Decay Inevitable

MAY MOULDER IS 63. Until her husband, Brian, died five years ago, they lived in Toxteth. She recently lost her sight thanks to diabetes. She worked all her life at a factory, punching the asbestos from grids for gas fires. She’s been battling to get her dilapidated flat repaired by the council. The environmental health declared it unfit to live in but the council won’t do anything about it. She also has trouble with the electricity board, paying over the odds to heat her house, and they are charging her for a fridge and cooker she never bought. Payments are being deducted through her electricity token meter.

Fuck her.

Sean put the page back in its folder and tossed it into the box where all the other files sat on the back seat. He’d gone on what? Nine, ten jobs with Vernon now, and there had been no progress. No feeling of getting under his quarry’s skin at all. Vernon was holding back from him. Vernon didn’t want him too close. Sean thumbed through the documents filing cabinet of his memory and tried to find some clue that he might have missed, but always, at the moment of closure, he was sent away.

Oliver and Victoria, both in their late sixties, had been a middle-class couple retired to comfortable life in Stockton Heath, to the south of Warrington. Victoria contracted a virulent form of Parkinson’s disease. Oliver was caring for her full-time. Pitiful man, he was, Sean now remembered. Gone to seed but trying to put on the hard man act. Photographs of him as a young man, Kray-like in his intensity, his polish, were arranged around the rooms. Sepia pictures of him shadow boxing, or in the ring waiting for the bell to release him from his corner. Pictures of him and his mates standing on a street corner, toy gangsters in white shirts with big collars and dark suits.

Victoria needed medication every two hours. They received no relief from social services or the NHS – Victoria was assessed as not needing medical care – so it was left to the pair to make ends meet alone. Their savings were not large and would soon run out if they were to get nursing care or a stay in a home. Oliver, the hard man, was being ground down. No way out. What help did he get from Vernon? What promises?

And the others.

Homeless Cheryl, twenty-five, unable to get any kind of housing other than a night shelter haunted mainly by old men. Wasn’t she HIV+? Sean remembered her whimpering as Vernon stood over her in a dark archway connecting Sankey Street with the delivery road behind Woolworths in Warrington’s town centre. She told Vernon how she applied for hardship payments, but large amounts were docked to pay for the night shelter, leaving her with next to nothing to live on. She was sleeping on friends’ floors. All her friends used drugs and she was rapidly sinking into that lifestyle. The voluntary agencies were powerless to help her. Ah diddums, Vernon had said, striking the wall above her head with the bat and causing her to shriek, recoil, try to make herself invisible before him.

Sean remembered Jess and Daniel, neighbours on a Liverpool housing estate trying to escape from homes that were no better than diseased hovels. The health of their children was compromised. Sean recalled tiny, denuded faces staring up at him, like ghosts. Underfed children that played with him while Vernon raged in the kitchen. One boy playing with half a dozen cockroaches. A girl sitting in nappies that hadn’t been changed for days. Ignored by the council on the basis that their houses were no worse than any others on the estate, Jess attempted to find a house through a private landlord while Daniel withheld rent as a protest and faced eviction. Two of his children were severely asthmatic. That’s not all they’ll be, Vernon warned, if you don’t give me something to put in my pockets. The children waving at him from the window as they left.

“Putting these... dossiers together, what? Does that codify all this for you? Make it acceptable? Does this woman really need a visit with a baseball bat?”

“Codify,” Vernon said. “I like that. I love what comes out of your mouth, Redman. Love it.”

“You going to answer me?”