Runaway (16 page)

Maurie found the entrance to Rachel’s stairway near the far end of Moynihan and we escaped the rain into a scarred and gloomy stairwell that smelled of urine. The lift was only big enough to take two, and so we decided to climb the stairs to the third floor. The smell of urine gave way to the perfume of stale cooking, cabbage and onion, and drains – a low, unpleasant note that seemed to permeate the entire building.

We passed along a dimly lit corridor to Rachel’s door near the far end. Her flat was on the interior side of the development. Some idiot with a can of spray paint had left his signature along most of the length of the wall.

Maurie knocked on the door, and after a brief wait we heard a girl’s voice come from the other side of it.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Maurie.’

The door opened, and she almost flew into his arms. He was as much taken aback as we were. She buried her face in his chest, her arms reaching around his substantial girth to squeeze the breath out of him.

‘Oh, Mo, I’m so glad you’re here.’

Her voice was muffled, almost lost in the damp of his jacket, and it wasn’t until she stepped back that I really saw her face for the first time.

There are many ways to describe a moment like that. Most of them mired in cliché. I could say that time stood still. Or that my heart pushed up into my throat and very nearly choked me. And in their own way these things would be true. I had butterflies in my stomach, and my mouth was so dry I could barely separate my tongue from the roof of my mouth. So I could be forgiven a little hyperbole.

When I first met Jenny Macfarlane, there had been an instant and powerful attraction. I had wanted her to be my girl. But at the risk of sounding like Jeff and his Veronica, this was different. I knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that
this
girl would mean more to me than any other in my life. I knew it then, and I know it still today, fifty years on. But in the words of the song from a 1969 Rolling Stones album,
Let it Bleed
, you can’t always get what you want.

Of course, I didn’t know that then.

Her face was thin, and very pale, as if she hadn’t eaten much, or had suffered a recent illness. But her eyes were huge. The deepest, warmest brown, a mirror of the chestnut hair that fell in unruly ropes over her shoulders. She just made you want to protect her. From all the darknesses of the world. She wore a long-sleeved, close-fitting white smock over bell-bottomed jeans and brown boots. She was a skinny girl, but not skeletal. She carried flesh on her bones in the right places, and there was something almost classy about her. Elegant. She wore not a trace of make-up, and didn’t need to. Her lips were dark and quite full, in contrast to her long, thin nose, and her jawline was so well defined it was almost elfin.

Her relief at seeing Maurie was tangible, and her emotion welled up to moisten those big brown eyes, so that they soaked up and reflected almost every ounce of light in this whole dismal place.

We all stood back a little, feeling like intruders, embarrassed and unwilling witnesses to a very personal moment. She hardly noticed us.

Then she glanced nervously along the corridor before ushering us inside. ‘Come in. Quick. You don’t want to be seen out here.’

We shuffled into the flat after Rachel and Maurie like sheep, and she closed the door carefully behind us. Through an open door on the left I saw an unmade bed, street light from the window falling across a tangle of sweat-stained sheets. From the hall she led us into the living room, where glass doors opened on to a cluttered balcony that looked out into the very heart of the Quarry Hill development. It seemed that half the flat had spilled out on to the balcony, bags of rubbish, broken bits of furniture, the detritus of a life in disarray, all piled up like debris washed ashore after a storm. The balcony itself gave on to a joyless view of other apartments, lights burning in countless windows, other people’s lives spooling out behind glass like so many private movies. Short ones, long ones, sad ones, happy ones.

But there was nothing happy about this apartment. It was a car crash of a place. We had to wade through an accumulation of old clothes, the flotsam and jetsam of lives in chaos, just to get out of the hall. There was a foul smell in the flat, and rising above it the unpleasant odour of paraffin. I saw an old paraffin heater sitting in the corner of the room, and thought that probably explained the tracks of black condensation that stained the walls and windows.

The mouldy remains of half-eaten meals littered a Formica-topped table.

‘Jesus!’ Maurie voiced all of our thoughts in a single oath. ‘How can you live like this, Raitch?’

I saw tears well up in her eyes again.

‘It’s not my choice, Mo. It really isn’t. It’s not my home, it’s Andy’s. And whichever of his friends decide they’re going to crash for the night. There can be eight or ten people sleeping over, some nights. You have to step over bodies just to get to the loo.’

Maurie shook his head in confusion. ‘So why do you stay?’

‘Like I said, I don’t have a choice. If I tried to get away Andy would come after me. I’m not his girlfriend, I’m his property. And where would I go? What would I do? I don’t have any money.’

Jeff said, ‘You told Maurie you could get your hands on some cash, Raitch.’

She glanced at Jeff, and I could tell immediately that she didn’t like him. One look was all it took to convey a whole history that the rest of us knew nothing about.

‘I know where it is. I just can’t get at it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Maurie said.

Without a word she led us back out through the hall and into the bedroom I had glimpsed on the way in. The smell in here was sour. Body odour and feet. On a bedside table there was a candle and, laid out on a dirty handkerchief, a syringe, a small round metal container, a strip of stained blue rubber about fifteen inches long and other, unidentifiable bits and pieces. Although I had never witnessed anything like them, I knew instinctively these were the accoutrements of the heroin addict. It was startling to see them laid out like that, as if they were everyday things in everyday use. And in truth, they probably were. But I was distracted by Rachel dropping to her knees at the side of the bed and reaching under it to slide out a small trunk secured by a large padlock.

‘This is where he keeps his stuff. And his cash.’

‘His stuff?’ I said.

