Monkey Wrench Read online

  You think I’m a cold-hearted bitch, do you? Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you think I’m pretending to be a cold-hearted bitch to protect my image. Because the London Lassassin is a hard nut. She don’t care if you’re smaller or injured. She’ll smash your nose into the canvas whatever you are. And if the London Lassassin’s a stony-hearted bastard, Eva Wylie’s got to pretend to be one too. While, in fact, deep down inside she’s soft and warm and cuddly.

  Don’t kid yourself. I do not give a wet fart for Dawn. What did Dawn ever do for me except kick me out into the cold one night. Who was the stony-hearted bitch then? Her with her chocolates and heated rollers, that’s who. Did she give a wet fart about me? She did not. She was young and pretty, and as fresh as you could be, leading the sort of life she led. That was her luck. But she never shared it, not even with her own kid sister.

  She used to be young and pretty. When I saw her yesterday she was sort of bloated and shapeless. A blob on the pavement. Now she was a blob on a meat tray.

  When I go, I want to go with a bang. I don’t want to be a blob everyone screwed and nobody knows. By the time I go, everyone’ll know my name. I’ll be someone. See if I’m not!

  So don’t you talk to me about Dawn. I don’t want to know.

  Which is why I didn’t go looking for Crystal. What does Crystal mean to me anyway? I sort of knew her when we were both down and out – a time I’m not too keen on remembering – and we both live in the same square mile in South London. Big deal. So do two million other erks. I don’t owe any of them dropsy either.

  Later that night Crystal came to see me. I was sitting on the steps of my Static eating cold spaghetti hoops out of the tin. Lineker was nosing round even though he knows he doesn’t get scraps from me. He’s fed when he’s done his job and not one minute before. Why should he be different from any other working stiff? He’s not a bleeding pet.

  All of a sudden we heard Ramses from the gate.

  ‘Ro-ro-ro,’ went Ramses. He barks like a bass guitar on full amp.

  Lineker pricked up his ears and that was about all – which really narked me off.

  ‘Lineker,’ I said, ‘you’re a greedy, lazy know-nothing. And if I wasn’t so soft you’d be living in a tin of cat food – fifty tins of cat food, seeing as you’re so big.’

  He didn’t like my tone of voice. Which was the first piece of sense he’d shown that night. I was serious. Lineker always takes the flabby way, and I don’t like it.

  He ran off, going, ‘Yak-yak,’ and showing his big white fangs like he meant it. What a poser that dog is.

  I picked up a wrench and a torch and went too. There’s a sign on the fence which says, ‘Armour Protection’. The sign’s pretty faded and I don’t know who Armour Protection were, or if they ever existed, but that’s what I call myself and Ramses and Lineker. It’s a good hard name.

  When I got to the gate, Ramses was standing with his shoulders up and his head thrust out and Lineker was running up and down the wire. He was still yak-yak-yakking, but Ramses had this steady phlegmy roar going in the back of his throat. It’s a lovely scary sound. Sometimes, when you’re up close you can’t tell the difference between him and a 1000cc Harley.

  I whacked the metal gate with my wrench and yelled, ‘Who’s there?’ I thought it was kids, but it was Crystal.

  She said, ‘Eva, it’s me. Can you come out a minute?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m on duty.’

  ‘Then can you do something about the dogs and let me in?’

  ‘They’re on duty too,’ I said. It was embarrassing talking to someone with a sister on a meat tray and I wanted to get back to my spaghetti hoops. Besides, Crystal had someone with her, and if you think I’m letting strangers into my yard you’re even stupider than I thought.

  ‘Didn’t that bloke give you my message?’

  ‘What bloke?’

  ‘At the gym,’ she said. ‘I gave him a message.’

  ‘Oh, the gym,’ I said. ‘I didn’t go in today. I went to see my ma.’

  Which, as you well know, was a total pork pie. I should have gone to see my ma. I thought about going to see my ma, but I didn’t want to hear her troubles any more than I wanted to hear Crystal’s.

  ‘You’ve not heard, then?’ Crystal said. ‘Dawn’s dead.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said. I was trying to sound sympathetic. A sister’s a sister after all even if she does shag for shillings.

