1
“Honey, the wolf’s at the door with a bill.”
“Sure it’s not a duck with teeth?”
(Mel Cash, Big Beast, 1963)
I fell into consciousness on the steps of the Town Hall with my head spinning and the feeling that waking up wasn’t going to cure it. My jaw was frozen into a gargoyle yawn like I was going to belch out some evil expectorant into the world. Coming round, I felt like Lazarus suddenly aware of a world he’d forgotten he’d left.
The early sunlight was rubbing out the last grey of the night over the jumbled rooftops where the chorus birds were ranting their obscene show songs. I was sitting in the shadow of a stone lion that leaned over the steps rising to the studded door of the Town Hall, its gritty eyes staring into the distance. It was one of two, sentinels of bureaucracy, their sandstone hides shot-blasted by northern hail, grown over with algae, felt tip pen and the graffiti of snails.
A big old lion it was with a big cold shadow. Around me, figures in dark coats were straightening their limbs and blowing the night froth from their lips. Sounds like creaking wood broke from their bodies as they slapped their sides to beat life into their hearts and drive out the louse battalions from their fetid recesses. Their faces were the bleached shades of driftwood, long faces sharpened by the wind, scored with the tally of excoriating journeys through a desperate City. Their clothes were parcels of drab patches, wide lapels and garish checks smeared with the scars of the street’s lacerations, some lashed with string and antique belts, others held up with braided wire or twisted ties. Their long coats were heavy as the coats on statues. Their unlaced army boots shifted and scratched as they got hard purchase on the earth. Some rose erect from the dark accumulation and marched away, others scuttled in hunched perambulations down the fuming mouths of alleys. One figure swayed past me and struck up Little Red Rooster on a tin harmonica as he was subsumed into the morning traffic. I sat for a moment till my brains were in working order and my eyes could mould their blurs into edges. Then I stood up. Ezra Monk was returned to the world.
Here I am, I thought, six foot four, huddled on the steps among the flotsam of the City. How am I here? Under my tongue, my teeth were carpet tiles and there was a pain in the sides of my head as if my hair had been stapled down with pins pressed through my temples by some maniac hatter. Little lights swam over my sight. In a thousand possible lifetimes, how am I here like this?
Last night the cold had been up and out and laying its death hand on anything it could find, like my face and feet and fingers and pretty much all of me. Through the dark, slobbery breaths and wheezing snorts mingled with the noise of the traffic and the sound of distant feet. Occasional music whined and pounded. I lay alone in the cold shadows as the dark fell, shifting restless and anxious and pulling the collar of my jacket further into my beard. I heard animals burrowing into coats and pockets and hoods as I lay half-awake. There were growls and rummagings and open-mouthed chewing noises. At about two o-clock in the morning the cold had me in a very delicate position. I tried stuffing the corners of my lapels into my ears to lag them against the hooting of the night club animals as they yahooed their way down the Headroad. Cans were footballed through arenas of laughter, styrofoam trays of yellow curry slipped and flopped, flaccid kebabs were unloosed down the walls of shops. Rats hobnailed it down the gutters with greedy eyes, their jaws dancing among the fallen food.
At four o-clock the cries of the lost around me started.
—Off me, demon woman. Off devil!
—Shuttit.
—She’s here for me! Off devil, demon devil...
—Shuttit!
—She’s at me. She’s at it again. Oh, merciful Lord, peel her off me!
—SHUTTIT you feeble wizend!
—She’s in me clothing… tug her out, man, tug her… she’s at me.
—Will you SShuttit!
But there was no shutting it for the rancid-voiced man wrapped in sleeves of matted wool howling from the bag of his throat to his demon mistress poised above him in the darkness. And soon the whole lot of them began to give it out into the night, shrieks and howls of self-pity and hoarded existential anguish. A right racket. I stuffed the lapels deeper into my ears but I couldn’t sleep and so began thinking over the events that had caused me to end up on the streets of the City with my ears suffering assaults of sound usually the province of heavy metal nightmares. And then, hailed by the siren call of the lost, the coppers arrived. In they stamped from the blue beyond, muscling through the coats and the darkness.
—Oi! You lot. Shift. Come on, move. They worked at the words to make them threats, moving outward in a cunning pincer movement. Coats stirred and jostled and one or two of the assembled began to rouse themselves from their torpor and arrange their bodies into a sitting position. Coughs staggered like drunks into the night air and the bodies had begun the long haul to an erect state when up sprang a gangling youth, eyes bouncing in his skull, nattering to himself and rooting about in his coat for something alive.
