by Mark Morris
The face pushed itself into mine. ‘It’s time to get up,’ it argued. ‘Time to get ready for school.’ Then the face recoiled, its nose crinkling. ‘Poo, Daddy, you smell.’
Reaching across to my bedside table, I grabbed my phone, which I was using as an alarm clock. After talking to Candice the night before, I’d come home and – armed with a three-quarters-full bottle of Jack Daniels and a packet of Marlboro Lights – had sat out for God knows how long on the narrow balcony of the third-floor flat that I shared with Kate, my youngest daughter. Barely feeling the cold, I’d demolished the whisky and smoked most of the pack while staring unseeingly over the spiky, uneven Chiswick skyline, my conversation with Candice (and more to the point the promise I’d made her) circling in my head like some mad, clockwork toy. Finally, my guts acidic with alcohol and anxiety, and my throat raw and aching with tobacco, I’d staggered to my little bedroom next to the bathroom and collapsed into a restless, semi-drunken half-sleep, which I’d known even as I crawled under the duvet would leave me feeling more exhausted than rested.
Sure enough, as my senses slowly returned, I became aware of just how groggily hungover I was. Kate was right; I did stink. Even I could tell that my breath smelled like a fire-bombed distillery. I needed several pints of water, a bucket of painkillers, a hot shower and about a gallon of coffee before I’d begin to feel even remotely human again. I could have done with another twenty minutes to groan myself out of bed too, but there was no chance of that with Kate around. My five-year-old daughter was like a mad, clockwork toy herself, full of frantic energy, especially first thing in the morning when she’d just had her batteries recharged with ten or twelve hours of the kind of blissful sleep that only kids can enjoy. In a minute she’d be bouncing up and down, demanding her breakfast, after which I’d have to coax her to wash her face, and get dressed, and brush her teeth and hair, whilst at the same time trying to get my own thoughts in order for the day ahead.
Every week-day morning started like this. It was stressful, frustrating and madcap, but even with that day’s added misery of a dozen pneumatic drills hammering in my skull, I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. Kate was a handful, but what she took out of me in terms of energy, time and patience, she gave back a million times over in love, joy and laughter. I don’t want to sound like a soppy, gushing idiot, but the bottom line is that she gave my life meaning in all sorts of ways – any parent worth their salt will know exactly what I mean. There’s nothing as fierce as the love you feel for your child, and the fact that I was effectively the only parent that Kate had, that I was her sole guardian and protector, intensified those feelings still further.
Checking my phone, I saw it was 6.53 a.m., only seven minutes before my alarm was due to go off. Although I had no idea what time it was when I’d crashed, I doubted I’d had more than four or five hours’ fitful sleep.
‘Why don’t you go and watch Toy Story for ten minutes,’ I suggested, ‘and then I’ll come and make breakfast?’
Kate’s big blue eyes widened in almost comical astonishment and glee. ‘I’m not allowed to watch DVDs in the morning,’ she said, as if it were some divine edict. ‘You said it makes me late.’
‘I know I did,’ I said, ‘but this is a special treat. If you go now, you can watch it for ten minutes, but then you have to switch it off and get ready for school. Deal?’
‘Deal!’ she yelled, loud enough to make my teeth ache. She leaped off the bed and scampered towards the door, a whirling dervish in yellow Little Miss Sunshine pyjamas. At the threshold she skidded to a halt and looked back at me as a sudden idea occurred to her. ‘Can I watch Toy Story 2 instead of Toy Story?’
Her round face was so earnest that I had to clear my throat to stop myself from laughing. ‘Course you can.’
‘Yay!’ she bellowed, and shot out of the room like a bullet from a gun.
I flopped on to my back and stared up at the ceiling. There was a brown stain there shaped roughly like the British Isles, probably from some long-ago flood in the bathroom of the top-floor flat. The stain had been painted over, but it had seeped through in speckles and patches, as if the joists and floorboards above were still saturated with damp. Ever since Kate and I had moved in four years ago, the attic had been occupied by a little Jewish woman in her seventies called Mrs Hersh, whose husband was dead and whose four children were scattered all over the globe. Although she looked frail as a bundle of dry sticks, Mrs Hersh was a tough old thing – always out visiting friends, or getting her hair done, or lugging her shopping back from the supermarket on the high road, her feet clomping up and down the wooden staircase. I was dreading a time when the stairs might become too much for her and she’d be forced to move out. I had visions of some new, heftier tenant climbing into a brimming bath, only to come crashing through the ceiling as the spongy floor gave way.
