“’Ey, lad. Tell your mate I wanna talk to him.”
“We’ve got no Rizlies, mate. I’m sorry.”
“I just wanna talk to him.”
I tried to reach for the door to pull it shut. Tricky with one foot braced on the clutch. I glanced over to the way out. The hoodie lad was gone.
Three-stripe held me back in my seat and tightened his grip on my shoulder.
“Hang on, lad,” he said. “I’m talkin’ to you.”
“Leave it out, mate.”
“Get out.”
His mate had opened the door on the pavement side. He leaned in and looked up at me. Blond lad with freckles.
“’Ey, lad,” he said. “Where you goin’?”
I heard Paterson’s voice in my head, reminding me what my job was. Guard your country, Azo. Britain. Your own folk, your freedoms, your way of life. Guard it all, for better or worse, or all that’s left is mayhem.
The other two lads had come and were leaning on the bonnet. They scattered and yelled when the Mazda started to roll. The lanky one leaning in my door hopped along with his foot inside on my seat.
Our hoodie lad had shown up again, across from us on the far side of the turnoff. I saw him duck down behind a parked car. Then I saw what had made him run. Someone else had shown up at the car park entry. Stocky, bald feller. White shirt under his vest, black trousers and boots. A guard from the dock.
He clocked the Mazda. He was looking around him for the hoodie lad.
I jigged out the clutch and let the car jerk forward faster. The big lad held on, hopping along with me. He wasn’t going away. I’d have to find a way to make him useful.
“Come ’ead then, you big fanny,” I said. “We’ll take the lot of you.”
I rammed the gas and churned the clutch out. The wheels crackled as the Mazda lurched forward. The freckly lad on my left side crumpled, slipped to the tarmac and fell away. The door pranged to but wouldn’t shut as I zipped towards the way out. The lad in the black trackie gripped my arm. I ground it up to twenty. He tripped away and rolled into the gutter.
A little way down the road, I did a U-ey and headed back towards them. I braked as we got close.
“What you doing, Azo?” Ayax yelled. “Fast now!”
“Hang on.”
I squeaked to a halt just across from the KFC, near the car where I’d seen the hoodie duck down. The four cider lads were standing yelling at the site guard.
“You two get out and have them,” I said.
“Azo, you crazy?” yelled Ayax. “Man is here.”
“Remember what I’ve taught you.”
I left the Mazda running and climbed out. I raised my arms at the cider lads.
“Come ’ead then,” I yelled.
As Casho and Ayax loped across the road, I scuttled round and crouched behind the car.
The guard shouted. My lads laid into the scalls. I’d taught them well. No one was looking at me. I crept away behind the cars.
The hoodie lad was crouching a few yards down, trying to watch the scrap through a car window. He jumped when he saw me. I put my finger to my lips. I took the first envelope out of my top and held it up as I crept towards him.
“Raz says hi.”
He slipped the little rucksack off his back and handed it over. I took hold of the draw-strings with one hand and lifted. Twenty pounds it must have weighed.
“What’s your name, lad?” I said.
He stared at me. Spotty, pasty lad with pale blue eyes. He said nothing.
I loosened the strings and looked in the bag. This little grey steel box in there. Raz hadn’t told me what I was looking for. No time to chat about it though. Casho and Ayax were yelling. I handed the envelope to the lad. He took it, looked inside, then at me, and stuck it down his top. He glanced over his shoulder and sprinted off back towards the Rock Ferry Bypass.
I stood up and watched. The guard never saw him go. He was stooping over one of the cider lads in the gutter, trying to give him first aid. One of the lad’s mates lay near him. The other two had run off.
Casho and Ayax were getting back in the Mazda. I was scrambling in behind the wheel, shoving the rucksack onto the passenger seat, when something gripped my shoulder. My big pal from before, in the boss trackie.
I shoved him off and he reeled back but didn’t fall. I stepped out of the car.
