'What, stuff that you can nip out and get in five minutes?'
'Crisps and bread rolls,' she says.
'Well Jill, I'm just coming to the end of my shift. Why don't you go shopping now? Proper shopping. I'll wait here.'
She raises her eyes to me. A smile sidles on to her face, turning up one corner of her mouth.
'No. Thanks, but I'd be gone an hour 'cos I'm gonna have to go to the Post Office first for money, and then I like Sainsbury's in Camden, and then the fruit market on Inverness Street.'
'Well, with any luck they'll try and break in.'
'No, they see who comes and goes. Are you serious?'
'Yeah.'
'You sure?'
Her eyes light up. She comes forward with her hands out two feet away from my face, stopping at the Manners force-field to mime cupping my nephew face in her hands. She goes into the hall to get her handbag and coat.
'Goodbye,' she shouts, slamming the door without even coming back into the room.
And now I'm alone in her flat.
Maybe she'll never come back. Maybe now I'm left with her life. Won't see her again. Cackling off into next week, like someone who's finally off-loaded a chain-letter.
I feel like one of those rota-system mourners at a vigil in olden days, someone trained to sit and wait for the tragedy to pass. I thought I'd be used to this, but no …
This is a purer vigil than my own. Here there's no chance of a phone-call or a letter from the Crown Prosecution Service. This is the control sample of my vigil. And now what?
I feel trapped. Cramped, stiff and aching like a cold-turkey addict in a holding cell, ready to confess.
There's a one-way window in Interview Room I. You can step out the room and look through it at the prisoner. Innocent suspects pace around fretting, moving their lips; the guilty just rest their head on their arms: arsed, tired, bored.
Can't look out the window in case the kids see me.
A small lampshade hangs off the bulb in the middle of the ceiling. What they don't steal must feel as though they've passed comment on it: 'We've left you this because it's shit.'
This is hard waiting. Just me and me. Now what?
Oh no.
Oh no. Just imagine — oh no.
Imagine if — oh no, that would be terrible …
… if she came back and I'd robbed her!
I laugh out loud, giggling uncontrollably, trying to keep the noise down as if she were in the other room. In stitches, howling. How hideous that would be! I can't stop. My hahahas are deep and full-throated. Remonstrative echoes bounce off the bare walls of her quiet two rooms.
Or if I smashed up her flat! Oh no, that would be awful. Imagine if I wrote all over her walls! Tears. Imagine if she came back and I'd written JOHN 4 JILL in great big letters on the wall! My hand taps the marker pen in my jacket side-pocket and then I fold the flap over the pocket to seal the pen in. Or if I wrote FUCK ALL CUNTS and then completely denied I'd done it. Claimed I couldn't see it! Said it was there before!!! JOHN 4 JILL Great big fucking letters. Hahahaha! Hahaha! Oh man, that would freak her out. Oh dear, oh dear. Oh deary me.
She hasn't removed the boards over her back door since the last robbery (or the one before).
On her bedroom door is another notice in green felt-tip block capitals: THERE'S NOTHING OF VALUE IN HERE. KEEP OUT. I NEED PRIVACY! YOU KNOW THERE'S NOTHING IN HERE. THERE IS STILL NOTHING IN HERE.
I open the bedroom door tentatively as if in fear of someone being in there.
In the top drawer, under an old swatch of wallpaper, framed photos lie face to face. A tin-framed, just-short-of-focus colour photo on faded paper. Under battered polythene like an old savings book it shows a 1950s girl on a stripy pink deck-chair squinting with the small-garden sun in her eyes.
A black and white photo in a glass frame. A woman in a wide-lapel polka-dot blouse pretending a parked motor bike is hers. She stands next to it gripping the handles, leaning down as if doing ninety. She smiles into the camera. Perfect teeth.
I lift the heavy brown chest of drawers. The complacent dust shows that I've found something the burglars never did. A letter. I pick it up between the nails of thumb and forefinger like evidence.
Spindly handwriting on brown, lined paper. The coarse paper is porous and sometimes at the beginning or end of a word the ink expands where the thoughtful pen paused.
