(2005) Rat Run Read Free

Now he never came, as if Ivanhoe Manners's life had gone on, as if he had found new destitutes to throw his time at. Through Manners he had learned of the estate's pulsebeat. He could stand now at the back window of the unit and look down on the square below, where the kids' playground apparatus was broken,
    where the grass was worn away, where many
    windows had plywood hammered over them, where graffiti were spray-painted on the walls, and watch the rule of the youth gangs. Some days he would unlock the door, draw down the bolt and go out on to the walkway to stare across the estate's inner roads, but only when he knew the door behind him was open and there for fast retreat, the key in the door for turning.
    In the early days of life on the Amersham, Manners had come, thrown the charity-shop overcoat at him and made him walk, had bullied him as if that were the therapy he required.
    So, Malachy knew where the crack-houses were on the estate; ground-floor units with heavy bars on the windows and steel plates on the inside of the doors where rocks of cocaine were sold and consumed.
    'Fortresses, man. They seem to know when the police are coming and can spot the surveillance. They have a nose for the raid that's on its way, and nothing's ever found.'
    He knew where the vagrants lived, in which dis-used garages they slept. He recognized some from the pitches where they begged in the underpass at the Elephant and Castle.
    'You'll know this yourself, Malachy. You're in the underpass and we'll say that four hundred people pass you in an hour, four thousand in a ten-hour begging shift, and fifty people drop a pound coin in your cap in the ten hours and think it's for dog food, or for your cup of tea. Fifty pounds in a day, that's good work, and good people have massaged their consciences as they hurry by. And you'll know that dossers empty the cap so often because it's bad for trade if people see what's actually given them. It's all for drugs, and the dog goes hungry.'
    Ivanhoe Manners had walked him round the worst dark corners of the estate, where he was safe only because he had the massive prize-fighter build of the social worker with him, where the ceiling lights of the inner tunnels were smashed, where the one-time shopping arcades were wrecked, scorched - where the vagrants hunted.
    'They need wraps of "brown". They have to jack up at least every twenty-four hours. You know that, you've seen it when you were under the cardboard.
    They're scum when they're on heroin. The brown destroys them. They'll steal from their only friend to get the hit, think nothing of stealing from family. They inject, and they chuck the syringes away even when there's a council-provided needle exchange - and kids find them. They got hepatitis A or B or C. They got tuberculosis, they're going to get thrombosis. They thieve - anything they can sell on, but best is a purse or a wallet. The cops all wear stab-proof vests because a used needle is a weapon for the vagrants. They are dangerous, and don't ever forget it, and you go carefully when it's dark on the Amersham.'
    Back in the autumn, Ivanhoe Manners had walked him by the shoebox-shaped flat-roofed public toilets.
    'They had to close them, the council did. A
    pensioner, male, goes inside, and a girl follows him.
    She's offering a blow for fifty pence. He's in the cubicle, panting, gasping, she's doing it. What else is she doing? Doesn't need her hands for a blow, her hands are on his wallet, inside his coat. She's got it, she's off and running, and his trousers and his pants are down round his ankles. He's too embarrassed, poor sod, to come charging out and chase her - if he could. The council closed the toilets.'
    And after they'd done their walking, Ivanhoe Manners would come back with him to flat thirteen on level three and they'd use the chess set that the social worker had given him. And with the chess games came the monologues that Malachy seldom interrupted.
    'This is where the real war is, a