Rule of Night

by Trevor Hoyle

  Kenny bought two rounds with the money and found that he still had three dabs left. He thought of keeping some by for the old lady – he hadn’t given her anything for three consecutive Fridays now – but it remained a thought.

  ‘We can have us a chippie supper!’ Crabby said excitedly.

  ‘It’s only nine o’clock,’ Shortarse said. ‘Bags of time.’

  ‘Drinking time,’ Fester said darkly, keeping up the image of champion boozer.

  Kenny was feeling good. His doubts had vanished, he had money in his pocket, the night lay ahead like an unplundered tomb. And he had Janice; he loved her and she loved him.

  ‘Let’s go to the Lake,’ he said suddenly. Everybody looked at him as if he’d gone crazy. But when he was in the mood to do something Kenny swept all before him. They drank up (Fester muttering something unintelligible), walked to town and caught the Number 8 bus to the terminus near the Fisherman’s Inn. Strangely enough, it was clear up there, the stars like icy pinpricks and the Lake cold and black and silent beneath the frosty air. On the Rakewood Viaduct the motorway traffic buzzed like a quiet yet angry swarm of bees.

  ‘It’s the highest motorway bridge in England,’ Shortarse said.

  ‘The longest,’ Arthur said.

  ‘The fucking highest,’ Shortarse said, ‘twatface.’

  Andy said, ‘I didn’t see the Greasers in the cafe.’

  ‘They’ll be up,’ Kenny said.

  ‘Where we going to drink up here?’ Fester complained. ‘There’s only the Fisherman’s and the Beach. They won’t let us in.’

  Kenny curled his lip at Fester. ‘Here,’ he said to Cil. There was a rosy glow in his stomach and there was nothing that could stop him. He put two pound notes in her hand and told her to go into the Fisherman’s for a half-bottle of Scotch: she was older-looking than Janice and would pass for eighteen: he fancied her at odd moments – like now – but there was an unspoken understanding amongst them that she was Andy’s. He wouldn’t touch a mate’s bird; not, that is, unless it was put before him on a plate.

  Across the smooth dead surface of the Lake the lights of the Lakeside Restaurant shone hard and bright in the still air. A car’s headlights flashed briefly over the water and turned a semi-circle to follow the dirt road which wound along the edge of the Lake for half a mile till it changed into tarmacadam. There was nothing moving in the Lake, not a yacht, not a buoy, not a fish.

  ‘It’s the coldest water in England, this,’ said Shortarse. Arthur scoffed. ‘It is!’ Shortarse said, his voice an octave higher.

  ‘You’ll be telling us next there’s a village underneath it,’ Kenny said, which was the resident local rumour, handed down over several generations.

  ‘There bloody is!’ Shortarse said, oblivious to the fact that he was having the piss taken out of him.

  ‘And you hear the church bells ringing under the water…’

  ‘You can!’ Shortarse said. ‘I know somebody who’s heard it.’

  ‘Get away,’ he was told scathingly by several of the others.

  Fester said, ‘I didn’t know that about the bell.’ Andy stuck his finger in Kenny’s ribs and they laughed at each other.

  A crescent of moon was coming into view, creeping up from behind the dark rounded shapes of the moors. Its steady, unwavering reflection lay in a clear straight line across the Lake. Out of nowhere it occurred to Kenny that the reflection wouldn’t exist if there were nobody there to look at it. For a moment it gave him a strange feeling, as if he were standing a distance away from himself and could see his life as one amongst many others. Several things became clear – for just an instant – and then it was as if the water had shivered and the reflection had been broken and his thoughts fell down again in a muddled heap.

  They saw the Greasers arrive on their gleaming machines: a roar of exhausts and their headlamps like big white eyes in single file.

  ‘Six,’ Andy said, wiping the neck of the bottle and handing it to Kenny.

  Janice felt the suffocation in her chest – of fear, exhilaration and the dreadful unknown. She couldn’t understand why she, of all people, should have been chosen to be here in this place at this time. What had she done to deserve such good fortune? Actually to be here at the live happening centre where real events were taking place, and not moping alone in some lost, dead corner where life was a mere grey blur. Her friends at school were like sheltered little bunnies: they would be sitting at home now watching TV, or helping their mothers bake a cake, or if they were lucky, dancing to Gary Glitter at the Church Youth Club. Janice wanted to feel that at last her life had started, that the adventure had begun, and here she was in the middle of an experience.

