Big Sky [Paperback]

'In spite of its savage background, Creer's novel is rumbustiously entertaining...partly because Jimmy is an engaging and strangely innocent hero, and partly because of Creer's heady, Burgess-meets-Berkoff prose' Ross Gilfillan, Daily Mail 'Amid the devilish plot twists Creer makes room to flesh out his principals most satisfyingly, and establish a page-blurring pace which he underpins with a unique and oddly lush economy of language' Chris Power, The Times 'Jimmy Mack...is the eloquent narrator of Gareth Creer's third novel and, to a familiar story of big money, death and deception, he brings a strange poetry...this is a curious novel, and perhaps rare for the genre in its sensitivity, merging as it does the romanticism of crime with a wonder for the world about us' James Hopkin, The Times

‘A well-paced, ambitious crime novel, handled with sensitivity’

‘Creer’s novel is rumbustiously entertaining'

‘Amid the devilish plot twists Creer makes room to flesh out his principals most satisfyingly, and establish a page-blurring pace'

A rising star in the firmament of British fiction, Gareth Creer's; Big Sky is narrated by a mute called Jimmy Mack. A good man who has to do bad things, he has spent his childhood in and out of children's homes. A kind of benign Fagin figure, he is the head of a family of similarly disaffected youths living on the North-East English coast. Surviving on a diet of petty crime, life is sweet enough until a bungled drug scam designed to rake in enough cash to set them up in Spain puts Jimmy perilously into the hands of Flint, the local mafia boss - and a woman. The pay off for trying to get a piece of the big time is that Flint dispatches them to Holland to deal with some unfinished business. And for the first time Jimmy finds that he is no longer in control. Seen through the eyes of the mild and likeable Jimmy, the action - some of it violent - is refracted through the lens of his own complicated past, and gradually a picture builds of a man who is desperate to find a sense of belonging. Shrugging off the conventions of countless drug-deal-gone-bad thrillers, Big Sky combines a seductive, almost poetic prose with a thrilling and utterly believable plot that drives the novel to its optimistic conclusion.

Jimmy's turf is a stretch of coastline in North-East England, where he and his ramshackle crew live comfortably on ill-gotten gains. But the time has come for them to leave these shores and seek anonymity in Spain: only before they can do this, Jimmy must pull off one last scam. A good man who has to do bad things, Jimmy sings his dirty song like an angel. And why wouldn't he? He's mute.

Gareth Creer
Gareth Creer grew up in Manchester and spent eight years working in the City. He gave up a lucrative career to commit himself to writing fulltime. He took the MA in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam, and since October 1999 has been Writer in Residence at Leicester Prison in the Young Offenders unit. He is now also the Lecturer in Creative Writing at John Moore's University in Liverpool. He is the author of three novels, Skin and Bone, Cradle to Grave and Big Sky.

I have felt the warm steel of death’s rusting blade on my smooth neck, smelt the clean and chemical smell of it cutting through the bowel stench of its early dispatches. I have seen its snarling lip curl in my direction, heard the broken flap of its wings. And I have tasted its kiss, a fresh gland affair that you might think would be free of disease or other harm.
So I say to you now, with the bidding for my lover’s life commenced and an untouching squeeze of fear and life upon my balls, that things must change, that it is imperative to risk everything for perfection. Because perfection is what we all deserve, and if we cannot somehow summon the final drop of fulfilment from our dreams and desires, then we may as well embrace a final throe and stake the chips of being left with absolutely nothing.
The telephone fractures an imperfect and solitary silence in the crouched basement of my office. It tolls for me. It rings Lutine loud, cuts a bad-message swath through the drum-and-bass thud of the club above. Something in me sinks, water in my lungs as I make my silent response, quaking in my heart and belly and boots in ways I knew I would for all of the seventy hours that have passed since Angela slammed the door and went to resume something from which I have tried and failed to woo her.
The frenetic flesh of a human voice shouts down the line, ‘Jimmy? Jimmy Mack? Are you there?’

‘It’s Angela; she’s in a bad way,’ says Tommy Curl. ‘Come quick, Jimmy. I’m in the Whalebone. They’ve given her bad stuff. They’ve set her up, and now they’re coming for her. Can you hear me? Give me a sign, Jimmy.’
I do the only thing I can: hang up and give voice to my answer with the only means available.
My heart beats fast and out of synch with the dancefloor Propellerheads. I can feel my body shaking as I sink to my knees and fast-dial the code on the chamber of my safe. I wait for the steel clunk as it releases itself, unlocks the bulk of my worldly wealth. Not a vast amount, thirty grand. Not bad: enough to grant a modicum of freedom you might think; but not really, only just enough to clear Angela’s debt to Denny Lane, which is now multiplying with itself on the passage of each day. It’s a nice wad to hold, has that solid sponge texture of something that might provide comfort. I stuff it into my pockets. Take it back out again, watch my hand place it back in the safe.
It would be the last time I could settle her debt. Better to invest in something more sustaining. So I rush empty-handed into the night, unweaponed and with distorted notions as to how I can wrest my chosen one from lethal clutches.
I boot the car along fast-trammel 2D headlight tracks that take me from Max, the nightclub I own, to the Whalebone; from the sad seaside of Warnsea to Easport’s docks, where the old habit is slowly dying in the Whalebone, like a last gust of methane in a dead-cow culture.
Rabbits and voles and bats scuttle and swoop in and out of the speeding rays. I drive unthinking across the tattoo pattern of routes that score my past and present, with my mind fixed on the up-close frightening future. I can drive sixth sense on the single-track dyke roads which follow the ditched waterlines of this sunk island that we have made home.
When I hit Dockroad going into Easport, the traffic turns maelstrom, flashing and blaring, swerving as I take a second gear blindcorner passage into the narrow canyon warehouse lanes where dockers, sailors and whores have been coming for a hundred years to rendezvous in the night. Except now it’s worse, because these are badlands of urban Gothic where modern horrors are screened, night and day.
Angela is my chosen one. We fit, and like mortice and tenon garnered from Dutch Elm, we are probably as good as either of us are likely to get, bound together as we are like vine by our bizarre, mutual pasts.
Trouble scrolls across the night in a slowdrift human passage away from the Whalebone. The seriousness of trouble’s subtext is written in the absence of police presence. No flashlight serenade, no siren backcloth. As I handbrake my squealing tyres and leap into the street, I force calm upon myself; stop myself dead, shape a mood that’s at one with the eerie tranquillity of felonies being policed from within. I breathe deep and nod ‘all right’ to youths I have seen in my club.
‘All right, Jimmy,’ they reply.
There are two girls outside the Whalebone. One of them is squatting, legs astride and a contortion tuck of arms holding the tiny cloth she would probably call a skirt. In Easport this is norm. In Easport, men piss like dogs and women piss like men, but I try not to break my stride. I continue my passage onward to the saloon doors of the Whalebone, past the kerb cluster of junkies with dead narcotic faces, faces I vaguely know, gathered in a quickfix huddle that confirms to me that law will not be interfering with the airwave message heard by pirates everywhere: that Angela is to be apprehended by unofficial forces.