Kevin the Gerbil

- September 2001

Drizzle over Nottingham, and a cool West wind blowing. Ben sat on the balcony in a kind of despair; he tried to remember the summer that had gone, the wind blowing detritus in his face as it whipped across the face of Cheverton Court. It had been at least a week since he’d last injected heroin.

A week of relative normality. He could eat, he had cleaned his teeth, his bowel movements were regular, and instead of pipes of crumbly crack and syringes brown with smack he thought of food. In the last few days he’d been thinking the unthinkable. He was thinking he needed something to do with his time, something to give purpose – routine. He thought of getting a job.

The wraiths of withdrawal had not let him go entirely yet. There was the aching and the weakness in his limbs; the fidgeting, restlessness, implacable obsession and ultimate ennui. His stomach and brain, now in full cognition of his lack of food over the last months, constantly plagued him with hunger. His sleep was disturbed, broken and still full of bad, crazy dreams.

However he remembered how grateful he was when he first slept after the first hours of the hellish process. Now he was getting at least four hours a night and managing a few naps in the day – which in comparison with what had gone before seemed luxurious.

There had almost been a slip. Yesterday, while nodding off to the Afternoon Play on Radio 4 the buzzer eeked frantically. There was a commotion outside. A girl’s strained voice: Chrissy’s. She was crying, begging to be let in. Then there were the heavy footsteps coming down, the gruff unintelligible shouts, followed by a muted sob. When the buzzer went his heart skipped.

The druggie receptors in his brain made the old Pavlovian associations and for a moment he felt excited, that one of the girls would come down and usher in a new era of drugged utopia – it was perverse how with drugs, addicts only remembered the rush, the good times and ecstasy of escapism.

The footsteps and the fact Chrissy had been followed quickly dispersed his selfish longing for substances. He turned off the radio and lights and hid behind the bathroom door. He couldn’t make out the other person, but by the sound of him – it was a HIM coming down the stairs - he was packing some bulk.

For a moment Ben feared that he might have left the iron gate unlocked – but the fear was only momentary. It was irrational, as he always made the gate a priority, but in truth he was scared. Emotionally, physically, spiritually he was wrecked.

The whole incident was probably over in less than two minutes. Then Ben admonished himself, first for thinking of the drugs first. For not helping Chrissy, for cowering so pathetically – he was still shaking and felt acute shame. Eventually he managed to structure his thoughts, he was straining to think lucidly with a mind still befogged by the ordeal of getting clean.

This incident served as a caution, a stark reminder of why he had made the break from that world and why he couldn’t fuck up again – that life was waiting for him, literally outside his door.

The next hour was self imposed torture, as he ran the incident through his mind – it had been a slip. He might as well be loading a fat pipe now. The problem was not the fact that he had picked up a needle or used, it was that his entire thinking process was corrupt to the core. A right thinking person would have called the police.

Now he was clean he was in deep water but had forgotten how to swim. The arm bands supporting him had a slow puncture. ………….It was only a matter of time.

As he sat on the deckchair, musing on his predicament and his belly grinding from lack of sustenance he was met by a shout from next door.

“Hello! Ben”

It was Kevin. Kevin, the ginger gerbil.

i) Kevin, The Gerbil

When Ben and Caddy first met Kev, they had been at the bar in the Old Angel down the lace market. The Old Angel was then the old Old Angel, before it was taken over by a corporate brewery and marketed as a Sunday roast brasserie, eatery and family friendly pub frequented by the upwardly mobile. The old Old Angel was a haven for the downwardly mobile, ne’er do wells, the underclass and every kind of drop out and social deviant you could dream of. Acid? MDMA? Cash your giro? Phet? Spit and sawdust, lock-ins till dawn…..it was that kind of joint. Less a den of iniquity, more academy of vice.

Kev at that time was the barman. His dipsomania more than qualified him for the job. The landlord had eloped to Grantham, following a highly publicised drugs investigation. No charges had yet been pressed, but the implications were clear. Kev, who slept in a ramshackle room upstairs had been left to oversee the pub in its terminal stages – before the brewery repossessed and refurbished.

Ironically, earlier that afternoon Ben and Caddy had been on a NHS-run ‘Controlled Drinking’ course. Caddy cadged a roll-up off Ben as they left, before suggesting they put the theories they had learned into practice. Seven pints later and on the last leg of what became a well-controlled pub crawl they slunk into the Old Angel.

The place still had its charms - its pet-shop ambience, its unwashed and varied clientele and of course it was as easy to score Ecstasy there as to buy a bag of pork scratchings.

Kev served them and was his normal garrulous self. He told them about the closure notice soon to be enacted on the inn. His job on the line, and with it his accommodation.

