by Ted Lewis
The street I was in was terraced just like all the others. Every now and again there’d be a passage, tunnel-like, leading to the back gardens. I tinned into one of the passages and at the end of it were two latched gates. One right. One left. I took the left one; there were no lights shining from the house on to the back garden. Everything was quiet. I closed the gate behind me and walked to the end of the narrow garden. At the bottom of the garden was a lumber shed about as big as a small outside toilet. The door was split in two, halfway up, like a barn door. I opened the top section and looked inside. It was too dark to see anything so I leant over the bottom half of the door and felt about in the dark. My fingers touched something solid but loose and dusty at the same time. Coal. What did you expect, I thought. A four-poster? I climbed over the bottom half of the door and pulled the top half to and lay down on the coal and tried to make myself comfortable. Then I waited and I listened.
It didn’t take them long. I guessed there were seven or eight squad cars screeching into the area, building up over a period of about a quarter of an hour. Then there was silence for a while. What were they going to do? Hang around and do the house to house or assume that if they couldn’t spot me straight away I was making it farther away and spread themselves accordingly? Even if they did that, they’d leave somebody on tap, just in case I was still around.
I lay there in the dark, trying to find some foolproof way of gauging when to move. I only had a couple of hours to play with before the car showed up at the box.
After a while I heard a different kind of vehicle sounding off a few streets away: the door-bell tones of an ice-cream van. An ice-cream van, at this time of year. But of course they’d have drinks on sticks and probably orange juice and coca-cola. The thought of something like that within easy reach began to stir the coalhouse dust in my throat and my nostrils.
If this whole scene had been down south, the phone box would be alive by now. If it had been the Yard that was involved they’d have already gone over the box from top to bottom and then got it staked out so that in no way would I have got back to it without being picked up. If you’ve got to have the rozzers after you, I thought, the farther north you are the better. I had to take my chances, but at least I wasn’t up against the Yard. And the chances had to be taken.
I waited for what I guessed to be an hour. No klaxons, no fresh screeching of tires. I climbed out of the coalhouse and made my way up the garden to the passage. Then along the passage. I stopped halfway along and listened. Nothing. I moved towards the arch of light. Very slowly I poked my head out. The street was empty. Now all I had to do was walk out into the street. That was all. Once out, there was no cover, nothing. A patrol car could pass the end of the street and I’d have no chance. But there was nothing else for it.
I stepped out. At least my footsteps were silent. Which was as well, because I’d decided to run: no use trying to play the dawdling tramp any more, not now they were wise to me.
I darted to the end of the street and pressed myself against the wall of the end house and peered round the corner. Again, nothing. Crazily, the old joke passed through my mind about the fellow falling off a skyscraper and as he passes each floor he says, “so far so good, so far so good.”
I took off again and filtered through a few back streets stopping and starting like this. Finally I came to the last row of terraced houses and when I stuck my head round this last corner I could see the allotments and playing fields straight in front of me.
I could also see a patrol car.
The car was parked almost exactly where I’d come out of the allotments. There was only one of them in the car. That probably meant that at least one other rozzer was wandering about doing a bit of casing. And there was no way of telling where the casing was being done, whether in the allotments or in the streets around me. But that didn’t matter as much as the problem I had of getting across the road. The only thing in my favour was that the car was facing away from me so that if I moved the only way the driver could see me crossing was in his driving mirror. But it was still too risky. The slightest movement on an empty road would be enough to make him flick his eyes up to the mirror. The other alternative would be for me to backtrack into the streets and finally come out at the far end of the road, far enough away from the car to chance making the crossing. But this meant travelling through streets I hadn’t travelled through before, and there was no way of knowing what I’d find in them. For all I knew there could be a patrol car in every one of them.
I leant against the wall and swore. Then I heard the bells of the ice-cream van again. I chanced another look round the corner. The van was coming down the road where the police car was, travelling slowly along in the same direction that the police car was facing. Only the van wasn’t an ice-cream van. It was a fish and chip van. A fish and chip van with an ice-cream sound. It swished slowly past the end of my road and the smell drifted across to me in the van’s slipstream and my stomach turned over. The smell of the fish and chips was stronger than my thoughts on how to get over the road. The sickness of my hunger churned around in my stomach.
Then I heard the van begin to slow down. It was stopping. I chanced another look round the corner. The van was stopping. Pulling in behind the police car. Pulling in between me and the rozzer.
It must have been one of the van’s regular pitches. I heard the doors being opened and then I saw women drifting over to where the van was standing. But I waited a while because now more than at any other time the rozzer would be looking in his mirror and I’d no way of telling how much his view had been obscured by the chippie.
