by John Harvey
“The girls,” Sharon said. “I even like them, sort of. The regulars, anyway. Not the little scrubbers who train over on an Away Day, then scuttle back home on their high heels like Cinderella. They’re the ones who’ll do it without a rubber, some of them, take risks, the stupid tarts.”
“And the boys?” Lynn asked. They were turning the corner into North Sherwood Street, Lynn pleasantly surprised to see her car still there where she’d left it.
Sharon stopped. “No, it’s … I don’t know, but somehow it’s not the same. I can’t, I suppose I can’t understand—I mean I can understand—but I just can’t relate to what’s going on. And some of them—God, it turns you over—they seem so bloody young.”
“Fourteen.”
“Younger.”
They were walking again, Lynn fishing in her bag for her keys. “The lad you contacted me about, you think it was him, Hodgson?”
“What I saw from the picture, it could be, yes.”
“I’ll meet you, then. Later. If that’s okay? Ten o’clock?”
“Better half past.”
They made the final arrangements and Sharon stepped back to watch Lynn make a U-turn and drive away. A nice woman, she thought, straightforward—a little too straight, maybe, uptight even—but no side. Sharon liked that about her. If only she’d take a bit more trouble with herself, she could be nice-looking too.
Six
Laden with Pepsis and cartons of popcorn—sweet for Nicky, salted for Aasim, Martin had mixed—they watched Dumb and Dumber and then went into one of the other screens to see Poetic justice, which Aasim insisted on seeing because one of his mates had told him there were shots of Janet Jackson naked from the waist up. “What’s new about that?” Nicky had wanted to know, but they went anyway. Fifteen minutes into the movie, when they realized what they were hearing on the soundtrack was meant to be poetry, they kicked back their seats and left. “I don’t care what her tits are like,” Martin said on their way through the foyer, “I’m not listening to no fucking poetry.”
It was a wonder that Miss Campbell hadn’t been there, Nicky thought, sitting up the back, taking notes.
They left the Honda in the Showcase car-park and took an Escort in its place.
“Wait up,” called Martin, as they were turning past the Assembly Rooms and in sight of the bus station. “This is as good a place as any.”
“What for?” Nicky wanted to know.
“You stay put,” Martin told him. “Make sure no bastard nicks the fucking car.”
So Nicky popped a Polo in his mouth and lit a cigarette, while Martin and Aasim made their way between the bus stands towards the toilets. Aasim, two years older than Martin, was almost a foot taller, a mustache already thick upon his lip. Martin had met him first in the children’s home, Aasim sitting on the top bunk looking at the pictures in Penthouse and Hot Asian Babes and listening to his Bangra tapes, over and over again.
Twenty minutes and three cigarettes later they were back: Martin had sixty pounds in twenties, fifty in tens and three tatty fives; Aasim had blood drying from a cut alongside his mouth and a graze across his fist.
“Better’n a bank,” Martin said with a grin. “Now let’s get the fuck out of here. This place gives me the runs.”
“Where we going?” Nicky asked.
“What do you care?” Martin said. “Just wait and see.”
But Nicky was already thinking that wherever it was, it probably wasn’t the place he most wanted to be. Sitting around kicking his heels while others were off doing stuff wasn’t his idea of a good time.
“I’ll tell you what,” Aasim said, “when we’ve finished this, let’s go to a club.”
This was Chinese takeaway, sweet and sour, chicken and cashew, chicken chow mein; Nicky had ordered two portions of toffee banana as well and now Martin was only reckoning they were for everyone, reaching over into the back of the Vauxhall with his plastic fork.
Oh, yes, another car. As soon as they had reached the ring road, Martin insisted on taking over the wheel and within less than a mile had wrapped the near side of the Escort around a bollard, after which Aasim had made a detour across the grass to the Social Sciences car-park of the University and liberated a Fiesta XR2.
“Fuckin’ students, man, got too much money. What’s some fucker on a grant doin’ with a car like this?”
