Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

  “There’s your simple hungry-and-homeless style, which is what I do most often, which is what we’re doing now. It’s the best if you’re a bit out of it ’cause you can just nod off sat there, and people will still chuck a few coins down if you look pathetic enough. That’s the pity approach, like.

  “Then there’s the hassle approach, which involves a bit more spiel. You can chase after people on the street, which they’re trying to clamp down on ’cause it’s antisocial or what have you. Or you can do what Caroline does sometimes, which is to blag a tube ticket and wander through the carriages making a bit of a speech and holding a cup out. You’re appealing to the punters’ better nature with that one, or else they might just give you the cash to make you fuck off, but either way that can be a good earner.

  “Or you can just go for the straight-up, in-your-face way of doing things. None of this ‘I need some money to get into a shelter’ or ‘Please help me get a hot meal’ or shit like that. You just look someone in the eye and ask them for a bit of change because the truth is that you’re fucking gagging for a can of Special Brew. Some people prefer that…”

  Thorne thought about it and decided that, as the person being asked to hand over the cash, it was definitely his favorite approach. Like most people, though, his normal reaction, however he was being asked for money, was to look away and mutter nonsense, or pretend that he hadn’t heard. He’d certainly ignored his fair share of beggars in the tube.

  “Right, thanks,” Thorne said. “I’ll bear all that in mind.”

  They were sitting against the wall just inside the entrance to Tottenham Court Road tube station. The sign scrawled on a strip of cardboard in front of them said please help and the small plastic bowl in front of that contained a handful of coins. One-, two- and five-pence pieces.

  “Tell me about some of these other ways,” Thorne said. “Loads of ways to get cash, you said…”

  Spike leaned his head back. A poster for a new Brad Pitt movie was backlit behind him. “Yeah, well, there’s a few. Busking, Big Issue, whatever…”

  Busking was out of the question, but Thorne had wondered about selling the Big Issue. He wasn’t sure how many of those who made money selling the magazine slept rough.

  “Don’t you have to register or something to do that? Get a badge?”

  Spike shook his head and leaned forward. He straightened the cardboard sign that was already sodden around the edges. It was chucking it down outside and the floor around them was becoming increasingly wet as rush-hour travelers brought the rain in on their way down from the street to the ticket hall.

  “Look, there’s selling the Big Issue and selling the Big Issue, like. Some people just get hold of one copy and sell it over and over again. You tell people it’s your last one and most punters won’t have the heart to take it. It’s a good scam.”

  “I might give that a go.” Thorne looked up at a young black woman coming down the steps toward them. She looked quickly away and stayed close to the far wall as she moved past them and on down the next set of stairs.

  “Or there’s poncing used travel cards and selling them on. I used to do a fair bit of that. That’s a good one an’ all, but they’re starting to clamp down a bit.”

  “Right…”

  “Oh, shit.”

  Thorne followed Spike’s gaze and watched a dumpy, dark-haired man walking down the steps in their direction. He was dressed in a gray hooded top and black combats, but it was the way he wore the clothes more than anything that identified him as a copper quicker than any warrant card could have done.

  “All right, Spike?” the man asked.

  “I was.”

  “Be fair.” The police officer held out his hands. “There’s two of you, so you’re actually causing an obstruction. Someone could get hurt.”

  “Whatever,” Spike said.

  “Where’s your girlfriend today?”

  Spike ignored the question. He pointed down the corridor toward the platforms, from where the less-than-melodic sound of voice and guitar had been echoing for the previous hour or more. “Why don’t you do something useful and go hassle the arsehole who’s murdering Wonderwall at the bottom of the escalators?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” He turned, looked down, squatted on his haunches next to Thorne. “I’m Sergeant Dan Britton from the Homeless Unit at Charing Cross. You’re new, yeah?”

