Impotence!

The outline of a man tucked into the shadow of the chimneybreast chuckles.

‘It were a good night last night, wan’ it?’ His voice rasps: metal on metal.

He lifts a hand to his mouth and in the silence of the room you can hear his breath drawing in fire. A red dot in his hand burns bright for a long moment and an orange glow warms the sharp angles of his face.

‘Yeah. Was.’ A softer voice concurs succinctly from the opposite side to the room. Over there, against the wall, another man, perhaps as old as thirty sits in the moonlight. His back is resting against the pasty anaglyptic ridges of wallpaper: his face tipped ceiling-wards reliving the fond memory. One of his dark denim legs is bent up towards his chest, the other thrust out into the room, where a foot in a mud splattered, cracked soled trainer, lolls across the violent colour-leeched swirls of a threadbare carpet.

Out in the open, sitting somewhere between the two men, a boy turns his head in the direction of the first voice and wipes his nose with the back of his hand.

His nose is dry. It usually is, but he often needs to check.

He watches hungrily as the dot of red light rises again, swells bright in that darkest corner of the room, then moves across to the right and down as it fades to a smoulder.

It’s almost completely black over there by the chimneybreast, sheltered as it is from the moonlight. But if the boy concentrates really hard he can just about make out the slight silhouette of an arm behind the dot and a delicate waft of grey smoke swimming in the inky pixels of his squint closed eyes.

‘Have you ever been to a club Mikey?’ The voice from the dark corner is rumbling rough and curling with an accent that the boy hadn’t heard before today.

The man on the other side of him hmphs a snigger and coughs it out.

The boy lifts the can he is holding up to his mouth,

‘No. Not yet.’ He mumbles and pours in liquid to drown the embarrassment of his reply.

The fizz is cold, metallic in his mouth, bitter on his tongue and new bread on his inward breath. He doesn’t really like the taste but he keeps it there for a moment savouring and tense, listening to the tickle of bubbles at the back of his nose.

Outside a car sweeps down the road towards them.

Its headlights through the window scan the space like a beacon from a watchtower. It lays bare the three of them sitting on the floor of the abandoned room: two grown men dressed darkly so as to fade into the night and the boy, clothed randomly in navy tracky bottoms, an old red hoody and a blue baseball cap pushed down over his wispy weasley face.

But the beam isn’t searching for them and as it swings past, it sends their enormous shadows flying in an arc across the walls and exposes the detail of the little there is to be seen.

The whisper of net at the window.

A scatter of twisted beer cans, left where they have fallen.

And dogends, crumpled like dozens of dead soldiers around an empty fire grate.

Otherwise nothing except, close to the door, a sliding stack of old newspapers, left over from the packing.

‘Don’t worry. There’s plenty of time for clubs. You stick with us. We’re your family now. We’ll show you a thing or two.’ The smoking man turns his hollow cheeks and hooked nose towards the boy.

‘It’s a good place you got here by the way.’

He leans forward and holds out the smoke towards the child. The man’s eyes are small and blue and cold. The boy reaches out a hand, the one without the port wine stain, he keeps that one hidden for now, and takes the joint in his long thin fingers with their chewed and dirty nails. He looks at the spliff for a moment, its long white smoothness, he holds it like a reward, his chest swelling with pride.

‘How d’you find it?’ the man keeps his voice low.

‘My mum used to work here. She looked after the old man before he died. Got him his lunch and stuff.’

Carefully the boy puts the fat rolly between his lips and pulls the curious prize in to his mouth. The peak of his cap diverts rising smoke towards his eyes, making them water. His head spins slightly as the drug smarts its way down into his chest. The skin inside his throat tingles and he wants to cough but he holds his breath, screws up his eyes and just manages to stop himself.

‘Does your Mum look after lots of old folk then?’

When the boy opens his eyes the two men are looking at each other across him, as if they understand each other. As if they don’t need any words to communicate.

Mikey’s gut twists a little with envy. He would like some of that closeness in his life too.

‘Do you know of any other gaffs like this? Ones that haven’t been cleaned out yet?’ It’s the moonlit man speaking this time. He is gentler looking than the smoker but more closed in. His face is rounder, disc like, framed with a curtain of light brown hair that falls in a lank fringe across his forehead, shadowing his eyes.

‘Nah,’ Mikey splutters in a hurry to get things straight between them. ‘My mum doesn’t do that anymore. She’s a dinner lady now. I know loads of places like this round here though. But they’re not empty, they’ve got people living’ in them still.’

