Billy Rags (24 page)

I rounded the hoarding and squatted down in the damp grass. At first I closed my eyes and tried to get sleep to blot out my depression but sleep wouldn't come. The thought that I might fail kept dragging across my brain.

For the first time I began to feel really thirsty. No hunger, just thirst. I kept thinking about that big yellow glass of lager on the other side of the hoarding. I wanted to get up and walk round and have a look at it, as if just staring at it would make me feel better. The thirst was so bad I was beginning to feel light-headed like a man in the desert with his mirage of a palm-shaded waterhole.

Then, a long way away, I heard a clock strike. Ten o'clock. Four more hours. But at least I'd know when to move for Sheila's call. That made me feel a little better. But not much. My skin had begun to obsess me. I felt like an alcoholic with withdrawal symptoms: every inch of my skin was crawling and I couldn't stop scratching. I'd scratch in one place and get blessed relief only to have to move on to the next area in a never-ending process.

Then the rain started again. This time a fine drizzle, as depressing as the view across the dead wasteland. The whole world seemed damp and dead and motionless.

The far-away clock struck a quarter to two. I stood up and peered round the edge of the hoarding. There was no one about so I walked over to the road and made for the phone box. As I got close to it I tried to fight the uncontrollable hope that was welling up inside me. I had to keep that down in case Sheila's news was bad. My system couldn't have taken another bashing.

I got in the phone box and waited. Half an hour went by. Maybe I'd got the time wrong. Maybe she'd phoned just before I'd got to the box. But if that was so, she'd keep ringing wouldn't she? I picked up the phone and got the operator to dial Sheila's number. No reply. Maybe she was still with Ronnie. Ronnie could be having trouble fixing things up and that's why she wasn't back. Or she could have been picked up. The Filth could have sussed out the new flat. They'd never be able to hold her, but they just might play awkward to make things difficult for any arrangements we were making. Anything could have happened.

I leant on the metal directory holders and looked out at the drizzle. The box was warm from my body heat. I began to feel drowsy. I wanted to sleep. Maybe when I woke up I'd find it was all a bad dream, and in fact I was lying next to Sheila between clean sheets.

There was a rat-a-tat on one of the glass panels. I jerked upright. A woman, waiting to use the phone. I pushed the door open and stumbled out, saying something about being sorry, waiting for a call, and the woman glared at me and frowned as the warm smell from the kiosk hit her. But I was too numb either to react to her or to worry about any consequences there might be. I just sat on the wall and stared at the houses opposite and waited for her to come out again.

She didn't take long. The door swung open and she bustled out, pulling on her gloves and giving me all the contempt she could muster. I avoided her gaze and stood up and went back into the box. Now there was a faint female smell mixed in with my own, a pleasant furry glovey silky smell that made me feel nostalgic for a past experience I couldn't quite define.

And still there was no phone call. After about an hour I phoned again. No answer. I began to sink into a maudlin apathy. The whole thing was becoming too much of an effort. I had a pain in my chest and my breathing was becoming shallow and rasping. The warmth of the kiosk was hatching out all kinds of wishful thinking in my passive brain. One idea that kept drifting in and out of my mind was to get myself committed to hospital. At one point this really became a very attractive proposition. A nice crisp clean bed and something to drink. Some hot soup, say. Tomato soup. That would be fantastic. Hot tomato soup. I rationalised it by telling myself that they wouldn't check me out, but really it wasn't a rationalisation at all, just an example of the weakness that had crept into my brain.

Children began to pass the kiosk on their way home from school. The chest pain was getting worse. Breathing was very difficult now. Purely psychological, I thought. A way out of the impasse. A way of excusing myself if I failed. I could say that I couldn't go on, my chest was too bad, I had to give in, how could I go on? If I hadn't gone to the hospital, well . . .

More time passed and the decision to risk the hospital got stronger and stronger. A couple more people arrived to use the phone and each time I left the box I almost kept on walking, but out in the cold drizzle my thoughts would take a reverse. The phone box was my life line, my oxygen mask. Outside the box, all I wanted to do was to get back into the warm, near to the phone.