Then the door of the police car opened. The rozzer slowly got out and dawdled over to the van and stood by the group of women clustered round the serving window. As the women were served they hurried back to their houses with the warm newspapers pressed to their bosoms. And then they’d all gone and there was just the rozzer. He stepped up to the window and gave his order and stood back with his hands on his hips and looked up into the night sky. Then the chippie handed the parcel through the window and the rozzer sorted out his money and gave it to the chippie and took the parcel and turned away and strolled back to his car, unwrapping the parcel as he went.
It was then that I crossed the road. As I reached the curb on the other side I heard the clunk of the police car door as the rozzer closed it behind him. Now there was no way that he could see me in his mirror. The chip van was completely obscuring his view. The van’s engine started up and I straddled the allotment fence and dropped down the other side.
I moved carefully away from the fence, into the darkness of the allotments. After I’d gone a little way in, I looked back to the row of terrace houses, unearthly bright under the sodium street lights. The rozzer was still in his car, feeding. There was no sign of anyone else.
This time I avoided the school and hit the playing fields at a different spot. I began to walk across to the lights of the dual-carriageway.
Then, outlined against the bright lights, I saw six or seven rozzers walking towards me, all strung out on a sweep operation. They had no lights; at least if they had they weren’t using them yet. They’d use the lights when they got to the school and the allotments. No point in using them on the playing field. Cracken wouldn’t be hiding out in the middle of a playing field.
They hadn’t seen me yet. I wasn’t silhouetted the way they were. But if I moved, if I tried to get back to the allotments, they’d be on to me. And the same if I tried any other direction.
My heart felt like concrete. Tears welled up in my eyes. After everything, this. I’d been too cocky. I’d been too sure.
The rozzers got closer. Still no one spotted me. Then I realized something. They’d just come out of the bright sodium of the dual-carriageway; I’d been flitting about in darkness for the last couple of days. My eyes were adjusted to the blackness: theirs weren’t. There was a chance.
Very slowly, I let myself sink to the ground. I didn’t make a sound, but I moved in ultra-slow motion. Then, when I was on the ground, I curled myself up into a ball and pressed myself into the wet earth. Then I waited.
I could hear their footsteps now. Then the rustle of their clothes, the sound of their breathing. I lay there wound up like a spring, waiting for a boot to stumble into my back and burst me open.
But they passed. There was no boot, no sudden cry of surprise. The rozzers passed me by.
I didn’t move until I heard them hit the allotment fence. Then I chanced turning my head to see what they were up to. I saw the lights go on and the legs swing over. Now I could move. But I didn’t get up. I crawled. I crawled until I got close to the dual-carriageway, but not so close that if I stood up I’d be picked out by the sodium. Which was what I had to do. I had to get to my feet so that I could sec over the perimeter fence and suss out what the Filth had fixed up on the other side.
There was a van and a couple of cars. Complete with drivers. Three of them, standing together, braving a natter.
I dropped down again. I could do nothing but go parallel with the perimeter until I got far enough away to go over the fence without being seen.
But this time I didn’t crawl. I ran, bent double, like Quasimodo. I covered about two hundred yards like this but I had to keep stopping for a rest: doubling myself up had brought back the pain in my chest.
I reached the end of the playing field. The perimeter fence made a right-angled turn in front of me. Beyond this there was no sodium lighting. Just suburban houses that faced on to the dual-carriageway. But the houses formed a curve, not a straight line. So in front of them the dual-carriageway must follow the same curve. Enough of a curve to make my crossing invisible from the crowd of rozzers way down below me.
I climbed the fence and dropped down into the back garden of the first house. There were no lights on in the house. I walked round to the front garden. Cars flashed by but there were no pedestrians. I went through the garden gate and began to walk along the pavement until there was a long gap in the traffic. Then I took off across the road and into the nearest side street. When I came to the first house without any lights showing I got off the road and worked my way back to the telephone box via a route of back gardens. This way I only had two streets to cross. Finally I came out into a front garden about twenty yards away from the kiosk. I dropped down and made my way to the privet hedge and pushed myself into the leaves and looked over the low brick wall towards the kiosk on the other side of the road.
The street was empty. All the chopping and changing I’d been doing made me lose track of the time. It could have been eight or it could have been nine. I’d no idea. As far as I knew the Morris could be just half a mile away, on its way back to the Smoke. It might even have passed me on the dual-carriageway. No, I thought, it couldn’t have done that. They’d have spotted me for sure. Surely they would. The feeling of desperation began to creep back into me again, like the awareness of my physical condition now that I was stationary again. The pain in my chest, the damp, the hunger. All spreading through me...
The sound of a car. A car had turned into the street. Slowing down as it approached the phone box. Then it stopped, but the engine didn’t cut out. A door opened. I pushed my face through the leaves and looked towards the phone box. It was a police car. A rozzer got out and walked over to the box. He glanced round as if he didn’t really expect to cop for anything. I just stayed how I was, staring through the leaves at the rozzer and the car and the phone box. I daren’t move in case the leaves rustled and I was spotted for. But in my gut there was enough movement for me to be going on with. All that I needed now was for the Morris to show while the rozzer was still glancing round.
