The Sin Bin (10 page)

She turned to me, wiped off the smile.
I swear that look in her eye came closer to evil than I
'
d ever seen.
'
I
carved her.
'
She made a
slashing move with her arm.
'
But
I still delivered, I got the job done.
'

Candy looked back down at the cash, her
mouth counting out the reams of bills.

'
That name,
Lottie Tanner ...
'

'
Yeah.
'

'
Think I might
have heard it before.
'

'Oh, really ...'

'Yeah, she came from Buffalo didn't
she?'

Candy looked up, her tone rose higher.
'You knew Lottie?'

'Only of her. And only professionally.'

'What the hell are you saying, Jake?'

'She was my last case.' I looked her in
the eye. 'I was a cop ... some days I think I still am.'

Candy's lip twitched. I saw her
reaching into the bag for her Colt but my foot was already on the brake. Her
head hit the windshield like a ten-pin strike.

I stopped the car. Leaned over to
Candy, put her hands behind her back and took off my belt to tie them.

The words felt worth the wait, the work
I'd put in.
'
Time for a trip
downtown, honey.
'

###

THE LOST
GENERATION

A lonely ex-pat in Paris finds himself
acting out of character when a beautiful but troubled young woman walks into
his meaningless work-fuelled existence in
The Lost Generation
, whilst an
ex-con takes matters into his own hands when a bullying boss targets his new
inamorata in
Take it Outside;
both stories feature in this new
collection of short fiction by Irvine Welsh's 'favourite British crime writer',
Tony Black. See a recent school-leaver react against the rigours of the
workplace in
First Day in the Job
and witness the drug-addled descent
into madness of a man forced to take the only job in a town peopled by junkies
in
Too Cool for School
. These stories are collected here for the first
time in an 8,000-word anthology.
First Day in the Job
originally
appeared in
Northwords Magazine
whilst the rest of the collection
featured in
Demolition Magazine
and
the American anthology,
Dicked.

The Lost Generation

The Lost Generation

First Day in the Job

Take it Outside

Too Cool for School

The Lost Generation

It was an old bar in the quarter
Parisians no longer frequented. On the walls hung pictures of sporting heroes
from across the Atlantic; baseball players and heavyweight boxers of the
thirties and forties that no one remembered now, but that had once been popular
enough to summon an air of nostalgia for lonely ex-pats. It was a place not
quite for the Lost Generation, but for those who had heard of them and fell for
the romance of the era. It certainly seemed out of time; maybe that's why I
liked it so much.

I saw her come in and order herself a
Pernod from the bar. She was not tall, but of that height where heels will help
a woman's stature. She wore her sleek black hair loose on her shoulders and
tucked a long stray tendril behind her left ear as the barman handed her some
change. She stared at the few coins, momentarily, like she wondered what they
were, then swiftly removed them to her coat pocket. It was then that her eyes
caught mine.

She had dark eyes, round and black,
with a penetrating stare that came not from an interest in life but more an anguish
with its tribulations. I couldn't say she looked tormented, but the jerkiness
of her movements made me think she wasn't far from it. She seemed to shiver and
sway a little – appeared uneasy out in the open – as she reached out a hand to
steady herself on the bar-counter.

I have never been confident, or even
competent, in my dealings with the opposite sex. There is no particular reason
for this; I am not an unattractive man, but I am not the sort given to easy
entanglements either. Stories my friends or colleagues have told me of torrid
mid-afternoon couplings with strangers picked up in the Jardin des Plantes or a
Montparnasse tabac are wholly alien to me. I do not live that way and never
have. All my affairs of the heart have been just that – heartfelt. I need to
know there is more than an animal instinct at work.

When I came to Paris it was for work –
I am a low-caste engineer – but I stayed for Marie. When that particular
entanglement had run its course I stayed for my other love – the city itself. I
have never regretted it, though have often wondered why I stayed alone.

The black-haired woman turned
embarrassedly when she saw that I was assessing her. I felt a pin pushed in my
heart when those dark eyes were removed from mine but I brushed the impulse
away, just like the glint of desire I felt. I was not the type of man to stare
wantonly at women in bars. For a moment I returned to my newspaper – a story
about suburban decay – but I soon felt my gaze rising from the pages to follow
the woman once more. She had turned from me and started to walk back the way
she had come in – towards the door. She seemed to be looking for someone,
waiting. Her features firmed, became pensive, and then she raised her Pernod to
her lips and drained a good third of the glass in one draught.

