My Fortnight With Joe
by Mark Colbourne
Me hand is all to sixes and sevens as I grip the brick and stand in front of the shop window.
“So what are we gonna do now?” I ask Joe.
Joe’s behind me. He’s gone and got himself a Mohican since the last time I saw him. A savage shock of hair which splits his shaved, bone-white scalp right down the centre.
“Put the window through,” he snarls, all snaggle-toothed and angry phlegm. “It means nothing.”
I’m shaking like a shitting dog. There’s no one about except me and Joe, what with it being three in the morning and all. The supermarket’s been closed for hours, but the security shutters are only fitted to roll down over the main doors - the big sheets of glass either side are a tempting, wide-open target.
“But what if we get caught?” I kind of whimper. This was all Joe’s idea, you see. It was always Joe’s idea.
“Nobody wants to go to jail,” he sneers. “But that ain’t going to happen. Just chuck the brick.”
Joe’s pretty persuasive, I got to admit. Leaning back, I take me aim and lob a goodun so it flies through the night in a foggy slow motion before smashing through the wall-sized pane. The quiet of the street explodes in a brittle crash and then this alarm starts a vicious, celebratory whooping. Joe grabs my shoulder and yells at me to leg it. I snap to and follow him down and out of the street.
I’d known Joe for about two weeks. I bumped into him the evening after I got the push from me job and was sinking some sorrows down the Cavern Arms. Joe walked in wearing combat boots, ripped trousers and a shirt with “1977” stencilled across the tits. He looked the proper dogs, I swear. He sat himself opposite and asked what the hell was wrong with me. I bought him a pint and told him all about me getting me marching orders from the supermarket earlier that day, about how they said I was scruffy and late for the last time and it weren’t really for me. Joe asked if I’d liked my boring job anyway, and when I said no way he told me it was no bad thing I weren’t having other people pushing the buttons.
“You don’t wanna be working for the clampdown,” he spat.
I came to realise over the next couple of days that he talked quite a lot like this, did Joe.
We run from the supermarket and across the precinct, jumping down the flights of criss-crossed concrete stairs before heading across a car park and up an alley where we hang against a wall to catch our breath.
“So where you wanna go next?” he asks me through a smokers’ gasping wheeze. We both have our hands on our knees and are gulping greedily for air.
“We need to get some sleep, Joe. It’s dead late.”
“Bullshit detection. You’re an all night drug prowling wolf,” he states. “And I don’t wanna hear this should we go bollocks. Drives you fackin’ mad. Where you gonna go? Yer mum won’t let you back in the ‘ouse anyway. You ain’t got yerself any safe place to call home.”
He was right on this score. Me old dear had only gone and chucked us out just the day before. What a bitch, man! Right at the time when I was most down on me uppers. Just cos I couldn’t cough up for me housekeeping, what with me losing me gig at the supermarket and all, she goes and turfs us onto the street. Now, I weren’t taking it right cool, to tell the truth of it. Last night had been a hard old one on the park bench and only a couple of hours ago I’d been settling down for another uncomfy kip when Joe came up and shook me leg.
“Nice haircut,” I’d told him as I sat up, rubbed me eyes and clocked his mo-hawk.
“What? You don’t like it?” Joe stroked an affectionate hand down the side of his freshly shaved skull. “Anyway: up off the bench. We got stuff to do.”
“Like what?”
“That job they stitched you up on - offering you the shop like they did for this to happen. We’re gonna go and take the fight, man. Give them a little hate and war. Wrong ‘em, boyo.”
“I don’t always understand what you mean, Joe. D’you know that?”
“We’re gonna get lost in that supermarket. I can’t think of any better way to spend the night.”
“I dunno. I ain’t sure that’s such a good idea.”
“But you wanna get your own back, don’t you? You can’t deny that.”
And I suppose Joe was right, but looking back now as we walked out of alley and towards the centre of town, I thought maybe we’d have done a bit more than just chucking a brick through the window. I don’t though, maybe sometimes the simplest statements are the most eloquent; sometimes the most brutal acts contain the greatest purity.
The sky’s clear and warm even though it’s night. You can see the stars up above and twinkling right bright like a cheeky kid’s eyes. It’s the kind of night that can give a bloke a little hope, you know, despite the wrong turns and bum steers the days always seemed to shunt in the road.
