London Calling (5 page)

Apart from the minor head injury, today was a fairly standard day. Peeling his tongue off the floor of his mouth, Carlyle tried to swallow. His head throbbed viciously, nastier than any bastard hangover he had yet managed to inflict on himself during his first two decades on the planet. Behind the pain, ‘I Fought the Law’ by The Clash was playing on a continuous loop deep within the mush of his brain. Under different circumstances, the irony would have made him smile. Now he just wished that Joe Strummer, Mick Jones et al. would kindly shut the fuck up and get out of his head.

Carlyle looked up at the gargoyle. ‘Got any aspirin?’

The paramedic grunted and tossed him a small foil-covered tray of pills pulled from his pocket. Carlyle popped two, and then another two, shoving the remainder into the inside pocket of his overalls. He grabbed a bottle of water from the low wall on which he was sitting, and took a cautious sip. His throat felt raw and it didn’t feel as if the pills would stay down. He felt the aspirin fighting their way back up, and swallowed hard.

‘Will I need stitches?’ Carlyle asked hopefully. Naturally squeamish at the best of times, he wasn’t a big fan of hospitals, but a couple of hours spent in one this afternoon would do nicely. He was in the market for some sympathy, and some hands-on care from a nubile nurse would go down a treat.

‘You’ll be fine,’ the gargoyle said, as he stripped off his rubber gloves and groped for the packet of cigarettes in the breast pocket of his uniform. ‘The brick, or whatever it was, basically bounced off your helmet. You should have a nice scar though. I’m sure it will look good for the girls.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ Carlyle grimaced, filing the comment away for future reference, all the same. Anything that helped with girls would be more than welcome. He wondered if he would have to pay for a new helmet. The old one had gone flying when he went down, and was now probably destined to become a trophy in someone’s living room.

‘Leave the plaster on for a couple of days,’ advised the gargoyle in a detached tone, sounding as if he was reading from a book of instructions. ‘If the cut opens up again after you take it off, go to the hospital.’ He glanced back down the road, whence the noise of the crowd ebbed and flowed. It was like listening to the spectators at a football match when you were standing two streets away from the ground itself. ‘I wouldn’t visit one round here, though, if I were you,’ he added, grinning.

‘No,’ Carlyle nodded. Round here, the police weren’t exactly popular.

‘You wouldn’t want another crack on the head,’ the medic added.

‘No.’

‘And you wouldn’t want to get yourself lynched.’

‘No.’

The gargoyle pulled an unfiltered cigarette out of his packet of Capstan. Carlyle smiled as he recognised the sailor logo. Capstan Full Strength (
For men who feel strongly about cigarette taste!
) had been his grandfather’s chosen brand. Ever since Carlyle could remember, his granddad’s fingers had been stained yellow from the nicotine and his cardigan pocket marked with cigarette burns. He’d always have a cigarette in one hand, often with a glass of Johnnie Walker Red Label in the other. Carlyle was no expert, but reckoned that the cigs and the booze didn’t do much for the old fella’s health. He had died two years previously, having barely made sixty but looking as if he was twenty years older.

Lighting up, the gargoyle ran a hand over his shaven head to wipe away a sheen of sweat that reappeared almost immediately. After a deep drag, he took the cigarette from his mouth, lent over and coughed up a large lump of brown phlegm which he deposited into the gutter, before plonking himself down on the back step of the ambulance. In the front cab, a radio chattered away, but he paid it no heed.

Along the road Carlyle counted another three ambulances where various policemen and strikers – coal miners who had been engaged in an increasingly messy and bitter industrial dispute for several months now – were being attended to for their minor injuries. One of the policemen was busy arguing with a photographer who had just taken his picture. Rather than wait to get thumped or, worse still, have his camera smashed into the tarmac, the snapper turned on his heels and marched off as quickly as he could manage, without quite breaking into a trot. The copper obviously thought about going after him before deciding that it just wasn’t worth the effort.

Further in the background, the hum of the afternoon’s struggle continued: five thousand police versus five thousand strikers. The scuffles that had been raging all across a worthless couple of acres of scrubland – outside the coking plant in an exhausted village called Orgreave, about five miles south of Sheffield, in the self-proclaimed Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire – showed no sign of abating.

