Jog On Fat Barry (7 page)

I can still remember Rosy and me sitting beside the bandstand on Parliament Hill Fields. Our whole lives lay ahead of us. I was saying that maybe sometime after she had the baby, we might leave it with her mum and go off to Majorca, for like, you know, our honeymoon. I told her I’d been saving. It wasn’t much, but it would get us there. Rosy said she wanted to tell me something but I wasn’t listening. I was too excited. She finally pressed her fingers against my lips and said what it was she’d been trying to say.

“Not mine?” I said. “Not fucking mine?”

I can still remember the way she looked at me when I asked her who the father was. Can still remember her saying that if she could have one wish in the world, it would be never having to answer that. But she did answer, because no one was handing out wishes that day. And what she said floored me. Because there I was thinking I knew everything about her, when, truth be told, I never had a bloody clue.

Róisín said her dad used to stroke her hair when she was little: used to pinch her bum and tease her when her tits began to grow. Said later, he’d slip his hand down the back of her knickers, and laugh, saying what a big girl she was getting. They had one of these funny old bathrooms with an Ascot water heater on the wall, and a pipe that fed the hot water into the bath, and if you had a bath in winter, the whole room would fill with steam until you couldn’t see anything. Róisín told me the first time it happened, she’d just got out of the bath and was drying herself off when she saw her dad through the steam. He was standing in the corner staring at her. She never said why she didn’t try to struggle or cry out when he came up to her and pushed her to the floor. I suppose she was hoping I’d understand, why she didn’t, but you don’t, not unless that sort of thing like has happened to you. Róisín said her mum was outside, and when her dad was done, she came in and helped Róisín clean up the mess. Róisín said they never talked: they cried a lot, but they never talked. Róisín had just turned eleven, and had been getting fucked by her dad off and on ever since.

Chelsea played away to Wolves. Madden and me were drunk on a train hurtling towards oblivion. It had been three days since I’d walked away from Róisín. I could still see her, it wasn’t hard to do, I only had to close my eyes and there she was, sitting at the bandstand, the tears running down her face. I hated her, and I hated the world, and I took that hate out on a boy who never did a thing to me: Darren Jacks; he was thirteen.

The judge said society was fed up with hooligans like Madden and me. Said he was locking us up and throwing away the key. Two months later Róisín had the baby. It was a Saturday. She named the little girl, Jade. Dad told me she stepped off the platform at Camden Town the following week: half an hour after she had smothered Jade. The train driver told police there hadn’t been enough time to stop, and the coroner’s inquest stated mitigating circumstance, with postnatal depression playing a leading part. I bought Róisín a coffin spray with some of the money I’d been saving: Forget-me-nots had always been her favourite flowers.

I looked at Jackie Pepper and Harry the Syrup, at Big Pat and Kelly Day, at Jimmy King and Frankie Toast. I had no words of wisdom for them: was in no position to give any even if I did. I had walked away and killed the only thing that ever really meant anything to me, Rosy: too frightened at five to say boo; too worldly wise at eleven to think anyone would care. Rosy was gone now and forever, but the Father was giving me a second chance, in his own roundabout way, to stop something that I’d been unable to do back then. I knew what I had to do: knew what had to be done. I saw the man through the steam; could see him waiting in the corner for me.

I parked the car by the canal and popped the boot. It was early Christmas morning and still dark. A full moon hid behind dark clouds. The sack was difficult to lift out and twelve stone hit the ground with a thud. I dragged it to the water’s edge, and then went back to the car. The paving stone was easier to carry. I used a mallet to break it in half. Then I put the broken pieces inside the sack before tying it back up again. When I stood up to catch my breath, the bloke inside the sack suddenly moved and cried out. I couldn’t believe it. I had lamped him with that mallet two times. Hit him harder than I did the paving stone but he was still alive. He squirmed and whimpered. And it was sort of ironic when you thought about it. So much so I started to laugh. Because here he was making the exact same sounds that little girl he raped and murdered on the Heath must have.

“Merry Christmas, slag,” I said, shoving the sack over the edge.

It slid into the black water. The moon broke through the clouds, and, for a few moments, it was bright enough to see bubbles rising to the surface. Then the moon was gone again. The police arrived ten minutes later. Big Pat had made the call. He’d waited eighteen years to put me in it. Said time and again there were no hard feelings, but Big Pat had just been biding his time. I’d thrown his brother Darren out the window of a moving train, and no one in the Jacks family was ever going to forgive that.

