Short Fiction

Prologue.

There's at least one major flaw in all of us. A bit of inescapable weirdness that was never corrected and so doesn't even feel wrong. Some appear as hallmarks of bad workmanship, like the unpicked seam on a silk blouse. Others are traits of poor self-control, like the crotch stain on a pair of immaculately pressed trousers. Mine was my gob.

The officer held out the ten or so leaves before me as though I were an especially naughty puppy who'd shat them onto his suburban rug. I waited, almost expecting him to grab the back of my neck and rub my nose into the papery rosette, but instead he just let them drop in a crinkled pile, onto the table. There they sat in draughty flux, a touch pot-bellied where the ballpoint had pressed its suit and somehow reflective of his inviolate disgust. At some stage I had leeched the biro dry, but it had taken another half-page of feverish nib-driving for me to realise, and its ghostly riverbed had to be coloured in by a tutting desk sergeant before the interview could proceed.

"Well, now. Looks like we got ourselves a writer," the big man drawled, while the other two, a man and a woman, made polite sniggers. They had the appearance of actors warming up, having played out such scenes many times before, picking up cues and improvising where it felt appropriate, perhaps indulging in the odd liberal fist-fight, interspersed with a dutiful 'fess up you slag' or two. Maybe not. At the very least, though, testing out their range of emotions on the hapless and compliant mirror that was me.

The typical interview room, almost cartoonesque in its simplicity. Not much to focus on or obsess about. The smallest of beige-topped tables, hemmed in by plastic chairs, still, I suspected, infinitely more comfortable than the one I was sitting on. Nothing noteworthy about the walls or floor either, except for their colour of uniformly washed-out grey. I don't know; perhaps I had finally left this passage of my life behind. Or maybe they had outmanouevred me, calculating an exact blandness that gave nothing for the imagination to claw at except its occupants. It was certainly a good job. They belonged in its featureless womb, whereas I, the interloper, couldn't fail to be intimidated by its sparse intimacy, partisan laughter and smell of cheap deodorant.

The word was the deed. And the deed was as true as its placarded word. Interrogation.

"Look sir, I know we said 'try not to miss anything out' but this is a bit much. D'you think you might be able to...condense it down? Time is running short..." The small thin man said, in a reasonable tone.

The desk was slapped in summary by the fat one. "Not to mention my patience. You're in deep shit, sunshine!"

The woman was looking at her nails. "I've got holidays booked for October. How long are we pandering to him like this?" She was Welsh, a tidy bit of Mid-Glam or as close as it got, with her bad perm and celebrity jawline. I had something to focus on now. These were B-list impersonators, busy at their day jobs. She was a cross between Judith Hann and Queen guitarist Brian May. With her chocolate-chip eyes and triple jumper ankles, crossed where my droopy head had parked its viewpoint.

In a haze, I demonized them all. Big man, small man. Good cop, bad cop. Beggar-man, thief. Not sure what else the woman could be there for. Making the tea? That would have been Vinny's interpretation. Bless his coal-sized, bigoted heart.

A different flavour of stupor, this. Lack of sleep a leading cause. But I still couldn't remember what I was doing here. Only that at five o'clock that morning I had sat bolt upright in my cell. They caught me scraping at the wall with a shirt button. Then the paper and pen were brought, and I must have fired it all off in that few hours. It lived freshly in my brain now, but a long time had passed since the day we left the Swan. What the hell was wrong with me? What were the fits and starts and the bandage on my head all about? What, exactly, had resulted in me being here, and why couldn't I remember any of it?

"Look at him. He belongs in a hospital. Psycho ward."

They could talk about me as if I weren't there all they wanted. Because, to all intents, I wasn't. Not really.

"This lot, though," fatty said, wafting the top sheet off the pile with his bingo wing. "Never seen anything like it." He'd moved across the desk, fast for a big man, and his thumb was peeling open my eyelid before I could close it. "Listen up, Tolkien. What's this all about? Where are we going with it?"

The woman shook her tresses, lifting her chin. "I've heard of this. Automatic writing. Hand of god stuff." She looked more like a male soccer pundit in that light. What snug-jerseyed slink had hung on to his 70s perm? Keegan? McDermott?

"Hand of god? That was Maradona, love," the fat one argued. "But if it leads to an automatic confession I don't much care."

