Cleaning Up (4 page)

Not too bad, Tommy thought, for a shithole.

For Darrin and the crew Saturday had been a bit of a shocker. A couple of lads had been caught shoplifting from the grocers, which was down near the canal on Dyke Road. The shopkeeper had nailed the pair whilst in the act, re-obtained the goods and had given them a well deserved boot up the arse for their troubles. The store doubled up as a takeaway curry joint, and the owner’s cousin and nephew had been out the back cooking up in the kitchen. They’d heard the ruckus and had rushed out to help send the shoplifters packing.

Unfortunately, the dipshits had not been duly chastened by their experience and, an hour or so later, they’d returned. But, there was about twenty of them this time. They’d steamed
into the shop and had systematically started to wreck the joint. Hasty calls by one of the three amigos had rallied the local Asian community and soon it was on for young and old. The raiding party had scattered when the cavalry had quickly started to arrive. Grown men tooled up with bats and bars were a little out of their purview. A couple of the vandals had been grabbed, smacked around a bit and then handed over to the coppers. But, there had been ripples from the event, later that evening an Asian schoolboy was knocked unconscious just a couple of streets away from the shop then, later still, a wheelie bin had been set on fire on the edge of Leeside and that had been underpinned with some Stone Age apocalyptic dancing and chimpanzee arm waving. It was more than intimidating enough to scare the shit out of some of the local residents and provocative enough to further anger plenty of others.

Word it was that a group of lads from the Coleshaw, a gang of black and white united in their wanton idiocy. The area was cordoned off until the wee hours of the next day and community leaders had been brought in quickly to dampen down the aggro. It was a right royal pain in the arse, exacerbated by the usual Saturday night shenanigans in the town, which included a mass brawl in Beckhams, the plastic city-centre wine bar with the subtle hint of a plumber’s arm pit, and a sexual assault in a side street down near the theatre.

When he got back to the station he was told by Sarge Thomas that there had been another mugging on the Barrington and he’d be up there with a D straight after tomorrow’s footy match.

If anything the game at the Shed would be a relative balm after the Saturday shit storm, it ran like clockwork these days. True, the modern day reign of peace was occasionally punctuated
by the odd group of visiting knuckle draggers who’d made the trip to the game by car. Such interlopers were often pre-determinedly set on trawling the local pubs with the purpose of sharing some of their opinions with the locals. They came looking for a fight and they always seemed to find one, so maybe some blokes just enjoyed getting filled in.

He had the coming Monday off. Roll the fuck on.

Pasquale had managed a full week at school, well half a week really, as he had bailed out on all of the afternoons apart from the Monday. He knew plenty of the other kids there well enough, in fact, he’d been to primary school with most of them. One or two had been friendly with him but most of the others had kept a bit of distance like he had the pox or something. In the afternoons he’d made his way on down to M’s on the Barrington usually via the game store in the precinct. The new GTA was out this weekend and, this Saturday, M was adamant that he would be at the front of the queue.

He’d had a puff with M and Junior and then they’d gone down to the estate for a chat with the slightly older lads who usually hung out around the shops. The local boys tolerated their presence with a belligerent amusement, the three of them posed no kind of threat and, thankfully, all the Barra boys knew, at least by reputation, Junior’s older brother Wes. So, they were not likely to give them too much shit, not while Junior was around anyway.

Wes was probably coming out of nick early in the New Year. Junior respected his older brother but that respect was tinged with obvious concern around the homecoming. Wes always brought a shitload of trouble home for Junior, his mum and his sisters to deal with. Junior didn’t want to go back to it.

After a few minutes of back and forth M had been pulled away by the older boys and they were engaged in a tight circled straight faced conversation. Matt managing to shut the fuck up for at least two minutes, the odd ‘sorted’ and ‘cool’ coming from him, M revelling in being seen with the big boys. He’d waved away the offer of more smoke when they got back to M’s place. He didn’t want to be red eyed and shuffling when his mum got back from work. It was OK between them, at the moment. M hadn’t been mithered by it; he’d met his mum and was always careful around her. Besides, him knocking it back meant more for him and Junior.

