Naked

by Kevin Brooks

  ‘And if they ever suspect me of betraying them,’ he’d told Nancy, ‘they’re probably going to assume that you had something to do with it. And you know what that means, don’t you?’

  Nancy nodded. She knew exactly what it meant.

  ‘It’ll probably never come to it,’ Joseph went on, ‘but if anything does ever happen to me, I want you to promise me something.’

  Nancy just nodded again.

  ‘I want you to promise me that you’ll leave Belfast as soon as you can, OK? Don’t bother packing or saying goodbye to anyone, don’t wait for anything, just get out of the country as soon as you can. All right?’

  ‘But –’

  ‘No buts, just do it. Do you promise?’

  ‘Yes … yes, I promise.’

  ‘And I want you to take William and Joe with you.’

  ‘Why?’ Nancy said. ‘The IRA’s not going to go after them, are they?’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘It’s William,’ he said. ‘If they kill me, and he stays here, there’s a chance that he’ll go after them. And if he does that, he’ll end up with a bullet in the back of his head. And then Little Joe’s going to grow up knowing that his father and his brother were killed by the IRA … do you see what I’m saying? I don’t want my sons ending up like me.’

  ‘They won’t,’ Nancy said.

  ‘You promise? You’ll take them with you?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve got a friend who lives –’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Joseph interrupted. ‘Don’t tell anyone. If the time ever comes, and you have to go, just go.’

  ‘Right …’ She smiled. ‘But the time isn’t going to come … is it, Joe?’

  ‘No,’ he assured her. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’ He returned her smile. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we both lived for ever.’

  The morning after William’s father was killed, Nancy and the two boys took the first available ferry to Liverpool. From Liverpool, they travelled by train to London, and by late afternoon they were sitting in the kitchen of a council flat in a tower block on the Cranleigh Farm estate in West Green Road. The flat belonged to an old friend of Nancy’s from nursing college, a woman called Rhoda Devlin. Rhoda had grown up with Nancy, they’d played together in the streets when they were kids, so she knew all about the Troubles. She understood how the paramilitaries worked. And once Nancy had explained what had happened and why she’d had to leave, Rhoda had no hesitation about letting her and the boys stay at the flat. In fact, as it turned out, she’d been thinking about leaving the flat to move in with her boyfriend, but it had taken her so long to get the council flat in the first place that the idea of giving it up now really irked her.

  ‘But if you wanted to stay here,’ she told Nancy. ‘You and the boys … well, I could move in with Derren and keep the flat in my name. Which might come in useful if things don’t work out at Derren’s … which knowing my luck with men, they probably won’t. So, anyway, what do you think?’

  ‘Would I have to pretend to be you?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘Only as far as the council’s concerned. And as long as the rent gets paid, they don’t really care who you are.’

  So that was pretty much that. Rhoda moved out a weeklater, and William and Little Joe began a brand-new life with Nancy. New life, new home, new town, new country, new ‘mother’.

  ‘Not that she ever asked us to consider her as our mother,’ William said. ‘She was just … I don’t know. Just Nancy, I suppose. She was all we had left … she still is.’ He looked at me. ‘She’s everything to us – mother, father, sister …’

  ‘She must be a remarkable woman,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, she is.’

  ‘How does she manage?’ I asked. ‘Money-wise, I mean. Is she still nursing?’

  William shook his head. ‘It’s still a bit difficult … she can’t really get a proper job until she gets some new ID, because if she uses her real name and real ID … well, we just have to be really careful, you know?’

  ‘Do you really think the IRA will be looking for her?’

  ‘I know they are.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He shrugged. ‘Contacts, people back home, people who hear things … it’s a small world back there.’

  ‘But a big one here.’

  He smiled. ‘Yeah …’

  ‘Isn’t there any way you can put things right with the IRA?’ I asked. ‘I mean, if they knew the truth, if they knew that Franky Hughes had set up your father and Nancy –’

  He shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t make any difference now. They don’t acknowledge mistakes – it’s a sign of weakness. The truth doesn’t matter, the truth’s irrelevant. All that matters to them is their honour and reputation.’

  ‘Their honour?’

  He just shrugged.

  For a moment then, I almost lost my temper. I just couldn’t understand how he could possibly accept such a ridiculously twisted sense of morality. Of course, I knew that he didn’t agree with it, and that his acceptance of it was really no more than a resigned acknowledgement of the way things were …

  But still …

  I think I just wanted him to show some hatred for the IRA.

  Which just goes to show how incredibly naive I was at the time.

  ‘So if Nancy can’t get any work,’ I said to him, ‘how do you manage to –?’

  ‘She can get work, she just can’t do anything officially until she gets some fake ID. But fake ID costs a lot of money, which is hard to come by because Nancy can’t get a real job until she gets the fake ID … so all she can do at the moment is cash-in-hand stuff, which doesn’t really pay very much. But we manage, you know? And I do as much as I can to help out …’

  ‘So you have got a job?’

  ‘No,’ he said, grinning. ‘I just steal stuff.’

