Not an Ordinary Job.

A while back I met up with an old mate from the job, after not hearing from him in more than twenty years. He was a mad bugger when I knew him, took risks on a daily basis, yet he survived unscathed. The careful ones, like me, who always remembered they had a wife and a home to go back to, got knocked about far more than he did. Any one of the many things that happened to him would make a good novel plot, except nobody would ever believe it actually happened.

He’s not well, suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, and lives in a warden-assisted flat just outside Sefton Park. We walked to Lark Lane, had a beer, just the one, in one of the many pubs and talked about the old days.

He reminded me, as if I needed reminding, why I don’t do the job any more. People I worked with were a special breed; committed to work long hours, suffer extreme deprivation, all in the cause of bringing about a safer society. The routine aspects of the job were mind-numbingly boring, but when we went undercover time stood still. He told me of a former Control who’d committed suicide shortly after retirement, unable to replicate the stresses that made his working life so valuable.

We talked of two young lads set on fire and thrown from the top storey of a tower block. We saw it happen, were powerless to prevent it. The screams of a ginger-haired man named Nobby – I never learnt his real name – as two men held him tightly while a third man dropped a heavy breezeblock from chest height onto his bare feet. We were in the next room, heard it all, couldn’t do anything to prevent what amounted to a sentence being carried out. All those memories.

We walked slowly back to his flat. At the door, he gripped my arm, tightly. ‘I still miss it,’ he said. ‘That feeling of making a difference, you know?’

I nodded. I knew what he meant, but I didn’t miss the job. I’d gathered enough evidence over twenty years for the Police and Crown Prosecution Service to bring to trial and eventually imprison numerous dangerous men. Drug barons, major criminals, all put out of harm’s way, behind bars. Yes, the job was necessary and the advantages of what I did were obvious, but do I miss it? Not for one moment.

My last day at work I’d had a gun pressed against my head, seen the finger of the man holding the gun whiten with pressure only for the gun to fail to fire. Twice. Getting away, at the cost of ‘only’ a severe beating, was a result, in the circumstances, but it was much more. It was the catalyst I’d needed to make a decision. To leave the job; do something else.

Best decision I ever made.