Get Carter (2 page)

Thursday

T
HE RAIN RAINED
.

It hadn’t stopped since Euston. Inside the train it was close, the kind of closeness that makes your fingernails dirty even when all you’re doing is sitting there looking out of the blurring windows. Watching the dirty backs of houses scudding along under the half-light clouds. Just sitting and looking and not even fidgeting.

I was the only one in the compartment. My slip-ons were off. My feet were up.
Penthouse
was dead. I’d killed the
Standard
twice. I had three nails left. Doncaster was forty minutes off.

I looked along the black mohair to my socks. I flexed a toe. The toenail made a sharp ridge in the wool. I’d have to cut them when I got in. I might be doing a lot of footwork over the weekend.

I wondered if I’d have time to get some fags from the buffet at Doncaster before my connection left.

If it was open at five to five on a Thursday afternoon in mid-October.

I lit up anyway.

It was funny that Frank never smoked. Most barmen do. In between doing things. Even one drag to make it seem
as if they’re having a break. But Frank never touched them. Not even a Woody just to see what it was like when we were kids down Jackson Street. He’d never wanted to know.

He didn’t drink scotch either.

I picked up the flask from off the
Standard
and unscrewed the cap and took a pull. The train rocked and a bit of scotch went on my shirt, a biggish spot, just below the collar.

But not as much as had been down the front of the shirt Frank had been wearing when they’d found him. Not nearly so much.

They hadn’t even bothered to be careful; they hadn’t even bothered to be clever.

I screwed the cap on and put the flask back on the seat. Beyond fast rain and dark low clouds thin light appeared for a second as the hurrying sun skirted the rim of a hill. The erratic beam caught the silver flask and illuminated the engraved inscription.

It said:
From Gerald and Les to Jack. With much affection on his thirty-eighth birthday
.

Gerald and Les were the blokes I worked for. They looked after me very well because that’s what I did for them. They were in the property business. Investment. Speculation. That kind of thing. You know.

Pity it had to finish. But sooner or later Gerald’d find out about me and Audrey. And when that happened I’d rather be out of the way. Working for Stein. In the sun. With Audrey getting brown all over. And no rain.

Doncaster Station. Gloomy wide windy areas of rails and platforms overhung with concrete and faint neon. Rain noiselessly emphasising the emptiness. The roller front of W. H. Smith’s pulled hard down.

I walked along the enclosed overhead corridor that led to the platform where my connection was waiting. There was nobody else in the corridor. The echoes of my footsteps raced before me. I turned left at a sign that said P
LATFORM
F
OUR
and walked down the steps. The diesel was humming
and ready for off. I got in, slammed the door and sat down in a three-seater. I put my hold-all down on the seat, stood up, took off my green suede overcoat and draped it over the hold-all.

I looked down the carriage. There was about a dozen passengers all with their backs to me. I turned round and looked through into the guard’s van. The guard was reading the paper. I took my flask out and had a quick one. I put the flask back in the hold-all and felt for my fags. But I’d already smoked the last one.

At first there’s just the blackness. The rocking of the train, the reflections against the raindrops and the blackness. But if you keep looking beyond the reflections you eventually notice the glow creeping into the sky.

At first it’s slight and you think maybe a haystack or a petrol tanker or something is on fire somewhere over a hill and out of sight. But then you notice that the clouds themselves are reflecting the glow and you know that it must be something bigger. And a little later the train passes through a cutting and curves away towards the town, a small bright concentrated area of light and beyond and around the town you can see the causes of the glow, the half-dozen steelworks stretching to the rim of the semicircular bowl of hills, flames shooting upwards—soft reds pulsing on the insides of melting shops, white heat sparking in blast furnaces—the structures of the works black against the collective glow, all of it looking like a Disney version of the Dawn of Creation. Even when the train enters the short sprawl of backyards and behinds of petrol stations and rows of too-bright street lights, the reflected ribbon of flame still draws your attention up into the sky.

I handed in my ticket and walked through the barrier to the front of the station where the car park was. A few of my fellow passengers got into cars, the rest made for the
waiting double-decker bus. Rain drifted idly across the shiny concrete. I looked round for a taxi. Nothing. There was a phone box near the booking office so I got in it, found ‘Taxis’ in the directory and phoned one. They said five minutes. I put the phone down and decided I’d rather have the rain than the smell of old cigarette ends.

