Top Hard

by Stephen Booth

  We dumped the Escort where it would probably rust away quietly forever and switched to my Subaru Impreza Turbo 2000. I dropped Slow Kid and Dave off and watched them disappear into the darkness towards their houses. They belonged in Medensworth, and they blended into the background the moment they walked out of the light of the nearest working street lamp. Being on my own felt strange after the excitement of the afternoon, and somehow the elation was starting to turn bitter in my stomach as I drove onto the monster of a housing development they call the Forest Estate. This is my home.

  You'll find Medensworth north of the Major Oak and left a bit. Tourists looking for Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest Country Park don't know it exists, and they wouldn't want to. It's one of those big pit villages that were thrown up for miners' families when the mines were first sunk, villages that are wondering what to do with themselves now the pits have gone.

  They're not pretty, these places. But there's some sort of symbolism in the fact that the most visited bit of Nottinghamshire, where visitors gape at a decrepit oak tree and walk along leafy woodland paths thinking they're in the heart of rural England, is completely surrounded by pit villages and the remains of their pits. I mean places like Ollerton, Edwinstowe, Welbeck, Shirebrook. Their slag heaps are cleverly screened, but they're still there. They look like hills thrown up by some delayed spasm of the earth. It's like nature, or God, or whoever, spent a hard week sweating to build all those really nice mountains and rolling hills and lakes and stuff, then decided to get rat-arsed on the seventh day and spewed up all these slag heaps. They may have come from the same place as the rolling hills, but the quality isn't the same. It's the shitty end of creation. Medensworth is one of those places, mostly.

  It was all quiet as I drove into Sherwood Crescent and round the corner into the back alley to park up. Houses in my street don't have garages. They weren't made for folk with cars - after all, men only had to walk up the road to reach the pit gates or the Miners Welfare. Where else would they want to go?

  Now we do have cars, though details like tax and insurance and MoT certificates tend to get a bit neglected. Well, we're not used to it. Can't read the small print on the log book (it fades when you photocopy anything). But the number of cars parked at the kerb and blocking up the street meant we had to have garages. So there are rows of them, ramshackle corrugated iron things in the back alleys and on bits of wasteland round the estate. My motor's in one of those - except there's nothing ramshackle about my garage and nothing cheap about the locks either. You can't be too careful, because you never who might decide to take a look inside. Maybe even some nosey copper. And we wouldn't want that.

  The Impreza is red and it's new, but not too flash. Lisa wanted me to get a BMW. I could have afforded it, I suppose. But driving one of those things round here might make people think you were a criminal, right?

  Oh, Lisa? Lisa reckons she's my girlfriend. At least she comes round to my house a lot, even talks me into taking her out occasionally. And we have sex in my bedroom quite often - sometimes not even in the bedroom. So I suppose it might seem there's some truth in what she thinks.

  I let myself into 36 Sherwood Crescent, turning off the alarm and listening carefully to the sounds of the house. You get into the habit of being careful - you want to be sure that the house is empty. There wasn't much to check out in the little hallway. Just one of the local free papers on the mat, shouting the attractions of a new fitness centre in a garish clash of coloured inks. I left the door into the sitting room open while I switched on the lights, skirting the settee and a couple of armchairs on the way to the kitchen. Apart from the telly and a good stereo, the room was pretty much empty. There are a few books on the shelf. Some local history, loaned to me by Lisa for my education. Some law books, a few crime novels -Inspector Morse and P.D. James. The certificates and the other stuff are buried in a drawer with balls of string and spare fuses and the rest of the dross.

  No end of women have told me the place looks like a hermit's cell. But so what? I've never been on any holidays where I'd feel tempted to buy a straw donkey or a glass paperweight to bring back for the mantelpiece. I don't have any reason to collect things that remind me of the past. And a certain sparseness means there's less to dust. This is important when you're a bloke living on your own, but birds don't seem to see it. And another thing - why make the sitting room too comfortable? You don't want a bird getting warm and cosy in front of the fire, do you? You want her keen to get out of there to the warmth of the bedroom. So the sitting room needs to be bare, and a bit cool. It's stick and carrot, if you know what I mean.

