4. Broken Homes by Aaronovitch Ben

Author:Aaronovitch, Ben [Aaronovitch, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780575132498
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2013-07-24T14:30:00+00:00

11

A Machine For Living In

We went in early like a dawn raid, on the theory that if we were already in place when the locals woke up they’d just accept us the way badgers accept a naturalist’s low-light camera in their sett. The other reason we went in early was because we were borrowing a van from one of my relatives and he needed it back first thing. We couldn’t hire a removal van as we didn’t have enough stuff to make that credible, and we had more stuff than we could carry ourselves since otherwise we would look like squatters or, worse, undercover police officers.

Not that we really were undercover police officers, because UC operations are subject to strict guidelines and operational oversight by senior officers. What we were doing was in fact an extremely subtle form of community policing. So subtle that, if we were lucky, the community could carry on, blissfully unaware that they were being policed at all. Just to be on the safe side, Lesley wore her other mask. The one which was coloured olive tan instead of surgical pink, which she claimed was strictly for when she was off duty. She let Toby sit in her lap.

You didn’t get a good view of Skygarden when you arrived by road. Stromberg had surrounded the central tower with five long thin blocks, each nine storeys high, a very conventional design that, one architectural critic complained, obscured the exuberance of Stromberg’s central conceit. These were built in a conventionally slipshod manner which certainly obscured the exuberance of most of the people that lived there, who also comprised the bulk of the population of the estate. Arriving from the Elephant and Castle side you emerged from under the railway bridge to get a quick glimpse of the tower before turning into the estate and dropping down past the, by then, sealed-off garage areas of the blocks and into a narrow culvert sunk six metres below ground level. It was just wide enough for a VW Beetle and a Mini to pass each other and the pavements were only a little bit wider than curbs, pedestrian traffic having theoretically been channelled onto the walkway that was suspended overhead. During the 1981 riots the residents had built a barricade across the culvert and waited with petrol bombs and stones, but the police declined to turn up – I don’t blame them. Back then the Skygarden had been as close to being a real no-go estate as ever existed in the fevered mind of a journalist but Sergeant Daverc said its glory days were long past, and you were as safe there now as you would be in Chipping Norton. Certainly it was home to fewer professional criminals.

The access road opened into a sunken tarmacked area that surrounded the base of the tower, the outer perimeter of which was lined with garage doors. The actual garages, built just slightly too small for modern-sized cars, were set into the soil of the surrounding landscaping.

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