the magic word

I ask the guy to "print and sign here please". I proffer the docket to sign. It's obvious he's drop down pissed. I hand him the pen and he bandies it around mid air while I follow the nib with the book. Talk about the pinning the fucking tail on the donkey. It's 10a.m. and he's shit faced. I noticed the garden straight away at the beginning of the week. Filthy toys strewn like plane wreck victims. A huge (once white?) three piece leather suite with glass table, now shit streaked and full of empty shot glasses. A large rusty barbecue. The same fiery faced gumbo mate slumped in his trundle-trolley, grizzled and pickled in white lightning. Fucking hell, I thought Ryelands was rough but this one street matches it and then some. Dogs? How about stray horses??
Then there was a pony rummaging around some poor fuckers 'garden' the day after. Now this guy's getting a recorded letter...bloody hell, what's in it? Opera tickets? A new liver?
He speaks to me but it's a guttural Glaswegian that I'd fail to pick up on even if he was sober. I hold his pen and allow him to scrawl his mark. It'll do. Fuck it. If I hear there's any kids still in the house I'll start to cry. God bless the social services. His mate makes some grunting sounds, also North of the border I hear. Obviously here for the weather. I fuck off further down the road, avoiding horses.
How can a City get to this? This one street allowed to fester and fail? Admittedly the area is known as a 'bit rough' but this wasn't the only house with leather suites in the garden. Ah well, at least it wasn't Ryelands. Ryelands is a whole estate of streets such as this one.
I'd heard of it of course. As a kid my mum drove me through there once, I think I'd been naughty or something. I remember the boarded up houses, plywood windows and all that..coated in spray paint..words I hadn't learnt yet. It's all changed now. The plywood's gone. Now its titanium steel plates smeared in dog shit. Gardens full of rubbish, PILES of rubbish, SKIP fulls of the stuff...I think they eat it. I say gardens but they're mostly shit covered scrub, dotted in the heart-breaking toy detritus. At least the post isn't too heavy on here. Not many e-bayers in this lot; or amazon fiends; cosmo subscribers. The expected brown envelope malarkey but nothing too stressful on the shoulders. It's the trudging through this dismal sinkhole that's defeating. Constantly stalked by toothless grizzled old winos demanding if there's "owt for number 98 mate??". And the constant housewife squawk of "if it's bills I don't wannem!" Don't fucking use utilities then I think. Don't shoot the messenger. Don't pay them!! Turn your fucking telly off. Here's 20p, go gas yourself I want to say but don't. I feign a weak smile and leave them to their Jeremy Kyle.
I thought after my first mum-led tour in the seventies that it must have changed, but no. I don't know how this has remained such a forgotten, decayed, area of Lancaster. It boggles the mind. Admittedly it's cut off by it's very design but then so's Haverbreaks. I don't know, it got to me. A lot of the people I met were fine, decent people, but then some just weren't. Then there were the dogs. I swear nearly every house had a huge, feral, rabid teeth-filled fucking monster behind every letterbox. Spitting flecks of dog spit on the mail before I'd even reached the box...ripping it to soggy stinking mush within seconds. Christ, if I ever put my hand through. Millions of the child killing canine cunts. Like I said, some people were fine. Some scary/smelly/odd. A nadir was reached as I approached two kids playing in their 'garden'. I posted the opposite side from them, semi-oblivious in my radio 4 woman's hour aural blanket..any distraction a comfort. I hear a "EEYYY!!!" "EEEEEYYYY!!!!". I post on. Stuffing door to doors (junk mail to the lay man) in abandoned abodes...that's another 1.7 pence I think. "No one lives there!!!" "Ey you fat cunt!!" No one fucking lives there!!" The two twinkly eyed rascals are what, between 5 and 7? "Come here and a'll fuckin' smack ya" I am briefly stunned but speed up instantly. Who knows who else is in the house, what else? "what do I care" I say and walk past, keeping a distance from their broken chain fence like they're raptors in a balsa box. "owt for us?" they yell. "got owt for us, ehhhh??" jabbing their filthy paws over the fence. "what number house is it?" I ask. A grown up, shaven head pops out of the upstairs window and shouts it out. I offer the baby raptors their bundle of misery: "what's the magic word?" Blank. I give it and rapidly move on before the adult appears. It's hopeless for them. Foul mouthed and fierce small children, destined for what? What is the magic word for them?
That was my final (for now) tour of Ryelands. I could smell it in my clothes for days afterwards (maybe I should wash more). Well at least I've done the worst area I thought but I wasn't prepared for fucking horses in the streets...what do you zap them with? Only a couple of streets though. No sweat. Turn up the radio and plod on.