Manners
Robert Newman
© Robert Newman 1998
Robert Newman has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1998 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd.
This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Book One
Beat Surrender
Vigil
Return To The Flightpath Estate
Stay Free
The Birthday Suit
Melt
Beverley's New Curtains
A Dead Man
Rave
Kieran's House
Country House
Saint Beverley's Day
Zero Tolerance In King's Cross
End Of Vigil
Book Two
Distress Restrictions
The Doorman
London Damage Control
Scanner
UltraViolet Mackenzie
The Same Force
Never Walk Alone
Control
In A Field Of Retired Police Horses
Drifter
A Leave-Taking
Boxer Beat
New Dawn Fades
Magnet
Peeled
Remote
Uncouth Behaviour
Him Or Me
The Day The World Turned Sad
Another Kind Of Section House
Gutted
Lying In A Stone Cattle Trough
Last Tour Of Duty
Book One
We were not meant to stand alone. We need to belong — to something or someone … Duty and conscience have no meaning if there is no sense of commitment to others, and others to us. 'Think of a person,' said Rawls, 'without any sense of justice. He would be without any ties of affection, friendship or mutual trust … He would be less than human.' The interesting question is, then, not why some of us are criminals, but why more of us are not, in a world where so many of the connections which underlie that sense of justice are being broken down.
The workplace has been the central community in the lives of many in this century … That 'many,' however, is now less than a third of all adults. The organizational society removed from many of us the need to belong to anywhere other than our workplace. As a result, when we leave it we have nowhere.
The Empty Raincoat — Charles Handy *
Even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life, and to recognize the presence of those great, elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilization, like untamed beasts in a cage.
Sherlock Holmes and the Five Orange Pips — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
And is evil just something you are? Or something you do?
'Sister, I'm a Poet,' Morrissey
Beat Surrender
I go over it again and again but it keeps coming out the same. Lee Andrew is still there at the end.
One a.m. Three hours ago it was just another late, an ordinary home beat on the Holloway Road, Kyle Trevorrow and two others tidily skipping a low wall out the park.
'Got any sharps?' I ask, running the quilted lining of his coat through both palms.
'No.'
'What were you doing in the park?' I smile.
'Short cut,' Kyle replies. Front pockets, back pockets. Kyle Trevorrow is just a scally — ten-bob deals of wiz and puff, boosting car-stezzies, Taking and Driving Away. A very different order from Lee Andrew.
'Where you going now?' I ask, stepping back.
'Party,' says Kyle.
'Eh?'
'A party.'
'Where's that?'
'We're just gonna find out now.'
'Yeah?'
'Yeah,' he says.
'OK.'
The three black kids walk away. Then I'm … then I'm back at the nick. (There's ten minutes I can't remember here but I'm confident no one died.) Go up to the canteen for 'lunch' at ten p.m. The happy van (Territorial Support Group) are in. I nod to a couple of them and sit on my own eavesdropping, hoping to hear cretinisms to tell Kieran when he gets back. We collect playbus sayings and repeat them to each other like they were profound philosophies. Each quotation is always appended with the phrase 'Cuppa tea? Cuppa tea?' (To be said in an Arthur Mullard voice.) Tonight I glean a classic which I can't wait to share with Kieran when he comes back from his course: 'Nah, the reason I shouted out "Balls of Steel" wasn't just 'cos I was excited — it's 'cos it's the name of the new AC/DC album.'
Excellent!
(The zenith of me and Kieran's running gag was one home beat when we saw a Royal Variety Sunshine Coach stopped at the lights on the Seven Sisters Road. I was looking at the cerebral palsy adolescents helplessly gurning out the window when Kieran supplied the subtitles: 'Everyone else in the division is jealous of us. Cuppa tea?' Unforgiveable of course, but pissed myself all the same.) I enjoy a very pleasing beef and onion pie, a bag of crisps and a coffee, but the mention of AC/DC reminds me of a small thing that's been niggling away at my mind all evening. Walking past a clothes shop earlier on I heard 'Geno' playing, but ever since I cannot for the life of me think what the name of the lead singer was. Can't leave it alone either like a loose tooth. I picture his face, I picture the Lyceum gig — all trombones and leather box-jackets. I try running sentences like 'When Celtic Soul Brothers was released Dexy's Midnight Runners' frontman [blank, blank] said that — '. But it's no good. I've had a complete brainstorm, forgotten one of those things you think you'll never forget. Next it'll be Joe Strummer that goes out the fucking window! And then where will I be? Or rather who will I be? Will I have forgotten John Lydon's name by the time I die?
'Look out arteries!' says Mickey, setting a white paper plate bearing an uncompromising Cornish pasty down on the table. 'Hi, sir.'