“You have no fear,” Joe says breathlessly, almost like he’s reading my mind.
Just before the High Street, he comes to a dead stop outside the Cavern Arms boozer. This was where I’d first met Joe, remember, and where I’d bumped into him for a second time. I’d been on a bit of a bender, to be honest, after losing me job and that. I’d sat in the Cavern for pretty much two days straight, just swigging off on me tod. Joe came in and he was wearing a demob suit with this skinny black tie. He bought the drinks and sat down at my table.
“Christ, you look like you’ve been drinking brew for breakfast,” he told me, eyeing my sulk with a lop-sided smile and roll-up cigarette.
I was slurring all me words by this point, and to me shame I must admit I kind of lost it a bit. I started ranting on about the supermarket and how they had no right to do what they did and it was a shit job anyway and what kind of bloke must I be if I can’t even hold something like that down.
“Career opportunities are the ones that never knock,” Joe noted.
And then, cos I was so pissed and pissed off, I swung me arm out and caught the table and the whole lot went over. Big Ernie who runs the gaff vaulted the bar in the flash of an eye to have me up by the scruff of me neck and heading to the door. He said to get out and stay out, telling us I was just some drunken loser scum. Joe remained where he was. I think he may have even started to laugh.
But standing in front of the place now, the door all shut up and the lights turned off, Joe assesses the pub and shakes his head thoughtfully.
“We ought to get this place, too,” he says.
“Right,” I whisper, and to tell the truth I’m a little reluctant. Joe seems to pick this up from the tone of me voice.
“These fuckers wronged you, man. When you was at your lowest, when you needed a place to hang your head, what did they do?”
“They chucked me out. Barred me.”
“That’s right. They ain’t got no respect for you. You know something, I was talking to Freddie Mercury the other day, and he reckons the British don’t have no respect for no one till they’re dead.”
“He’s got a point, I suppose,” I say, thinking about old Freddie’s words.
“Maybe, but the day I start agreeing with Freddie fucking Mercury’s the day I hang up my spurs and go straight to hell.”
“D’you get to see many famous dead people in Heaven, Joe?” I ask him.
“Some. Y’know. The odd face here and there.”
“You ever met Kurt Cobain?” And I spring up a little excited by this thought.
“Course I have - but ain’t seen him a while. He’s formed a band with Sid Vicious. They’re doing all these smackhead songs about scoring dope in the afterlife.”
”Really? What they called?”
“Holy Shit.”
“Any good?”
“Absolutely fuckin’ dreadful,” he sighs. “Now, c’mon. Let’s get this sorted.”
Joe kicks the top off this nearby bin and tips it upside down so the litter drops in a pile at the foot of the door. “Throw in a light. Come on. Death or glory,” he tells me.
I drag out this little pack of matches – which, weirdly enough, I’d picked up from a pile on the bar of the Cavern Arms a fortnight ago – out me jeans and carefully light one, shielding the sparking strip from any stray gust of wind the night might have the mischief to throw. Leaning down by the rubbish, I find a chunky sporting section from a discarded tabloid and it takes the flame like it’s been waiting for this moment all its life. The rest of the pile quickly follows suit.
Me and Joe stand there for a moment staring into the flames. I got to admit it’s a pretty hypnotic type of thing, the way they flicker and grow, the way they fold and lap, the way they jump like dogs teased with a treat that’s just out of reach. The fire spreads up to kick at the heavy, wooden front door. The paint blackens and peels with its hands raised high in surrender. Above us on the first floor, Joe sees a light appear.
“C’mon,” he tells me. “Let’s clear out.”
I follow Joe as we run down the High Street, away from the fire. Behind us in the distance by the pub I can hear someone screaming all the bastards under the sun.
