Thicker Than Water

by Mike Carey

  Mum recounted this with relish. Her favourite reading matter had always been true crime, although she preferred a good murder to any amount of aggravated robbery.

  ‘Then there’s Steven Seddon,’ she said. ‘He was at the docks for a while, back when they still had a few ships coming in every now and then. But he gave that up in the end and went to some night-school thing. He’s at a law office in the Cunard, now, and he wears a suit. I’ve seen him waiting for the bus up at the broo, looking like Lord Muck. I wouldn’t trust him with a bloody paper clip.’

  ‘Would any of them still drink at the Breeze?’ I asked.

  Mum made a sour face. ‘Richie might, though it’s a bloody mystery to me why anyone would go back to that place. Harold Keighley is the most miserable bastard of a landlord I’ve ever met, God forgive my language. He opens the doors when he puts the towel up, so the place gets as cold as a fridge.’

  The description made me grin: I remembered those winter nights when the determination to finish your last drink clashed with the onset of hypothermia. ‘Does he still do that, then?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s hard for a leopard to change its spots, Fix,’ she said sententiously. ‘And Keighley doesn’t even change his bloody underwear more than twice a year.’

  Mum got up and went into the kitchen again, coming back with two bottles of pale this time. She opened both with a kitchen tin opener - one of the old kind that have two hooked blades, one large and one small, and look like exotic torture implements. She handed a bottle to me, and I took it because I knew if I refused she’d drink them both herself.

  We drank, and reminisced, as evening fell outside. At half past seven there was a pause while Mum watched Coronation Street and I made a foray to the off-licence at the top of the street. Then we drank and reminisced some more.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, when I judged that she was mellow enough to roll with the impact, ‘Matt left home around the same time I did, didn’t he?’

  Mum nodded. ‘Same year,’ she confirmed. ‘His first parish was in Birmingham. Our Lady of Zion. You went to Oxford in September, and Matty left in December. He gave his first sermon two weeks before Christmas. You remember? We all came up for it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember. But he was ordained in April. So what was he doing in between times?’

  Mum gave me a look that was a couple of centuries too ripe to be merely old-fashioned. ‘He was learning to be a priest,’ she said. ‘He’d been ordained, aye, so he wasn’t a deacon any more, but it isn’t like an assembly line, Fix. They had all sorts of things he had to do first. Seminars, he called them. A seminar here and a seminar there. All up and down the country, he was, and living out of a suitcase. Except it wasn’t a suitcase, it was just a big shapeless bag with two handles that he got from the Army and Navy. Six feet long.’ She illustrated with her hands. ‘He looked like he was carrying a bloody bazooka, honest to God. If it was nowadays, someone would think he was a terrorist and shoot him.’

  That brought her too close to the painful subject of Matt’s current situation, so she shied away from it again. ‘He was everywhere,’ she concluded. ‘Running around like a blue-arsed fly.’

  ‘But he was still living at the seminary? Over in Skem?’

  ‘In Upholland? No, after that big - you know, passing-out parade thing, where the bishop put the oil on him, and gave him his Jezebel - they needed his room for someone else. He stayed there until the autumn, when they had the new lads in, then he came back here.’

  ‘Jezebel’ was Mum’s mispronunciation of chasuble, the sleeveless robe that a priest wears on top of all his other vestments when he does the business at Mass. I was never sure whether it was a joke or an actual mistake: after all, her mangled renderings of song lyrics, including turning Fun Boy Three’s ‘Our Lips are Sealed’ into ‘Olives to See You’, were legendary.

  But what made my ears prick up was the revelation that Matt had come back home in between the seminary and his first ministry. I was already off out in the world by that time, screwing up my degree course, and I don’t think I came home once in the first two terms.

  ‘Back to Walton?’ I asked, making sure I was getting this straight.

  ‘Back to this house, Fix. Where else was he going to go?’

  I nodded, conceding the point. ‘So he was around for three months,’ I said. ‘Back in circulation. Looking up old friends.’

