Eight months before, back in the dead of January, Gary Dunn had been two years younger. His name had been Steve then, Steven Bradley, and he’d been sleeping in a length of concrete tubing under the Westway flyover, between Wood Lane and the underground tracks, until the stotters took him in. They were older, big kids, almost grown-ups. He’d seen them before, the stiff robotic march, the swollen plastic bags clutched in their hands, the eyes glazed like those of the fish heads he sometimes came across, scavenging in bins for his supper. Nevertheless, it was they who’d saved him from the police. One was called Jimmy and the other Dave, and they’d been hauled in following a complaint from a woman they’d called a silly fucking cow because they didn’t like the looks she was giving them. The police had duly handed them a bit of harassment in return, but there was nothing much else they could do. Glue is not an illegal substance, and if the purchaser chooses to exploit its hallucinogenic rather than adhesive properties, he is perfectly within his rights to do so. Life, on the other hand, is something you need to be sixteen to consume without adult supervision. Steve couldn’t prove he was, so the constabulary thought they had him bang to rights until Jimmy, a plump toughie with curly fair hair and a face like a bent cherub, decided to throw a spanner in the works.
‘He’s me brother, isn’t he?’
‘Piss off,’ the desk sergeant told him tonelessly.
‘He fucking is! He keeps us half-way straight and all. He looks after us. We’d be ever so much worse if he wasn’t around.’
‘We’d be fucking monsters!’ Dave confirmed. He was tall and skinny and was wearing a torn denim jacket with ‘The Cult’ inked across the back, calf-length battledress trousers and large black boots. A line of swastika tattoos ran up his neck and cheek and across his shorn scalp like the footprints of some exotic bird.
The sergeant didn’t believe a word of this, of course. He knew that the two stotters were just trying to get their own back for the aggro they’d sustained. But he’d been in the game long enough to know that it wasn’t worth his while trying to stop them. It was all a question of energy. Despite the horrendous things they did to themselves, these kids had so much, whereas the sergeant, for all his diets and keep-fit and early nights, was still knackered by tea-time. It wasn’t fair, youth. Besides, he was just wasting his time with this boy. Ten to one his parents wouldn’t want him back, either that or the boy wouldn’t go. Social services wouldn’t want to know, and as for the charity organizations, if he hadn’t stuck with them already it was because he couldn’t stand it and would run away again at the first opportunity. In short, it was nothing but a wind-up whichever way you looked at it. The sergeant repeated his previous comment to Jimmy and turned away dismissively.
Outside the police station, Steve started to sidle off.
‘This way!’ Jimmy called, shaking his head scornfully, pulling the boy after him. He proceeded to go on at some length about the mentality of the wankers he was surrounded by, who couldn’t even find their way back to the fucking house unless he was there to hold their hands. He soon became so incensed about this that Dave suggested they stop off for a top-up. The filth had taken what they’d had on them — totally illegally, of course, but what were they supposed to do, call their solicitor? — so they dropped into Woolies to restock. A large sign informed customers that the management reserved the right to restrict the sale of solvent-based products, but the cashiers all looked as if they’d been at the stuff themselves and would have checked out a nuclear missile without a second thought as long as it had a price sticker on it. Back in the street, Jimmy pierced the foil membrane sealing the tube and squeezed some glue into the carrier Dave had taken without asking. Then they set out for home, taking turns to clamp the bag to their faces. When Dave had finished he automatically passed the bag to Steve, but Jimmy snatched it angrily away.
‘Not little Stevie!’ he cried. ‘Me mum’d turn in her fucking grave!’
Steve tagged along behind the two stotters, although they appeared to have forgotten about him. He had nowhere else to go.
At the junction of two streets just north of the Uxbridge Road, Jimmy and Dave disappeared. The property at the corner was fenced off by sheets of corrugated iron, and while Steve was standing there uncertainly, an arm suddenly shot out and pulled him through a gap between two of the panels. Inside, it was like being in the country: a rotting meadow of dead grass and spindly weeds. Overgrown shrubs and bushes competed for space and light. The ruined vestiges of steps and a path were clogged with branches, green with mould. Jimmy stuck his pudgy forefinger into Steve’s face, just below the boy’s eye.
