The Night Clock Read online

  With great caution, he crept along beneath the stained and unlit shelf of the walkway until he reached the edge of Balv’s shopfront window. The banging continued and Gollick could see the door shuddering in its frame. Opposite was a thick concrete pillar, one of eight holding up the walkway. Gollick took a couple of steps back and shuffled over to the pillar. Thus concealed, he could peer around and take a peek at what was going on. His gloved hands gripped the mottled sides of the pillar and he leaned out.

  What he saw filled him with amazement. Not content with just locking the door and flipping the CLOSED sign over, a large black man in a hooded jacket was taking the additional precaution of sealing himself into the shop by hammering a fistful of six-inch nails into the doorframe. Gollick could see beyond the man, along the aisle that led up to the till, and noted the presence of a second man who was holding a baseball bat a few inches from poor old Balv’s ear as he pressed the proprietor’s face into the counter. Balv wasn’t struggling.

  Gollick had withdrawn at this point. He went through his mental checklist of responsibilities. Under no circumstances was he to intervene in a way that might increase the threat of potential violence at the scene of a crime. That was the job of the police. Finding himself in this situation, Gollick could only praise the wisdom of this injunction. He had powers to detain but not of arrest; he carried no cuffs, no baton, no incapacitating sprays. He wore a padded stab vest, but that was his choice and not a mandatory requirement.

  What to do, though? A concern made more pressing as Gollick heard a muted shout of distress from within the shop and the sound of something hollow—the baseball bat had looked aluminium—impacting on something else of a more solid composition.

  Gollick decided to investigate the rear of the shop. He crept out from behind the pillar and trotted the length of the rain swept promenade until he arrived at the gated entrance to the Snowcat. He turned and had a look back. The hammering had stopped. All he could hear was the sound of the rain blowing in spattering sheets against the sides of the buildings. He dodged around the side of the pub and went to where there was a wooden fence corralling a small yard full of stainless steel beer kegs and old wooden crates. He stood on tiptoes and peered over the fence. He could see the back entrance to the pub but it was shut, probably locked. No one about. Gollick lowered himself onto the soles of his boots and padded around the back of the building. There was a narrow alley giving onto the rear of the parade and, to the right, the exiguous gardens belonging to a block of bungalows running parallel to it.

  Gollick crept along the alley until he came to a gate sentried on either side by piles of bulging black bin bags. The rain was a fine mist and Gollick squinted through it to see that the gate was ajar. The bottom of the gate rucked up a thick lip of mud as he pushed it open and he stepped through into the yard at the back of Balv’s shop. Ahead was a door that was inset with a small, filthy window. Gollick stole up to the door, past piles of crates, pallets and saturated cardboard boxes, their sides sunken in like gaunt cheeks and giving off a dim smell of must.

  Gollick peered through the window. He could see through the length of the storeroom and could make out the shape of Balv’s skinny old buttocks and legs, rickety with distress, as he was being forced to bend over the counter and receive repeated and savage blows to the side of his head from the baseball bat wielded by his assailant. Gollick winced every time the bat chimed off the old man’s skull.

  Gollick’s hand hovered above the handle. And then he remembered his prime directive and pulled it away. He sighed with relief.

  And then he remembered something else and backed away from the door as quietly as he could, his heart pounding in his chest. What a fool he was, he thought. All that training, that entire week, nearly wasted in the heat of the moment! He turned and went back through the gate into the alley. He pulled the gate shut behind him. Then he trotted the remaining length of the alley and came out into a space bordered on both sides by lock-up garages.

  Gollick rested for a moment.

  How could he have forgotten that the shop door had been nailed shut! That meant the only way out for the robbers would be by the back door and into the alley. Gollick had risked compromising the mission by being discovered. He shook his head and took off at a light jog across a green towards the community centre. He must have appeared odd, a bulky figure, hunched and loping through the misty rain, like grainy footage of Bigfoot shying away from prying eyes.

  As he ran, Gollick reached up into his cagoule and unhooked his radio. He pressed the button and seconds later was reporting hearing a disturbance coming from the Reservoir End Estate general store and he would be proceeding with caution to investigate.

