Desperado Daze
(j.h. 1974)

•

You know those days when nothing goes like you planned?
We'd robbed the petrol station without a hitch
and Philip was already back in the driver's seat
and we were laughing; his jeans were full of money.
At first we didn't see the pigs come, twenty
at least, but suddenly Philip pulled a gun.
We didn't even know he was carrying one.

The coppers went mad, and somehow the gun went off
and Philip got shot in the chest, and he screamed, or moaned,
and then they totally lost it. They pulled him out
and dragged him twenty yards across the tarmac.
They dumped him by the edge of some straggly trees
and systematically beat him to a pulp,
while me and my girlfriend crouched in the car and watched.

They were kicking his head as hard as they could.
His body twitched and jerked after every kick,
and everything looked red in the flashing light.
you know what it's like when people just lose the plot?
Well the cops were frothing at the mouth, eyes bulging.
Forget the bullet: they just kept kicking and kicking
while Philip got smaller and smaller, and we watched.

In fact we could both of us tell the second he died:
a ring of light rose up and glowed around him,
and then it vanished. And he was just so dead
there wasn't any doubt that he was dead,
and then they all remembered and came for us.
This ring of light, my girlfriend saw it too.
Then more cops came, and they beat us black and blue.

They were banging my head against some concrete wall -
and her head too even though she was a girl -
and my face felt sticky, and I lost the use of my limbs
for something that seemed like hours but was probably minutes,
and the strangest thing, I couldn't hear a sound,
but I could feel the beat in my veins; and the neon
lights on the petrol station's sign kept time.

Suddenly we were caught in a Jaguar's headlights,
like a film, and out steps a guy in formal getup -
and the cops let go of us and stood there dumbstruck.
He must have been the Chief Inspector, or something,
he must have been called out of some posh dinner.
I know they'd have killed us too if he hadn't come.
My girlfriend couldn't stand up when they took us in.

But in the car we'd had about twenty seconds
to get our alibi straight before they saw us:
What robbery? We'd just gone in for some cigarettes,
we'd hitched a lift, we were only passing through.
But really we'd been living with him for weeks:
we were sleeping together, me and her and Philip,
in a total, consuming threesome, the way you do.

For days I held out the way you only can
when you're seventeen and your girlfriend's in the next cell
and she's even younger. They cut us a deal: we swore
we'd never laid eyes on Philip before, and we said
he must have turned the gun on himself; in return,
the cops said if we ever set foot in Taunton
again, they'd make us wish that we were dead.