Smoke rose lazily into the sky from a car that had been cremated, by accident or design, on the edge of the skirmishes. The gargoyle took a final monster drag on his cigarette and tossed it next to a discarded yellow
Coal Not Dole
sticker lying on the pavement. Stubbing it out with the toe of his liver-coloured Doc Martens boot, he wandered into a front garden a couple of doors down, to take a piss behind a bush.

Carlyle looked around, wondering what to do next. This wasn’t what he had signed up for. Pouring most of the last of the water from the bottle over his head, he promised himself that, once this nonsense was finally all over, he would scuttle back to London and bloody well stay there.

Constable John Carlyle’s badge number was V253. Like all of the police officers, however, today he was not wearing any number. The normal identification worn on their shoulder straps had been taken off before the start of the day’s proceedings, to help avoid any trouble involving legal action and civil-liberties claims later. This divestment had become part of the daily pre-ruck ritual on the coach, as the officers were delivered to whichever picket line they were policing that morning.

‘Right, lads,’ barked their Scottish sergeant, Charlie Ross, ‘numbers off. Stick ’em in your pockets. We are not going to have any problems today.’

‘No, Sergeant.’

‘Rest assured, gentlemen, that no one will be pissing all over your fine work accomplished here at a later date.’ A general murmur of agreement rose from the seats closest to him. ‘And, remember, what happens on the picket line, stays on the picket line. We watch each other’s backs.’

‘Yes, Sergeant,’ came back the weary reply.

The smell on board was foul. The air was thick with stale sweat, body odour and nervous excitement. Carlyle stared out of the window and tried to breathe through his mouth. Sitting next to him was Dominic Silver, another recent recruit from Hendon. Dom was a genuine, one hundred per cent cockney, an east London lad, complete with regulation cheery-chappy grin plastered across his face. He was considered a ‘mate’, the kind of bloke who you should never confuse with a friend. Still, under the circumstances, Carlyle was more than happy to have someone he knew on the bus with him that morning.

Dom rocked back and forth, playing an imaginary set of drums on the back of the seat in front of him. He was speeding his tits off, but so was Carlyle. Dom knew where to get his hands on the best amphetamine sulphate, and half a teaspoon in a mug of black coffee set the day up nicely. Tired and wired was a million times better than just tired.

Dom broke off from his drum solo, nudged Carlyle in the ribs and stuck his hand up. ‘Sergeant?’ he gestured, like a hyper five year old. ‘Sergeant?’

Carlyle rolled his eyes to the heavens, knowing what was coming.

‘Yes, son?’ Charlie Ross grinned, enjoying such banter. In his fifties, he was at least twenty-five years older than anyone else on the bus. Carlyle couldn’t decide whether that made him super-hard or merely super-sad. On the brink of retirement, Charlie was small and gaunt, with sunken cheeks and a biker moustache straight out of Village People. When he rolled up his sleeves, you could see a Japanese dragon tattoo on his right forearm. There was an evil twinkle in his eye at all times, except when the booze took hold and he was about to keel over.

Despite the crushing schedule, all of this rushing around Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire had given Charlie a new lease of life. He looked twenty years younger than he had done when Carlyle had first seen him three months earlier, outside Cortonwood colliery, just down the road from where they were today, frogmarching a striker towards a Black Maria.

Dom put his question slowly and thoughtfully: ‘Didn’t I read in the paper that the new Home Secretary has promised that
all
transgressions on the picket line, committed by
either
side, will be dealt with properly, without fear or favour?’

The sarky little bugger had been reading the
Daily Telegraph
again. Not for the first time, Carlyle wondered why Dom hadn’t gone for some career that would have been better suited to his restless spirit and sharp brain. Surely, it would have been easy for him to get into the City and make shitloads of money as some kind of trader. He was just too sharp to be a plod.

Laughter trickled round the bus. The small minority aware that the relatively exotic Leon Brittan had become Home Secretary only a week before did not have much time for
his
views on their current battle. A CV that included Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School, Trinity College Cambridge, President of the Cambridge Union Society and a career as a lawyer certainly did not impress these young police officers. They knew that such a background didn’t give him the right to pass comment on those obliged to do the dirty work.