“Maybe it belongs to some teacher,” Nicky suggested. “Lecturer, whatever they’re called.”
“Don’t make me piss myself, man. Whatever sort of teacher drives a fuckin’ XR2?”
Nicky finally got tired of fending off Martin’s fork and let him have it all, tipping the contents of the container forwards across the seat and into Martin’s lap.
“Fuck it, Nicky! Just fuckin’ watch it, right?”
But Nicky was rapidly getting to the point where he didn’t give a shit.
“Syrup all down my tossin’ jeans!”
“Be cool,” Aasim said, “make you taste sweet.”
Martin laughed and, in disgust, Nicky lowered the window and threw all that remained of the food out onto the street.
“Right,” Aasim said, setting the car in gear. “We wasted enough time already, right?”
“Where we going?” Martin asked, still brushing away at his clothes.
“Clubbin’, I told you.”
“Not me,” Nicky said.
“Come on, you got to. I know this guy, right, works the door at the Black Orchid, yeh? Won’t cost us nothin’.”
It was beginning to grate on Nicky more than a little, the way Aasim knew someone who worked everywhere, some cousin, uncle, aunt, or brother. He’d bet anything you liked, mention somebody doing the most far-out job you could ever think of, personal bodyguard to Madonna, something stupid like that, and Aasim would swear on whatever it was they swore on that he knew the bloke’s Siamese twin.
When the XR2 pulled up outside the club, both Nicky and Martin got out but neither of them moved towards the door. “Suit yourselves,” Aasim said. After he’d parked the car and talked his way inside, the two of them jumped into a cab that had just dropped off four girls with skirts up around their tits and headed into town.
Sitting in the back, Martin did his best to persuade Nicky to work the Forest with him. Martin, he’d get some punter back into the trees and then Nicky could jump him, the two of them would beat the shit out of him and take him for whatever he had. “They’ll never do nothing about it,” Martin assured him. “Not the coppers nor nothin’. Married, most of ’em, that’s why.”
But Nicky wouldn’t budge. He left Martin cadging a light from a tart on the corner of Waterloo Road and took off down Southey Street, heading for home.
“Smoke?” Sharon asked.
Lynn shook her head.
“I know, I keep trying to give it up.” Sharon lowered the window on her side of the car a crack before she lit up.
The streets were busier now, small knots of girls in different shapes and sizes, gossiping at corners, blowing into their hands. Others, most often in pairs, walked slow along the pavement’s edge, a quick dip of the head towards any car that drew near.
“No lads,” Lynn said.
“Not yet.”
The drill was, park for a while where you have, as far as possible, an unimpeded view of one stretch of the territory; next, drive around the circuit at a steady pace, eyes peeled, letting the ones that knew you know you were about, casting a careful eye over anyone new on the patch. Look out for trouble, warn persistent punters away. Every now and again, there would be a lot of conspicuous action, rounding the girls up and taking them in. Fines in the coffers, a small knee jerk in the direction of the moral majority. Keeping the trade under wraps.
“You seeing anyone?” Sharon asked, stubbing out her cigarette and resisting the temptation to light another.
“Sorry?”
“A bloke, you know.”
“Oh. No.” In the close proximity of the car, Lynn felt herself beginning to blush
and blushed all the more. “How about you?” she asked.
Sharon smiled, almost a laugh. “Depends what you mean. Not in the regular sense, no. Friday nights at the pictures, Saturdays a takeaway and a couple of videos from Blockbusters, nothing like that.”
“But?”
To hell with it! Sharon lit up anyway, lowered the window a farther half-inch. “There’s this one guy, I don’t see him often, just, you know, when we can fix it. When he can.”
“Married, then?”
She did laugh this time. “Of course he’s married.”
Lynn stared out through the window; what she thought were shapes moving was probably nothing more than the wind in the trees. “He won’t leave her. You know that.”
“He’d better not!”
“You know you’re just saying that.”
