Not Dead Enough

24

Skunk was tempted to call his dealer’s mobile on the phone he had stolen, because credit on his own one had just run out, but he decided it wasn’t worth risking the man’s wrath. Or worse, getting ditched as a customer, tight bastard though his dealer was. The man would not be impressed to have his number on the call list of a hot mobile – particularly one he would be selling on.

So he stepped into a payphone in front of a grimy Regency terrace on The Level and let the door swing shut against the din of the Friday afternoon traffic. It felt like an oven door closing on him, the heat was almost unbearable. He dialled, holding the door open with his foot. After two rings, the phone was answered with a curt, ‘Yeah?’

‘Wayne Rooney,’ Skunk said, giving him the password they had agreed last time. It changed each time they met.

The man spoke in an east London accent. ‘Yeah, all right then, your usual? Brown you want? Ten-pound bag or twenty?’

‘Twenty.’

‘What you got? Cash?’

‘A Motorola Razor. T-Mobile.’

‘Up to my neck in ’em. Can only give you ten for that.’

‘Fuck you, man, I’m looking for thirty.’

‘Can’t help you then, mate. Sorry. Bye.’

In sudden panic, Skunk shouted urgently, ‘Hey, no, no. Don’t hang up.’

There was a brief silence. Then the man’s voice again. ‘I’m busy. Haven’t got time to waste. Street price is going up and there’s a shortage. Going to be short for two weeks.’

Skunk logged that comment. ‘I could take twenty.’

‘Ten’s best I can do.’

There were other dealers, but the last one he’d used had been busted and was now off the streets, in jail somewhere. Another, he was sure, had given him some crap stuff. There were a couple of buyers he could take the phone to, get a better price, but he was feeling increasingly strung out; he needed something now, needed to get his head together. He had a job to do today which was going to make him way more money than this. He would be able to buy some more later in the day.

‘Yeah, OK. Where do I meet you?’

The dealer, whom he knew only as Joe, gave him instructions.

Skunk stepped outside, feeling the sun searing down on his head, and dodged through the jammed lanes of traffic on Marlborough Place, just in front of a pub where he sometimes bought Ecstasy in the men’s toilet at night. He might even have the cash to buy some this evening, if all went well.

Then he turned right into North Road, a long, busy, one-way street that ran uphill, steeply. The lower end was skanky, but halfway up, just past a Starbucks, the trendiest part of Brighton started.

The North Laine district was a warren of narrow streets that sprawled across most of the hill running down east from the station. If you turned any corner you’d find yourself staring at a line of antique marble fireplaces out on the pavement, or racks of funky clothes, or a row of Victorian terraced cottages, originally built for railway workers in the nineteenth century and now trendy townhouses, or the sandblasted façade of an old factory now converted into chic urban loft dwellings.

As he walked a short distance up the hill, Skunk was finding the exertion hard. There used to be a time when he could run like the wind, when he could have snatched a bag, or goods from a shop, with confidence, but now he could only do something physical for a short time without getting exhausted, apart from during the hours immediately following a hit, or when he was on uppers. No one took any notice of him, apart from two plain-clothes policemen seated at a table in the packed Starbucks, with a clear view out through the window of the goings-on in the street.

Both of them, scruffily dressed, could have passed as students, eking out their coffees for as long as possible. One, shorter and burly, with a shaven head and goatee beard, wore a black T-shirt and ripped jeans; the other, taller, with lanky hair, in a baggy shirt hanging loose over military fatigues. They knew most of Brighton’s lowlife by sight, and Skunk’s mug-shot had been up on a wall in Brighton Central, along with forty or so other regular offenders, for as long as both of them had been in the force.

To most of the populace of Brighton and Hove, Skunk was all but invisible. Dressed the same way he had been dressing since his early teens, in his crumpled nylon hoodie over a ragged orange T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers, hands in his pockets, body slouched forward, he blended into the city like a chameleon. It was the uniform of his gang, the WBC – Well Big Crew – a rival gang to the long-established TMC – Team Massive Crew. They weren’t as vicious as the TMC, whose initiation rites were rumoured to involve either beating up a copper, raping a woman or stabbing an innocent stranger, but WBC liked to give off a menacing image. They hung around shopping areas, their hoods up, stealing anything that was readily to hand, mugging anyone who was stupid enough to get isolated, and they spent the money mostly on alcohol and drugs. He was too old for the gang now, they were mostly teenagers, but he still wore the clothes, liking the feeling of belonging to something.

Skunk’s head was shaven – by Bethany each time she came by – and there was a narrow, uneven stripe of hair running from below the centre of his lower lip to the base of his chin. Bethany liked it, told him it made him look mysterious, particularly with his purple sunglasses.

