‘Was that useful today?’
‘Canny enough. Has anybody said owt about the crèche?’
‘They haven’t. Not yet …’
She sighed. ‘And I thought I’d be seeing you again. At ours?’ Gore detected the flicker of Susannah’s eyebrows. ‘Weren’t you gunna come round to do them shelves and that? I don’t mind, I can get ’em done for us nee bother, but they need doing and you said you would, so …’
His sister, he knew, was unabashedly weighing Lindy in the balance. He couldn’t imagine how she might score, but he worried – for the puffa jacket, the vivid cosmetics, the little boy wrapped around her legs and fishing down the back of his trousers. He was not sure that Lindy herself would care more than a speck – until he saw her eyes flit sharply in Susannah’s direction. Susannah, though, was glancing repeatedly between her slender silvery wristwatch and the exit.
‘Look, I can’t stop, John, but I’ll call you, okay?’
‘You haven’t got my number.’
‘It’s in this from when you called me.’ Impatiently she flashed a mobile phone lodged in her palm like a gemstone, waved at him, then turned in a swirl of dark coat-tail and was gone.
‘Lindy, yes, I know, I’m sorry. Can it wait until next Saturday?’
‘I suppose. Aye, fine. That’s a date then? Come for around three-ish and I’ll give you your tea.’
‘Okay. Saturday then.’
‘Aye, right.’ Lindy smiled fleetingly at him, then she too was being yanked in the outward direction.
He was feeling perplexed, somewhat dispensed with, as Kully Gates stepped forward, her hands slotted demurely in the pockets of her multicoloured cardigan, her caramel hair plastered in wet-look waves.
‘Yes, well done then, John. For getting started. You’re quite a talker.’
Gore was unsure if he was on the horns of another teasing. This odd little woman’s whole face seemed to stretch with her broad piano-key smile, but behind chic little slot-like spectacles her almond eyes had a patronising cast. ‘Yes, but I must say, I am a little disappointed in you.’
‘What have I done?’
‘What have you not done? What about all we talked about at your meeting? What use are you making?’
‘Kully, you can see my congregation. It’s toddlers and pensioners.’
‘You have to make it. You don’t just go to work on a Sunday, do you? Now, come on. I have an invitation for you. What are you doing now? Are you busy?’
‘Right now?’
‘Within the hour. I have my drop-in at the youth centre. Crossman Estate.’
Gore could picture that squat, menacing seventies build, snug to the Gunnery pub, a pile of damp breezeblocks and rusty wire mesh.
‘I do a counselling session every Sunday, free advice. For the ones excluded from school, mainly. We have Cokes and burgers, yes? So you could come with me? Have a burger. Give a little advice, perhaps?’
‘Advice on what?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, John, maybe drugs? Sexual health?’
Gore put a hand to his brow, trying to massage forth an excuse.
‘I’m joking, John. Come on. What do you say?’
They walked together out into St Luke’s car park, where the day’s Coulson-appointed labourer was trying single-handedly to reload the pool table into the back of the transit, wrestling with one tilted end from ground level. Gore recognised him as the affable young dullard from Middlesbrough he had met on that first useful night in the Gunnery.
‘Alright there, Smoggie?’ Gore called out cheerily as he and Kully passed. The lad straightened, bore the weight of the table awhile, serving up a hard look in return.
‘Me name’s Robbie, pal.’
The truculence surprised Gore, chastened him somewhat. He paused. ‘Sorry, Robbie. That’s a tough job you’re taking on solo. Can I help?’
‘Aw, I doubt that, man. Can’t see it, nah.’
Gore was tending by degrees to the sense that he was being oddly and actively slighted. ‘Sorry, do you – have you got a problem with me, Robbie?’
‘I might do.’
‘Well, so you know, I don’t actually want any help that’s not freely given.’
Robbie snorted out a laugh and turned back to his Sisyphean task. Gore had begun to feel this determined oddness rousing his hackles.
‘That’s funny, is it?’
‘Not so very, no’ was thrown back over the lad’s hefty straining shoulder.
*
‘Striking, the art,’ he murmured to Kully, hoping he sounded approving.
‘Better they do it here than out of doors and get arrested.’
