Human Punk Read online

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  I look out of the front window and think about Debbie, wonder what she’s doing, what she’s thinking, Dave coming back from Smiles’s room with the Vibrators’ Pure Mania, Damned Damned Damned, Dr Feelgood’s Malpractice and The Ramones’ Leave Home. The Major’s standing at the end of the street, a proper scarecrow off the allotments, dressed in his Sunday best, the jumble-sale jacket and grey trousers, staring at what looks like a pile of dog shit, his face turning red at this latest crime against the community, going purple, almost gold now, as if he’s been held down and spray-canned.

  The Major might be off his rocker, but he’s harmless. He’s thirty or thereabouts, but never had a proper job in his life. Dad says it’s not that he doesn’t want to work, because he does, he’d love a nine-to-five like nothing else, to hold his head up a proud working man, but no company will give him a start. Instead of sitting in the precinct drinking meths with the dossers, or hanging around the job centre begging one of the Gestapo down there for an interview, he patrols the streets on our behalf. There’s no wage or paid holidays, no sick pay if he has a cold, but he’s glad to be busy. If he spots anything dodgy, something that’s not quite right, he’s straight over to investigate. Under-age smokers and grown-up drunks get a stern lecture off Major Tom, while shoplifters and vandals are nicked straight away. Thing is, it’s easy to get one last chance off him, even if you’ve had twenty last chances already.

  Sometimes he’ll issue an official warning, the serious look on his face making it hard not to piss yourself laughing. He lives by the rules of the land, but doesn’t let his work run his life. Five o’clock on the dot he’s off home for his tea. Even if he’s just nicked a boy for smashing up a phone box, he’ll be off in mid-sentence if it’s his teatime. The Major might be a bobby on the beat, but his mum doesn’t like her boy being late in. Sometimes he goes out on night patrol, but Dad says it depends on the weather. This is when the Major gets stick, coming out of a doorway after the pubs kick out and tapping a man on the shoulder when he’s having a piss down an alley, or like that time he tried to nick Tommy Shannon’s old man for blasphemy, saying Jesus because the Major made him jump. Mr Shannon knocked him out. Broke his glasses as well.

  The Major doesn’t seem to mind the stick too much, keeps his feelings to himself, maybe accepts it as part of the job, but deep down he must wonder, the anger bottled up inside. His thoughts are buried deep, expression firm. He can’t be planning his next Milky Bar wrapper arrest or Curly Wurly raid twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every single month of the year. I don’t know. Nobody knows. That’s the trick, I suppose, getting inside the other person’s head, seeing things from their point of view. That’s the thing about music, specially the new bands, because they’re putting into words what we’re thinking. It’s like The Clash album. The songs on there sum up our lives. That LP was already inside us, waiting for someone to write it down.

  Charlie May and his Alsatian pass the top of the road, followed by Delaney, Todd, Khan and a few others. The silver rings on Delaney’s fingers and ID bracelet on his wrist catch the light. A bell rings in Major Tom’s head when he sees the dog. I can hear it, sitting by the window with Lee Brilleaux belting out ‘Going Back Home’. The dog stops, cocks a leg, and pisses a fountain of yellow syrup against a lamp-post. It’s thick and dark, from the sun and excitement. He needs a drink, wags his tail and moves on. The piss rolls across square concrete slabs, losing its colour, something wet in a dry street, the boys, dog and piss the only movement in between dozing houses. The Major pushes his glasses into his face and takes two steps before stopping. He’s thinking. Working things out. Knows he’s only ever going to get trouble off this lot. They’re the hooligan element, up-and-coming, just about old enough. The Major’s got to behave. He turns his back and returns to the evidence, takes his notebook out, starts writing, turning pages. Maybe he gives these notes to his mum when he gets in and she studies his report as he tucks into his fish fingers and chips.

  –Fucking hell, Smiles says, sitting down on the couch, masking tape holding the stuffing into the arms, putting a Harp tray down on the carpet, four glasses of orange covering the picture of a yellow pint of lager, dog piss in a glass.

  –I thought we were going to get done when that car came round the corner. Dad would murder me if the police came knocking on our door. You know what he’s like.

