#devlee

THERE WERE MORE gutter-types operating out East End garages than any copper could poke a wooden truncheon at, but even the most lawless still find some benefit in hierarchy, and nobody was more king than their Maul.

Why? Anyone looking in would ask, and the response would be, well, why not? Why the hell not? Everything Maul did was on that philosophy. Maul was outrageous. He was stroppy! Maul was a frontman. Maul was a singer, but he didn’t do much singing, and attempts to make him sound more melodious were lost on him. He had these liberty spikes he had dyed red with Crazy Colour in some sink somewhere, and kept up with egg whites. Maul was not his real name. 

Maul did not have a real name. Oh, nobody wanted to have one, but everyone always did. The goal was to frighten the parents, the older generation, to separate yourself from who you had been. To say, I’m nothing like you. But in order to do that, you must first preexist the scene. And Maul had not. The scene had started with him, and he ended with it, too. The point was, Maul was as much myth as he was man. And he was still very young in those days, only twenty-two when the band broke up in ‘79, so not much of a man to begin with. 

If they could see him now, they might realise being Maul was never much fun.

NO ONE WHERE DEVON LIVES uses the front door. The rendering is peeling, and so is the stucco. It’s been barricaded and screwed shut to deter coppers, although everyone knows there’s people in there. Unless they’re dumb, which was possible, or Thatcherites, which was covered by the first point. The goal, she supposes, is to make it unenticing for a bailiff or a cop or whomever to come busting it and kick them all out. So instead of the front door, she slips around the side of the house. Their basement has one lone window, as stupid as that sounds, and there’s this big thing of metal grating wrapped around it so that none of the gravel from the driveway goes and covers it up. Window well, she thinks it’s called. Next to the staircase, like all the houses on this street. If Devon wants to get inside, she slips off the stairs, hitches the rusty latch, and then her boots are dangling about a metre, metre and a half off the concrete floor.

Devon must be a little dumb, too, because she never expects it to be crowded as it is. Oh yeah, she thinks. Real clever, thinking there aren’t people in here. Of course there’s people in here, there’s people fucking everywhere. Both meanings. There’s people on mattresses on the floor, there’s people coughing up phlegm from diseases she’ll get in a week, there’s people scratching at sores she won’t, and there’s people so packed tightly together the smell in the air is nothing but mildew and skin. Sort of like from back when she still had PE, but there are only children in gymnasiums, sweaty as they are, shiny and happy and clean. No one here has been shiny in years, and Devon won’t ever feel clean again.