Top Hard

by Stephen Booth

  But near the trees was another building that made me stop and stare. It looked at first like any old barn, built of ancient, crumbling stone. Then I looked again, and it registered on me that it was circular. It was about twenty feet high, and near the top were a whole series of holes built into the stonework. I wanted to wander over and peer closer to be sure. But I felt pretty confident that this was a medieval dovecote, sitting right here in the grounds of a house in this rich gits' village.

  Of course, this had been a farmhouse at some time, belonging no doubt to the manor down the road. Somehow this dovecote had got left behind and neglected over the years. I had a dim recollection of Lisa telling me that there were just three circular medieval dovecotes in Nottinghamshire, and they were all further south in the county. Well, never mind - it looked genuine to me, and that was enough.

  Now I could imagine the farmworkers toiling across the fields to harvest their crops and tend their animals. Old buildings do this to me. I go all sort of dreamy, just like after I've had sex. Must be an illness or something. Lisa says I'm sensitive, but what does she know?

  There was a movement beyond the yew hedge. A hat appeared - one of those white canvass hats, squashed and floppy like the hat on a Sunday cricketer who's been to the bar during the tea break. I thought I knew the face that would be under a hat like that, and I wasn't wrong. It was that Neighbourhood Watch face you get in these places, red and suspicious and constantly teetering on the edge of a heart attack. A rich gits' version of Welsh Border, no less.

  The bloke stared over the hedge at me. Somewhere behind him would be a wife, hovering near the phone, ready to ring the cops. 'Hello, hello, come quick, it's an emergency. Working class oiks are walking up our neighbours' path. The estate agents told us there was a by-law against the working classes. We wouldn't have retired here otherwise.'

  I only needed to put one foot wrong and I'd be a statistic at the next meeting of the Police Liaison Sub-committee. Another number logged in the book by the eagle-eyed busybodies of West Laneton. I'd be long gone by the time the police arrived in a place like this, of course. They'd have our registration number, but that wasn't what worried me. I didn't want them alerting Perella and his friends at this stage.

  Luckily, I had a handy pen in my top pocket and a notebook in my hand.

  "Good morning, sir. We're doing some work in the area, and we've had a job cancelled this morning, so we have some materials available. My boss has authorised me to offer householders in the area the chance to have their drives re-surfaced at a very reasonable price. It'll just be a few pounds for the lads. I wonder if you'd be interested, sir?"

  Mr Neighbourhood Watch had me weighed up now. He looked smug and satisfied. He knew how to deal with people like me, all right.

  "We don't do business with cowboys like you round here," he said. "We know all about your shoddy tricks. You might as well clear off. Nobody will have anything to do with you."

  "The cost is very reasonable, and I couldn't help noticing that one or two of the drives here need a bit of patching up."

  "Did you hear what I said?"

  "Fair enough, sir. But I wonder if you could suggest anybody else in this road who might be interested?"

  "If you're not out of here in thirty seconds, I'll call the police!"

  That was exactly what I wanted, of course - to be out of there. Neighbourhood Watch Man makes me uncomfortable. It's like coming face to face with some lumbering prehistoric creature, which will die out soon, but might just step on you in the meantime.

  I hurried back to the car, conscious as always of being an alien in a foreign land. I had the wrong clothes and the wrong accent. My hands were probably the wrong shape, made for carrying a useful tool instead of a tennis racquet. If there were border controls, I'd never have got through.

  There are different degrees of foreign, of course. These folk are low-grade foreign, just your basic bundle of incomprehension and resentment. I reserve the real aversion for nuclear-grade foreigners, like the French.

  You've heard of twinning, haven't you? Medensworth is twinned with some poncy village in Brittany, where they nick our fish and burn our lamb and blockade our lorries. Every year a bunch of our school kids go over there to be insulted and shrugged at. Then the Froggies send their kids on a return visit to sneer at our houses and turn their noses up at our food and our M & S sweaters. This is all done for the sake of understanding, of course. Entente bleedin' cordiale isn't in it. If what they've got is European culture, give me Coronation Street and egg and chips any time.