  In the kitchen, I switched the kettle on and pulled a pizza out of the freezer compartment to stick in the microwave. I didn't look too closely at the interior of the fridge while I had the door open. There were a few cans of beer in there that looked all right, but everything else was likely to cause a major European health scare if it ever escaped. There was a milk carton that had taken up a new career as a penicillin factory, and a bit of Cheddar cheese that would have cracked the floor if I dropped it. There were other things, too, that didn't bear looking at, and the smell was getting bad. I'd have to buy a new fridge soon.

  With the kettle hissing and the microwave humming, I switched on the telly and caught the climax of an American film, all guns and screams and cars getting blown up. But the house still sounded empty, and this is what made me think of Lisa, I suppose. It never feels empty when Lisa's there.

  It's funny, really. You see, me and women don't usually last longer than a few weeks together. I get bored easily, and just when they're talking about a steady relationship, I'm off eyeballing something different and it comes to a nasty end, one way or another.

  Obviously, I expected this to happen with Lisa once she'd been coming round for a month or so. It's a natural cycle, like Autumn coming after Summer. You don't even think about it - you just start sorting the woollies out of the drawer when the drain gets blocked up with leaves and the kids start chucking sticks at the chestnut trees for conkers.

  But it hasn't happened this time, and I don't understand why. It's as if nature has decided not to bother with Autumn this year because it's too messy, what with the dead leaves and all that, and she's quite happy with Summer, thank you very much. Surely Lisa must have clocked the way I am? She's not stupid - far from it. Sure, she gives me some hammer now and then. She has a fair old temper, so I don't answer back much. And there she still is. She's been around so long the lads have learned her name and even ask after her health. Every time that happens, I get this nasty feeling in my guts, like I've just eaten curried chips from the Bombay Duck takeaway. It's going to cause a real problem one day soon. You see, I was so sure that Lisa would drift away like all the others, that I've already gone and found the next one. And, like I said, Lisa's got a real temper.

  When I first met Lisa, I'd been going around with some bird whose name I can't quite remember now. One day she decided she wanted to visit Newstead Abbey, where Lord Byron used to live. She'd been gawping at the oak-panelled Great Hall and its minstrels' gallery and twittering on about how grand the Byrons must have been, and how wonderful the place must have looked when they lived there.

  My attention was already wandering a bit, and I was wondering whether what's-her-name would be interested in a bit of sex down by the lake. I had also, of course, noticed the blonde bird standing nearby. She was slim and smartly dressed, with short, well-cut hair, and she had that rare quality in a woman - style. Looking sexy and dying your hair blonde is okay, but if a woman knows how to wear clothes and how to hold herself when she moves, that's what really catches my eye. You don't see it too often, but Lisa has it. From her expression, she was several shades brighter than the bird I was with, too. Her eyes looked amused as she listened to the twitter. I like a woman with a sense of humour.

  "Actually, the fifth Lord Byron let the Abbey go to rack and ruin," she said suddenly. She seemed to be talking to me rather than Miss Twitter. "He died in t
he scullery, which was the only room left in the house where the roof didn't leak."

  "Yeah? Was he the poet?" I asked.

  "No. The poet was his great-nephew, Alfred, who inherited the Abbey from him. This Great Hall was so derelict by then that he only used it for pistol practice."

  "No kidding."

  The blonde woman began to talk about the monks who lived in the original abbey from 1150 until they were kicked out by Henry VIII. Then she told us about the follies built by the fifth Lord Byron - the two mock forts by the lake, where he used to stage miniature sea battles - and his sheer bloody-mindedness in neglecting the building and deliberately laying waste to the estate. She talked about his great nephew's riotous lifestyle and dubious friends, and his permanent money problems. She moved on to point out the cloister court, laid out as what she called a Mary Garden, with a carved sixteenth century water conduit, and then she led us into the kitchen next to the Sussex Tower, which she said had been modelled on the Abbot's Kitchen in Glastonbury Abbey.

