Thicker Than Water Page 5

  So if we were smart we learned not to talk about it. It was a strategy that saved you a world of pain in the short run.

  Kind of a shame, then, that I let my guard down and said what I said to Kenny Seddon - the last person in the world who was going to take it lying down.

  Kenny was one of those scary psychopaths you just have to work around when you’re a kid. His mum died when he was eight - of what my mum and dad, when they talked about it at all, called ‘the big C’ - and the rest of his growing-up followed a template of his own making. His dad worked at the Metal Box, then at Dunlop, then at Mother’s Pride, racing ahead of the bowwave of industrial collapse and chasing the work wherever it could be found. He turned his three sons over to his elderly mother to look after when he was away, but she was too old and they were too wayward, so they did their own thing and she lied to cover their tracks.

  Kenny was the toughest of a tough brood - only two years older than me if we’re talking strict chronology, but he was the kind of kid who seems to go straight from infancy to adolescence, becoming big and muscular and intractable and getting into the kind of fights that leave blood on the pavement while his peers were still making the difficult transition to lace-up shoes.

  He was a bully’s bully, ruthless and arbitrary to a fault, and he brought fear and pain into my life on a number of occasions. In the urban wastelands that we swept through like a swarm of grubby locusts, he was a moving hazard that none of us ever figured out how to negotiate. Once he decided he was going to write his name on all the younger kids in the street - a literal sign of his authority over us. His rough-hewn scrawl on my upper arm turned into an archipelago of bruises that lasted a good few days after the ink had faded.

  Another time he pushed me out of an apple tree that we were both scrumping from, in the high-walled cider orchard behind Walton hospital. We were twenty feet or so above the ground and I would have broken a leg or maybe my back if I’d fallen the full distance. As it was, I slammed into a branch four or five feet below the one I’d fallen from and managed to cling onto it. Kenny laughed uproariously: something about the spectacle of me dangling over nothing with my legs churning the air struck him as great slapstick humour. When my brother Matt climbed down to rescue me, Kenny pelted him with apples and swore at him, threatening to push him out of the tree too if he didn’t leave me to struggle back up onto the branch by myself. Matt ignored him and hauled me to safety, crab apples raining down around the pair of us.

  None of this was personal, though: Kenny terrorised everyone with equal enthusiasm, including his own two kid brothers, Ronnie and Steven. He broke Ronnie’s leg once with a rough tackle during a game of street football, and then made Ronnie tell their dad that he’d fallen off a wall.

  But the weird thing about all these incidents was that they never made much of a difference to our day-to-day customs and practices. All the kids of Arthur Street and of neighbouring Florence Road did pretty much everything together. Whether we were taking over the street with our huge sprawling games of kick-the-can, stealing from the allotments in Walton Hall Park or making one of our frequent raids on the kids of the Bootle Grammar School, we moved en masse. At these times Kenny was our psychopath: he was much valued both for his ability to handle himself in a barney and for being one of the privileged few who could decide what we did next and actually make it stick.

  One raw day in Whitsun week, the year I turned thirteen, he decreed an expedition to the Seven Sisters, those ponds that marked where the bombs had fallen on the railway line forty years before. It was too early in the year to swim - even in high summer the Sisters were bonemeltingly cold - but we could collect tadpoles, fish for sticklebacks, muck around on the edge of the water and pretend to push each other in, explore the surrounding grass and weeds for metal bolts that you could shoot out of a catapult and have huge, ill-defined mock battles through the bulrushes and stinking shallows. It was guaranteed entertainment, on a bank holiday when the shops were shut and there was sod-all else to do, so we were all up for it.

  And if ‘we all’ suggests a warm and inclusive cosiness, then strike it out and put something else in its place. There were lots of ways you could be bounced out of the collective. The gang of us, if you could corral us in one place for long enough to count, probably numbered around fifty on a good day, and we ranged in age from eight to fifteen. The frequency distribution was about what you’d expect. Very few of the youngest kids had the stamina to keep up with our wilder activities, and a lot of the fifteen-year-olds had discovered other, more absorbing pastimes that kept them busy elsewhere, so the thickest concentration was in the middle of the age breakdown.

