Jog On Fat Barry by Kevin Cotter

said smiling. “I know you want to, you dirty bugger.”
    Raindrops began to fall from the gloomy looking clouds that always seemed to be hovering over our estate. Somewhere a car alarm was wailing: somewhere else a dog was barking. Pauline’s skirt was hitched halfway up her thighs. I glanced at her blotchy skin.
    “You like my legs don’t you, Freddie?”
    “How’d you get them marks on your knees?” I asked.
    Pauline picked at her scabby knees with her fingernails.
    “That’s for me to know and for you to find out.”
    A skinny woman with a spotty face, Tracy Wilde, was pushing a pram with a buckled wheel up Addison Street towards us. I sniffed the fingers of my left hand: moments later I sniffed the fingers of my right hand. Her baby was crying but Tracy ignored it, pausing to light a cigarette when she reached us.
    “The fucking herbert got two years, Pauline, and I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to do. Not with another one on the way. And my bloody nipples! This sodding little bastard won’t be happy until he’s chewed the buggers off!”
    Tracy sucked on the cigarette. She looked at me for a moment, and then turned back to Pauline.
    “You two going out with each other then?” she asked, but before Pauline could reply Tracy snapped, “I shouldn’t have married him. Mum always said your brother was fucking hopeless. It’s him Ronald Taylor should’ve thrown out that fucking window, not Darren.”
    Tracy grabbed hold of the pram and carried on up the lane.
    “He’s fucking hopeless!” she called over her shoulder.
    We watched her walk away. Raindrops began to beat against the bonnet of the Capri. Pauline ran her hands across her legs. She caught me looking at her knickers. She grinned and opened her legs.
    “I bet you’d like to chew my nipples off, wouldn’t you, you dirty sod?”
    The church bells of St. Aloysius began to ring. It was six o’clock. Pauline glanced up at a window on the fifth floor of the tower block behind us and slid off the Capri.
    “I better be off. Mum hasn’t been the same since… you know, Darren and all that.”
    She pulled her skirt down and reached up under her jumper. “Here.”
    She tossed a paperback book at me. I caught it and looked at the cover: A Clockwork Orange .
    “I pinched that out of the second-hand bookshop,” she said.
    I flicked through the pages: stopped to read a few lines. When I looked up Pauline had already gone. I glanced across the street and saw her entering the flats. Her brother Darren had been killed three months earlier. Chelsea had been away to Wolves and two boys chucked him out the train window. Raindrops started hitting the book so I slipped it inside my jacket and slid off the bonnet.

    Fifty-five years ago there were no high-rise buildings in London. Then in May 1949, a ten-storey council housing block went up in Holborn. Some 2700 tower blocks were to follow. London was building a brighter future on the back of tower blocks in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1972, the Barbican Estate blew its own trumpet to announce the highest tower in Europe. But by the mid-1970s high-rise building had momentarily stopped. And in the 1980s, they began to be demolished. In the 1990s, however, they were back, and in 1993, the first tower block was listed. Mum and Dad never bought their flat because tragedy struck our family twice in 1976 and they bought a cottage at Leigh-on-Sea instead. I never stepped foot on a housing estate again, but I do remember there were fifteen different estates in Somers Town. Our estate had six blocks alone, and although I never knew how many flats there were altogether, I tried counting them all once, but packed it in when I reached 237.

    “Dad!” Mum called out for the third time.
    I looked up from A Clockwork Orange . Granddad was sat in his chair looking out the window. My brother Frank sighed.
    “Silly old sod hasn’t got his hearing aid in.”
    Mum appeared in the doorway wiping her hands on a teacloth.