Thicker Than Water Page 29

  I waited at the bus stop, out of sheer force of habit, for the number 93. I could have grabbed a cab, but I’d always gone in and out of town by bus. Neither of my parents had ever driven, and I hadn’t even taken lessons myself until I’d moved down to the Smoke.

  I checked my itinerary off in my mind. I was looking for Anita, first and foremost: notwithstanding my own bad example, those born and bred in Liverpool 9 have a strong homing instinct, and this was my best guess as to where she would have come after life with Kenny lost its lustre. I was thinking that I’d shake down her brother Richard - Dick-Breath - and see if he knew where I could find her. If not, I’d get what I could by putting my questions to him instead.

  I was also thinking of talking to some of the other Seddons if any of them had hung around in Walton. Kenny’s brothers Ronnie and Steven might know something about Kenny’s state of mind in recent weeks, and it was always possible he could have let something slip in a phone call or an e-mail.

  Two women talking behind me in the queue disrupted my thoughts. After so long an absence, it was impossible not to tune in to the nasal poetry of Scouse.

  ‘He loves the bones of her, he does.’

  ‘Oh, aye. You’ve only got to look, haven’t you?’

  ‘But if he thinks she’s getting that money down the bingo, he’s living in a fool’s paradise.’

  ‘She’s a dirty mare.’

  ‘She’s a hoo-er, is what she is.’

  That was how my mother always pronounced the word. Not whore: hoo-er. Two syllables, drawn out with censorious relish.

  Concentrate on business.

  Anita.

  Kenny.

  And one other outstanding item, which had to come first.

  The bus took me out of town along St Anne’s Street, and then up through the asphalt and concrete runway which is all that remains of Scotland Road. As you drive out from the centre, Liverpool opens itelf up to you in concentric bands of squalor and almost-affluence - although for real affluence you had to swing all the way east to Woolton, and that was nowhere near my destination.

  I got off two stops past where I should have done, at the Queen’s Drive flyover. Queen’s Drive is the Liverpool ring road, although Liverpool being a crescent-shaped city jammed in against the banks of the Mersey it’s really only half a ring. When John Brodie started building it in 1903, Walton was a village. By the time he downed tools and signed off on the job two and a half decades later, it had become a borough of the city, but there were streets behind St Mary’s Church that still kept that parochial charm. Other parts, particularly the streets around Walton Hospital, underwent a further metamorphosis into a slum, but as kids we had no standard of comparison. For all we knew, the queen had bedbugs too.

  The hospital stands just outside of Queen’s Drive’s tight embrace, at the northern end of Breeze Hill. But when I got off the bus I turned the other way, past the church and on down County Road. In the mid-1980s the city council had finally decided to pull the beam out of its eye and had torn down the shithole where I’d been born, relocating most of the inhabitants either to a new development on the Walton Triangle or to council houses a couple of miles further in towards the centre.

  A couple of miles. Tops. But geography is destiny in Liverpool, too, and for some reason the distances are strangely compressed. A hundred yards can be decisive in determining who you are, and what you are.

  For my dad, who’d already lost his daughter and his marriage, moving out of Walton into Everton Valley was the third strike: the one that finally took him out of the game. It meant leaving behind an ecosystem as complex and fragile and non-portable as a coral reef: an ecosystem where kids tended to end up living in houses on the same street as their parents, or the next street over, where you could call on twenty or thirty cousins within a half-mile radius, and where every family had inherited alliances and feuds stretching back at least as far as the First World War.

  Cut loose from that support mechanism, John Castor succumbed to colonic cancer and died within the space of a year. It was as though he’d made his mind up to it and saw no point in hanging about.

  I was travelling backwards in time as I walked: County Road was my bathysphere. From my father’s death, I descended a decade or so to my parents’ break-up. Probably that would have happened a lot sooner, too, if they’d been living in Everton back then. Probably conservatism is a kind of social cement. The kind of conservatism that comes without a capital letter, I mean: we all know what the other kind is. At any rate, my mother’s infidelities and my dad’s heroic binge drinking might have made their marriage shake like a Tokyo skyscraper, but it took actually walking in on Mum in flagrante to make Dad finally call time, and even then it was all nuance. You find your wife naked with another man, you beat him senseless and throw him through the bedroom window onto the shed, that’s understood. But the ‘don’t darken my door’ routine was probably for form’s sake. Mum just chose to take it literally this time.

