It’s A Shame About Ray

Ray was an idiot and I didn’t like him. Until the conditions of his ASBO banned him, he used to hang about pissed outside the railway station. After the ASBO he was still there, only now Ray was sober. When Ray was younger, he was a ‘five hander’ to get him in the back of the van. When Ray got older he just used to shout at everyone. Ray always promoted you. When you dealt with Ray, he called you ‘Sarge’ when you were a Constable and ‘Inspector’ when you were a Sergeant.

Ray was like a dog with age, each one of his years was worth seven of yours. He was an old man at twenty nine. This was down to the alcohol addiction he inherited from his absent father. His mother is a waster. She used to shack up with whoever Ray brought home from prison. These boys were always younger than Ray.

If he had been sober, he would have had to endure the indignity of listening to his mum servicing this endless trail of losers in the room next to his at their house on the Fields Estate. She always misunderstood their intentions. The truth was inevitably discovered in the empty handbag, contents scattered over the fake terracotta tiles in the kitchen. They always stole Ray’s drugs too. As a constable, I spent hours taking pointless statements in the front room of that place.

Ray’s criminal career was a kind of ‘looking glass’ affair. Ray started bad and violent and graduated to sad and useless. By the end, although always on the edge of any trouble in the town centre, he was a pathetic figure whose reputation as a bottomless pit for cheap drugs protected him from the worst excesses of the new generation. I knew something was wrong when he suddenly adopted the predictable criminal’s taste for self harm. Ray had never self harmed before. He hadn’t done enough time inside.

When he died of a heroin overdose, Ray was doing twelve cans of butane a day. He blamed this latest addiction on the courts which inflicted the ‘alcohol in a public place’ ban on him. Butane and cannabis do not mix. Especially when you introduce them to Jack Daniels. Before his death, the intelligence boys tried to sell Ray as some kind of ‘Pied Piper’ figure to the school kids, dealing them Class B drugs on their way to the railway station. We knew better. More likely they robbed him.

When I heard he was dead I pondered for a long while. I really thought hard about it. And about him. And about his mother. And one of the Sergeants asked me what I thought and I told him that I think it’s a shame about Ray. And I meant it.