I wasn’t thinking about that this morning, though. Just as it had the night before, my mind returned to the promise I’d made to Candice. I felt like someone who’d lost a vital set of keys, but couldn’t shake the urge to keep going over and over the same ground in case they’d missed something. I’d been trying to think of an alternative to getting in touch with the person I’d told my daughter would be able to sort out her mess, but even though my mind was working overtime, I knew that nothing else I might come up with would be anywhere near as effective. Just because I’d once – when I was young and stupid – been nicked for armed robbery, which had resulted in a nine-year jail sentence (of which I’d served six years and two months), that didn’t make me a tough guy, or an anti-hero. And neither did it mean I had a string of underworld connections I could call on when I needed a favour.
I did have one connection, though. Just one. But it was a fucking good one.
The day before being released from prison I’d been given a phone number, and told to call it if I ever got into trouble or needed a favour. I’d thanked the man who’d given it to me and put the number away in a safe place. But even back then I’d vowed never to use it, never to look back over my shoulder like Lot’s wife, never to open Pandora’s box.
I’d never thrown the number away, though. Call it superstition, call it hedging my bets, but I’d not only kept the number, I’d made sure I knew exactly where it was at all times. Now, because of that, I felt torn right down the middle. Half of me wished I had thrown the number away, that it wasn’t there to tempt me, whilst the other half saw it as my salvation – or at least Candice’s salvation.
‘It’s not for me,’ I said out loud. ‘I wouldn’t be doing it for me.’
I suppose I hoped that that might make it all right, but it didn’t, not really. Whether I was doing it for me or not, it didn’t change the fact that I was contemplating opening the door and letting the darkness back in. Because the thing is, nobody gets something for nothing in the world I was considering venturing back in to. If I rang that number, then it might mean Candice would be safe, but I would clock up a debt; it would make me beholden.
‘Da-deeeee!’ The call came from the living room beyond the flat’s short hallway, and despite the way I was feeling I felt a smile sneak on to my face.
‘What?’
‘It’s been ten minutes. Do I have to switch the DVD off now?’
My smile widened. Despite often behaving like a small but lively bull in a very cluttered china shop, my youngest daughter was a stickler for rules and regulations. I considered giving her two more minutes, but then decided that the rule thing was something to be encouraged, not let slide.
‘Yep,’ I said, swinging my legs out of bed and bracing myself to sit upright. ‘I’m coming to make breakfast.’
The next hour was the usual chaos of knocked-over beakers of milk and lost trainers and misplaced spectacles. Kate had been born in difficult circumstances, having to be cut from her mother’s womb because she was in a breech position with the cord wrapped around her neck. She was deprived of oxygen for longer than the doctors were happy with, and for a while it had been touch and
go as to whether she might suffer permanent brain damage. In the event the effects, thank God, had been relatively mild – a few initial developmental and learning difficulties, which she was now more than making up for, and some minor optic-nerve damage, which meant that she currently wore cute, pink-framed spectacles to stop her from squinting when she was watching TV or trying to make out the words on the whiteboard at school.
Needless to say, she was always losing the specs – when she wasn’t sitting on them and breaking them, that is. If I had a quid for every time I’d asked her where she was when she last took them off, I’d be a millionaire by now.
On this occasion, the specs, smeared with jammy thumbprints, were found under the sprawled-open pages of her Toy Story colouring book, which she’d been engrossed in while I was grabbing a quick shower. By 8.10 we were ready to go – or at least, thanks to me, she was. She stood impatiently by the door, watching as I laced up my boots, wearing her now-clean specs and her green-and-red duffel coat, a Dora the Explorer school bag slung over one shoulder. Despite taking two supposedly fast-acting Ibuprofen and downing three cups of sludge-thick coffee my head was still pounding. I was flushed and sweating too after my shower, though I told myself I was only imagining that the sweat oozing out of me and forming damp patches on my shirt smelled like pure JD.