  Gollick reckoned he’d give it ten minutes and then saunter back.

  Having fulfilled his duty, Gollick nipped up the steps to the community centre and had his first complimentary cup of tea of the morning, care of Maude, the voluntary hostess, who liked to support her local police, and who just happened to be the self same lady to be issued a ticket by officer Gollick a few weeks later for letting her dog curl a sneaky one down on a verge by the bus stop.

  NOW, GOLLICK WAS inside the store, and looking at the aisles of goods piled high on the shelves, marked up to the kind of eye-watering prices found only in shops enjoying very little or no competition and patronised by those unable, or unmotivated, to travel further for their shopping.

  “We got raspberry ruffles better than half price, boss.” Someone said, as if reading Gollick’s thoughts.

  Startled, Gollick looked around. From somewhere below him and to the left, the person said, “And we just got some of them mobile phone facials in, plastic, pretty, innit. For the kids. Up by the till.”

  Gollick looked down and saw Beanie, Balv’s nephew, standing in the aisle beside him. It was gloomy in the shop, and frigid. Light and heating, thought Gollick, detrimental to profit margins. First things to go.

  Beanie the dwarf grinned up at Gollick. Since the attack, Balv had been unable to continue running the shop owing to nerves and a steel plate in his head, and had passed the reigns to his nephew. Beanie, previously busy with his mobile disco, had taken on the role of shopkeeper with an enormous amount of disinclination and indifference. Takings were down. He bought in a lot from the more diverse suppliers, the kind of unsavoury joke shop tat Balv previously demurred owing to his strict religious observance, and Beanie certainly stocked a great deal more porn. The shop widow was covered in posters advertising BEANIE’s MOBILE DISCO AND KARAOKE, available for weddings, hen/stag nights and children’s parties and displayed a picture of Beanie in sunglasses and a baseball cap manning his decks and giving a stumpy double thumbs-up to the camera.

  Today Beanie was dressed in a child’s parka, mittens and snow boots. The oblong bulge of his head seemed to squeeze against the hood of the parka like that of some inquisitive savage leering out from a tufted shrub. He was carrying a box of miscellany that he was distributing around the store. He pulled a four-pack of coloured cigarette lighters from the box and poked them sideways into a gap between some tins of vegetable bhuna. They were priced at three pounds but Gollick knew you could pick them up for a quid in the cheap shop in town.

  “Just doing my rounds,” Gollick told him, squaring his shoulders. “How’s old Balv?”

  Beanie shrugged with disinterest. “He’s just sitting in the back, innit. Jibbling down his chin, like. Don’t say nuffin at all though. Hey, you want a free cock mag? Just help yourself, chap.” Beanie shuffled past Gollick and disappeared around the next aisle. Gollick heard him muttering and trying to jam things into available gaps.

  Gollick approached the counter. In the back of the shop, between the counter and the storeroom was a small room that passed as a kitchen. There was a sink and a table with a kettle on it. Sitting in a grimy, hollowed-out armchair was the old shopkeeper, Balv. There was a pinched, white dent in the side of his head, scarring from where he’d undergone the emergency surgery to shore up his sku
ll.

  Gollick coughed.

  There was no response from Balv. He continued to sit staring into the distance, his eyes glazed and tragic, with a sheen of saliva coating his chin.

  Gollick coughed again, more loudly, and raised a hand. “Morning, Balv,” he said.

  It was entirely possible that Balv was dead, so negligible was Beanie’s attention to him, and Gollick felt suddenly foolish. He’d saved Balv’s life after all, and it was terrible to see him reduced to this mindless crust. A small part of Gollick remained sour that the old man had never recovered enough to thank him.

  Gollick returned to the shop door. Beanie was watching him from the corner over by the Lottery machine. He was smiling, and looked – as he’d always looked to Gollick – like he was taking the piss. Beanie raised a diminutive mittened hand and waved.

  Gollick was about to leave the shop when he was barged aside by a tall figure coming through the door. Gollick wrinkled his nose as the figure pushed past and headed up the drinks aisle.

