Darren and his family lived in a terraced house in the centre of town, accessible through a courtyard which led out onto an offshoot of the main high street. Passing through this courtyard, more a patch of wasteground sandwiched between the street and the back of the bus station, you came to Darren's back gate, which always stood open for the passing trade, and made your way across the bin-and-washing-line-cluttered back yard to the back door, which generally stood open too. The front door was never opened, was in fact heavily barricaded up on the inside, as it looked better for customers to come round the back, passing through the courtyard from where they could have been heading to any one of the adjacent houses or the Indian restaurant or dental surgery that also backed onto the area, rather than trooping in and out of the front door in an endless succession, and it was better that any busts that might come should also have to come from the back, as those in the house could see anyone approaching through the yard from the living room window, and the approach of police vehicles to the house would tend to be impeded by the cars parked haphazardly around the courtyard.
There had been one change in the set-up since Kevin's last visit, a little under three months and a hundred centuries ago: there was now a dog in the yard, tethered to a drainpipe, which at his arrival started to yap belligerently and shot straight for his legs, its halter pulling it up throttlingly a couple of inches short. It was actually little more than a puppy at the moment, but was plainly of some extremely evil and inherently anthropophagous breed, possibly one of the mutant Japanese bastard-dogs he had read about in the paper some time ago, and Kevin, who had long operated on the principle that savage beasts respect displays of fear, gave it a wide berth as he navigated the yard and held his suitcase between them as a shield. This seemed to satisfy the brute, and after a couple more cautionary yaps it lost interest in him and promptly collapsed in a corner, where it raised its hind legs in the air and started to engage in an act of apparent autofellatio with great gusto.
There was a final obstacle to be negotiated in the form of a pram wedged in the open doorway containing a squalling infant. Kevin squeezed past and knocked diffidently on the door. "Come in," called a voice from the innards of the house. Kevin passed through the small and squalid kitchen and into the living room.
Inside, an obese woman in a flowery dress was sprawled on a couch watching what appeared to be some sort of slasher movie on video. This was Darren's mother. She looked up boredly as Kevin entered.
"What djer want, lad?"
"Er...I'm a friend of Darren's," said Kevin. "He said I was expected."
"Darren's out." She looked back at the television screen. "I can sort you out if there's something you want."
"Er...well..." Kevin hesitated, wondering if Darren's mother had been informed he was moving into the house.
"What you looking for?" She glanced at him again and registered the suitcase. "You the lad he wants to move in?" she asked in surprise.
"Yes."
"Well why didn't you say so? Come and sit down."
Kevin stepped gingerly through the litter of newspapers, takeaway food wrappers, empty beer cans, video cassettes, video games and music tapes that covered the floor, removed a banana peel, a half-eaten kebab, a nappy, a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine, a copy of Reader's Wives, a teething ring and a machete from an armchair, and sat down.
"He should be back soon," said Darren's mum. "He only went to get some tattoos. Skin up if you want." She nodded at a video case on the couch next to her on which reposed a bag of buds and some makings. Kevin picked it up and set to work. "I don't know why he thinks he needs an extra man," she went on. "He could handle it himself if he could stop in the house for longer than five minutes. Still, I suppose it's always best to have some extra muscle around, just in case." No-one had ever described Kevin as 'muscle' before. Darren's mum herself looked him up and down doubtfully and appeared to have second thoughts about her use of the term. "You can have Lee's room," she said at last. "I'll take you up in a minute."
"I'm sorry about your sons being arrested," said Kevin.
Darren's mum curled her lip. "Pricks," she said disgustedly. "There's not one of them got any brains. I've got them in a Dutch prison for a manslaughter they didn't even commit, him getting nicked for stealing cars every five minutes, and the youngest gets himself put in a home for bashing some queer. Me eldest is the only one in the family with any sense." She indicated a framed photograph on the wall, of a brother of whose existence Kevin had previously been unaware. "He got all the brains in the family. He got enough O levels to paper the bathroom with."
"Where's he now?"
"He's in for fraud." Darren's mum watched Kevin light up. "Are you the one who smuggled that stuff back?"
"Yes," said Kevin. "I was the mule."
