Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [122]
And from those tiny moments in the shadow a battered van on Silchester Road in Notting Hill, the violence started to spread. Tensions which had been smouldering since the riots in the summer were ignited like dry newspaper under a magnifying glass. Cars were overturned and set alight. Windows smashed and shops looted. By midnight, the number of people injured would be up in the hundreds. Several of them wouldn’t ever recover from their injuries.
Jack awoke on the floor of his room. His head ached terribly and his vision was blurred in one eye. Orange light flickered into the room from the window.
Outside, Silchester Road was ablaze. Everyone who lived in the area appeared to be out on the streets. Some were fighting, although most were just standing around waiting for something exciting to happen. A few kids were throwing bricks at the houses across the street. Hardly any of the windows in the street had any glass left in their frames to break. A bunch of Teds were wrecking a car; a few of them stood on its roof, leaping up and down gleefully, while others kicked its doors in.
Further down the street an old white woman was trying to protect two Sikh kids who had taken shelter in her front yard from an angry gang of whites.
The small crowd shouted filthy curses at the boys and chanted, ‘Bring ’em 211
out’ and ‘Lynch ’em’. The old woman was yelling at the mob, ‘Go home! You should be bloody ashamed of yourselves!’
Leaning out of his window, Jack felt as if he were watching a Pathe newsreel at the cinema; it didn’t feel as if it were really happening at all. And then he saw two figures on the streets and he knew it was real. He swung his legs over the windowsill and hurried down the fire escape to where Mikey and Dennis stood on the edge of a crowd of West Indians, Sikhs and older whites.
Mikey saw him coming and gave a grim smile of welcome. ‘Your eye looks bad, Jack Bartlett.’
‘What? Oh yeah, I know. Feels worse than it looks. What happened to the Scratons?’
Mikey led him over to a van, which had lost all of its windows. In its shadow lay Carl Scraton’s corpse.
‘Blimey,’ Jack swore. He only recognized the body by its clothes. The face of Carl Scraton’s corpse was entirely featureless. Just blank flesh where eyes, nose and a mouth had once been.
‘I killed him,’ Mikey said, in a flat voice. ‘And I’m not sorry. At least now Dennis is safe. We all are.’
Somewhere in the distance a police siren began to wail. The Teds who were smashing up the car, dropped their makeshift weapons and started to scatter.
‘No,’ Jack said. ‘Not yet, we’re not.’
The news of the riot spread through the city: smaller disturbances sparking off in other parts of the capital. Gordy listened to the reports on the radio as he drove back to Soho, scared and alone. He felt ashamed and guilt-ridden for having abandoned Carl, but when some Teds had started to kick the doors of the Rover he had, automatically, put his foot down and accelerated out of Notting Hill.
He had abandoned his brother.
People were already on the streets of the West End. The air was thick with the expectation of violence. Gordy was forced to slow to a crawl as he drove down Wardour Street, the crowds thickening as he neared the centre of Soho.
His gang were still at the nightclub when he got back, edgy and excited by the prospect of a riot. Gordy was relieved that the devil hadn’t taken back his men. Afraid that they might ask him what had happened to Carl, he ordered them out on to the streets.
I’ll show them, Gordy muttered to himself as he loaded his father’s service revolver. He led his men on a tour of destruction through Soho: he watched them as they threw flaming, petrol-filled milk bottles into the queer pub on Old Compton Street; cheered them on as they threw bricks through the win-212
dows of the Jewish-owned shops; and laughed as they ran riot through a Chinese laundry, chasing the petrified young women out on to the street.
Chief Inspector Harris tried to force his way down the centre of Brewer Street.
The streets were packed