The Dreams of Max & Ronnie (2 page)

– Jesus, Hel. What's that stink? And there's shite everywhere.

– Cats. My one's on heat so they're all coming in for a sniff.

– Can't you get her done? You're gunner be over-run with kittens.

– Can't be arsed. D'you know where the nearest vet's is? Can't afford it neither. Seen how much it costs?

– Well, Rhys says, rubbing his nose. – Can't you at least clean up a bit?

Helen looks at Ronnie. – Who's this, Ron? Who's this tosser you've brought in tells me to clean up me own house when I've just fucking invited him in?

– He doesn't mean anything by it, Ronnie says. – He's pissed. Keep yer gob shut, Rhys.

Rhys and Robert flop down onto the sofa which releases spores of dust under their weight like a puff-ball mushroom in rain. Helen looks at them then gets the fire going and sits cross-legged on the floor in front of it and Ronnie collapses onto a fleecy baby blanket in the corner to the right of the blaring TV, a blanket yellow in colour and decorated with images of smiling moo-cows.

– Where's the baby, Hel?

– At her granny's. What d'you want?

– Something to knock us out. Temazzies or something. Been on one for days and we're fucking wired.

Ronnie's teeth grind. Rhys inhales and swallows snot and Robert scratches his jaw with hands that thrash like dying sparrows.

– We're off to war in a few days, Rhys says, although he doesn't know why, and Red Helen takes down a bag from her mantelpiece and rummages through it and withdraws a small brown bottle.

– Tenner each.

– Tenner? Rhys splutters. – For one fucking knockout drop?

– Not yer usual sleeping pills, these. Special, see. And anyway, d'yer want to go asleep, or sit there shaking like yer being electrocuted for the next couple of days?

Pockets are dug in and money is produced. Pills are passed around; big, white, coin-sized pills like Trebor mints, bisected by a fracture line.

Robert examines his with a close and pink-rimmed eye. – What is it?

– Powerful, Red Helen says.

– Yeh, but what is it, exactly?

– Best not to ask. Just neck it and drift off for a while. Wake up feeling better.

Ronnie works saliva up in his mouth, pops the pill in it, gulps. Wants the shaking to go away; can't wait for the shaking to go away. The fried eyes, the itching skin, the hurricane in the head, wants it all gone. Waits for it all to go.

– It's a lucky blanket, that, Helen says, nodding at the moo-cow fleece under Ronnie's arse. – Tanya Lewis? She crashed on that one night and found a tenner the next day. And that feller with the bad eye slept on it and won fifty quid on the lottery.

– Nice one, Ronnie says. – Maybe on me first day I'll drill ten ragheads, then.

– I'm gunner sleep on it next Tuesday night, Red Helen says. – Before I do the midweek lottery on the Wednesday.

Rhys and Robert snort and Helen glares at them then gets up to answer the door because it's been rapped on. Ronnie asks his friends if they've taken their pills and they shake their heads and tell him that they don't trust Red Helen and that they're waiting to see what happens to him first.

– Don't trust Helen? She's a nurse, mun.

– Is she?

– Well, was. For a bit like. Few months. Till they caught her raiding the pharmaceutical cabinet. Which was probably why she applied for the job in the first place if you ask me.

And Helen, the not-nurse, the thief and purveyor of outlawed chemicals, returns to the room, now become stifling with the dry heat of the gas fire, with two more visitors; a man, prematurely bald, with a ruff of red fluff above each ear, and a skinny woman prematurely grey. Both are carrying plastic Tesco bags filled with short and thin sticks.

– Been out in the woods getting kindling, the woman is saying. – But it's a bit wet. Have to dry it by the Aga.

– Nature provides, says the man, then stops and stands still and stares at the three heroes, the two jan-gling on the couch, the third nodding on the moo-cow blanket.

– Ronnie and his two mates, Helen says. – They're off to Iraq in a few days.

– What for?

– To kill ragheads, says Robert, and Rhys laughs loudly.

– Soldiers, is it? the man asks.

– Aye.

– Or should I say robots? Lackeys of Bush and Blair's imperialist agenda?

The grey-haired woman raises her voice. – Be more accurate to say scum. Child-murdering scum.

– Oh Christ. Rhys' eyes roll like fruit-machine reels. – Hippies.