  My life, and Matt’s life, became a strange and fractured thing after that. Mum went away, we lived with Dad. Matt went away, and I still lived with Dad but it was more like two guys just sharing rooms, seeing each other occasionally and finding they had less and less to say to each other when they did. Then Mum came back, which raised the possibility of us all being a proper family again, but she moved in with her lover, Terry Lackland, instead and it just meant that Dad’s bad temper got an additional scary edge to it, and that there was one more place where I didn’t really feel at home.

  Now Dad was dead, and Terry was dead, and none of it meant anything any more. Except that the impassable terrain was still there between us shell-shocked survivors. The débris. I was walking on it now.

  Mum’s house was ex-council, now owned by a private landlord called the Inner City Partnership. Mentioning their name was a quick way to elicit a spectacular torrent of abuse from her, but there was no denying that this was a step - if not a whole damn staircase - up from Arthur Street. The door wasn’t covered by a slab of particle board, for one thing. And it had a bell.

  I rang, and silence answered. After a while, I rang again.

  Mum answered on the fourth ring, just as I was giving up. She opened the door and stared at me for a moment or two, blank-faced and bleary-eyed, before recognition kicked in.

  It was hard for me, too. In my mind, Barbie Castor always has a heroic, larger-than-life stature, as one of those Walton women of whom it was said, with approval and respect, ‘she fights like a man’. As a kid I used to look up to her in a literal and physical sense too, but her generous build and rugged independence made her the sort of person who it was easy to hide behind, easy to shelter in and rely on. Even her walking out on us hadn’t tarnished that image of her: if anything it had helped, because just when I was hitting my iconoclastic teens she wasn’t around any more to be measured against reality and found wanting. Consequently, when I thought of her at all, I saw her from the ten-year-old Felix’s perspective, which meant looking up from close to ground level.

  Mum was still big, but - like one of those packages sold by weight, not volume - her contents had shifted in transit between the past and the present. Her bulk had a softer edge to it now, and her short-sleeved top showed me that some of the definition had gone from her finely muscled upper arms. It had gone from her face, too, her eyes passing over me once and then twice rather than pinning me to the wall until she was good and done with me.

  ‘Felix,’ she said, with a rising inflection, and then again, with slightly more conviction, ‘Felix!’ She took me in her arms, briefly but with feeling.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ I said. Anything was going to sound banal under the circumstances, so I settled for, ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m all right. Come on in.’

  She led the way into the living room, which in true Walton style opened directly off the street with nothing in the way of a porch or hall. It was a room that exemplified my mother’s virtu
es: four-square, clean, and without a book or an ornament to be seen, apart from her much-loved print of Edward John Poynter’s Faithful Unto Death - which shows a Roman soldier remaining at his post, nervous but steadfast, as the ashes of Vesuvius rain down around him. The picture has taken on a darker and darker yellow-brown cast over the years, caused by nicotine deposits staining the glass despite regular and vigorous polishing.

  There was a single armchair and a narrow two-seater sofa, both in gaudily patterned fabrics, a portable TV about the size of a matchbox with an indoor aerial sitting on top of it, and a coffee table much marked with the whitened rings left by a thousand cups of hot tea - which brought to mind, rather too vividly, the young loup-garou on the train. There were no teacups on it now, though: just two bottles of Worthington’s pale ale, one empty and one half-full, and a glass with beer froth around the rim.

  ‘Bit early in the day, Mum,’ I said, trying to make it sound like a joke.

  ‘Away, away with rum,’ my mother said, quoting Mike Harding’s mock-temperance song: that was always her answer, whenever anyone commented on her drinking. She’s not an alcoholic, not by her own definition: she never lets herself get drunker than the business of the day requires. ‘You’ll be sticking to tea, then, will you, love?’ she added, with a meaningful roll of her eyes.