A couple of kids at the school had mentioned this Friday’s alcohol-free music night down at the Centre. He knew a few of the girls who were regulars down there and they were well tidy. But, he didn’t think that the three of them would bother to go, the Centre had way too many rules and restrictions, and the workers there - Sonny and the others - had a reputation for not taking any shit.

They’d probably get down the precinct for a while and, if Matt’s mum was out on one of her benders, they’d hang out there later on. Last summer she’d been gone for a full week and he’d been bunkered down at M’s for most of it. Maybe Tish and Sharyn would be at the precinct. Tish had let him cop a feel just a couple of weeks ago. She was tasty but a little too sure of herself. Knowing amusement in her eyes whenever she gave him the once over.

Monday was a write off. Darrin was knackered after the weekend’s shenanigans and only managed to crawl out of his pit at midday. He did a quick reheat of a takeaway that he’d picked up last night and then chilled out on the couch for most of the
afternoon. He intermittently toyed with the idea of making an impromptu visit to his mum’s for an evening nosh up but that would mean the tedious trade off of a couple of hours of having to listen to and tolerate his parent’s low level bickering. His dad would definitely be home this evening, he didn’t usually open the gym on Monday nights unless some of his boys were competing, whereupon it was on six nights and six mornings. The reality was that the gym was the only place that the old man was truly happy, the rest of life just a test of his old man’s patience.

He’d watched a box set DVD for a couple of hours, one that he’d picked up last week. It was a Sci-fi which wasn’t his normal bag, but Barnsey and Johnny Jones had raved about it so he’d given it a bash. A couple of episodes in and he was completely hooked. Humanity trashed by machines that they’d created. Darrin got off on the irony of that all right. He was quickly drawn into humanity’s epic battle for survival too; the survivors’ desperation, lines drawn, all that
backs up against the wall
stuff. Bit like last Saturday night, he thought, but with better special effects and better looking birds.

Yesterday, he’d accompanied one of the female detectives up to the Barrington to door knock about the latest mugging. The victim was still in hospital, a broken jaw and three teeth and seven quid the lighter for the experience. The victim couldn’t remember anything but he thought that there were at least two attackers and one of them was ‘a big black lad’. Most of the locals had remained tight lipped and resentful in the face of their questions and he had admired the detective’s patience as they’d made the rounds. He’d felt like belting more than a few of the ungrateful, po-faced fuckers.

At the end of the first disc he forced himself through some
press-ups and sit ups in his cramped lounge room. He’d give his parents a miss. He decided the DVD would provide all the company he needed.

For Tommy, the week had rolled by as lightly and as drama free as a fluffy white cloud. Thankfully, there had been no great fallout from Saturday’s ruckus on the Leeside, which had surprised him a little, although the weather had been wet and cold, which was usually good news for the local crime stats. Pauline had pulled him in on Wednesday to ask him to help her with a new funding bid that she was putting together. It was the ‘Building Communities’ programme, run through the auspices of the Lottery. Tommy smiled to himself at that bit of information. Mick hated the Lottery, to him it was just another pipe dream for the masses. Mick reckoned you had more chance of getting struck twice by lightning than you had of winning the fucking thing!

Tommy had pledged to help her, although writing out funding bids were definitely not his thing. He could do it if he had to though, no sweat, he was actually more than competent at that side of the job and, at the moment, Pauline was visibly drowning not waving. Mired in the constant grind of ensuring the long term viability of the Centre and making sure that it was operating at a level that she thought would meet the community’s needs. She was chuffed at his pledge to help and they had chilled out together briefly, sharing some of her slightly over brewed green tea and their youthful travelling tales.

He knew that she saw him as a bit of a kindred spirit. He wasn’t sure about that but did nothing to dissuade her from the notion. Partly out of pragmatism, as it was a boat that didn’t need rocking, and partly because he liked and respected her.

