Contents
Title Page
HAVERING
SUSANNAH RICKARDS
Ultimate Satisfaction Everyday
BARKING & DAGENHAM
MARTIN MACHADO
Unfinished Business
REDBRIDGE
DEBORAH O’CONNOR
The Homecoming
NEWHAM
KADIJA SESAY
A Village by Any Other Name
WALTHAM FOREST
ASHLEIGH LEZARD
North by North East
ENFIELD
UCHENNA IZUNDU
Nne, biko
TOWER HAMLETS
TABITHA POTTS
The Djinn
HACKNEY
RICKY OH
The Hackney Factor
HARINGEY
BOBBY NAYYAR
Hollywood
ISLINGTON
ARIANA MOUYIARIS
Real People
CITY OF LONDON
ANGELA CLERKIN
While the City Sleeps
SOUTHWARK
CHARLOTTE JUDET
Parting Gift
LEWISHAM
ANDREA PISAC
Pro Creation
GREENWICH
STELLA DUFFY
Notes to Support Funding Application Modestly
Proposed to the Woolwich Tourist Board
BEXLEY
EMMA DARWIN
The Sugar House
BROMLEY
EMILE WEST
The Penge Missives
INDEX OF CONTRIBUTORS
Copyright
HAVERING
Ultimate Satisfaction Everyday
Susannah Rickards
Greg Mason was a loser. He flogged dry dog food door to door round the outskirts of Romford and would have cocked up even this career had he not married the boss’s daughter, Eileen, because one unusual night he felt able to ask for her hand. Her father, glad to be shot of the sniping little mare, rewarded Greg with a sales franchise in Emerson Park, an easy, salubrious territory that earned him the resentment of fellow salesmen. But after her father retired, Eileen barged in on the business with a thirst for wealth that Greg found unseemly. She booked herself onto deal-closing seminars and then exploited her new-found knowledge, hogging the phone when orders came in, pushing protein enriched treats that Greg was sure played havoc with dogs’ kidneys. She upped the price each time new stock arrived. When business dwindled she blamed him. One sub-zero night she locked him out of the house in a game that soon turned humourless. To drum initiative into him, she said. But he gave up and went off to kip on a banquette in The Mariners, handing two months’ Peak Fitness Doberman rations to the barman by way of thanks. For Eileen, that was the end.
Greg’s solicitor lost him custody of the kids. He saw them twice a month, in charred playparks and cinemas. They spotted food on his tie and traded Yu-Gi-Oh cards with each other under burger-bar tables, ignoring his questions. When they parted his eldest said, ‘Laters,’ and wouldn’t return his hug.
One afternoon he was delivering to a leafy detached house on Woodlands Avenue when Eileen’s car pulled up at the mansion next door and Greg’s kids tumbled out. That unscheduled glimpse of their uncombed heads and restless limbs kicked his heart. He was gearing up to greet them when through the hedge he spied a man younger than himself belting a ball in the air and saw the blue curve of a swimming pool. Still, they were his kids so he called to them. Their footsteps stopped and he heard his youngest whisper, ‘Dog alert. Hurry. Or he’ll want to talk to us.’ The gate clanged as they headed for the pool.
Greg drove away, not back to his rented room above a shop on the Hornchurch Road but down to the Thames at Rainham, his childhood stomping ground. He parked where the road ran out at the entrance to the municipal tip. They’d grassed over the mountains of landfill since he’d last visited. A smell of toasting rice from the Tilda processing plant dominated the air. On either side of the water, factory chimneys steamed and machinery whirred, softer than the birdsong from the Purfleet sanctuary a mile away, as if industry itself ticked by unmanned. No need of human interference. No need for men like him.
Downriver some wag had placed a skeleton frame of a diver out in the water, as if caught to his waist in the mud. He bet the council had commissioned it. They had ever-wilier ruses for squandering Greg’s tax. Some self-appointed Thames Gateway Artist-in-River-Residence probably landed himself a fat grant for cobbling together found objects from the council tip or shoreline rubbish, and called it sculpture. But though he wanted to berate it, he found himself drawn to the diver, and stood a while, watching the tidal water run through the mesh of his torso, swilling about in the empty cage where his heart and guts should be. The late afternoon light on the wide river, the sounds of the birds and machines and the tide all filled his head and distilled his thoughts to this:
He sought one thing. One thing he was proud to have done in his life.