– No, just human beings, that's all.

– Well, you look like fucking hippies to me.

– Sound like 'em too, says Robert, and Ronnie coughs and gurgles and hears wind blow at the windows and chuck hail at the panes and wonders whether he dares go out into the back garden for a pee before he nods off but there is a dark wave of fog rolling towards him anyway. He sees that fog and he welcomes it, wants the blissful no-time that it contains. He's aware of his fellow heroes arguing with the two skinny newcomers, Neil Kinnock and Germaine Greer he thinks are who they look like, and he's vaguely aware of Helen exchanging bags of herbs for money with them as they shout at Robert and Rhys who shout back and he feels himself slipping under the real world amongst all the noise, the yelling and the weather, the TV's babble, the roar and thunder of cannon shot that awaits him and which has started to sound in his head, and the creeping heat from the sputtering fire crawling on the skin of his arms and the last thing he sees before sleep's narcotic pulls him under is a smiling moo-cow between his knees, looking up at him, a black-and-white moo-cow on a yellow field. Lucky blanket, he thinks. Bring me luck. And there he sleeps.

And there he dreams, on that blanket that shines with dirt, in the mouldy hovel in the sinking village. There he is allowed a vision. And in this vision he and his two companions, this triune of gallantry, are traversing the central upland moor of the country where once heroes fought for identity and nation-hood and self-governance with the ferocity of those who had nothing left to lose but life. Across the green desert of these central uplands they go, into valley bottom and up and out again, across saw-toothed peaks and around lakes bearded with sedge and under crashing cataracts that halo their heads with rainbow spume. On the ridge overlooking Hyddgen Ronnie is assailed by a terrible noise, such as he's never heard before, a clamorous commotion from behind him which he spins to regard and sees a man who might be young behind his wild red beard and beneath a tangled yellow mop of hair, riding a horse (a horse? thinks the dream-Ronnie; a bloody
horse
?) stained yellow up to the haunches by marsh mud and war paint and green on the head and hindquarters from rubbed moss and lake weed. The rider is wearing a tunic of a shiny-looking material with the letters FCUK embroidered on it in green thread and a gold-hilted sword (a sword? thinks the dream-Ronnie; a bloody
sword
?) scabbarded, bounces on his thigh in a sheath of black Gore-Tex which seems to gleam blue in its weave and is attached to the rider by a strip of canvas with a white plastic clasp. A green cloak (a bloody
cloak
?) is draped over the rider's lap with its fringes in laced yellow and what was yellow of the rider and the horse was as yellow as the lettering on the For Sale signs outside most of the buildings in the villages of this distant upland and what was green was as green as the green of the Range Rover four by fours parked outside those few buildings with Sold signs outside them, or with no signs at all, vehicles which gleam in their bodies and are called ‘Warrior' or ‘Crusader' and which snort smoke and roar with a forever unslake-able thirst. And he is angry of aspect, this rider, his eyes burning and nostrils widening and lips set bloodlessly between the matted yellow mop and wrestling red beard, so fierce-looking that Ronnie and his companions, unarmed as they are, turn again and begin to run, stumbling over the stones and tussocks, but the rider pursues them and Ronnie can hear the Darth Vader breathing of the horse at his back and feel the terrible heat of it on his nape and searing the tips of his horripilated hair. Terrified, he and his cohorts sink to their knees in the boggy ground, hands raised.

– Don't kill us! Please don't kill us! We're unarmed!

The rider halts his horse but the energy in the animal will not let it stand and it snorts and high-steps around the three kneelers, somehow combining in its twitchy tread equal elements of the dainty and the dangerous.

– I'm not gunner kill yiz, the rider says. – Don't be stupid. Get up, yer bunch of puffs.

They do. Ronnie's trembling and he asks the rider for his name.

– It won't mean anything to you even if I tell yeh.

Most people use my nickname, anyway.

– And what's that? If you don't mind me asking, I mean.

– Not at all, boy. I'm known as the Beast of Britain.

– Why?

– Why what?

– Why are you called the Beast of Britain?

The rider settles his horse to a head-tossing and snorting standstill and, somewhere in the tangle of his beard, bad-toothedly smiles.

