The Seven Days of Peter Crumb

by Jonny Glynn

  He stole three packets of Superkings and a couple of scratchcards, Thunderballs…I don’t know why he stole Superkings, I don’t smoke Superkings. I left fingerprints everywhere, but as he said, ‘What does it matter? You’ll be dead before they catch you.’

  I stepped out of the shop onto a quiet empty street and ambled home unnoticed. It was one of those beautiful evenings that hang still and silent. The trees full and frothy with blossom. If the truth be told, I felt…a little bit extra.

  I gave the scratchcards and Superkings to a drunk on Mare Street. He seemed appreciative and offered God’s blessings.

  When I got in the long arm was east and the short arm west. It all seemed clear. Write it down, he said–every dirty word, he said, the truth of it, the awful evil truth of it. I made a cup of the Earl and rolled a jazz.

  It is now nearly midnight. Both arms up…And I am mashed…and yawning. Yawning to the point of dislocation…I have no conscience…I am to bed.

  To bed, Crumb…bread crumb…to bed.

  TUESDAY

  It’s no use, I can’t sleep–he won’t let me. His mind is racing with fiendish notions and fizzing with evil intent. The time is south by north-east. I have done a terrible thing, an awful evil thing, and yet I feel nothing. I have no conscience…I am a murderer. He snickers at this last remark and says that, come Friday, that will be the least of it. God, what if that’s true? He keeps replaying every gruesome moment of the Sudder Street scandal over and over in his mind. Not in a Dostoevsky way, all miserable and guilty, but more in a Channel Five Reality TV’s ‘100 most violent criminal acts ever caught on camera’ sort of way: in at number nineteen, a new entry–fresh CCTV footage of a man who’s clearly not happy with the service. We call it–Hammer Horror…

  He’s sitting in the kitchen now doing one of his drawings. He says we shouldn’t waste time sleeping. ‘Six days!’ he keeps bellowing. ‘Only six days left!’ He says we should go immediately to the Shacklewell Lane and get a whore and anally rape her. I don’t know that I can be arsed. That’s my trouble, I can never really be bothered with any of it. Life, gnawing away at me, urging me on…I just can’t be bothered. Take my teeth and leave me alone–I refuse to bite.

  But it’s no use–he’s insisting on it–and he’s got a point. If not now, when?

  The Story of a Whore at Bedtime

  He got out of bed, pulled on his boots, threw on a coat and trudged the Downs to the Shacklewell Lane in search of some lickerish and a woman of shame.

  The night was like a bottle of Verdicchio–cold, crisp, clean and moist. The wind whispering warnings and a light spit threatening reprisals. I arrived on the Shacklewell to find it deserted, not a soul in sight. Good, I thought–let’s go home, get back into bed, snuggle up tight and appease yourself with a wank. But no, he said–‘Your blood’s up,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the horn,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no shillying out of it now,’ he said–‘Oh no…’ I sat down on the low wall outside the Texaco garage and waited, had a smoke and reflected…I hate episodes like this, I thought, the awful grubby reality of them.

  ‘You can do all the talking,’ I said. ‘I’m staying out of it.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Good. The whole thing will be much more enjoyable without your meddling rectitude.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Good.’ And fell silent.

  I didn’t have to wait long. After a minute or two a long thin Rastafarian gentleman materialized from nowhere, approached me and asked in a slow sonorous gnarl, ‘Wat you wan?’

  ‘I’m looking to rip the arse out of a whore,’ he casually announced, carrying on like the Duke of Edinburgh. The Rastaman looked at me, pausing for a moment and then said, ‘You want girl?’

  ‘Yees–that’s right,’ he said, acting like a fifteen-year-old Terry-Thomas on a weekend exeat in Amsterdam. It was embarrassing.

  The Rastaman considered me, and then said, ‘You sit on waall–one come along now.’

