The Concrete Grove Read online

  Banjo felt like he was floating, tethered to the ground only by the grip of his captor’s hand.

  The door he stood before was old, scarred, and weathered, as if it had been kept outside for decades rather than inside this room. The ancient paint was peeling like scabs; the heavy grain of the wood looked like burst veins and capillaries.

  “Step inside and become something else, something more than human wastage.” Monty Bright stepped back, prodding Banjo gently in the small of the back. Bright didn’t touch the handle, but the door began to open. It moved smoothly, without a sound, and Banjo stared at the ribbon of darkness that grew between door and frame, becoming a black wedge.

  “Go on, now. Let’s get this done, son. Let’s get this show on the road. The fucking road to nowhere.” Bright’s voice, along with his accompanying laughter, sounded as if it was reaching him from a great distance.

  Banjo stepped into the welcoming darkness and felt the last vestiges of his old fear leave him as the door closed behind him. He thought of his mother, and the way she had wasted her life on drink, her own drug of choice; he remembered his father, turning away and leaving them all behind; he recalled fondly the touch of his baby sister’s hand, the night she had died of pneumonia in hospital. None of these memories upset him – they were like pictures on television, scenes from the videos he used to love. He was free of them now; this room he had walked into, and the drugs, had cut him off from harm.

  Banjo walked to the centre of the room, his eyesight now growing accustomed to the darkness. The ground was soft, like mud, and the walls seemed to writhe at the corner of his vision. Soon he realised that he was surrounded.

  He stood at the centre of a number of televisions. Each of them was an old model – some of them must have dated back to the early days of the technology. Big dusty screens stared blindly in his direction; dead cables trailed behind bulky sets; large buttons and dials were like mutations on the shells of these machines.

  At one level he was aware that there must be something here, for him to see, but at another level, where he stood apart from the scene, he knew that he was so wasted that he could be looking at a bunch of cardboard boxes and moulding the image to suit his mood.

  Banjo kneeled on the soft ground. He was not sure why, it just felt right, like an act of communion. His entire life had been spent in thrall to these things as they pumped out images and lifestyle choices, so why not worship them now, in a dark underground room that felt so much like a church?

  He bowed his head just as the screens came to life.

  One after another, in quick succession around him, forming a crude circle of brightness, the screens flared, bathing him in their holy light. Dust swam before his eyes, giving the illusion that he was underwater. The television sets throbbed, a cathode-ray heartbeat, and he watched as pictures began to form from the static. It was like birth: difficult, painful. The forms bucked and writhed, twitched and jerked, and the screens bulged outwards as the figures took shape.

  Drug-demons: nightmares snatched from inside his head. He watched them with a sense of wonder.

  They were small and they were naked. Their skin was the colour of static; their eyes the grey of the dusty concrete that had surrounded him his entire life. They emerged like grubs from the television sets, their substance formed of the material of the screens as well as the nebulous static and the ghost of the heroin in Banjo’s blood. They left behind their empty TV shells as they rolled away, their legs lengthening in sudden thrusts. The fronts of the television sets looked like a series of kicked-in faces. The things that had hatched from these wounds lay curled on the ground before them, twitching occasionally; sleeping dogs dreaming of the chase.

  Then, simultaneously, they sprung up from the ground and stood erect, uncurling swiftly and almost mechanically. They stood before their televisual eggs, rocking back and forth, torsos without arms, long, back-folded insect legs lacking a midriff, flat, featureless heads unsupported by anything even resembling a neck.

  Their concrete-grey eyes were big and square and blank. Their mouths were just stretched ragged holes, lacking teeth or gums. They were tubes, those mouths, and Banjo didn’t want to see where they ended. He raised his hands to these new gods, these entities sired by the great glass tit of television, and opened his mouth to pray or question or perhaps just to scream. His drugs high had reached a new plateau: never before had his dreams become flesh.

  They were upon him within seconds, flowing through the space like a rogue signal, moving in the syncopated jinks and jerks caused by a faulty transmission. Banjo felt his cheeks expand as his mouth was filled with their flexible tubes. He tasted burnt copper and charred wires. He felt pregnant with emptiness. Then, without warning, the effects of the drugs abated. Banjo’s fear resurfaced, finding a way back inside the crowded schedule of his TV-learned emotions, and he felt the channel inside his head change forever.

  PART TWO

  People Under the Influence

  “Self-delusion is often just another

  coping mechanism.”

  – Lana Fraser

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS EARLY morning and Tom was running again.

  He had no idea why he was here, skirting the edge of the Grove, but he knew that he had come to some kind of decision. He ran at a steady pace – jogging really – and tried to give himself time to think about what he was doing. Last night had been a tipping point, where he had been forced to confront a truth he had hidden for years. He did not like the man he was becoming – betrayal was not something that came easy to him – but this constant mask-wearing was taking its toll and he was rotting away inside.

  Tom had not loved Helen for so long now that he could not even remember when his feelings towards her had changed. Even before she had been injured by That Man, his emotions had confused him. They had grown apart steadily, without any major problems causing clean fractures in their relationship, and the result of this gradually increasing distance was that when she went into hospital he was almost relieved to be alone.