  And something really funny happened as I listened to her talk. Suddenly I could see it. I could actually see and hear and smell everything that she was talking about. I could picture the holes in the roof, and the damp running down the walls, soaking into rugs that smelled of mould. I could see a journeyman carpenter painstakingly carving out the patterns by hand on yards of water conduit, his hands and clothes smelling of fresh wood shavings. I could hear the kitchen servants chattering to each other as they prepared yet another ten-course banquet for the eccentric poet and his disreputable friends. I could smell the sweat of those servants as much as the sides of venison roasting in the ovens and the hot, steamy aroma as the maids scrubbed stone-flagged floors on their hands and knees.

  This had never happened to me before. Until then, these places had just been tourist traps, somewhere for the Americans and Japanese and a few local folk like Miss Twitter to be parted from their money in exchange for postcards and Newstead Abbey key rings. But Lisa made it real. I think it was then I knew she was going to be part of my life.

  After the pizza was finished, I made a few calls. Though I was feeling good about the lorry load of gear we'd just got away, the big stuff was new to me just then. I still had my main business to run, the small scale stuff that's done so well for me and quite a few other people, since I fell out with a system that won't let you help out people worse off than yourself.

  But let's get this straight. Some folk think I'm a criminal. A thief even. Me, I call what I do redistribution of wealth. Wealth is the stuff that the rich gits have, and the folk who live round here don't have. It's always been like that, you know - right back to the time when some Stone Age bloke called Ug grabbed the best cave for himself and collected every flint arrowhead that was going and made all the other Ugs do the hunting and mammoth gutting. I'm just sharing out a few bits of flint that some modern day King of the Ugs has carelessly left lying around.

  So the first call was to Fat John, my best supplier. This is a two-way business, you see. I supply blokes in other areas with goods they want. In return, I buy in stuff I can sell on my own patch from their areas. You don't mess on your own doorstep, right?

  Once or twice the Trading Standards blokes have tried to make out some of the gear was counterfeit. But honest to God, I bought it in good faith, your honour. Well, what I say is - if people can have faith in the British justice system, I can have faith in Fat John when he tells me I'm buying top grade stuff. John says you you're getting Reeboks or Levis, and just like the constitution tells you, you're innocent until proved guilty. Well you either buy that shit or you don't. As far as I can see, the only difference is that Fat John gives it to you in black and white, and it's right there on the labels. But the constitution? The constitution only ever exists in the head of some decrepit judge, and depends on whether his piles are playing him up or the cheese he had for lunch is giving him indigestion. British justice? Don't make me laugh. I've seen more attractive concepts on the pavement after the pubs have shut.

  A fat voice answered the phone with a string of numbers, giving nothing away.

  "John? Stones. All right?"

  "Ah. Hello there, my friend. How goes it?"

  "Fine, fine. You trading, John?"

  "As ever, my friend. More watches for you. Rolex and Seiko. They shift well for you, yes? Also lots of videos and perfumes. Good names, good stuff."

  "I can take a load at the end of the week."

  "You have it, Stones. Usual arrangement?"

  "I'll see to it."

  "It's a pleasure, my friend."

  "See you, mate."

  The next call was to one of the boys. He goes by the name of Metal Jacket, because his shoulders are never out of a car engine. He took a long while to answer the phone.

  "Yes?"

  "Metal? Stones."

  "All right, Stones?"

  As usual, he was somewhere noisy. There was the banging of metal and a radio turned up too loud in the background, and a terrible echo. I could picture him pulling the phone out from under a pile of junk in a blacksmith's shop or something.

  "What's this message about a motor?"

  "Yeah, yeah. You ought to take a look at it, Stones. Nice wheels."

  Metal Jacket is one of the best when it comes to motors, but scores of them go through his hands. I couldn't understand what he was on about here.

