history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of past.
One other thing about guns: their beauty. As I flicked past the photos, diagrams and illustrations Dr Jauhari used to show the evolution of guns over the ages and the differences between pistols, rifles, machine guns and sub-machine guns, it grew on me how beautiful an object a gun—any gun—is. Some are more beautiful than others, of course, depending on the sleekness of their finish, the curvature of the handle, the thickness of the hammer and a dozen other factors. But just being guns makes them all beautiful. That things so small, so pleasing to the eye, so friendly to the touch—so passive—can contain such force is breathtaking. Then the way they hang just off the body, cradled tenderly like babies, sleeping—till the moment they erupt and carry beauty to another level. No beauty without violence, without death.
Our mole came through eventually. Naz brought the report over to my flat one evening.
“When we ask the Council for permission to use the space,” he said as he handed it to me, “we’ll have to decide what type of licence to apply for. We could…”
“Later,” I said. I took the report and closed the door on him.
It had come in a sealed, unmarked envelope. As I opened this I felt that tingling spreading outwards from the base of my spine. The pages were flaky and the text badly aligned; it had been Xeroxed in a hurry. The language it was written in was clear, which surprised me. I’d expected it to be full of police terminology—people “proceeding” instead of moving, “perpetrators” instead of people and with every noun and action prefaced by “alleged”. In fact, it was stark and straightforward:
The killers,
it said,
parked their car beside the Green Man public bar, stepped out and opened fire with Uzi sub-machine guns. The victim got onto his bicycle and tried to ride away, but turned too sharply into Belinda Road and fell onto the tarmac as the front wheel twisted under him.
I pictured the front wheel twisting and him going down. He must have known then that it was all up. He’d got up again, the report said, and taken two or three more steps down Belinda Road while the killers fired on him some more. Then he’d gone down a final time. He’d been dead by the time the ambulance arrived.
There were pages of detailed diagrams. They showed the layout of the area in which the shooting had happened: the phone box, the street, kerb, bollard, even a puddle into which some of the victim’s blood had flowed. They showed his position first as he stood in the phone box, then as he tried to escape, then as he fell, got up and fell again. They showed the killers’ positions as they parked their car and walked towards him, firing. The three men were drawn in outline with numbers inside the outlines, like you get in children’s colouring books. There were arrows indicating movement and direction.
The longer I stared at these pictures, the more intense the tingling in my upper body grew. It had moved into my brain, like when you eat too much monosodium glutamate in a Chinese restaurant. My whole head was tingling. The diagrams seemed to be taking on more and more significance. They became maps for finding buried treasure, then instructions for assembling pieces of furniture, then military plans, the outline of a whole winter’s arduous and multi-pronged advance across mountains and plains. I drifted off into these plains, these mountains, floating alongside the generals and foot soldiers and cooks and elephants. When I looked up from the diagrams again, Naz was there, standing in front of my sofa with another man.
“When did you come in?” I asked him. “Who’s this?”
“This man’s a doctor,” said Naz. “I’ve been here for the last hour and a half.”
I tried to ask him what he meant by that, but the words were taking a long time to form. The other man opened a bag and took a pen or torch out.
“You were just sitting here,” said Naz. “You’d gone completely vacant. You didn’t notice me, or hear me. I waved my hand in front of your face and you didn’t even move your eyes.”
“How long ago was this?” the doctor asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“The whole last hour and a half,” Naz told him. “Until just now, when you came in.”
“Has he experienced any