A Smaller Hell (2 page)

When I stopped running, the steam was curling off the shoulders of the jumpsuit and my ankles felt as if they were going to break in the platform heels.  I’d run through the maze of tyre-fitting garages, car washes and derelict pubs until I made it to the cobbled streets and old terraced housing.  In the mist, all the roads looked identical, so I picked one called
March Avenue
. 

Every window that I passed was either smashed or boarded up and the only sounds were of cats fighting in the alleys that ran between some of the houses.  The street smelled musty and there was green slime on some of the cobbles as if no-one had walked or driven through there for a while.  No TVs chattering in the front rooms and no smoke coming from any of the Victorian chimneys.  I ducked down one of the alleys as I heard voices and footsteps a few streets over and found that I was able to open a door to one of the yards that wasn’t too overgrown with weeds.  I pushed through the jungle, past a rusty bike and a smashed up fridge, until I came to a window looking into a kitchen with plates still piled high on the sink.

Something ran over my foot as I ducked underneath the door hanging off its hinges.  It moved through the weeds until it reached the corner of the yard and began hissing.  Amongst the dead telephone wires and rotting trainers suspended from them, a few lights still buzzed in the street, filling the house with long shadows and oblongs of amber light.  The sink stank too much of rotten food to stay in the kitchen for long, so I moved into the hallway, past the steep and narrow staircase.

‘Hello?’ I called into the darkness.

Nobody answered, so I proceeded into the parlour, where there was an old-fashioned fireplace.  The windows were boarded up, allowing only streaks of amber light through, so I climbed the fragile staircase to see if I could find clothes, towels or blankets to cover my shivering body.  I struck gold atop one of the wardrobes in the main bedroom when I found a down-filled ‘90s puffer jacket and in it, a lighter that still worked.  The jacket was too big and had a hood that zipped up halfway over my face, but it was warm and stopped my hands trembling when I dug them deep into the pockets.

Holding the lighter aloft, I searched for anything that could be used for firewood.  A bamboo cabinet in the bathroom proved easy to break up and carry back downstairs to the fireplace, but difficult to keep lit.  By the light of the small flames, I could see that behind the door there was a coal bucket from which I plucked the last few black nuggets.  Once these were lit, I smashed up a table for more firewood, gathered some old bedding from under the stairs and lay down next to the hearth.  With one of the sturdy table legs propped up against the door handle and another within easy reach, I tried to get some sleep.

The next morning, I took a bus back to my flat, my puffer jacket’s hood still drawn halfway up over my face, as it had been all night.  When I stepped off the bus and into the rain, I could see two people at the front door of the house and a police car parked on the driveway.  Waiting in the bus shelter, it was impossible to hear what they were saying because the traffic and the rain hammering on the plastic roof, but I recognised the sergeant with the moustache from the night before.  He was talking to my landlord, who shrugged and shook his head a lot.  The sergeant scribbled on his notepad anyway and handed my landlord a card.

Just as he was getting back in the police car, the next bus arrived, saving me the indignity of any more running in those platform heels.  I rode it out of town, disembarking at a village full of charity shops and tea houses to find some new clothes.  Everything creaked in this village, from the sign swinging above the post office to the old dears staffing the shops. 

In the first shop I entered, the lady seemed startled when the bell above the door rang, as if I was her first ever customer.  I unzipped my jacket and began rifling through the racks of men’s’ clothing, remembering just how cold it had been in the parlour overnight, even with a fire.

‘Anything in particular you’re after, dear?’ she asked.

‘Something warm: it’s freezing out there.  Some shoes, too,’ I said, looking down at my platform boots.

‘You go and stand by the fire, love,’ she said, pointing to the electric oil heater by the till.  ‘I’ll sort it out.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, hovering my blue hands over the hot metal grille.

She came back with a real Royal Navy reefer jacket, a scarf, hat, gloves, jeans … the works.  On top of the neatly folded pile of clothes she placed a pair of Adidas three-stripe trainers that looked as if they’d never been worn.