  As far as gender went, we were equal-opportunity delinquents. The hardier girls ran with us and did as we did, without question or challenge. The rest, for the most part, stayed back in Arthur Street close to the home fires, understudying with scaled-down Hoovers and plastic kitchen ranges the role that society had defined for them.

  Anita Yeats was one of the ones who ran with us, even though she was around the same age as Kenny and my brother Matt - the top end of our spectrum. By that age, most of the girls weren’t allowed to knock about with us any more, and didn’t want to. They had better things to do with their time, and parental prohibitions had kicked in, making them put aside childish things. Anita’s body was in the middle of that scary, enthralling transition: she was developing adult curves, her aspect morphing mysteriously from pinch-faced gamine to shithouse rose.

  So it was going to be the last year of running with the street pack for Anita, and probably for Kenny and Matt, too. Maybe that added an edge to things, I don’t know. Maybe it was part of the reason, in some indirect way, for Kenny picking an argument with Anita. And maybe, too, it was an offshoot of a broader inter-family feud, of the kind that were always breaking out whenever someone’s uncle’s son went to the bar and left someone’s cousin’s dog out of the round. But the main reason was that Kenny had been sniffing around Anita in a semi-obvious way ever since he hit puberty, and she’d never shown the slightest sign of returning his interest. It was only a question of when his arousal would finally topple over into aggression.

  And it turned out to be that Whitsun morning. Kenny rounded on Anita as soon as we’d descended onto the Triangle at Breeze Hill - one of the points where the huge acreage of waste ground touched the real world.

  ‘Sod off home,’ he said brusquely. ‘We don’t want you, Yeats.’

  ‘Why not?’ Anita demanded reasonably. There were other girls in the party, so ‘you’re a girl’, besides sounding lame and even potentially unmanly, just wouldn’t wash. And it had to be a reason that wouldn’t extend to Anita’s kid brother Richard - known for the most part as Dick-Breath - who was also in the gang.

  ‘You’re too slow,’ Kenny snapped. ‘We’ll be waiting for you all the fucking time. Go home.’

  ‘I’ll keep up.’

  ‘You never do. And you’ll argue over which way to go. We’ll have to listen to you giving it this’ - imitating a yammering mouth with thumb and fingers - ‘all the frigging time.’

  ‘I won’t talk.’

  ‘Well, your mam’s a slag and we’ll catch something off you.’

  Anita flushed phone-box red. Then, as now, bringing someone’s mother into the argument was moving directly to Defcon One: it was the Taunt Unendurable, and it required the Riposte Valiant. Dick-Breath kept his head down, having earned that derisory name for his willingness to do whatever was needed to curry favour with the bigger kids. But Anita was woven out of sturdier as well as more brightly coloured fabric. Mouthing off to her just wasn’t safe, and anybody with less heft than Kenny would have thought twice about doing it.

  ‘Fuck off, Kenny,’ she shouted, balling her fists. ‘You gobshite!’

  Kenny smacked her, open-handed, across the face, hard enough to make her stagger.

  ‘Your mam’s a slag,’ he repeated. ‘She’s knocking off Georgie Lunt.’

  Anita screamed
and went for him, but Kenny was a head taller than her and he fended her off with a violent shove. ‘So you’re probably a slag too,’ he said. ‘It runs in families. Who are you knocking off, Anita?’

  For some reason, this was shocking to me. I’d seen boys fight girls before: there was no real room for chivalry in our rough-and-tumble code of ethics, and girls could do you some serious damage if they fought like they meant it. It was just that this was so cold-bloodedly staged, and so obviously unfair - Kenny manufacturing the argument to pay Anita back for his blue balls - that it made my blood boil. And not just mine. I saw Matt, my big brother, lean forward as though he was about to step in between Anita and Kenny and take up the challenge on her behalf. My survival instinct - like Dick-Breath’s - was a bit better developed than that: Kenny had more or less the same height advantage over us as he did over Anita and, as we’d all learned on many occasions, he didn’t recognise the dividing line between what was legitimate and what was inconceivable.