Mickey, the duty inspector, sits down opposite. His blue uniform jumper is stretched tight over fatherly pot-belly. I roll up the sleeves of my jumper to cover the holes at the elbow. I put in an order for a new black V-neck six months ago when this one started falling apart. But there's people been waiting over a year for body-armour and radiopacks and handcuffs that lock. If people are still waiting on radios then jumpers is, is … Mickey's thick black belt has all sorts of shit on it. I'm tempted to have him relieve me of my Dexy's conundrum, but guess he wouldn't know, him being late forties or whatever he is with his pointy brown beard with flint-chips of grey. Is it Kevin something? Kevin …
'Going out on your own?' he asks. Even Mickey lowers his voice when the playbus are in the canteen. We all do. I think this is because when they go quiet — to concentrate on digestion, say — you're worried that to them your conversation sounds like: 'Ooh, when I saw the Issey Miyake winter collection I almost dropped my slice of Battenburg.'
'Just till Kieran gets back from his course, sir. Probably.'
'Why's that?'
'I don't know. I think the sight of an officer on his own at night reassures the public. I mean, if they see you and there's always two of you and you're always in a car and … '
'Yeah, yeah — but that's not the reason though.'
'I don't know … In the day I'll go out with someone, it's just at night.'
'Ah, macho.'
'No.'
'No?'
'No.' I don't want to tell Mickey that I feel more alert and switched on alone at night because you don't want to give the impression that you're not a team player. And the truth is I do like the collaborative side sometimes. But at night I've felt that the other officer gets in the way of something (Kieran exempted when we're both on a late). I am, however, bothered by the fact that I don't really have an answer.
'Where was this, sir?'
'Bow. I was on me tod on about me first night and, er — ' Mickey stops. His radio pack stands upright on the table and he turns up the dial to listen to something. There's such a frequency about this in canteen talk that no one ever says 'excuse me' or 'one moment'. You just gently fade out of the conversation like you were listening to a little portable conscience. It not needing his attention right here and now he turns the volume back down low and meets my eyes once more. 'And it was me first ever night beat and I get in a fight with the local head-villain. I seen a crowd all gathered round, so I think, "Ooh, I better have a look here," an' this guy was heatin' up a black man with an iron bar, I stepped in and he turns on me, I dropped him and 'cos he was the big boss I got quite a lot of respect from the local faces arter that.'
'I think I'm hoping to impress them with my sprinting speed.'
'Good idea.' He hears something, turns up the radio again, thinks about it, turns it down on low again.
'Is it all right if I don't wear my Gelex, sir?' I ask. 'I wanna obbo the robbers in Miranda Park.'
'It mus' be Thursday.'
'Yeah,' I laugh.
Thursdays all the Irish lads off the building-sites get paid. One or two car-teams in the area like to watch and wait across from the Archway Tavern to see who's going home scuppered, alone or both. They roll them in a choice of the same two or three tight spots. Everyone's been ordered to wear the bright yellow Gelex since the 'RA's last big bang, the idea being to reassure the public with a visible police presence. But the dayglo yellow makes it impossible to keep a low-profile watch on those who watch and wait. With your normal dark uniform you can get right up on someone before they see you.
'No, sorry, John. Oh, and I forgot to tell yer, Kieran's not on a course. He's moved to another division 'cos he hates yer.'
'No, he's in love with me but he's trying to fight it. He's terrified by the strength of his own emotions.'
'He's transferred to the Shetlands.'
'Actually he's gone to sort out his drug problem, sir, but he didn't want you to know.'
'Thanks for telling me,' he says, getting up.
'I was just gonna take it off when I got there, sir, only when I'm actually in the park. So, you know, I'll still be reassuring the public and that.'
'You ain't very reassuring the best of times,' he chuckles. 'Keep it on!'
'All right, sir. See yer.'
'Yeah, ta-ta,' he goes, with his back already to me.
It would've been so easy for it not to have happened. How easily Mickey might have said, 'Well, you can forget to put your Gelex on.' Then I'd have been standing in a shop doorway in sight of the Archway Tavern, instead of where I was.
He walks out the canteen and I go over to the vending machine for a Twix. The women in the TSG are all hard-faced blondes. They're pretty scary as well. One of the women, a sort, too, smiles up at me, perhaps longing for intelligent company after her years in the armoured van among the riot squad, but then again she may just be staring me out. Suppose I'd chatted with her? Killed a few seconds, minutes? Then I wouldn't have been exactly where I was, when I was; the tiniest movements of the nerve-endings in my arm would have been different; perhaps I would have taken a left turn rather than a right and never seen Lee Andrew's van, and then, and then. 'Hello, I'm John,' I might have said to her, or 'Busy night with you?' or 'Hello. My name's John.' But I don't talk to her. I go for a bifta.
Contrary to the fags-and-black-coffee cliché, I'm about the only smoker in the division. The canteen's No Smoking so I have to go and stand in the little room with arcade games — NBA Basketball, Space Invaders — and puff away, looking at everyone else through mesh-glass like I'm in a decompression chamber. I screw the butt down into the burnt, tinfoil ashtray where it lies next to my bifta of an hour ago when I was just starting my innocent late.
There's two flights of steps going down to the cells. If only I'd slipped on the cell steps and broken my collarbone. (But the TSG were having their tea-break.) If I'd broken my collarbone on the steps then I'd still be a good man. But instead the night carries on with vicious precision accurate to a millionth of a second.
