Authors: Derek Raymond
They dragged Scalo off across the black carpet of the club with its cigarette burns. He still didn’t believe we could do it to him, and left with the assured insolence of a credit card presenting itself at the thin mouth of hell.
As I made for the stairs with Stevenson:
I am a Spanish Jewess by birth; of course that explains a lot of things. Being a lonely woman, both shy and proud, I found myself thrown into surroundings where I was bound to be raped because my aloofness was a challenge to others – first at school, then later in the street, at the supermarket checkout point where I worked for a time, or at the pub Saturdays when the boys pinched, slapped and felt me to see what I was made of. ‘Not like the rest of the mob, are we then, Queenie, what did you say your name was again, Queenie?’ How could they know the sorrows and darkness behind my face, or know that in my own realm, inside myself, in my private relation with the world, I believed myself, in spirit, silently to be a queen, although disinherited, disrobed and discrowned? I wanted to keep my sense of my own dignity, but it is the most difficult thing of all to keep when you are poor. I was constructed to have a nature that could neither bend nor speak, nor be of a kind to ask for help – but, like all beaten people, had to retreat through the thorns until my hopes were rags and I had no sceptre or crown but what I could carry across London in
my shopping bag. Once I went to Spain for ten days – it is called Castilla – by bus and, getting away from the others for a while, inched my way down the rocks of a considerable ravine to a water bed which, because of its being summer, was entirely dry. On enquiring in the broken remains of what was formerly my own tongue I was told that they called such a place a canada. There I picked dry flowers burned as swiftly dry to their colours in that heat as the rocks where I had found them, and I held them against me for an hour before leaving them tied as a bouquet with a twist of weed and climbing back up to the bus. But I was happier than I had been before, being certain in my inner way that I had found myself there in that stricken yet proud country for a moment and left myself there. For I have read that my father’s name, Suarez, is a very ancient and respected Spanish name, and indeed, until I became so ill as to be able to think of nothing but my physical suffering, which contracts all horizons, including that of dignity, I, too, believed that I was worthy at least of my own respect. I used to murmur to myself in bed: ‘You are Dora, Dora Suarez’ – and who knows if I may not have the blood of princes hidden in me? On my mother’s side, of course, she being Jewish, I had no country by inheritance, and so, what with my father’s origins on one side and my mother’s lack of any, I was lost, just as their marriage was lost, and so we were all lost, and I had to go on alone as best I could …
Is it because I never knew who I was after all that I walk with my head bowed?
To work in A14 is to see everything that no one ever sees: the violence, misery and despair, the immeasurable distance in the mind of a human being that knows nothing but suffering between its dreams and its death.
Every death I have ever seen in my work – in bars, at the edge of motorways, in filthy rooms, suicides, people who have thrown themselves from high buildings, under cars, buses or the underground, are all for me casualties on a single front. Each to me, even some killers, have been men or women deprived of any reason for going on – children even, sometimes – and one bright
desperate day they awake and say to themselves, ‘I’ll end it,’ and they write themselves off in one single stroke of negative, savage joy, since there was nobody to meet them at the station.
Then, afterwards, the ravens, the vultures and the vampires that had been into them come to us to claim or complain over their now irrecoverable debt in the bloody, silent field, while the government, trailing the press after it like a shabby skirt stalks off to dine, wonders if it is still popular.
But for me the front is the street, and I am forced to see it every day.
I see it, eat it, sleep and dream the street, am the street. I groan in its violent dreams, see it under the rain and in the sun, the hurrying people on it, killers as well as victims, flying past absorbed as if they were praying. The way I am, I sense tears as well as hear them.
Dead people are very clean, too clean. They have been purged, white and even as the light on snow, but why? Where’s the justice in it? That’s what I want to know.
Why is it that the simplest questions are the questions that have no answer?
Why?
The narrow stair wound up to the next floor and ended at a small landing and a white-painted door, which was locked. Stevenson found his flashlight and looked at the lock. ‘Banham,’ he said. Then he got the keys out that we had taken. I looked at them in the palm of his hand.
‘Not one to fit,’ he said.
I said: ‘That’s easy. Give us a hand. One, two, three, both of us, OK?’
‘When you’re ready.’
We took all the space across the landing and gave the wood our right shoulders. It shuddered: it wasn’t the kind of door constructed to answer back.
