by D. B. Martin
This young woman, however, seemed to embody the excesses of womanhood with her rounded contours and expressive face. I found myself wondering what it would be like to squeeze her arm and see the blood drain away from the flesh before rushing back, leaving it blush-brown and lush again. What would her lips taste like – raspberries, strawberries – maybe even blackberries, given her colouring? How would it feel to have her lying alongside me, whispering in my ear, hot breath eating into my thoughts until I rolled over and ... Christ, what was going on in my head? I dragged my attention back to what the boy was saying and found he’d tentatively started to talk about the day he’d been taken into care. Miss Roumelia’s attention obviously hadn’t been wandering as mine had. She was helping the narrative along.
‘Tell Mr Juste what led up to how you think it all happened,’ she prompted helpfully, smiling politely at me. I nodded my thanks, desperately trying to stifle the rabid thoughts that were still bubbling away. Her eyes lingered on mine just a second longer than was necessary then flicked hastily away.
‘It were a Mon-day.’ He split up the two parts of the word sing-song, in the same manner as he’d trotted out the didn’t do it, wasn’t there claim. ‘Dad was up north on a job. He didn’t have the rent money so when Nobby came round and said they had summat he might be able to help with he said he’d go to keep us off the streets. He meant Mum really. Mum called him a stupid bastard and said that he’d get caught out one day.’ I stopped him hastily there with the rehearsed ‘that’s too bad,’ He scowled at my interruption and then caught on. He moved on several stages in the story and up several notches in my estimation of his intelligence. ‘That was Thursday and Dad hadn’t come home so when the tallyman came knocking on Fri-day morning Mum told us all to shut up and hide so he’d think we was out. He shouted through the letter box that he knew we was there and to open up or he’d be back with someone who’d make us open up, but we stayed put and after a while he went. Me legs had gone numb from hiding under the table by then and Mum was in a right strop because Benjie had peed himself. She’s like that – real nice sometimes and a cow others. I don’t like it when the tallyman comes round.’
‘Who’s the tallyman?’
‘I think he’s the local debt-collector,’ explained Miss Roumelia. ‘They call them the tallyman because he keeps a tally of who owes what. If they can’t pay he usually brings in the heavies – isn’t that right Danny?’
‘S’pose. Used to be lots of diff’rent blokes round to see Mum but the main one now’s a big fat bastard with bad breff,’ he added. ‘He ain’t quite as bad as the others. And Mum ain’t so rude to him. She don’t go out nowhere for a while after he’s been round but Nobby came round before he did last time so she were fuming and Dad were scarpered. I hate Nobby.’
‘I probably don’t want to know about Nobby, do I?’ I asked Miss Roumelia. She shook her head and grimaced. ‘You might have to at some stage, though,’ she added. ‘His kids are part of the gang that Danny joined – the whole family is in care, from what I understand. They operate on a, you scratch my back and I won’t knife yours, basis.’
‘Ah, all very principled then!’
‘It’s a different world to the one you and I live in,’ she said defensively, ‘but they do have their own moral code nevertheless.’
‘Really?’ I couldn’t keep the sarcasm from my voice.
‘Really,’ she replied firmly. The doe eyes narrowed and we assessed each other. We were both supposed to be championing the underdog, but her will to do so was from belief in what she was doing. Mine was because of cynical self-advancement, whatever I might have once imagined of myself in the romanticised role of law-bringer. Momentarily I doubted what I was doing and wished I still had the passion for righting the world’s wrongs that she plainly had – naïve though it was to believe any of us could. I dropped my gaze first and shuffled the case papers whilst I regained some sense of equilibrium. Even more than the boy and his background disturbing my ordered thoughts, this woman was disturbing my calm.
‘Did the tallyman come back?’ I tried to block out Miss Roumelia and concentrate solely on the boy.
‘Not then, but the next day. But the pigs were there by then too. Mum hadn’t come back and the old cow across the road had called them in after Sukie put her fingers in the toaster and blew the place up.’
‘Put her fingers in the toaster and blew the place up?’
‘It’s why they were all taken into care to start with,’ Miss Roumelia answered before the boy could answer. ‘It’s all in the case notes.’
‘In yours maybe, but not mine.’ I retorted, irritated that she should be suggesting I wasn’t doing my job properly. ‘All that is says in here is that the boy was taken into care after a charge of solicitation involving the mother. There’s nothing about hospitalisation in there. Suppose someone tells me the whole story – off the record, relevant or not?’ The boy looked uncertainly at Miss Roumelia.
‘Should I miss? I don’t want to get into no trouble? I didn’t want Sukie to get hurt but it was my fault. ’ I almost laughed. What did he think he was in now, if not trouble? But the volunteered confession that Sukie’s injuries were his fault surprised me. Why admit to something that he wasn’t being accused of – and I hadn’t even known about, yet steadfastly deny his guilt of something he was?
‘Danny, you’ve mugged an old lady, who’s died. I can’t see what more trouble you could get into.’
‘But he didn’t do that – he’s already told you that.’ Miss Roumelia was too quick in his defence. I could even sense a hastily stifled instinctive reaction to put her arm round his shoulders. She made do with attacking me instead. ‘Why can’t you believe him – innocent until proven guilty and all that – or do you not subscribe to that?’