"I don't know what he wanted to go bringing fancy stuff like that back for. He could have got two bricks of cheap resin for what he paid for that. He's not going to turn a profit on expensive stuff like that. People don't come here to pay through the nose for fancy stuff, they come for quick fiver and tenner deals and no fussing about what it is. Stick to the slate and the squidgy black and chop it up small, that's how you make your money. And as for that bloody Ecstasy he brought back - well, he'll make a profit on it, but I don't hold with dealing Class A's, I really don't. Where will I be if he goes down? But you can't tell them anything. I can't control them, none of them."
Darren's mother shook her head in exasperation, accepted the spliff off Kevin, and settled back to concentrate on her film.
"You seen this one?" she asked after a while.
"I don't think so."
"He rips out someone's larynx with his bare hands in a minute."
"Ah."
They sat smoking silently for a spell, Kevin flipping idly through Soldier of Fortune while Darren's mum watched various ad hoc organ removals, the wailing baby out on the step providing a counterpoint to the screams and gurgles and flesh-ripping noises coming from the television.
Just as Kevin was stubbing the roach out with one hand and reaching for the skins again with the other, a figure passed the window, and seconds later a man came in from the kitchen.
He was a tall, gaunt man in his middle thirties, clad in ripped T-shirt, jeans and boots, with alarmingly protruberant eyes and veins bulging in his arms, neck and temples in places where Kevin had never previously realized people had veins. He had a look of manic intensity and imminent psychotic breakdown. His jeans seemed to be held up by a belt made out of a piece of string, a telling detail Kevin felt.
"What a fucking day I've had," he said in a rasping voice by way of greeting, running a hand through hair like muddy corn stubble and pacing agitatedly up and down the room. "June, love, save me life, do us a tenner's on tick, me head's totally done in."
Darren's mum had glanced at him briefly as he entered and was now fixed on the telly again.
"We've got nothing for you, John," she said.
The man stopped in his pacing and looked as though his eyes were about to fall out of his head. "You fucking what?" he yelled in disbelief.
"You heard," said Darren's mum boredly, still not looking up from the telly. "We've nothing for you till you pay your debts."
"I'll pay me fucking debts!" the man yelled very loudly. "I've said I'll pay me fucking debts! I've said you'll have it on Wednesday!"
"Then you can have some weed on Wednesday," said Darren's mum imperturbably.
The man grabbed the sides of his head and started to pace round the room like that taking deep breaths. "Don't fucking do this to me, June, not today," he said shaking his head, in a slightly quieter but still aggressive voice. "A fiver's, then, at least just do us a fucking fiver's for the love of Christ. I would not fucking ask you, but you'll be saving a fucking human life."
"You'll get nothing out of me, John," Darren's mum almost yawned.
"You know I'll pay me debts!" he yelled, pointing a finger at her. "You fucking know it!"
"Fuck off, John, I know no such thing." There wasn't even any irritation in her voice and this time she did yawn.
The man clenched his fists and pressed them against his temples and looked as though he was about to have an apoplexy.
"You're shit!" he yelled, and suddenly swept a load of ornaments off the top of a bureau. "You're all shit!"
Darren's mum still didn't look round from the telly. She did, however, casually reach down and pick up what appeared to be a pickaxe handle with a great many ten pence pieces taped to one end that was lying in front of the couch.
"Get out, John," she said calmly.
"A fiver's," the man yelled, "a fucking fiver's, you wouldn't do it to a fucking dog, you're shit, that's all you are."
"Get him out of here," said Darren's mum to Kevin.
"Me?" said Kevin, almost tempted to laugh at the notion.
"Yes, you," said Darren's mum with more asperity then she'd shown the maniac behind her.
"Oh. Er..." After a brief hesitation Kevin found himself rising and walking cautiously over to the man. He went with extreme reluctance, but he went nevertheless. Thinking it over later, he concluded that the buds must have been sprayed with some chemical which promoted acts of suicidal idiocy. Not that he wasn't terrified, or had any aggressive inclinations towards the man, but the fact that he had done anything beyond remaining frozen with fear in his chair was incredible in itself. The man awaited his approach with fists clenched against his sides, his nostrils flared, his eyes almost out on stalks and arteries throbbing in his temples in a way that reminded Kevin of some eggheaded telepathic alien race he'd seen on Star Trek. "Come on, mate," said Kevin queasily, "let's, er..."
