The Constance Bullock Case Book presents:-
Eight line Poem
By Paul L. Mathews
“Control,
this is PC 257 Bullock. Now at suspect’s door, over.”
“Roger
that, PC 257…” A brief pause. “Hey, be careful,
There’s
a bubble of laughter from the others in comms room
before the radio drops out.
Hardey bloody ha, I think, scowling against the rain on this typically lovely English
summer evening. All about us the silhouettes of this Mancunian
suburb loom in the rain, trying to intimidate us with the random, disconnected
noises of barking dogs, gunshots and raised, angry
voices. Street lights battle against the dusk, whilst the sky—grey and grimy
like a smoker’s handkerchief—urinates on us. The air smells of burnt tyres and
timber. Behind me the engines are idling down on the patrol car, its lights
flashing rhythmically in the gloom as if to warn off any of the bolder, more
confrontational neighbours. I see the blinds and curtains twitching, and quick
glances of hostile faces as they access us through the downpour. Michael is
hunched against the acidic elements in his rain-cape, face down to avoid skin
contact. I don’t really care, to be honest. Let the
rain do its worst. After fifty plus years there’s not a great deal more nature
can do to me.
“They’ve
gotta point, mum,” Michael says. “Why
the Hell are we here chasing after some kid when we could be back at the
station doing proper police work?”
“’Proper
police work’?” I ask. “Like what?”
“Well,
I’ve gotta stack of paper work needs catching up on.”
“No
son—that’s admin,” I say as I hammer on the door again. It’s just as shoddy and
rundown as the rest of the neighbourhood, and it too has its fair share of
bullet holes. “We’re here to nick a criminal. THAT’S what I joined the force
for. THAT’S ‘proper police work’.”
He
swears under his breath, no doubt exasperated by his stubborn old boot of a
mother. I suppose I can see his point of view. The shops don’t even bother
prosecuting these days. As far as they’re concerned, stolen goods are just loss
leaders—especially electrical goods, everybody’s favourite stolen items. After
all, all those proceeds of crime have gotta be spent
somewhere, right? And seeing as ALL the shops are owned by the same guy …
“This
kid’s hardly a menace to society,” Michael says. He’s in a bad mood today,
spoiling for a fight. “He only stole a bloody stereo.”
Finally
the door opens slightly, and eyes peer out from behind the chained door. I
force the toe of my boot in the gap. I can make out a pretty, round face with
big, fearful eyes. Black, her nose is flat and wide and her high check-bones
sharpened by shadow.
“Hello?”
Her voice is timid and afraid.
“Hello,”
I say flatly, “I’m PC 257 Constance Bullock, and this is PC 258 Michael
Bullock. We’d like to speak to Graeme Loxley.”
“He’s
not here.” Her voice is shaking even more now. “Graeme’s not here. He’s at
work.”
“Are
you Dior Simmonds?” I ask.
“Yes.”
She sounds reluctant to admit it, as if she’s afraid I’m gonna
declare her guilty by association.
I
continue. “Dior, I have a warrant for Graeme’s arrest.” I carry on even as her
face falls, and tears fill her bewildered eyes. “Our VIPER system picked up
Graeme stealing a macro-stereo from Fresco this afternoon, and I’m here to
arrest him and retrieve the stolen goods.”
“But…
But that’s impossible,” she says. “Graeme’s working. He couldn’t have been
anywhere near Frescos. Are you sure there hasn’t been some mistake?”
“The
VIPER doesn’t make mistakes, Miss Simmonds.” I say,
lying through my teeth. “Graeme’s gotta come home
eventually, Dior.” I press on, softening my tone to try and put her at ease.
“So, you might as well let us in, hadn’t you?”
Moments
later, we’re inside.
She
takes us up the flight of stairs to the bedsit. It’s
a threadbare, one bed-roomed place that’s exactly like
Dior: Simple, but slightly chaotic. Lit sparsely with a few candles, it’s
brightened up by a few tatty old prints of African art. It smells slightly of
garlic and spent burnt matches. It doesn’t have much in the way of furniture, and
the scant shelves are practically buckling under the weight of more books than
I’ve ever seen.
