Free The Bug House by Jim Ford Page B

doesn’t want the gory details of Gul’s demise to become the topic of conversation in every lowlife pub and club in Newcastle.
    Even so, Ma looks genuinely surprised. Tyneside has as lively a gangland scene as any other provincial city, yet murder remains the exception rather than the rule. Round here they still talk in hushed tones about the killing on a Wallsend street of Viv Graham, a local hard man renowned for extortion and racketeering – and he was gunned down twenty years ago.
    ‘I wondered if you’d heard anything,’ Bernice says.
    ‘No, pet,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘I haven’t.’
    ‘What about your boys?’
    ‘Believe me I know
everything
they know – and they don’t know anything.’
    ‘Well, if you do . . .’
    ‘You’ll be the first to know, Bernice.’
    And Seagram knows that she will, because Ma Breaker appreciates that even though they are your sworn enemies, the police can also be your best friends.
    Ryan Breaker emerges from the kitchenette carrying two mugs of tea. He’s overfilled them and the contents are slopping over the carpet as he treads cautiously towards Ma’s desk, as if walking a tightrope on a particularly windy day.
    ‘Just put them there, son,’ Ma says, watching as Ryan painfully lowers the dripping mugs onto the desktop then stands grinning with inane triumph. Ma stands and clubs him across the back of the head with an open hand.
    ‘Now get a dishcloth and mop up that fucking mess,’ she says.
    In the Star & Garter public house in Benwell, pleased to be among sinners at last, Father Lawrence Meagher buys a bottle of Guinness and a cheese sandwich and sits down at his usual seat in the corner of the lounge. It is twenty past midday; the pub is a quarter full of old men in flat caps. A couple of young lads are shooting pool in the far room, and a dishevelled drunk is hunched on a bar-stool cradling what looks like a pint of piss.
    It is good to be here, he thinks. All morning he has been trapped in the community centre judging the annual painting competition organized by the toddlers group, which meets there every week. Ever since he read about a three-year-old whose childish watercolour had fooled art experts, Father Meagher has taken a close interest in the competition. How much had that girl’s picture been valued at, he pondered as he made his way round each new exhibit? Fifty grand? Sixty? Sadly, as his brief tour ended, he again had to resign himself to the fact that if he was to make his fortune in the art world, it would not be by exploiting the toddlers of St Joseph’s Community Centre.
My House
, by Kaden, aged two, bore the same hallmark as
Humpty Dumpty
, by Rihanna, aged four: a formless splat of powder paint issued from the brush of a talentless child.
    ‘Morning, Father,’ says one of the flat caps, looking up from the seven dominoes he holds expertly in the swollen knuckles of one hand.
    ‘Fred.’
    ‘You in for a game?’
    ‘Not today, thanks, Fred. How’s Mary?’
    ‘Not so good, Father. Not so good.’
    ‘Sorry to hear it. Tell her I’m asking after her, will you?’
    ‘Will do. Will do.’
    Painstakingly, Father Meagher picks at the layers of clingfilm around his sandwich, then scrunches the plastic into a small ball and drops it on the table. He lifts the lid of the soggy white bun. A solitary cross-section of withered tomato lies squashed on the square of processed cheese like something monstrous you would find under a stone. He quickly closes the sandwich and takes a bite. All he can taste is margarine. He chews until it is a bolus of paste in his mouth, then swallows it whole to avoid it making contact with his tastebuds. He pours half of the Guinness into a glass and rinses away the detritus that has clung to his teeth.
    A TV at the far end of the bar is showing horse racing from some deserted, fogbound venue. The prices for the twelve thirty scroll across the screen as the camera searches for runners and riders in the