Читать книгу The Guilty Party - Mel McGrath - Страница 13

A little after 3 a.m., Sunday 14 August, Wapping

The arm around his neck pulling him back smells familiar. He twists his head round and meets Dex’s face.

‘Mate, drop it.’

‘What?’ His body is peeling. He feels weird and wired. He spins back to look at the bloke who, just a few seconds ago, was about to slug him. He hears Dex say, ‘Sorry, mate. My friend’s a bit, you know . . . he’s not trying to disrespect you.’

What the fuck? thinks Bo. He bloody does mean disrespect, he means a fistful of it. He watches the bloke’s body language soften. Stupid bastard wants out of the scrap, looking for any excuse. He’s so tight now, though, everything he’s seen tonight, the adrenalin. Bloody great neither of them has a knife or a gun. He could easily have slipped a blade between that guy’s ribs, thought no more about it, the way he is now. How wired his body feels. His legs slacken, cease their forward momentum, the muscles melting into one another. He’s rooted to the spot. He’ll be fucked if he’s going to give way but it looks like he might not have to come forward. It’s all those hours in the gym, Bo’s thinking. Not the job title or the river view apartment or the strings of women. That fucker knows nothing about any of that.

‘Get out of here, mate, just go,’ he says.

The bloke hesitates. Bo knows exactly what the fucker’s thinking. He’s totting up the square meterage of muscle. Bo plus Dex equals . . . what? The stupid, stupid shit. The bloke’s eyes sweep the small gathered crowd. Ha! Ask the audience, phone a friend, thinks Bo. I fucking dare you.

For an instant it could go either way, then Shitface fills his lungs and blinks and it’s all over. Bo watches him turn and walk away with a bit of a swagger, wait till he’s out of the fist zone, then spit onto the paving. Yeah, whatever.

‘What the fuck?’ Dex’s voice is in his ear. He’s let go of Bo now. Funny, Bo thinks, first time I’ve knowingly been hugged by a gay. He doesn’t mind it. Doesn’t care who or what or how people want to fuck. He laughs to himself. Ha, he’s hardly got a leg to stand on in the sex department, given what . . . given everything, but he’s not a fucking hypocrite. Not like Dex was for all those years.

The small crowd has dissipated now. Nothing to see here. Bo and Dex are alone in the little turning. Dex loves all this, Bo thinks, the rookeries, the remains of cobbled mews that neither the Luftwaffe nor the town planners managed to destroy, all those tiny pathways stinking of urine that snake between the thoroughfares of the old East End and the City. He’s always been drawn to old stuff, whereas old stuff doesn’t interest Bo at all. Ancient stuff, like fossils, fine, otherwise new. Why he loves his apartment so much. A brand-new tower standing between what were once crumbling warehouses and are now bits of retro-fakery. Like someone punched through the river bank straight into the twenty-first century.

‘We should go to A&E, get you looked at,’ Dex says.

‘I’m all right.’ The bits and pieces of his torso are beginning to fuse back together. He feels suddenly tired, exhausted in fact. ‘Think I’ll just go home.’

‘Mate, you’re coming with me.’ Dex is at his side now and sounding insistent. He wonders if Dex knows his secret. Thinks not. Dex is the sort to have said something. It’s actually rather wonderful to be looked after, especially by a man. So long as Dex doesn’t try to interlink arms or pat him or anything gay. He feels protected. Loved, even.

As they walk down the street together, Bo is remembering that time when a stranger decked him outside the house. It must have been when they were living in Chelsea. Had he taken the dog out for a walk around the square? Anyway, the stranger – looking back he thinks maybe a wino or a guy with some mental health issue who had maybe climbed the railings – he recalls running into the house and his father being there, so it must have been a weekend, and his father bundling him back out of the front door ranting about no son of his and saying, ‘Get out there and don’t come back till you’ve showed him a fucking lesson,’ and Bo going back into the square and seeing the guy who’d punched him, collapsed on the bench with piss running down his trousers and his father clapping him on the back when he returned to the house, saying, ‘A man who comes running home without seeing to his business is a bloody coward.’

