by Baker, John
‘I’d want you to go away. That’s the whole idea.’
He leaned back in the chair, stretched his legs out in front of him. ‘I’m sure we can come to some arrangement, darlin’. When was you thinking? Only I’m fairly busy today.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she told him, ‘it probably won’t take long.’ She watched him turn it over in his mind, but in the end he let it go. It sailed on past him. Ralph was all kinds of things, but he wasn’t an intellectual heavyweight.
She’d do it, too. If she thought for one moment that she could trust him, she’d do just about anything to get her life back to normal. But Ralph would promise anything if he thought he’d get something out of it. After she’d done the deed with him he’d still be around, and he’d be expecting more.
When she came back to it a second time, the thought of him fumbling his way around her body brought the taste of vomit into her mouth. She wondered if she’d ever be able to wash him off her skin, if for the rest of her life she would have recurring visions of the time she screwed
Geordie’s brother to get him out of their lives. And she knew there must be another way. And she knew that she’d known that all along, only she still didn’t know what it was.
Watch him, she thought. That’s all you can do. Track him. Dog his every footstep. Make sure there’s no area of his life that he can call his own.
The trouble with keeping Ralph under surveillance was that he didn’t do anything. He collected his social security, he sat in various pubs, trying his luck with the barmaids; did a round of low-life cafés where he worked on the waitresses or any lone females who happened along. Sometimes he got lucky and was invited to a girl’s flat, the two of them with their arms wrapped around each other, their brains addled with vodka. Once he spent the afternoon in the Museum Gardens with a couple of truants, girls of no more than thirteen. He split a bottle with them before taking them into a derelict building down by the river.
It was that day, when he was with the two truants, that Janet noticed the other guy. She’d been aware of him for some time, out of the corner of her eye, but had not completely registered him. When she’d followed Ralph into the park the guy had stationed himself outside the doors of the museum, the huge neo-classical facade of the building rendering him almost invisible.
Later, she remembered seeing him sitting on a bench quite close to Ralph and the two girls when they were getting into the bottle of vodka. He was reading a book, raising his eyes occasionally to check they were still there. A rent-a-drool expression on his face.
Another day he appeared again, this time in Whip-ma-Whop-ma-Gate. The street was named after the activity of whipping petty criminals in the Middle Ages, and Janet thought it was somehow right that she should be watching Geordie’s brother here. Ralph had been drinking heavily that day and had come to a stop by the cycle park. He was checking his way through the bikes, seeing if there were any easy pickings. The other guy came out of St Saviourgate and stood by the telephone box with his hands in his pockets. He watched Ralph and Janet saw him shake his head from side to side.
Ralph’s life was like his chat-up lines: sad and boring and getting him nowhere. But what Janet did discover while she followed him around was that she was not the only one on his tail. Someone else was watching Ralph.
The man was tall with fair hair, looked like a sportsman. Obviously fit but not muscular, the kind who would play cricket rather than football or rugby. The strange thing about him was that he looked perfectly respectable. His hair was short and neatly cropped and he wore a fresh shirt and tie under a two-piece suit. His overcoat looked like a Crombie or a good copy. Janet couldn’t understand it. If someone was watching Ralph, she would have thought it was because Ralph had ripped him off - a guy from the same side of the tracks as Ralph, petty criminal, or someone with gang connections. Maybe Ralph’s sticky fingers had upset some kind of drug syndicate and they were looking for revenge.
Only the guy didn’t look like that at all. If she’d seen him in any other context, she’d have thought he was a doctor or a teacher. Someone with a profession. It didn’t make sense that a man like that was watching Ralph, the slimeball in her life.
She wondered, could the guy be a cop? And she gave up the thought almost immediately. The clothes were wrong. Even when they’re working undercover, there’s something about the bearing of a cop that they can’t hide. They get away with it sometimes, but only when they’re working with dopers or criminals who have more brawn than brain.
