by Trevor Hoyle
‘Hey Carol,’ Colin Purvis said suddenly. ‘Show him your tits.’
‘Get stuffed,’ the girl said.
‘Yeh, go on Carol,’ the lad with the pudding basin haircut said, just as keen himself to see her body.
‘What do you think I am, a stripper? Get lost.’
‘You’ve stripped before now,’ Colin Purvis said, grinning. He had a broad fleshy face, pockmarked, almost tending to fat, yet saved by the hard bulk underneath. His arms were round and packed solid and hardly narrowed at the wrists before opening to the wide spread of his hands. Terry’s own wrists felt hot inside them, chafed and sore.
‘Shut up,’ Carol said.
Terry gave up the struggle and tried to reason with them. By getting them to talk it seemed to push the danger away, as though words were some kind of soothing balm.
‘I haven’t done owt to you, Col, have I? You’ve had a go on me bike, fair enough; if you let go of me wrists I won’t run away, honest. They’re getting really sore now.’
‘Oh dear his wrists are getting sore,’ the lad with the impediment said solicitously. ‘What a shame. Oh dear.’
‘If I let go will you run away?’ Colin Purvis said. He winked at the others but they couldn’t see his face properly: it was just a broad pale smudge in the lamplight.
‘No,’ Terry said. Colin Purvis let go. The danger seemed to have passed. They weren’t going to harm him after all. Now if he could keep them chatting till he got his bike over the fence …
‘What you doing?’ Colin Purvis said as Terry bent down and took hold of the handlebars.
‘I was just—’
‘No you’re not. You’re not going yet. We haven’t done with you.’
‘What you on about?’
‘We want to see your dick.’
‘No,’ Terry said.
‘Carol wants to see it.’
‘I don’t,’ Carol said. She shook her long fair hair back. ‘Are we going to mess around here all night? Let him go home to his mam.’
Colin Purvis was standing casually with his hands by his sides, confident that he was within grabbing distance should Terry decide to run for it. He liked tormenting people. He was aware of his size and strength and employed them to make kids walk in fear of him – just as this snivelling squirt was frightened now. What he liked most, though, was the feeling that they were in his power: they stayed when he said stay and could only go when he said go. And part of the kick was to have an audience for his tricks and strategems and cunning deceits, which was why it was necessary to have Carol, Eddie and Shaz there to witness the proceedings.
‘It’s getting late, Col,’ Terry said, trying to keep his voice calm. ‘Me mam’ll be wondering where I am.’
‘She’ll have to wonder then, won’t she?’
‘You’ve had a go on me bike, what else do you want?’
‘Wait and see,’ Colin Purvis said softly, a little malicious grin creeping over his face. Without taking his eyes off Terry he went over to Carol and whispered in her ear. She said fiercely, ‘No,’ and there was more whispering. ‘Why not?’ he said, raising his voice.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘But why not?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘What you going to do?’ Eddie (the one with the speech impediment) asked Colin Purvis.
‘I want to watch him shag Carol.’
‘I won’t do it,’ the girl said. She folded her arms across her chest as if in self-defence.
Colin Purvis said deliberately: ‘Why not? You let me.’
‘I’m not having that little squirt poking up me.’
‘I bet you’d hardly feel it anyway,’ Shaz said. His shorn head gleamed like a close-fitting cap. Terry wanted to kick his dull stupid ignorant face in. He wanted to kill them all, even the girl.
‘Come on Carol,’ Colin Purvis said coaxingly. His hand was inside her coat and he was unfastening the buttons on her blouse. ‘Show him what a big pair you’ve got.’
‘I don’t want to, Colin,’ the girl said, though she made no attempt to resist the progress of his fingers. It was as if he had power over her – she had no choice but to obey him.
Colin Purvis said, ‘Bring him,’ and the five of them walked into the shadow of the fence, Colin Purvis draping his heavy arm across the girl’s shoulders and Shaz forcing Terry along with spiteful jabs in the small of the back. Carol leaned against the fence, indolent and resigned. She gave the impression that her body didn’t belong to her; it belonged to Colin Purvis, or Eddie, or Shaz, or anyone.
