The Graft (26 page)

‘It means nothing to me, Nick. They just make me feel better . . . make me feel wanted.’

‘But you are wanted, Tams!’

She looked up into his eyes and was surprised to see tears in them.

‘I only wish I could believe that, Nick.’

‘Believe it.’

‘It still wouldn’t be enough, whatever you said.’

He sighed.

‘Which brings us back to square one then, don’t it? Should I stay or should I go?’

 
Louis Clarke and Tyrell were eating a large breakfast in a café off the Wandsworth Road. It was a real heart attack breakfast and they were enjoying it immensely.

‘Look, it might not have gone too well last night, but for fuck’s sake, Lou, this is all new to me, ain’t it? Why else do you think I wanted you on board?’

‘I think you should leave it. I have a bad feeling about it all.’

Tyrell didn’t answer. He carried on eating, wondering how long it would be before the pain inside him eased.

‘I can’t, Lou, but I would understand if you left me to it.’

Louis smiled.

‘We need to sort something out here, Tyrell. I think Terry is up for helping us full-time - he said as much.’

Tyrell nodded.

‘Thanks, Lou.’

‘Shall we go and see Jude then?’

It seemed the logical place to start as far as Louis was concerned but he had been nervous of saying it to his friend.

Tyrell nodded but he was gradually losing his appetite. His biggest fear was that he’d discover Sonny’s death could have been avoided, and it was Jude, not himself, who could have made sure of that. Tyrell pushed the terrifying thought from his mind. He didn’t know how he’d cope with a discovery like that.

‘I just need to sort me blokes out then we can get off. You know Jude, she don’t surface with the rest of the world. She’ll still be out of it.’

Louis, who hated her with a vengeance, didn’t answer. Instead he concentrated on his food and berated himself silently for getting involved with something that could only bring his friend added grief.

But what else could he do?

Louis had seen Jude out of her nut, being taken to a locked ward, and poor distraught Sonny Boy clawing at the ambulance doors as he and Tyrell tried to coax him into their car. She had got off with court fines after shoplifting charges and even assaults because of Sonny and the way he could not cope without her. The boy had done anything he had purely to feed her and her habit. So why was Tyrell so determined to find out the worst about him? God himself knew he had few illusions left concerning the boy as it was.

Louis had a bad feeling about the lot of it. Something was not right about Sonny Boy’s death and he for one was not sure he wanted to know what it was.

 
‘Mrs Proctor?’

Maureen nodded, instinctively wary of the two men on her doorstep.

‘I might be. Who wants to know?’

The older man sighed.

‘Come on, stop playing games, where’s Gary?’

She shrugged.

‘How the fuck should I know?’

‘Well, his car has been found abandoned at Stansted airport and there was over a kilo of cocaine in the boot. So we wondered if he had gone on a little holiday, see?’

She shrugged, closing the door on them.

‘I ain’t seen him. If you catch up with him before I do, give him my best, won’t you?’

They had played this game before.

‘Can we come in?’

The policeman’s voice was loud through the front door.

‘Have you got a warrant?’

Her voice was even louder. She had been playing the game a lot longer than they had.

‘No . . .’

‘Then fuck off !’

‘We can get one.’

Maureen didn’t bother to answer. Instead she went upstairs and ransacked the house for anything incriminating. By the time they came back with the warrant she was leafing through the sofa catalogue. She had disposed of anything dodgy-looking by handing it over the fence to her neighbours who, fortunately, had no warrant pending on their house.

Job done.

She would kill Gary when she got her hands on him. It was always the same, he caused hag and she cleared up the shit. As she always said to her sister, ‘No change there then.’

 
‘Do you feel better now?’

Gino nodded.

‘Told you, didn’t I?’

He smiled.

Jude was almost envious of his first foray into heroin. She remembered her own first time, not the guy who had turned her on, he was scum, but that first feeling of belonging somewhere. And that somewhere was inside her own body. The way to true escape did not lie in plane tickets or a fulfilling job, the bullshit that straight people always gave you. The power lay in a needle for anyone who cared to use it.

He was on the nod again, in the twilight zone as Sonny used to say when Jude opted out of reality. She had been on it so long now she couldn’t function if the gear was cut too much. The dealer they used cut it with quinine and it was a bastard. But beggars can’t be choosers. Jude had to take what she could get.

She still had a thirty-pound bag and was careful not to give Gino too much. The last thing she needed was a dead boy on her hands. But even if he did OD, he was a consenting adult as far as the police were concerned. Once they hit seventeen they were men in the eyes of the law. Didn’t need their mummies and daddies down the station any more. So she wasn’t too trashed.

Gino would become her new little helper, he would be the next Sonny. For that she needed to guarantee his devotion and this should do it.

She heard a loud knock on the door and went to answer it. Gino’s mother was standing there, all thirteen stone of her.

‘Is he here?’

Jude shook her head and said in a puzzled voice, ‘Who?’

Deborah White stood there with her neat blond bob and her denim jacket, looking down her nose at Jude, and it rankled.

‘Who do you think?’

Deborah was obviously not taking any shit today.

‘ ’Course he ain’t here, what would your Gino be doing here?’

She sounded sincere and for a few seconds Deborah White remembered that this woman had just buried a child and felt a twinge of compassion for her.

‘Do you know where he might be, Jude?’

She shrugged, wishing this woman a million miles away. Dead would be good.

‘Nah . . .’

As she spoke, Gino jerked out of the front room towards the toilet, heaving as he felt the wave of nausea hit him. He was walking like someone drunk, lurching against the walls, the hand over his mouth already full of the yellow bile he was coughing up. It spurted through his fingers. Deborah White looked at her son and her heart stopped dead in her chest.