‘Well,’ the smoking man’s voice is reassuring. ‘That might not be such a problem, young Michael.’ His hand comes out of the shadow and he flicks a fleck of invisible dust from his knee with a yellowed finger. ‘We just want to have a look round you see. We’re not going to harm anyone. You could come with us, show us a couple?’

‘I…’ the boy hesitates. ‘I suppose I could.’ He doesn’t sound very sure.

‘Look at it like this,’ the harsh voice encourages, ‘you keep us entertained for a few days while we’re in the area and we could call that last little transaction a gift. What do you think Carl?’

‘Then anything you make when you sell the food on others, would be yours to keep.’

‘Sounds like a good idea to me.’ Carl sounds buoyant. ‘Possibly a very lucrative arrangement we could build up between the three of us. Its lucky we bumped into each other I’d say.

And don’t worry. We’re not going to hurt anyone, we don’t want any trouble. We’ll just get in, have a look round, see what we can find, and no one’ll ever even know we’ve even been.’

Carl tilts his head and looks sideways at the boy’s doubtful expression. He takes in the child’s weedy frame and his young face. There is barely yet a blemish on his soft pale skin, or at least none that wouldn’t wash off. No grimy detail to compliment the shock of wayward dark brown hair as it straggles out of the back of his baseball cap: splitting into rat’s tails and curling away as soon as it meets the resistance of his shoulder.

‘I’m not sure though Matt.’ Carl seems to waver. ‘True with that slim fit body he could be very useful to us but I’m not so sure the boy’s man enough for this sort of thing yet. You’ve got to be a certain sort of person to do what we do. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, this line of work.’

‘What do you mean?’ Mikey jumps in, indignant. ‘Course I am.’

He’s already up on his feet, fingernails pressed hard into his palms and heading for the door.

‘Come on then, I’ll show you!’

* * *

It would be fair to say that Mikey hadn’t expected his descent in the criminal underworld to happen as quickly as it did. But Matt and Carl weren’t like his usual mates. They were people that he had only met the day before and chance meetings can do that to you.

Also, at the time he was probably a little bit high because later, looking back, he couldn’t remember climbing up the ladder that they propped against the upstairs window of the next house they chose to visit.

He could remember climbing in through the window though. And he knew, from the marks he found on his leg the next day, that the wooden sill had rasped along the inside of his thigh.

But at the time he was sure he didn’t really feel it.

Or rather he had felt it, but the leg hadn’t felt like it was his as he edged his foot downwards, pointing and prodding, searching towards the floor.

He had decided that the house was badly designed, that the floor was too far away from the window, but then he was a first timer.

As he balanced at the top of the ladder, waiting for instruction, Mikey had examined the hands that held tight to the window frame, trying not to pull. He knew they were his. Both of them were long and fine and familiar, and this one, the one on his right side, had a port-wine stain at the base of the thumb. It was something that had caused him trouble in the past. He usually tried to keep it hidden. If he hadn’t felt the need to keep it hidden, he might have done better at school, because Mikey was not a stupid boy, just one who didn’t want to be wanted.

Usually he knew that he could trust his hands. And in the window that night his grip was steady and sure but he wasn’t certain how strong it was, or how strong he wanted it to be: he didn’t want anything to give, anything to come away in his hand.

But he did know that his palm was sweating. And that the winter air was tingling in his nostrils, lining them with ice so that he thought he might sneeze.

When he looked back later, he could remember hoping not. He had a feeling that Matt and Carl wouldn’t like it if he did.

At the time, as he edged himself a little further through the window and into the room, his other hand was beside him, holding on to the top of the ladder. He wasn’t sure whether he was using it to keep the ladder steady or using the ladder to steady him.

It was one or the other: perhaps a bit of both. But either way it wasn’t working because every now and then, the ladder wobbled as if someone below was trying to shake him off.

For a moment he thought he was going to fall.

Panic made him pant. As he looked over his shoulder and down to the ground to check, his breath came in short white bursts out into the cold night air.

Below in the distant dark, the smirking circle of Carl’s white face floated like a dead fish on an herbaceous sea.

‘Hurry up.’

Carl’s voice hissed up the rungs.

‘I’m freezing my bollocks off down here.’

At that moment in time Mikey had swallowed the tasteless nothing in the salt dry of his mouth and wished he was somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Behind him, out of the window, he could see the pitch and roll of the roof tops all around, a necklace of haloed street lights warming a path between empty black spaces while the fingers of winter trees stretched up from the shadow gardens to try and touch the lights in the star sparkling sky.

What a beautiful end to the year.

