Work Text:
“We’ve got a job, but it’s gotta be tonight.”
Having dropped this bombshell, Hard Lad Barry fixed Jonno with a cold green stare and paused to let his words sink in. Jonno, the lanky leader of the gang, sat up straighter in his armchair and stared back stony-faced as he considered the new information.
The lights dimmed dramatically.
When the room brightened again, everyone was still staring at each other – Jonno, Barry, and the curly-haired new hire Graham, who had just discovered that the overhead lights had a dimmer switch.
Jonno looked confused. “You still haven’t told us what the job is, Barry.”
“Oh, yeah!”
The lights dimmed again.
“Quit flipping the flipping lights, Graham! You’re breaking his concentration!” snarled Jonno. “Do ya want to know about this job or not?”
The lights stayed on.
Graham glanced round-eyed from Jonno to Barry and back again. Jonno’s hard expression shifted to a look of skeptical interest. Barry glanced from one to the other, then continued speaking in a conspiratorial tone.
“We have to rendezvous with an agent on the inside. We give the password, they’ll let us in. I have the address and the password that we need.”
Jonno’s interest was piqued. “Is it a burglary? A drive-by? Teaching somebody… a lesson?”
“It’s top secret. We’ll find out when we get there” said Barry mysteriously, drawing ‘Hmm’s and hard faces from the other two.
“So what’s the address?” growled Jonno.
Without taking his eyes off Jonno’s face, Barry reached swiftly into the pocket of his jacket – completely forgetting that Jonno’s coffee mug was still balanced on the back of his hand, where he’d placed it earlier to prove his toughness, loyalty, and lack of coasters.
Bloodcurdling screams filled the air, and all was chaos. Jonno and Graham both lunged forward, nearly colliding with each other; Barry fell writhing to the ground. The coffee mug flew through the air and smashed against the wall.
When everything was still again, Jonno and Graham found themselves sitting on the floor next to the overturned coffee table with Barry between them. He sat up, dripping coffee, and extracted a handwritten note from his pocket.
“I’ve got it here” he growled, struggling to keep his face hard and fierce.
The three bent their heads over the piece of paper, trying to decipher the address – but as luck would have it, the note had been so thoroughly soaked with coffee that it was almost illegible.
“Is that a 3? Or a 5?” asked Jonno impatiently.
“Does that say West? Or East?” asked Graham nervously.
“Here’s the password, at least” observed Barry. “It says ‘PLAY.’”
“That’s a funny password,” mused Jonno. “I suppose we’re meant to say it in a sentence, ordinary-like, so nobody else suspects anything.”
Suddenly, the door in front of them flew open and a tall balding man in a dark suit burst into the room.
“I heard a scream and a crash just now,” he announced accusingly. “What on Earth are you boys playing at?”
“Playing – that’s the password! Is it him we were supposed to find?” Graham whispered to Jonno.
“No, you eejit, that’s my Da” hissed Jonno.
“Look at this mess! You’re not going anywhere until this is all cleaned up!” snapped the man in the suit.
“It’s all under control! Now leave us alone!” was Jonno’s furious response.
The man in the suit glared at them a little threateningly – not a proper hard look – and muttered “right, then” as he turned and left the room the way he had come.
As soon as he had gone, Jonno whispered “Wait here” to the other two Hard Lads, then quietly slipped out the back door.
Graham was beginning to look quite worried and seemed on the verge of saying something, but before he could do so, Jonno reappeared. He was carrying a broom and dustpan and a damp rag. Jonno shoved the broom into Barry’s hands and tossed the damp rag to Graham, who fumbled it and bent to pick it up off the floor.
Then Jonno seized Barry by the collar and growled “Gimme your jacket.” Wide-eyed Barry dropped the broom, silently unzipped the jacket and slipped his arms out. Jonno barked “Now get to work, lads!” before once again leaving the room, taking the jacket with him.
Together Barry and Graham wiped up the spilled coffee, collected and binned the broken shards of the mug, and returned the coffee table to an upright position. When they had finished, Jonno reappeared. He was carrying a clean dark-coloured jacket – not Barry’s, but very similar.
“You can borrow this” explained Jonno as he handed the jacket to Barry. “We all need to be suitably dressed for tonight’s mission.”
“I’ve still got the address” Barry added helpfully, brandishing the coffee-stained note.
Jonno squinted at it briefly, then suddenly announced “Right, I think I know this address. Let’s go! There’s no time to lose!”
With Jonno leading the way, the Hard Lads slipped out into the sunny afternoon - the weather that day was disappointingly un-dramatic. Nevertheless they maintained their hard faces and shifty glances as they skulked down alleys, darted between buildings, and scrambled over fences on their way through the city.
Finally, they stopped and Jonno consulted the note again before announcing confidently “That’s the place.”
It was an ordinary dwelling in a row of terraced houses. Barry and Graham exchanged skeptical glances, but they followed Jonno as he approached the front of the house, trying to look casual. Soon they could all hear a murmur of voices coming from inside.
An upstairs window was flung open, causing the Hard Lads to hurriedly duck behind a bush, but no-one in the house appeared to have seen them. Now they could quite clearly hear a loud-voiced woman scolding someone for the state of their room, and a boy’s voice responding in alternately outraged and pleading tones. When a deeper male voice rumbled from elsewhere in the house, the female voice – still scolding, but in a different tone - retreated rapidly away from the window.
