London Noir

Love by Martyn Waites

Dagenham

Love it. Fuckin love it. No other feelin in the world like it.

Better than sex. Better than anythin.

There we was, right, an there they was. Just before the Dagenham local elections. Outside the community center. Community center, you’re avina laugh. Asylum-seeker central, more like. Somali center.

June, a warm night, if you’re interested.

Anyway, we’d had our meetin, makin our plan for the comin election, mobilizin the locals off the estate, we come outside, an there they was. The Pakis. The anti-Nazis. Shoutin, chantin — Nazi scum, BNP cunts. So we joined in, gave it back with Wogs out an that, Seig Heillin all over the place. Pakis in their casual leathers, anti-Nazis in their sloppy uni denims, us lookin sharp in bombers an eighteen holers. Muscles like taut metal rope under skin-tight T-shirts an jeans, heads hard an shiny. Tattoos: dark ink makin white skin whiter. Just waitin.

Our eyes: burnin with hate.

Their eyes: burnin with hate. Directed at us like laser death beams.

Anticipation like a big hard python coiled in me guts, waitin to get released an spread terror. A big hard-on waitin to come.

Buildin, gettin higher:

Nazi scum BNP cunts

Wogs out seig heil

Buildin, gettin higher—

Then it came. No more verbals, no more posin. Adrenalin pumped right up, bell ringin, red light on. The charge.

The python’s out, the hard-on spurts.

Both sides together, two wallsa sound clashin intaya. A big, sonic tidal wave ready to engulf you in violence, carry you under with fists an boots an sticks.

Engage. An in.

Fists an boots an sticks. I take. I give back double. I twist an thrash. Like swimmin in anger. I come up for air an dive back in again, lungs full. I scream the screams, chant the chants.

Wogs out seig heil.

Then I’m not swimmin. Liquid solidifies round me. An I’m part of a huge machine. A muscle an bone an blood machine. A shoutin, chantin cog in a huge hurtin machine. Arms windmillin. Boots kickin. Fueled on violence. Driven by rage.

Lost to it. No me. Just the machine. An I’ve never felt more alive.

Love it. Fuckin love it.

I see their eyes. See the fear an hate an blood in their eyes.

I feed on it.

Hate matches hate. Hate gives as good as hate gets.

Gives better. The machine’s too good for them.

The machine wins. Cogs an clangs an fists an hammers. The machine always wins.

Or would, if the pigs hadn’t arrived.

Up they come, sticks out. Right, lads, you’ve had your fun. Time for us to have a bit. Waitin till both sides had tired, pickin easy targets.

The machine falls apart; I become meself again. I think an feel for meself. I think it’s time to run.

I run.

We all do; laughin an limpin, knowin we’d won.

Knowin our hate was stronger than theirs. Knowin they were thinkin the same thing.

Run. Back where we came from, back to our lives. Ourselves.

Rememberin that moment when we became somethin more.

Cherishin it.

I smiled.

LOVED IT.

D’you wanna name? Call me Jez. I’ve been called worse.

You want me life story? You sound like a copper. Or a fuckin social worker. Fuckin borin, but here it is. I live in the Chatsworth Estate in Dagenham. The borders of East London/Essex. You’ll have heard of it. It’s a dump. Or rather, a dumpin ground. For problem families at first, but now for Somalis an Kosovans that have just got off the lorry. It never used to be like that. It used to be a good place where you could be proud to live. But then, so did Dagenham. So did this country.

There’s me dad sittin on the settee watchin Tricia in his vest, rollin a fag. I suppose you could say he was typical of this estate (an of Dagenham, an the country). He used to have a job, a good one. At the Ford plant. Knew the place, knew the system, knew how to work it. But his job went when they changed the plant. His job an thousands of others. Now it’s a center of excellence for diesel engines. An he can’t get a job there. He says the Pakis took it from him. They got HNDs an degrees. He had an apprenticeship for a job that don’t exist no more. No one wants that now. No one wants him now. He’s tried. Hard. Honest. So he sits in his vest, rollin fags, watchin Tricia.

There’s Tom, me brother, too. He’s probably still in bed. He’s got the monkey on his back. All sorts, really, but mostly heroin. He used to be a good lad, did well at school an that, but when our fat slag bitch of a mother walked out, all that had to stop. We had to get jobs. Or try. I got a job doin tarmacin an roofin. He got a heroin habit. Sad. Fuckin sad. Makes you really angry.

Tarmacin an roofin. Off the books, cash in hand. With Barry the Roofer. Baz. Only when I’m needed, though, or seasonal, when the weather’s good, but it’s somethin. Just don’t tell the dole. I’d lose me jobseeker’s allowance.

It’s not seasonal at the moment. But it’s June. So it will be soon.

So that’s me. It’s who I am. But it’s not WHAT I AM.

I’m a Knight of St. George. An proud of it. A true believer. A soldier for truth.

This used to be a land fit for heroes, when Englishmen were kings an their houses, castles. A land where me dad had a job, me brother was doin well at school, an me fat slag bitch of a mother hadn’t run off to Gillingham in Kent with a Paki postman. Well, he’s Greek, actually, but you know what I mean. They’re all Pakis, really.

An that’s the problem. Derek (I’ll come to him in a minute) said the Chatsworth Estate is like this country in miniature. It used to be a good place where families could live in harmony and everyone knew everyone else. But now it’s a run-down shithole full of undesirables an people who’ve given up tryin to get out. No pride anymore. No self-respect. Our heritage sold to Pakis who’ve just pissed on us. Love your country like it used to be, says Derek, but hate it like it is now.

And I do. Both. With all my heart.

Because it’s comin back, he says. One day, sooner rather than later, we’ll reclaim it. Make this land a proud place to be again. A land fit for heroes once more. And you, my lovely boys, will be the ones to do it. The foot soldiers of the revolution. Remember it word for word. Makes me proud all over again when I think of it.

An I think of it a lot. Whenever some Paki’s got in me face, whenever some stuck-up cunt’s had a go at the way I’ve done his drive or roof, whenever I look in me dad’s eyes an see that all his hope belongs to yesterday, I think of those words. I think of my place in the great scheme, at the forefront of the revolution. An I smile. I don’t get angry. Because I know what they don’t.

That’s me. That’s WHAT I AM.

But I can’t tell you about me without tellin you about Derek Midgely. Great, great man. The man who showed me the way an the truth. The man who’s been more of a father to me than me real dad. He’s been described as the demigog of Dagenham. I don’t know what a demigog is, but if it means someone who KNOWS THE TRUTH an TELLS IT LIKE IT IS, then that’s him.

But I’m gettin ahead. First I have to tell you about Ian.

Ian. He recruited me. Showed me the way.

I met him at the shopping center. I was sittin around one day wonderin what to do, when he came up to me.

I know what you need, he said.

I looked up. An there was a god. Shaved head, eighteen-holers, jeans, an T-shirt — so tight I could make out the curves an contours of his muscled body. An he looked so relaxed, so in control. He had his jacket off an I could see the tats over his forearms an biceps. Some pro ones like the flag of St. George, some done himself like Skins Foreva. He looked perfect.

An I knew there an then I wanted what he had. He was right. He did know what I needed.

He got talkin to me. Asked me questions. Gave me answers. Told me who was to blame for my dad not havin a job. Who was to blame for my brother’s habit. For my fat slag bitch mother runnin off to Gillingham. Put it all in context with the global Zionist conspiracy. Put it closer to home with pictures I could understand: the Pakis, the niggers, the asylum-seekers.

I looked round Dagenham. Saw crumblin concrete, depressed whites, smug Pakis. The indigenous population overrun. Then back at Ian. An with him lookin down at me an the sun behind his head lookin like some kind of halo, it made perfect sense.

I feel your anger, he said, understand your hate.

The way he said hate. Sounded just right.

He knew some others that felt the same. Why didn’t I come along later an meet them?

I did.

An never looked back.

Ian’s gone now. After what happened.

For a time it got nasty. I mean REALLY nasty. Body in the concrete foundations of the London Gateway nasty.

I blamed Ian. All the way. I had to.

Luckily, Derek agreed.

Derek Midgely. A great man, like I said. He’s made the St. George Pub on the estate his base. It’s where we have our meetins. He sits there in his suit with his gin an tonic in front of him, hair slicked back, an we gather round, waitin for him to give us some pearls of wisdom, or tell us the latest installment of his masterplan. It’s brilliant, just to be near him. Like I said, a great, great man.

I went there along with everyone else the night after the community center ruck. I mean meetin. There was the usu-als. Derek, of course, holdin court, the foot soldiers of which I can proudly number myself, people off the estate (what Derek calls the concerned populace), some girls, Adrian an Steve. They need a bit of explainin. Adrian is what you’d call an intellectual. He wears glasses an a duffelcoat all year round. Always carryin a canvas bag over his shoulder. Greasy black hair. Expression like he’s somewhere else. Laughin at a joke only he can hear. Don’t know what he does. Know he surfs the Internet, gets things off that. Shows them to Derek. Derek nods, makes sure none of us have seen them. Steve is the local councillor. Our great white hope. Our great fat whale, as he’s known out of Derek’s earshot. Used to be Labour until, as he says, he saw the light. Or until they found all the fiddled expense sheets an Nazi flags up in his livin room an Labour threw him out. Still, he’s a true man of the people.

Derek was talkin. What you did last night, he says, was a great and glorious thing. And I’m proud of each and every one of you.

We all smiled.

However, Derek went on, I want you to keep a low profile between now and Thursday. Voting day. Let’s see some of the other members of our party do their bit. We all have a part to play.

He told us that the concerned populace would go leafle-tin and canvasin in their suits an best clothes, Steve walkin round an all. He could spin a good yarn, Steve. How he’d left Labour in disgust because they were the Pakis’ friend, the asylum-seekers’ safe haven. How they invited them over to use our National Heath Service, run drugs an prostitution rings. He would tell that to everyone he met, try an make them vote for him. Derek said it was playin on their legitimate fears, but to me it just sounded so RIGHT. Let him play on whatever he wanted.

He went on. We listened. I felt like I belonged. Like I was wanted, VALUED. Meetins always felt the same.

LIKE I’D COME HOME.

The meetin broke up. Everyone started drinkin.

Courtney, one of the girls, came up to me, asked if I was stayin on. She’s short with a soft barrel body an hard eyes. She’s fucked nearly all the foot soldiers. Sometimes more than once, sometimes a few at a time. Calls it her patriotic duty. Hard eyes, but a good heart. I went along with them once. I had to. All the lads did. But I didn’t do much. Just sat there, watched most of the time. Looked at them. Didn’t really go near her.

Anyway, she gave me that look. Rubbed up against me. Let me see the tops of her tits down the front of her low-cut T-shirt. Made me blush. Then made me angry cos I blushed. I told her I had to go, that I couldn’t afford a drink. My jobseeker’s allowance was gone an Baz hadn’t come up with any work for me.

She said that she was gettin together with a few of the lads after the pub. Was I interested?

I said no. An went home.

Well, not straight home. There was somethin I had to do first. Somethin I couldn’t tell the rest of them about.