‘I don’t have that much money,’ I said.

‘Go and try them on.  If they fit, we’ll work something out.’

I wandered over to the changing room, clutching the pile of clothes as the lady tidied up around the shop.  Everything fit and felt warm.  I took the money out of my puffer jacket and transferred it to the reefer before walking back over to the till.

‘Leave the platform boots and the jump suit and you can have that stuff for nothing,’ the old lady said.

‘I’ll be back one day when I’m rich,’ I said.

‘Heard that one before,’ she replied.  ‘You keep warm and come back if you need anything else.’

‘Thank you,’ I said and dinged out of the door, back into the rain.

I pulled my scarf tighter and walked the length of the village, stopping at a few other little shops to pick up essentials before coming to a cash machine.  I looked up and down the street before inserting my card to withdraw the remaining money I had left.  The machine clanked angrily and flashed a message on its screen:

Card confiscated.

Contact your nearest branch immediately.

A woman with crows’ feet in her Botox lined up behind me, rustling a huge paper bag with
Tanner’s
written on it in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.  Her Chanel perfume wafted past me as she dropped the keys to her Mercedes and crouched down to recover them.  As she did so, she lost her Jackie Onassis sunglasses, which I picked up for her.  She snatched them away from me and continued with her phone call, leaving me to panic over my swallowed card, my severed lifeline.  I pushed every button on the panel, but nothing came up on the screen except a request to insert another card.

‘Are you going to be much longer?’ she sighed from behind me.  ‘Some of us have places to be.’

‘Spa day, is it?’ I replied, mashing the buttons with my fist.

‘I have a hair appointment at Andrew Bollinger,’ she said, applying yet more lipstick to her cruel, puckered mouth.  ‘With Andrew Bollinger.’

‘Are you this rude to him?’

‘Oh, just get out of my way: I haven’t time for this,’ she said, pushing me aside.  As she did so, her sunglasses fell to the floor again, this time crunching under my new trainers like a giant beetle as I stepped back from the machine.

‘They cost more than your house.  You did that on purpose,’ she raged as I walked to the bus stop, shards of polycarbonate in my sole scraping the pavement with each step.

‘Sorry,’ I shouted over my shoulder as I boarded the bus back into town.

Walking from the bus stop, I came across a tyre-fitting garage advertising part-time work via a hand-painted sign on their gates.  I wandered up the steep incline, past the rubber graveyard and the treadless corpses piled high in the corner, past a few dirty looks and into the huge corrugated iron shed.  Men wheeled tyres in and out of the building while they clamped their cigarettes between their teeth and spoke to each other in a language that sounded Russian to me.

Inside the giant corrugated shed was another shed, built entirely of wood and inside sat a balding man in his thirties with a white shirt and square glasses.  Even he was smoking as he held the phone between his shoulder and chin and flipped through piles of documents on his desk.

‘What you want?’ he asked as I lifted my hand to knock on his door.

‘I’m here about the part-time work.’

‘You work in tyres before?’

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Garage?’

‘No.’

‘Fix your car?’

‘I don’t have a car,’ I said.  ‘But I have a licence.’

‘Let me see,’ the man said, putting out his cigarette.

‘I don’t have it with me.’

‘I think you find work someplace else, my friend,’ he said, putting another cigarette in his mouth and closing the plywood door in my face.

I got back to my boarded-up house and set about making myself comfortable.  I started by heating a pot of water over the fire and having a stand-up bath before the freezing night air started blowing through the cracks in the window frames.  Once I’d dressed again, I heated up a tin of curry, eating it with some naan bread toasted over the fire, the spice of the food creeping into my stiff bones as I reclined on my puffer jacket.

