by Nicky Black
Lee smiled his acknowledgement. Of course. It’s the police’s problem and their solution to find. So much for partnership.
Outside, while Gallagher smoked and arranged his life on his mobile, Lee stood on the pavement and looked around him. The streets were empty bar a couple of dogs sniffing at bins, and a brown, leathery woman with a can of beer and a cigarette, sitting on her front step taking in the sunshine and swearing at her kids who were playing with mud and water amidst the rubble of what had once been a garden wall. He wondered how you saved a place that was already over the edge. How did you rescue an entire generation growing up knowing no different?
Ten minutes later, he sat around a table in a small meeting room at the community centre with five local women, Joyce, Gallagher and four housing managers. Lee recognised Margy and the ranting Scot with the headscarf from the public meeting. Margy’s face puckered into a frown when she saw him take a seat opposite her.
Once the tedium of the matters arising was done with, Joyce, radiant with pride, introduced Lee and DC Gallagher, who’d come to get their views on reducing crime. Margy’s eyes looked heavenward while Lee passed his business cards around the table and gave them some glaring statistics on crime levels, antisocial behaviour, conviction rates and the ages of offenders. Some tutted and shook their heads, while others listened intently, giving nothing away.
‘It’s the small minority, though,’ he explained, ‘just eight per cent of the estate’s population who are causing the problems, constantly on the lookout for cars to pinch, people to mug, houses to burgle. While the majority, the decent people like you, just want to get on with their lives and keep themselves to themselves.’
A dozen hooded eyes gazed at him: tell us something we don’t know. He willed someone to speak, and was finally saved by the headscarfed Scottish woman, her handbag held tightly to her chest, her lined mouth pursed in cynicism like a cat’s arse. ‘It’s the drugs, they’ll pinch anything for the drugs,’ she said with the trembling voice and shaking head of a woman who suffered from her nerves.
Relief spread over him. At least someone was speaking. ‘And I’ll do everything in my power to clean the place up, but I need your help.’ Lee looked directly at her, but she turned to her neighbour. What? He tried again. ‘Good people need to be more active, weed out the bad people, stop them spoiling it for everyone else.’
The old woman’s mouth was hanging open and her clawed hands began to tear at the fastening on her handbag. ‘What do you want us to do? Grass on drug dealers? Hey, we might be poor but we’re not stupid.’
‘I didn’t say you were.’
Another woman laughed. ‘I wouldn’t tell the police nowt, me. I like living.’ A couple of her friends sniggered with her.
Lee was determined to fight his corner. ‘If people don’t report crime, what sort of message does that give out? The kids see people getting away with murder while you’re trying to teach them right from wrong.’
‘He’s right about the kids,’ said Margy.
The Scottish woman pointed a knobbly finger at her. ‘Here. It’s alright for you, you and your man have got jobs, you can get out, we can’t.’
‘Why should anyone have to get out?’ asked Margy.
‘You know why,’ the woman continued to point shakily from one person to another, ‘because your life wouldn’t be worth living if you started shopping people left right and centre –’
Lee interrupted. ‘Nobody needs to find out.’
Gallagher sat up slowly: what’s he got up his sleeve?
‘They will, though,’ another woman whined, ‘and what if you’re on your own like me? I haven’t even got a phone, none of the phone boxes work.’
‘If you’re frightened we can give you panic alarms. Works like a radio, straight through to the station.’ Lee waited in the stunned silence. Gallagher stifled a snort.
The Scottish woman threw her arms in the air. ‘Jesus Christ! I’ve heard it all now. You might as well write ‘GRASS’ on your forehead and walk around the place with walkie-talkies! I’ve had enough of this.’ She stood up and shuffled to the door.
‘Dot, man, haway.’ Margy’s words were lost to the woman’s enraged ears. As the door closed behind her, the other residents stood up one by one, muttering comments and walking out of the room, leaving Lee, Gallagher, Joyce and Margy shifting in their seats.