Charlie stuck his thumbs into the breast pockets of his tunic and thrust out his chest. ‘Well’ – he had been given his cue and was preparing for the big build-up – ‘I can tell you this …’ he then glanced up and down the bus to make sure his audience was paying attention, ‘… there are three things in life that are of absolutely no use to man or beast …’

Carlyle grinned. He had heard it all before, several times, but he knew that Charlie’s monologue would still make him laugh.

Charlie ploughed on: ‘These are the Pope’s testicles …’ pause, smiles all round, ‘tits on a man …’ another pause to acknowledge the cheers, ‘and …’ extra pause, ‘a politician’s promise.’ A fierce round of applause ran through the bus, accompanied by cheers, whistles and truncheons being beaten against windows. Charlie made a small bow and, having milked it enough, let the smile fall from his lips. He began prowling the aisle, eyeing up his charges, looking for any signs of doubt or apprehension. ‘These fuckers aren’t going to give us any trouble today. Am I right?’

Nervous laughter filled the coach. A couple of cheery voices responded to Charlie’s rallying cry: ‘Yes, Sergeant!’

‘So don’t be shy.’ Ross chuckled as he watched a group of mounted police gathering fifty yards down the road. ‘Show ’em who’s boss.’

A few more joined in this time: ‘Yes, Sergeant!’

‘Don’t be a bunch of fucking poofs. Show those fucking communists who’s fucking boss.’

‘YES, SERGEANT!’

As the din died down, a voice came from the back of the bus: ‘Where are we, Sergeant?’

Charlie Ross gazed dreamily out of the window. ‘Dunno, son. Some DNS or other.’

‘DNS?’ someone asked.

‘Dirty Northern Shithole.’

More laughter.

Another voice piped up: ‘And what are we doing here, Sergeant?’

‘Precisely?’ asked another.

‘Exactly?’ Carlyle laughed.

‘Specifically?’ queried another wag.

‘What is this?’ Charlie snarled in mock fury, though loving every minute of it. ‘Twenty fucking questions?’ He smacked his truncheon against the side of a nearby seat and fixed his stare on one of the questioners. ‘We are here, lads, as you very well know, to maintain law and fucking order; to allow the ordinary working man do his job without interference; to protect the innocent; and,’ he paused again, to unveil his final and most winning smile of the morning, ‘most importantly of all, to break some fucking heads.’

Carlyle’s headache was getting worse. He swallowed another aspirin and pocketed the foil wrapper. Sitting motionless on the wall, he shut his eyes in an attempt to try to keep out the light, which seemed to be bouncing off every available surface in order to assault his brain with the maximum violence possible. He took a couple of slow, deep breaths. Finally, his heart slowed to a more recognisable beat. Now he could at least count the various different components of his all-round discomfort. Under the uniform, his T-shirt had melted into his chest. Sweat trickled down his spine and between the cheeks of his bum. Right on cue, his piles started playing up and he felt as if he had a knife stuck up his arse. He could feel his stomach churning and felt a chill wrap itself around his shoulders. Being so dehydrated, at least Carlyle didn’t also have to worry about needing a piss. With all the gear on, it would have taken him the best part of an hour to expose his dick.

Somewhere along the road, he could hear the hooves of a pair of police horses clattering over tarmac. Beyond them, a roar went up on the field of combat, as one side charged the other. Carlyle closed his eyes tighter and refocused on his breathing.

After a few minutes, he tried to stand and felt his legs buckle. His mouth was still dry and sticky and his stomach heaved. He leant over the nearest wall and vomited into the garden. That brought some temporary relief, and he tried to puke again but nothing more would come out. Carlyle pushed his fingers down his throat. No joy. Spent, he just sat there, feeling useless.

After a few moments, the dizziness eased. Sticking another couple of aspirin in his mouth, he took a final swig of water and swallowed quickly. Standing up, he began moving slowly up the street, away from the din of conflict. A police Alsatian had become separated from his handler, and was casually walking along the road too, heading away from all the noise and confusion. Like Carlyle, the dog looked as if he’d had more than enough for the day.

Carlyle kept his eyes on the ground, quickly jumping backwards as a piece of brick exploded near his feet.