Phase Ten Regeneration Area

iii) Commotion on the Chase

As Ben Parker woke that morning, the shock of last night’s incident giving him at sharp jolt, as his fuzzy memories now returned. He commenced the merry dance of citric, spoon, smack and filter, then carefully sucked up the brown liquid in a 1ml syringe. Flicking the tip to eradicate air bubbles, he began pumping his arms to find a victim vein.

Meanwhile the street gals stood on St Anns chase gossiping about the alleged shots fired at Pablo last night. The word on the street was like bushfire – especially when it affected the supply, distribution and availability of hard drugs. The driving force of this sink economy would soon resume

You could count on it that no police had been notified. No one would dare or care to report such trivialities. Occasionally when there had been a real mess (perhaps a serious hospitalisation, a murder, or rape) the police (or the Feds as the St Anns deviants called them) would commence an operation. Then it would get reported in the Evening Post. OK, it had been a gun this time and not a knife or a fist – but these yardies were a law to themselves. After such a little blip surely things would return to normality. The dealers with the regularity of a metronome would return to trade, barter and sell.

Someone who did actually care was Deano, he was cursing, pacing up and down in the Afro-Caribbean centre, thinking of what he was gonna do about ‘dis bad ting, yeh’. Deano the St Anns main man. After all Pablo was his ‘yout, dealing his ‘tings and takin his dollar and he didn’t like his bredren having their bits blown off. Especially by dem Meadows boys, dem rarse clats. Who had done this – man, all that would be left would be a clump of hair and a handful of gold teeth.

iv) Phase Ten

If you were to drive up the Woodborough Road from the junction with Mansfield Road at the turn of the century you would notice the placards and signs designating St Anns – Phase Ten Regeneration Area. From the bottom of the estate with the long abandoned cash and carry and the boarded up hypermarket, to Marple Square flats and the obscenely ubiquitous Cheverton complex, this was the area Nottingham City Council had now named ‘Phase Ten.’
On a coffee morning that Caddy and Ben frequented down at the ‘Regeneration Centre’, for occasional cups of caffeine to regulate their cider intake, the local vicar Reverend Andrews had started a campaign against the name. “Phase Ten - it’s just so wrong.” He said. “There are real people that live here and this name it is so utilitarian and starkly awful. I thought it was a joke when I saw the signs…it’s like something from Orwell or worse science fiction”
Caddy replied sarcastically that he loved it. “It compliments the bleakness and hopelessness of the place. The sooner they demolish the better”
Ben just thought how apt it all was. ‘Phase Ten’ seemed to epitomise the bunker mentality of the sunken city, the depersonalisation, the anonymity and the sorrow. This was the inner city at the turn of the twenty-first century, and a municipal boot had been added in the peverse renaming of this once proud town. The old St Anns - the Nottingham of Sillitoe, those angry young men who played hard and drank harder had somewhere died long ago. Arthur Seaton or his equivalent was now a rude boy, with gold chain and mobile phone. His hard earned pay-packet replaced with drug money and dole outs – out with the factories of a long forgotten era. Sad Sunday went on forever and Saturday never came, an endless drudgery of hopelessness in the regeneration zones……..

V) Fothergill's Monument

Occasionally amongst the dilapidated houses and monstrous architecture there was something special still surviving. Surviving from another era and the good times, when the working class still worked. Such was the old Methodist church that had now been taken over by the Pakistani community and served as their centre. It had been designed by the esteemed Nottinghamshire architect Watson Fothergill and was an impressive sight, adding colour to the backdrop of concrete bunkers that made up the 1970’s flats. For a couple of pounds you could get huge tray of curry, dahl and rice on a Thursday afternoon – it was a favourite meeting spot for Ben, Caddy and Kevin the Gerbil.
“Could you sub me mine Andy,” Kev croaked. “I’ve only a couple of quid and my baccy is getting perilously low…be a sport, old man.” Although compared to Caddy he was the old one. He was barely forty years old and looked sixty. Waiting for his grub, he nervously bit yellowed fingers and twitched about in his pockets fumbling with his packet of Drum.
“Ok, ok. I’ve never known such a bleedin cheapskate, eh, Ben. Always about the fags with him, innit. I suppose I better pay the ferryman this time or he’ll have to go out nubbin (collecting dog ends) and then spend the rest of the day drying them out over his one bar electric fire!”
They all laughed the comical picture of Kev and his little heater with the drying butts taking tension out of the situation. The meal to arrive was not to disappoint. A huge platter of veggie, meat and pastes – the cutlery was much to be desired though.
“It looks like they saw us comin’,” Caddy mused, “plastic knives and plastic forks – like they know we’re prison fish. Just in case I decide
to gouge out Kevin the Gerbil’s eyeballs, eh?”

Vi) A Shooting

They called him Crazy. He had been waiting on the corner of Watkin Street for an hour now, smokin white and fumbling with the keys on the ignition. Small time dealer, but big time smoker, there was not a vice he’d tried his huge hands at. Whether it was pimping, armed blags or simple street robbery – he was a jack of all trades but a master of none. In the glove compartment of his battered GTi was his latest toy. Excitedly, nervously he kept getting it out, toying with it - feeding its power. He’d used other shooters before, but not real ones. This was a dead weight of black cold metal, the genuine article. This was as heavy and as dark as his heart.

Crack wired and running out of it fast. His only thought was to get more. Of course he had a job in hand, he was now Deano’s man. Deano had set him up with his first pipe of that evening. Round at Deano’s yard, he watched as the yardie had put the forty stone on the table. Watched the room disappear as all he now saw was the pearl of white crack and his pipe, the flame from his lighter licking it’s base as the stuff dissolved to smoke before his eyes. It filled his lungs first and then his being. Now, he had become the destroyer of worlds.

Since then he had been on a mission, the forty stone wouldn’t last and Deano had promised him more if he accomplished his part of the deal. What the man had wanted was a kind of Biblical revenge. His boy Pablo had been shot up at the Chase last summer and as Deano explained, “It dat dere Bible. It say – eye for and eye and tooth for a tooth. It only be righteous – man, my ‘yout lost his blut clat ear.”
Deano continued as if he was speaking from a pulpit in stentorian tones, “I wanna get back at these St Anns bad men. The lord gives me the right to avenge and deal with der badness in dere 'arts. Then they will know the voice of de almighty. Shoot ‘im, yeh – but do not kill him. Shoot his arm or his leg…den when you done come back and Deano will treat you right, innit..”
All that mattered now to Crazy was his next fix. He was waiting for the blue Peugeot 305 to drive down Watkin Street and then blast away. Those fools he thought, the Meadows boys and the St Anns crews trying to play the yardies at their own game. Let them shoot each other up, in their little petty gangland disputes - but this time they’d over stepped the mark, who’d have the guts to shoot at the yardies? No, whatever happened was justice, like Deano said it was all in the hands of providence now.