Wasted Years

Twenty-Four

Mary MacDonald had been out since eight o’clock that evening. Short black skirt, black tights, high heels that pinched, a once-white blouse that hung open over the tops of her breasts. The fake fur, hip-length, she wore unfastened. By ten, Mary had been approached seven times, the car slowing as it neared the curb, window wound down, face-always white, usually middle-aged-leaning towards her.

“Looking for business, duck?”

It was as far as the transaction had progressed. Head withdrew, window up, the car puffing sharply away, looking for what? Someone younger, slimmer, sexier, closer to their damp and furtive little dreams?

Mary watched the same cars driving round and round the circuit, some of them never going beyond the first exchange, discussion of terms-“Any place to go? Strip? How about the night? Have you got a friend?” Mary lit a cigarette although she was supposed to be giving it up, leaned back against the stones of the high wall, paced slowly up and down.

From the corner of Gedling Grove along Waverley Street, hang about on the edge of Raleigh Street, then back again, heels clicking on the pavement as she climbed back up the hill. Across Waverley Street, the trees of the park were dark and losing shape and through them she could just see the lights of the Arboretum Hotel. Some nights the landlord would let her sit at a table near the bar, sipping at a rum and black, slipping off her shoes, now and again reaching down to rub her feet. Other times, the look on his face would be enough and if she were thirsty enough, fed up enough, she would walk the other direction, up on to the Alfreton Road, where the publicans were less fussy about their trade.

The car came round again, maroon, she’d noticed it before, gliding slowly past the railings, slowing down, smoothly accelerating away.

This time it stopped.

No movement.

Then the window winding down.

Whiteness of a face.

Mary MacDonald walked across the street.

“Charlie, have you seen this?”

“What?”

“On the box. Right now. The news.”

Resnick wriggled awkwardly backwards and withdrew his head from beneath the sink: if anything was guaranteed to make him feel incompetent it was being bent over double with a full set of washers and an adjustable spanner.

“Charlie!”

“All right.” Resnick rinsed his hands beneath the tap, looked for the towel, couldn’t find it; he was wiping his hands down his trousers as he stepped into the living room. On the screen an overturned bus had been set ablaze and was blocking a city street; the lights of other, similar, fires burned in the background. A youth, scarf half-masking his face, ran towards the camera and hurled a bottle. The microphone picked up the crash of glass, the whoosh of flame.

“Belfast?” Resnick asked.

Elaine shook her head. “Brixton.”

Resnick moved closer to the set and sat down.

Mary MacDonald rented a room on Tennyson Street: three-quarter bed and wardrobe, melamine table, chair, fixed unsteadily to the wall a gas fire that made a small explosion whenever she bent towards it with a match. On the tiled shelf above it were a couple of buckled postcards sent by an aunt in Deny, a plastic flower in a slender china vase, a photograph of herself and her friend Marie at Yarmouth, holding up ice creams and wearing funny hats, laughing so much they were forced to cling on to one another so as not to fall down.

“Mary, is it?” the man said.

“I never said …”

He was younger than the average punter, not fat either, tall, not bad looking. What did he want with her?

“Mary, then?”

“I never …”

“I know, you never said.”

“Then how …”

“Do I know? Well …” smiling “… you look like a Mary to me. Good Catholic girl. Perhaps we met at mass.”

“I never go.”

“Nor me.”

Mary’s throat was strangely dry. “I don’t understand.”

“No need. Now, why don’t you take off those clothes?

She held out a hand. “Pay me first. You’ve got to pay me first.”

“Oh, yes, don’t you worry. I know the rules. Rituals. Better than most.” Reaching into his coat pocket for his wallet. “Now what did we agree? Fifteen?”

“Twenty.”

The pink of his tongue showed at his mouth as he smiled. “All right, then, Mary. Twenty it is.”

Police in uniform, some still wearing their blue jackets, others down to shirt sleeves, stood in the otherwise deserted street, amazed. A young officer, twenty-one or — two, looked up into the camera’s lens and one side of his face was dark with blood. Stones, half-bricks, and bottles continued to land. Sirens and fire engines could be heard, overlapping, continuous. Smoke filled the edges of the screen.

“I can’t believe it’s happening here,” Elaine said.

“Here?”

“This country?

Resnick nodded. London seemed far more than a hundred and twenty miles away.

The telephone rang and Elaine picked it up, listened for a moment, and held the receiver out. “For you.”

“Are you watching?” Ben Riley asked at the other end of the line.

“Unbelievable, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“How d’you mean?”

“How long,” Ben Riley said, “before it spreads up here?”

On the screen, police were holding shields over their faces, slowly advancing down a tree-lined street under a hail of missiles. “Hold your line!” a hoarse voice shouted. “Hold your line!” A man Resnick’s age, who had already lost his helmet, staggered back, struck on the side of the head, and the line broke. Youths, black and white, surged through.