  Mum sniffed. ‘I don’t know about that. He saw some of them, aye, but he wasn’t going to walk in the Breeze and stand at the bar with them, was he? It’s not that kind of life, when you’re a man of the cloth. You’ve got to stand aloof.’

  The conversation veered off in other directions, by virtue of some unspoken agreement that passed between us. Nostalgia and beer are a potent combination in themselves; and when Mum got the photo album out and cracked it open in the middle we had the emotional perfect storm. There we all were: Matt and me in short trousers, Dad all tanned and handsome - ‘a dark horse’, my grandma used to call him, with mingled disapproval and admiration - and Mum looking like a million dollars.

  ‘Where did it go?’ I asked, wonderingly. ‘We just—’ I couldn’t find a word for it, so I pantomimed it instead - holding my hand in front of my face with the fingers pursed together, then opening it wide. ‘Where did that come from? One minute we’re a family, the next we’re . . . in the wind.’

  Mum didn’t answer. She just turned a few pages in the book back and folded it open at a page we hadn’t seen yet. There were three photos on the page: the first, Mum holding a baby, the baby all swathed in pink blankets and pink bonnet and pink everything; the second, the three Castor siblings in school uniforms, wearing the pained grimaces children always put on when they’re told to smile; and the third, Katie by herself, aged four, smiling a smile that was altogether more believable - a smile with secret, solemn little-kid thoughts behind it.

  I stared at the photos, suddenly sober despite the seven or eight beers I’d downed.

  ‘It took a while,’ Mum said, her tone soft. ‘It didn’t happen all at once.’

  17

  I didn’t leave Nimrod Street until almost ten p.m., by which time I’d drowned that little nugget of cold, hard sobriety in a few more beers and a lot more talk. But the talk was getting harder and harder to sustain, and the question of where I was going to spend the night was getting more and more pressing.

  Mum had offered me a bed, which I’d declined with thanks. The impassable ground again: the conversation leading us into the middle of a minefield and leaving us there without a map or a metal detector. She’d asked me about Matt. When had I last seen him and how was he doing? I’d passed the question off with some made-up bit of news about his teaching work, because the truth was that I never asked Matt about his life. I never had asked him, I realised now, since the day when he’d walked out of mine.

  I walked back up to County Road and grabbed a cab up to Breeze Lane. I could have walked it, but I wanted to get to the Breeze - my Mum and Dad’s old local, ruled over with a rod of rusty iron by the aforementioned Harold Keighley - before the towel went up.

  The pub hadn’t changed. They’d rebuilt the entire neighbourhood around it, but the Breeze remained its own sad-ass self, like the filament of platinum in that bullshit metaphor of T. S. Eliot’s. You dip it into a mixture of oxygen and sulphur dioxide and blam, you’ve got sulphuric acid - but the platinum stays the same, unaffected by the reactions it catalyses. The metaphor sort of falls apart at that point, though, because the Breeze was never the catalyst for anything apart from a thousand drunken fights about who was looking cross-eyed at our Karen and whose grandad had stolen whose great-uncle’s ration book back in the austerity years.

  It’s a Tetley pub, probably built around 1920, and since the size of the plot gave the architect no room in which to exercise his imagination it’s just a big blockhouse coated in rough-cast and painted white. The sign is a little classier, because it’s topped with an iron silhouette, painted in
bright red, of the liver bird - the mythical short-necked cormorant invented for the purpose by the desperate gofers of the school of heraldry back in the eighteenth century. That was when the city - flush with its winnings from the slave trade - slipped the heralds a backhander and asked them to run up a quick coat of arms.

  Call me a sentimentalist, but I’ve always felt a sort of kinship with that bird. It belongs to no genus, but everyone confidently declares it to be a stork, a pelican, or whatever else they need it to be to fit the theory in hand. Whereas actually it’s a sleight of hand, a brazen forgery passed off on man and nature. As a symbol for my home town, it’s not bad: everybody thinks they know what Scousers are like, but the closer you look at us, the less neatly the individual details seem to add up.

