Nowhere to Go

by Iain Rowan

  I felt sorry for Billy. I don't have any family—thankfully I'd never ended up being a father, what an example I'd be, and the people whose blood I happened to share had disowned me back when what I needed was help—but seeing your son go like that, dragged out of the house, knowing that his life was going to be that on repeat: prison, out, dealing, prison, out, dealing. For a decent man like Billy, it must have been hard to take.

  I was walking back along the corridor to my flat when Welsh John's door opened and Walker and Corrigan oozed out.

  "You not dead yet?"

  I ignored him, walked to my door no faster and no slower than I had been walking before. I could feel the stare on my back. I went into my flat, shutting the door behind me with the heel of my foot. I was tired now, and I felt low. It was a sadness that came more and more often these days, a sadness that puzzled me. I have no job, no money, nothing to do, no-one to love or be loved by. My friends are all people who are worse off than I am, trying to bring up kids or keep marriages together, while the Walkers and the Robbie Gildens and the kids who kick front doors in, the dealers and the junkies and the pimps and the multi-skilled, multi-tasking bastards who do a bit of everything, gnaw away at this place, tearing the heart of it out to throw at police cars, tearing the heart out of us to give themselves a buzz.

  What have I got? Nothing. What can I expect? Nothing. What do I have to live for? Nothing. But sometimes I still sit on my couch and cry like a child and say to myself I don't want to do it, I don't want to die, I don't want to go, no, not yet. I've spent my life running away from the world, and now I don't want to let it go.

  So I got stoned. I sat in front of the telly and watched something I couldn't follow from minute to minute, I pulled skins out and licked and stuck and lit and crumbled and folded and rolled and smoked and pulled and licked and on and on until everything was distant, behind plate glass, a play I'm only half-watching featuring characters I don't care about. It's not the same as my old habit, there's not that complete removal from the world, that sloughing off of the skin of worry and pain and fear, but I don't want to go back to that—won't go back to that, it's a matter of pride—and this is enough for me now.

  Until I ran out of skins. Before, I was depressed, but after this I was just fucking angry. Forget morbid self-pity about my impending doom, this was now, this was urgent. I knew I'd bought another packet but I couldn't find it anywhere. Too soon to stop, not numb enough, not numb enough by half. I staggered out of my door, into the hot air of the evening. Welsh John would have been back with the money for Walker, and he always had skins, forever smoking those prison-thin rollies.

  As I went out I bumped into Dean, letting himself in Alice's door. He smelt like a tin of cheap lager that someone had dropped their fag-ends in.

  "All right, Mickey."

  "Dean," I mumbled, "how's your mum? Got any skins?"

  "Nah. Dunno 'bout her, she's out with some bloke, haven't seen her since yesterday. You heard what's happened? Bastards."

  "What, Robbie Gilden? Yeah, I gathered."

  "Robbie? Fuck Robbie. Billy. There's going to be fucking trouble, you want to keep your head down tonight like, Mickey, it's kicking off, big style." Only a year out of primary school, only a year away from doing pictures of Jesus with coloured crayons, and he was talking hooligan tough.

  "Billy? What about Billy?"

  "Fucking police killed him."

  "What? Dean, are you out of your head again? What are you talking about?"

  "Killed him, like I said. They smash through the fucking door to drag Robbie out, and there's a right scrap, Robbie gives the bastards as good as he gets, but then about a hundred pigs take him down and give him a right fucking kicking, bastards. Billy tries to pull them off, he gets dragged off by more of the bastards, two fucking minutes later he's dead, fucking heart attack or something they'll say, but they fucking killed him, all the same. Whole place is going to kick off, there's already been a scaffolding pole gone through a pigmobile window, fucking good style."

  "Jesus." Poor Billy. "Look Dean, chill, yeah? Stay out of the way, stop at home, have a smoke, keep out of the way—"

  "Piss off, Mickey, I'm well up for this, going to be a laugh. Just nipping in the flat for any milk bottles we've got, know what I mean?" I let the twelve year old General Molotov disappear into his mummy's flat and walked down the corridor to Welsh John's.