‘Come on, Daddy,’ Kate said, rolling her eyes, as if I was the one responsible for the string of mishaps which had made us late, ‘or Paula will go without me.’
‘No she won’t,’ I said. ‘She’ll knock on the door first to find out where you are.’
‘She might forget.’
‘She won’t.’
‘She might have already knocked on the door and we didn’t hear her.’
‘I think that’s unlikely, don’t you? This flat is so small that if you trump in bed I can hear it in the kitchen.’
While Kate giggled I finished tying my laces and straightened up.
‘Right then,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
She turned and pulled down the door handle while I twisted the Chubb lock above it that she couldn’t reach.
‘Even if I do a quiet one?’ she said as the door swung inwards.
‘What?’
‘Trump in bed.’
I grinned. ‘Even if you do a silent one. An SBD.’
‘What’s an SBD?’
‘Silent but deadly.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means a trump which you can’t hear, but which smells really, really bad.’
Kate guffawed at this. The sound, echoing up and down the stairwell, was both delightful and alarming. She was still guffawing as she marched across the short hallway and rapped on the door of flat 4.
‘Well, somebody’s tickled by something,’ Paula Sherwood said, pulling the door open.
‘It’s Daddy,’ said Kate, her blue eyes widening behind her spectacles. ‘He’s been talking about trumps.’
Paula’s long-lashed eyes flickered to regard me with amusement as Kate pushed her way into the flat, shouting for the Sherwoods’ son, Hamish. Paula was a strong-jawed brunette with startlingly pale grey eyes and a scattering of girlish freckles across her nose and cheeks. I admit I fancied her, and sometimes I even flirted with her, but never seriously. I got the impression that she and her husband Adam were rock-solid, besides which he was a nice bloke, and there was no way I wanted to make waves in either my life or theirs.
I’d struck lucky with the Sherwoods. Because Hamish was the same age as Kate, Paula was only too happy to take the children to school every day, and pick them up, and look after Kate until I got home. She even babysat for me when I had to work late or on the rare occasions – like last night – when I went out. To be honest, they were a lifeline, and what I’d do if they moved away I had no idea; I didn’t want to think about it.
I shrugged now and gave what I hoped was a wry grin. ‘What can I say? We’d covered politics and the economy. I was running out of subjects.’
Paula chuckled, and then asked, ‘Are you all right, Alex?’
I felt suddenly self-conscious about the sweat patches on my shirt. ‘Bit hot and bothered, that’s all. You know what it’s like, rushing around first thing in the morning.’
‘But last night,’ she said, ‘when you got home? You seemed a bit… preoccupied.’
I shrugged again, trying not to look uncomfortable. ‘Just family stuff. Nothing major. Thanks a lot for last night, by the way. Don’t know what I’d do without you.’
That sounded a bit more intimate than I’d meant it to, but Paula had the good grace not to react. Instead she said breezily, ‘No problem. Besides, you’d do the same for us – you have done the same for us.’
It was true. I’d had Hamish round for sleepovers with Kate when the Sherwoods were out – but it hadn’t happened often. I owed them a lot more than they owed me.
Grimacing, I said, ‘Listen, I don’t want to take advantage, but is there any chance you might be able to have Kate for a bit longer tonight? There’s something I may have to do after work.’
She wafted a hand. ‘Sure. In fact, it’s easier having Kate here than not, because she keeps Hamish amused. If it was up to him, she’d live with us all the time.’
As I thanked her there was a shriek from the depths of the flat. Paula raised her eyebrows. ‘I’d better get the little horrors off to school before they wreck the place. Have a good day, Alex.’
‘Yeah, you too.’
I went back into my flat and closed the door. I’d have to be heading off to work myself soon, but I had the first period free, so there wasn’t a rush. I stood for a moment in the little hallway with the four doors leading off from it and took a deep breath, allowing my thoughts to settle. Then I walked slowly through to the kitchen to make myself yet another coffee, clearing away the breakfast things as I waited for the kettle to boil.
