A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

  We watched her hang the laundry, then prop it up with a wooden pole. She went back inside and the boy came out. He carried a tin bucket filled with an assortment of greasy tools: sockets, screwdrivers, a cold steel chisel and a clawhammer. The boy put a ring spanner on the 12-millimetre bolt and it spun without catching.

  “Imperial,” said Kevin. “That’s half inch. You need metric.”

  “I know what I need, mate,” said the boy.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the lump on his back. How had I missed it? It sat between his shoulders like the birth of another head.

  The boy tried to clamp the nut with a vise-grips, but the tool was old and rusty and the jaws wouldn’t lock. The boy reached into the bucket and pulled out the chisel and hammer. One by one, he sheared off the eight retaining nuts. Kevin winced every time. He wasn’t great with people, but he would never hurt an engine.

  The boy lifted up the metal cover and grinned. “All right mate?” he said, and then he poked into the opening with a flat screwdriver and pried off the clip on the cam chain. The chain itself dropped into the depths of the gearbox. Kevin closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “See,” the boy said, “that’s how you do it.”

  The cylinder head did not separate immediately because the years had turned the gasket to glue. The boy smacked it with the hammer and a cluster of brittle cooling fins snapped off. He kicked them aside. He hit it again and the head tilted. Two more heavy blows and it fell to the ground, revealing the block and the pistons in their sleeves.

  “There’s the pistons!” said the boy with some excitement. He reached in and tried to pull the engine block free. It didn’t budge. The boy kicked it with the heel of his shoe. Nothing happened. He tried to force the screwdriver between the block and the gearbox, but there wasn’t a razor blade of space. He couldn’t wedge, lever or force the obstinate lump.

  “If I had penetrating oil,” said the boy, “I’d have it out in a flash.”

  “But you don’t have penetrating oil,” said Kevin.

  “No,” the boy replied, “but I do have petrol.”

  Kevin looked at me and said, “He’s got petrol.”

  The boy went to a shed half buried in trash. He pulled open the sheet of corrugated metal that acted as a door. He disappeared, and when he emerged, he was carrying a milk bottle filled with a yellowish liquid. He sloshed it into both cylinders. It spilled out over the gearbox and onto the ground where it formed a rainbow puddle.

  “That’s going to penetrate,” the boy said, “and once that penetrates, the whole thing will slide away like butter. Like butter, mate. Wait and see.”

  I didn’t know much about things mechanical, but I knew that petrol did not have the same properties as penetrating oil.

  We waited.

  After two or three minutes the boy said, “That should be enough.” He kicked the engine once more and the petrol sloshed out. The block was as tight as ever.

  “Do you know what we need?” said the boy. “We need to force the pistons back down in the sleeves.”

  The boy went into the shed and returned with a pickaxe. Kevin’s eyes widened.

  The boy hefted the pickaxe over his shoulder. The handle rested on the ball of his hump.

  “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho,” said Kevin. “It’s off to work we go.”

  The boy didn’t get it. “One smack,” he said, “slap bang in the middle of the crown, that’s all it needs.” He turned to Kevin, looking for agreement, but Kevin remained inscrutable.

  The boy swung the pick-axe and the sharp point tore through the centre of the piston. It smashed the aluminium and plunged six or seven inches into the very guts of the engine.

  “Good shot,” said Kevin, lighting another joint.

  “It was, wasn’t it?” The boy replied, but the piston hadn’t budged, not even a fraction. The boy took the end of the pickaxe handle and wiggled it. He rocked it, he shook it, he kicked it and he knelt upon it. “I’m going to take it out and try again,” he said. He grabbed the head of the pick-axe and tried to withdraw it, but it had become part of the motorcycle.

  “Excalibur,” said Kevin, but the boy didn’t get it.

  The boy climbed onto the frame, put all his weight on the pickaxe handle, and started jumping up and down. The motorcycle promptly keeled over and the boy landed awkwardly. The last dregs of petrol flooded out on the ground and rolled towards the piano. The boy swore. He took the hammer and bashed the seat. He bashed the frame. He smashed the headlight. “You’re a bastard,” he said to the motorcycle. “A bastard.”