Murals in metallic spray paint adorned all four walls of the Centre – cartoon caricatures of scowling pint-sized hoodlums in outlandishly baggy pants and wraparound shades, carrot-like reefers jutting from their lips, some toting Russian assault rifles. Incomprehensible slogans and legends were marked up in bold jagged characters, filled with mists of colour. Still, this was a gloomy shed, rank with the reek of the toilet cubicle by the door: in the circumstance, graffiti were not so very unsightly.
He and Kully sat abreast behind a short table, government-issue leaflets fanned out across its surface, a hot seat opposite currently occupied by diminutive Cliffy, of whom Kully could not seem to get rid, such were his woes. He was pale and freckled, his small eyes wary, a gap between two buck teeth, his sandy hair so thin it already seemed to be receding.
‘They just take the piss out of wuh,’ he was complaining. ‘Doon the Job Centre. Me writin’ and that …’
I hear you, thought Gore. Like a child new to school he had feared he might be the butt of sniggers. But no one was paying him much mind. He surveyed the dozen or so adolescents loitering with little obvious intent. One pair hunched over a computer that had been dragged from cold storage and set on a shaky table. Through a built partition, a pool table and dartboard were the locus of some rowdier activity. But the chief lures were three moulting sofas shoved into a C-shape. A mixed group sat and smoked, lads with their chins in their hands, girls with their hair harshly scraped back. The wardrobe was all sportswear, firehouse red or aqua blue or canary yellow, yet its wearers looked anaemic. Over chugga-chugga music from someone’s improbably toaster-sized tape-player they conversed sporadically in a braying argot, thick and complicit. Is this how you’d talk to adults, Gore wondered? At school? Or work?
Such energy as there was seemed to emanate from that games room – the clack of balls, vying cries. Gore stood, politely forsook Cliffy and Kully, and wandered through the doorway. Instantly he knew the boy bent over his baize – the hooked nose in profile, the plump and ruddy face, the close-cut hair. Mackers it was, straightening and chewing his inner cheeks. Gore had no trouble imagining him ten years hence, planted on a pub stool, caked in drying plaster, sneaking a lunchtime pint with the lads. Mackers’s opponent – cigarette in mouth, his sweatshirt reading Notorious – punched him on the arm in passing and settled down to his own shot. Yes, Gore knew this one too. Though his face – sullen, hollow-cheeked but handsome – was newly marked by a blackened eye and a two-inch gash over one eyebrow, extravagantly close to a scar, his narrow eyes were memorably hostile. It was the bloke from whom he had endeavoured to rescue young Cheryl what’s-her-name some weeks ago on Scoular. If they had yet noticed Gore, they were ignoring him determinedly, and so he stepped closer.
‘Aye aye. Remember me?’
Grey eyes deigned to him. ‘Aye …’
‘Mackers, right? I’m John. C’mon, we’ve met.’
‘Might’ve done.’
‘Yeah, and I’ve met this one and all.’
Notorious spun his cue in one hand. ‘The fuck yee deein’ here?’
‘Well, I was invited.’
‘Not by me.’
‘Pack it in Jason, man.’
Gore gestured to the table and to Mackers. ‘Fancy a game?’
‘It’s winner stays on, man,’ Jason retorted.
‘I’ll play you then.’
Mackers shrugged, handed Gore his cue and left the room. The subsequent contest was brief. Gore did not presume himself a player, but nonetheless endured near-constant verbal gamesmanship. ‘Ahhh! You’re shit, man.’ Six of Gore’s red balls were yet afloat as Jason drilled home the winning black and pushed out past him.
Back in the main room Kully had joined the congregants on the sofas. A low-key symposium looked to be in progress. Gore squeezed onto the end of a chair-arm and accepted a glass of Coca-Cola. Kully gestured as if to draw him in. ‘Reverend, we were just talking about the riot last summer.’
‘Call me John. There was a riot?’
‘Aye, it were magic,’ said a girl with eyes like a low fever.
‘Best thing ever happened round here, man,’ a boy said, leaning back emphatically as if to invite dissent, or rival nominations.
‘What happened, John,’ said Kully, ‘the police chased a joyrider into the Blake Estate, and it all turned into a bit of a standoff.’
