Utterly Monkey Read Free Page A

himself and is struck by how clean and neat it is. Perfect. He looks over at Geordie’s fag, smouldering, spoiled. Geordie’s nails were bitten down so badly that the tops of the fingers puffed out baldly over the remainsof the nail. Numerous hangnails hung from their pink tiny divots. Danny bends his head to the flame Geordie’s offering.
    ‘So I do what you’d do, what anyone’d do. I grabbed my jeans and jumper from the floor and legged it to the bathroom. I threw the clothes through the window onto the roof of the scullery and stood on the cistern. I don’t know why I didn’t lock the bathroom door. If I’d locked that fucking door…I’m wriggling out through the window, the wee one. We only have a wee window in there, and it’s awkward because I’m going head first and I’m about to fall onto the scullery roof on my face and break my fucking neck. It’s about ten feet or so. But it doesn’t fucking matter anyway because I hear footsteps pounding up the stairs. And I hear my dad shouting my name. He’s screaming it. Geordie, Geordie. Over and over. And I’m halfway out the window. Caught in the window really, like in a mousetrap’–Geordie slides the first two fingers of his right hand between the thumb and index finger of his left, and wriggles them to show the swimming of a man caught in a window–‘and I feel this whack on my left leg. They don’t pull me in. They just stand there beating the tripe out of my fucking legs. I’m screaming at the top of my voice, I’m waking the whole fucking estate.’
    They break stares, both a little embarrassed. Odd how intimate it is to look into someone’s eyes. Like staring at the sun. You can only do it for a second. Danny is feeling relaxed now, forthright, made in Ulster. Geordie’s story’s reminding him of differences and how he doesn’t have to wake in the night to find four thugs coming for him like the apocalyptic Horsemen. He waits for Geordie togo on and glances round the pub. No one’s near enough to hear. Or young enough. There’s only two old guys sitting up at the bar, huddled, with stares that stall in mid-air. It’s like a care home in here, he thinks. With Gerard pickling the residents in order to preserve them.
    ‘So there’s four of them. And I know them. In fact you know one of them too. Jacksy Hewitt, from out past Fairhill.’
    Danny nods but can’t think of the face. ‘From McMullen’s class?’
    ‘That’s the cunt. Well, Jacksy sticks a blue pillow case over my head and I’m standing in my own bathroom and I piss myself. I actually piss myself. On my legs and the floor. And one of them is saying to me. Not so tough now sweetheart, not so tough now. And they push me down the stairs, I’m stumbling, and one of them is pinning my da against the wall with a baseball bat. And he says to him We’ll be back for you granddad . And they tape my hands behind my back with that silvery gaffer tape and lead me out through my own garden and trip me on the pavement. I’m lying on my face in my fucking keks in the middle of the estate with a pillow case on my head. Two of them lift me and dump me in the boot of some crappy wee Astra or something and I can hear them hooting and laughing as they start her and tear off. We take a right out the estate so I know we’re going towards Ardress or round the back of the town.’
    Eyeballing Danny now, Geordie’s showmanship is giving way to something hard like fear. He slows right down as if he’s suddenly exhausted.
    ‘It was the industrial estate…That’s where it was. Behind Harrison’s Meats…I know. You used to fuckingwork there. Could have done with you there then, Danny boy. You and a big meat cleaver. You and big Mungo and me with a cleaver each. We could have done some damage.’
    ‘What had they got? I mean, what else apart from the baseball bats?’
    Geordie shakes his head, and sets his mouth as if he’s disappointed.
    ‘Pack of stupid bastards. Idiots.