by RJ Dark
‘The spirits often drop hints, subtle hints.’
Her eyes narrowing, she picked up her bag. Reached for the crash helmet. Disappointment on her face. But’s that OK; disappointment is good. Because that means, really, she wants to believe. And if she wants to, then she will.
‘A lottery ticket.’
She took her hand off the crash helmet. Put her bag down. Cocked her head.
‘Yes.’
From there, it’s obvious.
‘But you don’t know where it is.’ I don’t let her speak, don’t let her get in a cynical comment. ‘Tell me the situation.’
‘Can’t he tell you that?’
‘I get more, impressions from the spirits than actual stories. Quicker and clearer to hear it from you.’
She’s wavering. Wants to believe. Wants an answer. But she can’t trust. That odd look crosses her face again. She stands.
‘This is lies, innit? Jackie’s a grifter. You are too. It’s all lies.’
‘It’s a slow process, Janine.’ She shook her head.
‘If it were real, you could tell me something really impressive, like the numbers on the ticket.’
‘Zero-two …’
‘Zero-two.’
‘… Thirty-eight …’
‘Thirty-eight.’
‘ … Nineteen …’
‘Nineteen.
‘ … Six and Eleven …’
‘Six and Eleven.’
Sometimes it happens like that; sometimes it feels like I’m saying the words before Beryl gives them to me, and it’s easy to believe that it is more than it is. Though I don’t let myself, because that’s the sort of thing people who get sectioned believe, and no one wants to be sectioned.
However, that little trick is impressive enough. She’s stopped in her tracks.
‘That’s the numbers – how did you know?’
‘How do you think?’
She stared. Not as confrontational. Tapped a well-manicured nail on the desk.
‘He won the Lotto,’ she said. ‘Eight million pounds, but he wouldn’t cash the ticket. He tried to hide it from me. Said it was insurance against me “misbehaving”. Bastard. We argued about it. I said he should cash the money straight away cos he might lose it. He said that would never happen. Then he died. And now it’s lost.’
‘And you’ve checked everywhere that—’
‘Of course I have.’ A flash of temper. ‘I was sure it’d be in his lock-up – guarded that bloody place like it was full of gold – but when I got the key—’
‘Got the key?’
‘Police gave it to me. From his body when they brought me his leathers and that.’ She nodded at the helmet. ‘I said I needed it to get some stuff for the kid. Anyway, the lock-up was empty.’
‘Had someone been in it?’
‘I don’t think so.’ A pause. ‘Maybe. The family are bastards.’ She leaned forward, and I saw real need in her eyes, a desperation. ‘Look, I have a kid – he’s three. You know what it’s like on the Edge. That money will get me out of there, help get him out of there. A good school, somewhere nice to live. Decent people. If you are what you say you are, and you can find the ticket, I’ll give you a percentage, Mr Jones. Just help me get the money, help me get away.’
And just like that, she had me. I wanted to help. Of course I did.
Help a young mother and her child get off the Edge? I’d have killed for that to happen to me as a kid.
How could I refuse?
3
Beryl makes tea. It’s one of the things she does. I am not allowed to make tea because my tea is either too weak, or too milky, or not sweet enough, or all of the above. And anyway, I prefer coffee, which Beryl doesn’t approve of.
‘How did you know the numbers, Beryl?’
She paused, steaming teabag on the spoon poised above the composting pot. Beryl is very environmentally conscious.
‘Last week’s is claimed, week before no winners. Week before that, no winners. Week before, claimed. Week before that one winner, not claimed. Gave you them numbers.’ She dropped the teabag into the composting pot. ‘You bought the shit tea.’
‘Well done.’
‘I’m not just a pretty face.’
‘Well …’
‘Don’t say it.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’
‘Yes, you were. Twat.’
I was about to say it: ‘You’re not a pretty face at all.’
‘You used to be fun, Beryl.’
‘No, I didn’t. Here.’ She shoved a mug of tea the colour of old brick at me. ‘Careful, it’s hot.’
‘It’s tea. I know it’s hot.’
‘Can never be too careful with you.’
