The Burn Street Haunting

My Life – Some Facts and Information, September 1973

Before you rush to judgement, let me explain: as a kid, I went bad – went bad, off the rails, rogue, however you want to put it – because of Certain Events. During those events, in a dark and distant place, I encountered something horribly malignant and inhuman, a predatory entity that lived there.

I can’t explain where that place might have been, or what that entity actually was – what it is – but from the moment it sensed my presence I understood, very clearly, that it wanted to eat my bones and drink my blood. I called it the Thing-in-the-dark.

This was over twenty years ago, in 1951. I was aged nearly-12.

The terrors instilled in me by Certain Events, by meeting the Thing-in-the-dark, are something I subsequently put a huge amount of effort into never speaking about, or dealing with, or even acknowledging most of the time. I was alone when I met it, and afterwards I remained alone with a gnawing inner fear I couldn’t express to anyone, or make any sense of.

For all these years I’ve been that well-known type of refugee: on the run inside my head, hurtling onward like an exhausted dog trying to spring ahead of its own shadow, constantly trying to out distance my own mind by distracting, denying, suppressing.

All I’ve wanted is to find peace.

Just some bloody peace! Or I’ll go mad.

There have been periods of my life, sometimes quite long periods, when I didn’t think about Certain Events at all, periods when I’ve denied it with such conviction that it’s they’ve been filed under Maybe I Dreamed It and ignored. I’ve convincingly pretended to myself that none of it happened, or happened differently. Over the years, I’ve lied to myself so well and so often that even today, right now, as I’m typing these words on the second-hand Remington I just bought, when I’m finally trying to acknowledge what happened to me, I have to pause and double-check my mental notebook.

I’m trying to face it, and I’m saying all this, because very recently I’ve been badly shaken out of my state of denial and forced to admit the truth. This recent shaking, I’ll put down on these pages in due course. When I need to.

I’ve been very good at self-deceit, and I’ve been even better at telling lies to others. The convenience of a useful lie quickly becomes routine, then a habit, then an instinct by which the truth is always Option B. It becomes what you do, what you are. All part of going bad, I suppose, the solid foundation stone in my mental brick wall.

Of course, it helps to have an innocent face. I’m told I’ve got a chummy look about me, with my sandy hair and rounded features. Like a slimline plasticine pig in human form.

The trick is genuinely to stop caring whether anything you say is true or not. To genuinely erase your feelings. Then you’re most of the way there, well out of sight of the difference between fact and fiction.

And that’s something I’ve been grateful for. Until very recently.

Anyway, people believe what I tell them. It’s always made me a more efficient thief.

I know I’m not a nice person.

I’m not a nice person.

As a child, frightened and angry in the months following Certain Events, I sprinted headlong into crime, entirely on purpose and more than willingly. I was desperate for a direction in which my head could run. I know exactly what fired the starting pistol, it was:

The first time I lied to the police

I remember it vividly. I was hanging around a shuttered-up greengrocer’s one warm spring evening in the city centre, with a temporary playmate, some boy who was waiting for his dad to come out of the brown-tiled pub on the corner. We were breaking up a couple of old fruit boxes, using the splintered bits of wood for swords and machine guns. Shhumppph! Arghh!

Then our heads whipped at the sound of police whistles in the distance, sharp and kettle-ish one-note peeps. Out of a narrow alleyway between the greengrocer’s and a shoe repair shop ran a man, wearing his cap pulled low at the front, hugging shut a bulky overcoat.

He dashed across the road to a rusty wasp-coloured Bedford van parked a dozen yards away from us. The whistles sounded again, now closer, a street or two away. The man threw himself into the front seat and the van shuddered, coughed, coughed, coughed. I could see him through the windscreen bucking with fury, battering at the dashboard. Cough, cough, cough.

His face became a howl of indecision. I looked back and forth between him and the alleyway. Any second.

He ducked down out of sight. I imagined him cramming himself as far into the footwells as he could and gritting his teeth.

There was a long clatter of running footsteps and two uniformed policemen appeared, one of them quite fat and struggling to keep up, his helmet dangling from his hand by the chin strap.

‘Dammit!’ spat the other, his gaze flitting along the closed shop fronts and the handful of parked cars.

Up on the corner, by the pub, a man who looked like he’d been badly beaten up, and an weirdly-dressed woman, were slowly crossing the street. In the opposite direction, smoke rose up like grey bars from the line of terraced houses visible on the horizon where the road curved down out of sight.

My stomach made a sudden flip. It seemed to propel the words out of my mouth before I’d even thought of them: ‘He drove away!’

