Bad Actors полностью

“Glad you came along, lady,” Number Eleven said. His breath was coming in short pants, as if this were foreplay.

If she hit the ground they’d be on her like dogs. Everyone there knew it, and two of them liked the idea.

Be nice to have a monkey wrench round about now.

Or a partner. Someone to watch her back.

Instead what she had was Shirley, watching Louisa shrunk to a pulsing dot on Roddy’s phone, which she’d swiped from his lap while his attention was elsewhere. The scale was such that Louisa appeared motionless, making Shirley wonder if she’d stopped for a lie down.

There was an idea—Louisa and Lech? Doing it in the dark, out there on the common?

Hard to picture, though that might have been because of all the racket. Roddy’s attempts to start the car, increasingly uncoordinated, had deteriorated to the point where they largely consisted of his offering it unspecified pleasures if it behaved itself. The coach driver, unimpressed by this development, was standing with his hands on his hips, framed by the windscreen. It was like being at a drive-in, thought Shirley, right up near the screen. And watching the wrong movie. What would he do next? What he did next was raise both arms in gorilla fashion: You are not gunna do that, she thought. But he did. He brought both fists down on the bonnet, making the vehicle shudder, and causing Roddy to yip—only word for it. As for Shirley, what she was feeling was the bliss of justified outrage. He’d just assaulted Roddy’s car. That was well out of order.

Behind him, the tourists in his coach were gathered upfront, staring from the wide windscreen at the unfolding spectacle. Not a few were filming it. A lot of this was already on Facebook, or that’s what Shirley assumed, reaching into her pocket for a face mask. The coach driver had stepped away, looking pleased with himself: you could see the indentations his fists had made on Roddy’s bonnet. Well out of order, she repeated to herself; maybe this time out loud. At any rate, Roddy turned towards her. “What you doing?”

“This,” she said, fastening the mask on, opening her door, climbing out.

The coach driver nodded sarcastically. “So he sends his little lady out, does he?”

“Little” depended on which angle you took, but Shirley was happy to accept the compliment. Not that this diminished the offence already caused.

“You hurt my friend’s car,” she said.

“Your friend’s a tosser!”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

The coach was two yards in front of her; the bottom of its windscreen about level with her head. She bobbed a little—once, twice—preparing her move.

“. . . What’s that in your hand?” the driver asked.

“We deal in lead, friend,” she said—though actually it was her iron—and launched herself off the ground.

It was nearly ballet; very nearly ballet. Maybe a little less delicate. At the moment the flat of the iron hit the glass she was airborne—an echo of the clubbing she might have been doing now, had the evening taken a different turn—and in the second of contact, the windscreen went opaque; she enjoyed a frozen moment during which a huddled group of tourists stared out at her, terrified, as if their entertainment had unexpectedly turned 3D. And then she was on the ground again, having executed a damn-near perfect superhero landing—the fingers of one hand touching the ground, iron raised like a hammer in the other—and the coach behind her was blind, and its driver stunned speechless.

Roddy’s car chose this moment to come back to life.

It sounded crazy loud, though had a lot of competition—horns were blaring from the traffic behind, and there was a certain amount of wailing coming from the bus. A police siren, too, had joined the chorus, though was some distance away; the noise remained a flashing blue suggestion behind a screen of trees. Only the coach driver had lost his voice, and he didn’t even yelp when Roddy missed him by maybe half an inch—Roddy couldn’t reverse, because the traffic behind had shunted forward, so swinging round the fat idiot who’d started all this was his only option. It would have been the work of a moment to lean across, open the door and let Shirley jump in, so Roddy really should have thought about doing that, but he was too busy avoiding the tree which had reared up, grinding against his paintwork as he passed, and suddenly all he had in front of him was nothing, a big black darkness that his headlights barely scratched, while the ground beneath his wheels was all over the place; an assault course of bumps and shallows and missing bits. He was breathing noisily—okay, maybe yelling—and the resulting sound ran up and down its own peculiar scale in time with the rockabilly motion of the car. It was all he could do to keep both hands on the wheel. Welcome to the Rod-eo: a lesser driver would have been thrown through the windshield by now.

Really should have given serious thought to being a stunt-man.