The lad with the pudding basin haircut held Terry lightly by the arms, not so much to restrain him but rather as a gesture that he was captive, under their control. But Terry knew full well he couldn’t escape, not with his bike to hump over the fence. He had no choice but to go along with it and pretend he wasn’t bothered. Colin Purvis said:
‘Have you ever seen a tart’s titties?’ – and standing in front of the girl with his legs astride hers opened her blouse all the way down and flipped up her brassiere with his thumb so that her breasts were exposed to the cold night air, pale spheres in the dimness, the focal point of attention.
Terry didn’t know why but he was frightened. There was something unnatural and obscene about Colin Purvis’s disinterested treatment of the girl, as though she were a lump of meat.
‘Have a feel.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Have a feel,’ Colin Purvis repeated in a voice that suggested it might be unwise to refuse.
Terry put out his hand and touched the girl’s flesh. It was like touching putty. Her skin was cold and flaccid. He experienced nothing.
‘Not like that,’ Colin Purvis said. ‘Like this.’ Carol stood passively against the fence as he fondled her with both hands, moulding his hands to her body. Then he leaned forward so that his pelvis was thrust into hers, and started grinding. ‘This gets her going,’ he said in an aside, and Terry noticed that the girl had closed her eyes and was breathing through her mouth.
‘Let’s make him do her,’ Shaz said close by Terry’s ear.
‘No,’ Carol muttered. ‘No.’
‘Come on Col,’ Eddie said in his queer nasal voice.
‘Fuck off you lot,’ Carol said, opening her eyes. Her hands were on Colin Purvis’s buttocks. She said, ‘Tell them to get lost, Col.’
‘The kid wants to watch,’ Colin Purvis said, and in another aside to Terry: ‘She’s like a rattlesnake when she gets going.’
‘I don’t want to watch,’ Terry said. ‘I want to go home.’ He was very scared and didn’t feel well; his insides were upset because all this seemed like a nightmare: the half-naked girl in the shadow of the fence and Colin Purvis leaning against her and the two rough lads like evil phantoms in the darkness. Denby, Cayley Street, No. 77, weren’t all that far away but they might have been a million miles. Somewhere nearby – from a back door left open while somebody went to the lavatory – a snatch of music drifted for a moment like sanity (it was Kay Starr singing Wheel of Fortune) and he had to make a supreme physical effort not to break down and scrike. He knew that if he cried it would be the end.
Colin Purvis was fumbling below. Carol made a sound in her throat and her head fell back against the fence. Her body began to move. Colin Purvis said calmly: ‘Give us his hand,’ and when Terry resisted Shaz held him round the neck while Eddie forced his hand down until it had made contact with something hot and open and wet.
‘No, no—’ Terry said, and collapsed at the knees. What happened next he wasn’t fully aware of: he was on the ground and for some reason Shaz was kicking him. But what hurt him almost as much as the pain was that he didn’t know why Shaz was kicking him, it was mindless. He hadn’t done anything to them. ‘I haven’t done anything to you,’ Terry cried.
Eddie stood on his hand. ‘Get Carol to toss him off,’ he said to Colin Purvis.
‘You must be bleeding joking,’ Carol said, fastening her blouse.
C
olin Purvis buttoned his trousers. ‘Denby lot.’ He looked down at Terry on the ground. ‘Soft as pig shit.’
Shaz said, ‘Let’s cob house bricks at his bike.’
‘Chuck it under a lorry on Entwisle Road,’ Eddie said, ‘best thing,’ and honked a few notes of his peculiar foghorn laugh.
‘You’ve got stuff all over me skirt,’ Carol complained, bending down to see in the weak lamplight.
‘Wipe it on’t grass,’ Colin Purvis said, turning his attention elsewhere. He got hold of Terry by the hair and kept pulling until Terry was standing up.
‘What we going to do with him?’ Shaz asked avidly.
Eddie leered into Terry’s face, enjoying the response it evoked.
‘You better not do anything to me,’ Terry said.
‘What will you do if we do?’ asked Shaz. ‘Tell your dad?’
‘Me uncle’s a policeman,’ Terry said hopelessly.
