Daygo's Fury (18 page)

In his braver moments, Deaglan shot a few snide remarks and insults towards Liam. They were always disguised, not directly referring to him; he would raise his voice as he talked to the other boys, offering a sideways glance in Liam’s direction and the hint of his vicious smirk.

Deaglan, Ultan and Erinin had become a unit, working together. No doubt with Deaglan pulling the strings and taking the large share of the takings. Liam started to think of them as Deaglan’s dogs, lapping at his feet, laughing at his jokes.

He avoided going to the tavern, Sally’s, that he and Calum normally frequented to see if the gang or Carrick had any work going for them. He was sickened by what had happened and was unsure if he wanted to go back.

He also stayed away from Lana’s, not able or willing to confront Calum’s death with her. His thoughts occasionally fell towards Racquel. He felt a longing for her company.

Eight days after he had knocked over the tray in the bakery, he found himself lurking outside it. He watched as Racquel and who he presumed to be Alison stepped from the front door and walked idly towards the well. He decided to follow them. He watched for a time as they sat on the wall of the well and chatted before deciding to walk over to them.

The well was the standard size for the slums. There were little variations. The soil underneath Teruel was well saturated from the nearby river. The round wall was just above waist height and the two girls were propped on top of it, their legs dangling above the ground as they chatted. It was set at the side of the road at a T junction. Directly behind it was a tavern. Liam watched a couple of men walk in the door, undoubtedly quenching their thirst after a day’s work. He wondered idly if he would see them again the following morning. It was sixth day and most men of the slums spent the day off spending their earnings in the taverns and brothels, building for a bad first day.

Alison noticed him as he approached and nudged Racquel. She looked his way and hopped down from the wall as she saw him.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Liam replied. She was wearing a faded white dress with flowers embroidered down one side. “That’s nice,” he said, half pointing to it.

Racquel glanced down at her dress for a moment, a slight frown on her face. “Oh,” she said suddenly. “Ya. Thanks.” She looked back up to him with a smile. Alison jumped down from the wall and joined her.

“Liam, is it?” She seemed to lift her chin away from him as she spoke, a look of distaste on her face.

“Ya.”

“So you’re the slum rat that stole the bread from the bakery?” There was a slight sneer to her high-pitched tone of voice.

“Ali!” Racquel exclaimed.

“What?” she answered. “Sure that’s what he is, isn’t he?”

“No,” said Racquel, blushing. She turned to Liam. “So what are you doing out here?”

“Yes, he is,” Alison shot back. Racquel looked at her angrily.

“I …” Liam looked from one to the other. “I was just walkin’ around and saw ye heading over here, so I followed yehs over.”

“Like a rat,” said Alison.

“What the fuck is your problem?” asked Liam, getting angry. He was sick of this, sick of being called a rat and being treated like one. “You think you’re better than me?”

“Yeah, I do!” she replied. Liam stared at her. He felt like hitting her. She couldn’t hold his gaze for long. She turned away and sat back up on the wall.

Racquel looked from one to the other. She seemed as though she was angry at Alison but didn’t want to take sides either. She looked back at Liam sheepishly.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” she said.

“Ya … I … sorry about …” He felt stumped for words as he thought of the last time she had seen him. He didn’t know what she thought of what he had done. He wasn’t sure of what he thought of it himself.

“Thanks,” Racquel interjected. “For … ye know … stopping him.” Liam looked up to see her eyes on him. She was sincere, he knew. He shrugged. He didn’t even know if that was what he had been doing, he had just gotten so angry. He was glad, however, that she thought kindly of it.

“Was he mad at you? After?” he asked.

“No,” she shook her head and started to laugh. “He was too shocked to know what to be. He couldn’t believe it. That some slum … boy just ran in and knocked over all his stock.” Liam noted the pause before ‘boy’ but he didn’t mind. Most people would have just said it. She giggled then. “You should have seen his face!”

