Mitch (Chapter Two)

Four hours later and Martha was jamming her key into the lock of her basement flat, 23B Retford Lane, Dagenham.

“Arrrgh come oooooon you bastard…”

Little rivulets of rain ran down her cheek as she tried, harder and harder, to massage the key into the lock. Above at pavement level, articulated lorries juddered past sending sheets of gritty water down the squalid little steps behind where she stood. In one corner, broken flowerpots and a slug-infested bag of compost lay festering where a former tenant had clearly once tried to muster a little beauty into the joyless scene. But it was the sort of basement courtyard that seemed hostile to all life, whether intended or unintended; only crisp packets and coke cans scudded mournfully around its dank, slimy walls. 

“You fucking thing, why won’t you move…”

There was that familiar drainy smell that accompanies many basement flats, particularly in this part of East London where the water board were constantly digging up roads to extract fatbergs. Martha’s boot had let in the water giving her a miserable, asymmetric sogginess around her left foot. Suddenly, a figure bubbled into view in the half-moon of glass at the top of the door. Oh God, no.

It was him. Mitch.

She froze, her hand still on the key in the lock. She could tell her landlord anywhere, even through rippled glass. That’s because it wasn’t his appearance that gave him away. No, it wasn’t his Millwall T-shirt, his meaty arms lined with tattoos, or his ubiquitous red shorts which he wore with an odd pride, even in the dead of winter. These things were merely garnish. It was Mitch’s swagger that gave him away – the unhurried gait that lumbered ominously between two great body-builder arms which in turn paddled forwards and backwards with exaggerated machismo. This is what made Mitch distinguishable from other men – that uncanny, forbidding presence in the peripheral vision like a bear standing behind a tree you can feel but can’t quite see. Martha’s stomach sunk as he grew in size, like a monster, in the rippled glazing above the door. She pulled out her key. The lock jangled.  

“Well well, look who’s ‘ad the balls to show ‘er mug?”

“Look, Mitch, please, listen to me…” The man raised his eyebrows, crossing his enormous arms across his T-shirt whose colours had faded since Martha had last confronted it. “Really, Mitch, believe me. There was an… an issue with my bank. Honestly, you can call Santander. The money appears in my account tomorrow at midnight. I’ll stay up, I’ll literally stay awake and forward it on the moment it comes in, I swear.” 

“Sh, sh, shhhh,” said Mitch, wafting a callused hand up and down. One of the things Martha hated most about Mitch was how he spoke slower when she spoke faster. His body language worked in inverse correlation to hers. It was just another way he highlighted the powerlessness of his victims; by drawing their attention to the fact that he had all the time in the world, while they had none. He relished seeing Martha like this and seemed to sup on her collapsing spirit like a dementor.

“Please, Mitch, I’m sorry. It’ll be in your acc…”

“Now, Marfa,” he said, eyes latching firmly onto hers. “I dahn’t fink you fully get me. See, this is the ‘fird – the ‘fird – time you’ve dicked me ar’and wiv rent.” He turned and began ambling down the unlit corridor, Martha following like an obedient dog. He made a left turn off the unlit passage into Marth’a room… the same room that served as Martha’s bedroom, dining room and laundry drying space because the communal areas were cramped and filthy. A drab overhead light flicked on. Fingers of pallid fluorescent light stretched around the room. “I’ve taken the liberty of stickin’ some of your clobber in these boxes. Ee’vah you get my cash tomorrow evenin’…” (at ‘tomorrow evening’ he stabbed his finger at the floor.) “oor I’m gunna get George raand to sling your clobber out. You remember George, don’t ya?”

Martha nodded. George was Mitch’s accomplice. A lank grimacing man with a protruding chin, who’d come round one evening to tape a piece of cardboard over a hole where a windowpane had blown out in a storm. He had hung around, refusing to leave until Martha paid “£50 for labour and materials” despite never subsequently returning. Now the cardboard was soggy, and an ivy vine was starting to stretch its green tendril underneath it like the leg of a malevolent spider.

