Escape From Evil (21 page)

‘I really don’t think you should swear quite so much, darling!’

Christ, it was Granny! Where did she come from? How long had I been unconscious? It didn’t matter. I was in too much pain to think about my language now.

‘Fuck off!’

Bearing in mind that she’d threatened me with a carving knife when I’d said ‘bugger’, you can imagine what went through her mind now.

But it was okay. I was fixed up and allowed to leave and Granny came round every other day to change my bandages. She didn’t have to do that and it was good to see her. Like a lot of families, we probably got on better once we weren’t under the same roof. Looking back, her visits remind me of the times she used to arrive with food for Mum and me.

The only problem was, I had to have a couple of months off work. By the time I was ready to return, they said they would not be renewing my contract. That was it. Cast onto the scrapheap at sixteen. I was confident I could find another job, but I couldn’t help feeling uneasy. Sixteen years old and life was going wrong already. Just like Mum.

Without my job, life with Simon was suddenly worse. You don’t like to think money plays a part in matters of the heart, but when you find yourself arguing about bills and all that nonsense, it does. We were so young. We didn’t know what we were doing. Still, I hated the idea of walking out without a fight. I’d left Tremola Avenue to set up home with this guy. It would be a failure – a personal failure – if it didn’t work.

Looking back, was this my teenage response to my father walking out on Mum? Was I attempting to rewrite history with my own life? Either way, I promised myself,
I will not give up on this relationship.
It would be a position I would take again – and live to regret.

But then fate intervened and presented me with a way out. We were in bed one night, sound asleep, when suddenly I was awoken by a fierce banging. There was shouting as well.

‘Simon!’ I said, startled as hell.

By the time he came round, I’d realized where it was coming from. An old metal fire escape ran up the side of the house and there was someone standing on it outside our bedroom window.

‘Christ,’ I said, pulling the covers up, ‘it’s a burglar.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Simon said. ‘Listen.’

Above the sound of my heart racing, I could just about make out the words coming from outside.

‘It’s all right, it’s your neighbour from downstairs!’

‘Thank God for that,’ I said. ‘Are you going to answer?’

Simon shrugged yes, pulled on some trousers and went over to the window.

A second later there was more shouting and a bloke I’d never seen before was suddenly standing at the end of my bed. He was long-haired, scruffy and absolutely out of his mind with rage and who knows what else. And he was waving a long, sharp knife.

‘What have you done with it?’ he screamed. ‘Where have you put it?’

I just wanted to crawl back under the sheets, but he was crazy, slashing the knife into the air like he was already in a sword fight in his head.

‘Put what?’ I managed to say.

He claimed he’d left his window open and someone had taken his jewellery. It had to be someone with access to the fire escape.

‘Anyone could get up there,’ Simon told him.

He wasn’t having it. ‘It was you. I know it was. If you don’t cough it up you’re getting it.’

The way he was swaying and flailing that knife around, I knew he wasn’t right in the brain. I’d seen it before at Telscombe Cliffs. He was high on something. Maybe he’d injected, I had no idea. I just knew that logic and reason and truth meant absolutely zero to him. There was nothing he wouldn’t do at that moment.

At one point he accused me of hiding the jewels in the bed, so he ordered me out to check it. I was stark naked and even though he was too far gone to bat an eyelid, you never feel more vulnerable than when you’ve nothing on. I honestly thought he was going to finish us off there and then.

Eventually, though, he calmed down. ‘I’ll give you twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Bring it down to me and it’s no hard feelings.’ He went to leave. ‘Don’t bring it back,’ he added, ‘and I’ll kill you.’

The second he was gone we bolted the door, slammed the window shut and both cried. We hadn’t touched his jewellery. I’d never even seen him before. How the hell were we meant to return it?

‘We need to call the police,’ I said. The problem was, we had no phone and in order to get outside to the call box we’d have to get past that madman’s front door.

Fortunately there was building work going on in the block next door and it was covered in scaffolding, so Simon, a natural where climbing was concerned, said, ‘I’ll jump over there and get help.’

That was a brilliant plan. But then, just as he was about to jump across, I said, ‘What if he comes back? I don’t want to be on my own!’

So in the end I went. I must have stood on that window sill for five minutes before I felt brave enough to swing across. Eventually I banged on the caretaker’s door and he called the police, who arrived in minutes. After they’d interviewed me and Simon, they went to talk to the neighbour.

So what happened? Absolutely nothing. He denied all knowledge and the police said there was no evidence. They asked if I could identify the weapon, but it was a kitchen knife. There was no law about having one of those on the premises.

The only positive to come out of it was that we showed the neighbour we were prepared to call the police. He never bothered us again, but life there was ruined. I couldn’t walk down the stairs without feeling sick at the thought that he might come out. And every morning we would find both our motorbikes kicked over in the street. It had to be him.

It wouldn’t take a genius to draw the parallels between entering that building and coming home to Preston Park or one of our old flats, with that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, worrying if those men would be there or not. I thought I’d put those days of fear and intimidation behind me. I was wrong. So I had to act.

I can’t live here,
I realized. But with no money and no job, where could I go?

The only saving grace in those days and weeks after the downstairs druggy incident was the Hungry Years. Ever since I’d first stepped through the door, as an illegal fifteen-year-old, I’d had this sense of déjà vu. Then, out of the blue, it came to me.

Mum used to bring me here.

I didn’t know why I hadn’t remembered earlier, but it was true. I was taken there as a toddler, allowed to wander around the bar while strangers attempted to amuse me. Mum drank snowballs. Even though I didn’t know what it was called back then, I could still clearly picture the yellow Advocaat and remembered thinking how ladylike she looked holding it.

