Arvon shortlisted entry- The Good Old Days of Evil by Gareth Shore

18th April 2012
Blog
12 min read
Edited
8th December 2020

The Good Old Days of Evil by Gareth Shore

Inspired by the 2011 England Riots

White van man cuts me up at the lights, so I give him the finger. It belongs to the owner of the car I’m driving and thumps satisfyingly against the van’s window, sliding a bloody exclamation mark down over the driver’s slack expression.

I screech away through the junction, leaving him scrabbling through chip wrappers and red top tabloids for his phone. I gleam my smile in the rear view mirror for him to gawp at, letting him know that I am untouchable, uncatchable and, to the likes of him, unknowable.

Another day and I might have stopped and basked in his fear, his confusion, but I like to think I’ve grown out of that petty stuff since my amateur days. Anyway, I have an important assignment to see to and it’s nearly dark.

The window purrs down and I lean out to suck in huge lungfuls of the darkening night. I concentrate, tasting and filtering and savouring and sifting. Petrol. Neon. Excitement. Fear. Concrete. Broken glass. A static buzz, growing. An electric hum, swelling. Something wild, bucking and charging and frothing as I near. Yes, it’s all there, the heady vapours and intermingling odours that razor my senses and water my eyes. The news was right: riot.

It’s like gravity, like a fight in a school, with that telepathic pull which has people swarming in to see, to grin, to revel in the temporary absence of rules, of laws, of order. It is in these moments that people forget themselves, reveal who they really want to be. It is to these moments that I am sent to peer into their eyes when the masks fall away and judge who is truly worthy.

A thump from the boot of the car. Finally, my latest client has come to. With a flicker of disappointment I swerve out of the neon current and pull over outside a row of closed shops.

He’ll be scared and groggy from blood loss, curled up and nursing a four-fingered hand. Deliberately I pause before opening the car door, wait again before giving it a sudden slam, stand silently for a few seconds before scraping my feet on the pavement as I approach the boot. Bending down, I can hear his ragged breathing. I can’t help but like the ways my eyes glint close up in the polished black metal.

The boot swings up and he is curled up and nursing a four-fingered hand. I lean in to compare his eyes to mine. His are dead things, dulled and hollowed by resignation. He is ready to deal. I wonder at the lack of fight in them these days. Where’s the fire and brimstone fury, the faith-fuelled indignation? Promotion hasn’t been what I thought. Sometimes I think I might as well be doing my old job again, taking from those at death’s door with all the fight bled out of them. No-one even curses me anymore.

This one is ready to sign, but I hesitate. It’s a done deal but I catch the electric scent of the gathering riot again. The city centre glows orange in the distance. Whether the inevitable fires have started or it’s just the usual sick neon glare I don’t know, but the charge in the air is growing. The whimpering ragdoll in the boot is supposed to be an evil man who has done many bad things, but he seems unworthy to me. I peer at him once more, weighing and assessing, and find him wanting.

Slamming the boot shut, I shake my head. This will not look good for me. I proposed him, basing his suitability on a few bad acts and criminal swagger without really doing a proper assessment. Taking his finger was another misjudgement. Might have got away with signing him up had I not broken him so quickly.

I need to find a more suitable client. Time to join the riots.

***

With the car and the nine-fingered ragdoll safe in a side street, I step out into the city night and breathe deep. The hum is there, the buzz of potential violence stronger than ever. Sirens wail by a few streets away, but they serve only to add to the sense of building turmoil. The urban chiaroscuro of black buildings and blazing streetlights is breathtaking. This is a place where extremes meet, where good and evil will clash.

My journey to the city centre is increasingly punctuated by shouts and dark running figures. The excitement is growing. A police van roars by, scattering litter and my heart flutters. Even with all my experience, even with all the things I’ve seen, the thrill is undeniable.

I arrive at the centre.

A shop burns brightly on one corner, glittering the broken glass on the road. Tabloid hoodies caper in its heat, swigging from bottles of vodka and whiskey. Some would no doubt describe the scene as hellish, but I know better than that.

All around rises the thrumming din of the riot. Shouts and breaking glass, whooping car alarms and the crackle of fire. Pungent bonfire smoke fogs the air as I inhale and sift the vapours.

The hoodies are starting to drift away from the burning shop and I wait in the shadows of a doorway. They pass in an identical herd, all hooting and texting in black polyester, and I flash out and snatch one from the back. He writhes and twists like a snake and I drink in his flash of anger and then panic as my hand covers his mouth. His mates move on, oblivious.

Eventually I let go and he spews a string of unintelligible vowel sounds at me on a hot gust of alcohol fumes and weed, posturing stiffly as I regard him in silence. His beady weasel eyes peer of out of his hood. Through their pebbled hardness I see… mindless hate, a smashed bus stop, twisted selfishness, junk food and cheap booze.

