The Night Clock Read online

  Trevena said, “You’re right, John, I need a break. And I want to do things your way.” That dry, gummy sensation was back in his mouth; these were words he really didn’t want to say. “But I’ve been here a long time and I can assure you I’ve done nothing clinically to contribute to any of these deaths. Les was on the ward for God sake. It’s unprecedented, and it’s going to have an effect on me, certainly, but I need to be working, not sitting at home with the pressure off. I’ve got paperwork to do, reports to write and there’ll be a shitload of stuff coming my way because of these incidents. I’ll stick to my desk. You can review it each day. If I’m going under you’ll know.” Trevena held his breath. He had tried playing Stibbs and he hoped Stibbs hadn’t realised. What decision would give Stibbs the illusion of having the most control? He hadn’t denied Stibbs the option of sending him off, but he had offered him a way of delaying it that still made it look like it was Stibbs’ decision. With any luck, Trevena was thinking, Stibbs might look upon a few days more as an opportunity for Trevena to destroy himself against Stibbs’ best intentions. Trevena wasn’t even sure why he was fighting so hard to stay at work. Because it was better than being at home on his own all day, pacing and fretting and having to worry about his daughter and his career and the state of his life? (He wasn’t going to let Stibbs know that, though. If he gave him the impression he’d be laying around with his feet up then it improved his chances of getting Stibbs to allow him more time at his desk). Because he didn’t want Stibbs thinking he was beaten? Because he needed time to think and find out what the fuck was going on? All of the above.

  Stibbs was giving it some thought. He was tapping his pen against the stack of folders on his desk and looking up at Trevena with a bland expression. Trevena was suddenly revolted. That he had to play up to a prick like this, and that the man sitting before him could muster no empathy whatsoever in its purest form while he pondered the best outcome not for his colleague, but for himself.

  “Okay, Phil,” Stibbs said in a tone that implied that—just for now—he was prepared to treat Trevena like a grown-up. “I think it would be good for you to step down from any one-to-one clinical work until we’ve had a chance to review this. Office duties only and we’ll meet up again tomorrow morning.”

  Relief, and a catastrophic impulse to laugh, rushed into Trevena. He bit down on the laughter—it was a twisted, fucked-up glee that was far better off being suppressed—but he let the relief soothe him as much as it could. He tried not to let it show as anything other than a species of subordinate gratitude. Stibbs seemed content with it. “Thanks, John,” Trevena said, and managed not to add, I’ll try not to let you down. That would have just been too much shit.

  Trevena turned and walked out of Stibbs’ office. There must have been a strange look on his face because everyone else seemed unable to look him in the eye as he went over to his desk and sat down.

  PLAGUED BY SOUSED philosophies, Rob Litchin lurched home. What was going through his head? What moronic ideation sluiced through those tarry ventricles? A book he had read once plagued him like an intrusive, perseverating thought, the initial idea that had begun it long ceased, carking it at the face of some burned-out synapse. How did it start? The book—Yellow Dog. Genius. An opening paragraph so clever it was impenetrable, you just had to accept it meant something and move on. Like life. Or not, Rob thought. Perhaps it was a con, to make you think the author was cleverer than he actually was. But it was nonsense. Like life. Maybe these last chapters of his life, part scripted by some tawdry hack minion of fate, part floundering, improvised stand-up, were meaning only in and of themselves. Meaning implied destination. It was heading somewhere for a reason. But there was nothing at the end to tie it all up, no wry dénouement, nothing to swivel in his direction like a smug villain in a red leather chair in a library in some exclusive club, and say, “Ah, you’ve arrived at last, Mr. Litchin. Join me for a drink, if you so like, and I’ll explain what that exasperating cobblers was all about.”

  Yellow Dog. But Rob Litchin went to hospital. But Rob Litchin got damaged. But Rob Litchin exerted lethal force on those that damaged him. Male violence does it, indeed.

  He stumbled; it’s dark, too many pints in the pubs on the way home from the hospital. Terrible thoughts now about Gollick. Gollicunt. Yellow Cunt.

