by Liza Cody
‘Okay?’ Tantie repeated.
‘Okay. Thank you.’
‘À ta santé,’ She raised her glass to me as if I were simply a social drinker like her.
‘Cheers,’ I said back. I could begin to think again. I finished my wine and then bundled myself up against the cold and, leaving Electra in Tantie’s care, I crept out to find a supermarket trolley.
34
Leaving Billy
Li’l Missy and Alicia left together. Li’l Missy was wearing Alicia’s paramedic bib and carrying her medical bag. They drove away in Alicia’s little white Kia. No one took any notice. The neighbours might have been watching from behind their curtains but no one called the cops.
Pierre, being a small giant, was more of a problem. I found a bedspread which I tied, sarong style, around his waist over baggy track bottoms. We piled as many badly matched garments as he could possibly wear over the top. I made him put on the one glamour wig Li’l Missy had managed to save from Chill Cherry’s vengeful hands. And I made him pull a beanie over the top of it. He hated that.
‘Do I got to?’ he asked. ‘Was that really a body next door? And what’s it got to do with me?’
‘You heard the cop,’ I said, winding the beautiful African scarf inside out, three times round his neck so it looked like a dirty piece of rope.
‘Well, maybe it is a little dead dude. But this is Britain – could be a Roman remain.’
‘I don’t think the Romans buried their dead infants under garden sheds.’ I stood back and stared at him. He looked like dog vomit. He looked like me. And he couldn’t help himself – he began to inhabit the clothes and invent himself as a homeless woman.
Tantie opened the door. She stopped, and then burst out laughing.
‘Thanks a whole bunch,’ Pierre muttered. ‘So I’ve mastered the look. Now all I have to do is to get down on the patter.’
‘That takes a lifetime,’ I said. ‘For fuck’s sake – we’re only going as far as the car.’
‘Disguise begins in the head,’ he told me reprovingly. ‘What do I got to do to get into yours?’
Tantie had an unexpected sense of humour – wordlessly, she handed him half a bottle of wine.
‘Now, I fight you for it,’ I said, snatching it away. ‘The Devil makes us so desperate that we start yelling, Billy calls the cops, we get nicked and chucked in chokey. That’d be a good start.’
We began to pile the rest of his and Li’l Missy’s bags haphazardly onto the supermarket trolley.
I went on, ‘Your back hurts. You’ve been moved on, over and over again, so you’ve been walking for hours in shoes that don’t fit. Your socks are wet cos the shoes leak. It’s dark. You’re tired but you’re too scared to lie down and sleep. Everything you own is in that trolley. It looks like crud to normal people but it’s all you got. And you know that however cruddy and little it is, someone will steal it off you. Someone just like yourself. Or someone quite unlike yourself might douse it with lighter fluid and set fire to it. The Devil’s children come in all shapes and sizes. Trust no one.’
‘Shit,’ Pierre said, not looking at me.
‘Exactly. Is that enough information?’
He didn’t answer but tore open a couple of bin liners to protect his possessions from view or a possible downpour.
‘Now you’re getting it,’ I said. I woke Electra up and put her two coats on her. She licked my nose.
Tantie went to the front door. When she gave us the all-clear, Pierre and I sidled out into the night. Neither of us said goodbye to Billy, but we both hugged Tantie. ‘Bon voyage,’ she said softly as she closed the door. I was close to tears. After a very rocky beginning she’d turned out to be a good friend.
It was only a couple of hundred yards to the first turning when we’d be off Cherry’s street and relatively safe. Only two hundred yards. A world-class sprinter could cover that distance in twenty seconds. We shuffled along, keeping to the shadows, at a world-class snail’s pace. Pierre was doing well, he pushed the trolley, head down, shoulders up, knees bent, hunched protectively over his possessions. His uncanny ability to assume another identity had made him look smaller, older and very insecure.
‘Think you’re going to get away with this?’ my mother asked. ‘Cheats never prosper and liars will always be found out.’
‘There’ll be hell to pay,’ said the Paymaster.