"That's the trouble," Thinny piped up. "Maradona got away with it."

"You better make sure this one doesn't." Fatso leafed a folio from the pile. "What the frig does this overblown shite mean, eh? Why can't you just write a straightforward statement like everyone else?"

I managed to lift my head. "You said to start at the beginning. That's what I've done."

Thin coughed. Fucked if he wasn't Alan Partridge with sideburns and a broken nose. "We need more though, son. And quicker. Can you just tell us? Everything on tape, like." He gestured around the room, at nothing in particular. "Modern day, all this."

"We need to wrap this up before it gets out. Keep at him!" The fat man scowled, and stalked towards the door, shaking his head. I pegged him in that moment as the teacher off Grange Hill whose name I'd never known. Alright, he had a beard and this chap didn't, but that same blustery exasperation shone through, and he had those same elbow pads on his jacket and wore cords. The twat.

I tried once to write a story about zombie cops, policing an able-bodied town. Then _Shaun of the Dead_ came out, followed by that bloody _Hot Fuzz_. Obvious that they'd split my idea in two and pinched it for double the profit. Anyway, the station in it had looked pretty much like this one, for what it was worth.

"Why are you being like this? Why don't you just tell us? We already know what you've done."

What had I done exactly? Fucked if I knew. And wasn't there something about a phone call? "I can't. There's nothing else after what I wrote. Tired now. Sleep."


Chapter One

By January my record of consecutive evenings spent in a haze of green smoke had come to a close, when the ounce of dank bud that fell into my possession around August finally expired. It was a sobering time of lucid thoughts and financial quandaries. By then I had pretty much run the gamut of the herbal scale - from red-eyed introspection to squeals of hilarity at amputee soldiers and doughy celebs teetering on TV ice, to the glimmering rim of fear and psychosis. By November I'd developed a mistrust of many things, such as lava lamps and spatulas, cupcake wrappers and Quorn. Even the flock of chimney-breast anaglypta had begun to haunt me, and every time I looked up from _Hollyoaks_, its sinister bubbles hinted at gargoyle tongues and droopy goat paps, woven around the afterimage of a twenty-two year old model in a school uniform. I'd have to physically wrench myself back to the screen, senses churning with hatred and abasement. It was a bit like Graham and Brown meets H.R. Giger, if you can imagine. Course not. Well then, fuel for the paranoia, all absorbed through glassy, couch-locked eyes that beheld the world like an old circus lion.

Nightly, these thoughts ebbed and flowed at the shore of my unwell mind. At first a gentle lapping which grew as time went on to a surge of tidal blood, crashing in breakers of sudden chest pain and fierce poundings of the temple, along with the occasional dead leg. So loudly it raged, that on occasion I was driven to nudge the volume button way past twenty. Well into the realms of grannydom.

Still I was powerless to stop and in spite of its early promise, this self-governed state failed to yield anything revelatory, aside from the belief that I had cancer of the hand (a ganglion now, I reckon) and hatchling sets of eyes growing, patient and spiderlike in my chest cavity. Ready to burst free at the behest of some future biological cue.

Oh, don't get me wrong. There was certainly an occasional epiphany to fill the space between loathing and euphoria, but in the seconds between finding pen and paper it had invariably vanished, leaving that space free for yet another lungful of rancid smoke and teasing glimpse of eternity. Or not.

So throughout my solitary autumn existence denied me its secrets; choosing instead to mock my unwashed feet and sordid air. My straggly beard and Kit-Kat wrappers. My lack of matching socks and toothpaste. All consigned, I suppose, to the spirit of mild dependence, psychological and otherwise, that typified the hippiefied.

In summary then I was barren and hard-bitten at the end of my quest to gain enlightenment and forget Sonia. There did remain a pile of smokable hemp stalks (too much bronchial unpleasantness for too little reward in all honesty) and a powdery coat lining the once-fecund bag. These dusky crystals could, in theory, be bodily vacuumed to yield one last pitiful high. But what was the use? You had to stop yourself at moments like these and realise that licking life's plate like some post-chillout Oliver could only promote the cycle of self-despite. Like the final, mechanical shag of a doomed relationship, the end was surely too bleak to justify the means. Giving in, my mother's voice insisted, made you no better than the beasts who pounced and pranced upon each other in the dust, to the leathery urgings of David Attenborough.

