Dust and Desire Read Online Free PDF

deserves a woman who will delay taking a piss for him.’
    I left her and ambled over to the staff door. Someone had put on some suitable music. Suitable for the fucking grave. Chris de Burgh. A woman dressed in red is doing what with you, Chris? Yes, because she’s deaf and blind and quite possibly brain-damaged. I was happy to leave them all to it.
    Stone steps. A bare 100-watt bulb. The sound coming up from the cellar was like a sledgehammer being repeatedly introduced to a mound of watermelons.
    I hesitated at the swing-doors at the bottom of the steps. Testosterone alone promised to push them open, and not from my side, either. My testosterone was trying to put its belongings in a handkerchief and slink away. I composed myself and slipped through.
    Mayhem. Around twenty beery, sweaty bodies were packed in a tight circle around a knot of flailing limbs. I was bemused by the lack of cheering. Apart from the occasional hiss of someone wincing at a punch, the shuffle of footsteps as the scrum watched the scrap, and the sounds of fist on meat, it was relatively restrained. Obviously because Sweet didn’t want to draw any undue attention to his private club.
    I caught glimpses of the two shirtless men hammering each other’s faces. They both wore masks of blood. One guy was gradually gaining the upper hand, though.
    ‘Rather them than me,’ I said, and one of the guys in the audience gave me a look that told me to hurry it up and get on my way. I circled the group, keeping back in the shadows by the wall, and checked faces, looking for someone who resembled Kara Geenan. When one of the men at the back of the crowd broke away for a breather, I collared him and asked him if Jason Phythian was in, tonight. Another ugly look.
    I was about to cut my losses and get out of this stifling, violent shit-hole when I noticed that my route back to the door was blocked. Intentionally blocked. The scrum had lost interest in the fight now that it had become so one-sided. A metronomic pulpy slapping sound indicated that the contest was over.
    Danny Sweet stepped forward as I tried to make myself look less isolated. Everyone was staring at me.
    ‘New boy,’ said Sweet. ‘All new boys must fight.’
    ‘I’m not that new,’ I said. ‘I’ve been around the block a few times.’
    ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that block is about to be knocked off. Choose your foe.’
    ‘I don’t fight.’
    ‘You do if you’re in here. So, you will.’
    ‘Look, I was with the party upstairs. I thought the toilets were down here.’
    ‘Take your shirt off,’ he said, ‘and pick your fight partner.’
    ‘All right, how about you?’ I said.
    ‘Fuckhead,’ he said, ‘I don’t fight. I ref. These hands’ – he held up his mitts for me to see – ‘are my prize possessions. They’re insured for half a mill. I’m not going to be knocking up any lamb and flageolet-bean stew with chunks missing out of these beauties, am I?’
    ‘Is Jason Phythian down here? I’ll fight him.’
    Nobody came forward.
    Sweet turned to face his cronies. ‘He’s making names up. He’s too shy to pick someone. Who’ll have him?’
    ‘I’ll have him.’
    A walking argument for the introduction of eugenics shambled out of the throng, pulling off his T-shirt as he did so. He had a tattoo on his chest of a naked woman on all fours, her backside raised at an anatomically questionable angle. Underneath was the word LADIEKILLER. He had the face of something that should have been sitting in a bush picking its arse and eating soft fruits. While he flexed his arms, I turned to Sweet and asked him if there were any rules.
    ‘No rules,’ he said.
    So I turned and kicked Ladiekiller’s bollocks into orbit. Then I was pushing through the bodies to the door, before anyone could argue that what I’d done was really rather unpleasant. Ladiekiller’s mewlings drifted after me up the stairs, along with some raised voices. There were going to be some feet following mine pretty