  ‘I will for now,’ I said, hedging my bets.

  She went through into the kitchen, and I stayed behind in the living room. Channelling Sherlock Holmes, I looked around for fag ends. But if Mum had started smoking again, she wouldn’t need anything as formal as an actual ashtray, and in any case I would have noticed as soon as I walked into the room: because it would have had that smell - somewhere between despair and dysentery - that smoking rooms in old hotels have.

  Lots of empty beer bottles on the mantelpiece, though. Putting them there was an atavistic impulse: when I was growing up they’d served the same function as clothes pegs, holding Matt’s and my smalls in place while they dried in the warm air coming up from the fire. Now the fire was a log-effect gas burner, and the bottles just looked like old soldiers who know that the ceasefire has sounded and are waiting for the order to stand down.

  Mum came back into the room, carrying a mug of milky tea in which a teabag still floated. She’d never really been into the idea that we eat first with our eyes. She handed it to me, then kissed me on the cheek, putting her hands on my shoulders and squeezing tight.

  I cast around for something to say, but found nothing. I wasn’t even sure if she knew, until she buried her face in my shoulder and let out a single, throat-tearing sob. Mum never cried: not actual tears. Maybe when Matt got his ordination, but tears of pride are different. The world had never wrung one millilitre of tribute out of her in any other way; and even now, her eyes were dry as she raised them to stare into mine. Hollow, troubled, red-rimmed, but dry.

  ‘If it had been you, Felix, I would have understood.’

  ‘Cheers, Mum,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t mean that I wouldn’t have cared, love. But Matty’s world is different from yours. It always was.’ She shook her head, giving it up. ‘I just don’t see how this could have happened,’ she said mournfully.

  ‘He didn’t do it,’ I said. ‘I can tell you that much.’

  Mum flared up, but not against me: against the world that was misjudging her son. ‘I bloody well know that!’ she said. ‘Didn’t I raise him? Isn’t he mine? Of course he didn’t bloody do it!’

  ‘Well, okay then,’ I said. ‘Just making the point, that’s all.’

  Mum sat down heavily in the armchair, picked up her glass and took a deep swig of beer, then refilled the glass with what was left in the bottle. I took the sofa, which meant I had to sit on the edge of a cushion, balanced on a single buttock, in order to face her. I put the mug of tea down on the table’s bare wood, adding another ring to the many already there. Maybe you could use them to tell its age.

  Mum was looking at me with a solemn, musing expression, the heat of her anger gone as quickly as it had come. ‘Three years,’ she said, softly. ‘Three years, Fix.’

  ‘I did call,’ I countered, but it was a feeble defence. The last time had been more than a year before, to ask her how she was doing when Matt had told me she was recovering from a chest infection. It had turned out to be low-grade pneumonia, and I’d still found reasons not to come up and visit. Given the distances involved, there was no defence. From London to Liverpool is three hours or so with good traffic: in America people drive further than that to pick up a carton of milk.

  So I brought her up to speed on my life, going light on the succubi, zombies and were-beasts and heavy on my recent wanderings after Pen kicked me out of her house. I know my audience, you see: Mum favours Matt because he went to God and I went to the devil. So when she asked me if I was seeing anyone, I ducked the whole story of my infatuation with Juliet, and how a demon from Hell had ditched me for a Sapphic fling with a church warden. ‘I’ve been seeing a nurse,’ I told her, which was unassailable truth and could be said without blushing.

  All of this was really just a way of not talking about Matt, and when I ran out of anecdotes that were fit to print, I found I still wasn’t ready to go there.

  ‘You getting out much?’ I asked, throwing the ball of procrastination into her court.

  Mum shook her head emphatically. ‘What for, Fix? I’ve got everything I need here in this room. I watch the telly, listen to the radio. Put a bet on, when it’s the flat season. You know me and my accumulators. Three cross doubles . . .’ ‘. . . And a treble,’ I finished. ‘The mini-Yankee. Yeah, I remember. Still listening to Sing Something Simple?’