A love-letter.
… and already I miss you … tell me the name of that soap you use so l can go and … I wish … you left your … when will … touching your leg under the sea … and no one knew … pretending to fasten my brooch in the Sussex bar … all my love, Maggie.
I take several goes replacing the letter in its holding square of dust.
The cheeky cow has been out two hours.
How does Jill manage it here day after day? No telly, no books. And only some racy memories to keep her warm.
What can I do? Read the Hornsey Journal double-page spreads she uses for a tablecloth. The judge ordered the jury to return a not-guilty verdict on the two men after no evidence was offered by the prosecution. Shorthand for someone got at the plaintiff or the witness. Another judge gives weight to the fact that the accused showed no remorse … The story continues under an empty glass vase. Forget it.
Wonder how much Lee's fulsome knowledge of court procedure influenced his decision to have a go. He knew that if he'd gone to court for assaulting a policeman I wouldn't be able to mention what I was trying to arrest him for. The court wouldn't even be told that he had form. I mean, that might make him look like some kind of, well, criminal! And the CPS can't be having that.
He knew then that he'd only have to say he had no idea what I could possibly have against him. The fact that I am legally not able to specify it would leave me having to make vague grumblings about him being known to me. This, he knew, would reinforce the jury's unavoidable impression of me as having some sort of grudge against Mr suit-and-tie Andrew. All this was stuff he knew, and who knows what echo of it hummed down his synapses when he made that fatal decision?
There are occasional moments in history when the need for Justice with a capital J outweighs barrister etiquette. The Nuremberg judges, for example, never said, 'Now I want you to discount all you may have heard or read in the press about Mr Goering, Mr Goebbels and Mr Himmler. I am aware that many newsreels have sought to present the defendants in a bad light, but I want you all to strike all that from your minds. As far as you are concerned, they are innocent men.'
The daylight world's code of justice is as out of touch with the truth and reality of evil as we all are until it touches us. The public have no idea how fantastically quaint and naive the idea of innocent-until-proven-guilty seems to a police officer or, for that matter, to anyone who lives on the same estate as the slag. They know he's guilty. I know he's guilty. He knows he's guilty. And he knows I know he's guilty. But the Crown — perhaps because of its ancient debt to robber barons — says he's innocent until he really, really wants to go to prison. Innocent until proven careless.
Sounds like an apology for verbals and planting, but it's not. No officer I know has ever done this. I think the reason for this is because you don't want to taint yourself with the evil. You want to keep definite lines between you and the bad. When you mess around with those lines, be it drink-driving, planting evidence, receiving seized goods, you open yourself to invasion by all the weird forces around in the night. Then again, maybe I'm not the sort of cop they'd tell.
Here in Jill's empty chamber is the first time I've thought about Lee Andrew for a long time. Then again maybe I've been thinking about nothing else. The Super never seemed totally satisfied with my description of how he died. Me neither. Gaps. There are gaps in what I can remember about the fight. Black holes that will tear me all apart? If I'm innocent then I should be able to just let memories about him and all just come, just come at me.
Lee. Lee Andrew. Lee and Tony Andrew. That balcony at the top of the tower
with all the dishes and aerials. What was the name of the place? The something Estate or something Tower, something House. Tony razzing around in the white Hi-Ace. I think Lee had a black 4x4 Isuzi or some such shit. Not the language of remorse. Lee. First-name terms. Calling him Lee by an effort of will just now, I was hoping to key into or open the way to warmth, remorse. They didn't show, and without them 'Lee' just sounds sneering, patronizing, like he's my bitch. Breaconbridge. The Breaconbridge Estate.
That didn't go exactly as – A loud rattling of bunchy keys in the lock makes the door frame shudder. (Still nervous after all these years hearing keys in the door in case it's Kenneth the coach-driver back late from the Stag's Head.) 'Give us a hand, there's some more outside,' she says.
A blue Sierra minicab drives off leaving two more stuffed shopping bags on the dusty pavement.
I put them on the kitchen floor next to a holder of rotten vegetables. She turns to me, saying, 'These are for you,' handing me a bouquet of damp daffodils wrapped in quality blue paper, and a chocolate policeman in a little plastic case.