—You! shouts out one copper, a lad of about nineteen with a sandblasted face mooning over the top of his uniform. Down! Out! Move on, now. But the youth was upon him before his voice had faded, swathing him in hideous whispers with his arms flailing now and his head tossing up and down. The copper slipped on a gutful of spilt curry and the youth writhed him to the ground and pounded him with feet loosely bound in fat brown trainers.
To the tom-tom of these thuds, the others undid themselves from their gleeful transfixion and shambled into the night, a weird dance of desiccated shapes tumbling amongst the folds of darkness. Their laughter followed them clutching its baggy sides. Up sprang the copper, dark-faced and crumpled from the dust. His mate was at his side now, hand on staff. The youth was running, his knees leaping up and down as the yawning trainers slapped the pavement billowing gouts of stale foot-air. Round one of the lions he raced and was heading up the town hall steps when the coppers, agile and angry, executed a regulation pincer movement, grabbed him, tucked him under an arm in some mangling armlock and dragged him spluttering into oblivion. Out of the darkness returned the others.
Sometime soon after I almost slept, with the rats tugging at my sleeves.
I had a bedsit two days ago, a snug little box at the bottom of Richmond Road. Convenient for all the major routes and a few pubs. It was not much of a room, about ten feet square with a low bed covered in army blankets against the far wall, a Baby Belling propped on a slab of worktop, a sink with an instant hot water geyser and a view of a dusty elm tree whose leaves pressed against the window where the frayed curtains stiffened their pallid flowers. It wasn’t home but it was somewhere to hang your washing. If I’d had any washing.
It kept the rain off and if you stuffed newspaper under the door, it kept some of the wind out as well. It was a foul little dwelling but I’d got used to it. What I hadn’t got used to was paying the rent. But who can get used to that? Forking out your hard-won cash to some bloated capitalist just for the privilege of keeping the rats out of his precious property. I don’t like to be viewed as a wallet on legs, particularly by a landlord. Particularly by Mr Wolffe. In fact, most of my time over the last few weeks had been spent thinking of ways to keep the Wolffe from the door. I’d tried feigning the usual sorts of poverty — late pay packet, lost pay packet, no pay packet — but he persisted with his demands. I tried appealing to his better nature but that was a real provoker. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a better nature, just that in his case better didn’t quite earn the tag human. Last time I heard his rough grasp on the door I was sitting at the table – an interesting specimen, being a thin rectangle of Formica balanced on a frame of tubular alloy legs, about as stable under use as a rodeo saddle – penning some work of enormity in my Rhino spiral. A verse sprang to mind:
I opens the door
And the wolf’s smile shows
So I closes the door
On the animal’s nose.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t rhyme so sweetly. By the time I had gathered the wit to spring to the door and attempt to wedge it shut with a shard of wood that used to be the leg of the spare chair, Wolffe had not only got his nose and his foot but also his shoulder on the room side of the frame and was moving into the picture so fast I saw the air quiver around him like heat haze. He flashed his yellowy fangs at me and seeing my discomfort pressed one of my grey-socked feet under the toe of one of his brogues. I saw greed flicker in the dry pupils of his eyes. I was closer than I wanted to be to someone smelling of mould and Brût. I tried to step back and he grinned at my wincing. Then he grinned again.
—Rent time, Monkey. And very overdue, it is.
—Morning, Mr Wolffe. What was it, now? Rent do you say?
—Dig it out, Fur Boy, dig it out.
—Dig it out?
—The rent, the rent, you slacker. I make it three weeks now, he continued, raising three fingers in turn and waving their lumps in front of my watering eyes. How much Brût can a man use without passing out?
—Three?
—Three weeks. And I make that, let me see, three times forty-two pounds sixty is, let me see…
—About ninety eight pounds something?
—About a hundred and twenty seven pounds eighty, shall we say.
—So much?
—Oh, yes.
—Oh, dear.
—So, dig it out, Monkey, dig it out.
But I couldn’t dig it out. There was nothing to dig. I strained on my trapped foot. Excuses swam through my head like idiot fish through a vacant globe. He suddenly released my foot and I was sent bowling over to the chest of drawers under the window. It wasn’t a long journey. I raked at a drawer whilst trying to massage life back into my flat foot. A hundred and twenty seven pounds and eighty pence. It was unreasonable, so much hard-caught cash for the use of this squalid retreat, even if I’d caught any hard cash at all, which I hadn’t. Wolffe folded his arms round his chest and stared at me like a greedy boy. He was an avaricious lad all right, I could tell that just by looking at him staring me out with those mouldy eyes. I opened a drawer, which was all pretence because all it had in it was my spare pair of socks, the one I saved for best. I rummaged around with the socks, looking serious. Glancing across the room I noticed that the bottoms of his trousers were wet and his shoes were dark with damp. He’d been out in the long grass had Mr Wolffe, watching the ladies in the park, no doubt.
