The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (17 page)

“Let’s sit down here for a minute,” Pinky said, pointing to a bench at the edge of the playground. “Something I want to talk to you about.”

Elijah’s nerves settled like a fist in his stomach. “I got to get back to my mums.”

“You don’t want a quick smoke?” Pinky reached into his jacket and grinned as he opened his hand; he had a small bag of weed and a packet of Rizlas. “Sit yourself down. I wanna get high. Won’t take long.”

Elijah did as he was told and sat.

Pinky was quiet as he held the cigarette paper open on his lap and tipped a line of marijuana along the fold. He rolled the joint with dexterous fingers, sealed it, and put it to his lips. He put flame to the end and sucked down greedily. He did not give the joint to Elijah.

“You quietened down now, little man,” he said.

“Yeah?” Elijah said uncertainly.

“You don’t wanna get too excited.”

“What do you mean?”

“That big smile you had on your face back then. Like you’d won the fucking lottery. Robbing those nips ain’t nothing. Rolling that train weren’t, either. You ain’t done shit yet.”

Elijah was ready to fire back some lip, but he saw the look in the boy’s face and decided against it. He knew banter, and this was something different; hostility sparked in his dark eyes, and he could see it would take very little for the sparks to catch and grow into something worse.

“You don’t know me, do you?”

“What you mean?”

“You don’t know who I am.”

“Course I do.”

“So?”

“You’re Pinky,” he said with sudden uncertainty.

“That’s right. But you don’t know me, do you? Not really know me.”

“I guess not.”

“You know my brother? Dwayne? You heard of him?”

“No.”

The joint had gone out. Pinky lit it again. “Let me tell you a story. Five years ago, my brother was in the LFB, like me. They called him High Top. Your brother, Jules, he was in, too. The two of them was close, close as you can be, looked out for each other, same way that we look out for each other, innit?” He put the joint to his lips and drew down on it hard.

“There was this one time, right, there was a beef between this crew from Tottenham and the LFB. So they went over there, caused trouble, battered a couple of their boys. Tottenham came over these ends to retaliate, and they found your brother and my brother smoking in the park. Like we are right now. They got the jump on them. They was all tooled up, and our brothers didn’t have nothing. Rather than stay and get stuck in, your fassy brother breezed. Straight out of the park, didn’t look back, forgot all about my brother. And he wasn’t so lucky. The Tottenham boys had knives and cleavers, and they wanted to make an example out of him. They cut my brother up, bruv. Sliced him—his face, across his back, his legs, all over. Ended up stabbing him in the gut. He was in hospital for two weeks while they stitched him together again. His guts—they was all fucked up. He weren’t never the same again. He has to shit into a bag now, and it ain’t never going to get better. Turned him into a shadow of himself.”

“Fuck that,” Elijah managed to say. “My brother would never have done that.”

“Yeah? Really? Your brother, what’s he doing now?”

“We don’t see him no more.”

“Don’t go on like you don’t know. I seen him—he’s a fuckin’ addict. He was a coward then, and now he’s a fuckin’ junkie.”

Elijah got up from the bench.

“Give me that money,” Pinky said.

Elijah shook his head. “No. Pops gave it to me. I earned it. It’s mine.”

“You wanna fall out with me, little man?”

“No—”

Pinky grabbed him by the lapels of his coat and shoved him to the ground. He fell atop him, pressing his right arm across his throat, pinning him down, and reached inside of his jacket with his left hand. He found the notes and pocketed them.

“Remember your place,” he said. “You ain’t nothing to me. You think you a gangster, but you ain’t shit. Give me lip like that again and I’ll shank you.” He took out a butterfly knife, shook it open, and held the blade against Elijah’s cheek. “One jerk of my hand now, bruv, and you marked for life. Know what it’ll say?”

“No,” Elijah said, his voice shaking.

“Pinky’s bitch.”

Elijah lay still as Pinky drew the cold blade slowly down his face. Pinky took a bunched handful of his jacket and pulled his head up and then, with a pivot, slammed him down again. The surface was soft but, even so, the sudden impact was dizzying. Pinky got up and backed away. He pointed at Elijah’s head and laughed. Elijah felt a dampness against the back of his crown and in the nape of his neck. He reached around, gingerly, expecting to find his own blood. He did not. Pinky had pushed him back into dog mess. The shit was in his hair and against his skin, sliding down beneath the collar of his jacket.