‘Where’s your tea?’
‘I have a date. Woman called Sandra, owns a dog-walking business. Meeting her in the park. And I don’t drink shit tea. You can have it, have fun.’
She left, taking the three carrier bags she always seemed to have with her but never opened or emptied, out to her car. She was right, the tea was awful.
I’m on my own a lot. I like it. I don’t exactly have a lot of clients and those I do have are pretty regular, so apart from Jackie, who turns up when he feels like it, I generally know when someone is coming. Psychic medium isn’t really a walk-in-off-the-street job, and I’m far enough from the Edge not to attract giggling schoolgirls who want a tarot reading.
So when my bell rang as the door opened, it was a surprise.
Two visitors; football shirts, hair shaved at the side, closely curled on top and gelled down so you can barely tell it’s ginger. Sallow white skin and shaving rashes, a spattering of acne. Young, maybe not school-age young but not yet in their twenties. One’s football shirt is white, the other red, but both are oversized, hanging loose on skinny lithe-limbed bodies. Thin necks with prominent Adam’s apples, freckles collecting over cheeks and nose, ranging eyes. Twins, scoping out the office, checking out my things, the lights, the décor – not finding anything they like or understand.
They move like cats in new surroundings, fizzing with nervous energy.
‘Where’s your TV?’ this was the one in white. He spoke like he wanted a bag of crisps but I wouldn’t give him his pocket money.
‘Yeah,’ said the other. ‘Where’s your TV?’
‘I don’t have a TV.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because this is where I work. A TV isn’t conducive to the atmosphere.’
‘Conducive,’ said the one in white. He mouthed the word as if tasting it.
The one in red reached into his back pocket and took out a pocket dictionary. Then he licked a finger and leafed through it. ‘”Adjective. Making a certain outcome possible or likely.”‘
The one in white nodded. ‘Da says we need to better ourselves,’ he said. He had cheekbones you could use to spread butter. ‘But I like to watch TV when I work.’
‘Can I help you boys?’
‘Da wants to speak to you,’ said the one in red. ‘Sent us to make sure that Paki’s not here.’
‘He’s a Sikh.’
‘Fuck off.’
I knew who they were, of course – if not which of them was which. They were the Stanbeck boys. Said out loud, it always sounded kind of wholesome, though nothing could be further from the truth. They were identical twins – a fact they used to stay out of jail. No one could ever say with real certainty whether it was Kyle or Ronaldo Stanbeck they saw knifing someone or stamping on someone’s head. If Ronaldo, or Kyle, was going to do something really bad, you could bet that Kyle, or Ronaldo, would be somewhere else where a lot of people would see them. They weren’t clever – their dad had probably told them about that trick – but they weren’t stupid either. Once they learned something worked, they didn’t forget it, and that was why they were still walking about despite being a pair of violent borderline sociopaths. Everyone on the Edge called them ‘The Krays’, which most people thought was a smashing together of their names to li
ken them to the other famous gangster twins, Reggie and Ronnie. But actually it was ‘cray’ with a C which is short for ‘crazy’, among the youth and if you called them the Krays to their faces, then they would kick your head in, as more than one unfortunate had found out. Still, it had stuck in my head.
They made me nervous.
Their dad was Trolley Mick.
He made me more nervous.
I heard him coming before I saw him. Kyle, or Ronaldo, went outside and gave some signal, then the whine of an electric motor heralded Trolley Mick’s arrival.
In the eighties and nineties, Trolley Mick had ruled Blades Edge; everyone had been terrified of him. When I was at school, he was the bogeyman used to ensure good behaviour: ‘Trolley Mick’ll come for you.’ Though, if you were one of the many Stanbecks at the school, you could do whatever you wanted – unless you were in the English teacher, Miss Feeney’s class, as she was having none of that. My old English teacher was the only person I ever met in my youth who wasn’t frightened of the Stanbecks, and I spent many breaks hiding in her classroom because it was a safe place. Mick cracked down on his family’s behaviour eventually. I think he worked out clever was more useful to him than violent, and I always wondered if Miss Feeney helped him with that realisation. Now St Jude’s School – or Choppy’s as we all called it on the Edge – was, if not a great school, at least not the hellhole I’d been “educated” in.