  ‘It’s not on any more,’ she said. ‘But there’s still Billy Butler on a Saturday.’

  Billy Butler, and his Sony bronze award-winning show, Hold Your Plums. It used to have Matt and me giggling our heads off when we were kids. Only Scousers could come up with a radio quiz based on a fruit machine, with a robotic voice telling you what was showing on each reel.

  ‘Billy Butler,’ I said. ‘Christ.’ It was the only comment that seemed to fit.

  ‘Oh aye,’ Mum agreed. ‘I never change, me. I’ve had enough changes in my life, Fix. I’m happy with what I’ve got, these days.’

  What you’ve got is nothing, Mum, I thought but didn’t say. Everyone you used to know is dead or somewhere else. And you’re stuck here in Walton like a fly caught in amber. Although pale ale doesn’t quite have that golden-brown lustre to it. It’s more the colour of piss.

  ‘Ever see anyone from Arthur Street?’ I asked.

  This time Mum didn’t answer. She looked at me thoughtfully, waiting for more. ‘Anyone from the old days, I mean,’ I clarified.

  Still nothing. She took another long swig from her glass.

  ‘I know a lot of people moved to the Triangle,’ I went on. ‘After they knocked down—’

  ‘What are you here for, Fix?’ Mum asked, putting down her empty glass. ‘Really?’

  ‘You mean besides seeing you?’

  ‘That’s what I mean, yes.’

  ‘It’s about Matt,’ I said, bluntly. ‘You know who it is he’s meant to have attacked?’

  ‘Kenny Seddon.’

  ‘So I was thinking I’d shake the tree a bit. Talk to some people who might know more than I do about what Kenny was up to before—’

  ‘Before someone sliced him up like a bacon joint.’

  ‘Well, essentially. Yeah.’

  Mum nodded, straight-faced. ‘Go on, then. Who’s on your list?’

  ‘Anita and Richie Yeats,’ I said. ‘And Kenny’s brothers, Ronnie and Steve. Do you have any idea where they ended up?’

  ‘The Yeatses are over in Bootle now,’ Mum said, counting them off on her fingers. ‘That’s Eddie and Rita Yeats, I mean - Rita Brydon as was. I haven’t seen Anita in donkey’s years. Richie was living with them, or so Ernie Hampson said, but I heard they gave him down the banks and showed him the door.’

  Her e
xpression told me that something momentous was being left unsaid. ‘Why was that, then?’ I asked. ‘Gave him down the banks for what?’

  Mum pursed her lips. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know. A grown man, and he’s never done a day’s bloody work in his life. He’s a waster, Fix, and there’s nothing down for him. Some people are never going to do any good for themselves if you give them a hundred years. And he’s - you know . . .’ Mum made the limp-wrist gesture.

  ‘He’s gay?’ I said blankly.

  Mum pursed her lips and nodded.

  ‘You’re saying they kicked him out because he’s gay?’

  Mum stood her ground. ‘Well, you don’t want your son bringing strange men into the house, do you?’ she demanded. ‘Some of these people—’

  ‘Thanks for the tip, Mum,’ I said, cutting her off. And thinking of Juliet I added, ‘At least he didn’t go outside his own species.’

  I think the homophobia must be a generational thing: it’s certainly not class or geography, because you can meet the same bullshit in Hampstead just as easily. I remembered now that Richie had made some non-standard life choices even as a kid - he was the only boy in my circle of acquaintances with a skipping rope - but I’d never read anything into that. Maybe someone else had, though: maybe the nickname Dick-Breath was more than just a whimsical jeu de mots.

  ‘Now Ronnie Seddon -’ another finger went down ‘- he was selling drugs at the Palm Tree, until he tried to sell them to a couple of plain-clothes coppers, so that was the end of him. He got three years in Walton. Mind you, there’s more drugs in there than there is anywhere else, from what I hear, so he’s probably happy. Teresa Size’s lad, Philip, was saying they smuggle them in over the wall from the cemetery on Hornby Road. They use catapults, he said. Just tie Jiffy bags full of heroin to old batteries and shoot them in with catapults.’