  There was blood on the boy’s hand from the fall. A splinter of engine fin had lodged in his palm. He pulled it out and pretended to feel no pain.

  “What we need to do,” the boy announced “is heat the bastard.”

  He poured the last drop of petrol into both cylinders and then asked Kevin for his box of matches.

  “Are you sure that’s wise?”

  “Just gimme the matches, mate.”

  Kevin tossed the yellow box at the boy. I had a bad feeling. The boy struck a match and flicked it at the motorcycle. The inferno was instant. Flames shot out of the cylinders and set the foam in the seat alight. The clutch cable turned into a fiery snake and the carburettor popped. The wiring loom started to melt and toxic floaters drifted through the air like miniature umbrellas. A molten drip landed on the rainbow puddle and a blue wave flashed across the yard and into the mound of rubbish. The dry tinder in the piano ignited and the creature living within scratched in panic, creating a noise not unlike improvisational jazz.

  The boy was shocked. It was as if he had never imagined that petrol and fire could make such poor bedfellows. He grabbed the ragged Union Jack and started beating the flames, but the flag caught fire and he tossed it onto the pyre.

  Kevin took a long drag on the joint and then, improbably, started singing Jerusalem: “Bring me my bow of burning gold, Bring me my arrows of desire; Bring me my spear! O, clouds unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire!”

  The boy still didn’t get it. I looked to the kitchen window where the boy’s mother stood at the sink, watching the flickering blaze. She turned on a tap and filled a basin with no great haste. She looked like a woman whose life would only get better if her house burned to the ground.

  11

  MOTO

  FRIDAY, MAY 18, 1979

  We are at the bus stop on Lordship Lane, ready to board the 243, when three youths with angry dogs approach us. They bar our way and the leader, a red-haired boy known as Ginger, with mannish aspirations and a face slashed twice with a razor blade, leans into the doorway and says to the driver, “These lads will be catching the next bus.”

  “I’ve been looking for you,” says Kevin. “You owe me money.”

  Ginger turns to his two pals, “This facking Paddy takes my motorbike and says he can fix it. I don’t see him for a month, and now he’s telling me that I owe him dosh.”

  The two companions laugh. Kevin looks at Ginger, wide-eyed and hurt. “Let me tell you about your bike.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  Kevin explains how one of the valves came unseated and punched a hole in the piston and how this in turn blew the big-end bearings out of their shells. Ginger’s face begins to sag under the weight of information and his two drones turn their scant attention towards the dogs.

  “The bloke what gave me that bike says there was almost nothing wrong with it.” Ginger sniffs.

  “Caveat emptor.”

  “Wot?”

  “It’s Gaelic for ‘he saw you coming,’” says Kevin. “And I spent a full Saturday morning working on it. That’s why you owe me money.”

  “I’m not giving you any facking money.”

  “Fine,” says Kevin, addressing the full length and breadth of Lordship Lane. “Then you and your mates can hop on the next bus, come to my place and pick up your junk. It’s a back yard I have, not a scrap yard.”

  Kevin stands akimbo and waits for a reaction.
His whole demeanour is so forceful, earnest and convincing that I almost believe the bike is a rusting eyesore, a blot on the Tottenham landscape. I almost forget that ten days earlier we’d changed the piston rings, shortly before Kevin put an ad in the Evening News:

  Honda 175 for sale. Perfect nick. £80.

  I’d been there, too, when two fat brothers came to the house, handed over £75 and wobbled away without helmets.

  “Come on,” Kevin says, “You can drag that piece of shite back to where you found it.”

  “What am I supposed to do with a clapped-out bike?”

  “Not my problem,” Kevin says. “But if you prefer I can always leave it out for the council or the coppers.”

  “Let’s not talk silly bollocks.”

