2009 - Ordinary Thunderstorms (13 page)

“You want some happy-flakes, baby?” she asked, thinking: please say yes.

“Yeah, Mum.”

“Yeah, Mum, what?”

“Please happy-flakes me.”

Mhouse filled a bowl with sugar-frosted cornflakes, added some milk and a few glugs of rum. Then she crushed a 10 mg Diazepam under the blade of a knife and sprinkled its dust over the flakes. She handed it to Ly-on, who was now curled up in a nest of cushions on the floor in front of the TV. She sat down beside him and watched him eat his happy-flakes. When he’d finished she took the bowl from him and stuck it in the sink with the other dishes. She slipped her,£200 into the stash under the floorboards in the toilet and, when she came out, saw that Ly-on—was now fast asleep. She turned the TV down and settled him more comfortably on the cushions, then went into her room, took two Somnola and smoked a joint—she wanted to be out for twelve hours, minimum.

When she woke it was four o’clock in the afternoon. Ly-on was still sleeping but he’d wet himself.

That night, Mr Quality-He-Delivers knocked on the door at about 8.00.

“Who is it?” Mhouse said, through the letter-box.

“Quality coming,” was the reply.

“Hey, Mr Q, come on in,” she said, unlocking the door. Mr Quality was perhaps the most important man in The Shaft, for all sorts of reasons, none of them particularly violent. No one who dealt with Mr Quality wanted him to be angry with them so he very rarely resorted to main force. He was very tall and thin and Mhouse knew that his real name was Abdul-latif. He stepped into the room, seeming twice as tall as Mhouse, and anyone might have thought he was about to go off running as he was wearing a dark maroon track suit and very new trainers, box-fresh. Only the fact that he had silver rings on all eight fingers and two thumbs made this supposition less than likely.

Mr Quality lounged against the kitchen wall, looking around him, proprietorially—it was his flat, after all. He was always lounging, was Mr Q, Mhouse thought, as if he supposed it made him seem not quite so embarrassingly lofty.

“Hey. Ly-on, man. How it hanging?”

Ly-on looked up from his TV. “Good,” he said. “I fit like new car.”

Mr Quality chuckled. “Sweet-sweet. You keep chillin’, man.”

Mhouse beckoned him away from Ly-on. “Where we at?” she asked.

“Saktellite TV, rent, gas, water, electric…” he pondered. “,£285, I say.” He smiled at her, showing small perfectly white teeth in mottled pink and brown gums. “You dey get problem?”

“No, no,” Mhouse said, thinking thank the good lord for Ramzam and Suleiman. “Everything working. Sometime the light he go out but I know it’s not you fault.”

“The electric he go be difficult. We have many problem. Gas easy, water easy, but electric…” he winced, tellingly. “We done get wahallah. They chase us—ah-ah.”

“Yeah. Bastards.”

She went into the bathroom for her stash, then pretended to rummage in the cardboard box beside her bed and opened and closed the cupboard doors before coming back with his £285. That left her with about £30—and she owed Margo…she’d have to go out again tonight. Still, the good thing about Mr Quality was that he could provide you with anything—anything—as long as you had the money. In Mhouse’s flat the gas, water and electricity had been cut off months ago but Mr Quality had reconnected her within hours. Every now and then Mr Quality paid to have sex with her—or rather, ‘paid’ in the sense that he always offered her money that she always declined.

She handed the,£285 over and Mr Quality paced about the flat, checking it out as if he were a prospective buyer. Mhouse kept it as clean as she could—she had very little furniture, but she had a broom and she always kept the floors swept.

“You have spare room, here,” Mr Quality said, opening a door into the second bedroom. There was a mattress on the floor and a few cardboard boxes with clothes and old toys in them. “I can get you lodger—£20 a week. No worry, clean nice person. Asylum, no speak English.”

“No, I’m fine at the moment. Keeping busy, business is good,” she said, trying to appear casual. “Things are OK, going fine. Yeah, fine.”

“You go let me know.”

“Yeah, sure. Thanks, Mr Q.”

After Mr Quality had gone she gave Ly-on his supper—mashed banana and condensed milk with a slug of rum. She crushed a Somnola into the mix and mashed it further with a fork.

“Mummy’s got to go out to work tonight,” she said as she handed him the bowl.

“Mummy working too hard,” he said, spooning the banana pabulum into his mouth.

“You go to toilet if you need pee-pee,” she said. “Don’t do it in you pants.”

“Mum—don’t saying that.” His eyes were on the screen.