  His shame at these feelings had forced him to bury the truth, to smother it under layers of forced emotion: duty, empathy, a sense of needing to do the right thing by his wife. Her injuries – her lower-body paralysis and resultant emotional neediness – had served to distract him, and also given him a reason to carry on pretending that he still loved her. Even though she had transformed into the likeness of an aquatic mammal before his eyes.

  He thought of this now, as he padded along the pavement. On the surface, he had no idea where he was heading. But underneath, where his real emotions lay, he knew that he was running towards Lana Fraser, and the promise of salvation he had glimpsed so briefly behind her dark eyes.

  Last night, as he’d sat in his car watching her flat, wishing that he could spot her silhouette at the window, he had crossed some kind of invisible border. He felt that he had travelled far, and under false pretences, to reach this place, and now that he had arrived he could no longer wear the lies in which he wrapped himself like a second skin. He had shed that skin and beneath its rotting layer had been a brand new being, a man who accepted his own needs and the fact that they had not been met for such a long time.

  Before he knew it he was running along Grove Drive, past the tract of waste ground where derelict factories stood like the repositories of nightmares. Small fires burnt across the bare earth, smouldering and sending up black plumes into the pale blue sky. Someone was incinerating old tyres. A thin man walked between his private pyres, prodding them with a long stick. Tom paused by the fence, staring through the railings, and watched the figure as he traipsed back and forth, tending the sputtering flames.

  The black smoke broke apart and rose in tendrils, like skinny arms reaching towards a liar’s heaven. Tom felt strange, as if he were being given a glimpse of another world. The figure was too thin to be human, and the long stick was actually an extension of his arm. He moved slowly and dragged his left leg behind him.

>   Tom’s eyes began to water, but it was not from the thick, acrid smoke. The land beyond the fence was grey; there was no vegetation growing through the flattened soil. In the distance, beyond one of the fires, a small dog sniffed at a heap of rags on the ground. Tom was certain that it was the dog he had seen before – the one with the human face. He had even dreamed about the same creature many years ago, when he was a small boy.

  His father had been a distant man, cold and abusive in the way that he withheld his affection. Tom’s mother was also emotionally cold, as if she were afraid to show how she really felt. At night, when he found it difficult to sleep, Tom would imagine a dog with a boy’s face wandering around the house, raking in the kitchen bin, sniffing at the cupboards, and padding softly upstairs to investigate the top floor of the house. The dog would never enter his room: it just sat there, outside his bedroom door, either guarding him or waiting for him to come out so that it could attack.

  It was worse on the nights when his parents had sex.

  Tom could hear them through the thin walls: his father’s repeated obscenities, his mother’s tears; and terrible animal sounds, culminating in a series of muted thuds as his father repeatedly punched either the headboard or his mother’s body as he climaxed inside her. Then silence, which was slowly filled by yet more of his mother’s weeping. After a short while she would go out onto the landing, walk to the bathroom, and lock herself inside. Tom always fell asleep before she left the bathroom, so he never knew how long she remained in there, or what she did behind the locked door. He had always imagined that she must be tending to her bruised body.

  Those nights, above all else, were the worst. They were the times when Tom was faced with the reality of his parent’s flaws, and no matter how hard he tried he could not block out the sounds. On mornings following these events, his mother would move slowly around the kitchen, wincing in pain with each step she took. She never said a word; she took it all in silence.

  Tom stopped dreaming of the dog when he was eleven years old. It appeared in his dreams only once more after that, on the night his mother died. It was as if her death had finally exorcised some kind of crude ghost, a shoddy spirit that only ever came to him because he craved his mother’s love.

  He had forgotten about the dog until he saw the vision yesterday evening in the Grove. He knew it was not real – it couldn’t possibly exist in the waking world. But what scared him more than seeing it was the thought that something had reached inside him and pulled out that childhood dream, putting flesh on its bones.

  The man tending the fires looked normal again: just a thin figure with a pointed stick. Tom smiled, feeling sad and empty as he pulled back from old memories. Then he resumed running, heading towards Lana’s Fraser’s flat and the precious new memory of her face, her eyes, and her ambiguous smile.

  Turning right onto Grove Road, he saw a car parked at the kerb. The vehicle was a Vauxhall Nova, the paintwork scratched, the wings battered from a collision, and the rear bumper hanging askew. Two boys in baseball caps sat in the car. The windows were rolled down. Another boy – this one younger, barely in his teens – was leaning against the side of the car and poking his head through the open driver’s side window. Tom slowed his pace to a walk. He was breathing heavily but still felt as if he had a few miles left to go. He watched the boys as they talked, and then caught sight of a small brown-paper package changing hands. The boy on the pavement straightened up, slammed his palm against the roof of the car, and then turned away, setting off in the direction of the Needle, whose pyramid-shaped roof and upper storeys could be seen from almost everywhere on the estate.

  The car’s engine revved loudly. The rear wheels spun on the road surface, and then the car shot off, taking the right turn into Grove End at such great speed that the rear end skidded across the carriageway.