  “Forty quid,” Kevin says, and Ginger’s eyeballs pop. The henchmen gasp and even the dogs seems to slobber the words in disbelief.

  Ginger’s blood rises like a spring tide in a blowhole. His face turns pink and his fingers curl into small but dangerous fists.

  “Twenty quid for repairing the bike,” Kevin persists, “and another twenty quid for getting rid of it.”

  Not only is he demanding a ransom, he has already sold the hostage. This is the Kevin that never fails to amaze me.

  We’d started our lives together, at the foot of the Blackstairs Mountains, playing games in haystacks and riding bicycles on hot summer tar. We looked at girls and they looked back. We stole a box of menthol cigarettes from the railway depot and gave them to the old men in the psychiatric hospital, thereafter referred to as “menthol patients”.

  After primary school, we travelled in different directions. I enrolled in the Academy to learn dead and crippled languages; Kevin went to the Tech, where they welded steel ribbons into the shape of infinity. But we both loved motorcycles and that tied us together. We rode down to Carnsore Point and Courtown, on back roads without road tax or insurance. We shouted at each other through raging wind: “Do you want to turn back?”

  “No. Let’s keep going.”

  One day we met on the bridge in the Rainy Town, and watched weeds flapping in the river current. Somebody played Jean Genie on a portable radio and Kevin said he was going to London. I didn’t pay much attention because I thought it was an aspirational thing. He was only fifteen years old. A week later, he was gone.

  Over the next three years, rumours and confusions filtered home. Kevin had found a job in a biscuit factory. He’d stolen a BMW and driven from London to Bristol with a girl he had charmed into riding behind him. He’d thrown a courtroom bible at a judge and got six months in Feltham Young Offenders’. He’d worked with a concrete crew on the building of the NatWest Tower. He was into jazz. He drove a Jensen Interceptor. He bought and sold amphetamine sulphate.

  It was all true. Except the stuff about jazz.

  Ginger turns to his mates. “Can you facking believe this Paddy?”

  The mates shake their heads and a bus rumbles into view. Kevin betrays no emotion. The word “Paddy” never slaps him in the face; he just lets it roll right over him and disappear into 800 years of history. Ginger’s hand slips inside his jacket pocket and I get the feeling that the day is on its way to a messy conclusion with blades, blood, witnesses, cops, ambulances, stretchers, transfusions, injections, last rites, next-of-kin, tears, beers and tombstones.

  Ginger’s hand emerges from his pocket, holding not a knife, but a note, a twenty-pound note showing William Shakespeare queenishly poncing against a stack of books. “Park that bike at the bottom of the canal,” Ginger says as he snuffles a sagging drip back up into his nose, “and let’s not talk about it again.”

  “I want forty,” Kevin insists.

  Ginger shakes his head. “You’re a cheeky facking Paddy,” he says, but he hands over another twenty-pound note.

  The bus stops and the doors open, Ginger waves us aboard like an old-time concierge. “You take care of that business straight away,” he says, “or there will be retro-cushions.”

  We climb upstairs and find seats at the front. The bus pulls away from the kerb and begins crawling through a valley of red- and brown-brick houses. We pull alongside Ginger and his mates. Kevin looks down at the pathetic expedition party of Union Jack parka jackets, Doc Martens and slobbering dogs. He is Amundsen observing Scott, triumphant but saddened. He hands me one of the twenty-pound notes as the bus picks up speed.

  “That,” he says, “is how they lost the Empire.”

  12

  CON

  TUESDAY, JUNE 5, 1979

  I emerge from Piccadilly station and head for Wardour Street. Like my forebears, I am magnetically drawn to Soho. I like the steam that rises off the place and the dynamo that spins within. Besides, it’s too early in the day to hit Ward’s Irish House and watch the cavemen blowing their noses on the walls.

  I turn onto Berwick Street and come across a small huddle of men standing around an upturned orange crate. Three heavily creased playing cards rest on the Jaffa label.

  “Find the lady, find the lady, find the lady.”