  Smiles’s mum killed herself when he was eight, and his old man has never been the same since. That’s what they say, and Smiles goes along with this idea. His dad makes the headmaster at our school look like a vicar, or at least the priest who comes in once a week for the Irish kids. The headmaster, Hitler, doesn’t fuck about when it comes to discipline. He loves his cane. He’s got three hanging on the wall of his office, and makes sure he keeps the wood vibrating, specially after Charlie May crept in and had a shit on his chair, an expensive-looking effort with armrests and a padded seat. Hitler never found out who did it, so made us all suffer. He would’ve expelled the boy and, if possible, had him sent to borstal.

  Hitler loves taking revenge on the scum mucking up his life, and after he found the shit things got worse. It was same as the war films. One person in a village does something wrong and the Germans come along and machine-gun the lot. He stands there in assembly and tells us the fighting and vandalism is bad enough, that we’re a bunch of guttersnipes, lower than the lowest animal, but now someone had sunk even further down the evolutionary scale. We’re looking at the floor trying not to laugh out loud, whispering ‘the truth is only known, by, guttersnipes’, from ‘Garageland’ by the Clash, making sure the missing Ts stand out, same as Joe Strummer sings it, another game we play, fitting song words to what’s going on in front of us. The whole school knows Charlie May has left a turd in Hitler’s office, that he went and splashed out on a plate of baked beans down the cafe before school to make sure things happened fast. He had to get in and out commando-style, but Hitler isn’t giving us the messy details.

  He goes off his trolley for a few weeks, and even canes Smiles for having a fag in the bogs, which is a scum thing to do, seeing the sort of boy Smiles is and what’s happened to him in life. Bowler, the poof who teaches PE, even goes and complains. Hitler should’ve called in the Major and put him on the case. I wonder if he’s CID material, or just a beat copper, if he really sees what’s going on around him, remembers faces, builds up a picture over time, whether the notes he makes in his notebook are for show or part of a bigger plan, if every case stays open till justice is done. I just don’t know. And he’s still out there, sweating in the boiling heat, chewing his pencil, splinters in his teeth and lead on his tongue. Maybe it’s the lead doing him in. I heard it gives you brain damage.

  –Getting nicked would be the end of me, Smiles says, stuck on the flashing blue light.

  He shakes his head.

  Smiles’s old man is as bad as Hitler, so we call him Stalin, because, though we don’t know much about Stalin, there was these two men down the Friday disco last month telling us how Stalin was worse than Hitler, killed more people, how the communists are trying to destroy our culture, that they want to take away our right to earn a living, the unions run by hardliners who’ve brought British industry to its knees with their endless strikes, it was them gave us the power cuts and food shortages, trying to shut the country down, so we couldn’t even collect our rubbish, and when it comes to the Labour Party it’s all university-trained benders handing the working man’s taxes to queers and scrounging rich-kid hippies, flooding the country with coons and wogs, middle-class traitors selling the ordinary man out to the Reds. They say socialists want to corrupt British children and turn the country into a Russian slave state. They give us a National Front leaflet and we move on, find a corner where we can listen to the music. There were two bands playing that night, and there was all these different people turning up from nowhere.

  Soon as we get away this long-haired bloke comes up and tells us we shouldn’t be
talking to those two, what’s the matter with us, are we stupid, don’t we know they’re NF and want to set up concentration camps and exterminate women and children. This hippy says people who love their country live in the past, we should be ashamed of the empire and our role in world politics, that we are all equal and new laws are needed to help immigrants, that only with the help of decent white people can the coloureds climb the social ladder. The English have no culture, and what we do have is rubbish, and he goes on for ages in this posh voice so in the end you feel closer to the NF who at least have the same accent, and he says we’re responsible for the starvation in Africa, the potato famine in Ireland, is it any surprise the IRA let off bombs and kill British soldiers. He smiles same as one of your teachers, looking down his beak at us, hands us a Socialist Worker’s Party leaflet, says laws are needed so homosexuals can get better jobs. Now we might be a bit thick, but we’re not stupid, know that a homosexual is same as a benny, and with this last one we leg it into the crowd, try and find some peace.

  So we christened Smiles’s old man Stalin, to match Hitler.

  –What’s the Major up to? Dave asks, looking out the window.

  I tell him he’s found a pile of dog shit. That Charlie May just went past with his mum’s Alsatian and he’s been putting two and two together. I ask Dave if he heard the crack of that kid’s skull when Khan booted him?

  –It made me feel sick, Smiles says.