Mac broke the silence. His nerves compelled him to go on the attack. That was his way.
“You reckon you’re the best do you?” he shouted, rolling his neck and walking towards Pike.
A chuckle of disbelief rippled through the gathered men.
“You’ve got some balls coming here gyppo,” said Pike in an accent as thick and bitter as valleys’ poteen.
“Speak up you Welsh cunt.”
“Watch yoursel,” hissed Barker, “Don’t forget where you are.”
“I hope you’ve got life insurance,” said Pike.
“Fuck off, I’m Mac Wisdom, the best of the travellers and therefore the best in Britain. And I’ve never even heard of you, you dirty fucking sheep shagging prick.”
The air within the quarry changed at this. It tightened. The light was fading but the beams from the cars gave the chiselled-out hole a strange atmosphere. It felt to Mac as if he were standing in a mass open grave. His vision went blurred for a second. The whole wood was humming in his ears like a lone pylon on a hill-side. He wanted this over. He wanted it ended. Cliff Pike said nothing. The men said nothing.
Barker stepped between them.
“Now listen lads,” he said, but as he did Mac swung a punch which missed Pike’s chin by the stub of a whisker.
Barker ducked out the way and the fight was on, as Pike returned with a punch that did scuff the side of Mac’s head. It was enough to wrong-foot him. His centre shifted and his weight was distributed all wrong.
When they came together in a clinch there was no grace or artistry, just desperation and brutality. They grabbed for one another. Two desperate men entangled. Mac could smell Pike. Summat stale. Stale and sweet, like rotten maggoty meat or cream gone sour at the bottom of the churn. Pike could smell Mac. Cigarettes and fear. A fear for his life.
The volume amongst the men grew as they hurriedly placed bets with one another and with Barker, most of them favouring the local man.
“Give us a ton on auld Cliffy-boy.”
“This Geordie gyppo needs learning.”
“There’ll be blood”.
“There’ll be a bloody murder.”
They pulled apart and traded punches for a minute or two then Pike smashed his fist dead on to the bridge of your Dad’s nose and followed through with a head butt that connected just above his left eye. Pike’s skull felt as hard and cold as the half-quarried seam of stone that held them. Mac’s ears screamed and rang and he swung wildly, but Pike punched him deftly in the solar plexus. Mac doubled over as the wind was sucked out of the vacuum that had opened up below his rib cage. He had never known pain like it before. A ball of it sat inside of him, stopped his breathing. Compared to this every fight until now had felt like a walk in the park. And he might as well have been out sniffing daisies for the past six months, the shape he was in. Desperate panic seized him. He was on the back foot.
Pike went to knee him in the face but Mac saw it coming. He felt pain like a hot poker being shoved down his tightened throat, took a side-step and grabbed for Pike’s cock and balls.
He found them held firm in Pike’s tight jeans and they felt full in his hand. He squeezed hard. He grabbed at whatever his fingers found and squeezed again, pretended it was mutton for his pot, and squeezed a third time, harder, until Pike made a noise like a wounded animal. Mac pulled and twisted until he felt something give, then pop. Pike howled. It was a noise to shatter glass.
“The dirty cunt’s got his bleeding knackers,” said a voice close by.
Only fear pushed Mac forward now. This had gone beyond a stand-up scrap and had crossed over into summat else. It was gladiatorial. It had to be ended quick. He knew that.
You don’t shake hands after a fight like this. Only one walks away.
The blood drained from Pike’s face as Mac let go of his crushed ball sac and straightened up. Everything was reverberating and he was breathing in strangulated, syncopated gulps. He managed to throw two head-shots then grabbed his opponent by the beard and pulled him forward to knee him. Pike was hyperventilating. He groaned and fell forward, jamming a thumb in Mac’s right eye as he did so. Pain seared through his skull. There was a yanking, ripping sound. He felt fingers being forced into his mouth and his cheek being peeled back from his face. He heard something tear, the sound of trousers ripping, only it was flesh. In desperation Mac did grab for Pike’s junk again. Grabbed for anything. To pull and twist and mangle.