  Inside, the Breeze continued to give that same impression of inelegant confinement. The main room is long and narrow, with the bar running the whole length of it: there’s just enough room between the bar and the wall for one row of people standing up and one row sitting down. When my parents were regulars here, social propriety dictated that the standing drinkers were men: tonight there was a fair mix, but I noticed that there was a heavy age bias, with most of the faces - both at the bar and along the wall - belonging to my mum and dad’s generation. The Breeze clearly wasn’t managing to sell itself as a happening place for the younger social drinker: no widescreen TV, no games machines, no jukebox even. There was a one-armed bandit sitting in an unfrequented corner, which probably made less income in a month than the bar staff earned from tips, but that was the only concession to the modern era.

  I didn’t recognise more than half a dozen people, and none of them seemed to recognise me. Life is the best disguise of all, and I’d been through a lot of it since the last time I’d bought a round in this place.

  But Harold Keighley hadn’t changed a bit. Standing dead centre at the bar, he was pulling a pint of Stingo from a chipped black hand pump with a golden liver bird perched on its apex, expertly tipping the glass to a shallower angle as it filled so that the head would be an even half-inch or so. He’d always been a big man - Hungry Harold, Harold the Barrel - and now he’d filled out to even more heroic proportions: his size, and his fearsome flatulence, were legendary, as was his refusal to treat drinking yourself into oblivion as anything other than a strict business proposition. His face, which I couldn’t remember in any other condition than flushed hectic red, was heavy-jowled and pugnacious, topped with a full head of hair the colour of the snow you’re not supposed to eat. Mind you, it would probably have been pure white if Harold hadn’t been a forty-a-day man: even now, in defiance of the recent ban, he had a fag hanging from the corner of his mouth - inspiring other, similar beacon fires around the room.

  He finished pulling the pint, set it down, took the money, gave change. I waited patiently while he dealt with two other customers who were at the bar before me. A younger guy with a nose-stud who was also serving asked me if he could get me anything, but I sent him on his way with a curt shake of the head. Harold had seen me by this time and I waited patiently while he worked his way around to me.

  ‘Matty Castor,’ he said, wagging his pudgy finger at me. ‘I thought you were a priest now.’

  ‘He is,’ I confirmed. ‘I’m not. I’m the other one. Felix.’

  ‘The little bugger who used to steal the beer mats.’

  ‘The same. I’m done with them now if you want them back.’

  He pursed his lips as though he was actually considering the offer, then made an obscene gesture. ‘What can I get you?’ he asked.

  ‘Pint of Guinness,’ I said, not being a big fan of Tetley beers. While he poured it I took another look around the room. Still just that thin leavening of people I vaguely knew, none of them likely to lead me onwards in the direction I needed to go in, even if they decided to talk to me.

  So I went for the big man instead.

  ‘Richie Yeats still drink in here, Harold?’ I asked.

  The Guinness was on an electric pump, so Harold didn’t need to give it much attention as it sluggishly climbed the glass. He looked at me shrewdly. ‘Well, now,’ he said, with a humourless smile. ‘If I had a fiver for every time I got that question . . .’

  ‘Yeah?’ I was interested. ‘Who else is looking for him, then?’

  ‘Who isn’t, these days?’ Harold countered. ‘That’ll be two sixty.’

  ‘And whatever you’re having.’

  ‘I’m having rectal surgery. Stick it in the lifeboat.’

  He took my money and gave me my change: true to his word, he’d just taken the cost of my pint, refusing the offered drink. Since I mentioned Richie, the temperature had cooled. I fed my change into the RNLI money box, a coin at a time. Harold waited, staring me out.

  ‘What about Anita?’ I asked, changing tack. ‘Ever see her around?’

  To my surprise, Harold’s dour face suddenly cracked open in an involuntary smile that had real warmth in it. ‘Not in too many years,’ he said. ‘Light of my life, she was. Even as a kid. She should have gone on the telly or something. A girl like that, her face is her fortune, innit? Her fortune or her falling down, as our Nan used to say.’

  That reflection seemed to sour his mood again. He shook his head, his lower lip jutting out like a shelf weighed down with all the world’s woes. Down at the other end of the bar some other guy’s hand was waving with an empty glass in it. Harold noticed it and turned, starting to head in that direction: I put my own hand out to detain him.

