Street-sweepers brushed discarded soft drink cans and polystyrene fast-food boxes from London’s pavements into black plastic bin bags. The previous day’s rainstorm had washed away the stale, humid air and brought with it an early-morning chill. I pulled my shirt cuffs down over my cold hands, perched on the wall outside the British Library and leaned back on the railings, hoping it would be warmer inside when it opened later. I’d spent the night in a homeless shelter at a church, but awoke early to get a head start on my day.
Now I passed the time by staring at the blank faces of the daybreak workers who sleepwalked past me. Any one of them over a certain age could have been Kenneth Jagger.
My first recollection of the monster that lived with my mother was of his iron-girder legs pounding down Doreen’s stairs. The solid brick walls had seemed to quake under each footstep. Then, when he reached us, Kenneth briefly eyed me up and down, and without saying a word, lumbered into another room. I looked at my mother quizzically. She answered with a forced smile.
My loathing of Kenneth was immediate, intense and plainly reciprocated. I had never been in close proximity to such an intimidating presence. He wore a thick, black moustache and his receding hairline was poorly disguised with a limp Brylcreem quiff. Dark hairs crawled across his broad shoulders like spider’s legs and poked out of the holes in his dirty white T-shirt.
A chequered history was etched across his gnarly face – a portrait of his environment. A collection of clumsily self-inked gun and knife tattoos on his forearms and the backs of his hands warned he preferred to be feared, not befriended. A crimson heart with a black dagger penetrating the name ‘Doreen’ sat off-centre on his left bicep. Its faded colouring indicated he had been a part of her life a lot longer than I.
As Doreen began to pull him aside into their tiny concrete backyard, I noted a scrapbook lying on the sideboard. He saw me looking and nodded his head as if to say ‘open it up’. It was more an order than a request.
Inside was a potted history of the man in the form of newspaper cuttings.
Kenneth Jagger – or ‘Jagger the Dagger’, as the press had branded him – was a gangster of sorts – enough of a wrong’un to earn vibrant stories every time the police questioned him in connection with armed robberies. Knives were his weapon of choice. His was a wasted life, blighted by sporadic stays at Her Majesty’s pleasure, but never a punishment so harsh as to encourage him to see the error of his ways.
By the mid-1960s, Kenneth had remained a small fish in a crowded pond. As a career criminal, he had seen meagre returns. All he had under his control were his aspirations, and Doreen. According to one report about his conviction for beating and robbing a postmaster, he’d been released from prison shortly after my mother had last walked away from us. I realised he must have been the one my parents argued about behind closed doors.
Kenneth and Doreen returned to find me engrossed in his criminal CV. If he thought something like that might impress me, he’d already misjudged me. And Doreen’s apprehensive expression told me she, too, sensed the atmosphere that hung thick in the air like her cigarette smoke.
‘Right, let’s get the tea on,’ she offered in an overly chirpy voice, like Barbara Windsor in a Carry On film. She nervously tapped her bottom lip with her finger. ‘Do you want to give me a hand, Simon?’
‘How do you know him?’ I whispered as she bustled me into the kitchenette.
‘Kenny’s an old friend,’ she continued without making eye contact, and focused on peeling potatoes and dropping them into a deep-fat fryer.
‘But why is he here? With us?’
‘He lives here, Simon.’
I glared at her, waiting for a better explanation, but there was none. I scowled at Doreen, unable to reconcile the carefree life she’d led in my imagination with the squalid reality before me. The silence loomed heavy between us as we made our first, and last, meal together.
1.50 p.m.
I’d sifted through mountains of electoral registers in the library dating back two decades, but drew a blank in trying to find any trace of Doreen. It was possible – and given her history, quite likely – she had moved on from East London. But the pain etched into her face the night my father and I turned her away from our door for the first time had told me she’d resigned herself to her fate. And that lay with Kenneth.
So I relied on my hazy memory, a London street map I’d smuggled out under my shirt, and several buses to get me to Bromley-by-Bow.
I recalled Doreen’s futile attempts to gloss over the sour mood between Kenneth and me that day by talking incessantly. He’d had little to say, and stared menacingly at me to relay his feelings instead. I all but ignored him, frightened to even make eye contact. She’d had everything she could possibly have needed with my father and me, but had discarded it for a pitiful existence with a worthless man. It made no sense.
‘How long’s he here for?’ Kenneth suddenly spat, then stuffed his face with another chip sandwich. Tomato ketchup trickled down his chin like lava.
‘Don’t be like that, Kenny,’ Doreen replied gently. Around my father she was the life and soul of the house, but around Kenneth, she was subservient. I didn’t like this version of her.
Doreen asked me about school and I explained how I planned to go to university and study architecture. She smiled warmly. Kenneth just laughed.
‘Poncey load of crap,’ he roared. ‘University. Load of bollocks.’
‘Why?’ I asked – the first time I’d dared to speak to him.
‘You should get a proper job. Get out there and work instead of learning rubbish.’
‘I’m thirteen, and I can’t train to be an architect if I don’t pass my exams.’
‘Listen, kid, I was in the boxing ring and earning money working on the markets when I was your age, not wasting my time.’
‘Well, my dad doesn’t think it’s a waste of time.’ I directed this at Doreen. Her eyes remained fixed on the table.
‘What does that pussy know? Someone needs to make a man of you.’
I was aware cockiness probably wasn’t the best way forward with a man like Kenneth, but my brain wasn’t listening. ‘Like you?’
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’ I looked down at my plate.
‘You think you’re better than me, don’t you?’ he continued, a volcano preparing to erupt. ‘Coming down here with your big bloody ideas. Well, you’ll never be better than me – you’re fuck all.’
I looked to Doreen for support, but she said nothing. Then my ability to self-censor completely evaporated.
‘So I should stab someone and waste my life in prison, then – would that be better, Kenny?’
He banged both fists on the table. ‘You know what I’ve got? Respect. And you can’t buy that.’
And before I could process what was happening, he’d thrown his chair to one side, and I was six inches off the ground, pinned to a wall by an arm the size of an anchor. His cheeks had exploded in a rainbow of reds.
‘You ever look down your nose at me again and I swear to God, I’ll fucking kill you,’ he shouted, as bread and potato bullets flew from his mouth and sprayed my face.