Fullalove (25 page)

When she goes home to Seaton, her last act will be a ritual incineration of her once-white suit.

She has been offered a place to sleep for the night by a local allotment holder. The allotments are adjacent to the block of flats where the memorial stands. ‘Trencherfield Fertility Association’, a board at the gate announces. ‘Allotments. Trading Shed. Vacant Plots.’ Hemmed in by housing on three sides, the road on the fourth; a slash-and-burn clearing, an unexpected village in the forest, an anomalous open tract.

We crunch along the cinder path between bean frames, plastic cloches, leeks and sprouts triumphing over the Iron Age mud, the acid soil. Men hoeing, leaning on spades, exchanging banter with a neighbour on the next plot; women in aluminium folding chairs, knitting, repositioning themselves away from the shadows, disappearing into the dusk.

Veorah’s pensioner waits by his hen run. A man in a bib-overall, tweed jacket, odd laces in his boots. There is a water butt, a creosoted out-house, green tomatoes set out on a window ledge to grow ripe. But the heart of the operation is a pigeon loft with plank steps and a raised wooden platform at the front, and a white-and-yellow picket fence traversing the roof. The birds are individually caged behind bars of wood dowelling, and their names inked onto cards. Many of these seem to be in Dutch (Prins, Kadet, Genopte, Donker), but some are in English: ‘Bright Star’, ‘Super Star’‚ ‘Shining Star’, ‘Shooting Star’, ‘Milky Way’, ‘Killer King’.

The old man removes the bird called Super Star from its cage and expertly upends it, its feet trapped between two of his middle fingers, the quartzite feathers around its neck showing to advantage. ‘A good bird for a dirty day‚’ he says, a man anxious not to get too much into his stride, warned many times by his wife in the past of the danger of boring non-fanciers into the ground.

Veorah had met him earlier, when she had presumably given an explanation for her appearance. Now, showing the pigeon is his way of introducing himself to me. ‘My beauty‚’ he coos to the bird, flexing one wing and then the other; smoothing a finger over its gently pulsing breast. ‘See the difference between this
one and a street rat‚’ he says, indicating the legs and feet, which he says he cleans with a mixture of lemon juice and baby oil. The architecture of the bones seems to glow through the skin, which is violet and translucent.

The ring is loose on its leg and reminds me for some reason of the rings sealing off the flesh of Heath Hawkins’s talismanic small hands – a thought that is immediately extinguished when I notice the late strawberries, the old man’s gift to Veorah, stacked in a cardboard nesting-bowl on a bin of grain.

At Wormwood Scrubs, Veorah had been invited to spend the night in the visitors’ centre: she had stepped into the low-walled plastic enclosure when everyone had gone and settled herself down on the dingy duvet among the cheap soiled toys.

Now she is soiled, symbolically stained by the bad karma and rogue energies she has been clearing up along the route. Filthy and fleecy like a toy that has been twisted, turned, scratched, shaken, banged against the wall, thrown to the ground (the disturbing pleasures of involuntary cruelty and humiliation); on all fours, laying out a sleeping bag on the sawdust floor of the murmuring pigeon coop.

I would like to switch off, but my mind keeps scratching away, working up an intro. ‘The police helicopter with its flickering and sweeping, thirty-million-candlepower lights is raking the streets like a stream of urgent piss being played against a urinal.’

Fancy. Fanciful, even. Okay. (And of course I wouldn’t get away with ‘piss’.) But I think I am allowed this. It is late. I have been drinking. I spent the ten hours before I started drinking fielding abuse on crapulous, scrapheap estates, braving killer dogs, hanging on the knocker. Now it’s R and R time in the ‘Trident’ bar of the hotel, and the bottles pop and the bar tabs slide into treble figures as we all try to shit each other that
we
have bought up the Devil Girls’ mothers/brothers/poxy junkie lovers.

The Devil Girls. Correction:
DEVIL GIRLS
The Devil Girls – and the drinks are on them – are Hayley Bonelli and Maria Scal-abrino, aged fifteen and sixteen. Italian, obviously. Originally. Third-or fourth-generation English-Italian and part of a small, long-established Italian community here.

Although it already feels like weeks, it is only three nights since Hayley and Maria earned their tabloid moniker by murdering the neighbour’s children they were supposed to be taking care of. Off their faces on acid, speed and estate-bottled rough cider, they took Mitsubishi Diamante, aged six weeks, and Sudio Porsche Carrera, aged twenty months, by their left legs and beat them against the wall. The indentations made by their heads were discovered by the babies’ mother when she returned home soon after midnight.

This happened on the fifteenth floor of a tower block called Ullswater House. (All the blocks were – unfacetiously – named after beauty spots in the Lakeland arcadia just a few miles to the north.) The Bonellis and Scalabrinos, the devil girls’ families, live
on different floors of the same building.
Lived.
As word spread through the estate about what had happened, vigilante groups spontaneously combusted. Italian shops were torched; people with Italian names, or known Italian connections, were driven from their homes. Cars were dragged into the middle of the street and burned, and riot police battered by bricks and petrol bombs. Street lamps were felled with sledgehammers, plunging most of the estate into darkness. Then the electricity substation was burned out after petrol was poured over its circuits.