‘Oh aye?’ said Shaz. ‘Will he come if we blow a whistle?’
‘Let me go,’ Terry said, starting to cry. ‘You lousy buggers.’
This was the wrong thing to say because it provoked Colin Purvis into hitting him in the stomach. He was crying hard as they picked him up and bundled him over the fence. The back entry between the fence and the row of houses appeared as a black tunnel, the dirt worn into ruts by the vehicles that used it to gain access to the garages huddled together under the corroding walls of the viaduct.
‘This one’ll do,’ Colin Purvis said, opening the door of a midden where the dustbins were kept. It was a windowless brick box with a thick stone flag roof. They pushed Terry inside and bolted the door; his shoes crunched on cinders and there was a smell of fish, wet newspapers and rotting vegetables. He sat on the edge of the dustbin, his chest shuddering, wondering in his terror what they would do next. They might drop lighted papers through the gap at the top of the door and choke him to death. But even worse than this was the fear that they would take his bike somewhere and wreck it. The impotence of his revenge overwhelmed him. He wanted fists of iron to smash the door down and batter Colin Purvis to a pulp of glue. It wasn’t fair, three onto one; the injustice of it made the blood sing in his ears and his throat close up.
When he had ceased to cry he realised that they had gone away. In case they were playing a trick he put his hand cautiously through the gap at the top of the door, then tried to reach down to unfasten the bolt. He couldn’t get anywhere near it: his fingers scratched feebly at the woodwork. Panic overcame everything and he kicked the door and yelled like a madman and didn’t stop until he heard the scrape of a back door thresher and footsteps crossing the yard. The bolt slid back and a man with a bald head and a long thin nose was looking at him suspiciously. The metal tabs on his braces caught the faint light and winked dully. He held the door open with a hairy arm and said, ‘What’s the bloody game? Playing at silly sods are we?’
‘I got locked in,’ Terry babbled. ‘Some lads—’
The man jerked his thumb. ‘Come on, out of it. You don’t live round here do you? Where you from?’
‘Denby.’
‘Then get back to Denby. And don’t let me catch you round here again.’
Terry said, ‘It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t help it if they—’
‘Go on, you little squirt, sod off,’ the man said and clouted him hard on the back of the head. Terry ran down the back entry seeing stars and nearly ran into a wall.
He shouted: ‘I’ll tell me dad over you!’
‘I’ll tell your dad,’ the man said. ‘Bloody vandal.’
His bike was lying where Colin Purvis had thrown it down. He lifted it over the fence, switched on the dynamo, and rode the quickest way home without stopping once.
The Engine Room
BARBARA WEBB HAD GOT A JOB ON THE HOUSEWIVES’ SHIFT at Oswald & Duncan’s and in the evenings Terry and Male would walk down Belfield Lane past the Croft Mill and turn up the track alongside the slipper works which led to the wire enclosure stacked with crates and bits of old rusting looms. Usually they didn’t go directly into the spinning shed (which meant sneaking by the chargehand) but went through the scarred green doors into the engine room and stood on the metal gantry watching the huge shining steel arm of the beam engine sliding through the hot moist air with a power and ferocity that was compulsively hypnotic. The noise and vibration trembled in the soles of their feet and they had to mouth their conversation above the pounding roar of oiled machinery. Terry thought it magical: he had never seen anything like it: in his imagination it was the boiler room of an ocean liner ploughing through the Atlantic or the main propulsion drive of a rocketship in deep space, en route for Mars.
The air was heavy like syrup, the dense smell of machine oil catching the back of the throat. Pungent steam drifted from somewhere, a faint pall of it obscuring the gauges and levers and polished brasswork; and everything was so spick and span that the engine room might have been prepared specially for display at an exhibition. The engineer in charge didn’t mind them coming in to look, although this was implied rather than stated because he never spoke to them or even nodded. He walked everywhere with a wad of cotton waste in his capable hand, automatically caressing the dials and copper pipes, the green gantry rail, the large brass-rimmed glass-fronted gauges. But it seemed that the machine didn’t need looking after: it pounded remorselessly onwards under its own volition, never pausing or faltering, obeying some secret, hidden law of its own creation.