Martha stared at the pile of boxes on her bed. The pathetic squalidness of the scene nearly made her gasp. Speechless, mouth agape, she felt tears prickle behind her eyes as she took in the full sullenness of her tiny – the space that represented her existence on this earth, that marked her accomplishments out from the rest, and which had now, for all intents and purposes, been vandalised. Mitch had torn down her Pulp poster, leaving its two top corners ripped off and remaining on the wall. Her mattress had been upended and laid alongside the window, which displayed the pavement in its top two panes, above the slimy wall. A pile of books had toppled over – clearly kicked by Mitch, along with two Harry Potter mugs which had been chucked in a box, deliberately hard so they invariably cracked on impact.

Don’t cry. It’ll be fine. Just be polite. His bark’s worse than his bite. Don’t cry. Hold it together.

But it was the sight of her Doc Martens shoved down into a storage-box prison which sent Martha over the edge. Martha usually couldn’t never tell what had the power to make her cry and what didn’t, but in this instance, it was clear: her aunt Eimear had bought her those Doc Martens two Christmases ago after she’d caught her gazing longingly on the iPhone after dinner; an act which had prompted Eimear, some hours later, to look to Martha and tenderly inquire: what size are you, darling? I’ll get those boots for you.   

“Now I ain’t a nasty geezer, Marfa,” said Mitch, catching a sideward glance of the tears Martha was trying to conceal with her sleeve. “But I dahn’t like gettin’ mugged off by little poshos like you, see?”

Posho? What because I own a few books I work in a bloody crepe fan, you absolute basta—”

“So, ‘ows it to be?”

“I will pay, Mitch,” Martha whispered. “Tomorrow evening, I promise. The moment it drops into my account.”

“Good girl. And you won’t let it happen again, will ya?” said Mitch circling the room and placing his thumbs under his belt like a prison guard. Martha watched as his eyes tracked up and down the walls of his miserable dominion with a half-smile, as if it were some prized work of art, not the vessel of endless litanies of human unhappiness.  

“No, I won’t,” said Martha biting her tongue, her sadness turning to anger. Fucking “good girl.” How dare he!  “You know I don’t like this situation either, Mitch?” she added coolly, though she quietly suspected Mitch did like this situation. “I will pay you tomorrow. And it won’t happen again.”

"Laaaavly,” said Mitch with a sudden manic smile. “I’ll let me’self out. Tat-taah!” He slid past Martha out the room making sure the shiny polyester of T-shirt bushed her arm. That was it. He’d done his nasty work. He had achieved what he’d intended: he had shouted, threatened and creeped her out. But his biggest victory was that he had seen the tears pool in Martha’s eyes. That had been his aim all along; the tears. They were his victory gong; the visual manifestation of his own twisted pseudo-sexual need for emotional climax.  

The door clanked and Martha sank to the floor. And there, her arms hugging her knees, she cried. She couldn’t say how long for, but it was the longest she could remember crying for. Perhaps ever. Images of last awful year flitted across her mind with each echoing sob that sniggered back off the bare walls: the flunked A-levels; the not-getting-into-uni; the endless fights with her mum; the cold reality of London which nipped, day by day, like a bolt-cutter around her hopes. All the while, Mitch’s nasal tones reverberated through her head, as real and clear as if he were still there in the room with her. That night, in her dream, she would see Mitch standing alongside her mattress in the middle of the room: he would loop it manically, like a merry-go-round, each time getting a bit closer to her. But right now the tac-marked walls of her sorry surroundings seemed to squeeze in on her like a vice. She thought about calling aunt Eimear; her lovely aunt Eimear who’d listen to any problem, any crisis, without judgement, and talk for hours. But she knew it’d make her worry, and what with her own worries, that was something Eimear didn’t deserve. She’d be too weak, physically and emotionally, and Martha didn’t want to burden. She would offer money, no doubt, but it would be money she couldn’t afford to part with. Aunt Eimear deserved better after all the kindness she’d shown her over the last two years. 

Outside, evening was falling. Through the window, the occasional cinema of feet glided past up on the pavement: stilettos; brogues beneath pinstripe trouser leg; kitten heels that clomp-clomp-clomped importantly. To Martha, they seemed to embody freedom. Those feet were unencumbered from the tyrants of this world; the Mitches and the Georges and the whole minimum-wage-taking machine that feasted on people like her who couldn’t cut it as anything more. People who couldn’t escape their pasts, or outlive their beginnings; who were too weak, too pathetic.