  ‘They beat her up in the alley behind the Full Moon,’ Crystal said. So Dawn didn’t drown. I don’t know what made me think she did. Perhaps it was that bloated look.

  ‘We left her safe in bed,’ I said. I didn’t want to be associated. ‘She was all right when we left her.’

  ‘She must’ve got thirsty or something,’ Crystal said. ‘She was gone when I got back from the market. She never come home all night. They came and told me in the morning. I had to identify her. Eva?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I hardly knew her, Eva. They marked her up so bad.’

  There’s not a lot you can say to that.

  ‘Shut up, Ramses,’ I growled. Ramses gave me his I-eat-babies look.

  The stranger hadn’t opened her trap so far, but now she said, ‘I was in the Full Moon last night. I think she went out with two men.’

  ‘Stupid mare,’ I said.

  ‘She was drunk.’

  ‘Same difference.’

  ‘Look Crys,’ the stranger said, ‘I thought you told me she was sympathetic.’

  ‘I never,’ Crystal said. ‘I told you she could help. I never said she was sympathetic.’

  ‘What sort of crap is this?’ I asked.

  ‘Some women,’ Crystal said. ‘They do business out of the Full Moon on and off. They want to learn how to do karate or something.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ I said. ‘Those slags?’

  ‘Ha ha, yes,’ the stranger said. ‘Us “slags”.’

  Crystal said, ‘See, Eva, Dawn wasn’t the first round here.’

  ‘And she won’t be the last,’ the stranger said, ‘unless we organise.’

  ‘You lot organise?’ I had to laugh. ‘What you going to do, set up a slags’ neighbourhood watch?’ I was falling about, it was so funny.

  The stranger drew herself up as tall as she could, which wasn’t very tall, and said, ‘We were going to start by getting you to learn us self-defence. But if you ain’t interested we’ll take our money elsewhere.’

  I stopped laughing. I said to Crystal, ‘Is she serious? And what’s it got to do with you, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing really,’ Crystal said. ‘Only I had to go to the Full Moon. See, Eva, the police don’t tell you anything. And when it’s, y’know, someone like poor Dawnie they don’t really care. They think, y’know, she was asking for it. So I had to go to the Full Moon to find out if anyone seen her.’

  ‘And some of “us slags” was in there,’ the stranger said. ‘Having a confab. Because there was that kid from Leeds last year. And then another one in March. And now Dawn. That’s three of us dead.’

  ‘I can count,’ I said.

  ‘The cops can’t,’ the stranger said. ‘Three “slags” do not equal one “respectable” woman. We won’t get no protection there. So we got to look after ourselves.’

  ‘Yes,’ Crystal said. ‘When they were talking about it I was wishing and wishing Dawn could of known how to look after herself. She was always getting knocked about. So I thought, y’know, you and your wrestling. You could teach them self-defence.’

  I was gawping at them through the gate. I didn’t know what to say, it was such a silly idea. Me, teach them?

  ‘They’ve got money,’ Crystal said. ‘They can pay.’

  Well, of course they got money. I just couldn’t see them parting with it for anything sensible. And another thing, women who earn their living on their backs, believe it or not, aren’t very physical.

  ‘Well?’ the stranger said.

  ‘Shut up. I’m thinking about it.’

&n
bsp; ‘Don’t take all night.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you anyway?’ I said.

  ‘You can call me Bella,’ she said. ‘And if you must know, I got a little boy and a grandfather to support, and I can’t make much of a job of it hanging around outside your gate while you scratch your great thick head.’

  ‘Yeah, t’rific,’ I said, grinning at her. ‘Well, off you go then. Go on. Go and get your fanny warmed up and while you’re at it get your thick head bashed in.’

  ‘You in then?’ Bella said. ‘Never mind. Look, I’ll make it easy for you, ’cos I can see thinking don’t come natural. If you’re in, come to the Full Moon dinner time tomorrow. If you’re out, get knotted. All right?’

  And she turned round and walked off looking exactly like what she was. And I thought, how can I teach someone who can hardly walk in that little skirt and those shoes how to fight?