  Crabby said, ‘I bet them Hondas cost a packet.’

  ‘Who was it, did you notice?’ Arthur asked Kenny.

  ‘Do you think there’ll be any more coming?’ Shortarse said nervously.

  The eleven of them walked along the edge of the road like the platoon of soldiers in a movie Kenny had seen called ‘A Walk In The Sun’. He remembered that he had seen it one Sunday afternoon at Janice’s, the two of them sprawled on the settee, Mrs Singleton sitting in the armchair and blowing out gusts of smoke across the screen.

  When they reached the cafe they stood to one side in the darkness and looked in through the open door at the six Greasers innocently drinking coffee and talking with cigarettes in the corners of their mouths. Their lank hair hung down on to their shoulders and at least three of them had skin complaints. The proprietor was standing behind the makeshift counter pretending to be doing something so that he wouldn’t have to leave the cafe unattended. The sound of a television jingle for garden peas could be heard coming from the room at the back.

  All but two of the gang outside stationed themselves quietly in the shadow adjacent to the door, while these two – Kenny and Andy – stood in full view and each broke a headlamp by putting the heels of their boots through the glass. It tinkled daintily in the cold air as it fell to the ground. As three of the Greasers stood up slowly, a kind of bewildered astonishment on their faces, and then came out in a rush, Fester and the others stuck out their feet across the doorway to trip them up; anyway, that was the plan, but the plan didn’t work, for none of the three fell down.

  The one in front – a tall lad, over six feet – kicked Kenny on the knee-cap and Kenny staggered into the gutter, cursing and almost crying. The pain didn’t seem to last long, because the next thing he knew he was scraping somebody with the broken end of a whisky bottle. There was blood on his forehead (somebody else’s blood: he had felt it spatter) and it seemed that the road was filled with bodies. How could there be so many? Had more Greasers arrived on silent machines, coasting along the Lake road like black leather ghosts? Kenny tried to count the number of bodies but every time he got to four he was interrupted and his concentration was required elsewhere.

  It must have been going on for at least a minute before he realised that somebody was screaming, like one of those sounds that by its intensity makes itself inaudible. Kenny saw a bright red gash across somebody’s forehead and a curtain of blood blotting out the features until it reached the O of the open mouth, all the teeth ringed with blood and standing out very white like a row of beads. And then something clouted him really hard on the back of the head and made him mad. He went mindless, forgot the Greasers, forgot the screaming, forgot the blood, lashing out with boots and fists without seeing who or what he was hitting. He did remember, after a while, to use the bottle, but when he looked at the end of his arm it was gone. He looked on the ground for it but could see nothing except shards of broken glass, one of which had ‘Lucas’, embossed in it. His left hand was smarting, and when he brought it to his mouth it seemed that something was wrong with his knuckles – one of them, at any rate, which didn’t appear to be in line with the others: it was raised up like the end of a knobbly walking stick. And shite, he realised, it was beginning to throb like buggery.

  Several of the bodies were n
ow lying down; Kenny ran at them in turn and put the boot in before running from the lighted strip of pavement outside the cafe and into the darkness in the direction of Smithy Bridge Road. He sucked his sore knuckle as he ran, scriking.

  DRUGS

  FOR SEVERAL MONTHS SKUSH HAD BEEN BREAKING INTO and stealing drugs from chemists’ shops in and around Rochdale. He had a habit he couldn’t break and there was nobody – no girl-friend – to haul him back from the brink. The situation was tragic and paradoxical: he took drugs because he didn’t have a girlfriend, while the taking of drugs reinforced his isolation and increased his desperation; and had he had a girlfriend to help him overcome his dependence on blues, black bombers and sleepers, it is likely that she wouldn’t have been required for that purpose, because he wouldn’t have needed to take them. His head was in a mess and his life was in poor shape – like Kenny he had had umpteen jobs and couldn’t hold any of them down for longer than a few months: the drug problem meant that he soon got fired, while his being out of work and therefore short of cash led to further black depressions which only drugs could alleviate; and having acquired the habit it reduced his chances of finding a job and earning money – which meant that for several months he had been breaking into and stealing drugs from chemists’ shops in and around Rochdale.

