Head Case

by Ross Armstrong

  I had recently wound up short of gaining a next of kin. I managed to hold out and not give Anita’s name, thereby successfully avoiding a bedside reunion that was the last thing I wanted. When my pen hit the paper, I’d just been informed that I’d reached recovery level six. So I think under the circumstances this was a good day. That’s how I’ll remember it.

  19

  ‘She’s so pretty

  She’s so wonderful

  She’s irreplaceable

  And she’s gone.’

  At the other end of the borough our doors slam in unison. It’s good we drove. It would’ve taken twenty minutes or more to walk and Bartu needed to drive to get the shakes out of him after seeing the leg. The leg that told us we better start breaking down some doors.

  Our boots hit the tarmac that leads to the playground.

  A slide.

  A horse on a spring. To the back and to the right.

  A roundabout to the left and forward.

  A scattering of oak trees behind them. Four to be exact.

  A metal fence running around it. The tops of which form into loops.

  We enter a small gate and step inside.

  ‘What’s this remind you of?’ Bartu says.

  ‘A standard inner city playground,’ I say.

  ‘Okay, look at this.’ He holds the picture out and turns us around to the angle he has asserted the picture is from, the two views merging and becoming one in all but colour. It’s as if we’re seeing the world through his eyes. There is a kind of magic to seeing the thing static but colourful on paper, then stripped to blandness in the dull reality behind it, but quivering with small signs of life in the wind, in the navy light of early evening.

  ‘How did you know?’ I say.

  ‘I took a long drive last night,’ he says. ‘There are six of these playgrounds with this kind of equipment within a five-mile radius. This was the first one I came to. I remembered I’d been here before. With my girl.’

  I feel that Atlantic wind move harshly past my ears. I blow into my hands.

  ‘Your girlfriend?’ I say.

  ‘No, Tom. Not my girlfriend. My little girl.’

  I take a walk over to the swing and sit down into it. Its dissonant squeak as I rock back on it, telling tales of frequent use and negligence and rust.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a little girl.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he says.

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  I’m not used to this kind of thing. I’m not trained for it. I get out of the swing seat and put my hands in my pockets.

  ‘Was… Was it? Was… ’

  ‘Meningitis,’ he says, mercifully helping me out. He knows this isn’t my forte.

  We listen to the air in the trees. He takes in the scene. Somewhere lost in memory.

  ‘And are… are you…?’

  ‘I’m still with her mother, yes.’

  I blink. He runs his hand across his face. Shadow moves.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. The first part I mean. I’m very pleased to hear the second. That sort of thing can break people apart, I hear.’

  He agrees, in deep contemplation. Partly in some other place. Partly, thoroughly here.

  ‘But there’s nothing you can do. Nothing. About that… kind of thing. The only thing you can do is carry on.’

  He nods, feeling my effort.

  ‘From the beginning of it to her going was three weeks. One minute she was a beautiful, healthy thing. Starting to run around. Next she could barely breathe. Then we found out what it was and she was mostly in hospital from then on. No promises were made. After that, every noise… she made… sounded different to us. Each one was a tiny struggle for a life. All children cry, but not like this. Noises it’s difficult to hear. To forget. Like she knew it was serious. Like she knew the crying would never stop. Until it did.’

  I nod. He breathes.

  ‘I still hear it sometimes, the crying. She passed away a year and a half ago. Last month I woke in the middle of the night to check on her. I thought I heard her fighting to breathe. I guess I was half awake, half sleepwalking. When I got to her room, of course, there was nothing there. When Aisha woke she found me on the floor in the baby’s room. She helped me up then held me close, then we went back to bed and said nothing more about it. We’ve already cried about it a hundred times, now comes everything after.’

  I nod.

  ‘I don’t want to think this guy. Him. I don’t want to think he was watching us, from that window up there, or that one there, watching me and my little girl.’

  His features tense. He holds the picture and matches it to the view from the first floor of the surrounding houses. But before he goes too far I stop him.

  ‘He wasn’t. I can promise you that,’ I say.

  ‘How can you?’ he says, his face reddened.

  ‘Because this isn’t the playground,’ I say.

  He pushes out smoking breaths. His fists ball and punch into his pockets. The snow around us has turned to sludge.

  ‘And how the fuck did you come to that?’ he says.

  ‘Because it’s not right. The trees aren’t exact. The distances between them.’

  ‘Don’t do this. Come on. You can see. You can see it’s the same,’ he says, animated, pushing it into my face.

  ‘Not exactly, I’m sorry. This man draws out of compulsion. Every single one is correct to the absolute minutiae, not in colour but in perspective, this is his skill. He cares about the specifics. It’s important they’re all in separate years so they don’t know each other. It’s important they don’t have siblings that they might open up to. He’s watched and taken photos of them at the school gates, looked them up on various websites and social media to corroborate their backgrounds and find out things that they like, so he can appeal to them on their level. He’s picked them especially for this before making contact. He sees patterns, like I do. He is struck by the image and he has to draw it perfectly. I’ve read about this feeling, I’ve felt it, I know. He wouldn’t make a mistake like this.’

