by Ted Lewis
“Fourness Road,” I say to Con. “Just off the North Circular.”
Con pulls away and makes for Oxford Street. The shops are bright with Christmas lights and as I look at the gawpers staring in the windows I wonder where they all come from at this time in the morning, why they’re not all at work or looking after the kids.
“What you getting me for Christmas, Jack?” Con says.
“Jimmy Swann’s bollocks.”
“That’s nice. I’ll have them made up into cuff links.”
“Here, Jack,” says Charlie. “Leave it out, will you?”
“Would you rather I gave him yours?”
Charlie doesn’t say anything.
“Well, then.”
Con goes round Marble Arch and up the Edgware Road. The gray sky seems to get grayer the closer we get to
Kilburn. Then eventually we reach the North Circular and drive past the unlovely changing face of London until we get to Charlie’s mother’s district. It’s all petrol stations and light-engineering and cut-price furniture shops and mean tarted-up boozers. The daylight seems to be the same colour as the surface of the road. A Wimpy sign or a Tesco’s occasionally stabs out into the different shades of dirty gray but their colours only emphasise the flatness of the depressing streets.
“You want to turn left into Fourness Road,” Charlie tells Con. “It’s past the Blue Star, just before the fly-over.”
Con goes past the garage and turns in to the road that Charlie’s pointed out. One side of the road is a row of small bay-windowed Edwardian houses, the other side is a flat waste ground of grass supposed to be some kind of leisure area that stretches away to the fly-over and the factories beyond. Directly opposite the houses there are some swings and roundabouts, right on the edge of the wasteland, but there are no kids playing on them.
“She lives at the end house,” Charlie says. “Next to the stocking factory.”
“Stop a few houses away,” I tell Con.
Con does as he’s told. We all sit there in silence for a minute or two staring through the windscreen at the house where Charlie’s mother lives.
“I’m going to talk to Charlie’s mother now,” I say to Con. “When I get out drive down to the corner and get Charlie to show you the way round the block and then drive past here every five minutes. All right?”
Con nods.
Charlie says, “Jack, my old lady . . . ”
“Don’t worry, Charlie. I’ve got a mother myself, you know.”
Con grins and I get out of the car and the car slides away.
I walk down to the corner house. It has a narrow front garden bounded by a low brick wall and a gate with peeling green paint and only half the house number on it. There is a small recessed porch and in the porch there is a dustbin so full that the lid is at forty-five degrees to the bin. At the side of the house there is a high trelliswork gate.
I stand in the porch and peer through the coloured diamonds of glass in the front door but there are no signs of life. I push open the front gate and go to the trelliswork and lift the latch and walk round to the back of the house. The garden is completely flag-stoned over and is covered with old cardboard boxes full of rubbish and there are a couple of rotting carry-cots and a rusty bicycle frame just to set everything off. At the end of all this garbage there is a six-foot-high slatted fence and beyond the fence an extension of the stocking factory cuts out any light that might illuminate the beauty of the back yard.
I take hold of the back-door handle and turn it very slowly. I push inwards and I find that the door opens into a small kitchen. The kitchen is empty so I slip inside and close the door as quietly as I opened it.
The kitchen sink is full of last week’s teacups. There is an alloy kitchen cabinet with the cupboard doors wide open revealing shelves that are empty except for half of a sliced loaf. The kitchen table is about three foot square and littered with crumbs. I squeeze between the table and the sink. The door that leads out of the kitchen is slightly ajar and I push it gently and find I am looking into the hall, and in the hall, bathed in the dusty light that is falling from the frosted panel in the front door, there are a couple of suitcases, all packed and ready to go.
