Not Dead Enough

call his dealer’s mobile on the phone he had stolen, because credit on his own one had just run out, but he decided it wasn’t worth risking the man’s wrath. Or worse, getting ditched as a customer, tight bastard though his dealer was. The man would not be impressed to have his number on the call list of a hot mobile – particularly one he would be selling on.
    So he stepped into a payphone in front of a grimy Regency terrace on The Level and let the door swing shut against the din of the Friday afternoon traffic. It felt like an oven door closing on him, the heat was almost unbearable. He dialled, holding the door open with his foot. After two rings, the phone was answered with a curt, ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Wayne Rooney,’ Skunk said, giving him the password they had agreed last time. It changed each time they met.
    The man spoke in an east London accent. ‘Yeah, all right then, your usual? Brown you want? Ten-pound bag or twenty?’
    ‘Twenty.’
    ‘What you got? Cash?’
    ‘A Motorola Razor. T-Mobile.’
    ‘Up to my neck in ’em. Can only give you ten for that.’
    ‘Fuck you, man, I’m looking for thirty.’
    ‘Can’t help you then, mate. Sorry. Bye.’
    In sudden panic, Skunk shouted urgently, ‘Hey, no, no. Don’t hang up.’
    There was a brief silence. Then the man’s voice again. ‘I’m busy. Haven’t got time to waste. Street price is going up and there’s a shortage. Going to be short for two weeks.’
    Skunk logged that comment. ‘I could take twenty.’
    ‘Ten’s best I can do.’
    There were other dealers, but the last one he’d used had been busted and was now off the streets, in jail somewhere. Another, he was sure, had given him some crap stuff. There were a couple of buyers he could take the phone to, get a better price, but he was feeling increasingly strung out; he needed something now, needed to get his head together. He had a job to do today which was going to make him way more money than this. He would be able to buy some more later in the day.
    ‘Yeah, OK. Where do I meet you?’
    The dealer, whom he knew only as Joe, gave him instructions.
    Skunk stepped outside, feeling the sun searing down on his head, and dodged through the jammed lanes of traffic on Marlborough Place, just in front of a pub where he sometimes bought Ecstasy in the men’s toilet at night. He might even have the cash to buy some this evening, if all went well.
    Then he turned right into North Road, a long, busy, one-way street that ran uphill, steeply. The lower end was skanky, but halfway up, just past a Starbucks, the trendiest part of Brighton started.
    The North Laine district was a warren of narrow streets that sprawled across most of the hill running down east from the station. If you turned any corner you’d find yourself staring at a line of antique marble fireplaces out on the pavement, or racks of funky clothes, or a row of Victorian terraced cottages, originally built for railway workers in the nineteenth century and now trendy townhouses, or the sandblasted façade of an old factory now converted into chic urban loft dwellings.
    As he walked a short distance up the hill, Skunk was finding the exertion hard. There used to be a time when he could run like the wind, when he could have snatched a bag, or goods from a shop, with confidence, but now he could only do something physical for a short time without getting exhausted, apart from during the hours immediately following a hit, or when he was on uppers. No one took any notice of him, apart from two plain-clothes policemen seated at a table in the packed Starbucks, with a clear view out through the window of the goings-on in the street.
    Both of them, scruffily dressed, could have passed as students, eking out their coffees for as long as possible. One, shorter and burly, with a shaven head and goatee beard, wore a black T-shirt and ripped jeans; the other, taller, with lanky hair, in a baggy shirt hanging loose over military fatigues. They knew most of Brighton’s lowlife by sight, and Skunk’s mug-shot had been up on a wall in Brighton Central, along with forty or so other regular offenders, for as long as both of them had been in the force.
    To most of the populace of Brighton and Hove, Skunk was all but invisible. Dressed the same way he had been dressing since his early teens, in his crumpled nylon hoodie over a ragged orange T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and trainers, hands in his pockets, body slouched forward, he blended into the