‘Again,’ I said, and this time the lock did our work for us,
tearing the mouth it was bolted into out of the jamb so that the door fell back open.
‘That’s better,’ I said, ‘let’s have some light on in the place.’ Everything was in pitch darkness.
But before he moved, Stevenson stood still on the threshold and said: ‘Wait. Do you smell something?’
I paused to breathe in and then said: ‘Do you mean something live? Is that what you’re saying?’ I added: ‘Yes.’ Something small moved in the darkness.
‘Don’t you smell straw?’ said Stevenson. ‘And vermin?’
‘Light,’ I said.
We found a switch with our flashlights and lit the place.
It was full of cages.
‘Let’s see what’s in the cages,’ I said.
Roughly there had been silence in the place until we lit it; now there was an increasingly flourishing rattle in the straw, a rustle of little bodies. Aroused by the light, things darted about trying to bury themselves in the deftness of their panic, fleeing the light, trying to hide as prisoners in a cell do in their bedding when the people come for them.
‘Why,’ I said, ‘they’re little rats.’
‘Nearly,’ said Stevenson, ‘but not quite.’
‘What are they, then?’
He said: ‘They’re African by origin, I think they’re gerbils, let’s see.’ The cages opened from the top; Stevenson opened one and grabbed an occupant. He held it up by its tail; it seemed to die; it drooped, almost motionless.
‘What does it mean?’ I said to Stevenson.
‘It replaces a hard-on. It’s a tunneller, it goes in where I think it does, it nibbles, it excites, it panics, it dies, and then you pull it out again by the string that you’ve attached to its tail. Of course you have to shave its skin off first so it gives the same nice smooth feel as a prick.’
‘Why breed them here?’ I said, ‘on top of a nightclub?’
‘Don’t be innocent,’ said Stevenson, ‘this is the upstairs.’
‘How do you read it?’ I said.
‘I read money and desire.’
‘Explain,’ I said. ‘Tell me everything you know and think.’
‘When it comes to AIDS,’ said Stevenson, ‘you’re rich, but you’ve got it – you’re loaded with money, but you’re infected, you want to fuck still, but with whom?’ He put the gerbil down and said: ‘There’s money in that. You know what organised crime is – it’s supply and demand.’
And Suarez?’
‘Well, she was bound to get it,’ said Stevenson, ‘wasn’t she?’
I said: ‘Well, that’s murder and you don’t even die.’
Stevenson said: ‘That’s a lot of people.’
‘I know,’ I said.
Stevenson said: ‘My dad was a miner in the north; he died in an explosion a thousand yards down, Geordie Main Colliery.’
‘Do you understand that poor girl Suarez,’ I said, ‘watching herself die in her mirror day by day?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Stevenson, ‘absolutely. You go out to work for next to nothing, and you run a mortal risk.’
‘Poor darling,’ I said, ‘that’s just what I can’t stand, you see?’
‘Ah, stop it,’ Stevenson said, ‘stop it, will you?’
‘How can we stop it, the way we see our work, though?’ I said. ‘What? Just let it all slide?’ I said: ‘My father had a little corner shop, drapery, South London; yet he was in the Engineers during the war and defused mines on the beaches, and I’m very proud of him, glad to be his son. He told me once: “They made me an officer so that I could ask the sergeant for the right tools to go up to it.” I said: “Weren’t you frightened, Dad?” He said: “All the time, but you reckoned you were protected – it was important what we were doing. I wouldn’t have had our boys treading on one of them. ’ ”
‘All right,’ said Stevenson, ‘so what do we do now?’
I said: ‘We get Scalo and Robacci out again and grill them.’
It is so difficult for a police officer to be part of the people that he
is paid by the state to control and yet it is sometimes not because he does not want to be part of the people, but because he does not know how to recover his origins until, as in my case, he is faced with a great personal catastrophe, which then becomes every catastrophe, and which changes everything both in himself and around him. Like Socrates, I think that all men must be just towards their own code if they are going to be at all, because in the end one code is all the codes, given that one is a just man. It is possible in my view that a just man should be indifferent to the fate of Carstairs and Suarez – one might as well be indifferent to one’s own fate whereas, as we all know, we are not.
We went straight over to the Factory and walked into Scalo’s cell; Scalo was sleeping on the army blanket, or as near as he could get to sleeping.