I was still watching her as she moved
towards me, her sharp heels clicking on the hardwood floor. She walked briskly,
always those dark eyes burning into me. What did they say? I could not answer,
only knew they stoked my curiosity in the strangest way, a way I had not felt
before.

I first met Marie in a bar; not one
like this, however. She worked then for one of those large American
conglomerates who seemed to trail the world looking for reasons to acquire new
businesses. A hotel on the Boulevard Haussmann had been the firm's latest
purchase and Alcatel-Lucent – my employers – had been tasked with providing the
company's telecommunications equipment. We drank fabulous coffee in the
luxurious surroundings and Marie told me about her upbringing in Idaho. She
missed the open space; Paris felt oppressive for her. I could see, even then,
that she was ambitious; the fact that she was also the type to succumb to
homesickness seemed strange to me – it was as if two contradictory parts of her
nature were competing. My then limited experience told me the stronger instinct
had to win out; I could not conceive of the presence of both in one individual.
I was that naive with Marie.

'You must help me.' It was her, the
dark-haired woman. She put her glass down on my table, the ice rattled and some
liquid escaped the brim, ran down the edge of the tumbler.

I knew my mouth had drooped, I felt my
breath stilled. I fought for some words but none of significance came, just an
atavistic drawl.

'What? I mean, what's wrong?'

She rounded the table and sat. She knew
my French was not native and she spoke again, in English. 'You look like a good
man to me.' Her thin brows lifted. 'I need your help.'

I put down my paper at once. There was
a part of me that did not want to be a good man – as I stared at her I saw she
was even more beautiful at close quarters. I guessed her age to be early
thirties, there were fine radial lines around the corners of her eyes but the
rest of her skin was clear, young-looking.

'Please ...' She stole a glance towards
the door as a man walked into the bar.

He was rangy, wearing a tight-fitting,
double-breasted jacket. For a second or two the barman appraised him – they
exchanged nods – then the rangy man looked up and down the bar. He thinned his
grey eyes when he spotted the woman at my side.

'
Please
...' she said softly. I
felt my hand gripped under the table. I turned, and at once fell into her dark
stare. My mind whirled as I tried to grasp this predicament, but all thought
was soon drowned out by the heavy footfalls I heard pacing towards our table.

This was Paris, a city I loved and knew
well; well enough to know that its quotient of madmen and carousers was high.
Did I want to get involved in these strangers' pas de deux? Did I want to read
about my involvement in yet another of the city's many torrid street crimes in
tomorrow's
Figaro
? I had only come in for a quiet drink, an escape from
my small,
deux-pièces
apartment. I led a simple life: I worked; I ate; I
slept. I did not, as a rule, defend damsels in distress. I was a sales
engineer, by God, not a white knight.

'Who in the hell is
he
?' the
rangy man spoke broken French; my new companion replied in what sounded like a
language of the east, Bulgarian perhaps. I quickly became lost in their
volatile exchange, only the flaring of eyes and shaking of heads allowing any
insight into the talk. She was calm, more composed than she looked at first,
but he was a hot-blooded type, eager to anger. He spoke quickly, scarring the
air with his brisk gestures. As his face coloured and sweat pustules sat out on
his broad, flat forehead an unhealthy agitation overcame his speech. The volume
of the man's voice rose, the woman looked away; at first she turned to me, but
then we both espied the barman taking an interest. He put down the glass he
polished with a white towel and strolled to our end of the bar.

'Is everything all right?'

The barman's intervention stilled the
air. The man and woman eyed each other over the table, but said nothing. A new,
gravid threat filled the room. I felt my shirt collar tighten, the heavy beat
of my pulsing neck hardened. In the second or two of uneasy silence it seemed
like we had entered an alternative reality – a parallel universe perhaps, where
this type of thing actually happened to me; surely this was not my existence
any longer. I couldn't comprehend the turn of events. Nothing seemed real. I
waited for someone to speak, but everyone seemed trapped, frozen in our surreal
tableau. I longed for the barman to intervene once more, but from the corner of
my eye I could tell he, too, was waiting for someone else to take the
initiative. Before I knew why, or even how, I had risen to face the rangy man.

