The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  She listens all the while, her head tilted on one side, just like Rosa used to do. There’s a long quiet as I’m finished, me looking at her, her at me. Smell Coal Tar soap and rosewater. Don’t know if she’s going to kiss me or join the Movement. Or both. Rosa did, after all.

  Then she says, ‘You have some queer ideas for a gas fitter from Goff’s Oak, Mr Smith. Talk like no Hertfordshire man I ever heard, neither.’

  Felt a little chip of ice enter me as she said that. Not because she hasn’t listened. But because she’s playing with me. Question is: playing like the village-girls used to, all knowing but unknowing? Or playing because she knows something? Could she be the one that has been following me?

  ‘Well, you spend twenty-five years sailing the world with a pack of Balts and Huns and Chinamen,’ I said – an answer well-rehearsed. ‘If you mind how I talk, I’ll keep quiet.’

  ‘I don’t want you to,’ she said. I could hear my heart beating. And hers.

  Then the fucking door knocker goes, shocking the very salt out of my blood. She goes to it. It’s Mr Parks. Shows him into the front parlour. I can hear their voices in there, low and quick, so after a bit I crept over and listened.

  ‘A very responsible position. House attached,’ he’s saying.

  ‘Bradford,’ she says back. ‘I don’t even know where it is.’

  ‘So come and see, Leah. I’ve handed my notice in and I’m going there tomorrow. To see the mill and the house.’

  ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘Your mother approves it.’

  ‘How do you know that? Cuthbert, have you gone to see her behind my back?’

  I had to stuff my fist in my mouth then. Cuthbert Parks. What a curse he must have been to his Mama, to have carried him and laboured him into this world, and after all that to have gazed down at his little pink face and willed the name of Cuthbert Parks upon him. Never had a chance.

  I missed what was going on in there for a bit, then heard.

  ‘But you know how I feel,’ Cuthbert Parks is saying. ‘Leah…’

  ‘I didn’t want that!’ she says, agitated. He says ‘Leah’ again and she squeals. I’m in there like a toothless babushka on a soup-bone.

  ‘You. Out!’ says I, grabbing the moist boy by his tweed coat and hoisting him up. Even crippled, I’m strong.

  Leah said nothing, red-faced, sobbing or – I think, maybe – pretending to sob a bit more than the real thing as I shove and drag Cuthbert Parks into the hall.

  ‘You have no right. This is not your house.’

  ‘Not yours neither,’ was the best I could do, as I pushed him out into the fog. Could have done better in Russian, or Yiddish, or Latvian and three other tongues. So as I go back in I think to myself, must get better at cursing in English. Then I think, no reason to, is there? I’m going back. The thought makes me sad. Sad and angry.

  I let her alone a while, and she went up to her room. Carried on cleaning, and then darned some socks. She came down with a new dress on, blue with flowers, very pretty.

  ‘Where did you learn to be so good with a needle?’

  ‘The Navy. An Englishman taught–’

  See, I’m getting like an old hull when the tar’s worn thin. Letting just tiny dribbles in at first. Then a proper spout you can catch in your palm. Before long, sunk to the sea-bed. I’m letting things slip, because I’m getting too easy here, with this girl. Who else but an Englishman would teach the fucking Englishman George Smith in the English fucking Navy?

  Luckily, she hadn’t heard, or hadn’t made anything of it if she did. She seemed bored, so I made tea. Remembered to put milk in. Played her a game of chequers on the pinewood set I carved in Yakutsk. Then in spite of the fog we took a walk. We stopped by a bill for the Yiddish Theatre and for a moment she slipped her arm through mine and said: ‘So strange that Jews’ writing of theirs. Like little crowns and forks. I’d love to know what it says. Probably telling them all to rise up and murder us in our beds.’

  I wondered again, then, is she testing me out, this apple-cheeked petticoat? I had the sense again, all the way on our walk, too, nice as it was to walk abroad with a pretty girl again, that I was being followed. Maybe because it was her. Following me. And am I getting too soft? Has loving one, and losing her, ruined me for this endeavour?

  I know what Velkis would have done. Pushed the little chit straight up the alleyway between the cobblers and the Temperance Hall. Cut her a second mouth before she could scream out of the first one.