I knew what I was doing. It’s called displacement activity. It’s where you find a bunch of unimportant tasks to occupy your time in order to put off what you really should be doing. Once I’d cleared the kitchen, I carried my coffee through to the living room, apprehension gnawing at me. Tucked into the corner between the French windows and the kitchen door was my desk, on top of which sat my Apple Mac, the telephone, and a haphazard pile of textbooks, documents, lecture notes and student essays which needed marking.
I eyed the third drawer down on the left. That was my ‘miscellaneous’ drawer, which contained all the bits and pieces I had no real use for, but was reluctant to throw away. I stood in the middle of the room, hovering for a moment, and took a swig from my mug. Then I said, ‘For fuck’s sake,’ and banged the mug down on the wooden blanket box in front of the settee, next to Kate’s Toy Story colouring book. Marching across to the desk, I yanked the ‘miscellaneous’ drawer open, half-hoping the envelope might have mysteriously vanished in the weeks or months since I’d last seen it. But there it was, small and white and dog-eared, poking out from beneath this year’s Father’s Day card that Kate had made for me. I’d put the number in an envelope because I’d been reluctant to transfer it to my address book, or to the contacts file on my computer, thinking that doing so would have been like officially accepting it into my life, making it permanent somehow.
Lifting the envelope from the drawer, I stared at the name on the front and sighed. Then I opened the envelope and took out the folded sheet of paper, which was low-grade, flimsy, torn from a standard-issue prison notebook. Unfolding the sheet with one hand, I lifted the telephone with the other and thumbed the connection button. As soon as the receiver started to hum I dialled the number scrawled on the sheet.
When the phone rang at the other end my mouth went instantly dry and my head and heart started to thump in unison.
He won’t be there, I told myself almost hopefully. He gave me this number years ago. He’s bound to have moved. He might even be back inside.
After three rings the phone was picked up. ‘Hello?’
The voic
e was wary, clipped, unwelcoming.
‘Benny?’ I said.
‘Who’s this?’
I licked my lips. They were so dry it was like pushing a stone between two sheets of sandpaper. ‘I don’t know if you remember me, Benny, but… it’s Alex. Alex Locke.’
FOUR
THE HAIR OF THE DOG
I start each academic year by telling my new students about my less-than-illustrious past. I do this not to impress them, or frighten them, but simply because university campuses are hotbeds of gossip and hearsay, and if I didn’t say anything then chances were that sooner or later they would stumble upon some far more distorted version of the truth.
Although kids of that age – or young adults, as our esteemed principal insists on calling them – like to pretend they’re too cool to be impressed by anything or anyone that’s older than they are, the initial response I never fail to get from each influx of students is wary respect bordering on awe. Many of my colleagues think I should milk this for all it’s worth, but I’m not comfortable with the ‘hard man’ image – and not only because it’s misplaced. The thing about violence is that it’s so antithetical to the majority of so-called civilised society that in the eyes of those who’ve rarely been exposed to it, it attains an oddly glamorous, almost mythical status.
But real violence isn’t glamorous at all. It’s savage and ugly and squalid. People are often destroyed by it, both physically and emotionally. It leaves nothing but fear and misery in its wake; it fucks up lives, permanently, irrevocably.
This is something I take great pains to drum home when I’m telling my story. Career criminals might seem cool with their designer suits and their entourage of hangers-on, but they’re really not the sort of people you want to be around. The majority of them are psychological wastelands; sociopaths. Yes, they can appear loyal, friendly, even charming, but in truth they often only mimic human behaviour in order to get what they want. And woe betide anyone who becomes a nuisance to them, or outlives their usefulness, or just happens to be in their way at the wrong moment. I’ve heard of people being stamped and kicked to death for a minor slight or ill-conceived joke; I’ve heard of crooks shooting or stabbing other crooks – sometimes even their best friends, blokes they’ve known for years – simply because of a disagreement over a restaurant bill or a misplaced comment about the other guy’s wife.
