Thicker Than Water Page 6

His opportunity came sooner than either of us expected. That summer Matt dropped out of school, immediately after taking his O levels, and transferred to Saint Joseph’s Catholic seminary at Upholland, about eight miles away from Walton. It was unusual for Saint Joe’s to take someone into holy orders at sixteen, but the Jesuit who ran the place had noticed Matt when he was doing a talent-spotting trawl through the parishes inside the Queen’s Drive ring road, and he’d been impressed. He was prepared to stretch a point, he told our dad, and let Matt enter the college now. He’d take his A levels at the same time as he started his holy orders, rather than finishing his studies at the attached high school first. Matt would be expected to live at the college, and although he could see his family at weekends they wouldn’t be encouraged to visit him and break his concentration at other times.

  Dad wasn’t thrilled. His plans for Matt’s future involved Matt getting a job and turning up some money for his keep. But he was a good Catholic himself, and he knew better than to throw down with the Pope and his bare-knuckled posse. He bought Matt a suitcase from the secondhand shop and away my brother went without a backward glance. As far as I can remember, we didn’t even say goodbye.

  But at least I knew now where Matt had got the balls to fight Kenny Seddon to a standstill: he had God on his side.

  So now there was nobody to run interference for me, and no strict reason according to the Walton book of etiquette why Kenny shouldn’t beat me into tenderised steak. But he bided his time for a good three days after Matt left, waiting for the perfect place and time.

  The place was up on the roof of the Metal Box factory - the Tinnie. It was a favourite spot for the gang that summer, now that the owners had finally given up on maintaining any kind of security over the disused site. We’d found a way in by levering out one of the uprights of the back fence and tearing the plywood sheet off a door marked AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  With the electricity turned off and all the windows boarded up, the interior of the factory was a three-dimensional maze of absolute darkness. You brought torches, and you stuck together, because on your own in the dark you were fucked. Previous parties had mapped out routes, but you could only find them with a torch. We filed through the cavernous machine shops and silent corridors and scaled the echoing stairs like mountaineers conquering an indoor Annapurna, finally breaking out into the daylight through a hole in the roof underneath which someone had set up a precarious folding ladder dragged in from God knows where.

  From the roof - since the whole of Walton is built on the side of a hill and we were close to the top of it - you could see the city set out below you. You could also swing on the flagpole over an eighty-foot drop, and collect metal offcuts which for some reason lay around the place like forgotten treasure. They were the pieces left behind when steel sheets were pressed out into box templates, and they came in a range of intriguing shapes: some like capital letter Es, others in the form of triangles (always right-angled) or diamonds with one vertex shaved off flat. They were all about two millimetres thick, and they were highly collectible because of their lethal sharpness and their resemblance to the shurikens we’d all seen or at least heard about in Enter the Dragon.

  There was the usual horseplay as we fanned out to look for hitherto unknown shapes and sizes of offcut. Davey jostled Steven Seddon, pretending to shove him over the foot-high parapet down into the street far below, and Steven went complaining to Kenny who kicked his arse for being so pathetic. John Lunt, who was one of my millions of cousins, stationed himself over the hole in the roof so that he could gob on the stragglers as they came up the ladder. Peter Gore tried to get a game of off-ground tick going, and foundered immediately on the fact that we were all a long way off the ground already. Peter tried to establish some rules that would work in this anomalous situation, but he was shouted down.

  And Kenny’s other brother, Ronnie, started to tell the story of the Tinnie Ghost.

  ‘It was the watchman, you know. These lads broke in, and the watchman went after them, but they threw him into one of the machines and he got all squashed and ripped apart, like. And that’s why he’s still here. On the roof. If you look into the puddles you might see his reflection, you know, and if you do then you’re gonna die. Everyone who sees him dies before they get back down to the ground.’

  Some of the smaller kids tried not to look at the puddles without being too obvious about it. One of them bleated to his big sister that he wanted to go home, and was coldly ignored.

  ‘What happened to the lads?’ someone asked.