It all went quiet and still in my head. I stood and watched him strut towards me. I picked out a spot on him. The middle of his lips where his yellow ratty teeth showed.
I left him lying for the guard to nurse.
I smiled to myself. My day’s work was almost over. Soon we were squealing back up towards Birkenhead. The tunnel. Bootle. Just one more stop. No trouble this time. A dark depot in among the warehouses off the dock road. A quiet driver who hardly spoke English. A metal carry-crate. I gave him his envelope while the hefted it into the boot.
I dropped them with the bag and the box at our front gate, drove off and dumped the car where Raz told me, on a waste ground the far side of Rimrose Valley. On the walk back, I ducked into a kiddies’ playground, found a bench and sat hunched over on it. I got my phone out and tried to call Paterson. He didn’t pick up. Too bad for him, that dickhead. He’d have loved to hear about all this.
21
I gave Maya a leg-up through the skylight where the attic roof sloped. Her bare foot with them painted toenails, cradled in my hand. Her arse packed in her tight Kappa bottoms. Biscuit tin in her left hand.
Being with her calmed me well down. The smoky smell of her and the sound of her voice, all warm and hopeless at the same time. Up she went and scrambled out of sight, sniggering and swearing under her breath.
I pulled myself up after her and poked my head through the skylight. She’d slid down the tiles to the bottom where a bit of the roof of the downstairs bedroom jutted out flat. Rodney was asleep in the room below.
I came slipping down the slates and settled next to her on the flat bit.
We looked out over the rooftops. Clear black summer sky. Stars. Porch lights. Buzz of traffic on Church Road. And from far down on the ground floor, the rumble of Raz snoring.
She opened her tin and rustled around in it, skinning up. She must have already smoked that first one in the afternoon. She peeled off a bunch of Rizlies, licked them up and started patching them together and sprinkling in tobacco and skunk leaves. More licking. In no time she had it rolled fat and tight. Sparked it up and sucked off that bitter first gobful. She coughed on the smoke, pulled again, deeper, and held it in.
I looked at her face in the glow as she tugged a third time. Wrinkles went out of her forehead. Her shiny sad eyes misted over. Little smile on her face. She let the smoke out slowly. Took another long lungful and handed the spliff to me.
“You trying to get me fired?” I said.
“Yeah.”
I held in my first drag deep and long. Wondered if she was going to talk. She didn’t. She wrapped her arms round her knees and shut her eyes. I opened my mouth at last and blew the smoke off over the rooftops towards Seaforth. That grassy taste as it rolled out my nose. I could already feel the tingling in my fingers and toes.
“Where did you get this?” I said.
“Stole it before I came here.”
I took a second pull. My legs went numb. “Who from?”
“My ex.”
I coughed and spluttered out the smoke.
“Don’t worry. He’ll not come looking for me,” she said. “He’d have to deal with Raz.”
My third lungful. I held it in a while. Felt happier. Started to forget about everything. I let the smoke out. My voice came out all strangled with it.
“You and Raz?” I said.
She opened her eyes. “He wishes. He come to my room last night after lights out. Sat on my bed. Talked.”
“What about?”
“Same stuff he tells the lads. Right and wrong. The past. Wars. Says I’ve got my own role to play. He’s got somethin
g planned for me.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. Just listened. Squeezed his hand. Waited for him to go.”
“So why is he giving you the pills?”
She stared out over the rooftops like she’d not heard. I said it again. My voice came from far away. “The pills,” I said. “I saw you this morning.”
“I have to take them. With the lads around, he keeps them locked up.”
“What happens if you stop?”
“I get bad.”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
She took back the spliff.
“Won’t this mess you up then?” I said.
She gave a hopeless shrug and stared at the sky. Shrinking back into her own world, where you couldn’t reach her. Where her eyes didn’t see you. Just like my mum. It drove me nuts, that look. Made me sad. Made me want her more. That and the skunk, eh. I’d only had three tugs and I was well stoned. Feeling all soft.
