Angel City (4 page)

 

 

 

 

 

So there we were, in the middle of one of the biggest, richest, most sophisticated cities in the world, at the start of the new decade of the Caring Nineties, and we were taking a job, cash-in-hand, from a man we met in a pub.

Would you credit it?

 

It went off easy enough. Money for old rope, really. Well, old something or other.

We made it down the East India Dock Road before the pubs chucked out and then on to the A13, bypassing East Ham and Barking.

‘We turn off here,' said Tigger unnecessarily. He hadn't said much during the trip, but I wasn't going to lose sleep over it. ‘That's it, River Road. Now we hang a right just down here.'

I assumed he knew where he was going. As far as I could remember, though I didn't know the area well, River Road ran parallel to Barking Creek, which eventually disgorged itself into the Thames. On the other side of the Creek was a huge sewage works stretching almost as far as the Royal Albert Dock, which is light years away from the yuppified Docklands further upriver towards the City. Down here was real bandit country; or maybe that should be pirate country.

‘There! Down there,' said Tigger, waving a hand in front of my nose. ‘Right down there between those two warehouses.'

I swung the van over and flicked on the full beams of the headlights as we left the road onto a concrete wharf. The warehouses penned us in with their darkness, and ahead the lights were beginning to waver and reflect off water. In the distance, I could see the lights of the sewage works, and my nose confirmed the sighting.

‘Turn it round,' hissed Tigger, dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘And kill the lights.'

I told him I didn't need telling to make sure I was pointing roughly in the Getaway direction, but unless we fancied a swim, I had no intention of killing the lights. Once pointed back towards the road, I turned off the ignition. We sat in silence for a few seconds. Somewhere in the distance a burglar alarm was ringing continuously, plaintively and unattended. Nothing unusual there.

Tigger had produced a pair of gardening gloves from the depths of his tracksuit and was pulling them on.

‘You stay here, Roy. Have a smoke, abuse some substances, think dirty thoughts. You can leave the dirty work to me.'

‘No doubts on that score, Tigger.'

He grinned at that and patted me on the knee again.

‘I think I'm beginning to like you, Angel,' he said as he climbed out.

‘Thanks for the warning,' I said to myself.

For ten minutes or so I watched him through the wing mirrors as he carted black plastic sacks from the back of the van and out of my sightline. At one point I thought I heard a splash, but I may have imagined it.

Then Tigger shut the doors with a bang and was back in the passenger seat, back in hyperactive mode, squirming around, pulling his gloves off and beating a riff with them on the plastic dashboard.

‘Let's go go go go! It's payday and the night is young.'

‘Then let's keep them in that order,' I said, holding out my hand, palm up.

Tigger gave my plastic glove a funny look, then shrugged as if to say each-to-his-own and began to unlace his right trainer, his foot up on the dash. When the shoe was off, he flipped it in the air and caught it with his left hand, then he put it on his right hand like a glove puppet and held it to his cheek.

‘Hello, Hi-Top,' he mugged. ‘Has pretty Hi-Top got some lovely folding stuff for Roy the Boy? He can only have it – what? What was that, Hi-Top?' He put the shoe to his ear, like it was whispering to him. ‘Only if he's very, very nice to you and gives you a kiss? Do you really mean that, Hi-Top? You want a kiss from rough old Roy?'

I sighed, turned all the van's lights on and leant on the horn.

‘For fuck's sake!' yelled Tigger over the blast. ‘Okay, okay.'

His hand came out of the hi-top and it was holding five of the new £20 notes. I took my hand off the horn and started the engine.

‘Thank you, Mr Hi-Top.'

 

If Tigger had been silent on the way out to Creekmouth, he made up for it on the way back to the lock-up garage. He talked about how he was at a high risk point in his life and the more risks he took, the more he felt alive. But it was all cool because he'd read that the body was at its peak at his age and he could take it. At that he'd looked to see if he'd offended me but I didn't let it show that he had.

There was no sign of Bassotti at the lock-up and Tigger said he rarely stuck around. I asked how many jobs he'd done like this one and he said ‘a few' and then asked me for a lift to King's Cross.

At that time of night, that meant one of two things, and I didn't think he was going there undercover for the Salvation Army, but I said okay nonetheless. It had been implied as part of the deal, and if there were more moonlight jaunts like this in the offing, I was in the market.

Across the City he sat on Armstrong's rumble seat and chatted away through the glass partition. He was going to experience everything he could before he was 21, he said, and then he would make a decision on how he was to become famous. It might be music, it might be fashion. It would certainly be outrageous. Oh yes, the world was going to hear from Tigger O'Neil. And I shouldn't laugh (though I wasn't) because he was serious and was building up the cash reserves to break out.

‘Break out of what?' I asked.

‘The Talent Trap,' he said, dead straight. ‘I don't have any natural talent except for showing off. That's what my school report always said: showing off. So, if you're gonna be a show-off, do it right, get professional help. That costs money. So I'm saving up. I don't have expensive habits, well, not that I pay for, and I live cheap and cheerful. The body can take it now, so store it all up as experience for the good life to come.'

As we hit a red light, I retrieved the pack of Sweet Afton from the glove compartment and lit up.

‘You're weird,' I told him over my shoulder.

‘And why's that, Mr Angel?' He reached through the partition and took the cigarette from my lips as I changed gear.

‘Where are you from, Tigger?' I tried to change tack.

‘From nowhere, going somewhere,' he said enigmatically, exhaling smoke into my ear.

I was right. He was weird.

 

As we approached King's Cross station, Tigger asked me to pull over near a letter box. I watched him in the mirror as he produced a brown envelope from his tracksuit and he checked the road both ways before he climbed out.