“Later, little man.” Pinky laughed at him. He left Elijah on the ground.

He bit his lip until the older boy was out of sight, and then, alone, he allowed himself to cry.

MILTON WAITED until the sun had sunk below the adjacent houses before he went out to scout the area. It was a humid, close evening. The stifling heat of the day had soaked into the Estate, and now it was slowly seeping out. Televisions flickered in the front rooms of the houses on his street, most of the neighbours leaving their windows uncovered. Arguments played out of open doors. The atmosphere sparked with the dull electric throb of tension, of barely suppressed aggression and incipient violence.

The area seemed to come alive at night. There were people everywhere. Youngsters gathered on street corners and on weed-strewn playgrounds. Others listlessly tossed basketballs across a pockmarked court while they were watched by girls who laced their painted nails through the wire-mesh fence. A lithe youngster faked out his doughty guard and made a stylish lay-up, the move drawing whoops from the spectators. Music played from the open windows of cars and houses. Graffiti was everywhere, one crude mural showing groups of children with guns killing one another. Milton carried on, further along the road. A railway bridge that bore the track into Liverpool Street cast the arcade of shops below into a pool of murky gloom. A man smoking Turkish cigarettes levered rolls of carpet back into his shop, drivers gathered around a minicab office, the sound of clashing metal from the open windows of a gym with a crude stencil of Charles Atlas on the glass. The arcade carried the sickly smell of kebab meat, fried chicken, and dope.

Milton took it all in, remembering the layout of the streets and the alleyways that linked them. Two streets to the east and he was in an area that bore the unmistakeable marks of gentrification: a gourmet restaurant, a chichi coffee shop that would be full of prams in the daytime, a happening pub full of hipsters in drainpipe jeans and fifties frocks, an elegant Victorian terrace in perfect repair, beautifully tended front gardens behind painted iron fences. Two streets west and he was back in the guts of the Estate, the ten-storey slabs of housing blocks with the nauseatingly bright orange balconies festooned with satellite dishes.

Milton crossed into Victoria Park, a wide-open space fringed by fume-choked fir trees. A series of paved paths cut through the park, intermittent and unreliable streetlamps providing discreet pools of light that made the darkness in between even deeper and more threatening. The area’s reputation kept it quiet at night save for drunken city boys who used it as a shortcut, easy pickings for the gangs that roamed across it looking for prey.

Milton passed through the gate and walked towards the centre. A group of youngsters had congregated around one of the park benches. One of their number was showing off on his BMX, bouncing off the front wheel as the others laughed at his skill. Milton assessed them coolly. There were eight of them, mid-teens, all dressed in the uniform: caps beneath hoodies, baggy jeans and bright white trainers.

He kept walking. As he drew closer, he heard the sound of music being played through the reedy speaker of a mobile phone. It had a fast, thumping beat and aggressive lyrics. The rapper was talking about beefs and pieces and merking anyone who got in his way.

One of the group sauntered out from the pack and blocked his path.

“What you want, chichi man?” The boy showed no fear. His insolence was practiced and drew hollers of pleasure from the audience.

“I’m a journalist,” he said.

“You BBC? You on the television? Can you get me on the TV?”

“No, I’m working on a book.”

Laughter rang out. “No one reads books, bro.”

“It’s about police corruption. You know anything about that?”

Milton watched the boy. He was a child, surely no older than fifteen. There was a disturbing aspect to his face, a lack of expression with his eyes constantly flickering to the left and right. Milton had seen that appearance before; soldiers from warzones looked that way, a pathological watchfulness to ward against the threat of sudden attack. Milton knew enough about psychology to know that kind of perpetual vigilance was unhealthy. He knew soldiers who had been constantly on the alert for danger, who equated any show of emotion with violence, and from whom all feeling had been smelted. They became machines.

“The pigs are all bent, man,” the boy told him. “You might as well write about the sky being blue or water being wet. You ain’t teaching no one nothing round these ends. No one’s gonna read that.”

“Do you know Elijah Warriner?”