"Let's what?" the man snarled. "What, are you gonna kick me out?"
"No, let's just, er, go outside and, you know, talk about it calmly," Kevin mumbled.
The man stared at him for an age.
"Come on, then, let's go outside and talk about it," he yelled finally. "Fucking happy to. And I'm not fucking coming back in, neither. She's shit," he snarled, and stormed off through the kitchen.
Kevin followed with an idea of locking the door behind him as soon as he was out, but decided that his instructions to get rid of him probably entailed getting him further away than that, and besides the pram was lodged in the doorway.
As they entered the yard the dog started yapping. "Shut up!" yelled the man, and kicked it in the throat. The dog yelped and retreated to a corner.
"Let's er..." Trying desperately not to give the impression of trying to hustle or bounce him, Kevin managed to steer the man over towards the gate. He had pinned hopes on shutting that on him, but saw to his dismay that it was wedged open by a huge breezeblock.
"I mean do you think that's right?" The man had suddenly turned and confronted him. "Do you?"
"No, no," said Kevin. "I quite see your point of view, but..."
"Am I out of order? I mean tell me if I'm fucking out of order."
"Not at all," said Kevin. "I appreciate your side of it, really I do. I mean I only work here." Really, he told himself, it was just like pacifying dissatisfied customers in the Chuck Wagon.
"I'm one of their best fucking customers," the man ranted, "and then they go and treat me like that?"
"I know, I know," said Kevin. "I feel for you, I really do."
"And to say I don't pay me fucking debts!" He pounded on his own chest with one finger. "I've battered a man to death for less! You're looking at a person who's battered a man to death for less than that!"
"Well, that's quite understandable," said Kevin, swallowing drily and cringeing even more servilely than before.
"A fucking fiver's worth of weed!" the man yelled. "They won't give me a fucking fiver's worth of weed? Who the fuck do they think they are?"
"Yeah, but keep your voice down, because..." A man in a suit had emerged from the back of the dentist's and had paused in the act of unlocking an expensive car to stare over at them curiously. Kevin grinned and waved at him. "We're attracting attention, look," he murmured conspiratorially.
"Attract attention?" the man yelled more loudly than ever. "I'll fucking attract attention! I'll burn the fucking place down if they treat me like that!"
A desperate expedient occurred to Kevin. "Look, why don't we go to the pub and talk about it calmly?"
The man paused and stared at his boots with his hands on his hips, doing the deep breaths again.
"All right!" he finally yelled. "I'll go the fucking pub, then! But I'm not gonna be fucking calm about it!"
That was, Kevin supposed, a bit too much to hope.
They made their way to the nearest pub, the popeyed man ejecting a gobbet of sputum, which he spent nearly half a minute summoning up from the nethermost recesses of his nose and throat, into Darren's yard by way of farewell, and continuing to rant his grievances at the top of his voice all the way there.
"I mean I've not long come off smack, me, I'm tryna get me head together, and this sort of thing happens?"
"Yes...I know...annoying..."
He kept up his tirade at full volume while Kevin ordered two pints and steered him to a remote corner seat. He paused briefly to take a gulp and say, "Cheers," and then started up again. The pub was quite a rough one but not so rough that the two of them didn't attract a great deal of attention. The man ignored all Kevin's suggestions that he should lower his voice.
"I'm sorry to keep fucking going on about it," he lied about twenty minutes later, "but it's totally done me head in. It's nothing against you, lad, you're all right, but those fuckers...I feel like I've been fucking raped. I'll say one thing: that house is not fucking flameproof. Know what I mean? Now you didn't hear me say that. But that house is not fireproof. I mean would you fucking blame me if I did something like that? Would you? I mean would you, really?"
"No, no," said Kevin. "You'd be well within your rights...A tad extreme, perhaps," he amended as he remembered that the house whose flammability was under discussion was the one he now lived in. "Perhaps there are other avenues of redress you could explore first."
"I think that would get me fucking point across, don't you?"
It was at about this point that another expedient occurred to Kevin. He still had an amount remaining of the weed he'd bought his last night in Amsterdam, which he had completely forgotten about until, in quest of an errant rail ticket on the train that morning, he had extracted it from his shirt pocket under the nose of an already suspicious ticket inspector. Suddenly remembering it now, he took it out and, saying, "Look, take this," presented it to the popeyed man. The latter stared speechlessly at the weed lying in his hand for some moments, then suddenly gripped Kevin in an extremely painful headlock which it took him several seconds to realize was intended to convey gratitude and comradeship.