When they came outside it was like stepping under an icy shower. The perspiration froze on their bodies and Terry shivered all over, feeling the sweat cooling on his neck. Male said, ‘Do you think we’ll get spotted if we go in’t mill?’
‘What can they say if we tell them our mams work here?’
‘The chargehand had a fit last time.’
Terry said, ‘He’s not the boss.’
They pretended to be escaped prisoners-of-war dodging the Nazis, slipping into the shadow of the crates and working their way towards the open double-doors from which the roaring clatter of the looms escaped into the night. If the engine room was magical and romantic, the looms were vicious and terrifying. They chattered non-stop like maniacs, endless rows of spinning metal and blurred white thread, working themselves into a frenzy. The heat and speed were hideous.
Bessie Smith was piecing up a broken end, her fat red arms inches above the whirling conical bobbins. She frowned when she saw them but couldn’t spare a split-second’s concentration in case the thread burnt a gash in her hand or flicked away a fingernail. Some of the women had the tops of their fingers missing. Terry’s mam was unloading a skip, stacking the full bobbins in the gangway: there were bits of cotton in her hair and stuck to her stockings. She shouted in Terry’s ear to keep a look-out for the chargehand.
‘Can we do owt?’ Terry shouted back.
She shook her head. ‘Unless you want to go and ask Ellis to make me a brew.’ She had to repeat this before he understood. The racket was tremendous.
Ellis was the man who operated the hoist – a man in physique but a boy in his ways. Sometimes, when he was in the mood and not sulking, he would make tea for the women, either in separate mugs or in a large aluminium teapot with a broken spout. Terry knew where to find him, in his cubby-hole lined with hot pipes next to the lift-shaft.
As he walked along the narrow gangway leather belts slapped and creaked overhead, spinning on large spoked wheels near the ceiling before disappearing through holes in the whitewashed walls. The heat came at him in successive waves, fanned by the looms: the warm fetid breath of machines.
Ellis was reading an old issue of Picturegoer. He had on just overalls, vest and underpants, his thin bare ankles protruding from a pair of rope-soled slippers with canvas tops. Terry asked if he wouldn’t mind brewing two mugs of tea, one for his mam and one for Mrs Smith. Ellis gave him a grin in which there were more gaps than teeth and wiped the rims of two pot mugs on the sleeve of his overalls. He scooped tea from the caddy us
ing his fingers and then pushed a tap with his elbow and scalding hot water spluttered from a pipe sticking out of the wall.
The chargehand said from the doorway, ‘What’s all this then?’ It was quieter here, so he didn’t have to shout.
‘I’m just getting a brew for me mam,’ Terry said. He smiled his most ingenuous smile. The chargehand wasn’t impressed, his face tightening with impatience, but then decided it wasn’t worth the bother and went away, shaking his head wearily.
‘What does he get mad for?’ Terry asked.
‘Piles,’ Ellis said. He giggled.
Terry thought about this on the way back with the mugs of tea, wondering ‘piles of what?’
When he and Male were outside and walking up Belfield Lane Terry began to feel wary and nervous. Twice in the past week he had woken sweating from nightmares in which he was tied down, unable to move an inch, while Colin Purvis (who was bald in his dream with tattoos on his arms) gave certain precise instructions to Eddie and Shaz – instructions that were unintelligible but which Terry knew were pure evil.
They passed the Cloverdale Hotel and walked along Entwisle Road, and the farther they walked, the more nervous he became. He was half-prepared to run at any moment, staying close to the houses and shop-fronts as if they might offer protection. A few feathery flakes of snow wafted down under the yellow lights and lay like soft confetti on the pavement.
‘It’s snowing,’ said Male. ‘Great.’
Terry was thinking: once we get past Oswald Street and under the Arches I’ll be all right; we can cut across the Common and climb over the railings at the end of Cayley Street…
‘Hiya,’ somebody said and Terry jumped. Whoever it was moved forward into the light and Male said, ‘Hiya Shap.’
He had been standing deep inside a shop doorway on the corner of Gowers Street, which was why they hadn’t seen him.
‘What’s up with you, Webbie?’ Shap asked Terry.