He’d stopped at Aziz’s on the way home to pick up some provisions. The prices in there were twenty percent up compared to the ever-handy Tesco’s but he would rather pay the mark up than put more money into those fucker’s bulging coffers. Today, Jamal was in the shop busily restocking the shelves, accompanied by Shaista who chastely smiled at his approach from behind the counter. Jamal told him whilst nimbly unpacking some jars of Nescafe, that ‘our Noora’ would be down for a visit in just a couple of week’s time, she was down with the kids for a few days. Jamal’s news had knocked him off balance and he was surprised that his heart had skipped a beat. Jamal finished off a couple more boxes and told him to wait as he went off into the living area behind the counter. He came back with a big grin flourishing a glossy photo which he held at arms length like it was the fucking Koh-i-noor and belonged on a plumped up velvet cushion. Tommy took the proffered picture, it was a current shot of Noora and her family, taken at some collar and tie do. She looked great, as self possessed as ever and that smile of hers - Jesus.

Sonny popped in to see him the next day and they chatted for a while about tomorrow’s rave. Sonny had his ear to the ground with the local Asian community and he definitely gave the workplace more of a rainbow coalition quality which always looked good in the Centre’s publicity material. Big Lottery are you looking? Sunil was an old Leeside boy; his parents had been living on the estate for most of Tommy’s lifetime. Sonny had been given the word that there were still some rumblings about Saturday’s incidents and that some of the younger bucks were still talking about taking some kind of affirmative action. Luckily, the older guys in the community were holding sway, as they usually did, and any half-arsed
retaliation was being held at bay.

They moved the conversation on to some of the ‘at risk’ kids that Sonny worked with. In Sonny’s role as a street youth worker, containment and damage control was the order of the day. Sonny was well aware that some of the younger boys on the town’s estates were getting into the periphery of the harder drugs scene. He told Tommy a couple of names that were now on his furrowed brow list; a kid called Matthew Marshall whose mum had been on the skid for years and a Floyd Alexander, a tall, skinny, wide shouldered black kid whose brother had once been a noise on the local scene before he’d predictably tripped over his pecker through a combination of greed and reaching beyond his grasp. The pair had been implicated in a couple of assaults down at the precinct and they were heading quickly down the slippery slope to Shitville.

Sonny shrugged his shoulders, with a show of resignation that Tommy knew Sonny did not really feel.

‘You know what the problem with these kids is Tommy?’ He did, they had said it to each other many times before. ‘They have no bugger to look up to, right Sonny?’

‘We are as that little boy with his finger in the dyke Tom.’

‘Ah well Sonny, as long as the dyke don’t mind.’

Sonny always laughed at his shitty jokes; big guffaws and a finger wagging mock reproach.

So, Matthew and his mate, Floyd, were out there, two baleful, restless clouds drifting away from the succour of any kind of safety net. The silly little pricks.

Sonny left him with a promise that he would be down at the Centre early tonight to help him move the tables for the rave. Thank fuck, the extra hands were always more than welcome. That evening, Sonny’s concerns with the two boys had quickly
manifested themselves in a tawdry example of universal synchronicity. The evening’s ‘safe rave’ had gone well, as it usually did, plenty of local and not so local kids taking advantage to chill out and have some fun. The mood was lively but relatively relaxed given the amount of hormones bouncing off the walls. He and Sonny played the avuncular muscle, Corrine and Pauline gave that presence some female balance and a couple of local worthies bolstered the adult ranks by giving up their time as volunteers. MC Lipz, aka Terry Lipscombe, a good natured, fresh faced middle class kid who preferred the less salubrious side of town, was up there on the dismountable stage spinning the tunes.

At about half ten Tommy went outside for some fresh air and to get away from the mind numbing music for a while. There was a few kids out there, some paired off couples who were chewing hungrily on each others faces and a small group of the lads that he regularly took to the gym on a Wednesday. He had a bit of banter with them for a while until he was distracted by a trio of boys wheeling their low slung bikes across the car park. They were slowly meandering towards the pool of light and the open double doors of the basketball court that housed the rave, loudly calling out to each other as they did so. Tommy was pretty sure that he didn’t know them and he unthinkingly edged away from the gym lads a yard or two, just to give himself a bit of separation and room. The musketeers pulled up a few yards in front of him, the carrot top in the trio called out to the group that he’d been talking to. The boys nodded back and a couple of them greeted two of the boys by their names - Junior and M.