Jog On Fat Barry (20 page)

A clinical psychologist at HMP Brixton told Mo that his dreams could give him a greater understanding of his confusing emotions. She said recurrent dreams were not only helpful in understanding psycho-spiritual injury, but were particularly useful in resolving those emotional dramas. All Mo said back was, “Fuck that… I just want to get on top.” The prison chaplain said the Bible stated it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it was for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. But Mo didn’t give two fucks about the kingdom of God and he said so, telling the chaplain that all he’d ever wanted to do was, “Get on top.”

That stretch in HMP Brixton had lasted eighteen months, but only four weeks out Mo was back inside again: remanded for armed robbery and murder at Wormwood Scrubs. And it took the jury less than an hour to find him guilty not six months later. Regretfully, the woman he had shot behind the counter of the Nationwide Building Society was pregnant, but Mo did tell them he would’ve shot one of the other girls had he known it at the time.

The Prison Service categorized Mo as being both difficult and disruptive, and he was frequently moved from one high security prison to another. They transferred him from Woodhill to Full Sutton for stabbing a sex offender, and from Full Sutton to Wakefield for head-butting a screw. Of course, attentive supervision had little success in reining Mo in. In fact, the Prison Service would probably still be shifting Mo from one place to another today: if he weren’t already dead, that is. Jimmy King and Kelly Day went to the funeral. Lionel Brown, who ran one of the boys’ homes Mo had been in, told them he’d suffered a myocardial infarction and died in his sleep.

“But that makes no sense,” Kelly Day had grumbled. “Mo didn’t smoke, never drank, ate well, and worked out every day in the gym. Blokes like Mo didn’t have heart attacks.”

But blokes like Mo did. His heart was shot, and had been broken a hundred times over, because he fell in love with a pound note, and got fucked by it every night.

agnes day

The wind was finally still, and everything had stopped rattling. South End Green and Parliament Hill Fields beyond were covered with snow. Everything was white; anything was possible. I had been looking at Agne when the nurse handed me the baby, saying, “Here… you take him.” And I did, not awkwardly, but dotingly, because he was mine, part of what I’d helped make. Agne watched me: she was pensive; wearing the face she always wore when we were about to make love. The baby reached up, his little fingers touched my nose, lips and chin. I sat down on the edge of the bed. Agne began to cry: she wanted to say something; she touched my arm: half her hand was on me, the other half on him. She was trembling, I smiled; she laughed: her eyes lit up the room. And so these were they: the feelings I’d turned my back on; forgotten. They raced through me. I kissed her, and said what only moments before would’ve been impossible to say, but that now came as simply as drawing breath: “I love you.”

Agne Lucescu was met at the airport. Leke Duka didn’t speak Romanian. He was overweight, unshaven; dirt was caked under his fingernails. He asked Agne for her passport but she didn’t understand him. He took it and started to walk away. Agne picked up her bag and followed him. They got into a Ford Fiesta that was scratched and dented. Duka started driving: eastbound. Endless semidetached houses lined the Great West Road. Agne was surprised by how many coloured people she saw. London was so big. There were so many parks, and trees, and grass as thick as carpet. Duka merged onto the North Circular at Gunnersby Park. It started to rain. Duka turned on the wipers. Agne was exhausted. She’d been on the go for hours. She leant against the window, closed her eyes and drifted off.

When Agne opened her eyes, the Fiesta was in a laneway and it was no longer raining. She was alone in the car. Duka stood a few metres away arguing with another man in Albanian. Agne could see that he had a small wad of euros in his hand. The man he was talking to turned to look at Agne. He had a lazy eye; was younger than Duka. He reached up to scratch a scar running across his cheek from earlobe to mouth. A moment later he nodded, counted some more euros off the wad he was holding, and handed them to Duka. They shook hands. Then Duka handed him Agne’s passport and suitcase. Agne watched the man put her suitcase in the boot of another car. Duka opened the Fiesta and told Agne to get out. She asked him what was going on. She wanted to know where the model agency was. He was meant to take her there. But Duka said nothing. He just yanked her out and shut the door. Then he got back behind the wheel of the Fiesta and drove away.

Bashkim Krizi spoke Romanian, or at least enough to tell Agne that she now belonged to him. He’d paid a lot of money for her and Agne would do what Bashkim said. And just to show Agne that he wasn’t pissing about, Bashkim punched her in the head before bundling her into the back seat of a rusty Renault 5.

“Fix face,” he growled in English, tossing a filthy rag at her. “Get blood on fucking upholstery I fucking show you good.”

Bashkim drove without saying another word, and Agne was too scared to speak. She knew Duka had made a terrible mistake. He must have thought she was someone else, because Agne’s arrangements had all been made, right down to the smallest details. The lady from the agency got her passport; bought her airline ticket; took her to the airport. In fact, Agne was still upset with her mother. Why was she surprised that the model agency was interested in her daughter? Her own mother failed to see how attractive she was, even though all the men she worked with at the cannery were forever telling her so.

