Acid Casuals Read online

  Acid Casuals

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Copyright

  Acid Casuals

  Nicholas Blincoe

  For Robert Blincoe

  Chapter One

  ‘Yeah, Boss. On my way.’ Amjad slung the radio handset on to the dashboard where his uncle’s voice faded into the slurp of the windscreen wipers and the hot breath of the Nissan’s air blowers. The rain hadn’t let up, not all day.

  When Amjad took the call, he was two minutes from the WARP bar. As he swung off Great Ancoats Street, it was just fifty yards ahead of him. Now he could see it, he was hoping the kid skipping around out front wasn’t his fare. Dancing in the rain like that.

  Amjad’s cab slushed to a stop at the kerbside. The doors to the bar opened and a woman stepped out. Tall in her heels, she had a scarf wrapped over her head. Dancing Boy held the cab door open for her and she slipped inside, on to the acrylic tiger furs that covered the back seat. The boy followed her.

  Amjad said, ‘Where to, Chief?’

  It was the woman who answered. ‘Palatine Court, please. You find it behind the cancer hospital.’

  ‘On my way, love.’ Amjad stabbed the button on his fare meter and pulled away.

  Amjad looked at the woman in his rear view mirror. Neither the accent nor her looks were English. He could have guessed she was foreign, even before she opened her mouth. If she’d been English, she wouldn’t have been much to look at. English girls went for natural looks – either that or they slapped the make-up on with a trowel. She wore a ton of make-up and there was nothing natural about it but she was no dog. If she had been English she wouldn’t have known what to make of herself. Not with her long, bony nose and the deep crescent lines down both her cheeks, either side of that huge mouth. This woman had made herself into a cinema queen. Sitting on Amjad’s tiger skins, wrapped up in a big black scarf and hung with jewellery, she could pass as a film star easy.

  She might be famous, you never knew. Maybe on the TV, perhaps she was a newscaster. What she was doing here, snogging some dumb kid she’d picked up in a bar, Amjad didn’t know.

  ‘Excuse me. You don’t mind me asking – where you from, love?’ he asked, half-turning over his shoulder.

  ‘America.’

  She didn’t sound American. Amjad was going to ask her about that, but she spoke first.

  ‘Why you have those beads hanging from the mirror? For luck? They balance your kharma?’

  Amjad laughed and flicked at the chain of beads dangling in the middle of his windscreen. They were supposed to keep him safe and so far they had worked fine. He never crashed. He’d only ever had a few twats crash into him. No one had ever tried to shoot him.

  ‘Keep us all safe, love.’

  ‘Safe,’ said the boy. He had a strong town accent, hissing the ‘s’ and coming down hard on the ‘f’, but it was forced. He probably came from somewhere outside Manchester originally. Now that he had started talking, it was like he wanted to be the centre of attention: ‘We’re all safe, I got enough good kharma for everyone.’

  The boy was definitely white. Amjad wasn’t sure about the woman. She probably wasn’t black, though. She didn’t look Pakistani – nor Indian, Bangladeshi, whatever. He turned to look at her again, but they were back snogging.

  Amjad kept quiet until he saw a diversion up ahead.

  ‘I’m going to have to go a different way.’

  The woman and her boyfriend pulled apart and looked over towards the police line. The area around the coach station was cordoned off with blue and white tape, flapping violently in the rain.

  The woman said, ‘What happened?’

  Amjad shrugged, it could be anything: IRA, football fans, a fight, maybe a raid on one of the gay pubs down there. The boy began telling her the story of a rentboy who had leapt off the carpark above the coach station a month ago. Amjad knew all about it, he’d heard it was an accident not a suicide: the kid had thought he could fly, off his head on acid.

  The woman continued to look around, even when the diversion was long behind them. Amjad was waiting at the lights on Whitworth Street when she asked, ‘What happened to Central Station?’

  The boy pointed. ‘That building, there? That’s G-Mex, Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre …’ He broke off. ‘You know Manchester, then?’

  She admitted that she did. Although she hadn’t seen it in a long time.

  ‘I can tell. G-Mex was built over ten years ago.’

  When Amjad stopped the cab in a cul-de-sac behind Christie’s Hospital, she paid the fare and tip. As Amjad pulled his Nissan round, he saw her fitting the keys to the apartment door. The lad was hopping from foot to foot, his head turned up to the rain. He was dancing again. Off his fucking head for sure.

  *

  Estela turned as she opened the apartment door. She watched the cab ploughing water from the gutter, watched Yen splashing through puddles. She could not believe now how wet Manchester could get. She whistled and Yen danced up to her like a sweet little doggy.

  ‘First floor, darling,’ she said. Yen bounced up the steps ahead of her.

  As they reached the apartment door, Estela held on to the back of Yen’s jeans to slow him down. She span him around and they began kissing. His mouth tasted sweet and furry from all the fizzy drinks that she had bought him. She might have mixed him a martini from her duty-free drinks collection, but he had already told her he didn’t touch alcohol. It was a pity, the gin might have disinfected his mouth. It would definitely have taken the edge off his manic, drugged energy.

