Manners

by Robert Newman

  And what invisible barriers, I wondered, were coming down the closer I got to Beverley? When women talk about dropping your defences they just mean letting love out. But I knew there were other things pent up behind those defences. Would they also slip through now? I was disturbed by my fascination with the allowed and the not allowed. Looking up her dress and that as if I was just some commuter. I didn't like where this was all leading me.

  Our next date was round at mine. It came up in conversation that she was doing one-on-one boxercise training at the gym … Sweating intimately with another man. One on one. Him and her. Him on her. Her on him. Just the two of them. He holds her arm or leg or waist to show her another position. How it should be done. Rewarding her with rare praise, she smiles delighted and glittery eyed. The master. All the body blows they pulled I felt with the internal bleeding of a twelve-rounder. And if push came to shove he could smack the shit out of me. I didn't ask 'is he black?' because I wasn't that sort of person. Once. (Most people would be shocked if they ever found out what their real views were.) She was staying at her sister's in Kentish Town. I was too drunk to drive her home but I wouldn't let her get in a minicab, so we walked about a mile, scouring for a proper Joe Baxy.

  'For fuck's sake, John!' she said when I walked past a second clapboard and yellow-siren minicab office.

  'No.' We walked a bit further, she shook her head and stopped to find the biftas in her bag.

  Coming down the other side of the street I saw a community-care crazy fellow, my age, in grey, bobbly tracksuit bottoms, brown shoes, a red tie and clean, striped, short-sleeved shirt despite the night. He carried a little pile of litter he'd picked up from the pavement. Crisp packet, Coke can, apple core, McDonald's carton. He looked extremely cross. He had a pinched, lined, black and brown face like he'd lived three lives concurrently. A once-round-the-clock, second-hand, re-tread face. There was a bit of chipboard lying across the pavement. He tried to walk past, but then, exasperatedly, he had to put his pile of litter down, lean the chipboard up against a chain-link fence before picking up his stack of litter again. Half facing away like he was busy elsewhere: kind of doing it as if he wasn't doing it, a part of him barely stopping. All the streets of London to tidy and never a word of thanks. No wonder he looked cross.

  'Oh, all right, OK,' I said to Beverley, and put her into the next minicab that came crawling by.

  I walked back home in a happy haze and all the Evening Standard hoardings knew they couldn't compete.

  HOLLOWAY MAN SHOT IN BOTH ARMS … ?

  RUSSIA 'NO' TO EEC BID … ?

  TUBE THREAT IN … ?

  NO, NOTHING.

  IT'S NOT IMPORTANT.

  Up till then I was the only single cop l knew of. Male or female. None of the other cops in the division are single, none of them. The job is impossible without support. And now I was in love, but with love came … other stuff, incessant stuff … It was like I'd doubled my surface area of attack, all the things that could happen to her out in the world. Despite her strength and suss all these fears just burst through all the same. If you don't love someone then nothing can happen to someone you love. But now every time I heard the other cops discussing some violent house breakin, or some woman who did parachute jumps now brain-damaged after the attack, here was a new terror. In those moments the fact that it was possible that bad things could happen to her became real. And bad men were out there.

  A Dead Man

  The first time I saw Lee Andrew was on Fonthill Road only a few weeks before he and I stopped being what we were. Midway through a succession of repetitive home beats me and Kieran were on our way back from an obbo.

  (Each time I aim for a memory I come in early; that is, before the actual thing I wanted to fetch my mind at. Is this because that part of me that didn't see disaster coming is fascinated by how time and life are chug-chugging along until you turn the blind corner? Or is it just dawdling to put off the ugly event? Either way, the memory comes in where it wants to come in as I bump, bump, bump my back against the Shaker chair-back like a metronome.) We'd just spent an hour or so parked up a narrow side-street in the unmarked purple Astra obboing these dealers working out of a fruit and veg. stall. They were selling Es in the post-rain sunshine. We'd heard they were popping Es in brown paper bags to the right customer with some apples or runner beans.

  'Lumme!' I said, 'that girl just paid £34 for that cauliflower!'