"You're saving a life," he said when he released Kevin.
It still didn't shut him up. "All this fuss over a fucking fiver deal," he said, and for another ten minutes was off again railing against the injury and injustice done him by Darren's mum. Kevin's primary emotion gradually changed from fear to boredom to intense hatred; finally he was praying for the man to die while outwardly continuing to fake sympathy and saying things like 'Some people, eh?' and 'It's shit, it really is.'
"The fucking day I've had," the man concluded hoarsely. "I thought I'd be out of the house for two minutes at the most. Me woman said she wouldn't fuck me unless I got some weed to calm down with, I've fucking left her naked on the bed with her legs spread. The fucking kiddie's been screeching its head off all day, I've had to batter that to sleep. And then all this shit happens."
Suddenly he folded his legs up in front of him so that he was sitting in a lotus position, closed his eyes, pressed clenched fists against his temples, and started to take deep breaths.
"Ohm!" he suddenly cried, very loudly and aggressively. "Ohm! Ohm! Ohm! Ohm!"
"Thank Christ I found fucking Buddha, that's all I can say," he said opening his eyes. "Mellowed me head no end."
"I really have to go now," said Kevin rising.
"You couldn't lend us a fiver before you go, could you?"
Kevin had a fiver which the man had seen him pocket with his change from the drinks. He told the man, which was true, that it was his last fiver, but the man took it anyway.
"I'll pay you back on Wednesday. I'm waiting on a giro."
"No, no, forget it," said Kevin.
"Hey!" the man yelled angrily. "I've said I'll pay you back on Wednesday, and I'll pay you back on fucking Wednesday, all right?"
"All right."
"All right then." The man stood up and embraced Kevin. "Fucking Buddha loves you, kid. Go in peace."
When he got back Darren's mum had finished watching her film and was reading a True Murder magazine.
"You handled that well," she said without looking up.
"Yes," agreed Kevin.
"Did he kick Cerberus?"
"Yes."
"He'll pay for that one day. That dog'll be the size of a pony when it's grown."
"Should I have unleashed it?"
"It wouldn't have helped much. It always goes for the weakest person in a fight." She put her magazine down. "Come on, I'll show you your room."
Kevin followed her upstairs and into a small box room whose walls were covered with pictures of film gangsters, ninjas carrying swords and muscular men toting automatic weapons who were possibly Soldier of Fortune centrefolds.
"I'm going out now," Darren's mum said as he put his case down on the bed. "I do a couple of nights a week at the pub. You'll have to go on duty."
Kevin followed her back down to the living room.
"All we're doing at the moment is resin in fiver deals," she said, opening up a video cassette case lying on the couch to show him a pile of small slivers wrapped in tinfoil. "He hasn't weighed the buds out yet. I don't know what he's charging for the Ecstasy and the speed so if they want any of that they'll have to come back when he's in. Don't give any ticks unless you know them well."
"What if the police come round?"
"They shouldn't do. If they do, there's a sack of dirty nappies out in the hall, shove everything in the bottom of that."
The mention of nappies prompted Kevin to wonder if there was anything he should do about the baby, but Darren's mum had already left.
For the next half an hour or so Kevin alternately skinned up and stared out the window and paced the room in agitation the way the Buddhist had done, the pickaxe handle gripped in his hand, working himself up into a fine frenzy of paranoia lest the police should arrive and find him in charge of a house full of Class A's, or some maniac like the Buddhist should come and overpower him and steal all the wares. He resented being thrown in at the deep end like this and felt the need of some sort of induction course like he'd had at Elysian Fields.
Presently his first customer arrived. A lad of around Kevin's age appeared in the yard, pacified Cerberus with a few kind words and a pat on the head, and made his way towards the kitchen door. Then he saw Kevin standing in the window staring out at him and stopped. Something about the way Kevin stood there with the pickaxe handle in his hand, together with whatever the fuck kind of demented expression he saw on Kevin's face, appeared to convince him that he didn't need whatever it was he needed that badly after all, for he turned round abruptly and left in a hurry.