Shortly before dawn, the whereabouts of Tony Bonelli, Hayley’s father, were discovered. He had been given refuge in another flat in Ullswater House and, when he realised the mob were on to him, fled to the roof of his building. Cornered by youths equipped with screwdrivers and pick-handles, he scrambled onto the parapet and dived to his death.

Since then, the looting, torching and running battles between police and rioters have continued. They’re going on out there somewhere now. The occasional flare turns phosphorescent as it meets the thirty-million-candlepower police beam. The sky flushes briefly red, followed by a mini-mushroom cloud that signals another Astra or Nova or police Ford Cosworth going up. A local stringer for the
Star
has drawn the short straw and been nominated our man on the spot, running back hot-foot with the details should anything go off.

Meanwhile we sit here getting crocked and giving it that about who we’ve pulled, got alongside, bought up, boxed off. Money talk. Trade gossip.

Heath Hawkins upsets a hackette who thinks nobody knows she had a bunk-up with him the night before last by producing the picture of a child mauled by a Rottweiler. ‘Have you ever thought about counselling? I think you’re sick.’

‘What would you know about
sick.
If you want sick, I’ll show you sick, you smelly shitbag fucking bastard bitch.’

Two older hacks are competing with each other doing one-arm push-ups on the floor.

‘I was told in all seriousness by a sniper in Sarajevo, “I am happy to kill a child when he is with his mother, because there is something fantastic on the face of the mother.” They only pussied out of using it.’

‘One night in a forest I saw a Khmer Rouge hoist the smallest boy in a family by his ankles and in front of his family this was swing him so that his head struck the trunk of a palm tree.’

A non-resident asks if he can pay his bill with plastic. ‘These days we take anything. I’ d accept a note from your mother.’

‘There’s only one job advertised on the noticeboard at the Job Centre in town here – “Security work. Furness area. One pound fifty an hour. Bring your own dog.”’

‘Did you get the stuff about the Bonelli guy, the father, having his ears pierced a few years ago by a friend with an ice cube and a carpet tack?’

Tuning out and in.

‘… One thing you can say about Carson. If bullshit was music, he’d be a brass band.’

‘… buying in spiders to keep the greenfly and blackfly down in the atrium.’

Still framing and re-framing the intro. I don’t know why. As far as intros go, I am surplus to requirements. Curtis Preece’s demise has cleared the way for Sebastian-Dominic to move up
the pecking order; and he has brought in his own new young hotshot news features scribe. I’m here in the role of legman, errand-runner, fatter of his puny paragraphs.

The police helicopter strobes our faces as it clatters over the hotel. ‘We got ten minutes to get the last fuckin’ chopper out of here, man‚’ Heath says.

The bar staff in their grease-rimmed, ill-fitting shirts, waiting to go home.

What is odd – what is
really
odd, and making me raw to the endless disparaging comments about the things people say and do oop here, broad take-offs of the accent – is that this used to be my town. That is, I grew up here, came back on regular, although increasingly infrequent visits during the time when my parents were still alive, remember when the hotel where we are staying was built and the buildings that were cleared to make way for it – the mussels and whelks shop, the wool shop where my mother started work at thirteen, the rag shop where I took rags to be sorted and weighed, the reeking piles, the crepuscular scales, the light streaming through knot-holes in the wooden structure. Behind the rag shop, the stables where the rag-and-bone-men bedded down their ponies, the ponies in their old brass-inlay leather blinkers, dragged steaming up the wooden ramp. In many ways, it was like a country town, with a town-centre slaughter yard, livestock market, feed store, hills visible at the ends of the terraced streets, the cranes from the shipyard poking into the sky.

What is even odder – and so far it is something I have managed to keep to myself – is that Brigg flats, as the estate that is currently drawing all the heat is known, is the estate where we used to live. More: Ullswater House was the last place here that I thought of as home. It was from Ullswater House that I set out to start the newspapering job in the Midlands which was to launch me on my amazing career.

We stayed on a waiting list for a number of years, accumulating the points we needed to qualify for a place in one of the new
multi-storeys, gazing longingly skywards from our fungal back-to-back at the stellar windows of Ullswater and Derwentwater and Coniston House.

In her job as a cleaner my mother somehow came into possession of some discarded blueprint linen from the offices of the architects who designed Brigg flats. This was washed out and used as a table cloth when she laid a table on Sundays. Traces of the drawing were still clearly visible – kitchen stacked above kitchen, bathroom above bathroom, the strict regularity making the services cheaper to install – and the three of us sat gazing into the faded plans and elevations, at the walls – the ‘commonplace good dullness’ – we hoped one day would contain us.