There’s a part of the estate you just DON’T GO. At least not by yourself. Not after dark. Unless you were tooled up. Unless you want somethin. An I wanted somethin.

It was dark there. Shadows on shadows. Hip hop an reggae came from open windows. The square was deserted. I walked, crunched on gravel, broken glass. I felt eyes watchin me. Unseen ones. Wished I’d brought me blade. Still, I had me muscles. I’d worked on me body since I joined the party, got good an strong. I was never like that at school. Always the weak one. Not anymore.

I was kind of safe, I knew that. As long as I did what I was here to do, I wouldn’t get attacked. Because this was where the niggers lived.

I went to the usual corner an waited. I heard him before I saw him. Comin out of the dark, along the alleyway, takin his time, baggy jeans slung low on his hips, Calvins showin at the top. Vest hangin loose. Body ripped an buff.

Aaron. The Ebony Warrior.

Aaron. Drug dealer.

I swallowed hard.

He came up close, looked at me. The usual look, smilin, like he knows somethin I don’t. Eye to eye. I could smell his warm breath on my cheek. I felt uneasy. The way I always do with him.

Jez, he said slowly, an held his arms out. See anythin you want?

I swallowed hard again. Me throat was really dry.

You know what I want. Me voice sounded ragged.

He laughed his private laugh. I know exactly, he said, an waited.

His breath was all sweet with spliff an alcohol. He kept starin at me. I dug my hand into my jacket pocket. Brought out money. Nearly the last I had, but he didn’t know that.

He shook his head, brought out a clingfilm wrap from his back pocket.

Enjoy, he said.

It’s not for me an you know it.

He smiled again. Wanna try some? Some skunk, maybe? Now? With me?

I don’t do drugs. I hardly drink. An he knows it. He was tauntin me. He knew what my answer would be.

Whatever, he said. Off you go then, back to your little Hitler world.

I said nothing. I never could when he talked to me.

Then he did somethin he’d never done before. He touched my arm.

You shouldn’t hate, he said. Life too short for that, y’get me?

I looked down at his fingers. The first black fingers I’d ever had on my body. I should have thrown them off. Told him not to touch me, called him a filthy nigger. Hit him.

But I didn’t. His fingers felt warm. And strong.

What should I do then? I could hardly hear my own voice.

Love, he said.

I turned round, walked away.

I heard his laugh behind me.

At home, Dad was asleep on the sofa. Snorin an fartin. I went into Tom’s room. Empty. I left the bundle by his bedside an went out.

I hadn’t been lyin to Courtney. It was nearly the last of me money. I didn’t like buyin stuff for Tom, but what could I do? It was either that or he went out on the street to sell somethin, himself even, to get money for stuff. I had no choice.

I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. Things on me mind but I didn’t know what. Must be the elections. That was it. I lay starin at the ceilin, then realized me cock was hard. I took it in me hand. This’ll get me to sleep, I thought. I thought hard about Courtney. An all those lads.

That did the trick.

The next few days were a bit blurry. Nothin much happened. It was all waitin. For the election. For Baz to find me some more work. For Tom to run out of heroin again an need another hit.

Eventually Thursday rolled round an it was election day. I went proudly off to the pollin station at the school I used to go to. Looked at the kids’ names on the walls. Hardly one of them fuckin English. Made me do that cross all the more harder.

I stayed up all night watchin the election. Tom was out, me dad fell asleep.

Steve got in.

I went fuckin mental.

I’d been savin some cans for a celebration an I went at them. I wished I could have been in the St. George with the rest but I knew us foot soldiers couldn’t. But God, how I WANTED TO. That was where I should have been. Who I should have been with. That was where I BELONGED.

But I waited. My time would come.

I stayed in all the next day. Lost track of time.

Put the telly on. Local news. They reported what had happened. Interviewed some Paki. Called himself a community leader. Said he couldn’t be held responsible if members of his community armed themselves and roamed the streets in gangs looking for BNP members. His people had a right to protect themselves.

They switched to the studio. An there was Derek. Arguin with some cunt from Cambridge. Least that’s what he looked like. Funny, I thought people were supposed to look bigger on TV. Derek just looked smaller. Greasy hair. Fat face. Big nose. Almost like a Jew, I thought. Then felt guilty for thinkin it.

It’s what the people want, he said. The people have spoken. They’re sick and tired of a government that is ignoring the views of the common man and woman. And the common man and woman have spoken. We are not extremists. We are representing what the average, decent person in this country thinks but doesn’t dare say because of political correctness. Because of what they fear will happen to them.

I felt better hearin him say that. Then they turned to the Cambridge cunt. He was a psychologist or psychiatrist or sociologist or somethin. I thought, here it comes. He’s gonna start arguin back an then Derek’s gonna go for him. But he didn’t. This sociologist just looked calm. Smiled, almost.

It’s sad, he said. It’s sad so few people realize. As a society it seems we base our responses on either love or hate, thinking they’re opposites. But they’re not. They’re the same. The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference.

They looked at him.

People only hate what they fear within themselves. What they fear themselves becoming. What they secretly love. A fascist, he gestured to Derek will hate democracy. Plurality. Anything else — he shrugged — is indifference.

I would have laughed out loud if there had been anyone else there with me.

But there wasn’t. So I said nothing.

A weekend of lyin low. Difficult, but had to be done. Don’t give them a target, Derek had said. Don’t give them an excuse.

By Monday I was rarin to get out of the flat, was even lookin forward to goin to work.

First I went down the shoppin center. Wearin me best skinhead gear. Don’t know what I expected, the whole world to have changed or somethin, but it was the same as it had been. I walked round proudly, an I could feel people lookin at me. I smiled. They knew. Who I was. What I stood for. They were the people who’d voted.

There was love in their eyes. I was sure of it.

At least, that’s what it felt like.

Still in a good mood, I went to see Baz. Ready to start work.

An he dropped a bombshell.

Sorry, mate, I can’t use you no more.

Why not?

He just looked at me like the answer was obvious. When I looked like I didn’t understand, he had to explain it to me.

Cos of what’s happened. Cos of what you believe in. Now don’t get me wrong, he said, you know me. I agree, there’s too many Pakis an asylum-seekers over here. But a lot of those Pakis are my customers. And, well, look at you. I can hardly bring you along to some Paki’s house and let you work for him, could I? So sorry, mate, that’s that.

I was gutted. I walked out of there knowin I had no money. Knowin that, once again, the Pakis had taken it from me.

I looked around the shoppin center. I didn’t see love anymore. I saw headlines on the papers:

Then underneath:

I couldn’t believe it. They should be welcomin us with open arms. This was supposed to be the start of the revolution. Instead it was the usual shit. I just knew the Pakis were behind it. An the Jews. They own all the newspapers.

I had nowhere to go. I went to the St. George, but this was early mornin an there was no one in. None of my people.

So I just walked round all day. Thinkin. Not gettin any-thin straight. Gettin everythin more twisted.

I thought of goin back to the St. George. They’d be there. Celebratin. Then there was goin to be a late-night march round the streets. Let the residents, the concerned populace, know they were safe in their houses. Let everyone know who ruled the streets.

But I didn’t feel like it.

So I went home.

An wished I hadn’t.

Tom was there. He looked like shit. Curled up on his bed. He’d been sick. Shit himself.

Whassamatter? I said. D’you wanna doctor?

He managed to shake his head. No.

What then?

Gear. Cold turkey. Cramps.

An he was sick again.

I stood back, not wantin it to get on me.

Please, he gasped, you’ve got to get us some gear... please...

I’ve got no money, I said.

Please...

An his eyes, pleadin with me. What could I do? He was me brother. Me flesh an blood. An you look after your own.

I’ll not be long, I said.

I left the house.

Down to the part of the estate where you don’t go. I walked quickly, went to the usual spot. Waited.

Eventually he came. Stood before me.

Back so soon? Aaron said. Then smiled. Can’t keep away, can you?

I need some gear, I said.

Aaron waited.

But I’ve got no money.

Aaron chuckled. Then no sale.

Please. It’s for... It’s urgent.

Aaron looked around. There was that smile again. How much d’you want it?

I looked at him.

How much? he said again. An put his hand on my arm.

He moved in closer to me. His mouth right by me ear. He whispered, tickling me. Me heart was beatin fit to burst. Me legs felt shaky.

You’re like me, he said.

I tried to speak. It took me two attempts. No I’m not, I said.

Oh yes you are. We do what our society says we have to do. Behave like we’re supposed to. Hide our true feelings.

What we really are.

I tried to shake me head. But I couldn’t.

You know you are. He got closer. You know I am.

An kissed me. Full on the mouth.

I didn’t throw him off. Didn’t call him a filthy nigger. Didn’t hit him. I kissed him back.

Then it was hands all over each other. I wanted to touch him, feel his body, his beautiful black body. Feel his cock. He did the same to me. That python was inside me, ready to come out. I loved the feeling.

I thought of school. How I was made to feel different. Hated them for it. Thought of Ian. What we had got up to. I had loved him. With all me heart. And he loved me. But we got found out. And that kind of thing is frowned upon, to say the least. So I had to save my life. Pretend it was all his doing. I gave him up. I never saw him again. I never stopped loving him.

I loved what Aaron was doing to me now. It felt wrong. But it felt so right.

I had him in my hand, wanted him in me body. Was ready to take him.

When there was a noise.

We had been so into each other we hadn’t heard them approach.

So this is where you are, they said. Fuckin a filthy nigger when you should be with us.

The foot soldiers. On patrol. And tooled up.

I looked at Aaron. He looked terrified.

Look, I said, it was his fault. I had to get some gear for me brother...

They weren’t listening. They were staring at us. Hate in their eyes. As far as they were concerned, I was no longer one of them. I was the enemy now.

You wanna run, nigger-lover? Or you wanna stay here and take your beatin with your boyfriend? The words spat out.

I zipped up my jeans. Looked at Aaron.

They caught the look.

Now run, the machine said, hate in its eyes. But from now on, you’re no better than a nigger or a Paki.

I ran.

Behind me, heard them laying into Aaron.

I kept running.

I couldn’t go home. I had no gear for Tom. I couldn’t stay where I was. I might not be so lucky next time.

So I ran.

I don’t know where.

After a while I couldn’t run anymore. I slowed down, tried to get my breath back. Too tired to run anymore. To fight back.

I knew who I was. Finally. I knew WHAT I WAS.

And it was a painful truth. It hurt.

Then from the end of the street I saw them. Pakis. A gang of them. Out protecting their own community. They saw me. Started running.

I was too tired. I couldn’t outrun them. I stood up, waited for them. I wanted to tell them I wasn’t a threat, that I didn’t hate them.

But they were screaming, shouting, hate in their eyes.

A machine. Cogs an clangs an fists an hammers.

I waited, smiled.

Love shining in my own eyes.