Bashkim parked in the car park of the Hilldrop Estate in Tufnell Park and led Agne up the stairs to the third floor. He paused at a door with no number and unlocked it. Then he shoved Agne through the jamb and followed her in. He shut the door and dropped Agne’s suitcase on the floor. He then told her to get undressed. She just stood there looking at him. He shouted at her to take her clothes off: first in Albanian, and then in English. Agne didn’t speak either language but understood well enough what it was Bashkim wanted her to do. She shook her head. His face twisted in anger and he punched her in the chest. She slumped to the floor gasping for breath. Bashkim grabbed Agne by the hair and dragged her along the hall for a few metres. Then he released her and started to take off his belt.

“Now you fucking see who is boss,” he snarled.

Agne could hear children playing somewhere even though the window was shut. It was terribly cold. She was on the bathroom floor, naked; her hands manacled to the outflow pipe. She couldn’t recall how long Bashkim had raped and sodomized her for. He had left, saying things had to be arranged.

“You work,” he had said in English. “I invest money in you. You pay back, with interest, like good investment.”

Bashkim had told Agne that the last girl he had turned out to be a waste of time. She was seventeen and too strong-willed for her own good.

“She was trouble from moment she arrive,” he said. “She think only of escape… nothing else. I liquidate venture capital. She give Bashkim no choice. I chop her up. Dump bits over London. Except for head. That still in freezer.”

Agne started to cry again. She was shivering. The day had faded to night. All the children were gone. She was alone. Bashkim had warned her that trying to escape was stupid and pointless. And even if she managed to get away, no one would help her because she had entered the country on a false passport.

“This serious,” he said. “If police find, you in prison ten years. Fucking English hate all foreigners.”

But Bashkim wasn’t like the English. He said he liked everyone, and to prove he did, he made Agne a deal. If she did as she was told, and worked hard for six months, he’d set her free. But if she tried to escape like the other girl had, he’d kill her. The choice was hers. It made no difference to Bashkim. There was always room for another head in the freezer.

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, “Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” But Alfred was a bloke who spent most of the time thinking about Alfred and little else. And the subject of love, like some maggot squirming away on a hook, was nothing but a lure employed to sell his wares. My mum, on the other hand, knew all about love. She got swept off her feet at a dance in Hampstead Town Hall in 1959. My dad was on furlough: halfway through his national service. Mum had been seventeen; lived on the Maitland Park Estate. Dad was two years older, and had grown up on Lamble Road in Gospel Oak. He asked Mum to marry him the day after Buddy Holly died in a plane crash: they were sitting in Marine Ices. He’d bought the engagement ring for ten bob in Queens Crescent market. Mum said yes with no hesitation: theirs was love at first sight. They were married at Hampstead Town Hall and had a drink-up in The Roebuck on Pond Street. The pub was opposite the Royal Free Hospital, where Mum would give birth to Janelle in November, and then to me the following December. We had a flat on the top floor of Salcombe Lodge, and you could see the Parliament Hill Lido and the Athletics Track from all three bedrooms. Dad was a nuts and bolts man who fixed cars at the garage in Swains Lane: Mum worked in the Post Office. And every Friday night while my gran looked after Janelle and me, Dad would take Mum to The Oak, where she’d have a Babycham and he a Light and Mild, and he’d tell her time and again that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

The millionth Morris Minor 1000 A-series ran off the assembly line the first week of January 1961, and Morris marked the occasion with a limited edition: 349 cars with
Minor 1000000
badging were made. There was one car for every dealer in the UK, and every one was painted lilac. Dad got his from the dealer he had gone to work for in Swiss Cottage. I remember because that was when the doctor told Mum what was wrong with our Janelle: she had hydrocephalus—cerebrospinal fluid trapped in the ventricles of her brain. The doctor said she might have had an infection as a baby. He called it encephalitis; said the infection had led to intracerebral haemorrhaging. That was why Janelle was the way she was, and why kids called her
Humpty Dumpty
, and why her head never stopped growing, and why the council moved us into a flat on the ground floor: Mum couldn’t get Janelle and the pram up the stairs anymore.

Janelle couldn’t feed herself. When she wasn’t sleeping, she had horrible fits and vomited everywhere. She never talked; made this high-pitched cry. Her eyes darted about in their sockets, or sank down until you only saw the whites of them. Janelle couldn’t go to the toilet by herself; was constantly confused, and her face got wider and wider. Her eyes began to protrude; they grew further apart. Sometimes when I’d got home after larking about on the Heath, I’d find Mum alone in the lounge room, sitting in the dark. She and Dad fought in the morning before Dad went to work, and started right back up again when he walked through the door at night. Gran said they blamed each other because Janelle had water on the brain: blamed each other for Janelle not being perfect. Dad started coming home later each night. And when he went to The Oak for his Friday night drink, he’d go alone, and loiter about after closing time, wondering if he’d missed his start in life, and if tonight was the night he was going to jump in his car and drive to a place where he could start all over again.