  Tom knew that drugs were big business on the estate. He would have to be a fool not to recognise that he had just witnessed yet another deal, but rather than frighten him it filled him with an intense feeling of sadness. These kids, they were wasting their lives before they’d even begun. If they were dealing in that stuff now, what would they be doing in five, ten years’ time? Gun crime was a recent problem and it was only going to get worse. Things here still weren’t as bad as they were in the States, but surely that kind of gang-driven chaos wasn’t too far away… a decade, maybe even less?

  Tom was glad that he and Helen had never been able to have children. Then, feeling guilty once more, he thought about Hailey, Lana Fraser’s girl. What kind of future did she have to look forward to, trapped on this godforsaken estate? Nobody seemed to care – not the local council, the central government, or the media. The latter were more than happy to demonise the people on estates like this, but they refused to examine the real problems at the root of this kind of behaviour. These sink estates were forgotten zones, dead spots in the nation’s psyche. The public would rather envisage them as the playgrounds of devils than the places where those who had lost everything ended up.

  Facts were always difficult to consume; fiction made for a much less complex diet. Tom had learned, and accepted, a long time ago that most people were content to be spoon-fed a simpler gruel. It was easier to keep down, and to forget you had even eaten.

  Tom stood on the pavement outside the Grove Court flats, undecided whether he should ring the buzzer or continue running. Part of him wanted to escape, to get away from the emotional holocaust he sensed might be the result of any further association with Lana and her daughter. Yet another part of him – this one stirring, as if roused from a lengthy sleep – reached out towards her, needing her by his side.

  “Tom?” Her voice came from behind him. For a moment he was too stunned even to move. “It is Tom, isn’t it? From yesterday?”

  He didn’t realise that he was holding his breath until he remembered to let it out. His chest deflated; his throat ached. He turned around.

  She was standing on the pavement a few yards away, clutching a blue plastic carrier bag in her left hand. She was wearing a faded denim jacket, buttoned half way up with the neck left open, and her legs were bare beneath a red knee-length skirt. On her feet she wore a pair of battered running shoes. Her hair was loose, messy, and it framed her face like the fur of a hood. Her eyes were lowered, as if she were unable to meet his gaze.

  “Hi,” he said, feeling small and weak and needy. “Sorry.”

  “For what?” She smiled, tilting her head to one side. She showed him her small white teeth: they were perfect, like lovely ivory sculptures of teeth rather than the real thing. “Why are you sorry?”

  “For being here, I guess. I’m not some kind of stalker. Honest. I was… well, would you believe I was just passing?” It sounded pathetic. He felt ashamed.

  She laughed, then, her eyes widening, those flawless teeth flashing in the morning light. And all at once he knew that it was okay, that everything was fine. She didn’t think he was pestering her; she enjoyed the attention. “Come on up,” she said. “I was going to make coffee.” She held up the carrier bag, indicating that she had been shopping for provisions.

  Tom followed her in silence. He did not want to speak, not yet, even to accept her invitation, in case she changed her mind.

  Upstairs he stood at the window as she unpacked her shopping in the kitchen. He stared out at the view: the circular array of streets clustered around the Needle, and the imposing sight of the crippled concrete tower itself. The windows on the lower floors were covered with wooden boards and metal shutters, but those higher up the building, where nobody could gain access, were mostly unsecured. Some of the frames still held panes of glass, others had only shards, like curved and pointed teeth, where kids had shattered them with stones.

  The glass of the pyramidal roof was in bad shape. It was unbroken, but birds had desecrated the panes with their droppings to mix with the other general filth. It looked to Tom like there was a swarm of flies gathered around the pointed tip of the skylight, but sur
ely flies would be invisible to the naked eye at such a distance? They were too small to be sparrows or pigeons, and he didn’t know of any birds that were capable of hovering in such a manner. They were almost motionless: just a faint blurring of their wings against the sky.

  There was a lot of graffiti on the walls at the lowest levels, where kids had sprayed obscenities and depictions of sexual acts. A few names had been added in a cruder style, almost as an afterthought. Further up, on the south wall, the word ‘Clickity’ had been daubed in dull red paint. Isolated in such a way, it was incongruous, entirely random, yet Tom felt that it must hold meaning to someone. He recalled something he’d often seen on the side of a footbridge over the A1 motorway when he used to travel south regularly for work: Cigarette Burns. He’d often wondered what that meant – was it the name of a band, a record label, or something more sinister? He hadn’t thought about the piece of graffito in years…

  “How do you take it?”

  “Sorry?” He turned stiffly.

  “Your coffee. How do you take it?” Lana was leaning across the kitchen counter. She arched her black eyebrows. Her cheeks were pale, almost white at the edges, but small circles of red had appeared at their centres.

  “White. One sugar.”

  She nodded and slid back into the kitchen.

  “What happened here? Where’s all your stuff – the furniture. Where did it go?”

  She appeared from the kitchen holding a mug in each hand. The coffee steamed, sending out bitter ghosts. “I owe money to someone and couldn’t pay this month’s instalment. So they sent somebody round to take our stuff instead.” Her smile was rueful, yet behind her eyes he could see what he could only describe as restrained terror. Lana was scared, and trying hard not to show it.