Crusaders

by Richard T. Kelly

  ‘In effect. But you’d have your own name on the door, and a proper share of the profits. You’d hire your boys, up to you, I’ll trust you there.’

  Stevie frowned down at his plate. It was far too much to compute at one sitting, tumbling out of a tanned shyster who had paid to have him hospitalised all but forty-eight hours ago. As business, though, he had never heard a more gratifying offer.

  Caldwell settled the bill and they strolled by the Tyne. It had turned into a bonny day, sunshine and a kind breeze off the water. Caldwell flared up a cigar with a Zippo, using his good camel-hair as a windbreaker.

  ‘How can you smoke that, man? Do you even like it?’

  ‘I like how it bothers people. I like that a lot.’ Indeed his eyes seemed watery with delight.

  ‘How’d an old bloke like you get involved in all clubs and that?’

  ‘Less of the old, eh? It was this buddy of mine. He’d sunk a bit of money into these big parties out in the country. Fields, y’know? Mad young kids coming in from all over. Crazy operations, they were. But, you know, it attracts all the wrong attention … As I see it, there’s no reason why your regular clubs can’t cater to that market, if they’re big enough. It’s no’ the open air, I agree, but there’s not the cow-shite lying about neither. Least the kids can get a taxi home. Same god-awful music and all else they’re after.’

  ‘Drugs, you mean, aye?’

  ‘Do you’ve a problem with drugs, Stevie?’

  Stevie shrugged, looked away, studied the dappled surface of the shirring Tyne waters.

  ‘Well – to me, I tell you, it’s a very pure transaction. I run a sound operation. I’m a businessman. I pay tax, VAT, National Insurance … I’ve a few young friends work with me, and I’d want for you to get friendly with ’em and all.’ Caldwell jammed his cigar in his mouth and rummaged in his coat, coming up with a silvery tin of small printed cards. ‘Now, you can either handle all that or you can’t. But whenever you decide, give us a ring.’

  That night he slept at Karen’s, she gravid and snoring at his side, he mired in revolving thought. By morning light, under the thrum of the showerhead, he knew at least that he wanted the money. Drugs were drugs. Hadn’t he hammered them into his veins for years now, albeit to a higher purpose? He didn’t say he liked all that issued from the trade. But such was the world – it seemed to exact a certain price on men and their relations. The world hadn’t started out from fair, so hardly a shock that it didn’t finish up there neither.

  *

  They were presentable, at least, these young friends of Roy’s – black leather coats and proper shoes the uniform. Thus did Stevie find himself grasping the hand of moon-faced Mickey Ash, who had ditched the specs and the bum-fluff moustache while seeming to swim inside his shiny baggy leather. But Mickey caused him no grief – not like those punters who sidled up to him and asked if he could ‘sort them out’. They were out on their chins, no two ways about it, and he trusted Roy knew that was how it had to be, if only for sake of face. Shack and Simms and Dougie would take a different tack, but Stevie was resolved not to care. And wherever he witnessed trading unlicensed by the house, it was his pleasure to fall upon the offender like the proverbial hod-load of bricks.

  One night Roy lingered at the doorway of Zeus just prior to opening, ostensibly to smoke a cigar, and so they wandered together toward the water’s edge.

  ‘You keep your eyes peeled, right, Stevie? For faces?’

  ‘Roy, you divvint have to tell us, man, I’m a professional.’

  ‘Just keeping you abreast, son. You know the Irish lot? The Codys? Mate of mine says they’ve been making noises in pubs. The usual bollocks, but, you know …’

  ‘I’m not bothered. I’ve telt you, man, none of that scares wuh. Fear’s a thing on its own. The only thing to fear is fear.’

  ‘Aye well, you’ve got that going for you, and they’ve got guns and knives. If you’re impervious to that lot, my son, then I owe you a pay-rise.’ And Roy chuckled, amused by himself, plugging his lips once more with his plump Havana. Stevie hawked and spat into the Tyne, something he meant as a gesture defiant of the fates.

  Chapter VI

  OUTREACH

  Thursday, 3 October 1996

  Spikings parked his Subaru into the kerb halfway up the incline of the modest close in Arthur’s Hill. He clicked off the CD player that had been burbling Debussy, and shifted in his seat to face Gore.

  ‘How you feeling? Bit daunted?’

  ‘Not so much. I’ve done this before.’