  ‘Self-defence?’ I said to Crystal. ‘She can’t hardly walk. What’s the point me learning her how to punch and kick, if she dresses like that?’

  Both Crystal and me watched Bella teetering from the light of one street lamp to the next until she disappeared round the corner into the bottom of Mandala Street.

  Crystal sighed. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Sensible, like me. But then Crystal wouldn’t attract no horny punters either. She’s got a face like a monkey and she doesn’t wear make-up.

  She said, ‘Eva, can I come in? I’ve only got my room to go to, and it still smells like Dawn.’

  Well, I couldn’t really tell her to fuck off, could I? Call me a sentimental fool, but I couldn’t just walk off and leave her looking pitiful by the gate.

  ‘You got to promise not to cry,’ I said, unlocking one of the padlocks. ‘I can’t abide people crying.’

  ‘I’m not crying,’ she said. ‘I’m angry.’

  Which made it all right. So I let her in and took her to the Static for a brew.

  Crystal is no more of a crier than me. But she did want to talk. I don’t mind that too much. I like stories.

  ‘You never took to Dawn,’ she said, when we’d got our hands wrapped around a couple of mugs of tea.

  ‘She never took to me,’ I reminded her. ‘If she’d of let us in that night it’d be a different story.’

  ‘You always remember the bad bits,’ she said.

  Well, I’d be a fool not to, wouldn’t I? If you forget about the bad bits how you going to avoid them in the future? Besides I never did know any good bits about Dawn.

  ‘Dawn wasn’t always like that,’ she went on, dipping her upper lip in her tea. ‘Except she was always the pretty one. I used to think she was lucky, but when we got more grown up I reckoned she wasn’t. Everyone wants things off you if you’re pretty. Being pretty makes you a mark.’

  Crystal knows about marks. That’s what makes her such a shrewd trader down the market. I never thought about it before – mark, market. Geddit?

  She didn’t notice me sniggering, and she went on, ‘Even when she was very young, y’know, eleven or twelve, there’d be blokes coming up to Dawn, saying things like, “Hey, gorgeous. Fancy a drink, want to come dancing?” Stuff like that. And she used to go to pubs and things before she was old enough. And she thought the blokes were giving her a good time. She didn’t know they never give anything. There’s always a price. The first time she came home crying with blood on her legs and she said someone hurt her. That’s when she realised about the price. But, see, she didn’t learn from it ’cos she kept falling in love. She believed in love. She said it made her feel real.

  ‘There was this bloke. We used to see him on our way home from school sometimes. On the days we actually went to school. He had a big red car and he used to wear very flash suits. He collected the money from the arcade. That’s where we used to go after school – to the arcade. And I could tell he had his eye on Dawn. Because, even then, I used to try to watch out for her. She really needed a minder.

  ‘This flash bloke, he’d say to me, “Shove off, titch, you’re in the way. Three’s a crowd.”

  ‘And I’d say, “I’ll tell our mum. I know your sort.”

  ‘And he’d say, “You know bugger all.” And then he’d say to Dawn, “’Course, if you want your kid sister tagging along why don’t you go down the playground with the boys.”

  ‘And then she’d say, “Shove off, Crystal.” And if she said shove off, I had to shove off.

  ‘One time when I got really worried I did tell our mum. And she went and told her husband. And he gave Dawn and me the strap and locked us in our room at night. But Dawn was in love so she climbed out the window. And she wouldn’t talk to me for weeks. Which is why, when she started missing her monthlies, she never told me. And by the time she did she was already three months gone.’

  ‘I never knew Dawn had a baby,’ I said.

  ‘She didn’t,’ Crystal said. ‘She lost it. Well, she had it, but it was born blue and we couldn’t save it. See, what happened was, she told me about being up the spout and we decided to go and talk to this flash bloke together. She thought he loved her too. She thought he couldn’t wait to get married, and the only thing stopping him was her being underage.

  ‘But the first thing he said was, “How do I know it’s mine?” And the second thing he said was, “Get married? I think my wife might have something to say about that.” Turns out he has a wife and a couple of kids not much younger than Dawn.