‘So.... that went well,’ said Gallagher after an awkward moment’s silence. ‘I’m away for a smoke,’ he said, his delight evident at seeing Lee’s cards strewn untouched around the table. Gallagher and Joyce stood up together to leave the room. Lee watched them. There was something odd about their relationship. Their eye contact, though brief, made him suspect they’d known each other some time, and yet they didn’t greet each other, or in fact speak to each other at all. He could see why Gallagher would want to keep this estate at heel. It was his pension. Cut the crime and what would he do? But the housing director? Surely it was in her best interests to keep people in their homes for as long as possible. It must have been costing her a fortune boarding up houses and getting them ready for the next lot of problem families.
He turned to Margy, but before he could open his mouth to ask about Nicola and Liam, she was on her feet. ‘Got the lunch club,’ she said sternly, and headed out of the room. He quickly got up and followed her into the lobby but was hindered by a series of shrivelled old people with sticks and Zimmer frames heading for the toilets with their carers. He zig-zagged into the main hall, his eyes met with a sea of white hair but no Margy. A blue-veined, wiry hand caught his sleeve and pulled him down with surprising strength. He sat on an empty chair at the end of a long trestle table between an ancient woman with a hearing aid and an even more prehistoric man with white hair pouring from his nose and ears. The woman kept her hand on Lee’s arm, and sat so hunched that she could only talk to his chest.
‘Nearly a year since he died,’ she said. ‘Went through agony after he got shot. Wouldn’t heal, you know, just an open hole. Oh I do miss him.’
Lee stopped searching for Margy and turned his attention to the tiny woman who picked at his sleeve with her long nails, her eyes rimmed with the redness of severe old age. He put his hand on hers. ‘Who?’ he asked kindly.
‘My bairn.’ Her head shook slightly as she glanced up at Lee momentarily.
‘Did the police get the person who shot him?’ he asked.
‘Why no. What’s the point of telling the police? They do nowt.’ She pulled her hand away angrily.
Lee frowned and lowered his head down to her level. ‘You didn’t tell the police...?’ He felt another quaking hand on his other arm and turned to the liver-spotted face of the old man.
‘Border terrier,’ he said in a high-pitched, almost nonexistent voice.
‘Ahhh,’ said Lee, relaxing and turning to the old woman. ‘Ever thought of replacing him?’
‘Eeeh, I couldn’t go through that again, son, you get too attached.’
Margy was at his shoulder, and she thrust a plate of food in front of the old man, rubbery mince with mashed potato and tinned, processed peas. Lee shared a glance with him, reading his mind.
‘Aah knaa – shite, isn’t it?’ rasped the old man, staring at his plate.
‘Alright, Norman?’ Margy asked him.
‘Aye, pet. Smells lovely,’ he beamed up at her.
Lee stood up and followed Margy into the same windowless kitchen they’d all stood in after the public meeting that seemed an age ago, the light still flickering tiresomely.
‘I know what you’re doing,’ she said before he could speak. Lee looked puzzled and opened his mouth. ‘With Nicola. I know what you want,’ she went on. Lee held his hands up in defence but again couldn’t get a word in. ‘My advice to you is to stay well away,’ she said.
Lee looked her in the eye. ‘I can help –’
‘– Help how? Whole lot of help you’ve been so far.’
‘She needs to get away from him if he’s dea
ling. I can do what I can with social services, but if there’s drugs in the house, she doesn’t stand a chance.’ Margy fiddled with her apron. ‘Who else was in the house that day?’ Nothing. He raised his hands in exasperation. ‘Jesus, you people!’
‘Micky doesn’t deal,’ said Margy, ‘not on that scale anyway.’
‘So who else was in the house?’
Margy puffed up her chest. ‘Kevin Moone,’ she said, then pointed a finger at him. ‘If you hurt her, or put her in danger, I will tear your eyes out,’ and with one final glare she took two more plates of mush and left.