He wasn't worried about being mugged on the way to the letter box, he was watching the station concourse across the road, and he took his time walking back to Armstrong. ‘Change of plan,' he said as he got back in. ‘Drop me at Lincoln's Inn, would you?'

‘What's up? Is the scene too quiet for you?'

If he had been looking for the street-corner pick-up scene – which I doubted – he was in the wrong place anyway. All the kerb-crawling traffic was round the corner up York Way these days. There were too many lights at the entrance to the station, and that discouraged passing trade. The huge entrance hall, however, still doubled as a meeting point for runaways and rent boys looking for a bed for the night, if only dossing down with some of the dopeheads and drunks too wrecked to care if they got taken in by the Transport Police or the Salvation Army. King's Cross wasn't as bad – or as popular, depending on your point of view – as some of the other mainline stations, but even at this time in the morning it seemed oddly quiet.

‘There's been a Whittington,' said Tigger. ‘I copped a view of the vans round the corner.'

The first police Operation Whittington, named after the legendary mayor of London, had concentrated on underground stations and had been designed as the human equivalent of an arms amnesty. The cops went round in groups of three, two uniforms and a woman constable, picking up anyone under 18 who didn't look as if they had a home to go to. They were questioned, but not searched, and gently moved on: to a hostel or a night shelter if they wanted it, even back home if they could face it. Or just moved on, if they insisted. No arrests, no confiscations. What had surprised them, or more probably not the cops but the seriously liberal journalists who wrote it up, was the number of the younger homeless who happily refused the offer of sheltered accommodation. They had made their cardboard-box bed and they were going to lie in it.

‘Lee will have gone by now,' Tigger said quietly. I asked who he meant.

‘Lee. Just a friend. I do have friends, you know.'

‘I'm surprised; I thought they might cramp your style.'

‘Nothing, but nothing, cramps my style, Angel,' he said in tough guy mode.

Some tough guy.

I dropped him at Lincoln's Inn, outside a long-closed wine bar near the Old Curiosity Shop, and he got out of Armstrong on my side, standing next to the driver's door as if he wanted something. I let the window down.

‘If you wanna do this again, I'd better have some way of contacting you.'

‘Fair enough,' I agreed. ‘I can give you a number.'

He went through a routine of patting himself down and then he smiled sheepishly to indicate no paper, no pen.

I dug a felt-tip out of my jacket and wrote the Stuart Street number on the inside of the top flap of the packet of Sweet Afton, the bit where they print ‘The best that money can buy'. I was going to tear the flap off but he reached in and snatched the pack away from me.

‘You really should quit, you know. Smoking's a young man's game.'

‘So is getting a fat lip.'

He clutched both fists to his chin in mock terror, then put on his little-boy-lost look.

‘You couldn't spare some change for a cup of tea, could you, guv'nor?'

‘Come off it, Tigger, you got your wages tonight as well.'

‘Honest, not a cent on me. Look.'

He pulled his tracksuit top up to his neck, exposing a white hairless chest, then he twirled around in the middle of the road like a ballet dancer again, and as he faced me his hands went to the waist band of the tracksuit bottom.

‘Want to see everything?' he said loudly. ‘Just to make sure?'

I took a pound coin from my pocket and flipped it at him, and his hand snapped it up like a bird picking off an insect. He pulled the top down and shivered.

‘Thank you, kind sir. It's getting too cold to go through the whole act.'

‘It's a good act,' I said, putting Armstrong into gear. ‘But where the hell are you going to get a cup of tea at this time of night?'

‘Oh, I'm not. I just like to keep my hand in.'

 

We did two more runs that weekend on the same pattern. Tigger would ring me and arrange to meet in or near a pub in the East End. Bassotti would turn up looking uneasy and as if he had a better way of spending Friday and Saturday night. He probably had. I had; just couldn't afford it. Tigger almost certainly had, but that was probably illegal as well.

Bassotti would have one drink and then take Tigger in his car, and I'd follow in Armstrong until we found a lock-up garage and a box van or a Transit already loaded to the roof with black plastic sacks. That made three different lock-ups and three different vehicles, but all in the general Bow or Mile End areas.

We used the same dumping ground down near Barking Creek on both occasions, and both times Tigger did all the heavy lifting, insisting I stay in the van and keep look-out. And after dropping the van off, he'd got me to take him to King's Cross again, and each time he stopped and used a letter box on the way. But what he did with his wages was his business.

The money was coming in useful, I have to admit. Hell, not just useful, vital. I stayed with the dispatch company but cut it to three days a week, which just about covered Armstrong's running costs.

To tell the truth, it kept me out of the house on Stuart Street, which was becoming more depressing by the day.

Doogie and Miranda were having dry runs at packing all their worldlies into cardboard boxes, some of them so big they would have been classed as condominiums among Tigger's friends sleeping rough down at Lincoln's Inn. They still had over three months before Doogie moved north to coincide with one shooting season or other, but every day there would be a different combination of boxes and bags on the stairs. It was Miranda's way of deciding what could be shipped and what had to be sold. As they didn't have a car, they were trusting everything to either the postal system or the railways, so maybe they had a reason to be concerned. Yet the volume of sheer
stuff
that they seemed to have baffled me. When I'd arrived at Stuart Street, I'd had a Sainsbury's carrier bag. And I'd had trouble filling that.

Lisabeth and Fenella were no better. They had discovered iridology, staring deeply into each other's eyes and claiming to be able to diagnose not only present ailments, but past ones, by studying the iris of the eye. I did the old mine-look-like-road-maps routine (‘You should see them from the inside') but they didn't see the funny side and went off in a sulk.