  Maybe I should have done that.

  For good or bad, I didn’t. We bought two penn’orth hot chestnuts off an Italian woman and walked back slowly. I started to think I’d been imagining it. Enjoyed being with her. For the first time started to think, too, that another girl could be better than Rosa. That girl always wanted a fight. An argument. If not about the inherent weaknesses of dialectical materialism then about why did I look at that shiksa’s arse as she went by and was one girl not enough for me. Leah isn’t like that.

  Maybe I felt a bit guilty for thinking that about Rosa – like it was a betrayal. So I was a bit quiet as Hartington Park loomed up out of the icy, woolly mist and we were there almost by our door when she stiffened next to me like a farm dog on a scent.

  Parks was waiting outside the door – frozen blue by the looks of him, blowing his fingers. He holds them up as we approach, like a tart admiring her nail-paint and says, ‘Look. This is important. Please. I have something to tell you.’

  So we let him in and I ushered him straight through to the back. No fancy front room for Mr Parkses this time.

  And he looks pale and grey, as he says, ‘I went up the hospital to talk to your mother, Leah…’

  ‘To tell tales on me and get her to stick her nose in so I’d go with you to the north, you…’

  He holds up a hand to stop her.

  ‘She’s died. Leah. She died this morning.’

  I can hear her starting to cry. Can feel that I ought to do something. Comfort her. Keep that wet-lipped woodlouse from comforting her. But I can’t. Because I’ve been staring out of the window and seen a little ball of wool fly over the yard-gate, a graceful dive like a gull after scraps.

  The job is on. Tomorrow.

  * * *

  Back at the office, Rex discovered that Dordoff wasn’t the only one watching him.

  ‘She’s after your hide,’ Brenda said without looking up. Enthroned behind the reception desk, she was munching on gözleme while reading a magazine.

  By the time Rex reached her office upstairs, though, Susan was shuttered up in yet another meeting. He could hear men’s voices, and, unusually, a lot of laughter.

  Rex switched on his machine and searched for marrow + transplants + Antwerp. Along with a great many research papers written in Flemish, the results included the website of a clinic called Senticel, replete with videos of treatments at work in the bloodstream and pictures of improbably beautiful nurses. You could email them, fax them, Skype them, even book a live video-chat to discuss anything from repairing spinal chord injuries to warding off degenerative disease. He opted for the telephone.

  ‘I’m calling on behalf of Simeon Dordoff,’ he said, as a polite, Chinese-sounding woman replied. ‘It’s about the treatment.’

  ‘What is your relation to Mr Dordoff please?’ replied the woman. It seemed he’d got the right place.

  ‘I’m a colleague in the rabbi’s office. My name is Mr Schild,’ Rex lied. ‘Yitzhak Schild. Mr Dordoff asked if you could fax another copy of Micah Walther’s test results.’

  There was a pause. ‘I’m sorry, who?’ Rex repeated the name. There was another pause. He thought he could hear typing. Then he heard a muffled conversation. The woman came back on. ‘We don’t have any results for a patient of that name.’

  ‘He’s a potential donor, not a patient.’

  ‘We don’t have any results for a donor of that name.’

  Rex hung up. Did that mean Micah Walther had pulled out befor
e this clinic became involved? Or that they’d known him under a different name? Or perhaps they just weren’t telling him. They certainly knew Simmy Dordoff.

  He made a few notes. He wrote down ‘Arms’ – remembering what Mike Bond had told him about the unexplained marks on the Bettelheim boy. He wrote down ‘Pressure’ too, the word Toyve Walther had used. How much pressure, and what kind, Rex wondered. He remembered what Sister Florence had said to him the night before, about the sick young man at the hospice: they would do anything. Was that true of Dordoff and his community, as well? The Narpal was gravely ill. The community desperately wanted him to stay alive. And this desperation to prolong his life had perhaps forced them to seek dangerous cures. Families had panicked and pulled out. Had something gone wrong? Something which meant some people knew too much, and had to be silenced. Perhaps Dr Kovacs had found something out, and that was really why he’d made all those trips over to Stamford Hill. Or whilst he was talking to people like the Walthers about his book, seen something he wasn’t supposed to. Something that meant he had to be killed.

