Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (19 page)

‘Dada wants to rid himself of the F word,’ Vanessa pronounces sententiously.

‘How true, how true . . .’ Bill mutters.

When the buggy and its cargo have disappeared inside the house Bill straightens up; he has arranged to meet Serena in the pub in St John's Wood, and more importantly – he's covered. He holds a seminar at the Middlesex Hospital every Wednesday evening at this time, so Vanessa won't be curious about his absence. Bill stashes the paint and brush in the cardboard box of car impedimenta that he keeps in the boot of the ex-Volvo. He strolls up the path and opening the front door with his key shouts into the crack, ‘I'm off!’ and at the same time snatches up the CD face-off, his mobile and a sheaf of lecture notes he has to drop off for Sunil Rahman – who is giving the seminar. To Vanessa, who is feeding the toddler in the kitchen, this irruption of sound is just that – an odd kind of effect, as of a train window being opened while passing through a tunnel at speed.

In the ex-Volvo, waiting at the lights by Putney Bridge, Bill dickers with the servos that alter the angle and rake of the driver's seat. One of the servos is on the blink, and if he presses the button too much the seat tilts forward and to the left, threatening to deposit him face down, dangling over the steering wheel, in a posture all too reminiscent of how Bill imagines a suicide would end up after making with a section of hose and watering the interior of the ex-Volvo with exhaust fumes. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaims out loud as the lights change. ‘I've got to stop this!’

Proceeding up Fulham Palace Road Bill faffs around with nodulous buttons until he manages to get Serena's number. He clutches the purring instrument to his ear and hears her recorded pout. When the time comes he leaves a plaint in place of himself: can't make it, lecture, car trouble . . . later. This isn't, of course, the first time that Bill's bailed out of this kind of situation, nor, he suspects, will it be the last.

The lecture notes dropped in reception at the hospital, Bill wheels the big car up on to the Westway and heads out of town. There's only one place for him now, Thame, and only one person he can speak to, Dave Adler, proprietor of the Thame Motor Centre – Repairs and Bodywork Our Speciality. Dave has worked on Bill's Volvo for many years now – ever since he gave up psychiatry. Dave sees no intrinsic design faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo itself, rather he is inclined to locate them in the driver.

Conversations between the two men usually go something like this:

Dr Bill Bywater: Dave? It's Bill.

Dr Dave Adler: Yeah.

Dr BB: There seems to be something wrong with the transmission . . .

Dr DA: Yeah.

Dr BB: The car isn't changing up smoothly, it sort of over-revs and then – well,
surges.

Dr DA: Have you checked the automatic transmission fluid?

Invariably Bill hasn't checked it, or the windscreen reservoir, or the oil, or the brake fluid, or indeed any of the seething, bubbling liquids that course through the car's blocky body. This will provide Dave Adler with an entrée for a sneer about how ridiculously cavalier Bill is about his car, and how if he would only pay attention to maintenance he wouldn't run into this trouble.

While Bill smiles to himself at the thought of the unscheduled lecture he will receive this evening when he turns up in Thame, the ex-Volvo rumbles down off the flyover and heads west into the soft heart of Britain.

Forty minutes later the car rolls to a halt in a dusty lane that snakes away from the market square of the small Oxfordshire town. The high wooden doors of Dave Adler's garage are shut and chained. Dangling from the hasp of the lock is a peculiar sign which Dave uses in lieu of a more conventional one. The sign reads: ‘BEARING IN MIND THE FACT THAT EVERYONE HIDES THE TRUTH IN MATTERS OF SEX – WE'RE CLOSED.’ Bill guffaws to himself, albeit a little wearily.

Meanwhile, in Putney, Dave Adler lowers himself carefully into the inspection pit of the Bywaters’ marital bed. He has the necessary equipment and he's intent on giving Vanessa Bywater's chassis a really thorough servicing. As far as Dave Adler is concerned a car is a means of transport, nothing more and nothing less.

THE NONCE PRIZE

1.

D
anny and Tembe were standing in the kitchen of their house on Leopold Road, Harlesden, northwest London. It was a cold morning in early November, and an old length of plastic clothesline was thwacking against the window as the wind whipped it about. The brothers were cooking up some crack cocaine; Danny worked the stove while Tembe handled the portions of bicarb and powder. On the kitchen table a deconstructed boom box – the CD unit, speakers and controls unhoused, connected only by a ganglion of cabling – was playing tinny-sounding drum ‘n bass.