  I knew that something was wrong as soon as I saw that the door was still open. No-one leaves their doors open here, not for a minute. Even if most of what you own has been stolen, there's always something else to take. I knocked on the door, shouted, and when there was no reply I walked in. The narrow hallway still stank of Walker's aftershave. Expensive stuff, I'm sure, but it always smelled cheap on him. Like dabbing Chanel on dog shit.

  Sheila was sitting at the cheap folding table in the kitchen, her face in her hands. She was making no sound, but I could tell by the spastic shiver of her shoulders that she was crying. The kitchen was a mess, shattered mugs on the floor, toaster cracked and sagging against one skirting board, the narrow worktop swept clean, everything on it dumped onto the floor by a casual arm.

  "Oh Sheila, love, what have they done?" I crouched down beside her, went to put a comforting hand on her but stopped myself, wondering what the last hand to touch her had felt like. I got the answer after a minute or so, when she coughed some phlegm back into her throat and raised her face out of her hands to look at me. Her left eye was nearly closed by the swelling, and the mark across her cheek was dirty, bruised, hand-sized. I noticed that her blouse had been torn open. She'd pulled it back together, but the missing buttons let it hang open enough to let me see the dark bruises, almost like a love bite. Bastards. What do you say? What can you say.

  "Sheila, Sheila, Sheila." I said. "Don't cry. They're gone. Please, Sheila, I'm so sorry, please don't cry. John'll be back soon—"

  She wailed, a horrible painful sound like a cat dying. "They've gone to find him Mickey, they've gone to find him. He should have been here, he should have had the money, the stupid bastard, he should have been here, he told them he would be here, all he had to do was pick the money up and come home, he should have been here. He'll have drunk it, that's where he'll be, staggering around some pub, when he should have been here, oh Mickey, he should have been here."

  "Maybe he got delayed down at the site, maybe they didn't have the money..."

  She looked at me, and I couldn't finish the sentence. We both knew that she was right. John loved Sheila, really cared for her, but drink was his mistress, and after years of experience Sheila knew when he was being unfaithful.

  "They're going to hurt him, Mickey, really bad. Walker said they're going to put him in the hospital to teach everyone on the estate a lesson about paying on time. Oh, Mickey, they're going to hurt my John, I don't care about what those bastards did to me but they're going to hurt my John." She started to cry again, every part of her face melting into grief and pain.

  "I'll find him." I stood up, took a chance, slid a hand onto Sheila's shoulder. She flinched a little, but then put her hand on top, squeezed mine.

  "And then what?"

  "I don't know, Sheila, I don't know. I'll think of something. I'm supposed to be smart, remember, I'll think of something. I'll find John first, warn him off, get him to stay out of the way, then we'll see what we can do about the money, see, there must be something. I've got a bit of gear stashed away in the house, I could sell it, might keep them off his back for a day or two. Go to your sister's, Sheila, get off the estate in case they come back, it's all going to be fucking war here anyway, Billy Gilden's dead and the kids are going to tear the place apart."

  Again the long look at me. "This is my home, Mickey. I am not leaving my home. Not for Walker, not for those little thugs, not for anything."

  I didn't know what to say. Half the country would probably look at Sheila Price with contempt, a jobless un-educated nothing married to a jobless un-educated alcoholic
, living away her life in a crumbling flat, bootleg cable, gin and fags out of the back of a white Transit. But half the country would shit themselves and run away if Walker knocked at their door, and here was Sheila, defiant, protecting what little she had. It might have been nothing, but it was her nothing.

  "I'll find John," I said. "I'll find him." I had a pretty good idea where to look. Problem was, so did Walker, and he was at least an hour ahead of me. I left Sheila sitting in the wreck of her kitchen, went back to my flat for my keys, and walked out into an estate that was already going up in flames. I checked all the piss-stinking corridors leading into our block. Nothing. As I walked away a black BMW softly rolled around the corner. Bad news, because it was Walker. Good news, because it meant they were still looking for John. I decided to head for The Greyhound, the estate's only pub. An ugly grey blockhouse, it looked as if it were designed to survive a nuclear war. It was somehow reassuring to know that in the event of a global holocaust a place would still exist where survivors could buy drugs and fence stolen electrical equipment to the sound of an overstretched tape of half-remembered Eighties hits.

