by Iain Rowan
I was annoyed, because I realised that I had done a bit more than I had intended to and I don't like losing my self control. Fucking over a copper is not a good idea because it's one of their own, isn't it, and they'll not let that rest. Still, I thought, if he's not dead he's probably going to be staring into space and learning to make baskets, given the way the back of his head looked, like a boiled egg after you've smacked the top of it with a teaspoon, so he's not going to identify me in a hurry. There was still no-one else about, I could wipe my fingerprints off his truncheon, take the tin with me, who would think it could have anything to do with me, just another good kid from a decent home.
I bent down to pick up the tin, and it I was when I straightened up that I saw it.
I looked down the street, then up the street, and counted two more.
Black robot eyes, looking down from a height, looking down on me. CCTV cameras. Nothing I could do, no way I could reach them. It was a lovely sunny morning and I had been standing around for ages. They'd have no trouble getting a decent print of me. And they had the reason to go the extra mile didn't they, one of their own and all that. I could have run for it, gone to a new town, slept on the street, reinvented myself but, you know, I couldn't be bothered with that. Way too much effort. So I went home instead. Mam and Dad are out, gone to see my Auntie Clarrie in her old people's home. They'll be gone all day, breathing in the smell of piss and vegetables.
I realised, there's no getting away with this one. Doesn't mean I'm not smart, I've just had a bit of bad luck. Can happen to the best of us. Doesn't mean I'm not smart. I've spent a lot of the morning thinking about the consequences, the interviews and the weeping parents, the psychologists and the lawyers, the judges in stupid fucking wigs droning on and on and on and then being locked up for years with a bunch of dead loss criminals, tattooed fuckwits with the IQ of stones who got caught breaking into a car, or selling a bit of dope. Do-gooders trying to understand me, rehabilitate me.
Frankly, the prospect bores the shite out of me. Endless tedium with no hope for anything to brighten it up, and if I think I'm the chairman now, Christ, what would all that be like. So I thought no way, I'd rather die, so that's exactly what I am going to do. And you can listen to it all, because there's plenty of time left on the tape, and whoever you are, it's your job to listen to this and I'm telling you now, it's going to haunt you for the rest of your life, you'll hear me in your dreams. I've set a noose up out of some tow rope that me dad had in the garage, and it's going to do the business too, because I'm not stupid, not like those morons who tried to blow their own heads off with shotguns and missed. It's all going to be right.
There, I've put it on now, and in a second or two I'm going to climb up on the chair—one of me mam's best dining chairs it is, if you listen to this mam—and I doubt they'll let you—sorry if I piss all over it, but that'll be kind of outside my control. And dad, sorry I've had to nick one of your Beatles tapes to record over with this, but I didn't have anything else, and it's got to be said, I've always fucking hated them. Told you that you should have bought CDs.
Anyway, I'm bored of this. Listen now. You've got to. You'll hear everything. And you'll remember it forever. My parting gift to you. You got kids? I'd watch 'em, mate. Imagine if it was your own doing this. Maybe one day it might be. They hate you, you know. Even if you think they don't, they do, I'm telling you. If you're lucky—really lucky—they don't hate you, they just despise you. But you love them all the same. So think, one day, they might be just like me, doing something just like this. Ha ha. Bet you wished you'd called in sick today, don't you?
Whoa. Nearly fell off the chair before I was fucking ready. That would be funny, wouldn't it. There. Now.
Listen. Remember.
THE REMAINS OF MY ESTATE
Samuel Johnson wrote that the prospect of death concentrates the mind wonderfully. Much as I hate to be cruel about the man who created the English dictionary and made Scrabble a feasible proposition, I have to tell you: this is bullshit.
It has been seventy-eight days since a man wearing a spotted bow tie leant across his desk, slid his glasses back up his nose, sighed, and said, "I'm sorry, Paul, but there's no doubt, no doubt at all, I am afraid." He gave me six to twelve months before my body ate itself from the inside out. Have I spent these precious last weeks of my existence on earth squeezing the last drops of juice from the fruit of life? Well, I don't know. I'm not altogether sure if smoking as much gear as I can afford and watching daytime TV counts. Call it laziness if you want, I prefer to think of it as a relaxed attitude to life. I saw a doctor talk about this on TV, between the makeover (a politician—she went from grotesque to grotesque with tidier hair) and the cookery slot (something with eggs). Apparently I'm a type B personality. We take everything as it comes, greet it with a smile, never get worked up over things. A world apart from your neurotic Type A, snapping at all around him, blood pressure through the roof, everything in his life a cause of stress. It's a bad thing, the TV doctor said, to be a Type A person. It can lead to an early grave. Don't think that the irony of this has escaped me.
