I cut through an evil alley streaked with reeky piss and broken bottles. They say you can pass a hundred negative ions through a thing and then just one positive ion and suddenly it's positive, the electro-magnetic charge reversed. On night patrol I always felt like I was the positive ion, a one-man Reclaim the Night march — like those sisters did that time. This alley feels evil but it's not a street and they definitely said that evil street. Let it draw me to it, let it pull my negative ions. Where was I?
The way I imagine evil is like nitrogen or carbon and we are semi-permeable membranes for it. It's in the air, all around us. It enters us in different compounds. Little things we do can make its existence take or perish, and it leaks into us also through the system, spores grown in the shadow of big business, like industrial poisons leaked into the high-profit water supply.
One freezing winter's day I had to do Public Order outside an asbestos factory. Didn't really need to be there 'cos the demonstrators were peaceable, middle-aged mums lobbying about something this asbestos factory had done thirty years ago. Victolic Asbestos, the company was called. That's right. A truncheon charge being out of the question, I started chatting with the goodly mums. Back in the 1960s, they told me, before the effects of asbestos were made public, the asbestos factory used to leave piles of the stuff in the street. The children of the estate played in the white sandpit, silvery-white dust running through their fingers. Tyre-marks from Raleigh Choppers on its edges, rubbing white sand in the face of the new kid. Playing Best Man Dead clutching an invisible gun-shot wound to the chest, falling from garage roof on to ash-white, rough-cut powder. Clark's commandos jumping off the high wall, landing on all fours up to knee and elbow, puffed out clambering free. Breathing it every day. On windy days it hid in hair and knitted jumpers, settled on kitchen window-sills by food scraps left for birds.
Thirty years on, the prizes in the Best Man Dead competition go to silicosis, lung cancer and asbestosis. And this winter's day there were all these middle-aged mums demonstrating outside to get compensation and recognition for the fallen. Victolic Asbestos, meanwhile, were lawyered up and fighting the women's claim. And there was me, as usual, standing between protest and property.
Maybe evil's a bit like that invisible asbestos, in the air every day. Growing up on the Cromwell Estate, say, or Cannoncourt, there's more evil in the air, more evil in you being there: the greed of big business which insists on a system where profits are privatized and costs socialized. So they breathe the cynical air like asbestos. This may in a few cases lead to a powerful immunity, but in most it just means you're breathing in more evil every day. A force of its own, evil mulitplies like cancer cells, a force of its own, a rip-tide.
It would be good if we could see the swirls and spores of evil, if we could see evil in the air, how it forms and bonds on a sub-molecular level within and without us. To see how every time you go with an instinct it gets stronger; every time you deny an instinct it gets weaker.
A tiny hardening of the heart in a towel-flicking City boy as he gang-bangs the currency to free up some more chips for the Bundes-casino, the job-wrecker's allowance. Follow the swirls and spores down to the brown mould dotted with black on the filthy air-vent windows of the school, the dripping roof and the tattered books.
At my first nick in Liverpool they had helicopters with thermal-imaging night-sights. They felt they could see evil at the infra-red end of the spectrum, the robber hiding in a hedge, his ultra-scanned bad soul panting away in ultraviolet night. And that was what was wrong about the chopper cops. That's when I felt like one of those pathetic fucking brown-uniform shopping-mall security men. That's one of the reasons I transferred down to the Met. to join the scruffiest and the best.
When I'm walking the evil is out there; when I stop moving it's in me.
Across the street, a young woman hurries home with the intent purposefulness of lone women at night, leaning forward in the italicized body language: 'NO.' Behind her is a pub called the Lamb and Flag. I stare at the sign of a lamb holding a pennant in a raised front paw. The lamb. I stop. My heart starts bumping. This is what the scanner killers meant by 'lamb'. Not lamb as in innocent, unsuspecting victim. It's here. I walk up to the pub, shut now. A makeover ex-pub with a cappuccino machine and wine prices chalked on a blackboard for flash top-boys.
I cut through the alley beside the Lamb and Flag and find myself on the Rockingham. Grass sprouts through the slabs as council punishment for all the trouble they cause.
I hesitate when I see him. Me, not him. He looks at me curious. I carry on towards him. Heart beating some more.