But Mac’s legs had gone. The earth-line tilted and everything slowed down to a series of fragmented images. He saw the men round him and the quarry stones beneath him and Cliff Pike retching and heaving with pain. He saw it as if he were looking through water. He fell like a brick through treacle, feeling nothing.
As he slumped to the ground his sound and vision in his good eye became crisp and clear, and then the whistling and wailing in his ears became even louder. His head was a bell and his brain was the clapper. Your Dad’s head was that twenty-eight hundred weight brass bell up in the rafters of the top tower of the cathedral, and now it was being rung by the feet of strangers.
His head was wet and so was his cheek. There was summat on it that shouldn’t be there. A pendulous mess.
Some of the men saw. Between the blows they saw Mac’s eyeball dangling on pink tendrils, then summat cold and hard and blunt hit him from behind and boots and fists rained down upon him.
A muffle of breathless voices came through the ringing and roaring in his ears. Hillbilly voices from the throats of mountain men. Excitable grunts. Sexual grunts. Gurgles of pleasure. The music of the pack feeding. They were wild hungry beasts setting upon their prey. They fought each other to get at him.
“Get the English cunt.”
Blood slipped down the back of Mac’s throat. It was viscous and thick, the taste of copper. His breath was still trapped in his windpipe and his cheek was hanging from his face like comedy glasses.
Then he was on his front and the pain was unfathomable, too real to make sense of as blunt instruments hit him on his elbows, knees, chest. Bolts and jolts. Boots stamped on his fingers. Cracks and spasms. Where was Barker? Fingers found their way into his mouth again, his eyes. His cheek was wrenched back again. A flap hanging in the dirt now. A belt buckle whipped the back of his head. Yet still more punches came as one thought echoed.
Where was Barker?
His trousers did come loose and they were being pulled down around his knees. He lost a shoe. The eyeball dangled and the quarry echoed to the sound of something primal and awful there deep in the woods. There was no shouting now, just the sound of men expending energy.
His body became a limp thing made of string and feathers and egg shells.
Mac was buried at the bottom of a landslide now. An avalanche of pain. All colour drained from the world and he felt himself slipping away. He was certain now that he was going to die. He was reduced to a tiny speck of light far, far away from everything and everyone and the loneliness he felt was even worse than the physical punishment being meted out to him.
Then he stopped feeling anything.
Then things were never the same for any of us again.
*
Part III
In The Topsoil
I’m up on the Nook and the light is changing. Pink fingers are starting to creep across the sky in the far distance. I reckon there’ll be a sunset like you see in the fillums in a bit. It’s all beautiful; too beautiful for a night like this.
I’ve skirted right round the perimeter of the Nook. I’ve gone the long way round through the woods and the places they call the Scrubs, the no man’s land of brambles and hidden corners and motorbike tracks. I’ve been peering over fences into back gardens with rottweilers and broken motorbikes in them, and checking out all the alleyways and ginnels that lead back out here and seeing which roads are dead ends and what links up to where. Memorising the entrances and exits. Doing a reccy. Making a memory map.
After I’ve laid low in the bushes deep in the S
crubs for a while it’s evening and the sky is still changing. Them pink fingers have turned orange, like someone’s set fire to a cloud. Sky arson and that.
I smoke some tabs, scrat me balls and think about what I’m going to do.
I decide to leave the Scrubs and go round the back of the estate again where I count the houses until I find the one I’m looking for. The one where they hang out smoking their tack, dealing their powders and banging young lasses. It’s not hard to find – I just have to follow the crappy rave music. The bleeps and beats and squeaky voices of the Toytown rubbish. Doof doof doof. Christ. What a din. Nee wonder they’re all on the gear. You’d need summat.
I go to the back fence and take a peek. There’s nee curtains on any of the winders. Upstairs some of the glass has been put through and is covered with cardboard. It’s not that late but there’s people all over the shop and they’re all getting mortal. There’s a big black burnt patch where a back lawn used to be.
