How to Make Monsters (11 page)

Long shadows detached themselves
from some ragged bushes that overhung the mouth of the alley, slow-moving but
purposeful: three stooped figures, nothing more than dense silhouettes, drifted
into the alley, following the man who’d just left my car.

There was something not quite right
about the figures, and my internal alarm bell started ringing. They moved
clumsily, without natural rhythm, and their limbs looked too slack, as if
lacking any proper working joints. I opened the car door, set my foot on the
kerb. Listened. But there was only silence, underlain by the dry rustling of
dead leaves and empty crisp packets in the gutters, and the usual distant
estate sounds of bass-heavy dance music, crying kids, shouting spouses.

I waited for roughly thirty seconds,
and when nothing happened I closed the door and drove off into the night
towards a promise of warmth and safety that could only be realised when at last
I curled into my sleeping wife’s soft and welcoming back.

****

It was only when I saw
the television news two days later that I realised I’d been expecting the
report. A local asylum seeker, Jalal al-hakim, from Iraq, had gone missing. He
had last been seen leaving the city centre offices he cleaned as part of a
five-man crew at one-thirty a.m. on Saturday morning. Police were treating his
disappearance as suspicious; Mister al-hakim had only been in England for eight
months, after fleeing persecution and torture in his own country. He was an
outgoing, friendly family man, liked by both his workmates and his employers,
and had no known enemies.

Al-hakim’s face flashed up at me
from the screen. It was a recent photograph, probably taken by his wife, in
which he played with his two young daughters. He was laughing; he looked happy.
But still a shadow seemed to loom over his small frame, shading his features.

My insides churned as if I had an
ulcer, and my skin prickled as if stung by nettles. I had been the last person
to see this man before he’d vanished; I was a potential witness. So I rang the
police without finishing my morning coffee and told them what little I knew,
agreeing to go down to the station to make a statement later that morning. But
still my conscience wasn’t clear: I had driven away after watching those
shambling figures follow him down the alley. I felt ashamed, cowardly in an almost
abstract kind of way- and desperate to make amends.

I left the house without telling
Tanya about what had happened. She couldn’t help but notice my reticence, along
with the fact that I was more withdrawn than usual, and stared a silent
question at me as I kissed Jude goodbye. I shook my head, smiled sadly. She
brushed her dry lips against my forehead, blew hot stale morning-breathe
against my hairline, winked at me as I drew away and opened the front door.

I went to the police station in my
lunch hour, not expecting much and receiving even less than that. It was
fruitless. I informed a disinterested uniformed officer of what had happened
that night, and about the shadowy figures I’d seen slinking into the alley;
then I left, feeling utterly disillusioned. Nobody cared about these people,
not the public, the police, or the politicians. All they were was an election
tool, a way of faking interest in the community. Local councillors would bleat
on about asylum seekers and their attendant problems all day long, but when it
came to caring- actually doing something- they suddenly clammed up and found
some more pressing business. It seemed that nobody wanted to get their hands
dirty.

There was more graffiti visible on
the flyover abutment behind the High Street on my way back to the depot:

Get shot of immigrint shit!

Charming. And these people thought
they were so much better than everyone else? They couldn’t even spell in their
own language, while the people they despised so much could speak it if not
better then certainly more politely than these restless natives.

By the time I got back to the depot
Claire was on a break. She was pouring herself a coffee as I walked in, and
made me one with an air of faked irritation so I didn’t feel like I was getting
special treatment. We sat at the chipped Formica table in the cramped office at
the rear of the tiny building, and I told her about my visit to the police
station.

‘Are you really that surprised?’ she
asked me in a tone of mock incredulity, that broken glass growl of hers coming
from somewhere down near her boots. ‘C’mon, Karl, nobody gives a shit about
anybody these days. It’s dog eat dog out there, and if you aren’t a consumer
you just get consumed.’ She sipped at the awful coffee, her large bland face
forming a grimace around the rim of the mug.

‘I s’ppose you’re right,’ I
relented, then blew on my own drink, watching with a faint nausea as the skin
that the milk had formed on its surface rippled like an oil slick on a park
pond. ‘I was just hoping for more, y’know?’

‘And that’s what I like about you:
you’re different. You give a shit. But don’t let it go to your head, because
I’ll deny ever saying it if it comes out.’ She smiled one of her rare sunny-day
smiles, then went back to the coffee. I felt numb, empty. Ghost-like.

‘Anyway,’ said Claire, disrupting my
bleak thoughts and attempting to change the subject. ‘You heard the latest?’

I hadn’t, but knew that I was about
to; Claire was the woman to see if you wanted to know what was going on in
Scarbridge. She was better than the local news- more up-to-date, and her
sources never failed her.

‘Which is what?’ I asked, wondering
if I’d soon regret it.

‘Well, it seems that about four
months ago half a dozen corpses went missing from the town morgue. Those kids
who died from smoke inhalation in that warehouse fire down by the old Dock
Road… the silly sods who set it alight while they were trying to rob it? Them.
Their bodies. Stolen.’

I glanced up at her, looking for any
sign that this was one of her morbid little jokes. Her face was rigid, blank;
she was telling the truth.

‘Fuck,’ I said quietly, placing my
mug on the scarred tabletop. ‘Some people will steal anything.’

She smiled; a sad, tired expression.
‘It was all hushed up by the authorities, of course. Too embarrassing to let
into the public domain. People are finding out though; they always do. Nothing
stays buried for very long round here. Someone spoke to someone else after a
few too many pints, and the news is breaking out like little fires all round
the estates. Just like always.’