But he didn’t look in mirrors that much. He used to stare at himself for hours, as a small boy, trying not to be ugly, trying to convince himself that he wasn’t as ugly as his mother and his brother told him. Now he didn’t care any more. He’d done fine with the girls. Sometimes his face now scared him, it was so dry, blistered, emaciated. It looked like it had been shoehorned over the skull bones beneath.

His body was rotting – you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. It wasn’t the drugs, it was the impurities crooked suppliers mixed with them that destroyed you. Most days his head swam as if he had flu, as if he was living in a permanent heat haze one moment and winter fog the next. His memory was crap; he wasn’t able to concentrate long enough to watch any film or TV show all the way through. Ulcers kept breaking out on his body. He couldn’t hold food down. He lost track of the time. Some days he couldn’t even remember how old he was.

Twenty-four, he thought; or thereabouts. He’d meant to ask his brother, when he phoned him in Australia last night, but that hadn’t worked out.

It was his brother, three years older and a foot taller, who had first called him Skunk, and he’d quite liked it. Skunks were mean, feral creatures. They slunk about, they had their defences. You didn’t mess with a skunk.

Cars had been his thing in his teens. He discovered, without really thinking about it, that he could steal cars, easily. And when word got out that he could nick any car anyone wanted, he suddenly found he had friends. He’d been arrested twice, the first time put on probation and banned from driving, even though he was too young to have a licence, and the second time, aggravated by an assault, he’d been sent to a young offenders’ institute for a year.

And now this afternoon, on that damp sheet of paper folded in his pocket, was an order for another car. A new-shape Audi A4 convertible, automatic, low mileage, metallic blue, silver or black.

He stopped to take a breath, and dark, undefined fear suddenly rolled through him, drawing all the heat of the day away from him, leaving him feeling as if he had suddenly walked into a deep-freeze. His skin crawled again, the way it had done earlier, as if a million termites were swarming over it.

He saw the phone booth. Needed that booth. Needed that hit to get his focus, his equilibrium. He stepped into it, and the effort of pulling the heavy door left him suddenly gasping for breath. Shit. He leaned against the wall of the booth, in the airless heat, feeling dizzy, his legs buckling under him. He grabbed the phone, steadying himself with one hand, dug a coin from his pocket and put it in the slot, then dialled Joe’s number.

‘It’s Wayne Rooney,’ he said, talking quietly as if someone might overhear him. ‘I’m here.’

‘Give me your number. I’m going to call you back.’

Skunk waited, getting nervous. After several minutes, it finally rang. A new set of instructions. Shit, Joe was getting more paranoid every day. Or had watched too many Bond movies.

He left the booth, walked about fifty yards up the street, then stopped and stared in the window of a shop that cut foam rubber to order, as he had been instructed.

The two police officers sipped their cold coffees. The shorter, burly one, whose name was Paul Packer, gripped his cup by looping his middle finger through the handle. Eight years ago, the top of his right-hand index finger had been bitten off below the first knuckle, in a scuffle, by Skunk.

This was the third deal they had witnessed in the past hour. And they knew that the same thing would be going on in half a dozen other hot spots around Brighton at this very moment. Every hour of the day and night. Trying to stop the drugs trade in a city like this was like trying to stop a glacier by throwing pebbles at it.

To feed a ten-pound-a-day drug habit, a user would commit three to five thousand pound’s worth of acquisitive crime a month. Not many users were on ten pounds a day – most were on twenty, fifty, one hundred and more. Some could be as high as three or four hundred a day. And a lot of middlemen took rake-offs on the way. There were rich pickings all along the chain. You busted a bunch of people, took them off the streets, and a few days later a whole load of new faces, with a fresh supply, would appear. Scousers. Bulgarians. Russians. All with one thing in common. They made a fat living off sad little bastards like Skunk.

But Paul Packer and his colleague, Trevor Sallis, had not paid fifty pounds out of police funds to an informer to help them find Skunk in order to bust him for drugs. He was too small a player there to bother with. It was an altogether different player, in a very different field, they were hoping he would lead them to.

After some moments, a short, fat kid of about twelve, with a round, freckled face and a brush cut, wearing a grubby South Park T-shirt, shorts and unlaced basketball shoes, and sweating profusely, sidled up to Skunk.

‘Wayne Rooney?’ the kid said, in a garbled, squeaky voice.

‘Yeah.’

The kid popped a small cellophane-wrapped package from his mouth and handed it to Skunk, who in turn put it straight into his mouth and handed the kid the Motorola. Seconds later the kid was sprinting away, up the hill. And Skunk was heading back towards his camper.

And Paul Packer and Trevor Sallis were out of the Starbucks door and following him down the hill.