Liam smiled. “I did!” he said. “Almost caught me too, dono what I woulda done if he had.”

“He hardly said a word the rest of the day.” She smiled at him and there was a moment’s silence. Liam found himself wishing that Alison wasn’t there. He glanced in her direction. She was still moping on top of the well’s wall, staring off into the distance, pretending not to be interested.

Racquel noticed his look, glancing back as well.

“You want to call by the bakery tomorrow again?” she asked quietly. “An hour before dusk?”

“Ya, okay.”

“I could meet you at the end of the road, beside Fenrow Street?”

Liam nodded. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll be there.” They stood awkwardly for a moment longer, then Racquel turned and walked back to Alison.

“See ye later,” she said.

“Bye.” Liam turned and walked in the other direction, not sure of where he wanted to go.

******

He was hungry every moment of every day. Without Calum, his takings were down and he had no income from working with Carrick or the gang.

He was considering going to Darren or Cid and offering to team up. But he was strangely discomfited by the idea. Was there such a ready replacement for Calum? He also feared a little about his own freedom. He didn’t want to be tied to the hip with someone else, and he was still reluctant to break his self-imposed isolation.

Besides this, Cid had his brother, Bradan, to look out for. The two of them normally took to the streets together. That only really left Darren.

There was another girl he knew, who he and Calum had worked with on a few occasions. She lived two streets down in another family, and was nothing like the two girls that lived with them. She had breasts but Liam often forgot once he spent some time with her. She was more like them. She was tough, but she had seemed fair.

He resolved to approach one of them soon despite his misgivings.

Deaglan’s ruling of the group increased as the weeks past. Whether it was dictating what game they played at night or changing the rules to suit him, he slowly, more and more, began to dominate proceedings.

Before, when Calum was alive, Liam had looked upon Deaglan with distaste. But he had been insignificant. His weak attempts to undermine Calum or usurp him were always too far from any real success for Liam to pay him much mind. He had forever held a lower profile to Calum in everyone’s eyes.

Now it was as though Liam had inherited Calum’s hate for him and it was slowly beginning to set into stone. He was cruel and sadistic. Sometimes it felt as though it were Liam’s responsibility to put a stop to him. He sometimes entertained thoughts of stabbing him in his sleep and being done with it.

Calum had been a leader. He had often talked about his ambitions to build a group around him and work their own jobs. Many of the family had been hoping for this. Liam, however, had always been more singular of purpose. He had held a similar ambition but thought about what he could achieve on his own as opposed to what he could build with others, outside of Calum, that was. Deaglan offered the group that hope.

Over the weeks, Liam met with Racquel almost every day at the same time. Twice each week, he had to put up with the annoying presence of Alison. They would spend an hour together walking through the streets of the slums. Liam was always careful not to be seen by Galo as he waited at the end of the street. He didn’t know what he would do if he found out that Racquel was meeting up with the boy who had knocked over the tray.

After a couple of days, Liam realised that the gnawing hunger in his stomach and the fist that clenched and squeezed his heart, ever present since Calum’s death, dispersed when he was in Racquel’s company. With her, he was consumed in the moment, able to leave the worries and pains of his life behind. Without her, they came back, all the more obvious to him but still somehow lessened.

The rest of his day, outside of her company, became a necessary chore, as though the hour he spent with Racquel was real while the rest was just a harsh and ongoing dream.

When she asked him about what he did all day, Liam was unsure of what to say, so he told her the truth. She listened with interest, asking how he managed to do things that Liam took for granted. He felt proud as he slipped into telling her of all the routines and moves that he and Calum had performed over the years, how they developed and perfected their plans. He tried to leave out some of the rougher stuff as he filled her in, things that he himself found discomforting. He almost forgot himself as he relived past events with the happy sheen of memory. They laughed together at funny stories and occurrences, lucky escapes and ridiculous performances. It was only as Liam got to talking of them that he realised how many stories he had. A lifetime spent living on the edge in the slums, there was too much of the strange and unlikely to tell.

