Black Car Burning

by Helen Mort

  ‘What is there to say?’

  Dave’s tone was brusque. He was sitting next to her, leaning back on his chair like a kid at school. The legs groaned under his weight. His shirt rode up a little, showing his paunch. She had an urge to pull him back, so he was sitting properly.

  Inspector Apsley cleared his throat. ‘We’ve been called out every night for the past three weeks. Reports of anti-social behaviour. We get called out because of the groups. The Roma. But if they aren’t doing anything apart from talking, there’s not much we can do. There’s growing tensions, especially from the shopkeepers and representatives from the Pakistani community. They all want us to do something.’

  There was nothing but the tree behind the window. Alexa had always wanted to live on a street with lots of trees, to watch the year change through them. To see everything through the leaves. At home, Caron had taken to sleeping with the curtains open. She said it was more natural to wake up with the light. Then again, she didn’t do night shifts.

  ‘The problem is the number of people that have arrived in Page Hall in the past few years. We don’t know how many it is exactly … but the council reckons there are about 1,500 Eastern European Roma children in the city as a whole. That’s just kids, so maybe 600 to 900 families in total. And most of them are in Page Hall.’

  Sue was shaking her head. Someone was talking about washing being stolen from washing lines. Greg, the other PCSO, was repeating an anecdote he’d already told Alexa, a night last week when a group of lads had been kicking a football against an elderly couple’s window on Popple Street and they’d wanted him arrested, because it wasn’t just about the football – they’d had enough.

  ‘I’ve known them years. I think they felt like I’d let them down …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Inspector Apsley. ‘What we’re facing here is an issue of trust.’

  An issue of trust. Wasn’t it always? Alexa wondered how many times a day she heard that word. She imagined Caron’s mouth saying it and the word became beautiful. Don’t you trust me, Alexa? Then she saw Inspector Apsley repeating it and it sounded harsh again, cracked at the edges.

  ‘We are approaching breaking point in Page Hall. As I say, it all comes down to winning trust.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said Dave, ‘and we’ve got a shitload of that, haven’t we?’ He said it a bit too loud. Inspector Apsley’s face sharpened.

  ‘David, if you want to continue your one-man mission to turn every meeting into a discussion of Operation Resolve, maybe you’d better do it elsewhere. My priority is Page Hall.’

  ‘Did I say owt about that?’

  ‘Operation Resolve is a completely separate inquiry.’ His voice was leaden. ‘The results of the inquests will not affect our other work.’

  There was a heavy, hot kind of silence. People shifted in their chairs. Operation Resolve had been talked about for months, muttered in the corridors. The latest criminal inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster, headed by an investigation team. Dave was obsessed with it.

  ‘To repeat: what we need in Page Hall is a clear and visible presence.’

  Alexa stared at the huge tree. She tried to make up some kind of private analogy. Like the trunk was South Yorkshire Police and the leaves were all kinds of things, the leaves were Page Hall and Burngreave and Parson Cross, but the leaves were also Hillsborough and the Miners’ Strike and Orgreave and investigations and shouted orders and cover-ups. And you couldn’t have the tree without the leaves.

  Dave didn’t say anything for the rest of the meeting. His balding head gleamed with sweat. Leaning back with his paunch almost touching the table, he reminded Alexa of a greying Friar Tuck. He sat still and listened to Inspector Apsley’s solutions. That’s what we do here. We frame problems and we look for solutions. He listened to the anti-social behaviour figures for East Sheffield. He listened to the Inspector’s decision to apply for a Section 30. He listened to him saying they’d all have to work hard and show they were present in Page Hall. Alexa watched his leg judder under the table.

  Afterwards, she caught him hurrying down the corridor.

  ‘Dave!’

  They walked in time. He was leaning very close to her. She could smell that he hadn’t showered. He’d been out last night in The Kelham Island Tavern until late. Maybe he hadn’t slept. He didn’t look at her.

  ‘Think your dad would have stood for this if he’d stayed a copper?’