  ‘Oh I know. The prep is hard, though, don’t you find? More than the actual service, even. It’s rather an exercise in telepathy, I always think.’

  Gore’s eyebrows vaulted.

  ‘Well, you sort of have to – think your way into their head. If you’re going to say anything useful on the day. They’re just too … shattered, to think straight. How do you sum it up, but? The life of a loved one? I don’t know. But they expect you to manage it.’

  They were out of the car and tramping up the hill, the sky slate-like as befitted grave business, though Spikings chattered on. Gore trusted the lesson would be complete before they rang at the doorbell.

  ‘Funerals now, you can’t see them as one more job. Yes, we do a lot of them, it’s what we’re for. One of the things, anyway. But that’s a trap. We can get a bit trite. Punters expect better.’

  Spikings dug in his anorak, produced a scrap of paper, checked a scribbled address. They were at the right driveway, a respectable semi.

  ‘I mean, look at the effort goes into weddings these days. Any wedding. Not just the toffs. Gary and Tracy. Same with funerals. You have to treat it as a – well, uh, you know – as a special day …’

  They reached the front porchway.

  ‘Well, you’d best go first. Don’t worry, I’ve got your back.’

  The door was opened slowly by a dormouse of a woman.

  ‘Mrs Ash? I’m Reverend John Gore. You’ll know my colleague Bob here. Please accept my very deepest condolences for the loss of your son. I’m so terribly sorry.’

  *

  It was a lower-middle-class home, the kind from which offspring fled early or else never left. In the double reception room the carpet was wall to wall, the wallpaper blue Anaglypta, the dining table G-plan, the ornaments Edwardian ladies, the curtains chintz and hung under a frilled pelmet. Hazel Ash brought coffee in a pot, and unstacked a nest of tables between the clergymen and she and her husband Clive. Gore rested his notebook on his knee, keeping notes discreetly in a careful hand.

  The Ashs, though, had little to say of their son past the time of his schooldays when, it seemed, he would get good reports in science.

  ‘Mike or Mick?’ Gore asked as the thought occurred.

  Hazel’s mouth flickered. ‘Some of his pals might have called him Mickey, I never cared for it.’

  A photo album was produced. Gore turned the leaves gingerly, for the story told therein felt sadly skimpy. The boy Michael had worn thick NHS spectacles, soon replaced by metal frames. Adolescence was marked by a wispy effort at a moustache. Early twenties saw him affecting a tonic suit and porkpie hat, as if looking like a spiv might make him a ‘character’, relieve him of shyness. It was, then, with some surprise that Gore beheld the latter pages, holiday group snaps, a lively balmy bar-room – Spain, Gore supposed – and a very presentable blonde clutching Michael’s arm. He was tanned and even toned in a white tee-shirt, the facial hair resurrected as a trim goatee. Everyone in shot was red-eyed and grinning maniacally.

  ‘I always liked that one,’ Hazel sighed. ‘They all look so happy.’

  Out of their brains on drugs, thought Gore.

  A stray Polaroid not affixed to the page slid onto his lap. He flipped it and so met with Stevie Coulson, grinning his outsized grin, one slab of an arm slung around bashful Michael. Gore’s finger trailed over the image. It seemed a promising lead, and he inked ASK STEVIE in the margin of his own book. There remained a few
common-coin queries that, under the circumstances, seemed impossibly delicate.

  ‘What was Michael’s work?’

  Husband and wife looked to one another. Hazel looked aside as she spoke. ‘Well, there were a few things, this and that, over the years. He was always very into the music.’

  ‘Aye, mad for the music, he was.’

  ‘That was it, mostly.’

  Gore didn’t wish to persist, but he needed something better. Hazel Ash seemed to read as much in his poised pen. ‘A couple of his pals from school had this sort of pop group, and he drove the van for them a bit. Then he was – like their manager. For a bit.’

  ‘He said he was,’ Clive sighed. ‘Divvint knaa what they thought.’

  ‘I wonder – would it be possible for me to speak to them? Those pals?’

  ‘We’re not in touch with them, Reverend.’

  Gore set down his coffee cup carefully. ‘Mr and Mrs Ash, what I’d like to agree with you, get your feelings on, is the … the balance of the content of the service. Between the treatment of … what we would call the soul of the departed. And the degree to which we just remember and commemorate the life Michael led.’