  I sat back down on ‘waall’ and waited. Waited to see what obscene abomination would appear, and I didn’t have to wait long. At first, from a distance, half-hidden in the shadows, she appeared to be quite attractive. She was jiggling lickety-split towards me, a pert forward quickstep and that good old-fashioned wiggle, wiggle. She was wearing a short denim skirt and jacket. Her figure was defined, thin and angular. Her limbs long. Over her right arm she carried a small fake Burberry handbag; and in her left hand she carried a half-eaten packet of Walkers crisps. As she grew closer her pace slowed to a cautious lope. She stopped. The Rastaman turned and looked at me.

  ‘Dis girl,’ he said, just in case I hadn’t realized. I got up and approached the goods for closer inspection. And oh my God, what a raddled old skank cracker she was. Not at all the back-lit beauty of the shadows that I had imagined her to be as she gambolled from the darkness towards me–oh no. What in silhouette had seemed one thing, close up was quite another. Her naked greasy legs were covered in a violent camouflage of cuts and sores and track marks. Small dark thumb-sized bruises were dotted over her mauled, pawed and fingered flesh. Her skirt and jacket were old and out of fashion and stained and threadbare and worn. A dismal, emaciated, grizzled horror. She was wretched. And her face, dear God–the greatest horror of all–just recalling it makes me gag. She was probably about twenty-five but looked at least forty-five. Her skin was dead and rotting on the bone. It looked like the congealed fat in a frying pan after a greasy breakfast fry-up. Cratered with black scabs and heaving yellow spots, criss-crossed with a network of fine worn lines, and all of this bloated pustulating hideosity made garishly worse by the cheap liberal application of oily make-up. Her eyes were darting, hollow and empty, her expression haggard, cold, wary, hard and insolent, her mouth pulled sideways and down in a fixed rictus of devious suspicion. She was truly and utterly repulsive. Utterly disgusting. A heinous raddled whore of the lowest order. A common brown-road trollop. Crack-deformed skank, out of her mind, posturing on the pavement and wiggling her arse at the passing traffic. Fair enough, I thought. You’ve got to put your goods in the window.

  ‘Is you looking for some bizniz?’ she asked, her voice a coy paranoid jitter.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he boldly replied, far too boldly in my opinion–over-compensating, trying to show everyone how at ease he was with the situation and not at all nervous. The fraud. She saw through him straight away. She thought he was a joke–and he knew it, which enraged him and delighted me.

  ‘I want to storm the last bastion of your nakedness,’ he went on, comically licking his lips.

  ‘What?’ she pecked, his literary allusions lost on her.

  ‘I want to fuck you up the arse.’

  ‘Oh, I fought you said you wanid ado somfin to me.’

  ‘I do. I want to fuck you up the arse.’

  The Rastaman looked at her, nodded downwards, then looked at me, jutted his chin forward, nodded upwards and said, ‘You go wid ’er.’

  ‘Is gonna cost ya,’ she sniped in.

  ‘Of course, my child.’ I cannot believe he called her ‘my child’–the shamefaced temerity! Heaping disgrace upon shame at every twist and turn–and she doesn’t even realize it. ‘How much?’

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes were darting suspiciously, there was a pause and everyone suddenly seemed unsure.

  ‘’Ere, you got a car?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Oh…’ she said.

  The management intervened, working the angles. ‘Is gonna cost more widout a car.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, quickly taking up his lead. ‘If you ’aven’t got a car is gonna cost more if we have to go up vair.’

  ‘How much more?’ I was becoming slightly irritated.

  ‘To fuck me in the arse?’

  ‘To fuck you up the arse–yes.’

  She paused. I waited. She was wondering how much she could take me for.

  ‘Twenty pound.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said and handed her a crisp clean twenty-poun
d note. ‘If you act like you’re enjoying it, I’ll tip you an extra tenner.’

  That brought a smile to her face, which was an error on her part as it showed her teeth, or what was left of them. Dark rotten tarnished yellow stumps coated in the half-chewed remains of Walkers finest cheese-and-onion. I think I may have winced.

  ‘Come on ven,’ she said, and intertwined her arm through mine and led me up the street. I allowed her this intimacy for a step or two but then shrugged her off and told her not to walk so close. She didn’t seem offended, but to be honest I didn’t care–she stank. A pungent acid chemical stink, mixed with BO and vinegared crisps. Notably odious. We continued up the street for about twenty yards and then stopped next to a deep double doorway floodlit beneath an arc lamp. She turned her back to me and started lifting her skirt.