Ben listened intently, before Caddy unveiled something that was of interest to both Kev and Ben. He told them about Marple Square and Cheverton Court. The tens of flats abandoned in St Anns on the estate. It was simple –

“You just go in the Housing Office, as long as you haven’t blown a council tenancy before. Rent arrears and the like……they show you around and give you the keys. Not only that Kev, but rumour has it – the whole shebang – Cheverton and Marple are destined for the great council estate in the sky. Demolition in less than three years and if you’ve got a tenancy – they’ll rehouse you and pay you 10 grand compo!”

The deal sounded too good to be true thought Kev. Then he poured Ben and Caddy “One on the ‘ouse”, a pint of Smeatons Special Ale.

“I’ve tended those barrels in that cellar like a bairn, j’ew know” he wistfully told them. “Best cellarman in Nottingham – if I say so me self, it’s a shame they’ve had to let this grand old boozer go, lads. Keeping ale is a craft. I’m so adept down there with the kegs that they call me Kev – Kev the Mole.”

He offered a yellowed claw of a hand in friendship.

Caddy burst out laughing, taking in Kev’s gingery stubble and tobacco stained teeth, two of them protruding like a hamster’s. A more murine personage you could never envisage.

“Hang on a minute!” Caddy pointed a finger in the air. I know you from somewhere innit? If you’re so and so……..where the fuck is Roland?”
Kev twitched his whiskers, perplexed.

Caddy’s routine was in full swing. He twizzled on the bar stool, comic timing and co-ordination compromised by alcohol.

“Roland Rat – of course! “

Caddy turned round to Ben, almost dancing now, ecstatic - despite his joke being as cheap as the beer.

“Ben! Would ya know it! Come on, your on this one. Kevin the Mole, my ass! He’s gotta be the one and only - Kevin, the ginger Gerbil!!!”

Kev blushed, smaning under his breath more at Caddy and his imbecility. For a moment Ben thought he was going to have to arrange a Section for Caddy. This bedraggled figure in a boiler suit needed sedation at least; bring on the chlorpromazine Ben mused.

Everyone around the bar seemed to collapse in stitches, although it was more truly tragic than comic. Alcohol is the great debaser and Caddy had nailed Kev’s physical appearance.

Kev just scowled and pouted. From that day the three became friends. Much to Kev’s disdain though, the gerbil moniker stuck and was normally prefixed and qualified with ginger, which grated him even more.

The meeting in the Old Angel did set another dreadful chain of events into place. Both Ben and Kev did as Caddy said and applied to Marple Square housing office. Both were in the process of losing their employment, both had insecure tenancies and were a cat’s hair from eviction. The idea of a private let in bedsit land was appalling.

They knew of the sad, lonely, awful places along the Alfreton Road and the scummy single rooms in Lenton. These private sector DHSS places with bedbugs and damp rot – Ben thought you might as well get a blank suicide note with the shorthold tenancy agreement – details to be filed later.

Caddy’s idea seemed possessed with genius, a clean warm council flat – no questions asked and £10K compensation money down the line, it was as attractive an offer as you’d get in desperate days. Little did Ben or Kev know of the egregious milieu of Marple Square.

Later that week Ben met up with Kev and they made their way to Marple Square housing office. It was that simple, they viewed their respective properties, both in Cheverton and conveniently next door to each other. They signed the paperwork over and took the keys.

Although these flats were cramped and in a kind of strange architectural archipelago (Cheverton Court with its runways and pyramidal structure) they were warm and clean. Most important of all though, there was no prying landlord – no deposits asked for, all they wanted were some housing benefit forms to be sent in after a few weeks. This was the entry point to the submerged world, the invisibility of the sunken city was absolute.

Mr. John Hope – caretaker of the blocks - was pleased. He wanted nice, respectable and clean people to live in the complex. He had been with Cheverton from the start and it was like family to him, he hushed any questions about the crime rate and the prostitution. Like the planners of the 70s, he was on a utopian cloud, blind to the seething, sickening obvious.

As he showed Ben and Kev around he had imagined these clients as hardworking professionals, he pictured Kev as a businessman and Ben, why he was probably a post graduate student.

Sometimes Mr. Hope’s fantasy would be shattered. Like when he was cleaning up the needles or mopping up pools of blood, but, he liked to put these nasty things away from his mind – most of the time.

Perhaps Kev did foresee the problems, but he cared so little about his life now though, He just wanted a place to get his head down, claim benefits and get pissed.

The job in the pub had been cash on the side, his back was screwed from years of roofing as a younger man. He did know a little about the area, he knew a working girl, Big Tits Lisa. He wasn’t like those other punters though – he just wanted to be her friend.