Kevin decided he had better relax. He put the pickaxe handle down, switched EastEnders on, sat down on the couch and methodically massacred the buds until he was in a less uptight frame of mind.
Soon his second customer passed the window and came in from the kitchen. It was a young boy in a school uniform.
"Do us a fiver's, mate," he said holding out a crumpled note.
The uniform perturbed Kevin somewhat.
"Aren't you a bit young to be doing this sort of thing?" he said.
The kid looked contemptuous. "How old do I have to be?"
"I've got a pair of shoes older than you are," said Kevin.
The kid looked him up and down. "That doesn't surprise me," he muttered.
Doubtfully, Kevin took the fiver and handed over a sliver of weed.
"Well...don't neglect your homework," he said.
"Oh, fuck off," said the kid, snatching the weed and leaving.
The next two customers were a pair of lads of Darren's age who asked after Darren and his younger brother. They wanted a tenner's apiece and insisted on looking through the stash box to pick out the biggest deals for themselves. Kevin was quite relaxed now and even this didn't worry him much, although he was careful to keep close to the pickaxe handle. They left with friendly words and without hijacking him.
The two deals after that were very quick and straightforward and when he had got them under his belt Kevin began to feel quite the seasoned pro. The next customer was a rather nervous-looking boy of Kevin's age and Kevin found himself talking to him friendlily to put him at his ease, quite as if he'd been doing this sort of thing all his life.
Next two rather sluttish but quite fit young girls came in and asked for a tenner deal to be paid for next week. Although he remembered what Darren's mum had said about not giving ticks, as Kevin was feeling very relaxed indeed by this point and as the girls were smiling at him flirtatiously, saying things like, "Please, lad, we'll be really grateful," and sitting next to him on the couch virtually in his lap, he decided to stretch a point in their case and, after a certain amount of kidding about what they'd do for him in return, gave them the weed.
"You're dead dead kind, you," one of them said.
On their way out they paused on the step to coo over the now-quiescent occupant of the pram.
"Aw! Isn't he cute!"
"Is this your baby?" one of them called.
"Er...yeah," said Kevin. "Djer want one?"
"Cheeky sod!"
Sniggering to himself, Kevin started to skin up again happily. All the girls love a dealer, he thought. He had quite enjoyed that little power-game. Maybe one day he could make the transition from dealer to pimp, and build up a stable of narcotically-enslaved young bitches, who would come to him in their satin hot-pants and halter-tops and pathetically whine things like, 'Come on, baby, give me some of the stuff, I know you're holding...I just need a taste...I'll treat you good, sugar, you know I will...' He could meet fresh victims over at the bus station, innocent young chickens who had come to the big bad town to pursue their pathetic dreams of stardom but would end up spending their days stoned out of their minds, performing abominable sex acts and making fifth-rate porno movies in dingy bedrooms, wearing leather boots and an orange wig and, he was quite firm on this point, satin hot-pants. 'What's my motivation in this scene, Big Kev?' they would say fuddledly. 'Look, just fuck the terrapin, okay?' Kevin would reply, in his long leather coat and wide-brimmed hat. 'You trust me, don't you? It's a good career move.' 'And Mr. Spielberg himself asked me to test for this part?' 'Who?...Oh, yes, yes.' 'I'll do it for you, baby,' they would say trustingly, 'I'll do it for us. You're the only one who's ever treated me like a person.' 'Right, right,' Kevin would say abstractedly, counting his money. 'You don't want to have to go back to that awful secondary school, do you?'
Kevin sat there smoking and giggling at his pimp fantasies and 'Djer want one?' for quite some time. He suddenly decided this was the best job he had ever had. Just then he realized Darren's TV had cable on it, and his cup was overflowing.
He was lying full-length on the couch with a fresh spliff in his hand, watching Italian housewives disrobe, sporadically giggling, singing, 'Hi-fiddle-de-dee, a dealer's life for me,' and thinking, rather pityingly, of a friend from college who now worked in insurance, when another figure passed the window.
"What can I do you?" Kevin asked without looking round as he heard whoever it was enter behind him.
"Who the fuck are you?" the newcomer demanded in a gruff voice.
Kevin looked up. A squat, white-haired, but very muscular old man stood there. He had scars on his nose and forehead and headcase written all over him, with a psychotic gleam in his eye that made the Buddhist look a paragon of equanimity by comparison.
