Rule of Night Read Free Page B

gob.’
    â€˜Smooth talker,’ Arthur says. They all laugh and start kicking at each other. A crush of women emerges from the Empire Bingo, vacuous expressions on pallid faces, the wafting odour of cheap perfume softly cloying in their nostrils on the cold dark air. The women scurry along in pairs, linking, their hard white hands clutching each other’s sleeves and holding their handbags tight to their bodies.
    The lads shoulder through them disdainfully. In actual fact Kenny – the others too – is afraid of these grim squat womenwith their set lips and stiff lacquered hair, yet won’t admit it to themselves, let alone the others.
    Kenny spies a girl he knows coming towards him. She works in the office of the engineering firm where Kenny drives a lathe all day. He think’s she’s called Sandra: longish blonde hair sweeping either side of a small, pretty, weak face: a pointed chin and almost no lips.
    â€˜Hello Sandra.’
    â€˜Hello.’ She’s like a child, standing there unflinchingly under their collective stare.
    â€˜Where yoff to?’
    â€˜Home.’
    â€˜Yad enough?’
    â€˜She hasn’t had any.’ Arthur.
    A slow grimace sours Kenny’s face. ‘Excuse my friend, he’s got a spastic brain.’
    â€˜Better than a spastic prick.’
    â€˜See you,’ Sandra says, preparing to go.
    â€˜Hey,’ says Kenny, putting his arm round her. She has small bones and he can feel her tiny sharp shoulders through her coat. Not a bad little sparrow to make a nest with. He could show her a couple of things. She could show him two or three things. The beer has warmed his gut so that suddenly the night appears to him as a mysterious and almost a magical thing: his territory, his world in which daydreams become realities, and he experiences a sudden release as if from a strait-jacket. It’s the simple combination of the beer and the dark.
    â€˜Isn’t your name Kenny?’
    â€˜Yeh.’
    â€˜Mr Tripp doesn’t like you. He thinks you’re a tearaway.’
    â€˜What – Diarrhoea Features?’
    â€˜Is that what you call him?’
    â€˜Yeh. What the fuck does he know?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’ A shrug. ‘That’s what he said.’
    â€˜That twat,’ Kenny says without any real malice, without expression. ‘Hey, where yoff to?’ Sandra pauses in mid-stride and turns back. ‘Come and have a drink.’
    â€˜I’ll miss me bus.’
    â€˜You what? It’s only ten past ten.’
    â€˜Me bus.’
    â€˜Come on!’
    She says something unintelligible and drifts away into the thinning crowd, small, a little lost, spidery legs in wedge shoes making her tread unnaturally, bent at the knees. Kenny clenches and unclenches his right fist. The sensation of the skin tightening over the knuckles is pleasurable but not consoling.
    â€˜Go on,’ he suddenly shouts. ‘It’d be like sticking it in a mouse’s ear, anyway.’
    It isn’t so much the shattered anticipation of having it away with her that angers him (he’s got Something Lined Up) as the unpleasant taste of rejection, the humiliation of being dismissed with such tame indifference by a cheap little scrubber. He thinks of the girls in the Fusilier and their gaudy laughter, the ring of shrieking faces sharing a private joke as though its exclusiveness placed them in some special and privileged position when all the time they sweated and puked and excreted like everybody else, and what he wanted to do was smash that fake superiority and shake them and shake them until they saw sense and stopped acting like a bunch of overgrown schoolgirls creaming their knicks …
    He belches and farts together; his senses are beginning to drift; a rubbery numbness is creeping into his face and hands. The screams and chatter and guffaws in the Flying Horse merge into a dull background roar and his