Chewing the final mouthful, I heard the front gate to the house creak open and footsteps walk up to the front door.  I tried not to make any sound as I reached for the table leg and walked into the hallway, trying not to slip on the piles of ancient flyers for taxis, takeaways and escort services.  Whoever was delivering this latest one must have been tall, because it came sliding through the crack at the very top of the board and tumbled on to the pile like a dead oak leaf.  The gate creaked again and the heavy footsteps faded back down the street, so I picked up the flyer and took it into the parlour to read it by the fire.

Temporary Christmas staff required for Tanner’s busiest time of the year.

No qualifications or department store experience necessary.

All applicants considered.

Wide range of positions available.

I checked my watch and ventured back out into the cold dusk to make a phone call from the booth outside The Captain’s Rest, a derelict pub near the river.  The vast wastelands stretched like fields of illuminated amber under the streetlights, beyond which I could see the odd light in a window or two on the estate in the distance.  I folded up the flyer and stuffed it in the pocket of my reefer jacket until I reached the phone box.  It stood alone and illuminated, blushing a flaky shade of red and pink as if embarrassed by its spray-painted panes of glass, rusty hinges and the dandelions growing inside it.

I opened the door and picked up the receiver with two gloved fingers, trying to avoid the patches of dried bodily fluid.  I paid the tariff, dialed the number on the flyer and waited for an answer.

Good afternoon Tanner’s Department Store how may we help you?

‘I’m calling about temp work over Christmas.’

Hold the line please.

Something moving about under the bridge way down the street.

A squeal of tyres in the distance.

Hello?  May I take your name?

I thought about hanging up.

Your name?

‘Tony Black,’ I replied.

Please hold the line.

Shouting from the amber meadows by the estate.  An old tyre up in flames.

Several shadows coming this way from under the bridge.

‘Hurry up,’ I whispered away from the mouthpiece.

Please report to Ms. Doyle’s office at 11 a.m. 

‘
Thank you bye,’ I said and hung up.  The rusty hinges of the phone box squeaked loudly, causing all the shadows under the bridge to break into a run towards me.  My trainers were light and almost silent as I took off running down the labyrinth of alleyways and backstreets to shake off my pursuers before I went back to the house.

The following morning, I caught the bus back to the village charity shop to see if I could find a shirt, suit and tie for the interview, but it was closed.  Up at the other end of the village high street, I found another, from which I bought a whole outfit for ten pounds.  It was no Hugo Boss and it fit my pocket better than it fit me, but it was better than the jeans which were covered in oily mud from the puddles I’d splashed through the night before.  She wished me luck as I ran out of the shop to catch the bus to the department store.

On the way, I looked up from the left-behind newspaper and sniffed the air, trying to work out what the guy was smoking.  He sat two rows ahead on the left side of the bus, fumbling in the pockets of his dirty jacket every five minutes to produce a small glass pipe, but I could distinguish no smell above the bus' bouquet of black smoke, oil, urine and vomit.  His swift capping of the pipe with the lighter after smoking made it all the more difficult to work out.  He was amazingly adept at hiding his habit even in the condensated quarters of a crowded bus. 

No-one cared enough to risk becoming a statistic. 

I looked at the newspaper on the vacant seat next to me and saw a sketch of my own face:
Police want to question this man in connection with a murder. 
I was already nervous about the job interview and reading the article made me feel as if I couldn’t breathe properly.

I put down the newspaper and took the flyer from my pocket to read it once more before I arrived at my stop.

Temporary Christmas staff required for Tanner’s Department Store’s busiest time of the year.

No qualifications necessary.

All applicants considered.

Wide range of positions available.

I smoothed down the unruly lapels of the suit and loosened my tie before I was startled by the sound of breaking glass.  I looked up to see the pipe smoker clutching his chest, the shattered pipe crunching under his staggering feet and drool spilling from his blue lips.  He was trying to ask other passengers for help, but no-one would oblige.  After a few seconds, he collapsed on to his back in the aisle.

And still no-one came to his aid.

They looked at him like he was getting what he deserved.

I crouched down next to him and began CPR, the other passengers staring down at me out of the corners of their eyes.