'Mr Trevorrow.'
A pause, a puzzled look on his face. 'Mr Manners.'
'How are you?'
'Yeah, I'm fine.' He takes me by the arm, and leads me round a corner into a smashed chain-link five-a-side patch of crumbly, spent Tarmac.
'How ya doing?' he asks, looking right into me.
'OK.' A pause.
'Ah, um, are you allowed … I didn't know you were allowed to wear trainers.'
Oh shit. Through my rising neck-flush I manage to say, 'It's a new thing. They should be black though, you're right. I better go back and change them.'
'I suppose you wanna search me then?' he suggests, raising both arms to let the tailor take a chest measurement.
'Er, yeah.'
I run my palms over his skinny torso, under the back of his jacket, over his knobbly cotton spine.
Kyle checks left while I'm doing this. Nothing found. I step back, but he leaves his arms up scarecrow-stance. So I step forward again and pat down his pockets, only just remembering to mumble, 'Got any sharps?'
'Eh?'
'Got any sharps?'
'No. No sharps.'
At Hem Corner, however, I find a wrap. I slide my hand through the busted lining. (I know his coat better than my own, its stash-flaps and ripped lining.) A gram of charlie in my hand. A tiny, folded envelope cut-out from a colour A-Z.
Kyle lowers his arms. I look around. Look back at him. Look around.
'That's your car there,' he says.
So it is. The unmarked purple Astra. I've come round on myself. Full circle. And didn't even know it.
He checks over his left shoulder again. Can't see anything myself.
We drive. We drive right past the station. We carry on driving.
'Where we going?' he asks casually. Chipper.
He knows.
How long has he known?
He's known all along.
He knows.
'How come you got in the car?' I ask.
'Someone.'
'Who?'
'Someone just round the corner.'
'Who?'
'Tony Andrew.'
'How did you know he was just round the corner?'
'I just been round the corner.'
'Why? What were you doing?'
'I can't tell you that.' The car stops at the lights.
'No. OK. You were with him?'
'I said "Hello."' We both stare at the red light, waiting for it to change. 'I was glad you killed that shitcunt Lee Andrew.'
'I didn't "kill" him.'
'Well then they buried the wrong man.' Feel him look over at me a couple of times. Farringdon Road. 'I was there that night.'
'You saw it?'
'No, I was just in the mob that piled round right at the end.' Clerkenwell Road. 'Where we going?' he asks, mildly curious.
'Smithfield. I've got to check out a reference in someone's statement to what they called the slaughteryard. It might be around here, it might not.'
'The slaughteryard?'
'Yeah.'
'How do you know about that?'
'Eh?'
'That's what bouncers call the bit like the back-yard of a club where they beat up the other gang.'
'Who calls it that?'
'I dunno, it's lyrics, innit? Everyone. Many clubs. It's like, you know, the slaughteryard. I dunno, maybe they call it other things other pla
ces. You know about that! Ha!'
I follow the brown heritage sign for Smithfield.
'Yea-es,' says Kyle. I follow his gaze. A film-shoot. Or maybe a TV-shoot. Smithfield meat market is closed now but they are using its colonnades for a film. Blue light. A spray of fake snow on the cobbles. Trucks, wires, actors — ha! cops and robbers. 'We gotta check this out!'
'OK,'I say.
'Go dere!' he says, American.
Kyle buys two cups of tea from the catering truck.
'How many sugars is that?' I ask.
'I dunno — four, five.'
We sit on the steps shielded from everything except the film-set by a lorry on which G.E. Stowell Theatrical Costumiers is written heraldically.
'This is better, innit?'
'Yes, thanks,' I reply.
Actors with napkin make-up bibs sit around between takes. We stare at the sorry cop — all wrong — and at the woefully Pete-Tong black 'villain'.
'Dem ah fink we're extras, ha! ha! ha!' It used to piss me off when Kyle, a few years younger, used to talk Yardie shit, but now he's being ironic, or it's just an occasional trope.
I take off my helmet and put it between my feet on the step. Holding the hot cup with my fingertips, I balance my tea on the helmet, swivelling styrofoam cup on silver tit.