And at that precise second a police car pulled up beside us. The driver opened his window. ‘Oy!’ he called.
‘Keep moving,’ I muttered to Pierre.
‘My name ain’t “Oy”,’ I said to the cop, over my shoulder, forcing him to keep pace with us.
‘What’re you doing in this neck of the woods?’ He wasn’t hostile exactly – just asserting his Devil-given right to be a pain in my arse.
I turned away and coughed my plastic teeth into my hand. Then I faced him and mumbled. ‘I was looking for this woman, see.’ It came out as, ‘I wor vooking vor is ooman… ’ on a blast of wine-breath. I smiled my ghastly smile at him and his passenger. To my horror, I saw it was the Senior Police Spokesman last seen on Billy’s telly. My hand clenched tightly on Electra’s scarf, but I smiled even more broadly and mangled, ‘How can I help you?’
‘This is not a good area for people like you at this moment in time,’ Junior Cop said, looking to Senior Cop for help, but Senior Cop was gazing loftily through the windscreen.
‘Giss a lip ten?’ I wheedled.
‘Eh?’
‘I think,’ Senior Cop said wearily, still staring straight ahead, ‘I think she said, “Give us a lift then”.’ Which, I suppose, is why the Devil promoted him to his present position – he could understand what was not intended to be understood. It made him dangerous.
‘Yeah,’ I said, showing cracked eagerness, and beginning to reach for the rear door handle.
At last Senior Cop turned to look at me. ‘Keep moving,’ he said in his impeccable accent, almost as suave as he’d seemed when talking to the reporter. ‘Don’t let us catch you in this area again.’
‘Yef fir,’ I said, drooping with disappointment.
Junior Cop accelerated away. I hissed out a lungful of bated breath and popped my teeth back in my mouth.
‘What the fuck were you doing?’ Pierre demanded angrily. ‘You were just begging to be pulled in.’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘They never do a sodding thing I ask, do they?’
‘You’re playing with fire,’ he said. And I could see he’d been seriously rattled.
‘You’re in the Devil’s playground now. Fire’s the name of the game.’
He didn’t answer but he picked up the pace, shuffling along much faster than a real bag lady would.
‘Slow down,’ panted the real bag lady. Electra and I had to trot to keep up. But he wouldn’t listen. He even had his car keys in his hand. He didn’t seem to care who saw him now. Like many blokes, I suppose, the closer he was to his car, the safer he felt.
Mistake. The people carrier turned out to be the next problem.
Pierre, sighing with relief, opened the hatchback and started to haul his bags out of the trolley. I could’ve told him what would happen next, but I was too out of breath to speak.
He had parked his Vauxhall People Carrier outside a row of small but respectable houses with neat little front gardens. Not unlike Cherry’s. His car was similar to the other mid-range clean respectable cars already parked there. It fitted in.
We didn’t.
As a bristling red-headed guy told us clearly and loudly, backing up his statement with a cricket bat.
‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’ he yelled. ‘That’s not your car. This ain’t where you live. You don’t belong here.’
‘Right, right and wrong,’ Pierre said belligerently. He straightened up, towering above our attacker. He was so
fed up that he stepped out of character altogether.
‘Be careful, Dave,’ said a pregnant woman, popping up from behind the cricket bat. ‘She isn’t a woman. She’s black.’
‘I got eyes,’ Dave said.
‘Then look at my car key,’ Pierre said, dangling it in front of Dave’s nose. Not his wisest move.
‘Who did you mug to get that?’ Dave shouted, alarmed. He swung the bat and hit Pierre’s hand an almighty whack, sending the key flying.
‘Dial 999,’ Dave ordered his wife.
‘Ow-wow!’ Pierre cried, cradling his injured hand.
It was spontaneous combustion. Fear and aggression ignited in thirty seconds flat. The crackling in my ears was the Master of Stereotypical Consequences breaking into wild applause.
‘Stop!’ I shrieked at the top of my voice. ‘It’s fancy dress. We’re going to a costume party. Just stop!’
