Peter James: Not Dead Enough

He fumbled on the shelf behind his twice-bashed head, stretched out his thin arm, with a rope tattoo coiled all the way along it, and found the cigarette pack and the plastic lighter, and the tinfoil ashtray, lying beside the blade of his flick-knife, which he always kept open, at the ready.

The ashtray spilled several butts and a trail of ash as he swung it across and down on to the floor. Then he shook out a Camel, lit it, lay back against the lumpy pillow with the cigarette still in his mouth, dragged, inhaled deeply, then blew the smoke out slowly through his nostrils. Sweet, such an incredible, sweet taste! For a moment the gloom faded. He felt his heart beating stronger. Energy. He was coming alive.

It sounded busy out there in his office . A siren came and went. A bus rumbled past, roughing up the air all around it. Someone hooted impatiently. A motorbike blatted. He reached out for the remote, found it, stabbed it a few times until he hit the right button, and the television came on. That black girl, Trisha, he quite fancied, was interviewing a sobbing woman whose husband had just told her he was gay. The light below the screen said ten thirty-six.

Early. No one would be up. None of his associates would be in the office yet.

Another siren went past. The cigarette started him coughing. He crawled off his bed, made his way carefully over the sleeping body of a Scouse git, whose name he couldn’t remember, who had come back here with his mate sometime during the night, smoked some stuff and drunk a bottle of vodka one of them had nicked from an off-licence. Hopefully they’d fuck off when they woke up and discovered there was no food, drugs or booze left here.

He pulled open the fridge door and removed the only thing in it, a half-full bottle of warm Coca-Cola – the fridge hadn’t worked for as long as he’d had this van. There was a faint hiss as he unscrewed the top; the liquid tasted good. Magic.

Then he leaned over the kitchen sink, piled with plates that needed washing and cartons that needed chucking – when Bethany next came – and parted the orange speckled curtains. Bright sunlight hit him in the face like a hostile laser beam. He could feel it burning the backs of his retinas. Torching them.

The light woke up Al, his hamster. Even though one paw was in a splint, it did a sort of jump-hop into its treadmill and began running. Skunk peered in through the bars to check the creature had enough water and food pellets. It looked fine. Later he’d empty the droppings out of the cage. It was about the only housework he ever did.

Then he jerked the curtains back together. Drank some more Coke, picked the ashtray up off the floor and took a last drag on the cigarette, right down to the filter, then stubbed it out. He coughed again, that long racking cough he’d had for days. Maybe even weeks. Then, feeling giddy suddenly, holding on carefully to the sink, and then the edge of the wide dining-area seat, he made his way back to his bunk bed. Lay down. Let the sounds of the day swirl all around him. They were his sounds, his rhythms, the pulse and voices of his city. The place where he had been born and where, no doubt, would one day die.

This city that didn’t need him. This city of shops with stuff he could never afford, of arts and cultural stuff that were beyond him, of boats, of golf, of estate agents, lawyers, travel shops, day trippers, conference delegates, police. He saw everything as potential pickings for his survival. It didn’t matter to him who the people were, it never had. Them and me .

Them had possessions. Possessions meant cash.

And cash meant surviving another twenty-four hours.

Twenty quid from the phone would go on a bag of brown or white – heroin or crack, whatever was available. The other fiver, if he got it, would go towards food, drink, fags. And he would supplement that with whatever he could steal today.

7

It was promising to be that rarest of things, a sublime English summer’s day. Even high up on the Downs, there was not a hint of a breeze. At ten forty-five in the morning, the sun had already burned most of the dew off the swanky greens and fairways of the North Brighton Golf Club, leaving the ground dry and hard and the air heady with the scent of freshly mown grass, and money. The heat was so intense you could almost scrape it off your skin.

Expensive metal gleamed in the car park, and the only sounds, other than the intermittent parp-parp-parp of a rogue car alarm, were the hum of insects, the snick of titanium against dimpled polymer, the whirr of electric trolleys, the rapidly silenced ring tones of mobile phones and the occasional stifled cuss of a golfer who had hit a totally crap shot.

The views from up here made you feel you were almost standing on top of the world. To the south was the whole vista of the City of Brighton and Hove, the rooftops, the cluster of high-rises around the Brighton end of the seafront, the single chimney stack of Shoreham power station and the normally grey water of the English Channel beyond, looking as blue as the Med today.

Further to the south-east, you could make out the silhouette of the genteel seaside town of Worthing, fading away, like many of its elderly residents, into the long-distance haze. To the north stretched a view virtually unbroken, apart from a few pylons, of green Downland grass and fields of wheat. Some were freshly harvested, with square or cylindrical bales laid out like pieces in a vast board game; others were being criss-crossed at this moment by combine harvesters, looking as small as Dinky toys from here.

But most of the members out on the golf course this morning had seen all these views so often, they barely noticed them any more. The players comprised a mixture of the elite of Brighton and Hove’s professionals and business people (and those who liked to imagine they were a part of the elite), a fair showing of ladies for whom golf had become the fulcrum of their world and a large number of retired people, mostly rather lost-looking men who seemed to all but live here.

Bishop, on the ninth, perspiring like everyone else, focused his mind on the gleaming white Titleist he had just planted on the tee. He flexed his knees, swung his hips and tightened his grip on the handle of his driver, preparing for his practice swing. He only ever allowed himself one practice, it was a discipline; he believed in following disciplines. Tuning out the drone of a bumblebee, he glared at a ladybird which suddenly alighted on the ground right in front of him. As if settling in for the duration, it retracted its wings, closing its back-flaps after them.

There was something about ladybirds his mother had once told him that he was trying to recall. Some superstition about them bringing luck, or money, not that he was into superstition – no more than anyone else, at any rate. Conscious of his three partners waiting to drive off after him, and that the players behind them were already on the green, he knelt, picked the orange and black creature up gently with his gloved hand and tossed it to safety. Then he resumed his stance and his focus, ignored his shadow falling directly in front of him, ignored the bumblebee that was still hovering around somewhere and took his practice swing. Thwackkkk . ‘Yup!’ he exclaimed to himself.

Despite the fact that he had arrived at the clubhouse dog-tired this morning, he had been playing a blinder. Three under par on the first eight holes and neither his partner, nor his two opponents, could quite believe their eyes. OK, he was a reasonable-standard club player, with a handicap that had remained resolutely at eighteen for many years, but it seemed to them this morning he had swallowed some kind of a happy pill that had transformed both his normally intensely serious mood, and his golf. Instead of walking around with them moody and silent, immersed in his own inner world, he had cracked a couple of jokes and even slapped them on the back. It was as if some private demon that he normally carried in his soul had been banished. For this morning, at least.