Mackers seemed offended. ‘Aye, cos the fella ran off and left the car, but the coppaz went knocking on doors like we wuz all of us hiding him. So they get telt to piss off and do summat useful. It was them what started the bother. Cos of that.’
‘Aye,’ someone seconded. ‘They lash into ya for nowt.’
‘Some people said they’d been a bit harassed,’ Kully nodded. ‘And one or two missiles got thrown at the police and next thing –’
‘Coppers are cunts, man, bunch of fucken cunts.’ This was Jason, muttering into his chest, though clearly for the attention of the group.
Gore winced. ‘Come on with that language.’
Jason’s head snapped up at him. ‘Shut yer mouth, man. What the fuck? How ya want us to talk, like? Like me’sel or how you want us?’
‘I’d like you to talk to me the way you’d want me to talk to you.’
‘Ah divvint care how yee talk to wuh.’
‘You’d want me to show some sort of respect.’
‘Why should ah respect you?’
‘Why should I respect you? “Notorious”? Because of your brilliant fashion sense?’ The resultant sniggers, Gore sensed, were on his side. ‘Look, I don’t expect you to like the police. I’m interested in your view. But that language – it’s hard to hear. And among women, you know? And I think you knew when you said it that I would find it so, right? But you said it anyway.’
Jason snorted and stared at him in silence – though he was tapping his foot to the floor with a manic intensity.
‘So, yes, we were saying – why you dislike the police.’
‘You heard. Even them uns are al’reet, they come round, aye? Act like you’re mates ’n’ all. Then summat gans off and they steam into you like bastads.’
Gore nodded.
‘Is “bastads” alreet for ya, then?’
Gore sniffed. ‘Yeah, fine, I know a few bastards.’
A few more chuckles, not from Jason. Gore looked to the group about him. ‘What do you think about Hoxheath, then? As a place to live?’
‘It’s ballocks,’ said a girl, sadly.
Cliffy chipped in. ‘I’m bored shitless, me. There’s nowt tuh dee.’
‘Nothing to do?’
‘Thas what ah said. Do ah stutter, fool?’
Gore blinked in surprise, for the half-pint boy had half-risen from his seat to spit the last word with maximum derision. He earned the best laugh of the afternoon. Gore bit his lip. ‘No, what I mean is, is there absolutely nothing to do?’ He looked to Kully but she was staring absently to the window. ‘What sort of work would you like to do? If you had your pick? What sort of jobs do people you know do?’
‘Bin man, bin man,’ intoned Jason, amusing himself.
‘I knaa what I’m gunna do,’ Cliffy piped. ‘Gunna work for Big Steve, me.’
For his pains, a torrent of jeering abuse. ‘Not in a million years, man.’
‘You gotta be rock to work for Big Steve.’ This was grey-eyed Mackers, as if he had now seen it all.
The complicit air in the room bumped the needle of Gore’s curiosity. ‘Stevie Coulson? Why do you want to work for him?’
‘The big man, in’t he?’ Cliffy scowled. ‘Original gangsta.’
‘Coulson’s a bastad an’ all,’ Jason muttered, seemingly heartfelt. ‘He wants workin’ on.’
By who? thought Gore. You? And whose Panzer division? ‘You know Stevie does a spot of work for me? At my church?’
The youths seemed to try very determinedly to remain doleful and unimpressed. But Kully was attentive to him again. ‘Yes, John, what about your church? Would you say a little?’
‘Oh. Sure. Well. I have a church service on Sunday at St Luke’s School. It’s just … really it’s a place to come along and hang out. Be together like this. And talk a little about how we might make things better. No pressure from me, you know? I won’t look out for you, I mean. But you’d be very welcome. I’d appreciate it. And if I can ever be of any help to any of you then … you know where to find me.’
There, he thought, you can’t say that’s not friendly. And he slapped his palms upon his thighs. ‘Well, I need to be off, thanks for your time.’
‘Me and all,’ declared Mackers. ‘Nee rest for the workin’ man.’ Gore noted that Mackers’ alleged friend Jason, now recumbent and toying with the bunched hair of one reluctant girl, was goading him with a masturbatory jerk of his wrist.
