Dead Centre - Andy McNab [51]
A taxi rank served the Broadmead Shopping Centre and cinema. I joined the queue. Four or five groups of students were ahead of me. The girls’ skirts weren’t long enough to cover their goosebumps, and they weren’t carrying coats because they knew they’d get nicked in the bars and clubs.
When my turn came I jumped into an old Renault people-carrier. The sickly aroma of vanilla air-freshener did nothing to disguise the smell of the roll-up the driver had blatantly just finished. He was in his mid-fifties, white hair greased back. He didn’t need gel; not washing it for a month did the job just fine. His faded tattoos and big rough hands told me that, if it wasn’t for the recession, he would have been more at home on a building site.
‘Easton, mate. I’m after Barratt Street in Easton.’
‘It’s an extra fiver for a drop-off in little Mogadishu, boy.’
It was far enough from the centre of town to be a good fare, but even beneath the deep West Country burr I could tell he wasn’t too pleased.
We used Bristol for training because it was close to Hereford and as segregated as Belfast and Derry. The safe areas were very safe; the rough areas were very rough. But unlike in the Province, the segregation wasn’t religious. It was financial. A lot of places were in shit state. The local housing authorities used them as dumping grounds for the poor and dis advantaged. In the 1980s the St Paul’s area, near the city centre, became notorious for riots and drug-dealing. It all boiled down to lack of opportunity.
Easton had become a Somali ghetto, and it was no accident. Bristol lads were the original slavers, and for hundreds of years the dockland was populated by Africans, Indians and Chinese. Some of the graves in the local cemeteries contain the bodies of black businessmen, and they date back to the first half of the eighteenth century.
My iPhone vibrated.
‘I need to stop at a cashpoint, mate.’
He grunted something indecipherable in carrot-cruncher code but pulled over outside a building society. I added another fifteen hundred to the wad I’d taken out the other side of midnight.
14
THE KEBAB WRAPPERS and splashes of vomit gradually retreated as we moved into a more residential landscape. Every traffic light was red, but we were soon surrounded by terraced houses and little bay windows. They might have been nice and shiny when they were built during the Boer War, but Easton had definitely seen better days.
We followed the railway line, carried above us on a plinth of grime-covered brown brick. The roads were only just wide enough to take the people-carrier. They were designed for the odd coal cart to trundle up and down, not for the world of Grand Theft Auto. Vehicles were parked up on both sides, half on the pavement, half off.
We drove past three or four mosques and endless rows of dirty brown houses. All the old corner shops had become fast-food joints. Box-fresh knights sat astride rusty mountain bikes outside them, waiting to fulfil their delivery promise. But it wasn’t late-night pizza these kids in their immaculate white high-sided trainers and ball-caps were in the business of bringing to your door. It was something even more addictive.
We stopped at a junction, and he pointed to our right. ‘That’s Barratt. I can’t get down there.’
I paid my £17.50 with a twenty-quid note and told him to keep the change. A big old industrial building that had been converted into a gym stood on the corner. Lights glared from the first and second floors, but nobody was inside. I turned down the narrow and dimly lit street beside it.
15
THERE WERE NO front gardens as such, just walls a couple of feet from the front windows. Some were slabbed, some had weeds springing out of broken concrete. One had a mattress decorated with Coke cans and McDonald’s wrappers. Most of the cars and vans alongside them were at least five years old. I walked past a jazzed-up 1.2-litre Peugeot with the world’s biggest exhaust extension.
I rolled the three grand as tightly