In the early eighties, Ullswater House, which had stood for nearly thirty years by then, was retrofitted and recladded, the roughcast concrete blocks of the original overlaid with an uninflected synthetic cream skin. By that point the ‘decent’ families had started to move out to estates on the periphery, and the crack addicts, muggers and ram-raiders had started to move in. Flats were stripped, copper cable ripped out, radiators sold for scrap, entire floors burned out and boarded up. The tenants who remain protect their territory with big dogs tethered to the balconies. Filled nappies rain down from the upper storeys. Another hazard for pedestrians is the number of people throwing themselves off the roofs. (In the week before Tony Bonelli, a man leapt from Coniston House clutching two carrier bags of supermarket shopping.)

The Prince Monolulu – the ‘Mong’ – used to be a quiet local, the haunt of old men studying the horses, rolling their own, and playing dominoes and cards. Now it is where the loansharks and estate ‘enforcers’ hang out: members of local firms following police movements on scanners, doing speed-balls, injecting cider into their veins, watching tapes of themselves ‘roguing’ and ‘displaying’, laying rubber, doing hand-brake turns and wheelies in front of the impotent Bill in stolen Renault turbos and Golf GTIs. The bandits flash and chirrup inside padlocked, wrought-iron, baseball-bat-proof cages with minimal holes for the hands.

You don’t just walk into the Mong. You have to be invited. And Heath had arranged a meet with some of the top men who had already taken care of his drugging needs and said they could get us into the flat where Mitsubishi Diamante and Sudio Porsche Carrera were murdered, which they did.

Forensics had completed their business; Linda Bundy, the mother, had been absented, and they seemed to have the run of the place. It was clean, modestly furnished, with a painted mask from Japan, some miniature statues of Romans with heads and limbs lopped off, a goldfish swimming in just enough water to support life, trailing a thready discharge, round and round a miniature castle, the rings of evaporation sedimented around the bowl.

There was the line of the sofa (had they moved it to give themselves a bigger target area?) and, below it, the two clean bloodless head shapes imbedded in the wall. Heath got me to place my fist inside each of them in turn to show the scale. This reminded me of the survivor of an attack by a serial killer who encouraged me to put my fist in the deep depression which, although new hair had grown over it, still cratered her skull.

There were syringes rolling around the lift in which my mother had had to be brought down vertically in her coffin. There was a strap of nylon webbing across her forehead holding her in place, like the internal straps of the suitcases she used to pack when we were going off on caravan holidays when I was young.

Later that night they came for Heath at the hotel and held a knife at his throat until he had drawn up to his limit at the nearest money machine.

Most of the warehouses on the docks have been turned into restaurants and bars. And many of these come under the control in one way or another of Frank Leppard. ‘As of this minute I am worth one million, one hundred and sixty-four thousand, four hundred and seventy-three pounds and twenty-eight pence‚’ was the first thing he said to me tonight, although I hadn’t seen
him for a dozen years. ‘And I’m accountable to nobody. I could spend it tomorrow. It’s all mine. Oh! The money’s horrendous.’

I was at school with Frank. He went from school into the shipyards, following his father. The last time I saw him he was doing unisex hairdressing and repro pub mirrors. ‘Fat bastard‚’ he said. ‘I’m a fat bastard. We’ve both turned into fat bastards.’

We took a tour of his principality. This meant following him through dustbin areas and cellars and dark, hot-walled passages so that he might appear as if by magic at the heart of the action and surprise somebody with their hand in the till or handing out a dirty glass or violating any of the many staff protocols he has established. (Lipstick must be red or crimson, this does not mean orange. Waitresses must not wear black bras under white shirts. Male bar staff will limit themselves to
one
ear-ring.)

From Blinkers to Quavers to Boobs to Bangles to Berlins. A swift schooner here, a demi-carafe there. Here a hit, there a quaff. A curry pizza.

Tonight I have learned (in so far as I’m capable of remembering what I’ve learned) two things. People drink ‘prestige’ lagers straight from the bottle because if you pour it into a glass nobody knows you’ve paid
£
1.85 for your drink. (In places like the Mong there is the added consideration that draught beer is easier to spike with substances that render you incapable of offering any resistance when they eventually roll you.) Two: it costs Frankie twelve hundred pounds a week in replacement glassware. (This was as close as either of us came to any form of personal disclosure.)

Being at the Brother at least meant I could allow him to drop me off where I am staying. It’s not the best place to be, but it isn’t scraping the barrel either, although they tried. (Did they try.) In fact I fell lucky. I have ended up being allocated an Executive-King at the standard Single rate.

My key was missing from Reception, which has alerted me to the possibility of Hawkins pulling a stunt he has pulled more than once in the past – running up a lot of room service from my room, on my account. And, sure enough, as I round the corner, I
can see that parked in the corridor outside room 319 is a service trolley with all flaps raised to accommodate the detritus of what seems to have been a Lucullan tuck-in – domed platters, gravied plates, bread rolls still swaddled in their linen nappy, soiled napkins, lightly perspiring cheese. And bottles. More bottles than even Hawkins could have got through on his own.