With a heavy smack it split-smashes on the pavement and my shoes. I groan.
Kyle gets up. I watch him stroll over to the catering van and sweet-talk Miss Southend 1971 in the hatch. He ambles back and hands me the full, fresh cup wordlessly. He kicks the shitty split and spilt cup into the pavement, toeing it once, twice and into the gutter; wipes a tiny brown tea-splash from his Timberlands and throws the balled napkin into the gutter, where it lies at the mouth of the stained and disgraced ex-cup.
'Why did you get me out of the danger zone back there?' I ask. 'Why are you helping me?'
'No reason.'
'Right.'
'I dunno.'
'Oh.'
'I dunno, I seen you do a cool thing once.'
'Yeah?'
'Yeah. You was trying to calm down this old Jamaican drunk who'd been thrown out the betting-shop on, ah, Junction Road, and then this black like graduate-type comes by — little round, gold specs, you know, intellectual-brother-to-the-rescue sketch. "What are you doing with this man, I have a law degree, you know." Now when I've seen this sketch before, the dibble's got humpy and it's like, "Back out, this is none of your business." But you were like, "Oh, I'm glad you're here. Can you sort this out for me?" He starts talking to the old drunk feller and then you just like left them together.' Kyle started laughing.
'What you up to?'
'Me?' he asks. 'I'm fully changed. Well, maybe not fully, but I'm not — I'm at college and well into consciousness-raising.'
'Same course as Tony Andrew?'
He looks at me balefully. 'What — just 'cos I was talking to him? You can't just decide that you've thought better of the past and it doesn't exist. It's always there and looking to jib into your now, innit? It's like you can't give up smoking after fifty years and say, "Right, I'm a healthy guy now," you know? All the old years are still looking for their main chance in the present, in the now. Tony Andrew … I mean, I live on the estate, too, innit? But that's not — I'm not the person you think you know.'
'No?'
'Got fined and one year probation so I thought, "Well, which way now?" That was in August, and in September I signed on to a course. I'm doing Politics at North London University there. And I'm well into it, too. Bang into it. ARM. All that.'
'What's that?'
'African Reparation Movement. Moneys owing to us from all the years of slavery and exploitation, 'cos all the European and American wealth is built up on stolen labour and stolen land.'
'But it wasn't like all Europe … I mean, at the same time as slavery was going on you had your Lancashire cotton-mill workers who were slaves, white slaves, and children as well — nine, ten; and you had the king's army wiping out all the Highland tribes in Scotland, and the Irish. So what, you gonna have everyone except ... '
'You're saying it's not black and white — literally — but that's a white tactic — it's only not black and white because you throw in the grey to stop anything getting done,' he says as a grey four-a.m. dawn makes the lighting man stare up at the heavens with godless calculation. 'You can always say "What about? What about?" but two wrongs don't make a right and you start with the Big Wrong.'
'But if you say I can't say "What about?" then I can't argue.'
'Right! So shut up!' he grins. I take the lid off my tea. 'Careful now,' he says, 'you know what happened to the last one.'
'Yeah, yeah,' I murmur and am struck by how much I sound like old Duty Inspector Mickey. Now of all times when I'm not even trying. Now after all to be like my old sardonic skipper. Yeah, yeah.
They are breaking up the scene, gutting the arc lights and hushing the buzzing generator dead. They unplug and wind up cables, sweep fake snow into the gutter. Discussing and logging. A fit-looking young woman wearing a headset goes round speaking to all the cast individually to remind each of a small but important thing. She's told them all, and now she comes to a stop on her own; looks around for a bit, then falls into a trance.
'I dunno,' I pick up, 'my girlfriend Beverley — she has all these weird, strange angles — '
'And strange boyfriends.'
'Ex-boyfriend.'
'You an ex-everything!'
'I hear that man!'
'"I hear that man!"' he sneers.
'Well, this is it, that's just it … that's what Beverley's always saying. She says that white people, we love it whenever a black person gives us like a high-five or the black handshake or gives it, "You're broad"; We love that shit. We love all that stuff so much, she says, we love it so much you should start charging. And she reckons if you charged for it — you know, five quid for a "respeck" or a (I do the fist-thing) 'that would wipe out the poverty gap right there.'
'Ha ha ha … Yeah! In a day!' he says, 'She's broad.'
'Isn't she?'
Right by us two women push a clothes rail up a wooden ramp on to the lorry. A pair of bloodstained jeans, an empty police uniform in dry-cleaner's polythene, leather jackets, a clear, plastic bag full of old shoes labelled with cardboard name tags like corpses' toes. A man pulls up the battered ramp, jumps off the back of the lorry and drags down the shutter with a skiffly washboard sound. Sitting here with Kyle behind the wardrobe truck, it's like we met kind of backstage; like playing football between the trenches on Christmas Day.
'Why didn't you stop?' Kyle suddenly says. The silence kinks and sags.
'Oh … oh … Hmm.'
'What's going on?'
''Cos I knew I was innocent, and why wait, you know … I dunno.'
'Or 'cos you didn't know you were innocent,' he said.
The Theatrical Costumiers truck heaves up on its tonsil sparks, shudders all through and pulls off.
Suddenly exposed, we're backstage no more. First light.
Across the street are some faces walking from drum'n'bass to a bagel. Just out of Turnmills or the ECI, probably.
Kyle and me stand up simultaneously. We don't know them, but they are the sort that we might. Might have. Once. We remember ourselves, we remember where we are. With the sudden frost of a film-set snowfall, we turn to face each other. 'Take care,' he says.
'Thanks. You all right to get home?'
'Yeah, yeah.'
I put my helmet back on. Looking down I tut bitterly at my wrong pumps.
We shake hands — in the European style, but with a Colombian joy buzzer palmed from soft, moist to hard, dry palm. Kyle nods as if that's only right.
*
Driving home. I know Tony Andrew's after me, and I know that all the time I search for the murder of the lamb it puts me at risk of a beating from him, but that's never stopped me doing my duty before.
Never Walk Alone
On Holloway Roa
d every male I see in his mid-to late twenties I think, 'This could be him, this could be the victim.' Every male in his mid-to late twenties I think, 'This could be the killer.' Every male in his mid-to late twenties I'm almost 100 per cent sure is neither killer nor victim.
In spitting rain outside an Italian deli, I see a massive artic lorry with foreign number plates parked up for deliveries. They have rolled the lorry's black plastic side-panel all the way up to reveal a field of fresh-cut straw containing two hundred jumbo water melons, and a woman. The side-panel hasn't been opened since southern Italy and here's all this goodness laid open to a wet and blustery Hornsey. A melon in each arm, she rolls a third up her leg.
A lot of the time I'm on a pavement that I don't even realize is a bridge, like here by Kentish Town station. Anywhere with a high wall might be a bridge. I'm all confused again, like a divining rod twitcher in the rain. It's like one minute I'm led on by what looks like a bridge, the next I'm lurching to trace a street that feels evil, or even looking for a cigarette butt on the pavement. It's all crazy and insipid. I should settle on one thing per day or per hour. But it's hard to settle on one thing when the clues are so … nothing.
*
I've been walking for two hours with a lung-puncturing depression. I think I'm in Clapton, but then again, maybe that's just how it feels when you're this low.
Chilly sunshine on an evil street in a run-down meaningless council sprawl. The spirit of a place like this estate whose name I don't know gives me a crushing, ugly, reality overload that makes everything else look like padding, lagging. It makes everything else — music, Beverley, telly — all look like a precarious distraction. The denizens are mean and hard-faced and have glib rationalizations for the evil they do, like the glib tones of the politicians who rationalized them. Council semis sprawling over a few run-down roads. Half the houses are boarded up, one with a crater in the roof like a direct hit from aerial bombardment.
The only people who avoid us are the decent ones. That's how you know who's on the firm: there's no chance anyone would think they're informing, so they can come out and talk. But not the good people. A retired man up-ending the grass he's cut from the lawn-mower bucket keeps his head down. It doesn't do for him to be seen talking to me. What gives the estate a feel of evil rampant: the cowed, defeated faces of the law-abiding. Too scared to ask next door to turn down the banging techno, they try to concentrate on Gay Byrne on The Late, Late Show as if the noise from next door was just a fault with the transmitter in a poor reception area.
Manners Page 17