  And then there's the Germans. Did you know they subsidise their coal mining industry by four billion pounds a year? That's forty thousand pounds per miner. No wonder they can dump shit-cheap anthracite on us. It's anthracite now, but what next? Meanwhile, our own pits are closing. Nottinghamshire had twelve coal mines left in 1992, when Heseltine got in on the act and seven of them went. That's nine thousand jobs, nine thousand men on the dole. Later, when the electricity generators discovered gas and cheap German imports, the rest began to shut.

  When it comes to twinning, I've got a better idea. Why not twin Medensworth with one of these rich gits' villages, like West Laneton? No need to trek across the Channel to be insulted - you could get the experience right here. And they're two different cultures all right. Shit, these rich kids would get a shock if they had to walk home down First Avenue to a grey council house with a resin toad over the door.

  * * * *

  When I got back to the car, Slow hadn't moved. He was staring at the village churchyard, trying to figure out how the sundial worked when there wasn't any sun.

  We drove by the church and looked at some more big houses. Each was in its own grounds, set back from the road, with carriage lamps and magnolia trees. The only magnolia you ever see on the Forest Estate is the colour of the paintwork that goes with woodchip. Here, even the 'For Sale' signs had to be different. Every one claimed to be advertising a 'Home of Distinction'.

  The whole lot reeked of new money. I'd been to places like this before, in my past life. Some of the times I'd been welcome, sometimes not. I had a feeling this was going to be one of the nots.

  "We need Hooper for this, Slow," I said.

  "He's tagged, Stones. He's got another year to go for that last job they done him for."

  "Are you telling me those tags don't go wrong sometimes?"

  "Oh, yeah. Right."

  "Get me Hooper, then. And tell him it's got to be tonight."

  21

  Yes, I was definitely getting paranoid. When I saw there was a car parked opposite Lisa's house that I didn't recognise, my first thought was of Craig's crew watching me, making sure I carried out my part of the deal. Deal? More like blackmail.

  There was no one in the car just now, but they'd be around somewhere. Mentally, I gave them a wave. Look, I'm doing my bit, like the deal says. But if you hurt Lisa, you're dead, pal.

  Lisa wasn't home, though, no matter how much I knocked. Again I found myself peering through windows. I could practically smell the pot pourri, as if her spirit was lurking there. I rang my home number to get the messages from my answer phone. There were no messages from Lisa.

  Finally I gave up and drove home. When I went through the e-mails on my computer it was obvious business still wasn't good. But then I'd been neglecting it these past few days.

  So I got to work again. Things to do, arrangements to make. A vital operation to plan. I needed gloves, a balaclava. What else? A torch. Were the batteries working? No. Shit, this isn't my sort of thing at all.

  I jumped when there was a hammering on my door, but it was only Doncaster Dave reporting for duty. He stood on the doorstep chewing a bar of chocolate, like a huge kid wanting me to come out and play. I had to find a way of telling him he wasn't coming with us tonight. He would only be a liability.

  We drove along Sherwood Crescent, down First Avenue and out onto Ollerton Road by the shops. There was a faint grey drizzle falling, and women walki
ng towards the bus stops were swinging and dipping their umbrellas with disregard for the safety of other pedestrians. It's dangerous on the pavements sometimes. Maybe it's time they got everybody off the pavement and onto the roads.

  We pulled into the car park at Cost Cutters and I let Dave push the trolley. I stocked up with some stuff from the freezers and plenty of beer, plus milk and coffee and loo paper. And batteries for the torch.

  "I'll have a job for you tonight, Donc."

  Dave was concentrating on steering the trolley. It looked like a toy in his hands, and it was showing a tendency to shoot madly off in the wrong direction.

  "Yeah? We're going out to this village?"

  "Not you, Donc. I want you to go somewhere else."

  "Right."