  In the week before Christmas (which was mild, damp and depressing) Skush was admitted to Birch Hill Hospital suffering from an overdose of barbiturates. On the second day, after spending two nights in Roch 3 Ward, he was taken to see Dr F______, the resident psychiatrist. Skush explained that it had been a mistake, an accident, that he hadn’t meant to take an overdose, only get a good night’s sleep. Why had he needed to get a good night’s sleep? the psychiatrist had asked. Because he hadn’t been sleeping, Skush had replied. Why hadn’t he been sleeping? the psychiatrist asked. Because he’d been worrying, Skush answered. What had he been worrying about? the psychiatrist asked. About not sleeping, Skush said. I see, the psychiatrist said, and in the same breath: Where did you get the tablets from? From me mam, Skush said instantly. (Part of this was true, anyway; his mother did take sleeping tablets from time to time, but when Skush had tried them they had had no effect at all.) After being kept under observation for one more day he was released, Dr F______ asking him if he wouldn’t mind keeping in touch, particularly if he felt the need coming on to take regular doses of drugs to make him sleep.

  That night – the day of his release – Skush broke into a chemist’s in Castleton and got away with several dozen each of Durophet, Ritalin and Drinamyl tablets in their small white plain cardboard boxes. They were impossible to trace, he knew; if the police didn’t connect him with the break-in he was safe, and he made sure of that by taking every possible care and precaution: fear and an intense form of controlled panic had bred in him cunning and deceit. The plotting and planning to get what he needed and the actual physical activity involved had for the moment displaced the full extent of the depression which he carried round with him, and from which he couldn’t escape. Skush felt it hovering there, like a large black heavy bird, waiting to settle on his shoulders and dig its claws into his neck.

  What depressed him was this: that he couldn’t understand how Kenny and the others knew instinctively the correct things to say to people (girls) while he had forgotten (never knew) the secret code by which human beings communicated with one another. For instance, he had studied Kenny’s strategy for dealing with girls – simple, direct, crude – and had tried to copy it. But when he did the girls either ignored him or took his blunt directness as a personal affront and reacted as though he had insulted them. Skush couldn’t fathom it out. Had he said the wrong thing or said the right thing wrongly? He wasn’t deformed, was he? He wasn’t a hunchback, he wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t an imbecile – so what was he? Was there something wrong with him? How come Kenny could get away with blatant and unsubtle advances while he was afraid to open his mouth in case he said the wrong thing (which he invariably did)?

  Another instance: Fester and Shortarse, a couple of unattractive deadbeats if ever there were any, didn’t seem to suffer the agonies of rejection that he did, yet from his own observations he knew that their failures and abortive attempts were equal to his. He had watched them clumsily chatting up birds in the pub and had squirmed at their shallowness and stupidity – and then been amazed when, occasionally, the girls responded. Or had they not responded, been equally amazed when Fester turned away with a crude remark and a beery grin, apparently unaffected by once again having been spurned and made to look a tool.

  Skush was different. He couldn’t bear it when the eyes of the girl he was talking to went cold and distant; it wasn’t open antagonism he feared most, it was the cold glassy stare of indifference, as if she were looking straight through him, as if he didn’t exist. So to avoid situations like this he stopped talking to girls altogether – apart from Jan and Cil, and even with them his conversation was monosyllabic and self-defensive. This closing in on himself evoked a nightmarish future for Skush in which his life had been sacrificed before he had had chance to live it. At certain moments it struck him (like a blow in the face) that the life he was living was the only life he had: if things were as bad as this now, what were they going to become? What about girlfriends, and engagement parties, and fiancées, and getting married, and buying a house, and choosing furniture, and having children? Were they not meant for him? Was this little shell of loneliness and anguish and quiet desperation the sum total of the future? Skush could think about this for just so long, and then thankfully he didn’t have to think about it any longer. Three white tablets shrunk his head to a dwindling speck of light and his awareness of conscious reality would have had acres of room on the head of a pin.