But eventually the rozzer got back in the car and the car pulled away and then the street was silent again. So that’s what they call a stake-out up here, I thought. A periodic visit to the phone box. If I’d have been in any other condition I’d have had to smile. That and the fact that their visit might coincide with the Morris’s visit.
Then about three minutes after the police car had taken off there was the sound of another car engine approaching the box. I peered through the leaves again. A Morris Oxford. And it was stopping. My heart jumped but then it began to fall on a sickening downward curve. The Morris wasn’t maroon. It was black. Sheila wouldn’t have made a mistake: telling me the wrong colour could have had me back inside, no trouble. She’d said maroon and that was what she’d meant.
The Morris pulled up next to the box. No one got out. I couldn’t see into the car because a strip of sodium was reflecting off the windscreen.
Then the offside door opened. A man got out and walked towards the telephone box. The man was about twenty-five years old. He had close-cropped fair hair. And he was wearing a sheepskin coat. Sheila had told me to look out for a man in a sheepskin coat.
The man in the sheepskin coat looked around the area where the box was in much the same way that the rozzer had done. In my mind I was trying to decide which was wrong, the car or the coat. Suppose Sheila had been told the wrong colour, and this was their last circuit? The man began to walk back to the car. He shook his head once as he went. I stood up and swung my leg over the wall. The man carried on walking but whoever else was in the car must have said something because the man stopped and turned and looked straight at me.
“Billy?” he said.
I nodded my head.
“Billy?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Billy.”
I began to move towards the car, slowly at first, then my movements got quicker and quicker until I was almost falling headlong over the bonnet. The man in the sheepskin coat was holding open the rear door. Everybody was talking at once.
“Christ, what took you so long?” said the sheepskin.
“We’ve been here waiting for nearly five minutes,” the driver said. “We’ve already been here once before.”
“The car. It should have been maroon,” I said.
“It is maroon,” said Sheepskin.
“Maybe it looks black in this light,” said the driver. “Sodium does that.”
“That’s what it must have been,” I said. “The sodium.”
The car U-turned and made for the dual-carriageway.
“You hungry?” said Sheepskin. “You must be. How does fish and chips grab you? Got ’em from a van in between circuits.”
I smiled, a weak, silly smile. Fish and chips. From the van I’d seen earlier. Me and the rozzer. The same fish and chips.
“Yeah,” I said. “Great.”
Sheepskin twisted round in the passenger seat and handed me the warm parcel.
“What about a drink? Scotch, beer or tea?”
“Tea,” I said. “With a drop in it.” A thought struck me. “You don’t have any lemonade, do you?”
“Lemonade?”
“Doesn’t matter. Tea’ll do nicely.”
Sheepskin began unscrewing a flask. The driver said:
“There’s fresh clothes under the back seat. You’ll have to lift it. I should change once we get out of this place.”
“Thanks.”
“There weren’t any road blocks on the way up,” Sheepskin said, handing me the flask cup.
“They still think I’m in the area,” I said.
“Shouldn’t have any trouble, then.”
I took the tea and drank. The car turned on to the dual-carriageway and began to pick up speed. On my right were the playing fields.
“Plenty of Filth about at any rate,” Sheepskin said, twisting round in his seat and looking through the rear window at the police cars and van still parked by the playing fields.
The tea spread through my body and I began to feel a wonderful weak helplessness. No more decisions, no more risks. They were being taken for me.
I felt like a child again. Protected and cared for. The town disappeared behind us and we were in the limbo of the night motor-way, unrelated to the real world. I emptied the cup and sank back in the warm upholstery.
Sheepskin turned round again.
“Want some more?” he said.
I shook my head.
“How are you feeling now?”
“Fine,” I said. “Fine.”
“Wait till you see the papers,” he said. “You’ll feel even better. Christ, you’re the biggest thing since Hiroshima. I mean . . .”
The driver cut in on Sheepskin.
“Later,” he said. “Leave it till later. All he wants to do now is to sleep. Don’t you, Billy?”
Part Three
I awoke.
The first thing was the perfume. That was the first thing I noticed. The soft sweet smell of Sheila’s body drifting into my senses.
I opened my eyes and turned my head. Sheila was in a deep sleep. Dark auburn hair tumbled over the pillow and over her bare shoulders. Her breath was soft and slow. I could feel the light warmth of it on my neck. I looked at her a long time before I turned away. Then I just lay there and enjoyed the luxury of the traffic sounds in the high street beyond the bedroom window. Rumbling lorries and swishing cars and blaring motorhorns. It was music.