Mick was a bodybuilder back then; shell suits and mullets and arms thicker than my waist. Someone broke his legs with a baseball bat in the early nineties. Or he broke them skiing. Or he got run over. Or he was kneecapped by the Mafia. The story was always changing. But he stopped exercising, and the muscle turned to fat. He got too used to the mobility scooter he started using and never regained his old shape. Even when his legs started working, he never got off the scooter. That was the noise I heard: the mobility scooter’s electric engine complaining under Mick’s weight.
They didn’t call him ‘Trolley Mick’ because of the scooter though; they’d always called him that. Started out as Off His Trolley Mick, because of his temper. I’d heard he had less of a temper now. I still had no wish to cross him.
I had no wish to meet him either, but that seemed unavoidable.
He was a grotesque, and it wasn’t because of the way he looked. It was because he chose to be grotesque – or didn’t care, I don’t know. He rode the sort of mobility scooter you didn’t see any more; bashed and rusted, blue where there still was paint. The seat, more electrical tape than vinyl, on the end of a tube of metal, handlebars the same, and it didn’t look like it should support the pyramid of flesh that was Trolley Mick. He wore green canvas trousers and a once pink shirt. Both were filthy. He’d always worn his hair long and still did, but now it was a mess of wispy, greasy grey strands smeared across the liver-spotted skin of his scalp and forehead. His face was mean, like all his features had gathered in the centre of it for fear of falling off the rolling flesh around his skull. And he stank – rumour was he just couldn’t be bothered to wash, but I didn’t believe that. Trolley Mick ran Blades Edge and everything on it, and no one had managed to take it off him yet. He was a man who calculated everything. He knew he was repellent; relied on it, I imagine. You saw him, you made a decision. You judged him, people wrote him off or wanted to stay away from him. He used that, his physical presence, the smell of him, to intimidate people.
He certainly intimidated me.
‘That bitch has been in here,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’
‘My daughter-in-law. Don’t bother lying.’ It sounded like every word was a strain, like his voice box had been burned out and the words were being forced through smoke and hurt. He took a pouch of tobacco from a pocket and started to roll a cigarette. ‘You going to tell me it’s no smoking in here?’
‘I try not to waste my time.’
He looked up from rolling his cigarette. ‘Me too.’
‘He’s got no TV, Da,’ said Kray One.
‘Says it’s not con-juice-ive, Da,’ said Kray Two.
‘That means, “to make an outcome likely or possible”, Da.’
‘Well, boysm,’ he said, adding an ‘m’ to boys, making it buzz like there was a wasp in the room ‘Let’s hope our visit is conducive to Mr Jones helping us, eh?’
‘Yes, Da.’
‘No need to talk anymore, boysm.’
‘Yes, Da.’
‘I know why the bitch came here, Jones. And what she’s after is mine, right? One of my boys won it, so it’s mine. You find it, you give it to me. Not her.’
‘I can only follow the path the spirits lay out before me – I may not find anything.’
‘None of your bollocks, Jones. You’re a clever little shit with a way of finding things out and that’s been useful to me, on occasion. But you’re clean now, and good for you – I like a man that betters himself. You’re up here fleecing old ladies, and that’s none of my affair.’ He glared at me with little piggy eyes. ‘But don’t interfere in my family’s business, lad. Now, I’m not gonna mess about, Jones. I do not like hurting people. But sometimes, I think people feel the need to be hurt. And they choose me as the conduit of their pain.’
‘Conduit,’ said Kray One. And Kray Two took out their dictionary. The mobility scooter whined across the floor as Mick drove a little nearer.
