Three weeks community service. Or Community Payback as they call it these days. I’d have to tell our Mikey about that.
I was picked up by the supervisor, Mr Cooper —call me Nigel, we’re all grown-ups here—from the bus stop on Main Street. It was horrendously early, 9.30, and I wasn’t due to be dropped back until 5.30. Long day. The only woman in a minibus with six other convicts. They seemed nice enough lads. There was a tense moment when one asked,
‘You’re Mikey Barnes’ sister?’
You never know which way that’s going to go.
But I nodded and he mumbled ‘Top lad’.
Mr Cooper, I mean Nigel, passed us neon-yellow tabards as we clambered out the van in the Rec car park. My tabard was stiff and nearly touching my knees. Comfortable as wearing a cardboard box fancy-dress costume.
‘Do these come in any other sizes?’
‘No.’
Any day spent working in a Community Payback tabard would be a long day. But I should have thought of that before shoplifting the three bottles of nail polish from the wall display in Hair Cutz N Beauty.
‘Or at least before you got caught,’ Mam said.
Beverley Kirch had an eagle eye for a stray pubic hair and cut the straightest bob in town, so given her infamous attention to detail, what made me think I’d get away with stealing Midnight Mist, Bikini Blue and Rouge Rebel whilst her back was turned?
The glass bottles had jiggled in my trackie bottoms pocket as I reached out to smush my card against the card reader. Beverley’s arm swung out at speed, making me jump as she grabbed my wrist.
‘Hang on a minute Missy.’
She’d held onto me with a vice-like grip, her eyes rapidly scanning the display wall looking for gaps. She didn’t let go until the community policeman disturbed her wind chimes. That bastard had a good feel around my bra’s underwire after I emptied my pockets.
According to Mam, the only saving grace was that I’d waited until after her hair was finished. I was treating her to a Bombshell blow dry.
‘This is what I get for paying for your birthday hairdo,’ I’d told her.
‘Shut up. I have to go back for highlights in six weeks, you know.’
I was assigned the stream on the west side of the field with Billy, a spotty looking lad I remembered from school. Bouncing on the spot, shifting his weight from one foot to the other; he seemed very jittery.
‘Longest day today,’ he said. He kept glancing around as if waiting for someone else to turn up.
‘Yeah. Your first day too?’
‘Nah. Been doing this six weeks now. Halfway through.’
‘Oh.’
‘Longest day coz it’s the summer solstice, innit?’
‘Is it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh.’
‘I know this stuff, I’m kinda like … into it.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah, me and my mates. We ain’t druids or nothing. But we like to drive to Stonehenge sometimes and get pissed.’
‘Right.’
Obviously I wasn’t going to ask him why he was here. We both pulled a few plastic bags out of the stream and Billy speared an empty coke can from above, like he was catching fish. The aluminium tore open. I held open the black bin-liner, bagging his catch.
‘ABH if you’re wondering.’
‘I wasn’t,’ I lied.
‘Yeah, well didn’t want you to worry you were working with some paedo or summat.’
‘Nah, they don’t give them community service,’ I said. But what did I know?
‘Dunno. Probably. Anyway, I’m not normally violent so no need to worry.’
‘Right.’
I waited for Billy to elaborate, but first he had to catch a Walkers crisp packet floating downstream.
After a while I started to think he might never speak again.
Nigel came over. He said it was time for a tea break. I looked at my watch. Actually, it was Mam’s watch, she’d nicked it from H Samuels when she worked there in the eighties. I’d borrowed it from her jewellery box last week. They’d said no mobiles, so I’d worn it to keep track of time. It was only ten o’clock. We’d done about twelve minutes work.
Tea and biscuits were available from the rear of the minibus. Nigel had bought several Waitrose Essentials packs of custard creams and bourbons and the other guys were joking with him that he was a posh fucker. He had a cardboard box with five flasks, two tea, two coffee and one with cold milk. He also had some little sachets of brown sugar.
‘You can thank Mrs Cooper for those,’ he said.
Some of the lads removed their tabards to drink their tea.
I didn’t bother, even though mine was beginning to chaff the edge of my armpits.
‘So, if they don’t call me, then do I call them?’ Billy was asking one of the other crooks about something.
‘Nah, mate. Probation officer’s got bigger problems than little ol’ you.’
After break, Billy and I wandered back over to the far side of the field. Not together though. Billy took the longest possible route to get to our bit of the stream. Once he arrived, he asked why I’d got Payback hours and I told him I’d taken the blame when my Ma got caught shoplifting at Hair Cutz. I knew he’d believe me. Proper gullible.
I picked up my litter picker to get started again, and Billy jogged on the spot for a bit and then decided to go and ask for a spade. His top-notch timewasting skills reminded me of Mickey. I’ve not seen him for ages now. I should visit more often but he’s doing ten in high security and its miles from here.