_Mount up, Nelly! Mount up! (The musk-drunk behemoth breaking the female's leg in his eagerness to rut.) _Let her have it!_

Or at least that seemed my recollection of the episode in question. In hindsight, as good a reason as any to stop. Ignore the primal pull. Rise above it, so to speak. Let it lie. Desist.

Which was why I scraped it all methodically, with the blade of a craft knife, into a mug of tea. One last tincture for the soul's comfort. In reality a galling brew, tasting of disenchantment and - oddly enough - feet, until a jammed bicuspid hinted at more sinister contaminants.

I sighed, fishing out the guilty clippings and holding their perfect crescents to the light, noting the shade of cerise with a puffy-eyed indifference. Toenails. Sonia's. Inexplicably, it seemed like a step to recovery, so I made some toast.

It wasn't as if there weren't more drugs. They were drugs that could be found if needed, out there in the concrete wastes of Salford. To actively seek them though was to entertain an admission more damning than sobriety. So behind the crushing despair of wanting but not surrendering, beneath the morbid beach-combing of quantum crumbs in domestic alcoves; beyond all manner of pocket-rifling, bag-licking and wallpaper-gazing there lurked - judgemental and triumphant - the maddening voice of reason that was my occasional saviour. This was the problem, see? Pride. It was pride that had driven her away and pride that found me here now, feet shuffling and knuckles raised, at oblivion's door. Pride, and the fact that I simply couldn't be arsed. Christ - was this really how P. Diddy felt in the mornings?

Later, there came a knock. No-one had been near for months. Three biblical tolls, evenly spaced. The flat impossibility of it gridlocked my senses. No _rat-tiddly-at-tat_ of the casual caller, this. It had to be Official. My first instinct was to hide, for the plausible reason it might be a bailiff. Who knew what promises of financial penury lurked between the piles of takeaway flyers, over-50s insurance and pictures of the Franklin Mint's latest gaudy shekel barricading the front door? Besides, any visitor would baulk at the stench of bush and microwave noodles, Budweiser and farts. As a secondary proposition, I watched the image of a bemused drug squad officer's face play across my mind, his peripatetic bloodhound lying in aromatic seizure, at his feet.

So I dropped to the floor and pressed myself at the sofa's edge, subjecting my cheek to a tickle of draylon fringe. Still this endless scanning. Those could easily be nuggets of bud there, nestling between the hessian fibres and discarded roaches, empty Monster Munch packets and wank rags. If nothing else, it helped take my mind off not sneezing.

Again it boomed. The giant fist of an angry God, bothering the floorboarded hallway. Not even the gnarliest of debt recovery agents, I realised, gazing down at the upturned face of my lost watch, was brave enough to patronise this neighbourhood after eleven at night. Also, for some reason, Sonia had taken the carpet.

The letterbox flapped like an old crow. "It's me - Vinny. I know you're there, I can hear the telly. We want to try drugs. You in?"

And from this lowly position and frame of mind, the perverse experiment began.

****

Cold. The numbing, furious cold of January. Outside, high-rise blocks with their windows open, leaking rancour into the street. Inside, a working men's table, its rich wood stained with the beer of a thousand spills. My glass hovering above, thwarted by an unnatural attention to this vast and burnished field that was rutted with untold knockings of domino and knuckle and ploughed by meteor strikes of keys and coins and the frank slap of pints. Finally the pot steered itself onto a sodden landing pad. I was conscious of them waiting, but my gaze was now drawn to the table's dark underside. A murky planetoid, terraformed by Wrigley nubs and bogies. Its legs...

_Oh shut up_, I told myself. _Just stop it. _

Here, at least, was space in which to evaluate my inner damage. This ongoing and symptomatic distrust of the mundane, for instance, apparently not limited to things domestic. It could drive you that way, the weed. I hoped it would stop before I went mad. The real thing, though. The thing that made me look and feel angry: was that it never happened when I actually sat down to write. This easy flow and summoned rhythm falling into step like an obedient dog refused to come. Instead, any manner of more urgent thing, no matter how long-standing or trivial, requiring my attention. It would be great to remember all this, to be able to set it in stone instead of having it float through the consciousness like the tail-end of a storm. A storm I'd slept through and could only recall in drips and rumbles. The only other worse thing I could think of to be was an amnesiac prophet.

