That Part of London

Luke Sanderson was not a clever man; or at least, that's what he'd always been told. Of course, he had a different kind of wit about him – it takes a special sort of man to give directions through his city via off licenses, bars and police stations. He knew the funeral parlours in this part of town by name, and had seen twelve of his friends die; one for each year he'd spent in school. If he was rich, people would have likened his personality to Charles Bukowski, not that that was a compliment in any shape or form – he just like the smell of liquor on his own breath talked as much and as fast as he could to compensate for that.

Sixteen is too young for a man to have been drinking for five years now, but Camden was like that, especially in 1997. It was the part of London that didn't get glossed over as cosmopolitan; the part where 'rude' wasn't a fashion statement but a survival tactic, and if you carried a purse you were either walking hurriedly or running away from its previous owner. The nights were a sharp black, the kind of shade where everything has a bite to it but you don't stay around to savour its taste.

It was the part of London where the only rainbow you'd find was in the WD40 slick in the gutter slowly draining the colour out of your life. The part where a 'walk in the park' could be putting your life on the line and you only ever did it to get the shortest route home. The part where Christmas means the new year's clothes, a decent meal and nothing more.

It was the part of London called home. The part of London called human.

Sixteen is far too young for a man to have seen his first corpse; not one of those preened ones you get at open casket funerals, or the kinds you see in old-fashioned history classes where they line up the First World War casualties on an old film-slide for the OHP and expect you to feel shocked, despite being adolescent and not quite knowing what shocked means. No, the corpse that Luke saw too young was that of his brothers, still bleeding in the corridor while the wind knocked the forced front door back and forward, tolling the hour like a death knell from Macbeth.

Darren Sanderson was not a clever man. Five years older than his brother, he'd been forced into guardianship three years ago when their dad died leaving them both orphans. His three GCSE's didn't leave him with much to play with on the employment market that lay about post-Thatcher, so he turned to less salient career opportunities throughout the city, ferrying packages of powder in the back of a rucksack while riding a stolen bicycle. He'd picked up the habit when he left school and found himself surrounded by the kinds of people who'd offer those sorts of opportunities – he didn't go to college or get an apprenticeship, he picked up a pack of white powder around the age of sixteen and didn't turn back regardless of whose turf his career made him cross.

Sixteen is far too young for a man to have made himself into a career criminal, but here was Darren Sanderson nonetheless. The boy, not a man really, made a reputation for himself by beating a man nearly to death with a section of pipe because he was jealous of the girl he was dating and, hey, that's how his peers always taught him to express himself. He carried himself around town with more swagger than a fifties gangster because that's what he thought he was, the 'more-than' Al Capone. Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day but you give a man a wad of fifties? You'll stoke his ego for a life time. And he carried that ego out of bounds, further than old Wayne had told him he could take his white powder to sell.

It was the part of London that had never seen a credit card except to cut out lines on a glass table. The part of London where stepping on someone's toes didn't get you a telling off, people just quietly went around asking questions about you until they could follow you home and put a knife in your ribs. It was the part of London that Darren Sanderson shouldn't have gone to.

Blood stains in the carpet, Luke ran to the phone for once hoping the police would arrive sooner rather than later. Darren was pronounced dead at the scene, and Luke was taken into foster care for the remaining two years, in an old battered house that never saw many guests but the waifs that were already trapped there. These waifs would be the last new people Luke'd dare to meet, and old Wayne approached him there once, at first out of sympathy, but later out of necessity.

Nineteen is too young to be a drug dealer, but nineteen is also too young to be a father, and for all he'd tried to avoid it one of those waifs had turned into Luke's wife. He was a father to three five years later, twin girls and a boy; his partner always said the little brat always took after him. It took the bright blue eyes of this youngster to pull him away from old Wayne and the £400 'in-your-pocket' a week life style. He went on the dole, and then into sales, and then finally into the cardiac unit at Whittington Hospital where the cocaine caught up with him, leaving his son the only boy in the Sanderson family.

James Sanderson was not a clever man; but only because he was not yet a man. He had a sharp tongue that got him into trouble more often than it got him out of it, but the humour that rolled off of it and out of his mouth always had a certain wit about it that very few of the stragglers around post-Blair Camden could copy – he was smart in an organic sense, and it didn't take him long to get over the death of his father and take in the inevitability of his family's poverty. In 2014, slowly emerging into his teen years, he sought to fix it.

Fourteen is too young to be a drug dealer, but old Wayne had nothing but kind words for James' father and uncle, so the kid thought he'd give it a shot.

How'd you reckon this one ends, then?