Tembe had heard an item of gossip when he went to buy the powder off the Irishman in Shepherd's Bush three hours before, gossip he was now hot to impart. ‘Yeah-yeah-yeah,’ he said, ‘sheeit! Those fuckers jus’ sat in the fuckin’ house an’ waited for the punters to come along –’

‘Issat the troof?’ Danny cut in, but not like he really cared.

‘I'm telling you so. The filth were smart, see, they come in an’ do the house at aroun’ eleven in the morning – like the only fuckin’ down time in the twenty-four. Bruno and Mags was washing up an oz in the kitchen – Sacks was crashed out with some bint in the front room. They got one of them jackhammer things, takes the fuckin’ door to pieces, man, an’ then they come in with flak jackets and fuckin’
guns,
man, like they've got the fuckin’ tactical whatsit unit out for this one –’

‘Tactical firearms unit,’ Danny snapped, ‘thass what they call it – but anyways, wasn't Bruno tooled?’

‘Yeah – and some. The blud claat had a fuckin’ Saturday night special, .22 some motherfucker built from a fuckin’ starting pistol. You recall I tol’ you that Bruno shot that nigger Gance and the bullet bounced of his fuckin’ rib – that was this shooter. Anyways he didn't have notime nor nuffin’ for that cos’ they was on ‘im in seconds, gave him a good pasting, nicked his fuckin’ stash, nicked about a grand he had in cash, an’ then tol’ ‘im he had to front it up while they nicked all the fuckin’ punters.’

‘And did he?’

‘Yeah, man. Solid. He had no choice. He sat there by the fuckin’ door an’ greeted them all in. Jus’ imagine it, man, you fink you're goin’ to score a nice rock, you're all didgy about it, all worked up an’ that, pumping, right, an’ you get to the fuckin’ door, in a right state, only to get fuckin’ nicked! Silly motherfuckers! The filth got twenty of them – that's that Bruno out of the fuckin’ crack business –’ and Tembe, no longer able to contain himself at the thought of this busted crack house, like a ship of fools grounded off the All Saints Road, burst into peals of unrestrained laughter; a laughter that to Danny's over-sensitive ears sounded peculiarly harsh and insistent.

To cut the flow Danny waved the bottle he'd been cooking the crack up in in front of Tembe's face. ‘Lissen,’ Danny said, ‘now you've tol’ me hows about I get to have my fuckin’ get up an’ that – yeah?’

‘Yeah, all right, no fussin’, yeah. Keep it mellow like . . .’ Tembe fumbled around in the mound of crack that sat drying on a wad of kitchen towelling, his finger picked a peck and he passed it over. ‘There you go – thass at least three hits, bro’, get it down you an’ then fuck off an’ that.’ Danny wasn't paying any attention to this, he'd already fumbled out his stem from where he kept it, tucked in the top of his right boot, and was crumbling a pinch of crack into its battered end. Once the stem was primed he lit the blow torch and commenced smoking.

Tembe regarded him with quizzical contempt. ‘Y’ know I mean it,’ he said, putting on his most managerial of tones for this troublesome employee. ‘I want you doin’ those City drops like
now
, man. Those boys want their shit nice an’ early. If you're done by one, you can pick up another ‘teenth – do the bitches at the Learmont. I'll sling you some brown in all –’

‘How much?’ Danny snapped, he was still holding down the hit of crack.

‘A bag – whatever.’

‘In that case,’ he spoke through the gust of exhalation, ‘you do the fuckin’ portioning – and I'll’ – he snatched up a roll of clingfilm from the work surface – ‘do the fuckin’ wrapping.’

Two hours later Danny was limping down Aldergate. It was raining and he was soaked through. About the driest things he had about his person, Danny reflected bitterly, were the rocks of crack housed in his cheeks, each one snugly wrapped and heat-sealed in plastic.

‘Do the City,’ Tembe impatiently ordered and off Danny had to go, clanking down the Bakerloo Line to Oxford Circus, and then clanking on along the Central Line until he reached Bank. On the fucking tube, the
tube,
not even a cab to ease his lot. And when he got to Bank it was the fucking foot slog. Up to Citibank, the stupid plastic jacket he had to wear flapping in the wind and rain, the defunct radio attached to its lapel banging against his collar bone. Then get the fucking Jiffy-bag out in the vestibule. Spit a couple of rocks into it. Seal it. Up to fucking reception: ‘Delivery for Mistah Fuckin’ Crack-Head Banker.’

