No More Heroes

I’ve been staring at Daft Frank for the last five minutes, wondering why he hasn’t turned into a puddle of sweat.

We’re both sitting in the car with the windows rolled up. It’s hot as fuck and the air-conditioning in my Micra might as well be someone blowing on your face, but there’s Frank, North Face jacket zipped to the throat.

It’s annoying. Either he has ice for blood, or he’s too simple to notice that he’s burning up. Maybe he’s just got big old pit stains on his shirt and he’s too embarrassed to show me. Still, it won’t get any better if he doesn’t do something about it.

“Francis,” I say.

He doesn’t say anything.

“You alright in that coat, mate?”

He turns his massive head towards me and blinks like a cow.

“Y’alright?” I say.

He returns his gaze to the street.

Hardly a satisfactory answer, that. So I keep watching him. He keeps trying to ignore me.

“I’m just asking, Francis, y’know, if you’re a hundred percent set on wearing that coat.”

Nothing.

“If you’re warm,” I say. “Are you warm?”

“I’m fine,” he says.

“It’s just that you won’t feel the benefit when you get outside.”

Frank’s face puckers, but he still doesn’t look at me. I can hear him moving in his jacket, though. Tensing up. Getting just that wee bit narked at having to share the car with me.

I start drumming on the dashboard, but I can’t maintain the rhythm I’ve started. Keep trying, but I can go about thirty seconds before the beat goes wrong. Fuck it, I was never meant to be a drummer.

So I look at Frank again. He can feel me staring at him, I know it. And that irritates the fuck out of him, but he’s such a Quaker, he won’t do anything about it.

“Francis,” I say.

Silence.

“Francis, did you bring your colouring book?”

Frank shifts around again, his jacket making a swishing noise. A hurt look on his face. “Okay, what’s the problem?”

I stare straight ahead, watch the street. “I don’t know what you mean, Francis.”

“That,” he says. “That Francis stuff. Everything.”

“I don’t have a problem. Anyone round here’s acting like they’ve forgotten their crayons, Francis, it’s you.”

“See? That nipping at us. Don’t think I haven’t noticed, Cal. I’m not daft, y’know.”

Contrary to popular belief.

“No, Francis. You’re not daft.”

There’s a return to silence. I hear Frank turn back in his seat. And before long, I’m back to chewing the inside of my mouth again, so I stop. Shift around in my seat to get into my jeans pocket, pull out some gum.

It won’t stop the cravings for long, but it’ll have to do. I can’t smoke in the car —
my
car, by the fucking way — because Frank’s lungs can’t take it, and he’s now declared the motor a work environment. So the way Daft Frank tells it, if I choose to smoke in my own fucking car, I’m breaking the law and am liable to be fined up to fifty quid a cigarette. Sounds like a joke, but the man’s serious. He brought a pamphlet in and everything.

So, it’s a fucking sweatbox in here. And I can’t smoke. If that wasn’t enough, I have to put up with my back roaring at me. Normally, I’d take a pill and let that work its magic, but every time I reach for the bottle, Frank gives me the old bovine eyes again, all disapproving.

I hate that look. Next time he does it, I’m going to tell him he looks like a special needs case.

Which he kind of is.

But Frank Collier wasn’t Daft Frank until him and a couple of his wannabe gangster mates tried to knock off a Securicor van with a half-brick and a rounders bat. Reckoned they had it all worked out, knew when this particular van picked up from the new casino by Ordsall, had an escape route all planned, the lot.

So, not so daft, really. And fair play to him, Frank was one of the few who managed to grab a cash box and sprint up Regent Road with it. Course, he wasn’t too fit back then. A diet of pints and bacon barms caught up with him — he’d hardly made it halfway up the road before his heart kicked at the inside of his chest and his lungs screamed for oxygen.

He sat the box down on a wall, leaned on his knees to get his breath back, and caught the exploding dye pack right in the face.

When the police found Frank, he was coughing his guts up, his face day-glo pink. Since then his sense of smell’s gone for a Burton and he has the lungs of a life-long smoker. Some say the dye got into his brain, made him a bit tapped, which is where the Daft Frank thing came from.

And sometimes, Frank does nothing to prove those people wrong.

Like now, fiddling with the radio because he’s bored.

“You can’t blame me for being restless,” I tell him.

“Still no reason to take it out on me.”

I sniff some sweat up my nose. Mash my nostrils with the heel of my hand and sniff again. “Fine. Fair enough.”

A pause as Frank processes that. “Did you just apologise?”

“Whatever you need.”

Frank goes back to yipping through the stations and I concentrate on staring out of the window.

Someone starts singing, and I know the voice.

Saying that money talks, but it don’t sing or dance, and it don’t walk.

I look across at Frank. His lips are moving, but it isn’t his voice. Frank nods his head, his eyes closed. His jacket rustles in time to the music coming from the radio, his arms moving like he’s milking a really big cow.

It’s too much for one man to take. So I kill the song and look out of the window.

“Whoa,” he says, “what you doing turning off The Diamond?”

“The Diamond?”

“Yeah.”

I tap my temple and pull a face. “You’re not right in the fuckin’ head, Frank.”

“What?”

“The
Diamond
? Jesus wept.”

