Out of the station, through the automatic doors which Darren attempts to open even as they are sliding apart so he bellows at them. Through a taxi rank and out into the drizzle, Alastair remaining several paces behind the floundering Darren, up past the side of the Empire Theatre and on to Lord Nelson Street where the thin drizzle drifts and Darren now turns to face Alastair who can see further up the street the sign for Ma Egerton’s pub and its hanging baskets. And Robbo and Freddy jogging across the road on the diagonal, each holding half of a pool cue in arms bent back over their heads.
—Urry the fuck up, will yeh, Alastair … am needin a fuckin –
Without breaking pace Robbo or it might be Freddy one of them anyway with full swing whacks the cue-half into the back of Darren’s skull. Alastair hears the THUNK bounce off brick and concrete and Darren collapses in an instant as if shot, all animation removed in less than a second. He is given a couple more whacks and then rolled over so that the rucksack can be accessed.
—Nice one, lads. Good effort.
Only a feeling in Alastair of embarkation. Not of any revenge or redemption but only a notion of a beginning. A step towards a place that may glow and may satisfy.
The two boys are peering into the sack. Blood matts Darren’s hair and deltas the pavement feathering in the greasy rain and Alastair looks down at the crumpled figure and feels no pang, no pain.
—Fuckin ell, Robbo. Fuck me stiff, lar. The divvy was right. We’re fuckin brewstered.
—Ton an a half each, lads, that’s what we sorted. Eeyar, giz the sack.
Alastair’s hand held out palm up expectant above the fallen Darren. Cold and oily rain spotting his open hand and the tip of his nose as it drip-drips off the peak of his cap. The tip of his nose all that extrudes beyond that peak until the fat end of a pool cue drives that nose inwards towards the face and on its way down slams the descending skull two, three times, blows cushioned by the cloth of the cap but still with impact sufficient to bring on blackout.
The two of them now on the wet pavement perpendicular: this T. They are unconscious for a few minutes and in that time, on this wet side street, only three people pass: one, rushing through the rain for a taxi, steps over them, believing them dressed as they are to be victims of each other, of a fight among themselves; another, a visitor to the city on business taking a short cut to Lime Street to catch his train home, believes them to be victims of drink and/or drugs and ignores them accordingly; and the third, a quasi-feral dipso on his way to the cheap London Road pubs doesn’t care why they are unconscious in the gutter and rifles their accessible pockets but flees when the bigger of the two begins to groan and writhe. This is, of course, Darren, who awakes to rage. And then pain. Alastair awakes to pain too and a mouth that is screaming in his face, all he can see is this wet purple hole lined with worn teeth and his initial waking wish is to be unconscious again, insensible to all this, the rain, the pain, the roaring mouth, oblivious to what is here now and what must surely lie ahead. And behind.
OTHERS
VISITOR
DEAR GOD, HOW I hate and detest having to come to this terrible, terrible city. I wouldn’t bother, if it wasn’t for the firm having an office here too, I mean I’d just stay in Manchester if I could but I can’t, so … Seedy, that’s the word for this place; seedy. And run-down? Oh yes undoubtedly but that’s no excuse; I mean my work takes me to a lot of cities up and down the country, a lot of rough and run-down cities like parts of London or Newcastle or Bristol, even sections of Manchester itself, but none of them are like this place and the difference is in the people, the general populace; forget what you’ve heard about the Scouse humour, the salt-of-the-earth people, they’re extensions of their city, big and loud and vulgar and full of dark dirty little alleyways … That’s the thing, y’see; they exult in their own seediness and shabbiness, they seem to celebrate the fact that everything here is down-at-heel. There’s no shame, no sense of embarrassment; it’s like Wales or Scotland – you go into those provinces and the prevailing attitude is ‘we’re-all-screwed-up-and-we-don’t-care’. They should do something with themselves, try to better themselves, find some way of escaping the mess around them, instead of just … But oh no; I mean look at these two here, for example, here in the gutter, too drunk or drugged or both to even stand, lying across each other on the wet pavement … absolutely no shame. Although, knowing these people, it’s probably a trap; I’ll step over them and they’ll reach up and grab my legs and pull me down and beat me up and take my wallet and briefcase … that’s what this is, it’s a trap …
No it isn’t; these two idiots are too out of it to even move. Totally dead to the world, they are. And at the corner of the street I see a shaking old alcoholic eyeing them up, no doubt waiting for the coast to clear so he can go and rifle their pockets, get some change for his next bottle of Buckfast or whatever. I tell you; the problem here is the attitude. It’s not loss of industry or negligible governmental investment or trickle-down Thatcherite economics or any of the other favoured and convenient scapegoats, no, the problem entirely is the attitude … the fecklessness. Spinelessness. That’s why there’s so much theft in this city, because its inhabitants are all so idle and unmotivated; they seem to believe that they deserve something for nothing, that they’re owed something. It’s an attitude I personally can’t stand. It’s pathetic. It’s risible. No wonder the city’s falling down. Oh yes there’s investment - Urban Splash and Concert Square and all that – but it won’t last. And it won’t last because it won’t be appreciated. Mark my words, I’ve seen it happen before, many times. And City of Culture! Do they really expect to win? Might as well nominate Gaza. Jennifer and I did laugh when we read the shortlist. Can you imagine it?
