I was sure Tommy had killed his Dad that morning, but I wasn’t going to let that ruin our day; the old bastard probably deserved it more than most anybody else I knew.
+++++Tommy’s old man was a hooligan, a meathead who knocked around with my own Father years before, did his dirty work. The pair of them ruled this wee town.
+++++Then my old man went missing and Tommy’s fell into a bottle of vodka and now, from the state of Tommy’s hands, he’s either dead or so fucked he wishes he was.

We drank Frosty Jack cider under White Point Bridge, looked into the summer rain and waited. It was all we could afford; £3.50 for 3 litres, 22 units of alcohol a bottle and Tommy drank two bottles every day I knew him. We hid from the stamping foot of the rain beneath a black grease mark on the stone where a fire had raged.
+++++Tommy swigged from the plastic bottle, handed it to me and looked out at the yellow field and squat council houses against the cool white of the sky. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said, reaching up to touch his mouth. His lower lip was puffed up like a slug and split down the centre. ‘I almost hope them lasses don’t even turn up now; how the fuck am I supposed to do anything when me jaw’s like this?’ Carpet fluff filled his long Blond hair, dirty and parted in the middle. His blood stained hands shook. ‘Fuck, what the fuck am I going to do?’
+++++ ‘What exactly happened?’
+++++ ‘Never mind; pass us back that bottle.’

Tommy’s house was at the back of mine and I heard his Mam scream before I’d even dragged out of bed that morning. I looked through the window at the rain-dark bricks of his home and saw the old man’s fat silhouette against the glass. I saw he had her by the hair, tight against the kitchen floor, then I saw Tommy run in and grab the old man’s shoulders and pull him backwards out of my view and that was all I saw. His Mam screamed again, something high and filled with a hundred nights of knuckles and Gin and then the house fell into a silence so sudden it came like an attack. I reeled from the stillness, blood thumping at my ear, waiting for whatever evil was going to rise from that calm, but nothing came. An hour later Tommy climbed over the back-garden fence and was at our kitchen door, bottle in hand.

‘Just let me think for a bit.’ He handed me back the bottle.
+++++I shrugged and drank. It had a chemical taste and was bitter like bile at the back of your mouth. It’s what you expected for less than four quid. ‘Everyone fights with their Dad at some point, mate,’ I said.
+++++ I wasn’t a drinker like him and the fizz of the afternoon worked up at the hard luck thoughts like mints in a bottle of coke. The rain stank of the distant smoke of fires in the scrap yard and the entire world was hard and cool as marble.
+++++ ‘They aren’t coming,’ he said.
+++++ ‘Don’t you think that’s for the fucking best?’ I replied. ‘What happened with your old man, then?’
+++++ ‘Let’s not talk about it, not right now.’
+++++ ‘We’re gonna have to do something.’
+++++ ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s piss off.’
+++++We sat and looked into the rain, neither bothering to move.

We’d met the girls next to the Kamikaze ride the night before; Tommy wore a dirty Middlesbrough shirt and was smoking Lambert and Butler’s, his hair loose on either side of a face moist with booze sweat. I wore my Dad’s old Biker Cut-off, a denim jacket with the sleeves sliced away and the gang’s name and insignia, faded and year cracked by now, across the shoulders. It was too big for me, but was the only thing of his I had. He walked out one night when I was small and neither my mother nor I had heard a thing from him since.
+++++ Tommy and me both had long hair, and the girl’s wore Nirvana T-shirts, so I reckoned they’d spotted us among the milling Chavs and taken us for kin of some kind. They were so drunk they hadn’t even noticed I was a girl. Tommy wasn’t good with words, ‘Here on holiday?’ That was the best he could do on the spot. They were clean beneath the shop-bought grunge, perfectly made-up and I flashed envious glances at their long legs and perfect teeth.
+++++ When I started to speak the tallest interrupted, ‘Jesus! You’re a girl!’ I felt my face burn and Tommy pushed me with his shoulder and announced, with the pissed-confidence that saved him sometimes, ‘We’re mates, me and Nat.’ I turned and stared at him. He continued. ‘Best mates.’ The air was heavy and wet and the jeans I wore stuck to my legs; I felt strangled, captured by the night, deafened by the boom of dance music and the heavy metal screech of rides and kids screaming and yelling with the kind of laughter that comes dangerously. I watched Tommy lean over the girls, his hands on their shoulders. He kissed them both before they climbed onto the ride, then he watched the Gondola tip upside down into the neon stained black of night, cigarette hanging from his lips, crooked half-grin on his long face. The girls hung there, held against the dark by the ride’s heavy arm and I saw them scream and Tommy whistled, his fingers in his mouth, laughing. He didn’t even notice me leave.

