by Mark de Rond
As the dog days of summer elongated, and with school out and everyone who is someone having been moved on, and with nothing to do and nothing whatsoever to look forward to, two teenagers killed a pizza delivery guy and didn’t eat the pizza.
They stood in silence for a while after as the adrenaline metabolised. I turned off the radio and moved nearer the cracked window.
‘Yo, wagwan; what’s the move?’
‘Dunno, bruv.’
‘That’s mad peak.’
A wasp seemed to have landed on one of the dead man’s eyes.
‘Bruv that’s grim.’
‘Dat’s how you clock someone’s gone.’
‘What you saying?’
‘Cuz a dead man can’t even blink, innit.’
‘Dat’s some next ting.’
The delivery man was dead alright and still wearing his helmet and backpack because that’s how quick the teenagers had been to the draw.
‘Who you reckon got there first?’
‘I reckon we was both equally quick.’
‘Which one you reckon is yours?’
‘Dat one up top, innit. What was you tryna hit?’
‘His ticker innit.’
‘Someone hit him in the nuts, and it wasn’t me.’
‘Dat ain’t what finished him still.’
‘But you was tryna off him and dat’s what the feds care about – in-ten-tio-na-li-ty – and dem don’t care if you’re a dead aim or not.’
The summer had been a beast. Whatever moisture the sun hadn’t already burned off was sucked out of the air by neo-brutalist high-rises linked by walkways. There was so little vegetation left on the estate that nothing could absorb the heat except for those living on it: tradesmen and single mums, the jobless and ex-soldiers like me, all of us thrown together in a utopian experiment in the midst of strikes, stagflation and class-wars. Not even the hardiest of us escaped the madness the heat and unrest bred. Visitors began to stay away as did the summer winds, and without winds there wasn’t anything to cleanse our estate from the sourness it secreted. Couples took to sleeping separately for that’s how warm and listless nights were to reunite over breakfast and sigh with the concrete at Southwark Council’s decision to cancel the estate and everyone in it. And so, our homes became a holding pen as we waited for our relocation briefs.
It wasn’t the waiting so much as not knowing when the waiting would end that had stopped life in its tracks and transformed the estate into a chaos of nothing: life was empty as was the soul. Pessoa’s curse had become ours too.
The experience took me back to my time on the Kosovo-Serbia border as a young man, and how we’d pray for firefights to lift the boredom. Of how one day our sergeant said, ‘let’s kill a fucking cow’ and made a spear out of a broom stick and zombie knife and pinned this cow into a corner and stabbed it. Of how the cow looked at him and then us and couldn’t understand why anyone would hurt her. Of how the sergeant passed the spear to someone else and so on until we all shared in the shame and of how she ultimately went down. Of how we decapitated her with a saw and then didn’t know how to gut the rest of her except to mind the bladder but how we figured it out in the end. Of how Johnny cooked us up some steaks and a farmer walked up while we were cooking and said he’d seen us kill his cow and of how we said we didn’t kill her but that she got caught in the crossfire. Of how he wanted compensation and our sergeant said there’s no fucking way we were going to give him any cash but that he could have potatoes to the value of his cow, and of how we decided that hers was the best steak we’d ever had.
‘So, what we gonna do with him?’
‘It’s calm, innit. We’ll fix this. Let’s bury him.’
‘Nah, bruv, that’s long. It’s bare hot out here.’
‘If we leave it, the body’s gonna start ponging.’
‘Let’s lob him in the river.’
‘He’s gonna float, innit bruv.’
‘Nah, not if we slap bricks on him.’
‘No way we gonna move him to the river without the ends knowing. People gonna ring the feds for sure.’
‘We could burn him.’
‘You reckon man will burn, bruv?’
‘It’s like a crem, innit?’
The waiting caused unease and suspicion on the estate and before long the overhead telephone wires were said to give off a buzzing noise; and because of this some now only ever went out with heads wrapped in silver foil. Others said the noise came from an electrical charge going through the wires and how they had it on good authority that the birds sitting on them weren’t birds at all but drones with cameras made to look like birds.
The teenagers’ barrister, who happened to also be a lay preacher, would point the finger at Southwark Council for its persistent lies and contempt. The teenagers, he would say, had ‘diminished responsibility’, that is, if the prosecution were even able to prove that they’d had a role in the death. Residents had been afflicted with a psychosis, is how he would put it, and submit in evidence how two mutts from the same family had been skinned and strung up from one of the walkways, and how the family whose pets they were packed up to leave what they said was – and I quote – ‘a godforsaken hellhole’. Several others reported cats with heads removed that some said was the work of urban foxes, but others said couldn’t be as the cut was too clean and because one had been found halfway down a mayonnaise jar and there’s no way a fox could do that. The Londis around the corner had gone up in flames and the owner’s wife, Bev, of how she had to be committed afterwards to keep her from hurting herself, and how none of these things had any obvious cause except that they were inspired by Southwark Council. The estate, the barrister would say, was cursed, and the killing of a pizza guy fit a pattern of senseless slaughter. What this estate needs isn’t a show trial, he would say, but an exorcist.