  He’d had a last one in The Macebearer on the corner of the shopping centre. Some of the windows were still boarded up. Something went down recently, some sort of riot on the estate, but Rob didn’t remember it. Probably slept through it. Things hadn’t been right since though, for him or the estate. The Polish seemed more menacing, more clustered; an ethnic defence against something they sensed, perhaps. They were more open to that sort of thing, Rob windily surmised. More traditional in their sporadic bouts of violence. There was an Eastern Bloc wintriness about their blunt, Romany bloodshed. Over in seconds. Rob had been clumped a few times, in the pubs, over the years, by big men with heads like the concrete balls that decorate the tops of gateposts. They’d let it go for a while, pores cemented shut with blackheads on the planes of their profiled cheeks, and then: a fast clump. On your arse. And that was if you were a clown pisshead twat. Knives, blunt instruments and vehicles for you if you crossed a different kind of line.

  Rob crossed an expanse of earth between two blocks of flats. Children played there during the day. Dogs shat there at all hours, despite officer Gollick’s best efforts to prevent them doing so, and the deep treads of Rob’s boots tractored through it in careless disregard. He would, as he ended up doing most days, scrape and stamp it off in ridged strips on the edges of the concrete steps leading up to his flat.

  Gollick lived nearby. With his old mum, Ethel Gollick. She’d been a Lollipop Lady when they’d been kids, Rob remembered. If it was pissing with rain, she’d always let the cars go first if Rob was waiting, shivering, to cross. Her big tin lollipop towering over him, clenched in her municipal fist, rain clattering off its dented, rusty disc. STOP CHILDREN. Should have said FUCK CHILDREN for all that old cow cared.

  One day she’d gone under a joy rider’s nicked Citroen. Atomised her pelvis. Rob smiled, the old memories seeming fresher now. It was new stuff he had trouble remembering. Alzheimer’s, he thought. No, what was it called? Korsakoff’s. He was fucking dementing, that’s for sure. And what of it? Anyway, that was the end for Ethel. At least it was the end of her contribution to community service. Might explain Gollick’s choice of career. Old bitch living through her son. They didn’t have Community Support Officers when they were little. Just infrequent Traffic Wardens, who were ridiculed and lampooned, but were mostly avoidable because you could park anywhere you liked in those days.

  Rob grasped the thread of a memory and spooled it into something coherent. A few years ago he had been sitting in a pub looking out of the window. He’d just sold some rare Zappa, so he had a few quid for a sherbet or two. He was mellow on proper cider. And he watched the world go by through the single frame of the window, and as he watched, into shot came a Parking Attendant, as they are now known, in full uniform. He checks around a car, parked in a time-limited bay outside the pub, and then takes out a little camera and starts taking photos. Having captured the crime, he walks off, head down, checking his digital screens of data, and as he moves out of frame, a man runs past in the opposite direction, loping in a luminous yellow running suit, and pushing his baby boy in a trendy three-wheeled sports buggy. The child is chortling away with the joy of it as dad’s long-legged, Ichabod Crane sprint propels them both past and out, and off into the future. Rob stared out at the road, at the now mundane-again world framed by the pub’s window and feels that something important has just happened. He actually feels, riding those ciders to a good place for a while, that he’s just had a cartoon squirted into his eyes. All sudden colour and incident, and it vexes him that there’s a point to this epiphany, and he suddenly gets it: neither men notice each other. They are lost in their own worlds and demonstrate the polarity of humanity t
hat makes us both sublime and absurd; wonderful, hopeful, joyous, petty, stifling and cuntish, all at once. Kafka and Carroll. Legalism versus freedom of expression in one sudden, bright, ephemeral moment. It’s a good moment for Rob and he celebrates by having a load more to drink and thus forgets it ever happened. Until now.

  He scuffed onto the path that ran alongside one of the blocks of flats and felt those viewpoints, those pickled ideations, coalesce into something coherent, purposeful. Tonight, Rob Litchin was the Cheshire Cat (he stretched his mouth into a grin as he walked the length of the alley, liking how it felt beneath the restrictive bindweed of his neglected beard. And the thought progressed to this: his grin was more like a pike’s, pushing up through a mat of black, rotting pondweed. Fuck the Cheshire Cat, Rob Litchin was the Norfolk Pike) and he was going to tear down the civic restrictions imposed by ruling bodies and steering groups and ratifying committees everywhere. The Norfolk Pike was going to take it all back for the people.

