Crackle lay on the hard bed in the police cell and did that trick with his mind that detached him from humiliating and painful circumstances. It was a knack he had. He’d had it since he was a little kid. It had come to him on a Maundy Thursday in school assembly. They were singing ‘There is a green hill far away’ and Crackle had suddenly known what it must have been like to be Jesus. To have nails hammered through his hands and feet, and to be left to hang from the cross until he was dead. Crackle had stopped singing, the breath had left his body and he couldn’t feel his hands or his feet. He had sat down on the floor of the assembly hall, surrounded by the legs of the other children. He couldn’t find the words to explain to the headmaster what had happened to him. So he had remained sitting down and had said nothing. It was during the headmaster’s angry denunciation of him in front of the school that Satan had come to him.
Crackle distanced himself from the police cell and thought about the person he loved most in the world: Bilko. Bilko had always protected Crackle both from his enemies and from Crackle’s own foolishness since they were at junior school together. Bilko had joined the class half-way through the autumn term, long after alliances had been formed and a pecking order established.
Thirty-five white ten-year-olds, boys and girls had listened to Mrs McLuskey, the class teacher’s nervous preamble. “We’ve got a new boy joining us today. His name is James Billington. I’ll be bringing him into our classroom quite soon. Before I do that I’d like to ask you to be especially kind to him. Be tolerant. It’s not easy joining a class half-way through a term. I wonder, is there anybody who’d like to be his special friend and show him around the school?”
Mrs McLuskey scanned the room. Nobody lifted an arm. She sighed and said again, “Please be kind to him.” Then she left the room to collect the mysterious James Billington, who for some reason needed their kindness.
An excited chatter broke out as soon as she’d closed the classroom door. There was speculation about the boy. Crackle, who was one of the class clowns, mimicked Mrs McLuskey’s Glaswegian accent. “Be kind to him, be tolerant.”
Crackle was not popular. His kitchen-scissors haircut and hand-me-down shoes betrayed his extreme poverty, and only a few children laughed.
When Mrs McLuskey returned she had the boy with her. His skin was black and his hair was braided in dozens of thin plaits. The boy, James Billington, was dressed in a scaled-down version of adult clothes. He looked straight ahead, seemingly engrossed by the contour lines of a map of South America, which hung on the back wall of the classroom. Mrs McLuskey said, “This is James. Say hello to him, please.” The class droned, “Hello James.”
When Crackle put his hand up and said, “He can sit next to me, Miss,” giggles broke out and somebody shouted, “Poofter.” When the boy sat down next to him Crackle could hear that James was breathing very fast, and he knew that the boy’s induction into the class had been an ordeal for him.
At playtime James Billington leaned against a wall with Crackle and watched the white children mill around in the playground. He spoke for the first time.
“What they runnin’ around for?” he said. “They ain’t goin’ no place.”
“You’re American!” said Crackle.
“No, Jamaican, but I’ve been living in New York City, with my dad.”
Crackle was impressed. He had heard of New York. It was where the Mafia lived.
“Why have you come to live here?”
“My dad sent me to live with my mum.”
Crackle looked beyond the playground to the Bevan, as the estate was called. He’d lived there all his life in one of those little cramped houses. “Why, what did you do wrong?” said Crackle.
“I din’t do nothin wrong.” James plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy jeans. “My dad got married again.”
Crackle understood at once. He himself had been passed around like an unwanted parcel since his real mum had left home and he had somehow ended up living with his second stepfather and his stepfather’s new wife. He knew that neither of them wanted him: the whereabouts of his next move was a daily topic of conversation. Crackle wanted to live with his real mum again, but she had moved in with a man called Barry, who couldn’t stand children. There was a rumour that this Barry had a white carpet in his living room.
For a few weeks Crackle guided his new friend, now called Bilko by everybody, around the estate; warning him about which streets to avoid, and which persons might give him grief. Then one day, after a fight with a rival school, when Bilko had saved him from a good kicking, the roles were reversed and it was Crackle who looked to Bilko to guide him through the many difficulties he encountered in his life.