‘Count yourself lucky you’re not getting a good booting. You get us in trouble with the filth again, I’ll fucking kill you.’
If Steve had been sure which panel in the fence opened, he might have tried to make a run for it, but it was too late. Jimmy led the way along a winding path trodden through the matted grass. The house seemed very large, close up like this, in the hushed wilderness inside the fencing. The windows and doors were all boarded up with plywood, but Dave prised back the screen on the back door far enough for them to slip inside. Had the house been for sale, rather than awaiting replacement by a block of retirement flatlets, the estate agents might have described it as ‘a rare opportunity to purchase a property offering considerable scope for imaginative refurbishment’. Alex, one of the other residents and good with his hands, had hot-wired the electricity supply, bypassing the meter, and at one time there had been talk of installing heating and even a cooker. But this had come to nothing, and the stairs, doors and skirting-boards, as well as much of the flooring, had been broken up for firewood. On the retreating island of intact floorboards, a number of mattresses lay scattered around a television and video recorder. These had been donated by a contact of Jimmy’s who occasionally needed help in enforcing his various business interests. Unfortunately he had ended up on the wrong end of a knife just before Christmas, since when things had been a bit tight.
When Steve and the others came in, Alex was flat out on one mattress watching TV. A girl with white hair and black lips, wearing a lime-green T-shirt, a short silvery skirt, zebra-stripe tights and pink socks, was lying on her belly on another mattress, listening to a Sony Walkman. Her legs were raised behind her and her left foot idly caressed the curve of her right calf. Her name was Tracy, and both she and Alex, a runty street urchin from Belfast, seemed mildly puzzled at first by Steve’s presence. But Jimmy was in charge — no one disputed that, except Dave when he had one of his turns — and like the glue itself, his fantasy proved stronger than the reality to which it was attached. Once the Woolworth’s bag had circulated a few times, no one except Steve himself had the slightest doubt that he was Jimmy’s younger brother and that he lived there with them, looking after them, keeping them half-way straight.
Steve soon settled into the role in which he’d been cast. For the first time in his life — well, the first that bore thinking about, anyway — he filled a gap, completed a family, belonged. He went to the shop further down Trencham Road marked OOD S ORE. This satisfied most of the stotters’ needs, consisting as it did of a grocery and off-licence which also hired videos. He reminded them when it was time to go and sign on at the DHSS, and then trekked to a distant block of council flats early in the morning to extract the cheques from the broken letter-box which they used as a convenience address. He did his best to keep them from electrocuting or poisoning themselves when they were completely out of it, which was all of every evening and most of most days. Their mediator, their go-between, their shabbes goy, he ran errands between them and reality.
Faithful to the letter of Jimmy’s scenario, the stotters never allowed Steve to take part in their rituals. He remained a spectator as they inhaled the muddling vapours and passed the plastic cylinders of cider from hand to hand. He watched them gibber and gesticulate, their faces distorted with terror or stupefaction. He watched them fight, usually with clumsy harmless blows that whirled astray, although one night Dave got Jimmy by the throat and squeezed and squeezed with those gristly hands of his until Alex pulled a burning plank from the fire and smashed him over the head with it. He watched them fuck, mounting Tracy one after another with expressions which suggested that the activity was a tedious necessity not unlike defecation. Afterwards they fell asleep where they lay, then got up next day and did it all over again. It was like sharing a cage with a pack of grouchy wild animals, violent and unpredictable, but not too bright. Steve was well aware of the risks he was running, but he reckoned that he could probably keep one step ahead, sensing the stotters’ mood shifts before they were aware of them themselves. All in all, he was better off than he had been for a very long time.