  ‘Right …’

  He looked at me. ‘Sometimes you just have to do whatever it takes.’

  I didn’t say anything, I just looked at him. And as I gazed deeply into those haunted eyes, I thought about everything he’d been through – his mother’s death, his father’s life with the IRA, his father’s murder by the IRA – and I tried to imagine how it must have been for him, how it must have made him feel … but it was beyond me. I didn’t even know how it made me feel. I felt something though – there was no doubting that – and, whatever it was, it moved me so much that I wanted to take hold of William and never let go.

  But this was the real world – Saturday night, Sunday morning, the backyard of a house in Seven Sisters, the brutal beauty of the Ramones blaring out from the wide-open windows – and I knew that in this real real world, I couldn’t put my arms round William and hold him for ever …

  But I could put my arms round him for now.

  And when I did – not holding him too tight, and not feeling the need to say anything – it felt so right, so absolutely perfect, that I wished we were in another world, a world that wasn’t real, a world where we could hold each other for ever. And we were holding each other now … it wasn’t just me with my arms round William, we were embracing each other.

  And although that’s all it was – a simple embrace, with nothing else to it – it was, for me, an incredibly intimate moment, and for the first time in my life I knew how it felt to be at one with somebody. I felt complete, content … I didn’t need anything else at all. Just this.

  I felt totally liberated, as well. There were no expectations, no rules, nothing to be embarrassed about. It felt perfectly all right to be silent, but at the same time, if I wanted to say something, anything, I knew that I could. I didn’t have to think about what to do. So when I felt a question forming in my mind, I didn’t stop to consider if I ought to ask it or not, I just opened my mouth and let the words come out.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask y
ou something else?’ I murmured.

  ‘Is it about fairy tales?’

  I smiled, remembering the night of the Valentine’s Ball. ‘No,’ I said, just as I’d said that night. ‘No, it’s not about fairy tales.’

  ‘In that case, no … I don’t mind.’

  ‘Is William Bonney your real name?’

  He didn’t say anything for a while, he just carried on holding me, and then after a few moments he gently let go – without moving away from me – and looked into my eyes. His eyes, I noticed, were traced with tears. But his smile was a good one – a smile from the heart.

  Just as he was about to answer my question – or, at least, just as he was about to say something – a horrible screeching sound came from inside the house, and the music suddenly stopped, and we both heard the unmistakable sound of fighting – raised voices, bodies crashing around, shouting and swearing. It was coming from the room downstairs where people had been dancing.

  ‘What the hell –?’ I started to say.

  ‘Listen,’ William said.

  I kept quiet for a moment, and then I heard it. An all too familiar drunken voice, angry and stupid and out of control:

  ‘Come on then, you fucker! Come on!’

  I looked at William.

  ‘Curtis?’ he said.

  I sighed. ‘Who else?’

  20

  The fight at the party that night sounded a lot worse than it actually was. In fact, Curtis and the other guy – a punk called Andy – were both so stoned that it wasn’t really a fight at all, just a lot of pushing and shoving, a lot of shouting and swearing, and a fair amount of falling over and rolling around on the floor. When I asked Curtis later what the fight was about, he told me that it was nothing, just ‘one of those things, you know …’ And when I pressed him further, he claimed that Andy had been bad-mouthing Naked.

  ‘He said we were fakes, for Christ’s sake … public-school fakes. I mean, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

  I don’t know if Andy really did say that – although I wouldn’t be surprised if he had – but I doubt if that was the true cause of the fight, because some weeks later I found out that Andy was going out with Charlie Brown – who wasn’t there that night – and I think it’s more likely that they came to blows after Curtis had said something to Andy about Charlie, or Andy had said something to Curtis …

  Whatever the reason, it was all pretty pathetic.

  But then, in all honesty, a lot of things seemed kind of pathetic after hearing about William’s troubled life that night. In comparison to what he’d been through – and was still going through – so much of everything else suddenly seemed so trivial and insignificant. Me and Curtis, the band, school, music … I saw it all in a new perspective now. None of it was a matter of life and death. None of it mattered that much. Even my mother’s continuing problems weren’t quite so distressing in light of what had happened to William’s parents. I mean, at least my mother – and father – were both still alive. Of course, I’m not saying that I suddenly realized how wonderful my life was or anything … I just realized that it could easily have been a whole lot worse.

  21

  The weather cooled a little towards the end of May, but the days began to warm up again in June, and by the end of the month the whole country was bathed in scorching blue skies and sweltering heat. In what was to become the hottest summer since records began, temperatures soared to 80˚ F for days on end, often reaching well over 90˚ F. Throughout June and July, and into the early weeks of August, the heat bore down relentlessly. There was no respite – no rain, no cooling breezes – and even at night the temperatures barely dipped. Some nights were so hot that people took to sleeping on rooftops. And as the summer went on, the never-ending heat and the continuing lack of rain began to take its toll – pavements cracked, roads melted, rivers ran dry, and water supplies had to be rationed. There were devastating forest fires, plagues of ladybirds, widespread crop failures, all kinds of economic and industrial problems … none of which, to be perfectly honest, had any effect on me whatsoever. And it was the same for everyone else I knew too. Our world was our world – our streets, our houses, our days, our nights – and anything beyond that, which pretty much meant everything else on the planet, simply didn’t concern us. We weren’t interested in politics, we didn’t keep up with foreign affairs, we couldn’t have cared less about nuclear weapons or the war in Vietnam or anything else that the rest of the world – at least, the rest of the adult world – deemed important. And while it was true that William had far more experience of life – and death – than the rest of us put together, even his relationship with the rest of the world was relatively insular.

