PHASE TEN - A Prologue

"With Kings and Counsellors of the Earth, Who build desolate places for themselves" - Job 3:14 KING JAMES BIBLE

i) Prologue

The Sun was shining over Nottingham and traffic was crawling up and down Mansfield Road. The sights and sounds of the city were mingling with the birdsong of midmorning. People were getting on with their lives, working hard at their jobs in the town centre, some shopping whilst their children played at school. An occasional horn would blurt out to intersperse the rumble but over a council estate, you could make out the sound of something ominous.

The chop and drone of the police helicopter was unmistakable. Hovering like a wasp in its yellow jacket, it circled over invisible demarcation lines, an avatar of the chaos and confusion commanding part of this city. The watchful eye in the sky was like a surrogate parent, busying over delinquent children. It offered punishment and protection – but was indebted and paid for by the nanny state.

Only those who bothered to look closely saw the ubiquitous presence of the panoptical eyes of the CCTV camera, or those who felt this intrusion mar their daily lives.

To those who had understanding of these dreadful days, the apathy was an irony to a nation under the shadow of these electronic voyeurs. These impersonal spectators were by controlled a huge monitoring suite in the heart of the Cheverton complex.
It was with sadness that both the pursuers and the pursued treated these drastic measures with contempt. Instead of protecting the estate, they were in reality just hideous lesions on its face.

If you took a left up the Woodborough Road and walked up to St Anns hill, you’d still be forgiven in assuming that this was a mundane, everyday part of the city. Pensioners talked over garden fences about the wretched weather whether it was good or bad, dogs chased cats and the sounds of children still resounded on the terraces.

Generations of families had been raised here and a life of sorts still went on. Acute poverty and social problems were the mainstay, just in the same way there had been years ago. But you needed insight to read the warning signs - to reach under the drab linoleum to peer at the rotten floorboards underneath.

Here you would find a vein of deep running malaise, something so abhorrent you could only ignore it or let it become you. Denial was the not the only solution, the old tradition if ‘keeping your head down,’ and the stoical resolve of ‘making do…’ still held sway.

What had really underlined the present from the troubled times of the past, was the drug epidemic of the mid-nineties. This new iniquitous and violent era had come quickly, shockingly. As Britain basked in the glorious optimism of the new century, a legacy of woe had already crushingly broken Phase Ten.

St Ann's always had some infamy, its reputation preceding it - a no go area, a sink estate. Evidence of this was clear, with a huge black-market economy running on the sanguine pulse of a red light district and lubricated with a currency of hard drugs. It was the most forlorn and desolate part of this famous city. Beneath this dull, if seedy exterior those who could afford to look would not bother. In a hypothetical world, if someone were to excavate and enquire to the culture of this submerged part of the city, they would find an unwritten testament to the underclass.

Sadly a truth that would fade, not ever to be remembered or its lessons to be learned from.
Somehow it is always more convenient to turn your face and walk away than to acknowledge a rancorous fact. Real people lived their lives in this realm of dismay.

In 2002, there was a shooting on most weeks in Nottingham, but this was just the subtotal of the red tipped headlines. Aside from these few incidents - who counted the overdoses, the beatings, the terror and inhumanity that went on? Nottingham, at this time was earning its reputation as the gun capital of Britain - but beneath this, the real causation was the pestilence of crack cocaine and heroin. The tragic lives and tragedies of those who lived within this underground were rarely reported. This was a world that shed its secrets only to those within its bounds.

Ben Parker lived for two years in Cheverton Court leaving barely alive, but others still remain, still raising and scoring, trapped in the glass jar of Phase Ten like moribund butterflies. Sadly for the few, the finality of death was their only escape.