I nod. I try to say 'ma'am,' but for some reason can't get the word out and a strangled lowing noise comes from me. 'Mmmmaaaaa! mmmmmmaaa!' Braying like a crushed donkey.
I walk away with Mickey.
'Right,' he says, 'this is how it is. You go home now, bring back the car and the uniform. You understand why we've got to have them back today, don't you?' I nod. 'OK, see yer in a shiver.'
'Hey, Mickey, tell me that story about the iron bar again?'
'No, John,' he says, slowly shaking his head. 'No. No. No.'
There's a sort of charisma about the slow way he shakes his head, and so I start doing it too.
I make my own way out the nick. Weirdly, I don't see a soul right until I'm almost outside. I open a door with a poster on it warning about walk-in thieves in the workplace.
It's not the usual front desk: building renovations mean that half the station, including front desk, is in Portakabins. Uncle Jess is on the desk.
'Hi John,' he says, before disappearing under the desk burrowing through folded blue jumpers, helmets, phone books and scraps of paper. Even though him doing that is just a coincidence, of course, it reminds me of how in gangster films the barkeeper ducks down below the optics when there's a hit on.
'Hi Uncle,' I say. Meaning 'Bye.'
And with that, I'm out the front in the chilly sunshine.
*
A 134 at the bus-stop. I get on. Take me home. We putter up the high street. I stand up for home. Ding-ding. Round twelve. A father-and-son team get up ahead of me. The kid is only about twelve but sports a cloth cap. I think that's pretty individual of him. Only twelve but with his own style. No Nike or Arsenal cap for him. A flat cap. Our eyes meet briefly as we queue in the stalled gangway before the bus docks. Only twelve, his dark eyes are old with brown bags in the sallow skin beneath them.
I step off, concertina doors hiss shut behind me. A little way away the boy waits while his dad takes an empty Evian bottle out his canvas haversack, puts it in the bin, and then rejigs the haversack on his shoulders. It was hot on the bus, and here in the cold outdoors the boy removes his flat cap to scratch his bald head. Leukaemia. A novice in the Order of Chemotherapy. Here and there is a frizzy twist of light-brown nearly-hair, like settled dust. He presses his cloth cap back in place on his dome, smooths it down with the junior hollow of both palms and rejoins the pedestrians.
*
My keys still work in the front door. Chewing the edge of my bus ticket I get changed. Mickey'll be impressed seeing me all laid-back in natty threads. Grey cords, baggy V-neck, loafers. But I'm sorry, Mickey, I can't take the uniform back. Not today. Just the car for now, Mickey.
I park the purple Astra in the pound for the last time and walk in through the side door. A loud voice familiar and unexpected as a positive thought. 'Johnny!'
'Kieran! All right mate?'
An arm around my neck, and a stubbly kiss on my cheek. 'Ma pigga!'
'What's that?' I ask, looking at the hypo in his hand. 'Fuckin' druggie cunts,' he says. 'Becca's pulling out the kiddie seat from the back of the car, and she feels something down the back of the seat, puts her hand down and she finds fucking this. Could have been there for weeks or months, baby could have got fucking junkie AIDS.'
'Jesus.'
'How you doing?' Kieran asks gravely.
'Not very well … I'm like some kind of … '
' … Not-doing-very-well-at-all … person.'
'Yea-eh.'
'I feel bad about not being in touch, but, you know — '
'We shouldn't be talking now.'
'Fuck it, this is the nick.'
'Yeah,' I smile, looking at the floor.
'I should've — '
'I know.'
'Yeah.'
'You don't need to — '
'Johnny! Johnny!'
'Ha!'
'Hey, we took those fruit and veg. men a few months back.'
'Shit! I'd've loved that one!'
'Well, you were there, when — you know … '
'Yeah, but … '
Shit, the fruit and veg. men. I put a lot of work into that and I wasn't there for the pull. I'd missed out on the fruit and veg. men. Fuck. Eagle Eye, too, so double-plus points from the bosses.
'What are you doing now?' he asks.
'Well, I've just returned my car. I think I'll check it now before I take the keys to Uncle.'