Walking home. It's raining today and I'm as horny as all get out. A girl in a short black dress shelters under a newsagent's awning on Fortess Road. A nearly-pretty estate girl. Seventeen. The soft rain makes her bare legs intimate, her naked, sheltered legs. Indoors outdoors, inside out. Almost there.
It shouldn't be this way, dignifying shallow impulses with romantic ideas of being taken over by desire, carried away, awash.
Lust is really just a slight tingling in the testicular subbasement. Yet despite this the whole day is National Horn Day. A State of Emergency is declared, democracy suspended, the rational debating chamber is shut down in favour of pumping rhetoric.
They don't know they're doing it, but men look at women in the street the way police-state cops look at civilians. You notice this particularly when a woman crosses the street swinging her bag or singing as if she owned the place, as if she owned the place rather than us men. You see it in the faces of men when a woman wears less than textile-regulation-minimum. Men think they're just staring, but it's that cautionary, chin-down, 'Are you sure?' type of stare; a devilling stare of warning and affronted authority. The stare that says, 'You may well have incurred a penalty … or be about to.' Even though they don't know they're doing it, even though those aren't their thoughts explicitly.
Buddhists deal with pain by focusing on the fact that it is localized to one particular part of the body, and is not, though it feels like it, actually making the whole body throb. A bit of self-discipline, a bit of self-mastery is all that's required … except we don't want to be masters of ourselves. Oh, the foolish, end-of-pier, grinning faces of men when you try to talk seriously about resisting lust.
'Back here now after telling some builders off for whistling at a girl. Eating my chocolate policeman and watching telly with the flowers in my lap. The news.
A while ago they brought in performance-related pay for teachers and police. So what happened? Schools expel difficult kids, grades go up in the purged schools. Arrest rates go up because we keep arresting the same kids they threw out, who go out and re-offend 'cos they know there's fuck-all we can do to juveniles. But here tonight is your newsreader with AI statistics and thumbs up when in reality things have got much, much worse all round.
Watching the news a cop wonders how each news item will tilt the ether, how it's gonna change the vibe on the street, the colour of the sky. It's beyond me to define, but there's an index-link between the share price and the knife in your back at the cashpoint. There is a connection somewhere between G8 handshakes and, say, the way graffiti migrates. First it was just white lorries and vans; then it moved to any colour lorries and vans, then it moved to white cars — which is where it's at now, in Holloway division at least. New crimes are round the corner, waiting like condensation for the right conditions. Kidnappings will be a major twenty-first century player; extortion demands will be nailed to the door of modest semis.
'The government today pledged tax breaks for enterprise … ' says the newsreader. Now I'm independent, my instincts for detection swivel their gaze to new directions … Tax Breaks for Enterprise. Rearrange these letters and get Income Support for the Very Rich Paid For out of My Fucking Pocket. Rearrange and get No More Shekel for Dibble Choppers — my sky rocket — which will just have to rust and fall out of the sky into a parched and fenced-off Severn-Trent as we take points-failure-wounded from hozzy to hozzy on the rumour of a bed.
The Super was talking to me and Kieran once about her old nick in West Riding. She worked the Tobruk Estate, a satellite of what was once a mining town. Tobruk wasn't so bad until after the mines were shut down, after which it became The Estate That Time Forgot. From being a law-abiding community, she saw it go up 80 per cent in reported crime in the space of five years; as she said, 'It went from being a fairly decent community to a holding pen.' The kids break into boarded-up council houses and rip out copper piping to sell to the scrap-yard. These people have always scratched a living from the fossilized remains of a lost age. Only once it was coal and now it's copper.
'It's all to do with fucking shares, and the City, short-term profits. We should go into the City and nick the fucking lot of them!'
The Super looked at me in a curious new way, pleased, perhaps, to find I wasn't a mason.
People are always surprised when they meet you at parties that cops have political opinions (if they ever stop moaning about parking tickets long enough to find out). But most cops have seen something like what Sandra Rowse our Super has seen.