To the left of the hall there is another open door and from behind this door are coming the faint sounds of Radio 1. I cross the hall and stand outside the door and listen but I can still only hear the sounds of Radio 1. So very slowly and very carefully I maneuver myself into a position where I can look into the room. The angle of my view takes in a pale green fireplace with a mirror above it and standing in front of the fireplace, putting on her make-up, is who I take to be Mrs. Abbott. With one hand she is wielding her lipstick, with the other she is holding a cigarette. She has bright red hair and her lips are redder and brighter and she is wearing a chiffon polka-dot head scarf over her rollers and the head scarf doesn’t exactly go with her leopard-skin patterned coat. Altogether quite a bright little ensemble for someone in her early sixties. I can see from the reflection in the mirror that there is no one else in the room so I give the door a gentle shove and make my entrance.
Mrs. Abbott drops her lipstick and shrieks and whirls round and begins to back away from me but there is only so far she can go and when she reaches the sofa that is pushed up against the wall beneath the window the seat causes her legs to buckle and she sits down with a thump that makes the dust fly up into the gray light that is filtering through the window.
In a cage in the corner a myna bird says, “Suit your bleeding self, then.”
“Morning, Mrs. Abbott,” I say.
Mrs. Abbott sits there with her mouth open. She’s still holding her cigarette and a piece of ash falls to the carpet.
“I was wondering if you could help me?” I say to her, but she still doesn’t move and she still doesn’t say anything, so I walk over to the settee. She has a mild convulsion and this time she drops the whole of her cigarette. I bend down and pick it up and sit down beside her on the settee and stick the cigarette back between her fingers. She keeps her eyes on my face all the time.
“I noticed your suitcases as I came in,” I tell her. “Off on your holidays are you?”
She still doesn’t answer.
“Look, you know why I’m here,” I say. “What I want to tell you is this. If you let me know where you were about to go with those suitcases then I promise you, I promise, understand, that nothing’ll happen to you or to Jean or the kids or even to Charlie. I can guarantee that because it makes no odds to us what happens to the rest of the family because there’d be nothing in it for you to talk to the law in Jimmy’s place. Your family’d know better than to do that twice, wouldn’t they?”
She nods.
“So,” I say. “What about it? What about telling me where Jimmy is?”
She just keeps on staring at me. The cigarette is about to burn her fingers so I take it out of her hand and stand up and throw the filter tip into the fireplace, then I turn to face her again. The radio on the mantelpiece is beginning to get to my nerves so I reach out and switch it off. The room buzzes with silence and gradually the sound of a jet passing overhead burbles its way into the room.
“Now look, Mrs. Abbott,” I say, about to tell her that I’ve got Charlie outside, but a voice behind me stops me
doing that.
The voice behind me says, “No, you look, you mug.”
I close my eyes. I don’t have to look. I know by the tone that the voice is carrying the kind of reason I’m not prepared to argue with.
Mrs. Abbott is still frozen to the settee.
Another voice says, “Get down on your knees, mug.”
As I’m in the process of getting down to my knees the irrelevant thought enters my mind that both voices have Geordie accents. Then there are a couple of soft footsteps and I feel the icy touch of double barrels at the base of my skull and my mind no longe
r has any room for irrelevant thoughts.
There is a low laugh and the second voice says, “Jack Carter. Fucking great. Just fucking great.”
“Bleedin’ marvelous,” says the myna bird.
For the first time Mrs. Abbott speaks and at first it’s hard to tell the difference between her and the fucking bird.
“What are you going to do?” she says.
There is still no answer from behind me.
“You can’t do it here,” says Mrs. Abbott. “Not in my house.”
“Don’t worry, Ma,” says the second voice. “Keep your bloomers on.”
Whatever they’re going to do they’re taking their sodding time because there are a couple more minutes of silence before Number Two speaks again.
“Ma,” he says, “lean forward and feel in his pockets and take out what he’s carrying.”
Mrs. Abbott leans forward and dives her hand into my inside pocket and I can smell her dry smoky breath mixed in with her face powder. Her fingers close round the shooter and she yanks it out and throws it to the far end of the settee. Then she spits in my face.