  Beanie ducked behind the counter and climbed onto his stool.

  Gollick decided to wait a moment.

  The man stumbled to the counter carrying a pair of two-litre plastic bottles of cider which he slammed down like a soldier under fire unloading huge shells of ordnance before returning for two more.

  Gollick watched as the man paid with coins and shoved the bottles into two plastic carrier bags. He was mumbling, “Fuckin’ charge me for bags you burnt smurf.”

  Unoffended, Beanie rang up the purchase. “Overheads, innit.” He said.

  The man grunted and swung around, the bags clenched in his bony fists. He saw Gollick standing by the door and his expression changed, notching quickly up from disgruntlement to aversion. He continued down the aisle and edged past Gollick without looking him in the eye.

  Gollick smiled and opened the door for him. “Good morning, Rob.” He said. “Stocking up for a productive day?”

  The man ignored him and left the shop. Gollick decided to follow him.

  He watched the man traipse across the car park and make for a bench over the main road in front of the school. He threw himself down and pulled a bottle from one of the bags. Gollick walked over.

  The man looked up, his eyes narrowing.

  Gollick appraised him, taking in the long, greasy black hair streaked with grey, and the beard, likewise grizzled with a hint of some uncommon solid diet still clinging to the strands around his mouth. A pallor indicative of a liver the size and function of an old individual meat pie. And army camouflage gear, jacket and trousers; an outfit contrived, Gollick imagined, to imply danger and caution people away. And big black army boots. Very intimidating but hardly functional as weapons in a fight as the poor sod hardly had the strength to put one foot in front of the other.

  “Oh, fuck off, Neil,” the man said. “Leave me alone.”

  “Goodness me, Rob,” said Gollick, feigning surprise, “I didn’t see you there with all that camouflage gear on. You’re nearly invisible. Remarkable feat of concealment. Very effective—”

  “I said fuck. Off.”

  Gollick watched as the man took a bottle from a bag and stuck it between his knees. He unscrewed the top and lifted the bottle to his mouth. He gazed at Gollick with a rheumy expression of defiant content as half a litre of laboratory cider swilled down his throat.

  “You can’t sit there outside the school and drink,” Gollick said.

  Rob lowered the bottle and sighed. “It’s half term, Neil.”

  Gollick looked over Rob’s head at the empty playground and low, lifeless prefabricated buildings. “Well, you need to move on.”

  Rob sat back and crossed his legs. He had another swig from the bottle. He stared past Gollick towards the community centre.

  “Why don’t you just piss off back to the tea shop and harass some grannies, Neil.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” Gollick commanded.

  Rob sighed again, licked his lips. Once, he and Gollick had been friends; they’d gone to school together, grown up on the estate together. Neil Gollick and Robert Litchin had been mates. He recalled the slow deterioration of things, things specific leading to things overall. Things. Rob thought a lot about things.

  While he sat in his flat, or if the weather was amenable, one of his spots around the estate, Rob drank and thought often about killing himself. That had begun to preoccupy him a lot recently. He didn’t question it; it seemed to him to be a logical ordering of thoughts. Once certain paths had been trodden, certain choices made, then it seemed only a matter of time before the mind turned in on itself and began to cascade despair along its pathways. It felt like the passage of some thick, hellish tar, coating an infinite network of flumes until nothing good, clean or useful could pass along without becoming degraded in filth.

  Before the booze kicked in and hazed somewhat the bleak itinerary of his downfall, Rob would be prone to early-morning recollections. Staring at the bare, scuffed walls of his flat as he laced his boots, Rob would remember, with a brief and insufferable clarity, the fact that he had once had it all. The house, the job, the girl. Stuff. He’d had some great stuff. And now it was all gone.

  Like all heavy social drinkers, Rob had experienced a brief period of ascent as the sauce took hold, a sense of being invulnerable; he had found his peace in the ordered and undemanding routine of customary intoxication.