– I'll tell yer why. After the scrap here, he nods at the valley to his right – I got bored sitting around with me thumb up me arse waiting for something to happen so I pulled a scam and got the dosh together to go out to 'Beefa. Lived it large for a few weeks, filled some gash, necked a
lot
of quality E, didn't want to come back when the money ran out cos I was
on
it, man, yeah? Come back here to the rain and everything else? Fuck
that
, man. So I got in with some geezers and one night we gets in the back room of one of the clubs, manager's in there counting his takings, I stuck a nine-mil in his mush and says: ‘Suck on
that
, bitch!' Eight grand we got away with. Spanish Old Bill pick us up but I'm full of ching and E so I smashes up the patrol car and sticks the head on one of the wop coppers and only tries to bite his bleeding ear off don't I? And down the station they're all saying, ‘he is-a the Beast-a of Britain!' My boys were
well
laughing. The Beast-a of Britain!
Well
funny, man. Name stuck, yeah?

Ronnie and his companions digest this information then nod in impressed agreement and concur that Britain's Beast is a character of note and Ronnie is about to tell him so when he is startled by another blurt of noise louder than the first, as it were a noise of thunder, and he turns towards it although something in him is telling him to move away from it and he sees another, youngish feller with a mad hat of reddy-blond hair and clean-shaven this time, his back erect and face firm with an almost aristocratic mien. He rides a big horse, a big noble horse, coloured like the first with yellow on its legs and the man is wearing a shirt of red nylon with vertical yellow stripes and yellow piping at the cuffs and the yellow is as yellow as the For Sale signs lettering and the red is as red as newly spilled blood, that deep maroony kind of red, as red as a Manchester United home shirt for that is what it is, this rider having been born in Eastbourne and whose allegiances to football as to anything else were guided more by a perceived reflected glory than any kind of rooted loyalty. This rider arrests his horse next to the Beast's and he speaks to the Beast but looks only at Ronnie and his companions, his hoisted nose a laser down which to guide the beams of his judging eyes.

– Who are these little shits?

– Dunno, the Beast replies. – Just met them. Seem sound to me, though. Leave 'em alone.

– Do they pay their taxes?

– How the fuck do I know? Ask 'em.

The second rider and his horse both snort and ride away and Ronnie watches him go until he's disappeared over the nearest ridge and can no longer be seen.

– Who was that, Beast of Britain?

– Dunno. Fuck's sakes, what do you all think I am? Friend to every bastard? I did recognise him, though. Seen his face on local election posters. Politician. Ponce if you ask me.

Then the dream flips as dreams do and Ronnie and his wee legion are trudging again across the high green plain in a whistling wind towards a village on the far side of a river, fairly small here and traversable by a skimmed stone in eight or nine hops but which Ronnie knows will become mighty as it nears the sea far away. And encamped on the banks of that river is an army, a multitude attired in desert camouflage with their armoured cavalry painted the same way, many of them shirtless in the high sun and exposing tattoos of faux-Maori design or faux-Celtic design or of stylised crucifixes across the back or Chinese lettering or Sanskrit lettering and the amount of men is such that each of the tattoos is replicated many times over on different limbs. So many tattoos, so few designs. Sitting on a rock regarding this multitude is a sad fat man in a top hat and with a cigar the size of a baby's arm between his lips, flanked by a man in a cassock on his left and a thinner, pinch-faced man on his right who the dream-Ronnie knows is only a ghost, dressed in ghost-khaki and sporting a phantom moustache and wearing insignia on his spectral breast pocket declaring Desert Rats. Behind these three stands a man grinning with lots of teeth below steely eyes with his hands hovering uncertainly over his sheathed sword as if they do not know what to do with such a weapon, not how to draw it nor how to use it, except the man is barking orders at the roistering troop to draw and be prepared to use theirs. The skin is white on this man's grinning face and he wears a plain and unremarkable dark and sober suit with a red tie. The Beast of Britain glances just once at this man and then approaches the sad fat man in the hat, smoking the big cigar.

– Winston, he says. – How are yeh, brother?

Winston, still sitting, looks up at the Beast, glances at Ronnie and his mates, looks away again.

– Great Scott, he says in a voice that sounds like a rumble in a tunnel. – Where did you find these miserable specimens?