by S Williams
The viewpoint of the street is from the entrance. It has been taken by a tourist and the quality is just about as good as the BBC. Loss guesses it has been taken by a Japanese tourist, and then wonders if he is being racist. It shows a group of hooded youths, some carrying iron bars, milling around, looking both menacing and bewildered at the same time. Nothing happens for a few moments, then a slight movement of something spinning, and then thick white smoke starts spilling out of the ground, as though it’s just been opened up and steam is coming out.
‘She’s in the tree,’ Stone mutters. The youths stare at the smoke bomb as though it just magically appeared there. Slowly, they edge towards it and then jump back when another one appears a few feet away.
‘She’s in the tree, fuckheads. Jesus. Did these boys forget their brains or what?’ Loss takes his eyes off the screen and looks at the detective by his side, possibly for the first time. At least, properly.
‘Is everything all right, Stone?’
‘Sir?’
Stone is transfixed by the action on the TV. He is grateful for the ‘sir’. His role, somewhere between expert witness and involved party, has thrown his identity crisis into overdrive. The fact that Stone is treating him just the same is helping him stay on the ground.
‘Only I’ve noticed that you seem to be swearing quite a lot and I wondered if everything’s all right?’ When she silently turns and looks back at him for a moment, Loss wonders if he has crossed a line. He can’t get his daughter out of his mind, and he has an urge to hit something and go to sleep at the same time. He suspects he’s having some form of breakdown. Then Stone smiles at him. ‘No sir. Everything’s fine.’ Loss can’t work out the sentence. Does that mean everything is not fine, but she’ll be all right? Or everything is fine and stop asking? He stops thinking about it as another three smoke bombs hit the ground and the gang of hooded youths start coughing.
And then one of them screams and falls to the ground.
‘Here we go again,’ Loss whispers, reaching into his pocket for a cigarette that isn’t there. A ghost cigarette.
66
I’m not very good with the throwing knife: all I did was smash him in the head with the hilt. Oh well. There go my cool points. I light the fuse that connects up to the fireworks then jump down to the ground. As I land, the tree above me explodes. Twenty exhibition fireworks all going off at once makes quite a spectacle. The bad boy nearest me looks up and I slash him across the throat with my knuckle knife, circa 1914 vintage. While he’s gurgling away I kick the next one in the crotch and start running. There’s swearing and spluttering all around me and I can hear the sound of police sirens a few streets away. I pick up the throwing knife. The drone I threw it at is still on the ground. I stick it in his thigh and move on. There’s sparks raining down everywhere, mingling with the smoke, and the screams, and the coughing.
Lucky I’m wearing my mask and goggles really, isn’t it? There are two left in front of me so I start running towards them.
67
‘Bloody hell, it’s Apocalypse Now.’ The team gathered in the police incident room have gone quiet as they watch the carnage unfold on the screen. It’s hard to see anything clearly after the tree explodes, even with the expensive equipment that was used to film it. The whole scene is wreathed in white swirling smoke and shimmering crackling stars.
‘I’m pretty sure I saw a rocket,’ quips Stone. Loss ignores her, concentrating on the figure running around the gang members. In the oversized goggles her face could be an insect’s, or some alien being’s.
‘One swipe and she’ll be down. That’s all it would take. Why would she risk it?’ he mutters.
‘Well that’s obvious,’ Stone says. ‘She’s laughing at them. She’s making them look ridiculous in the eyes of their peers.’ On the screen, two of the gang boys dive to the ground as Tuesday runs towards them. ‘Plus, according to our friend Drake, she thinks she’s dead already. Who could possibly touch her?’.
68
I run past the tourists and into the church. Outside, the police car screeches to a stop. Very macho. Very Flying Squad. Perhaps I should swoon.
I love St Olave’s. I run through the church and out through the cemetery arch. The cemetery is exactly as you’d hope it to be; all Gothy, and sinister, and crumbly.
In fact it’s so Gothy that Charles Dickens used it in one of his books, renaming it St Ghastly Grim. Nice one, Charles.