  It’s a small riot of noise and hubbub, a splash of chaos and row-tow-row.

  “Come on, boys and girls, find the lady! Find the queen of hearts!”

  With my fresh young face, I must look quite the mark. In fact I’ve heard about this scam, though I’ve never caught it in action.

  A man in a suit, the so-called “toff”, says: “Here, young lad, put your hand on this card and don’t let anybody move it, ’specially not him [gesturing towards the “dealer”]. Don’t let that bloke move it. He’s trying to move it. He’s trying to cheat me. He’s trying to cheat me out of twenty quid. Keep your hand on that card. That’s the red lady. Keep your hand on her while I get out my wallet.”

  I put my hand on the card.

  “Good lad,” the toff says as he pats his pockets in a grand gesture. “Now where did I put my lolly?”

  To see into a man’s soul, the best avenue is through the eyes, but the Victorians were right – to know a man’s place in the world, look at his shoes. Worn-out leather and stitching that’s ready to burst. Heels fading into tapered wedges. This toff is no toff.

  The dealer has an anorak with a broken zip. His eyes are puffy from a high-salt diet, and oily strings of hair are hooked around his ears. He looks frantic, wounded and damp.

  The man on my left and the man on my right are “spectators”. They make a lot of noise, but their movements are tired and slow, as if they have done this routine so often they just can’t be bothered anymore.

  “Keep your finger on the card, mate,” they both say, slowly and in unison.

  Another accomplice stands on the corner of Peter Street. This is the “lookout”. He’s tall and nervous, with his fingers close to his mouth in case he needs to whistle.

  “Let me get my money out, mate. Don’t budge. This is a dead cert, son, a dead cert.”

  I wonder if they even know how to perform the sleight. Instead of showing me the lady, and then hiding her, they have dispensed with all finesse. I am to be swayed solely by the impeccable honesty of this tatty toff with his worn-out shoes and dilapidated suit. I feel cheated – not because I’m being cheated, but because they’re giving me the abbreviated version of the con.

  The toff says, “Here’s my twenty quid,” and wedges the note between my finger and the card. “You’ve done a great job. Tell you what, I’m going to let you in on it.”

  “No bloody way,” the dealer says, faking comic-book shock.

  “He’s my mate. Helped me out, he did. I’m letting him in.”

  “That’s only fair,” the spectators say, slowly and in unison.

  “What’s your name, son?” asks the toff.

  “Jude,” I reply, for a lark. “I’m named after the saint.”

  Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, but they don’t get the joke because they’re stupid. And Protestant.

  “Well, your mate Jude is looking out for you today,” says the toff. “Now come on, be
fore this bastard shuts up shop. Plant your twenty quid down on that card and we’ll both be winners.”

  There is silence and calm all around me. These men have made their pitch. They have tried their pitiful best, and now their collective belly sucks itself in as they wait for a decision.

  The whole thing is depressing beyond words. It’s a sad wreck of a swindle. Twenty pounds divided by five men – what’s the point? I could easily afford to let them have it. I make fifty pounds a day for dozing around in an office, and these blokes have given me nothing but fun in the five minutes I’ve known them. For pure entertainment value, it’s almost a bargain, but I’m torn. Back in Ireland, a few short months ago, twenty pounds meant long hours stuck in the drawing office above the steelworks.

  A memory takes me, and I’m back in the developing room, soaking up the stench from the ammonia box. I hear the low groan from the print machine and the near-constant sound of hammer on iron. I hear the punch of the drill presses, the buzz of the welders and the snap of the guillotine.

  At five minutes to one, every day, two hundred men lump together in the yard, waiting for the big, blue gates to open. The timekeeper stands with his eyes fixed on the clock. Every day the same men, hidden in the dowdy safety of the crowd, call out the same things.

  “C’mon for fuck’s sake Freddy, open the gate. Open the gate and let us get the dinner. Come on, Freddy. Fuck you Freddy. Freddy you’re a bastard. You are a cunt, Freddy.”