  I had little hope of finding John in there—it was the first place Walker would have tried—but I was short of ideas. Hanging around outside the Greyhound was someone who would have seen John if anyone had. Would have seen two of him, probably. Pat Barratt was one of John's regular partners in drink, but where John was a good man brought low by alcohol, Pat was a sly little bastard by birth.

  "Mickey, how you doing. You coming in for a drink then?" What Pat meant when he asked you in for a drink was for you to go in and buy him one, so he could hang around inside trying to scrounge more without the landlord throwing him out.

  "Would love to Pat, another time, you know? I've got to find Welsh John, really got to find him. This is important. You seen him?"

  Pat put on a look which I'm sure he thought was inscrutable but which made him look like a weasel. Well, more like a weasel.

  "John, you're after. Now. Welsh John. My old friend. Well, maybe I have seen him, but maybe I haven't. That would all depend now, you see."

  I wanted to hit him, but I didn't have the time or the energy. I dug into the front pocket of my jeans and dug out the crumpled five pound note that was supposed to be food for tomorrow. And the day after.

  "No time to piss about, Pat. I need to know. Tell me, and here's five quid for some meths."

  "Cheeky bastard. That's not a very nice thing to say someone you're asking for information, not a nice thing at all, by rights I should tell you to piss off." But Pat's bloodshot eyes never moved from the money in my hand, and I just waited in silence.

  "Yeah, to piss off, by rights. But seeing as it's for John, and he's one of my oldest friends, and you say it's important, and me and John, we go back a long way..." his hand moved towards the money, but I lifted it so that it was out of his reach.

  "So I have seen him, if you must know. Not here though, town, in the Miller's. He was buying. He'd got some compo money for something, I didn't listen what, but he'd stopped off to celebrate on the way home, 'just one or two' he'd said, but he'd been there for hours, pissed as a fart and getting more so. I had to go, had to meet someone up here for a bit of business, you know, bit of important business that's no concern of yours, but important it is, and—"

  "John." It must have been important business to drag Pat away from John flashing his money in a pub.

  "Eh? Oh, John. I left him behind in the Miller's, still buying drinks like he'd won the fucking pools. He said he was going to have one more for the road and then go home to see Sheila. Dutch courage he said, needed one more before he went home. Sheila was probably waiting for the money to buy some fucking dress or something, I reckon, not like she ever works mind, and she has the fucking cheek to tell him not to spend his money on a couple of drinks with his mates—hey, you promised—"

  I had stuffed the fiver back into my pocket and turned to walk away. Pat let fly with every swear word he knew and was still going when I turned the corner. If John had been at the Miller's Arms and was heading home then he'd come on to the estate past the community centre, in between Rose House and Gardenia House, across the war zone and then into our block through the service stairs at the back. Like junkies, alcoholics were creatures of habit. In every sense.

  The police helicopter clattered overhead, a finger of white light poking down into the anthill, stirring things up. I had to intercept John down by the community centre, before he got onto the estate. To get there, I walked through hell. No sulphur, just the stink of petrol and burning plastic, but otherwise the estate fitted the traditional descriptions of the underworld. Most of the streets were in darkness, which was nothing new, but every now and then the dirty concrete of the buildings were warmed orange by the guttering flames of a still-burning car. Sirens came and went, echoing through the concrete canyons, and I could hear shouting, the way you can when you're near a football ground and a goal goes in.

  I took a short-cut through the war zone. Battles were still raging all over the estate, but the war zone, of all places, was quiet. No-one wanted to fight over it, no-one wanted to be in it. The war zone was a piece of ground neither the bad boys nor the law cared about. It had been the site of Lily House, the first of the blocks to be built, but as early as the seventies the appalling shortcuts that had been taken in the building were apparent and after a gas explosion the council took the chance to pull it down.

  The plot had stayed a wasteland for a few years, and then a programme of progressive housing began—not the squat slabs of the flats, but small family homes, communal spaces, little bits of garden. Nice enough, from all accounts, but these little oases were surrounded on all sides by hulking concrete crags. Their gardens were overlooked by the pissed-up kids on the walkways of Iris, their small, neat bedrooms rattled to the noise of the stolen cars being paraded up and down the access road. The council built them well enough, but no-one wanted to come and live in them. In the end they were just used for rehousing problem families from elsewhere off the estate, easy solutions to neighbourly disputes for a harried planning officer, and within ten years of their construction they were falling apart. Now none were permanently occupied.