_Something terrible's going to happen!_ Finger snapping, agonised scratching of head. _Begins with a 'P'. It'll come..._

Surrounding me, the expectant faces of four men steeped in tradition. Men of character with whom I occasionally fell in to learn from and philosophise with. I'd actually kidded myself that way at first. To learn from. Oh, the humanity! Of course the real reason was that I belonged with them, was a displaced, younger version of them. At the outset, I wanted to be with people I could feel better than and even managed to fail at that. Today though felt like some sort of opportunity. Was, perhaps, one of the few valid enticements to bring me from my cocoon into the murmuring, yeast-steeped vault of the Swan. The chance to teach - even bad things to good people - is a powerful lure. To feel better and, if not, to at least have company in misery was something else solitude seemed to have placed firmly in my mind.

Semantics aside, each of these fellows was in their own tarnished, urban way 'Best of Breed' in class. 'Little' Vinny Lomax, he of the mythical knock and thinning quiff. Fair play, the drainpipes had been jettisoned in the nineties, after the doctor told him the problem that sent his wife spinning into the fertile orbit of his next-door neighbour was almost certainly years of 'shit-stopper' abuse.

"Just like that," Vinny confided after a few black-and-tans one night. "No fancy words, nothing. I'll never forget his wrinkled up nose."

"They probably didn't have the Latin for it," Ken McMahon sympathised. Nobody laughed. Nor was it a joke. The happy couple still lived next door and their triplets kept him awake crying at night. Vinny crying I mean, the girls were a trio of bonny sixteens by now. A testament to sperm counts and ship-jumping.

After that bombshell (still, a syndrome named in your honour, eh? Accredited by medical science, no less, and giving rise, as Frank the Scouser suggested, to a new type of birth control - _The Vinny Method_.) After that little problem, drape jackets and crepe soles didn't really go. Not with the elasticated jeans and the truss. He'd hung on to the quiff though. These days it was more a testament to hair tonic and the power of denial. That, and his jukebox selections. This was the thing though: Vinny liked the attention, even if it only meant being sent up. Besides, he was pushing sixty now. For others, perhaps not so vital to still be nurturing their virility. For him though, in the great scheme of things, understandable.

It was the sort of tale I used to come for. Spent many an evening here chasing, to their initial bemusement. And if they wondered why such a generational misfit would seek the company of old soaks they never asked. But I'll tell you. Here was more material than in any library or archive; here was wit and brio and whipcord dialogue, set fair for the price of a few pints. And that's all I needed. With this kind of input the novel would surely write itself. _Saturday Night and Sunday Morning_ with a bit of _'Salems Lot_ thrown in. The earnest sweat of men at coal faces, all tits and graft. Tough, flint-faced women waiting at the door with armfuls of washing and a ring of smudge-eyed kids. All turning into bloodsuckers when the sun went past the washing line. Dreadful, honestly. Awful.

Anyway, I digress. Little Vinny was the ex-Ted. Ray Feeney the gambler. Frank Birtles the Scouser and Kenny McMahon, the know-all. Stereotypes, sure. Nobody denies it. But archetypes too. Best of Breed like I said. The research they served a purpose for was long since abandoned, but I loved them in a fatherless way and was even flattered to have inveigled myself into their collective consciousness now. They wanted my expertise and I dearly needed to be an expert in something. By god. Anything.

"We thought you'd dropped dead, Nev. Been weeks."

The sound of my own voice, querulous from lack of use. "Yeah. Bit of trouble with the missus. Ex-missus."

"Sorry to hear that, son. Course it's a winter thing, you know. There's even a name for it," I could sense the others rolling their eyes; at least one sigh of exasperation. "Sensational...Abnormal Disease."

Kenny could cheer you up like that. His omniscience was an act of course, like his magisterial face. A bluff fumble for authority. We had a lot in common, me and him. The difference was, the others knew Ken almost always winged it, with just a germ of plausibility or mangled bit of truth thrown in. That they endured it was somehow the worst unkindness. A sort of blanket humiliation he would never awaken to. In him I saw a future me the most, which was as depressing as it sounds.