Outside the dungeons, squatting against the wall, Big Stuart looks up: 'Ten minutes it took us from there to there,' he says, raising a hand off his knee to point out a ten-yard stretch of corridor. His shirt is torn at the shoulder and he holds an epaulette in his hand.
I peek in the cell. A wizened man about forty with a wire-wool beard and wearing a flea-bitten parka. Bald except for long, crazy wisps of grey hair below the hat-line and a peaked sore on the top of his grimy dome. Alone in his new cell he acts out slow-motion replays of punches he's thrown, gurgling in glory. Clocking me he stops, lifts his chin and waves me away like a lord: 'Move along, it's all over, move along, nothing to see here, nothing to see.' Then mutters, 'You missed it mate, heh-heh. You missed it.'
When I turn back Big Stuart's waiting with a see-what-I'm-up-against face. 'I tell yer,' he says, 'it's true what they say about nutters having superhuman strength!'
Let me stop this time and ask him what the nutter's in for. Let me stop and stand still for no reason and have Stuart look at me a bit strangely.
Out in the car park I walk through night drizzle on to the street, putting my hand up my jacket sleeve to roll down the arms of my jumper. For the next half-hour I prowl all the back-doubles. In an alley off Central Road I notice Lee and Tony Andrew's Repairs and Alterations Toyota Hi-Ace parked up. Lee Andrew. Tony Andrew. Andrews? Andrew. Lee and Tony Andrew and four other slags walked into an electrical repair shop and raped the sixteen-year-old Indian girl who'd been left in charge while her parents were out to lunch. Knew who they were, too scared to say. A shining, Kieran said. A shining he told me then is when your new gang member bloods himself by organizing a gang-rape for the others. 'And', he added, 'the Andrews are expanding their slagbase.' Central Road. Check my watch and file and store. I cut through the Derwent Estate and up a side-street, remembering more about the Andrews.
Another time, they waited in a van and abducted two girls walking back from a gig. The Andrew brothers and team drove them half a mile, then broke into an office-furniture warehouse where the attack took place. If I keep following the side-streets I should come out by that road that leads to St John's Road.
The girls positively identified Lee Andrew right down to the blue bug-eyes and light-brown hair, and got his nose exactly on the E-fit. They even picked out his picture from the North London Slag Directory despite the fact that he's got long hair in the photo. But the girls were too scared to go to court. Once they checked out of the rape-suite they were never coming back, I was told, not for all the tea and Chocolate Hob-Nobs in China. I cross Drayton Park. Cut through the Holloway Estate, over a little bank of grass and on to Massie Street. Hear something on my PR and turn it up: 'Sexual assault, Ley's Leisure Centre, six suspects ICIS. On foot going north at the end of Central Road … '
'Can you tell us where there's a minicab office around here, please?' asks the girl in the red and black stripy tights and a bobbly white synthetic-wool coat. I give her the international hand gesture for 'Shut up a second,' press my ear to the radio. Crackle and static. I point towards the minicab office. Control repeats the same message only this time adding, ' … mid-to late twenties … My mind is already racing and not until I've run two blocks do I realize that I've sent her the wrong way. 'Fucking pig.
'
Central Road, Lee and Tony Andrew's van. ICI: white males, mid-to late twenties. You could get six in that van. Helpless pinned woman. Scarved-up cheers. A tin-can taste from the sump of burnt lungs slows me to a trot. I push-button the PR and ask Control for details of the victim.
'She's the aerobics teacher working at the gym and it appears the assault took place in the, er, ladies' changing-room.'
Oh no. The place where she felt most confident, compromise of shiny-clothes and sweat and making yourself pretty. The forever association of sweatiness with this … Was it broken up before — Shut up! — Sick pulse pounding too much at the thought of it to think clearly … Think clearly. If this is Lee Andrew he'll go home, get changed and go out again (why, the night is young!). So. OK. Right now we are both in the same night air. Fibres from the aerobic teachers lycra still speckle him like dandruff in a warehouse party's ultraviolet. If I can take him prisoner now … if I can head him off …
'Control? Me again. What end of Central Road's that? Do you mean the Farringdon Road end or the other one?'
'The top.'
'Do you mean the top as in the north or the top of the hill?'
'The top of the hill, I think.'
What will Andrew's rat-run be? No longer heading for Central Road now, I thread an alley, grapple up a creosote fence into a builder's yard. Hopping and jumping across spotlit log-piles and loud plank stacks I glimpse a sudden canyon, a shocking drop. Railway tracks run far below on its valley floor. A great bite out of London, this hidden quarry.
I jog under the cement pillars of the Breaconbridge Tower where the Andrews live and out into a long dead-end street. He'll stay off roads to avoid squad cars and the TSG van. There's a chance he might use this restricted access one though if he isn't going to duck and bob the whole route. Walking now to get my breath back, I follow the tedious blind curve of towering brick like a city wall, where a huge, dead factory runs alongside this deserted street. I hear my footsteps like they're another man's. Lee Andrew comes marching round the corner in black, knee-length leather coat, looking over his shoulder and not a gelled hair out of place. He nano-hesitates, keeps right on walking towards me.
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