The Human Pool Read Online Free PDF Page A

The cops hinted that they did political work that made them important. They were told I was from England, looking at the scene. They seemed cool about that. They talked about the riot with relaxed familiarity. The woman who jumped off the roof had survived, the paler cop said. One of the skinheads mimicked her bicycling motion, and they all laughed, and I watched her again, fall through the night.
    At ten we left the cops and drove to a Chinese takeaway where a load of food was waiting, enough to feed a small army. The skinheads laughed at my mystification. They bantered with the Chinese woman owner, imitating the way Japanese spoke German, and were all laughing away. The carryouts filled the boot. Whatever the arrangement, it didn’t involve paying over the counter.
    We drove away from the city centre. The skinheads wanted to know other words for wank. Toss. Toss-off. Jerk-off. Jack-off. They recited the words obediently, polishing each one until it was as hard as a pebble.
    Our destination was airport country, industrial zones full of anonymous big sheds. We turned down a side road, dotted with scabby litter and the first sign of a muddy green countryside. Railway lines ran alongside. We stopped in front of large security gates. The skinheads had a key. Inside was a big yard, stacked with house-high bales of pulped paper; at the far end a further set of gates and a Portakabin, with two cars parked outside, and beyond that a large windowless storage shed. The two men who came out of the Portakabin were from the Middle East or Turkey. They looked incongruously smart in their slacks and soft dog-shit yellow leather jackets. Their cars were smart, too, one a big 7-series BMW and a top-of-the-range Merc. The men looked like they could take care of themselves. The skinheads didn’t do banter with them. Everything was carefully polite.
    The food was for the people in the shed. We drove the car right in and unloaded it on trestle tables, behind which were racks of bunkbeds. About a hundred people were milling around, not doing much, until they saw the car. The food produced a rush to the tables.
    Apart from the chomp of eating, the only noise came from a couple of unwatched televisions in the background. The skinheads stood around drinking beer given them by the men from the Portakabin. No alcohol was served at the tables. Those eating looked like the united colours of Benetton. There were even some Chinese, sitting in a group.
    The skinheads started kicking a football around. This developed into a game of five-a-side, in another smaller shed where two goals with nets were already set up, the skinheads making up one team, with me drafted in as the fifth, against the best of the rest. One of the men from the Portakabin refereed. Others stood around and cheered. The game felt like a regular fixture. The skinheads appeared concentrated, happy even. I found a substitute and wandered off in search of a toilet.
    Outside, everything felt remote and mysterious. A plane cut through the sky on its way to landing. The sound of a goods train carried from the railway. The noise of the game sounded far away. A Chinese woman stepped out to bum a cigarette. She stood there, arms folded, staring at the moon, hugging herself, the pair of us wondering who on earth the other was and how the hell we had got there. She muttered what sounded like a prayer. I tried to talk to her. We had only scraps of language between us, and a lot of guesswork. She didn’t seem to have any idea where she was, not even which country; nor did she know how long she had been there. She had left China with travelling companions who weren’t with her now.
    After a glance she was gone. One of the men from the Portakabin walked round the corner with an Alsatian straining at its leash. He spoke a language I didn’t understand, but his meaning was clear. No standing around outside.
    Dog patrols—to stop the people inside from getting out or the other way