Not Dead Enough

18

Skunk’s phone was ringing again. He woke, shivering and sweating at the same time. Jesus, it was hot in here. His clothes – the ragged T-shirt and undershorts he was sleeping in – and his bedding were sodden. Water was guttering off him.

Breeep-breeep-breeeep.

From somewhere in the fetid darkness down towards the rear of the camper, the Scouse voice shouted out, ‘Fokking thing. Turn the fokking thing off, for Chrissake, ’fore I throw it out the fokking window.’

It wasn’t the phone he had stolen last night, he realized suddenly. It was his pay-as-you-go phone. His business phone! Where in hell was it?

He stood up hurriedly and shouted back, ‘You don’t like it, get the fuck out of my van!’

Then he looked on the floor, found his shell-suit bottoms, dug his hands in the pocket and pulled the small green mobile out. ‘Yeah?’ he answered.

The next moment he was looking around for a pen and a scrap of paper. He had both in his top, wherever the hell that was. Then he realized he had been sleeping on it, using it as a sort of pillow. He pulled out a thin, crappy ballpoint with a cracked stem, and a torn, damp sheet of lined paper, and put it down on the work surface. With a hand shaking so much he could barely write, he managed to take down the details in spiky scrawl, and then hung up.

A good one. Money. Moolah! Mucho!

And his bowels felt OK today. None of the agonizing gripes followed by diarrhoea that had been plaguing him for days – not yet, at any rate. His mouth was parched; he was desperate for some water. Feeling light-headed and giddy, he made his way to the sink, then, steadying himself on the work surface, he turned on the tap. But it was already on, the contents of the water tank all run out. Shite.

‘Who left the fucking tap on all night? Hey? Who?’ he yelled.

‘Chill out, man!’ a voice replied.

‘I’ll fucking chill you out!’ He pulled open the curtains again, blinking at the sudden intrusion of the blinding, early-afternoon sunlight. Outside he saw a woman in the park, holding the hand of a toddler on a tricycle. A mangy-looking dog was running around, sniffing the scorched grass where a circus big-top had been until a couple of days ago. Then he looked along the camper. A third crashed-out body he hadn’t noticed before, stirred. Nothing he could do about either of them now, just hope the fuck they’d be gone when he came back. They usually were.

Then he heard an almost rhythmic squeak-squeak-squeak, and saw Al, his hamster, with his busted paw all bound up in a splint by the vet, still spinning the shiny chromium treadmill, his whiskers twitching away. ‘Man, don’t you ever get tired?’ he said, putting his face up close to the bars of the cage – but not too close – Al had bitten him once. Actually, twice.

He had first found the creature abandoned in its cage, which had been tossed by some callous bastard into a roadside skip. He had seen its paw was busted and tried to lift it out, and been bitten for his troubles. Then another time he had tried to stroke it through the bars and it had bitten him again. Yet other days he could open the cage door and it would scamper into the palm of his hand, and sit there happily, for an hour or more, only shitting on it occasionally.

He pulled on the grey Adidas shell-suit bottoms and hooded top, which he had stolen from the ASDA superstore at the Marina, and the brand-new blue and white Asics trainers he had tried on and run out with from a shop in Kemp Town, and grabbed a Waitrose carrier bag containing his tools, into which he dropped the mobile phone from the car he had stolen yesterday. He opened the door of the camper, shouted, ‘I want you all fucking gone when I come back,’ and stepped out into the searing, cloudless heat of The Level, the long, narrow strip of parkland in the centre of Brighton and Hove. The city that he jokingly – but not that jokingly – called his office.

Written on the damp sheet of paper he carried, safely folded and tucked into his zipped breast pocket, were an order, a delivery address and an agreed payment. A no-brainer. Suddenly, despite the shakes, life was looking up. He could make enough money today to last him an entire week.

He could even afford to play hardball in negotiations on the sale of the mobile phone.