  She said nothing. Her face reddened. Eventually his walk slowed down, he was breathless from hurrying.

  ‘Sorry, Al. I didn’t mean …’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘I just meant, people have no idea. How much we’re meant to do. And with what?’

  Most people got louder the angrier they got. Dave got quieter. He sounded almost hoarse now. Alexa followed him out into the car park. He pressed the key in his pocket and the lights flashed on his dirty silver Fiesta. He got into the driver’s seat. Alexa opened the passenger side door.

  ‘Watch your knees, love, my snap’s in the glove compartment.’

  He reached down to get his tin of sandwiches out and offered her one.

  ‘Cheese, peanut butter and cucumber. Bloody lovely.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Are you eating? Is he feeding you properly at home?’

  Alexa faked a laugh. Dave still assumed she had a boyfriend, never wondered why he didn’t join them in The Fat Cat on Fridays. Sometimes, people aren’t as interested as they think. Once they’ve sketched a picture of you, they’re content. She had never bothered to put her colleagues right. It wasn’t to do with shame, just apathy. Dave’s mood had lifted now, halfway through his first sarnie. A small piece of cucumber dangled from his lip. He’d parked in front of a high brick wall and they both sat, staring directly into the red and brown patterns of it. The car smelled of feet. Dave must have his trainers in the back. Alexa knew he was frustrated that she couldn’t get angry about it all like he could. Page Hall. Hillsborough. Staff cuts. Blame. If she was a better person, she’d be able to make him laugh right now. But Alexa wasn’t good with humour. Not the kind where you could say something funny on cue, or take someone’s words and turn them round so that they suddenly realised the whole thing was ridiculous. Banter. She wasn’t any good at that.

  Caron was good at it. And confrontation, too. She did it in a way that made you feel like she wasn’t furious about things, just passionate. Caron always let you know she was right. Alexa couldn’t remember the last argument they’d had. This morning, she’d already gone out when Alexa got up. There was no note, just no bread left and a pile of dirty clothes snaked at the top of the stairs. What was that phrase? Ships in the night. They weren’t ships. They were rowing boats. Small. Rained on. Alexa looked at herself in the passenger side mirror. Her roots needed doing. She had her hair scraped back in a high, severe pony tail and it only emphasised it. Her whole face felt pulled taut. She was paler than usual. Her chin was growing a spot. At least she didn’t look like Dave with his three-day stubble and pothole eyes.

  ‘Why did you mention my dad, back there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sorry. Wanted a reaction, I guess.’

  She nodded.

  ‘He was a top bloke. Always good to me.’

  ‘Yeah? Then how come you don’t keep in touch?’

  Dave had just bitten off a big chunk of peanut-butter-and-cheese sandwich. His eyes seemed to bulge. He was chewing frantically.

  ‘How come you don’t, Alexa? In’t that the question?’

  His mouth was all claggy. It ruined the drama. But she got out of the car and slammed the door anyway.

  * * *

  Eva was in the doorway of her house on Wade Street, chain-smoking, like always. Her black hair was tied back and gelled down at the front. She nodded to Alexa when she saw her on her beat.

  ‘Time for a brew?’

  Alexa checked over her shoulder, as if there was someone there. Dave or Inspector Apsley, watching her. She was at work.
She shouldn’t be spending time with the locals. But Eva was gone already, into her cream-tiled kitchen, leaving the door open for Alexa to come in. Alexa knew every corner of that room. They’d been called out to Eva’s countless times the previous year, before she finally sent her husband packing. Eva said he’d gone back to their hometown in Slovakia. Her eyes flicked from side to side whenever she talked about him. This visit was pastoral. She was only checking up on things. But she still ducked through the doorway, furtive. Hard to be inconspicuous in Page Hall.

  ‘Sugar, love?’

  Alexa sank into the plastic chair. She liked the way Eva said love. How her accent hardened briefly into Yorkshire. She nodded.

  ‘Two?’

  ‘Three. It’s a three-sugar day.’