  "Why should I take a look? I've already got a motor."

  "Yeah, I know. But this one's a real nice motor. Special. You know what I mean?"

  "No." I sighed. Communication isn't all that it's cracked up to be sometimes. "Where is it, Metal?"

  "Oh, down the workshop."

  "I'll be along tomorrow."

  "Right, man. See you."

  "See you."

  The third call was to a legit contact. I do still have some of these, and they're really useful. It's like a packet of condoms - they're no fun at the time, but it's always best to keep a few in your pocket, and you're always glad you had them afterwards.

  "Hello. Newsdesk. Can I help you?"

  "Nah then. Is that the whatsit, the editor?"

  "This is the news editor, Mel France. Can I help you, sir?" The voice was cautious, like someone who never knows quite what to expect when he answers the phone.

  "Well, I've got this bit of news, like, that I thought you might be interested in."

  "Oh yes?" Encouraging, but non-committal. A professional.

  "It's about my dog, you see. My neighbours are taking me to court complaining about the noise he makes."

  "Oh. And how do you feel about that?"

  "Well, I'm barking mad."

  There was a brief silence, then a click, like your car key turning in the central locking.

  "That's McClure pissing about, isn't it?"

  He still sounded annoyed, but relieved too. It wasn't some irritating member of the general public to deal with, but just me after all.

  "Shit, Mel. You're so sharp, you catch me out every time."

  "I'm up to my neck in deadlines here, Stones. What the hell do you want?"

  "I want to be informed, educated and entertained. Where do you think I can find those things, Mel?"

  "Piss off. You're bad news."

  Mel France is one of my favourite contacts. I think it's the way he falls over himself to be helpful. I must have done him a real big favour some time in the past. Now that he's news editor on a big evening paper, he's always delighted to get the chance to pay me back.

  "You journalists are so full of bullshit. Why don't you just cut the guff and get to the point?"

  "I'm pretty close to the point, Stones. To the point of hanging up."

  "There was a van fire on the A614 last night. What have you got on it?"

  "Why don't you read the bloody paper and find out?"

  "You'd have to write it in language I can understand first, Mel."

  "There's a limit to how much you can say in words of one syllable."

  "Oh yeah
? I mean, there was a headline the other day that said 'Bespoke oak folk are tree-mendous' What the hell does that mean? Is it in English?"

  "What did you want to know about this van?"

  "Anything you've got. What are the police saying?"

  "Damn all, as usual." There was a rustling of papers at the other end of the phone. Somehow I'd imagined everything being on computer screens in newspaper offices these days. Maybe Mel was doing the Sun crossword. If so, he wouldn't keep me long. "We're talking about a Renault Master, right? Near the Clumber Hotel? Normanton entrance to Clumber Park?"

  "That's it."

  "The fire service were called, but the van was totally destroyed, it says here. No other vehicle involved."

  "Casualties?"

  "Two. Taken to Bassetlaw Hospital and treated for minor burns, but not detained. No serious injuries."

  "Pity"

  "What?"

  "Names?"

  "Er, no names given. Withheld at the request of the victims."

  "Victims, right."

  "That's perfectly normal these days. People can say they don't want their names giving out to the press."

  "Yeah, I know. So if there were no other vehicles involved, what was the cause of this fire?"

  "Mmm, doesn't say. Some sort of electrical fault, surely."

  "Maybe."

  "Do you know otherwise, Stones?"

  "No, no. I was just passing, and I thought it was someone I knew."

  "Oh yeah? Nobody important, then."

  "Ta."

  "Well, as long as the van was insured, there's no harm done, is there? I mean, it wouldn't have been nicked or anything, by any chance? We're not talking about a crime here, after all, are we? Just an insurance job. So nobody loses."

  "That's right, Mel. Dead right. Nobody loses."

  I hung up and tapped my fingers. Nobody loses. You've heard people talk about victimless crime. Well, there are some crimes that not only have no victims, but everyone benefits from them. Nearly everyone, anyway.