And she looked at me, I think, for the very first time. There was a moment, I am sure of it, that mirrored for Rachel the moment when I first set eyes on her. I can still see and feel it clearly in my mind, although I wonder now if it wasn’t exaggerated in my imagination, and imbued in later years with the memory that I have of it today.

‘The stuff he sells,’ she said.

‘Drugs?’ Maurie seemed shocked.

She nodded. ‘H.’

‘He’s a dealer?’

‘And user.’ Her brave face crumpled just a little before she caught herself. ‘He’s started making me take it, too.’

She pulled up her sleeve to reveal the bruises and scabbing around the injection sites in the crook of her arm. The stunned silence in the room seemed to affect her more than anything else. As if serving, somehow, to bring home to her just how far she had fallen. We were her peers. Middle-class kids from a south-side Glasgow suburb, staring at her with the same horror she would have felt herself in other circumstances.

Silent tears brimmed on her lower lids, before spilling over to run down her cheeks. ‘Please, Mo. Get me out of here.’ Though for some reason, it was me she looked at.

But it was Jeff who took the initiative. Not the brightest, but always practical. ‘Are there any tools in the flat?’

She wiped her cheeks dry with her palms as she stood up. ‘Andy keeps stuff in a box under the sink.’

We followed her through to the kitchen.

In the cardboard box there was a stout screwdriver, a set of spanners wrapped in cloth, a claw hammer, a rusted file with a pointed end, a bicycle pump and some corroded tins of chrome cleaner. Jeff grabbed the box and carried it back through to the bedroom.

Maurie turned to Rachel. ‘Get packed, Raitch. Minimum that you need. You got a bag?’

She nodded. ‘Andy’s got an old sports bag in the back room.’

‘Then pack now.’

The imperative in Maurie’s voice infused us all with a sense of urgency. None of us wanted to be here when Andy got back. I hurried through to help Jeff try to break open the trunk.

‘We’ll never bust this padlock,’ he said. ‘Best we can hope for is to break the clasp.’

His instrument of choice was the file. It was about twelve inches long and solid iron. He insinuated it between the clasp and the body of the trunk and braced his legs against the trunk itself to try to lever it free. The side of the trunk buckled with the force of it, but the clasp remained firmly attached.

I sat on the trunk and added my heel and the strength of one leg, to try to gain more leverage. The scream of metal under stress filled the room, and there was some movement of the rivets that attached the clasp to the trunk. Enough for me to be able to force the head of the screwdriver between the two and hammer it down. The panel welded to the clasp buckled, and with two of us now exerting leverage at different points, the whole thing bent outwards, protesting all the time, until finally it gave. Jeff fell backwards and the padlock dropped to the floor.

I threw back the lid of the trunk. Me and Jeff, and Dave and Luke, all crowded round to look inside. If we had expected it to be crammed full of heroin we were disappointed. It was almost empty, except for a single, clear plastic bag sealed with sticky tape and filled with a white powdered substance. It was about the size of a two-pound bag of sugar. The bottom of the trunk was littered with small resealable plastic sachets, all empty. There was a small set of scales, a spectacles case that opened to reveal several unused syringes, and a black cloth bag with a string threaded through the open end of it, gathered and tied in a bow. I untied it and pulled the bag open to lift out two wads of banknotes. Fives, tens and twenties.

‘Jees!’ Dave’s voice came in a breath that seemed to fill the room. ‘Must be a couple of hundred quid in there if there’s a penny.’

I weighed them in my hand. It was certainly a lot of money.

‘We can’t take that,’ Luke said suddenly, and we all looked at him.

‘Why not?’ Jeff said.

‘Because it’s stealing.’

I stood up. ‘Luke, this isn’t honestly earned money. The guy sells drugs. He trades in people’s misery. It’s not theft, it’s liberation.’

But Luke shook his head. ‘It’s still stealing.’

I felt frustration well up inside me. I needed to provide him with a logic for taking it. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Andy and Rachel are a couple, right? They share their lives. So, by rights half of this should be hers.’ I threw one of the bundles back into the trunk. ‘We’ll only take her half.’

‘Hey!’ Jeff protested.

But I never took my eyes off Luke. ‘It’s more than enough to get us to London, Jeff. What do you say, Luke?’

I could see the internal struggle going on behind his eyes. Whatever else those years of being dragged around the doors had done, they had instilled in him an unshakeable sense of morality, of right and wrong.

He nodded and said quietly, ‘Okay.’

Maurie and Rachel appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a black leather jacket now, and he was carrying her holdall.

‘We ready to go?’

‘We are.’ I thrust the notes at Dave. ‘Better stash this in your money belt.’

Luke leaned into the trunk and lifted out the plastic bag of white powder. ‘Not leaving him with this, though.’ And he pushed past the rest of us to get to the toilet, where he burst open the bag and emptied its contents down the pan.

Rachel’s voice was hushed and filled with fear. ‘Oh my God, he’ll kill us. He really will. He’ll kill us.’

Luke flushed the toilet.

We were all in the hall when the front door opened. A thickset youth wearing ox-blood Doc Martens and black drainpipe jeans lifted his head to look at us in astonishment. He had a chequered shirt beneath a navy-blue donkey jacket, like coalmen wore, with leather patches across the shoulders and on the elbows. He sported an American army-style crew cut, and had a scar that ran from the corner of one eye, through top and bottom lip, to his chin. His eyes were a dangerous blue, one of them substantially paler than the other, and he was as surprised to see us as we were to see him.