Sic transit Gloria Mundi by Joolz Denby

Bradford

We put six black plastic bin bags of stuff in that Rent-A-Wreck transit van; that’s what we took, and we left another twelve or so of rubbish in the house. We’d cleaned up too — or at least what we thought of as cleaning; though it’s no good excuse, you’d have needed an industrial steam-cleaner to shift the muck in that kitchen. And we left a note, taped to the spotted mirror in the front room:

And we set off in the middle of the night, an old transistor radio and tape deck wedged on the filthy dashboard, the rain smearing the windscreen as the wonky wiper jerked spastically across the glass and we put “Babylon’s Burning” on at full distort and we laughed and you floored the pedal until the engine howled.

Oh, man; running away from Bradford in the lost, gone, and sadly not-forgotten ’80s. Running into the great spirit gold of the rising sun and the hot rush of cutting loose at last from the viscous, clinging mud of small-town England; every weekday the dole and just enough coarse cheap food to keep you alive, every Saturday night the same round of drinking, fighting, and dreaming, every Sunday a long smashed afternoon of everyone droning on about how shit it was and how if only they had the breaks, cha, just watch ’em, they’d be rock stars and axe heroes and Somebodies.

If they had the breaks, yeah. If some god on high did it all for them and made it all for them, they’d be off to London in a trice, because that, we all knew, was where everything was. That’s where liber-cool parties were a dazed haze of glitter-floating beautiful people with clothes from boutiques so hip even their names were a transgression, where even the lowliest shop-girl was such a counterculture punkette pin-up she got her pic in Sounds, and the streets were paved with cocaine and the gutters ran with Jack in a fumey vapor of sweet decadence; rich boy’s piss, the blood of rock ’n roll. We all knew this to be 110-percent true because what journalist ever wrote paeans to the punk night at Queen’s Hall, Bradford, or eulogies to some darktime niterie in say, oh, Chester? No, it was London; everything, everyone, every luminous, lush, and longed-for treat was stashed in the belly of that old beast. It was a fact. We’d read it in every newspaper, Sunday arts supplement, music journal, and fashionable novel since forever. It was the way it was and we were the huddled peasant masses crouching on our savage hills gazing up in the torch-lit dark at the divine superstar that was London, London, London.

So we sat in the van as it hurtled down the M1, wired out of our skulls with adrenaline and burning with messianic passion, white hot and calamitous. We weren’t kids, oh no; we weren’t teen escapees, you see; we were genuine artists, gone twenty-five and almost possessing a record contract with EMI; cash-poor we might be, but we’d worked like dogs and earned our turn at the table — so no pallid, plump, dumb fuck of a corporate recording executive was going ruin our Big Chance. We would be there in the thick of it, in London, in control. We weren’t going to be throwaway tinsel two-bit popstrels, oh no — we were going to change the face of music, of literature, of art, of life, forever. Those decadent, air-and-arse kissing Londoners would be forced to welcome us with open arms because we were the future, we were the Warriors of the New. Strapped into our armor of hand-stitched leather and raggedy black, we looked in my tattered old tarot cards and saw rapture rising behind us like a prophecy.

It had to be that way. We’d told everyone it would be. We’d been princes and princesses in Wooltown, now we were going to live like kings and queens in the Smoke. We’d chanted the spell, we’d invoked the gods. It was a done deal.

All that winter six of us slept on the spare bedroom floor of our singer’s sister’s shoe-box flat in the Northerner’s ghetto of London, Highbury New Park. Done up like chrysalides in our stinking doss-bags, we waited for spring when we’d be turned into butterflies. At night the floor heaved like a living carpet and the air was sucked clean of oxygen, but it was too cold and grimy to open the window. They’d never said how tumble-down, litter-strewn, and dirty London was in those magazines and on the telly; the muck was terrible. Put on a clean T-shirt and it’d be black-bright in ten minutes of being exposed to the exhaust-fume leaden reek of the monstrous crawling traffic. Blow your nose and the snot was black; clean your makeup off and the grease was shot with gritty gray that wasn’t mascara. The dirt had its own smell too, sour and rank, hanging in the unmoving air like a filthy veil.

Back home, we’d think — each to ourselves and not letting on for fear of being thought soft — the cold, fresh wind off the moor unrolled through the canyons of gothic sandstone buildings, embroidered with the faint scent of heather and the sweet dust of the craglands, scouring the crooked streets and lighting wild roses in your cheeks.

But it was no use thinking like that. We were here to stay, to make our mark. So we’d shake ourselves back to the now and think, hey, who cares about Wuthering Heights when we can go to Heaven, guest-listed on the strength of the last article in the NME about our meteoric rise to cult stardom, or my snarling mask adorning the front-cover of Time Out — Kabuki-style, rebel-girl eyes sparkling incandescent with unreason and fury. Fame, we thought, never having been taught to think otherwise, was better than bread — and infamy was preferable to anonymity. We didn’t have to stand in line with the other runaways outside whatever nightclub was in that week, listening to the chopped vowels and singsong drawl of the North, the West, or all the other great cities that netted the country — what Londoners called “the provinces” in that particular tone of voice that made you want to spit in their eyes.

So we walked past the Liverpool whine or the Brummie choke of the queuing hordes, and strode in a cloud of patchouli, crimper-burnt hair, and Elnett, into the dreamland they could only hope for. A London nightclub; wow. The carpets patinated with muck, spat-out gum, and marinated in beer slops and puke. The glasses plastic and the watered-down drinks a fortune, the toilets a slick tsunami of bog-water and busted, stinking, scrawled-on, paperless cubicles flapping with broken-locked doors. You never really got anything for nothing in London, see; proved how sharp they were, proved no one got anything over on a real Londoner.

Not that we ever met a real Londoner. Not one born and bred, like. Maybe they were out there somewhere, but we never found them. Certainly not one who could truly say he’d entered this vale of tears to the cheery clamor of Bow bells, the coarse comforting din of the old pub pianner belting out “Miybe It’s Becorse I’m a Lunnoner,” and the smiles of pearly royalty handing out platters of jellied eels and cockles. No, folk said they were from London, but there was always somewhere else hidden in the dusty folds of their fast-forgotten past; they’d lived in London, oh, now, you know, God, forever. But they came from Leicester or Bristol or Glasgow or Cyprus or Athens or Berlin or Ankara. They came to be famous, but until that bright day they washed dishes, threw plates of greasy nosh about in caffs, or struggled round the heart-and-soul-breaking savagery of the infamously brutal London dole offices.

Oh, aye, it was a cold coming we, and many like us, had, and no mistake. But what did we care? If we felt heartsick or homesick, we stood ourselves up straight, wiped our eyes if we were girls, unset our rock-hard jaws if we were boys, and commenced afresh our sure-to-be-stellar careers in the world of art. We would show them, we would not be broken and crawl off home like yellow, sag-bellied curs — we had a meeting with EMI tomorrow where we’d tell ’em how it was, and tonight there was a Happening at an old warehouse by the river, promising an installation featuring a naked model-girl embedded in a tank full of jelly created by the latest cutting-edge performance art duo, a clutch of ranting skin-punk poets, and a couple of hot new London bands cobbled together from the tatterdemalion remnants of last year’s hot new London bands.

How many of those Happenings did we go to, expecting the dark whirligig of cruelly brilliant excess and getting instead a half-cocked mock-up in a rickety-rackety drafty squat where some anorexic pilled-up slapper was toted round in a rusty wheelbarrow slopping with lime Chivers by two public schoolboys whose aristo boho dads had been Hampstead artists in the ’60s, and people we recognized from magazines cooed about authenticity and artistic daring as they wiped their coke-snotty noses and patted each other on the back? They always, always all knew each other from school and from their families and they didn’t know us — but suffering Jesus, we knew them, because we knew what real really was and they. Did. Not. Still don’t, as it goes. Anyway, all these evenings ended in fighting, in smack-and-thunder brawls driven by our frustration and our rage at those whited sepulchres and their great stitch-up. How we frightened them, the faux-Londoners, how we shook their skinny trees. Yeah, yeah, yeah — all that talk of voyeuristic ultra-violence and the thrill of the street evaporated like oily vapor off a stagnant pond when they saw the lightning we were. They never knew us, no, they never did. They never saw us weep.

Oh, it was all such a shill, a sell, a sham; while we ripped ourselves apart searching for the pure, beating heart of things, believing we could, by telling the truth, by tearing the old lies apart at the seams, set ourselves and all our tribe free, London rolled on, a tottering juggernaut of blind and desperate delusion, all the little mannequins trying to find the tailor who made the emperor’s bee-yoo-ti-ful new clothes, so they could ape the great cockalorum and maybe, maybe grab a tiny bit of reflected glory. It was a nonstop dance macabre and we didn’t realize how bone-tired we were becoming.

Then, for us, it all came down in twenty-four hours.

First, we woke up and knew that yet again we wouldn’t be able to see the sky. Might not sound like much but it finally got to us, hemmed in and overshadowed as we were by the ugly gray buildings crouching over us, the exhalations of air-cons and extractor fans panting rancid fast-food farts into the starving air, choking us. In Bradford, you see, the skies constantly scroll above us in a massive cloudscape, as free and ever-changing as the wild pulse of nature — the sandstone of the city is buttery amber, lit from within by a million prisms when the light hits it at sunset. We live in a flame, in a painting by Turner, in Gaia’s Lamp. In London, we were dying for lack of light.

That morning, well, we knew it would be another London day, and lo! It was. And that night it was my thirtieth birthday, and I wasn’t a kid anymore. I had decided to have a party. It was to be at the Embassy Club, private, just for the tribe, and it would be a suitable send-off to my disheveled youth. I spent hours with the crimpers and the kohl pot and I looked like the priestess at Knossos, but I covered up my breasts out of modesty. The snakes, well, I had them tattooed on; easier that way.

How long did my birthday party last in that tatty mold-smelling red-velvet cellar before the scavenging liggers arrived, cawing over the booze they stole, screeching and cackling at us, the barbarians? How long was it before one of them abused the wrong soldier in our little army, and bang-bang it went? Not long, believe me. Then there were cracked noses, plum-black eyes, split lips swelling fat in an instant over sharp-chipped teeth, and the shrill screams of speed-skinny harridans egging on their leathery men-folk to try and “fuck that bitch up.” That bitch stood as the maelstrom rolled around her in a sparkle of broken glass and the red stitch of blood, and thought, ah, enough. So that bitch — which was me, of course, naturally — picked up a tall bar stool and, raising it overhead, smashed the great mirror by the bar into a blossom of shards so I wouldn’t have to see my reflection backdropped by that screeching mess.

Then it went quiet, and all you could hear was breathing and a fella coughing where he’d been whacked in the gut. And the mangy jackals slunk off as the bouncers — late as ever — bulked into the room and tried to get lairy and failed, no one having the energy left to take them seriously.

And I went to the bar manager and said I was sorry for breaking his expensive-looking glass, and he said I hadn’t.

So I said, no, it was me, I’ll pay for it, fair’s fair, somewhat nervous though, as I was mortally skint as usual.

And he said, no, it wasn’t you.

But it was, I said. It was.

No, he said, it wasn’t, you didn’t do it, it’s nothing; you’re famous, we all know you, people like you don’t have to pay for what you do.