“So how did you get here? I said. It came out sounding all deep. “I mean what are you here for? I mean what happened? Where’s your folks?”
“Formby.”
“You a bit posh?”
She shrugged. “Not been home for a while. Not since I lost my job.”
“Job, eh? You get flasher and flasher, you. Job where?”
“Bank.”
I spluttered. “You blagging?”
“No. It went tits up with all the others.”
She rolled over on her side towards me, looking me in the eyes as she blew her smoke in my face.
“So you’ve got folks but you never see them?” I said.
“I see my mum. Sometimes.”
“Wish I had a mum in Formby,” I said. “Wish I had any folks at all. Only wanted a quiet life, me. Home. Garden. Sofa and an X-Box.”
I was talking too much. Found myself telling her about Ali. Frank. Leanne. Barely managed to keep my mouth shut about Paterson.
She curled up next to me and patted my arm.
“So what’s Raz got planned for you?” I said.
“Don’t know. I’ll not stick around long enough to find out.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got something planned for him first.”
22
I still hadn’t got to see what was in those boxes. Raz had me busy running the house. Coco Pops for brekkie each morning, then training out the back. I taught the lads and Maya how to block and hold and hit. Crunch, snap, throttle. How to kill, stuff like that. Easy. Top use of taxpayers’ money, that training. It had sorted me out. Now I was sharing it with other young people. It helped me pass the time till I was up on the roof with her again.
“So come on, then. What’s this plan of yours?”
It was the night after our first spliff-off.
“Eh?” she said, blowing out a lungful. I couldn’t tell if she was really dopey or just making like she was.
“For Raz.”
If she was going to stir things up, I wanted to get it moving. Raz had been cold on me ever since that night when I went down to the tracks. If he sussed out who I was, he’d take me down in the cellar.
Maya rolled her head round on the slates to face me and passed me what was left of the spliff.
“You found out what’s in that crate yet?” she said.
“Course not. No one can get into Raz’s room. If you did, he’d kill you.”
“Don’t you want to know what’s in it?”
“Course I do. I nearly got done nicking the thing.”
“Time we searched his room then.”
I sat and took that in. I’d thought of that when I first come to the house. I’d reckoned it was too risky to try breaking in. I’d told myself I’d look for a chance and put it to the back of my mind. Search his room. It was the first thing I should have done.
“Even if you did get in,” I said, “the box is locked.”
“Next you’ll be telling me you there’s a password to read his mails.”
“He doesn’t do email.”
“Really? He does a lot of typing behind that door.”
What could I say? I’d had a lot on my mind since I’d started in the house. Hadn’t had time for any fancy crap like listening at doors.
“Well, yeah then. It will have a password.”
“Never stopped me.”
I sat there with the spliff in my hand, looking at her with my mouth open like a div.
She smiled. “Come on, Azo. You don’t look like the kind of lad who’d let a locked door get in his way.”
“You’re dangerous.”
“You love it.”
“I wouldn’t if Raz caught me in his sock drawer.”
“Never mind socks. I’m getting in his PC.”
More to this bird than I thought then, eh. Well, well. Part of my job. Some day I’d have to get to the bottom of who she was and what she knew. But just then she was moving too fast. All I could do was cling on.
“Hack him?” I said. “You know how to do that?”
“My ex taught me.”
“And where’s he? In Formby?”
“No. He’s left.”
“Where to?”
“Syria.”
I took a deep breath. “So you hack the big man. Then what?”
She grabbed the spliff back and brushed a scrap of ash off the front of my t-shirt. Her fingertips grazed my right pec. She stuck the spliff in her gob and winked at me.
Raz’s bedroom door had a shiny new Yale lock. A night latch on the inside by the look of it. You could usually open them with a bit of jigging and strength and a stiff sheet of sandpaper. Jenks had shown us how in the posh jail. But unless you’re a right pro it scratches up the lock and the door frame. I’d had half a day on it with Jenks but I’d never tried it for myself on the outside. Raz would see straightaway that one of us had messed with his door.