‘Fine, if you leave it right here I can sign for it –’

‘Sorry, it's a special whatsit thingy – he's gotta sign himself, yeah?’

‘Oh right – sure, I'll ring his extension.’ She looks through Danny at a Monet reproduction while he waits, finger-drummingly bored. And then here he comes, Mistah Fuckin’ High Wire Act, tripping across the quarter-acre of carpet tiling without a care in the world, on his own little personal conveyor belt, which is carrying him straight to a seventy-quid Nirvana.

‘Is that for me? Thank you. Where can I sign – there?’

You can sign wherever you fucking please, asshole, because this biro doesn't work and this bit of paper is just that.

‘Thanks again – and do give my regards to Mr Tembe.’ He rolls away again.

Fucking pin-stripe suit, fucking old school tie. He won't be looking so fucking dignified in five minutes’ time, Danny internally sneers as he slops his way back to the lift, sitting in a fucking toilet stall, pretending to do a shit while he sucks on a pipe made from a crushed Coke can. Silly cunt.

In Aldergate Danny paused to envy a dosser. The young white guy sat in the doorway of a travel agent's, surfing to nowhere on a piece of old packing case. His blue nylon sleeping bag was pulled up to his armpits, leaving his arms free for entreaty. He looked, Danny thought, like some enormous maggot that had crawled into this niche in order to metamorphose, possibly into a crack-head banker. Danny gave the dosser a fifty-pence piece, and savoured the shock on the young man's face when he realised he had successfully begged from a black guy not much better off than himself.

Good karma, Danny thought to himself as he slopped on down the road. Give to those worse off than yourself and the Fates will look kindly on you. Nowadays Danny was increasingly drawn to consider the attitude of the Fates to almost anything he did. The Fates had to be consulted as to which sock he should put on first when he got up; which boot he should tuck his stem into before leaving the house; and which side of Leopold Road he should walk down on his way to the tube.

Danny appreciated – with a deep, almost celestial clarity – the fact that the Fates were very much a product of the ten or so rocks of crack he was smoking every day. For one thing the Fates often appeared in his mind's eye as tall, wispy, indeterminate figures, their forms actually
composed
by gossamer wreaths of crack smoke. However, if Danny honed in on them, their miasmic covering fell away to reveal truly terrifying, djinn-like figures – the towel-heads from hell. Bearded, turbaned, wearing long grey-and-black robes, and carrying mutant, nine-foot-long Kalashnikovs.

The Fates kept him company – they were the bears that would savage him if he stepped on the crack. But if he maintained those good high stimulant levels, the Fates would keep counsel with him, warn him of the filth round this corner, or some Yardie cunt Danny had stolen from round the next. Of course, Danny didn't really
believe
in any of this, it was simply a magical soundtrack to his life; but then the Fates were very similar in their manifestation to Danny's crack habit itself – both were paradoxical addictions to something intrinsically frightening and unpleasant. He shifted the wads of plastic in either cheek, with a motion akin to rinsing with mouthwash; then he delicately palped each one with the tip of his tongue.

Danny conducted this internal stock-taking at least a thousand times a day. In his left cheek was his own stash – in his right was the merchandise. Usually, when Danny set off from the house in the morning, the right-hand cheek would have around twenty-five rocks in it, and the left five. Five rocks to take him through five hours of tube rides and walking around the City pretending to be courier, a cowboy without a horse. Ducking into a khazi, or an alley, or a fucking hole in the wall, every quarter-hour on the quarter-hour to smoke the poisoned flour. Out with the stem; out with the lighter; crumble finicky crumble as the Fates gather at the periphery; crowding in, a press of dirty beards and muttering; the recitation of arcane fundamentalist texts, decrying the existence of Danny; dirty grey nails reaching out to rend him – then blown away, extinguished, blanketed by the first rich gush of smoke from his nozzled mouth.

