Deadwater

Sean Burke

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 29 aug 2002

Deadwater begins with the murder of a prostitute in Cardiff's Tiger Bay. The novel's protagonist, the alcoholic pharmacist Jack Farissey, wakes up next morning in blood-stained clothes on a plastic sheet and no memory of what happened the night before. Lucky for Jack that the police soon finger local gangster Carl Baja for the murder. What follows is a bleak journey through the dying Cardiff docklands as Farissey looks into his own heart of darkness and that of his childhood friend, the musician Jess Simmonds. Both Jack and Jess love the same woman, who is bent on proving Baja's innocence. Baja's release from prison will be the beginning of the end for all three of them.

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Deadwater by Sean BurkeLeadtext: Everything is in front of me, she thought as the train windows blacked out. I can't get rid of it.She wouldn't ever know that it was the Severn Tunnel that decided her, nor that Bristol Parkway was the furthest from Wales that her short life would take her. She got off mid-journey with no more of a plan than the intuition that put her on the Paddington train in the first place.At Parkway she chain-smoked, dragging so heavily on each cigarette that she felt queasy. When the announcement of a train came over the intercom she had no sense of how long she'd been looking at the late-afternoon sun on the wet, tingling tracks. She didn't listen, didn't look at the computer screens or the posters on the carriage windows. She simply boarded the train because it looked like the one she'd boarded from Cardiff.'Where are you going?' the ticket inspector asked.'Cardiff.' Two harshdirt syllables, spat out as though it hurt her to say them, like a sailor's last Capstan-grained cusses.'Sorry,' the ticket inspector said. 'I don't understand. Your ticket is one-way from Cardiff to Paddington. You're travelling backwards.''I changed my mind at Bristol, all right?' she says, making a point of flicking her ash into the aisle. 'I gets on the train and thinks I don't want to go to London. So here I am going back to Cardiff.'She's conscious of people trying not to look at her: somehow her fear is so great that it's started to faze the world around her. She feels like she hasn't got a name, a history, a place to come from or to go to, scarcely even a face: just that black leather jacket, defensive downcast eyes, auburn frizzes and off-blue stonewashed jeans.The station guard looks her up and down. Younger than the hardness in her eyes, the sneer about her lips: twenty or so, he estimates. Black leather jacket, blue jeans, a kind of Afro perm. On a white girl that has to be trouble. He wouldn't see the vulnerability behind the little toughie act.'Your ticket's not valid. I'll have to take your name and address.''Christina. But my friends, they calls me Tina.'The inspector regards it as one insolence too many. She realises that there might be a pathetic little hassle if she doesn't play the game. She gives her offcial address.'Christina Villers, 28a Loudoun Square.''That's in the docks in Cardiff''Butetown is what it's called.''It's all the same thing down there,' he says. Her address has confirmed his impression of her as low-life scum. She knows, retorts with her own look of special contempt.The ticket inspector lets it go, eyes raised as if offering up his small mercy for notice.She could only feel safe where she was in danger: Butetown. You could only play the gangs off against the coppers for so long. Whoever got to her first would show her a way out.That was the hope; that was the dread.The Butetown skyline looks ugly as the train slows into Cardiff Station. All leading towards the docks and the deathly cold room of custom. It was like she was being sucked back into something. Why had she come back? Christ, she'd only fucking left two hours ago and thinking she was gone for good. But what the fuck was London to her? She didn't know anyone there. The only plan she had was the £500 she'd conned from the Baja brothers in a roundabout way. Better to confront her fears, she thought now. Better to use the money to buy her way out than land up lonelier than she could imagine in London.The sky was grey and full of something as the taxi took her the short ride to Argyll Square. She must get some good money tonight. She'd started hustling there three years ago before moving on to the Butetown pitches. It was as safe and secure a pitch as she'd ever found; just around the corner from her Auntie Babs's house, her father drinking in the nearby cluster of pubs. A couple of miles from Butetown and its docks, gloomy and heavy now, when it had been easy money and endless parties a few years ago and where, for tonight, she must resign herself to the most dismal of beds. Hustling in Argyll Square and sneaking back to Butetown to sleep - it was more than she could stand. Perhaps tomorrow she'd call in on Auntie Babs: but her old man had found she was on the game and there'd be all fucking hell to pay, most like.'Christina,' she says in another carriage. 