  ‘Should I skin up?’ asked Yen.

  Estela nodded. A joint might begin to mellow him out. She stepped over the suitcases that remained unpacked on the floor of the apartment, and found her plastic carrier bag of duty-free. She picked her way over to the kitchenette, then took an age to find the glasses – they were where she would have kept the kitchen cleaners, if this had been her own place.

  ‘Boss stereo,’ Yen shouted from the other side of the room, slotting a tape into the mouth of the machine.

  Estela said, ‘It came with the flat, I don’ use it yet.’

  Yen began playing with the buttons on the amplifier while Estela made herself a drink. She looked in the fridge for the olives she remembered putting there. Yen rolled around the living room floor trying to find the plug sockets. The stereo buzzed into life as Estela spun an unripe olive into her glass. It was some kind of electronic synthesiser music, with no kind of rhythm track at all.

  Later, standing swaying in her bedroom, Yen said that he was sorted. Ambient sounds, a bit of spliff and he was coming down nicely. Estela felt good, too. Her jet-lag was beginning to loosen. She could feel the pressure spots on t
he soles of her feet unbind, releasing quiet waves of energy into her spine while she lay on the bed. She was surprised to find Yen’s tape so relaxing. It was a kind of dance music, but without a beat – just splashes of repetitive noise like the soundtrack to a lost disco. She wondered how it would sound set to a rhumba. Sitting up at the edge of the bed, she took hold of Yen’s thighs and drew him half a pace closer to her face. As he stood above her, she tapped the ends of her fingers in a light Latin beat on his buttocks. His penis jiggled in front of her, the long foreskin making its tip into a cute pink snout. He seemed to be in a trance. He was waving his arms slowly in the air, as though he were a piece of seaweed on the ocean bed, or a young tree in the breeze – some kind of spacey shit like that.

  Estela pulled a condom out of her hairband. She carefully tore open the foil and, with the teat between her teeth, used her mouth to unroll it over Yen’s springy erection. She let him dance in front of her, moving his penis in and out of her mouth. His trancey cosmic style was not a complete act, Yen was a gentle boy.

  *

  Yen fell asleep almost immediately. Estela did not mind. She had picked him up because she hated to nurse jet-lag alone but she was already feeling a thousand times better. She felt that she could easily fall asleep. Yen was spread over two-thirds of the double bed, slim and white against the sheets. He was very pretty. It was probably for the best that they had skipped full sex, after she had fellated him. Estela was still almost a virgin. She had not yet decided how best to approach the question of penetration. Through the finer and the coarser moments of her sex change operations, as she waited for her Brazilian doctors to pronounce themselves satisfied, she played safe and she waited. She felt, very soon, she would become as comfortable with the sex act as she already was with her new body. Tonight, her pantyhose stayed wrapped to her new curves. The protective layers of her underwear saved her any awkwardness.

  She rolled on to her stomach, flattening her breasts beneath her. It took a moment before she found a way to get comfortable in the space between Yen’s outstretched arm and his body. She let her own arm drift across his stomach and fell asleep before it reached the end of its line.

  Chapter Two

  Estela was woken by the sun through the blinds. The latitude was all wrong. The light felt weak and she felt cold. Her travelling clock said Two. She had to squint to read the flashing ‘p.m.’ sign. She remembered having company when she fell asleep. She was alone now. The only thing on her pillow was a black mascara rash. Beyond the headboard, a sluttish reflection stared at her with streaky panda-eyes. In God’s name, why were there so many mirrors in this flat? It was horrendous. Having to look at herself everywhere she turned, after three connecting flights and eighteen hours in the air. No wonder, once she arrived, she had run straight out again. She needed to find something to help her unwind.

  Estela tripped out to the hallway, ignoring the used condom as she stood on it. She could tidy up details later. What she wanted to do, her primo priority, was dial herself another ten centigrade on the hallway thermostat. Before she left Manchester, the chill would have sunk straight through to her bones, she knew it.

  When she took this job, she was promised a condo with all the extras: at least, a pool, a gym. She might take a photo of the dishwater-grey puddles outside her apartment. Show her boss what kind of swimming pool his dollars bought. He had no idea, he probably believed Manchester was like Maybe a little foggier. Whoever told him the apartment had a gym, they were taking a risk. If he found out that there was nothing but a nautilus machine in a room the size of a closet, someone was going to have to explain the joke. They could end up back in Medellin, putting bombs under judges and bishops. Héctor Barranco Garza preferred slapstick to most kinds of comedy.

  When she reached the living room, she knew Yen was gone for good. Herr suitcases were still spread over the floor, only now they were open and her clothes were thrown across the carpet. Jesus and Maria, she would have to go through every case to work out what the little bastard had stolen. Her life was nothing but annoyances.

  Stepping over a case, Estela made for the bathroom and its wall of mirrors. She felt that she would faint if she did not rehydrate her poor, problem combination skin soon. All the magazines warn that air travel is unforgiving on the complexion. If she could be basted in ice-cold Evian, she would pay for someone to turn her over every five minutes.