Four months ago. Just about the same
time that the attacks on immigrants had begun: foreign families being burned
out of their low rent council housing, kids spat on at school, a pregnant woman
pelted with fruit in the local supermarket, one or two people even going
missing, just like al-hakim… there had even been a picket line outside one of
the town’s three primary schools, the parents in the area refusing to allow a
couple of Turkish children into the building. One of their fathers had been
hospitalised when someone had thrown an engineering brick at his head. It was
all so wrong… such a fucking mess.

I wondered if the incidents were
linked: whether some right wing group was about to implicate the immigrant
community in the theft of those boy’s bodies, laying claims to all kinds of
voodoo and necrophilia. Breeding even more fear. More violence.

I didn’t want to think about where
it all might end.

****

The chill early hours again; midweek
in Scarbridge, when all the smart folk are tucked up in their beds, wrapped in
sleeping yoga poses around their loved ones. I was returning to the depot from
a drop-off in Newcastle- a nice little earner- and decided on impulse to take a
detour.

The urge to return to Wishwell came
upon me unannounced. Now, with the aid of hindsight, I can put it down to
shame, guilt, the need to do something- to do anything. I didn’t know what I
would do when I got there, but I did know that I had to go back to the mouth of
that alley. To inspect the place where I’d dropped off al-hakim for his final
truncated journey home.

Winter was closing in like a gloved
hand around a warm neck, choking the life out of the world: trees had shed
their blossoms long ago, the sky looked brittle as a sheet of glass, and a
sharp chill had crept into the air. Yet still I saw young women dressed in
nothing more than artfully placed scraps of wispy material and tottering about
on four-inch heels, displaying their goose pimples to whoever cared to look. I
shook my head in amazement at these people. Once more, I vowed that my child
would be raised differently, brought up with intelligence and thought for the
future.

Wishwell dominated the skyline to
the east, three and a half miles out of town, it’s run down tower blocks
blocking out the stars. The four central ragged concrete towers were surrounded
by a maze of estate blocks- cramped terraced houses, cheap purpose-built flats:
the estate was a riot of contrasting architectural styles, and had been
continually added to since the early 1960s. I drove to the perimeter of the
estate and parked up by the alley; I turned off the radio and sat in silence
behind the wheel, remembering those lumbering loose-limbed figures and their
odd disjointed movements. How they’d seemed to detach themselves from the
darkness like smoke.

Was there really some extremist
neo-fascist group operating out of Wishwell? Some militant offshoot of one of
the local right wing political parties, whose aim was to clear the immigrant
population out of the district, starting with this grubby, downtrodden estate?
The thought terrified me, but made complete sense. There had been an intense
paranoia and distrust of the asylum seekers who had been shipped into the area
for quite some time now, and such reactionary groups feed off negative emotions
like hyenas at a rotting cadaver.

I left the car, making sure I locked
it up, and headed towards the black maw of the alley. Straggly bushes, like
clasping skeletal fingers, had stretched across the entrance, forming a natural
barrier that I was forced to duck beneath. It was dark in there, the solitary
streetlamp shedding no light. Had it been sabotaged, or was I just tapping into
that vein of paranoia and distrust? I stepped gently along the length of the
alley, expecting dark shapes to jump out in front of me, their slack limbs
waving at me, blanched hands grabbing for my throat…

But I reached the other end without
incident, and found myself in a small square surrounded by shabby box-like
cluster homes that had probably been grafted onto the estate in the mid 1970s.
I registered movement at the periphery of my vision, and spun around to face
whatever had caused it; a dark blur slipped away into another narrow alley,
followed by two more. It was them, the same lurching figures I’d seen that night.

I followed, keeping to the edge of
the square, hugging the rough outlines of privet bushes and lopsided garden
walls. The figures were turning right at the other end of the alley, and I
waited until they were out of sight before following any further. My heart beat
double-time and my mouth went very dry; I felt afraid yet exhilarated. I was
doing something.

I stalked the men through the estate
- I could now tell that they were male by the clothing that I glimpsed beneath
the muted orange glow cast by the few working sodium lights: hooded
sweatshirts, baseball caps, gaudy tracksuits. They shambled through
labyrinthine passages and beneath arched stone walkways, never speaking, not
even glancing at one another. I treaded oh so softly, but still the crumbling
concrete beneath my feet seemed to mock me: shifting like tectonic plates as I
walked and crunching loudly in the heavy silence of deep night. The men didn’t
hear me; the forces of good seemed to be on my side.

The vast night sky pressed down on
me like a huge sheet of black ice, threatening to trap me in the moment until I
could be discovered shivering in the pale dawn. Stars blinked out one by one,
like heavenly lamps being switched off. The men entered a boxy flat somewhere
near the heart of the estate, not far from those glowering grey tower blocks
that watched dispassionately from so many broken and boarded windows far above.
I hid in a garden in sight of the flat, and waited for inspiration.

Much later I woke without even
realising that I’d nodded off. I was cold and my lips were beginning to chap.
The estate was in total darkness, and I estimated the time to be well into the
ungodly early hours. The sky was still pitch-black, but the stars had turned
themselves back on. I let go of the hedge that I’d been cuddling, and climbed
over the low garden wall, making no sound and feeling justifiably proud of my
stealth. Not once did I stop to ask myself what I was doing; I didn’t even
pause to think of what might happen to Tanya and Jude if any foul deed befell
me. I was focused, determined to do what was right.

I inched across to the building the
men had entered. It was a ground floor flat, with dirty net curtains barely
visible through the crudely whitewashed windows. The small front garden was
weed-choked and littered with empty beer cans, takeaway wrappers, clots of old
food. I spotted a thin strip of flagstone walkway along one side of the
building, and followed it round to the back. The rear door stood ajar, hanging
from rusty hinges. Obviously security wasn’t a priority here; but, saying that,
they were safe on their own ground, surrounded by their own people, so probably
felt no need to lock doors and bolt windows.