  Rob kept that grin on his face and turned left at the end of the alley.

  Towards Gollick’s mum’s bungalow.

  GOLLICK’S MUM’S BUNGALOW was one of eight in a small square behind the flats. They were quite tidy with well-tended front gardens. They housed some of the oldest residents on the estate and seemed, by some virtue unknowable to Rob, to have remained exempt from the vandalism and depredations found everywhere else around them. There were potted plants and ornaments, wind chimes, bird tables, all sorts of Homebase crap. Neat little flowerbeds dotted the lawns, and the fences were stout and painted and did not lean. A single streetlamp in the middle of the cul-de-sac lit the close with a bright white luminescence. How did they get a white light? Rob wondered as he walked up to Gollick’s bungalow. Everywhere else on the estate was lit by dim, flickering orange sodium. If they worked at all. He stopped for a moment and looked around. It was oddly tranquil here and, if you ignored the massive looming flank of the flats that rose behind them, a bit timeless.

  Rob opened Gollick’s gate and walked up the ramp that led to the front door. Ethel’s mobility scooter was parked up on an outcrop of concrete to the right of the door, part hidden under its burgundy plastic all-weather protective cover. It seemed to crouch, that scooter. As if it resented its role in life as much as the old bird that rode it around the estate resented her immobility and need for it. They seemed to have an edgy symbiosis, Ethel and her scooter; her scowling bulk atop its quaking, wheezing chassis, its puny motor pushing them along at a glacial pace through the byways of the estate and the aisles of the VAL-YOU! shopping mart in the plaza. Once, Rob recalled, years ago, he had hidden behind a display of breakfast cereal and watched as she’d tried to reverse the scooter up an aisle, having been thwarted by a blockade of mums and pushchairs down by the Reduced To Clear counter. Her fury at being unable to take her rightful place blocking the salmonella counter from all the other shoppers while she laboured over her pick was evident on her face and in the aggressive way she handled the accelerator. Unable to resist, Rob had started making loud beeping sounds interspersed with pronouncing, “THIS OLD COW IS REVERSING! THIS OLD COW IS REVERSING!” in straight-faced, stentorian tones. He was still pissing himself when old Derek, the acting manager, caught him and threw him out for being a childish twat.

  Rob stood outside Gollick’s home and suddenly felt a little ashamed. His Norfolk Pike grin had gone and had been replaced by a thoughtful pursing of his chapped lips. Ethel had been moved to this bungalow after her accident because it was modified and had a warden-controlled alarm system. But there was more to it. Gollick had had a sister, Rob remembered. Barbara Gollick. She was a year below them at school but she was a big girl. Well, fat really. And very moley. Molier than Duncton Wood, to be perfectly honest. She wasn’t unpleasant at all, in fact she was quite a cheery thing and she used to hang about outside their prefabricated classroom at the top of the playground during breaks so she could spend time with her brother. She mortified Gollick by her very existence but he’d try and be nice to her. Unfortunately, with their innate abhorrence of lack of appeal in other children, their tyrannous misgivings towards any blemishes, pongs or impediments, the rest of the children – Rob included – found themselves bullying the poor girl. It was like they couldn’t help it. And of course, Gollick got it in the neck, too, just for being her brother, and when he tried to defend her, well, he was finished, really. Rob’s shoulders slumped at the memory of things he’d said, and heard said. Old moley, and fat old moley. Inspired combinations like that.

  It had got so bad that eventually Ethel herself had come charging down the playground, her huge yellow reflective coat billowing and her lollipop dragging behind her, throwing sparks off the hopscotched tarmac, bellowing, “Who made my Barbara cry? Who made my Barbara cry?” at the top of her lungs. It had been terrifying. But also, and fatally, quite funny. Gollick had burst into tears, too, at the sight of his mother’s wrath, which hadn’t helped him, and afterwards, when it had all blown over, and they had all stood there wide-eyed and gasping with the shock and awe, and outright thrill, of seeing an adult—an adult in authority—lose it so badly, they had recommenced bullying the Gollicks with a renewed and vile fervour. Rob included.