'Well, I'll see you down there.'
'OK.'
I buy a sausage roll and a mini Malvern water from the deserted canteen. Munching away in the car park, I put the rest of the sausage roll on the car's roof. I clear out my A-Z and an old Lucozade bottle from the glove compartment. I run my hand carefully down the back-seat groove. Loose change, a neatly folded empty crisp packet, and then … seven tiny half-gram sealed-up polythene sachets of smack … and then a gun. I carry the sachets straight in to Uncle Jess, who bags, tags and signs for them in triplicate. The Uncle must be something like sixty-five. Everyone knows he's way past retirement, but they bent the rules and let him stay on because he lives alone and there's nothing down for him beyond the job. I give him the sachets but all the time I wear the gun down the small of my back, stuck in the belt. He goes away to put them in the drugs cupboard. Kieran comes back in and Jess says to him, 'You didn't last long without your needle.'
'I need it back, Uncle. I'm hurting, man.' The Uncle cackles like a miser and disappears into his back office.
'Listen John,' says K., 'look, just come round on Sunday for dinner.'
'But I can't.'
'Fuck it. We're on our internal honour. As long as we don't discuss the case.'
'Thank you. Thanks. But no, I can't do that.'
Kieran nods, and looks at me. '"Cuppa tea?"'
"'Yeah, awright geezah"' I manage.
I was worried that we'd bump into Mickey on the way and he'd ask why I hadn't brought the uniform back. The canteen was empty, and me and Kieran sat on the edge of two freshly wiped tables facing each other.
He looked at me, raised his eyebrows. 'You're not looking your best.'
I grinned and said, 'I dunno, K., it's like the job slowly strips everything away, you know — first you can't have friends outside the job — that goes — and it's like layer after layer — then your idealism, and Beverley, and then — ' But thinking of his settled drum with Becca and the kids I changed tack. 'Or maybe not the job — it's like there's some force that's singled me out, and it's been steadily dividing and sub-dividing me, reducing me to some central — I dunno, it's like I'm locked into some process of stripping everything away until there's just the thing that needs to be … met.'
'Yes … ' he said, non-sarcastically, for once. And yet somehow the fact that he was being sincere made me feel even lonelier. As it would if he'd ended a letter to me with 'yours sincerely'. I looked down. Time passed. I heard him move. His arms were round my shoulders. I leant into him and stood up. We both stood up, him still hugging me. I buried my face in his shoulder, my crinkle-cut eyelids stinging, but not crying. I wanted this hug to last, but as his hands went from my shoulders to my back, all I could think of was that I didn't want him to find the butt of the gun sticking in my waistband. I stepped away. And looked at him with the strange force having sub-divided me one more turn. And I knew he knew that I'd been going out in my uniform and wanted to ask, but he wasn't going to say anything until I did, so I said I had to leave to get a solicitor sorted out and that I hadn't got a solicitor because I was waiting till I had a date for trial before bothering.
'No, no. If you'd had a solicitor he could've speeded up the trial date.' Then he paused, and I knew he was thinking that maybe that was why I hadn't got one before now. He turned his radio up to listen to something. Then turned it down again.
'What was that?' I asked.
'Oh, machine-gun maniac on the rampage just outside, killing everyone,' he said and sat back on the edge of the table. Not going anywhere.
'Well, see you then,' I
said. He looked at me and frowned quizzically. 'I better get off.'
'Yeah, all right, John,' he said, disappointed. 'All right.' Then, 'Make sure you stay the course.'
*
Walking back from the nick in plain clothes now I'm worried that everyone thinks I'm a dangerous criminal maniac. Nothing to do with the gun. I've always felt like this in civvies, but I've only really been aware of it since suspension, like a rattly roof tile you can only hear once the factory has shut down. My walk is different in civvies. In uniform I just move my eyes and keep my head still; now my head rubber-necks and rolls.