The thin officer’s attention snapped onto me. ‘What’s that, lad?’

‘A man!’ I cried, eyes wide, finger pointing towards the houses. ‘He was running! He got in a blue car, it went off that way!’

Doubt never even flickered in their expressions. ‘Going for Hagley Road,’ wheezed the fat one, his cheeks flushing. ‘Must be.’

‘Better get to a phone, quick!’ As the thinner one hurried past me, he gave my shoulder a swift pat. ‘Good work, lad.’ They sped over to the pub.

I glanced over at my temporary playmate. He was motionless, staring at me with boggled eyes and his jaw hanging slack. At the same time, the fugitive was clambering watchfully out of his Bedford.

He called me over with a twitch of the head and reached into his coat, where a broad sewn-on pocket was almost spilling a crush of loose cash. He plucked out a £1 note and handed it to me. There was dirt ingrained into his fingers and the lines of his face, and he stank of beer and unwashed clothes. I nodded at the overflowing pocket. ‘Better buy a new van with that.’

He beamed at me. ‘Cheeky little bastard,’ he grinned in a Brummie drawl. He scurried away down the street, glancing over his shoulder a couple of times at the half-dozen slinking figures who’d quietly left the pub a few seconds after the policemen had gone in. With my heart racing, I looked at the money in my hand, the delicate green swirls and the bold red serial numbers, the little signature in the corner that looked like it said ‘peppermint’.

I was joyful! Elated! The sense of winning, of sticking two fingers up to the world! It filled me with pride. For the first time in the many weeks since Certain Events I was happy, I had relief from the pressure in my head, relief from the fear. It was at that precise moment, as I held that pound note, all those years ago, on that warm spring evening, that I thought I’d found the answer to the pain I felt.

If I only had a chance to go back and talk some sense into myself! Young Me would be deafened by my angry shouts.*

* HANDWRITTEN NOTE INSERTED INTO TYPED PAGES AT THIS POINT, DATED YEAR 2 OF THE NEW CALENDAR: Oh yeah? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! You just wait, fuck-face!

My Life – Some Facts and Information, part II: more Things To Know About Me

Before I tell you about why I went on the run to London, there’s something else I ought to mention . . . or confess? . . . if I’m going to be doing this facing-up-to-the-truth business.

I am a freak. I don’t have two heads or a merman’s tail, but I am an actual, living freak. P T Barnum would have set me up with a tent and a turban and charged punters sixpence a head.

It’s because I’m a freak that Certain Events happened in the first place. I can see that now.

Most of the habitual criminals and scammers I’ve knocked around with over the years have thought of me as naturally lucky, one of those types who skate smoothly over the ice of life watching everyone else go arse over elbow. At times, especially as a teenager, some of them considered me literally a lucky charm, like a rabbit’s foot or a four-leafed clover, the fluffy dice hanging from the rear-view mirrors of their Morris Oxfords and their ’53 Ford Populars. This was all because I was hardly ever involved in a job or a con that turned sour, and if it did I always managed to evade arrest.

Nothing whatsoever to do with luck, purely my freakishness: quite often, when I meet people, and without any conscious control on my part, I can see inside their heads. I get these tiny, scattered splinters of their lives embedded in my thoughts like psychic shrapnel. Not hard information, not addresses or bank account numbers – nothing that bloody useful! – but echoes and half-images, emotional flashes of past events, or their state of mind, as if I am skimming quickly through their mental photo album. I haven’t the faintest idea where this peculiar little faculty comes from, I don’t know why or how it happens, and I’ve certainly never discussed it with anyone.

It seems weird to be writing it down like this. Too exposing. Like stripping off for a medical.

No, it isn’t a bloody gift. And it isn’t a curse either. It comes and goes, and occasionally I read things wrong. I certainly don’t get bombarded by other people’s thoughts in crowds, or any of that sci-fi crap. I can’t do it deliberately and I can’t turn it off. It’s there, or it isn’t. If I get too wound up or too tired, it mostly vanishes. I was barely even aware of it until after Certain Events.

That dishevelled man, running from the police, I could read behind his panic. It wasn’t to do with getting arrested. He was scared of breaking a promise, one he’d made to someone he loved deeply, a woman in a blue dress, while coals glowed in a dowdy fireplace. When he left, I saw a decision form in his mind, a soft green ripple of optimism. I felt I’d helped him.

Of course, deceivers of all kinds are good at cold reading people – working out who someone is and what they want, through clues in their voice or their appearance, or tics of body language or facial expression. It’s a skill you can learn. I have an involuntary version of it soldered into my brain, that’s all.

