Thieves in the Night

Brendan Ball

Description

Two young outsiders - Bron, a jaded musician unworldly and luckless, and Dan, a semi-reformed criminal secretive and haunted - are brought together by a chance encounter and drawn by kinship of character, desperation and music into each other's worlds. Between them on Dan's council estate comes the beautiful but troubled Cal, to Bron a songbird and daydream but to Dan a byword for all that he knows comes with her. On their horizon gleams the mirage of being something and someone, but ever closer behind is Dan's past, inventive in its nemeses and indiscriminate in its prey.'An accomplished novel replete with deft writing, memorable characters, sharp dialogue, humour, wisdom and evocative observation... Original, rewarding and moving.'Matthew Branton (novelist), TLC.

Informations

• Publié par: eBookPartnership.com
• Date de parution: 28 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783014972
• Langue: English

Extrait

THIEVES IN THE NIGHT
 
Brendan Ball
 
 
 
 
Copyright 2014 Brendan Ball
 
All rights reserved.
 
 
 
 
 
 
To Ivan
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
PART I
 
 
 
 
‘When it thunders the thief becomes honest.’
 
George Herbert.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1
 
 
(London, 1999)
 
 
Up there on stage in the slow grim fury of a cringing spotlight they droned out their vision of three chords and the truth.
“ Me trousers they were brown, yeah babe,
Like your stairs I’d fallen down, yeah babe... ”
The singer’s head was a shaven trellis of blue veins but for twin front locks hooked one around each ear, a diseased lightbulb splinted by Kitchener’s moustache. He rocked back and forth with the made-for-TV gesture of trauma or psychosis - feeling it, he meant to say, and I was feeling it too, a cold gnawing dread that this was all there was.
“ The ceiling it was yellow-o
And I couldn’t even bellow-o... ”
I tore up their advertisement from the throwaway weekly with my note meet bar after set .
The side door was kept ajar through that summer of the false millennium, and sick at heart I pushed out into the alley’s slanted moonlight.
 
Refugee punters lined the shadowsoft cement like extras from The Waste Land , moontinged into statues, down to where it ended in scaffolding and a skip. Midges fried themselves on the light bulb above the door to the sound of argument from the street end.
I lit a cigarette and a lone lean figure stepped out from the shadow of the scaffolding. He came through the cobwebbed moonslant dressed up for the end of the world, shoulders back, eyes wide, dark, staring down some adversary only he could see.
“Got a light?”
I held it out.
“Mate,” he said, “I’ve had better times on bad acid.”
He frowned as the smoke wisped starward.
“My friend’s on in a bit so I came with her - told me it was ladies’ night so I thought there’d be action...”
“With that much humour she must be better than this.”
He considered.
“She ain’t really my cup of tea, but you can listen to her more than thirty seconds without wanting to wring her neck.”
The band finished inside to a spatter of applause from their half-dozen guests.
I said, “Then she’s special.”
He shot me the glance, quick and involuntary, of a man in a foreign country hearing a snatch of his own language, but a thirsty flotsam drifted inbound then between us. The argument out by the bouncers grew louder.
“...eighty quid in mine, and all me cards...”
“...didn’t have it when I got here, I couldn’er paid to get in, could I?”
He sucked down and cast away the cigarette; his eyes darted to the dead end of the alley, back toward the street and up and down what remained of the drainpipe; with mumbled thanks he slipped back in on the tail of the crowd.
The bar was off limits a while but I had a ritual for that alley. It started at the drainpipe, symbol of my exit from the straight world, and the skip stood for defeat and ruin. I still believed but there was a limit to everything, in this case about a dozen steps.
Step one, three years back: in a temple of learning where a main gaineth the whole of literature and reduceth it into -isms, I fail to see the use; the pederastic don of -isms, realising he has more chance of doing unto Lord Lucan than unto me, denounces me to the elders; I return south with an accomplice and songs, but when the world is not won in six weeks the would-be revolutionary takes a job at his father’s office as assistant sharpener of pencils.
Step two, as I finished the cigarette and moved on through the stragglers: Mervyn the Mad Welshman, found busking at Victoria station, has music in him to knock a tune from a dead cat and no fear of work, but then the dragon in him breaks out; he forswears the sinful dust for the higher path of Taoism and heads east in search of three purities.
Step three, into thickening grime: I chance upon two likely lads possessing time and equipment, fair ability and half the drive of a broken tricycle. But they are staying put parent-supported in their commuter village so I persevere, and into this mix comes a Dracula-like drummer whose father owns castles in Transylvania and Texas and who subsists on fiery goulash and amphetamines. His pater calls him west, though, and without His Excellency’s chemical vindaloulash there is no way to ignite the other two. Again I move on.
Step four, into shadow: a managed band and minibus tour await until the bassist’s sister tries to impale said manager with a pregnancy test; he packs up his troubles with a few sick bags and heads north in the magic bus.
And so it went on, step after step and tale after tale, until the skip was close enough to touch. A length of cable tray protruded from the front like the gun of an abandoned tank, tra ined on Tottenham Court Road. I had never thought to come so near.
The door burst open and a hollering oik was frogmarched out; gargoyle-faces peered from the repopulated gloom.
“...go of me right fucking now or I’ll - ”
“Move.”
He was back.
“...no idea who you’re fu- aaaagh!”
A carroty head with burning red ears writhed and butted air, a loose arm whirred and flailed, and down the alley bouncerwards through the ochre moongleams was manoeuvred the rodeo lawnmower.
They met at the corner.
“What the - ”
“Untwist your knickers and cancel Sherlock, it’s Santa’s reindeer. Say ho ho ho, you horrible bastard.”
“Urrrnngaaaagh!”
“But who the - ”
“And you shall all go to the ball.”
“That’s my phone!”
“My wallet!”
He left them to it and homed to the shadows of the alley. By the door he stopped, shrinking I thought from the acclaim of the gargoyles, and came back to me.
“You got another smoke?”
He was the type women like, bold and faithlessly handsome, though I sensed even then he had no love for mirrors. I gave it and waited.
“Know his kind when I see it - clocked him the minute I walked in.” He stared up hard into my face. “Don’t need the show full of Old Bill mate. I got a sort of an allergy.”
He ran his hand inside his pristine collar.
“No cure I found yet,” he said, and drew something from his sleeve. “But he had a tenner of his own and there ain’t a bar where he’s off to. What you drinking?”
 
