Nineteen Seventy-Seven: The Red Riding Quartet, Book Two Read Online Free

hers.’
I look up at Ellis and nod.
DC Ellis brings his fists down hard from behind into Kenny’s shoulder blades.
He screams, falling to the floor.
I’m down there with him, eyeball to eyeball.
‘Just fucking tell us, you lying piece of black shit.’
I nod again.
The uniforms haul him back up into the chair.
He’s got his fat pink mouth hanging open, tongue white, hands to his shoulders.
‘Oh, why are we waiting, joyful and triumphant,’ I start singing as the others join in.
The door opens and another bloke looks in, laughing, and then goes back out.
‘Oh why are we waiting, joyful and triumphant, oh why are we waiting …’
I give the sign and it stops.
‘You were fucking her, just say it.’
He nods.
‘I can’t hear you,’ I whisper.
He swallows, closes his eyes, and whispers, ‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah what?’
‘I was …’
‘Louder.’
‘Yeah. I was fucking her, right.’
‘Fucking who?’
‘Marie.’
‘Marie who?’
‘Marie Watts.’
‘What about her, Kenny?’
‘I was fucking her, Marie Watts.’
He’s crying; big fat fucking tears.
‘You dumb fucking monkey.’
I feel Rudkin’s hand on my back.
I turn away.
Noble winks.
Ellis stares.
It’s over.
For now.
I stand in the white corridor outside the canteen.
I call home.
No answer.
They’re still at the hospital or up in bed; either way she’ll be fucked off.
I see her father in the bed, her walking up and down the ward, Bobby in her arms, trying to get him to stop crying.
I hang up.
I call Janice.
She answers.
‘You again?’
‘You alone?’
‘For now.’
‘What about later?’
‘I hope not.’
‘I’ll try and get over.’
‘Bet you will.’
She hangs up.
I look at the bleached floor, at the bootmarks and the dirt, the shadows and the light.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know where to go.

    The John Shark Show
Radio Leeds
Monday 30th May 1977
    Chapter 2

    Ancient English shitty city? How can this ancient English shitty city be here! The well-known massive grey chimney of its oldest mill? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up? Maybe it is set up by the Queen’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Commonwealth robbers, one by one. It is so, for the cymbals clash, and the Queen goes by to her palace in long procession. Ten thousand swords flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing girls strew flowers. Then follow white elephants caparisoned in red, white and blue, infinite in number and attendants. Still, the chimney rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the chimney so low a thing as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry. Stay! I am twenty-five years and more, the bells chime in jubilation. Stay .
The telephone was ringing.
I knew it was Bill. And I knew what he wanted from me.
I stretched across the other brown pillow, the old yellow novels, the strewn grey ashes, and I said:
‘Whitehead residence.’
‘There’s been another one. I need you here.’
I put down the telephone and lay back in the shallow ditch I’d dug myself among the sheets and the blankets.
I stared up at the ceiling, the ornate brocade around the light, the chipped paint and the cracked veins.
And I thought about her and I thought about him as St Anne pealed the dawn.
The telephone was ringing again, but I’d closed my eyes.
I woke in a rapist sweat from dreams I prayed were not my own. Outside trees hung in the heat, moping in willow pose, the river black as a lacquer box, the moon and stars cut from drapes up above, peeping down into my dark heart:
The World’s Forgotten Boy .
I hauled my tried bag from Dickens to the chest of drawers, across the threadbare flooring, pausing before the mirror and the lonely bones that filled the shabby suit in which I slept, in which I dreamt, in which I hid my hide.
Love you, love you, love you .
I sat before the chest of