The Magpie Trap: A Novel Page 3

  The rest of the commentator’s speech was drowned out by loud booing in the shop. Danny had never seen it so animated; he felt the slight twitch of doubt at the back of his mind. What if Terry Martell, the little bastard, had been wrong about Quick Fix? He drew deeply on his cigarette and tried to recover his former good mood.

  And we’re off! A good start from Magnetic Fish Pond on the left, followed by Do the Right Thing and stable-mate Chocky. Coming up just behind them is the grey mare Bobby’s Girl and chasing fast is Quick Fix…

  This time, the commentator’s high-pitched delirium disappeared behind a wall of yelling from the Killingbeck punters. On screen, Quick Fix was starting to look good; he barely even looked to have broken sweat yet. Danny chanced a surreptitious glance to his left where he saw Jackie leaning forward in excitement. The old man was mock-whipping his own thigh; his eyes for once, were sparkling. He was sucking on his false teeth; this awful slurping and clicking sound emerged, like the sound a horse’s hooves make in wet mud.

  ‘Come on cocker!’ screamed Danny. ‘Ride hard, Quick Fix.’

  And as we approach the long bend which marks the mid-way point of this race, we have Magnetic Fish Pond neck and neck with Do the Right Thing. Closing fast is Quick Fix, followed by Bobby’s Girl and Mr. Happy. Towards the back of the field, Chocky is fading fast. He looks tired, the old boy.

  Danny couldn’t help but smile. Old Terry had come through for him. He knew that putting all of those orders his way would pay off some time, even when the engineers complained about the quality of Terry’s equipment. Good old Terry; he’d have to phone him and thank him once the race was over and he’d escaped the mob of well-wishers.

  Underscoring his glorious moment were the sickening sounds of Jackie’s own excitement: click – suck – slurp – click.

  Chocky has pulled up now! The ten-to-one third favourite is out of the race. Bad news for the Irish stable that were hoping for a one-two in this race in the build-up to the big one at Ascot. Up at the front, there’s not a lot of grass between the leader Magnetic Fish Pond and the chasing pack, but Do the Right Thing is not walking this race as some commentators thought he would.

  The smart money’s now on a good finisher like Mr. Happy or Quick Fix…

  Another roar from the crowd in the Killingbeck Turf Accountants greeted the mention of Quick Fix’s name; Eileen, who had come out from behind the counter started to nudge Danny in the ribs with a sharp elbow. Sheepishly, he returned her smile.

  A quick look to his left; Jackie’s teeth were now half way out of his mouth. It gave him a hollow-cheeked look, like he was undead or something.

  Twenty furlongs to go now and the race is hotting up. The front three of Magnetic Fish Pond, Quick Fix and Do the Right Thing are riding hard. They see the end in sight. Now who has that final burst in their legs?

  Danny could see that Quick Fix still had reserves of energy. The jockey still hadn’t applied the whip and yet he was keeping easy pace with the other leaders. Steam was pouring out from the horse’s flanks like an old train that was about to embark on a sprint. He was a beautiful horse; so elegantly poised, so magnificently tuned.

  Click – pop – wheeze – gurgle, from Jackie.

  Magnetic Fish Pond seems to be tiring now. He’s lagging behind the front two by a furlong and the gap is growing bigger by the second. And now as we enter the home straight it all comes down to a sprint-finish between the favourite, Do the Right Thing, and the well-backed outsider, Quick Fix.

  Danny tuned out the noise of the commentary and the crowd. He concentrated on the images; the two horses were straining with every sinew now; foam sprayed from their mouths. The jockeys were secondary but still threw everything they had into the final portion of the race. The camera showed a brief close-up of Quick Fix’s jockey in his harlequin-style shirt; he was virtually rising up above the horse’s head now as though believing that if it came down to a photo-finish, he’d be the one to secure the win.

  ‘Come on Quick Fix!’ he tried to yell, but felt his vocal chords constrict. Must have been the cigarette he’d just smoked. He felt the burn in his throat and reminded himself that he really needed to give up. Smoking was no good at all for him. But then, looking down, Danny realised that he was somehow already smoking another cigarette. He couldn’t even remember being offered one.