  It was impossible to tell whether he was disappointed, relieved or just couldn't care less. The expression on his face didn't change. Of course, he could just have been trying to thaw out the frozen steak through sheer will power so that he could eat it before we got to the checkout.

  "Donc, I want you to go to Lisa's place and wait for her to come home."

  He nodded. He knew who Lisa was, I think. Even though she hadn't got tattoos, he'd noticed her around occasionally.

  "When you see her, you stay with her. I don't want anyone getting near her, right?"

  "Right."

  A harassed housewife with two kids in tow barged our trolley with hers as she reached across us to grab at the soap powder. Dave gave her a hurt look as she pushed past without a word. It was a cut-throat world in here.

  "You can take the Impreza. I won't be using it tonight. Slow and Metal are getting us something inconspicuous."

  Dave nodded cautiously. He is able to drive, but only at ten miles an hour, because his accelerator foot gets jammed against the floor and his elbows stick out of the windows.

  "If necessary, get Lisa in the car and bring her back to Medensworth. For her own safety."

  We got into the queue at the checkout. Dave had gone very quiet. I picked up a handful of chocolate bars from the display by the till and dropped them into the trolley, in case he needed a quick fix of energy. But when it came our turn at the checkout, I saw where his attention had turned to. We'd picked the queue for the heftiest, most muscular checkout girl in the place. Underneath the uniform, she was bound to have tattoos.

  I saw Dave admiring the way she shot the barcode reader at each item and how her thick fingers thumped the keys of the till. He seemed charmed by the high pitched screech that came out of her mouth when she announced the total. When I handed over the cash, the bird smiled at him, not me. Amazing.

  On the way back from the supermarket, Dave got talkative. It was like that cement toad suddenly flexing its legs and hopping off the porch.

  "Stones?"

  "Yeah, Donc?"

  "Can I ask you something?"

  "'Course."

  "Do you think I'm well muscled, or just a fat bastard?"

  I thought about this for a minute. If a bloke asks you a serious question like that, it deserves a bit of thought.

  "Does it matter?"

  "Well, yeah."

  "Why?"

  "It's, you know... what people think of you. It's important sometimes, ain't it?"

  "Donc, have you got off with one of those waitresses you're always drooling over?"

  "Don't be daft."

  "Because if that's it, then I'm the wrong person to be giving advice. I don't give a toss what women think of me. They have to take me or leave me. That's the way to do it, Donc. Don't let them get their claws into you, because they'll try and change you, and it doesn't do you any good. Are you listening to me, Donc?"

  "Yeah."

  "Good."

  "So.

  "So what?"

  "Do you think I'm well muscled, or just a fat bastard?"

  I sighed, and tried to ignore him for the rest of the walk back to Sherwood Crescent. But the brain's a funny thing, isn't it? It was right then that my mind started to put two and two together, the way it does sometimes when there's no bird or booze to occupy me. It hadn't seemed important while I was actually at Eddie Craig's place, but now I started to wonder how his lads had known to visit the Rev to find out where I was holed up. Craig isn't strictly a local villain - his home manor is Mansfield and Ashfield, where the market for his stuff is. So for information, he must have to rely on local snouts.

  I wondered who had tipped him off to tap the Rev for my whereabouts. Who knew that I'd visited St Asaph's the day before I skipped off? Only my own crew, and one other person.

  Yeah, and another thing. Who had been gossiping to Moxon and Stubbs about my private activities, my personal liaisons? I could think of someone who had. And those two someones were one and the same person.

  "Dave?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Food later. Let's go visit St Asaph's for a few minutes."

  The Reverend Bowring came out of the vicarage when he saw us in the churchyard. He was dressed like a chat show host in a bright woolly cardigan. Perfect evening wear for Medensworth.

  "Where is your young lady, Livingstone? I haven't had the pleasure of seeing her for some days. No trouble, I hope?"

  "Trouble? You don't know the half of it, Rev."

  "Oh. Would you like to tell me about it?"

  "Not really."

  "Has there been a disagreement between you? Not a permanent estrangement, I trust?"