It was instinctive, the thinking,
reasoning part of the brain had been overcome by some autonomic drive. No one
was more surprised than me. We stood eye to eye over the small table, for the
briefest moment my leg brushed the table's rim and the small glass of Pernod
trembled. We stared on some more and then he looked back to the woman and
turned down the corners of his mouth, revealing a jagged, uneven row of teeth.
He muttered, something in a Slavic tongue again, it was beneath his breath and
cut off abruptly by a sudden turn towards the bar as he strutted across the
open floor, all the way towards the door. A few customers in the bar followed
his brisk steps; he may have been muttering still. I watched him all the way.
As he went he loosened the buttons on his double-breasted jacket and ran an
open palm along his thick hairline. At the exit he turned and, swivelling on
his heels, he spat in our direction; he looked like an angry snake spraying its
venom.

I apologised to the barman – I still
heard the door swinging to and fro on its slack hinges,
'Deux
Pernod,
s'il
vous plaît
...'

He shook his head and retreated. At the
bar I watched as he removed the bottle from the shelf, inflating broad cheeks
as he poured two small, thin glasses.

I didn't know what to say to the woman
at my side. I watched as she took up her drink and, after a few deep breaths,
downed the last of the liquid in one swift motion.

As we sat waiting for the barman to
bring two more shots I wondered just what I had got myself into. I knew I
should get up right away, pay for the drinks and leave, but something kept me
right where I was. I was surprising myself in new ways; ways I had never even
considered possible until the moment the dark-haired woman walked into the bar.

'I'm Frank,' I said.

'My name is Elena.'

First Day in the
Job

'Now listen, you get a good grip of
them, boy.'

'It's Bobby.'

'What ...?'

'My name's Bobby.'

'Aye, right you are; now, like I say,
get a good grip of them keys, boy. Count them.'

'... Eleven.'

'And it's eleven I'll want back at the
end of the day. Hundred and forty bar it costs to get them cut if you lose them
– you hearing me boy?' Bobby nodded. The Old Giffer listed off the keys' uses.
Red top: stock room; blue top: back stairwell; green top: shop floor; other red
top: supply cupboard and fuse box ...

The Old Giffer handed Bobby a dustcoat.
It was mustard-coloured with two pockets at waist height and one at the breast.
There were pens in the breast pocket and inky stains. Bobby touched the stains
and looked at his fingers.

'Get it on, boy,' said the Old Giffer.
Bobby put the coat on. There was a tear in the seam of the first sleeve he
tried to put on and his hand popped out like a puppet. The Old Giffer laughed.

'You'll have to get your mammy to sew
that for you, boy.'

Bobby did up the dustcoat's front
buttons. The Old Giffer's coat was flapping open, exposing a prominent gut.

'Right, at least you look the part; now
follow me, we've a lot to get through the day.'

They set off down the corridors. The
Old Giffer pointed out the air-con vents and flanges, the thick black
iron-riveted pipes of the plumbing, the service elevators, waste chutes, the
Big Man's office, fire exits, the stairwell ingress and some floor tiles that
needed replacing; all the time pointing out 'wee jobs' that had been messed up
by Bobby's predecessor.

When they reached the basement the Old
Giffer sat down. There was only one seat in the room. Garbage was flowing
from a hole in the wall into a big tin container with wheels, like a
supermarket trolley. It was a noisy process.

'Do you smoke?' said the Old Giffer,
stoking his pipe with tobacco.

'Aye.'

The Old Giffer lit his pipe and blew
grey plumes into the heavy basement air. Bobby took out his packet of ten
Regal.

'Filter tip!' said the Old Giffer,
before his voice trailed off into a hacking laugh. Bobby lit up. There was no
talk between the pair of them. The smoking tasted good to Bobby. He bit the tip
and drew it deep into his lungs and it reminded him of home.

'When's lunch?' he asked.

