Amjad stopped outside the Croner Hotel and told Estela she was sure to find Michael Cross inside. Estela asked him to wait. If Michael was there, she’d be right out to pay him. ‘No offence,’ he said, ‘I trust you.’ But he wasn’t hanging around. Not today, not when things had got so heavy recently. Amjad told her: ‘Dead cert, Michael Cross would be there, no worries.’ Estela stayed in the back of Amjad’s Nissan for a while to watch the boys in pin-rolls and puffa jackets cruise up and down the road on their mountain bikes. Every time one passed the cab, he would look down – half-interested because his job depended upon him remaining aware. Otherwise, every one of them looked indifferent. They pushed their pedals around in long slow movements, standing up from their seats and scanning the streets in equally long and slow circular movements. They looked like some kind of super-evolved bird that had given up its wings for the bicycle. Black herons with their heads cocked against the breeze.
Estela paid and thanked Amjad – see you around — and entered through the side door, the entrance that Amjad had pointed out for her. Sweet clouds of dope hung frozen under the pool table lights. Waiting until her eyes grew acclimatised to the heavy fug, Estela stepped out.
It did not take her long to find Michael Cross. He was stood by one of the two pool tables in the shadows to the rear of the Croner Hotel. Running around the three walls of the pool area was a shelf built to hold the players’ drinks. Michael was leaning against it, at ease, his elbows braced against the shelf-edge and his feet slightly apart on the floor. Estela wasn’t fooled. She saw a body that could straighten and sprint in a moment. He had kept himself in shape over the past years. A different shape to her, he was barely changed. Maybe a few more lines, enough to prove age carries experience. The dreads were new, but Michael Cross had always been wise to fashions. The short, un-rasta locks were woven flat to the top of the crown until they burst out like a comet tail behind his head – as though he were locked in a cartoonish hyper-drive. In motion, even when he was sagging against a pool room wall.
Walking towards him, a white boy cut across her path and reached Michael first. She heard the boy ask for an eighth. Michael reached under the shelf and came up with a knife that must have been stuck blade-first into the shelf’s underside. Taking a black stick of resin from his pocket, he cut a sliver from one end and pushed it towards the boy with a wink. Michael pocketed the note and few coins the boy offered, nodding thanks as the boy shuffled away. It was only then he saw Estela. She could have laughed, he was so intent on cool seduction.
‘Where’re you going to, honey, because I tell you, I want to come along for the ride.’
Michael Cross had a lazy grin, breaking open on to a band of white between his full purple lips. Like an orthodonist’s dream, framed by tear-drop dimples.
‘You look sweet, I mean it. You could light up this room like you’re a thousand-watt bulb. Just let me supply the candle-power.’
‘I don’ think so, Michael,’ Estela said. ‘You far too old for me.’
His eyes, that had shone like pools of limpid Bovril, narrowed. His smile began to chew at itself. Estela enjoyed the pause. Beneath the surface, Michael thrashed about for a clue. Estela admired the outward calm. He could not place her.
‘Do I know you? Because if I’d had the pleasure, I would have bet on me remembering,’ Michael said, finally.
‘Estela Santos.’
Michael flexed effortlessly, and stood upright to meet her outstretched hand. His grip was dry.
‘I wish I knew who you were, sister.’
‘You know me, Michael,’ Estela lisped sweetly before dropping her voice to a nasal drone. ‘I don’t believe you won’t let on to me, you twat.’
It took a second to register: ‘Paul! What’ve they fucking done to you?’
Now they were sitting in the other bar, drinking together in the near-empty calm of the spacious lounge area, they had a chance to catch up. Estela had said she was working for some businessmen, over in the States. Michael nodded, Yeah? He was doing this and that: you know, keeping up appearances. There was still one thing bothering him, Estela could tell.
‘Are you going to lose that voice?’ he had to ask.
‘Does it upset you?’
‘It doesn’t do anything for me, that’s for sure.’
‘It will grow on you,’ said Estela in melodic Anglo-Latin. She loved the way a burst of her Manchester accent had shocked Michael out of his cool, she could swear she saw smoke blowing out of his ears.
‘I hear all the old boys are in prison,’ she said.
Michael had reasserted his kharmic deportment. Estela always admired his balance. His voice purred with the mellifluence of a power-tool, turned-on but not put to work – only stirring the air.
‘That’s right, the Western Union is out of business. The brothers got heavy-duty sentences. By the time they’re out we’ll all be too old for that kind of shit. I’m sweet. I tell you, I walk through the estate, and all these kids come up saying I’m the OG – the godfather. But I’m through with anything but dealing a little draw. I’m taking it easy. I’ll be playing dominoes and drinking rum before long.’
