by James Hawes
For a wild second I considered simply gunning the engine and speeding off, with the mad girl still on the bonnet, if necessary. And then I saw, beyond her pale, young-old face, the eye of the next CCTV camera, staring directly into mine.
This time I was in genuine trouble.
35: Good as Gold
No doubt it took something a bit special to grab the attention of the underpaid, half-trained, part-time para-police minions who were idly scanning the banks of night-time images piping endlessly down the wires from the myriad cameras of London. And no doubt a screen filled by the half-dressed arse of a skinny girl climbing over the bonnet of a car while her friend screams at the driver, a shifty-looking middle-aged man out alone in his Merc at this time of night, was just the thing to do it.
Christ, they must be zooming in and locking on already. I had to stop this, and in a friendly way, and fast.
—OK, OK. Peckham. Fine, whatever. Just get in. No, no, the back, the back! I’m not opening the front! Right, get in and shut the door.
—Just drive, mate, we got money, see?
—Never mind the money. I don’t want your money.
—Well that’s all you’re getting, mate, so don’t kid yourself!
—No, I mean, look, I’m not a bloody taxi, OK? Now, please, sit still and just let me get off the bridge before I kill someone.
—Claire, he’s a fucking weirdo. Let us out! I’m outta here!
—Don’t! We’re moving, for God’s sake. You’ll hurt yourself.
—You fucking stupid, Jez? You want to go back and see Skaggsy? Stay in the fucking cab.
—He said he isn’t a cab. I’m outta here.
—Stay in the fucking cab, Jez.
—He’s a weirdo.
—You stopped me, for Christ’s sake!
—Skaggsy’ll fucking kill us, you stupid cow. Driver, Peckham. We got money, see? And you just shut the fuck up, Jez, right? Stay in the cab.
—Ha ha ha!
—Ha ha ha!
—Now, er, ladies. Where did you want to go exactly? I don’t really know London very well yet and …
—Peckham.
—Well, you’ll have to show me the … this is ridiculous. Look, I’m not a cab. I’ll drop you by the nearest tube and …
—We’ll scream.
—What?
—If you drop us in the middle of fucking nowhere, we’ll scream.
—We’ll tear your fucking face off, mate.
—We’ll tell everyone about you kerb-crawling.
—I wasn’t! I’m a married man, with kids.
—Your missus know you’re out here then, mate?
—What? Well, no, not exactly, but that’s because …
—You like young girls, do you? Bet you do. You all do.
—Shut the fuck up, Claire, ha ha ha!
—Look, I was just, well, I just decided to go out, I …
—Yeah yeah yeah.
—He ain’t going to make a fuss, Claire, you can tell.
—Na, he don’t want to make trouble. You can tell.
—He’ll take us home, won’t you, mate?
—He’ll be good as gold, won’t he?
—Well, yes, of course, I’ll take you, but honestly, you’ll have to direct me. I really don’t know this area at all.
—There you go, Jez. Told you he was all right.
—Cheers, mate. Ta. Next left, second right.
I obeyed, thinking only of the gun lying almost openly beside me. Just do what they say, and get rid of them. Then straight to the M25. Or maybe not? God, I needed to be careful. I needed to think, quietly and logically. I needed to sit in an old library somewhere, my natural habitat, and …
—Second right you said, er, girls?
—Yeah. Then keep on for a bit.
I turned as ordered. There was absolutely nothing else I could do.
36: No Cameras
We couldn’t have been more than half a mile from Tower Bridge, but now we were at the end of the world.
I turned again as ordered and entered a long, low street where hopeless-looking shops, all with graffiti-covered steel shutters, stood in the patchy sodium light as far as the eye could see. A single grey-white lighted takeaway joint buzzed with shadowy groups of young people in hoods, gathered about cars drawn up at self-consciously crazy angles. Over the scene loomed high-rise flats which seemed to rear up from directly behind the dead shops, their tops lost in the foggy darkness. Their few lit windows, high in the air, made me shiver.
Sniff!
