Shooting in the Dark

people say, so you can have the right response. If you hear footsteps coming up behind you, whistle a tune, so you can’t hear them any more. Even if you’re in a dark alley, and you hear footsteps, and maybe some thug shouting his mouth off about what he’s gonna do to you, rip your head off your shoulders and shove it up your ass. Just whistle something, like from an Elton John album, or Madonna. Anything’ll do. Like a Ve-er-er-er-gin.
    Geordie stopped, froze to the spot. The HUD truck was stationary outside the Banana Warehouse and the driver was climbing down from his cab, his eyes fixed on Geordie. The guy was as wide as he was tall; shoulders on him like a goalmouth.
    He dropped to the pavement, his legs spread apart. He wore a blue T-shirt a couple of sizes too small for him and each of his rippling arms was adorned with tattoos, identical serpents wound around long-bladed daggers. He had long curly hair parted down the middle, and two of his front teeth were missing. He fixed his beam on Geordie and rolled towards him with a gait like a sailor.
    Geordie looked around for some means of escape. He didn’t know whether to believe this was happening to him. He’d thought someone was watching him, but he’d never been sure. Somewhere, he’d almost convinced himself that it was an illusion. On balance he’d thought he’d rather have the illusion, especially when he took in the sheer size of the guy who was bearing down on him. Geordie was probably as tall as the trucker, but only half his weight. And in terms of meanness there was no contest. The trucker would get the gold for meanness every time, even if he hadn’t lost his teeth. Geordie wouldn’t be able to read the entry form.
    By the time he managed to animate himself it was too late, the guy already had him by the shoulders. There was a powerful sense of oil and truck and stale sweat, and there was that old dizzy sensation that accompanies terror.
     
    Geordie was shaking right up to the point where the guy spoke. There was reassurance in the tone of the man’s voice. It wasn’t what he said, because Geordie didn’t hear what he said. It was something else, something more basic and instinctual than language. It was the quality that is in the keening of the bereaved or the sigh of satisfaction or of wonder of a mother who has seen her infant child for the first time. It was a quality of soul, carried on the breath and embedded in the sound that the man produced.
    There was compulsion in his voice. He said, ‘Geordie? What’s the matter with you, man? Don’t you know who I am?’
    And there was tenderness there in the words and the way they were spoken. There was concern, anxiety, heart. Geordie looked up into the man’s eyes. He shook his head and said, ‘No, I don’t know who you are.’
    But while he was speaking the words a picture began forming in his head. The picture of two young boys, way back in Sunderland, shortly after their mother had run off with the landlord. Geordie was twelve years old, and his brother, Ralph, was almost sixteen. Geordie was absolutely certain that it was all a mistake, and that their mother would return once she realized what she’d done.
    He was screaming at Ralph. He could see the arched posture in the picture forming in his head. He was like a bow, tense and ready for battle. And Ralph was silent, shaking his head. ‘She’s not coming home, Geordie,’ he was saying. ‘This’s the end of us, man.’
    In the picture Geordie’s mouth was open wide. His eyes were bulging. He was reminded of those horror films, where the moon comes up and the hero begins the howl that will transform him from man to beast.
    Their mother had never returned.
    Ralph had got himself a job as a cabin boy on a tramp and sailed off into the distance. He hadn’t told Geordie he was going, but he’d left him a note, worded almost the same as the one from their mother. Dear Geordie, I know this’ll come as something of a shock...
    Geordie had lived alone, then, in the house, until all the food had gone. It was when he was caught leaving the local supermarket with two cans of baked beans and a bottle of sherry up his jumper that the local authority became involved.
    All the other kids in that place were orphans. Their mothers were dead. ‘But I’ve got a mother,’ Geordie tried to explain to the staff. ‘I’m not an orphan. There’s been a mistake. If I’m in here, nobody’ll know where I am. When my mother comes home