Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

This nonsense set Elisabeth off again. Will, happy that they were happy, glanced over his shoulder and started laughing too.

There was a man in the car park in a crash helmet. Huge coils of rope were slung over his shoulder. He was climbing. He was climbing the car park. Horizontally.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: WETWORK

MAY MOULDER IS 63. Until her husband, Brian, died five years ago, they lived in Toxteth. She recently lost her sight thanks to diabetes. She worked all her life at a factory, punching the asbestos from grids for gas fires. She’s been battling to get her dilapidated flat repaired by the council. The environmental health declared it unfit to live in but the council won’t do anything about it. She also has trouble with the electricity board, paying over the odds to heat her house, and they are charging her for a fridge and cooker she never bought. Payments are being deducted through her electricity token meter.

Fuck her.

Sean put the page back in its folder and tossed it into the box where all the other files sat on the back seat. He’d gone on what? Nine, ten jobs with Vernon now, and there had been no progress. No feeling of getting under his quarry’s skin at all. Vernon was holding back from him. Vernon didn’t want him too close. Sean thumbed through the documents filing cabinet of his memory and tried to find some clue that he might have missed, but always, at the moment of closure, he was sent away.

Oliver and Victoria, both in their late sixties, had been a middle-class couple retired to comfortable life in Stockton Heath, to the south of Warrington. Victoria contracted a virulent form of Parkinson’s disease. Oliver was caring for her full-time. Pitiful man, he was, Sean now remembered. Gone to seed but trying to put on the hard man act. Photographs of him as a young man, Kray-like in his intensity, his polish, were arranged around the rooms. Sepia pictures of him shadow boxing, or in the ring waiting for the bell to release him from his corner. Pictures of him and his mates standing on a street corner, toy gangsters in white shirts with big collars and dark suits.

Victoria needed medication every two hours. They received no relief from social services or the NHS – Victoria was assessed as not needing medical care – so it was left to the pair to make ends meet alone. Their savings were not large and would soon run out if they were to get nursing care or a stay in a home. Oliver, the hard man, was being ground down. No way out. What help did he get from Vernon? What promises?

And the others.

Homeless Cheryl, twenty-five, unable to get any kind of housing other than a night shelter haunted mainly by old men. Wasn’t she HIV+? Sean remembered her whimpering as Vernon stood over her in a dark archway connecting Sankey Street with the delivery road behind Woolworths in Warrington’s town centre. She told Vernon how she applied for hardship payments, but large amounts were docked to pay for the night shelter, leaving her with next to nothing to live on. She was sleeping on friends’ floors. All her friends used drugs and she was rapidly sinking into that lifestyle. The voluntary agencies were powerless to help her. Ah diddums , Vernon had said, striking the wall above her head with the bat and causing her to shriek, recoil, try to make herself invisible before him.

Sean remembered Jess and Daniel, neighbours on a Liverpool housing estate trying to escape from homes that were no better than diseased hovels. The health of their children was compromised. Sean recalled tiny, denuded faces staring up at him, like ghosts. Underfed children that played with him while Vernon raged in the kitchen. One boy playing with half a dozen cockroaches. A girl sitting in nappies that hadn’t been changed for days. Ignored by the council on the basis that their houses were no worse than any others on the estate, Jess attempted to find a house through a private landlord while Daniel withheld rent as a protest and faced eviction. Two of his children were severely asthmatic. That’s not all they’ll be , Vernon warned, if you don’t give me something to put in my pockets . The children waving at him from the window as they left.

“Putting these... dossiers together, what? Does that codify all this for you? Make it acceptable? Does this woman really need a visit with a baseball bat?”

“ Codify ,” Vernon said. “I like that. I love what comes out of your mouth, Redman. Love it.”

“You going to answer me?”

Vernon pushed a smile onto a face that didn’t welcome it. “I’m not answering anything. But while we’re at it, let’s sort us out a new rule, shall we? That rule is, you stop asking me questions. I’m trying to concentrate and you are making my shit hang sideways with this constant, cocking chat.”

He steered the four-by-four back onto Fiddlers Ferry Road. Across the St Helens Canal, Spike Island, a thick spit of mudland reaching into the Mersey, was tigered with mist, as was the Runcorn bridge, like a brontosaurus’s skeleton spanning the river. Thousands of roosting starlings made cloud formations above the bridge. Once they were across it, Vernon toed the accelerator and they moved on to the Spur Road at ninety.

“What did you tell your lassie, in the end?” Vernon asked, mischief returning to his features. “What was the wordsmith’s excuse tonight?”

“I told her that you rang me up and asked me to go out on a job with you.”

“And she said?”

“And she said, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll go out some other time.’”

Vernon seemed cheated. “Women today. No spunk in them at all.”

“Unless they’re in your films,” Sean said. That set Vernon off on a long, rich passage of laughter that turned into a hacking cough.

“Did you find us a lady? A lady who wants to be in pictures?”

“Maybe.”

Vernon thrashed the Shogun around a series of tight bends as they drove past the concrete mesas and buttes of Runcorn’s Shopping City. Up ahead loomed the urban goldfish bowl that was the Uplands. The porthole windows and token attempts at decoration were swamped by the vast edifice of cement out of which its features glared.

“You’re enjoying it though, the game, this rush?” Vernon asked. “All kinds of life is here. All kinds. Adds to your experience. Makes you more of a man. No?”

“Whatever you say, Vernon. I just wish you’d let me know what you’re doing. I thought you trusted me.”

“Time is on our side, Sean. Impatience is no help to anybody. You’re still on probation.”

Vernon parked the Shogun under a guttering streetlamp that sent shadows into his eyes as he pulled the bat from behind his seat and stuffed it into the deep inside pocket of his leather trenchcoat.

“Surely, Vernon, you don’t need that. She’s sixty-three. She’s blind for God’s sake.”

Vernon made a moue of his lips. “Her circumstances might’ve changed. She might have a big, beefy lodger. She might have bought herself a guard dog.”

They went up the graffiti-strewn stairwell, Vernon verbally ticking off each floor as he met it. On the fourth level, he ducked to his right and marched along a narrow passageway. Down below them, on a patch of grass, three boys were trying to set fire to a dead dog. A white Cosworth was up on blocks and a pair of jean-clad legs were sticking out from beneath it. A radio played Bryan Adams. A radio played Hole. A radio played Roger Whittaker.

At the door of Mrs Moulder’s flat, Vernon smoothed down his hair, adjusted his collars, and rubbed the toe of his left boot against his right calf. Then he yanked the bat out of his pocket and did for the door with one mighty swing.

“You want to be in with us on the softstrip,” Sean said. “An action like that.” An old joke now.