  ‘He killed them in their sleep,’ said Ronnie. ‘One by one, like. They dreamed he was throwing them into the machine and they had heart attacks. And the last one, when they went into the bedroom the next morning, they found him all ripped apart. Bits of him all over the room, like. Blood and bits of bone everywhere.’

  This was shite on a heroic scale, and I felt it was down to me to light the beacon of truth.

  ‘How did anyone know what they dreamed about,’ I asked, sardonically, ‘if they died in their bloody sleep?’

  Ronnie didn’t falter. ‘They screamed “Get me out! I’m dying in the machine!”’ he said.

  But I was getting into my stride now. ‘Anyway, ghosts don’t have reflections. Ghosts don’t even have shadows. And what’s he doing haunting the frigging roof if he died down in the machines? It’s bollocks.’

  Ronnie bridled, and jug-eared Davey jeered from my left. ‘Who asked you, Castor? How many ghosts have you seen?’

  I launched into an answer, realised part-way through the sentence that I might be getting myself in too deep and began to stammer. Before I could pull back and regroup, Kenny stepped up between his kid brother and his brick-built enforcer and glared down at me.

  ‘Castor’s an expert on ghosts, isn’t he?’ he sneered. ‘Sees them all over the place. He’s got the I-Spy book and everything.’

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t like the way this was going, not least because the mood of the gang was against me. I was being a smart-arse. A smart-arse is always lower on the pecking order than anyone except a chicken or a grass. Very few of the faces that were surrounding us were showing anything like sympathy.

  ‘He saw our mam, didn’t he?’ Kenny pursued. ‘With her throat cut and blood all over her. Didn’t you, Castor?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I did.’

  Kenny’s face set hard. ‘Well, you’re a lying cunt,’ he said, ‘because she died down in the ozzie in the cancer ward. You’d shit yourself if you saw a real ghost, you wanker.’

  ‘You would,’ I retorted, groping for a response that would knock him back on his heels. ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘You’re a chicken, Castor.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  Kenny shoved me in the chest, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to reinforce the challenge.

  ‘Prove it,’ he suggested. And before I could answer he bellowed ‘Gauntlet!’, punching the air with his fists.

  ‘Gauntlet! Gauntlet!’ Ronnie and Steven crowed, and the shout was taken up on all sides.

  The gauntlet was just a piece of casual sadism that usually looked a lot worse than it was. Everyone lined up in front of you. You ran past them, down the line, and people kicked you and punched you as you passed. It was a test of manhood, invoked when someone had allegedly brought the gang or the street into disrepute. You collected a few bumps and bruises, but you had a certain amount of control over your own vector and if you fell you could angle your fall outwards, away from the line, and take a time-out: the people making up the gauntlet weren’t allowed to move until you got to the other end.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, shouting to make myself heard over the din. ‘Fine. I’m not scared.’

  ‘Over there,’ said Kenny, pointing. I turned to look in the direction he was indicating, and like Gertrude Stein said on a different occasion, there wasn’t any there there. The slightly pitched coping stones of the ledge were only a step away, and beyond that there was a sheer
drop to the street. He couldn’t mean . . . ?

  Kenny’s hand clamped on the back of my neck and he pushed me forward. I flailed in his grasp, thinking that he was going to push me over the edge. He didn’t. He just stood me up on the narrow parapet and then stepped away, warning me with a wagging finger not to move.

  ‘Gauntlet,’ he said, pointing to left and right. ‘There and back again, you little twat. Or else say you’re a chicken.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I riposted.

  ‘Right, then,’ said Kenny, with a gleam of malicious triumph in his eye.

  He set Ronnie and Steven to work collecting offcuts, and then arranged the gang in a long line from end to end of the roof, about twenty feet away from the ledge where I stood and wobbled, trying to look nonchalant. The three stooges handed out the offcuts so that everyone had two or three - except that a lot of people, Anita among them, had dropped out by this stage and were refusing to play. It was a hard core of about twenty kids who faced me, their faces radiant with the thrill of the hunt.

  Enough was enough. I put one foot down off the parapet.