“Oh, I get you,” he says. “You’ve just got no taste.”

“I’ve got taste, mate. But we’re on a job here. Say our boys turn up and see you fuckin’
dancing
in the car. Hardly going to shite it, are they?”

“Then I won’t dance.”

“That’s not the point, Francis.” I grab my cigarettes from the dashboard and Franks starts coughing.

One of those non-smoker, I-really-wish-you-wouldn’t, hacking fits. False as you like.

“Relax,” I tell him. “I won’t light up till I’m out of the car, alright?”

Frank nods, and his cough winds down to a cleared throat. He rubs his mouth and says, “I don’t know that you should get out of the car, like. They might see you.”

“Then they see me. I can’t stand it in here anymore — I need some fresh air.” I put the Embassy in my mouth.

He starts coughing again, louder this time.

“Illegal,” he says. “I’m telling you—”

“Is it lit?” I say. “Really, Francis, did I light the fuckin’ thing?”

“No.”

“Then stow the theatrics, alright?”

A fist to his mouth, he says, “Just making sure. I don’t need you aggravating my condition.”

“Yeah, okay.”

I peel myself from the seat, get out of the car. It’s cooler outside, but not by much. I light the cigarette, away from Frank’s delicate lungs. Look across at the house we’re supposed to be watching.

Two weeks on what Donald Plummer calls an “accelerated procedure”, and if this is accelerated, I’d hate to see slow. But then I don’t know the first thing about evictions, I just do them for a living. All I know is how to slap a piece of paper into someone’s hand and leg it back to the car.

Tag, you’re it. No backsies.

Difficult when there’s never anybody home, though. Which is the case with this student house. If it was up to me, I’d slip the eviction notice through the letterbox and be done with it, but Plummer’s a people person. He prefers the personal touch. I know that because he tells me every time I whinge about the job.

I said to him: “You want these people out of the property, Don, you take it to court like a human being.”

Make it the law’s problem, right?

Wrong.

Plummer’s got this jaded view of the legal system. He reckons Frank and I should share that view, seeing as we’ve both done time. It was the legal system that put us away, so we should be bitter. We’re not, really, but that doesn’t stop Plummer from banging on about it. He doesn’t trust the law, and the reason he doesn’t trust the law is because he’s bent it enough times himself. The man’s a smooth-talker, all mouth and expensive trousers. He doesn’t like courts because every time he’s appeared, it’s as the defendant.

Someone’s singing again. I glance inside the Micra. Frank is mouthing along to whatever’s playing on the radio, but that’s not where the singing is coming from.

Up the road. One loud, strangled song. Other voices joining in now. I check my watch: past kicking-out time.

Rap one knuckle on the window. “You hear that, Frank?”

He sticks his head out, catches my cigarette smoke in the face. Starts waving his hands in front of his mouth, coughing and whooping like he took a chest full of mustard gas.

“You want to keep a lower profile?”

“You want to stop killing us with your smoke?”

“Shut up.” I jerk my head towards the noise, coming closer. “You hear that?”

Stupid question, because the noise is impossible to miss now. Blokes, young, rowdy, singing at the top of their lungs. A chant more than a song, but there’s a melody in there somewhere.

I flick the cigarette away, give the air a quick waft and get back into the car.

Coming round the corner now. Students. Definitely. Not so strange around here, but these lads are special.

I turn off the radio. Frank opens his mouth to moan at me, shuts it when I point through the windscreen at the new arrivals.

“D’you think—”

“Looks like we’re on, Francis.”

It’s definitely them. Three blokes, off their faces. Veering towards that very same house we’ve been watching for the past two weeks. Plummer told us it was a student property, but that it shouldn’t be any trouble. From what Plummer could tell us, they’re studying artsy subjects. It’s the wannabe lawyers we need to watch out for.

“Don’t let them give you any guff,” I say.

“Don already told us that.”

“Just making sure it stuck.”

“I’m not a spaz.”

“Never said you were.”

“You treat us like one.”

One of the students stops in front of the house. The other two crash into him. Laughter, mock martial arts, a couple of swaying poses. Looks like one of them actually knows how to fight, even if he is pissed.

I feel sick for a second. Hope he’s not a guy I’ll have to deal with.

Reckon the chief tenant is the student at the front door. The one holding his keys up to the other two.

He shouts, “Tea and toast!”

The students head up the path, the front gate left swinging. Once the door’s open, the three of them bottleneck in the doorway. A few seconds of shoving and swearing, and they spill into the house.

I wait for the front door to slam shut and a window to light up before I say, “You got the paper?”

Frank looks at me, puzzled. “No.”

“I gave it to you.”

Frank’s face creases. He rustles around in his coat pocket.

“I gave it to you, because you wanted to hold onto it.”

“I didn’t—”

“If you’ve lost it, Frank, just tell me. And then me and you can have some words about responsibility.”

Frank waves me off with one hand. Pulls out the official eviction notice with the other. The paper’s all mangled. Frank reads it, still frowning.

“Give it here.”

“Could’ve sworn you had it.”

“See, that’s why I treat you like a spaz, Francis.” I grab the paper, push open the driver door. “‘Cause sometimes, mate, you fuckin’ act like one.”