The Scarlet Pimpernel

He was the worst kind of cocky, cheeky, little cunt imaginable.

He rode the lines every day, and cultivated a deep knowledge of the tube system. He slipped through the turnstiles. And his life slipped through the cracks. Sometimes he just disappeared.

In the morning he would pack some sandwiches, a flask of tea, and a Ribena.

He kept his racking plots a secret. Auto Ks in South East London. Beltons in Dollis Hill. Kings Road for Buntz. Other plots for Homestyles and Halfords. If some cunt got to B&Q the week before him, he got spun. Sometimes he rode big Mets out to deep bumpkin sides to rack, where the sky was so clear at night he could practically see the fucking MIR space-station. The air hurt his lungs.

He saw colours. Topaz Yellow. Brick. Pearl Grey. Bonfire. Almond. Beige. Chippewa Sandstone. Terra Cotta. Burgundy. Grey-stone.

He made mops out of Pritt Sticks and pool table felt. Out of bingo dabbers. He mixed red Artline with blue Pentel ink that left a bright pink stain when it got buffed. And when his pens leaked into his socks or jeans, his mum would be screwing.

He would go to the Wimpy bench, twos a Silk Cut, catch jokes, drink a lickle rum. One time he battered a bottle of Martini Bianco and got on the tracks at Harrow and started punching himself in the head. He never huffed or drank Brasso though, like the bag-heads he saw round the way.

He lived in a system-built citadel of walk-up red brick housing blocks. The rads never bothered going in because neglecting it was easier. Every now and then he chirpsed a girl from the estate. A few people said she was butters, but he liked her. And she always gave him shiners.

In the evening he went to the cotch and lay on the green couch. He ate Golden Wonder — Britain’s noisiest crisp — and drank Nurishment. He blazed zoots until the roaches gave him hot lips, and got ready for yards. His mind would start thinking as it moved through the ganja portal. Letters would deconstruct and outlines would find their rhythm like a four-bar Amen loop or a drum fill, ready to burn. Missions crystallised. The possibility of a runner masked cosmic pain. He longed to get lost on the lines, in the track grease, dust and grime.

He preferred getting into G through the mews, crawling across a garden, scaling the back wall, dropping to the sub-station, and then down the cutting to the ledge overlooking the two train side of the yard. The three train side usually had more track divvies floating about as it was nearer the workers’ rec building with the clock on it. Once he saw someone having a wank over a copy of Razzle in the driver’s cabin of a lil Met. He waited for the cleaners to leave, their brooms clanking on steel as they swept rubbish out of the open carriage doors.

After clocking the yard for a bit, he decided to paint the first lay-up on the two train side. It was a cunt to squeeze into as there was only about three feet between the wall and the train. His nerves started jangling like fuckeree. It was always a throb until cheeba smoothed him out again. He used the pipes and cables on the wall to straddle between the wall and the train and reach the top of the carriage for a top-to-bottom. His paint rattled. Spliff fumes mixed with the pear-drop fumes of a Willow Green Homestyle. The fumes talked and seeped into his mind, illuminating it. But also rotting it. He started to flow, the outside world receding into the shadowlands. Raaaahhhhhh.

They could never keep him out. He was fucking invincible. He was Jerry. They were Tom. He was an escape artist. Trackside Houdini. The Scarlet Pimpernel. A one man crime wave. He’d had a few close shaves in the past. He nearly got bagged during a BTP raid. A copper pushed him onto the running track, and he fell and got shocked as his foot hit the live rail and his belly caught the earth line. His body had juddered. His jacket fizzed. The skin on his on his knees was burning.

But still he got away.

Very early the next morning he stood on the platform waiting for a runner and looked at the Jims in their shit shoes commuting to their shit jobs in shit offices with shit-cunt bosses, and thought,

What price is freedom?