The Mercy Seat by Martyn Waites Read Free Book Online

laughed.
    He turned to the boy exasperated, anger beginning to bubble within. ‘Who’s this Jenas guy, anyway?’ he asked.
    The boy laughed. ‘Plays for Newcastle. You look just like him. Could be his brother.’
    Jamal nodded. The anger subsided.
    Silence.
    ‘So,’ Si said, ‘what you doin’ here again?’
    Jamal remembered the cards in his pocket.
    ‘Sellin’,’ he said.
    ‘Sellin’ what?’
    ‘Cards. Credit. Debit.’ Jamal shrugged like it was no big deal. ‘You know.’
    ‘Let’s see.’
    Jamal looked around. ‘Not here, man,’ he said. ‘Why? You interested?’
    ‘Not me,’ said Si, ‘but I know someone.’
    Si began to walk to the exit. ‘You comin’?’
    Jamal shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he said as casually as possible and followed the blond boy out.
    Behind him the abandoned machine flashed, offered him another life.
    ‘So where did you say you got these?’
    Jamal looked at the speaker. His first reaction on seeing him: fuck me, you’re a fat cunt. Any more an’ you be wearin’ a dress. But he had kept that to himself. Because of the eyes. They didn’t go with the body. They belonged to someone whom you knew not to fuck with.
    Si had told Jamal as much on the way there, over a Big Mac at McDonald’s.
    ‘You’re from London, aren’t you? So what you doin’ up here?’
    Jamal slurped up his cola, felt a pinprick of pain between his eyes from the cold.
    ‘Needed a change,’ he said.
    ‘You runnin’?’
    Jamal looked dead-eyed, shrugged.
    ‘You need somewhere to stay?’
    The same question as the day before. He thought of the BMW. Just for one night. Then it’s five star all the way.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘The bloke we’re goin’ to see,’ said Si between mouthfuls, ‘Father Jack. I’ll put in a word for you, yeah?’
    Jamal shrugged again, nodded.
    ‘Howay, then.’
    Jamal followed Si to the Metro station. They emerged from the tunnel, went over a concrete bridge high above a dwindling, weed- and garbage-decorated river, a strange, curving block of flats to the right of them, like a huge, multi-coloured wall with windows.
    ‘Where’s this, then?’
    ‘Byker,’ said Si.
    They got off the train, left the station. The area looked derelict, boarded-up shops, rubble-strewn emptiness. Scary pubs and barricaded pawnshops the only things thriving. People moved around, went about their lives oblivious. Air close, sky dark, a weight pressing down. The kind of placeJamal had seen on the news, a reporter standing in front of saying, ‘And life gets back to normal after the shelling.’ When he thought about it, the kind of place he lived in in London.
    ‘Come on,’ said Si.
    He led them to a house in an old terrace which on closer inspection seemed to be two houses knocked through. Or three. The pebbledash and whitewashed façade now blackened and greying with dirt and moss, the ornamental grille work over the windows colonized by rust, like lime eating into bone. The houses on either side were boarded up. Weeds flourished in the meagre front gardens. The street was truncated, book-ended by low-lying thirty-odd-year-old housing estates, opposite some 1980s-built orange-red flats, designed with the same amount of flair and imagination as a modern prison.
    Si pushed open a rusting front gate and walked up the short path.
    ‘This is it. Now, remember.’ Si looked suddenly serious, as if part of the grey cloud hanging over Byker had detached itself and was now haunting him. ‘You might think he’s funny lookin’ an’ that, but don’t laugh at him. He’ll make you sorry if you do.’
    Jamal frowned. ‘OK …’
    They entered.
    It looked like the
Big Brother
house for under-eighteens. Brightly lit, adequately furnished, a real mess. A flat-screen TV took up one corner of the front room, wires haemorrhaging from it; Play Station and two operating consoles sat in front. Video cassettes and DVDs lay on the floor and other surfaces, well used, not well treated. Jamal clocked the titles: