Manners

by Robert Newman

  The centre of this estate is a large square of patchy grass, green and brown like army camouflage. Some scrawny white kids are sitting on a couple of comfy-looking leather armchairs liberated long ago from some derelict flat. The sunshine has dried the mould out of them.

  'All right, cunt … stubble?' says one of the kids. I put both hands on my belly and move it up and down in a Beano ho ho ho. Already pissing themselves at the great pun, they continue to laugh as if my put-down was just me making a prat of myself.

  I cross a huge, burnt-out patch of pagan cinder the size of a centre-circle: what mammoth bonfire was this? The superlightness of silvery cinders on my boots (I remembered the right footwear today) is very satisfying — perhaps in contrast to the heavy adrenalin thickening my legs. I head their way. That's important: never obey their force-fields. IGNORE ALIEN ORDERS as the sticker on Joe Strummer's guitar used to say.

  The way they're looking at me … To these kids the uniform's a joke. Fancy dress. Now I know why I don't feel mad walking around in uniform: the slags look at me EXACTLY THE SAME as they always did, when I was on home beat. A look that says: why the fuck is he wandering around in that fucking garb? Dispossessed youth look at all policemen as if they were unofficial. I feel exactly the same as when I was official.

  I pass some teenage girls shouting on the top of garage roofs. Short skirts. They start throwing handfuls of gravel at me. 'Do you wanna shag her, you skinny fucking nonce!'

  I keep my head steady. A gravel asteroid, clumpy with gooey asphalt, whacks me hard in the cheek. I walk on like it hasn't happened, but can feel how some gluey bits of dusty grit have stuck on my face.

  'Ah, he's simple,' shouts one.

  I walk on, unruffled by their laughter. I think I handled that quite well.

  Fucking bitches! Losers! I earn over twenty grand a year! They've got nothing! Nothing! No future. Nothing! I wish I'd … I wish I'd coolly turned round and said, 'Oh, by the way, enjoy your lives of crushing poverty and being left on your own when you're up the stick at seventeen, won't you?' I've got a Dolce & Gabbana suit! I've got design furniture! I've been to university! I've got talent at my job! Fucking loser cow slapper slags!!!

  Back on residential streets, a private-mortgage Georgian terrace. What a frustrating day. No progress made. No nearer to finding the street that feels evil or the broken bridge, and all the time the depressing sense that I might be walking through it all the time. And then those kids.

  I overtake a middle-class mum belabouring her six-year-old son into wonder. 'Look at the beautiful bright-blue fence, Arthur. That's almost an azure, isn't it?' She's read all about how you have to talk to kids as if they're adults, and yet — surprise, surprise — the invaded boy is sullen and unresponsive. 'Do you want ciabatta for lunch?'

  'Leave him alone,' I say in passing.

  She looks stunned, shocked. And when I'm a few yards ahead I hear, 'I beg your pardon!'

  I turn round. 'And give him a proper name, for fuck's sake — a kid's name.'

  *

  A red Sierra stops. The driver puts a clipboard on his lap to correlate some bullshit sales flow chart. He hasn't seen me and dumps a McDonald's carton and wrapping and thick-shake cup out the window on to the pavement. I scoop these up and throw them back in his window.

  A few blocks later I have a terrible sense of winding down as the trail goes cold and I'm left in fancy dress.

  The man drives an Isuzu jeep. Dry, brittle, light-brown hair in a side-parting. A bitter expression on his face. A young, black lad in an Escort hasn't noticed that Jeepster is trying to turn off the road. Jeepster moves his hand over the horn, changes his mind, mouthing curses instead behind silent glass: 'Fucking nigger.' The way his face settles back into the sediment of bile it lives in is truly bad. I know how his mind works: seeing evil in the everyday.

  He finally pulls out on to Fortess Road, exasperatedly belabouring the power-steer, snatching the stick. Stepping into the road, I hold up my hand like a lord. Spot check.

  'Pull in over there, please. Thank you.'

  'What fucking now?' says his giveaway face. Yes, that's right, life is designed just to thwart you. You with your money-for-nothing, beefy four-wheel drive.

  'What? What did I do?' he asks.

  'Turn off the ignition please, sir.'

  'What, what for?' Wide-eyed, incredulous.

  'Step out the car, please. Have you got some proof of ID?' Fawn linen suit, Pony sweatshirt.

  'Yeah,' he sighs heavily, in the desert of his long and testing odyssey, his religious ordeal, the fucking muppet. His right hand goes to his jacket side-pocket. Peek-a-boo. He drops a black leather wallet back in his pocket again. Doh!

  'No,' he says. That's me fooled! Smiling into his eyes to distract him, my left hand dips his wallet.

  'No, this'll do,' I cheerily remark. No longer a question of what he's got that he shouldn't have, only of where. If I hadn't known it was there just now, I might have given up. But as seven fanfare trumpeters stand behind him and remove the bannered brass from their lips for the red-liveried toastmaster to announce: Possession of Controlled Substance, I take out all his business cards one by one until I find the wrap.

  'Coke?'

  'I don't know how it got there.'

  'Oh, well on your way, then … ' He actually makes to move. (No sense of irony!) 'No, really,' I say, grabbing his knobbly, hairy wrist.

  Driving home in his car it turns out he works for a record label.

  'This isn't a police station,' he objects, looking around my flat.

  'It's a station-house.'

  'I won't tell anyone,' he offers. 'If you let me go I won't tell anyone.'

  'Sit down, please.' We sit down facing each other across the wooden table.

  He looks around the room with fast, twitchy movements. I suspect he's recently done some of the controlled substance because he seems very paranoid, nervy, agitated, and as I stand up to put the kettle on he near jumps out of his skin.

  If I'd arrested him before I was self-employed, I'd have had to process him under the statutory, recognized crime and let everything else go. I would've had to arrest A1 Capone for tax evasion. Whereas in my present position as a locum, I am able to charge him with the real wrong-doing, the spiritual one.

  'When you look at ancient paintings,' I tell him in a friendly village desk-sergeant manner, 'Tutankhamun, statues, Red Indians — their faces have got a calm pride, a dignified, placed bearing. But modern faces are all sullen and resentful — like yours. Which is why you're here.'

  I've obviously hit a nerve here, as he puts the offending face in his hands and starts breathing heavily, trying to huff and puff off the capitalist mask.

  And now his guilt seems to kind of turn this flat into an actual station house somehow anyway. 'And it would've been actually more polite to beep,' I point out.

  'Yes,' he says, 'but you don't know what the reaction will be, do you? Everyone's ego's so brittle, all at snapping point.'

  'Whose egos are these, then?' I ask. He only scowls. 'You're putting your problem — fear — on to him; you're making your weakness his fault.'

  'No. Black people are under more pressure and they've been more devalued by society and friends of mine have beeped black people and paid the price, so it's not racist to assume … that it's not clever to bang the horn.'

  '"Fucking nigger."'

  'What is this?'

  'Expecting the worst from everyone and finding it. Seeing yourself, self-pityingly, as wronged — that's how malice breeds, that's how people like you — ' My up-and-down hand gesture includes his suit, his middle-class, middle-aged face, the expression of self-righteousness which he wasn't actually wearing any more, to tell the truth, but which was why I'd arrested him. 'That's how people like you end up committing crimes. Most people who do wrong don't think they started it. They all see themselves as finally striking back. You only see what fits into how you see things. There they go, the avaricious, demonically energetic youn
g estate criminals. The "new brutal breed". But maybe the lad just hadn't seen you, pal.'

  He looked at his tea but didn't drink it. I suppose the drug puts you off hot drinks. I let him off with a caution and now that's done it's nice just to kick back and chat for a while.

  'I've been thinking a lot about fear lately … ' (He was a good listener, as it turned out. Nodding attentively a lot.) 'Well, being a policeman, it comes into your mind, just like in your job you probably find yourself thinking about, I dunno, er, drums or whatever — '

  'Yes, yes, you're right, you're right.'

  'Anyway, I was thinking about how, when you say, "It was one of those Friday nights with something evil in the air," it's not.'

  'Yes, yes.'

  'It's not different at all. What's different is that your cocoon against chaos and the ugliness of the world has got dislodged slightly, temporarily, and you get an inkling of all the wild forces of the world.'

  'Yes, that's absolutely right.' He's saying this such a lot that it's embarrassing. But I smile, pleased that he's understood straight off without me having to go into a long, involved explanation. I suppose at the back of my mind is the worry that the ideas I've been brewing in long isolation might be eccentric. So him agreeing with me so readily is a good sign.