And an abyss opened up in front of me that reeked sulphurous of what I could become, of what was in me that rubbed its corrupted hands together and murmured about fame, power, and hubris, which would be the end of freedom and the death of my spirit, and I knew too that a million wannabes would think me the biggest fool living for not pricking my thumb pronto and signing on the dotted line. So I threw some money on the bar — without doubt not enough — and walked out of that shabby shithole, my pretty golden boot-clogs crunching the broken mirror-glass, and I felt a great disgust at the sorry, sordid smallness of the sellout offered me. For if I was going to trade my immortal soul, brothers and sisters, would it be for the entrée to crap clubs and pathetic parties in a slutty run-down frazzle of a city in a small island off the coast of Europe? Oh, I think not, I really think not, as it goes. Only the universe would be enough to satisfy my desire, and I’m still working on that.

So we left London and returned to Bradford double-quick before we had time to think too hard. We rented another stone house terraced on the slopes of our crazy secret city’s hills and breathed the good air with profound relief and paid Mr. Suleiman what we owed, and more, and he said he knew we’d come back one day and we all shook hands, straight up. Then we set ourselves to write our own histories in songs and stories, make our own testaments in paintings and books, which we have done and are still doing and will do forever and ever, amen; stronger and stronger, brighter and brighter. And I’m grateful I saw what I saw when I did, before I was blinded by habit and despair, like so many I know who are lost now, beyond recall.

Twenty years have passed since that night, and I ask myself what it really was we all hated most about our sojourn in the Great Wen. What was the grit in the pearl in the oyster, the time-bomb ticking heart of it? I’ve heard all the stories of loneliness and fear, of self-harm and suicide, of madness and addiction, from others who finally limped home to lick their wounds — but it wasn’t any of that for us. No. What finally, finally finished us with London wasn’t the corruption or the scandals, nothing so interesting, nothing so bold, nothing so grand.

Sic transit gloria mundi — so passes away the glory of the world.

London, that braggart capital, passes away without glory, you see. Without greatness, without any kind of joy, without passion or fire or beauty. In the end, you see, London was such a pathetic bloody disappointment.

And you know what? It still is.

That’s all.

New Rose by John Williams

New Cross

Years ago Mac had read this interview with a British soul singer whose career had had its share of ups and downs. The guy was asked whether he felt he’d been a success. “Well,” he said, “I’ve never had to go back to mini-cabbing.” It was a line that came into Mac’s head quite regularly these days as he delivered a fare to the Academy or hung around the office playing cards with Kemal, the night controller.

Not that Mac minded cabbing particularly. There were a lot worse things to do, he was well aware. And it fit pretty well with his lifestyle. Not just the working at night but the fact that you could drop it just like that when something better came along. Though it was a bit of a while since something better had come along. It had been three months since he’d finished a stint road managing for the Lords — a bunch of re-formed Aussie punks he’d known from back in the day. And it had been a good six months since anyone had asked Mac to get his own band back on the road. Mac had been in one of the original class-of-’76 punk bands but one that had somehow missed out on becoming legendary. They had a bit of a following in Italy, and most of the places that used to be Yugoslavia, but that was about it.

Five a.m. a call came in for a trip to the airport, Heathrow. Kemal looked over at Mac, who sighed then nodded. It was 7:15 by the time he made it home, a council maisonette in Gospel Oak. Jackie was just getting up, making some tea and yelling at the kids, teenagers now both of them, to get themselves out of bed.

“Hey,” he said flopping down on the couch, absolutely knackered.

“Hey yourself,” said Jackie.

“Good time last night?” Jackie had been out with a couple of mates from the school.

“Yeah,” said Jackie, “nice. Listen, there was a message for you when I got in. From someone called Etheridge. Wants you to call him. Sounds like it might be a job. Etheridge, why does that name ring a bell?”

“Used to manage Ross, you remember?”

Jackie pulled a face. “Oh, him.”

“Yeah,” said Mac, “him. He’s doing all right these days, has his own label and management company. Did he leave a number?”

“Yeah, by the phone.”

“Right,” said Mac, stretching and heading for bed. “I’ll call him later.”

“So,” said Jackie at teatime, her turn to sit on the couch looking knackered, after a day spent looking after special-needs kids at the school. “What did he want, this Etheridge?”

“Ah, he wants me to talk to someone.”

“Oh yeah, any particular someone?”

“Yeah, someone he wants to do a gig, and he’s heard I’m the man who might be able to talk this someone into doing one, or at least sober him up enough to get him on stage.”

“Oh Christ,” said Jackie, “not bloody Luke.”

“Yeah,” said Mac, “bloody Luke is exactly who he wants. It’s this label’s twenty-fifth anniversary and they’re having a whole series of gigs to celebrate and they really want Luke to be there, as he was the guy who started it all for them. There’s some decent wedge in it for me and all, if I can get him on stage.”

Jackie shook her head. “Well, just as long as you don’t bring him round here again. Not after last time. Not if he’s still drinking.”

“Oh,” said Mac, “it’s a pretty safe bet he’s still doing that.”

Luke North was another old-timer, another feller who went all the way back to ’76/’77, had played all the same speed-driven, gob-drenched gigs as Mac. Only Luke’s crew had found favor with the all-important John Peel on the radio, and a bit of a cult had grown up around them over the years. Every decade or so a new band would come along and say their heroes were Luke and his mob, and then there’d be a feature in the NME about his dissolute genius or whatever.

All that dissolute genius stuff sounds fine when you read about it in the paper, of course. It tends to be a bit different when you get up close, though. The truth of it was that Luke was a fuck-up, and one who had the knack of fuck-ing up anyone who came in his orbit. But to be fair, he had charm, charisma even, and, given that Mac wasn’t planning on sharing his life with the bloke, he’d always got on with him okay. They’d been close for a while right back at the beginning, drifted apart as you do, then become mates again after they’d both been touring Slovenia at the same time a few years back, both of them at a low ebb. Since then, Luke would call up once a month or so and they’d go out, have a drink or whatever.

A few times Mac had brought him back to Gospel Oak but Jackie wasn’t too keen. Said she sort of liked him, you know, she could see what the attraction was, but there was something about him that creeped her out. Mac hadn’t really known what she meant till the last time he’d come round. He’d been really drunk, maybe something else going on as well. He hadn’t eaten a thing, stubbed his fags out in the food, all that kind of shit which was bad enough, but this time Mac had really known what Jackie meant. There was something — not evil, that was overstating it — but rotten, something definitely rotten coming off him. And since then, that was three, four months ago, Mac had only seen him once.

But apparently that was more than anyone else had done, and if Etheridge was going to pay him a grand “consulting fee” just for getting him on stage, well, Mac was in no position to turn it down.

Calls to the couple of numbers he had for Luke proved fruitless, so Mac decided to cruise around a few of his known haunts in between fares. A run down to Soho gave him a chance to check out the Colony and the French; Luke liked those old-school boho hangouts. No sign of him though, which wasn’t much of a surprise, no doubt Etheridge would have found him already if he was hanging around Soho. Same went for Camden Town. Mac checked the Good Mixer and the Dublin Castle just in case, but once again no sign, nothing but Japanese tourists hoping for a glimpse of someone who used to be in Blur. This was ridiculous, Mac decided, there had to be a million drinking holes in London and the odds of finding Luke at random were next to zero. Even if he was in a pub at all and not crashed out in some flat in Walthamstow or Peckham or God knows where else.

He’d just about given up on the idea when a fare took him to London Bridge station and he had a bit of an inspiration. Years ago, Luke had a kid with a woman who ran a pub just down the way. Well, she hadn’t run a pub back then, but she did now. Luke had taken him in there a year or so back. He was from Bermondsey, was Luke, originally. Over the years, he’d become all international rock and roll, but scratch deep enough and there was a bit of barrow boy lurking in there. And for years, when he was starting out, he’d had this girlfriend who came from the same background as he, London Irish, Linda her name was.

The pub was tucked underneath the railway line, a real basic boozer with a pool table and jukebox and bunch of old fellers sitting at the bar.

Linda was playing darts when Mac walked in. She was a tall woman, what you’d call handsome rather than pretty, chestnut hair and good bones, looked like she could sort you out herself, no problem, if you started any trouble. He waited till she finished her turn, then said hello.

“All right, darlin’?” he said, and she looked at him uncertainly for a second, then broke out a big smile, came over, and hugged him. Women liked Mac, always had, he was big and solid and he kept his troubles to himself. Plus, in this particular case, there was a little bit of history. It was a long time ago, so long ago that Mac had kind of forgotten it till he felt her arms around him, but once, must be twenty years ago, they’d had a bit of a night. Nothing serious, just a bit of a laugh when Luke had been driving her crazy.

“So,” she said, leading him over toward the bar, “what brings you down this way?”

“Well,” said Mac, “pleasure of your company, of course.”

“Oh, aye?” said Linda, and gave him a bit of a look, one that said she didn’t believe him for a moment, but she’d let it slide for now. “So how’s the family?”

“Good. Growing up, you know. How’s your boy?”

Linda shook her head. “In prison.”

“Oh,” said Mac, who wasn’t inclined to rush to judgement, he’d done his own time in his wild youth. “Anything serious?”

Linda scrunched her face up. “Not really, just some E’s and intent to supply.”

“What? They sent him down for that?” He looked at Linda, saw the little shake of her head. “Oh, not a first offense then.”

“No,” said Linda, “not exactly.” Then she mustered up a bit of a smile. “Like father, like son, eh?”

“Yeah, well,” said Mac, “he was always a bit of a boy, your Luke, that’s for sure. You seen him recently?” Felt like a bit a bastard slipping that in.

“Luke? Yeah, now and again, you know how he is.” She paused, took a slug of the drink she had on the bar. Could just be Coke, though Mac wouldn’t have bet on it. “You know what I used to think, back when?”

“No,” said Mac, remembering her back then, a sharp girl in a ra-ra skirt, worked as a barmaid in the Cambridge. Ha, funny to think of it, but she was the only one of them who had managed to advance her career in the meantime, barmaid to landlady definitely had the edge on punk rocker to punk rock revivalist and part-time cabbie.

“I used to think you two were like twins. Like Luke was the good one and you were the evil one.”

“Me?” said Mac, affecting an expression of mock outrage. “Evil?”

“Well,” said Linda, “you had just come out of Strangeways when I first met you.”

Mac shook his head. It was true. The band he’d been in, in Manchester, they were all proper little hooligans, got all their equipment by robbing music shops. Nothing subtle either. Just a brick through the window in the middle of the night and leg it with whatever you could carry. It was no wonder he’d ended up inside.

Linda carried on. “Then later on I thought I’d got it arse backwards, you were the good one and I’d picked the evil one.”

Mac just looked at her, didn’t say anything. The business they were in, you didn’t play by the usual rules. You were in a band, no one expected you to behave properly. A woman went out with you, it was taken as read there’d be others. At least when you went on tour. Had Luke been worse than him? He didn’t really know. He’d never really been one for judging other people. Certainly not back then.

“I chucked him in the end, you know. Well, of course you know. I just got tired of it. And I thought about you now and again. How I should have chosen someone like you.”

Mac shook his head, started to say something, “You don’t know...”