Still, I can hardly complain that my last days on this beautiful planet are going to be spent on a sink estate on the outskirts of a failing industrial city, surrounded by dirt and random acts of violence. The choices I've made have always been my own. Most of the estate had no choices, no chances. I had all that a good family could provide, but I wasted them all in the soft arms of my darling, my love, my one and only. It was an infatuation which lasted the better part of a decade, but twelve months ago we got divorced. No methadone, no help, just me in a room with a bucket and a twelve inch portable colour television that Welsh John stole from a second-hand shop full of previously stolen goods. It wasn't the best fun I've had, but I did it and I won. I was clean. I was unscathed—no hepatitis, no HIV. And then a few months later I found out that I was going to die anyway. Don't think that the irony of this has escaped me either. I am the Alcatraz of the ironic. Nothing gets out of here alive.
It was seventy-eight days since I had been told I was dying, and I could feel the estate buzzing. Even though I spent more and more time in my flat, too tired to go out, I knew. I could hear it in the way the kids whooped and swooped along the walkways, I could hear it in the way the mothers shouted at the younger ones to get back inside this fucking flat NOW, I could hear it in the way the constant restless hum of the anthill had changed in pitch. Something was in the air. I swallowed out a handful of assorted painkillers—well, what's the worst that can happen—and headed out the door.
I bumped into Welsh John on the landing. His name's John. He's not Welsh. I don't know, either.
"Mickey boy, how you doing?" John sounded drunk. He always did now, even when sober.
"Not so bad today, John, not so bad." It was what I said every day to everyone who asked. For the first day in a week, I almost meant it. "What's going on out there?"
He grinned, and I saw his tooth. "Yeah, you can always tell, can't you. You not know what's happening then?"
"I've not been out for a couple of days. Resting, like."
"Right, yeah, resting, okay. It's Billy Gilden's boy, Robbie. He's back on the estate."
"You're fucking joking."
"No word of a lie. Boy was back on Tuesday, but word only got out last night, he's been laying low."
"And if word got out round the estate last night...."
"Yeah. The old bill will have known about a second later. That's why there's all the excitement. Word's out Robbie's leaving today, off to Rotterdam, mate of his runs a bar there, so if they want to grab him it's got to be today. So, everyone's out to see a bit of a show, coz Robbie's said he'd rather kill one of them than go back inside. He won't you know, he's all bloody talk, seen Scarface too many fucking times, it's all to impress the kids, but it's got everyone all fired up. Wanting a spectacle, they all are. You having a walk about?"
"Yeah," I said. "Just thought I'd see how the land lies."
"Walker?" I asked.
"Walker," John said. He went quiet for a moment. "Still, got to go. You take care now Mickey boy, you take care and if I've got any cash come the weekend I'll drop you off a nice bit of skunk like, keep you going."
I started to protest, but John was already gone, shuffling off down the landing in that lopsided way of his. The estate might look like hell on earth, but there are some decent people here. Everything's gone wrong for them—and it always will go wrong, all their lives, but they are good people all the same, prepared to spend some of what little cash they have on an ex-junkie who had every chance in the world and blew it, pawned the silver spoon from his mouth at the first opportunity.
Walker. I'm a placid person, I try not to judge people. If you look hard enough, even vicious little tossers like Robbie Gilden have their good points, although I'll admit that I'm pushed to think of one off the top of my head. But Walker, he was the exception, he was a parasite that preyed on half the estate, the good and the bad alike, sucking everything out of them just so they could buy the kids some new clothes or stop the electric being cut off. Walker didn't live on the estate—fuck no—but it was his territory, his empire. He roamed the alleys and the corridors, the stairs and landings, everyone's lives imprisoned in neat little columns in his little black book, and Corrigan—his muscle, dumb but vicious, a rabid buffalo—never more than two paces from his side.
I limped out onto the walkway that linked my stained concrete island to the next. It was the weary end of summer. The heat slumped unmoving over the ground, three steps was enough to break out into a sweat, and for once the litter stayed in its stinking piles in the corners without being whipped into spirals of filth by the whirlwinds that usually stalked the estate. Trouble weather. I'd slept badly for the last two nights, because the clammy air that weighed heavy down on me, and because of the sounds of trouble brewing, stolen cars spinning, the apathetic slump of the hot day brewing the tension of the night. Too hot, too airless for too long. And now Robbie Gilden was back, and everyone was waiting for the sirens.
If the boy had any sense, he'd have left the estate as soon as word got out, although I suppose if Robbie Gilden had any sense he wouldn't be Robbie Gilden. Not much stayed secret here for long, there was always someone eager to get the police off their back with a scrap of information. I felt sorry for Billy Gilden, a decent old man who had worked hard building cars, working hard building his family, only to see his factory close down and his son slouch into third division dealing.
I leaned on the edge of the walkway and looked out over the courtyard below. A group of lads drifted across, laughing, smoking, swearing. One was Dean, son of my neighbour Alice. He had just turned twelve but already I'd found him lying in the stairwell, mumbling at the walls, stinking of glue and the piss that had soaked through his trousers. Now he was tagging on to the fifteen year olds, the cocks of the walk who had already been in and out of detention centres. Dean had a few rounds of community service to do before he'd get there, but he would get there in the end. Alice was being preyed on by that human blowfly Walker too, for the holiday she'd taken Dean on last year. First holiday he'd had in six years, first holiday since his dad had walked away. She'd paid for it four times over already, maybe more, and Walker still wasn't finished with her.