I sipped the pint that had been laid before me moments earlier, signifying the shift in power. Them paying instead of me. They needing something I possessed this time and knowing I'd every right to be as cute in parting with it as they once were. Hoping my fewer years on the planet hadn't yet nurtured the curmudgeon. That it wouldn't cost them too many drinks.

_At the heart of every human is a lonely bit of carbon, a billion light years from home,_ came the random thought, and I really wished it would end soon, all this. Nobody should be wearing a duffel coat and sunglasses at 4pm in the mood-swinging gloom of a Northern pub. Except for one of the Gallaghers maybe, and I couldn't begin to hope for that sort of cool.

There was collective nudging and throat-clearing, then Frank Birtles exercised his Bootle twang. "Ok, then. Let's start at the beginning. We've found this."


****

I snorted, splashing half a head of mild into the ashtray. "F-fucksake!"

A carrier bag lay plumply on the table, brazen as a Reader's Wife. Peering inside, I blanched at all the packets and twists, wrappers and ampoules, pills and blotters with chunks of nine-bar, subdued by shrink wrap. It was what you might term a motherlode of opiates, rarely seen outside the grounds of Colombian mansion or Iberian nightclub; certainly not in the smoky conservatism of the Swan. Trouble was, this bloated _habeus corpus_ might easily net us ten years apiece, with a couple left over for the landlord. I swiftly, and perhaps a little avidly, swiped the stash from the table top, my whitened hands trembling. Talk about the elephant in the room! Pulsing beneath the semi-opaque plastic and supermarket branding were a thousand possibilities swarming toward a million outcomes, the overwhelming majority of which ended in prison and bloodshed. It was a powerful force that radiated from where I'd squirmed it, between the outside of my thigh and the adjacent leg of Little Vinny Lomax, whose face wore the woozy innocence of a child nuzzling a rattlesnake.

"Couldn't you have put it in something a bit more discreet?" I gasped. Christ, this had woken me up. My eyes were on stalks now, the whole place an energy field, electrified by the foreign object. Everything was suddenly polarised within the oaky atmosphere of the snug. Clink of barside glasses. Irregular _whunk!_ of darts finding quadrants. Angry clack of pool balls. I looked around, thankful for the relative seclusion of the den, even if we were squashed in a bit, like kids in a treehouse. At the side of me, moisture beaded the window, giving our emblematic swan an overheated appearance. I couldn't blame it. In spite of the season, it had gotten sticky.

Ray Feeney coughed. "That's why we needed you. We figured you'd know what to do." His thin head wobbled as he spoke and he licked his lips like the Lancastrian Lee Van Cleef that he was. Ray loved the gee-gees. The contents of this bag was currency to him. I saw that straight away, clear as a bookie's conscience. But what of the others?

"Aye. Show us the ropes, Nev. That sort of thing."

"There's a commission in it for ya, naturally," Frank finally conceded, when my silence had reached the ceiling rose high above, dissipating on cobwebby mounds of plaster the colour of jute. My glance stayed there, hoping for inspiration, while the colour slowly drained out of my beard. _Show us the ropes?_

Well, they hadn't been concerned about me after all. I could have been lying dead among the dishes for all they knew. They just had a wheeze on, a hot potato. And how! But this wasn't just about money, I could tell. That, and Vinny had said _'We want to try drugs, you in?'_ and I'd thought he meant was I home, which was foolish since he was already talking to me. But he was really asking: _you in?_

Unexpectedly, I was the parent in this. The authority. Only the legal context and their joyous ignorance of it stopped me enjoying the moment. Their fate hung in my balance and again it wasn't really the thrill of them hanging on my every word that kept me quiet. This was what Sonia had talked about before she left. Responsibility. Maturity. Doing the right thing, being the best you can be. Committing to the future. Having matching furniture and liking shopping. In that order.

Sitting opposite her though, leaning into our shared space, fists clamped over drawn-together knees like an earnest grief counsellor - all she seemed to be saying was, "I want a baby, I want a baby, I want a baby!"

"It was Ray that found it," Frank the Scouser explained. "Tell him, Ray."

Ray still wore the falsely attentive look of any number of those needy saps from _Antiques Roadshow._ The camera lingering on them too long, framing their greed in its raw entirety. Lifelong wishes, suspended in the aura of that smarmy expert, who should dear god please stop enigmatically gazing now and just cut to the fucking chase already.

