Running Scared (3 page)

‘Can’t see anyone,’ I said, wiping trickling raindrops from my face. ‘All I got was into a barney with a bus driver. Where’s our friend?’

‘Cleaning himself up in the washroom.’

‘Hope he doesn’t leave it smeared all over with blood. Just think, when Hitch has done it all up for you, you’ll be more fussy who you let go in there.’ (Yes, ‘whom’, same excuse.) ‘Did you warn him about the loose top on the cistern? It’d be a pity if he came out more injured than he went in. He might sue. He’d want his tenner back.’

‘I told him!’ said Ganesh testily.

There was a clanking from distant plumbing and the stranger reappeared. He’d got rid of all the blood, brushed his coat, and, swelling apart, no one would have noticed at a casual glance that he’d been in very recent trouble. I told him I’d been unable to see any Mercedes or ponytailed heavy.

‘That’s all right, then,’ he said. ‘I thought they’d have cleared off. They wouldn’t have seen me come in here. I shouldn’t worry.’

He’d now completely regained composure and was well up to dealing with his problems. I still wished I knew what they were.

‘Thank you very much,’ he said to me, nice and polite. ‘I appreciate everything.’

With that, he opened the door and slipped out. He looked quickly in either direction and then set off rapidly.

Another crepe paper chain fell down.

‘So much for that,’ said Ganesh. ‘Breaks up the morning, I suppose.’

‘I wish I knew what it was all about,’ I said wistfully. I gave Ganesh a quick rundown of my ideas about the visitor, adding, ‘It’s all very well deducing things, but you like to know if you got it right.’

‘You would. Leave me out of it. I’m sure it’s better we don’t know anything.’ Ganesh opened the till, extricated two fives, put in the tenner and closed the till. He handed one of the fives to me and tucked the other in his pocket.

‘We earned it,’ he said.

We? As I recalled, I was the one who went outside in the rain and made myself a possible target for aggro. Ganesh stayed inside and made the tea. But never argue with the man who’s holding the money.

‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know,’ I said, pocketing my fiver.

But I was wrong and Ganesh, as usual, was right. I mean, we were to find out what it was all about – and it would have been better if we hadn’t.

Chapter Two

I walked out of the shop at just gone one o’clock. Things had stayed quiet after our visitor left, the rain either keeping people indoors or sending them scurrying past, anxious to reach dry destinations. As we pinned our now somewhat battered decorations back into place, Ganesh and I had rehashed the morning’s main event. It remained a riddle and we went on to talk about Hari, whose postcard seemed to watch us accusingly from behind the counter. We wrangled about the washroom and Hitch’s imminent arrival on the premises and half a dozen other things. Just as I was leaving for home, Ganesh presented me with a Mars bar. Perhaps he thought I was owed a bonus for going out in the rain to spy out the land, or possibly he felt guilty for letting me do it. I put the chocolate in my pocket.

There was a supermarket on my way. I called in there and used some of my fiver to buy a packet of tea and some pasta and a jar of pesto. Memories of the morning’s events were beginning to fade. It had been just one of those spurts of activity which occur from time to time. Like a pebble thrown into a pond, they disturb the surface, create a few ripples, and then everything settles down again.

‘Have you got any change?’

I heard the voice, though the question wasn’t addressed to me. The voice came from a doorway just ahead of me and the request was made of a prosperous-looking elderly gent.

‘Have you got any change, sir?’ She emphasised the last word. She sounded pathetic. The old guy wavered, wanting to stick to his principles and walk on. But he couldn’t do it, not with that childish desperate voice echoing in his ears, a young girl’s voice. If that had been a man begging, he’d have told him to go and get a job. What he did now, as I knew he was going to do, was give too much. A small blue note changed hands.

The old gent huffed a bit and said, ‘You know, my dear, you really oughtn’t—’ But he couldn’t finish the sentence because he hadn’t a clue what to say. He hurried away, distressed and angry, already regretting parting with the five-pound note.

I approached the doorway carefully. There had been something about that voice which rang a bell. I peered in.

She looked wet, cold and miserable, and was stick-insect thin. No wonder the old fellow had coughed up. Talk about Little Nell. Rain had plastered her straight fair hair to her head. Her eyes were huge and tragic in a face which had the matt, pale complexion of the heroin user.

I said, ‘Hullo, Tig.’ Truth was, I’d hardly have known her if I hadn’t heard her voice first, she was so changed from our last meeting.

She jumped and her eyes blazed in her waif’s features. I thought she was going to take a swing at me.

‘Take it easy,’ I said hastily. Those frail-looking ones can catch you a nasty swipe. ‘It’s Fran, remember me?’

I hadn’t seen her for the best part of a year. She’d passed through the Jubilee Street squat when I’d been living there. I’d got to know her as well as you get to know anyone in that sort of setup, which is always as well as they’ll let you. She hadn’t stayed long, a week or two, and had been no trouble. A cheerful, plump, happy-go-lucky fifteen-year-old who hadn’t long been in London, she’d hailed from somewhere in the Midlands. She’d left home, she said, as a result of some family dispute, the old story. We’d rather missed her when she’d moved on, but I hadn’t expected her to stay long. The feeling I’d had then was that she was trying to give her parents a scare, get back at them for some real or imagined injustice. When she reckoned she’d done that, she’d go home. If asked, I’d have guessed she’d have returned there long before now, when cold, hunger and street violence ceased to sound adventurous and just got real and frightening.

But I was clearly wrong. The change in her shocked me deeply, even though I’d seen kids like Tig before. They arrived from out of town, full of optimism, although I couldn’t think why. What did they think they were going to find in London? Other than a whole community of people like themselves with nowhere to go and a host of sharks ready to prey on them? They learned quickly if they were lucky. The unlucky ones came to grief before they’d time to learn.