He’d lived all his life in Havering, this sleepy rural second cousin of a London borough, and that placidity seemed bred inside his bones. At Hi-Pro motivational conferences he’d met salesmen who’d moved out from Bow and the Isle of Dogs. Living here was a sign of making good. There was an edge to them, a pride born of having escaped the city. And there were the ones who’d moved in from outlying Essex villages, hungry for all those Romford doorsteps, every one a sale in the making. But Greg was not edgy, not hungry. Until now, Havering had suited him. He’d been quiet and kind and satisfied all through his life, but that was from disposition not choice. Should he have fought for Eileen? Would a bitter custody battle have shown his boys a depth or quality of love they doubted now? He tried to remember how he’d filled his time before she’d commandeered it. Hours at the run-down gym in the outhouse of The Admiralty, weight-lifting. He’d been strong back then, in body. Perhaps that’s what Eileen had liked. Perhaps she’d imagined that strength ran through him. Why, he’d been so physically powerful as a single man that once he’d lifted a car to free a child trapped beneath.
Greg breathed in, stepped forward towards the river. At his feet a thousand washed up water bottles and coffee cups looked up at him like a stadium crowd. A sudden calm infused him. That was the One Thing. He had forgotten it until now but he had saved a life.
Back then his energy outstripped his patience for exercise. He’d done two circuits that night, all his usual weights upped by ten, and not felt tired. The other gym-jocks invited him for a pint and he turned them down, not wanting to blunt the fizzing health he felt. It was November, early dark. He crossed the yard onto the steep main road. Outside Costcutter’s a car pulled up and Kerry, Dean Fletcher’s girlfriend, got out. Her knew her by sight. Prettiness masked by acne, wet look curls, long legs.
He watched casually, his eye drawn simply because hers was the only movement on the street. The spill of light from Costcutter’s window framed her, adding potency to her ordinary actions, as if she were in a film. Kerry went to the boot to fetch something. As she did, the rear door opened, her little girl scrambled out and toddled in front of the car. Greg was about to call out for Kerry to watch for her when he realised the car was rolling downhill. It nudged the child and she fell in its path. The car’s front wheel rolled onto her hair and her trailing fur hood, trapping her, inching towards her soft wide face. All this in seconds as he sprinted towards them. Kerry screamed into the night: ‘Oh someone – Oh God!’
Greg reached them, squatted, lifted the car clear, not aware of its weight, just the hot strength flooding through him. Kerry pulled her child free, face buried against her saying, ‘Ashley, bubba, wake up, talk to mumma.’
He released the car and it seemed light, bouncing as it landed. When he stood, it felt like he kept on rising and rising un
til the world were navel height to him and he could run his hands over its surface to make it right. Now other people, scenting crisis, joined them: the checkout man from Costcutter, waving a lollipop at Ashley, an old woman quoting out-of-hours doctors’ numbers by heart. The cashier pushed the lollipop against Ashley’s lips. Her eyes opened, blank, staring past her mother to the sky, then she opened her mouth and shuddered. Her scalp was bald in patches, and bleeding, but the checkout man said scalps do bleed a lot, his brother’s did when he got attacked, and it looks worse than it is, see her neck’s moving and she’s breathing. Kerry kept thanking him for the lollipop. She didn’t thank Greg. She moved away from the car into a dim side street, the pensioner at her shoulder, advising.
For a moment the cashier looked like he might ask Greg something, but some teenagers started shouting in his shop and he went after them. Greg stood alone in the street with Dean’s car. The power that had brooded inside him was gone. He felt clean and his skin stung, like after a day in the sea and sun. That night he asked Eileen to marry him. Weeks later, her dad set him up with the new franchise and they moved to Upminster. He hadn’t seen Kerry or the child since.