  He was so deep in his thoughts that he didn’t notice Susan standing in front of his desk.

  ‘I’m assuming that’s a page of ideas for the next edition.’

  ‘The terror crack-down,’ he said quickly, surprising himself. ‘You know – stop and search, plastic bloody cutlery everywhere… I heard someone called the cops yesterday because they saw a couple of blokes with beards whispering in ShoeZone. There’s got to be mileage in all that, hasn’t there?’

  Susan gave a slow nod, with a very faint smile. ‘It’s lucky for you, Rex, that you’re enough of a chachem to be able to come up with a brilliant idea on the spot, even when you’ve clearly been devoting all your attention somewhere else.’

  ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘A chachem. Ask your friends in Stamford Hill, next time you’re there. But before you go, listen to me. We need an A-class output this week. Print and web. Top stories, the absolute best local issue stuff we can get. I can’t tell you what that meeting was about, but it’s important. Really important. Everything hinges on it.’

  After looking up chachem on a Yiddish-English website, and being flattered to find his boss was calling him a genius, Rex took her at her word. He spent the rest of the day interviewing people on the High Street. The bearded whisperers were the tip of the iceberg. Everyone had tales to tell: a young father-to-be missed the first ultrasound scan because the bus was late after the police had decided to search every single backpack and shopping bag. A stallholder down in the covered market section of Shopping City who’d had his entire stock impounded because one DVD had a picture of the Twin Towers on it. Rex almost wondered whether it would be worth doing a special pull-out ‘Wood Green War on Terror’ supplement.

  By four o’clock, his foot was in agony, and he’d retreated to The Seagull, a chain pub at the very top of the High Street, to wash down some painkillers with a pint of Tyksie. They had the stuff on tap there, which was about the best thing that could be said for the place. The clientele, by and large, were the sort of men who kept a different mobile phone in each pocket of their long leather coats.

  They were small-time hoods. More accurately, a large number of them were men who did fuck-all, but derived a mysterious satisfaction from pretending to be small-time hoods. None of them were terrorists, though. Rex had a hard job believing anyone was, in this neck of the woods. The DVD stallholder, a thin, anxious Pakistani now reduced to gloomily sipping tea in the pots and pans outlet next door, had summed it up perfectly: ‘I’m here twelve hours a day, six days a week. What I’m not paying in petrol and taxes I’m giving to my ex-wife so I can see my kids for four hours on a Sunday. When have I got time to build a bomb? By the time I get home I’m so tired I can’t see straight.’

  He’d let Rex film him – and Rex was planning to put it on the website. Not just because Susan was almost indecently obsessed with what she called ‘embedded video’, but because it said exactly what Rex and everyone else in the borough seemed think. For most people life was just too hard, too hard and boring and tiring, to want to spend their precious scraps of spare time building bombs or listening to inflammatory sermons or even being that interested in global injustices of any kind. Terror was a hobby, a luxury.

  His phone rang. With a spike of dread, he saw that it was Terry. He took another sip of his beer before he answered it.

  ‘Rex, I – I’m sorry about before. I just – I keep losing it. And with the wrong people, an’ all. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Rex said, although he wasn’t sure if it was. Terry had really frightened him.

  ‘I just called ’cos, you know, I bet Susan’s on your case about stories and… I’ve got one for you. It’s Bird.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He tried to break in next door. To Kovacs’ house. I didn’t see him – I was downstairs. First thing I knew was all these cops show up. He was pretty wild and they tasered him. Took him off in an ambulance.’

  ‘Right… Thanks. Nice one. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Aye,’ Terry said. ‘Inshallah.’

  Inshallah, he thought, as he waited for a 144 towards Edmonton. Like kurva, the Polish insult that so many people had adopted, you heard the Arabic phrase for ‘God willing’ from a great variety of mouths, Islamic and otherwise. He’d never heard it before from Terry’s, though. Perhaps he’d picked it up in prison.

  Outside the newly refurbished and extended North Middlesex they’d erected a huge sign with the words: ‘We’re back in business’. Unfortunately, the bevy of nurses and doctors whose photographs they’d used to illustrate this legend looked so forbidding that it wasn’t clear what the business might be. In a recent ‘Laureate of the Ladders’ column, Lawrence Berne had suggested it might be debt-collecting.