Five rocks equalled twenty pipes – one every fifteen minutes. Enough time while the gear was still doing its thing for him to slop to another financial institution, make his drop, slop on. Enough time – if he eked it out righteously – for Danny to avoid a clanking comedown on the Central Line, seated sweating in a strip-lit cattle truck, along with the rest of his hetacomb. All too often, however, Danny's lop-sided chipmunk visage began to balance itself a little early in the day, the right-hand cheek getting delved into a little more than it should. And on those occasions Tembe would withhold the bag of brown at the end of the shift; or even – if he was feeling particularly managerial – even a measly taste. And Danny would have to accept this – accept the rack of shit his life had become.

How had it come to
this
? Danny bit down on the cyanide capsule of the past as he turned into London Wall, heading for London Bridge and the offices of Barclays De Zoete Wedd. How had he ended up being a runner for his dumb little brother Tembe – or ‘Mr Tembe’ as he was apparently known to the denizens of the Citibank futures department? Dragging his drenched carcass around these terrifying caverns of commerce, feeling his life blood, his manhood drain away, and with only the Fates to keep him company. Danny knew, of course, the answer: he had touched the product.

Whether this had occurred before or after the exhaustion of the seam of crack Danny had discovered in the basement of Leopold Road, he did not wish to acknowledge. The mother lode of crack had certainly been too good to be true – and now it no longer was. Whether Danny's estimates with plumbers’ rods had been inaccurate at the outset, or the bulk of the crack had simply been washed away, corrupted by drainage and seepage, was besides the point. All that mattered was that after a couple of years of very high living the seam was gone, and at around the same time Danny, feeling wrung out by the experience, had taken his first pipe of crack and discovered what he had always suspected; that, in this most unnatural of pursuits, he turned out to be a natural.

Corresponding mysteriously to an episode in their childhood, the two brothers now found themselves on a seesaw, Tembe coming down to the ground, while his older brother shot up into a psychotic sky. For, as Danny cranked up the go-go candy, doing first three, then five, then sixty pipes a day, so Tembe decided that enough was enough and stepped on the shit once and for all.

In fairness to Tembe, contrary to the expertise of a thousand counsellors, psychiatrists, politicians, churchmen, and the parents of teenagers who had died from ecstasy overdoses, he found it astonishingly easy to step back through the door of non-perception. ‘Never did like the shit anyways,’ he explained to members of the posse, hanging out on the traffic island by Harlesden tube, drinking Dunn's River and riding the dossers. ‘I jus’ did it cos it was like
there.
Gimme a spliff anna beer any day; I can do up a ton of sensi a day an’ all it do to me is to make me more righteous, more irie an’ that.’

Being more righteous and more irie for Tembe largely consisted in a switch from unbridled crack consumption to quite remarkably efficient production and distribution. As Danny gibbered his way through the peaks and troughs of the crack storm, no longer the master puppeteer – merely a puppet on a pipe, so Tembe took up the strings that fell from his numb fingers. Little brother grabbed the clientele and set big brother – once so fucking arrogant, so high and mighty – to work.

Whereas Danny the non-user had always felt at worst indifferent, and at best friendly towards the munificent mannequins, Tembe the former user felt nothing but contempt for them – especially if they were white. ‘They have every opportunity, every fuckin’ break an’ all they do is smoke this shit. They have no respect for themselves – I tell you, they actually
deserve
to be crack-heads, they should give me their money an’ that, because they're really
donatin’
it, donatin’ it to a righteous cause.’

The righteous cause was Tembe's black Saab 9000, with full skirts, fairing, personalised number plate etc., etc.; and feeling irie for Tembe was equivalent to feeling silk shirts between his shoulder blades, and the weight of an entire wardrobe of American, gangsta rap-style suits hanging from them. Tembe brought a fervour to his materialism that was almost messianic, as if, having pissed thousands of pounds up the wall, he was determined to wring out bricks and mortar until he got it all back again.

‘You're too fuckin’ fly, boy,’ Danny had admonished him, as they sat, Tembe beering and spliffing, Danny piping and cracking, in front of the Saturday-afternoon racing. With Darcus long gone – all that was left of him was a hair-oil stain on the ancient antimacassar of his armchair – Danny, preposterously, was adopting some of the old man's avuncular manner ‘You go strutting roun’ the fuckin’ town, making out like you're some big mutha-fuckin’ dude. Thass the way you bring the heat down, man; all the fuckin’ heat – an’ not just the filth, the Yardies, the Turks, the Essex boys, the Chinese . . . even the fuckin’
Maltese.
You need to maintain a low fuckin’ profile, look respectable an’ that –’