Linda waved his words away. “Yeah, I know. I realized it last time I saw you. A year or two back, when Luke brought you here. I saw you both then and I realized you were the same, just blokes. You just want what you want, all of you.”

Mac had a sudden urge to protest. Was he the same as Luke these days? He didn’t like to think so. Since he’d been with Jackie, god, getting on twenty years, he’d been a reformed character, responsible.

Well, up to a point. He’d tried to be responsible, he’d give himself that, but there were plenty of times he’d failed, plenty of times he’d strayed. Slovenia, where he’d met up with Luke again, that was a case in point all right. This girl called Anja. Yeah, Linda was close enough to the truth of it. Though he kind of hoped there was a sliver of difference in there somewhere, like the gap between Labour and Tory or something, tiny but just big enough to breathe in.

“So,” he said “you know where I might find my evil twin?”

Linda leaned forward reached out a hand and took hold of Mac’s chin, turned his face till he was looking right at her, and she at him. “See what I mean?” she said. Then she laughed and let him go and said, “Dunno, exactly, but you could try New Cross. He’s got a new girlfriend, she’s at Goldsmiths there.”

“A student?”

“No, a bloody lecturer. What d’you think? Course she’s a student. You think some grown woman’s going to take Luke on?”

Mac put his hands up in surrender, then leaned forward and gave Linda a quick kiss right on the lips before heading back out to the car, where he could hear Kemal squawking on the radio.

“Hey,” he said, “calm down man. Look, I’m going off the radar now for a couple of hours, but I’ll work through till morning. All right?”

He switched the radio off before he could hear Kemal’s no doubt outraged reply and headed for New Cross.

Jesus Christ, Mac remembered when New Cross was a nice quiet place to drink, basically dead as anything with a bunch of big old Irish boozers. Now it was like a dank and ugly version of Faliraki, all-disco pubs with bouncers on the outside and liquored-up sixteen-year-olds on the inside. He’d tried Walpole’s, the New Cross Inn, and Goldsmiths. No sign of Luke. He tried the Marquis of Granby, which was a slight improvement, a standard dodgy South London Irish boozer where you could at least hear yourself think. Tired and thirsty, he drank a quick pint of Guinness, tried to remember where else there was to drink in this neck of the woods, and was struck by an unwelcome thought. Luke had always been a Millwall fan.

Reluctantly he dragged himself back out to the car and drove round some back streets that had done a pretty good job of escaping gentrification till he got to the Duke of Albany. He’d been there once with Luke for a lunchtime pre-match session. Hardcore wasn’t the word.

From a distance it looked as if it had closed down. The sign had fallen down and most of the letters of the pub’s name had gone missing. But there was a light showing behind those windows that weren’t blacked out, and Mac sighed and headed on in. He was rewarded by the sight of a dozen or so hard cases giving him the eye, England flags all over the place, and a carpet that immediately attached itself to his feet. He had a quick look round. No sign of Luke. The locals didn’t seem to appreciate his interest. Still, Mac knew exactly how to handle these situations these days.

“Someone order a cab?” he said brightly.

“No, mate,” replied the barman, and Mac shrugged and grimaced and got out of there.

Back in the car, he checked the time. Eleven, closing. He was about to turn the radio back on when he was struck by a memory. Years ago, he’d played a few gigs at a pub in New Cross. What the hell was it called? The Amersham Arms, that was it. Heading down toward Deptford. Maybe it was still there.

It was, and practically the first person he saw when he walked into the music room was Luke North — he was slumped on a banquette with his arm around a ghostly pale redhead.

“Hey,” said Mac, “how you doing?”

“Hey,” said Luke, his eyes taking a moment to focus, “big man. How you doing?”

Better than you, thought Mac. Luke looked ravaged. Way back when, he’d been tall and blond and slightly fucked-up looking. Now he was still tall and blond but more than slightly fucked-up looking: His hair was receding and thinning, his face, even in the light of the pub, was mottled and flaking, and his hard drinker’s belly was stretching his shirt underneath a black suit that looked like someone had died in.

Luke pulled the girl to him, turning her attention away from the band, if that’s what you called a bunch of art-student types hunched over record decks and laptops, silent films playing on a screen behind them. “Sweetie,” he said, “this is Mac, an old mucker of mine. Mac, this is Rose, she’s the best thing ever happened to me.”

Christ, thought Mac, just how pissed is he? Rose smiled at him enthusiastically. She was very pretty in a Gothic sort of way. Extraordinarily pale skin, set off by hair dyed blood-red, skinny as a rake under a long-sleeved black top.

“Nice to meet you,” said Mac. “You want a drink?”

“No,” said Luke, standing up suddenly and banging the table as he did so, sending a glass tumbling to the floor. “Let me get them. Guinness, Mac, yeah? You sit down there and talk to Rose.”

Mac nodded and watched Luke sway his way toward the bar, then seated himself across the table from Rose.

She smiled awkwardly at him and mumbled something. Mac gestured to indicate that the art students were making too much of a racket for him to hear, and she leaned forward. “You’re a friend of Luke’s?” she said.

“Yeah,” said Mac, and paused for a second, then said what was on his mind. “Is he all right? He looks terrible.”

Rose just gave him a look, like she had no idea what he was talking about, and leaned back and turned her eyes to the band. As she did so, her top rode up and Mac couldn’t help noticing how terribly thin she was, not just skinny but full-on anorexic thin. Oh lord. Well, what sort of a girl did he think would want to go out with someone like Luke? She reminded him of someone. Anja the Slovenian. He’d fallen for her big-time. Typical midlife-crisis number, he supposed. Made him blanch to think of it now. He’d have given up Jackie for her, given up his whole life for her if she’d have had him. Thank Christ she hadn’t been interested. He’d been an experience for her, that was all. A learning experience. Maybe that’s all Luke was to this Rose. He hoped so, but her cuts gave him pause.

Moments later Luke hoved to, with a mineral water for Rose, a Guinness for Mac, and a pint and a large whiskey chaser for himself. Mercifully, the art students decided to pick that moment for a break in proceedings, and Mac figured he might as well make his pitch while the volume level permitted and Luke was still conscious.

He ran through the deal. The twenty-fifth-anniversary show. At the Festival Hall. Everyone was going to be there. All Luke had to do was twenty minutes. Could lead on to a whole lot of other stuff — Meltdown, All Tomorrow’s Parties. Mac had no idea whether any of this was true or not, he was just spouting the same bullshit Etheridge had given him.

“He’ll even sort out the band for you, if you want. Or you can use your own, if you’ve got one at the minute.”

“Fuck that,” said Luke, and slumped back in his seat. “Fucking wankers.”

Mac wasn’t sure who the wankers were — his band, Etheridge, the whole crew of post-punk entrepreneurial types with their post-modern music festivals in out-of-season holiday camps. Personally, he was quite happy to agree that the whole lot of them were, indeed, wankers. But that wasn’t going to get the bills paid.

“There’s good money in it.”

Luke just shook his head, but Mac knew him well enough to see something feral appearing in his eyes.

“Five grand,” said Mac, “twenty minutes work. Not too shabby.”

Luke rolled his eyes like five grand was neither here nor there. Then he leaned forward and grasped Mac’s hands in his. “I don’t give a shit about those wankers, Mac, you know that. But if you want me to do it, I’ll do it. I love you, man.”

Jesus Christ, thought Mac, wondering what chemicals Luke had imbibed along with the lake full of booze.

Mac hesitated for a moment. Say he delivered Luke to Etheridge, got him on stage with the right combination of chemicals inside him to impersonate sobriety — or at least sentience — for twenty minutes. What would be the upshot? Five grand for Luke — probably enough to kill himself. A grand for Mac — probably enough to pay off Jackie’s credit cards.

Shit, why was he feeling guilty? They were all grown-ups, weren’t they? Mac had enough to deal with in his own life, hadn’t he? And anyway, we all had a few too many once in a while, didn’t we? He looked at Luke trying to maneuver the pint of lager to his mouth without spilling it. It was blatantly obvious that he had passed the point of no return, social-drinking-wise. Dylan Thomas had that line about how an alcoholic was someone you didn’t like who drank as much as you did. Well, Mac had been fond of quoting that in his time, but he could see the shallowness of it now. Thomas’s drinking killed him, after all. Luke needed help. It was as simple as that.

“Look, I want you to promise me one thing. You do this gig, yeah? You’ll spend the money on rehab.”

“Sure,” said Luke. “I love you, man.”

Just then Rose got up to go to the loo. Luke watched her go, then leaned forward to Mac. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”

“Yeah,” said Mac, “she seems very nice, bit young though, eh?”

“Yeah,” said Luke, “goes like a fucking firecracker, though.” He knocked back his whiskey, then leaned forward again, motioning Mac to do the same. “Got some nice friends and all, if you’re interested.”

Mac was appalled to find himself considering it, by the unwelcome knowledge that somewhere inside him was the capacity to say yes, set me up with an anorexic waif of my own. Linda’s line about them being like twins was running through his head. It struck him now that it was the evil twin she liked, she wanted. It let her off the hook. Maybe he should just give in to his dark side, maybe that actually made it easier for everyone. No self-repression, no hypocrisy. Just get down in the dirt.

He looked at Rose, heading back from the toilet, stopping at the cigarette machine, all young and fresh and damaged, saw Anja in her place, remembered how much he’d wanted Anja the first time he saw her at that club in Ljubljana. He saw Luke staring at Rose, eyes full of lust and lager, saw himself in Luke, embracing death. He felt like there was no air in the room. He took a deep breath, sucked in as much as he could. Then tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling, wondering how he got to this pass. Maybe he could retrain as a social worker or something. Something useful. Something that would stop him from taking his place in the tableau in front of him. He shook his head hard and the fog seemed to clear momentarily.

He became aware of the record that was playing, some old punk thing by the Damned, probably the art students were playing it ironically. It didn’t sound ironic to Mac though, it sounded like his youth. It reminded him viscerally of what it had felt like being young then, nearly thirty years ago, playing this stupid fast music for no other reason than the sheer rush, the sheer pointless, joyous momentum of it.

And it reminded him that he wasn’t young anymore, and no matter how many Anjas or brand-new Roses he picked up, he would be nothing more than a vampire, not magically returned to the loud stupid kid he’d once been. He tilted his head back down and looked at Luke. Then it struck him, the difference between them. Luke was still the loud stupid kid he had been, still a selfish, pleasure-seeking child. Ah well, good luck to him, he supposed.

“Sorry, man,” he said, shaking his head, “not my scene.”

“Your loss,” answered Luke. “I tell you, she’s a fucking firecracker, that one. Another pint?”

“No thanks,” said Mac, but Luke was already up and lurching bar-wards again. As he did so, Rose ran over to him, threw her arms round him, and kissed him like she hadn’t seen him for a week. He said something in her ear and she nodded and reached into her bag, took out her purse, and handed him a twenty. Luke trousered it and turned toward the bar before suddenly seeming to convulse. And then, slowly and oddly gracefully, he collapsed on the floor, banging into the legs of a couple of his fellow drinkers.