  ‘You come down,’ Kenny snarled, ‘and you’re a fucking chicken. You admit you’re a chicken. We don’t have chickens in the gang. Ready . . . aim . . .’

  The sane response would have been some pithier version of the proverb about live jackals and dead lions, but I hesitated. I didn’t want to be faced down by Kenny, because at that moment his face represented everything that I hated in the world - including Matt running off and leaving me so he could look for God.

  The pause was just long enough.

  ‘Fire!’ Kenny bawled, and the air was filled with whistling steel. I ran, because the alternative was to be sliced to pieces where I stood. To be fair, I was probably exaggerating the danger from the offcuts themselves. They were absolutely useless from an aerodynamic point of view because they were too thin and light to hold to a line - but there were a fuck of a lot of them, and it would only take one hit to make me flinch backwards reflexively and make the long swallow-dive onto the rutted asphalt of the factory’s forecourt.

  I ran head down, only looking at the stone under my feet. I got lucky. A spinning steel rhombus took a small nick out of my cheek, but it was turning in the wind and had spent most of its momentum when it hit me. Another bit into my arm, but again very shallowly and with no real force. Apart from that I reached the corner unscathed - and unopposed for the last ten yards because everyone had spent their ammo in the first few exuberant moments.

  ‘Time out to reload!’ Ronnie shouted, and Kenny nodded his imperial assent. They all went looking for their own ammo this time, and they were a bit more liberal in interpreting the rules. Some of the kids came back with lumps of shattered brick and one or two had taken out home-made catapults.

  This had started out way beyond a joke, and now it was in Lord of the Flies territory. If I made the return journey, a single hit would knock me off the ledge.

  ‘Fuck this,’ I said, stepping down off the parapet onto safe, solid ground.

  ‘Get back up there, you little piss-pants bastard,’ Kenny commanded, striding across to me, ‘or I’ll throw you off my fucking self.’ He grabbed a double handful of my lapels and shoved me backwards, trying to make me stand up on the ledge again. I resisted, leaning back without letting my feet leave the ground, although that exposed me to the very real danger of losing my balance and falling backwards over the edge.

  ‘Sod off, Kenny!’ I said. ‘I’m not doing it. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Not yet you haven’t,’ Kenny said grimly. ‘We’re not finished yet.’

  I struggled in his grasp, trying ineffectually to trip him so I could break free. His superior weight made it a forlorn gesture, but I had to try. I stumbled backwards, planting my feet on the ledge because there was nowhere else to go, but when Kenny tried to disengage I went with him, gripping his left arm tightly. He punched me in the face to loosen my grip, and once again set me up on my perch. I staggered, seeing stars.

  ‘Now you fucking run!’ he snarled, stepping back quickly. ‘Ready . . . aim . . .’

  I don’t know what I would have done on the word ‘fire’: fortunately I never got to find out, because the command never came. Instead, Kenny made a really unlovely noise: a sucking gurgle that cut off before its time and ended on a terrifying silence. His mouth opened and closed and his arms spasmed, as though he was trying to get a good grip on a parcel of a peculiar shape and heft.

  He turned around a hundred and eighty degrees, presenting his back to me. There was something odd about it: his shirt was gaping open, split from side to side as though he’d started to turn from Bill Bixby into Lou Ferrigno. And then from within the shirt - filling it miraculously like the endlessly rising bubbles in the plastic trim of an old-fashioned Wurlitzer - blood welled, saturating the cloth in an instant, to spill down his jeans in a lapping tide.

  He hadn’t turned around on purpose to show me this: he’d turned to stare at Anita, who was still standing there with a slender length of steel in her hands. It was one that we would have discarded in our hunt because it was far too long and thin to throw. As a makeshift scimitar it clearly had its drawbacks, because Anita’s hands were bloody too, dark red beads sliding down her fingers onto the pale metal. She held Kenny’s gaze as she let go of the steel strip so that it clattered down on the ground between them.

  ‘Kick the can,’ Anita said, in a very level, very matter-of-fact tone. In the game of the same name, it was the phrase you shouted as you freed all the kids who’d already been caught.

