In the first predictions of what Localisation would look like, Liam said they had it on the news that we were one of five areas that would be the hardest hit. What they meant by that, he said, was that the gap between the budget needed for basic services and what was coming in in taxes was the biggest. Rotherham, Blackpool and Stoke were the others, plus somewhere in Wales Liam could never remember so he always called it something like Lafwadunda.
For weeks there were roaming protests. It worked on rotation and they came to Margate every other Saturday. Fluorescent cardboard rectangles held above people’s heads all along the seafront. ‘The world is watching.’ ‘Localisation = death.’ ‘Win-UN-stable.’ ‘Left to sink.’ ‘History will condemn you.’
‘Us?’ I said to Ma, when we went down to see. ‘History will condemn us?’
‘No, it’s for the reporters. They’re speaking through the cameras to the government people. Look at that one,’ she said. She read it out loud. ‘The only good Tory is a lavatory.’
‘Who are they, though?’ Liam said. ‘Most of them don’t even live here.’ He wandered over to the press side, to a guy with a huge, expensive-looking camera. ‘Take this twat,’ he said, close enough for the man to hear. ‘Where are you from?’
‘The US,’ the man said. His voice sounded like cycling up and over a hill. ‘Special Report.’ Then his huge camera tilted down to me. ‘What do you think about what’s happening, young lady?’
‘Dunno?’ I said. ‘Exciting?’ Which made JD start laughing from behind me and say, right into the lens, ‘I’m trying to sell her, does anyone want a kid? I’ll do her fifty per cent off.’
The cameras on the streets, the donations arriving in truckloads, boxes of tinned food in towers, people telling their stories on the internet and receiving cash in online bank accounts – for a while it seemed like they might be the new normal. But as Ma often said, normal changed a lot these days, and the world didn’t watch for long. Soon, the only boxes appearing on the streets were the belongings of more people leaving. And this time, leaving in a hurry, boarded-up windows popping up in a piecemeal patchwork.
‘All these houses – all the fucking best ones – and of course they can go,’ Liam said. ‘They only bought these places with help from their parents. No personal investment so—’ he threw the ‘so’ into the air like a ball ‘—back to Belsize fucking Park they go. Cunts.’
He’d never said that word in front of me before. It’s hard to explain what happened to Liam, how it happened so quickly. The grey in his hair spread, like he’d walked with his head too close to wet white paint. He started to say what my grandparents had done was a good idea. He said it right in front of my mum. He said that any time there was any hope, any time people tried to come together, it was crushed flat like a fly, and surely it was best to do the crushing yourself.
Before Liam’s factory shut down for good, he started going into work drunk, getting into accidents. All his brightness went out. JD said it was like he’d been taking happy pills the whole time we knew him and suddenly stopped them. One afternoon, when I came back from Caleb’s, Liam had cut his hand on a glass he’d broken and hadn’t done anything to stop the blood. He was sitting on the sofa and the whole cushion underneath him was red.
Then one night, Ma got home late from work and found Liam sitting on the end of my bed, watching me sleep with a pillow in his hands. When she asked him what he was doing, he started crying. The noise he was making started to be so loud, she had to put the pillow in his mouth so he could bite on it. ‘Do you understand?’ she asked me later. I said I did. I didn’t.
When Ma ended it with Liam, JD told us his new friend could sort us out with a place. He said it was a ‘showstopper’. ‘The building’, he called it.
‘Which one?’ Ma asked him.
‘That one.’ He pointed. ‘The one next to Dreamland.’
He meant Arlington House. All eighteen storeys of it. The building that was four times taller than everything else in town.
Floor after floor of concrete zigzag that changed as you walked around it. Coloured curtains that stayed shut all through the day. A faded blue-and-stars Europe flag left behind in one window. A Jenga frame of concrete car park at the back.
Caleb, when I told him where we were moving, said it wasn’t a good idea for us to do that. He asked me what floor. He said that you couldn’t get insurance if you lived anything higher than the third.
‘Caleb says if there’s a fire we’re done,’ I told JD.
‘Tell him to say it to my face. I’ll wreck the snobby gaylord.’
‘Don’t you dare say that!’ Ma went for JD’s head with the back of her hand.
‘What?’ he said back. This jabby sound.
‘Snobby. Don’t you dare! He’s been nice to your sister.’
‘Fucking last of the DFLs.’
‘JD, you knobhead,’ I said. ‘We came from London.’
‘Yeah but he’ll run off soon like the rest of them.’
‘J, he was here before you—’
‘Not if you count the start. I was born here,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘I don’t know about you, but I was. Anyway – rich in’t he? From the way he speaks. When we get up there, I’m gonna pick ’em all off like a sniper.’
The way JD talked about the flat before we got there – the bedrooms, the view. He said the word kings again and again – we’d live like kings – and so, even if it was ugly on the outside, I thought inside might be different.
Ma nearly cried when we opened the door and stepped into the flat. I saw it ripple through her face, this flicker across her forehead. The carpet was ripped up at the edges, and it looked like someone had beaten one of the walls with a baseball bat. But JD went out for a takeaway and some beer, he even put a few sloshes in a cup for me, and by the evening, it was a bit better. ‘Kole’s in the same block too, see,’ he said. ‘Solid lad. Solid spot.’
He pulled us into him on either side, and escorted us over to see the view. Our thin ring of windows looked out to the sea on one side, and the dregs of Dreamland on the other, knotweed pushing up and running like green veins in marble through the concrete paths. The ditch where they’d dug up the Chair-O-Plane was waterlogged and winked in the light.
‘It’s good to be up high,’ JD said. ‘Good to per-ooze the kingdom. Good that even the fattest waves can’t splash us.’ He’d just washed his hands, and when he said that, he flicked a fist of droplets in my face.
Kole came over on our second day in the flat. I didn’t speak to him. At one point he asked questions about me and Ma, but he asked them to JD. ‘How old’s them two, then?’ he said.
If JD was a pretty boy, this guy was an animal. Handsome, but like a jaguar or a lion – there was something big cat about his face. He moved his mouth around like he was getting something out of his teeth and was about to spit. I’d never seen a man with long hair before, tied up like that in a bun. I thought there was a necklace pendant buried under his T-shirt, but when he took his top off, it was a piercing. Right between his pecs, with scars around it, like it had shifted under the skin a few times.
JD had a set of weights that he bought from a gym that closed down and that was what they did all day. They laughed a lot, they called each other mate a lot. Mate, mate, mate. There was something nervous about JD’s laugh at first, this forced thing, almost like his lungs were clapping.
At one point Ma and I went into the room to ask if they wanted toast. Kole lifted the biggest bar JD had, and stared at me. Then he lifted it again and stared at Ma.
‘Did you see his arms?’ Ma said to me, pulling me away into the kitchen.
‘No,’ I said. I had. They were huge. ‘What about them?’
‘Don’t look at them,’ she said. She spread some margarine so thick you couldn’t see the bread any more, and leaned in. ‘Track marks. It’s like a fucking terminus on there.’