'But my friends, they calls me Tina. That do you? That all right?' she asks, exhaling from yet another cigarette with brisk and brash defensiveness. Lanky guy at the wheel of the small, beat-up car: looked like a friendless student. Another one of those limp-dick weirdos and a task before her harder than coaxing dawn fire from dead coals.'What's your last name?''Why you putting this heaviness on me? There isn't no fucking names in this, you know. That should suit you; and it certainly suits me.' She holds his gaze.'What's your fucking story anyway?' she whispers, as much to herself or the air as to him.'Sorry, it's all a bit impersonal.''That's the whole fucking point, isn't it?''It just makes me nervous, that's all.' Unused notes fluttering in his pocket, like the butterflies of a stomach on being called to this event. A car without headlights screeches from a side street.'There's an accident looking for somewhere to happen,' he says, turning towards her.Cut the friendship thing, creep, she thinks. I don't need this: not now.He said he was cold and miserable and wanted to smoke a cigarette first. She kicked off her shoes, pulled a condom from her handbag, waited.'Whenever you're ready,' she said absently, but with a hint of mewling, of low moan: a once-full voice falling away from itself like ash from a cigarette or wood-shaving from a lathe.She leaned to the passenger window, unbuckled the belt of her jeans. She liked to keep her black leather jacket on unless they insisted on going at her nipples. Somehow the jacket made her feel cool, safe, in control. As if she feared for herself from the hips up.Two or three more punters, a short taxi ride to the docks and -it'd be tomorrow. Then she'd think her way out of this. She was still just - but only just - OK with the cops. But if she testified then she'd blow it with them and the other hustlers to boot. If she didn't then the Bajas were after her. She wasn't wanting any of it any more. Her Auntie Babs said to get off the drugs first, but she wouldn't understand, sweetheart though she was. How could you hustle if you didn't do a few drugs? And how could you buy the drugs if you didn't hustle? It's not that simple. You just got by one day at a time. And waited for something to change. So one morning you'd be settled and you'd have a baby and all this would be just bad memories.But she knew it wouldn't ever be like that. That's what she'd dreamed of with Tony Baja and look where it'd got her. She could see her father poncing a pint off her with his told-you-so attitude. 'Why don't you find a nice white man, Tina? White man, white woman: it's natural that way.' She'd heard that shit all the way through her teens. And what had happened with Tony Baja was nothing to do with black or white. It was to do with drugs and fuck-ups. 'There's black blood in our family,' she'd reminded her father: with which he takes a swing at her; catches her, a real beauty.'Youth's on your side, love,' Auntie Babs had told her. 'And you'll never know how beautiful you are. Some decent man will love you, love you enough not to mind what you've been in the past.' No man will ever love me, she'd said. She knew that. The streets were her only security, and she was in all sorts of jeopardy there.Just before midnight, another car flashes its lights at her. The wrong type of car, but she could handle it. She gets into the back seat.'Heard you were living above the bookies on Angelina Street,' says the copper in the passenger seat.'This little room I uses for business. It's not mine. I don't live there.'Two weeks ago and I wouldn't be Iying, she thinks: the chilly room Lida lent her with a mattress and a three-bar electric fire. The room of business that now doubled as a hide-out.As he waits for a radio response, the copper asks her to empty the contents of her handbag. A speed-dusted make-up mirror, a couple of passport-size photographs, two department store cards, lipstick, a powder compact, three loose but unopened condoms, a half-exhausted pack of Berkeley cigarettes, a book of matches carefully folded into its lip.The main copper fingers the make-up mirror, tastes the sulphate. 'Not the best in the world, is it?''Is what?''All right, love,' he says. 'Just keep off the main street. And anything you hear about those Baja brothers, you know . . .'She walks back to Argyll Square, looks up, down and around. Rich, healing tears well up in her eyes. She cuts a small line of sulphate on her mirror. She remembers a couple of cans of Breaker in her holdall, opens one, takes a good gulp.Rainy now and Easter Saturday and no late licences in the city centre: a profitless night, she suspects.

Deadwater

Preț: 43^.19 lei

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Deadwater

Preț: 43.19 lei

Specificații

Notă biografică

Recenzii

Extras

Preț: 43^.19 lei