  As his eyes re-focused on the screen, Danny realised that something had gone horribly wrong in the brief moment he’d looked away. Now there was only one horse in the picture and it wasn’t Quick Fix. He felt Eileen’s sharp elbow connect with his ribs. This time the connection was harder, more meaningful.

  He tried to concentrate on the screen; tried to work out what had happened. He realised that the room had now gone quiet again and that every eye was trained on him.

  Now the sounds coming from Jackie were reminiscent of choking.

  And Do the Right Thing romps home to win the 3.15, screeched the commentator. It was a close thing for him, but after that late, painful-looking trip from Quick Fix, there was never any doubt.

  Another commentator joined in: Very sad when a horse has an accident like that. I may be wrong, but that looks like the kind of fall that a horse doesn’t recover from.

  Eileen clicked a button on the remote control and suddenly the commentary was gone. It was eerily quiet. Hands on hips, the old scouse battle-axe turned to Danny.

  ‘So what happened to your tip, Danny-Boy? I had fifty quid of me own money on that…’

  Then the rest of the dissenting voices started; Jackie, Fish-Eye, Key-Ring and Do-Nowt. Naked aggression filled the air. Danny started to edge toward the door, keeping his back against the wall so as to negate the chance of any surprise attack. The gnarled old men were starting to close on him now; moaning their reedy-voiced moans like that, they seemed like a herd of zombies or something.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Eileen reach over the counter and pull out a meaty-looking baseball bat. She handed it over to Key-Ring, who looked as though he might have a good swing on him. Danny had heard that Key-Ring used to be a bouncer down Bradford way. He didn’t want to find out whether the man had retained his strength. As it was, he’d always looked on the man as a cuddly-bear type; so lacking upstairs that he didn’t register on the radar as dangerous. But now, Stone Age club in hand, he seemed to bristle with menace.

  Danny started to move more quickly now, feeling his way along the wall with his hands. He dreaded the sound of another punter stepping into the shop and blocking the doorway.

  ‘Seventy quid!’ roared Accy. ‘That’s almost me whole pension you little fucker.’

  ‘I won’t be able to pay me gas,’ groaned Jackie, whose eyes had returned to their natural, milky nothingness now that hope had been extinguished.

  The crowd parted to allow Key-Ring through their ranks. He made one loping swing which whizzed past Danny’s ear before connecting with one of the plastic chairs. A loud crack reverberated around the room and for a moment everybody was still. This was the moment of no return; the calm before the storm.

  Suddenly, Danny darted toward the door. He felt someone catch part of his jacket and start to yank him back. For a moment, he feared that he was about to be pulled back into the fray, but then he heard the rip of his expensive coat and the agonised roar of the crowd as they realised that their prey was about to escape.

  He made the door and paused for a moment, about to offer some words of apology. But Key-Ring made a final, desperate lunge with the bat. It rippled through the plastic beading but did not connect. Danny plunged out of the shop and into the garish sunlight of the street.

  Before he could think about it, he was running; leaping over the tartan shopping trolleys of old women and cracked kerbs; hurdling mobility assistance handrails and overflowing rubbish bins. In the distance, he saw a bus pulling into a stop and he made for it as though his life depended on it.

  Safely on the bus, Danny couldn’t help but reflect on what he’d lost. It wasn’t just
the money, although that was a large part of it; no, he’d lost something more. He’d lost that knuckle-headed confidence which had been flowing through him from the very moment that he’d thought up the plan. Or rather, since the plan had been thrust upon him.

  He traced his fingers across the fake leather of the seat in front and tried not to give in to melancholy. Or to the fear; every time the bus creaked to a halt at another pointless stop, he was scared that the next person to climb on board would be Fish-Eye or Eileen or Jackie. He knew that he was stupid in these fears; none of the regulars had actually left the confines of the shop for something like eighty years, he reckoned, but still, there was a first time for everything. Nevertheless, when a burly, broad-shouldered man got on at a stop just outside Harehills, he could have sworn that it was Key-Ring. The man clutched a big hold-all bag, and Danny was convinced that it contained the baseball bat. He sunk lower into his seat and pulled his collar up. Only when the man had safely taken the last available seat was Danny assured that it was not Key-Ring.