  There was no sign of any ID being produced. Maybe this was one of those coppers who didn’t think that everyone merited an official introduction. This and the counselor-meets-children’s-TV-presenter voice were not facets of a winning personality, but it didn’t really matter. In that utterly irrational yet completely straightforward way that Thorne had—that he was convinced most people had if they were honest—he’d marked Britton down as a tosser before he’d so much as opened his mouth.

  “New-ish,” Thorne said.

  “Well, if you have any problems, just come down to the station and ask for someone from the Homeless Unit.”

  Thorne remembered what Lawrence Healey had said to him. There seemed to be no shortage of people offering their help.

  “Can you do anything about the price of heroin?” Spike said. “It’s fucking extortionate…”

  Britton ignored him, carried on talking to Thorne. “Any problems, yeah?”

  “Right,” Thorne said.

  Staring at the floor in front of him, Spike raised a hand, slowly, like a sullen schoolboy with a question. “Actually, there is something that’s a bit of a bloody nuisance…”

  Thorne could hear the mischief in Spike’s drawl, but Britton took the bait.

  “What?”

  “It’s this bloke. He appears to be going round killing people like me, and I was wondering, you know, if you might be able to help with that. Sorry to be a bother, like…”

  Britton made a poor job of hiding what, to Thorne, looked a lot like embarrassment. He stood up and gave Spike’s outstretched leg a nudge with his scuffed training shoe. “Come on then, off you go. It’s getting busy down here and people’ll be tripping over you.”

  Spike climbed slowly to his feet and Thorne did the same.

  “Don’t worry,” Thorne said. “For some reason, people are careful to keep as far away from us as they can.”

  They’d taken half an hour or so, wandering slowly along a darkening Oxford Street, saying very little. They’d seen a couple of familiar faces, waved at Radio Bob talking animatedly to himself outside a sandwich bar. They were loitering just inside the entrance to Borders when Spike suddenly began talking as if the earlier conversation had never ended. As if no time had passed at all.

  “Begging’s getting bloody tricky now…”

  Thorne had seen the same thing with his father when the Alzheimer’s had begun to take hold. He knew that naturally occurring chemicals could be every bit as potent as the ones that people stole, and killed, and sold themselves for.

  “Is it?”

  “If you just sit there with your hand out, you get moved on, and if you’re too pushy, you run the risk of getting an ASBO, like.”

  Thorne knew what Spike was talking about. The Anti-Social Behaviour Act, launched in a blaze of Blairite glory, was supposed to curb the activities of nuisance neighbors, of tearaway teenagers, and of others who blighted the lives of the majority living in the inner cities. Overly aggressive begging certainly came within the remit of the legislation, but it had become clear pretty quickly that certain councils were using their own interpretation of aggressive in an effort to eradicate beggars of any description. Westminster Council, in particular, was chucking Anti-Social Behaviour Orders around like they were parking tickets—making a sustained effort to criminalize begging, the consumption of alcohol on the street, and any other activity liable to offend. God forbid they should upset those honest, upright citizens who might be confronted by such indecent behavior on their way home to beat their children and drink themselves into a stupor indoors…

  “Plus, there�
��s the asylum seekers,” Spike said. “A lot of them use their kids, or borrow other people’s, and if punters are going to give their change to beggars, like as not they’ll give it to them. So, you know, you need a bit of extra dosh, you have to be clever. You have to get a bit naughty now and again.”

  “Naughty?”

  “Yeah, naughty. Now, I mean, there’s degrees of naughtiness, like…”

  Thorne nodded. He’d seen just about every sort.

  “Some of the ones with a real bad habit can get a bit desperate, you know? There was this one bloke used to put on a crash helmet and run into the chemist’s with a claw hammer. I seen him one time running out carrying the dangerous-drugs cabinet on his back. Lugging this dirty great metal box up the fucking street. Another mate of mine used to go into shops just before they closed and hide, like. Then, after they shut up, he’d rob the place, then break out.”

