Free The Dreams of Max & Ronnie by Niall Griffiths Page A

had sought all their lives to achieve, were in fact desperate to achieve. The man seemed to know this; the dream-Max felt that the man knew this. His throne was surrounded by recording equipment and he was pushing buttons and twiddling dials, and Max wanted to do that too, knew that all his life he’d been yearning to do whatever it was that the man on the throne was doing.
    And then he saw the woman. And the dream-Max thought: Jesus fucking Christ . She, too, dazzled his eyes like the gold had done, was doing, like the sun would if he ever gazed directly at it. She was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. She was Beyoncé, Alesha Dixon, Lisa Maffia. She was the kind of woman he deserved to have on his arm, the kind of woman whom the papers should carry photos of hanging off his arm and caught in the flash as they both exited a white limo. She was everything he dreamed of in a woman. She wore white, and the bits of gold that adorned her were tastefully, not trashily, done; bling beautified her still further, enhanced her features rather than overshadowed them. She got up and came to him and he put his arms around her. He groaned and started to thrust. The dream-Max was as horny as the real-world one, the one from whose overheated head he leapt all sweaty and atremble. Her tits pressed against him. She smelled sooooo good. Her thighs were around one of his legs. He was thrusting and moaning. Her slim brown fingers with the perfect nails wrapped themselves around his dick. He felt the warm and precious metal of one of her rings against his hot and hard flesh. Christ, he was…
    â€“ Wake up, maaaaan!
    Waking up. Someone was shaking him. He let out a little shout.
    â€“ All kinds of noises you were making, bruv. Some fuckin dream you were having, maan, ey?
    The faces of his boys in his. The concern in them, and something a little bit like embarrassment. The club’s lights bouncing off the shaven scalps of some and the hairgel of others and their little earrings and their single gold teeth and their pitifully small sovs and neck-ropes and oh God this is the real world. He’s back in it. This poor, imperfect excuse.
    â€“ Freaking right fuckin out you were, Maxie-boy. Worried about yew, see. Think you should eat something? It’s been a long time, maan.
    And our man Max aches, he’s aching, in body and elsewhere; his dream has put in him a pain, has infested his entire body to bone-joint and fingernail with an anguished longing, a terrible yearning for the beauties of that dream, the beauties that he felt were his by right and which he was somehow, and cruelly, being denied. The castle, the gold, the woman, it should all be his. Especially the woman. He’d be complete, with a woman like that. The howling hole in him would be filled with a woman like that at his side.
    The Emperor Max is sad. And this is unusual because, in him, sadness has heretofore tended to undergo a rapid mutation into rage, or contempt, or a mixture of the two, and a concrete manifestation of that on some other human being’s face and body; but now, here, he’s just sad. There’s a heavy pocket of pain in his chest. He feels, for fuck’s sake, that he might, for fuck’s sake, cry.
    He points across the table to one of his boys. – Goan start the car, brar. Wanna go home I do.
    â€“ I’m banned, Maxie. Three years.
    â€“ Well call me a fuckin taxi then. Wanna go home I do.
    He slips some small packets to one of his men and instructs him to sell them for him and look after the shop and then he leaves the club, the saddest man on the planet, and takes a taxi home with one of his boys as bodyguard but he does not speak to this man and once home in his docklands flat he just stands there in his living room looking out of the huge picture-window at the bay’s twinkling lights and his huge flat-screen plasma TV and his sound system and his games consoles and his racks of hanging