“What’s he got to do with the feds?”

“I want to talk to him. I heard he’s around here sometimes. Is he a friend of yours?”

“That little mong ain’t my friend, and there’s no point talking to him. He don’t know fuck all. You want, though, we could have a conversation? You and me?”

Milton noticed one of the boys in the group take his phone from his pocket and start to tap out a message. “Fine,” he said. “What would you like to talk about?”

“Wanna know about violence? I shanked a guy last week. Want to know about that?”

“Not really.”

“I could shank you, too. I got a knife, right here in my pocket.” He sauntered forwards, towards Milton, still showing no sign of how outsized he was. He patted the bulge in his hip pocket. “Six-inch blade, lighty. I could walk up to you right now, like this, take the knife, shank you right in the guts.” He made a fist and jabbed it towards Milton’s stomach. “Bang, you’d be done for, blood. Finished. I could make you bleed, big man, right in the middle of the park. Ain’t no one gonna come and help you out here, neither. What you think of that?”

Milton said nothing.

“Man got shook!” one of the others shouted out. “Pinky shook the big man.”

Milton looked down at the boy. He was tall and thin and wiry, couldn’t have been more than nine stone soaking wet. Calling his bluff would provoke the escalation he seemed to want, and there was no point in doing that. He wanted them to think he was a journalist, harmless, a little frightened and out of his depth. The hooting and hollering around them continued, but the atmosphere had become charged.

“I might shank you the moment you turn your back.”

Milton noticed a group of boys cycling across to them from the edge of the park.

“Don’t turn your back on me, big man. You don’t mean nothing to me. I might do it just for a laugh.”

The group on the bikes reached them. There were half a dozen of them. Milton recognised Elijah at the back. The biggest boy—Milton guessed he was seventeen or eighteen—propped his bike against the bench and strutted over to them.

The boy walked across to the group. “Alright, Pinky?” he said to the youngster who had threatened him. “What’s the beef?”

“Nah,” the boy said. “Ain’t no beef.”

Milton ignored him and addressed the newcomer. “Are you in charge?”

“You could say that.”

Milton pointed over at Elijah. “I want to talk to him.”

“You know this man, Elijah?”

A look of suspicion had fallen across his face. “Yeah,” he said warily. “He was with my mums.”

“And do you want to talk to him?”

Elijah shook his head.

“Sorry, bro. He don’t want to talk to you.”

“He say he a
writer
,” one of the boys reported, loading the last word with scorn.

“That right?”

“That’s right. A journalist.”

“Bullshit. You ain’t a journalist, mate. If you’re a journalist, then I’m going to win the fucking X Factor. You must think I was born yesterday. What are you? Social?”

“He’s po-po!” one of the other boys cried out. “Look at him.”

“He ain’t a fed. Feds don’t come into the park unless they’ve got backup.”

The atmosphere was becoming fevered. Milton could see that it had the potential to turn quickly, and dangerously. He concentrated on the older boy. “What’s your name?”

“You don’t need to know my name.”

“I don’t want any trouble.”

“Then you don’t wanna come walking through our ends late at night, do you, bruv?”

“I’m not police. I’m not Social. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

The boy laughed scornfully. “Do I look worried?”

“No, you don’t,” Milton said. He raised his voice so that the others could hear him. “Tell Elijah that I want to talk to him. I’m going to have my breakfast in the café on Dalston Lane every morning from now on. Nine o’clock. Tell him I’ll buy him breakfast, too. Whatever he wants. And if he doesn’t want to meet me, he can call me here instead.” Milton reached into his pocket and took out a card with the number of his mobile printed across it. He gave it to the older boy, staring calmly into his face. A moment of doubt passed across the boy’s face, Milton’s sudden equanimity shaking his confidence. He took the card between thumb and forefinger.

“Thank you,” Milton said.

Milton turned his back on the group and set off. He felt vulnerable, but he made a point of not looking back. He felt an itching sensation between his shoulder blades, and as he walked, an empty Coke can bounced off his shoulder and clattered to the pavement. They whooped at their insolent bravado and called out after him, but he didn’t respond. He kept walking until he reached the gate next to the lido. He stopped and looked back. The boys were still gathered in the centre of the park. No one had followed.