I shook him and said: ‘On your feet. Get up. Move.’
He started wiping the sleep out of his eyes and said: ‘What now?’
I said: ‘A few questions upstairs.’ I said to the officer who was with us: ‘Get him dressed and bring him up to 205.’
When Scalo arrived, I said: ‘Look, the choice is easy, Scalo. You either reply to us – otherwise it’s the old game, bright lights and three teams of three officers relieving each other, nine men. They drink the beer, eat the sandwiches and fire the questions – you get fuck all. Well, that’s it. Depends the way you want it, but make up your mind and let’s get started anyway.’
‘You prove I was responsible for these three so-called murders,’ said Scalo, ‘and OK, I pick up the tab.’
I said: ‘That’s right. That’s how it works.’
‘Right,’ said Scalo, ‘so go on and try and prove I’m involved.’
‘Stop looking so happy, will you?’ said Stevenson. ‘As a police officer I hate that. As a police officer I’m not happy in my mind anyway, and so I doubly don’t like it when I see cunts like you looking happy, Scalo, and that’s where your face don’t fit in this room, sweet. I just don’t like your face, Scalo. I don’t like it when I look at happy, guilty people; our code, Scalo, our code.’ He
caressed Scalo’s fingers and said: ‘Did anyone ever tell you you had very pretty hands? Well, fancy that, berk, now it’s me, just a humble detective sergeant, that’s telling you.’ He stroked Scalo’s fingers again and said: ‘With sweet fingers like you’ve got there on the end of your hands, you want to go balls out so as not to get them broken then, don’t you?’
Scalo said: ‘What are you trying to say?’
I said: ‘What we’re saying is, you’ve gone too far, Scalo. Over the Parallel and the three deaths you’re wrapped up; you’re yesterday’s wet newspaper, you’re way over the edge.’
Scalo said: ‘There’s no price on it?’
I said: ‘Not on yesterday’s news, no.’
I got up, yawning. ‘We’re going on a short trip now, the three of us,’ I said.
‘Oh yes?’ said Scalo. ‘Where are we off then?’
‘Back to The Parallel,’ I said. ‘Where else? We’re going on a quick trot down there, and you’re going to be the guided tour.’
‘Why so?’ said Scalo.
‘That’s the question people ask themselves as they die,’ I said.
‘I’m not dying,’ said Scalo.
‘No, not yet,’ I said.
We ran him away downstairs to the car and took him round again to the Parallel at that dead hour between day and night when even in London there’s no true light. Driving there, I said to Scalo: ‘How well did you know Dora Suarez?’
He shrugged and said: ‘The name means something, but do I know every little scrubber that comes into one of my places to sing?’
‘Reflect on the question,’ Stevenson said. ‘It was she took the axe in the face, not you.’
When we arrived and I unlocked the place, Scalo said: ‘Can I just go for a shit?’
‘Why not?’ said Stevenson. ‘If it’ll make you smell less bad.’
Stevenson and I waited against the long bar decorated in black and gold, and I switched on its single brilliant spot. Somewhere an
automatic fan started up as we stood in the shadow which that one light underlined; it also showed up a thin drifting haze of dust that the fan sent over to the stacked bottles on the shelves, the buckets with their melted ice – all the ceased activity of a closed-down bar.
‘Scalo?’ I called out. Distantly, the long hollow crash then the cistern rang out, its noise important in the silence, and then at last the loo door slammed.
‘Ah, there you are,’ Stevenson said to Scalo when he finally arrived round the far end of the bar, doing himself up at his crocodile belt. ‘Good, because we wouldn’t have wanted you to leave us the way the turds go.’ He said: ‘OK, now this is a further introduction to the easy method. Not that you need it – our methods are the same as yours. Now, are you going to take us on the tour here, or do you want your doorman, Robacci and yourself doing the uphill run, the three of you separately, in front of twenty-seven trained men – because don’t worry, we’ve got them.’
‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘do we start you off with Bowman, Drucker and Rupt, or would you rather tell us what this zoo you’ve got upstairs is about?’
‘Zoo?’ said Scalo. ‘What zoo?’
‘Ah, now you’re starting off terribly feeble,’ said Stevenson. ‘We’re talking about the gerbils you’ve got pulsating away upstairs.’