  Of course, I realize now how narrow-minded and self-obsessed that probably sounds, but it’s just the way it was back then. We didn’t watch TV, we didn’t read newspapers … we just lived our lives.

  That summer, for us, was just our summer: we enjoyed the heat, we cursed the heat, we sweated, we burned … we did what we did. We spent our days just hanging around in the sun or rehearsing at the warehouse, and in the evenings we’d either hang around some more, or go to the pub, or – more often than not – drive across London to play another gig.

  Our gigs were coming thick and fast now. Two, sometimes three, a week … the venues were getting better all the time, the crowds getting bigger, the buzz getting louder. The punk scene in London was really starting to take off, with more and more bands emerging all the time. At the beginning of July, the Ramones played two nights at the Roundhouse, and on the night we went to see them, everyone who was anyone was there, including just about every music journalist in London. The same month saw the debuts of the Clash, the Damned, and the Buzzcocks. The music press was still divided over how good these new bands really were – some of the papers hated them, others quickly fell in love with them – but, either way, punk music was beginning to get a lot of media attention. The Ramones’ gigs in particular were huge events. And as a result of all this publicity, the record companies were gradually starting to show some real interest in punk … some of which was coming our way.

  It wasn’t much yet – mainly just rumours and vaguely promising possibilities. Jake was forever telling us that he’d spoken to so-and-so from Polydor or A&M or whoever, and that they were ‘seriously’ interested in us, or that they were coming to see us at our next gig, and a deal was ‘definitely on the table’ …

  But, so far, nothing had come of it.

  We were getting fairly regular coverage in the music papers too – reviews, reports, interviews – and the overall feeling among most of the journalists was that while we were undoubtedly a punk band, at the forefront of the burgeoning scene, we weren’t quite the same as all the other bands. Yes, we were loud, and sometimes really fast. And, yes, we embraced and embodied the punk sensibilities. But we didn’t just do the 1-2-3-4, bam-bam-bam stuff. And while that occasionally led to accusations that Naked weren’t a punk band at all – which I always thought was a pretty pointless thing to say – it mostly worked to our advantage.

  ‘If you want to get noticed,’ Jake said once, ‘it’s no good being exactly the same as everyone else, you have to be different. You have to stand out from the crowd.’

  We’d also been together a lot longer than most of the other bands – the Pistols excepted, of course – and, musically, that gave us an edge too. We knew what we were doing. We were tight. We were good.

  What more could a record company want?

  We had great songs.

  A unique sound.

  We had Curtis, who was born to be a rock ’n’ roll star.

  And we had William.

  Although Naked had always been Curtis’s band – he was the songwriter, frontman, singer, lead guitarist – and although it was still always his name, his voice, his picture that dominated all our press coverage, it was also becoming apparent now that there was a growing inter
est in William. Reviews and articles about us began to focus not only on Curtis, but on William too … or Billy the Kid, as they insisted on calling him right from the start. There was praise for his guitar-playing, his singing, his looks … even his dancing got rave reviews. Billy the Kid, it was generally agreed, was an exceptionally cool individual.

  William never bothered reading any of the music papers. He had no interest whatsoever in other people’s opinions, either of the band or of himself, and when it came to doing interviews, his view was exactly the same. He had no interest in them at all. He’d happily sit in with the rest of us during interviews, and he was never rude or dismissive to any journalists, but he never actually talked to them. Never said a word, never offered an opinion, never answered any questions. In all the time I knew him, the only words I ever heard him say to an interviewer were, ‘You haven’t got a spare cigarette, have you?’

  Jake was forever trying to persuade William to say something, but he always flatly refused.

  ‘It’s just music,’ he’d say. ‘What’s there to say about it?’

  Which was kind of strange, because I remembered when Curtis had said something very similar to me shortly after we’d met. ‘Songs are songs,’ he’d said. ‘They don’t need explaining.’ And yet now here he was, just a year or so later, regularly and volubly – and very publicly – discussing his music at the drop of a hat. Not that I held it against him or anything, it just struck me at the time how quickly things can change … for better or worse.

  Things change.

  William never changed though. He just carried on saying nothing and keeping his thoughts to himself, and I think he just kind of assumed that in the end the media would eventually get used to it and leave him alone, but that didn’t happen. Instead, his refusal to play the game only increased the amount of interest in him. It added to his ‘coolness’. It gave him a sense of mystery and intrigue. And there’s nothing the media likes more than a mystery.