  Eva raised her painted eyebrows, ladling the granules in and fishing out the bag. She put the mug on the table, resting it on unopened envelopes. Alexa tried not to look too closely at them. The block capitals that said URGENT, CONFIDENTIAL, TO BE OPENED BY THE ADDRESSEE ONLY. Official logos. Eva’s surname spelled wrong on the front of half of them.

  ‘Three sugars, hey? Why so bad?’

  ‘It’s nothing. Long day.’

  Eva pursed her lips.

  ‘Trouble with your boss?’

  ‘It’s nothing important. How’ve you been keeping, anyway?’

  ‘Good, good. I spoke to my mother yesterday, on Skype. My dad’s not so well.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Alexa remembered all the times she’d said those words to Eva, she and Sue, sitting in the strip-lit kitchen, holding her hands, taking notes. Writing the unspeakable. Did the argument take place before he tried to push you down the stairs? Do you remember what happened next, Eva?

  Eva shrugged. ‘Nothing to be done. I need to find the money to fly back, when the time happens.’

  ‘How much does it cost?’

  ‘Depends. But too much. For me.’

  Alexa looked at Eva’s hands, bare, with the gold band she wore so stubbornly for months removed now. They were small hands, quick hands, hands you could fold into your own. There was something delicate about her thin face, too.

  ‘Did you have any luck with the agency?’

  Eva shook her head. ‘They keep saying they’ll call me. But you know how it is.’

  Music started from next door. A jumping bassline, so deep it seemed to get into your chest and shake it.

  ‘Bloody kids,’ said Eva. ‘It’s like this always.’

  ‘I’ll have a word. Pay them a visit after this.’

  Eva laughed. ‘They’ll start again when you go.’

  Alexa took a swig of her tea. The sweetness was almost unbearable.

  ‘Did you hear about the baby?’ she said.

  ‘The Roma boys in the chip shop? Yes. I don’t like to think of it. Not much.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t like to think of what happens after. You know? If the baby …’

  She paused. The music from next door cut out abruptly. Alexa put a hand on her knee and squeezed. She remembered Eva’s belly, the neat swell of it. She remembered the aftermath, the weeks of recovery. The silence.

  ‘You know what they do back home for this? When a child dies?’

  Alexa shook her head.

  ‘It’s bad luck if you die unmarried. Very bad luck. So the funeral … it’s more like a marriage.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Wedding of the Dead, it’s called. It happens in lots of places. Tradition, you know? In Romania, in China … I think in China they call it a ghost marriage, actually. If someone dies and they aren’t married, there is this ceremony – if it is a child, for instance, they are married to another dead child at their funeral.’

  ‘Like a party?’

  ‘No, not really. The couple – the ones being buried – they wear clothes for a wedding. But the guests dress for a funeral.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Yes. Sometimes they are married to a living person. It depends on the tradition.’

  ‘And you really think it’s bad luck, to die without being married?’

  Alexa was thinking of the games she used to play when she was small. Lining her teddy bears up on the carpet and marrying them, the other soft toys and plastic figures in a dumb congregation just behind. She used to pick dandelions from the garden and place them in front of the teddy called Blossom, the one she had decided was a girl. When her dad found her, sitting cross-legged in front of her audience, he laughed. Are you going to get married one day, just like Mummy and Daddy?

  Eva turned to her sharply. ‘Who says I think anything? It’s tradition.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean …’

  ‘Birth, marriage and death. The three important stages of life, no? They say it’s bad luck if you break the cycle, if you die before someone marries you. So that’s why. They must do it after you die.’

  ‘Do you believe it?’

  Eva shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m already unlucky.’

  ‘Maybe you can make your own luck.’ Alexa winced as soon as she’d said it.

  ‘There are lots of things like this back home. Mostly my parents believe, people like that. It’s bad luck, too, if you don’t spend time with someone before they die, make your peace with each other. I know my mother thinks so.’