“Like hell I am. Leave her and what’ll he expect? Me to dump his washing in the machine last thing at night, collect his suit from the cleaners, cook, be nice to his kids. I’ve had a bellyful of that once on my own account; I’m not about to fall for it again.”
“What is it, then? Why do you keep seeing him?”
Sharon drew in smoke and exhaled slowly through her nose. “Sex, why d’you think?”
It was quiet inside the car, each woman aware of the other’s breathing, the heat of her skin.
“I don’t know if I could,” Lynn said. “Not unless …”
Sharon barked out a laugh. “Unless you loved him?”
“Unless I thought it was leading somewhere.”
In the semi-darkness, Sharon was looking at her. “You’re young, you’ll learn.”
“I hope not.”
Sharon lowered the window a little more and tapped ash out into the air. “Look, me and him, we spend the night together, most of it, once every two or three weeks. He’s a nice bloke, a good lover. Treats me with respect. He’s never aggressive or overdemanding unless I want him to be, he’s got great hands and a lovely cock. And he makes me laugh. You think I should be holding out for what? A co-signee for the mortgage and someone to help me push the trolley round at Safeway?”
For a while Lynn didn’t answer. “Maybe not,” she finally said. “Only …”
“Only what?”
“After you’ve … after you’ve been to bed and …”
“And done the deed.” Sharon laughed.
“Yes, if you like. And he’s gone back home to his wife, well, how do you feel?”
Sharon put her hand on Lynn’s arm. “Somewhere between having had a Turkish and a long massage, and being seen to by the Dynorod man.”
The laughter of the two women filled the car and when it faded, Lynn said: “Look, what’s that? Over there.”
“Where?”
“Over there.”
Nicky had walked past the house three times now, a two-story end-terrace with lace curtains at the window, even those above street level. The kind of house, the kind of street where people put milk bottles out last thing at night, but no one had done that here. Okay, he thought, it was getting late but not that late, most of the other houses had lights showing in their bedroom windows at least. Not here. He turned along the side of the house to where a narrow ginnel ran into the darkness, giving access to the backs.
For as much as five minutes he stood in the center of the rear yard, letting the darkness gather round him. A few doors along someone was playing their television too loud, someone else was singing, one of those pathetic songs his mum would sing when she was in the kitchen and thought no one else was listening, or when she came back from the pub after last orders and didn’t care. There was a gap at the top of the window at least an inch wide and his guess was that whoever lived there had forgotten to close it tight. So simple, Nicky thought, so why was he still standing there when by now he could have been in and out? Another ten minutes and he’d be home. Nicky took a pace towards the window, then another; as far as he was concerned most of the evening had been a washout and here was his chance to finish it on an up.
Face close against the glass, he saw, beyond his own reflection, the contours of the neat back room, everything ordered and in its place the way old jossers’ homes were. Some of them, anyway. The ones that didn’t babble on at you in the street, half-drowned in their own dribble, sit in their own piss. Yes, he bet whoever lived here dusted it every morning, moving every sodding ornament on the shelf. Nicky had done places like this before, money hid away in the most stupid places, obvious, inside vases, between the pages of Bibles, biscuit tins. Three hundred he’d found once, three hundred almost, pushed up the arse of this donkey, a present from Skegness.
Easing himself silently up onto the tiled sill, Nicky slipped his fingers over the top of the window and began to slide it down.
Seven
Nicky stood still long enough to let his eyes grow accustomed to the light. Table, chest of drawers, sideboard, mantelpiece, chairs—gradually, the details sharpened into place. Family photographs. He had already turned the key to unlock the back door and slipped back the bolts; he could be out of there in seconds if he had to. But he wasn’t going to have to. Wherever they were, the people who lived there—off on one of them geriatric coach trips or boring the balls off their relations—they weren’t here. Quiet as the sodding grave.
He would do this room first and then the front. No rush for a change, Nicky, take your time.
Brian Noble had followed the boy down into the trees.