‘You were sent down, too. It’s what I heard,’ Estela said. Michael let his arms hang by his side: Yeah. Shrugging; it was a stupid business.
‘I still can’t fucking believe that. I got sent down for being a football hooligan. And that was in, like, 1988.’
‘You don’ think you were too mature for that kind of thing?’
‘Too right. I hadn’t been on that tip for years. At the time, there was all kind of things in the papers about cracking down on the Waving Tide Of Hooliganism, if you believe the papers. The same time, the clubs are pledging to get heavy with the Small Violent Minority and the government are threatening a whole load of new shit. I didn’t pay attention to the hype, it’s not like I was going to get into anything. I was going to watch a match, that was it.
‘City were playing Everton. Even before kick-off, there’s chanting from the other side about the niggers on the pitch and the niggers on the terraces. But when it’s at a match, you don’t notice it any more. It just goes on all the time, you drown them out by singing louder.
‘What I didn’t realise, because I wasn’t even looking for it, was the coppers keeping an eye on me. Maybe they thought that if City were playing stone-cold racists like half the people following Everton, then it’s going to be a brother who starts any trouble.’
Michael paused. Estela sensed a pulse of anger, beginning to break beneath Michael’s composed front.
‘After we left the ground, the police keep us separate from the Everton crowd. We can see all these kids from Everton flicking V’s and shouting Nigger. We just face them down. Then someone breaks through the line of police – not even a black lad. There’s a surge forward, we clout a few kids as we’re pushed past them. That’s it. The next day, I see myself on the front page of the Manchester Evening News – Hard Core Hooligan. I’ve been filmed by a video camera in the ground, just chanting on the terraces. They got me at the right moment, I look like an animal ready to tear some cunt apart – but I know I was only singing. The police swear that I was the one who orchestrated the trouble after the match.
‘The police give evidence that I’ve been behind most of the violence at Maine Road for the past fifteen years. They say I’m known on the Kippax as the Black Napoleon. All other kinds of shit, you know. That it was time to make an example of people like me. In the end, I couldn’t believe they only gave me three years. I thought they were going to roast my nuts and hang them over the ground.’
‘That’s too bad.’
‘Too right.’
‘I hated prison,’ Estela admitted. ‘That’s why you had to get me out.’
A nod, Yeah, he’d helped her out. ‘But with me, I couldn’t believe I stayed out for so long so I just rolled over and accepted it. If you’re a face, you know, you think that you’ll get banged up eventually. But serving two years …’ Michael shrugged again, in a way that Estela read as: two wasted years.
‘And even then I could say I was lucky because I spent some of it in Strangeways. At least I was in Manchester, living in the same city as my family. But after the Strangeways riot, the Home Office ended up transferring me to Scotland.’
Estela picked up on Michael’s mention of his family. ‘You’ve got a couple of boys haven’t you?’
‘No. Now I got four sons, two daughters – from three different women. I’m married to one of them. I don’t know.’ Michael shrugged again. This time Estela couldn’t read it.
‘They’re all local. I could open my wallet, I’d show you photographs – of the kids as babies, school pictures, and they’re all beautiful. But now my sons are gangstas. Like I said, I’m sweet. But if they don’t end up doing serious time, then they’ll end up dead, shot on the street by another boy with a gun and a mountain bike.’
Estela could read the shrug now.
She said, ‘I was hoping you liked guns, because I really need one. But if you can’t help with that, I’d appreciate a place to stay. I have a feeling that the police are squatting outside my place.’
Michael’s mouth seemed a little tight: you’re bringing trouble down on my head? But he didn’t say anything. Instead, he stood and walked to the bar which stood in the centre of the pub.
The two halves of the Croner were closed to each other. Only the bar opened on to both the pool room and the lounge. When Michael reached the wooden counter, he leant over and beckoned to someone out of sight in the back half of the pub. He held up a finger for Estela: just one second.
After a moment, a younger man joined Michael at the bar. Michael took something – it could only be the stick of resin – from his pocket and handed it over. They shook briefly, sliding their palms across each other’s hands until only their fingertips touched: yeah, see you. Michael returned to Estela.
‘Clive can take care of business. We’ll step over to my place. I should tell you to fuck off, but I always feel responsible for anyone I’ve broke out of prison. I’ll give you a smoke, some decent shit I’ve got. We can talk.’