The Hard Lads crept out from behind the bush and continued to approach the house. They had gotten quite close when suddenly an empty beer can flew out of the open upstairs window, accompanied by a short, harsh burst of laughter. Taken by surprise, the Hard Lads flattened themselves against the wall of the house lest someone should look down from above and see them. No-one looked down. The window slammed shut, and now-muffled voices could be heard again on the other side of the glass.
The curtain on the front window twitched. The Hard Lads had almost reached the door when it creaked slowly open in front of them. Standing in the entryway was a tiny girl with green and orange pigtails, wearing a GAA jersey that hung down to her feet.
Jonno, Barry, and Graham glanced at each other, then at the girl. Was this really the person they were supposed to meet? There was no-one else in sight. Remembering the password, Jonno bent down towards her and whispered “Would you like… to play?”
The little girl stared back at Jonno’s hard face for a moment, then wailed “I don’t want to play with you! You’re scary!”
Her cries brought adult footsteps pounding through the house. The Hard Lads backed away from the door, glanced at each other again, then turned and ran. They had already disappeared around the corner when a blonde woman in a fuzzy pink dressing-gown took the girl’s hand, glanced quickly around with a comment of “There’s no-one here, Anne,” and closed the door firmly.
Huddled behind a hedge several streets over, the Hard Lads glared furiously at each other.
“That was the wrong place, you knob!” snarled Barry. He pulled out the coffee-stained paper again, turned it around once or twice, squinted at it from various angles, and finally announced “I know where this is. Let’s go!”
As dusk approached, the Hard Lads slunk, crept, climbed, dashed, and zigzagged through the city until they arrived outside an imposing old building that was most definitely not a house.
Barry announced “That’s the place,” and led the others cautiously around to the back of the building.
There they saw a door that had been left slightly ajar, with a glow of light and the faint murmur of a voice or voices coming from inside. Jonno now shouldered ahead and took the lead, scowling meaningfully at the other two before pushing open the door.
They found themselves in a dimly-lit empty corridor along which they tiptoed stealthily, following the sound. As they drew closer to the source it became clear that they were hearing only one voice, rising and falling in varied intonations. After several turnings and additional doors, they found the room where the mysterious voice was speaking. The door was half-open, and they paused beside it warily to listen.
The voice inside the room declared “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king!”
The Hard Lads glanced at each other wide-eyed. “That’s the password!” hissed Jonno. He stepped boldly through the door with a menacing scowl on his face, the other two following close behind.
They were standing in a surprisingly large room with a bright light shining down from above. A dark-clad man, lean as a greyhound, stood under the light with his back to the door. He was wearing a scarf around his neck and a flat cap set backwards on his head. As soon as he heard the squeaking of their shoes on the floorboards, he turned to greet the intruders.
They stared at him curiously, almost forgetting to make hard faces. Could this really be the person who had a job for them? His every movement was unnecessarily elegant, and his mind seemed preoccupied with something else even as his eyes looked them up and down.
“What brings you young rrrrapscallions here tonight?” he asked dramatically.
Barry blurted out “Play, you said? That's why we're here.” He spoke too quickly to sound intimidating, but nobody seemed to notice.
“What, for auditions?” gasped the man. “Oh, dahling, the auditions ended ages ago. I’m terribly sorry. Better luck next time! Of course, if you want to see the play, it opens next month. I’m just here tonight for some extra rehearsal.”
The Hard Lads exchanged confused glances. Jonno growled “Right then, let’s get outta here.” Without further ado, they swiftly fled from the bright lights and retraced their steps down the corridor to the outer door.
Outside the building, the twilight was deepening and the little gang huddled under a streetlight to discuss their next move.
“I was sure this was the place” whined Barry.
“If the job’s supposed to be tonight, we’re running out of time” groaned Jonno.
“Can I see that address?” asked Graham.
The stained and smudged piece of paper was brought out once again, and Graham considered it for a while before declaring “I’ve got it, lads. I know where we’re going.”
As swiftly and quietly as they could, the Hard Lads made their way through the dark streets and alleys with Graham in the lead.
At last, they stopped under a faltering streetlight outside an old house with one lighted upstairs window. In the darkness the house had a foreboding air, but Graham loudly whispered “That’s the place” with such confidence that Jonno and Barry had to believe him.
Once again Jonno led the way up to the door, a hard scowl on his face. The others followed him, wearing similar expressions as they swatted at the moths fluttering under the glow of the streetlight.
There was a doorbell. Jonno bravely pressed it. This was their last chance for the mysterious job; there was no time now for caution.
At first nothing happened, but they had seen the light in the upstairs window, so they waited. They heard no voices or footsteps, but eventually another light went on behind a curtained window near the door. Clearly the person they were meeting was quiet and cautious.
The Hard Lads continued to wait, trying to keep their growing nervousness from ruining the hard expressions on their faces.
Finally the latch clicked, the knob turned, and the door opened just a tiny crack. From behind it, a high-pitched reedy voice demanded with surprising authority “State your business!”
Graham found his tongue first, and remembered the password. “We’ve come to play, if you know what I mean” he said, in what he hoped was a suitably sinister voice.
The response came in a much softer tone: “Oh, fancy that, someone wants to play.”
The three of them watched as the door opened a little more and the face of a grey-haired, bespectacled woman peered out. At the sight of them, she smiled and pulled the door all the way open. Despite her advanced age, the woman was quite tall. She wore a long green dress and smelled faintly of something alcoholic.
She did not seem the least bit intimidated by the Hard Lads’ hard faces.
As the woman beckoned them inside, she said sweetly “How thoughtful of you to pay a visit to a lonely old woman! None of my family likes to visit me anymore. What good luck that there are three of you; we can play a game of bridge.”