From the building they have left, Precious can hear banging and shouting and furniture being thrown.
They get to the top of the fire escape and step out onto the flat roof. Up high, the wind is even stronger and colder. It blows through their dressing gowns and pajamas. Precious takes small comfort in the garden. She is standing with her rose plant, her herbs, the evergreens, but comes to the sad realization that this is quite possibly the last time she will see any of them. She hopes they won’t be destroyed. It wouldn’t matter to anyone else; they are only plants. But she put them there herself, and she has cared for them for years. She can see a slug on the rose right now, the cheeky bastard. It seems to be feasting on the leaf mulch she placed at the base, but it will soon make its way up the woody stem and begin feasting on the plant itself.
Precious moves towards the edge of the roof and looks down. She can see people being dragged out of the building. Some of the girls were working. She can see naked bodies being thrown onto the street. Girls in underwear, shivering as they are shoved into police vans. Men too, cowering in the cold beneath the stark lamplight.
She can see the dogs now, as well as hear them. Huge German Shepherds and Dobermans, up on their hind legs, pulling on their leads furiously, jaws gnashing.
She has known dogs. That sort only have love for their handlers and they will perform whatever task is asked of them. Right now they are being held back, but they are pulling with all their strength to be free, and if any of those police officers let go of the rope, they would be on their victims, tearing them apart.
“Why did they bring the dogs?” Precious mutters.
It was a vaguely rhetorical question but Tabitha responds anyway. “They’ll be searching for drugs, or firearms.”
Precious looks down again. Some of the Archbishop’s disciples have begun to come out of the cellar. She doesn’t know if the police even went down there or whether the vagrants just came crawling out on hearing the commotion, like worms at the sound of stamping feet. They hear the thumping, think it might be something good, then come up to the surface to see, only to get stamped on or run over or pulled from the earth by hungry blackbirds and fed to a nest of squawking chicks.
The police scoop them up as soon as they appear. The lot of them are funneled into the back of a windowless van. She sees them, thin and pasty, hunched over, dejected. The doors of the van are shut behind them, and then the vehicle begins to drive away.
They never did find that Cheryl Lavery, she reflects.
Tabitha comes to join Precious at the edge of the roof. She has carried the handheld megaphone from the street protest up to the roof with her. She hands it to Precious.
“Call for help,” insists Tabitha. “Say something.”
“It’s three in the morning, hun. We’ll wake the neighbors.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Who is going to help us?” She points. “The police are down there.”
Tabitha snatches the megaphone. “I’ll do it, then.” She switches on the device and begins to shout through it, calling out for help, denouncing the police, screaming out injustices past, present and future. The batteries give in after about forty-five seconds and the grainy, electronically enhanced voice fades to a hoarse, human rasp, battling the billowing wind.
Precious begins to laugh. Tabitha looks at her friend. Her face is cross at first then she smiles, then she laughs too. The women laugh together.
“God knows what I thought was going to happen,” says Tabitha. She throws her head back and laughs again. Precious draws her in for a cuddle, then notices something. “Look,” she says. “There are some people staring at us from that hotel window.” A light has flicked on in the building across the street, and a man and a woman are peering out nervously from behind a thick set of curtains. The woman has a phone pressed against her face.
“She’s calling the police, look. From where she is she can’t see the police down on the ground. She must think we’re up to no good.”
“Do you think she’s calling the police so they come and help us or so they come and arrest us?”
“Hard to say.”
There is now also a crowd of people gathering on the street. Some are pointing upwards. Some are shrieking and shouting things Precious and Tabitha can’t hear.
“They think we’re going to jump,” Tabitha observes. “Are we going to jump?”
“No we are not,” Precious replies, incredulous. “I don’t feel suicidal at this moment in time. Do you?”
“Not one bit. I have an unquenchable lust for life.”
“Well then.”
“It’s just I thought this was going to be a much more effective and dramatic last stand than it has in fact been.”
Last Night Stand: Part II
A few streets away, Robert Kerr has been unable to sleep. He is slumped on his couch in pants and an old T-shirt, a brown beer bottle in one hand,