Billy went back over the field diagonally to where Nigel was supervising three blokes dragging a fallen branch out from under some bushes. I stopped litter picking whilst he was gone. The day was already going extra-terribly-desperately-awfully-slowly and that was despite the fact I now knew it was also officially the longest day of the year.
The Rec was surrounded by field on three sides. Near the entrance, by the car park were a few houses. Nice houses. The kind with the latest gadgets and jewellery boxes on dressing tables. There was a small play area, where a Marks & Spencer-type woman was pushing a toddler in a swing. I wondered if she thought we were proper workmen or if she realised she was surrounded by criminals.
Billy was picking his way across the field now towards the car pack. Nigel must have given him permission to get the tool from the van. Billy was a proper tool himself, I mused. The sort you could persuade to do anything.
When Billy finally returned, he put the spade on the grass and picked up his litter picker. He resumed fishing the stream. I noticed he smelt of fags.
‘So, you gonna tell me what happened then?’ I said.
I was bored now and wanted Billy to entertain me. I knew he’d fail miserably, but times were desperate. And lads always believe we are genuinely interested in them, don’t they?
‘So, this bloke followed me to the toilets’ Billy said.
‘And?’
‘Younger than me, he was. I got the hump and clouted him.’
‘Because?’
I stopped fishing to encourage him to go on.
‘I was in a club. And he’s following me into the toilets and I panicked. I mean once you’re peeing that’s it. Dead end innit? Before I started to piss, I had to do something.’
Billy’s voice sounded agitated. I nodded.
‘So, I punched him twice.’
Seemed a bit extreme. I raised my eyebrows, then quickly corrected my expression to neutral, but Billy wasn’t looking at me. He was gazing off into the distance, deep into memory-land. After a brief pause, he was off again:
‘He fell over. Boom. Must have hit him harder than I thought. But it was self-defence, more or less. Anyway, I got arrested for that.’
Billy raised both hands, as if to say unbelievable. I stepped backwards in case he decided to start waiving his litter picker about. He continued wittering, but quieter now. I was straining to hear him over the babbling stream.
‘First offence. I told them anxiety made me do it. He was coming for me. I was genuinely scared. He could’a stabbed me.’
‘Right,’ I said. I wondered if Billy could tell I was unconvinced.
‘They said it was an entirely unprovoked attack on innocent bystander or summat like that. Three months Community Service for that.’
He spat into the stream in disgust.
‘Community Payback.’ I corrected.
‘Yeah, right. Payback.’
We fished and bagged in silence until lunch. Now and then, Billy had a fag break by pretending to fetch various tools from the van. He clearly couldn’t stay in one place for too long. I idly wondered if the judge should’ve taken his jitteriness into account. One of them extenuating circumstances. He probably could have been diagnosed with something or other to get him off the hook. So could Mickey, come to think of it.
My yellow tabard was heating up from the sunlight, but no point complaining. I forced myself to plod on until the next tea break, promising myself another of Mrs Cooper’s bourbons.
As I litter picked, I thought about Billy. About how he would finish off this spell of Community Payback and then before long, he’d getting nicked again. Just like my brother. I’d seen it all before.
About 5pm, three lads I knew from clubbing, passed through the park on their way from the building site to the pub. One’s a plumber and proper hot. I’ve never been so embarrassed in all my life to be caught wearing that yellow tabard. He’s never going to look at me the same again now.
Back from another fag break, Billy asked me to pass him his litter picker, and as I bent down to pick it up from the grass, I noticed that I’d already chipped the red polish on my thumb.
Solstice or not, it had been a very long day. It was going to be a long three weeks. Most nail polish never lasts three weeks, I thought. And I could see some sort of irony there, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Oh, unless it’s the gel polish, of course, that shit’s hard as nails.
There was a thud as Billy flung his litter picker down onto the grass, squatting down he leant forward into the stream and tugged with one hand at a half brick which was weighing down a plastic bag. After retrieving the litter, which I bagged, Billy sat back on the grass and practised catching and throwing the half brick with one hand. Each time he threw it up in the air, he twisted it, so it turned over and landed in his palm the other way up. Thunk, thunk.
I thought about how dull the next three weeks watching Billy waste time when he should be working would be. The wet brick glistened in the sunshine. I thought about how long it would be before Billy was in trouble again. It was only half a brick, light enough to be thrown and caught with one hand. I thought about what colour polish to go for after I finished Community Payback. Thunk. Thunk. You couldn’t build a thing with a useless brick like that. Perhaps Billy would try to take it home. Billy was the type I could persuade to do anything. I thought about him bending his arm back, taking aim. I imagined the half brick sailing through the window at Hair Cutz and Beauty, Beverley Kirch sweeping up glass shards with her dustpan and brush, her angry-red fingernails.
Author: Alexis Wolfe writes short stories, creative non-fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines including Mslexia and The London Reader.