The newsreader’s voice tolled over the scene. “Our community relations are as good as can be expected,” said the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir David McNee.

Backed away by the fire, Mary held her tights bunched up in one hand. Aside from the shoes he had told her to put back on her feet, she was naked. The man had removed his jacket, hung it over the back of the chair; loosened his tie.

“Don’t want to get over-personal, Mary, but that body of yours, bit of a bloody disaster area if you ask me. What I mean, must’ve seen better days.”

She was beginning to wonder whether any of the other girls had seen her get into the car, if any of them knew the man and might have had good reason to have noted his number. Wondering whether, naked or not, she could get past him and out of the door, down the stairs, and into the street. Wondering how much she would get hurt.

“What I think, Mary, way I look at it, what we’re here for, looks don’t so much matter. If they did, well, they wouldn’t come trolling out here, would they? They’d be back in the middle of town in some hotel, waiting for the discreet knock on the door. None of your cheapskate twenty-pound job there.” He pinched the loose flesh of her arm between finger and thumb. “No, bloke comes out here, all he wants, something to slop around in.”

“Bastard!” she spat at him, automatically flinching from his reply.

What he did was smile. “Frank,” he said. “Frank Churchill, that how it was with him?”

She blinked and stuttered her feet. The fire was starting to burn the backs of her legs. A piece of her skin was still tight between index finger and thumb.

“You remember Frank? The night of the party. Just the four of you. Pissed on cheap champagne.”

She remembered her and Marie giggling so hard they liked to have wet themselves. The blokes hollering and grabbing and finally one of them fishing out some cocaine and insisting on sniffing it off Marie’s backside, sniffing it up through a fifty-pound note. Her and Frank and Marie and …

“Who was he, Mary?”

“Who?”

Finger and thumb twisted just a little, not too much, enough. Tears came to her eyes and the backs of her legs were red and tender and the insides of those bloody shoes biting into her ankles.

“Who, Mary?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t make me …”

“Swear to God, I don’t know.”

“Mary!”

“Ow!”

“Mary.”

“He never said, I …”

“All that time, you must’ve heard his name. Must’ve called him something. Frank. He must’ve …”

“John.”

“What?”

“John. I think that’s what he called him.”

“John.”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I think …”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes. Yes. John.”

“John Prior.”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s who it was.”

“If you say so. I said, I don’t know. He never said his other name. I don’t know.”

“John Prior, that’s who it was.”

“You know already.”

“I know.”

“Then why all this …?”

“Confirmation, nothing more.”

“Oh, shit!”

“What?”

“Shit!”

“What now?”

“You’re police, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

“Police, you rotten bastard!”

“Steady.”

“Pig!”

She thought he was going to punch her in the breast but the fist opened up and he stroked his fingers around the deep brown of her nipple. “Maybe later, we can have some fun, eh? For now, why don’t you get over on the bed, take the weight of your feet, take a look at these pictures, see who you recognize. Okay, Mary? Okay?”

Resnick was in the front room, transfixed by the ten o’clock news. A half-cup of coffee sat close by him, cold. A virtual no-go area had been hewn out of that part of South London, roads blocked off by vehicles overturned and set on fire. Rubble and glass were strewn across the streets. All along Brixton High Road, shop windows had been smashed through, allowing youths to loot at will. Discarded as too heavy, the settee from a three-piece suite lay on its back across the curb.

The sky at the upper edge of Resnick’s TV set burned with an orange glow.

Elaine stood behind him, hand resting on his shoulder. “Poor Ben,” she said.

He turned to look at her.

“If it happened here you’d be all right. Now. He’d be out there, in the front line.”

Resnick nodded.

“I could never understand,” Elaine said, “why he didn’t move into CID, same time as you.”

“Fondness for regular hours. That and being out on the street.”

Elaine looked past him towards the television. “These days, I should have thought last place anyone’d want to be. Any of you.”

Resnick got up and switched off the set. “Bed?” he said. “Early night?”

“All right.”

Within fifteen minutes, the rhythm of Elaine’s breathing had changed and she was asleep, leaving Resnick to replay the images of the evening. How long before it spreads up here?

On the corners of Hyson Green and Radford groups of men were congregating, hands in pockets, heads down. By the early hours, well before light broke in the sky, the first crates of empty milk bottles had been taken.

Mary MacDonald sat alone in her room, squatting down before the gas fire in her pink candlewick dressing gown, praying that her friend Marie would never have to go through what she had that night; praying that what he had forced out of her would not end up in the papers, be read out in court. Simply praying.

And Rains?

Fast off the moment his head touched the pillow, sleeping the untroubled sleep of the just.