  We'd got into this thing where we'd say 'crikey', 'crumbs' or other innocent, old-fashioned cuss-words. 'Blimey' was another one. Like a used car we'd gone right round the swearing clock: we'd cunted ourselves out. I was actually slightly fonder of these catch-phrases than the K. (He had the charisma to start catch-phrases that the whole division would latch on to. 'Ache' — as in anything involving hassle — was one of his.

  And once, after a guilty verdict when he said, 'How did that happen?' this sardonic catch-phrase became used about guilty verdicts from then on. And also for thief-takings made by untalented CBOs.) 'She didn't really have to say much to him, though, did she?' puzzled Kieran.

  'No.'

  'You probably just go up and say — ' Kieran started winking elaborately, "Can I have [wink-wink-wink] five apples please?" And that's five pills. But then you get some old lady with a twitch come up and go [wink-wink-wink] "Can I have a turnip please? That one you sold me last week was incredible!"'

  'Yeah, "That was the best turnip I ever bad!" Crumbs,' I said. Kieran granted.

  We waited some more. Happy now in the sharp, prismatic, glinting rain shards.

  'I was driving the other day on the North Circular, and there was this woman in a red BMW and we were sort of level for about half an hour and I felt like we'd been on a journey together me and this woman driving the other car, that we were almost friends … '

  Kieran started laughing. 'Run for your lives!'

  'What?' I asked.

  'Run for your lives! "Yeah, I saw these matches in the shop and I really understood how someone becomes an arsonist, you know there they all are all these matches and you can do absolutely anything with them! Anything at all! And then someone went into a house and I really understood how someone becomes a murderer, and then I walked past a bank and I thought it's full of money … " Catch on to yourself, won't you?' he chuckled.

  His impression of my accent added a yokelly naive woolliness that made me sound like a Benzedrine Barmy Benny off of Crossroads.

  We waited some more.

  And then, as if on cue with our comedy script a little old lady did turn up. I supplied the subtitles. 'Don't give me a turnip though, my sister bought one of those and fell asleep with the electric blanket on.'

  K. looked at me like he was looking at a miser who'd just given his watch to a dosser. 'Crikey!' he said. Chuckled, then three seconds later, looking out the windscreen now and thinking to himself, chuckled again.

  We waited some more. We were waiting to see who supplied them. They spoke to a few other traders and someone from the techno-import 12-inchers shop but that was all. We drove off.

  Our way back to the nick took us past the rag-trade wholesalers of Fonthill Road. Two men with short brown hair and bug-eyes of watery blue came out of a shop. Repairs and Alterations said the shop's logo over a cartoon man stepping out with a pair of giant shears. Kieran slowed the car and leant out of the window. 'You still around?' he said to the men with unusual aggression.

  We drove on.

  'Who's that?' I asked.

  'Slags,' he replied, 'Lee and Tony Andrew. They deal drugs and knock out fake suits.' Here Kieran put on a cockney sparrer, barrer boy, swaggering, hustling lilt: 'Top quality suits 'ere: Lime'ouse, Jesper Cawnren … only cheaper!'

  'I seen their photos up on the board.'

  'And they just got refused charge after raping two students coming back from a gig.'

  My guts lurched. 'How did they get off?'

  'The girls didn't want to proceed. Couldn't face seeing them again.'

&nb
sp; 'And there they are — walking around.'

  'They wrote all over the girls' bodies.'

  'What, "whore", "bitch", that sort of stuff?'

  'Yeah.'

  Familiar icy patches took up position all over my skin, heart zig-zagging the cage, heavy blood throbbing up the sides of my neck. Sexual assaults always have this seismic, sickening, dismaying effect on me in a way that, say, murder doesn't. Slogans: Rape is worse than murder. And yet I have to know all the details and all the details I don't know I make up. There's a terrible complicity in that. I hated Lee Andrew right then and there. We drove round the block to eyeball them a second time. There he was, the scumbag atrocity, walking around free having done that shining and never been caught. If he can do it and get away with it then the world has become a nightmare where there's nothing to stop you doing it and everything is wild, and all the barriers are down and the next woman gets it. I hated him. That look on their faces, like they hadn't done what they'd done, like nothing. Lee was laughing and giving it jest about something on the mobile.

  'Which is which?' I asked in a deadly tone.