So perhaps the guy was a private eye? Employed by someone Ralph had victimized or exploited. Whatever, Janet found it strange to imagine herself as a single link in a chain of surveillance. There was Ralph at the cutting edge, watching the world for anything it might put in his path, then there was the blond guy watching him doing it. And Janet was standing behind them, watching the two of them, watching the blond guy watching Ralph and Ralph obviously not watching his back. She wondered if there might be someone else, Geordie, say, who was watching her in turn. And further back still, another Other? Makes for a creepy feeling down your spine when you start to think like that. Find yourself looking around, scrutinizing the old lady with a shopping trolley, checking out the unshaved youth in the long gabardine.
She thought: the blond guy is some kind of private detective. He’s watching Ralph on behalf of someone else with a grievance. OK, let’s assume that Ralph is on the run from someone or something in his previous life. If that was true, then that’s exactly what she needed as a lever to prise him out of her life. Next time she saw the blond guy she’d go up to him and say, Hi, my name’s Janet. Have you got anything on Ralph that I can use? Just lay it on him like that. See what happened.
But the next day the blond guy wasn’t around. She kept her eyes skinned for someone else, the blond guy’s replacement or partner, but didn’t find anyone obvious. It was a cold day and Ralph got himself settled in the bar of the Lowther on King’s Staith. Janet had Echo with her, in the pram; she hung around for half an hour and felt her feet go numb and then decided to call it a day and go home.
His room was a tip. There was a Gustav Klimt poster on the wall, Garden with Sunflowers, which she’d put up the day he arrived, but it was the only bright thing in there. His clothes, shoes, dirty socks and underwear were all mixed together on the floor. Not an inch of carpet showed itself. Janet had put a waste bin in the room but he hadn’t used it. Instead he had three or four plastic carriers filled to the brim and overflowing with cigarette packets, betting slips, racing papers, sweet and chocolate wrappers, old envelopes and bits and pieces of household items that he’d systematically taken apart. The drawers in the chest were almost empty. A pair of jeans in one and a jacket with holes in the elbows in another. The top left drawer was locked and there was no key. There was an alarm clock that Janet had had in her flat, before she met Geordie, but it was now separated into its component parts. Several pens, similarly broken, the casings split apart and abandoned. There were a couple of patterned mugs in there as well, both stuffed with decaying food, apple cores and the remains of a sandwich, might once have been Coronation chicken. The mugs Janet had bought in the market only a fortnight ago. Another two carrier bags contained hardcore porn mags, stuff you couldn’t ignore: a magazine called Cum Shots, and another one which promised Black Hard-fucking Amateur Babes.
There was nothing else in there. No birth certificate, no National Insurance card, not even a letter from the taxman. There were no personal photographs. The poverty was so overwhelming that Janet sank down on her knees in the entrance to the room. Nobody lived in this room. Mr Nobody.
She took the two mugs - green-and-yellow abstract design with a chain of daisies on the inside - downstairs and emptied the decaying food into the dustbin. She washed the mugs and left them on the draining board.
There was a time when Geordie could have gone the same way as Ralph. There was a time when Janet might have taken the same path. She’d even begun on it: regular shopli
fting trips and a casual relationship with prostitution. The only thing that made the difference was that she’d found Geordie and he’d found her. There’d been Sam as well, of course, and Celia, the small handful of people who had seen the best in them rather than the worst. All of those things were missing in Ralph’s life. He didn’t only have nothing; he had no one.
But, apart from Geordie, who would offer him love? He was so damaged that he couldn’t recognize value. He saw love as a form of weakness, something to be exploited. The closest he got to it was in his Euroslut mags.
Janet wondered if she should go softer on him. Take a back seat and let Geordie’s brotherly affection and concern do its work. She could cook and clean and do the washing and be an all-round toe-rag in the house.
Could she?
Yes, she could, and she’d do it too if she thought that it would make a difference. But all that would happen was that Geordie would slowly be disillusioned and she and Echo would be exploited. Ralph would gain more power out of the situation than any of them could handle. And he’d abuse it; he’d abuse it on a daily basis.