The barrister would heap evidence on evidence to show how this psychosis gave rise to other strange occurrences: of an alien script written in paint on walls and into the softening asphalt; of Mrs Merkle’s mobility scooter displaced as if by magic from her front door and onto the roof of the local Montessori; of all the water on the estate have turned a dirty brown overnight; of cars catching fire without apparent cause; of clowns stalking kids; of blood running down concrete walls; all of which had residents calling for police and firemen to be defunded. When that failed to materialise, they trained their resentment on those outside the estate instead – academics and doctors and lawyers – until they had so internalised their bitterness that they wished for nothing other than for everyone to be as angry and as bored as they were.
Suspecting that teenagers might have been co-opted in Southwark Council’s work, some residents took it upon themselves to burn down an arthouse cinema. The barrister himself once used the pulpit to claim it was used to manipulate the minds of impressionable teenagers with subliminal messages and to coerce them into depravity. Others took to decoding strange events as messages from a great leader who kept his identity a secret. They would meet sharpish at 6:30pm every night in Mrs Merkle’s flat to discuss their findings, and reasoned that if the Council had cursed their estate, they might as well scorch the entire city and have front-row seats to a world on fire as they waited for the storm. For the storm would come and bring with it relief at last from the infernal heat and boredom. It would carry powerful winds and rains to end the drought and rid the estate of an evil beyond anything in living memory.
‘Bossman ain’t bunning.’
‘Check his garms, fam.’
‘Dem don’t bun either.’
‘Burn his hair then, innit.’
‘….’
‘….’
‘So his hair’s gone, but there ain’t no fire yet.
‘He looks proper mad with no hair.’
‘Innit, fam, proper mad.’
‘Does your mum have any bits to spark up the fire?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like petrol, gas, white spirit.’
‘Nah, bruv.’
‘How ‘bout the guy’s ped? Bare petrol in there.’
‘But how we gonna get it out though?’
‘You suck it, ya get me? Find me a rubber hose or something.’
‘We ain’t got nothin’ like that in our yard.’
‘Grab me the shower hose and a big blade then.’
‘What for, bruv?’
‘To chop the hose.’
‘Are you mad, fam? My mum’s gonna clock that the hose is shorter, innit.’
‘You got any better plans?’
‘Nah, bruv. It’s calm. Let’s do the hose ting.’
The barrister would also offer his own hypothesis for the cause of death: that it’d been a rare case of backward lightning shot from deep below the concrete, at which those residents present in court would murmur agreement for they remembered hearing thunder; and he would say that the pizza delivery guy happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and – and here he would raise a hand and cite scientific evidence – that while it looked like he’d been defending himself when attacked, it wasn’t that at all. It was the natural result of his muscles contracting and causing his joints to flex, leading to – and here he would pause for effect – the pugilistic pose, widely found among bodies recovered from Pompeii following Vesuvius.
I walked from my kitchen to the bedroom window to put faces to voices and saw that these had been students of mine a few years back. The boy reminded me even then of a young De Niro in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight but with tats and fairer. Natasha wasn’t any longer the harmless 13-year-old of my English Comp class and a strong writer. The death of her child by a crackhead mum, and living with a gangster brother, had hardened her features.
‘So, his legs are on fire but the rest of him ain’t burnin,’ said the young De Niro.
‘Didn’t I say start pouring from his head, bruv? Now all the petrol’s done.’
‘So, what we gonna do?’
‘Dunno. Maybe fold him.’
‘How we gonna fold him?’
‘Ya lift his back and push, innit? Get his head down to his knees so it can bun up.’
‘He’s proper stiff,’ De Niro said.
‘You’re bare weak.’
‘Maybe we get some of the youts to lend a hand.’
‘Don’t be daft, bruv. Use your bulk.’
‘He ain’t staying folded.’
‘Siddown on him till he stays folded then.’
‘Bruv, I’ll bun up if I do that.’ ‘Don’t be a wasteman.’ Natasha sucked her teeth. ‘You push and I’ll drop the ped on him to weigh him down.’
The barrister would call on me as a witness for the defence seeing how I was the only one to have seen and heard everything. Did I recognise the teenagers in the dock as having been on the scene, the barrister would ask while reminding me of the penalty for perjury and telling the jury of how upstanding a citizen I was being a teacher and former soldier and all, and I would take a deep breath and give the court my answer. The barrister would then say that it is true that he couldn’t explain how the man’s moped had ended up on top of him but that life’s weird sometimes.
