Bring it Back Home Read Free Page B

Salt and vinegar?'
    The spotty lad wordlessly pointed at an array of cutlery and sachets of sauces. Cakes took a knife and a fork and some packets of salt and pepper and vinegar and one of red sauce too. He squeezed them over his food back at the table and began to eat.
    The chips were pale and uncooked. Tasteless. Frozen to begin with and still cold in their centres. They left a film of slime on the inside of his mouth after he swallowed them. He bit into the burger. Also cold, also slimy. The processed cheese slice was unmelted, so uncooked was the meat, and when Cakes sniffed at the burger he thought he caught a whiff of something stale, sweetly rancid. He took the plate up to the bar and showed it to the barman.
    'A problem, sir?'
    'I can't eat this. It's cold. And horrible.'
    'I'll have a word with the chef, sir.'
    'I'm not gonna eat raw burger and chips.'
    'I said I'll speak to the chef, sir.'
    The barman took the plate into the kitchen and came back out.
    'Chef will heat it up for you, sir.'
    Cakes went back to his table. Some minutes later the food came back. It was steaming hot but drooping and soggy; evidently it had simply been put into the microwave for a couple of minutes. The red sauce Cakes had squirted on the chips was bubbling hot, and when he tried to spear a chip it slid off his fork and broke apart on the plate. When he bit into the burger, heated grease spurted out onto his hands. The pathetic slice of tomato scorched his tongue and he spat it out. What was on his plate he wouldn't feed to a dog. In fact, even a starving dog would turn its nose up at it. And seven quid! For this shit! Disgraceful. Absolutely disgraceful.
    He wiped his hands on a napkin and bundled it up. He dumped it on the sweaty mound of chips and left the pub. Outside, he scanned the lamp-posts and walls for surveillance cameras and saw none, so he went over to the knee-high wall that bordered the car-park and studied it for loose bricks. He couldn't see any so he repeatedly kicked the top layer with the sole of his shoe until one brick came loose and then he worked it back and forth with his hands until it broke free. He lifted it in his right hand then walked back over the car-park and threw the brick through one of the pub windows, hurling it overarm, with force. An alarm immediately screeched and people screamed and scattered and Cakes calmly climbed back into his van and reversed out of his parking space. The spotty barman and a fat chef wearing a white apron and checked trousers came out of the pub, the chef carrying a large knife. As Cakes sped past them he gave them the finger and laughed at their stupidly gawping faces. Too stupid even to check out his number plate. Faces with the simple, empty features a child might draw on a balloon.
    Cakes re-joined the motorway, and some miles down it he pulled into a service station where he topped up his tank and bought a ham salad roll, a bag of crisps and a can of lemonade. He ate in his van and flicked through an old copy of the Daily Mirror that he found on his dashboard. Kylie Minogue diagnosed with breast cancer. Something about the Beckhams snapped shopping in Tokyo or somewhere.
    He took out his mobile and tapped in a number.
    'Hello?'
    'It's me,Cakes.'
    He heard pub sounds on the other end of the phone; voices and laughter. He heard an old man's voice say something about having to take the call because it could be important and then he had a conversation with that old man, evidently outside the pub because the voices in the background had ceased talking and the old man could talk quietly. Then Cakes put his phone away and re-joined the motorway again, heading west.

Chapter Five
    Up in the cemetery that overlooked the village the wind blew hard and cold, whistling and whining around the gravestones and the church tower, and through the trees and long grass. Lewis turned his face into it and hoped that it would blast the hangover out of his head. Which, to an extent, it did. When