  Eva looked down at the table, at her folded hands. Alexa wanted to comfort her, reassure her, tell her she’d find a way home. But all she could think about was her own dad. The old, jinxed house where they used to live. His face at the window, angled towards the garden, as if he was watching something happen there or beyond there, out on the tower-block horizon. Something happening again and again, right in front of him.

  She hardly noticed when Eva started to speak again. ‘I think they believe this. In Page Hall, yes? The Roma, I mean. Many of the things they do, they do them because they believe. Nobody understands this. It’s their way of life.’

  ‘Like gathering in the street.’

  ‘Yes. Like so. It isn’t threatening, it’s just … you know. How they do.’

  Alexa sighed. ‘Some people don’t see it like that.’

  ‘People see the things they want to see.’

  Alexa rinsed her mug and put it on the draining board. When she got back on to the streets, she walked slowly, hesitantly. She did not look like an officer. A man was leaning at the bus stop by the main road, a hat and a hood pulled over his face, fiddling with a mobile phone. When he looked up, she saw he was older than she’d thought, almost her dad’s age. He turned to his right, as if he was about to say something but there was no one there. He lifted his hand as if to steady someone’s elbow. As if there was a woman next to him. Alexa could imagine the shape of her. Ghost bride. She wrapped her uniform round her and moved on.

  Page Hall

  Days like this I lie low, keep as still as I can and listen to the things people say under their breath. The city’s bristling; nobody knows what to do with their hands. It’s too hot; it shouldn’t be so hot, not at this time of year. Lads square up to me, then slump back like someone’s stuck a pin in them, bang their fists against the walls. Sometimes, grown men call me names they heard their fathers call their mothers, names repeated in the playground after school. Kids tell me I’m boring, riding their bikes at full tilt, pedalling towards the edge of the sky or throwing a cricket ball so hard they almost take down the sun. Women call for home, call the others back, have their tea ready at five. Then there are quiet conversations. Some I don’t like. Men outside the pubs talking too low to be overheard. A group of blokes who come from out of town in a discreet van, walking the streets with hands stuffed in their pockets, eyeing the houses, listening to the languages in the gardens, the lovely hubbub. By evening, they’ve gone. Soon I’ll be steady, everyone inside their houses with the radio turned low. There’ll be kids play-fighting in the yard outside. A man helping a grandmother cross the street. Two Somali teenagers coming back fro
m the shops, throwing a word back and forth between them in the warm air. Babe. Hon. The Bangladeshi newsagent taking the sign in from outside his shop, straightening the magazines, putting everything right.

  Him

  He was awake. Listening for the soft hiss of tyres outside and hearing nothing, he worked out it must be about 3 a.m. No birds yet and a single light on in the street – the man from Number 62 whose front room was crammed with cardboard boxes and who stayed up through the night at his dining table, hunched over books and papers like an accountant. He checked the digital clock: 3.25 precisely. He had come home from The Byron sweetly exhausted, his mouth dry from whisky chasers, and fell asleep early, on the side of the bed that used to be Angela’s once, allowing himself to think about her. He tried to remember his dreams. He never slept properly when he’d been drinking. Angela’s hard shoulders. His hand at the nape of her neck. Her brother’s wedding in St Helen’s, the guests in formation, doing the conga. A football match they went to together when they were first courting.

  He turned to the notebook on his bedside table and opened it. He wanted to write down all the things that flickered back to him in the night, as if they might mean something when he read them the next morning. A dream diary, was that what they called it? The first half of the book was spidery now. Pages of notes from court cases and reports, copied out neatly. Then other passages, written quickly, the letters flat and hurried and joined up, but never written fast enough to keep up with his thoughts when they came.

  It wasn’t a surge. It was like a vice, getting tighter and tighter.

  He’d started that and got no further. He felt silly, writing things down. As if he was going to have to submit the lot for review. Even when he wrote alone in the tight kitchen or in the storeroom at work, he kept startling, imagining someone reading it over his shoulder. It made him think about the way he used to be in bed with Angela, how he’d always whisper, even when there was nobody to overhear.