I crossed the walkway, and picked my way down the stairs at the other side. By the time I'd reached the bottom I was wet through with sweat and my legs were shaking. I sat down on the bottom step and skinned up. Chance to give myself a rest. Some days were better than others, some days I almost felt like my old self—no, start again: some days, despite the fact that I am dying, I felt better than my old self. But then my old self was a walking corpse much of the time and twice I'd been down at casualty, teetering on the edge of the abyss, the stuff either too pure or too badly cut, so maybe my new found health was not too much of a surprise. Today wasn't too bad, a few aches, a shortness of breath, but not too bad. I knew that a time was not far off when every day would be bad, and then every day after worse than the last. Taped inside the panels of my bath is the last heroin I ever bought. I bought it a couple of months ago, as much gear as I used to get through in a whole week when I had my habit. It's the velvet curtain that is going to fall across my stage when I decide that I can't go on again. It's my savings for the rainiest of days.
After a sit down and a smoke, I carried on through the estate towards the streets near the bypass, skirting round the war zone, the barely-populated blocks in the middle of the estate that served as shooting gallery and morgue and rat trap. I had just walked into the underpass beneath Clematis House—I'm not joking, the whole estate was a floral tribute—when a voice behind me called my name.
"Mickey Robbins. The one man Priory Clinic. Nice to see you out and about."
I stopped walking but didn't turn around. I'd insult him when I could. But not too much. Walker wouldn't have bad dreams about making a dying man unable to walk or feed himself.
"Mr Walker. Thank you for the kind words, but I'm not interested in your financial services right now."
Walker laughed, and strolled round in front of me. I could still feel a completely silent, concentrated menace behind me. Corrigan.
"You're not interested? Don't insult me. I'm a businessman, Robbins, a successful businessman, and do you know how successful businessmen stay successful?"
I didn't answer, just looked at the sunlight raining gold into the entrance of the underpass.
"How stupid of me," he said. Jesus, he was predictable. The only thing worse than an amoral violent parasite, is an amoral violent parasite who thinks that he is funny. "Of course you won't know how successful businessmen stay successful, will you, Robbins, because you've never known what success tastes like, have you? Successful businessmen don't stay successful by taking bad risks. And lending good money to dying ex-junkies is a bad risk. Terminal even."
Behind me, there was a noise like a faulty gas boiler trying to heat water. Corrigan laughing at the boss's bon mots. Trapped in an underpass with the bastard offspring of a cross between Cannon and Ball and the Kray twins, enough to make me wish I had less time on this earth, not more. I was lucky though, because I was stoned. Straight, and I would have said something clever that would have earned me a punch in the kidneys from Corrigan, a casual kick in the head from Walker's Patrick Cox brogues when I fell over. Stoned, I thought of about three witty retorts but couldn't decide which of them to use, and then they all blurred together anyway. So I just said, "Mmmmmm."
"Still," Walker said. "Much as I love talking to an educated man like yourself, I can't waste the day in this shithole. Places to go, debts to chase."
"People to threaten." Fuck. Where did that come from? But it didn't matter, Walker just laughed, made a shaking signal with his finger to the wheezing blackness behind me.
"The successful businessman's work is never done. Still, it's a living. And I like living. Bet you do too. Did, I mean. Shame then, considering."
I stood still until the footsteps crunched away over the rubbish that carpeted the underpass. Walker had always despised me. I had fuck all, he had lots. I had no future, he was probably saving for a place in Spain. But I was better than him, smarter than him, more than him. And he knew it. And he knew that I was aware that he knew it. And that's why he hated me. Everyone on the estate feared him. Everyone on the estate hated him. He was used to that. But I looked down o
n him.
Before I got within a hundred yards of Billy Gilden's house, I knew that I had missed the action. I've spent a lot of the last few months watching fuzzy repeats of Columbo on my little portable, and I've learnt all that there is to know about the art of detection. Let me tell you the clues that tipped me off that maybe, just maybe, Watson, the game was already well afoot.
First clue: the first breeze of the day came from the police helicopter clattering overhead. It circled round and round like an inquisitive dragonfly. There were probably half a dozen kids leaning out of their windows with air-rifles, praying for it to come just that little bit lower.
Second clue: sirens. Lots and lots of sirens. Sirens coming from the east, sirens coming from the west, sirens having the good grace to let any bail absconders and wanted men or women on the estate know that they should keep indoors, draw the curtains.
Third clue. The shaven-headed kid in a stained white tracksuit running back through the estate kicking at anything that smacked to him of authority—bins, lampposts, bus stops—shouting "Wankers, the fucking wankers, they've nicked Robbie, pigs, wankers, fucking bastard pig wankers".
I put all the elements of this puzzle together, and through a brilliant deductive leap, decided that it was probably time to go home. The sirens meant that they already had Robbie in the bag, no need for stealth now. He was probably already standing in front of the custody sergeant being booked in. All the police were doing now was keeping a lid on things until they could extricate themselves and let the estate get on with the business of tearing itself apart.