“You fucking wanker!” shouted one of the drinkers, and wound up to throw a punch, before realizing that his opponent was already down and out.

Mac looked on transfixed, his attention entirely gripped by Rose, who calmly knelt down on the floor next to Luke and cradled him against her, stroking his head with one hand, a flame-haired, flat-chested Madonna and her debauched infant.

Later, sitting in the cab, resigned to being a grownup, earning his money the hard way, he found the words “damned” and “blessed” jostling for space in his brain.

The following afternoon he was woken up by the phone. It was Etheridge on the line. Mac paused for a moment, wondering what to say. He wasn’t sure he really cared what Luke did, but the thought of taking a finder’s fee for tracking him down felt weirdly unclean, seemed to somehow make him complicit in Luke’s grim debauch. On the other hand, it was undoubtedly an easy grand.

Before he could make the decision, Etheridge started talking. “Look,” he said, “not to worry about tracking down old Luke.”

“Oh,” said Mac, “decided against risking him on stage, have you?”

“No, no, not at all,” explained Etheridge, “people love a bit of drama, don’t they? No, his manager’s been in touch so it’s all sorted out. I just thought I’d let you know.”

“Manager?” said Mac.

“Oh yes, delightful young woman by the sound of her, name of Rose. Sounds like she’s got him right under her thumb. So there we are. Well, thanks again.”

“No trouble,” said Mac and put the phone down.

The next morning he finished his shift deliberately early and got home in time to find Jackie still in bed. After they’d had sex he was happy to realize that for the first time in a long while he hadn’t thought about Anja at all.

Penguin Island by Jerry Sykes

Camden Town

Eamonn Coughlan had lived in Camden Town all his life, and from as far back as he could remember there had been packs of teenagers roaming the streets: from the wartime cosh gangs that had operated during the blackouts to the hippies in the ’60s... from the punks of the ’70s through to the... Well, he didn’t know what they were called these days, but whatever they were called he had never come across a group of teenagers that had marked out their territories with as much determination as the current crop. Of course, he knew that graffiti had been around forever, ever since an unknown caveman had first picked up a piece of sharpened flint and scratched into the walls of his cave pictures of the animals that he had killed that morning. But it seemed that in the last few years almost every building in Camden Town had been marked with some kind of multicolored lettering or sign. He knew that it had something to do with drugs, an ongoing turf war, and that the signs were forever changing because of the constant battle for the rights to deal drugs to the thousands of tourists who flocked into the area around Camden Lock each weekend, but the subtleties of the different signs were lost on him.

For the last eighteen months, the dominant piece of graffiti on the wall beside the lift in his building had been a large picture of a castle in red and blue. But as Coughlan pushed through the door that late spring morning, he saw that the castle had been covered over with black paint and that a couple of boys were now creating a new motif in its place. The new design was still little more than a sketch, he could just about make out three big letters outlined in red and orange — YBT, it looked like — but before Coughlan could see more, one of the boys caught him looking and turned and raised a hard chin in his direction.

“Yo, what d’you think you’re lookin’ at,” snarled the boy, his neck stretching out of his collar. From the rest of his face he looked to be no more than thirteen or fourteen, but his eyes were cold and hard, aged before their time. He had a greased-down, straight-fringed haircut that made him look like a little Caesar, and the skin around the corners of his mouth was studded with cloves of acne. The other boy continued to paint, his head rising and falling to some music that no one else could hear.

Coughlan shook his head and let the door fall closed behind him. Averting his eyes, he shuffled across to the lift, Little Caesar following him with narrowed eyes, his breath loud and coarse through his mouth. As Coughlan pressed the button to call the lift, the other boy turned to see what his friend was looking at, and Coughlan recognized him at once as Pete Wilson, a boy from the building that he had known since he was a toddler. From what Coughlan could remember, he must have been about twelve now.

Pete’s pupils went wide as he recognized the old man and his hands whipped behind his back, hiding the paint can.

“What do you think you’re doing, Pete?” asked Coughlan, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth he felt his shoulders tense. He had never been one for making a fuss, and his outburst had scared him almost as much as it had surprised him.

Pete hesitated for a moment, torn between his childhood links and the new alliance of his fresh and future independence.

“I bet your mother doesn’t know what you’re up to,” Coughlan persisted, brave now. “What do you think she’d say if she knew you were down here vandalizing your own building?”

Discovering that the decrepit old man in front of them knew his friend, Little Caesar’s mood lightened and he sniggered and punched Pete on the arm. Pete grunted and punched him back, glad for the distraction. From further up the stairs the sound of someone cursing and kicking the lift door could be heard.

“I hope you’re going to clean that mess up before you go home,” said Coughlan, pointing a crooked finger at the wall.

“I was just painting over the castle,” protested Pete.

“With black paint on a white wall? And what’s with the red and orange letters? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s YBT,” replied Pete, smiling. “You Been Torched.”

“I don’t understand,” replied Coughlan, frowning.

Pete opened his mouth to speak, but before he could do so, Little Caesar hit him on the shoulder again. “You know we’re not supposed to tell no one about that.”

“It’s not a secret,” protested Pete, holding his arm tight where Little Caesar had punched him.

“Fuckin’ child,” snapped Little Caesar, snatching the paint can from Pete’s hand and storming out of the building. Pete watched him go and then, after taking a quick glance at the unfinished graffiti, followed him. At the door, Pete cast a look back at the old man, and Coughlan thought he detected the hint of an apologetic word in the nervous stutter of his lips.

Coughlan watched them disappear around the edge of the building, Pete trailing the other kid like a sibling desperate to please his elder brother. He waited a couple of seconds to make sure there was no return, and then felt a long hot breath leave his chest. He had not realized that he had been holding his breath. He turned back to the lift and pressed the button again.

A couple of minutes later, an old woman in a blue raincoat appeared at the foot of the stairs, panting as if she had just walked up them and not down. “I hope you’re not waiting on the lift,” she managed to gasp on a cloud of smoke, a cigarette burning in her fist, before she too disappeared through the door.

Coughlan took a deep breath and started up the stairs.

Back in his flat on the fourth floor, he filled the kettle and dropped a teabag into a mug. Waiting for the kettle to boil, he rested his hands on the edge of the sink and looked out over the estate toward Kentish Town Road, toward a couple of phone booths. Behind the booths was a low brick wall where it was common knowledge that a number of drug dealers practiced their trade, their customers either walking up or pulling up on the street in their cars to pick up their goods. There was a dealer out there at the moment, and another one strolling up and down the street, gesturing with a pointed finger at the cars that passed. It had become such a common sight, part of the threadbare fabric of the estate, that it no longer triggered an emotional response in Coughlan. But as he let his attention drift across the rest of the estate, his heart filled with sorrow as he spotted Pete and his friend sitting on the back of a bench no more than fifteen feet from the phone booths, watching the drug dealers in silent fascination.

Later that night, stretched out on his bed, Coughlan listened with grim acceptance to the sound of his neighbors arguing, the rise and fall of drunken tongues and slurred insults. On the weekend it was like this most nights, along with the rumble of music through the wall that reminded him of the night during the war when a German bomb had reduced their neighbor’s house to smoking ash and rubble. The bomb had buckled the foundations of their own house, and the front door had never fit the frame after that, still letting in a draft when the council had moved them out of the house and into the Castle Estate the same summer he retired. And it was on nights like this that he wished his neighbors, his imagined enemies, could be bombed all over again.

A week later, Coughlan was walking across the estate to the newsagent’s on Castle Road when he saw Pete with another boy at the side of the building. It was the first time he had seen him since the afternoon near the lift. The other boy was not the same one who had been with him that time. No, this one looked to be more like one of the lads that hung around the phone booths, older, all cold skin and hand jerks. The two of them were talking, but there was something odd about their body language. Pete was nodding and grinning as the older boy spoke, as if the older boy was telling him a long joke, although from the look on the older boy’s face he seemed to be more annoyed than amused. Coughlan tried not to watch, but he kept glancing up as he walked past, and when Pete caught him looking, the grin fell from the boy’s face and his once innocent cheeks flushed with something approaching shame. The other boy caught the change in his features and, after peering across at Coughlan, jabbed Pete on the shoulder and asked him who the old man was. Pete attempted to shrug off the question, but the other boy jabbed him again on the shoulder, harder this time, and Pete’s mouth sprung open. Coughlan turned his head aside and hurried on, but not before he caught his name in the tumble of words that spilled from Pete’s mouth.

The following afternoon, struggling home from the supermarket — since arthritis had calcified the knuckles in his hands, he was unable to load more than a few items into his bag at a time and so had to go shopping each afternoon — Coughlan ran into Pete again. As Coughlan was crossing the junction at the foot of the estate, a line of impatient cars pushing at the red light, Pete came rushing out of the greengrocer’s with a loaf of bread under his arm and bumped straight into the old man. Coughlan stumbled but did not fall, though he did drop his shopping bag, and a tin of processed peas rolled into the gutter.

“Whoa, watch where you’re going,” squealed Pete, and then pulled up as he noticed that it was Coughlan he had bumped into.

Coughlan frowned at him and shook his head, and then stooped to pick up his groceries.

“Here, let me get that,” said Pete, crossing to pick up the peas from the gutter. He held out the tin to Coughlan and the old man took it and put it in his bag with the other things.

“Sorry about that,” Pete continued. “Look, why don’t I carry your shopping home for you? The lift’s not working again.” Without waiting for an answer, he took the bag from Coughlan’s hardened and aching hands and started walking.

Pushing through the door of the building, the boy holding it open with the back of his heel, Coughlan noticed that Pete headed straight for the stairs without so much as a casual glance at the mess of graffiti on the wall. It had not been touched since Coughlan had stumbled across Pete and his friend with fresh paint on their hands, but he thought that Pete would have at least sneaked a look at it. Or perhaps that was the reason behind Pete helping him with his shopping...

Upstairs in the flat, Pete put the shopping bag on the kitchen counter, took out his own loaf of bread that he had put in there for safekeeping, and then turned toward the door. But he appeared to be in no great rush to leave, his lips mouthing silent words as if he had something on his mind.

Coughlan thought he knew what it was. “Don’t worry about it, son,” he said, smiling. “I’m not going to tell your mum about the graffiti or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about...”

“Oh no, that’s not the reason I helped you,” insisted Pete, shaking his head. “No, that’s got nothing to do with it. I just saw you struggling across the street and I thought...”

“I know, I know,” Coughlan assured him, patting the air in front of him with his palms. “And I do appreciate it. It’s just that... Look, can I get you a drink of squash or something?”

“No, that’s all right,” said Pete, shaking his head. “I better get this bread home or my mum’ll be wondering where I am.”

“All right,” said Coughlan. “Well, thanks again, Pete.”

The boy offered him a brief smile and then turned and disappeared back down the stairs.

The following afternoon, Pete was waiting for Coughlan when the old man came out of the supermarket, and once again offered to help him with his shopping. Coughlan was surprised to see him after the awkwardness of their last meeting, but he knew enough to keep his mouth shut if it meant that much to the lad. And on the walk back to the estate, it did seem that Pete had forgotten all about it, chatting about his school and his teachers.