—Look, I said in what I hoped was a reasonable voice but which was probably only a whining sort of snivel, could we come to some agreement?
—Oh, yes, he replied, all serious, of course we could. Some sort of agreement involving you paying me the hundred and twenty seven.
—Ah.
—Ah, he mused, thinking suddenly in that slow wolfish way of his, then trying to look smart by talking what he thought was posh. Do I take it that your non-payment and current evasiveness indicate that you lack the necessary wherewithal to meet the required fiscal demand?
—What?
—You’re broke, aren’t you. I knew it. I was only saying to Mrs Wolffe the other day, I was saying, I’ve got some right ones in the houses at the moment, all talk and no cash and some of them not even the talk. Youth of today. You could bag ‘em and sell ‘em as biscuits for all the use they are. Idle. Layabouts. Something for nothings. Good for nothings. I knew it. I was just saying…you’re broke, aren’t you?
—No. I’ve just got a sort of…
—A sort of cash flow problem. Heard it before, Monkey, doesn’t wash with me. Seen it all before.
—No, not a cash flow thing…a sort of cash loss thing. Hard life, you know.
—You what? Spent it on the booze have we? Been down the English Oak have we, supping poor Mr Wolffe’s rent money. Or is it drugs? Been snorting up the street talc have we? Bad for your nose, that. And not paying the rent can be bad for the nose and all, if you catch my drift.
I caught it all right, along with a wheeze of instant coffee manoeuvring the room on his breath. I took my hand out of the sock drawer and twitched my nose with two fingers. Wolffe shifted his weight and leaned on the wall. He wormed his shoulder against the architrave and lowered his eyebrows. Then he smirked and looked as if he was enjoying the smirk. I had a go.
—I got mugged, didn’t I.
—I don’t know, he replies.
—I got mugged by two schoolboys – don’t laugh, it’s the truth!
—I believe you, Monkey, that’s why I’m laughing.
—They had an iron bar. A big bar like made of iron and they were big kids, you know, not the little punky sorts you had when I was at school. They were big. And they were serious, wanted my money or they said they’d do me head in with the bar.
—School kids?
—Yeah, they had the uniforms as well. Said they’d split my head like a paper bag if I didn’t give them all the money I had and quick.
—Quick? They said that?
—Yeah. Quick.
—Don’t teach them nothing at school these days, do they.
—I don’t know. Does it matter? They seemed to know enough about mugging innocent passers by. An iron bar. Like a piece of scaffolding or something.
He looked at me and pulled himself away from the wall. He heaved a deep sigh and rubbed his hands together. I didn’t like the way his eyes were looking at me, sort of serious and cunning and amused all at the same time.
—They don’t make scaffolding out of iron.
—They don’t? Ah, well, don’t know nothing these kids. As you say. But they made off with my money. Well, your money really.
—They did, eh? You gave them the money?
—Course I did. I like my head the way it is.
—Then you’d better have some more money, then, hadn’t you…?
I noticed it then, he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking past me to the chair under the window. I froze. I suddenly knew what he was looking at and of all the things in the room I didn’t want him seeing that. Prickly heat was crawling all over me like spiders. He took a step forward. I took a step to the side to try and cover the chair. He took another and more determined step. I looked at the biceps swollen under the sleeves of his suit and decided it was all over. He knew what he had seen. It was his daughter’s purse. The black and gold one her mother had bought her. Oh, foolish and forgetful girl. Foolish, foolish Monkey. He lunged at the chair and me with a sudden brute ferocity and the wave of aftershave that lunged with him nearly put me out of things for good. But I dodged. Oh, I dodged with the fluency of a practised dodger and, ducking under the flail of his arm, I got to the door.
As he snatched up the purse and stared at it in shocked disbelief I tore down my jacket from the peg behind the door and swept the notebook from the table which gave a slithering jolt and threw itself onto the floor. That table, that table that I had so hated for the past weeks, saved me. As I twisted through the door Wolffe, with an unholy roar torn from the bucket of his soul, launched himself at me full length across the room. It wasn’t a big room and it was a big launch. He hit the table top with the full force of his foot and it shot out from under that foot like a frisbee. Wolffe’s legs snapped from under him and he hit the floor with a very nasty crack. I was gone.