Michael
is already prowling around the room, maybe hoping to make the best of a bad-job
and find something worth busting Graeme for after all. As he takes in the rooms
limited contents, I pick up one of the books.
Poetry.
Jesus, I think, trying to
remember the last time I’ve SEEN a poetry book, never mind read one. It was at
school. Primary School.
“Hey,
cute baby,” I hear Michael say, and I turn, putting the book down as I see the
tiny cot in the corner. A mobile that looks like its
held together with love and sticky tape hangs over the baby inside. “Gotta license for it?”
I’m
about to turn back to the book shelf, expecting Dior to confirm her possession
of a Reproduction Licence and that’ll be that.
But
she doesn’t.
A
silence descends over the bed-sit, and I turn back to Dior as Michael studies
her, close and hard.
“You
DO have a Reproduction Licence, don’t you?” he says. Like a shark, I see that
twinkle in his eye as he smells blood and a worthwhile result.
Again,
she doesn’t answer. She just looks away and closes her eyes. I’m fairly sure
she’s biting back tears.
Michael
continues, relentless. “You DO realise how serious an offence it is to have a
baby without the required license, don't you?”
Again, no answer. Michael takes a step closer
to the girl, pressing gently against her arm now, as he also lowers his voice
to a more menacing tone. He’s a nasty bastard sometimes.
“I
said—”
“I
heard you!” she shouts, turning on Michael and bending at the waist as she
hurls the full force of her vitriol at him. “I HEARD YOU!” She looks away.
“And, no, we don’t have a license.”
I
see the look in Michael’s eyes, predatory and cold,
and I have to step in. I have a sick feeling about this. “And how did this
happen?” I ask as I step forward, giving Michael a glare that says ‘Back. Off.’
“How
do you think?” She’s getting bolder now, “We’re in love. We got carried away,
made a mistake.” She turns away and covers her face. She suddenly look s very small and very fragile. “I don’t expect you to
understand,” she says, her whisper barely audible as she shoves Michael to one
side and picks her baby with such care that it nearly makes me weep. The kid’s
sleeping, oblivious.
“Of
course I understand,” I say quielty. I blush slightly
as I feel Michael’s eyes on me. “It’s an easy mistake to make.”
“OK,
so you made a mistake an’ got up the duff,” Michael says, looking me in the eye
and not Dior. He’s starting to make this personal now. “But why didn’t you
apply for a Reproduction License?”
Dior
and I both glance at each other before she answers. I already know exactly what
she’s gonna say.
“Yeah
right,” she says with a snort. “Two kids with no money and no future? D’ya think I’d really apply for a
license knowing all I was gonna get was a court order
to report to the abortion clinic?”
I
feel like shit. The Reproduction License was brought in to put a stop to the
gangs of lawless children left wandering the streets like hungry dogs,
abandoned to the streets by “parents” who didn’t care, and I’d been all for it.
“If you can’t feed ‘em ,don’t breed ‘em,” I used to say.
If you’d told me this bed-sit harboured an unlicensed baby, I’d have expected
to find two sub-class chavs who couldn’t feed their
kid ‘cos they’d spent what money on fags and the
latest X-Station game. I’d have expected to find some poor mite screaming in
hunger. I’d have expected spent and dirty syringes.
I’d
never have expected this.
This
is the other side of the argument. It takes one look at Dior to see how much
she loves her kid (Christ, I don’t even know its sex), and another look at her
to see how hard it is to make ends meet. She’s thin—too thin—her eyes blood
shot and tired, and her hands bruised and cut from the hard shifts at whatever
sweats-shop pays her ‘wage’.
Dior
and Graeme aren’t criminals. They’re victims.