  The new interior was gleaming and impressive, in a way, although some of the changes seemed a little patronising. The Geriatric Unit had now become the ‘Elder Care Community’ and the old Clap Clinic had turned into something vaguely entitled ‘Encounters’. But it was in the main male ward, still named after Danny Blanchflower, that Rex found Bird.

  To his immense surprise, he also found the Whittaker Twins, Mark and Robert, in their wonky suits and their Clark’s Skuffaway shoes, seated in a pair of high-backed chairs either side of the black man’s bed.

  ‘He goes to our church,’ explained Robert.

  ‘Sometimes,’ added Mark.

  Rex blinked. He’d had no idea the Whittakers had a church. Then again, he didn’t know anything about them, except that they sold advertising space very well. That was all anyone knew.

  ‘They’ve given him something to sober him up,’ said Robert.

  ‘Cunts,’ Bird added.

  ‘I can see how you might feel that way,’ Rex said, looking round for another chair. There wasn’t one. In fact there was a sign saying ‘No More Than Two Visitors Per Bed’, and a tiny, very angry-looking nurse at the end of the room who, Rex guessed, was the kind to be quite keen on enforcing the rule. He felt rather strange – woozy and a bit short of breath – but he’d just have to stay standing and get on with it.

  ‘How did you know Dr Kovacs, Bird? Can I call you that? Is it your real name?’

  ‘It’s his stage name,’ said Mark Whittaker.

  ‘Bird Curton,’ said Bird, proudly.

  ‘He was a jazz trumpeter – weren’t you?’ Robert coaxed.

  ‘I made a lot of record,’ Bird said, his eyes suddenly welling up. ‘Record with everyone. Barber. Brubeck. Lyttleton. DeVries. George had all of them.’

  ‘Dr Kovacs had all your records?’

  ‘All of them. He was my friend. He try an’ help when I lost my flat. Tried to get me to stop drinking.’ Bird chuckled, causing a tubercular-sounding coughing fit. ‘He didn’t mind, though,’ he wheezed, finally, as beads of sweat shone on his brow. ‘He said me welcome at his drum, drunk or sober, so long me naa sick ’pon the carpet or piss o
n em floor. Let me sit in the cellar when he was away. Showed me a way in, through the window.’

  ‘Is that what you did today?’

  ‘I tried! Some blood-clat lock it now!’

  Terry and Lawrence, Rex thought, protecting the little archive in a way its creator, oddly, never had.

  ‘He tried to break a window at the front,’ Mark Whittaker said. ‘The Police saw him.’

  ‘Oddly vigilant,’ Rex said. He’d have said more but found he had to grab on to the little clip-on table attached to the bed. He felt as if the floor was lurching, and he wasn’t sure how much this was to do with the painkillers, and how much with the utter weirdness of what he’d just heard. Kovacs had a friend. A real friend. And the friend was Bird. Bird who sat on the high street, drinking Navigator super-strength lager and hurling abuse. The mysteries of the universe surely knew no bounds.

  ‘Why were you trying to get in today?’

  ‘Want to see what that bitch had taken. I thought maybe she take some record of mine.’

  ‘What bitch?’

  ‘Cut-back bitch,’ Bird said, leaning back on his pillow and squinting at him. ‘All bleeding down her back. When he was away. When George gone some place away me walk past, and me seen this cut-back bitch come out his place. Blonde hair.’

  Rex remembered what Bird had been shouting at the funkily-dressed woman in the street, the day after the murders. Cut-back bitch. Teef. He’d thought it was something about budgets, naturally assumed it, because the cut-backs were on everyone’s mind and because Bird’s particular bugbear seemed to be the Council. But Kovacs had been dead a day when he’d seen Bird outside.

  ‘He hadn’t gone away, Bird. He was dead. I saw you shouting at her – do you remember?’

  Rex remembered. He remembered the woman running away, her biker jacket half-on, half-off. Had she been bleeding, as Bird said? He remembered the dried blood on the floor of the cellar – but that could have come from anyone.