I crouch down in the grass an
d sit for a while, watching the house through a knot hole in the fence. After a while someone comes out into the back garden with nee top on and a bottle of orange 20/20 in his hand. It’s one of the povvy bastards. I don’t know his name. He walks towards us. He’s got a crappy Union Jack flag tatt on his arm. Proper sketchy. He walks down to the end of the garden. He stops and gets his cock out his trackie bottoms and has a long piss on the other side of the fence. He waves it about and sprays piss everywhere. I’m so close I can smell it. It’s a bit like Sugar Puffs. He has another slug from the 20/20 and slowly walks back to the house, stopping to hoof a flat football up against the back door. Then he gans back in.
The sun is proper going down now, and it’s getting darker and colder and I want to have a tab but I don’t. I just sit there in the grass, watching the house through the hole.
The doorbell keeps ringing and people keep coming and going.
I see Bannon at the kitchen window and he’s laughing and talking to someone I can’t see. Then he disappears. Then I see Maria and she’s not laughing. She’s stood at the kitchen sink looking out into garden. She looking right at us. Dead-eyed. Right at the piss-drenched fence. She doesn’t see us though. She can’t.
Then Bannon is back and he’s stood behind her with his arms round her waist and he’s either kissing her neck or whispering summat into her ear, but she squirms and pushes him away. Then he grabs her arse from behind, and they both disappear, and I’m wishing I’d properly brayed this twat instead of just giving him a bloody nose.
And I can hear me Dad going: Aye you should have put him in hospital while you had a chance you soft little shite.
It gets darker and the party carries on. My legs start to cramp and though it’s getting nippy I’m as warm as toast in my combat jacket and even though it’s August I put a beanie on because everybody knows that’s where you lose most of your body heat.
All of Banny’s lot are in there and other people I don’t recognise. They’re downstairs, all properly hammered, shouting and hoying stuff about. They’ve got some povvy disco lights in there that are flashing on and off and Maria was right about them being Nazis because there’s a tatty whatsit on the wall. Aye. A swastika.
A light goes on upstairs in one of the bedrooms. There’s two lads and a lass.
The lads are in their late teens but the lass looks proper young. Thirteen or summat. Mebbes less. It’s hard to tell. The house is too povvy for curtains so I can see the scene like I’m watching it on a big telly.
The young lass looks like she’s half asleep or has mistaken the pills for smarties when one of the lads says summat and gives her a gentle shove from behind. She stumbles forward.
She’s wearing a boob tube that’s not really got any boobs in it. Too young to be in bedrooms with bigger boys.
I’m thinking about Charmaine at her age.
The lads are sort of facing each other when one of them raises his voice at the lass, then she disappears out of sight, on her knees. The lads are talking to each other, then one of them drops his crackers, tilts his head back and gets a hand around the top of what must be the young lasses’ head, then starts shoving it back and forward.
And I’m thinking about Charmaine.
He’s stood there with his chest out, all proud, his other hand clenched into a curled fist by his hip. I want to smack the pride right off his face. Turn his nose sideways.
Then he grabs her with both hands and goes at her harder.
She’s too young, I’m thinking. She’s too young, you cunts. She should be at home playing Barbie. Or she should be in bed asleep.
The other lad just sort of stands there for a couple of minutes, watching and grinning like a gormless dickhead. Then he gets his cock out and begins to have a wank right where he’s stood. He’s tugging at his skinny bit of string and he’s glegging at the other lad, and they exchange the odd word and laugh, but mainly their faces are serious, as they concentrate on what I cannot – and don’t want to – see.
The lad getting the nosh starts jerking about. He hunches over some more and is slamming her face like a demon, and I’m feeling proper sick, and have to force meself not to stand and throw the nearest rock at his paedo head.
And I’m still thinking about Charmaine.
After a bit the lad steps back and the girl stands up. She’s wobbly on her legs as she wipes her mouth. I reckon she’s mebbes been spiked or summat. She’s all floppy, like a puppet that’s had its strings cut.