It was on one of these days, when he was caught up in blissful memory, that she asked him where Calum was now. He stalled. He had forgotten it all amidst his words and it suddenly all came crashing down once more, like waking from a dream. He stopped short, shocked at how easily and quickly he had forgotten as he had talked to her. He felt suddenly ashamed. How could he forget? After all they had been through, after all Calum had done for him, how could he ever forget?

They had just entered Badger’s Burrow. Racquel’s expression had changed from curious interest to concern at his reaction. Liam looked about him sadly. Here, like everywhere else, was full of memories. He couldn’t meet her eyes, afraid that the concern there would turn him into a blubbering fool.

“He’s dead,” he said finally.

“Oh.” Racquel paused. “I’m sorry.” She took a step closer to him. Liam shook his head sadly and walked across to the edge of a building to sit down. Racquel followed, sitting down beside him. He put his forearms on his upraised knees and picked at his nails between them.

The small square was quiet. The few stalls were being packed up by their owners for the night. People wandered around in less of a hurry at this time in the evening, as always. Tired, Liam supposed.

“When did he die?” Racquel asked. Liam dropped his head between his hands for a moment. He didn’t know if he wanted to talk about this. He had been avoiding the subject with everyone for four weeks now.

“About four weeks ago.” He sighed. “Remember the day I knocked over the tray?” He glanced over to her and saw her nod. “It was the afternoon before that.”

“Oh,” she said again. A brief look of disappointment crossed over her face but was replaced quickly by a little frown. She looked at him again. “How did it happen?”

Liam sighed. “A blacksmith … A blacksmith hit him across the head with a hammer.” Racquel’s eyebrows rose up in shock. “We were … we were stealing from him.” Liam improvised, not wanting to tell the whole story.

Racquel sat quietly beside him, her feet stretched out before her on the ground. She held her hands clasped together in her lap. They stayed like that for a few moments. Liam looked off into the distance, just above the buildings opposite him, at the sky there and the few fluffy white clouds floating across it, where the bare outline of the red moon was visible.

“There’s a story about Calum I never told you,” he said after a moment. “He had a big, huge scar going down his face. From here to here,” he said, tracing a finger from his temple to his jaw line.

“It used to hurt him sometimes, in the cold. He wouldn’t really say anythin’, but you could see that it hurt. It would break open and even get pussy.” He glanced across at Racquel, who looked back at him with interest, caring.

“He got it years ago. We were both starvin’. Well, I was starvin’. He was hungry. It had kindof snuck up on us, ye know. We went through a couple of weeks of poor takings, we hadn’t been eating much, and then we just started to get more tired, started going out and leaving the flat less. After a while, we realised that we were really in trouble. The other lads in the flat weren’t doing well either. One of us … one of my friends, died that year. It took months, it was horrible.” Racquel watched him intensely as he talked.

“Anyway. No-one had anythin’ to spare. Calum decided that we needed to take a risk, or we were fucked. He had sussed out a place over a few months. It was an easy steal. Real easy, with real good takings. We’d been tempted by it before, but we’d left it cause it had a red flag. Nothin’ was worth messin’ with that. But it was getting to the stage where we had nothin’ to lose.” Liam sighed.

“I wasn’t … any use. I was too weak. I could barely leave the flat. He had to go on his own. It was a pawn shop, of all things. Where everyone went if they had stolen some jewellery or somethin’ else to get cash for it. Myself and Calum had been there a few times before. That’s how he noticed the place and figured out how easy it would be to steal the takings. He could only go for the cash, he knew, or he’d be found out once he tried to sell the jewellery somewhere else. We’d never taken a place before like that, though. The money he could get from it would last us months.” Liam kept his gaze on the fluffy white cloud making its way over the buildings in the clear blue sky. The beautiful sky.