Down and Out on Murder Mile by Tony O'Neill Page B

bones.
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    â€œI want you both out tonight.”
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    â€œI just paid you rent for the week.”
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    â€œYou’ll get it back.”
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    â€œNow?”
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    â€œNot now. When I have it. Now fuck off. If you don’t wanna leave, I’ll come back with some mates and I’ll chuck you out. You know that I ain’t fucking around, right?”
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    I knew. I looked down at Susan. “Pack our shit up,” I told her. “I’m gonna go find us a place.” I left her there with Michael and Jack. I didn’t want her coming with me. I didn’t need to hear her fucking voice on top of the chatter in my ownhead. I cursed and punched the elevator doors as it brought me down to the ground floor. Outside the rain was pissing down. The gutters were filling up with filthy water, and I was racking my brain about where to go. I remembered the hooker motels around Kings Cross and decided to hit there. Any motels that rent rooms by the hour had to be cheap.
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    On my way out of the flat, Michael had the audacity to yell after me: “Don’t give up on sobriety, mate. When you’re ready to come back, the meetings will be there for you.”
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    I paused by the door, and gave him my considered response.
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    â€œYou can suck my dick, Michael, you fucking faggot.”
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    I slammed the door, made my way down to the rain-blasted streets. I felt strangely liberated. This is when I functioned at my best, with my back completely up against the wall. I knew that the situation at the bank wasn’t good. We had maybe a hundred pounds to our name. The rain kept coming down on me, oblivious to my situation.

17
DOWN AND OUT ON MURDER MILE
    We stayed in Kings Cross for two sleepless nights. The first night that we were there I woke up in the early hours, covered in bites from the bugs that lived in the mattress. The motel was a run-down shithole off Caledonian Road, and the room was in the basement floor and didn’t even provide sunlight. I called Dr. Stein’s office and informed them that we were now homeless and looking for a place to live. His nurse warned me that unless we found something by our next scheduled visit, our prescriptions would be canceled. I hit the papers looking for a place.
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    Susan got on the phone to her father in LA and pleaded for money. Over the years she had burned both of her parents down for money, but surprisingly the old man came through for her this time,wiring two thousand dollars by Western Union. When I expressed surprise she just laughed.
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    â€œThey’re just happy that I’m not in LA anymore. That has to be worth a couple of thousand, right?”
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    I looked at her and silently wondered just who had gotten the best out of that deal.
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    I found a flat that lay above a shoe repair place on “Murder Mile”—Upper Clapton Road. We saw the place at ten in the morning and took it straight away. It was a pit, but we couldn’t afford to waste money in the motel any longer. The landlady’s son showed us around, and something about him gave me the impression that after we said we wanted the flat that he might try and sell us a stolen cell phone or some bootleg DVDs. I figured the uglier and more fucked-up the flat was, the less chance that they would be interested in what went on behind closed doors. Total anonymity was my goal, and I got it.
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    The first night that we were there, I turned on the TV and a local news reporter was standing outside of our front door.
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    â€œThey call it Murder Mile,” he said, looking straight at the camera, “a section of East London that has more shootings per capita than anywhere else in the UK. Today, Homerton Hospital announced that they were hiring doctors from South Africa—doctors more adept at treatinggunshot wounds—to deal with the spiraling consequences of Murder Mile’s crack-fueled explosion of