Over the following couple of weeks, Pete helped Coughlan with his shopping a number of times, and soon Coughlan found that he was timing his trips to the supermarket to coincide with Pete coming home from school. Sometimes Pete would accept the old man’s offer of a drink, gulping it down, but more often than not he would decline, telling him that he had to get home.

And then one afternoon, an hour or so before Coughlan was due to leave for the supermarket, there was a knock at the door. When he opened it he was surprised to find Pete standing there with a couple of bulging shopping bags in his hands. “These weigh a ton,” he gasped. “Are you going to let me in or what?”

Startled and amused, Coughlan stepped aside to let him across the threshold. “What’ve you got in there?” he said, trailing Pete down the hall and into the kitchen.

Pete left the question in the air as he hefted the bags onto the counter. He let out a great breath, and then turned and rested against the counter, smiling and shaking his head.

“I don’t understand,” said Coughlan, frowning.

“The teacher was sick, so we got let out of school... I thought I might as well pick up your shopping for you.”

“But that lot must’ve cost you a small fortune,” said Coughlan, stepping forward and peering into the bags. “You didn’t pay for it yourself, did you?” He had no idea how much pocket money Pete got each week, or whether he had a paper round or some other job, but, whatever, he should have been spending it on himself, not on an old man. “You must let me give you the money.”

Coughlan moved into the front room, the fire turned down low, and returned with his wallet. He took out a ten-pound note and handed it to Pete. “Is that enough?” he asked, looking at the remaining note in his wallet, a fiver. He felt that he should give the boy more for his thoughtfulness, but the fiver was all he had until he claimed his pension at the end of the week.

“Ten’s fine,” replied Pete. He took the crumpled bill from the outstretched hand and folded it into his front pocket.

“It was very kind of you, anyway,” said Coughlan. “Very thoughtful.”

“Look, I was thinking,” said Pete, hesitant. His cheeks were flushed pink, and there was a fine sheen of perspiration on his forehead. “Why don’t you let me do this all the time, get your shopping for you on my way home from school. I know it must be difficult for you, what with your hands like that... It’s no problem, honest, especially as you always eat the same things.”

Coughlan felt tears prick the back of his lids. “That’s a great idea,” he said. “Thanks.”

“And then you can pay me when I get here,” Pete added.

“But what if I’m not in?” said Coughlan, sniffing.

“Well, I don’t know...”

“I might want to go out. I don’t want you getting my shopping for me and then not being here to let you in.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a mobile phone, have you?”

“Er, no. No, I haven’t...”

“Well, I don’t know then,” said Pete, his forehead crinkled in thought. “What about if you let me have a key or something? Or how about leaving it with one of the neighbors?”

Coughlan thought about his neighbors, the born fighters. “I’ll go down and get you one cut in the morning,” he replied.

“Sorted,” said Pete.

The new arrangement suited them both fine. But then Coughlan found that he was just waiting in for Pete to arrive, and not getting out and about as much as he would have liked. He let this go on for some time, until one afternoon, as he was looking out the window, the clouds above the estate parted, the solid shapes of the buildings started to soften around the edges, and he realized that he was just being ridiculous and decided to go out for a walk. Pulling on his jacket, he left the estate and headed down Castle Road toward the center of Camden Town, past the boarded-up pubs, the shops that sold little more than international phone cards, and the cafés with names in languages that he did not even recognize let alone understand. As he walked, he saw a number of walls and bridges littered with both the castle and YBT graffiti, the castle artwork faded and peeling while the YBT letters shone with a brittle freshness. It did not cross his mind for one second that perhaps Pete had been one of the artists.

At the junction in front of Camden Town tube station there was a traffic island, a triangular slice of concrete and paving stones that for as long as Coughlan could remember had been known as Penguin Island. In the street behind the tube station, there was a Catholic church that back in the ’50s had been frequented in the main by the Irish families who lived in the immediate area. After the regular Sunday morning Mass had finished at 11:30, the men would gather on the traffic island to wait for the pubs to open at noon, while the women would go home to prepare lunch. Standing there in their uniform black suits and white shirts, with their hands in their pockets, shuffling around on impatient feet, the men had resembled nothing so much as a squadron of penguins stranded in the middle of a sea of traffic.

Coughlan smiled at the remembrance, but then another more potent image appeared beside the first one: Coughlan himself walking back from the church with his wife at his side, wanting to be on the island but not having the courage to tell his wife that that was what he wanted. It had been the tale of his life, and he wondered if he would ever now get to Penguin Island. He pushed his hands deeper into his pockets and walked on.

When he returned to the flat an hour later, Coughlan was surprised to hear voices coming from the living room. At first he thought that Pete had arrived and turned on the TV to amuse himself while he waited, something that he had done before, but when he stepped through into the living room, he found Pete and another boy standing in front of the mantelpiece.

At the sight of Coughlan, Pete cast a quick glance toward his friend and then turned to look at Coughlan again, his mouth open in a mask of timid shock. The friend caught the apprehension in Pete’s face and pushed back his shoulders and looked over toward Coughlan with a slow grin on his face.

“Yeah, this is... this is Keith,” stammered Pete. “It’s all right for me to let him come in and watch TV with me?”

“Well, I suppose so,” replied Coughlan, distracted.

Coughlan looked across at Keith, took in the knowing look and the stance that told him that he was just as comfortable, if not more so, in Coughlan’s home than the old man himself.

“Hello, Keith,” said Coughlan, nodding.

Keith said nothing, just kept up the grin in response.

“I’ve put the shopping away,” said Pete. “And I got you another one of those pork-and-pickle pies you like.”

“Thanks, Pete.”

“It was reduced so you might have to eat it today.”

“Yes, thanks, Pete,” muttered Coughlan again, embarrassed at discussing the state of his finances in front of a stranger. “Anyway... look, Pete, I don’t mind you bringing your friends round here. But in the future, can you ask me first?”

“I’m sorry, I thought you’d be in,” replied Pete.

“That’s all right, no harm done this time,” said Coughlan.

Pete kept a low profile for a short time after that, but when Coughlan came home late one afternoon a week later — to appear less needful he had taken to being out sometimes when Pete was due to call with his shopping — he found that Pete had not one but several friends with him. When Coughlan poked his head through the door, curious at the noise, there was a group of four or five lads sitting around the living room. One of them looked to be about the same age as Pete, but the others appeared to be about two or three years older, tufts of soft hair coloring their chins and their long limbs barely under control. Pete was sitting in the middle of the sofa and looked to be more at ease than he had been the time before, staring at the TV. He did not seem to have noticed Coughlan, but then none of them appeared to have noticed him, and Coughlan felt a tumble of emotions pass through him. On one hand, he felt that he should pull Pete out of the room and ask him to ask the others to leave, but then he did not want to embarrass the lad in front of his friends again. Without waiting to see if he had been spotted, Coughlan made a gesture as if he had forgotten something, and then turned and left the flat.

He walked up to Parliament Hill, through the park past the athletics track, and back down to Camden Town, his mind adrift on children and the past. When he reached home again, Pete and his friends had gone, but the smell of cigarettes and something else still hung in the air. Coughlan opened the top windows to clear the room and then closed the door tight and headed for bed.

Later that night, stretched out on his bed, unable to sleep because of the noise coming through the wall from his neighbors, Coughlan felt himself returning to the thoughts that had been troubling him during his walk earlier. He and his wife had not been able to have children of their own, and so he was not sure how he should have handled the situation with Pete. Instinct told him that he had done the right thing, but he wished to God that he had more than instinct on which to base his reactions.

In 1945, a short time before Coughlan had started courting his wife — he had known her since junior school, and in their teens the pair had lived just three streets apart — she had had a brief but intense affair with a married American soldier stationed in London. When the American had broken off the affair to return to his wife and home in West Virginia, she had just shrugged it off as if he had meant no more to her than a pair of old shoes. But then two months later she had fallen into a deep depression and not ventured out of the house for another three weeks. When at last she came out again, she had been a different person, as quiet in her new skin as she had been the life and soul in her old skin. And she had also then had some time for Coughlan, too, the quiet and dependable kid in the corner of the neighborhood. Of course, there had been rumors that it was not depression that had kept her in the house all that time, the strongest of which was that following the American’s departure she had undergone a backstreet abortion that went wrong and left her barren. Coughlan had ignored all the rumors at the time, grateful for her attention, and had maintained a closed ear even when she had failed to become pregnant throughout their long marriage. Even now, more than a decade after her death, he still refused to believe that the rumors were something other than malicious gossip, putting their childlessness down as something that was just meant to be.

The following afternoon there was a group of boys in his flat again, but this time Pete was not with them. There were just the three of them, smoking and watching The Jerry Springer Show.

“What are you doing here?” asked Coughlan, doing his best to sound indignant but finding a touch of fear holding him back.

The boys ignored him, grinning as the TV pumped out a hard rattle of cheers and applause.

“How did you get in?” said Coughlan, stepping further into the room.

The boys continued to grin and ignore him.

“I said, how did you get in?” repeated Coughlan, stepping in front of the TV.

“Your boy gave us his key, man,” replied one of the boys at last, scowling, his pale face shrouded in the hood of his sweatshirt, arching to look around Coughlan at the TV.

“You mean Pete gave you his key?”

“If that’s what his name is,” sniggered the boy.

“Well, he shouldn’t have done that,” said Coughlan, reaching down to turn off the TV. “So I’d like you all to leave.”

“I was watching that,” complained one of the other boys.

“Yo, he gave us his key, man,” said the first boy. “Gave us his key and told us to wait here for him. Said he had to do some shopping for you or something. You can’t ask us to leave.”

“Yeah, what’s he going to say when he gets back here and finds us gone?” said the second boy. “What’s he going to say when he gets back here and finds you kicked us out?”

“Well... that’s different then,” said Coughlan, taken aback. “You should have said.” And all at once he felt shrunken, as if he had betrayed Pete. He felt all the boys looking at him, judging him, making him out to be the villain of the piece. He did not know what to do, feeling like even his breathing was further condemnation, and after a few moments of just staring into space, he turned and walked through into the kitchen to look out across the estate, a terrible weight hanging in his chest.

Pete at last turned up half an hour later, but the next time that Coughlan came home to find a group of his friends watching TV in his living room, Pete was again not with them. There was still no sign of him an hour later, either, and so Coughlan climbed down from his stool in the kitchen, shuffled through into the living room, and asked them to leave. This time the boys did so without much bother, clucking tongues and dragging feet, but it left the old man feeling confused and hurt.

The time after that the lads had the TV up loud and, despite Coughlan asking them a couple of times to turn it down, the noise remained constant. Coughlan did not have the strength to argue with them and kept to himself in the kitchen. After waiting for Pete for over an hour, he could take it no longer. He slipped on his jacket and headed out into the night.

He sat on a bench in the center of the estate, watching people come and go. It was a warm evening and he felt comfortable out there, more comfortable than he did in the light, the twilight hiding the geographical sins and scars of the estate.