Is there anything I can do? she asked herself. Are there any actions available to me that will bring this whole thing to an end? She sat down at the table and put her head in her hands and thought hard.
There were a number of things, of course. But there was not one single thing that Janet could think of that wouldn’t involve a series of risks to her family. Risks that, on balance, she was not prepared to take. She didn’t believe she had the authority to take those risks without consulting Geordie. And that was out of the question.
After mulling it over for forty minutes she was left with one option. One thing she could do, and it didn’t really amount to much. She could clean his room.
She took everything out of there and left it in piles in the hall. She hoovered the room and went to work on a couple of coffee stains with carpet shampoo. Next she tried to decide which of his clothes were clean. She made two piles, taking one of them downstairs to the washing basket and folding the others neatly and placing them in drawers and on shelves. The skin mags she left in their plastic bags and put them under his bed.
When everything was done she looked at the room. She hadn’t touched the bed, for reasons she didn’t want to think about. But it was crazy to leave everything else clean. She stripped the cover off the duvet and picked up the pillow. A pair of scissors was there: green plastic handles, exactly like the ones in her sewing basket. She took them downstairs and checked. Yes, they were hers. She returned to Ralph’s room, thankful that she had found them in time. Another day and he’d have taken them apart.
Janet changed the sheet and the pillowcase and realized what was missing. She brought up a vase of dried flowers from the kitchen and set it on the dressing table. Pleased with herself now, for having thought of the extra thing. The thing that makes the difference. She wasn’t doing it for Ralph, she was doing it for Janet.
She stood at the door and smiled when she saw what she’d done. It looked really pleasant in there, a nice place to be. She took a step back and was about to leave and close the door when she changed her mind.
She took three steps forward, towards the bed. She lifted the top corner of the mattress and saw the roll of Sellotape. She hadn’t known or consciously thought that she would find anything at all. It was as if some invisible force had drawn her there. She lifted the mattress a little higher and withdrew the magazine.
It was called Loaded, and when she flicked through it several pages had had sections cut out of them. The cutout sections were not of naked women, which is what one would have expected of Ralph. They were cut-out sections of text.
43
Ralph had seen the redhead and done nothing about it. Nearly nothing. He’d given her a look down the length of the bar. Then he’d ordered a pint and waited.
Fourth bar, fifth lager. He’d had two in the Lowther, one in the King’s Arms, another in the Robin Hood, and now this one. Posh pub, but every place had its barflies. She came over when he’d taken the top off his pint. Tight little ass and a short leopard-skin coat with smooth hair on it like a real cat.
‘Got a light?’
One of those extra-longs hanging from her bottom lip. He flicked his lighter and lit up her face. The tiny cracks in her rouged lips caught his eye, the elasticity as she rearranged the cigarette between them. She sucked in and the flame bent towards her, her eyelids fluttered and she held his gaze for a moment before blowing out the smoke and enshrouding them both in a halo of sweet nicotine.
‘Ta,’ she said, pulling out the vowel, holding his eyes.
‘What you called?’ he asked.
‘Ramona.’
‘You on your own?’
She nodded. ‘Want some company?’
He asked her how much it was going to cost and she reeled off a price list. Ralph didn’t take it in, having no intention of paying. He liked the look of the goods, though. ‘Sounds about right,’ he said.
‘I don’t do rough stuff,’ she told him. ‘If you want that, I’ve got a friend.’
‘No. You’ll do nicely.’
He went with her to a flat in Walmgate, feeling good all the way. She linked her arm in his and laughed at his jokes. Ralph was into simple pleasures; it didn’t take a lot to make him happy. If the day was going well, that suited him fine. And today was running on schedule.
He could imagine this tart was Janet. About the same size, tight little body and good legs. He’d have to ignore the red hair, the Birmingham accent. Close his eyes, filter out the bits he didn’t want, filter in the fantasy.