  ‘How much can we get?’ Kenny asks.

  ‘Dollar apiece,’ Skush says. He takes three large round pill boxes out of his pocket and counts the number of tablets; then calculates for a minute. ‘Thirty quid or more.’

  ‘Shit,’ Kenny says wonderingly, staring out of the diesel window. ‘Ten dabs each.’

  ‘You won’t get that,’ Andy says. The three of them are on their way to Manchester, excited and nervous.

  ‘Why not?’ Skush says.

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You bloody won’t.’

  ‘I’ve paid a dollar each before now.’

  ‘You would,’ Andy says. ‘But you won’t get that. You’ll get half a dollar each or more likely three for a dollar.’

  ‘That’s still a fiver each,’ Kenny says optimistically.

  ‘If we don’t get nabbed first.’

  ‘You’re a cheerful bugger,’ Skush tells Andy. His eyes are like great watery brown marbles. ‘Anyway we’re not selling them all. I’m only selling two boxes.’ He puts them back in his pocket. The train moves through the dark night, swaying and rattling between Middleton and Newton Heath. There’s a girl in the carriage who keeps looking at Kenny, but girls who eye him up put him off; he’s scared if they take the initiative.

  ‘Where should we try first?’ Skush says.

  ‘Pendulum,’ Andy says. His dark skin is glowing and he looks very handsome. In comparison, Skush’s complexion is paperwhite: his movements are jerky and frenetic like a doll slowly winding down, and there is in him the faint hard edge of hysteria. Kenny hasn’t noticed anything he considers out of the ordinary but Andy feels he ought to say something, yet he doesn’t know what.

  This being Christmas-time, the Pendulum is packed to the doors, the low rectangular room crammed with bodies and the smoke writhing in thick layers above the assembled heads. As yet (this being before nine o’clock) nobody is dancing: a roughly square area of floor is set aside like a sacred patch of territory which can only be invaded when the time and circumstances are judged right. But the music pounds on – amongst the jostling bodies, through the thick blue smoke, against the dirty white-washed walls – as the three lads squirm their way to the bar and have the barm
aid set up three pints of Tartan. Skush disappears into the crowd and comes back several minutes later jingling some coins in his pocket:

  ‘Seventy-five pence,’ he says, ‘for eight.’

  ‘That’s … how much is that each?’ Kenny says.

  ‘Nine pence,’ Andy says. ‘I told you, you won’t get much more.’

  ‘Give us three,’ Kenny says, and swallows them with his pint.

  ‘Your hand’s still swollen,’ Andy says.

  ‘You should have seen that knuckle the day after,’ Kenny says. ‘Christ it was out here. The bastard; he must have hit me with a bottle.’

  ‘Is it still sore?’

  ‘A bit. Not sore: tender. I told the old lady I’d fallen down some steps.’

  ‘I bet it stopped you wanking,’ Andy says with a brilliant grin.

  ‘I get Jan to do it for me.’

  ‘What does she say when you slap it in her hand: ‘No thanks, I don’t smoke Woodbines’?’

  Skush smiles wanly and orders another round. Kenny says, ‘Give us a box,’ and goes into the crowd.

  Almost precisely on the stroke of nine, a boy with short back and sides and dressed in an open-necked shirt, blue and yellow striped pullover, a pair of baggy trousers with turn-ups, and brown leather shoes with hard soles begins to dance alone in the sacred square in front of the battery of amplifiers, behind which the dejay sits in darkness with a turntable and a stack of 45s. The boy’s dance is a composite of styles: be-bop and rock n’ roll, African tribal celebration and Voodoo ritual – but at its simplest it is free expression: the reactions of his body to the raw soul music which comes blistering from the speakers and makes the air seem solid with noise. He dances alone, looking down at his feet, intent on the movements and rhythms, as though what comes next is as much a surprise to him as to the people watching. For a while he is the focus of attention, and then in twos and groups of three and four other people come into the square and begin to take up the dance. Very soon the floor is filled with jerking, swaying, weaving bodies. Everyone dances with concentration; it is as though this is the serious part of the evening, to be pursued determinedly and with single-minded dedication.