“Okay.”
And that was all I needed to know.
Half an hour later we were back on the road. But a mile or two down the A614, traffic slowed and gradually came to a crawl.
“Oh shit, what’s this? More roadworks?”
Slow Kid is always impatient with delays. But me, I look for the positive side, watch for the opportunities.
“If there’s some new roadworks, keep your eyes peeled. Some of these contractors are very careless with their equipment.”
“Right.”
But as we got nearer to the hold-up, we could see there was no chance of any mobile generators or JCBs going spare. Instead, there were flashing lights, police cars slewed across one carriageway, an ambulance, a fire engine and a cloud of steam and black smoke.
We crawled by the scene as traffic was filtered into one lane past the accident. Like all the other drivers, we craned our necks to see what had happened. The blackened and smouldering remains of a van stood at the side of the road, and fire had scorched a patch of grass and tarmac around it. The van was a Renault Master high roof. It might once have been blue.
“Hey, isn’t that—?” began Slow, his eyes popping as he stared out of the window. He began to brake for a closer look.
“Don’t make us noticeable — drive on,” I said.
“But Stones—”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Rawlings and his mate.”
This wasn’t good. The smile had frozen on my face. It was as if a blast of icy air had suddenly blown in through the window, straight from the smoking wreck of that van.
3
The village I live in is Medensworth. It’s in an area called the Dukeries, on account of all the dukes. Medensworth is in the Domesday Book, according to our county’s tourist office, which seems to think it’s a mark of historical importance. Back then, some bloke by the name of Roger de Busli held eight bovates of land here, and a fishing yielding one hundred eels. It seems de Busli was one of William the Conqueror’s minions. His reward for backing up his gaffer in 1066 was getting his hands on about half a million acres of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire that had belonged up till then to some poor bloody Saxons. The Saxons happened to have been on the wrong side in the Battle of Hastings. So it goes.
Whenever I happen to read that bit about the bovates and eels, I can just picture some fat Norman landowners living it up in their manor houses on venison and French wine while Saxon carls slaved away in the fields and ate mouldy potatoes in their dingy hovels, knowing that they weren’t worth mentioning, not even in the bloody Domesday Book.
A few centuries later on, a load of dukes divided Nottinghamshire up between them, like greedy kids with a big cake. They built these vast monstrosities of houses for themselves, surrounded by acres and acres of parkland, outdoing each other to spend their cash. Worksop Manor once had five hundred rooms. How could anyone actually live in a place like that? It can’t have been a home, just a huge stone box to contain someone’s ego. And this was Worksop, for God’s sake — it ain’t exactly Florence.
Meanwhile, these peasants were still pissing about in the fields, eating the same rotten potatoes — at least, those of them that weren’t already being sent into the pits and factories, or shipped off to die in a war somewhere. They weren’t worth mentioning either. The area’s called the Dukeries, not the Peasanteries.
The rich gits may change a bit over the centuries, but it’s always the same bloody peasants. These days we don’t slave in the fields so much. In fact, we don’t slave anywhere much since the pits closed. Instead, we stand in a dole queue for our pittance. And instead of rotten potatoes we eat packets of Fry Dry frozen chips, which I don’t think are even made from anything as exciting as potatoes. Have things changed since Monsieur de Busli? I think not.
Well, we all know it’s going to be like that for ever and ever, unless someone breaks a few rules here and there. That’s where I come in. I help to share out a bit of wealth. That means breaking more than the odd rule. But they’re other people’s rules, not mine. If a load of stuck-up magistrates don’t like the way I do it, then tough shit. Maybe now and then I re-distribute more of it than strictly necessary towards the Stones McClure Benevolent Fund. So? Double tough shit.
We dumped the Escort where it would probably rust away quietly forever and switched to my Subaru Impreza Turbo 2000. I dropped Slow Kid and Dave off and watched them disappear into the darkness towards their houses. They belonged in Medensworth, and they blended into the background the moment they walked out of the light of the nearest working street lamp. Being on my own felt strange after the excitement of the afternoon, and somehow the elation was starting to turn bitter in my stomach as I drove onto the monster of a housing development they call the Forest Estate. This is my home.
You’ll find Medensworth north of the Major Oak and left a bit. Tourists looking for Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest Country Park don’t know it exists, and they wouldn’t want to. It’s one of those big pit villages that were thrown up for miners’ families when the mines were first sunk, villages that are wondering what to do with themselves now the pits have gone.
They’re not pretty, these places. But there’s some sort of symbolism in the fact that the most visited bit of Nottinghamshire, where visitors gape at a decrepit oak tree and walk along leafy woodland paths thinking they’re in the heart of rural England, is completely surrounded by pit villages and the remains of their pits. I mean places like Ollerton, Edwinstowe, Welbeck, Shirebrook. Their slag heaps are cleverly screened, but they’re still there. They look like hills thrown up by some delayed spasm of the earth. It’s like nature, or God, or whoever, spent a hard week sweating to build all those really nice mountains and rolling hills and lakes and stuff, then decided to get rat-arsed on the seventh day and spewed up all these slag heaps. They may have come from the same place as the rolling hills, but the quality isn’t the same. It’s the shitty end of creation. Medensworth is one of those places, mostly.
It was all quiet as I drove into Sherwood Crescent and round the corner into the back alley to park up. Houses in my street don’t have garages. They weren’t made for folk with cars — after all, men only had to walk up the road to reach the pit gates or the Miners Welfare. Where else would they want to go?
Now we do have cars, though details like tax and insurance and MoT certificates tend to get a bit neglected. Well, we’re not used to it. Can’t read the small print on the log book (it fades when you photocopy anything). But the number of cars parked at the kerb and blocking up the street meant we had to have garages. So there are rows of them, ramshackle corrugated iron things in the back alleys and on bits of wasteland round the estate. My motor’s in one of those — except there’s nothing ramshackle about my garage and nothing cheap about the locks either. You can’t be too careful, because you never who might decide to take a look inside. Maybe even some nosey copper. And we wouldn’t want that.
The Impreza is red and it’s new, but not too flash. Lisa wanted me to get a BMW. I could have afforded it, I suppose. But driving one of those things round here might make people think you were a criminal, right?
Oh, Lisa? Lisa reckons she’s my girlfriend. At least she comes round to my house a lot, even talks me into taking her out occasionally. And we have sex in my bedroom quite often — sometimes not even in the bedroom. So I suppose it might seem there’s some truth in what she thinks.
I let myself into 36 Sherwood Crescent, turning off the alarm and listening carefully to the sounds of the house. You get into the habit of being careful — you want to be sure that the house is empty. There wasn’t much to check out in the little hallway. Just one of the local free papers on the mat, shouting the attractions of a new fitness centre in a garish clash of coloured inks. I left the door into the sitting room open while I switched on the lights, skirting the settee and a couple of armchairs on the way to the kitchen. Apart from the telly and a good stereo, the room was pretty much empty. There are a few books on the shelf. Some local history, loaned to me by Lisa for my education. Some law books, a few crime novels — Inspector Morse and P.D. James. The certificates and the other stuff are buried in a drawer with balls of string and spare fuses and the rest of the dross.