The pregnant woman stopped before thumbing the final 9 on her mobile phone. Dave managed to pull out of the blow he’d aimed at Pierre’s head.
In my poshest accent I said, ‘I understand your confusion, really I do, and I’m sure you’re only trying to be a good neighbour, but really, this is my son’s car. And we’re already quite late for a party.’
‘Son?’ said the pregnant woman.
‘Son?’ Pierre said. He was driving one-handed. ‘I suppose you think I should thank you.’
‘It’s not what Alicia would’ve said. Sorry. I’m not Alicia. I’m a coward. It was just the first thing that came into my head.’
‘Well, it’s so weird – they bought the costume story, but I really am big and black. I guess you’re getting some small idea of what its like to be me.’
‘And I really am a bag lady and a thief. Maybe you’re getting some small idea of what it’s like to be me.’
‘Shut up,’ Electra said. ‘This incident really hurt him.’
‘It hurt me too.’
‘Not the same thing,’ she said.
‘What did you say?’ Pierre asked, quite hostile.
‘Nothing,’ I said. Taking Electra’s advice is almost always the right thing to do.
He drove us back to the shelter. His hand was swelling up and obviously giving him a lot of pain. I offered to drive, but all he said was, ‘I’m in enough shit already.’
‘You need to get that hand X-rayed.’
‘I need to get rid of you and go back to Alicia.’
‘She’ll say the same thing.’
‘You don’t know diddly what she’ll say.’
This was true. He was really out of sorts and hacked off with me. I didn’t know what to do about it so I lifted Electra down from the passenger seat, collected my backpack and watched him drive away.
If he’d waited five minutes he’d have had another example of what it was like to be me – Rex wouldn’t let me into the shelter. ‘You were seen begging, and you’ve been reported,’ he said. ‘You know the rules: if you’re staying here, you’re not allowed to beg. You broke the rules. You’re out.’
‘There must be some mistake,’ I wheedled. ‘I haven’t been begging. I had to go to Stanmore to see a friend in trouble. But I never begged. I wouldn’t. Search me. See if I’ve got any dosh.’
‘You drank it all,’ Rex said. ‘I can smell it on your breath. You’re pissed. Strike two.’
‘My friend gave me a glass of wine.’ Actually Tantie had given me about a third of a bottle altogether. And it was true I had been begging. I’d needed the fare for the bus up to Holloway, and I’d needed the Dutch courage to talk to Pierre and Li’l Missy about Connor.
But I said, ‘This is a false accusation. Someone’s telling lies. Who reported me?’
‘That’s confidential,’ Rex said.
‘But I’ve nowhere else to go.’
‘You should’ve thought of that before you broke the rules and started begging and boozing again.’ He was implacable.
‘But I wasn’t begging.’
Just then Lorelei opened the office door to hand in the kitchen key. ‘Have a heart, Rex,’ she said. ‘All her gear’s still in her room. No one else has moved in.’
‘Well, all right,’ he said, looking as if it killed him to agree. ‘Just one night, and then she’s out.’ He buzzed me in and let her out at the same time. As we passed each other in the airlock, I said, ‘Thanks,’ and she handed me a small square of card.
As soon as she’d disappeared up the steps to street level Rex said, ‘Get your stuff. You’re out.’
‘But you said… ’
‘What I say in front of volunteers and what I say to you is two different things. You did break the rules. You were seen begging. You’re drunk and a troublemaker. You’ve stayed here too long already. The guys are pissed off cos we bend the regs in favour of women.’
‘Woman,’ I said. ‘I’m the only one here. And what sort of fascist system is this, where you can just kick me out on the word of an anonymous informer, and I’m not allowed to answer the charges?’
‘Juliet House rules are Juliet House rules. I don’t have to explain myself. And stop shouting or I’ll call the cops.’
End of story. I had to push my way through the tattered crowd of men drawn towards the office by the smell of aggression. The guy standing outside my pod was Scots Gary. His eyes were fogged like dry ice but there was a hint of triumph in his thin smile. He hadn’t been staying at the shelter for the last two days. Now he was back.