“Filth,” she says. “Shit. Bleeding shit.”
There is more low laughter from behind me. I shake my head but it doesn’t speed up the passage of the spit as it slides down my face. And I know better than to feel for my handkerchief.
Whoever isn’t holding the shotgun steps past me and picks up my shooter and holds it in his hands and looks at it.
“Jack Carter’s shooter,” he says. “Beautiful. Something to tell the kids about. That is, if I ever have any.”
“You won’t,” I tell him.
He sits down on the edge of the settee, next to Mrs. Abbott, and for the first time I got a proper look at him.
He has a blond crew cut and the skin around his mouth is covered in eczema. He is wearing a white Shetland polo-neck sweater and a pale gray gabardine suit that is as out of fashion as his haircut. He smiles at me and the colour of his teeth does nothing to brighten up the dimness of the room. Then he balances my shooter in the palm of his hand and with it he smacks me on the side of my face so that I have to roll with the blow and to steady myself I find I have put my hand among the cigarette ends that are littering the grate. I straighten up again and dust my hand on the lapel of my coat and then the shotgun is digging into the skin of my neck again.
“Like it always turns out,” says the yob on the settee. “You’re nothing. All you clever bastards. You always turn out to be nothing.”
Mrs. Abbott stands up and squeezes by me.
“Well, come on,” she says. “We’ve got to get moving. You were late as it is. Any bleeding later and you needn’t have bothered coming at all.”
“Shut it,” says the yob, and Mrs. Abbott does as she’s told. The yob looks up at his partner and the pressure of the shotgun is relieved. The yob points my shooter at me.
“Get up,” he says.
I get up.
“Go and wait by the front door,” the yob says to his partner. I watch the partner go out of the room. He’s about twenty-five and wearing a Levi denim suit. He carries the beautiful short-barreled brand-new shotgun as though it’s his favourite childhood toy.
“You go and get in the car,” the yob with the crew cut says to Mrs. Abbott, “but before you go you can pass me that little instrument that lies there by the wall.”
Charlie’s mother picks up a second shotgun and hands it over to the yob, but instead of putting my shooter in his pocket he still continues to point it at me, just crooking the shotgun in his other arm. Mrs. Abbott goes out into the hall.
The yob smiles at me and says, “Move it, you poor mug.”
I go out into the hall. The denim yob is standing by the front door, pointing his shotgun at me. Mrs. Abbott has a suitcase in one hand and she is turning the front-door handle. She opens the door, revealing a beautifully framed composition with the fly-over in the background, the swings in the middle distance, and in the immediate foreground Con in the process of opening the front gate, his dark leather coat standing out sharply against the yellowness of the Scimitar and the grayness of the background.
Mrs. Abbott shrieks and tries to close the front door but the denim yob pushes her out of the way, causing her to trip over her suitcase and fall to the floor. Beyond this activity I see Con start to drop down behind the gate and Charlie open the nearside door of the Scimitar. At the same time I take into account that I am clear from the yob behind me because although his shotgun is poking through the door he has yet to emerge into the hall. I also take into account that the denim yob is moving his elbow to prime the shotgun.
All these events take place at the same time but the events that follow seem to happen even faster, like speeded-up concurrent images on a split screen.