'Don't you concern yourself with that,
my boy. I decide who eats, and when, around here,' said the Old Giffer. Bobby
looked around the basement, but there was only the two of them.

'Twenty year I've been here, boy, I'll
no' have you dictating to me one day in the job!'

'I was just ...'

'I was just. I was just. I was just
nothing! I make the rules up – have done for twenty year – and you'd do well to
remember that!'

The Old Giffer tapped his pipe off the
side of the tin container and stamped the black soot into the cement floor with
the sole of his shoe. He took Bobby over to the far corner of the basement and
flicked on the four rows of light switches. The room lit up like a fairground
and Bobby screwed up his eyes. The Old Giffer saw this and smiled, then turned
them off again and the dim bulb in the centre of the room took over on its own.

'Never put all the lights on like that,
boy, it's a waste – a pure waste. I pride myself on keeping the electric down.'

There were tins which held paint
stacked in the far corner. There were no colours on the outside, just a number
on the top of each lid which corresponded to a chart on the wall. 00176 was
magnolia. 00177 was pure white. 00181 was duck-egg blue. There was only one tin
of 00181.

In his doocot the Old Giffer showed
Bobby how to stack the brushes. They were held in coffee jars half-filled with turpentine.
He took one out and rubbed it on the back of a newspaper. The bristles were
shining.

'You see – clean,' said the Old Giffer,
'that's what this job is all about – cleanliness. Look after your equipment and
it'll look after you. I'll be minding you, boy, keeping an eye on you.' He
touched the side of his nose and squinted at Bobby, 'You keep this clean, and
do as you're told, and we'll get on fine in here, boy.'

Bobby said nothing. The Old Giffer
handed him a broom and told him to go and sweep out the basement, top to
bottom. He was told to start in the far corner, so he did. It was dark and had
a dank smell and Bobby couldn't see what the end of the brush was doing, but he
persisted.

The Old Giffer was sorting out nails
and nuts and bolts in his doocot. Bobby swept around the edges, in the alcoves
and dark hollows, round the boxes and planks and under the trestle until he had
worked into the middle of the floor, under the light bulb which gave off a dim
glow.

A little mound of sweepings was
gathered in an ash-coloured molehill. Bobby smoothed its sides with his hands.
It looked like the earth rugby players moulded to kick from. Bobby wanted to
kick the sweepings high into the air. He looked for the Old Giffer, who was
still in his doocot, sorting out his bits and bobs. Bobby approached him.

'I've done the sweeping.'

'Oh, aye?'

'Do you have a shovel?'

The Old Giffer didn't look up, just
motioned to the back of the door with his hand. Bobby took the shovel from the
back of the door. It was weighty. He gripped the handle in his hands and raised
it above his head. The waxy shine of the Old Giffer's head was an inviting
target.
One blow, just one swift blow
, he thought,
and I could be
free of him
… free to go home and have a smoke in front of the telly.

'When you're finished up with that you
can have your lunch break – an hour mind, only an hour!'

Bobby slowly lowered the shovel and
went back to his little mound of sweepings. He hurriedly piled the dusty debris
onto the face of the shovel and dumped it in the big tin container with wheels
like a supermarket trolley. He undid the buttons on his mustard-coloured
dustcoat and flung it over the back of the chair. The Old Giffer didn't look up
as Bobby left the basement and quickly lurched up the stairs.

Outside the building Bobby walked
briskly. He thought about glancing back but knew this would slow his pace. By
the time he reached the Old Brig he was beginning to tire and could feel a
sticky layer of sweat between his shirt and his skin, so he stopped.

He looked out over the flowing waters
and felt calmed. His breathing settled and a craving in his chest called out
for nicotine. He took out the packet of ten Regal and pressed the filter tip
between his lips, then he reached for his lighter. Something jangled in his
pocket. It was the Old Giffer's keys. He counted them and smiled: there were
eleven.

Bobby held up the keys and looked at
them for a while.
They're just a bunch of keys
, he thought,
bits of
metal that open doors
. He drew his fist around the bits of metal and pulled
his arm back with a force that hurt his shoulder, then he launched them into
the sky. Each little key sparkled in the sun as they whirled and whizzed
through the air, before skimming the surface of the water, and sinking, fast.