I hail a Joe Baxy. Sitting in the back of the black cab, I notice the driver has a colour photo of his wife and kids stuck to the dash by a magnetic bulldog clip that also holds his chits and shit. I tap the pane and say, 'Excuse me.' He leans back with his head to one side and slides the perspex panel open. I have to shout a bit to be heard. 'I'm not being funny or anything, but do you have that picture of your wife and kids there to remind you what you're going through all this ache for; or is it really there in case you get a violent bloke in the back of the cab and you hope that it will deter him, like a sort of human shield?'
He swings the cab over, flashes his headlights at a parked cab, gets out and walks round the bonnet. As the other taxi-driver gets out of the other cab, he says to me querulously, 'Out you go! Get out son! I'm not taking you!'
I'm so angry I shout at them both for a bit. I walk off still staring at them and nearly get run over.
Taking a short-cut through the estate playground, a couple of little girls sit on the swings, drifting the heels of their rollerskates, and every twitching net-curtain thinks I'm a nonce. Perhaps it's because my stroll is aimless where everyone else has some project or purpose.
I pop into the corner shop for a Coke and worry that the Muslim woman thinks I'm about to rob the gaff: sees me time-coded and fuzzy, leaning over the scarred counter, smashing the till.
And when I wear civvies at night it seems lone women are particularly scared of civilian me. Do they see something feverish, vengeful in my steps? I try to correct my walk but only the attacker tries to look harmless.
There's an upside though to being in civvies. Today a man in a parked van and me walking past — we smiled at each other. It happens sometimes, doesn't it? Some meteorological kink in the air, some pocket, some loophole, a temporary cessation of hostilities … and two strangers smile. And the beauty of it was that it wasn't a black — white thing, it wasn't a gay thing or a guy thing, it was just like we'd both caught each other off-balance, open, or had recognized that we were both harmless or I don't know what, but there it is, a smile between two strangers for no reason in London.
It didn't feel at all odd to be in uniform even though I wasn't meant to be. Certainly no more absurd than when I was a community policeman looking for a community that wasn't there — just getting my tithead bashed in the cross-fire of its corporate destruction, in fact. You can build a little community centre and have meetings, but it won't ever be a community, no matter how many of your neighbours you say 'hello' to, because all that really links us is that we're all fighting each other for cash. That's why the word 'community' always sounds so fucking forlorn. The council puts up painted diagrams outside every estate. Something about these field maps outside every council estate in Britain suggests a general and a baton-pointer for the flashpoint battle-zones of the cash war.
Law-abiding citizens think the uniform means you're less likely to get hit when something kicks off. In fact, cops get hit more than anyone except women and children. There's a crowd of thugs fighting outside a club, oh everything's all right here comes someone wearing a blue jacket with brass buttons. When you go to arrest a slag, the look they often give you is a fight threat. Come on then. And sometimes a freaked cop won't make the pull. He'll back down from the arrest. Cops are just like everyone else: how important does any job become when it looks like something might happen to your face? Though the general public see the uniform and not the face, that's not true of the slag. He's having a good look at your face: your jaw, your nose, your neck, and checking your eyes for weakness, for fear.
But there's a twist here, isn't there? It never felt like just a uniform to me. For me, the uniform did make the biggest difference, change my face, my eyes, cancel my weakness, my fear. (Some officers wear the uniform like a council bib or like protective goggles: something you put on rather than something you wear, or are.) And it felt like me or a better me. It felt like how I would've been all the time if every detail of my upbringing had been positive. And I always have the trousers tailored down to a drainpipe cut (rather than the frumpy pegs they expect you to risk your life in, ducky).
Why did I keep that gun? Why? Now I'm home it has no words on it. No idea what make it is. Big and heavy with a revolving chamber and six bullets. Empty the caps and hide them in the bottom of a flowerpot. There is one central hole in the bottom of the flowerpot and five in a circle. I insert a bullet into each as if the up-ended pot were a chamber itself.
Magnet
Don't put on your uniform. If you're spotted this time then you'll have finally fucked up your life. The chinstrap sits snug under my chin. Don't go out the door. Keys in pocket.