When the street lights came on I tried to get Sheila again.

This time she was there.

“Where were you?” I said.

“Ronnie's had problems.”

“I've been here all the time, waiting . . .”

“I phoned twice. The line was engaged. Listen . . .”

“I just . . .”

“Listen. They'll be there at eight. Eight o'clock. They've got everything you need.”

Outside on the pavement there was a young fellow waiting to use the box, looking in at me.

“They're on their way?”

“Yes. They're in a red Morris Oxford. One of them will be wearing a sheepskin jacket. Are you listening, Billy?”

The young fellow on the pavement kept looking at me.

“I'm listening.”

“They'll stop by the box and the one in the sheepskin will get out and go into the box. They'll do this every quarter of an hour until nine. Right? Then they'll go. They'll have to go at nine. So you've got to be there.”

I don't care what main-liners say about the heroin racing through their bloodstream or what women say about having a baby, this news was the complete ecstatic experience. They were on their way. The weight of the last few hours fell away from me. I was alive again. The transfusion was working.

“I'll be there,” I said.

“They can't wait after nine.”

“I know,” I said. “Don't worry. I'll be there.”

I put the receiver back on its cradle. This time the face in the mirror was smiling.

I pushed open the door. The man who'd been waiting had gone. I didn't look to see where to. All I could think of was the phone call. This time I knew I'd be all right. It had that feel to it. Adrenalin pumped my elated thoughts through my brain as I strode back towards my hoarding. Just a couple of hours. Nothing. A couple of hours meant nothing. Not now. I was breathing properly now and I could smile at the pathetic defeatism of the hospital idea. I knew that even if the car never showed I would be able to adapt accordingly. The spell was broken. My strength and self-reliance had returned and I was determined not to rely on anything but my own abilities again.

I began to cross the road to the turning that led to the hoarding. Three men stepped out of the darkness of the turning. One of them was the guy from outside the phone box. There was no mistaking who they were. The Filth. The elation I'd got from the phone call had furred up my other faculties. I should have tagged the rozzer outside the kiosk as soon as I'd seen him, no trouble. But I knew I had no worries. They were as surprised to see me as I was to see them. They'd probably been called out on a routine check because somebody had phoned in to say they'd seen a tramp hanging round the phone box obviously up to no good. And so the Filth had come out, just in case, but not really expecting to come up with Billy Cracken, so they'd only sent them three-handed. And when the young rozzer had copped for who the tramp actually was, they'd got no choice but to come at me before I cleared off, while the uniform in the car radioed in and upset half the dinners in the town.

I stopped walking. They stopped as well. There was about twelve feet between us. The soft drizzle was still falling. Behind me, at the far end of the road, the traffic swished by on the dual-carriageway.

The young rozzer was the one to speak.

“Can we have a word with you, sir?”

You really had to hand it to them. Faced with Billy Cracken, a twenty-five year man, they still kept themselves covered. They still gave you the “sir.”

One of the other rozzers had been staring at me particularly closely. Eventually he gave the nod and said: “That's him.”

They began to walk forward again. They moved with a controlled casualness, as if they weren't really closing in on Billy Cracken, as if there wasn't going to be any trouble at all.

There wasn't.

I let them get to within six feet of me. Then I took off. Straight down the road towards the dual-carriageway, the wind roaring in my ears, the rain flicking in my face, coat flying, my face grinning a wild grin that described my feeling, my knowledge that nobody was going to take Billy Cracken.

Fighting with the wind in my ears was the voices of the rozzers, calling for me to stop, and I thought, Silly bastards, of course I'll stop, I never realised that you wanted me to stop, or else I wouldn't have taken off in the first place.

