremely vigilant. He went on to say that local residents should Keep all doors and windows locked. He made no comment on the status of the investigation.’

III

The television screen fizzed into life: ‘Twenty-eight dead, twenty five released, thirty-four still being held.’ They had eaten the wrong meat, spoken the wrong words, offended, offended, offended. The cigarette smoke circled, sullying from the craven stick. McShane had ‘quit’ before; he was by now so good at quitting—breaking the habit—that it seemed he’d never hold a ‘good’ one (of the thank-you-for-not-smoking variety) ever again. Dull sofas and dirty coffee tables were completely desirable, as were full ash-trays and empty polystyrene boxes. The benefit bourgeois collection, manufactured and sold locally. The