Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch [123]
From our balcony, on a clear day, you could see all the way across the courtyard to the net curtains of our neighbours.
‘How’s the Filth?’ he asked. He always called the police the Filth, although he turned up for my graduation from Hendon and seemed proud enough of me then.
‘It’s not easy keeping the masses down,’ I said. ‘They keep fighting and nicking stuff.’
‘That’s the sad condition of the working man,’ said Dad. He sipped his coffee, put the mug down and picked up his tobacco tin. He didn’t open it, just placed it on his lap and rested his fingers on it.
I asked whether Mum was okay, and where they’d been the night before. She was fine and they’d gone to a wedding. He was hazy as to whose; one of my many cousins, a definition that could range from the child of my aunt to a guy who wandered into my mother’s house and didn’t leave for two years. Traditionally a good Sierra Leonean wedding should last several days, as should a funeral, but in deference to the hectic pace of modern British life the expats liked to keep the celebrations down to just a day, or thirty-six hours, tops. Not counting preparation time.
As he described the music – he was hazy on the food, the clothes and the religion – my dad opened his tobacco tin, took out a packet of Rizlas and with great care and deliberation made himself a roll-up. Once it was finished to his satisfaction, he put the tobacco, Rizlas and the roll-up itself back in the tin, sealed it up and replaced it on the table. When he picked up his coffee I saw his hand was trembling. My dad would leave the tin on the table for as long as he could stand it before picking it up and putting it on his lap, then he might remake his roll-up or, if he couldn’t stand it any longer, smoke the damn thing. My dad had the early stages of emphysema. The same doctor who supplied him with his heroin had warned him that if he couldn’t stop smoking he should at least keep it down to less than five fags a day.
‘Do you believe in magic?’ I asked.
‘I once heard Dizzy Gillespie play,’ said Dad. ‘Does that count?’
‘It might do,’ I said. ‘Where do you reckon playing like that comes from?’
‘In Dizzy? That was all talent and hard work, but I did know a sax player said he got his chops from the Devil, made a deal at the crossroads, that sort of thing.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘He was from Mississippi?’
‘No, Catford,’ said Dad. ‘Said he made his deal on Archer Street.’
‘Was he any good?’
‘He wasn’t bad,’ said Dad. ‘But the poor bastard went blind two weeks later.’
‘Was that part of the deal?’ I asked.
‘Apparently so,’ said Dad. ‘Your mum thought it was when I told her. She said that only a fool expects to get something for nothing.’
That sounded like Mum, whose principal saying was, ‘If it doesn’t cost something, it isn’t worth anything’. Actually her real principal saying was, at least to me, ‘Don’t think you’ve got so big that I can’t still beat you’. Not that she ever beat me, a deficiency that she later blamed for my failure to pass my A levels. Numerous university-bound cousins were held up as shining examples of discipline through physical violence.
My dad picked up his tobacco tin and put it in his lap. I picked up the mugs and washed them in the kitchen sink. I remembered the groundnut chicken and rice in the microwave. I took that out to the balcony, ate the chicken but left most of the rice. I also drank about a litre of cold water, which is a common side effect of eating my mum’s food. I seriously considered going back to bed. What else was there for me to do?
I stuck my head out onto the balcony to ask