Dirty Weekend

by Alan Scholefield

  ‘Where? The West End?’

  ‘No, somewhere we can talk. Somewhere quiet.’

  They walked along Whitehall, crossed Parliament Square into Petty France, entered the first pub they saw and found a corner table. He fetched two glasses of white wine from the bar.

  They chatted on a superficial level, circling each other verbally. She told him about her flat, the women she shared it with, her new job. They had a couple more drinks and then she said, ‘I should be getting back.’

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘Why don’t I buy a bottle?’ She went to the bar and came back with two bottles of red Rioja. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘Are you inviting me to dinner?’

  He could see she was nervous. In the car she was very bright and brittle, waving her hands around. Her flat-mates had gone for the weekend and they had the place to themselves. She drank rapidly and talked as quickly.

  He sat beside her on the sofa and instantly she got up and crossed the room and sat in one of the black leather and chrome chairs with which the place was furnished.

  She kept on topping up her glass and he said, ‘Should I go out and get something? There must be a take-away around here.’

  She found some peanuts and put them in a dish. ‘First course,’ she said, holding them out to him.

  She sat down, but got up almost instantly. ‘I think there are some crisps in the kitchen.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  She went out. Came back. ‘Sorry.’ She held out the peanuts again and he took her wrist.

  ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘You’re making me jumpy.’

  She tried to smile but her face had become frozen.

  ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ she said.

  When she came back she was wearing only a short silky kimono. She sat next to him on the sofa and took his hand and put in on her breast. It was small and firm. ‘Do you get the impression I’m trying to tell you something?’ she said, forcing brightness into her tone.

  ‘I get the impression this is a kind of experiment,’ he said.

  She held his hand and took him in to her bedroom. ‘Let me undress you,’ she said. Her speech was thick and slightly fuzzy.

  He felt her fingers on the buttons and zips of his clothes. He wanted her but not like this.

  They lay down on the bed. He put his arms around her. She felt cold. It was like embracing dead flesh.

  The knife cut was a thin white line against the smooth brown of her stomach skin. He bent and kissed it and felt her stiffen even more. One of her hands came down to cover it. He picked up the hand and kissed that too.

  ‘Now,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tell me what you like.’

  He felt her lips travel down his stomach and rolled away.

  ‘I’m frightened, Leo.’

  ‘It’ll take time. You’re like someone who’s been in a car accident. You think you’ve got to get back into a car.’

  ‘Leo, I want you to know something. He never . . . He didn’t have time . . .’

  ‘Is that what’s worrying you?’

  ‘I wanted you to know.’

  He propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at her. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I’m not going away. I’m here. Let’s just take it step by step. We’ve got all the time in the world.’

  ‘What’s the first step?’

  ‘Why don’t we try kissing each other?’

  That’s how it had been. Slow. Cautious. Mostly in the beginning it didn’t work for either of them. But they let their love for each other dictate the pace and finally they became physical lovers as well. She no longer had to get drunk.

  *

  Silver, standing lost in thought at the window of his apartment, heard a noise and turned. She had come up the stairs from the bedroom. She was dressed in the same see-through kimono with nothing on underneath. Her eyes were filled with sleep. She crossed the room without speaking and put her arms round his waist. Her head came up to his shoulder.

  In a thick, muffled voice, she said, ‘Where the hell have you been, Silver?’

  They had a second cup of coffee and, as she gradually grew into wakefulness, he told her.

  Chapter Ten

  Less than two miles away, on the opposite side of the river in Battersea, Macrae was letting himself into his house. It was a small Victorian villa, two up and two down, in a street of exactly similar terraced villas. On one was chiselled woodbury cottages 1889. Each had a little patch of garden in front, each had a bow window, each a recessed front door. At one time they had been the homes of respectable clerks and office workers. Then they would have had lace curtains and aspidistras in the front parlour. The gardens would have been filled with early bulbs and primroses.

  Now the houses looked out on dereliction. The street was dotted with the dead carcasses of stripped and rusting cars; the gardens had been covered in concrete. Where once flowers had grown, weeds sprouted, and each garden was separated from its neighbour by spindly hedges of variegated privet, their leaves, in the grey morning light, looking diseased and dirty.

  Macrae hardly noticed the street any longer. For him it was no man’s land, a place to get through into his own territory. And that territory, in the jargon of the brutal school of architecture, was called, not a home, not a house, not a dwelling, but ‘defensible space’.

  The house was dark and permeated by the smell of frying, but the wreck he had left had been cleaned up. The kitchen was tidy, the crockery washed up and put away, the piece of cheese which had so offended Frenchy, thrown out.

  He made himself a mug of coffee, put in three sugars, and went to the sitting-room. The purple curtains – a legacy of his second wife – were closed and he left them as they were. He found a whisky bottle on the floor next to the sofa where he and Frenchy had been watching TV, poured himself a dram and threw it into the back of his throat.

  She wasn’t a bad sort, Frenchy. At least she’d earned her money. She was one of those women who can’t abide untidiness, or not for long anyway. Like his mother. She’d fought a war on dirt and lost a battle each day.

