A Traitor to Memory

Unlike many areas of London, Tower Hamlets had not become gentrified. Films made here did not feature actors who batted their eyelashes, fell in love, lived arty lives, and lent an air of genteel down-at-heel glamour to the place, thus resulting in its renaissance at the hands of yuppies in Range Rovers yearning to be trendy. For the word renaissance implied that a place had once seen better times to which an infusion of cash would return it. But to Pitchley's eyes, Tower Hamlets had been a dump from the moment its first building had its initial foundation stone set into place.

He'd spent more than half his life trying to scrub the grime of Tower Hamlets from beneath his fingernails. He'd worked jobs not fit for man or beast since his ninth birthday, squirreling away whatever he could towards a future he wanted but couldn't quite define. He'd endured bullying at a school where learning took a distant seventh place to tormenting teachers, demolishing ancient and nearly useless equipment, graffitiing every available inch, shagging birds on the stairwells, setting fires in the dustbins, and pinching everything from the third-formers' sweets money to the Christmas collection taken each year to give a decent meal to the area's homeless drunks. In that environment, he'd forced himself to learn, a sponge for whatever might get him out of the inferno he'd come to assume was his punishment for a transgression he'd committed in a previous lifetime.

His family didn't understand his passion to be free of the place. So his mother—unmarried as she always had been and would be to her grave—smoked her fags all day at the window of the council flat, collected the dole like it was owed to her for doing the nation the favour of breathing, raised the six offspring that were got by four fathers, and wondered aloud how she'd managed to produce such a git as Jimmy, all neat and tidy like he actually thought he was something other than a yobbo in disguise.

“Lookit 'im, will you?” she'd ask his siblings. “Too good for us, our Jim. What's it to be today, laddie?”—as she looked him over—“Riding to the 'ounds, are we?”

He'd say, “Aw, Mum,” and feel misery climbing from his navel up his chest and into his jaws.

“Tha's all right, lad,” she'd reply. “Just pinch one of them nice doggies so we'll 'ave a watcher round these ol' digs, okay? Tha'd be nice, now, woul'n't it, kids? 'Ow'd you like our Jimmy to pinch us a dog?”

“Mum, I'm not going fox hunting,” he'd say.

And they'd laugh. Laugh and laugh till he wanted to thrash the lot of them for being so useless.

His mother was the worst because she set the tone. She might have been clever. She might have been energetic. She might have been capable of doing something with her life. But she got herself a baby—Jimmy himself—when she was fifteen and that's when she learned that if she kept having them, she'd be paid. Child Benefit was what they called it. What Jimmy Pytches called it was Chains.

So he made his life's purpose the demolition of his past, taking every odd job he could get his mitts on as soon as he was able to do so. What the job was didn't matter to him: cleaning windows, scrubbing floors, vacuuming carpets, walking dogs, washing cars, minding children. He didn't care. If he was paid to do it, do it he would. Because although money couldn't buy him better blood, it could get him miles from the blood that threatened to drown him.

Then came that cot death, that god-awful moment when he went into her bedroom because it was long past the time she generally woke up from her nap. And there she was like a plastic doll, with one hand curled to her mouth like she'd been trying to help herself breathe—for God's sake—and her tiny fingernails were blue were blue were bluest of blue and he knew right then that she was a goner. Crikey, he'd been in the sitting room, hadn't he? He'd been right next door. He'd been watching Arsenal. He'd been thinking, Lucky day, this is, the brat's well away and I won't have to fuss with her during the game. He'd thought that—the brat—but he didn't mean it, never would have said it, actually smiled when he saw her in her push chair at the local grocery with her mum. He never thought “the brat” then. Just, Here's lit'le Sherry and her mum. Hello, Nubkins. Because that's what he called her. He called her a nonsense name. Nubkins.

Then she was dead and the police were there. Questions and answers and tears all round. And what kind of monster was he who watched Arsenal while a baby was dying and who even to this day remembered the score?