The walls of the tunnel had started to drip rust from the iron girders above and we’d had enough of the mud and dust; Tommy wanted to find the girls. He knew where they were staying. He was unsteady on his feet as we walked down past the White House hotel, looking out over the fairground.
That was where Jingo found us.
+++++ He slowed the red GTi by the grass of the cliff edge and turned the thumping Tommyce music down low. ‘Tommy,’ he shouted out of the window. We ignored him. I heard somebody laugh in the back of the car, but couldn’t see a soul inside through the darkened windows. Jingo slipped the shades from his face; shrunken pupils in his eyes like burnt match-heads. He was a local dealer with pretensions, his older brother and Tommy’s father met in Durham prison a score of years before; they ran pills and brown down from Middlesbrough before business suddenly ceased, that was how I understood it from Tommy, when he was drunk enough to spill. Jingo was intent on fucking with us to pass an afternoon. ‘Tommy, these lasses say they know you, mate.’ More laughter from the back seat of the car, enough to make Tommy stop, turn and look down at Jingo; he glanced at the pale line where the day was fading, then into the back seat. ‘Hello again,’ he said, ‘thought we had a date?’
+++++Jingo laughed. ‘You’re already out with a young lady, though, very romantic. Maybe she’d see you in a different light, if she knew, eh? How is it Nat, heard owt from Daddy? I bet you fucking haven’t; I know where they buried him, you see.’
+++++Tommy, quick as a snapping dog, reached through the window, took hold of Jingo’s fat, grease stained throat and dragged him half out the window. The laughter turned to screams. Tommy raised a fist, brought it down on the Big Mac shine of the dealer’s face. I heard the nose smash, blood sprayed out like juice from first cut on a grapefruit and I dashed over, grabbed Tommy. He shoved me backwards, reached in the window and unlatched the door. Dragged the other lad onto the pavement and started giving him the boot, until Jingo stopped moving and blood streamed like spilled paint out into the chickweed breaking through asphalt.
+++++ Tommy trembled and looked over at me. ‘He shouldn’t have said that about your Dad,’ he said, then, he pushed me towards the car. ‘Get in.’ I heard a siren on the summer breeze.
+++++ ‘The fuckin’ police are coming…’
+++++ ‘Get in.’

Tommy pressed the small car through the back roads as if it was a blade pushing into something’s heart. Dust ripped from the gutter on Danger Bank, then down by the banks of the Esk, and up out into the moorland and the hills, where traffic was restricted to trailers, tractors and nothing much beside. He gripped the wheel and I could smell the drink coming out of him in great swathes of sweat. The two posh lasses were crying in the back seat as he ripped the car from side to side of the thin road, up against the blue sky thin as eggshell already falling into night at the edges where the day had surrendered to the larger darkness coming for everything standing in light.
+++++ He eased his foot off the pedal and glanced in the rear view. The police were miles back, lost in the side roads and lanes of the dale bottom. He lit a cigarette and turned. ‘Having fun yet?’ He yelled and there was madness in his gaze, as if he knew this was to be his last stand. Next thing would be the helicopter.
+++++ ‘Tommy,’ I said, reaching over and taking hold of his hand. ‘Why the fuck did you turn on him like that?’
+++++ ‘There’s things you don’t know about your old man, things you shouldn’t know; him and my Dad were bad men.’ He swallowed. ‘Jingo knows that, knows what went on, back then. Fucking hell, he knows too much.’ He stared at me. ‘We’re mates still?’
+++++ ‘Always.’
+++++He nodded and smiled as though this had satisfied him. Then he turned to the girls. ‘Not quite the date I promised, lasses, but out you get,’ he said, ‘the three of you; this is a one way ride.’ He glanced at me out of the half-opened window as I shut the door. ‘They’ll come looking for me,’ he said.
+++++ ‘I don’t think you hurt him that bad.’
+++++He looked past me into the air. ‘Not for him.’ Then he locked eyes with me again. ‘Fuck ’em all, eh?’
+++++ ‘Fuck ’em,’ I said, stepping back, feeling tightness in my throat. I knew I would never see him again.
+++++He nodded. The two girls started running back towards the town, which glittered at the foot of the hills as if a sparkling jewel set against black leather. The sky above the west burned with loss and Tommy started the engine, turned the car on the gravel of the pull-in, and raced into darkness.

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Gareth Spark

Gareth Spark was born in Whitby He began writing the pieces that became his first collection, At the breakwater (Mudfog Press, 2001) in the late 90’s. His second collection Ramraid (Skrev Press, 2004) followed soon after. In 2007, he moved to Spain, where he began to write his third collection Rain in a dry land (Mudfog Press, 2008) while working in various bars. His short fiction and poetry appeared in Close to the Bone, Shotgun Honey, Line Zero, Ink, sweat and tears, Out of the Gutter, NAP, Poetry Bus and Deepwater Literary Review, among others. His story American Tan won second place in the GKBC International Short Story competition in 2013. The publication of his first collection of stories Snake Farm (Electraglade Press) followed in 2015. He reviews online for Fjords Review, among others, and is a member of the Zelmer Pulp writing collective.

Latest posts by Gareth Spark (see all)

• This notion of a fire - October 31, 2016
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