The Dreams of Max & Ronnie by Niall Griffiths Page B

re-pumped-up chest, then he sends that picture to each of their mobiles and tells them to show that picture to anyone they met who might bear them ill will. Them boys up there know what I look like , he says.  Yew just tell them yewer with me.
    â€“ But, maan...
    â€“ What?
    â€“ You’ve never been up there. Told us so yerself.
    â€“ No, but I’ve been on the telly up there, haven’t I? That documentary last year, remember? Gareth, y’know that goofy lad from up there? All talking about it up there, they was, he told me. So them boys know what I look like. They won’t mess, brar. Now go on, bugger off.
    They grumble and shuffle in a group. Max grabs the shoulder of a man next to him, a man who has been with him a long time and who he trusts yet whose given name he has never known, referring to him only as Thirteen due to that number being tattooed all bold and black and in Gothic figures on the back of his left hand. This man’s shoulder, his deltoid muscle, feels like a melon in Max’s grip.
    â€“ Thirteen, he says. – I’m putting yew in charge, brar. I’m trusting yew with this. And I’m trusting yew to keep these fuckers out of the pubs and away from the sniff. This is your thing, maan. I’m giving it to yew . Don’t let me down, bruv. Find me the woman I deserve and yew know there’ll be a big fat sweetener coming your way.
    Thirteen gives a firm nod. – No worries, boss. Count on me. Yew know you can.
    And they scurried off. Well, I say scurried, but it was more of a collective pounce, really, a darting away to cars, eagered as they were by the ‘sweetener’ word. There’s excited jabber and loud laughter and an almost palpable keenness yet Thirteen asks them what the fuck they think they’re doing, tells them they need to sleep off the Baileys and bugle, that the bizzies’d be on them – state they’re in, driving all over the shop – before they left the city. He was taking responsibility, Thirteen said, tapping himself on the chest. He’d been given that. And besides, who knew where they were going? The north, aye, but whereabouts in the north? The north’s a big place. Someone get on the internet and find out where this fucking filming is going on. Bollax. Shooting off like kids on their first toot of amphet. Grow up. Serious business, this. Bollax.
    Ah, but there’s a dissenting voice. – ‘Serious’? Yew mean ‘stupid’, brar. What does he think this is? Wants us to find him a woman? What, and slay a few fucking dragons on the way? Man’s proper lost it. Shite on this. I’m stopping here.
    â€“ Aye, you are that, said Thirteen, and punched him in the face with the tattooed fist. The speaker instantly became a non-speaker, flew back a few feet, smacked the back of his head on the doorframe of a car, slid unconscious to the rain-slippery pavement.
    Thirteen boots him a few times in the ribs and then looks up.
    â€“ Anyone else staying here?
    Of course not, no.
    â€“ Right then. Go home. Meet at station car park at nine and not one fucking minute after. Yeah? And someone find out where the fuck it is we need to go.
    Nods. And then a scurrying off. And then a turning of the planet so that they come to face the sun again, bright as it is in this mid-year month, casting shadows at 9 am across the pitted and oil-pocked tarmac of the station car park and Thirteen counts them off and receives information about where the filming is taking place: some castle or something, unpro-nounceable name even though it belongs to the country of which Thirteen has been told repeatedly he is a citizen although he’s never really believed it. The capital city is his, aye, but the country beyond it and to the north belongs to someone else. It’s not his, or the Emperor’s. Never has been. Foreign land.
    And they roll off, this group of messengers. Errant