  The houses had been gutted for anything that had ever been of any value. Some of them didn't have floors any more; somewhere someone would express the need for some floorboards, and a day later their need was met for a little bit of cash. Younger kids sniffed glue in them, older kids chased the dragon in them, local tarts led their unwary punters to them, either for ten minutes of unsatisfying sex, or into the arms of their pimps who spoke quietly in the darkened rooms and let what little light there was reflect off the blades of the knives they held. I'd spent my time in the war zone, drifting away from everything. Now I skirted past it.

  I walked around the corner of Rose House and right into a dozen police, all silent faceless threat in their black riot gear. Twelve visors turned to look at me, each one reflecting the night. I held my hands up in what I hoped was a conciliatory gesture, tried my best to look like an innocent civilian caught up in someone else's trouble. Someone from off the estate, in other words. One of the helmets said "You" and started to clank towards me. A burning star grew in the sky behind them, turned end over end in the air, and then splashed fire all over the ground. One of the policeman beat at flames on his trousers, and out of the darkness beyond came voices laughing, jeering. I took advantage of the confusion and ducked back around the corner. I would have to go the long way through the alley that ran around the side of Rose House.

  Just before I reached the alley a red Fiesta screamed past, horn blasting. It did a handbrake turn, rubber melting on to the road. The car span once, twice, three times and then what was left of the tyres gripped and it accelerated away, back into the darkness. Through the broken driver's window I had seen Dean, wired, exultant. I turned into the alley and saw a figure staggering towards me from the other end, weaving along as if there were a precisely
marked winding path that only he could see. Welsh John. I shouted and started to hurry towards him, and then one of the shadows in the alley moved and there was a terrible solid pain in my chest and I hit the wall and slid down it like rain down a window.

  "Fuck off, junkie scum," Corrigan said mildly, and lumbered down the alley towards John.

  "Ah, the knight in shining armour, how sweet," said another shadow, and then Walker kicked me just behind the ear, the leather of his shoe skidding across the back of my neck, tearing the skin. "Stay out of my business, or your short life will be even shorter. I won't be telling you this again."

  Something at the far end of the alley was on fire and the air was acrid and full of shouts and fear. This must be what war feels like, I thought. I staggered to my feet and saw that Corrigan had John up against the wall, was holding him there while Walker gave him the lecture. Once the lecture finished, then the beating would start. Nothing I could do to stop them, not one half-dead ex-junkie. Corrigan would swat me away like a bothersome gnat.

  I ran back out of the alley and around the corner. Most of the police were moving in a steady group across the road, riot shields held above their heads. Three had stayed where I had first run into them. They were talking into crackling radios and looking at a half-folded map. Fucking tourists.

  "Hey!" I shouted. "Down here. Someone's getting half-kicked to death."

  One of them looked up at me, for just a moment. "Piss off."

  "He's one of your lot—he's a plainclothes. They've got a samurai sword and everything, they're going to do him."

  Visors looked at each other for a moment, flies conferring over lunch, then the three of them ran towards the alley, batons up. I shuffled after them, still fighting for breath after Corrigan's punch. John was on the floor now. Corrigan kicked him, kicked him again, and then raised his foot for a slow, deliberate stamp. The police shouted and Walker sprinted away down the alley. Corrigan turned to face the policemen. The first of them flailed wildly with his baton and Corrigan just caught his arm, slammed him round into the wall of the alley, then dropped him to the floor in a heap. The second policeman landed a blow in Corrigan's gut but it didn't seem to bother him at all. Corrigan swung a punch, but the copper had put so much force into his attack that he fell over, and Corrigan's fist swung harmlessly above his head. Then it was all over. The last policeman held his hand up to Corrigan's face and something hissed. The big man bellowed with pain and started charging from side to side, his hands clasped to his eyes, hoping to force his way through. The copper on the floor did Corrigan's kneecap with his baton, and when Corrigan fell over the one who had sprayed the CS started whaling in, Rodney King style. I'd seen enough. Corrigan was taken out, John was safe, for now. But Walker had gone, and I had a feeling that he would know exactly why the police had turned up at that moment.