  But I did what I could. I replied to the taunt.

  ‘Well, your mam killed herself, Kenny,’ I called out. ‘It wasn’t cancer - that’s all my arse. She cut her throat with your dad’s razor.’

  There are moments in life when you know you’ve gone too far: you can tell them by the eerie stillness that descends around you - only half a second long in reality, but in subjective time easily long enough for you to think ‘Oh Jesus, I wish I hadn’t done that’ and then start in on the Lord’s Prayer. Kenny swivelled to stare at me, his eyes bulging out of his head in cartoon slo-mo. He opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but no sound came out. Everyone else, including Anita and Matt, was watching him with strained, breathless curiosity. This was going to be bad.

  But it was just such an easy call to make. I could tell the living from the dearly departed pretty accurately by this time, and Mrs Seddon’s ghost had a huge tear in the flesh of her throat and an apron of dried blood on her faded floral dress - a bit of a dead give-away, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’d seen her looking out of the window of Kenny’s house so many times that I’d lost count, and a couple of times I’d seen her hanging around Kenny himself, staring in miserable, befuddled longing at the wayward son she’d left behind along with her tired flesh. As for the razor, that was just a guess. But whatever she’d used to do herself in, it had been spectacularly effective: it hadn’t been a kitchen knife, unless the Seddons kept their kitchen knives a lot sharper than we did ours.

  So I threw in the razor out of a nascent sense of drama, to add to the overall effect. And on that level, it was a roaring success. Kenny’s huge fists rose into my line of sight like a pair of half-bricks held up by a kung-fu master to demonstrate the cleanness of the break. Then one of them moved, and magically I was lying on my back with no understanding at all of how I’d got there. The left side of my mouth tingled unpleasantly, and there was something wet on my face.

  ‘You little bastard,’ Kenny said, and he stepped in for the inevitable follow-up, which would have been a kick to some unprotected part of my body.

  But Matt stepped in too, and he caught Kenny on the side of the face with a hard jab that made him stagger and lurch before he got his balance back. A moment later the two of them were grappling like all-in wrestlers.

  Kenny versus Matt wasn’t as ridiculous as Kenny versus me would have been. Matt didn’t have Kenny’s height or anything like his weight, and as a choirboy at Saint Mary’s church he was widely considered to be a pushover, but I knew from countless brotherly skirmishes that he was stronger than he looked and quick with it. None of that should have stopped it from being a foregone conclusion, though: the general consensus was that you couldn’t stand against Kenny when he got going any more than you could stop a freewheeling truck by standing in front of it.

  But Matt was making a good showing - seeming in the first few frenzied seconds to be giving almost as good as he got. He managed to hook a thumb into Kenny’s eye socket and force his head back so that Kenny couldn’t butt him, and he landed a sucker punch to Kenny’s stomach when the opportunity presented itself. Kenny retaliated by slamming his fist into Matt’s jaw - a solid punch with all his weight behind it that made Matt’s head rock back and then forward again like one of those dogs in the backs of cars whose oversized craniums are mounted on springs. But Matt kept his guard up and blocked the vicious low blows and crotch kicks that would have ended the fight in one go.

  Then there were a few moments when the two of them were so tightly pressed together that they couldn’t really punch or kick at all: they just swayed backwards and forwards, struggling for leverage. I could see a few people in the group - Kenny’s brother Steven, who was my age, and his best mate Davey Barlow who was red-haired and rangy and almost as big a psychopath as Kenny - looking doubtful and unhappy, as if they weren’t sure whether or not to intervene. The protocols were complicated. If Kenny invited them, they could wade in and kick the shit out of Matt with no loss of honour: if he didn’t and they joined in anyway, there was always the chance that someone would say later that Kenny couldn’t have won the fight on his own. In any case, I tensed to jump in on Matt’s side if they intervened on Kenny’s.