  A few months later Barbara had stopped coming to school. Ethel’s adherence to the Green Cross Code had become more selective, too, and there were rumours amongst the mums that she might be about to lose her job.

  And then Barbara had died.

  It was the first time Rob had experienced something like that. He remembered the assembly that morning. Why had they all been summoned to the hall the moment they got through the gates? Teachers were sombre and damp-eyed and irritable. Clouts were applied to the sides of facile little heads. And then the announcement by the Head Mistress: Barbara Gollick died last night.

  That was pretty much it. No explanations were given, and in those days none were expected. Things carried on as normal and Barbara was forgotten. Callous, really. And the focus remained on Neil Gollick, even though he was clearly in shock and grieving, because he was now the brother of a sister who had not only been fat and moley, but was also dead, which, to his classmates, had a poignant and ostracising enthralment too gripping to ignore.

  And then, not long after, Ethel had gone under the Citroen. Rob’s brain struggled with a link but finally landed it: she’d tried to top herself, too. It was obvious now.

  Remorse suddenly flooded Rob’s system like a chemical trapped for decades behind a blocked gland. His knees buckled and he leant against the side of Ethel’s scooter and felt tears welling up. Drunkenness and the effects of the recent shock of the shooting overwhelmed him. Through the window behind the scooter, Rob could see into Ethel’s kitchen. He watched, through eyes multifaceted with tears, seven or so Neil Gollicks walk into the kitchen and switch on the kettles. Rob wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket and Gollick resolved into just one, who was wearing an I LOVE HUNSTANTON tee shirt and baggy khaki leisure pants. Rob stood up straight and backed away from the window. He wiped his eyes again but the tears were still coming because now Ethel had come into the kitchen, propelled by her motorised wheelchair, and Rob could just see the top of her white fluffy hair. He pressed his hand to his mouth to suppress the horror of his own mind. Perspective had made the low altitude of her barnet look like some species of fuzzy rat scuttling along the windowsill.

  He bent forward, so he could take the scene in fully. Ethel was chiding Gollick about something; Rob could tell by the defeated set of Gollick’s shoulders and his clenched fists. Gollick reached for a carton of milk but knocked it over. Milk spewed across the worktop and flooded down the door of the fridge, soaking a gallery of faded postcards stuck to it with magnets. Gollick fumbled for a tea towel while Ethel shrieked. It was awful. Rob stared wide-eyed, his mouth hanging open, his beard dewy with his tears.

  “I want my hot chocolate!” Ethel was screaming. “I can’t sleep! I want my hot chocolate!”

  “None of us can sleep, mum!
” Rob heard Gollick say. “Don’t know what’s wrong with me. Must be the shock of nearly being bloody killed!”

  “Don’t give me that! I’ve seen that video on the Internet. You’re yellow, Neil Gollick! Yellow!”

  Gollick rounded on his mother. She flinched but Gollick slipped in the pool of milk on the lino and went down. Rob gasped. Gollick clambered to his feet and stood glaring at his mum. His left hand reached out and went for the bread knife by the toaster. No, hang on. It was a spatula. Rob squinted and wiped his eyes again. It wasn’t a spatula, nor was it a utensil of any kind. It was a purse. It was his mother’s purse. Rob groaned with relief. How Gollick kept his hands off that old woman, he’d never understand. Gollick raked around until he found some coins and then stormed out of the kitchen.

  Rob was seized with panic. He looked around for somewhere to hide. Gollick was in the hall, putting on his coat and shoes. The front door opened. Rob leaped behind the scooter and cowered down.

  Gollick thundered down the path and through the gate. He was wearing his Community Support Officer jacket over his tee shirt. Rob watched him turn right out of the cul-de-sac and head across the green.

  Relieved, Rob stood up and followed him.

  GOLLICK TRUDGED ACROSS the green with his head down and his hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat. Rob kept a distance of about fifty meters between them. He wasn’t sure why he was following Gollick at all. More than once he decided to duck away down an alley but changed his mind. There was something he needed to do, something that might at least give the last couple of days some closure. He needed to talk to Gollick. They’d nearly died and that needed acknowledging, didn’t it?