Too Cold For Snow

Row, full of rent defaulters from other sink estates, who even if you set the bar for standards pretty low would limbo dance their scrotty way underneath.
    The women each had a mug of very strong tea. They were addicted to caffeine just as surely as their sons and daughters were hooked on hard drugs.
    Kylie was telling them how her son had rifled through her handbag and taken everything he could find, and he would even have taken her benefit cheque had she not had the foresight to hide it behind a skirting board next to the washing machine. When she’d confronted him he’d been sufficiently cooked on something to try to stare her down. Coolly she told him she was asking him to leave the house until he was clean. It was breaking her heart, she told him, but he had to learn to fend for himself on the street, and that would break him or make him.
    The first time she had found drugs in his possession she knew nothing about them, where they came from, what you did with them. But like all the mothers on the estate she’d been forced to learn, playing catch up with her little boy turning man. By now he was shooting up ketamine between his toes, the rest of his veins pushed to collapse. When you were getting your highs from horse tranquilisers, bottom wasn’t far away. Little wonder that they had convened to work out a way of ridding Llwyngog estate of the plague.
    All of the drugs trade on the estate was handled by a group of men who loved violence and Nazi Germany and were so feared that even the police stayed clear. There was something almost supernatural about the evil that emanated from them and the house on the estate which they had commandeered. One day, reckoned the local police superintendent, peering at the future through a fug of smoke from his Bensons, they would have enough evidence to take in a fleet of marias, take in the Army in tanks if necessary and haul them all in for a kicking in the cells. But the dealers wove such a web of fear that it was hard to isolate someone who would squeal. The women knew this, and it was the principal reason they made the call to a man who knew a man who knew another man who knew how to leave a message for Krink.
    It was no better a life than Krink’s, although Kamosiwe’s appearance in his life gave it a new and strange dimension – a sidekick, a confidante, maybe even a friend. Up until their serendipitous meeting Krink had been the very apogee of loneliness, who often had to refresh his social skills by reading Victorian novels, where people greet and meet a lot. It wasn’t often you met a Yanomamo Indian, let’s face it, certainly not in Llandudno Junction, where they’d found themselves sharing a table at Real Fried Chicken and Krink had been stumped by the man’s accent when he’d ordered himself a bucket of chicken pieces, and was prompted to ask about it. Kamosiwe had an easy manner and his arm muscles had a powerful sheen. He was an attractive man.
    Krink thought it strange how quickly he’d found himself confiding in him. It might have been the huge differences in their outlooks; it might have been the great similarities that can bind two absolute strangers in next to no time if given half a human chance. Or it might be that it was a time to unburden, to prepare for that later reckoning that if he’d had a vestige of faith, other than a basic fear of the void beyond, might have vexed him a bit more than it did. Krink smiled at the thought of his new friend, almost with a sexual frisson, and wondered why he’d let his guard slip so readily. Normally he thought of friendship as a weakness.
    Krink drew down the blinds and then walked outside to pull down the metal shutters. They had only recently been sprayed by two rival gangs – The World Security Council and the 24:7s. He would given them a fright one of these days, sure as eggs is eggs, sure as daisy. But not tonight. Tonight was for harvesting the houseplants.
    Keeping a dark pharmacy of poisons right out in the open seemed to him a masterstroke. Few people knew how many of them yielded poisons and fewer still would guess how it easy it was, with the most rudimentary of lab apparatus to distill the sappy juices into delivery systems for nephritis, blindness, nerve spasm and death.
    The shadows gathered under the leaves of angel’s wings and a mighty Swiss cheese plant, monstera deliciosa. His collection was by now pretty exhaustively put together – flamingo lilies and kaffir lilies, crotons and