You just have to make the most of it, but I feel sorry for some people. There’s this old lady I know, she must be ninety-odd, she’s lived in St Paul’s all her life. Now look at it – the whole street is black. Reggae booming out all hours. Curry everywhere. Muggings, drugs, prostitution. I mean live and let live, all right, but she remembers the days when all this was a good area. You never even saw a darkie when she was a girl. I drop round there with some chocolate from time to time and let her go on – not often, once she gets going you can’t stop her. But it is interesting.

Of course she makes it hard on herself – never goes out, never talks to the neighbours. You can’t blame her, they probably taught you that darkies ate you when she was a kid. She probably thinks the curry’s full of old dears like her.

On the other hand she was probably a snooty old bag even when she was young.

‘Fat Jew Bastard.’

Me… a Jew? I ask you. I’m so Jewish, I think a bar mitzvah is a sort of biscuit. Fat… all right. Bastard… well, sometimes. But I’m no Jew-boy. Those Rastas are more Jewish than I am. Lost tribe of Israel – some of them believe that, I’ve read it. I’m Bristol-born, Bristol-bred. My dad was, and his dad before him. We go back for years. I admit my great grandfather was Jewish-ish. That’s where the name comes from. I’d have changed it if I was bothered. I get a bit of stick about the name, but I never thought anyone’d smash up my shop because I had a Jewish name.

Even if I was Jewish, what have they got to get at me for? They’re always going on about being picked on ‘cause of their race; how do they think the Jews feel? Those darkies don’t even know what persecution is. Actually, my side of the family had it easy, we were over here when everyone else was getting gassed over there, but still.

They’ve only been over here two generations, the West Indians. Didn’t take ‘em long to pick up the local prejudices, did it?

I’m going off the point. I was very upset about my shop.

Anyway, seediness. I say this because I was going down the road the other day, on my way for a pint at the Eagle, and there it was – the police car half up on the kerb, flashing lights, the ambulance blocking off the road, everything looking busy and no one in sight…

It’s always interesting when someone gets into trouble. Although this could have been more interesting if it was something else. The ambulance – it could just have been someone hurt themselves falling downstairs. Or a fight, something domestic. Now if it were armed robbery or supplying stolen goods – what you might call traditional crime – that would’ve been nearer home and something to tell the lads.

I did a little detour just to have a nose. I knew the house very well from years ago. On the corner, quite a nice big garden. I keep an eye on things but on the City Road there’s always people moving in and out; you never know, you can’t keep track of them all. I hadn’t even noticed who lived there for donkey’s.

I was walking down the road opposite and the door opened and these two ambulancemen came out, half carrying, half dragging this lad between them. The police car was going, flash, flash, flash. I dunno who he was, I don’t remember seeing him before.

I thought – drugs. It had to be. This bloke, his head was on his chest, he was stumbling. He’d taken too much and given his mates a scare and they’d called the ambulance and now they were being done as well!

Typical.

I thought, Nah, not really my scene. I don’t take drugs and I don’t deal in them either, although I know some of the boys make a lot of money like that. I watched them load this lad into the back of the ambulance and I was about to head off down the Eagle when the door opened again. This time it was the cops, and they had this boy and a girl. The bloke was tall and thin with a scatty haircut. I didn’t recognise him. The girl was young and pretty, or at least, she used to be. She was still young, but… I knew her from a while back, you see…

She used to work down the massage parlour on the Gloucester Road.

Now, don’t go on at me. If you knew my missis. She’s really let herself go. I mean, all right, we’re both on the large size, but it’s different for a bloke. Anyway, just getting the right bits in contact with each other is a matter of logistics these days and I don’t think she’s all that bothered the past few years. So, yes, I do have recourse to the massage parlour once in a while. If my horse comes up, or sometimes my brother comes over from Spain and we drop by before we head off on the beer. Or even on the way back, but the girls have to work for their money then.

I knew this one because… first of all she was very young, younger than most of them. I like that. And then she was nice in the sense of having an attractive personality. That’s important for me. I like to relate to a girl. Most of the girls don’t like talking customers but this one liked me. At least, she gave that impression.