As a police-officer you're not supposed to express your personal political beliefs, which translates of course as being only able to express the personal political beliefs of the ruling classes: banks, big business, the MP for British Aerospace, the member for ICI. And so when we're on our own we love to talk about where society's gone wrong, and always in the headshaking tone of the never-consulted, in-the-field expert. Not all of it radical, but not all of it bring-back-the-death-penalty either. (Not all of it.) The way civilians say they don't want to be taxed, like there's a choice! There's always a tax. It's just a question of how you want to pay. Access Control Systems, Intruder Alarms, Automatic Porch Lighting, Home CCTV, Logic Control Entry Grilles, 24-Hour Monitoring Service.
All this crisis talk about the crime rate, but hasn't it always been this way? Bit more humane here, bit less there. Unsteady but holding. The first policeman was shot in 1798 during a riot by river smugglers on the Thames. In 1896 a Manchester teenager who murdered another in a gang fight was only charged with common assault. The average age of everyone ever hung in Britain is thirteen. There's less guns in London now than in the forties and fifties. There's less footpads around.
The government always go to the US to look at crime and the big-city solution. On police courses there's over-your-head projections from Greater Manchester DIs about 'the latest American techniques'. But they never send fact-finding teams to look at how they create so much crime in America. To suss the latest house-on-the-hill techniques of crime creation before they happen here.
Oh fuck me.
Oh no. All these thoughts like — like I was still a part of decent people! Like I was still one of the good academically wondering how to make the world better, criticizing those whose views are harmful when I am not part of all that any more. I have made someone dead. I am on the outside of all that. Coming back from Jill's earlier, I stopped off to get some money out the Woolwich and the cashier woman said, 'Hello again, how are you? You've not been in for a while … '
And I thought, will she see my picture in the paper soon and know all about me? And I sensed how terrible it is going to be to lose that common connection with others, with strangers. What a terrible loss to be no longer part of everyone else. To be outside of fellow feeling. Not to be one of everyone any more. Upal the outcast. To sit in a cinema, say, and not to be on the side of right in the battle between Good and Evil.
And now here it
comes again. Another night channel-scanning while I silently panic. Acute loneliness, a semi hard-on, searching and never resting. Thinking if only it wasn't too late to phone someone. If only I had someone to phone. If only there was a woman with me now to hug and to hold then I wouldn't feel so bad.
Everything seems distant or at one remove as if I had no body, no human self. It's been like this for years. Only then there was work. Working all the hours God gave me so as not to have to face the ones Satan gave me. Staying out long hours because I knew that when I came home late alone, Satan would be plumping up the cushions and saying: Ah, there you are. I thought I'd wait up. So, um, on your own then … ? Oh dear, oh deary, deary me. Well, what am I gonna fuck you over with tonight? You wanna watch telly, eh? Go ahead. Put it on. What's this programme? 'Club Nation'. Yes, by all means put your hand down the front of your trousers if that makes you feel comfortable. Just look at all these girls, look at how they're giving it out … what's that? It does your head in, the aggressive competitive atmosphere of the club, the hard spirit, the revealing clothes that say fuck off and come here at the same time? Hey, never mind, let's channel-hop. A couple of hours of this and then you'll really feel like you've achieved something. Don't fancy it? Well, you can always … talk to me.
*
Frozen chicken sandwich. These days I can ignore sell-by dates, cooking instructions and star-marked freezer compartments. Pop pink bits of icy chicken in my mouth, knowing salmonella can't live in the acidic, black, molten lava of my dismal guts.
The porn channel. Glary American video. I hate American porn. There's something extra-mean about American porn. The men all have mean sadistic faces and say aggressive stuff like, 'You like this, don't you!' The women have to look distressed, they have to yelp like they're in pain if they want to work again. Or else they're kind of submissive-aggressive too in the declared war of American sexuality: 'Fuck me harder, fuck my bitch's arse!' I hate it. It scalds my mind, and I've been putting in about three hours of this every night for months.
Phoned an 0898 number. All calls are charged international rate and women, love and comfort are a foreign country, half the world away.
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