It was Bilko who had later warned him not to touch crack cocaine. They were both twenty-four years old, and were in the kitchen of Bilko’s luxuriously furnished council flat. It was a superior block which had a security guard on the door, and closed-circuit cameras in the well-kept public areas. Bilko was a fastidious man. He couldn’t have lived in the shit holes that Crackle lived in.
They were in the kitchen. Crackle was watching Bilko iron a pile of Ralph Lauren shirts. The steamy smell reminded Crackle of his real mother. Crack had recently arrived in the city and Bilko had seen that there was big money to be made out of supplying it. But he was doing OK with his own specialist business—selling steroids to body-builders and athletes. He’d got most of the East Midlands covered. It was illegal, what he did, but he was hardly the evil drug pusher, was he? Some of his clients had won big competitions: there were six framed photographs grouped on one wall of his living room, showing his clients, victorious and smiling with their trophies and winners’ sashes draped across their bulging chests.
He finished ironing another shirt, hung it on a hanger, buttoned it up carefully and gave it to Crackle, who took it through to the bedroom and hung it in one of the built-in wardrobes. A specialist firm had made them to Bilko’s specification. Crackle stopped briefly to look at the photographs of Bilko’s children displayed on top of a chest of drawers. They were happy-looking babies. When he went back into the kitchen Bilko was pushing the pointed end of the steam iron in between the buttons of another shirt. He could have had any number of women to do his ironing for him, but so far nobody came up to his exacting standards.
“Have you ever used crack, Bilko?” he asked.
“No, and I ain’t going to neither. I’ve seen what it does to people.”
“What does it do then?” Crackle was intrigued.
“OK, they call it ‘licking the rock’, OK? So the first time you lick the rock you get this fucking amazing high. So fucking amazing that there ain’t words in the dictionaries to describe it, innit.”
“What, like coke?” Crackle had used cocaine when he could afford it. It had made him happy to be alive for once.
“No, no. It ain’t nothing like coke. They call this stuff ‘the broken promise’ because the second time you take it you’re expecting the same amazing thing, innit? But the second time you don’t get it as good, and you ain’t never gonna get it as good, innit?” Bilko picked up the little jug and poured water into the funnel inside the iron. “Because. The first time you took it, it destroyed some of the pleasure centres in your brain, so you ain’t never gonna feel the same pleasure again. Not just with crack, but with sex and food and even fuckin’ music man. So don’t touch it eh, Crackle? Promise me, man.”
“Promise,” said Crackle. But within days, behind Bilko’s back, he had gone to a crack house on a council estate on the eastern outskirts of the city, where a motherly woman called Rita had prepared his first crack hit.
Within seconds he experienced an ecstasy of sensation. He was blissfully aware of every vein in his body: they were coursing not with blood, but with sweet, sweet honey. His eyes saw the wondrous colours in Rita’s room. He looked down at his hands and was transfixed by the beauty of his fingers. He knew everything. He was a superior being, the secrets and beauties of the universe were revealed to him. His body was an exquisite conductor of the magnificence of living.
Within twenty minutes he had shit himself. Diarrhoea spread out from the crotch of his jeans in a brown stain. Rita helped him to the bathroom and explained that it wasn’t his fault. Crack was cocaine mixed with bicarbonate of soda and the bicarbonate of soda loosened the bowels. She fetched clean underpants and jeans from a stock she kept for the purpose and he cleaned himself up and changed into the clean clothes and joined the others in Rita’s breakfast room, who were sitting in the dark, ascending to heaven or descending into hell.
Rita charged him nothing for his first time with crack. On his second visit she asked for thirty pounds. He gave it to her gladly, but the second time he took it it was just as Bilko had said it would be. It was a broken promise. Trouble was, his body kept on wanting it like it was the first time. Crackle was on a treadmill trying to catch up with that amazing sensation, but it was always in the distance, just out of reach.
When Bilko found out he wouldn’t speak to him for a month. But then he relented and even paid off a few of his crack debts. When Bilko’s other friends, the wearers of Hugo Boss suits and Timberland Shoes mocked Bilko for his philanthropy towards Crackle, Bilko shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yeah, that Crackle’s a sad bastard, but we go back a long way, innit.”