"Not much to tell, really. Found it coming out of Peabody's yesterday morning. It was all over the pavement." He shrugged. "Well, that and the claret..."

He broke off, blinking at his own stupidity.

"What?" Frank interrupted, just ahead of me. Kenny's know-all brow furled and he was, I felt sure, about to offer something inappropriate. In any event, Vinny's camp, gin-mill brogue overrode us.

"Blood, Ray? You never mentioned any of that before?" Ray's daybreak vigil of Peabody's Turf Accountants was probably a given, but the blood was significant. Even they knew that.

Ray toyed with his pendulous ear. The classic lie. Left for love, right for spite. Eyes everywhere but on us, finally settling onto his hands. "Aye. Well, like I say, it was just a splodge or two, really. I was more concerned about this stuff..." He gestured anxiously at the carrier bag, craning his neck to make sure it was still lying there between us. "...scattered all about. And that led me to the rest. Does it matter?"

_Only if it belonged to a couple of drug dealers duking it out,_ I thought, but didn't say. Out loud would be even less thinkable.

"You're doin' a lot of this Ray," Frank said, imitating his shifty shrug. Then, lapsing into a colloquial parody of Max Bygraves. "Wanna tell me a stor-eee?"

There were times for such banter. It was good entertainment normally, watching them rip each other limb from jocular limb like this, each with a style of their own that would take centre-stage before the night was out. But Ray and Frank's exchanges carried an unaccustomed edge of needle. Of their dilemma, these were clearly the main dissidents, and they faced each other now with the wariness of natural opponents. In spite of my jangly, comedown state, or maybe _because_ of it, I could sense Ray's outrage working on a couple of levels. First of all, this was _his_ find and wasn't he entitled to do with it as he saw fit? I sensed now that he regretted involving the others, that he'd done it only as a means of evaluating the booty and maybe to enlist some additional distributorship. I mean, what was he even thinking? It was akin to the way a child might enter a room, open up his soil-crusted fingers, and let an unexploded WW2 hand grenade roll across the coffee table.

_Look Mummy! Look what I found!_

The second strand to Ray's apparent huff, what any Leigh miner might deem 'having a cob on', was written in the unyielding glint of his steel-blue eyes. With everything becoming caricaturised about him in old age, a feller could still retain a bit of twilight credibility with those eyes, and Ray had that. They were a saving grace, set deep in a broken-veined face of bags and etchings, rescuing its thinness from cruelty and serving as a barometer of his outward opinion, like now. Narrowed and piercing, what they were saying to me was that it was one thing having a Liverpudlian pitch camp on your Lancashire prairie, slotting right in with his neighbourly patter and shared sense of the absurd, no more exemplified than in the vowel-elongated speech and perpetual store of excess phlegm. It was quite another to have him come along and start telling you what to do with your property. That sort of resentment, left untended, could become serious. Could, as Little Vinny Lomax had confided to me in the bogs earlier, get _racial_. He and Ken had seen it coming. Fair play to them, especially Vinny. It took a lot to get him out of the snug before closing.

A forgotten bit of Blake, fragment of my abandoned degree, resurfaced while I drank: _I was angry with my friend, I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe, I told it not, my wrath did grow._ The haul was almost secondary at this point. A side chosen now might signify allegiance to a deeper cause, and neither Ken nor Vinny would want to cast a vote that tipped the balance of their friendship. That was, I decided, the nub. Or rub. Whatever.

The problem for me was that I'd missed out on a vital session. The one where they'd all sat down and discussed the prospect of seeing what kind of experience might be drawn from taking those drugs; the rationale behind it. The belated presence of blood in Ray's tale now gave it the appearance of selectiveness, fuelling any mistrust that may have already been building. Looking around the table, it was clear to see in his cohorts' angsty faces. What else might he have omitted to say?