  'Tony the short slag with the bug-eyes and brown hair.'

  'And Lee's the large one with the bug-eyes and brown hair.'

  'Yeah, Lee's Smoothy Slag and Tony's Runty Slag,' said Kieran. I couldn't join in his japes, but stared at the Andrew brothers with a choking sensation in my throat.

  Runtish Tony, older and scruffier, was clearly the dangerous one, however. Gaps in his teeth, prison tats, dirty jeans. The one concession to their schmutter money was a brand-new black puffa jacket. But on him it just looked like he was borrowing it for a day so as not to get identified. He looked more like someone who sold second-hand filing cabinets than Issey Miyake. A squint of continual concentration, of low-down speculation. Energetic, hustling, speaking to a third person in an undertone. A full day on. Busy here, busy there, busy everyfuckingwhere.

  Lee was naturally bigger and a body-builder to boot. He looked like one of those white boxers who appears as a Page 7 Feller; has his photo took with Linda Lusardi and gets knocked out in Round One. Clean-cut, clean-shaven, gelled-back brown hair, shaved at the sides. Dead Lee had a neat, just-round-the mouth beard. He had a kind of sleeping mouth as if his crimson Cupid's-bow lips were not quite touching. His bulbous nose was flattened at the tip as if he was pressing it against a window. A brown suit over tight, black, shiny V-neck and chewing a fat wad of gum in a wad of jaw. Giving it large: Timberlands, mobile, gangster wannabe.

  That was the first time I saw Lee Andrew. The first time I met Lee and Tony Andrew is hard to say 'cos I didn't know if it was them or not.

  Rave

  'When you see 'em checking for dealers with the Maglite they're just trying to catch any dealer who's not on the firm,' said Ellen as we walked up the unlit street with gasworks on the horizon. 'Nightforce run the door and just let their own dealers in and take a cut.'

  'Who's Nightforce?'

  'Lee and Tony Andrew?' said Ellen. 'D'yer know about 'em?'

  'Kieran pointed them out to me the other day,' I casually replied. In fact … Since Kieran had first pointed them out to me on the Fonthill Road three weeks ago, I'd seen Lee and Tony Andrew all the time, coming out of a shop, parking a car, chatting, sometimes to women.

  'Was you eyeballed?' she asked.

  'No,' I said with certainty, but in reality I wasn't sure whether they hadn't seen me all the time I was screwing them. Always at the back of my mind I was noting what street Lee or Tony was in and computing whether they'd ever seen Beverley. Clocked her. Got bothered by her swinging gait. Made plans. They could take anyone off the street at any time. They'd done it before. Lee and Tony had done the most terrible thing in the world and here they were walking around free. If they could do it and nothing happen, then, then … there was no punishment.

  'The Andrew Sisters shouldn't be actually on the door, though,' Ellen added, 'they'll just be around. Keep your face out the closed-circuit when we're queuing in. We just gotta avoid them and go for the vendors and then sweat the vendors later.' We turned into the cobbled slipway that led down to the Drum Club, and now we hear the hot body din of the Drum Club, banging techno bang bang bang, and see the Gelex bouncers.

  'How's your footwork?' she asked.

  'Don't you worry about me babe — Camber Sands Soul Weekender, Prestatyn '87.'

  'Ha ha ha!'

  Ellen was wearing a fawn minidress and glitter, top-of-the-knee pop-socks. I could smell the delicious scent of cocoa butter which basted her shining brown thighs and bare, Barbasian arms and hands. The soul boy of discretion, I was dressed in Van's, khaki army trousers and some zip-up Ted Bakerage.

  WPC Ellen Melvinas was a natural thief-taker. Not only that — more than any other officer I'd worked with — except Kieran – I always had this sense that nothing bad could happen to me when I was out on patrol with her. Something to do with her energy, with the half-smile she had when firing questions at suspects on the street, an intrigued grin which kind of suggested she was thinking at twice their pace. A right old cockney gel.

  ('I can tell that you come from a family with lots of older brothers, don't you?' I once said to her after a dust-up outside the Rocket on Holloway Road.