  His feet kick gravel into a pool of half-frozen water.

  ‘I think you’re guessing. I think you’re trusting your instinct too much. We can’t hang everything on your brain.’

  I’m reminded of what Dr Ryans said. He shared the same concern.

  ‘And I think you’re adding importance to this place that isn’t there. It’s a memory, Emre. It’s not anything calling to you. Don’t confuse the mystical with the practical because of personal bias. People do that all the time. It’s not good instinct.’

  He charges towards me and punches me on the arm. I can tell he wanted to go for my face, but thought better of it. I hold onto it and then hold onto him, too. Two strangers pass and watch the community police officers holding each other to stay upright.

  ‘Even if the trees were right, Emre. Look…’

  I hold the picture up again.

  ‘There are bars missing from the gate all along the left side in this picture. There are too many differences. This isn’t it.’

  He steps away. He looks to me. His face rich with creases and colour.

  ‘It was close. You’re going to be a great police officer.’

  He stares at the icy puddle in front of him, reflecting the shivering sky at us.

  He sighs and lightens the smallest amount.

  ‘I’m sorry, Emre. I’m sorry for everything.’

  ‘Just tell me we’re going to catch him.’ His voice comes back, changed. Like it’s coming from another part of him.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. Yes, we are,’ I say, taking a step towards him and then stopping.

  I can tell he wants me to keep my distance for a moment. He’s so still. It lasts for a while. We stand stiff, held up only by the cold.

  20

  ‘I always prefer to be a driven around.

  I see their faces, but hear no sound.’

  The trip is pretty pin-drop other than the occasional grunt. I imagine it’s good to t
alk about these things, but less good to be stuck in a car with a man you didn’t intend on sharing your soul with when you pulled on your boots that morning. He wanted to show me the place without giving it all away, and he couldn’t, but there’s no shame in that. His feelings are closer to the surface than I realised, closer than most, certainly closer than mine.

  Our tour continues in East Tottenham but a quick look shows no line of oak trees. We don’t even get out.

  We drive and drive. Four more council-built playgrounds to go. The streets that pass form the centre stage of the Tottenham riots. I still remember the broken glass on the high street like it was this morning. I was working in a call centre in Dalston at the time, my life drifting away before my very eyes. When I arrived home there was a ‘before the storm’ feeling. At least there was something going on, I thought. You could feel it. An energy, an excitement. I assumed that a particularly lairy footy match had just finished at White Hart Lane or some sort of carnival was about to start. That was before it all really kicked off.

  TVs were dragged through broken windows. I saw a Chinese kid punched in the face and his bag nicked from off his back, so I picked him up and took him home, while around us a brother and sister sprung out from a trainer shop with cuts on their elbows and glass on their backs, carrying an armful of white socks each.

  We get out at another playground and give it the once over. Same roundabout, same swing, same horse on a spring, surrounding houses and some oak trees. But the layout isn’t right, it’s more spread out and the swing and the horse are at a diagonal to each other rather than adjacent. Without saying a word, we get back in the car.

  Three to go.

  After I’d dropped the Chinese kid off at his flat, I went back into the chaos. It was palpably dangerous and I liked that. It felt like everyone was waking up. A guy in riot gear, caught on the wrong side of the line, flew past me and I hid in a doorway as teenagers hurling bricks, bits of scaffolding, bottles and anything else they could find, charged past. I turned a corner and saw embers rising into the sky and flickering away like fireflies. Beneath it the shell of a car lay burning. I walked towards it a few steps to feel the heat more keenly. On closer inspection it was clear that it was a police car. The windows were smashed and in the passenger seat sat a bin that’d been wrenched from the street where it once stood. And a few yards away, shimmering like a pond, two sets of shutters were sunbathing in the glinting trickle of the nearby firelight.

  Then I heard the cries. ‘Missile up! Get some missiles. Anything.’ They were coming back.

  Bartu scans the next playground while I stay in the car. The roundabout is too far away from the swings. The angle isn’t right. Snow starts to fall again. He gets back inside. And drives.

  Two more left.

  Later I’d find out I’d missed the worst of it. It had been ramping up throughout the day. Our area was cleared when Turkish shop owners with blades chased the looters away. As I pulled back from the burnt-out car, I heard the heavy footsteps of a running crowd. I took a look inside a local pharmacy, torn open. I thought about quickly stepping foot inside and grabbing something as a keepsake. Something practical like headache tablets, condoms or that cream I use for my hair.

  A whoomph from what sounded like a petrol bomb, woke me from my haze. Then the sound of distant cheers. I got out of there. As I ran hard for home I saw a young police officer running for his life in the gaps between the buildings. Away from the rest of his group, he sprinted into the distance, pursued by a twenty-strong mob, armed with chair legs and rocks.

