Precious can feel an elbow digging into her lower back. Her face is pressed against a policeman’s shield. The clear acrylic is heavily scratched, from years of use. Her left cheek and eye are squashed against it, and through the hazy glass she can see the riot police, standing shoulder to shoulder, with shields and batons, and more behind to hold the line.
She remembers her sons standing on the other side of a plate-glass door, between the kitchen and hall in her old flat. They used to press their faces against it while she was cooking, squashing their lips and cheeks into the glass to make her laugh.
Someone is standing on her foot. She tries to shift it.
She can hear Candy squaring up to another policeman. She does her best to twist her body in the direction of the sound.
The man Candy is shouting at is exceptionally large. In his boots, he is nearly a foot taller than she is. He is wearing a helmet, so Precious can’t see his face clearly, and his hands are covered by thick, dark gloves.
Candy tells him he’s a bastard. She tells him he should be ashamed of himself. Then she changes tack. “I piss on men like you every day,” she says. “I piss on men professionally. I piss on their faces. I piss on their cocks.”
His response is shrouded by the balaclava and his heavy helmet with its visor. He doesn’t look down at Candy, but up over the crowd.
Candy continues to shout. “I’ve pissed on police officers. I’ve pissed on judges. I’ve pissed on politicians.” She is getting angrier and angrier. The policeman ignores her, but his colleagues are now watching. One policewoman looks furious. Another scared.
Then Candy stops shouting. Her face becomes calm. She looks like she is trying to reach something on the ground, but the weight of people around is forcing her to remain standing. She lowers herself slightly, so she is just out of sight, and then she comes back up. Precious tries to push back against the person standing behind her so she can get a better look, but she doesn’t need to see. She can soon feel it underfoot. Urine.
The large policeman is now looking down at her and she is smiling up at him. And then he jumps. He has felt what she is doing. He moves like a spooked bull in a cattle chute. He is pinned to his position by the crowd of protesters in front and the line of police to the back, but his movement is involuntary, and explosive. He swings his arms wildly. People around him are knocked to the ground. Candy is knocked down, and Precious too. Precious manages to crawl away, but she watches as Hazel and some of the others are wrestled to the ground by police officers, then dragged kicking and screaming and shouting into the backs of police vans and driven away.
Then the rain comes. Clouds were building all afternoon, but now they fall, as if clouds are what happens when the world begins to daydream, and rain comes when it is revived. At first the water falls as thick drops, slowly then suddenly very quickly, then as ice. The hail shatters against tarmac and concrete and brick, casting shards into the gutters and drains.
The Past
Robert often sees a ghost. The ghost walks at night with a ghostly dog. He isn’t as tall as he used to be, his bones having fallen into one another with age like kindling licked by flame, but Robert still recognizes the outline: his gait, his long nose, the way he looks over his shoulder after he changes direction. The dog is new, but suits him, tall and thin like a greyhound, but with long, white silky fur. It trots at his heel. They come from Mayfair, cross Regent Street, then walk the backstreets of Soho. Robert thinks about calling out to the man, or going over and tapping him on the shoulder, but he doesn’t.
Robert moved from Glasgow to London in his twenties. During an Old Firm fight he bottled the son of someone important and was advised to disappear. He traveled to London with a small piece of paper in his pocket, with the address of someone who could help him get work scrawled in pen, and a name Robert couldn’t make out. He followed directions from Euston Station into Soho and knocked on a door at street level, then was led upstairs to an office. When Roster was a young man he was exceptionally handsome. Even Robert remembers being impressed. Reginald Roster was five, maybe ten years older than Robert, and he looked after him, in a sense. Roster was the boss’s driver, but also much more. The boss had all his most important conversations in the back of his car, and Roster heard them. He sorted everything out for him, and he gathered men like Robert to help him do it.
Robert sits alone in a holding cell. He was brought in for a chat, then he got rough and was put in the cell to cool off. He has a phone call. When he used to get in trouble, back in the day, he would call Roster, and Roster would come with the lawyer. It must be thirty years, but that phone number is still as clear to him as ever. Robert has no idea if it is still in use. He isn’t sure where it was connected to, at the time; either to a line in the Soho office, or maybe to a line at the Mayfair townhouse.
Robert thinks about calling Lorenzo, but he’s already regretting everything he told him. Lorenzo