I lift the grate hidden next to a plague grave and drop down into the sewer system. Since the church got bombed in the Second World War the sewer system round here has been replaced with a newer one, but the structures of the old one are pretty much intact.
Enough to get me back into the main system, and allow me to lose myself below London, anyway.
Bye bye police.
Bye bye thieves
Bye bye.
69
‘Last year, according to government records, only six children under the age of seventeen were found living on the streets in central London. They were, of course, immediately placed under the ward of the city, found shelter, and put onto a programme of rehabilitation.’ The man in front of DI Loss and DS Stone looks tired. Not tired as if he’s ready to drop; tired, as though he’s ready to throw it all in and sod off. They are all cramped together in a small office above a sex shop in a tiny lane off Brewers Street in Soho. The room reeks of decay and mildew and the walls appear to be sweating. The window is grimy, filtering the neon lights, making them almost pretty. Behind the man is an A5 poster of a naked girl kneeling, facing away from the camera but looking back over her shoulder. The photograph has a sleazy sheen to it. Underneath is the caption ‘Your daughter, your partner, your friend: never an object.’ The girl’s lips are parted slightly. Loss feels sick inside.
‘Not seen that one on the tube adverts,’ says Stone, nodding at the poster. The man turns round and looks at it.
‘No,’ he says, turning back to them, barely registering their presence. ‘Bit too hard-hitting for the Mayor, that one.’
After all the media interest in the homeless, and the video footage of Tuesday, the new CIC has sent Stone to glean information from the various agencies that dealt with homelessness in central London.
‘So there are no children living on the street at present? All the homeless are over eighteen?’
‘Consenting,’ Stone adds, still looking at the picture. The smartphone sitting on the desk beeps discreetly. Loss takes in the desk and thinks it has not just seen better days, but better years. It looks as though it has been liberated from a skip. So does the man. He has greying black hair, and his eyes are whisky-veined and look as if they have seen far too much, for far too long.
‘No, as you are no doubt well aware, I’m not telling you that. All I’m telling you is what the government says.’ The man picks up his phone and reads the IM scrolling across the screen like ticker-tape.
‘So how does it work then? What’s the deal?’ Stone leans against the wall. Loss grimaces at the thought of what her shoulder might be touching. ‘Where do the stats come from?’
‘Every year Westminster Council commissions an audit of all the homeless in Soho, Chinatown, and the surrounding areas.’ The man does not look at them as he tells them this. He continues to read the texts on his phone. ‘This comprises two teams going out on one specified night at 11 p.m. and checking the doorways, subways, and such and doing a head-count. If they think an individual looks under eighteen they are reported and taken in to the appropriate juvenile authorities. They do not, however, check the bedsits for sofa surfers, the abandoned buildings where the junkies squat, the container hotels, or the myriad other places that technically don’t count as “the street”.’ The man stops speaking and looks up at them. ‘Basically, it’s the three monkeys.’
The man’s name is Tam, and he works for an outreach charity for the homeless. He is obviously severely overworked, minimally paid, and very angry. The DI doesn’t blame him. It’s hard to
watch a city eat people up, and then pretend that nothing is wrong.
‘So it is possible for an underage girl to be living on the streets, then?’ Stone asks, with just a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
‘Oh yes, depending on your definition. I could take you to brothels with 16 to 18-year-old illegal immigrants, boys and girls, who are working for nothing except the promise of the return of their passports. I could take you to a house across the river where 14-year-old Somali girls, whose parents have sold them, are being rented out as maids. It’s not so much as it was fifteen years ago, with Cardboard City. It’s more hidden now.’
‘Cardboard City?’ Stone finally takes her eyes off the picture on the wall. Tam looks at her. ‘How old are you? OK. Cardboard city was near Waterloo Station, in all the old underpasses there: around 250 homeless people living in tiny cubes made out of cardboard boxes; runaways, ex-cons, mental patients, rubbing together in a happy Third World wonderland of drugs, rape, and random violence.’
