Rob Johnson - Lifting the Lid (2 page)

Lenny ignored him and lit up. He took a long drag and blew a couple of smoke rings. Putting the cigarette to his lips for a second time, he was about to take another draw when he hesitated and began to sniff the air. ‘What’s that smell?’

‘Er… smoke?’ Two can play the “duh” game, thought Carrot.

‘It’s like…’ Lenny’s nose twitched a few more times and then puckered with distaste. ‘Ugh, it’s piss.’

‘Dumps like this always stink of piss.’

‘No, it’s more…’ Lenny carried on sniffing, his eyes ranging around to try to identify the source of the smell. ‘Oh Jesus, it’s him.’

Carrot looked in the direction he was pointing and, sure enough, the dark stain which covered the Suit’s groin area was clearly visible despite the charcoal grey of the trousers. ‘Oh for f—’

‘Bugger’s wet ‘imself.’

‘I can see that.’

Lenny took a pull on his cigarette. ‘Fear probably.’

‘Don’t be a prat. The man’s out cold. He doesn’t know if it’s Christmas Day or Tuesday.’

‘Maybe it’s like when somebody has their leg cut off – or their arm. They reckon you can still feel it even though it’s not there any more.’

Carrot stared at him, unable to discern any logical connection between amputation and pissing your pants.

‘You know,’ Lenny continued, apparently aware that further explanation was necessary. ‘It’s like your subconscious, or whatever, doing stuff behind your back without you realising.’

‘I think it’s far more likely it’s a side effect of the stuff we injected him with.’

‘Could be,’ said Lenny, and he took a last drag on his cigarette before lobbing it over his shoulder into the stairwell.

‘Ready now?’ Carrot made no attempt to disguise the sarcasm in his tone.

‘I’m not taking the feet this time though. My face’ll be right in his piss.’

Carrot squeezed his eyes shut and counted to three. ‘You want to swap?’

‘Not necessarily. We could try taking an arm each.’

Because of the substantial difference in their heights, Carrot knew that this meant he would be taking most of the weight again, but he also realised there was no point in arguing. The priority was to get the guy up the stairs and into the flat before somebody spotted them.

CHAPTER THREE

The time wandered by, and the miles slid comfortably under the tyres at a steady fifty-five. Battered though it was, the converted Volkswagen Transporter was only twelve years old and could have gone faster, but Trevor was in no particular hurry. He was enjoying the ride, happy to be away and with the road stretching before him to an unknown destination. Milly seemed equally contented and alternated between sitting upright on the passenger seat, staring fixedly ahead, and curling up to sleep in the back.

It was Trevor’s first real trip in the camper, and he liked the idea of having no fixed itinerary. After all, he reasoned, wasn’t that the whole point of having one of these things?

To say that he had bought it on a whim would have been a gross distortion of the truth. Trevor didn’t really do whims. His idea of an impulsive action was to buy an item that wasn’t on his list when he did his weekly shop at the local supermarket. Even then, there would have to be a pretty convincing argument in favour of dropping the quarter-pound packet of frozen peas, or whatever it might be, into his trolley. Half price or two-for-one were minimum requirements.

The camper van hadn’t fulfilled either of these criteria, and to begin with, he’d toyed with the idea of a motorbike. Something a bit flash, like a Harley. He’d have needed a halfway decent tent of course. A simple bedroll and sleeping out under the stars were all very well in Arizona or wherever but totally inadequate over here – unless you were one of those rufty-tufty outdoor survival types with an unnatural fixation about the SAS.
He’d never understood the attraction of deliberately putting yourself in a situation where it was more than likely you would either starve or freeze to death or be attacked by a large carnivore or stung by something so venomous you’d have seconds to live unless you applied the appropriate antidote in time or got your best friend to suck out the poison. No, Scottish midges were about as much as he was prepared to tolerate, but even then he’d make damn sure he had a plentiful supply of insect repellent with him.

A hermetically sealable tent and a good thick sleeping bag would be indispensable as far as Trevor was concerned and, if space permitted on the Harley, an airbed – preferably with a pump which operated off the bike’s battery. It had all started to make perfect sense until a small problem finally occurred to him. What about Milly? She was too big to ride in a rucksack on his back, and as for the only other possible option, the very idea of a Harley with a sidecar made him squirm with embarrassment.

A car was far too ordinary for his purposes, so a camper van had seemed to be the next best thing if he couldn’t have a Harley. It still had a kind of “just hit the open road and go where it takes you” feel to it, and he’d once read a book by John Steinbeck where he set off to rediscover America in a camper with an enormous poodle called Charley.

The whole decision-making process had taken months of what Imelda would have called “anally retentive faffing”, but which Trevor preferred to consider as an essential prerequisite to “getting it right”. In his defence, he would have argued that it wasn’t just about buying a van. There had been much greater life choices involved, such as whether to pack in his job at Dreamhome Megastores.

As it turned out, that particular decision had almost made itself for him. The company was in a bit of financial bother and was having to make cutbacks, so he and several of his colleagues had been offered voluntary redundancy. Although not exactly generous, the severance package was certainly tempting enough to cause Trevor a run of sleepless nights. But it wasn’t until his annual staff appraisal that he’d finally made up his mind.

He had sat across the desk from the store manager and studied the thin wisps of hair on top of the man’s head while he read out a litany of shortcomings and misdemeanours from the form in front of him.

‘This simply won’t do, Trevor. Really it won’t,’ Mr Webber had said, finally looking up and removing his glasses. ‘I mean, there have been more customer complaints about you than any other member of staff.’