The two-floor Mojo had a mezzanine stage that left a standing performer with the partition across his face. Down below nodded the metalheads in a ponytailed herd, chained from their studded belts and branded, in cartoon blood, Dragönfylth and Helmetpayn . There too were the baroque Scandinavians - Lonely Planet Boys I called them after an old song - in velvet and neckscarves and eyeshadow and bracelets. Beyond in counterculture finery loitered girls with the lines of pillar boxes and, watered by the bar, a shrubbery of wilted flower children left by time for compost.
He elbowed through, and reaching the corner turned about and nodded at the stage.
A fluid energy half woman half daydream was climbing the flaked steps, her dark hair long and loose and silvered in the low beam.
“Is that your friend?”
She had a curved overfullness at the heart beneath eyes blacklisted from fairyland, and if she was not his cup of tea then that was fine because I was hearing calypsos.
“Unh,” he said, and pushed off to the bar.
“ She hoisted up her petticoats a bit above the knee... ”
The male part of the crowd awoke. It was a voice for which I would have done anything.
“ So nimbly she’d run o’er the ground... ”
‘Friend’ and the insouciance were too much to believe, and when he came back with the bottles I looked again at the fortunate man with the shadows around his eyes.
“Song ain’t hers,” he muttered, and scowled down at bitten fingernails as the voice soared.
“ He took her by her milk-white hand
And by her grass-green sleeve,
He pulled her down at the foot of a bush
And never once asked her leave... ”
The heat rose and the air clotted; condensation sweated from the ceiling onto the bodies in the pit; on the swanky upper deck the executives daytripping to bohemia shut up about gym memberships and car insurance.
In the last song two blonde shampoo advertisements squeezed past us and the eyes of my companion, mystery that he was, tracked them like security cameras.
“ Oh love is gentle, love is kind,
Bright as a jewel when first it’s new... ”
They weaved through towards the alley door, and the mystery craned his neck to the last.
“ But love grows old and waxes cold
And fades away like morning dew... ”
She came off to rattling applause, wolf-whistles and a few marriage proposals. The mystery held up his empty bottle.
“Your turn - see you outside.” He winked. “I can’t breathe in here.”
 
I went and waited for the resident barman, a prancing anthology of Latino cliché.
“Oo’s a-next? Bella signorina !”
The descended signorina floated through a coterie of regulars.
“Thanks very much...glad you enjoyed yourselves...Is that right?”
I had somehow expected more but then across the beerguts and banalities her eyes met mine and she smiled, in stealth and only at me, reproaching without malice. She had been adopted as pilot-fish by a sweating human lobster with seedy eyes and a parting that began at his armpit.
“So Keith Richards goes to me he goes, ‘Alan, you are a nutter...’”
She escaped him and glided into the corner beside me.
“ Bella signorina! ”
“A double Gordon’s dry enough to sleep in, and two beers.”
I could not imagine her wanting for company but any worthwhile company would have bought for her. She laid a note on the bar and turned to me.
“A friend of mine doesn’t care to introduce us.”
Her voice had the tone colour of a Karas zither.
“Ten years a bodyguard,” came despairing over the babble from about five feet off the floor. “I been shot, stabbed...disembowelled...”
She raised the glass and drank through unparted lips, smoky eyes teasing over the rim and behind them