"I, er..." Something about the old man told Kevin he hadn't come there to buy drugs and he decided that 'I work here' might not be the right thing to say. "I live here," he said.
"Like fuck you do!" the old man snarled.
Kevin got to his feet as the old man advanced with fists clenched. One of the old man's fists, he noted, had the word LOVE tattooed across the knuckles, and the other had the word HATE. He wondered whether it would help to mention that he had studied Night of the Hunter at university but decided against it.
"I do, really," he said. "Er...would you like a toke?" he added desperately, holding the spliff out towards the old man.
"I'll give you a toke," yelled the old man, snatching up the weighted pickaxe handle and brandishing it at Kevin. "I'll fucking murder yer, yer druggie bastard!"
"Er..." Kevin backed away as the old man advanced on him, coming towards him in a feral crouch pounding the club against one hand, with a broken-toothed grin on his face, an intense smell of alcohol, and a manic light in his eyes.
Luckily just then Darren came in.
"Granddad, Granddad, put that down," he said. "He's a mate of mine, he's moving in here."
He wrested the pickaxe shaft from his grandfather's hands and laid a restraining arm against him. The old man looked as resentful as an attack dog called off its prey, and in fact growled at Kevin, and seemed to contemplate doing him harm with his bare hands for a while, then abruptly gave it up and turned away.
"Ah, yer druggie bastards," he muttered disgustedly, starting to stagger out towards the hall.
On his way out he gave a lurch and jarred his shoulder heavily against the edge of the living room door.
"You fucking door!" he snarled, kicking frenziedly at the offending portal with hobnailed boots and pounding it with his fists. "I'll kill yer!"
Eventually he made it out and started to climb the stairs.
"Don't mind him," said Darren. "He's all right except when he's had a few."
Suddenly there came the sound of someone falling heavily down a great many stairs.
"Fucking stairs!" Darren's grandfather yelled, followed by a sound like thunder as he kicked and pounded at the staircase.
"Fucking character, me granddad." Darren took the spliff for a brief toke then grinned and shook his head. "Fucking hell, mate, you will not believe who's here."
Just then a small, pretty brown-haired girl emerged from the kitchen carrying the baby and stared at Kevin quizzically. Darren went and put his arm around her and kissed her on the head.
"You remember me bird Karen I told you about?" he said. "This is her. She was here waiting for me when I got back." He shook his head again. "You will not fucking believe what she's been through. She was knocked down by a fucking car in Blackpool, she's been lying in a hospital for three months with no memory of who she was or where she came from. Total fucking amnesia. She only came out of it last week. Fucking unbelievable, eh?"
"Er...yeah," mumbled Kevin, shaking his head too.
"She was so fucking shy with me at first. It was like she was frightened of me. She thought I'd be angry with her for being gone all this time. She thought I might not want her back. Can you believe that?" He hugged her happily. "I reckon it must have been my love for her that brought her out of it. I reckon some part of her mind must have sensed me and the baby missing her, and that's what brought her round."
"Maybe it was," the girl murmured. "The doctors said it was a miracle."
Darren squeezed her again. "This is me mate Kevin I was telling you about," he said. "He knows how much you mean to me. He's the one who used to read me that letter you sent me when I was in stir. All about how much you missed us. I must have made him read it about fifteen fucking times."
The girl's mouth fell open and she stared at Kevin in horror; her face went deep red and then a sickly white.
"Pleased to meet you," she mumbled at last.
"Likewise," said Kevin. "I'm really pleased you two are back together."
She nodded and tried to smile, then thrust the baby on Darren, muttered, "I've got to go upstairs a minute," and fled the room.
Darren came over to Kevin grinning.
"I'm the happiest man in the world, mate," he said. "That's me now, fucking family man from now on. Fucking settle down and face me responsibilities. Look at this." He rolled up his sleeve to show Kevin a tattoo featuring the words DARREN 4 KAREN 4 EVER on a background of twin hearts. "She's got one the same, I won't tell you where hers is." He beamed down at his son and uncle gurgling in his arms. "I've got me best mate working with me and me woman back by me side. Conquer the fucking world. What a buzz we're gonna have."
"Let the good times roll," said Kevin.
Chapter 19
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