  ‘Here?’ I said, a little perturbed.

  ‘Yeah–woss wrong wiv ’ere?’

  ‘Everyone can see us.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Can’t we go somewhere a little more…shadowy?’

  ‘I’m not doin nothin’ funny. I dunno who you are. I’m not going in up an alley–an inyway vair ain’t iny. You might wanta kill me.’

  ‘I don’t want to kill you–I want to fuck you up the arse.’

  ‘All right–you dun arf go on a-bow-tit.’ She pulled her skirt back down and continued on up the street. I followed. We turned into the Estate and crossed into an open stairwell. ‘Happy now?’ she said. ‘Shadowy enough?’ We were standing in a refuse stairwell surrounded by eight-foot-high metal dustbins filled with the foulest stinking rotting filth imaginable. I was gagging, ready to vomit. There were rats casually dining. And for this you pay extra?

  ‘Are you ready ven?’ she leered, reaching towards me and groping my crotch.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I replied, unzipping my flies and removing my flaccid little spigot. Without hesitation she dropped to a squat and stuck her mouth on me, sucking and licking my tired limp and dirty little dick, urgently polishing me off. I looked mournfully down at her, yanking and twiddling, desperately trying to suck me into an erection. What a pity, I thought, what sad indignity is this–human beings, aren’t they revolting? And to think how encrusted with dry piss and smegma my cock was. I could smell it. It stank. I thought I was going to throw up all over her. Shouldn’t she have sheathed me, I thought? There’s a procedure usually followed in these situations. This old strumpet’s long since abandoned any codes of conduct. Hey ho, I thought, it’s her look out. She’s probably already diseased and past caring. Trying to spread it, I wouldn’t wonder–her revenge on mankind. After about a minute she stood up, lit a cigarette, hitched her skirt up around her waist, turned to face the wall, spread her arms out in front of her, shoved her naked arse towards me and said, ‘Go on ven, get on wiv it.’ My cock was barely erect. Her arse was bruised, scratched and smeared with…God only knows what. It looked like dried blood, or dry shit. There were no buttocks to speak of–nothing to pinch or tweak or slap, nothing to plunder, no fat to cushion the pushing, as they say–just an angular arrangement of bones beneath worn stretches of yellow stained skin, divided down the middle by a dark dirty crack. The grotesque unwashed seedy reality of it all was working a wonder on my erection. The back-alley awfulness of it all was far more arousing than the sex of it. I reached forward and peeled her arse open. Her sphincter was a slack gaping hole. It’s fair to say I wasn’t her first. I looked to the night sky and the stars and then drove my cock into her in one smooth determined stroke. She didn’t even notice. I stabbed away at her, jabbing it in and out, grunting and puffing–harder and harder, my pelvis impacting into her with increasing malice and resentment, my fingers gripping her bony hips, clawing into her, tearing her arse apart, wanting to hurt her–but all to no avail–the fucking trollop paid no attention at all, just kept sucking on her fag and spitting. You could have fucked her with a twelve-inch carving knife and she wouldn’t have noticed. My pace and vigour ensured it didn’t last long. I squirted a little blob, grunted and was done. She pulled her skirt down, and turned to face me, her fag dangling between her teeth.

  ‘Dat was nice,’ she said, angling for her extra tenner.

  I ignored her, pushed my cock into my trousers and fumbled up my flies. She looked so pathetic and hopeless. So utterly fucked-up and debased. She was just a bit of rotten flesh, a skinny, crack-addled Hackney whore–to be used and done with in whatever scandalous or outrageous or offensive a way one wished. I actually felt a little sorry for her. What a monstrous ghastly frightful reality was hers.

  ‘Why do you do this?’ I asked.

  She looked at me and smiled that coy, hideous derangement of features and said, ‘Is the crack innit.’

  ‘Why don’t you get off it?’ I earnestly went on. ‘You’re young still–you could get on a programme, start again. Clean yourself up–start over.’ How foolish I must have sounded.