‘I don’t know enough about it all yet – and neither do you.’ Even to me my voice sounded overly harsh. Alongside my lurid imaginings about her, I’d missed the overtures of war that had really been steadily growing between us. God only knew how we were going to work together. A red alert sounded and stupidly I turned off the alarm. We locked in battle like two rutting deer, head to head. Anger made her eyes deepen to near black and set her jaw as if she was a snarling tiger. Tiger woman – yes, she was a tigress, not a scented jasmine. I felt my pulse quicken and real excitement flowed through me for the first time in years. I leant forward, accepting the challenge and breathing in the smell of her sweat across the table.
I’d put my jacket back on to hide the sweat patches on my shirt. Now it clung uncomfortably to me and the wet rings under my arms chafed. A trickle of perspiration slid down my face and ran behind my ear. As it swung on its rotating arc, the breeze from the fan cooled it like ice forming. She watched it make its winding way down into my collar and I felt it soak in there. Her eyes slipped back to mine and they were unreadable. The boy watched us intently. As she sat back he looked at me and then swivelled to look at her again.
‘You fancy him, don’t you?’ Now he had both of our attention.
‘Danny, whatever makes you say that?’ She was clearly embarrassed – just as I realised the boy was also clearly correct in his assessment. His observation enabled me to see through the antagonism now. I was relieved he was only focusing on her or he’d possibly detect the same inclination in me. I consciously reeled myself in. Learning how to play poker-face in court obviously had its advantages out of court too.
‘Well you keep eyeing him up. Aren’t you s’posed to be helping me?’ I could see from the deepening of colour in her cheeks that she was blushing again. I decided to help her out, since I’d got off the hook so lightly for the moment. One can be gracious in victory and I’d long since learnt not to kick my antagonists on the way up in case I met them again later on my way down.
‘You are absolutely right, Danny. Whatever we think about each other is one of those things we said isn’t relevant – but your story is. Let’s get on with it, shall we?’
He studied me coolly
for a while. ‘OK, yeah.’
She threw me a thankful look and seemed to physically shrink down in her chair. The tense body language relaxed and was replaced with submission. The boy had centre-stage. Surprisingly it was being centre of attention that released the trap door and Danny’s story came tumbling through it without the need for any more prompting. I’d interviewed enough old lags to already know the psychology, but not that it applied equally well to a kid as an adult. I took note. It had already been an unusually illuminating morning but it wasn’t until the session wound up that I realised how fully my mind had been taken off funerals, newspapers and the bloody route to the top, although it was probably one of the very last things the boy told me that did it.
6: Jaggers
John Arthur Green, he called himself; ‘Jaggers’ – and he’d been to Borstal. He was a legend before he even turned up at the children’s home in June 1962. He’d been sent there for much the same offence as we’d so carefully hidden – a stabbing. With the arrival of Jaggers, it was no longer petty theft or small time crime that we had to keep ahead of, it was full scale war. Not only had he learnt how to play with the big boys when he’d been in Borstal, he’d also acquired their tastes. Sex, drugs, violence, intimidation – all with a smile and perfect courtesy to the Houseparents, who unexpectedly doted on him. I think that might have been when Georgie first started using. No-one approached me. Maybe they knew I would have run and told Win, and Win would have turned it into a fight for control – another part of the empire to conquer. Georgie though, he was so much in his own world by then, I think he barely remembered I was there – let alone who I was. I let him slip away because I didn’t know what else to do.
It had always been a world of barely hidden violence and carefully controlled fear, not just from the gang influences but from each other and the home’s staff. Nights were often punctuated by the screams of nightmarish dreams, and days by small discomforts and petty cruelties. Jaggers brought a new and excruciating level of terror with him. Of course he and Win went head to head straight away even though Win only had months left before he was formally released from care when he was sixteen. The die-hards from Win’s reign stuck with him but the turncoats and spin doctors followed Jaggers. I was left in the middle – afraid of Win, but even more afraid of Jaggers and the unnatural practices it was said he imposed on dissenters. I teetered – withholding my alliance, relying on Win’s protection until Win was ill with gut rot one day about two months after Jaggers arrived. It was probably engineered by Jaggers and his crew, but it left Win out of action and me within firing range. Jaggers wheeled in the big guns to convert me because as Win’s little brother – by then Georgie didn’t count – I was a pivotal point in his strategy. If I defected, so would most of the rest of Win’s gang.
I spent the day anxiously avoiding Jaggers or any of his crew. It was fairly easy during the day. There were lessons to endure, although even then I enjoyed learning. I had to pretend otherwise in the home but I had my secret passions. English class – and one piece of literature in particular was one. For the other boys, hearing the teacher expound on the principles of honesty and truth in something like To Kill a Mocking Bird was an exercise in boredom. For me it was inspiration. Lucky perhaps that we had such an enlightened and rebellious young teacher at the time. Of course it wasn’t part of the curriculum but the book was all the rage because of the Hollywood blockbuster starring Gregory Peck. Not what the school head would have approved of if he’d known that his newly-appointed young English teacher was subversively reading it with his class under the guise of ‘looking at society’s norms in literature’, but for me it was exceptional and ground-breaking.