Kully followed Gore to the door, and together they saw Mackers zip up his coat, don a helmet and mount a moped, its delivery pillion box decorated in the Italian tricolour and emblazoned BARZINI’S PIZZA/PASTA. Kully shook his hand, her smile still pitying. ‘John, John – you’ve got to sell yourself better. “I’d appreciate it.” Really.’
Gore shrugged. ‘This was useful, thanks. I just don’t think they have much use for me.’
‘Oh rubbish. Now I will call you, yes?’
‘By all means,’ he murmured, vaguely amused by her rhino hide. Then he was striding free down the concrete ramp to the gravel parking lot. Then suddenly he was slipping and skittering and nearly falling face first. Not fucking dog shit, not again. He hastily inspected his sole, glanced back to Kully – for once, a picture of embarrassment – and heard the laughter of a few lads jabbing jeering fingers at a burst condom and a snail trail of leavings smeared down the ramp.
‘Urgh man, look. A dobber, a used dobber …’
*
‘They need men in their lives,’ announced Jack Ridley. ‘That’s what.’ Had he banged upon his placemat with the hub of his stout table-knife, he could not have seemed more emphatic.
They sat as six in the reception of Monica’s tidy home in Gosforth – Gore, Jack and Meg Ridley, Monica, husband Stan and their daughter Janet, a quiet dark girl in her twenties. Gore had been recounting his impressions of the Youth Centre for only a few moments, in the course of which Monica had borne to table a stupendous shepherd’s pie, its raked and fissured crust bubbling in a dish the size of a paving slab. It smelled wondrous to Gore, and his appetite for conversation receded. Yet Ridley was wrangling him from across the table.
‘And this Indian girl was the only one in charge? How is it the only ones trying to put any sense into these young men are women?’
‘They’re not all women.’
‘Whey, charity and social services and that … all a lot of fussy women.’
‘Jack, you’ll get a clout off Monica if you don’t mind your tongue.’
Meg Ridley was silver-haired and ruddy-cheeked and rather handsome, like the wife of a well-heeled Scottish hill farmer, the homely fragrance of the Geordie hearth about her.
‘Well, Jack’ – Monica made a face – ‘I can tell you, there’s always vacancies in them sorts of jobs. If any fellas could be bothered. The money’s poor, mind, and it’s only women’s work, so they get stick off their mates.’
‘I’m not talking about them jobs. I’m talking about how they’ve not got fathers,
these lads. That’s what they need. Set a good example and they’ll follow it, sharpish.’
‘Like you and our Luke,’ murmured Meg, and Ridley glowered at his wife.
Gore decided to capitalise on the injured silence. ‘I don’t believe all these boys are from broken homes.’
‘Oh, some’ll have dads but they’ll be dead losses and all, I’ll bet. The majority won’t, but. “One-parent households”, eh? I’ll bet you any money. That’s why we’re overrun. Two so-called parents, two nice flats, two lots of benefit …’
Gore looked for someone else to intervene, but no one did. Meg looked merely indulgent. They chewed in silence for a moment. Gore was weighing up the potential size of his second helping before he realised that Monica had her eye on him. ‘Oh, but John’s a big fan of the single mam.’
Meaning what? He set down his cutlery. ‘I agree, life would be better if everybody got raised by two happy parents, but I don’t think it’s essential. Clearly there are kids who get by. With just a mother, say.’
‘“Get by”,’ Jack growled. ‘They shouldn’t have to “get by”.’
‘Well, that’s just life, couples can’t always stay together. It’s not a curse falls on the kids’ heads.’
‘So why are they sitting around, dead losses, not in school, not in work? If you had kids of your own, John, I tell you now, you wouldn’t stand to watch ’em piddle their lives away. You’d give ’em a kick up the arse. Well, I say that, maybe you wouldn’t, maybe you’d just let ’em run amok.’
The evening was starting to oppress Gore, its mood recalling him to childhood subjection. ‘Some of these lads, Jack, they’ve not got a chance.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they’re poor. Just that. They get looked down on.’
‘Poor, get away. You’re dreaming, aren’t you? Being poor is having nowt. My dad’s life.’
‘Poverty’s relative. If you’ve got so much less than everyone else, you still feel it. The stigma of it.’
‘Aw, so that’s why they lie around all day, is it? Life’s not fair?’
‘Well, it’s a fact that it’s not fair –’
‘And what are you going to do about it?’
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