Not that his memories went very far back, or were especially detailed. All he had was a selection of images as unconnected and apparently inconsequential as a handful of snapshots. As usual in photographs, everyone was smiling, but Steve didn’t make the common mistake of concluding from this that the past was a happy place. The camera often seemed to have been badly aimed, missing the main action, whatever that might have been, to focus instead on the leg of a chair, a section of carpet, or an electric fire with a gleaming concave back which reflected two elements, the lower of which sometimes glowed dully red. When people appeared in the photographs, it seemed to be by accident, as if they’d blundered in unexpectedly, so that only some odd bit of them — a shoulder, part of a dress, a length of hair — emerged clearly. Despite this, Steve was quite content with his memories, even though the crucial one, which would account for the existence of the collection and explain why it was in his possession, was missing.
The finer points of Steve’s relationship with his past were, however, lost on Jimmy, who couldn’t understand why he didn’t just go down the fucking DHSS like everyone else. What did he think he was, some sort of special wanker? After the boy had been living there for a few weeks, he and Dave dragged him down to the offices with them, but as soon as Steve saw the row of cubicles where people sat being quizzed by officials he bolted. It was as bad as the police.
That evening things came to a head.
‘Look at this muck!’ Jimmy exclaimed suddenly. He pointed to the stotters’ dinner, consisting of a pack of chicken loaf slices, a packet of crackers and the remains of a tin of cold rice pudding. ‘Make you sick! And it’s fucking near all gone.’
‘You know how they make this?’ Dave said, holding up the last slice of pale grey meat. ‘First they cut their heads off, then they chuck them in this acid bath, burns off all the feathers and that. Then they hose them down, cut them open, yoik out the guts and chuck them in this fucking great press which crushes them, bones and all …’
Jimmy turned accusingly to Steve.
‘You been stuffing yourself, haven’t you? We go out to sign on and you eat all the fucking food in the house!’
‘To each according to his ability and from each according to his need,’ muttered Alex.
Tracy looked up from painting her fingernails a penetrating shade of purple.
‘I’d do anything for a hamburger and chips,’ she murmured wistfully.
‘What a bunch of wankers!’ Jimmy exploded, pounding the floor. ‘Never take a single thought for the future, do you? Look at this place! What a dump! And they’re going to come and tear it down any day now. And what do you do about it? Bring this useless young prick home!’
He pointed at Steve. The others turned to look at the boy as if seeing him for the first time.
‘But I thought he’s, like, your brother, isn’t he?’ Dave frowned.
Jimmy gazed at him incredulously.
‘My brother! He’s not my brother! He’s nothing like my brother. I haven’t even got a fucking brother!’
Dave’s frown deepened.
‘You mean he’s been pissing us about all this time? Oh well, that’s, fuck, that’s, I mean one thing I can’t stand is, I mean you can come up to me, face to face, man to man, and say anything you like …’
‘Any fucking thing you like,’ Alex echoed.
‘… and if I don’t like it then I’ll fucking do you, right? But one thing I can’t stand is people, people pissing me around, no really, that’s the one thing, I mean, that’s …’
Dave’s voice mumbled to a standstill.
‘We can’t let him go now,’ Jimmy mused. ‘He knows too much.’
‘No one leaves the organization alive,’ Alex said in his Ulster accent, as thick and bitter as a gob of phlegm. ‘If you’re not for us, you’re against us.’
‘You know the free papers?’ Steve said.
Jimmy glared at him.
‘Which three papers?’ he demanded suspiciously.
‘They need people to deliver them. They’ll take anyone. It doesn’t pay much, but it would be something, for now.’
They all sat staring at the boy for a long time. At last Jimmy nodded slowly.
‘Worth a try.’
After that everyone relaxed again. Dave put on the new video, about a disfigured ghoul which tracked down everyone who had ever lived in a certain house and killed them in a variety of colourful ways. As usual, there were wanky patches where character was established and plot developed, and during these Steve’s idea gradually took off. By midnight, Jimmy had mapped out a scheme for establishing a distribution empire monopolizing the delivery of free newspapers throughout the country, the work being farmed out to an army of underpaid kids while the real money came straight to him.