As I neared the dual-carriageway I checked the traffic as I ran and I gauged that if I kept running straight on, straight across the opposing flows of traffic I'd get over without being run over. Which I did. Cars braked and swerved but I made it. I glanced behind me and saw two of the rozzers hesitating while the traffic dispersed. The other rozzer must have been beating back to the squad car. On my side of the dual-carriageway was a low slatted fence, the perimeter of one of those multi-purpose school playing fields with a dozen football pitches crammed end to end and side by side. I clambered over the fence and took off into the flat darkness. Eventually I reached a concrete playground and beyond the playground there was a bicycle shed and behind the shed another fence. I went over this fence and I was in allotments again, but this time they were the real thing with sheds and neatly dug vegetable patches and the rusty paraphernalia of the suburban gardener. I paused for a moment. I couldn't see the rozzers against the lights from the dual-carriageway but that didn't mean to say that they weren't there, beating across the field after me. I took off again. Over another fence into a street of small flat-fronted terraced houses. I kept going. This street would be alive any minute now. Patrol cars would be screaming on their way. I turned right as soon as I could, into another street with the same kind of houses. Then I turned off left and then right until I was a good three or four streets away from the allot-ments. But I couldn't just keep on running. I'd be picked up in no time. I had to find somewhere to hide. But whatever I found was bound to be chancy, especially if they did a house to house. But there was no choice. I was finished if I stayed on the streets.

The street I was in was terraced just like all the others. Every now and again there'd be a passage, tunnel-like, leading to the back gardens. I tinned into one of the passages and at the end of it were two latched gates. One right. One left. I took the left one; there were no lights shining from the house on to the back garden. Everything was quiet. I closed the gate behind me and walked to the end of the narrow garden. At the bottom of the garden was a lumber shed about as big as a small outside toilet. The door was split in two, halfway up, like a barn door. I opened the top section and looked inside. It was too dark to see anything so I leant over the bottom half of the door and felt about in the dark. My fingers touched something solid but loose and dusty at the same time. Coal. What did you expect, I thought. A four-poster? I climbed over the bottom half of the door and pulled the top half to and lay down on the coal and tried to make myself comfortable. Then I waited and I listened.

It didn't take them long. I guessed there were seven or eight squad cars screeching into the area, building up over a period of about a quarter of an hour. Then there was silence for a while. What were they going to do? Hang around and do the house to house or assume that if they couldn't spot me straight away I was making it farther away and spread themselves accordingly? Even if they did that, they'd leave somebody on tap, just in case I was still around.

I lay there in the dark, trying to find some foolproof way of gauging when to move. I only had a couple of hours to play with before the car showed up at the box.

After a while I heard a different kind of vehicle sounding off a few streets away: the door-bell tones of an ice-cream van. An ice-cream van, at this time of year. But of course they'd have drinks on sticks and probably orange juice and coca-cola. The thought of something like that within easy reach began to stir the coalhouse dust in my throat and my nostrils.

If this whole scene had been down south, the phone box would be alive by now. If it had been the Yard that was involved they'd have already gone over the box from top to bottom and then got it staked out so that in no way would I have got back to it without being picked up. If you've got to have the rozzers after you, I thought, the farther north you are the better. I had to take my chances, but at least I wasn't up against the Yard. And the chances had to be taken.

I waited for what I guessed to be an hour. No klaxons, no fresh screeching of tires. I climbed out of the coalhouse and made my way up the garden to the passage. Then along the passage. I stopped halfway along and listened. Nothing. I moved towards the arch of light. Very slowly I poked my head out. The street was empty. Now all I had to do was walk out into the street. That was all. Once out, there was no cover, nothing. A patrol car could pass the end of the street and I'd have no chance. But there was nothing else for it.

I stepped out. At least my footsteps were silent. Which was as well, because I'd decided to run: no use trying to play the dawdling tramp any more, not now they were wise to me.

I darted to the end of the street and pressed myself against the wall of the end house and peered round the corner. Again, nothing. Crazily, the old joke passed through my mind about the fellow falling off a skyscraper and as he passes each floor he says, “so far so good, so far so good.”