She kissed his forehead and went to change into her working clothes. No point in waiting, she thought, might as well get the cash as soon as possible. She put on a cap-sleeved T–shirt with a red heart across her chest, wriggled into her short skirt, pulled on her zip-up white boots, picked up the umbrella, checked her bag for condoms and fastened the keys on the long chain to her belt. She locked the door on a sleeping Ly-on—she’d be back in a couple of hours or so, she reckoned, no need to alert Mrs Darling, and headed along the walkway to the stairs.

As she was leaving The Shaft, heading out to the Rotherhithe shore and her usual beat, she saw a black taxi-cab pull up, its light off. No one got out while it sat for a minute or two at the kerb. Who’s ordering a black cab at The Shaft? she wondered as she made towards it. Brave fool.

The driver stepped out as she walked past—big bloke, ugly face with a weak, cleft chin. She glanced back to see where he was going and saw him lock his cab and wander into the estate.

T
HE VET HAD BEEN—what was the word?—contemptuous, yes, almost contemptuous when Jonjo had told him what The Dog’s routine diet was. He was a young fellow with a square of beard under his bottom lip and a single dangling earring—something Jonjo didn’t expect to see in a Newhani veterinary surgeon.

“He eats pretty much what I eat,” Jonjo had said, reasonably. “I tend to cook for two—scrambled eggs and bacon, curries, sausage rolls, pork pies—he really likes pork pies—biscuits, crisps, the odd bar of chocolate.”

“This is a pedigree bassett hound,” the vet said. “Anyone would think you were trying to kill him.”

Jonjo sat quietly as the vet berated him for his neglect, then told him the sort of food The Dog should and must eat and wrote a list down on a piece of paper and handed it to him. Smug bastard, Jonjo thought.

He touched his breast pocket and felt the crinkle of the vet’s folded list. The back of his cab was full of tins of special dog food and paper sacks of dog biscuit and fibrous additives; there were pills and suppositories and other types of medication should symptoms appear and complications occur. Bloody expensive too. He’d hand it all over to Candy in the morning. He wondered whether he should give The Dog back to his sister…

He stepped out of the cab and locked it, contemplating the tall blocks of the Shaftesbury Estate. He ran through his checks: the small Beretta Tomcat between his shoulder blades, snug in a rig he had designed himself; the larger 1911 .45 ACP holstered in the small of his back, one round in the pipe, cocked and locked; knife strapped just above the left ankle. He was wearing an extra roomy leather blouson jacket that perfectly concealed the small prints of his weapons. He had loose, pale blue, stone-washed jeans and yellow builder’s boots with steel toecaps. He eased his shoulders and rotated his head, remembering the last time he’d experienced this adrenalin buzz—when he had knocked on Dr Philip Wang’s door in Anne Boleyn House.

He walked into The Shaft completely unafraid, calm, ready for anything.

Jonjo could hear Sergeant Snell’s voice in his ear. “
The Three O’s, youse cunts!
” Over-arm. Over-react. Over-kill. Number one: you can never have too many weapons. Number two: somebody calls you a name—you knock him down and kick him senseless. Number three:—you don’t just wound, you permanently disable. Somebody tries to hit you—you kill him. Somebody tries to kill you—you destroy his family, his house, his village. Snell always made sure you got the picture. True, these instructions were tailored for violent combat zones but Jonjo had always regarded them as pretty sound counsel for life in general and, by and large, adhering to the Three O’s had served him well, only a few of his overreactions landing him in trouble with the police—but they tended to understand once they learned of his background.

Jonjo wandered across the cracked dry mud of a grassless central courtyard, looking around him. He was in a wide, two-acre quadrangle, surrounded by four of The Shaft’s apartment blocks. He saw snapped-off saplings, a washing machine with its guts ripped out and its porthole window open, graffiti-ed walls and doors. A few people looked down at him from the upper walkways, elbows resting on the concrete balustrades, smoking.

These places should be razed to the ground, Jonjo thought, and houses built for decent people. Take all the scum who live here, put them down with humane killers, like cattle, incinerate their bodies and throw their ashes in landfill sites. Crime in the area would fall by 99 per cent, families—would relax, kiddies would play hopscotch in the street, flowers would bloom again in front gardens.

Three little girls were sitting on a bench, sharing a cigarette. As he approached, Jonjo saw that they weren’t so much little—just small. He looked at them: eleven? Or eighteen?

“Hello, ladies,” he said, smiling. “Wonder if you can help me.”