I
didn’t mean for this to happen, I wanted to nick a tea-leaf, not a struggling
mother, and I want to just walk away right now. But I have a problem now. A child. My child . My Michael.
Let’s
be straight about this, as much as I love my boy, he’s a shit, and he’d arrest
ME if it meant getting a promotion. Now, as he starts prowling the bedsit, looking for more incriminating evidence, I can hear
the wheels whirring in his head. This is an easy bust, an’ he’s sucking up hard
to the DCI to get a transfer to plain clothes. This
wouldn’t hurt his chances, would it? This wouldn’t hurt at all. With population
figures and urban over-crowding being such buzz-words right now, we’re,
apparently, keen to uncover cases like this where-ever and when-ever we might
find ‘em.
I
don’t know what to do. If Michael reports this, that’s it, the kid’s history,
taken straight into ‘social services’ and Dior an’ Graeme’ll
do time.
I
didn’t mean for this to happen.
“Michael,”
I say. “We should—”
He
holds his hand up to me in a halting gesture. He’s not listening. Instead he’s starring
at a computer with an expression that just says ‘What the fuck is that thing?’. To be fair, he’s gotta point. Christ knows where they got
this thing from, but it’s definitely older than Michael. It may even be older
than me.
“What’s
this?” Michael says, gesturing at the desk the
computer’s sat on. There’s a neat pile of what look like manuscripts stacked
next to an ancient printer.
“They’re
Graeme’s poems,” says Dior. She’s picked the baby up now, gently, so as not to
disturb its sleep. “He’s getting ready to send a collection off to a publisher.
He’s hoping to get a book published, get us out of this Hell-hole.”
Dior’s
tone cuts through me. Despite her obvious grief and terror at the prospect of
what we can do to her and her baby, there’s a fierce pride when she talks about
Graeme’s work. I wonder what kind of gift he has to engender that kind of
passion.
“Poems?” Michael says with a grunts
as he reaches for the topmost sheet, “Who the fuck writes poems anymore?”
“NO!
You musn’t! Grameme’s very
shy about his work!”
“Michael,
leave it.”
“This
is ‘Proper Police Work’, mum, remember?” he says as he picks up the sheet on I can just about see a neatly typed eight line poem. “I’m
just conducting a thorough investigation.”
I
close my eyes and look away. I don’t know how I’m gonna
get these kids outta this. Michaels’s gonna arrest ‘em and they’ll
never see their baby again. I should never have come here.
I
hear Dior starting to cry, and I look at her. She’s clutching the sleeping baby
and sobbing, her face screwed up as her defiance and anger deserts her, and
she’s just left with fear.
“We’re
leaving.”
I
turn back to Michael, not quite sure I heard him correctly. He’s finished
reading the poem and he’s gently laying the sheet back down where he found it.
“What?”
I ask him
“We’re
leaving,” he says, turning his back on us and heading for the door, but not
before I catch the faintest hint of tears in his eyes. I can’t believe it. I
haven’t seen Michael—the poster boy for 21st century hedonism and
emotional paucity—cry since he was a teenager.
“But…”
I’m confused now, and concerned for my boy all of a
sudden. I’m not used to seeing him hurt. “What about the stereo?”
“What
about it?” he says, muttering. “VIPER made a mistake. Wouldn’t
be the first time. One call to Graeme’s boss and he has an alibi. No
problem.” He pauses, and smiles sardonically. “Good ol’
fashioned police work, mum.”
My
throat’s dried up. “And… what about the baby?”
There’s
a pause as he stops at the top of the stairs. I hold my breath. Finally he
turns slightly to look at me over his shoulder. “What baby?” is his only answer.
My
jaw drops. I look back at Dior, and she looks at me. Neither of us know what to say, or what to do. I shrug, and head after
Michael as I hear his heavy footsteps on the stairs. At the door I turn back,
and look at Dior and her baby. “What’s she called?” I ask, suddenly curious.
“Hope.”
© 2008 Mathew David Spaull. All rights reserved.