The thing that really stuck in my mind about her from Jubilee Street days was that she’d brushed her teeth after every meal, even if she didn’t have toothpaste. There are a lot of people who think that being homeless means being dirty. That isn’t true. Whatever the practical difficulties, homeless people try to keep themselves clean. Cleanliness means there’s still fight in you, circumstances haven’t ground you down. You still care about yourself, even if others appear to have written you off. When a cat ceases to groom itself, you know it’s sick. People are no different. With them it’s also a sign of a sickness, either in body or in spirit. The sickness in spirit is the more difficult to deal with. Looking at Tig now, I wondered which kind of sickness afflicted her.

We’d had a no-drugs rule in the squat and if she’d had the habit then, she’d concealed it very cleverly. But I didn’t think that was the case. She couldn’t have been that smart. I guessed the habit was recent. Actually, she wasn’t that smart. Belatedly, I remembered that, too. Naïve, perhaps, but a bit dim also.

‘Yeah, Fran,’ she said eventually. Her eyes slid sideways, past me. I remembered her gaze as it had been, bright, full of good nature. Now it was dull and hard. ‘Got any spare change, madam?’ she wheedled of a motherly woman with a bulging plastic carrier. The woman looked concerned and parted with twenty pence. Tig put it in her pocket.

‘How are things?’ She seemed to be doing well begging, but there was a quiet desperation about her which made me wary because when they reach that stage, they can really freak out.

‘All right,’ she said. Her gaze shifted past me again, this time nervously.

I still had two pounds left from my fiver and I gave her one of them. She looked surprised and then suspicious.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I had a bit of luck.’

At those words, misery welled up in her face, and was immediately wiped away. Luck had been avoiding her. She no longer expected any. But on the streets you hide your feelings. They make you vulnerable and God knows, you’re vulnerable enough without the enemy within.

‘Good for you,’ she said bitchily and shoved the pound coin away in her pocket with the rest.

I persevered nevertheless – the memory of the old Tig made me do it. ‘You heard what happened to the Jubilee Street house? They knocked it down.’

‘Yeah, I heard. It was going to fall down anyway.’

That hurt. I’d been fond of that house and it had sheltered her, as well as me, for a time. She owed it better than that.

‘It was a good place!’ I said crossly.

‘Look,’ Tig said, ‘you’re really in my way here, you know? How’m I supposed to ask people for bloody change with you standing there nattering about sod all?’ Her voice was aggressive but her eyes were flickering nervously past me again. She hissed, ‘For Chrissake, get lost, Fran!’

I got the message. ‘Here,’ I said, and handed her my Mars bar. She needed it more than me.

She snatched it away and I walked on without looking back. I was too busy looking elsewhere and sure enough, I spotted him almost at once. He was a big bearded bloke, in his twenties, wearing a plaid wool jacket, jeans and a woolly hat. He was loafing in the angle formed by a building which jutted out on to the pavement and under the shelter of an overhanging first-floor balcony. It kept him nice and dry and out of the draught. That dark little comer would be a mugger’s haven in the evening and I wouldn’t have seen him if I hadn’t been looking for him. He wasn’t a mugger, of course. He was Tig’s protection, amongst other things.

I’d come across these street partnerships before and as far as I was concerned, the woman was scarcely better off in them than out of them. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve known some really good partnerships which have started out there on the street, but it’s rare for them to last, even the good ones. The fact is, you can’t let yourself become dependent on anyone out there. You’ve got to stand alone, be able to take care of yourself, sort out your own problems. The street’s a family of sorts, but it’s a family of loners. Once you can’t hack it any more on your own, you’re lost.

Still, couples form, split, make new partners, just as they do in the world of the nine-to-fivers. There’s the old man/woman thing, of course. But there’s also a practical side to it. Tig’s man might be an idle lout who hung around in warm corners while she stood out in the cold wind. But he was on hand if things got rough, either while she was begging, or at any other time. Mind you, he probably also took most of the money, if not all. He’d see she had enough to keep the drug habit going because as long as she was on that, she’d have to beg, steal, sell her body, do whatever was necessary to get the money to feed it. He might even have got her on to it in the first place. He’d look on it as a business investment. People were far less likely to give him money had he been standing in that doorway with his hand out. From the brief glimpse I’d had of him, he didn’t look as if he’d been going hungry lately. Unlike Tig, who looked as if she hadn’t had a square meal in days. But the worse she looked, the more she earned. He couldn’t lose, really.

I felt a spurt of hatred for him, whoever he was. I’d never let myself be used like that, but then perhaps Tig’s situation had got so bad that whoever he was he’d seemed like a good idea at the time.

I was feeling pretty angry by now. One morning can only hold so much hassle. I stomped on homewards, ready to take on the next person to cross my path. Fortunately, no one did, at least not until I got there and then the encounter made me more inclined to laugh than spit fire.

At that time I was living in a basement flat in a house owned by a retired lady librarian called Daphne Knowles. I’d come by the flat through the intervention of an old gent called Alastair Monkton, whom I’d helped once. The flat had given me more security than I’d had in years. I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen and I’m twenty-one now. The trouble with security, when you’re not used to having it, is that you don’t really believe in it. I somehow knew that flat wasn’t going to be permanent, but I meant to make it last as long as possible. I was never going to get so lucky again, that was for sure.

It had stopped drizzling by the time I got to the street where I lived, and a feeble sun had crept out. The pavements looked clean and washed. As I passed the basement railings of the house next door, I saw coming towards me a sight which made me grin.