I cross over the road. I'll know what I'm looking for when I find it. I have a sense that a futile gesture is important. What am I about? I'm not doing a penance walk any more, not looking for the end either. (They've probably got to that poor bastard by now anyway. Hope they didn't kill him.) No, I'm just looking for some kind of end to this patrol, maybe.
Walking through an industrial estate I see a picket-line outside the Magnet kitchens factory. The pickets see me. Shit. Now I'll have to do what a policeman would normally do so as not to attract their suspicion. I take up position on the other side of the entrance. How long will I have to stand here before I can go and do this thing which I will know what it is when I get there? The pickets give it some booing and muttering. A middle-aged Hindu woman with a red dot on her forehead is walking towards me holding up two leaflets. She has a strange smile as if I'd just dropped the leaflets myself and she is returning them to me. Over her sari and under her sky-blue raincoat she has a T-shirt with a compass print on her chest. A detailed compass design like you get on old, seafaring maps: all points and cogs within cogs. At the top, instead of an N, there's a B. She goes back to the lines. The pickets give a little sarcastic clap when I start reading it.
I read how the dispute has wrecked the homes of those who make kitchens for dream homes. I look at model kitchens in the factory showroom window. At least Pol Pot actually offered his punters the real agricultural idyll, not just phoney farmhouse kitchens in the mass-production age. The pickets all start booing and shouting and blowing whistles as if they've just heard my last thought, but when I look up I find that a big artic. lorry is turning into the entrance. The driver has fucked it slightly though, perhaps in guilty haste to get by the picket-line without meeting anyone's eye. He reverses out slightly with his lorry making its loud reverse beeping. Not my concern. I go back to the leaflet: 'After all the years of hardworking, loyal service I've put in, they turn round and tell me I am expendable. The year since the sackings has been very hard on strikers' health and morale. Men and women who have worked all their lives must now face each day without any structure, shape or purpose apart from the struggle for full reinstatement.' The lorry revs up noisily, disturbing my read. I look up. The driver looks well-vexed as he starts his second attempt to drive through the entrance. He checks his side mirror, works it out, front bumper clean through now. He's got it right this time and gives me a conspiratorial wink.
I put my hand up. He doesn't stop at first so I bang the medicine-cabinet-sized wing mirror. He stops, still revving. I walk round the front of the cab, ignoring the pickets as best I can. I tell them to step back. They're not happy about that, but do as I say.
'Turn the engine off, please.'
He looks in the wing mirror.
'There's a car behind me.'
'Just turn the engine off, please, sir. Thank you.' He jerks back his thumb, but it falls away like the ghost of hitch-hikers passed. The engine shudders down to a big stop. The pickets use the silence to orchestrate their jeers and shouts into a unified chant of 'Scab! Scab! Scab!' I feel a delicious transfer of pressure from me to driver man. He is carrying so much pressure! A car up his arse, living in the hate of the common people, and now me ducking down under the wheel arch. I kick his tyres. The more pressure he gets the more I'm floating on air.
Standing up again I lean into his window, saying, 'There's not enough tread on these tyres.'
'I only had it serviced a few months ago!'
'Well, I'm telling you there's not enough tread on these tyres.' I go and check the back ones. A car is hooting behind him. I give the car a calm-down gesture. They give me a nod back. 'The others are all right,' I come back and tell the lorry driver, 'but this front offside is no good. You're gonna have to go to the nearest garage.'
'It's not my lorry. It's the company's.'
'Well, it's your responsibility. You're the one breaking the law driving this lorry.'
'OK. I'll just go and do my pick-up first.'
'No, I'm afraid not.'
'But I'm here now. It's madness not to!'
I shake my head. 'Start it up and then reverse slowly out.'
'But they'll be closed the night then!'
'Well you must have been very wicked in a past life,' I chuckle, banging the door panel twice. 'See ya!' He gives me a look of disgust as the window moves away and the lorry starts its beeping. He reverses out. Tricky: the lorry's rear-end wobbles like a south-pole magnet approaching repellent north. Finally straightened up in the road, he gives a digit to the cheering pickets, handbrake hisses in impotent hydraulic fury and lorry snorts off down the road.
Manners Page 22