Con produces his shooter and fires from between the decorative rails of the top half of the gate. The yob pumps his shotgun at the gate but before the shotgun goes off two of Con’s bullets have taken him in the stomach, causing the shotgun barrels to be lifted slightly so that they’re pointing in the general direction of the Scimitar and Charlie. Charlie, who sees what is about to come his way, screams and can’t make up his mind whether to throw himself to the ground or scramble back into the Scimitar and ends up doing a fair impression of a seven-man acrobatic troupe who’ve just all run into each other. The shotgun blasts off and Charlie is taken in the chest and is spun round so that he falls face down on the bonnet. Mrs. Abbott begins a series of long shrieks and tries to get up off her back but her progress is impeded by the slow sliding fall of the denim yob who now, instead of clutching his shotgun, is clutching his stomach and asking Christ to help him in his moment of need. And in my part of the hall, I have nowhere to go and no choice but to turn and try to change my own situation without suffering some permanent alteration. But I am fortunate in that the yob at my back has decided to back out of range of anything that might be flying in his direction and he’s slammed the door just to make doubly certain. So now my choice is easy and I rush down the hall and shout to Con to go round the back and then bend over the dying yob and find some more shells in his denim pockets and restock the shotgun and while I’m doing that I catch a view of Charlie levering himself up off the bonnet like an unfit man doing push-ups for the first time, and Charlie’s mother, now on her feet, running towards the gate as if she’s trying to catch the last bus. Then I go down the hall and open the kitchen door and then the back door so that I have a clear view of the yard, then I go back to the door that the yob slammed behind him and I shout through it, “You’re going nowhere. Come out and at least you’ll stay alive.”
There is silence for a minute or two. I see Con as he appears in the back yard and I indicate to him that there is the heavy in the room and so Con moves back out of sight to take up a position. Then I hear the small sound of the window catch being lifted. I wait a moment and then I hear the springs of the settee as the yob prepares to make his exit so I barge through the door and brace myself, the shotgun pointing at the window. The yob has one foot on the settee and one foot on the windowsill.
“Don’t go outside,” I say to him. “It’s raining.” But he’s no intention of taking any notice of me and immediately I speak, his rabbit panic sets him scrambling to get the shotgun into a firing position. I give him as long as I possibly can before the point is reached where it is either me that fires or it is him and in the end, of course, it has to be me. The yob and the window explode outwards into the damp air and I swear and drop the shotgun and go over to the window and look out to see the yob draped over the now overturned carry-cot with Con appearing from behind the corner to inspect the damage. I tell Con to pick up my shooter and I run back through the house to try and at least salvage something from the whole bloody mess.
By the time I get to the front door Charlie is no longer hanging on the bonnet of the Scimitar. His mother has dr
aped his arm round her neck and she is supporting him as they stagger across the wasteland towards the swings and the roundabouts. The street is no longer deserted. Mrs. Abbott’s neighbors are filling the front gardens. I run down the garden and through the gate and as I pass the Scimitar I notice that Charlie’s glasses are still on the bonnet of the car, face down, having slid off Charlie’s bowed head. I run across the road and call for them to stop but they continue struggling on but by the time they get to the swings the effort is finally too great and Mrs. Abbott staggers under Charlie’s weight but manages to avoid a complete collapse by grasping a chain on one of the swings and swaying the seat underneath Charlie so that it stops his progress to the floor. When I get up to them I realise the damage to Charlie isn’t as bad as it might have been. It’s his shoulder and chest on his right-hand side. He must have missed copping the main body of the blast and while his right arm won’t be much good for darts any more at least he’ll live. So I lift Charlie off the swing but as I begin to lift him I get Mrs. Abbott swiping and kicking and hanging on to me while I’m trying to get Charlie across my shoulders in a fireman’s lift. My arms aren’t free for me either to give her one or to steady myself so I find myself overbalancing back on to the swing. But matters are helped by the fact that Con has made his way to the scene and he pulls Mrs. Abbott away from Charlie and me and the four of us make our way back to the cars, me carrying Charlie and Con dragging Mrs. Abbott behind him. The audience is still filling the front gardens although no one is prepared to become part of the cast, but in the background there is the sound of the law about to crash the scene.
The yobs’ car is parked in front of Con’s and as we get to both cars I say, “You take yours and I’ll take these two in the other. And get well rid.”
“Don’t macaroni,” says Con. “You don’t think the fucking registration’s straight, do you?”
I don’t answer because the way the last twenty-four hours has gone a straight registration would almost be a matter of course.
Instead I say, “I’ll see you at the Garage.”