He sat for another few minutes and then decided to go for a walk. When he got home again about half past 10, the gang was gone but had left a mosaic of trash behind in his front room: crushed beer and Coke cans, fried chicken boxes, cigarette butts, neon bottles with chewed straws poking out of their lips. He tidied up as best he could and then went to bed, determined to confront Pete and ask him to give him his key back.

But Pete did not appear the following afternoon, or the one after that, and when he had still not turned up on the third afternoon, Coughlan felt his fragile resolve start to waver. Then one lunchtime, as he was looking for some tinfoil to wrap a half-eaten sandwich in, the ongoing tension had made him lose his appetite, he found something that fired him up again.

Standing on a chair in the kitchen, he was reaching into the top cupboard where he was sure there was some tinfoil, when he felt a cool plastic bag there. He could not see into the cupboard so he shifted his arthritic fingers around, attempting to make out what it was. An old carrier bag, stuffed with some linen napkins, perhaps. He tried to find purchase on the bag but his fingers kept slipping off. After a few failed attempts, he managed to catch hold of a corner of the bag and started to ease it out of the cupboard. Moving it a couple of inches at a time, he pulled it toward the edge of the shelf. And then there was a shift and a tumble, and a cascade of small plastic bags and little foil envelopes fell out onto the floor in a solid splash. A black bin liner followed like a winded kite. Coughlan looked at the mess in astonishment. There must have been at least two or three hundred little bags and envelopes spread across the kitchen floor.

It took him a minute to get there, but Coughlan had seen enough police shows on TV to know that he was looking at drugs. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of pounds worth of drugs. He climbed down from the chair and sat for a moment looking at the hellish pile on the floor, wondering what to do with it all. He checked his watch and saw that it was almost 5 o’clock, Pete’s usual time for coming around. Sighing at the situation, he levered himself down onto the floor, scooped all the small packets back into the bin liner, and hefted it up onto the table.

Fifteen minutes later he heard Pete’s voice out in the hall, and then another voice behind the first. Coughlan held his breath, his heart beating loud in his chest, as he waited for them to walk along the hall and into the front room. He heard the TV being switched on, a quick pulse of canned laughter, and then seconds later a kid with black hair stepped into the kitchen. He saw Coughlan sitting at the table with the full bin liner in front of him and his pupils went dark and wide in anger.

“What the fuck d’you think you’re doing with that?”

“I might ask you the same question,” replied Coughlan.

“It’s none of your fuckin’ business.”

“It’s my flat,” said Coughlan. “It’s my home.”

At that moment Pete walked into the room, lured in by the raised voices.

“Did you know anything about this?” asked Coughlan, pointing at the bin liner.

Pete glanced at the other boy, looking for the right words.

And then without warning, the other boy stepped up to Coughlan and punched him hard in the face.

Coughlan felt a great bolt of pain shake his spine and nail him to the chair. Tears sprang across his face and diluted the blood that bubbled from his nose. His head spun for a second, and then he fell unconscious face-first across the bag of drugs.

“You’ve killed him,” squealed Pete. “You’ve killed him.”

“He’s not dead,” said the other kid, poking Coughlan hard in the shoulder so that his head lolled back and forth. “Look, he’s still bleeding. Dead people don’t bleed like that.”

“But he might be dead soon,” said Pete, his face turning white and his tongue sticking in his throat.

“Don’t be fuckin’ stupid,” said the other kid, stepping forward and giving Coughlan a hard shove. The old man slid off the table and dragged the bag of drugs onto the floor with him, spilling its contents across the battered linoleum.

Pete just stared at the old man, the spread of drugs.

“Well go on then, pick ’em up,” said the other kid.

Pete hesitated for a second, his limbs telling him to run, but then did as he was told. He gathered the drugs together and tried to see if Coughlan was breathing all right.

“Come on, come on,” snapped the other kid, tapping Pete in the side with the toe of his trainer.

Pete hurried to scrape up the remainder of the packets and stuff them back into the bin liner. He gathered the neck of the bag together and then tried to hand it to the other kid. But the other kid just told him to put it back in the cupboard.

“But what about Mr. Coughlan?”

“He’s not goin’ to be telling no one,” came the response.

Coughlan came round moments later, more shocked than hurt. Drifting back into the here and now, he remained on the kitchen floor for a short time, listening for signs of other people in the flat. It all appeared to be quiet, and he was sure that it had been the slamming of the door that had stirred him. He ran a hand across his upper lip, wiping at the blood there. It had started to harden and it felt like his nose had stopped bleeding. He climbed to his feet and shuffled across to the sink. He turned on the tap and let it run until it got as cold as it was going to get. Cupping his hands together, he filled them with water, and then held his nose in the water until it had all leaked through his hardened fingers. He repeated the action. As the center of his face started to numb, the numbness spreading out from his nose, he felt his strength returning and his mind clearing. He knew that he should go to the police, but he also knew that would be a mistake. He had seen what had happened to people who stood up for themselves, and he did not want to go through that himself. Rather than bringing an end to their torment, it had more often than not meant an escalation.

He shuffled through into his bedroom and changed into a fresh shirt, throwing the bloodstained one into the waste bin behind the door. There were a few splashes of blood on his trousers, but as he had just bought them a few weeks earlier, he was reluctant to throw them out too, and decided to keep them on. Once he had finished dressing, he walked into the bathroom to inspect his injuries in the mirror. He used a flannel to wipe the dried blood from his skin and then leaned in to the mirror to get a closer look. There was a small scratch on the side of his nose, and the beginnings of a bruise, but apart from that the damage appeared to be minimal, at least on the outside.

He went back into the bedroom and put on a thick sweater. Despite the warmth of the evening, the assault had left him feeling cold and he had goosebumps on his arms. Then he went back into the kitchen and looked at the blood on the floor, the bloodied handprints from the floor to the sink like the footprints of some great lost beast. The sight of it made him feel a little sick, and he told himself he would clean it up later. He turned and left the flat, closing the door behind him.

He walked through Camden Town, through the streets he had walked since childhood, feeling that he no longer knew them. His mind was all over the place, dislocated and lost within the familiar maps of his life. Earlier he had been quite prepared to confront Pete about letting his friends use the flat, but now he felt like he just wanted to forget that he had ever met the boy.

He tried to eat an omelette at a café on Chalk Farm Road, pushing it around his plate until it got lodged in the cooling grease, and then walked up to Parliament Hill fields. There, he sat on a bench overlooking the athletics track, watching a group of girls messing about in the long jump pit. At one point, one of the girls ran across to the steeplechase water jump. There was no water in it, but she still jumped in and pretended to be drowning, waving her arms around and screaming. Her friends just ignored her and at last she returned to the sand pit.

The girls left when it started to get dark, but Coughlan felt too tired to walk home just then and stretched out on the bench to rest for a few minutes before setting off. The brittle summer stars spreading across the darkening ceiling of the world reminded him of a time during the war when he had dragged his mattress onto the roof of the outhouse to listen to the bombs dropping on the East End. Despite the noise and the threat of the bombs getting closer, he remembered it as being a time of calm for him, a time before he had met his wife, a time before the neighbor’s house had been crushed. He let his lids fall, so tired and with a persistent headache, and when at last he opened them again it had started to get light. Surprised, he rubbed hard at his face to wake himself up and then climbed to his feet. His back ached but the pain eased up as he started walking toward the gate. When he checked the clock outside the jeweler’s store on Kentish Town Road he was surprised to see that it was 5 o’clock in the morning.

He let himself into the flat and stood for a few moments in the hall, just holding his breath and listening. Minutes passed but all he could hear was the regular sounds of the flat creaking. He appeared to be alone, but to make sure he went round each of the rooms, checking in cupboards and behind doors, before going back to the front door and locking it. Then he went back into his bedroom and climbed into bed, still in his clothes.

When he woke again it was after 4 in the afternoon, a dull rectangle of orange light spread across the bed beside him. For a moment he did not know where he was, and then he remembered falling asleep on the bench and it all came back to him. But in that fleeting moment of not knowing, he had felt at peace with the world. And now the knot was back in his stomach. He looked at his watch again to check the time. Pete or some of his friends would be around soon and he did not want to be here for that. He went into the bathroom to check on the wound, and then back into the bedroom to dress in a set of thicker and more comfortable clothes. In the kitchen he took his pension book from the drawer, slipped it into the back pocket of his trousers, and headed back outside. He took a quick glance at the drug dealers sitting near the phone booths, then turned and headed back up toward Parliament Hill fields, calling in at a corner shop to purchase a couple of small pies and a carton of milk.

There were a few pensioners out on the bowling green, and a middle-aged couple were struggling to hit the ball over the net on one of the tennis courts. Coughlan stopped for a moment to watch them, aching inside at their casual grasp of the ordinariness of their lives, and then continued on to the bench where he had slept the night before. As he turned from the fence bordering the court, he started to panic at the thought that someone else might be sitting there. But when he reached the top of the rise and saw that there was no one else there, the feeling of relief that flooded his senses was just as great as if he had returned to his flat and found that Pete and his friends had decided to leave. He stepped up his pace until he reached the bench, took his seat, and then looked around, blinking in the high afternoon sun. There was no one on the athletics track, no one messing around in the long jump pit, nothing for him to watch and help pass the time. But on the main path there was a woman out walking her dog, and when Coughlan offered her a cheerful hello he was rewarded with a brief smile. It was the greatest reaction he’d had had in a long time, the greatest acceptance.

Through the birch trees on the far side of the track and the cranes that seemed to be forever stalking the streets of London, Coughlan watched the sun go down until he became shrouded in darkness. The shroud felt a little colder than it had the night before, so he pulled his coat tight around his chest. A slight wind had also started to blow across the hill, and he thought that perhaps he might be too cold on the bench. He tried to think of somewhere else he might be able to sleep. There was a small café near the tennis courts, and he thought that perhaps he might be warm snuggled up there at the back of the kitchen. But then he remembered the bandstand further back. Not the usual kind of bandstand with a wrought-iron railing circling the stage, but one with a solid wall facing the path. Whenever the bandstand was in use, the audience would sit on the hill to watch. If he crept in there he would be sheltered from both the wind and people passing on the path. Taking one last look across the track toward the failing light, Coughlan bundled himself up inside his coat and headed for the bandstand.

Within an hour he was asleep. He dreamed of black-and-white creatures diving from a concrete island and swimming free, at ease with both themselves and their surroundings. From the opposite bank he stood and watched them for a long time before summoning up the courage to dive in and join them. His arms and legs felt awkward at first, stiff and making little progress, but soon he too was swimming free. At first the other creatures kept their distance, but after a few minutes he was accepted into their fold, and when the swim was over the creatures let him climb out onto their concrete island. When he looked back at the place from where he had dived into the water, it had disappeared.

The following morning he awoke feeling like he had just had the best night’s sleep of his life, and he set off back to the flat with something approaching a spring in his step.

Walking across the estate, he saw that the door to his flat was wide open. Fearing that he had been burgled, he picked up his pace and hurried up the stairs. But as he approached the door, the fear was replaced with something else: huge relief that at long last he had no responsibilities and could do just as he pleased. On reaching the door, he stopped and listened for a moment, and then pulled it closed and carried on walking.