  'Yeah,' she smiled. 'How d'yer know?' I'd been holding down one hot-head, knee on his shoulder, and looked up while Ellen pushed the other bloke away. He was trying to get past her to have another pop. Then he started winding up to kick it off with her. It was all wrestling with her, very slow, knowing she had extra gears, and then suddenly the bloke's on the floor looking really pissed off with Ellen kneeling on his chest. ) 'OK?' Ellen asks me once we're inside.

  'Yeah, yeah,' I say.

  Ribena her, Beck's me. I spark up and add my smoke to the dry-ice, sweat-steam and sulphurous smog of Marlboro Country. Ellen scopes the room with cop-intensity disguised as an E-stare.

  'Right, I'm off!' she says. 'Meet back here.' She gives me a peck on the cheek. Gone.

  Germ-free adolescents. Teeth glowing in the UV. A bump at my shoulder nearly spills my beer. Someone chatters to me in Jabberhut then mimes lighting a cigarette. I hand him my bifta to take a light off it. He shakes his head, mimes a cigarette again. I raise no-comprendez hands. He pauses. Thinks. Goes. A girl in snow-camouflage trousers and a pink T-shirt made see-through with sweat (marinate for two hours and allow the breasts to rise) emerges from the steam. She tugs her collar to let the air in.

  So this is House. Never danced where most everyone is white before, I say to myself in an effort to lay a straight track of thought over a swirling, tidal-wave swamp of sensation.

  They sample an old reggae toaster. A bit of Studio I in the bang bang bang.

  Early doors so no one's really going for it on the floor yet. Each dancer is just bobbing meditatively, marking time till the pills kick in, nodding their heads slowly as if listening to negotiations between central nervous system and MDMA. The DJ cranks a techno fanfare, but it's too soon and none of the kids get on his bus.

  I try to join in, but my feet are heavy because I'm not in the dance. Like a stereo thief at a party I'm outside it all. I always was. Maybe that's even why I became a cop, but this thought, too, is bumped and jostled out of hold.

  Each time I go to a club I think this time I'll hang on to myself, my core, or consciousness, hang on to structured thought, but I always, at some point in the night, lose it. I'm loving it, the lowest head in the club that night, just polishing steps and keeping out of sight. Then the next minute, welcome to the theatre of self-hate where I lose it all in a psychic landslide under the rotating lights and bass bins. It all seems mean. Mean-spirited. Brutal. Aggressive. What is it with me? A compound loneliness, a sense that … a party to which I was never invited. I'm missing something they've all got in common. A sense of profound rejection, looking up at the podium I feel betrayed, sold out by these girls in shiny miniskirts.

  You have to look away. People don't get it when I talk about th
e need to overcome lust. And I just feel like a Puritan in black breeches, white collar, black, broad-brimmed clerical hat, long white beard, black buckle shoes. Maybe though these people just aren't players. What happens to me in clubs? I scope and rubber-neck lust at women all day, but in a club I become a Puritan; perhaps horrified to see my own raging desires taken up by a mad army.

  Can't see the Andrews or any dealers so I just scope the punters. Two ugly fat white geezers at the bar in white shirts and pleated keks. Keenly aware of being dressed wrong but joking to each other like they're above it all, as if they're a nucleus of calm when in fact they're not. These two regional finalists have bitter expressions on their faces as they scope the women, lowering their expectations. Wow, whichever unlucky woman he gets off with will have to satisfy all that bile.

  A South American-looking woman walks by on her way to the toilet queue. Elegant, kindly features. An intelligent, graduate, career woman. They look at her in muted resentment. And both pump a swig from their Low-brau. How could she know that she's a walking personification of rejection for them. Her blameless face and white vest on brown skin, carrying a little purse, trousers, no socks, shoes. She's certainly not one of those women who are, in fact, saying 'fuck off' to you in their haughty pose. But to them, it's as if her relaxed hips say, 'Not for scum like you.' The brown, bony peak of her academic shoulders says, 'No chance' to them. Her black-jeaned, red-labelled arse says, 'Well out of your reach!' Her nipples under the vest tell them, 'Get to fuck! Crawl back under your stone!'

  Maybe that's why the Andrew brothers' gang wrote all over one of the girls' bodies when they abducted and raped two late-night students. The subconscious justification for every evil act is revenge, a skew-whiff, bent idea of revenge.