Sometimes, sitting here, alone, I miss things. Not that I’m complaining, I’d do what it was I did again; only, I miss things. Grass swaying in a wind that blew warmly, grass that seemed to surge like an ocean, and small birds rising out of it like flying fish. I miss seeing kites flapping high overhead; miss seeing kids splashing about in paddling pools; miss seeing dads teaching their boys the fundamentals of football.

“Here you are, son! On me head! On me head!”

Two boys. Best mates. Sat on a park bench. Washing their faces with ice cream wafers. Yeah… I miss things. Then again, birthdays always depress me. And mine was last week. I turned forty-four. Had it in this pisshole: HMP Full Sutton. “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” was Top of the Pops. I worked out that in two years I would have spent half my life behind bars. I do get well looked after though, always get slipped a lager or two. The prison governor even told me (off the record, of course) that what I did was heroic. And the screws couldn’t be nicer, bringing me this here, that there. The Father even pops up. He brings me a birthday cake every year, and asks me the same old silly questions about my soul and that. In fact, I told him only last week that I was growing more remorseful with each passing year.

“I sometimes wish things turned out differently,” I said. “I miss Rosy. And do you know, when I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still hear that nonce’s wife howling at me the way that she did in court, telling everyone I’d destroyed her life. Well, destroyed hers maybe, Father, but I saved a few by doing so.”

“The world’s unjust,” the Father had told me back, chomping down on his little bit of cake. “But there’re better places to go; better places to see.”

I told him he had no reason to worry about me. Said I’d do what I done again. Said I’d do it all again. And besides, I told him, it wasn’t as if they were going to keep me where I was forever. They didn’t keep you in these places forever, no, not for doing what had to be done. And I said it was funny, when I thought about everything that had happened, because I didn’t feel courageous, or bold, or any of those other things people on the radio, or in newspapers had said about me. Because at the end of the day, well, it was Him who planted the seed in my heart, wasn’t it. And who was I to question His will? You answer me that.

I told the Father it was odd being seen by others as a champion of the people. I said a feeling like that, placed in the wrong hands, could be a dangerous thing: could work its way up under your skin, like some itch you couldn’t scratch, and make you want to do it all again. I went on to say that I’d been doing quite a bit of inward thinking lately: contemplating, if you like, about what I might possibly do when I got released.

“Which isn’t that far away now, Father,” I said.

I told him that I’d been thinking about going to see Rosy’s dad: thinking about doing the same things to him that I’d done to the nonce. Of course, they were only thoughts, but still. The Father stopped eating. He put down his plate, wiped his mouth, and placed his hand on my shoulder.

“Let me pray for you,” he said.

“Pray?” I laughed, shrugging off his hand. “You want to fucking pray for me? I’ll tell you what, Father, if you’ve got praying to do, you’d best do it for them! Because when I get out of here!”

I threw my plate against the wall. It shattered into pieces and the fork skated across the floor.

“When these fucking bastards let me out of here!”

mutton

Pauline Jacks wasn’t what anyone would call a sort. Truth be told, she was hard to look at: she had fat ankles, and fat arms, and a fat head, and her school uniform was always grubby with bits of dried egg on it. Her black hair was lank and smelled like chips, and she was a dirty cow too. My brother Frank told me that every Thursday afternoon milkmen from Unigate and Express Dairy took turns shagging her in the storeroom under Johnson House for a dozen eggs, two bottles of gold top and a tub of cottage cheese. But Pauline was also fearless, and could steal just about anything once she put her mind to it.

“Here, Freddie.”

She was sitting on the bonnet of the Ford Capri Frankie Toast and Jimmy King had raped and pillaged the night before.

“Bet you can’t guess what I got up my jumper.”

“What?” I asked.

“Put your hands up there and find out,” she said smiling. “I know you want to, you dirty bugger.”

Raindrops began to fall from the gloomy looking clouds that always seemed to be hovering over our estate. Somewhere a car alarm was wailing: somewhere else a dog was barking. Pauline’s skirt was hitched halfway up her thighs. I glanced at her blotchy skin.

“You like my legs don’t you, Freddie?”

“How’d you get them marks on your knees?” I asked.

Pauline picked at her scabby knees with her fingernails.

“That’s for me to know and for you to find out.”

A skinny woman with a spotty face, Tracy Wilde, was pushing a pram with a buckled wheel up Addison Street towards us. I sniffed the fingers of my left hand: moments later I sniffed the fingers of my right hand. Her baby was crying but Tracy ignored it, pausing to light a cigarette when she reached us.