—That’s better. Oh, nice gear, Jez.
—Excuse me, um, what are you …? Oh God, look, that stuff’s illegal. Sorry, look, you can’t just go and take cocaine in my car …
—You want a line, driver? Fair’s fair, Jez, give the man a line.
They smiled up at me with whacked-out eyes. What if I did? What if I took their drugs and then had a laugh with them and took them home and showed them the gun? Then they would know I was no ordinary boring old bastard! Then they might, who knew, they might even both decide to …
BAAAARP!
Suddenly the cabin was flooded by headlights and filled with the outraged blast of a horn right behind us. My grip on the wheel locked tight, my foot instinctively lifted off the accelerator and covered the brake. The glaring lights veered out, the horn blared again and then the car was past us and in front, brake lights glowing angry red. Eyes shone back at me from the death-pale masks of furious male faces, black faces and white faces but all lit to a zombie pallor by my own headlights. I had no choice but to stop or ram them. I hit the brakes.
—Oh fuck! Fuck! screamed the girls.
—Who are they? I cried, and cried was pretty well the right word.
—I told you, you stupid cow! snapped one.
—Fuck them. Drive on! screamed the other one.
I put the car in gear again and tried to swing out past my enemies. This was a public street, for God’s sake, there were cars passing now and then on the other side of the road, there were even cars behind me. Surely nothing much could happen here?
But it could: the other car simply reversed into my path and yawed round deliberately to block the entire road. I stopped, disbelief stronger even than fear for a brief second. This could not be happening. They could not simply block the whole street like this. People could not simply be mounting the pavement to get past us without stopping. Where the hell were the cameras? There must be cameras. The five young men in the car could not seriously mean to just leave their car like that, get out and come strutting towards us. This was London, this was England, this was …
I flipped my lock shut.
The police. How long would it take the police to get to us? Mobile, quick.
The police? How could I call the police?
With terrifying ease, the obvious leader of the young men snapped the Mercedes star off my bonnet and pocketed it. Then there were faces at the windows, hands going for the doors, fists and boots on roof and panels.
—Jez, get out the fucking car, you bitch, and give me my charlie back.
To my amazement, the blonde girl buzzed her window down.
—It-is-not-fucking-yours, Skaggsy.
—I bought it!
—I gave you the fucking money!
—You lent it me, Jez, you bitch!
—You never fucking pay me back anyway.
—I fucking do, every time.
—Open the fucking door, mate.
—Go on then, mate, open it. He’s my fucking boyfriend. Let me fucking out or he’ll kill you.
—Yes, yes, right, fine …
I pressed the switch that opened all the doors. The blonde girl got out and smashed the largest of the youths round the face. Unfortunately, I caught his eye as he recoiled.
—What you fucking looking at, you old cunt? What you fucking doing giving my bitch a lift? You some kind of fucking pervert?
—Look, I was just going home, I …
—Listen to him.
Posh fucking pervert.
—Leave him alone, Skaggsy, he only give us a lift.
—Fucking posh kerb-crawler in a Merc!
—Get him out!
I flipped the switch and my own door locked, but I was too late: the passenger door was already open, and arms were reaching in for me.
37: Dad Pants
It was happening. My nightmare. After all these years of work and qualifications, I had stupidly forgotten who I was and had wandered unthinkingly into the part of the comprehensive playground where no teachers ever looked, to be hopelessly surrounded by tough boys from the council houses.
I squirmed round and braced my back against the still-locked driver’s door, thinking instinctively of trying to kick the grasping hands away. But I stopped myself before I kicked. I knew this scenario all too well. This was not normal male pecking-order violence with some logic and limitation to it, however nasty. If I hit back, let alone kicked back, there was no grudging handshake coming my way. I would only make things worse. I was them, the other, the boy with the clean uniform and the posh voice in the tough school, the lone straggler from the rival band of Cro-Magnons, the effete wine-sipping Muslim shopkeeper in the town surrounded by hill-farming, vodka-tossing Serbs. This was open season, sheer class hatred, that first cousin of genocide, and I was going to be very lucky if I got home at all tonight.