‘Anyone who wants their fucking newspaper delivered, we’re the boys they’ll have to talk to!’ he enthused, finger stabbing the air to emphasize his point. ‘We can name our price! We’ll have the whole of England under our thumb!’
‘What about Ulster?’ Alex put in. ‘We gave our blood at the Somme too, you know.’
But his comment was lost in the shrieks of a young woman who was being spectacularly dismembered by the video ghoul.
As is their wont, things looked rather different the next morning. It was Tracy who brought the matter up again. She had a bone to pick with Jimmy, who had urinated in her mouth while she was trying to fellate him the night before. She relieved her feelings somewhat with a number of sarky remarks about the future empire builder, who was slumped in front of the TV watching Play School. Sensing a storm brewing, Steve said he would go and phone the Capital Advertiser. He returned with the news that there were no distribution vacancies available, which appeared to put paid to that idea. But Jimmy now felt that his credibility was at stake, and so the following Friday the two old-age pensioners who delivered the Advertiser to homes in the area were set upon and beaten up and the pram containing their stock of papers dumped off a railway bridge. When Steve phoned again he was told that a vacancy had unexpectedly become available.
Since it was a double round, Alex volunteered to help out. Unfortunately, the only way Alex could face the work was by getting fucked up first, and after he did, one house looked much the same as another. The result was that the residents of one street were each treated to over forty copies of the Advertiser dropping through their letter-boxes at five-minute intervals. Some of them phoned to complain, and Alex’s brief career in newspaper distribution came to an end. Steve was transferred to another round, further away but short enough for him to do alone. His only worry was that the money had turned out to be so rubbishy — less than a penny per paper — that it wouldn’t be enough to keep Jimmy satisfied. Jimmy, however, had more important things on his mind. One of the OAPs he and Dave had put the frighteners on had cashed a couple of pension cheques earlier in the day and was carrying over seventy quid. Jimmy was so impressed by this that he forgot all about Steve’s contributions to the housekeeping. Doors were opening up, possibilities beckoning, a whole new lifestyle awaited. Unlike the clueless wankers he lived with, Jimmy had always known that there was more to life than glue and cider and condemned houses. There was heroin and Bacardi and B and Bs on the south coast, to say nothing of souped-up BMWs, designer threads and 250-watt-per-channel stereo rigs. All you needed was cash. Getting it had turned out to be a lot easier than he had imagined.
Meanwhile, Steve carried on distributing the Capital Advertiser to 230 homes every week. He liked the job. He saw himself as a sort of postman. He himself never received any post, of course, but he knew that people looked forward to the postman’s visits. In a way Steve was even more welcome. The postman brings bad news as well as good, but the bad news Steve brought always happened to other people. There was a lot of it — brave kiddies, tragic mums, heartless conmen, abandoned pets, ravished grannies and torched tramps — but since it all happened to other people, it was actually good news, Steve reckoned. The more bad things happened to other people, the less likely they were to happen to you. Like a postman, Steve had little contact with his clients. As the weeks passed, however, he got to know his route, and came to notice the difference in the doors through which he delivered the paper. They were all roughly the same size and shape, but the closer you looked, the more you realized that each was an individual. A few had clear glass panels, so that you could see right into the hallway, but this was rare, and anyway the hallway was usually so carefully cleaned and tidied that it amounted to another door. The real house — messy, intimate, full of secrets — began further on. More common were panels of frosted glass. Sometimes the glass was only slightly cloudy, with vertical streaks that were almost clear, through which you could catch glimpses of the interior. Steve never saw anything very interesting going on, but he approached these doors with special excitement, for you never knew. But mostly the glass was completely opaque, giving the door an air of false sincerity, like someone making a show of having nothing to hide. Steve preferred the solid wooden doors that shut you out and made no bones about it. They ranged from drab plywood slabs to complex layered jobs with an antique air. Most conformed to a type and must have been identical at one time, but wind and rain, scrapes and scratches, coats of paint, numbers, names, knockers and bells — to say nothing of letter-boxes at any level from Steve’s shoulder to his foot — combined to make each a distinct presence which the boy gradually came to know. He found his new acquaintances restful and reassuring. Unlike the stotters, they had no moods. Come rain or shine, they were there, lined up in their places, waiting their turn. Steve fed them one after another, taking his time, pacing himself. It all seemed very safe and satisfying, until one day early in March.