  Then Kenny broke free, got in another devastating punch to Matt’s face but jumped back, not pressing his advantage. The two of them stood panting, dishevelled, Matt’s nose and Kenny’s lip bleeding.

  It couldn’t end in a stand-off. Kenny’s status in the gang, however vaguely it was defined, wouldn’t allow it. I was expecting him to wade in again at once and finish what he’d started: then, when he hesitated, I thought he’d decided to throw the fight open to his brothers, to Davey, and to anyone else who wanted to earn his doubtful and short-lived favour.

  But he didn’t lower his head and charge, and he didn’t shout ‘Twat him!’ He just stood for a second or two, on the balls of his feet, breathing like a bellows. And then fate intervened, in the shape of a policeman coming down the gravel bank towards us, shouting a challenge that we couldn’t hear at this distance. Given how quickly all this had happened, it wasn’t likely that he’d been alerted by the noise we were making: he must have seen us as we descended from the road above and decided on the balance of probabilities that we were up to mischief. The railway land was council-owned and we were trespassing, which was reason enough to send us on our way.

  We scattered. We always did, when we were an all-ages mixed rabble: a few older lads on their own could have bearded a rozzer and then legged it when he gave chase, but the presence of the younger kids guaranteed that someone would be caught and brought to book. So the order of the day was to explode in all directions like a cluster bomb and hope the multiplicity of targets would slow the copper down long enough to allow us all to get away.

  Matt cut off across the tracks towards the ragged borders of Walton Hall Park, with Anita almost keeping pace beside him. I retreated with a few of the smaller kids through the tunnel, which led to another railway cutting a quarter of a mile up the line behind Bedford Road. I didn’t see where Kenny and his cohorts went.

  So a stand-off was what we got in the end, whether we liked it or not - and for most of the gang that would be a ‘not’, because an unresolved fight left a sort of tension in the air like the hair-prickling feel of undischarged lightning. Better to get it over and done with, pick up any busted teeth and move on to the next big thing.

  But for some reason that wasn’t what happened. Everybody expected Kenny to take the first opportunity to finish the fight. Instead he let it lie, and the next few times when we all met up he gave a good impression of having forgotten that it had ever happened.

  I wondered why. I considered asking Matt, but the two of us seemed to be growing apart very quickly around then. Matt still looked out for me on the street, and at home too since we were yet another one-parent family by this stage (our mum had left home the year before after a matrimonial bloodletting that I was considered too young to have fully explained to me). But cooking
baked beans and sausages out of a tin and making sure I didn’t get my head kicked in marked the limit of Matt’s involvement with me: he had nothing to say to me any more, and since dad had always been the taciturn type there was a silence around the Castor household that had gone beyond pregnant into stillborn.

  So I had to come to my own conclusions about what had happened that day on the Triangle, and my mind went back to those two seconds when Kenny had hesitated after breaking Matt’s hold on him. It occurred to me, incredible as it seemed, that Kenny might actually have been afraid. Of my brother. Because Matt had taken everything that Kenny could throw at him and he hadn’t gone down. Maybe Kenny wasn’t certain that if he took up the fight where he’d left off, he’d be able to win it: and maybe that uncertainty kept him from doing the obvious and calling down a general fatwa on Matt. You did that to weak kids, where there was no question that your own alpha status was at issue. If you did it to a potential rival, people would notice. Kenny was a wily little bastard, and at fifteen he already knew what Hitler and Napoleon and Attila the Hun had learned the hard way: that the appearance of strength is strength.

  And, by the same token, people would notice if Kenny went after me. It was Matt who was his contemporary, so it was Matt who was his legitimate target. I was protected by the bizarre unspoken gospels of the street, which were the measure of our lives and our souls right then.

  It was only a matter of time, though, and I could see whenever Kenny looked at me that he hadn’t forgotten my remark about his mother’s suicide. I’d spoken of death to the king, and one way or another he was going to make sure I paid for it.