  He poured himself another shot of whisky and took it at one gulp. It was the way his father had always taken it, as though it was medicine, hating the taste but wanting the effect. Macrae had seen other alcoholics drink like that. They would order a drink and leave it on the bar-top, and look at it for a long time and then pick it up and, with a shudder, drain the lot.

  Well, he wasn’t an alcoholic, Macrae told himself. He enjoyed the taste as well as the effect. He wasn’t going to be like his father. Not now. Not ever. No matter what happened to him.

  When he was a boy his father had been head keeper on the Morile Estate in Inverness-shire. It had been a wild place of hill and heather and river. The laird ran a few sheep but it was mainly a sporting estate. In summer the river was let for salmon fishing and from 12 August the moors were let for grouse shooting. In November there were the hinds to shoot and later on the stags. Hamish Macrae ran all this with great efficiency. Often he would take George with him to help.

  It was then that George began to see the two sides of his father. It was all yes sir and no sir and three bags full sir to the wealthy clients who came to fish and shoot. Often, watching them order his father about, George had felt ashamed. He had wished his father would act like a man, tell them to go to hell, or at least have the dignity of some of the other keepers he knew.

  But he wasn’t like that. He bowed and scraped to people George wouldn’t have given the time of day to – wealthy factory owners from Birmingham and Leicester who spoke in adenoidal tones and shot with expensive Purdeys. The real gentry were almost never to be seen.

  But when Hamish Macrae came down off the hill in the evenings he became a tyrant. He’d bring in mud on his great hobnailed boots, just when his wife had cleaned. He’d rant and rave about people he’d just touched his forelock to,
and take out his humiliation on his wife and son.

  It was at these times that George would avoid him. His mother could not. They fought all the time, often over George.

  He was doing well at school, was the brightest in his class. When he won a scholarship to the Academy in Aberdeen his mother was overjoyed. His father said no. What was the use of education? How did that tell you when a grouse had threadworm or how to cast a fly to tempt a running fish? He wanted George to start earning a living as soon as he could. And that was that.

  After half a bottle of whisky he wasn’t easier to live with but worse. Once he beat his wife so badly he broke her arm. It took her a long time to recover, not so much from the physical hurt but from the psychological.

  The next time he beat her – not just the slaps and blows which punctuated their daily lives, but really badly – she was found floating in the Home Pool by one of the tenants who’d gone down to catch a trout before breakfast.

  The jury at the inquest brought in a verdict of accidental death even though everyone knew she’d drowned herself.

  Six months later Hamish Macrae was felling a huge old rowan tree when it unexpectedly crashed the wrong way and killed him.

  By that time George had begun lessons in boxing. He had a fantasy that one day he would fight his father and knock him to the ground. The rowan tree saved him from that and the boxing relieved him of a pent-up aggression he sometimes thought would blow the top of his head off.

  Now, sitting on the sofa in his darkened living-room he decided, in memory of his father, not to have another drink but instead went upstairs to bed.

  He lay for a while staring at the ceiling. Part of him wanted Frenchy beside him. Or, if not Frenchy, someone, a warm body. He just wanted to touch the flesh with his fingertips to know that he was alive.

  Instead, he began to think about the dead man and how he had got where he’d been found and who would want to kill him. His mind began to go through the case step by step until finally sleep came. But just before he dozed off another thought came into his mind. It was something Wilson had said and Macrae knew he was right. Living like this without the Met to give him a background would turn him into a replica of his father – and that would be the end.

  Chapter Eleven

  Terry woke early. Light entered the stables through dusty windows. He looked down from his nest in the straw. Two of the horses were lying down, the others were standing as though asleep. He searched for a word in his limited vocabulary to describe what he was feeling about them. All he could think of was ‘kind’. They were asleep and quiet but mainly they seemed kind.

  He wished Gail could see them, perhaps even stroke them as he had done.

  He lay curled up in the straw, his arms around his knees because it was cold. He knew he would have to leave this place but did not know where to go. Soon people would come and do whatever they had to do to horses in the morning, feed them perhaps, give them water. They might need the straw that was sheltering him. He wanted to be away from there by the time someone arrived.

  He thought of the arcades where he had spent the last week playing video games. He couldn’t go there. He thought of the army surplus stores and the tourist shops where he and Gail had nicked clothes and sweets. Those would be too dangerous now. He couldn’t go back to Hungerford Bridge and he couldn’t go to the steps in Piccadilly and he couldn’t sit on a Circle Line tube all day. London, which he knew to be a vast and sprawling city, seemed to have become small and dangerous.

  Suddenly he saw the man’s face and he was filled with terror again.

  Day . . . lee . . . Day . . . lee . . .

  OK, so, it’s Daley Thompson and Jürgen Hingsen and Huntsman Collins. First day of the decathlon over, and only thirty points separating them. Now, the first event of the second day – ‘the aristocrat event’, as his grandfather had called it – the one-hundred-and-ten-metre hurdles.

  But the magic wasn’t working any longer. Huntsman Collins and the world record no longer seemed able to close his mind to what was happening to Terry Collins. Gail was the key. She would know what to do. The only trouble with Gail was that she might be zonked out.