  “Breaking and exiting…”

  Spike cackled, enjoying Thorne’s joke, repeating it a couple of times. “I’m just talking about a bit of nicking, yeah? A spot of light shoplifting. Marks & Spencer’s is the best. You used to be able to nick stuff, take it back, and they’d give you the money for it. These days they just give you vouchers, but you can sell them easily enough. Say you sell twenty quid’s worth of vouchers to some punter for fifteen? You’re sorted, and they get an extra fiver’s worth of pants and socks, right? Caz is ace at all that stuff…”

  Thorne was fairly sure he’d need to supplement his forty-six pounds a week somehow, but wasn’t convinced that shoplifting was the best way to do it. It wasn’t any sort of ethical problem: minor offenses would be countenanced as part of his undercover role. It was more about avoiding the hassle of getting caught. He hadn’t nicked anything since he was thirteen or fourteen, and that had been a short-lived shoplifting career. He could still remember the look on his old man’s face after he’d been marched back from the local branch of W. H. Smith by a beat bobby.

  “You all right?” Spike asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  He could still remember the look…

  “I got done for nicking an Elton John album from Smith’s when I was a kid.” Thorne hadn’t intended to say anything at all, but once it had started coming out of his mouth, he felt good sharing the memory. “They didn’t actually prosecute me in the end, but it put the shits up me, I can tell you. My dad went fucking mental.”

  “Did he belt you?”

  “No, my mum did.” Thorne remembered his mum’s largely unsuccessful efforts to instill a bit of discipline. She’d used her hand on the back of his leg, or sometimes a spiky blue hairbrush, but her heart had never really been in it. “The look on my dad’s face was far worse, though.”

  “Were you scared of him?”

  Thorne was about to make some crack about his father being afraid of him, but stopped himself. He thought about how, toward the end, his father had spent most of his time afraid. Thorne hated the idea that this might be the way he remembered him.

  “Fucking hell,” Spike said. “Elton John?”

  Thorne stared blankly back at the security guard who was eyeing them from a corner. “He was better then…”

  They stepped back out on to the street and stood for a minute, unsure exactly what to do next. Suddenly Spike raised his arm and pointed back in the direction they’d come. “My sister works there.” He flapped his hand toward Tottenham Court Road and beyond. “In the City. Working with stocks and bonds or something. She’s got a posh flat in Docklands.”

  Thorne was surprised, more at what Spike had said than the fact that he was following Thorne’s lead, and talking about his family. Thorne had clearly been wrong in assuming that people who lived like Spike couldn’t possibly have any close relatives nearby.

  “Do you see her?”

  “I’ve seen her a couple of times since I started living on the street. Both times she got a bit upset.” He began to step from foot to foot, rocking, as Thorne had seen him do on the night he’d first met him. “I’ve not seen her for a while, like.”

  Thorne wanted to know more, but before he could say anything, Spike began moving away quickly.

  “Let’s have something to eat…”

  Thorne hadn’t eaten for eight hours. He hurried to catch up.

  Spike pointed ahead again. “There’s a McDonald’s back up here on the right. Shall we go mad?”

  “I knew there was more to this place than just somewhere to have a shit.” Thorne shoved the last of the cheeseburger into his mouth and chewed enthusiastically. The food tasted fantastic.

  Spike was on his third Crunchie McFlurry. Chocolate and ice cream. Standard smackhead fare.

  “The H-Plan diet,” Spike said, grinning. The ice cream coated his teeth, making them far whiter than they were normally.

  “What about that copper Britton, then?” Thorne asked. “What’s he like?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “All right?”

  “Yeah, well, he’s about the same as the rest of ’em, isn’t he? None of that lot down Charing Cross can make their minds up what bloody side they’re on, like.” Spike was talking faster, running one word into the next. His face was suddenly gray and Thorne could see the goose pimples standing out across the backs of his hands. “Can’t decide if they’re there to help us or sweep us off the street.”