The adrenaline is beginning to wear off and be replaced by a horrible throbbing on his right side. Is that where the punch landed? Must be.

They are walking north now away from the river and towards the Mile End Road. Dex is saying something about losing each other earlier in the churchyard and seeing some random woman getting beaten up, but to be honest, Bo can’t really focus on anything except the pain in his right side and the reoccurrence of the much deeper emotional pain of his childhood. The first he doesn’t really care about. The second he wants done with.

‘Hey,’ he says, ‘you look like all kinds of shit yourself, mate. What’s with the eye?’ Dex has clearly been in some minor war himself and he’s hoping to deflect the discussion back to safer ground.

‘That massive a-hole wanting to know why I was looking at his girlfriend. Remember, at the festival? I told you.’

They’re walking past a bakery now and the waft of scorching dough reaches Bo’s nostrils and makes him think, briefly, of the pizza delivery girl from earlier.

‘Some women are just trouble,’ he says.

‘Whoa. Where did that come from?’ There’s a pause, which is what Bo has been dreading. He imagines the cops, going to court, all that shit, but to his surprise, Dex says, ‘I’m going to text the girls and let them know where we’re going, though if they’ve got any sense they will have gone home.’

‘Good man,’ Bo says, holding up his right palm for a high five, forgetting the state of Dex’s hand.

They’ve passed Watney Market and are heading up the side of the Holiday Inn now. It’s quiet here. The mess down in Wapping hasn’t reached this far north.

Dex’s phone pings. ‘Cass is home. She and Anna got separated but she says Anna’s phone was running out of battery and she hasn’t heard from her.’

‘Oh?’ Bo says, not liking the sound of that.

Another ping. ‘Hang on,’ Dex says, manoeuvring the phone into his unbruised left hand. ‘That’s Anna now. Says she’ll meet us at the hospital.’

‘Tell her not to bother if she’s already on her way home.’ On balance, Bo would rather just sort this out with Dex. He doesn’t want it to become a whole performance and he absolutely does not wish to be questioned about what happened in the churchyard. It’s a massive relief that Dex hasn’t yet mentioned it and he hopes he won’t. They’ve all been through enough this evening. They are at the entrance to the Royal London’s A&E department when Dex’s phone next pings.

‘Anna says she’s in Ali’s getting a fry-up.’

‘Really? Anna? A fry-up?’

Bo doesn’t remember Anna having any food issues when they were first dating all those years ago, though he probably wouldn’t have noticed in any case. On the contrary, she was curvy back then. All that borderline anorexia stuff must have started after they split up. He recalls that she managed to conquer it for a while, just before her accident, then it came back with a vengeance. Bo presumed she’d got to grips with it again when that thing happened between them – she wasn’t looking particularly skinny that night – and during her pregnancy with Ralphie, but in the last year or so even Bo had noticed that she’d lost weight again. He didn’t really get women. He figured, being gay, Dex probably understood them better. Anything too deep about the female psyche pretty much freaked him out. He just wasn’t all that interested in what was going on in their minds. He was fundamentally an algorithm bloke. Code, formulae, all that stuff. There is an honesty to numbers. They’re clean. An internal laugh bubbles up, despite the pain, which he does his best to suppress and he realises he’s been thinking how ironic that is, for a guy who’d made his money reinventing the dating app. The laugh, though silent, causes the pain in his ribs to surge.

‘She’ll be along in a bit. She says don’t leave A&E without her.’

They’ve just walked through the swing doors into a heave of mostly blokes with what look like minor injuries; casualties of the fighting, Bo supposes. He wonders if there’s a private A&E he can go to, avoid the queues, but if there is, the likelihood of its being here in the East End is pretty low. He thinks about packing it in and just going home, then thinks it might be useful to have himself on camera in the A&E.

They join the line at the triage desk.

‘Fancy a coffee?’ says Dex. In one corner of the waiting room is a bank of vending machines. Bo looks over and spots a camera on the ceiling above the machines. Could be useful. Certainly won’t hurt.

‘You stay in line,’ he says. ‘I’ll go.’