She just stands for a minute then one of the lads says summat to her and backhands her hard. I don’t hear it, but I feel it.
She stands with her hand to her cheek. He pushes her forward so that she’s bent double and starts fucking her.
Christ, I’m thinking. What happened to holding hands?
The first lad, the one who’s been grinning and wanking, says summat threatening to the lass and then she starts sucking him off while she’s getting done from behind.
Fucksake I’m thinking. Fucksake.
I look away.
When I turn back the young lass is still spitroasted on their grubby charver cocks. The one doing the banging starts slapping her arse then pulls her hair.
The one getting the noshing responds by slapping her face I turn away again and look deep into the darkness of the Scrubs, the bile rising, me throat tightening and everything flooding back as the girl’s face is replaced by Charmaine’s and tears well up then wet me cheeks, and all the while downstairs people are partying and the music is still playing in search of a melody that seems forever just out of reach.
*
Everything was different. It was as if your Dad had been broken down and then put back together but there were parts missing. Vital parts. Summat had broken deep, deep inside.
They kept him in for five months. Them mountain men had broken his fingers and one of his legs. They’d fractured his skull and knocked out ten teeth. They’d broke his nose and his jaw and tore his cheek half off, and it took wiring, thirty-odd stitches and sucking melted ice cream through a straw for weeks to set it right again.
They had cracked his ribs and smashed his elbows. They’d bitten off an ear lobe and broken an ankle. They’d near destroyed one of his kidneys and ruptured his testicles so that he pissed blood for weeks. He dropped from fourteen stone to ten.
And they’d near gouged out one of his eyes. In time they’d make him a false one to fill the gap it left, but for now it were a black hole with a bandage over it. Then he took to wearing a patch.
But he had lost a lot more than blood and an eye – he had lost his heart. It was still beating, inside him, but it was a hollow thing. It was empty. His spirit was smashed and it was like his blood had been replaced with pond water and no matter how many plaster casts or poultices they applied, or drips and needles they inserted, that old Mac was broken.
That Mac was gone now.
*
Them charvers treating that young lass like that have got us too
riled to sit still any longer.
There’s not much I can do sat with me eye to the knot-hole and me legs seizing up with cramp anyway, so I stand up and skirt back round the edge of the estate, down an alley and into the street where the party house is. It’s proper dark now but I’m still making sure I skulk in the long shadows cast by the hedges and fences.
There’s another alleyway a few houses along from the party and at the other side of the alley there’s one of them little power sub-stations where they store the electricity and that, so I bunk up the fence, slide onto the roof of it then press mesel down flat.
The sub-station is quietly humming.
Though the roof is gravelly and bits of it dig into me legs and chest, the sound of the electricity is soothing. From up here I can see the front of the house an all. I lie flat for a bit and suddenly feel tired. The humming from below us and the roof that’s still warm from the day’s sun makes us drowsy.
It’s about one in the morning when there’s shouting and a door slamming and I’m looking up at the house. I think mebbes I’ve nodded off for a bit.
A couple of the lads I don’t recognise come out of the house and head off in the opposite direction from us.
I get me knife out and fold the blade out. Then I think, no. Put it away you daft knacker. Nee knives.
Knives make us as bad as them. Knives are what done our Coughdrop.
I close it and put it back in me pocket.
A couple of minutes later the numpty I saw taking a piss earlier on comes out all wobbly on his jelly legs. I recognise him as the lad who was egging Bannon on to bray us at the fairground the other night. Shotter, I think he was called.
He walks down the garden and turns along the road towards us. I ready mesel. Then he turns right into the alleyway where I’m at. When he’s as close as he’ll get, I push mesel up like I’m doing a press-up or summat and as I do he hears me feet on the gravel and he looks up, but all he sees is a shape against the sky, and suddenly I’m jumping down like bloody Batman or summat, and I’m on him like a nightmare and he’s proper shitting himsel, the soft twat. He doesn’t know what the bally-hoo is happening.
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