Since the early days in Cheverton, Ben and Kev had something of a friendship too. Caddy, Kev and Ben it was the three of them against the rest. There had been recent arguments though, not least since Chrissy’s arrival at Ben’s.

Kev was a acutely lonely and had been trying to get Big Tits Lisa to move into his squalid lair. Lisa as a matter of course had introduced him to crack cocaine and his brain (already frazzled from years of chronic alcoholism) had been a more than willing receptacle for the product.

Kev lost it once, when Lisa had been staying at Ben’s with Chrissy one night. In a fit of rage and jealously, he got the wrong idea. Was Ben doing the girls? What had driven him to it was the thought of young Chrissy at Ben’s, the pipes and in Kev’s bent mind the frenzied sexual couplings. He imagined Lisa with them in a triolism.

Three pans full of boiling oil spat on his stove. Ready to tip on Ben when he came back from a score. Kev passed out drunk while he was waiting. Caddy found him. He saw the oil and told Kev that he’d lost his mind - gone radge, crazed. As radge as George Dubya Bush when the towers went down, as Caddy was to say some time later.

Fortunately for all – the oil was tipped down the drains.

Chrissy had gone from Ben’s, that was for sure Kev realised.

After calling to him over the balcony, hands were shaken and Kev invited Ben in to listen to Dave Brubeck CDs. It seemed that this antipathy had been temporary. This was the start of a new entente cordial between the two neighbours.

Kev looked a lot better than he had in ages. Last time Ben had been invited in you couldn’t see the floor for blue plastic Polestar bottles. This time Ben was surprised that only was tea on offer, but clean cups, sugar and Ben had to pinch himself – Milk!

It transpired that Kev had managed to get a job. It was cash in hand again of course and NOT on the books. £40 a day for manual labour, painting and decorating, even a bit of rewiring – Kev had sorted himself out.

“Yeah, I’ve knocked the booze on the head. It almost killed me coming off though – the shakes, the DTs – I got in the bath and I was like a washing machine on heavy spin cycle rattling so much, so I was. Then the sweats, sores on my skin oozing stinking sweat that seemed to eat into my skin……..”

Ben congratulated him. Kev still looked like an extra from Dawn of the Dead, with his sunken eyes behind wiry John Lennon style glasses – but he was on top form. Smiling, even laughing sometimes he was a warm and agreeable host.
Then the talk turned to less salubrious things.

“You off all that shit. That crap…….you know me, Ben. I know exactly what was going on nextdoor. Up and down those fuckin stairs like a jack rabbit. Comings and goings all night long. You were becoming…….well, one of them. A full blown junky…a bag rat - don’t tell me I didn’t know…..”

Ben told him the truth. He had nothing to hide. He did put Kev straight though when he insinuated that anything sexual was going on.

Ben’s honesty won through and Kev began to talk more of his own problems. The child he didn’t see anymore, the failed marriages, the debts, the family disgrace. Some of the territory they had in common.

“Since I’ve stopped drinking Ben, I’ve been glad of this work I’m doing. Sat staring at the tele, or the walls and I would have been pissed again. Everyday is a battle. I’m only paid for four hours work, but I graft eight hours or more. Anything to tire me out. When I get back to the flat, it’s just emptiness and misery. You need to get a job, do something, you’re only young, kidda.“
It was clear that Kev was “white-knuckling”, as they say at the AA meetings. He’d stopped drinking but the void left was eating him up.

Then Kev asked Ben something he hadn’t expected.
“Y’know I’m friendly with Lisa. The one they call ‘Big Tits’ – disgusting if you ask me. She’s a human being like the rest of us.” Then his tone softened and he apologetically told Ben that Lisa and him had often smoked rock and then even surprisingly Kev went on to talk about the sweet sticky heroin they’d chase afterwards.

“What I’m saying Ben is -…..I want you to score for me. I’ve got plenty of money. Just the brown, white’s too nice and too expensive. How many bags can you get me for …say forty……?”

Ben was pissed off. He said NO. He got upset and started to leave. Before he slammed the door shut – suddenly it was all OK again. The anger and frustration - what was all the fuss about?

Moments later he was down Robin Hood Chase. No need for phone calls.

On the corner of Westville Gardens stood Pablo, the tall voodoo man. In the darkness the white of his teeth stood out……….he saw Ben coming and smiled; he whispered but in Ben’s ears it sounded like an oratorio.

“Good tings, bred…….. “
“Four D………”

An hour later back at Kev’s flat Louis Armstrong crooned out the hi-fi.
Sheets of blackened foil lay strewn over the small front room. The midnight flame had been licked, like sunshine to a snake.

“I love gouching.- it takes the pain away” Kev said nodding out.

Ben was already passed out though. He was dreaming the sleep of angels, just one last time (or so he kidded himself)…………..