‘It’s where the IMAX is,’ says Loss, wearily. ‘Tell me, Mr Tam, what’s a container hotel?’
‘Old shipping containers put on pre-development land, owned by gang lords masquerading as human beings, and stuffed full of street kids who are then used to run drugs around the city,’ says Tam, reading a new message on his phone. ‘It’s a win-win situation. Less homeless on the streets, with no squatting damage to public buildings. But all this is by the by. What you really want to know about is Tuesday, yes?’
‘According to the media interviews with the homeless kids, they all say they knew the girl known as Tuesday,’ says Stone.
‘I’ve seen the news, yes. Tuesday the street warrior. Tuesday the ghost.’ Tam looks up from his phone to DI Loss. ‘Tuesday the policeman’s daughter. I’m sorry, Inspector Loss. I never met her myself, but those in the field talk very highly of Suzanne.’ There’s something slightly strange about the way that Tam is looking at him, but Loss can’t put his finger on what it is. Outside the room the neon is fractured by strobes from a passing police car, shuttering his concentration. For a moment, he can’t distinguish between the sirens outside and the sirens from three years ago. The before-sirens and before-strobe lighting that ripped his life into jagged little strips of pain, and loneliness, and guilt.
Tam begins counting off organisations on his fingers. ‘Streets of London. Railway Kids. Thames Reach. Crisis. There a dozen or more charities working the London streets. And that’s not including the hospitals and the faith agencies. There’s the old-school homeless; the mentally ill who have slipped through a very ragged net; the armed forces burn-outs with battle fatigue syndrome who stagger the streets of London but see the streets of Basra; there’s the benefit losers who can no longer afford their council flats, who’ve handed over their kids to the state and are trying to drink away the memory; and all the immigrants who aren’t even entitled to benefits, stuck in the cogs of a system that’s not kept up with how the world is now.’ Tam’s fingers have stopped counting and are clamped tight to his phone. Loss wouldn’t be surprised if he threw it through the filthy window. He is not telling them anything they didn’t already know, but he is saying it with such venom that it’s like hearing it for the first time.
‘And there’s the runaways,’ Stone adds.
Tam looks at her. ‘Yes. And there are the runaways.’
‘You are aware of the refuge centre my daughter worked at?’ Loss asks. Tam nods. ‘Colin Stevens, whom I believe you did know, said the refuge dealt with teenage runaways. He also said that a high proportion of the girls were pregnant.’
Stone is concentrating on the wall poster again.
‘The more you look, the more you see, yes?’ says Tam. ‘Notice the old track marks on her left arm? And look at her eyes. No hope left. A whole book of sorrows.’
‘The runaways?’ prompts Loss again.
Tam sighs and plays with his phone for a while, and then looks at the two detectives.
‘Some kids get kicked out of their homes, and just don’t have the skills to sort themselves out. First they sleep on friends’ sofas, jumping from flat to flat. Sofa surfing, it’s called. And then eventually …’ he shrugs his shoulders. ‘They don’t. They feel they’ve used up their welcome and they just come to the capital and disappear.’ He puts down his phone.
‘And then some get sexually abused, or suffer physical violence, either from a new parental figure, or a long-standing situation that the victim is now old enough to walk away from. Or there’s bullying at school, or by a sibling. Or there’s drugs and alcohol in the home. Or neglect. Or psychological problems.’ Tam sighs, then looks up at them. ‘Dr Stevens could probably give you a lecture. The whole system is not hermetic. There’s not one agency that has a handle on when they leave home to when they end up with pavement sores and alcohol dependence. I only really deal with the practical problems once they’re here. And once they’re here, the race is on.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Statistics will tell you that the average life expectancy of a long-term street-dweller is 40, but shocking as that is, that doesn’t tell even half the story. This city is full of sharks. Drugs. Prostitution. Criminal fodder. Unless we can get to them first, and persuade them to get back into normal life, then they’re just oil for the machine, really.’
‘How long have you been doing this work?’ Stone asks.