  ‘First you do dat to my arse’ole and now you wanna save me?’

  She had a point, but I didn’t relent–the bit was between my teeth. ‘Why not? You could–if you wanted. You can’t do this, go on doing this–lifting your skirts for sick twisted perverts like me to stick their cocks up–for twenty pounds–to put in your pipe and smoke! Come on,’ I went on, ‘this life will kill you. Look at you–you’re young. This doesn’t need to be your life. Save yourself–before it’s too late. Imagine a different life.’

  She was staring at me, wide-eyed and bewildered. Confused but moved. This sort of post-coital intimacy was obviously alien to her. She didn’t know how to respond.

  ‘But…’ she tentatively stammered.

  ‘Go on,’ I gently coaxed.

  ‘Is the crack innit…’

  What was the use, and what was I thinking–this guttersnipe wretch had no capacity to imagine, no capacity to imagine anything, to imagine at all. Just a stupid human, a dullard like the rest, an ignorant dolt–slovenly, indulgent and useless. She enraged me. Stupid humans. My touchy-feely compassionate conservatism was rapidly giving way to something quite other. An acid spike of hatred was rushing through me. A bitter incensed resentment, curdling into violence.

  ‘Are you laughing at me?’ I suddenly barked, surprising myself as much as her. ‘Don’t think I don’t know!’

  She was wedged between a bin and the wall, staring at me. Her eyes flickering with fright, or flight, or fight. She knew well not to speak. There was something animal between us…I could feel my face peeling into convulsive cackles of sneering laughter: ‘HAhahahahaha!!! HAhahahahaha!!! HAhahahahaha!!!’

  The tart was looking very confused.

  ‘Look at you,’ I snapped. ‘Look at you–you raddled fuck. Just a piece of cunt that I can do what I like with–aren’t you? Look at you!? A slice of the pie to fuck and forget! And what’s wrong with that, eh? What’s not to like?! Look at you–in a dustbin, snivelling grubby reality. Grubby reality! I can smell it on you. Sucking cocks for fivers–that’s your life! You’ll be dead in week–dead in a week! They’ll come knocking and you’ll be rotting! Dead on the floor in a corner. Knickers round your ankles, arse in the air. Dead in a crack-hole cave. Dead. You’ll be scraped up off the floor and shovelled into bin bags by a pair of underpaid council workers who’ll grumble and moan about the stench of you even after you’re dead. They’ll sling you out with the rubbish and burn you up at the dump. And all will be pleased, and glad to see the back of you. And that will be that. No-one will miss you. No-one will remember you. It’ll be as if you had never existed, and frankly, my dear, better if you hadn’t!’

  I grabbed her by the throat and pinned her pathetic frame against the wall. I pulled the extra tenner from my pocket, put my face close to hers and whispered, ‘Daddy can’t come on Thursday, but Mummy will kiss you good night.’ And with that I reached for her face and stuffed the tenner into her mouth and forced it as far down her throat as I could push it. I released my grip. She fell to her knees, coughing and choking, clawing at her throat, gagging and
retching. I took a step back away from her, giving myself some room, and then swung my leg and toe-punted her in the face. She reeled backwards, clattered against a bin and collapsed. Her two front teeth were broken and lying at right angles to her gums, blood and spit trickling …She didn’t move, but she wasn’t dead. She made a small almost imperceptible ‘umph’ noise and then farted.

  I knew this would happen…I should have stayed at home, I thought, and had that wank. Why did I listen to him? Look at her. Poor bloody wretch…Look what you’ve done to her.

  I squatted beside her, reached into her mouth and pulled the tenner back out of her throat. Her Majesty was not amused. Darwin looked appalled.

  ‘I’m sorry…’

  She rolled away from me. It was strange, the way she rolled, the way she folded her arms into herself, the fall of her shoulder, and her sniffling tears, it all made me think of Valerie.

  I don’t know why I got into such a rage with her, but now I feel low and rotten and ashamed. And he did it to me! I am foul and loathsome and rotten and wrong. Wrong, I tell you! Wrong!