He had driven past him twice, the boy standing in shadow at the edge of the street light’s fall, holding his cigarette down by his side, cupped inside his hand. Noble had parked the car on the nearest of the side streets, careful to push anything which might be stolen beneath the seats. One of the women had called out to him, asked him if he wanted a good time, but that wasn’t the kind of good time that interested him. He could get that at home.
The first time he walked on past, just slowing enough to judge the boy’s age—fourteen or fifteen, soft flesh still around those hard eyes. On the way back he spoke, stopped and asked him for a light.
“You don’t want a light,” the boy said.
“Don’t I?”
“Fifteen quid,” the boy said, not looking at the man directly, glancing back and forth along the street.
“What for?”
The boy showed him with an almost elegant gesture of the hand.
“Doesn’t that seem rather a lot?” Brian Noble asked.
“Suit yourself.”
Noble was gazing at the boy’s face, the dark hair that hung loosely across his forehead, the first beginnings of a mustache darkening along his upper lip. He imagined the pubic hair around the boy’s cock and felt himself grow hard.
“Suppose there are things I want to do to you?” Brian Noble asked.
“Cost you.”
“Of course.”
The boy stared at him now. “Well?”
Across the street a car, an Astra, dark blue, slowed almost to a halt and woman jumped out of the back seat before the car had come to a proper stop. “Wanker!” She stepped off the pavement, middle finger trust high into the air as the car accelerated away.
“I have a car,” Noble said.
“Fancy that.”
“We could go to it now, it wouldn’t take a minute.”
“No.” He didn’t know why, but he didn’t fancy it. “No,” the boy said. “Back here.”
Noble looked at the headlights from Gregory Boulevard, strung in perpetual motion through the trees. “It doesn’t look so very comfortable,” he said.
“Suit yourself.”
The boy ground the nub end of his cigarette beneath his shoe and started to move away. Noble detained him with a hand, restraining yet gentle on the boy’s arm. “All right. Have it your way.”
“The money first.”
“What, here? Where everyone can see?”
“The money.”
Noble fingered fifteen pounds away from the fifty he had pushed down into his trouse
r pocket before leaving the car; his wallet he had locked for safety inside the glove compartment.
“I thought you wanted something more,” the boy said, looking at the money now in his hand.
“Let’s just see, shall we? See how we go. I think that’s enough to be going on with.”
Without another word, the boy turned and Brian Noble, not without the exhilaration of fear, followed him down towards the trees.
Nicky had upturned every jar and ornament, opened every box and drawer, and all he’d come up with was a few pounds’ worth of five-p pieces inside a half-size whisky bottle and a postal order for one pound, forty-two. It went without saying they had neither a stereo nor a VCR, just a poxy plastic radio that wasn’t worth taking and a postage stamp TV that was more state of the ark than art.
He would have to try upstairs. See what, aside from the old man’s best trousers, they kept under the mattress.
Under the worn tread of the carpet, the stairs squeaked a little and groaned, however lightly Nicky placed his feet.
“Slowly,” Brian Noble said, his voice a hissed whisper. “Go more slowly. That’s it, that’s it. There.”
He was leaning back against the rough-hewn stonework of the cemetery wall, its unevenness poking hard against his shoulders, the back of his head, base of his spine.
“That’s it, that’s lovely. Go on, go on.”
The boy stood close alongside him, always looking away, his elbow pressing into Noble’s arm. Noble wanted to dip his head and kiss the V of hair, dark at the back of the boy’s neck, but knew that if he did the boy would pull away. Instead, he set his right hand softly against the boy’s waist, and when there was no resistance, slid it down over his hip and round until his finger ends were resting on the boy’s buttocks. He felt the boy’s muscles tense and prepared to pull his hand away but it was all right, there was no need.
Faint, he could see the headlights along Gregory Boulevard, strung like a moving lantern between the trees.
“Christ!” the boy complained. “How much longer you gonna be?”
“It’s okay, okay. Just … here, here, touch me here as well.” And he caught hold of the boy’s other hand and thrust it inside his open trousers, tightening it around his balls.