Mikey turned back towards the house and took a deep breath. The breath wobbled its way into his lungs. Better get this over with. He grabbed the air firmly in his chest and held it there as he forced his leg down as far as he could; so far that he felt as if his ribs were ripping apart.

At last, when he had extended himself almost to his limit, he felt the brush of carpet, firmer than air beneath his foot and relaxed slightly, letting a little of his breath creep out from between his teeth. He shifted his body weight forward, away from the rungs of the wobbly ladder and further on into the room.

But as soon as he did so there was a dull rush and a thud.

A pile of boxes that he had mistaken for the floor slid away from his foot and avalanched their contents on to the ground.

Mikey grabbed the window frame with both his sweat slimy tingling hands and froze. Suspended there across the sill, one leg on either side, he teetered like an acrobat, rocking like a child’s balancing toy, while his eyes flicked across the room to where Matt’s back was poised, silent, hawkish by the bedroom door where he stood, trying to peer around it and out onto the dead black landing.

With the noise of sliding boxes Matt’s head span around. His small blue eyes stabbed at the boy through the darkness and his hand flew up in a stiff order of silence as he turned his head back to listen for the house’s response.

Mikey stayed as still as he could, waiting for instruction. The wood of the window sill dug into his groin while the panting breath released from his lungs became a white mist and floated off: sending smoke signals out in to the winter night.

Time stretched in the silence. Slowly Matt raised his hand and beckoned the boy to come to him.

Quickly.

To come quickly.

To join him.

The instruction was a relief and relief made the boy agile.

He slipped over the sill and slubbed onto the bedroom floor like a cat, landing on all fours.

He paused. He stood.

Moonlight from the open window splashed a stain down the front of his hoody.

He looked around.

They were in a small bedroom. The walls were papered in a faded floral print that ran in lines from the yellowing skirting board at the bottom to the yellowing picture rail at the top. Above the picture rain the ceiling took over, grey and smutty. The only other decoration in the whole room was a washed out print of a haloed, bearded man dressed in a blue robe, holding a bird on his hand and surrounded by wild animals.

Totally unbelievable: whoever thought up that one.

But Mikey knew him.

St Francis of Assisi.

Other than that, the walls were bare.

Along one wall a single bed was made up for somebody and covered with a pale coverlet. It looked like nylon, like it might melt in the heat of the sun and stick to your flesh like toffee.

But somebody must have chosen to buy it.

The shiny fabric was topstitched in a quilted diamond pattern while the ruched sides wrapped the bed in waves of satin sheen.

Next to it on the wooden bedside table sat a small lamp in the shape of a red and white spotted toadstool with a garden gnome leaning up against it.

Once it might have been bright and exciting for a child but here, the half-light had stolen some of its identity, left it standing still, drained of colour, dated and expressionless.

The rest of the room looked like it has been picked up, shaken and dumped in a corner.

The box that had been under the window was ripped down one side now, spewing books and papers across the chequered print of the carpet. The drawers in the dressing table behind the door had been pulled out and their contents left spilling down the front like the chemical froth of an overflowing drain.

On the top of the dressing table, in front of a large utilitarian mirror, a small collection of china animals had fallen on their sides as if felled in a massacre and several embroidered, lace edged doilies lay askew: lily pads on an overcrowded pond.

As he took in the chaos, Mikey caught sight of a white-faced frightened child looking back at him from the mirror. He jumped, took a step backwards. Then realizing that it was his own reflection, he pulled himself up to make himself look taller, stronger. He yanked off his baseball cap, quickly ran his fingers through his hair and pulled the fringe forward to disguise his own babyface. To make himself look tougher, badder.

The seconds ticked away.

Outside, the squall and yowl of cats fighting, overlaid with the rush of a distant train, was suddenly fractured by a massive series of explosions. For a moment the room was illuminated in shades of red gold and green.

Mikey stiffened and kept his eyes fixed on the back of the man by the door, waiting for guidance.

When he turned to speak Matt didn’t use sound.

‘Fireworks!’ He mouthed, raising his eyes to the heavens and gesturing with his thumb that this was a good thing.

‘I’ve already checked in here.’ Matt continued, shaking his head and pointing at his eyes with two fingers of one hand, while circling the room with the other.

‘There’s nothing.’

‘Are we going in?’ Mikey barely breathed the words

‘Shhh.’ Matt’s head flipped back towards the door as if to suggest that someone might be listening on the other side. He waited another moment then moved silently across until he was standing right up against the boy. He took hold of Mikey’s arm. His fingers were sharp and pinching. Mikey could feel Matt’s chest through the fabric of his coat as it swelled up and shrank back with every breath he took. Continues...