“Fuck off, peedlefile.”

“What’s the name of the main crew, round here? Who runs the area, you know? Number one gangsters. I’ll give you a fiver if you tell me.”

One of the girls, with bad acne, said, “Give me ten and I’ll flog you off.”

Another, a fat one, said, “Give me ten and it’s the best blow-job of your life.”

They all laughed at this—giggling, silly, pushing at each other. Jonjo remained impassive.

“Who’s the big guy in The Shaft, eh? I got a job for him. He’ll be well angry you didn’t tell me.”

The girls whispered to each other, then Acne said, “We don’t know.”

Jonjo took a twenty-pound note out of his pocket and dropped it on the ground. He turned away from them and put his heel on it.

“Let’s do it this way,” he said. “I didn’t give you this, you found it. I just need a name and a place, then I walk away and I won’t know who told me. No one will know. Just tell me—and don’t play silly buggers, right? Because I’ll come back and find you.”

He crossed his arms and waited. After about twenty seconds one of the girls said, “Bozzy, Flat B1, Unit 17.”

Jonjo walked away, not looking round.

Jonjo followed the signs to Unit 17 and found Flat B1—it was derelict, on the ground floor, the windows boarded up. For a second or
two
he wondered if those little bitches had conned him but then he saw that there was no padlock on the door and, peering through a slit at the edge of one of the boarded-up windows, he realised there were lights on inside.

He slid his 1911 out of its holster in the small of his back and held it loosely in his hand, butt first. Then he knocked on the door.

“Bozzy?” he said, in an anxious voice. “I need to see Bozzy. I got money for him.” He knocked again. “I got money for Bozzy.”

After a moment he heard bolts being thrown and the door opened six inches. A bleary, stoned face looked out.

“Give me money. I give it Bozzy.”

Jonjo smashed his gun, held flat, into this guy’s face and he went down with a yelp. Jonjo was through the door in a second, gun in both hands and put his big builder’s boot on the guy’s throat. His nose was broken, askew, and he was spitting blood, feebly.

“Relax. I’m not the police,” Jonjo said in a level voice, “as you can probably tell. I just want a word with Bozzy.”

The room was full of smoke and the strange smell of burnt rope hit Jonjo’s nostrils. He saw a couple of sagging filthy armchairs, three stained mattresses, some empty bottles and a litter of food wrappers and foil containers and, to his vague surprise, halved lemons, squeezed dry. Three other dazed young men were slowly rising to their feet.

“Lie down on the floor,”Jonjo said, pointing his gun at each of them. “Face down. Place your hands on the back of your heads. I just want a conversation with Bozzy, then I’ll fuck off.” He smiled as the young men lay down on the floor. He lifted his boot off the sniffler’s face and with a few prods of his toe encouraged him to turn over also. “So…Which one’s Bozzy?” Jonjo said.

“I am,” said a beefy guy with a hot, flushed face.

“You’d better be Bozzy, mate,”Jonjo said. “Otherwise you’re in deep shit.”

“I’m Bozzy. And you fuckin’ dead, man. I know you face, now. You dead.”

Then, swiftly, Jonjo kicked the other three prone young men very hard in the ribs with his steel toe-capped bricklayer’s boots, feeling ribs give way, stave, splinter, yield. The men shouted and rolled around in serious pain. Every time they coughed or sneezed for the next three months they’d remember this encounter, every time they crawled out of bed or reached for something they’d think of me, Jonjo acknowledged with satisfaction.

“Get out,”Jonjo said. “Now.”

They left slowly, stooped, carefully, clutching their sides like old men while Jonjo covered them with his gun. Then he bolted the door behind them and turned to Bozzy. From the pocket of his jeans he took two plastic cuffs and first bound Bozzy’s ankles and then attached Bozzy’s left wrist to his ankles before heaving him into a sitting position.

“This is very simple, Boz, me old mate,” Jonjo said, taking his knife out from its ankle scabbard. He grabbed hold of Bozzy’s free hand and very quickly cut the web of skin between Bozzy’s third and ring finger—just a nick, really, about a centimetre deep.

“
Fuck!
” Bozzy cried out.

Jonjo dropped his knife and grabbed the pair of fingers on either side of the gash and gripped them fiercely in both fists. Blood was dripping now, welling up from the small cut.

“We used to do this a lot in Afghanistan,” Jonjo said. “The Al-Qaeda guys say they’ll never talk but they always do.” He could see Bozzy looked blank. “You heard of Al-Qaeda?”