The Drop

the world to save my life.
    I lost track of time or what I was supposed to be doing. Then, I didn’t think about anything any more. There was just silence and a great big, comforting cloak of blackness.
    When I came round, Finney was laughing at me. ‘Don’t worry Brains,’ he said, ‘you’ve not lost your looks,’ his great, ugly mug was peering down at me and then Sarah, all concern, was at my side, a damp tea towel in her hand, which she proceeded to dab with great tenderness to my bruised and battered face. The cool water helped me to get my senses and, though it was an effort to talk, I asked them.
    ‘How’d you find me?’
    ‘You called me,’ said Sarah. I had no recollection of this at all.
    ‘Did I?’ and I wondered why I had dialled her and not Laura or some more useful and muscular presence for the aftermath of a fight, like Finney. I put it down to delirium and she continued to look at me with the concern of a mother for a small, injured child.
    ‘You couldn’t really speak, just sort of gurgled, so I asked if you were at your flat and you said yes, then it all went quiet. I was in the car with Finney anyway. He was dropping me off at Joanne’s, so we shot round here straight away.’
    ‘You’re just lucky the match was over,’ said Finney, ‘else you’d have waited ninety minutes for the cavalry.’
    ‘You break the door in?’ I asked.
    ‘It was open,’ he said, ‘whoever did this left in a hurry and, judging by your carpet, he was bleeding like a stuck pig. What happened?’
    So I told them. There didn’t seem any reason not to tell the truth, all of it. Finney listened to my slightly delirious description of the fight then he looked at the mess on the living room floor. ‘Well,’ he said approvingly, ‘looks like your mum in law come in handy.’
    And then I remembered what I hit Weasel-face with. I got a slow and horrible realisation that I had used the irreplaceable ashes of my girlfriend’s dead mother as a weapon and, even now, they were all over my carpet, mixed in with bits of broken china and a burglar’s blood and most likely trodden right into it all by Finney’s size twelves.
    ‘Oh fuck,’ I said and Finney laughed an evil laugh.
    ‘I’d say your problems are just starting.’
    Sarah was a diamond, she really was. She insisted Finney helped me to my feet and got me sitting up on the couch. She made me a cup of tea, which I sipped while I slowly came back down to planet earth. Finney rang in a brief, coded description of what had happened to me to Bobby who was apparently very relieved to hear that I was more or less okay. In a strange way, I realised that me being targeted like this might just end any lingering suspicion he might have had about me.
    Only when she was sure I was not suffering from major, life-threatening concussion did Sarah transfer her attention to the mess that littered the floor of my flat and began to tidy it up for me. ‘I’m sure we can sort all this out before Laura gets back,’ she said doubtfully. I appreciated her lying to me like that, especially as I felt like shit. I had bruises everywhere. Even in my crap state I knew there was no chance of making this scene look any better than it did but Sarah tried, bless her.
    I was beginning to think I must have done something really bad in a past life when at that point, with impeccable timing, Laura walked through the front door, keys in hand. She spotted Finney standing there then looked at me slumped on the couch and asked, ‘what’s the matter?’ before I could answer she finally noticed Sarah kneeling on my carpet, a brush and a dustpan in hand, into which she had managed to sweep roughly a third of Laura’s mother.
    The noise Laura made was almost indescribable.

TWENTY-FOUR
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    L aura never really did calm down, not even later while she was packing her night bag and storming out on me. Obviously I did not expect her to be happy that her mum was scattered all over the carpet like a carton of Shake-n-Vac but I did expect her to listen to me while I tried to explain what had happened. I told her I’d had no choice but to fend off my attacker with the only object to hand, which just happened to be the urn, but she treated me as if I had somehow contrived this whole scene deliberately. She regarded Finney and Sarah as if they were a couple of teenage accomplices who had wrecked her parents’ house during an illicit party while