***
How had he not carried that with him over the years? He wasn’t sure he’d even told his children. He and his wife weren’t given to reminiscing and the boys were not the curious kind. He must have told Eileen the night he proposed. As he stood looking out across the wide river, he thought perhaps he had and that she’d slid her cool hands over his biceps, bringing his mind back to her, where she believed it should be.
He turned to head back. Along the Thames, beside the Tilda loading jetty, the fleet of dumped concrete barges had shifted over the years. They stood half-submerged now in the river sand, hulls pointing at the sky. In childhood he had imagined the barges solid and wondered how a boat made of concrete could float. Now that they were disintegrating, he saw it: their skins were paper thin, their frames no sturdier than the diver’s mesh. His father used to walk him here some Sundays, pointing out the council plaque that said the barges had formed part of the Mulberry Harbour, played their part in winning the war. He’d heard that disputed in recent years, as though the barges had fancied themselves in their youth and now their crumbling frames shed doubt on previous honours.
Seventeen years ago he’d lifted her free. He got into his car and headed back along the service road from the tip towards Rainham. Ahead of him the A13 ran on stilts over the salt marshes, feeding traffic into London and out to the ferry ports. He scanned the cars for green ‘L’ plates. Ashley could be gunning along nicely on that road overhead right now, her head full of a trip to Paris or a West End show.
The image pleased him. Over the following days he developed it, gave her a new dress on the back seat of the car, various occasions for wearing it. Not for Ashley a life standing on the footbridge, fending off the slipstream of the Eurostar as it hurtled through Rainham station. She’d be inside the train, a glossy mag open between her pretty hands. She’d escaped death. She’d not be one to let life grow over her like weeds.
His own boys remained morose, uncouth, as Ashley, the daughter he’d never had but now laid claim to, blossomed. He was there at her graduation when she tossed her mortarboard into the air where it freeze-framed. She smiled delightedly when he, not a patient, walked into her surgery. But why stop there? ‘Hey Greg,’ she breathed into the mike from the stage at O2. ‘This song’s for you.’
The Fletchers lived three floors up on a council run in Harold Hill. It had taken Greg eight days to find them. He’d contacted many Fletchers in the old neighbourhood, a sack of Hi-Pro Dog at the ready, as an excuse. At this door he got a feeling, a settling round his shoulders. This was where a sympathetic Kerry, an ever-grateful Dean would introduce him like a lost relative: This is Greg. He saved your life when you were small. He’d like to meet you now if that’s OK.
A middle-aged woman opened the door. It took him a moment to realise she was Kerry. Her drenched curls had been replaced by a helmet of purple hair, and the acne had given way to smoker’s lines.
‘Kerry. It’s Greg Mason, remember me?’
‘Might.’
‘I wanted to see Ashley.’
‘Ash,’ Kerry called through the flat, ‘Got call.’ No welcome, no sign of surprise, but she stood aside and let him pass into her orange lounge which housed a cabinet, a sofa spewing foam and a tin dog-bowl.
Kerry turned on him, fingers flicking unseen fluff from her sleeves. ‘You sort her meds before you’re out that door, all right? She’s back forty-eight hours and already she’s doing my nut. And I want her housed cos she ain’t staying here. Got that? This is my home and she’s–’
A girl came into the lounge. She had her mother’s dark curls. On each cheek was a weeping sore, like a second set of eyes, larger and brighter than the small dull ones above them. She went to the sofa and lay on it, pulling her jeans down low on her hips to reveal a hard ball of a belly which she kneaded, groaning and twisting.
Greg stood feeling cumbersome, searching for the right comment. He landed on a genial and soothing, ‘The midwife’s on her way, is she?’
‘Can you stand in the doorway, where you ain’t in the way,’ Kerry said. ‘She ain’t in labour, she’s coming off methadone. Ain’t you even read her file?’
‘Sorry,’ said Greg. She must think he was a medical man or from social services. Her misunderstanding pleased him, showed she saw in him a man who helped others, changed lives. He wanted to be that man and turned to watch Ashley with what he hoped passed for tender, professional assessment.
Ashley yanked at her jeans, trying to undo the waistband, then gave up and her hands went limp.
‘It’s freezing in here,’ she said.
