Crackle woke up and found himself alone in the cold bedroom. No Tamara next to him and no Storme in her cot. Then he remembered.
He felt like crying but he didn’t know how to get the tears out any more. They were locked inside him: these tear-shaped pieces of rock. His whole body was full of them; sometimes he wondered how he managed to walk around carrying such a heavy weight. If he was cut open, like Storme was last night, they wouldn’t find no blood in his veins, just these little shining tear-shaped rocks.
After lighting a cigarette, he got out of bed and wrapped himself in a blanket. He shouted, “Tamara,” but she didn’t shout back. Something must have happened. She never went out or did anything without telling him first. He went to the window and drew the curtain aside. The estate was strangely becalmed by the snow. As he watched, a car drove slowly along the slip road and parked in front of the flats. PC Billings and Kevin McDuff got out and looked up at the flats. Had Tamara blabbed to the police and done a runner? Crackle let go of the curtain and bent over the pile of black clothes he’d thrown on to the floor beside the bed the night before. They were cold to the touch and he shivered as he put them on.
When he’d been a little boy he’d dressed in front of the gas fire in the living room on winter mornings. His real mother had made him eat a bowl of porridge before he’d gone to school. He remembered her running after him once because he’d forgotten his gloves. He’d been ashamed because he’d been with Bilko, who didn’t believe in gloves.
He was fastening the death’s head buckle on his belt when the knock came on the door. As he went to answer it he practised what he would say if they accused him of hurting Storme.
He opened the door and they stepped back slightly as the smell from the flat rushed out on to the stone cold landing.
“I need to do a home report,” said Kevin.
Crackle opened the door and ushered them inside. PC Billings covered her nose and mouth with a gloved hand. The air in the flat felt thick, as though it were saturated with bodily secretions.
“I tried ringing,” said Kevin. “Did you know your phone’s been cut off?”
“Bastards,” said Crackle. It was Tamara’s fault. She was always ringing them 0891 numbers to find out what her stars had lined up for her. She was a Libra.
Kevin knew the layout of the flats and he led the way into the bedroom. All three of them looked down into the cot. The smell of urine was already overpowering, but became worse when PC Billings pulled aside the damp blankets to reveal the soaked mattress, which was stained with faeces and dried-on blood.
“And this is where she slept?” asked PC Billings.
“Yeah, but she kept climbing out of it,” said Crackle.
“I’m not surprised,” said the PC. “It’s not exactly Mothercare in there, is it?”
She circumnavigated the chaotic piles of things on the floor and walked out of the bedroom and looked at the other rooms. The hopeless squalor of the place disorientated her. She didn’t know where to begin to describe it in her notebook. And it was so cold. Her breath fanned out in front of her. She sorted through the documents on top of the television and, amongst the unopened DSS letters and lottery tickets and British Telecom threats, she found Storme’s birth certificate, a prison visiting order, and what seemed to be a poem written in crabbed handwriting on the back of a large white envelope. Before she could read the poem Crackle came into the room with Kevin and she put the envelope back on the pile. Crackle said, “Do you know how she is this morning?”
Kevin said, “I rang the hospital before I came out. She’s comfortable.”
“Comfortable,” repeated Crackle. “That’s good.”
“Comfortable means nothing,” said PC Billings. “They said it about a bloke I knew with sixty-degree burns and a broken pelvis. Poor sod only lived three days.”
She wouldn’t give Crackle any comfort. If she couldn’t get him for physically abusing his kid, she’d get him for neglect, and if she had to drag that disgusting mattress into court as evidence, she would.
Meanwhile, she would take Crackle back to the police station with her before he could start clearing the place up. She wanted the police photographer to capture its insane chaos.