Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 1 August 2009

Tale of woe

I handed Trev his usual — a large house vodka and coke. ‘Come outside for a fag,’ he said. We took our drinks outside and Trev got out his Mayfairs. The landlord followed us out and told us ‘for the hundredth time, for crying out loud’ that we weren’t allowed to take drinks out on to the pavement, so we followed him back inside and placed our drinks on a table and went out again.

Trev had had a bad week, he said. He’d broken a bone in his cueing hand on someone’s head, he’d spent a night in a cell, and to cap it all one of his houses had burnt down. (Trev is a builder. Recently he bought a couple of ruins, did them up, and let them out.) ‘What, completely destroyed?’ I said. He described the extent of the damage to the house by using the past tense of the most commonly used obscenity. In that case he wasn’t exaggerating, I said. He really had had a rotten week.

And that wasn’t all, he said.

Unbeknown to Trev, his tenants had been using the house as a cannabis farm and stealing the electricity to power the grow lamps from the national grid. The cause of the fire was the improvised wiring, which had been unsafe. While tackling the fire, firemen had noted the absence of furniture inside the house, and the presence, instead, of hundreds of cannabis plants. Police were advised. Their enquiries led them to Trev. Trev supplied them with names of his tenants. His tenants, whereabouts unknown, had since got word to Trev that he’s going to have his legs broken for ‘grassing them up’. ‘The coppers asked me who lived there, and I told them.

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