Six
SIX
TICK TICK TICK
TICK TICKTICK
TICK
The fan recessed in the wall spun slowly, its bent blade striking the casing irregularly, annoyingly. Bruce held his head in his hand, facepalm-style. How long had it been, hours, day, weeks? It all seemed so long ago now, walking into Paradise Records, walking through Jimmy Masters... He laughed out loud in the darkness.
Suddenly, something seemed different; there was a change in the dusty air. He listened hard a moment but heard nothing, just the goddamned broken fan ticking like a psychotic clock. The wailing sirens wailed no more.
His phone lay useless in his pocket, no battery left, just a dead weight clumping his thigh as he edged through the ducting. What time was it? Did it matter? Onwards he crawled, further into the carcass of the building, incline after turn, edging silently through the blackness. His stomach gurgled and growled as he forged forwards blindly.
At last a shaft of light appeared, faint at first in the distance. As he crawled towards it, he could taste fresh air, or what passed for it in the city at least; it was cold and crisp, rotten carbonated piss, refined and poisonous. Was that our crowning achievement as a species, he wondered, the burning and belching away of our precious life-force up towering chimneys, spilling forth from rush-hour exhaust pipes? Perhaps one day it would blot out the Sun itself in a final, suicidal affront to the Heavens. Bruce giggled at the thought; he felt delirious.
A shaft stretched above him, twice his height. Daylight latticed around him as he stood and braced himself against the sides. He remembered the movies. Hands and feet braced against the walls, he shuffled vertically toward escape, his prosthetic arm hissing with the strain.
As he reached the final few feet, the vent wall in front of him gave way with a harsh metallic shriek beneath his touch. The sheared sheet metal clattered to a halt as he tumbled after it on to hot tarmac. Blinded by the sudden bright sunlight, Bruce lay dazed for moment. He was so tired. If only he could lay there forever.
A warm sticky sensation on the back of his neck brought him back to his senses. His fingers probed the problem area; no cut, but his fingers were sticky with blood. Twisting to his knees, he saw the carnage that lay in his wake. A pigeons grey head lay grotesquely, beak twitching, an eye turned skyward, severed at the neck at the edge of the panel. Blood spread from beneath the metal. He wrenched it up, slicing his good hand open on the serrated edge. A small bird’s nest lay broken beneath, the contorted young pigeons squashed flat with their mother’s body. He felt a tear well in the corner of his eye. The poor little bastards...
He recovered them gently with the torn metal sheet. The tear broke and ran down his cheek. He felt a strange connection with the brood, blood dripping from his cut and running together with theirs spilt on the tarmac. He too would never fly. For a few seconds, he was lost until the throbbing in his hand brought back the gravity of the situation. He had to smile. His objective was complete. Jimmy was dead, that fat crooked fuck.
Bruce sat down against the low wall separating the rooftop from the sheer drop to the traffic below and slipped Jimmy’s wallet from his pocket. It was worn black leather, one zip, three sections containing four credit cards and five hundred and twenty six pounds in cash and a receipt for a Thai massage at a place called “Wang Yin’s Sin Bin”. There were several receipts in fact.
“Bet he doesn’t show those to his wife.”
Bruce thought aloud. It was good to hear a voice again, any voice, even his own stupid drawl. He kept digging the fat wallet. A book of sandwich vouchers, a loyalty card for an American coffee chain, two buttons, an unused book of second-class stamps.
“Cheap bastard.”
A condom packet, opened and empty and a well-thumbed letter, handwritten in purple ink on brilliant white copier paper. Bruce shook it open. It said:
“Jimmy,
I loved you, you fat prick. Why did you have to go and shit on my heart?
I hope you die. It’s only fair.
We need to talk...
xxx”
Bitter. Bruce dropped the wallet; this was promising. He turned the letter over and over looking for the sender’s name, initials, something, but to no avail. He sat back down to think. A passport photograph of a man and a woman had tumbled from the empty leather near his foot. Bruce picked it up. There was Jimmy, smiling awkwardly like it hurt to do so, crammed into a dark stiff suit and a mysterious blonde woman with big blue eyes poking her tongue out at the camera. He turned it over in his palm. The back was marked with the same purple scrawl.
“Mr and Mrs Masters first official photograph”
Underneath, there was a phone number.