As darkness fell, Liam lay with Nicola, bottle in his mouth, his fingers twirling her hair. Michael Jnr sat sullenly at the bottom of the bed, refusing any interaction with her or anyone else. Margy had just left the refuge with news that Kim was exhausted, but managing to get things sorted with the help of one of the volunteers from the centre. Nicola felt reassured, the fear that Kim wouldn’t cope lying heavily on her conscience. Micky was also looking for her, she’d said. He’d been to Margy’s house three times that day, each time more persistent, each time more threatening. No doubt Kim had also had the pleasure of a visit. When Margy saw the despondent look on Nicola’s face, she’d leant in and grinned at her. ‘Your policeman came to the residents’ meeting today. All sorts of shite about zero tolerance, grassing on people, direct lines to the station....’ Her smile had faded, though, when she saw Nicola turn her distressed face to the wall. She’d left without mentioning him again.
Her policeman. Nicola touched her bruised face. She’d done her best to hide the discolouration, the other girls having a good laugh as they plastered their make-up onto her face that afternoon. Brenda told tales of how she’d used toothpaste mixed with foundation to cover up her black eyes, but she’d ended up looking like something off that Michael Jackson video. They’d howled, and Nicola couldn’t help but smile, wondering at their ability to find humour in such viciousness.
She felt Liam’s head getting heavy on her arm. She had to think of them now, her children. Not some bloke she’d taken a fancy to. Not Micky. But Micky would never let her go. She’d have to find a way to either live without him, or live with him. Was it really that bad? It wasn’t as if he’d broken any bones. Most of the time it was a thump in the arm, a twist of the finger, a foot in the kidneys. She’d lost great clumps of hair to his fingers, but she still had all her teeth. She closed her eyes. Still. The inevitability of what was to come was written all over the faces of the women in this place. She fought against the image of Lee, sitting at the bar, his smile creasing his face into lines that reached around his cheekbones. Despite her revulsion for everything he stood for, she couldn’t help but feel a flush in her cheeks when he tiptoed into her thoughts. She shook him from her mind. Her children. They were her top priority now. She would not turn into her mother. She wouldn’t bring an inventory of men into their lives every few months. She wouldn’t leave them to fend for themselves. Her mother’s illness had driven their father away when they were barely out of nappies. The ridiculous highs, the shattering lows. She didn’t know it was an illness then. Only now, when she watched TV programmes about mental illness, did she recognise the symptoms, symptoms she had recognised in Mark on his release from Deerbolt. One day he was climbing the walls, the next rolled up in a quilt on the sofa like a caterpillar. The men came and went in her mother’s life, most of them lowlifes, she desperate for adult love and the comfort of a pair of arms around her at night. Nicola and Mark were still babies really when she started to disappear. First the odd night, then a weekend, then a week, then... She didn’t dare think about it. She cuddled Liam to her. No. She would do for her children what her mother never did for her and Mark. She would put them first.
Liam started to snore gently and she opened her free arm out to Michael Jnr, but he shook his head vigorously.
Michael had cried his face crimson earlier in the evening. He didn’t like this place that smelled of tobacco and air freshener. He’d refused to play with the other kids. She couldn’t blame him. They were scary – either wild or moody, screeching or whingeing at their mams for juice, biscuits, telly, toys, attention. Nicola had found Brenda’s nine-year-old, Damon, sitting on the stairs by himself, while his mother smoked and drank tea in the kitchen with the other girls, her blackened, bare feet resting on the table. Her sham laugh pervaded the whole house above the noise. Ha ha ha. HA HA HA! Damon was kicking at the spindles, ignoring Nicola’s polite requests to stop. She’d tried to entice him down, but it seemed the more she cajoled him, the harder he kicked, until the spindle shot out, clattering onto the hallway floor. Nicola had shouted at him, and Brenda had immediately swayed into the hall, her grey leggings showing every lump of fat wobbling around her thighs, her legs splaying out below the knee. Her eyes bore into Nicola, who felt the floor quake with the power of Brenda’s feet. Brenda picked up the spindle. Nicola held her breath and was about to apologise – never cross the line – never tell off other people’s kids in front of their parents – but Brenda pushed past her and up the stairs, laying into Damon with the spindle.
‘How man, I’ll fucking kill you!’ she’d bellowed at him.
Damon had wailed, Gerroff!! But when his hands were at his face, Brenda aimed for the legs, and when his hands came down to his legs, she aimed for the arms.