Grafton Avenue was towards the end of Steve’s round. One side had been swept away to make room for a council estate, but since this formed part of the adjoining delivery zone Steve was conscious of it only as scenery. His side of Grafton Avenue started off as a terrace of three-storey semi-detached houses with pillared bay windows and steps leading up to an imposing portico where he left a pile of papers, one for each of the flats into which the houses had been divided. Further along these gave way to bijou villas, heavy in architectural extras such as moulded cornices and decorative brickwork. They reminded Steve of the elderly Asian who ran the OOD S ORE: at once plain and exotic, other-worldly and grasping, like a prince in disguise or a magician fallen on hard times. The last house in the road was quite different from all the others. It was so high and narrow that it looked likely to fall over at any moment. The end walls were windowless expanses of mortar, as though the existing house was a remnant of a much larger building. The main floors were set in a bay, giving the house a thrusting, aggressive air. At first sight there was no way in or out, but in fact a path of quarry tiles led into a lean-to porch at the side of the house. Here a short set of steps continued up to an enclosed area where leaves and litter had collected over the years. Once your eyes adjusted to the gloom, you could just make out the front door, four massive panels of unpainted wood separated by strips of heavy scrolling. A large, dull, brass letter-box was inset in the horizontal strip between the upper and lower panels. On the doorpost, at about the same level, was an ivory bell-push in a circular brass surround.
Steve had learned that letter-boxes were as individual as the doors themselves. Some opened as flaccidly as a toothless mouth, others clamped their jaws on the rolled newspaper like playful dogs. But what happened that afternoon in Grafton Avenue was something Steve had never seen before: when he inserted the folded copy of the Capital Advertiser into the letter-box, instead of either lying there, wedged and inert, or falling limply through, the paper was plucked from his fingers and pulled smoothly inside, like a video-tape when you put it into the machine.
Steve snatched his hand away before the door had that too. After a moment, the letter-box opened again and an envelope emerged. It tipped over the rim and fluttered to the doorstep as the letter-box closed with a definitive bang. Steve picked up the envelope and ran down the steps and along the path as fast as he could go. Safe in the street again, he set down his orange sling and looked at the envelope. There was no name or address written on it. He tore it open. Inside there was a five-pound note and a pencilled list.
Tin corned beef (Fray Bentos or other reliable brand)
Dried peas
Small pot sardine and tomato paste
Marmite (Large size)
Jam, strawberry for preference
Sugar cubes
Two tins of prunes
Packet of tea
Please leave by door. Keep change.
Steve felt slightly disappointed. He had been hoping for something less ordinary. But when he had finished his round, he went to the Tesco nearby, bought the items on the list and carried them back to Grafton Avenue. When he had almost reached the house again, he noticed a man striding purposefully towards him. He was young, with sharp angular features, all glistening planes of sweaty skin and greasy hair. His face was split in two by a grin like an unhealed wound and his eyes glittered fiercely. His clothes were filthy and threadbare. The trousers were ridiculously short and his socks did not match.
‘Do you know what time it is?’ he demanded as he reached Steve, who shook his head. The man laughed contemptuously and walked on.
When he reached the house, the boy stood in the street staring at it for a long time. The curtains were all tightly closed and no light showed in any of the rooms. Finally he took a deep breath and scampered rapidly up the path, into the dry sheltered darkness of the porch. He climbed the steps, set the bag down and ran quickly back to the street. He stood and watched for some time, but no one emerged. There was no sound, no movement. The house might have been empty for years. After a while it came on to a drizzle, and Steve turned up his collar and started to walk home through the darkening streets.