  Clive Ash looked to his trouser leg and brushed it needlessly. ‘Well, I say, he was a decent lad … If you could just say a bit about what he done at school. Is that it? What you’re asking?’

  Spikings was wincing. ‘I suppose, Mr Ash, that what John is talking about is heaven.’

  Gore nodded. ‘It’s a small matter but very important. Some believers wish for a very clear statement about their loved one and … the next life? Others are happy just with more of a gesture. To the idea that their loved one is – in God’s hands.’

  Mr and Mrs Ash looked at each other again, longer this time.

  ‘We just don’t know, do we?’

  ‘I think you should just say what you think’s best, Reverend.’

  Shortly thereafter the clergymen were striding stiff-legged back down the hill. Gore was glad of the cold air. Spikings seemed a little bemused, so much so that Gore enquired after his thoughts.

  ‘No, no, you were fine, John, I just wondered if you were going a bit far in the direction of asking them to, uh, judge their dead son.’

  Gore bit his lip. Either the words were important or they weren’t. If not, they were as well to get a brass band in, and some other cleric presiding.

  *

  That afternoon Gore watched as his dot-matrix printer very tortuously disgorged a sheaf of invitations to the Inaugural Sunday Service of St Luke’s, Hoxheath. Then he took a seat and folded sheets into three, gazing out of the window at his straggly lawn. Should he try to cut the grass before autumn truly set in? Already a carpet of damp brown leaves had settled, dotted here and there by discarded takeaway food wrappers, evidently tossed over his wall from the alley.

  The chime of the doorbell jolted him back to matters at hand. He gathered up his two hundred fliers, stacked into sets of fifty and bundled by rubber bands, descended the stairs and opened the door to Susan Carrow in a lilac coat and scarf, flanked by a trio of friends.

  ‘Hello, Susan. There you go, thanks a lot for this.’

  ‘Right you are. I’ll do Oakwell, Brenda will do Scoular, Ann will do Milburn, and Jackie will do Blake. So then …’

  ‘I’ll do Crossman.’

  ‘Right you are.’ And off they trotted, his Christian soldiers.

  Sufficient unto the day, he decided, once he himself had slipped fifty envelopes under doors chosen randomly but for that of Eunice Dodd. Heading home past the Netto supermarket he coaxed himself to replenish his meagre fridge and larder. An assortment of handwritten notices and want-ads were taped or pasted to the store’s long window. He resolved to enquire at the checkout if he might add a flyer.

  Collecting a wire basket, he made directly for a small selection of fresh produce. For some moments he toyed with a limp browning lettuce before he looked up and about him and recognised the figure of a young woman further down the aisle, stooped, her mien similarly sceptical over a tray of bruised apples. It was the hair, brunette but russet-hennaed toward the tips, cut in long bangs to near shoulder-length. That, and the tilt of her chin, the upturned nose in profile. Lindy Clark, no question.

  Setting down the lettuce he drifted in her direction, stealing looks. What was it about her? There was something – a certain flair to how she assembled and carried herself. She wore a short jacket of red corduroy over a turquoise V-neck tee-shirt. Her long denim skirt fell to her ankles, split below the knee, and she was shod today in block-heeled sandals. A dinky leather embroidered handbag was slung over her left elbow, unzippered, slightly overflowing. As she bent again to the bad fruit, her tee-shirt and jacket rode up and thus did Gore see a tattoo impressed at the base of her spine – a coiled emerald cobra, rearing up to strike. It made him cringe, all these young women, their tender spots assailed by needle and ink.

  Now Lindy Clark glanced aside and saw him – the briefest eye contact. Her eyebrows knitted, lips parted – then she turned and sashayed toward the cash tills. He put on a step to follow, strolling into the queue just behind her, his face but inches from that hennaed hair, gathered thickly on the back of her neck, at which she scratched absently with a red fingernail. It was hair dyed so often as to render the root shade a historical mystery.

  She tossed her selections onto the conveyor. He knew he ought to say something, wished instead that she would, all the while studying the side of her face, the cheekbones somehow Slavic, the purplish-painted lips and eye-shadow. Her nose was pinched at the bridge yet flared at the nostrils, her two square front teeth a little discoloured. He detected now that her narrow eyes were grey-green, small wrinkles discernible even under thick-slathered liquid base. This because she was now looking straight at him.