  I’ve never met a member of the armed response unit who carried out the hard stop on Mark Duggan, which resulted in an officer, only known publicaly as V53, firing the deadly shots that kicked off the riots. But that’s what Tottenham is remembered for, to the ends of this island and in the footnotes of international newspapers. Duggan’s name will forever be inextricably linked to our force, his death tarnishes us, and we accept it; his body around our necks, deepening chasms of mistrust, that we must sweat to close.

  I thought about turning up the day after it all happened to tidy up the streets, like many others did. But I didn’t. I watched from my bedroom window and didn’t do a thing. I just waited, powerless. I waited for them to reach the top of every tower, kick down the doors of the penthouses and remind the owners how stupid they all were to think that they could get away with their charmed fucking lives.

  I feel differently now.

  It’s my time to jump out and I grab the picture. It’s getting dark. Headlights pass. A car in the distance stops and then keeps going, a silver one. I feel like I’ve seen it before.

  No oak trees. The central swing seat almost completely torn off. I sit back in the passenger seat and keep the car sighting to myself.

  One more to go.

  21

  ‘She.

  She, she she.’

  By the time we get to the last patch of playground we need our flashlights to poke into the dark and illuminate the subject. We started as night was falling and it had come in thick as tar.

  The first hopeful thing we saw were the bars missing in the fence. We couldn’t tell if they were at the exact point we needed them to be, but the similarity was enough to beckon us to peruse the rest with forensic conviction. We pick out the slide with a light. The roundabout is in the right position and the trees are good enough. Bartu steps back while I try and cast a beam over the whole thing as best I can, pushing my hand into the middle of the light source to spray it out onto the vista of the scene. He turns, trying to draw an imaginary line from the windows behind him to the playground. He folds up the picture and puts it away. I don’t know why he does that at first.

  Tottenham’s association with outrage began in 1909, during an event which has come to be aptly known as the Tottenham Outrage.

  Two men named Helfeld and Lepidus hatched a plan to rob their place of work. Having established which day wages were collected from the bank in South Hackney and brought over to the rubber factory, they decided to strike without delay.

  Armed with semi-automatic pistols, they shot the driver of the car that carried the money. Two Tottenham police constables, Tyler and Newman, hearing shots, gave chase and finally found George Smith, a local gas stoker, beating Lepidus on the ground with his fists. This work of civic duty backfired a touch when Smith was shot twice by Helfeld and the two assailants made off. But miraculously, Smith did not die, despite being shot in the collarbone and head, which sounds fairly hard to believe, but then who am I to talk?

  Then a fracas ensued, with the two men firing at a crowd who had started to give chase. During the rampage through Tottenham a stray bullet hit a ten-year-old boy, who died in another by-stander’s arms. Constable Tyler, who had initiated the chase, also caught one in the head and officer Newman stayed with him until the ambulance arrived, but the bullet did what it was born for and Tyler wouldn’t kiss his children goodnight that evening, or any other.

  Meanwhile the criminals escaped into the marshes and headed for the River Lea, managing to hijack a tram. Officers commandeered one too and started a genuine full-blown tram chase, during which another constable, Hawkins, arrived heroically on horseback, but he was dispatched when Helfeld shot his horse.

  However, when they opted to continue the escape on foot, the police soon caught up with Helfeld, who had failed to climb a six-foot fence and, not loving his options, pressed the gun to his right eye and fired.

  Lepidus managed to find his way into a cottage away from the river, and when police stormed the building he holed up in one of the bedrooms. After a volley of fire, they finally opened the door to see Lepidus was dead. An autopsy would later show he had ended the episode with a single bullet to his own head.

  In the upshot, Helfeld was not so fortunate, surviving for a good while before passing away from the smoking hole his bullet had made in his tired face. All of which served as a kind of justice to some, but was of no comfort to the mother of the ten-year-
old boy who lay, five miles away, killed by Helfeld’s earlier stray discharge. She requested to keep his shoes, and was buried with them fifty years later.

  Both men were Latvian Jews, and their act of terror helped ignite a new wave of xenophobia and fear of immigrants in Britain.

  ‘It’s not right,’ he says.

  ‘Why not. Looks pretty good,’ I say, flailing my flash light around.

  ‘Let me help you out,’ he says, running the beam along the entire area.

  Trees.

  The fence with missing parts.

  Roundabout.

  No horse. No horse.

  ‘See?’ he says, as the snow turns to rain, brown mud and ice gathering around our feet.

  ‘Shit,’ I say.

  He searches again, in some distress at our disappointment, his feet sloshing around like his boat’s capsizing. The beam continues its search, unbroken by my hand, insisting on some kind of revelation.

  ‘Not there. Not there. Not here. Definitely not there. Not… shit!’

  A figure emerges into the light.

  ‘Christ!’ I shout, dropping my torch.

  Bartu reaches for something instinctively but has no apparatus to defend himself with.

  The rain comes down.

  The silhouette gets closer. I stand frozen in fear as Bartu fumbles in a pool of water and ice below.

  The figure steps in. Then Bartu, having located the torch, points it onto some legs, then a body, then a face.