Nicola had looked on, horrified, as Tracey, Lisa and one of the refuge workers prised Brenda off him, her raging face spitting at the world. Brenda breathed deeply, staring down at her crying child with the same expression of both satisfaction and fear she saw on Micky’s face after she’d taken a hiding.
‘Fucking little prick,’ Brenda muttered as she tossed her white fringe from her eyes and calmly walked back down the stairs and into the kitchen with her lackeys, discarding the spindle on the floor as she went. Michael had been sitting at the top of the stairs, his face stricken. Then the crying started.
Liam was still snoring lightly as Nicola put him under the covers and went to sit next to Michael at the end of the bed. ‘You tired, too?’ she asked, stroking the hair from his forehead. Michael nodded and finally gave in to his need for a cuddle. He snuggled up to Nicola’s breast, thumb in his mouth, and she rocked him to and fro. She vowed never to allow herself to become like Brenda. Hardened, pitiless and vicious.
Micky studied the queue of people filing down the hill into the club. Between him and Stevie, they created a human barrier to the good time to be had inside. Thursday was student night and usually one of his most lucrative, but the queue was only a fraction of what it usually was at this time of night. Most had exams or had gone home to their mammies and daddies to get fed and lounge around their bedrooms for the summer.
Micky hated students. Vermin. They talked from their stomachs, loud and cavernous. They dressed well and looked healthy, paying a tenner or more to get into their clubs – not like ten or fifteen years ago when he worked Rockshots and they were all scruffy and half-starved, scraping the two pound entrance fee together, making sure they had enough left over for their poppers. Now everything was designer, even the drugs. Even the vermin.
He looked at his phone. He knew Nicola had his number by heart, he’d made her repeat it often enough so she could never say she didn’t know it. That fat slut, Margy, had refused to take Nicola’s mobile phone and give it to her. She’d stood at her front door, hating him with her pokey little black eyes, denying she knew where his wife was. ‘Honestly, Micky, she’s not here,’ she’d said in her flabby drawl of a voice, ‘the social services won’t let you near them, anyhow.’ Fuck that, he’d said, did she think he was born yesterday? Where the hell else did she have to go? ‘Exactly,’ Margy had said flatly, ‘you’ve made damn sure she’s got no one left, you prick.’ Micky was in two minds whether to admire her or slap her face. Not many people stood up to him, but there she was, standing at her door like the fucking Sphinx and he wasn’t getting past. He’d held Nicola’s phone out to her, but her hands had remained folded
over the beachballs she had for tits. He’d put it on the ground next to her feet and she’d kicked it onto the pavement. Then she’d closed the door in his face, the fucking fat fuck.
Micky seethed. He should have gone after Nicola that day he’d locked her out, but his pride and shame had nailed him to the mattress. He hadn’t slept after she’d gone, too much adrenalin. He’d stewed in his own guilt and rage instead. She’d come back to him, though. She loved him.
He concentrated on his hands in his pockets. He wondered how it would feel if they were tender and gentle instead of savage and rough. The effort it took to control them was overwhelming, and often he had no choice but to let them rip. It was the only thing that relieved the build-up of frustration and self-loathing that ate him from the inside.
He took his hands from his pockets, examined them, opening and closing the palms, turning them back and forward as if looking for clues. They’d been his bread and butter at one time when he was in the ring every week. He’d thought they would make him a champion, the best, his big achievement. Now they shackled him. Put paid to him being the good husband he’d never really wanted to be. The ring was where he’d met Tiger. Tiger could see his potential, not as a boxer, but as a man people could both admire and fear. Just the sort of man Tiger needed on his team. But even after working for him for all these years, Micky still hadn’t been able to earn enough to take the leap out of Valley Park to the decent life that Nicola wanted. He’d promised to give it to her, but he hadn’t, and now she was slipping away. Slowly but surely, inch by inch, he could sense it. And the more he felt her cutting loose, the more repulsed he felt about his own sickening failure. He wished she would be patient. His time was coming, he could feel it.
As a couple of pissed teenagers stumbled into the club, he asked himself what would happen if she didn’t come back this time. He would have to persuade her to stay, no question, he’d done it before and he’d do it again. His anxiety diminished as he reassured himself and he put his methods of persuasion back into the deep pockets of his coat.