The way it works is, you go in for an ordinary massage, see, and then you have to negotiate if you want a special – so much for this, so much more for that. You can always tell if they don’t fancy you because they up the price. This one – Nicky, she called herself, not that that means anything – this one drove a very hard bargain, but in the end she’d always give me what I wanted. You know?

I’d say, ‘I can’t afford it, love.’

She’d say, ‘Oh, well, you’ll just have to have something else then.’ Then halfway through she’d say, ‘Oh, all right, since it’s you…’ and she give it me anyway.

She didn’t have the heart, see. All I had to do was look disappointed. She liked me. And then… this is what I really liked about her… she’d finish me off, and then I’d give her what she wanted in the first place. And she’d laugh her head off. Like we were mates. I mean, that’s charming, innit? I like to think she liked me, but you don’t know. Maybe she was just good at her job. I always went away after a session with Nicky feeling like a million quid.

Yeah, she was great, Nicky. We used to talk about all sorts. The other girls did you off and then wanted you straight out so they could get the next payer in, but not her. She really gave herself. She’d share her opinions with you. We used to talk politics, but not too much because we differed rather radically on that. She had some odd views on being a whore, though. Apparently, if it wasn’t for people like Nicky, all the sad little blokes who didn’t get it off their wives, or who hadn’t got a woman or whatever, they’d get so frustrated and worked up that they’d be off committing sex crimes.

I said, ‘Are you trying to tell me that if I didn’t come round here once a month, I’d be out molesting little girls?’

‘Oh, no, not you, not you,’ she said.

I said, I should think not.

That put me off a bit, actually. She was being a bit too open there, because she let slip what she thought about the punters. I mean, I know none of the girls respects the customers. That’s the trouble with whoring as a profession. As a tobacconist, you can smoke and respect your fellow smokers. As a whore, you have sex, but for some reason, they all look down on the blokes who pay for it. Fair enough, I suppose, because the blokes who pay for it look down on the girls that sell it. Well, I knew that and she knew that, but she shouldn’t have let on.

She got a bit hard in the end. Some of them do. The ones that don’t care can stay fairly easy about it, but the ones what do care, the ones that shouldn’t be doing it, they’re the ones that get hard. She got on to drugs in the end. I saw the track marks on her arm. I told Gordon, that’s the owner at the parlour, I told him I didn’t want Nicky after that. You have to be careful. Aids, all that stuff. Sharing needles. They get a bit sloppy when they’re doing junk. Besides, I have my pride. I mean, I’m old and fat and out of breath and if I want anyone to sleep with me I have to pay for it, but I don’t have to do it with a junkie. I’m not that desperate. I’d rather try it on with the missis, to be frank.

I don’t know if she was still working at the parlour. I hadn’t seen her for a bit, but then I’d asked not to. She looked pretty ropy. It might have been the blue lights or what was happening to her, I dunno, but she looked about forty, and she used to reckon she was seventeen and I thought she was lying upwards at the time.

Then this funny thing happened. There was this pause while the coppers opened the car door. I was staring at Nicky and the skinny-looking bloke with her was watching me watching her… and he gave me this little nod. I thought it was for someone behind me at first; I looked over my shoulder but there was no one there, so it had to be me. I didn’t know him from Adam. I thought, What’s he nodding at me for? But I had seen him before, walking up and down the road. He was just one of those faces that walk past over the months and then disappear one day, and you never notice they’re gone any more than you noticed they were there.

I stared hard at him. Then it clicked.

It was only David. It was only that lad I’d given to Richard a few years before. I thought, Bugger me, you’ve come a long way and most of it’s been straight down. I remembered that time he turned down my fags and told me they turned your skin grey. I had a pack of Bensons in my pocket; if I’d had the nerve I’d have waved them at him and shouted, ‘I bet you wouldn’t say no now.’ But there were coppers everywhere. It’s not all that clever to catch the eye of the Bill when they’re busy about their work. I saw the copper who was with them watching me, so I did what I always do when I see a copper watching me. I moved on.