‘I don’t know why. I’m always polite. Always try and give advice whenever I—’

‘But that’s exactly the problem, Trevor. More often than not, the complaints are
about
your advice. We’ve had more goods returned because of you than… than…’ The manager had slumped back in his chair. ‘Good God, man, have you learned nothing about home maintenance and improvement in all the… What is it? Fourteen years since you’ve been here?’

‘Fifteen.’ And in all those long years, he’d never once heard Webber use the phrase “do-it-yourself”, let alone its dreaded acronym.

‘Quite honestly, I’m at a loss as to know what to—’

This time, it was Trevor who had interrupted. He couldn’t be sure that he was about to be sacked, but he’d already had his quota of verbal and written warnings and thought he’d get in first with: ‘About this voluntary redundancy thing…’

And that was that. Decision made and not a bad little payout. Added to what he’d squirreled away over the last couple of years or so, he could buy the van and still have enough left to live on for a few months as long as he was careful. He’d have to look for another job when the money did run out of course, but he was determined not to worry about that until the time came. At least, he was determined to
try
not to worry about it.

‘What the hell, eh, Milly? This is
it
,’ he said and shoved a tape into the cassette player.

He caught sight of the dog in the rear-view mirror. She briefly raised an eyebrow when the opening bars of Steppenwolf’s
Born to be Wild
bellowed from the speakers above her head. Then she went back to sleep.

Trevor tapped the steering wheel almost in time with the music and hummed along when the lyrics kicked in. A song about hitting the open road and just seeing where it took you seemed particularly appropriate for the occasion, and when it got to the chorus, he’d begun to lose all sense of inhibition and joined in at the top of his voice.

Moments later, the van’s engine spluttered and then abruptly died.

CHAPTER FOUR

Carrot and Lenny hauled the Suit to his feet and, with an arm slung around each of their shoulders, half carried and half dragged him up to the first floor landing. As Carrot had predicted, Lenny’s contribution amounted to little more than providing a largely ineffectual counterbalance, and by the time they’d lurched and staggered to the top of the second flight of steps, every muscle in his neck and back was screaming at him to stop whatever he was doing.

‘I’m gonna have to… have a break for a minute,’ he said, fighting for breath as he altered his grip and lowered the Suit to the ground.

‘Come on, mate. We’re nearly there now,’ said Lenny, but his words of encouragement were meaningless, given that he did nothing to prevent the Suit’s descent.

Carrot groaned as he sat him down against the frame of the fire door and so did the Suit.

‘’Ang on a sec. He’s not coming round, is he?’ Lenny squatted like a jockey at the start gate and brought his face to within a few inches of the Suit’s. ‘He is, you know.’

The muscles in Carrot’s back grumbled as he crouched down to take a closer look and spotted the faintest flicker of the eyelids.

‘You can’t have given him enough,’ said Lenny.

‘What?’

‘The injection.’

‘Yeah, stupid me,’ said Carrot, slapping his palm against his forehead. ‘I should’ve allowed extra time for all your fag breaks.’

Even though he resented Lenny’s accusation, he’d worked with him on several other jobs and was used to getting the blame when things went wrong. Not that this was surprising since Lenny always avoided making any of the decisions, so any cockups were never his fault.

‘We’ll have to give him another shot,’ said Lenny.

“We” meaning “you”, Carrot thought and shook his head. ‘Stuff’s still in the van.’

‘Jesus, man. What you leave it there for?’

Carrot bit his lip, aware from his peripheral vision that Lenny was staring at him, but he had no intention of shifting his focus to make eye contact. The Suit’s eyelids were twitching more rapidly now and occasionally parted to reveal two narrow slits of yellowish white. Maybe the guy was just dreaming, but it was two hours or more since they’d given him the shot, so—

‘Better bop him one, I reckon,’ said Lenny.

It was Carrot’s turn to stare at Lenny. ‘Bop him one?’

‘Yeah, you know…’ He mimed hitting the Suit over the head with some blunt instrument or other and made a “click” sound with his tongue. ‘Right on the noggin.’

Carrot continued to hold him in his gaze while he pondered which nineteen-fifties comedian Lenny reminded him of, but he was shaken from his musing by a strange moaning sound. The Suit’s eyes were almost half open now.

CHAPTER FIVE

The tiny room in the hotel near to York Minster was ridiculously expensive but all he could get. He and Milly had trailed round all the cheaper places in the city for a couple of hours, but they were all full. In the end, he’d been fit to drop and couldn’t care less about the money as long as he had somewhere to sleep for the night.

The van was in a local garage, waiting for parts.

‘Tomorrow lunchtime at the earliest,’ the mechanic had told him.

‘But I have to be at my brother’s funeral in Newcastle by then,’ Trevor had lied.

The mechanic had tutted and rolled his eyes, which could have been interpreted as an expression of sympathy or an indication that he didn’t believe a word of it. ‘As soon as we get the thing, we’ll get straight onto it.’

He hadn’t actually said “the thing”, but Trevor had no idea what part it was that had to be replaced.

‘So what do I do till then?’

‘There’s plenty of good hotels in the city.’

‘Can’t I sleep in the van?’

The mechanic had repeated the tutting, eye-rolling routine and said something about not being covered by the garage’s insurance policy.

‘Can’t we push it out onto the road then?’ Trevor had asked.

Just the tut this time and something about the local coppers taking a dim view of New Age Travellers.

‘Well, thanks a bunch for your help, you greasy-arsed toerag,’ Trevor hadn’t said, but the idea of having his windows smashed in with police batons in the middle of the night hadn’t appealed, so he’d pulled a few essentials from the van and wandered off into the city with his dog.

* * *

He lay sprawled on the single bed, listening to the sounds of dinner being prepared for a hundred-or-so residents directly beneath him and wondered why it was that people on their own were always given the crappiest rooms in hotels but still had to pay well over half the cost of a double.