The quandary made me moodier still. This should have been a straightforward stash and grab. I was really in no fit state to judge all the side-issues. Why did I have to over-think things like this? Why did they? I needed time, not least because I was still running on the remnants of bifter power, and it could muddy as many things as it clarified. In spite of this, the germ of an idea began to form. If coaxed into coherence it had the potential to be big. Bigger than all these things put together. What if I could recreate that missing process and put myself in the role of impartial arbiter? Would it be worthwhile? In the face of Ray and Frank's growing rift, I thought so. On the road to this impasse, some had made bigger footprints than others, some opinions had been mooted more forcefully and hastily. In its simplest form, these were boys who'd found treasure and were squabbling over it. But there was also something compelling and socially experimental that my part-cooked brain was only just beginning to assimilate. Why, for instance, would any of these staid old dobbers even consider entering the louche world of narcotics? This was a puzzle to be solved and then, depending on the outcome... well, it would sing a far different tune than working class vampires that was for sure. All I needed to do was pin it and them down with a firm pen.

I sighed. Maybe at the end of this test, sent from whatever passed for god as a measure of my integrity, waited Sonia and the baby, perhaps outside IKEA with one of those flat trolleys you can get loads on. Perhaps I would like it, after all. It was certainly a much more enticing prospect than, say, spending the next ten years sharing a toilet with Sexuagenarians.

Frank, with his Merseyside rat-smelling instincts firmly intact, spoke my thoughts. "I think we should start again. Not missing anything out this time. A windfall's one thing, Ray. But..."

"Not here," I said, cementing the decision. "Somewhere else." Of course the real puzzle was, if Ray was genuinely bent on selling this stuff it would actually be in his interests to have us believe it was red-hot. In that light, a skilful liar might conjure up the blood after a night of careful brooding, then have it leak out here in front of us to slip around on, so to speak. Exactly how skilful was he though?

Vinny nodded, relieved. "Your place, Nev?"

"Christ, no!" This is what I was up against. What was the use? "I don't think anyone appreciates the sheer..."

He looked aggrieved. "Shall I ask Don if we can use the function room?"

I stood up. "For Pete's sake. This is a _public_ house. The last place you'd want to be drawing attention to something this - private!"

Behind the glass divide, a scrape of barstool on fake parquet, followed by some nasal whooping.

I froze, while my co-conspirators gurned nervelessly, slurping at their foam moustaches. A second or so later the coppery thud of coins heralded the source of the outburst and I managed to exhale. That rare beast it seemed: a fruity jackpot.

Kenny McMahon ratified the event with a solemn wink. "Deaf Malc. I know his celebration. He'll have put three times as much in."

"Look - chaps.." How did you go about addressing such a gathering? "Gents." I didn't know exactly how to begin marshalling a crowd of this seniority. I was usually the observer, see. But I had to start somewhere.

"This isn't tax-free fags or shonky vodka we're dealing with. Someone, somewhere is missing this stuff. Someone with maybe a pint less blood, or worse. Before we decide what to do with it, a few things need to be established."

"Told you the lad would talk sense," Kenny said, from across his folded arms, and that gave me a bit of welcome confidence.

"What _we_ do with it, aye," Frank emphasised, in case there might be any doubt as to the terms of my ambassadorship.

I lost my rag. "Hey - before we go on. If anyone feels uncomfortable, I'll be happy to bow out now. My using days are over. There's no profit in this for me." The funny thing was, as tetchily as it came out, I meant it. What bigger temptation lay ahead would have to be dealt with, but all I knew was that a few years back, this sort of haul would have turned my flat into a Malibu beach party for six months. Perhaps I was growing up after all.

"It's not like that, Nev. Is it Frank?" Vinny darted him a look that defined the limits of his diplomacy. "We're in a bugger's muddle is what he means. We'd really appreciate your help."

"Aye. I might know somewhere, an' all," Ray conceded, perhaps anxious to align himself again. "Nephew uses it sometimes. Hasn't been round for months though."

"That's because he's twenty-six and on remand, Ray," Frank chortled, and the group titter that followed was reassuringly unifying.

"Curious thing about the legal system..." Kenny began, but that lecture would, thankfully, have to keep.

"What things?" Vinny questioned, adding, for the benefit of my perplexity. "That you said needed establishing."

"Oh yeah. Inspect it. Catalogue it all. Try to find out where it came from, then decide exactly what to do with it. This place of yours safe enough to store the, err, stuff too, Ray?"

"Oh aye," he confirmed. "I'd put my house on it."

"It'll be the cellar, then," Frank winked. "Bagsy not going down first."

Of course he should have set his sights a lot higher, but never mind.