  “Where is Caroline, anyway?” Thorne asked.

  Spike grunted. What?

  “That copper was asking, wasn’t he? I haven’t seen her all day. You two fallen out?”

  “She had to go and meet her caseworker. He keeps trying to encourage her to get a hostel place, but she’s even less keen on ’em than I am.”

  “She’s ‘chaotic,’ too, right?”

  “Not really. She’s just got a problem with institutions. Spent a lot of time in care when she was a kid and stuff. In homes. It was things that happened to her in institutions that put her on the street in the first place, d’you know what I mean?”

  Thorne thought that he probably did.

  There were few women visible among the community of rough sleepers. So far, Thorne had seen no more than a handful. He’d asked Brendan Maxwell about it, who had explained how a great number of women ended up among the vast population of the city’s “hidden” homeless.

  Spike used language that was a little more basic.

  “See, a lot of girls can get a bed for the night, but they have to share it with some fat, sweaty cunt whose wife doesn’t understand him. Selling their arses, them and a few young boys, right? That’s what these caseworkers are worried about. Don’t have to worry about Caroline, though. She’d rather starve.”

  “It’s not food that’s the problem, though, is it?” Thorne said.

  Spike took another mouthful of ice cream, and was off on another tangent. He and Thorne began to speculate on just how shitty you’d have to look to be refused entry to various London restaurants. Dressed as they were now, Spike decided that there’d be little or no problem in any KFC or Pizza Hut. Thorne thought they’d have no chance whatsoever of making it past the doormen at the Ivy or Quaglino’s, but still had a fair way to go yet before they were considered too shitty to be allowed into a Garfunkel’s.

  “McDonald’s is a one-off, though,” Spike said. “I reckon you could order a burger in here stark bollock naked with your underpants on your head and a turd in each hand and they’d still ask you if you wanted fries with it.”

  It was genuinely funny, but even as Thorne laughed he was watching Spike press his hands hard into the sides of his face. The boy pushed the skin back toward his ears. He pinched up pieces of sweaty skin and tugged at them, as if the flesh on his face no longer fitted.

  Bob knew the image of himself that came across.

  He was well aware what others thought, but it didn’t really bother him. In fact, he played up to it, muttering a bit more than he otherwise would, putting on a bit of a show by giving them all that “Come in, come in, this is Radio Bo
b calling the mother ship” rubbish. He’d seen a film set in a prison once, and while everyone else was getting brutalized, they tended to leave the loonies alone. Most people were a little bit scared of them. So he let them all think it was harmless and that he was communicating with aliens, or receiving transmissions from God, or whatever.

  Nobody could even begin to guess at what he actually heard. They couldn’t possibly know that the voices rising above the constant hiss in his head had real things to say: news and rumors and secret theories; politics, history, and religion spoken of in strong accents and strange languages. Profound, frightening things that would cause him to giggle or weep, or fill his pants where he stood.

  He never passed on any of this information, of course. If he did, everyone would know he was a nutcase.

  He was just drifting off when the man appeared above him. Losing himself in the soporific hiss, with only the faintest of voices breaking in occasionally from far away, the words no more than a distant rhythm.

  If the man spoke to him before he struck, Bob didn’t hear anything.

  When it began, the shadow like a bludgeon, it was as if he could feel each part of it in isolation: the laces and the metal eyelets tearing the skin around his mouth and nose; the flesh of lips and nose flattening; the force that drove his head back against the wall shattering bones on both sides of his skull.

  Then, finally, those messages he had waited so long to hear began to come through.

  Something had been booted loose or realigned and suddenly the wave of pain became a frequency he had never received before. He couldn’t make out all of his wife’s words, but the tone of her voice told him everything he needed to know. The lilt of sorrow was unmistakable.

  He tried to shut out everything else—every other sound—and listen harder. The voices were still so familiar. There was something wet in his ear, something warm and sticky on his handset.