‘This was supposed to be Hazel’s room,’ I said, the electronic key in my hand. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You dobbed me in.’
‘She’s gone,’ he said, eyes sharpening with anger. ‘But you’re still here. Where’s the justice in that?’
‘Don’t answer,’ Electra warned. She nudged the hand that held the key and I let us into the pod.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her after I’d closed the door.
‘Don’t waste time on “sorry” – just get us out of here.’
First I took everything out of the box drawers under the bunk and put them on top. I took Billy’s coat off and piled layers of clothing on myself. It was still close to freezing outside and ice filled cracks and crannies. I covered my bedroll with polythene and strapped it to the backpack. I was still swamped by Billy’s coat, which I thought would be a good thing in the long run, but it made hefting a bursting backpack onto my shoulders awkward.
Eventually I was ready. I thought about locking the key inside the pod – just to be petty. But I knew that if I didn’t hand it to Rex on my way out he’d frisk me for it. Then he’d find the last remaining inch or two of Tantie’s wine I had hidden in the inside pocket of the coat. He’d confiscate it even though I was no longer a resident. Out of spite. Because he could.
The walk of shame along the corridor, between groups of silent men seemed to take forever. But no one tripped me up or added to my troubles. Even though half of them remembered how I’d spoiled the dogfight and were pleased to see me go, they all knew how cold it was outside.
Once I was in the airlock I slapped the key down on the counter in front of Rex. He buzzed me and Electra out. I let the door slam behind me. And that was that.
I dragged myself up the stairs to the street and turned South towards the West End, my home turf. For the first few steps I thought about using Pierre’s phone to call him or Li’l Missy for help. Then I examined the card Lorelei had given me and thought about ringing her. But I left the phone where it lay, in my pocket, untouched.
Rex had clearly demonstrated how much charity cost, but for almost the first time since leaving chokey I was alone with Electra, answerable to no one.
As we trudged on, though, the weight of the backpack on my shoulders gradually became Connor. Connor, for once too exhausted to scream at me or bite me, let me carry him to a hospital where I dumped him on strangers. Or tried to.
Less than an hour later I dumped him with strangers again. Which led to Fergus dumping him at Cherry’s house. Which led directly to… death.
If only the weight on my back actually was Connor, alive and kicking, screaming and biting…
‘Dream on, hypocrite,’ said the Beast. ‘You’d do the same thing all over again.’
‘Oh, that’s right,’ my mother put in. ‘Reach for the bottle any time anyone tells you a few home truths. You’re too selfish, too egocentric to save anyone but yourself.’
‘Shut up,’ I mumbled through the last mouthful of wine.
We plodded steadily through a glass wall of cold air. Bent forwards, I let the weight on my back push me on as if I was falling. I used to walk like this for hours on end, Electra padding beside me. I find it soothing – the rhythm of footsteps shuts out my circular saw thoughts. But that night, oh, it was so cold and Connor weighed so heavily on my shoulders.
By the time we reached the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street I noticed that Electra was limping. ‘Not far to go now,’ I said to hearten her because her head was down. But she didn’t answer, and we ploughed on.
I heard a church clock strike two before we arrived in St Martin’s Lane and one of my favourite refuges in the deep doorway under the awning of Duke of York’s Theatre. It was a good place – there was shelter from wind and rain, and the theatre staff kept the pavement outside relatively clean. Often there was competition for a berth there, and sometimes fights broke out, which of course the strongest men won. But tonight I was alone. I guessed that the shelter at St Martin in the Fields, hardly a stone’s throw away, would be crammed because of the cold.
I shed my backpack, spread a layer of polythene on the ground, laid out my bed roll with the sleeping bag on top. I was shivering but almost happy. I could make my bed in one of my favourite places in all of London. My bedding was dry. I was alone with my best friend. There was no wall three inches from my face, and no door shutting me in. I could breathe.
I opened Billy’s huge coat and Electra snuggled in beside me. I covered us both with the quilted bag and an extra layer of polythene. My head rested on my backpack. We were asleep almost immediately.