I’d sneaked into the back of the local flicks when the film was being screened just after Jaggers first arrived. The front of house ticket seller was doubling up on her roles as usherette and sweet kiosk salesperson and I slithered into a back row seat and was completely blown away by both the actors and the notions within the story itself. Thereafter I’d modelled my attitude to the Win/Jaggers situation initially on Atticus Finch, and tried to remain impartial but principled. Atticus became my hero, and remained so when I later made law my career. Ironic that we were secretly reading about rape, repression and inequality in school and I was secretly living it in the children’s home. Unfortunately principle and practice can still make cowards of us all. At times I’m glad the fictional Atticus couldn’t have met me when I think of all the times then that I bowed to pressure and relinquished my beliefs for the sake of saving my skin, and at others I wish I could have debated the rights and wrongs of some of the cases I’ve taken since with such a hero. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself? Maybe being true to oneself includes self-preservation when it is only oneself that would be harmed otherwise?
But I couldn’t dodge Jaggers forever. Night was the time when I could no longer avoid vulnerability and without the threat of reprisal from Win, surrounding me like a dark angel enfolding me in its wings, Jaggers struck. I had tried to stay awake, counting the springs on the underneath of the bunk above me, and reciting my times tables in my head but eventually the insidious down of sleep crept over me and I succumbed. I woke panicky and unable to breath, crushed flat on my stomach but head rammed to one side. I struggled and the coating over my face invaded mouth and nostrils, wet and sticking to my skin with the moisture from my breath, plastic sucked deep into my mouth with every shuddering gasp. Jaggers whispered harshly in my ear.
‘Shut up and stay still or you’ll suffocate, you asshole.’ My head swam and even though the dorm was dark, it seemed as if everything was dropping into a night so dark not even stars could pierce its depth. Even lying still my head spun giddily and my hearing faded in and out as I started to lose consciousness. The plastic bag was secured tightly round my head and I could feel the pressure and then the searing pain as Jaggers violated me. ‘This is what I’ll do to you every night your dearly beloved brother Win is holed up in sick bay unless you leave his gang and join mine.’ It was a mercy I was almost unconscious because confusion and lack of oxygen deadened the pain to a mere fraction of what it could have been. When he was done the unnatural practices I’d previously feared as a kind of far-off threat were a reality. Homosexuality was prevalent in prisons, although I don’t believe now Jaggers was a homosexual. It was more that he was sharing with me – and no doubt many others – the pain and defilement he’d suffered. Maybe transforming it into a tool for control made it more palatable for him.
Just before I passed out, he removed the bag and left me gasping and retching on my soiled sheets before curling into a ball. My body raged at the abuse and I thought I wouldn’t ever sleep again as I relived each moment of desecration in the quiet desperate hours before dawn. It was only then I wondered where the other members of my dorm were and why no-one had come to my aid. Clearly it had been a carefully orchestrated attack and my dorm companions avoided me the next day and the day after that in embarrassment. After the first angry reaction, I realised – just like Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mocking Bird – there could be no impunity for me. I was the target, the stool pigeon, and no matter how much they might want to help, to get between me and Jaggers would have been as lethal as getting between Tony and the knife that killed him. It was my first lesson in acceptance and forgiveness. I forgave them their abandonment of me and I learnt acceptance of the role I knew I had to play. I just wasn’t sure how to play it yet. One other thing became clear – that I should find a way to never be as vulnerable again.
I played a dangerous double game, acceding to Jaggers and pretending to Win when he made it out of sick bay, grey-faced and several pounds lighter. I joined in with both gangs’ raids and for a time it seemed as if I might get away with it. I knew whatever I did I wasn’t going to let myself be subjected willingly to the abject terror of the suffocation and rape ritual Jaggers promised if I didn’t play ball with him. My duplicity came to an end, and a new beginning, when Jaggers came up with a plan to finally r
id himself of Win altogether, and I was given the starring role. Looking back now, I wonder why he was so adamant that Win needed to be dealt with. We were down to mere weeks before his sixteenth birthday. Control I suppose – and that ruthless need to destroy he always carried within him.
It was the first mugging either of the gangs had been involved in. Until then our crimes were amongst ourselves or against arch enemies such as the biker gang. We confined ourselves to petty larceny and a minor amount of vandalism to local shopkeepers but this was an audacious and deliberate plan to rob a third party – someone totally uninvolved with our petty internal politics, and an old woman to boot. Jaggers and one of his lackeys had been observing the old dear who lived in the end terrace just before the corner shop. She had to be about ninety, shuffling along in her carpet slippers, clutching her small pink floral shopping bag and battered brown leather handbag.
‘She goes every Tuesday, collects her pension and then comes home. Hers and her husband’s. There’ll be all of thirty quid in that bag.’ Jaggers was jubilant, ‘And you’re gonna get it, Kenny, but you’re gonna make sure you tell Win what you’re doing and take him with you, and when she calls for the Old Bill, you’re gonna dump the bag on Win.’
