Crackle swore when he saw the queue outside the prison visitors’ centre. He hated queuing and would normally push to the front of any queue and ignore anybody brave enough to protest. But this queue was different. There were hard men in it, men to whom violence was a daily occurrence, and some of the women had faces that spoke of fighting and confrontation.
Crackle took his place behind a thin woman with extravagantly ringleted blonde hair, who was holding the hand of a small boy with a raw face and a shaven head. The boy was clutching a large picture he had painted at school. In Crackle’s opinion the kid had laid the paint on too thick: different coloured flakes of it kept floating to the floor. Crackle could still remember the creamy smell that drifted up to him when he mixed the paints at junior school, and the delight in assembling the thick brushes and the sugar paper, and that moment, that fucking brilliant moment, when you made the first brush stroke on the paper. He read the name on the back of the painting. It was written in a teacher’s neat italic hand. ‘Grant Lee’.
Crackle was curious to see what kind of picture Grant had painted, but the kid kept waving it about, which irritated him. Then, as the queue moved along, Grant dropped the painting and Crackle saw that the picture was one that he himself had painted at school. A house, a path, a fence, a tree. And, at the side of the house, his real mum and his real dad and himself.
Crackle swallowed hard, and felt the weight of those heavy tear-shaped rocks inside him again.
After being searched by a prison officer and being sniffed at by an addicted Alsatian dog, hungry for drugs, Crackle was allowed into the visiting room. He sat down at a chipped Formica table. He kept his eye on the door that the prisoners entered by. He could hear Grant talking excitedly to his mother at the next table.
The room quickly filled up with visitors; there were defeated-looking middle-aged parents, young women who’d made a special effort to look glamorous, and other women who’d given up. There were young men who lounged back in the plastic chairs with their legs splayed defiantly, whose eyes were never still.
Crackle felt better about everything as soon as he saw Bilko come into the room, tall and black and handsome in his white t-shirt and jeans.
“You look good, man,” he said.
“S’all the sleep, man,” said Bilko. “There’s fuck-all else to do, innit? You look shit,” he added, censoriously, looking at Crackle’s bluish-looking scalp and sunken face.
Crackle told Bilko his latest problem. How he had social services and the police on his back now because Storme had fallen out of her cot.
Bilko frowned. He liked children. He had four of his own. “That’s bad,” he said.
When Crackle told him that Storme had a fractured skull and that her spleen had been ruptured he said, “Fuck, man. How’d you let that happen? She gonna be all right?”
“I dunno, the bastard doctor won’t let me or Tam see her.”
Bilko thought about the time his eldest kid, Zachary, had drunk bleach. He hadn’t left the kid’s bedside for two days. He didn’t remember even going for a piss.
“So they’re saying you done it?” checked Bilko.
“Yeah, the bastards”
Crackle’s indignation was genuine. He hadn’t meant to do her any damage. It was just that he wouldn’t stand for her crying in the night. She had to learn that she couldn’t get her own way.
“Do you swear to me that you din’t do it, man?”
“Would I do that to my own kid?”
“You’re too hard on her, man.” Bilko was troubled. “I’ve seen how you give her big, big licks.”
“She gets out of hand sometimes,” said Crackle. “She’s not good like your kids are.”
“I don’t give my kids no licks never, and neither does their mothers. It ain’t right, Crackle. We’re big and they’re little, y’know?”
Crackle shifted uncomfortably on his plastic chair. He hadn’t come here to be lectured.
“She was all right when she was a little baby, but as soon as she started walking she was a fucking nightmare. Always touching things. She did my head in!”
“Then you shouldn’t have never had her!” shouted Bilko. The prison officers who were placed around the room looked across to where Crackle and Bilko were sitting. Bilko lowered his voice. “All kids fuck about with things, Crackle. You gotta give ‘em something else to do. I never saw you play with Storme, not once, ‘an she was always shit up, y’know. If my kids was ever dirty like she was I’d give their mothers serious grief, y’know.”
Crackle said, “Tamara’s an idle cunt. She don’t clean up or nothing, and anyroad we ain’t got your money, Bilko.”
Bilko raised his voice again. “How much is a fucking bar of soap?”
Heads turned.
Crackle answered, “I dunno.” He had never bought a bar of soap. Soap was either there or not there.
“It’s fucking nothing? shouted Bilko ‘And why have I got money? Because I go out and I hustle for it! I work a fourteen-hour day, seven fucking days a week!”
A prison officer strolled over to the table where Crackle and Bilko were sitting turned away from each other.
“You got a problem here, Bilko?” he said.
“No,” said Bilko, turning and smiling up at the prison officer. “Nothink I can’t handle, Dave.”
“Yeah, well keep it down, will you?”
The prison officer patted Bilko on the shoulder and walked over to the refreshment stall where elderly ladies in green overalls were selling junk food and watery beverages to the prison visitors.
“Do you want anything?” asked Crackle, who wanted a change of conversation.
“Yeah, I want my kids,” said Bilko. He longed to hold them to him and listen to the strange funny things they said to him. They made him laugh more than any comedian ever did. Bilko looked away and watched Grant Lee talking to Craig, his dad. Craig was serving seventeen years for slicing a love rival’s nose open with a beer glass, before setting fire to the man’s flat. Bilko looked at Grant’s shaved head and earrings in disgust. His own children attended a Church of England school and wore a uniform and polished shoes. You would never have known from looking at them (and Bilko prayed that they would never find out) that their father, he, Bilko, had a gun hidden inside the front passenger seat of his black BMW. None of them knew he was in prison. He phoned them every afternoon after school, and when they asked him why he didn’t come home, he told them that he was in another country, which was almost true.
Bilko said, “Crackle, don’t come and see me no more, man.”
“Why, what I done?”
“You know what you done.”
And Bilko got up and gestured to Dave, the prison officer, that he wanted to go back to his cell. Bilko preferred solitude to keeping company with a man he knew for sure had harmed a child.
Crackle left the prison in a daze. As he walked towards Veronica’s Cafe, he saw a blue illuminated sign on a church. “Jesus Loves You,” it said.
Crackle stopped, and read the sign over and over again. He didn’t know where to go after he’d been to Veronica’s; he didn’t want to go back to the flat. He didn’t like it there without Tamara and Storme, and he didn’t feel safe in the city no more, not without Bilko’s protection. He’d got too many enemies and he was sick of waiting for a signal from Satan. He read the sign one last time before turning away. “Jesus Loves You.”
“I’m glad some fucker does,” he said out loud. He looked around to see if anybody had heard him, but, as usual, there was nobody near to him.