Ross Armstrong - The Girls Beneath

I want the days after she leaves to be the kind of textbook break up weekend I’ve always heard about, comprised of time spent in my pants and regular doses of alcohol, but that’s a little too close to the norm for comfort. So instead, I run, racking up 15k the day after she leaves and double that on the day after. Getting fit again has been one of the pleasures of the training process, but today I am running just to run. A picture show clicks on through my head with every thud that my feet beat on the tarmac. Each sting observed and recognised. I look out on the streets and streets that pass and see little of interest, which is at least in perfect keeping with the training officer’s perception of my observation skills, and Anita’s of my consistency. Somewhere in the distance, Gary Canning rests his back against the pigeonholes and doesn’t even laugh. He breathes deep and leans, blissfully unaware of me, and thinks of India.

I reflect on this as I reach into the pocket of the jeans I was wearing the night she left. I may never be praised for my instinct, I think to myself, as I look at the tiny box in front of me. The one my father had pulled out in front of my mother in far more romantic surroundings many years earlier, under real stars, under the lights of Paris.

I think about my sense of timing, as I examine the little diamond before me. And as I wipe my eyes with my index finger and thumb, I laugh.

3

‘You’re my little one

Say I didn’t love in vain

Please quit crying honey

Cos it sounds like a hurricane’

It’s one degree below freezing on Seven Sisters Road but I’m not complaining. The first thing officers have to combat is the weather. Christmas is three weeks away and snow has settled, shrouding Tottenham in a crisp white blanket. Towelling it up like a baby after a bath. Hugging it close and singing it a lullaby.

I breathe into my gloved hands and watch the cloud stream onto them and then up into the slate coloured sky. If you don’t like being out on the street, then try another profession. It’s our job to know our neighbourhood, which means mostly being out on foot or on your bike. Fortunately for me I’ve got one advantage. I know these roads like the back of my arse. I’ve lived here most of my life.

I’ve watched corner-shop keepers get older and kids I went to school with become upstanding members of the community or, more frequently, go the other way. I’ve seen their little brothers, once new born babies who held on tightly to my finger in their mother’s arms, grow up to get their very own ASBOs. I’ve given them out myself.

Or rather ABCs, the ASBO is the last resort before criminal charges are brought. An ABC comes before that.

That’s my first act on my first day, Monday at 10.10 a.m. Drawing up an Acceptable Behaviour Contract for my schoolmate Dom Minton’s half-brother, Eli. He’ll probably be the last kid around here to get one, as they’re soon to become defunct, so I suppose you could say this is a bit of a Kodak moment.

Eli has a birthmark that wine-stains the top left hand side of his face and I feel sorry for the kid. School is hard enough without the kind of stares it must bring.

I take advice from my sergeant on it all. I look at Eli’s case notes and write down a few of his greatest hits. Then I ask if he would agree to the reasonable suggestion that he should’ve thought better of them.

The severity of his list of misdemeanours escalates sharply. Something dark in me struggles not to laugh when I glance at them over his shoulder as he reads:

CONTRACT

I will get to school on time .

I will not graffiti my school toilet wall .

I will not climb into any lift shafts .

I will not throw rocks and debris at passers-by.

I will not attempt to set fire to people .

‘Does that sound fair, Eli?’ I say.

He looks up and recognises me. It helps that I know his brother. But he’s saying nothing.

‘Think you can manage not to set fire to anyone? For a while? Maybe try not to ignite anyone just for this week and see how it feels. Sound like a plan?’

I’ll probably learn not to take the piss at some point but I’m new at this. He looks at me, stone-faced, then signs.

‘And you understand the consequences of not sticking to the contract, don’t you? Eli?’

All I hear is the sound of engines and tyres on the road.

‘Eli? I need to hear you say it, mate.’

He looks up again, having been fascinated by the pavement for a few seconds.

‘Yes I do, PCSO Mondrian.’

He leans quite heavily on the ‘SO’ and not so much the ‘PC’ as if to make a point, but I still pat him on the shoulder and attempt a smile that aims for reassuring, while steering clear of any local-bobby-earnestness that might engage his gag reflex.

He barely looks half of his fourteen years to me. But then he did throw a brick at a pram and try to set fire to an old man so perhaps I shouldn’t feel too sorry for him.

I wish I didn’t feel this way. But living around here, experience tends to toughen your opinions.

His dad grabs him by the shoulder I patted and leads him back to their car, clearly not delighted at having to take an hour off work for that. I hope he isn’t too hard on him, I hope he isn’t one of those dads, but then it’s difficult to tell. Eli pulls away as if the shoulder already holds a fresh bruise that’s more than a little tender.

On Tuesday I see my first dead body. I’m early on the scene at a gruesome traffic accident, a head-on collision that’s killed the driver of Vehicle 1 instantly. His chest and the steering wheel are an item. His jaw is locked wide open. His passenger and the driver of Vehicle 2 are taken away and are in critical condition. I meditate on the nature of suffering, the end of things and déjà vu. Then I sack it all off, take an early lunch and have a steak and kidney pie.

On Wednesday I check out a break-in where the intruder has done nothing but broken a window, nicked one laptop and shat on the bed. People are very strange. Some watch videos of executions. Some change names on gravestones so they become rude words. Some are purely vindictive with their poo.

On Thursday the highlight is standing out in the cold for five hours, making sure the peaceful demo about closing the local library doesn’t erupt into a volcano of bloodshed. There’s no chance of that. It was more the sort of event where someone erects a cake stall, but on this occasion no one even did that.

Thursday’s lowlight is getting a call telling me that Eli has neglected to turn up for school. His dad, out of town for a few days, was contacted immediately and ominously asked in a mutter over the phone if he could ‘deal with it’ himself. None of this seems very good for Eli, so seeking some other option I trudge over to his brother Dom’s house.

‘What can I say, the kid’s an evil little fucker at times,’ Dom says, hands tucked into his jogging bottoms. ‘But he’s my brother.’ This much I have already gleaned.

‘Do you think your dad’s… a little hard on him?’ I say, searching for the most delicate way to put it.

‘Dad’s no soft touch. Never thumped me. But then Eli is… Eli.’

‘Eli? Eli!’ I call, seeing his face peeking out unsubtly behind the kitchen door.

Before Eli drags his bones towards me, Dom hangs his head and then whispers to me, ‘Sorry, Tom. He’s having trouble at school, they’re pulling him into some gang. It’s nasty. He asked if he could hide out here.’

As he enters, I see the picture of a kid stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. Shitty dad at home. Shittier kids at school.

Eli clearly isn’t ill and I have a choice to make. He’s breached his contract and I’ve stumbled in on him doing it. Let him have it and dad will come down hard on him. But at least a full blown ASBO would give him a legitimate reason to stay away from his new friends in the evening.