It gave me a little fillip, realizing Mum and I had the same tastes. Maybe I blocked them on purpose, but any other emerging parallels between our lives did not enter my mind. If only they had, I could have done something about it . . .

The Rising Sun crowd were a big, brash mob. Your classic biker gang, I suppose. They played drinking games in the car park at Box Hill. Blokes would ‘accidentally on purpose’ spray beer over women’s tops so they had to whip them off and it was all a great laugh – and probably scared the bejesus out of old ladies on occasion, by looking like the tabloids’ version of typical two-wheeled trouble-makers. But they were nice guys really.

Nothing gave me greater pleasure than playing pool all night – winner stays on – and drinking and giggling with everyone and making them all listen to ‘Oh Carol’ on the jukebox. I couldn’t get enough of their company and, because they were so much older than me, everyone seemed so exotic. On reflection, most probably had day jobs in banks and things and only let their hair down at weekends, but as an impressionable teen, I just thought they were all so worldly and experienced in things I’d never understand.

Of all the characters there, one guy began to emerge more than others. As I’ve said, no one really led the group. Members came and went and the faces changed quite regularly. But during that first summer as an independent woman, I realized I was seeing one face more and more often.

The first time I saw him I was playing pool, as usual. I noticed that a small crowd had gathered round one table. Always keen to be near the action, I drifted over. Usually everyone would be trying to chip in with their own jokes and stories, the usual one-upmanship you get in groups. But on this occasion everyone was quiet, listening to this bloke.

I’d never noticed him before. He was older than the rest of them, at thirty-something, and even seated I could tell he was quite short, about 5´7. He was slim, dressed head to toe in tight denim and his skin was really tanned, which I liked. Whereas everyone else in the pub had long, trademark, Samson-like biker hair, his was closely cropped. Even his leathers stood out from the pack. The vogue at the time was for tassels, studs and sewn-on patches – the more outlandish, the better. His jacket was more Lewis Collins from
The Professionals
, heavy and practical.

At first glance then, he was unusual, but certainly not eyecatching. So why did he have such an audience?

I pulled up a chair and realized why everyone else was so quiet. The stranger had such a thick accent that I could barely make out every other word. I don’t think I’d ever heard a Scottish accent before and this Glaswegian brogue was almost impenetrable. The man spoke quietly but with passion and the more I struggled to understand him, the closer I leaned in and the more I became hooked on his every word.

At one point I caught his eye and he paused. Then he took another puff on his Old Holborn roll-up and carried on speaking about the wounds he’d picked up during service on the front line.

‘I’ve still got shrapnel in my wrist,’ he said, pulling up his right sleeve for his audience to examine, ‘but the worst of it is in the back of my skull.’ He reached behind to the top of his neck. ‘Just here.’

‘Does it hurt?’ someone asked.

‘What do you think?’ he replied with a wink. ‘I’ve got drugs for it, but the pain never really goes away.’

I really was rapt. It was like watching one of those Sunday-night documentaries Grandpa loved. But this guy wasn’t on television, he was right here in the Hungry Years. Most of my friends had never been outside Sussex. This bloke seemed to have been everywhere. This was a man who’d fought for his country in Aden. I didn’t know where that was, but it sounded important. As for the shrapnel embedded in his body – that just made him the bravest person I’d ever met.

At some point, the group broke up for more games of pool and a bit of dancing, but when we all got on our bikes to go home I found myself seeking the stranger out to see what he was riding. I wasn’t disappointed. He had an old Honda CM250 with drop handlebars – my favourite.

A few days later, I saw the man again. When I walked into the Hungry Years he was already at the bar. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ he asked. I was flattered. After all, I didn’t even know his name. A few minutes later we’d found a table and I was learning even more about his incredible past. He’d risked his life repairing oil rigs and had held high-powered jobs, with hundreds of people under him. Everything he said sounded so glamorous and so, so grown up. The people he’d met, the things he’d done, the danger he’d been in – it was an intoxicating cocktail for a girl desperate for something better. And best of all, not one of his stories was about scaffolding.

To be fair to Simon, I wasn’t exactly setting the world alight with my own conversation. It’s not easy to compete with a war veteran and I felt embarrassed that I’d done so little with my life. I found myself telling him that my mother had died when I was young – I didn’t reveal how – and that I didn’t really know my dad. I even heard myself telling him about the frustrations of living at Tremola Avenue. He laughed and nodded in all the right places, but I was convinced I must be boring him. What on earth did I have to offer a man like him?

He had plenty to offer me though. When I told him about my money worries, he just shrugged.

‘A girl shouldn’t have to worry about money. I’d never let a girl like you worry about money.’

‘But I like working,’ I insisted. ‘I just can’t find a job.’

‘I’ll give you a job,’ he said. ‘I manage a hotel. If it’s work you want, then I’m your man.’

I couldn’t believe it. Was there no end to this man’s surprises?

I’ve thought about this moment thousands of times and, honestly, it was never a case of love at first sight. But I can’t deny there was a lot about this man that I found very attractive. So, when he added casually, ‘There’s a bed for you there as well,’ I leapt at it. He didn’t say if it was sharing with him or not – and I didn’t care. The fact that it was in his power to offer me anything at all, I found very seductive.

My life with Simon was over. In truth, it had been since I’d met this man who was older than my father. We’d run our course and it was time to part. Simon couldn’t offer me half the things this stranger had promised. Where were his war wounds or tales of outwitting the law in half a dozen countries?

I admit, I was intoxicated. I’d been looking for an escape route from the drudgery of life with Simon, a way out of the hellish flat I was too scared to be in on my own and a new job. Suddenly this amazing man was offering me all three.