Her mind turned to calling Andrew. The pair of them had often bemoaned their respective landlords in the sweaty confines of the van. Andrew lived in a flatshare in Angel with two Australians who smoked bongs. She’d been round there once and looked on in envy at their hippie art-covered wall, massive living room and indoor yacca that arced majestically up to the ceiling in a great canopy. It had its problems, sure – Curtis, the longest standing tenant, was a probably a part-time dope dealer and high-functioning alcoholic – but she’d take that flat any day over of 23B Retford Lane, Dagenham.

She picked up the phone and scrolled to Andrew’s number. But something stopped her dialling. Instead, her finger hovered over the cracked iPhone screen, as it relaxed back into a webbed half-glow. She was getting the feeling, lately, that Andrew might be starting to develop a crush on her. There was something about the way he had begun to giggle and poke her side whenever she made a wisecrack about a customer. Now and again, she could feel him looking at her, as if she had a sixth sense in her side; and at some points, over the last few days, he’d stumbled a bit over his jokes, while grinning at her in the van as if something in his mind – some notion or warm feeling – had hijacked his train of thought halfway through. The whole thing made her feel a bit fuzzy, and she wanted it to stay. Sure, Andrew looked a bit strange, he definitely wasn’t conventionally attractive, but there was something oddly sexy about his easy manner and his dogged refusal to be defeated by adversity. The city’s minimum wage life was for him a kind of game – a Rubik’s cube that needed to be cracked, or a level on SuperMario with its deadly mushrooms and spike infested-pitfalls that needed to be vaulted. Andrew could roll with the punches, or at least he seemed like he could. He had the lives to spare.

She pulled down the mattress from against the window and threw her phone on it.  No, she wouldn’t call him tonight. Pity is the death knell to any burgeoning sexual frisson.

She had hardly thought of the wallet and ticket since arriving home.

Poor bloke will be going out his mind, she thought now, as she slumped down on her bed, the adrenalin of the confrontation with Mitch receding.

Picking up her bag, she rummaged to find the wallet that she’d found abandoned at the station which had worked its way to the very bottom, buried under a deodorant spray and phone charger. She fished it out and opened it, pulling out each of the bank cards, one by one, from its leather gill-like slots. A gym membership. Name: Frankie-Sam Alverton. Then, a London Borough of Chelsea library card, also bearing the name Frankie-Sam Alverton. Martha laid each card out along the floor. There were seven in total, including two bank cards.

And, of course, the ticket.

She pulled it out and examined it again.

King’s Cross to Edinburgh. First Class. LNER. Saturday 14^th September 11.30 am.

That was tomorrow morning. Underneath was a phrase she’d not seen before in capitals: *TICKET ONLY VALID ON DATE AND TIME OF TRAVEL*

A thought shot across Martha’s head. She didn’t notice it right away as it swam through the knotted weed of her grey matter. It was a peculiar thought, borne out of the curdling mix of panic, desperation and unheard ambition that underpinned her life in London, and which, now, had been rendered white-hot by the oxygen of Mitch’s words.

She picked up her phone and began to search for a number to report the find.

But then the thought washed back, bigger and heavier than before, as if it hand multiplied in the seconds that had elapsed, like a virus. 

She gazed at the stacker boxes lined up along the opposite wall of her room. Automatically, she found herself pickup up her phone and Facebooking searching “Frankie-Sam Alverton”. Several profiles flashed up: an engineer from Bletchley; a girl, school age-looking, from Doncaster; a man clearly in his 60s, playing golf. None of them fitted the description of who she had in her head, and the effeminate-sounding voice she’d heard yelling across the station concourse yesterday.

Martha held the ticket between finger and thumb, bending it into a little springy curve with her forefinger. Her heart panged with an odd, unfamiliar feeling – a sort of thrilling shame as if she’d suddenly seen something she shouldn’t through a neighbour’s window; something she knew she shouldn’t look at but couldn’t help peering at again.

What Martha didn’t know at this early moment in her life – a time before experience would make her wise, love would make her a poet, and happenstance would make her complete– was that she had already made her decision. The die had been cast for this particular girl, in this particular room, in this particular corner of London, on this particular October evening. She didn’t know it yet, but years from now, on the striped sofa of a lounge in a not-so-remarkable northern market town, she would recall this moment, and understand a little more of her own faltering passage across the sea of life.