Jenks had been going to teach me how to pick locks for real, fiddling about in them with pins and stuff. I’d been looking forward to that. But then Paterson had called me in that day without warning and sent me straight out to Toxteth. I’d not seen Jenks again.
I warned Maya about all that, to stop her diving straight in and messing it up. She was in a hurry alright. I talked her into waiting a day or two so we could work something out.
“What about Manc Lee?” she said.
She was right. I remembered his life story from that rainy day down by the docks.
Maya had heard it too.
“He told everyone he knows how to pick locks,” she said.
“Raz will know it’s him, then, won’t he?”
“Raz will never find out. We’ll pick the lock, not force it.”
“The Manc’s shit-scared of Raz, like all of us. He’ll never say yes.”
“We’ll make him.”
We played cricket in the park again that evening. When we got back to the house, I asked the Manc to help me carry the bats and stumps out back.
At the bottom of the garden, I opened the shed door and he went in and put his stumps down. As I stepped in after him, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Maya had snuck up on us. She followed me in. We stood there all three in the tight space between the door and the stack of mats and junk.
“Alright?” said the Manc.
We didn’t have much time. Raz was in the kitchen tossing pancakes. I told the Manc Raz was going out the next afternoon to see his man in Warrington. Told him what he had to do.
“You off your trolley?” he said. “He’ll rip my head off.”
“Not if he doesn’t find out.”
“What do you care what’s in his room?” he said.
Maya put her hand on my arm and squeezed past me. She stood close to the Manc.
“Lee, love. It’s not safe here,” she said.
“Not with you around.”
“I know you’re scared of Raz. We’re all scared. That’s why you’ve got to help us.”
He looked suss. “Not safe how?” he said
.
“He’s planning something,” she said.
“Like what?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we’ve got to get in his room. To find out.”
He still looked suss. “I’m doing alright here. Better than on the street.”
I heard a clink of plates from the kitchen. Raz would be calling us in soon.
“You’d be better on the street than dead,” I said.
He looked at me. Worried now. He believed I was one of Raz’s main men. And he believed I was turning against him.
“I mean it,” I said. “He doesn’t care about us. He’s using us. And it’s going to end bad.”
“Raz has said he’ll sort us out,” the Manc said. “Why should I trust you?”
I shrugged. “No good reason,” I said. “But we’re having a go at his bedroom door tomorrow. If we mess it up because you won’t help, we’ll tell him you were with us anyway. I reckon he’d believe us. Everyone knows you’re the burglar in this house.”
I was sorry to put the screws on the Manc like that. He was alright, Lee. But I had to work quick. Raz had his eye on us. Most of all me. Every minute we spent plotting out there in the shed meant more risk.
The Manc looked down at his trainies. He didn’t know what to say. I was about to start bullying him into it, but Maya spoke again. Her soppy breathy voice.
“At least do it for Hanzi, love,” she said. “Raz’s got it in for us all. Little Hanzi hasn’t done nothing.”
He met her eye and nodded.
That night on the roof, me and Maya patted each other on the back about getting the Manc on board.
“You not scared of messing with Raz?” I asked her.
She shook her head. I couldn’t tell if she was faking. She had that faraway look in her eyes.
“Long as he keeps giving me my pills, I’m safe in here,” she said. “I’ll find out what he’s up to. I’ll get a piece of him.”
“I reckon he’d like a piece of you.”
She grabbed the biscuit tin and twatted me round the head with it. She giggled at the look on my face. Twatted me again.
I grabbed the tin and tried to get it off her. Braced my back against the sloping roof. The two of us trying not to laugh. She wouldn’t let go. I pulled harder, dragging her towards me. She steadied herself. Swung her leg over me and sat in my lap.
House of Lads Page 10