Seeing into people, enabling me to plan accordingly, is what kept me out of prison. My so-called luck was never anything more than that, but it didn’t hurt my reputation to be thought of as a charm. I was a fixture in the local ever-shifting criminal underclass, and judged a competent grifter. I stole, conned and defrauded my way through my teens, twenties and beyond, and the state of permanent distraction it brought is what helped me to keep on doing what I needed to do, to deny and suppress, to forget.

It was like a messy, complicated game, one in which the core rules stayed the same and the rest changed daily. Playing it soaked up my attention, my instincts and my time; I needed to stay alert to navigate my way around the hidden back-stabbers and the nice-as-pie weasels who’d sell their firstborn for loose change.

The vast majority of those around me were driven by peer pressure, or desperate necessity, or by broken lives, or simply because they knew nothing else. I deliberately stayed a peripheral player. Unlike them I was there by choice, not compulsion, so I remained the sly son of a bitch in the background. I played for the time-draining immersion of it, the way a new boozer drinks to obliterate pain. An amnesia of effort, before dependency sets in.

I never got involved in anything major, anything Organised. I had opportunities in that direction, but I had neither the ambition nor the greed it took to climb those particular ladders. Too wary of snakes. I wore the standard-sized No Bollocks Allowed exterior, but nobody ever mistook me for tough and I never physically injured anybody, apart from the odd fist fight. Except for—

But that wasn’t my fault.

It wasn’t my fault.

I was the kind of lower status scumbag who took part in local post office break-ins at three in the morning, who liberated white goods from their warehouse prisons, who did the roping when slimy little town planners got conned out of the nest eggs they’d embezzled. I fenced knock-off consignments of menswear, stole posh cars to order, never kept to one activity or one set of colleagues for too long. There was an unspoken agreement at the shallower end of the crime pool that firearms were strictly for idiots and TV villains, and you’d be surprised how little interest there was in pills and powders back then.

There was never very much money in any of it, except on rare occasions, but for a long, long time I happily swam in a cesspool sprinkled with glitter. A sleazy pretence at glamour.

I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason Alison married me. The long gaps between payouts were the reason we split up. She thought she was getting Al Capone, what she actually got was more like the cartoon fox in Pinocchio. She couldn’t understand that the money was never the point, not to me. The point was to keep those two fingers raised.

I deftly avoided getting banged up and I neatly sidestepped formal charges. From time to time, some nice helpful officers would politely request my presence at the nearest police station, to assist with their enquiries, where my face would be screamed at from an inch away and I’d have the living shit kicked out of me by assorted bastards with moustaches and sweat stains. Whenever my colleagues were invited along for a similar chat, some of them would talk and some of them wouldn’t. I considered it a triumph that all they ever got out of me was stubborn resentment.

But, in the end, I had to get out of that life while I still could, before my mythical luck ran out and I made a mistake I couldn’t correct. It was going to happen, at some point. I became apprehensive about the same skin-of-your-teeth insecurities which had once felt like a solid career choice. As time ticked past the Paris riots and Neil Armstrong, I could see the odds shortening, the whole game getting rougher and more entrenched. Harder bargains, more drugs and violence, tougher-to-beat security.

A couple of years ago, at the dentist, I ploughed through an article in which some sociological twat said that crime in the UK was getting worse because of rising consumer affluence. No, crime in the UK was getting worse because PC Plod had discovered the baseball bat and the database. It was getting riskier because it was getting nastier.

Everything was getting more difficult to juggle. I read alarm bells and treachery in unexpected people, even in the very few I thought I could trust. Not that I blamed them. There were no hard feelings, not on my part. I saw what the System did to them, chewed them up and shat them out, with every last bit of decency cut away. That’s what the sociological twats never seem to grasp.

In any case, my life luggage had been slowly piling up over the years: Mum, then Alison, then Dad. It all got me thinking about moving on and starting again, leaving for good and preferably without so much as a single word to anyone.

Then a golden opportunity came up, completely out of the blue. It gave me the shove I needed, to make up my mind, get out quickly and quietly and move on.

And it wasn’t my fault! I didn’t kill them!

Fearing detection, I left without looking back. I got on the train to London and ran.

No, that’s not right. That’s a lie.

Correction: this golden opportunity was the perfect chance to quit I’d been looking for, but it wasn’t what shoved me onto the train. I told myself it was, but it wasn’t. That’s not why I ran. I ran because after it happened, that same night, something horrible came out of the dark, to look at me.