  Rob had money at first, because he had a job, and acquaintances, because he socialised. A sense of well-being suffused him and he felt, for a while, so free—the world, because it feeds him the bright enlightenment liquor brings, is his very good friend and takes him on a new adventure. This adventure is enhanced by a liberating loss of judgment that is mistaken for spontaneity and self-actualisation.

  There’s a woman down the pub who is also self-medicating with alcohol, in her case to escape the reality of a neglectful and abusive husband. Her eyes are dead but her breasts heave with mountainous, floury warmth beneath her low-cut tops and her décolletage is only just beginning to crease into the loose artex of the fiftyish sunbed habitué, her lips are still full and are yet to display too many of the pinched striations common to the chain-smoker, and it is discovered one evening on a sprung sofa back at hers in front of a grate of cold but still fragrant apple wood logs, following another bottle of cheap white wine picked up at Balv’s, that she gives a stupendous gobble, and that’s that.

  Now things are really looking up because he’s out every night, coming back late and getting to slip this woman a length of the old pipe supreme. He neglects his girl and she starts to nag but he feels a bit invincible now even though things are starting to slide, like personal hygiene. He struts; his new piece tells him he’s big, even though he’s clearly not, and there’s nothing like the feeling of popping against the spongy ring of tonsils at the back of her throat. His thinking is becoming a bit limited. Work is suffering because he slips away early, or doesn’t go in at all. There’s a stool at the end of the bar he likes to get to first. He likes to sit at the sun-dappled bar in the late afternoon and watch the place fill up. He relaxes. He can stop and think, or think he’s thinking. By dusk the anxiety’s gone and he can think about later, about tomorrow, maybe—just about think that far but really no further—then think about the laughter around him, the fire in the grate, the brisk smell of autumn whenever the door opens and someone blows in.

  His girlfriend finds out about the other woman and leaves him. She takes quite a lot of stuff so he’s left mostly with the shit. But there’s still the record collection—quite a lot of rare vinyl there—and his World War II memorabilia, and his air rifles.

  He likes hunting rabbits in the fields that surround the village. One day he takes a friend, a young lad he’s met in the pub and got talking to, in order to impress him with his rustic approach to life, but he can’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo. In the end he takes out a juvenile rabbit from about four feet. It jumps so high and fast he thinks for a second the fuc
ker’s teleported. Then he sees it lying by a hay bale. Its eyes are wide with shock but it’s alive. The boy from the pub is watching and is clearly upset; the rifle he borrowed is hanging slack in his arms—he’s not fired a shot all morning, just stood enjoying the misty morning light and the clarified air. This was about being up early, about the stealth and secrecy of being with the dawn, not about the focused revulsion of taking something’s life.

  So with the boy watching, he looks down at the rabbit and feels like he has to act like the hardened tracker, and fires three pellets at point blank range into the side of the rabbit’s head.

  They walk back to the house in silence, the rabbit thrown over his shoulder like bagged game. In fact it looks pathetic, a furry epaulette. He slings it on top of the chest freezer in the utility room when he gets back, and he imagines the boy is expecting that by dinner time there will be rabbit stew on the menu.

  He cracks some beers in an attempt to keep things sociable and they watch some porn together in awkward silence, just the slow sound of lips pinging off the tins and long self-conscious swallows over the ripe sounds of fucking, which all seems terribly misjudged, because he doesn’t ever socialise with this boy again after today—and in reality he ends up throwing the tiny corpse of the rabbit into the bin two days later, trailed by a confetti of tiny white maggots before putting a frozen Admiral’s pie in the microwave.

  So, the job’s gone now. His talent got him a job working for a small, independent computer graphics firm. He wasn’t getting anything done, which, when confronted, really threw him. He protested, because he was sure he was all over it. But, no. He’d achieved fuck all in six months.

  His hair is long, his beard substantial. He’s always favoured the old army fatigues as they complied with his self-image of the woodsman-survivalist type. His catch phrases were once the celebration of the pub, now they seem to grate on the regulars and he ends up sitting alone. Now he gets absolutely slaughtered and by then he’s feeling okay and the anxiety’s gone. The woman he was shagging hasn’t been out for ages as her husband has put her in hospital again.