  On the seat behind him, some spindly teenager kept kicking her feet into his back. The boy next to him had his Ipod on at deafening levels. The heating had been set too high too, so that the windows fogged up and he couldn’t see where he was going properly. Danny believed in signs; he had an almost superstitious faith in his ability to read them and the veracity of what they foretold. The very fact that he was crammed into the creaking brontosaurus of a bus was a bad sign. Having lost the money was something far, far worse. It was something that he could barely bring himself to contemplate.

  Whenever he thought back to that zombie mob-scene in the bookies, he now saw Cheryl’s face instead of those of the old men. And her many faces burned with that same told-you-so antagonism that he knew he would face him when he got back home that evening. He could almost hear her voice, and the endless repetition of that stupid goddamn question that he could never hope to answer; why?

  And so, rather than dwell on what had happened, Danny settled into anger instead. He dug out his mobile phone and tapped in Terry Martell’s number. Understandably, it took some time for Terry to answer, but Danny persisted, showing a willpower that generally deserted him in more pressing situations.

  ‘Awwright Dan,’ sighed Terry in his sickening cockney drawl. ‘Before you start in on me, can I just say that I’m sorry about the…’

  Danny didn’t give Terry the opportunity to finish his sentence: ‘Sorry’s not worth three hundred ding, cocker,’ he snarled.

  ‘We’ll find some way…’

  ‘Find some way of what?’ roared Danny. Some of the passengers started to turn round, casting their inquisitive eyes over this strange, well-dressed stranger in their midst.

  Let them stare, thought Danny. Let them disapprove. Let them be all high-and-mighty about someone shouting on the bus before they go home to their own shouting match suppers and braying the kids before bedtime.

  ‘I’m trying to tell you, mate…’

  ‘No; I’m telling you. Don’t expect me to stand up for your shitty cameras next time there’s a fault. In fact, don’t expect me to ever do anything to help you out ever again.’

  Danny clicked off the phone, realising that there weren’t really any other threats that he could justifiably make. He couldn’t threaten him with a baseball bat over the phone; he couldn’t threaten to take back the money that he was down. All the ‘fuck offs’ in the world were still only words. And Terry was a work contact after all; if Danny had have really let the man have it, then word would surely have got back to Fartin Thomas, the head honcho at EyeSpy Security. And Danny’s position at the firm was already looking pretty shaky.

  Danny caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window as the bus passed into shadows. He saw how bedraggled he now looked; how his slick-back hair had started to go astray. Soon, he reflected, he would be like the old boys in the bookies. If he’d have been able to look closer at the image of himself, he’d have been able to see that his piercing blue eyes now looked a little jaded and bloodshot around the edges and his cheeks were getting more hollow by the day. He was becoming one of them already.

  ‘Fuck Terry,’ said Danny, returning the phone to his pocket. Somewhere, a woman tutted; somewhere, a teenager laughed.

  Well fuck them too, thought Danny. Soon he wouldn’t have to worry about what people thought of him or wonder whether it was socially acceptable to swear so loudly on public transport. Soon, he’d have money, and that would facilitate his escape from the shit-tip.

  Mark Birch

  Mark’s whistling was off-key. In fact, those mysterious, dark and shadowy Trades Description people would probably have pricked up their ears when they heard Mark’s remarkably poor attempts at holding a tune being described as a whistle. Alarm bells would jangle in the Trades Descriptions secret bunker. The chief would be summoned, with his big, dusty tome of rules and regulations, and he’d have been astounded by the massive discrepancy between the tuneless, forceful blowing which was passing through Mark’s pursed lips and an actual, honest to goodness whistle.

  Okay, so Mark wasn’t exactly whistling, but he was certainly affecting an air of calm as he walked back to the security lodge at Edison’s Printers with Callum Burr. And perhaps being poor at whistling made Mark seem even more nonchalant; to hear him, one might say that he couldn’t have a care in the world. Certainly it seemed to hardly matter at all to him who heard him making such an almighty magpie-racket.

  Burr gave a brief, amused smile as he left Mark at the gate. ‘You need some lessons, mate,’ he said, as a parting comment.

  Mark looked confused and ran a thick hand over his shaven head as though he’d been ordered to show and tell ‘confused’ to an audience of aliens that were unaware of the vagaries of human body language.