  ‘Then he says, “Here’s some money for an abortion, but if you come round me whining again, the next time you look in the mirror you’ll think you’re looking at a butcher’s window.”

  ‘That’s what he said, word for word. That’s the type Dawn fell in love with.

  ‘There wasn’t much I could do. Of course I slashed his tyres with a carpet knife, and I lobbed a brick through the windscreen.’

  ‘’Course you did,’ I said. Crystal’s like me. She has a lot of self-respect.

  ‘But he didn’t change his mind,’ said Crystal. ‘And by the time Dawn plucked up enough courage to go to the doctor, and by the time the tests were done she was nearly five months gone, and no one would touch her. And then our mum noticed, and her husband threw Dawn out.’

  ‘I suppose you went too,’ I said, ‘to look after her.’ Because if had been my sister, I’d’ve done the exact same thing. Except my sister wouldn’t get into trouble that way. She’s much too smart, and she isn’t interested in men.

  ‘Yeah,’ Crystal said. ‘We came to London and hit the streets, and then one night Dawnie had these pains, and along came a little baby, all black and blue, like she’d been thumped, and we couldn’t make it breathe, so we buried it in the garden of one of those houses on Kipling Road before they knocked them all down.

  ‘It was my fault really. I hadn’t got the hang of things and I could never seem to scrounge enough to feed Dawn proper. It was just as well, though, about the baby. I’d never’ve managed with three of us, and Dawn would’ve got taken in care for sure. She never could’ve stood for social workers and things.

  ‘Anyway, it cured her of love, and the next bloke she met she made him pay. “Crystal,” she said, “it’s no different from doing it for love, but you eat better.”

  ‘And then, because she was still young and pretty, another bloke she met set her up in that room in Paddington. And he took care of her. And even though she gave him two-thirds of what she made she still lived better than she ever did before. Or since, for that matter.’

  ‘You said you wouldn’t cry,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘I’m just bloody angry.’

  So I lent her a T-shirt to blow her nose on.

  Chapter 3

  I said I like stories, but I didn’t like that one much. For one thing, I’ve heard it too many times before. Change the names, change the dialogue, and I bet you’ve heard it too.

  Crystal dropped off to sleep on my couch so I went out to do my rounds with Ramses and Lineker.

  ‘Good thing you’re not femal
e,’ I said to Lineker. ‘You’re just the type who’d fall pregnant to a married bloke.’ He was sleek and beautiful and dozy, and if he didn’t have Ramses and me to keep him up to the mark, people would take advantage right, left and centre.

  I heard a lot of girls’ stories when I was young. If you spend much time in reform schools and what they call ‘places of safety’ you hear just about everything bad that can happen to girls. And let me tell you, this love thing is fucking lethal. Because what’s love for the girls is just a poke for the blokes, only the girls don’t want to admit it. I’m glad I’ve got more moral fibre.

  I bet you think I don’t know what I’m talking about. You take one look at me and you think, no one ever fancied her. So what does she know about sex?

  Well, that just goes to show how ignorant you are.

  I tried it once and I didn’t like it. So there.

  Actually, I didn’t try it. Someone did it to me. But I still didn’t like it. And, tell you the truth, nor did he. ’Specially after I threw his trousers in the furnace. Because that’s where it happened – in the boiler room of one of those ‘special’ schools they kept sending me to. I used to bunk off lessons to the boiler room because it was the warmest place in the building, and one afternoon the maintenance man caught me there. He said he wouldn’t dob on me if I let him have a little feel. Ha ha. Well, he lost his trousers and I found out where a lot of the other girls got their sweets and cigarettes.

  Place of safety? Don’t make me laugh!

  ’Course, what you don’t hear about in special schools is the girls who get to marry the flash-suited bloke in the big red car. I mean, someone married him, right? Or he wouldn’t’ve had a wife and kids. And maybe she thought she’d got it all. Maybe they’d go out together of a Saturday and choose wallpaper for the spare bedroom. Maybe she never knew about little Dawnie and her blue baby. Or maybe she did. Maybe she divorced him and cleaned him out. But maybe she’s still with him, cooking his tea at night and watching what he wants to watch on telly, because she can’t get at his money and she’d rather be miserable than poor.