  Once Terry had been caught sniffing glue in the toilets at school. The teacher had taken him home. His mother wasn’t there so she’d told his grandfather. She said if it happened again they’d report him to the police.

  Terry had been fearful of how his grandfather would react. He wasn’t afraid of violence. He was simply afraid of the look in the old man’s eyes.

  Garner Maitland had nodded and smiled and made no trouble and said he would take care of things and it would never happen again. Finally, the teacher had left.

  The old man, still without saying anything, had gone into Terry’s cupboard and pulled out his spikes, thrown them to him and said, ‘C’mon.’

  They had gone to the park. It was abandoned now by mothers and children because the swings and roundabouts had been vandalised and there had been several gang rapes. Parts of it were used as a dumping ground for old bedsteads and car tyres.

  In one corner of the park there was a sandpit where once children had played. Garner Maitland had marked a run-up and already Terry had used it so often that it had become worn.

  ‘Now I going to teach you the hitch-kick.’

  They spent the next two hours by themselves in the far corner of the park and Terry tried and tried to learn the hitch-kick but somehow his legs would not follow his brain until his grandfather said, ‘See it in your head, mon, before you start.’

  Terry had made a picture in his head of what he wanted to do. This time it worked – running down, taking off, the legs bicycling in the air.

  ‘That’s it, mon! You got it!’

  On the way home, through the mean streets, his grandfather mentioned drugs for the first and only time. ‘We doesn’t need drugs, Terry. We better than that.’

  Terry had never been sure what he had meant by that. Were black people better? That couldn’t be right, not from what he had seen on his own housing estate. Or athletes? And that didn’t sound right either; not with steroids. Maybe he meant that Terry and himself were better than that.

  Gail took anything: speed, smack, angel dust, acid, crack. Anything that was going. And sometimes a cocktail. He hated her then. But when she was off the drugs it was just the other way round. He wasn’t sure what love was. There was a special feeling he had had for his grandfather. He had the same feeling for Gail, only slightly different.

  He had met her through the Rat. It was his first night on the streets and he’d gone to Centrepoint, the night shelter for homeless young people in Soho. There had been several street kids hanging about the entrance. The Rat had come up to him and been friendly. He’d offered him a drink from his can of Heineken. Terry had been vulnerable then. He’d been scared, even though he was putting a brave face on it. He’d never slept rough before and didn’t know how to go about it. But he’d heard of Centrepoint, so he’d gone there.

  ‘You’re never sixteen,’ the Rat had said. ‘You’ve got to be sixteen before they’ll take you. Otherwise they go to the police.’

  That was the last thing Terry wanted, especially after what he’d done to the classroom.

  ‘I can get you money,’ the Rat had said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘You see that punter over there?’ He pointed to a well-dressed City type holding a brief-case, standing near the doorway to Centrepoint looking at his watch and pretending he was waiting for someone. ‘He’ll give you a tenner.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Doing what he wants.’

  Terry paused. He had heard of this, of course. You couldn’t grow up as he had without knowing. But he didn’t like the idea. On the other hand he wanted the money.

  ‘I could probably get you fifteen. A coupla punters a day, maybe three, and you’d be rolling in it.’

  ‘Fifteen?’ He felt nervous but didn’t show it. The whole point was never to show it.

 
; But what would his grandfather have said? He couldn’t even imagine. Yes, he could. But his grandfather was gone. He felt a kind of confused anger. He was gone and Terry was here. Left on his own. For he did not count his family. It would teach his grandfather a lesson. Teach them all a lesson.

  And then Gail had come up to them and held out a can of beer to Terry. ‘I haven’t seen you here before,’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t been here before.’

  He took a mouthful from the can. He didn’t really like the taste of beer but this wasn’t the time to go into that.

  ‘I’m just telling him how to make it,’ the Rat said.

  Gail was short and thin with cropped brown hair. She wore, as they all seemed to, a track suit and trainers. Her face was spotted by acne but her smile was open and warm.

  ‘Make it? Like you? You’re bloody positive!’ She turned to Terry. ‘He’s positive. Been on the game since he was twelve.’

  He hadn’t understood her then, but later he came to understand that ‘positive’ meant HIV-positive and he had washed his mouth and lips from contact with the Rat’s beer can.

  ‘I got a fiver on the trains,’ she said. ‘You want something to eat?’

  Terry was hungry. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

  Afterwards she asked him where he was going to doss and when he said he didn’t know she said, ‘You’ll die out there. You better come with me.’

  She took him away from the West End to the dark empty streets of Westminster near the Tate Gallery. There, in the basement area of a block of old mansion flats which were being demolished, she showed him a small den where the refuse bins had once been stored.

  He hardly slept that night. Each time he woke he sensed that Gail was awake too. Once or twice he turned and looked at her. Each time she was watching him.

  The following day they hung around together. It was assumed, without any discussion, that this would be the pattern. She took him to the right shops to nick things and soon he was wearing a brand new track suit and trainers. He was warm for the first time since leaving home.

  She had also taken him to a camping store and they had stolen a sleeping bag and a plastic groundsheet and she had brought him back with her to her lair under Hungerford Bridge.