‘Gino?’

She pushed past Jude, knocking her back against the wall.

‘Oi, hold up, this is my house!’

It was her voice that did it, Deborah told herself later in the day. The way she acted like she was being wronged when Deborah’s son was drugged out of his head and vomiting through taking heroin given to him by this lying scum standing not two feet away from her.

She gave Jude a punch that would have floored Giant Haystacks. She felt the other woman crumple under the force of her blow, and as she went down Deborah’s foot seemed to act of its own accord and she kicked Jude in the head with all her might, sorry that she was only wearing bumpers and not a pair of officer boots. For the first time in her life she wanted to take someone’s life because she knew that Jude had just taken her son’s. He might not die today but he’d be as good as dead once the brown got him.

She ran to the toilet after him. The stench hit her first, and then she saw her son sprawled on the seat, his eyes glazed and his lovely new T-shirt covered in yellow bile. She was trying to pull him up and take him home with her when Jude appeared behind her.

‘He had already taken it . . . I took him in. I told him he was a mug, Debbie . . .’

Deborah faced her furiously.

‘You fucking whore! You took my boy and you dragged him down to your level. You lost your boy, do you want me to lose mine as well?’

Her voice was loud and by now the neighbours were crowding round the door. There was always a cabaret at Jude’s, she was like the local entertainment.

‘He’s all I’ve got.’

‘I was only trying to help him!’

Jude was all self-righteous now, warming to her theme.

‘I lost my boy, that’s right, I did. So do you think I would take part in anything like this willingly? I was trying to help him, I tell you.’

‘You couldn’t help anyone, Jude. You’re fucking incapable of doing anything to help anyone except yourself. My Gino loved your boy, and he was a nice boy, Sonny. Despite you and your scummy fucking life, he was a nice kid. You destroyed him like you destroy everything you touch. You’re a fucking junkie and junkies are shite in my book. While you kept your shit inside your own front door you was safe from me but now you are in more fucking trouble than you could ever believe possible.’

She grabbed Jude by the throat and pushed her forcibly against the wall, banging her head painfully and repeatedly against it as she shouted at her.

‘I don’t want to see my Gino outside the toilets renting his arse out like your fucking poor Sonny did to feed your habit. We all used to see him on our way to bingo, flogging his arse for you! You have no shame. People like you never do. We’re all fucking working to keep
you
in drugs! The world has gone fucking mad!’

She started to punch Jude again and as she was dragged off, shouted, ’A fucking rent boy, Sonny! It was a disgrace what you did to that boy. Well, you’re not doing it to mine.’

Louis watched the scene in shock, unable to believe what he was hearing but instinctively knowing that it was true. Tyrell was holding the big woman in his arms and trying to calm her down. The neighbours were all standing on the landing, shaking their heads and whispering among themselves. Some even had coffee, tea or can of beer in hand, depending on personal preference. It was like a party, only it wasn’t to celebrate anything good, it was to witness the final humiliation of his dead son.

Deborah was calmer, crying loudly now as she said to Tyrell between sobs, ‘Look at my boy . . .
she
did that. He’s out of his nut on skag and
she
gave it to him. Your Sonny wouldn’t touch it though God knows she tried to get him on it. I know that for a fact, I used to hear Gino and his mates talking. They all think she’s so great, that because they can drink and smoke cannabis round here this is the place to be. I can’t fight that, see? My house is boring in comparison, all B&Q wallpaper and
Coronation Street
. But I tell you this, I will kill her! I am taking him home now and if I find out he has been near or by this shit hole again she’s fucking
dead
. Because if that’s what it takes to keep him off the brown I will do it.’

Everyone fell quiet as she spoke and Tyrell looked at the woman with compassion, knowing that all she said was true.

‘Go home, love, I’ll sort this out. We’ll get your boy back for you, sweetheart, and I guarantee he won’t be round here no more.’

‘Look at him. Look in that toilet and see what she has reduced him to.’

He turned and looked at Gino, saw him sprawled there, wasted, and felt the urge to clump Jude himself.

‘Come on. Let’s get you both home.’

He nodded to Louis who went into the toilet and, seeing the state of the boy, placed a filthy towel over his shoulder before picking him up. He carried Gino out of the flat in a fireman’s lift, not sure which was filthier, the boy or the towel.

The crowd at the door dispersed slowly as he walked past them. They were all still talking among themselves and there was much whispering and shaking of heads as they saw the condition young Gino was in.

‘Show’s over, people.’

Tyrell walked the distraught woman out of the door, not even shutting it behind him. Jude was quiet now, feeling her neighbours’ animosity and knowing that whatever pity they had felt for her son’s death was over now.

Poor Jude was long gone. She was Junkie Jude again.

But she consoled herself with one fact: Gino would be back. Whatever his mother thought, he would be back. The brown had called to him as it had to her, and for all Deborah’s big talk about her precious son, he was like all of them on this estate: accidents waiting to happen.

Jude slammed the door in her neighbours’ faces as the police arrived on the scene. As usual no one had seen or heard anything and they were glad of that fact. So long as there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction involved they couldn’t give a flying fuck what the estate’s residents got up to.

Chapter Thirteen

Gino was in bed. He knew something was not right, but as Jude had given him a bigger dose than before he was out of it completely. He could not be arsed to think about what had happened and so retreated further into the drug. He was nodding for England now. Had stopped caring what was going on around him. Tyrell and Louis had settled him and Tyrell watched him for a while, remembering doing the same thing for Jude on many occasions.