—Ah, he didn’t do nothing, Skaggsy, he just give us a lift.
—Fancy my girl, do you, you old pervert?
So I didn’t kick. I let them pull.
—Ha ha, his trousers are coming down.
—Ha ha ha!
Laughter! There was hope then.
My old childhood senses felt hope. If the rough boys were laughing at me, I might yet escape hospital. If I just played the clownish, posh punchbag, the man with no shame and hence no value, I might yet get away with a mild kicking. I could not remember exactly which underpants I had fished blindly from the drawer in darkness and somehow managed to struggle into whilst juggling a whimpering Mariana at five this morning, but I prayed that it was a good, baggy, comical pair. It seemed likely.
—Ha ha ha, look at his big baggy Dad Pants!
Yes! Hope! Thank God for M&S!
—Oh God, I exaggerated my own accent, —My new pants!
—Ha ha ha! His new pants! Get them off!
I let go of the wheel, shielding my balls with one hand as I allowed them to drag me over the central console, out through the passenger door and into the rain. It felt cold and greasy on my naked thighs. I floundered entertainingly around in the supposedly vital effort to save my precious pants. With a bit of luck I would look so utterly wretched when stripped of my underwear that I would have more value as entertainment than as boot fodder. And there were girls here, however scary, which made my position far more hopeful. Girls brake men. I made my senses freeze over, the way I had done so many, many times on walks home from school in the wintry dark, and just made sure that I managed to turn over as they pulled me free, protecting my vulnerable face and presenting, instead, my comical arse.
As my bare knees landed in the gutter and the puddles, I shut my eyes, left my body and flew to that quiet arctic library far beyond the kicks, a place I had not needed to visit since my mid-teens, but whose key now leapt straight into my forty-five-year-old hand.
Here we were again, then, after all. This was my place and I would never escape it. Oh well, what did Nietzsche say? We are all only old barrel organs with one tune and eternity itself turning the handle. Yes indeed. Ah, interesting, so that was what it felt like to be kicked up the cold, wet, bare arse by one of those ridiculously shiny, plastic-coated trainers I had seen on these young men’s feet. Surprisingly painful. But only the arse. Just try unobtrusively to protect the balls, that’s all; if they don’t hit the balls, nothing matters much when you are knees on the floor and arsewise to your attacker …
—Ow! Ouch! Ag!
—Ha ha ha!
—Get the old cunt all the way out then!
—Look at his fat fucking old arse, ha ha!
At this moment my hands fell upon the cool metal beneath the passenger seat.
38: Unencumbered by Trousers
As my fingers wrapped around the Armalite, Newton gave up and Einstein took over. Time hit the brakes hard.
The laughs still cackled in my ears, the nylon-tipped trainers still pummelled my thighs and arse, but the gun, and my hands on the gun, seemed to exist in an entirely different time stream.
I clearly watched it slide free from the ripped, snagged bags as my right hand, finger already groping for the trigger guard, pulled it forwards and outwards. I rolled back, down and to my left, as the gun came free, buttstock first. My back hit the tarmac, the barrel swung high and round, landing plumb in my waiting left palm.
Unencumbered by trousers, I managed to jerk my feet up towards my arse and so make a springing arch with my legs and spine. I screamed aloud and shot myself backwards and upwards a foot or so. I had time to register clearly every gramme of the impact, every millimetre of give in the metal panel when my back and shoulders impacted with the rear door of my car. As I hit, my right hand landed plumb on the ammunition clips. I was tearing one of them free from the handguard before my naked backside had even settled again on the wet roadway. The hideous, shameful feel of the cold water up my arsehole was all I needed now.
—Aaaaaah! I roared with all my teeth bared, and then the little magazine slotted into the gun as if drawn by magnetism to its appointed place. My hand slapped it home with a chunk that could only be studio-enhanced. And when I, quite without thinking, snapped back the bolt with my left finger and thumb, the chonk seemed to issue from some deep and metal-lined cellar.