  'You can go now,' I announce. He stands up and backs out nodding. Very respectful. That's nice, too. I smile, turning my hands up at the wrists and say, 'Just don't end up back here again. OK?'

  Control

  Now he's gone I turn on the scanner while I fix a coffee. Someone dialling. I hear the eight-note chasing melody before the purr-purr, purr-purr, purr-purr. No one home.

  *

  I catch a couple of calls where the flickering signal's so weak it holds for just a sentence, a snatch: 'Hold on, I'm going under a tunnel … Hello? Hello?' Static. Scan down. I hear the weary sighs of what I guess to be a couple of fat geezers. Heavy, burdened huffs and puffs, groans and tuts carry on throughout this call. Not the same blokes as before but it might as well be. All hail to thee, my old friends! The Brotherhood of Reluctant Fishermen!

  just heard the, er, weather forecast. Said its gonna be fine'

  'What, tommorrer?'

  'Tomorrer … '

  'Sounds like we'll have to go '

  [Tutting.] 'It looks that way.'

  'Fuckin' tench, though.'

  I let the scanner run to automatic, flailing through the kilohertz until it picks up a strong signal. There's a woman up on some Sunderland estate talking to her man who's working down in London on the sites. Lonely, tearful, horny, she's worried about him meeting 'some fancy tart doon en Loondun. Just coom up now.'

  'Oh, aye, I'll coom oop oan mi private jet ah've got parked opp at Heathrow.'

  'Ah wish you fucking did'

  Maybe I imagined the end and the broken bridge.

  'Take a sick,' she says.

  'I hope you ent serious.'

  Was it Satan in my own echoey head urging me out on to the streets at night with all this chaos and rage in me, knowing more than I do about what I could do? Such a mystical landscape: broken bridges, the sacrificial lamb, the promised land — did I imagine it?

  'Just think of all the things ah cood do fah you in the mahnin' if you were heeah with me nahw,' she tries, going all husky.

  'Just think of all the things ah coodent do fah you if ah didn't have a job.'

  Perhaps this voice so tired of waiting is the brother to a repressed, homicidal fury of my own. If Kieran was here he'd say that, dopey with redundancy, I needed a purpose and just heard something that wasn't there. Static crackle and fizz now. I watch LCD numbers tumble down the FM, looking for trouble.

  'We only seen him, but your phone was off — we followed as far as Holloway Road … '

  'Did yer see where he lives?'

  'No, I got fucking stop-and-searched didn't I?'

  'Was you holding?'

  'Yeah, but the dibble never took me cap off and it's always in the lining.'

  'Keep it under yer hat.'

  'Oh, something else altogether — is that your cap I found at mine with like the criss-cross-checks pattern inside?'

  'Oh yeah, yeah.'

  'I'll bring it round with the ... '

  'All right'

  'There's like a bloodstain in it and it's in like the shape of a tree.'

  'Oh yeah, that's from — you were there — up the slaughteryard that time, remember, when – '

  The scanner loses the wavelength in my shaking hand. Holloway Road! I was there yesterday! Maybe I saw the killers! Maybe I saw the victim. The lamb. No, not the lamb, that's a pub. The Lamb. The Lamb and Flag. Get it together. Stop your head reeling. Think. By following my divining plod and these strange, mystical clues I've scored a near-hit. I must be doing something right.

  In A Field Of Retired Police Horses

  Don't want to get eyeballed by police or thieves, friends or enemies. But I can't stay out of relief now they're going to murder someone. I live walking distance from division. The scanner only picks up calls where one of the people talking is within a two-or three-mile radius. This means I traverse relief borders with my trail. What can I do? The Lamb and Flag is here, the slaughteryard is, I now know, thanks to Kyle, the back yard of one of the clubs in the area (although it could be a club in town where one of my two persons unknown works).