  The telephone rang before she was out of the shower. She grabbed a towel and wrapped her hair up into a high, white towelling turban. There was a matching bathrobe hanging behind the door. She found the telephone beneath an upturned Macy’s bag.

  ‘Manchester office,’ she said, playing at secretaries.

  ‘Estela? How you doing?’ The confident, Hispanicised English of her boss. ‘I hope you relaxed, already. They got you a good condo. It gotta pool?’

  ‘It’s too cold for swimming, Héctor. It’s not stopped raining since I landed.’

  ‘No shit. And you probably jet-lagged to fuck, huh? I thought you never going to get to the phone.’

  ‘I’m a little slow this morning, Héctor. I took something to help me sleep last night. But once I get to work, I’ll be nursing my jet-lag by the side of your pool inside two days.’

  ‘I would love to see you by the pool, baby. I send the boys out for a tube of bathing milk and spread it over you with my tongue.’

  Garza was in a good mood, playing it up in English. But he never let business details drift away in small talk

  ‘You got the package?’

  Estela guessed so.

  ‘What d’you mean, you not looked? Santa Maria, Estela, get on the fucking page. It’s only a satellite connection, let me hang on the fucking phone while you go look. Don’ worry, I got better things I gotta do today.’

  Estela dropped the handset to the floor and started for the bedroom. Garza’s voice continued to spill out of the earpiece and on to the carpet. She ran back for the receiver: ‘Sorry, Héctor?’

  ‘I said, you got conference? Put the phone on conference. You think I’m some loco schizz-nutzoid, I wanna talk to myself.’

  Estela prodded the loudspeaker button at the front of the telephone. Garza’s voice followed her as she picked her way back to the spare bedroom. He shouted that she knew the procedure. What was her problem? She want to go see one of her fancy five-star pussy doctors – she wanna plead PMT, the fucking menopause or what? Estela knew the procedure, it was just that she wasn’t feeling altogether one hundred per cent. Garza had insisted she handle this job personally. She had never wanted to fly to England but Garza said this kind of business could not be trusted to a franchisee. It had to be done in-house.

  ‘Get with it, Estela. A job like this, I do it before breakfast. I do it between waking and walking to the fucking john, give my woody time to slack off. I hear you talk about England. I figure you know your way around, at leas’ how to act cool. Or what counts as cool, around Anglo-Protestant assholes.’

  Estela recalled the whole conversation now. Garza did not think that Manchester was Miami in a fog. He thought the whole of England was like Boston, which he had visited once. In town just three hours, he had upended the maître d’ of the hotel restaurant in a bouillabaisse. Outraged, he could not believe the way the man had acted. If anyone thought that kind of behaviour was going to be tolerated – well, Héctor Barranco Garza pitied the whole fucking town. Estela could see him now, arms frozen in a shrug: I mean, the fuck is this. He had been looking forward to the trip. He imagined that everyone would look like Cary Grant or Grace Kelly, or perhaps Charles Laughton. He thought he would get to see some classy interpersonal skills in effect. Estela had tried to imagine Cary Grant with Charles Laughton, maybe a Grace Kelly sandwich trick. Visited by a full premonition, warning the Boston trip would end badly, Estela took a swerve by pleading business in Miami.

  She walked into the smaller bedroom, expecting to find an attaché case in the closet. She did not expect to see it on the nautilus machine,
wide open. She felt her knees go weak, looking at it lying there.

  Yen had been through the case. There was no doubt, he had not tried to cover his thieving tracks. Where there should have been a Beretta, there were only a few scattered papers. Otherwise, the case was empty.

  Garza’s voice didn’t give her the time she needed to think. She shouted that she had it; yes, yes. Garza could not have heard her, he was bellowing What? What? She scrambled the case and the papers together and hugged it closed as she ran back to the living room.

  ‘I got it, Héctor.’

  ‘Yeah? You got the folder?’

  The photographs were no longer in the manila envelope. They were loose and turned frontwards, backwards, every way but the right way. She shuffled them around and looked down at the face of the man she was supposed to kill. Whoever put the package together had helpfully typed the name on each photograph, along with an arrow pointing to Mr John Burgess’s head. A marked man, the arrows pointing him out in a crowd and indicating the trajectory of a bullet. They could have left the graphics alone; Estela already knew his name.

  She had to seem calm, there was no need to panic. She believed in fate, in the stars and their psycho-magnetic influence. She could play this, once she had seen the way the astral forces were spinning.

  ‘Estela?’

  ‘One second, Héctor, honey. These high-heels aren’ made for running after men.’

  ‘Let them run to you, huh? You do it your way, baby. Let him come over, you knock him back.’

  Estela looked at the photographs again. Every last one showed the owner of the bar where she had cruised Yen the night before. John Burgess had placed his own picture high on the wall where he could smile beatifically down on his punters. She knew him. Worse, Yen knew him.

  She needed to think this through. Yen had looked at the photographs. No doubt. But would he put it all together? Gun plus photo equals one dead man; bang, bang, bang. Estela rechecked the contents of the case. Apart from the Beretta, nothing seemed to be missing. Yen might have taken a photograph, she could not tell, but he probably had not.