‘It’s up full whack, Ash,’ Kerry replied.
‘Oh, I’m not gonna make it!’
Ashley rushed from the room, bent double.
Kerry studied him. ‘You’re new, ain’t you? What was you before?’
‘Sales,’ he said. ‘Pet foods.’
‘Hah!’ Kerry squealed.
She retrieved a key from her sweater, unlocked the cabinet and took out a bottle of liqueur. It had a stick of sugar running through it, shaped like coral. When she’d poured two shots she locked the cabinet and tucked the key back into her bra. ‘Not a good game this, is it? Need a bit of this and that to see us through. Suck it up.’ She handed one to him – a challenge. He knocked it back. Like candied fire. It was years since he’d drunk anything but beer.
From the bathroom Ashley retched and moaned and flushed.
‘Ain’t you got questions?’ Kerry asked.
‘Would she like to be readmitted?’
‘What? To Holloway?’ Kerry screeched a laugh, caught his confused eye, screeched again. ‘Dunno, pet shop boy, shall we ask her?’
‘I meant hospital. What’s she on?’
‘Nothing. Lost your notes? They cancelled the meth script soon as she got out. Don’t give her nothing to tide her over, cos she’d only flog it. She got to go up the GP but she won’t.’
Ashley came back into the room. Her jeans zip was undone to ease her bloated belly. She looked up at him with both sets of eyes, then her head drooped and she shivered.
‘Hey,’ said Greg. He took off his jacket to give to her.
‘Oi, she’s burning up. You got to keep cool, Ash. You only think you’re freezing. Open the window, Keyworker.’
Greg opened the door to the balcony, onto bland, summer air. The estate spread out beneath him, its chalk and smoke buildings, the broccoli trees of Duck Wood to the east, and traffic snaking south towards Romford centre with its glass land of shops and bars. It wasn’t that bad a place. It didn’t deserve such helpless attitudes from him or Ash or Kerry. In the late afternoon light it looked full of possibilities.
‘Hey Ashley, come and stand out here,’ he said.
‘I got the heebies.’
‘Well… have them out here in the sun.’
‘Bloody hell.’
But she stumbled out towards him, still grinding her fists into the swollen rock of her belly. He gripped her arm. Her body was surprisingly compliant; it fell against his. He righted her, trying to steer her round so he could stare into her eyes but she wouldn’t meet his gaze. She kept squirming and keening about her bellyache, like a spoilt child. The diplomas and silk dresses and concerts, even her ruddy driving license detached themselves from her and sailed from the balcony, sailed down like the clothes of a spurned husband. All his plans for her, all she might have been, dispatched towards the blue van up on bricks in the yard below, from which music with a brain-stopping beat thumped back at him.
‘Look around you!’ he said. ‘I gave this to you.’
‘Eh? What?’
‘Look!’ He shook her gently. Paternally, he thought, but she wailed. The pillowslips drying on the balcony opposite, the music from the knock-off motor below, even these should seem marvellous to her.
‘Get off me. I’m dizzy.’
‘Oi!’ Kerry came to the balcony doorway. Greg let Ashley go and she crawled inside to the settee. Kerry beckoned Greg in but blocked his way so he had to squeeze past her.
‘Reckons Social recruited him off a bloody pet shop, Ash,’ she said. ‘Mind your step or he’ll kennel you.’ Up close she smelled of sweat and bleach. The skin under her eyes and at her chin hung in frail loops. Greg had to fight the impulse to tuck a finger up under the flaps, as he did with dogs whose faces hung that way.
‘You ain’t her keyworker. What are you?’
‘Greg Mason,’ he said. ‘Dean’s mate from school, remember? The car outside Costcutter. Ashley fell under the wheel. I lifted the car.’
‘What?’
‘I lifted the car so you could pull her free.’
Kerry’s eyes flickered. ‘I ain’t saying you’re lying,’ she said, ‘but I don’t recall. She was a terror. We was in and out Queens’ A & E so much they almost give us her own bed. Ash, remember that time you was running on top that Spitfire at Hornchurch aerodrome and you fell and that squaddie what caught you split his arm up, breaking your fall?’
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