“Manager?” said Mac.
“Oh yes, delightful young woman by the sound of her, name of Rose. Sounds like she’s got him right under her thumb. So there we are. Well, thanks again.”
“No trouble,” said Mac and put the phone down.
The next morning he finished his shift deliberately early and got home in time to find Jackie still in bed. After they’d had sex he was happy to realize that for the first time in a long while he hadn’t thought about Anja at all.
Penguin Island
by Jerry Sykes
Camden Town
Eamonn Coughlan had lived in Camden Town all his life, and from as far back as he could remember there had been packs of teenagers roaming the streets: from the wartime cosh gangs that had operated during the blackouts to the hippies in the ’60s... from the punks of the ’70s through to the... Well, he didn’t know what they were called these days, but whatever they were called he had never come across a group of teenagers that had marked out their territories with as much determination as the current crop. Of course, he knew that graffiti had been around forever, ever since an unknown caveman had first picked up a piece of sharpened flint and scratched into the walls of his cave pictures of the animals that he had killed that morning. But it seemed that in the last few years almost every building in Camden Town had been marked with some kind of multicolored lettering or sign. He knew that it had something to do with drugs, an ongoing turf war, and that the signs were forever changing because of the constant battle for the rights to deal drugs to the thousands of tourists who flocked into the area around Camden Lock each weekend, but the subtleties of the different signs were lost on him.
For the last eighteen months, the dominant piece of graffiti on the wall beside the lift in his building had been a large picture of a castle in red and blue. But as Coughlan pushed through the door that late spring morning, he saw that the castle had been covered over with black paint and that a couple of boys were now creating a new motif in its place. The new design was still little more than a sketch, he could just about make out three big letters outlined in red and orange — YBT, it looked like — but before Coughlan could see more, one of the boys caught him looking and turned and raised a hard chin in his direction.
“Yo, what d’you think you’re lookin’ at,” snarled the boy, his neck stretching out of his collar. From the rest of his face he looked to be no more than thirteen or fourteen, but his eyes were cold and hard, aged before their time. He had a greased-down, straight-fringed haircut that made him look like a little Caesar, and the skin around the corners of his mouth was studded with cloves of acne. The other boy continued to paint, his head rising and falling to some music that no one else could hear.
Coughlan shook his head and let the door fall closed behind him. Averting his eyes, he shuffled across to the lift, Little Caesar following him with narrowed eyes, his breath loud and coarse through his mouth. As Coughlan pressed the button to call the lift, the other boy turned to see what his friend was looking at, and Coughlan recognized him at once as Pete Wilson, a boy from the building that he had known since he was a toddler. From what Coughlan could remember, he must have been about twelve now.
Pete’s pupils went wide as he recognized the old man and his hands whipped behind his back, hiding the paint can.
“What do you think you’re doing, Pete?” asked Coughlan, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth he felt his shoulders tense. He had never been one for making a fuss, and his outburst had scared him almost as much as it had surprised him.
Pete hesitated for a moment, torn between his childhood links and the new alliance of his fresh and future independence.
“I bet your mother doesn’t know what you’re up to,” Coughlan persisted, brave now. “What do you think she’d say if she knew you were down here vandalizing your own building?”
Discovering that the decrepit old man in front of them knew his friend, Little Caesar’s mood lightened and he sniggered and punched Pete on the arm. Pete grunted and punched him back, glad for the distraction. From further up the stairs the sound of someone cursing and kicking the lift door could be heard.
“I hope you’re going to clean that mess up before you go home,” said Coughlan, pointing a crooked finger at the wall.
“I was just painting over the castle,” protested Pete.
“With black paint on a white wall? And what’s with the red and orange letters? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s YBT,” replied Pete, smiling. “You Been Torched.”
“I don’t understand,” replied Coughlan, frowning.
Pete opened his mouth to speak, but before he could do so, Little Caesar hit him on the shoulder again. “You know we’re not supposed to tell no one about that.”
“It’s not a secret,” protested Pete, holding his arm tight where Little Caesar had punched him.
“Fuckin’ child,” snapped Little Caesar, snatching the paint can from Pete’s hand and storming out of the building. Pete watched him go and then, after taking a quick glance at the unfinished graffiti, followed him. At the door, Pete cast a look back at the old man, and Coughlan thought he detected the hint of an apologetic word in the nervous stutter of his lips.
Coughlan watched them disappear around the edge of the building, Pete trailing the other kid like a sibling desperate to please his elder brother. He waited a couple of seconds to make sure there was no return, and then felt a long hot breath leave his chest. He had not realized that he had been holding his breath. He turned back to the lift and pressed the button again.
A couple of minutes later, an old woman in a blue raincoat appeared at the foot of the stairs, panting as if she had just walked up them and not down. “I hope you’re not waiting on the lift,” she managed to gasp on a cloud of smoke, a cigarette burning in her fist, before she too disappeared through the door.
Coughlan took a deep breath and started up the stairs.
Back in his flat on the fourth floor, he filled the kettle and dropped a teabag into a mug. Waiting for the kettle to boil, he rested his hands on the edge of the sink and looked out over the estate toward Kentish Town Road, toward a couple of phone booths. Behind the booths was a low brick wall where it was common knowledge that a number of drug dealers practiced their trade, their customers either walking up or pulling up on the street in their cars to pick up their goods. There was a dealer out there at the moment, and another one strolling up and down the street, gesturing with a pointed finger at the cars that passed. It had become such a common sight, part of the threadbare fabric of the estate, that it no longer triggered an emotional response in Coughlan. But as he let his attention drift across the rest of the estate, his heart filled with sorrow as he spotted Pete and his friend sitting on the back of a bench no more than fifteen feet from the phone booths, watching the drug dealers in silent fascination.
Later that night, stretched out on his bed, Coughlan listened with grim acceptance to the sound of his neighbors arguing, the rise and fall of drunken tongues and slurred insults. On the weekend it was like this most nights, along with the rumble of music through the wall that reminded him of the night during the war when a German bomb had reduced their neighbor’s house to smoking ash and rubble. The bomb had buckled the foundations of their own house, and the front door had never fit the frame after that, still letting in a draft when the council had moved them out of the house and into the Castle Estate the same summer he retired. And it was on nights like this that he wished his neighbors, his imagined enemies, could be bombed all over again.