Time synchronised itself again, and I blinked.
So did they.
—Fuck, said one of them.
39: Respect
They froze. I froze. The whole world froze.
—Shit, shit, shit. Now look what you’ve made me do, you stupid little bastards. It’s loaded and cocked. What the hell am I going to do now?
—Fuck me, is it real, mate?
—Of course it’s real, you bloody little idiot.
—Respect, man.
—I don’t want your brainless bloody imitation-Yank respect, you walking argument against everything I believe in. Actually, yes I fucking well do, because I’ve worked hard all my life, unlike you. But the main thing is right now I just don’t want this sodding thing to go off and I have no idea how to defuse it or disarm it or uncock it, or whatever you say, without actually shooting the bloody thing off.
—Hey, man, we just thought you was, you know, just some old git in a crap Merc.
—Crap? You calling my Merc crap?
—Hey, no, only jesting. Safe, man.
—Safe? Safe? No it is fucking not safe, or at least, I have no bloody idea whether it’s safe or not because I am just a normal bloody Englishman so what the hell do I know about guns? Eh?
—I dunno. Fuck. What do you know about guns? Shit, no need to point it! Fuck!
—Know about guns? I know sod all about guns, of course, you wandering benefit sponge! And, since I’m an old git, I’ll point my gun at whomsoever I bloody well like, OK?
—Point taken, man. Whomsoever. No worries.
—No worries? What kind of bloody Australian surfing bollocks is that? Since when were there no worries? This is England, and yes, actually, there are worries. I’m worried about my kids and my bloody mortgage and a million arseholes like you. You bullied anyone recently? Made life miserable for any shy, hardworking kids lately, have you? Eh?
—Easy, man. We just want to go home, OK?
—So give me my trousers back, you foul little fucking cokehead.
—Sure, man. Cool. Get the man’s trousers, Biggsy.
—Trousers, Skaggsy.
—It’s not me fucking wants them. Give them back to the man, you stupid cunt!
—Oh yeah. Trousers, man.
—Put the trousers in the back of the car. Very slowly.
—They’re there, man. Trousers in.
—OK. Now, move away from the trousers. Easy. Thank you. Back off, and let me get in. I really don’t know how easily this thing goes off. I really don’t. And I don’t know where the safety catch is, if there is one, and I have no idea whether it’s set to fire just one bullet or the whole bloody lot. I wouldn’t want to save the taxpayer several hundred thousand pounds over the next few decades by blowing one or more of you in half, would I?
—No way, man. That would be very bad stuff. Look, hey, you win, no need to keep your finger on the trigger like that.
—Ah, but I can’t move it, you see. I think that if I move it at all, I might move it the wrong way.
—You just keep your finger right there, man.
—I’ll try. Oh, and would you give me back my bonnet badge, please? Or do you really want a taste of my little Armalite?
—I got it, man. Hey, sorry, y’know.
—Toss it into the car. Thank you, gentlemen. A bit further back, please. Christ, look at my arms, they’re shaking. Would you just back off and give me some fucking space!
They backed off so fast that one of them fell over. He scrambled up, arms shouting I surrender, clearly terrified that his accidental fall might shock me into loosing off at him. His fear was the best thing I had seen in months. I heeled the passenger door shut (ah yes, the reassuring Mercedes clunk!) and walked round the car very, very slowly. Keeping the gun pointing out and up, I slid into the driver’s seat. Then I very carefully lowered the barrel downward and arced it over into the car, making damn sure it never pointed anywhere near my face, until it was aiming squarely at the passenger door. I was then able to swing it through ninety degrees in a horizontal plane and lower it on to the passenger seat. It was now pointing straight forward. At last I dared take my finger away from the trigger. Nothing happened. I slid it forward and allowed the snout to dip into the footwell. There was now room to let the buttstock down over the front lip of the seat, lay the whole thing on the floor of the car then start to slide it back underneath, into darkness.