“Bastard! Kill ya! Can’t fuckin’ touch me! Stab you up!” he spits, jerking and jumping. He’s like a small animal backed into its burrow. I smooth my hair back and smile as the polyestered runt flinches, and take a single step forward into his personal space. I know there’s a knife in his pocket. It would have been out in a flash had his mates been here, but without the rest of the pack he is merely puffing himself up, unwilling to escalate.

I lean down into his face. “What if I am the police?” I ask quietly.

“Fuckin’ feds, can’t do nothin’. Nah, nah, can’t touch me. Nah, ain’t done nothin’. Fuckin’ pigs.”

He stops as my smile fades, but I am not angry, not with this runt, anyway. Fearing that I have failed again this night, I peer into his eyes, deeper this time, past the posturing. He’s robbed houses and stolen cars, smashed the window of an off-licence, mugged a teenager for his phone before throwing it away, assaulted one man with four of his friends, smoked weed on the top deck of a bus. He hates ‘Pakis’ with a thoughtless, directionless hate. Surely there is more than this?

Deeper. There must be more. The news over the past few days has been full of rioters in other cities venting their fury, fuelled by biting injustice. I wanted to taste their righteous hatred, grew even more excited as disorder spread through the country. Assignments began to flood in and when I saw my Mr. Soon-to-be-nine-fingers job was in this city I anticipated a big night.

But something has gone badly wrong. The runt’s mask has dropped and I stare appalled into endless, blank numbness behind his eyes. There is nothing there, just a bottomless empty well and the dumb desperate desire to fill it with something, anything. His thoughts line up like a child’s building blocks: Hunger. Greed. Want. Take. Got. More.  His actions are like water poured onto desert sand. Nothing can grow there, not even evil.

Stepping back, I release him and he streaks out of the doorway. Some way up the road he turns and jeers and gestures, suddenly brave again before his black tracksuit blends him into the smoky night.

I understand evil, the desire to bring pain and suffering. I admire the purpose and conscious spite of my best clients, but this… this blankness is a new and strange thing. As I sniff the air again I sense it everywhere. Fires rage around me and laws are broken, but only to fulfil a mindless, hollow need.

In my mind’s eye, I see them. The runt is one of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands. A whole race of thoughtless sheep just doing things without thought, without any kind of drive other than to fill one moment, then another, then another. There is nothing for me to work with here. What am I supposed to do, live on scraps like Mr. Nine fingers?

I feel dizzy, wobbly, like the world has suddenly tipped. I sit down heavily, head between my knees. The balance has gone, the millennia-old system I have always been a part of in ruins, I can see that now, and without it I am useless. My chest is tight; I choke, smothered by the sudden stifling blanket of mindlessness that presses down upon the city, squeezing out the meaning of it all.

And so, past hooting looters and drunken, screeching girls all wreathed in smoke, I stumble back to the car. Resting my burning head on its cool metal, I think about the deal I was going to make with the man in the boot and laugh a hollow laugh. This night has made it a pathetic, antique thing.

I pop the boot. His twitch and little cry actually hurt me, and I flinch back, shocked at my reaction. Looking down at his foetal form, I see the man has indeed done bad things, but is as obsolete in this brainless new world as I. He is part of the old ways, the evil that has been kicked off its end of the scales by the runt and his swarming race who put the same amount of thought into hurting someone as choosing a new ringtone.

Taking his good hand, I pull him out. Unsurprisingly, he fights me and cowers back against a shop wall.

“Get in the back seat. Deal’s off. There are no more deals now. You need to go to a hospital.” He hesitates, a lifetime of mistrust holding him back. “Your wife will be worried. You can ring her from there,” I find myself saying. I glance up into the smoky orange halo of a streetlight. When I took the man’s hand I knew what must be done. The world has changed my role and I am filled with little jolts, the flickering sparks of renewed purpose.

***

The man in the back seat is silhouetted against the shrinking riot fires in the rear-view mirror. His good hand on the door handle is shaky from the night’s horror. I don’t feel any guilt, for my actions were right at the time, but now I want to do different things. The world needs me to do different things to put it all right side up again.

“Wait,” the man says. He swallows and tries again. “What are you doing? This isn’t the way to the hospital.”

“That is our second stop,” I reply and despite everything, I cannot resist falling silent to let the man imagine the worst. My reflected grin doesn’t help. “We’re getting something that belongs to you first.”

I have decided that the first act of my new life should be to go back and retrieve the man’s finger. Not a game changer, I know, but it’s a good start.

Writing stage

Comments