  "To be honest, I think some other bloke's got her, Rev."

  "Ah? A rival? Dear me, how sad."

  "Don't worry, I'm going to do something about it."

  "Remember that God giveth, and He taketh away," said the Rev. "That's what the Bible says. Sometimes we must accept His will, Livingstone."

  "The Bible doesn't say God taketh it away from one bloke and giveth it to another who doesn't deserve it."

  The Rev smiled understandingly, damn him. "Ah, but it may say that. In a way."

  "What do you mean, it may do? It's written down there in words, isn't it, Rev? Either it says it or it doesn't."

  "Hardly. The Bible means different things, according to our interpretation."

  "Well, holy shit. Nobody ever told me. So can it mean whatever you want it to? That must make your job a lot easier, Rev."

  "Mmm. On the other hand, there are a number of basic truths that we must live by, Livingstone."

  "Yeah, yeah."

  There wasn't much fun in baiting the Rev. He was likely to take it seriously and decide I needed to join Bible classes, like the glue sniffers. So far I've managed to get away with not coming to services because of my voluntary work in the churchyard. But if the Rev got the idea that I was some poor soul facing eternal damnation instead of being the original Good Samaritan, he'd have me with a Good News Bible in one hand and a hymn sheet in the other before you could say Moses.

  The sound of a petrol mower drifted across the graveyard, along with the smell of cut grass. There was a horribly familiar boiler suit moving backwards and forwards by the graves at the end of the churchyard. It was Welsh Border, still toiling away in the gathering dusk like the Gadarene Swine.

  But no one keeps me away from my dad's grave. The Rev went over to speak to Councillor Border while I walked down the row to the lump of stone that's the only thing commemorating the day that Granville McClure gave up the fight. My mum is here, too, but she lasted longer and died of pneumonia in the end. Somehow that doesn't seem as bad - at least it's something that God did to her, not someone else.

  Border had switched off the lawnmower to empty the grass box when the Rev wandered up, and I was vaguely aware of him kicking his boots against the side of the mower as they talked. His voice was rising in agitation, and it occurred to me for a second or two that maybe he was still smarting from our previous encounter. He'd got it into his head that I was a hooligan or an unsavoury character. People come to all sorts of wrong conclusions about me.

  Then I looked up and met his eye. The Rev was getting anxious and
flapping his hands about, as if to ward off a swarm of midges. A large figure loomed in the background by the church wall, unwrapping a Mars bar.

  "All I'm saying, vicar," said Border, raising his voice so that I could hear, "is that we ought to be a bit more careful who we allow to be buried in this churchyard. Some families that quite undesirable and always will be, in my opinion - no matter what jobs they manage to weasel their way into. People expect a churchyard to be a respectable place, not a hangout for criminals. They're entitled to think they're going to be buried with decent Christians, not alongside the relatives of thugs and crooks."

  Well, that was it. Patience finally runs out for everyone. I had my limits, and Welsh Border had just crossed them.

  "Donc," I said. "Help Councillor Border with his grass cuttings."

  Dave ambled forward, his chocolate bar still sticking out from between his teeth. He reached down and pulled the full grass box off the lawnmower, like he was pulling the leg off a fly. It was one of those plastic boxes with net sides, and it was full to the brim. Bits of chewed grass spilt over the lip onto Border's beautifully mown patch.

  "Just a minute. I don't want your help. I can manage perfectly well myself."

  "I don't think so, Councillor. You look tired. In fact, you look so tired you might fall over at any moment."

  The grass smelt green and dark and juicy, the sort that stains your hands and clothes as soon as you look at it.

  "The compost heap is over there," said the Rev helpfully, pointing away towards the back of the churchyard, trying to ignore the atmosphere. Poor bloke, he doesn't know what to do when it comes to taking sides between the sheep and the goats. The thing about goats is that they're stubborn where sheep are meek, wayward where sheep are regimented, independent where sheep are submissive. You can count me in with the goats if you like. No kidding.