‘The cash up front,’ she said.
Ralph laughed. He took her forcibly on the narrow divan. When he pinned her arms behind her back she began to protest but he gave her the look and she shut it. When he’d finished he was still hard and he flipped her over on to her face and went in the other way.
‘I don’t do that,’ she said, twisting her head around, trying to wriggle away from him. Ralph put the pillow over her head and pushed down with both hands, thrusting with his hips.
‘Jesus, Janet,’ he said as he juddered to a climax, his back arched like a performing seal.
‘You bastard,’ said Ramona, emerging from under the pillow. Her make-up was streaked and her hair and face were dripping with sweat. ‘You could’ve suffocated me.’
‘I still might,’ he said, pulling himself out of her and rolling over on to his back. ‘If you don’t keep quiet.’
‘You owe me,’ she said.
Ralph ignored her, reached for his jacket and lit up a fag.
Ramona got to her feet and went through to the bathroom. He put one arm behind his head and smoked and listened to the shower cascading against the tiles. Why pay? he thought. What’s she gonna do about it?
He stubbed out the cigarette and dressed. He was stepping out of the room when Ramona came back. ‘Where’s my money?’ she said.
Ralph smiled, showing the gap where his teeth used to be. ‘Sue me,’ he said. He stepped through the door and closed it behind him. He walked down the short staircase, the smile in place, glad the day was still working for him.
When he reached the front door it was locked. He turned quickly, sensing something behind him, and was faced by two men. The first was small with narrow eyes and carefully coiffed dark hair, couldn’t have been more than twenty years old and around fifty kilos. No problemo. But the other one was different. He wore a double-breasted striped suit that could only have been bought at High & Mighty. He had lost all the hair off the top of his head and was left with a cropped border like a monk. There was nothing pious about him, his main feature being a scar of tissue where he must once have had an eye. He had a cricket bat cradled in his arms, but he didn’t look the sporting type.
There was a movement at the top of the stairs and they all looked up at Ramona as she came to the banister. She wore a black silk slip and fluffy mules on her feet.
‘How was it, babe?’
the little guy asked.
‘He doesn’t wanna pay,’ she said. ‘And he fucking hurt me.’
‘No problem,’ Ralph said, pulling his wallet from his back pocket. ‘Nothing we can’t sort out, fellers.’ He tried to smile but his top lip seemed to have a mind of its own and he couldn’t get it lined up.
The young guy plucked the wallet out of his hand and threw it into a corner of the hall, then the two of them rushed him. He saw the cricket bat coming for the side of his head and ducked, but while he was going down he realized he’d misjudged. It caught him on the ear and the jaw at the same time and he went deaf and watched an arc of blood explode and leave his body. Perfect really, he thought, as he rolled over on to his back. Just one blow and all the fight was knocked out of him.
They frisked him, found the twenty in the top pocket of his jacket and another one in his shoe. He watched everything they did. He couldn’t move; if they’d started to eat him he wouldn’t have been able to fight. He was nauseous and a riff from a song kept going through his head, maybe it was a hymn or a carol, something about a blackbird.
They took his feet and dragged him through to a backyard. The one with the cricket bat spat on the concrete and looked up at the sky. Ralph thought he must’ve been built by the same firm that did Stonehenge. Didn’t tell him, though; no point upsetting the guy.
Ralph must’ve passed out for a while, then, because when he opened his eyes he wasn’t in the backyard any more. He was in a long alleyway on his knees. The little guy had said something and the big one-eyed one was walking away, the bat swinging easily by his side. ‘Just don’t kill him,’ he said.
Which was good news, the best Ralph had heard all day.
The little guy kicked him, must’ve been twenty times. A rib went, and something in his back but he couldn’t help feeling glad it wasn’t the big guy doing the kicking. A boot in the ear sent his consciousness reeling and when he came back to his senses he was alone, shivering with cold. He crawled out of the alley and over the pavement to the kerb.