  ‘The whistling,’ explained Burr, gruffly; perhaps annoyed that Mark hadn’t got his point. ‘Never mind; the guard will take you through your exit procedure and then you can be on your way.’

  ‘Oh… okay, thanks,’ said Mark, embarrassed.

  And so Mark waited in the no-man’s land sterile area. He waited to be cleansed and processed and allowed on his way to carry on with the rest of his list of jobs. While he waited, he suddenly realised the sorry fact that he’d been whistling perhaps the most unsuitable tune possible while he’d been escorted by a big brute of a Scotsman; England, by Ralph McTell.

  It wasn’t Mark’s fault; the music had been used on a recent Billy Connolly travel show that he’d watched. And surely Callum would have known that Mark hadn’t meant any harm by it anyway. After all, it wasn’t a song about defeating the Scots in battle now was it? It wasn’t all about sending people homeward tae think again.

  Mark often found himself wincing in the aftermath of some of the unthinking things he said and did. It seemed that while he was brilliantly adept with his hands, his mind was somehow hard-wired incorrectly. Put him in a room with policemen in it and he’d somehow always end up by admitting to some terrible crime that he’d not committed; put him in a room with his boss, Martin Thomas, and he’d end up by agreeing to take on more hours for less pay than he’d started out with in the first place. And then he’d put the icing on the cake by calling the boss ‘Fartin’, just like Danny did.

  Because he’d long been aware of this suicidal desire in himself to say the wrong thing, he often winded up saying nothing at all, and therefore came off looking even more stupid and bumbling and buffoonish.

  Frustrated, he kicked at some of the loose gravel on the floor. He must have caught one stone in particular with rather more force than was strictly necessary or intended. It flew off in the direction of one of the big Edison’s Printers lorries. Mark could hardly bear to look as it clanged off the heavy metal roller shutter back door, leaving behind a rather obvious dent. He prepared himself for the loud cat-calls of the lorry’s alarm but nothing came.

  ‘Idiot,’ he whispered to himself.

  ‘Pardon?’ asked a vaguely scruffy-looking man t
hat had just that minute popped his head out of the security lodge.

  Mark looked at the man through wide eyes for a moment, willing himself to speak. Don’t make this security guard think that you’re an imbecile. Speak, dammit, speak!

  ‘Ummm, I was just… ummm… talking to myself.’

  The security guard looked amused; his eyes lit up full of possibility. Here was someone that was on a lower rung of the ladder than him.

  ‘First sign of madness,’ he said, giving Mark an over-elaborate wink. He ushered Mark into the room at the back of the security lodge and told him to wait a moment while he got some forms from the office.

  The security guard wasn’t what Mark had been expecting; he had what looked like three of four day’s-worth of stubble on his cheeks and dark, deep-set eyes. He looked more like a student, Mark thought, than somebody that needs to be ‘front of house’ at a place like Edison’s Printers.

  The room at the back of the lodge looked to Mark like a dentist’s waiting room, except it was flanked by big grey lockers which held the mobile phones and personal items of the staff and visitors. Mark sat down on one of the chairs for a moment but soon found that he couldn’t keep still. Instead he started to pace the room like a caged animal waiting for release. Waiting again.

  He listened to the distant sound of a radio. It sounded like it was tuned to a sports channel; he could easily pick out the high-pitched abandon of the commentator. Probably a horse race, he thought. And he wondered whether this was the real reason that the security guard had retreated into the office. Maybe the guard was like Mark’s friend, Danny Morris, who had an insatiable urge to gamble, even if it meant putting everything else in his life in jeopardy.

  Mark couldn’t understand such fervour. He couldn’t understand how people could lay themselves so open to the wiles of fate. Mark held what few dreams he had close to his chest, as though if he let anyone read his hand, it would be easily trumped by the more wily players on the table. His one heartfelt wish had been broken once before, and as such he never truly allowed himself the guilty pleasure of daydreaming. He therefore moulded a new personality for himself; one which consisted of substances such as hard work, austerity and quietness. He never expected that life would simply grant him all of his wishes; drop them all off into his lap as a reward for being in the right place at the right time. For him, life was a long, obdurate, gritty Test Match, compared to the showy one-day big-hits of people like Danny.