Outside I stood and stared across the car park. The bus and the cars had gone. Directly opposite me was the entrance to the car park and beyond that was the road with its loveless lights and its council houses. It all looked as it had looked eight years ago when I’d seen it last. A good place to say goodbye to.

I remembered what Frank’d said to me at our dad’s funeral, the last time I’d seen the place.

I’d been eating an egg sandwich and talking to Mrs. Gorton when Frank had limped over and asked me to pop upstairs with him for a minute.

I’d followed him into our old bedroom and he’d taken a letter and he’d said to me, “Read it.” I’d said, “Who’s it from?” He’d said, “Read it.” Still eating the sandwich, I’d looked at the postmark. It had come from Sunderland. The date was four days earlier. I’d taken the letter out of the envelope and I’d flicked it over and looked at the signature.

When I’d seen who it was from, I’d looked at Frank.

“Read it,” he’d said.

The cab swung into the car park. It was a modern car with a lit-up sign in the middle of its roof. It stopped in front of me and the driver got out and walked round and opened the passenger door.

“Mr. Carter?”

I walked towards the car and he took my hold-all and put it on the back seat.

“Lovely weather,” he said.

I got in and he got in.

“Where was it?” he said. “The George?”

“That’s right,” I said.

The car began to move. I felt in my pocket and pulled out my packet of fags but I forgot it was empty. The driver pulled a packet of Weights out of his pocket.

“Here,” he said, “have one of these.”

“Thanks,” I said. I lit us both up.

“Staying long, are you?” he asked.

“Depends.”

“On business?”

“Not really.”

He drove on a bit more.

“Know it round here, do you?”

“A bit.”

We were driving along the same road we’d been on since the car park. The lights were getting brighter. In front of us was the main street.

It was a strange place. Too big for a town, too small for a city. As a kid it had always struck me that it was like some western boom town. There was just the main street where there was everything you needed and everything else just dribbled off towards the ragged edges of the town. Council houses started immediately behind Woolworth’s. Victorian terraces butted up to the side of Marks & Spencer’s. The gasworks overshadowed the Kardomah. The swimming baths and the football ground faced each other only yards away from the corporation allotments.

And really it was a boom town. Thirty years ago it had been just another village hiding in the lee of the Wolds. Then they’d found the sandstone. Thirty years later what had been a small village was a big town and would have been bigger if it hadn’t been for the ring of steelworks hemming in the sprawl.

On the surface it was a dead town. The kind of place not to be in on a Sunday afternoon. But it had its levels. Choose a level, present the right credentials and the town was just as good as anywhere else. Or as bad.

And there was money. And it was spread all over because of the steelworks. Council houses with a father and a mother
and a son and a daughter all working. Maybe eighty quid a week coming in. A good place to operate if you were a governor who owned a lot of small time set-ups. The small time stuff took the money from the council houses. And there were a lot of council houses. Once I’d scrawled for a betting shop on Priory Hill. Christ, I’d thought, when I’d happened to find out how much they took in a week. Give me a string of those places and you could keep Chelsea. And Kensington. If the overheads were anything like related to what that tight bastard I’d been working for had been paying me.

We pulled up outside The George. It said T
HE
G
EORGE
H
OTEL
, but all it was was a big boozer that did bed and breakfast. It was all Snowcemed and the woodwork was painted blue and the windows were fake lattice but I knew inside it was crummy. When I first started going in pubs when I was fifteen, The George was the one boozer I daren’t try. It looked so respectable on the outside. Later I learned different. I still didn’t go in, but for different reasons. But at this moment it suited all right.

The driver whipped round the front of the car and opened my door. I got out. He opened the back door and got the hold-all.

“How much is that?” I said.

“Five bob,” he said.

“Here you are,” I said. I gave him seven and six.

“Thanks, mate,” he said. “All the best.”

He made to take my bag towards the hotel.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I can manage.”

He gave me the bag. I began to turn away.

“Er,” he said, “er, if you’re off to be about during next few days and you need owt, driving anywhere, like, give us a ring. Right?”

I turned to look at him. The blue of the neon and the dead yellow of the high street light made him look as though he needed an oxygen tent. There was an earnest helpful look on his face. Rain looked like sweat on his
forehead. I kept looking at him. The earnest helpful look changed.