  ‘Could I leave a message for Richie?’ I asked.

  He stared at me hard, frowning so that his eyes almost disappeared as the topography of his corpulent face shifted seismically. ‘Could you what?’ he echoed.

  ‘I just want to talk to him,’ I said. ‘About Anita. She’s missing and I’m trying to find her. He knows we used to be friends. If he wants to meet up he can leave a message here. Or he can just call me.’ I fished a pen out of some recess of my greatcoat and wrote my mobile number on a beer mat, then held it up for Harold to take. He hesitated for a moment, then nodded brusquely at the counter top, indicating that I should put the beer mat back where I’d found it.

  ‘If I see him,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell him. If I remember. I’m not saying I’ll remember.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Harold walked away and I drank the Guinness, which in Liverpool is almost as good as it is in Dublin. Then for the hell of it I went over and fed a few coins into the one-armed bandit. There’s something about watching your hard-earned cash disappear very quickly into a machine’s impassive maw that encourages philosophical detachment. It’s a very pure transaction: almost spiritual. All you’re buying is a few seconds’ worth of flashing lights, and a near-subliminal flicker of hope.

  The towel was up by the time I’d finished that pint, and true to form the doors at either end of the bar were standing open. It doesn’t have quite the same impact in summer, but I was done anyway. I left the pub, walked down to Rice Lane and caught yet another cab: this time out to Aintree, where there was a small B&B I remembered. It was called the Orrell Park. It took in a lot of travelling sales reps, and consequently stayed open all hours. They had a room for me at a knock-down price, and it was - just about - worth every penny. It even had a kettle and some sachets of Douwe Egbert’s, so I made myself a treacly black coffee and ate a complementary pack of digestive biscuits: not much by way of supper, but I’d make it up with an artery-hardening English breakfast in the morning.

  In the meantime I lay on the bed with my shoes off and worked out a plan of campaign for the next day. There were a few other people I could shake down for a possible sighting of Anita or Richie, but they could wait until the afternoon. My morning was going to be devoted to Steven Seddon.

  I wondered about Harold Keighley’s sudden changes of mood. He definitely hadn’t been happy to hear Richie’s name, or else to hear that I was looking for him; and he’d said in so many words that I wasn’t the only one. Maybe Dick-Breath had landed himself in
some kind of trouble and was lying low for reasons of his own, using the Breeze as a poste restante. But in any case he was only relevant to me as a possible bridge to Anita, and if Harold was right and she hadn’t been seen around in a long while, then I was probably just chasing my own tail to start with.

  How in the name of all that’s fucked up and untenable had she ended up with Kenny? What tortuous byways of destiny and dumb lucklessness had led her to live with a guy she already knew was a coward, a bully and an emotionally unavailable gobshite?

  Nicky had filled in some of the gaps, of course, but it hurt a little to think about that: about the long succession of other men she’d lived with, only to move on once the magic wore off or the hard-core abuse set in. Why had she made so little of her life? Become a casual adjunct to a bunch of losers, one of whom had even given her a kid without that making the slightest difference to his level of commitment? She’d seemed like the best of us, in a lot of ways. The most alive, anyway.

  But where was she now?

  And assuming I even found her, could she give me any clue as to why Kenny hated Matt enough to put him in the frame for murder?

  I fell asleep still chewing on these unpalatable little nuggets, and as a result I slept very shallowly, coming awake from disconnected dreams and then dozing off again in a cycle that made me feel more tired when I woke the next morning than I had been when I went to bed.

  But as sometimes happens when you’ve been through a night like that, your mind like a computer that’s hung in the act of shutting down, you wake up with fragments of the recent past stuck in the forefront of your consciousness. For me, the fragments included Matt’s first sermon at Our Lady of Zion. The text was from Numbers 23: ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my end be like his.’ A pretty downbeat choice for your first Mass at your first ministry, I thought at the time. But I never asked him why, and I realised now what a shitty thing it was I’d done to him. Yeah, I came along to wave the flag and mark the occasion. But Matty was hurting: he’d told me so as clearly as he knew how. And I’d walked away without saying a word.