Tam gazes at her. ‘Too long for me. Not long enough for them.’ What he is saying hangs in the air for a moment, while they all think about it.
‘And so you know a lot of the street people. Have any of them been talking about Tuesday. Have you met anyone who knows Tuesday?’ Stone persists.
Tam smiles widely. ‘Everyone knows Tuesday. They talk about her as though she’s some sort of talisman.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that, young people living on the street, sooner or later the drug gangs sweep them up, use them as runners, or for prostitution, whatever. When your girl Tuesday started knocking out gang members as if they were toys, then the rumours started slithering up and down the lanes. I mean, she didn’t just fight back and hurt one of them. She humiliated them. She made them look stupid and weak. Before Tuesday, these street kids thought the world was fixed. That nothing could change. Now you’ve got rape girls telling their story to the BBC. You’ve got the bad boys and girls running around like chickens, not even welcome in their mothers’ homes. And you’ve got the homeless kids being sought after. Their opinions asked. As if they’re human beings. Really, it’s a brave new world.’
‘Whereabouts?’ Stone asks. ‘Where could she be holed up?’
Tam opens his arms wide, as if to encompass the whole city. ‘The wreck of the Temperance Hospital. An old cinema. Under the Thames in an abandoned tunnel. In the sewers. In a penthouse in Canary Wharf, from which she emerges like sodding Batman. In the shell of the old refuge. In hell. Take your pick.’
‘And what about you, Tam,’ Loss says, gently. ‘Have you ever seen her?’
Tam returns his gaze, unblinking and clear-eyed. Loss can’t tell what Tam is thinking, but he knows they’re not happy thoughts.
‘What a shitty job you have, Inspector. Always having to push people further. No, I have never met Tuesday. If your daughter were still alive she might have been able to tell you where Tuesday is. From what I picked up, Suzanne seemed to have the trust of all the young street kids. The pregnant runaways were her special thing. That’s one of the reasons the refuge was set up. There was nowhere else for them to go, except gang flats or the breeder dorms.’
‘The what?’ asks Stone.
Tam sighs. His phone beeps again and he picks it up. ‘The gang boys knock up a girl so she gets a flat if, and it’s a big if, she survives the hostels, and then once she has an abode they move in, use it as a safe house for drugs, as a brothel. Whatever. Look, detectives. I’m sorry I can’t be of any more help, but I don’t know who Tuesday is, where she lives, or how she does what she do
es. But I promise, if I get any information you’ll be the first to know, OK? Now I’ve really got to go.’ Tam gets up and goes to the door, opens it, and raises his eyebrows at the detectives. They thank him and leave.
Out on the Soho streets they gaze at the lights and the displays of erotic ephemera in the shop windows.
‘Not a happy bunny,’ says Loss.
‘Not even an unhappy bunny,’ Stone agrees. ‘More like a fucked-off social worker with anger issues. Did you notice the screen saver on his phone?’
‘The picture of Tuesday Falling from outside the Marquis? Of course I did. Contrary to popular belief, I’m a detective.’
DS Stone smiles slyly. ‘But not a good looking shit-hot one, like me.’
They walk through the Soho streets to Leicester Square, and disappear down into the tube station.
70
When I started getting my mind back together, and unhooked myself from the street islands, I just let myself float. Suzanne was gone. My daughter, gone. All the earlier things, all the things that had happened before, I’d packed away and thrown down a rabbit hole. I just let myself drift through the city. Letting it know me. I knew I’d have to fuck him up, when I was ready.
Mr Man.
Not just fuck him up into next week, or next year, but forever. I didn’t know how, but the how wasn’t important, not then. If I didn’t want to just curl up and scream until I was dead, or deader, then it wasn’t the how. It was the why.
The question DI Loss is asking. Has been asking for three years. Everything’s coming to an end now. Everything is slowing down, but back then everything was black and white. The past was dead zone black and the present was static-white.
I used to come up at night, onto the streets. I had an A to Z on my tablet, and I used to just slide through the night, getting to know how London was stitched together.