After I’d got barred from the Cavern I gotta tell you I got real, proper low. I spent a couple of days just slumped on the sofa in me mum’s living room, watching crap TV and thinking the whole world was against me. Mum’d come home from work and look at us like I was a shitstain and then the arguments would all kick off right on cue. I reckon me old mum’s always been in a bit of a piss with us. I mean, she’s never said it in as many words to me face or nothing, but she blames me for a lot of the grief she’s had to put up with. I can tell. Dad leaving all them years ago, her having to work so much, me never doing too clever at school or getting a girlfriend and moving out of home even though I’m nearly through me teens. I’m stuck there like I have been all me life and mum can see that and I don’t think the old girl likes it not one bit. You ever been called a useless fucker by your mum? I have, you see. I have.
Anyway, I was sitting there one day when she was out and Joe called round so I asked him in to watch a bit of telly. I was glad of the company, to be honest. It was getting right moody just sat there being miserable and that.
“Why d’you keep popping up then, Joe?” I asked him.
He laughed his cackling laugh and told me to think of him as my guardian angel.
To be honest, I didn’t really know what he meant by that.
“But why you here?” I pleaded.
“Because you need a friend, my son. You weren’t born. Not into this life. You just fell out. No one seems to notice you. And if you ain’t being kept company by all the screams and the sirens then all this silence makes you lonely.”
I was a bit stunned by what Joe said, and I didn’t really know what to make of it. He looked pretty sad himself all of a sudden, too, as if saying all that about me had also somehow affected him. He got up, shaking his head and left the room. Then me mum came home and we started having a barney about what I was supposed to be doing with my life and all the way through that I still seemed to have Joe’s gruff voice ringing in me ears.
Before tonight, that was the last time I’d seen Joe. “One last place to go,” he tells me as our sprints stumble to a jog before collapsing to a walk, and as we take the turn across the ring road I realise we’re heading back to me mum’s house.
“Thought you said we weren’t going home?” I ask Joe.
“You know what I said? Well, some if it was true, but we gotta do this one last thing.” Joe suddenly picks up his pace and after all the running I’m finding meself struggling to keep up.
“Joe?” I say, cos I know the question I’m gonna ask is pretty dumb and I don’t wanna sound thick in front of him. “What’s it like where you live? You know? Up there?” And I kind of look up into the stars, cos that’s where I imagine Heaven to be.
“It’s… nice,” he laughs. “There’s a lot of interesting folk to talk to. You can’t ever say that you get bored and that.” He stops for a moment and seems to consider something. “But, you know, there’s bad sides to good things just like there’s good sides to bad things. It makes a change to be sent back down here, back to the underground.”
We start walking again, getting closer and closer to me old home, through the council estates and maisonette flats, past the rows of shops and the sexual health clinic, until we reach it.
I stand by Joe’s side in front of me moms little garden of yellow and red paving slabs.
I look at Joe and he just nods real slow back at me. I know what I got to do.
There’s a milk bottle at the side of the doorstep. I go to collect it and come back to the top of the garden by Joe, then turn and chuck the milk bottle at the front door so it smashes with this great big sodding almighty crash. The light comes on in me mom’s bedroom and I’m shouting how much I hate her stupid guts and all the lights start sparking in the neighbours’ houses and then this police car pulls up and two coppers grab me and bundle me into the motor and all the while I’m still screaming and crying and bawling all these things out.
By the time I get to the police station, I’ve calmed down quite a bit. In the holding cell, a copper sees this and comes in to have a little chat to me. I ask him how they got to me mom’s house so quick, and he said they were on their way there anyway.
CCTV caught me throwing that brick through the supermarket window and lighting the fire outside the pub. Me old boss who’d come down the shop to turn off the alarm had identified me and grassed up my address. Well, suppose it was in the post. Joe may have had a lot of great ideas, but he didn’t always seem to think them through proper. And me, well, thinking was never much my bag anyway.
The copper goes out of the cell and Joe slips in.
“Alright,” he says. “That manager of yours, eh? What a bastard. You were right to not trust him.”
“And he never trusted me,” I sigh.
“At least you made your stand,” Joe tells me. “The Law may of won, but at least you fought ‘em.”
“Suppose so.” Sitting on my little bench, I feel pretty odd and all kind of deflated. “Joe?”
“Yeah?”
“Was your daddy really a bank robber?”
“No,” Joe says as he steps back out of the cell. “He was a civil servant.”
And along the corridor, one by one, the jail doors go clang, clang, clang.
May 5th, 2007 at 12:43 am
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