‘Don’t hurt yourself, lad, Okay?’ He reached up with a meaty hand, rolled-up cigarette smouldering between huge, nicotine-stained fingers. He gently slapped my cheek once, twice, three times. ‘You do as I ask, lad. And you will, cos you are a fuck-up. Your mother was a fuck-up, a whore too stupid to charge for opening her legs, and you are too. If your brown friend hadn’t dragged you out the gutter, you’d still be there now.’ He smiled as he said the words, and I noticed the end of his pointed nose moved with every breath he took. ‘I know fuck-ups, Jones – it only takes a little push to send you reeling back to where you came from. You find that ticket, you give it to me and we’re done again. I’m not an unfair man – you’ll get a finder’s fee.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘Then I will push, Malachite Jones, and then you will fall off the edge.’ The scooter whined as he reversed it. ‘Boysm, you give Mr Jones here a gentle lesson – let him know we mean what we say, but no bruises, nothing broken, okay?’
‘Yes, Da,’ they said.
4
Steven Hitch died on the 4 May 1992. It was a bank holiday and the hottest day of the year. ‘Please Don’t Go’ by KWS was at number one, and I was fourteen. I’d just discovered Nirvana and thought that Kurdt Cobain (sic) was the only person in the world who truly understood me.
Steve’s death wasn’t mysterious or violent or particularly memorable. He fell on Blades Edge Hill, hit his head, died. Most people probably don’t even remember it.
He was my best friend.
Not my only friend – there were four of us. Me, Steve, Alby (short for Albert) Hersden and Sharon Shaftsbury. Though we didn’t see Sharon as much, as she was just discovering she was attractive to boys and had an on-again off-again relationship with Steve that governed whether she hung out with us or not.
Me and Steve were inseparable. He shared all the sticky details of a boy’s first love with his terminally uninteresting-to-girls friend. I shared all the gifts my parents showered on me. Our friendship was based around books, music and the comic 2000AD. It never made much sense to me, our friendship; Steve was almost popular, for one of the grunge kids, and I definitely wasn’t. But still, friendships are strange things.
Jackie Singh Khattar made our lives hell. He didn’t have a gang or anything like that. But no one messed with him; he was wrong, everyone knew it. Bright lad, capable, and so very clearly on course to end up in prison. If he’d been white the Stanbecks would have picked him up in a flash. But he wasn’t, and they didn’t. A large part of my early teens was spent running or hiding from Jackie Singh Khattar’s fists or his wicked tongue. There were others that
made school miserable, but they weren’t in Jackie’s league.
Sometimes, when it’s really hot, I dream of that night. Of running across Blades Edge Hill, Alby somewhere behind me, Steve behind him, Jackie behind them, chasing us. I know, in the dream, that Steve is actually dead, that he’s not running. But dreams don’t care about that. Steve is there, and he’s trying to tell me something, but I don’t know what. His face is covered in blood, his forehead dented by the rock he fell against.
I wake up, covered in sweat, feeling the same way I did when I went through withdrawal. Hot and shivery, hungry and nauseous. Sometimes I think I hear Steve’s voice but I block it out, put on earphones, blast music, the radio, anything, because I don’t hear voices.
I sometimes wonder who I would be if Steve had lived, who Jackie would be too, cos that night changed us both. It pushed us together, sent Jackie on a trajectory that would end in the army, doing God knows what in God knows where, and me on a course that would end in a gutter, drinking cheap cider and begging for enough spare change to buy my next hit.
Guilt is a terrible thing.
Jackie didn’t want me to be an addict, and as part of not being an addict, he taught me to fight. I’m not good at it, and violence mostly scares me, but if you’re not expecting it I know enough to hold my own and make enough space to run away.
That was the first thing Jackie taught me, his first rule: if you can, run away.
The reason Trolley Mick wanted his boys to check my office for Jackie is that Jackie Singh Khattar, despite his rule, has never run away from anything. If Mick started something with Jackie, then he knew it would end with someone dead because Jackie has no idea how to stay down.
It is not a part of who he is.
I, on the other hand, know exactly how and when to stay down. So when Kray One punched me in the stomach, I went down. Then when he lifted me up – my world empty of air, my stomach a black hole in my body, the pain sucking me in – and held me so his brother could have a go. I went down again. That’s why, when Beryl returned, she found me lying on the floor, curled up in a ball around my aching stomach muscles.