  Other officers, the Super even, all warned me about living so close to work and now I see their point. Two close calls in two days. Yesterday on Willesden Lane I saw two cops across the street before they saw me. I ran towards them pretending that I'd chased someone out of my relief into theirs. 'He's gone down that way!' I yelled, TCI male, twenties. Go round there!' They paused a second then gave it toes down the alley to head him off behind the deserted cinema. I ran round the block the other way, stopped, turned round and headed for Kilburn leaving the two officers to listen for the sound of one pincer clapping. Meanwhile this ICI male in his late twenties stopped in Iverson Road, hands on knees, out of breath, and bitterly reflected that I was only there in the first place because I had had to take a tediously round-the-Wrekin route after I saw a parked-up patrol car effectively blocking the route I'd planned to the Lamb and Flag.

  And this afternoon I was walking down Warren Street — and I was only there because the two Kilburn cops had knocked me off course again! — when two vigilant WPCs came conferring and frowning towards me. I told them I'd just been giving evidence at Marylebone Crown Court. Oh right, sorry, of course, lovely day. We chatted on some more, whilst scanning the street, keeping one eye on the civilians, those others. I got in my car which was parked up by Regent's Park and I'm still driving. Everything seems to be conspiring to frustrate me in my mission. And as if time wasn't against me anyway!

  Still driving I don't know where now.

  An old Italian woman in black sits on her front wall on this A-road. Her brown, deep-lined, thin face looks baffled, lost. Growing up south of Basilicata in a one three-wheeled-van town this was what old people did. Sit out front in the late afternoon. But it ain't happening. Where's her knot of headscarved widows? Where they at? Where's Hortensio the onetime communista mayor, now a smallholder with a scandalous love-life? All her hella gioventu this is what she seen the old folks do. After grappa and draughts you sit outside. Part of something. Not now, not here. Baffled as red, blue and pastel cars shoot the breeze from third to fourth. But the old Italian widow is made in the shape of her old life and knows no other. She is one of history's loose ends; history stared at her one sunny day in Calabria and still has her on his retina now that he looks at an overcast AI.

  Beverley phoned last night. After a few seconds it was clear she doesn't know about my suspension and the man I killed. Sub judice has kept my name out of the papers. She doesn't know. It's weird her calling up and not knowing, like a late arrival ding-a-linging the doorbell at Cicelio Drive five minutes after the Manson murders, standing on the doorstep with a bottle of Liebfraumilch and saying
, 'I hope I'm not too late.'

  I shan't tell her. It'll be nice to be the man I was. To be innocent. To still look like a good man. For an interlude, at least.

  Through the chain-link fence of a land-refill site I glimpse a half-buried strip of dirty white shirt tugged at by the breeze, the gentle wind toying with a project of excavation.

  I've been wondering where I'm going exactly as suburb leads to dual carriageway, but driving up a slip-road and on to a bridge now, I know that I'm headed for the field of retired police horses.

  On one of our first dates she drove us ten miles to the field of retired police horses at whose fence I'm standing now, the light failing in the chilly sky. Last time I was here, when I came with Beverley, there were a dozen horses. Now there's only one.

  There is an unexpected beauty here about this field with its lone retired police horse near a big roundabout junction off the MI; the huge horse and a moon loitering in the day sky having missed the shuttle. Massive reddy-brown horse with a stiff, matted, off-white fringe. A long white tail which is ginger again at the end like it had grown out its blond roots. A bathtub in the middle of the green field is his trough of nettle-soup.

  I vault the gate and go up to the horse. Now the low orange sun makes an acid bath of the trough-water. 'Where the others? Where your mates, eh?'

  It's fucking enormous. Nine-foot tall with a tyrannosaurus head. I have a stab at patting the side of its big suede jaw. There's meant to be some way of doing this, isn't there? What is it? From the side so they can see you? I try it. Pat pat. He flinches, then throws his head right up. Maybe it's not from the side, after all. I mean, you're very close to their eyes like that and that's got to make them nervous. I'm nervous too. He can smell it. Wheels away. Canters off ten yards or so. I turn and walk back from the middle of the field to the fence. He follows. Catches up. Drops his muzzle — bang — right on my shoulder. I jump and yelp. He wants to bite my ear off. I run a few steps. The horse runs a few steps. Overtakes. I change course. Don't want to be behind his Wang Chung hams. Head out the field another way, walking but sharpish. He blocks my way, standing side on. Immovable object. I try patting his side. We've got off on the wrong foot; here, let's be friends: guy patting horse in field. OK? He thrashes his head at me in furious zigzags. I jump out of my skin, screaming, 'Fuck off!'