  Kenny opened his mouth to answer and vomited a huge amount of dark red blood. Then he collapsed, and Anita fled. Ronnie and Davey made a half-hearted attempt to catch her, but their coordination was shot to hell by the shock of what they’d just seen. She got away clean, and in the mess and chaos that followed so did I.

  Like I said earlier, you had to go down through the levels of the factory in convoy unless you had your own torch, so I was stuck with my former tormentors until we were back on terra firma. But the business of lowering Kenny down the ladder and then carrying him in blood-boltered relay from floor to floor occupied so much of the gang’s attention that they paid none at all to me. The game was over in any case, and it had turned out to be a game of two halves with a vengeance.

  The relay carried on all the way to the casualty department at Walton hospital, which was right next door to the factory. It turned out later that Anita had cut deep enough with her wild swipe to puncture Kenny’s lung, which had started to deflate. She’d also hit his posterolateral artery, which supplies blood to the spine. The bumps and stresses of Kenny’s forced descent hadn’t helped the situation either, and he was down to four pints of blood by the time the doctors got to him.

  He was away from the street for a long time - first of all in intensive care, then on a normal ward, and finally with an aunt way out in Kirkby where his dad sent him to recuperate. All of this was relayed to us by Ronnie and Steven, who without their big brother to make up the trinity were now humble rank-and-filers in the gang. Davey Barlow, the Igor to Kenny’s Frankenstein, faded out around then too, so we experienced something of a renaissance. I remember the rest of that summer as a good time, marred only by the fact that Anita also abandoned the gang after that day, and by occasional letters from Matt that made me resent his absence all the more.

  When Kenny did come back, he came back as someone else. His sixteenth birthday had taken place while he was still away from the street, but it was obvious when we saw him walking up Breeze Lane eight months later that he was carrying an unaccustomed weight on his shoulders. He had a job now, at Plunkett’s garage, and a girlfriend out in Kirkby who he visited every Saturday night. He had a context that kept me safe in perpetuity from his vicious streak, like a Walton get-out-of-jail-free card. Grown men didn’t hit kids, unless the kids were their own.

  So these were the events that passed in review before my eyes after Basquiat spoke the fateful name.
They didn’t come in exactly that order, as a clean and coherent sequence: they were mixed in with a lot of other things. For me, thinking about Liverpool was always like trying to take one tissue out of one of those little hotel-room boxes where the bloody things are interleaved and as thin and fragile as the Turin Shroud: one tug and you take the whole box.

  So I also remembered my mum coming home to Liverpool three years later to face my dad down and move in with her former fancy man, Big Terry Lackland. I remembered Matt’s finishing his holy orders and becoming Father Matthew Castor, on a spring day in torrential rain, wearing a rough-hewn but beautiful scrimshaw crucifix that Mum had bought from the pawnshop as his ordination present. I remembered - with confused emotions - my own escape, when I aced my A levels against everyone’s expectations including mine and pissed off to Oxford without a backward glance: the best way to leave, in my experience, if you can make it stick.

  And as the cascade reached its inevitable conclusion, I remembered the one Castor who wasn’t around to see all this stuff happen. The one whose death taught me what I was and launched me on my path, bringing me by insensible degrees to this moment and this place.

  I remembered Katie.

  And the rest was silence, until Gary Coldwood broke it with a blunt question, pulling me by the heels back into the present day.

  ‘So you and Mister Seddon weren’t on the best of terms?’ he demanded.

  I shrugged, as casually as I could manage. ‘It’s not a Batman and Joker thing, Gary,’ I said. ‘It was a hell of a long time ago, and I haven’t seen him since. Haven’t even thought about him.’

  ‘It’s probably fair to say that he’s thought about you,’ Basquiat pointed out, her tone hard. ‘He painted your name in his blood.’

  I shrugged again. ‘Maybe he was starting to write his will,’ I suggested. Well, what the fuck? My conscience was clean, at least as far as attempted murders were concerned. Whatever this looked like, I knew what it wasn’t: it wasn’t The Tell-Tale Heart.

  ‘You still want to leave this hanging?’ Basquiat asked Coldwood.