  ‘Wake up there, vicar.’

  She motioned over his shoulder, and Gore spun to see a bloated man waiting to set a great deal of dog food down on the belt.

  ‘Sorry, daydreaming,’ Gore muttered.

  ‘Aye, you looked a bit glakey,’ said Lindy, turning back to the Asian girl manning the till and proffering a fifty-pound note, at which the girl peered sceptically for some moments before punching at her register. Lindy gathered her goods and chattels and walked off without another word. Gore bagged his handful of purchases, paid with correct change, and dashed from the store, down the ramp, looking left and right. She was thirty yards down the pavement, headed back to Oakwell.

  ‘Lindy? Wait.’

  She turned. Gore arrived before her, short of breath. ‘Hi, sorry to hound you.’

  ‘You’re alright.’

  ‘I just wanted to say – what you were saying at the meeting the other day – I wondered if we could have another chat about it?’

  ‘A chat?’

  ‘Yes. The child-related things, I was interested in your idea.’

  She shrugged. ‘Whatever. Tell you what, give us a hand with these back to mine and I’ll put the kettle on.’

  She hoisted up one of her plastic bags. Gore accepted the bargain.

  *

  ‘Get yer’sel sat, I’ll just get these put away.’

  Deftly she whisked an ashtray from a low coffee table and headed for the kitchen. Gore lowered himself onto a black leatherette sofa. Her place was better appointed than he had feared. In layout it was, inevitably, a double of his own, but one afforded the benefit of a feminine, contemporary sensibility. Here, too, were the cramped cubby-hole kitchen, the stairway leading from lounge to upper floor. But she had traded the cheap charcoal carpet for shiny wood-laminate, strewn over which were two overflowing crates of toys, a monster truck, a Japanese robot, mounds of plasticine, chalks and crayons and a screed of pages filled by black scrawl. The walls were smoothly papered in china blue, one of them lined by a sequence of wooden-framed photos of Jake – a swaddled babe, a toddler at play, a child in first uniform. One pine-effect unit of symmetrical squares was dressed with dried flowers, coloured bo
ttles and stacked CDs. Vertical micro-blinds veiled the sliding glass to the garden. A hulking television and VCR were set squarely in one corner, atop the telly an alabaster Jesus turned into a camp joke by the addition of a doll’s frilly pink tutu.

  Lindy returned, setting down coasters, two mugs of tea and a clean ashtray. Then she slumped into an armchair, rummaged her bag, retrieved a lighter and cigarettes, and flared up. She was a poised and artful smoker, the fag cocked between index and middle fingers as she exhaled bracing plumes.

  ‘You don’t mind this, do you? Not like your partner in crime. Fanny Blott.’

  ‘You mean Mrs Bruce?’

  ‘She’s a right fusspot, don’t you think?’

  Gore smiled, nodded, stroked the arm of the sofa. ‘You keep a clean house.’

  ‘Did you think I lived in a pigsty?’

  ‘No, I mean – you should see mine.’

  She nodded and relieved her cigarette of ash. ‘Oh, I’m into me good housekeeping.’ She had slipped into an abrupt Irish brogue. ‘Cleanliness! Next to godliness, don’t you know?’

  She shrugged herself out of her short jacket. He found himself studying her bare arms, her slender carriage, the rise and fall of her chest. How invasive was his gaze? The thought sharpened as Lindy abruptly pulled up her legs and curled them under her body, an act somehow protective of personal space and sovereignty.

  ‘So, you’re on like a recruitment drive?’

  ‘That’s right. You saw what we got the other night, the turnout. That’s the core, really.’

  She exhaled. ‘Mmm. Not good, is it?’

  ‘No. Thanks for coming yourself.’

  ‘Nee bother. Just half-fancied hearing what you’d to say.’

  ‘From – seeing the posters?’

  ‘Actually, y’knaa what? I saw you kicking a ball about with some lads a few weeks back. I thought, “He’s a tryer, that one.”’

  Gore smiled. ‘How did you find it then? The meeting?’

  ‘How did you find it?’ She snorted blue smoke. ‘Good luck there, that’s what I say. They’re all a lot of snobs. You’ve noticed that, right? I mean, it’s amazing. People with fuck-all to brag about really, and they still get to be snobs.’ She clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘Sorry. The gob I’ve got on me.’