Sshperny oddzzsh, larr? Fordy capla khultcha, likh.
The big clock in Lime Street tells me I’m ten minutes early for the Piccadilly train although it’s probably broken like everything else in this city but thank God I’ve not missed it; it’s another hour ’til the next one and an extra unnecessary minute in this city would surely kill me. Soon be back in Didders with Jennifer and the girls and I’ll be away from this godforsaken pit of a place for another week. Seven days. Seven blissful days at home.
I buy an Americano from Coffee Republic and am accosted by another of this place’s denizens, his filthy palm held out expectantly, asking me for spare change in that grating, whining accent. I just ignore him, turn my back on him (which he flings abuse at; no surprise there), and go and find a seat on the waiting train. A window seat, so I can watch the city as it recedes, as I leave it. And good bloody riddance too. At least until next week.
Forty minutes between this place and my home and it might as well be a continent. Might as well be a world. I hate having to come here each week. I hate it.
ALKY
Aw fuckin junkies man … lowest of the low thee ar … scumbags, toerags … callin me bad n useless cos I liker bevvy juster fuckin jakey all that shite but fuck that man it’s them friggin junkies bringin this city down … won’t friggin catch me lyin inner gutter inner fuckin rain like no lie … no way man … fuckin cunts yerrah bastards could av yez fuckin all callin me useless an a, anner fuckin, me, lar, me, what the fuckinnn …
Smart cunt inner suit an a briefy over deer, wait for that get to pass lar … knob’ed don’t fuckin reelise like I was im once, like im … adder suit n house n car n missis an it can all fall apart in one week, man, one friggin week’s all’s it took an deer’s me, fuckin nowt … job goes, house goes, car goes, friggin missis goes, goes off with some fuckin I.T. consultant from fuckin Knotty Ash … it’s the terror, man, the terror … iss bastard in iz suit, fuckin kite on im all stuck-up fuckin gobshite like tell ee thinks he’s fuckin it but it can fall all apart easy for im as it did for fuckin me, no lie … knows NOWT, that cunt, NOWT … g’wahn, getcher fuckin train ome yer twat an I hope yiz never avter go through what I av … woulden wish it on me werst enemy, man, which is now that fuckin I.T. consultant from f
uckin Diddyland … cunt … wish leprosy on that get or fuckin Aids but not what I’ve fuckin got now lar which is sweet fuckin all …
Over the road, me, straight into deer fuckin pockets, no messin round. Too good an opportunity to pass, knowmean? But softarse, me; as if junkies as out of it as these two are gunner av any fuckin odds left … juster few pence like, birrer shrapnel, fuck all but lint anner big bastard, he starts movin an groanin an wakin up an I think about wellyin im one in thee ed, knock im fuckin sparko again like but nah fuck that, man, av got some bleedin self-respect still, oh aye … oh yeh … these cunts think I avn’t but I know I fuckin well av … might be down inner friggin gutter like but some of us av still got what counts … birrer friggin self-respect, man … birrer friggin dignity like, knowmean? … that’s all that matters won’t welly this no-mark baghead cunt’s suffrin imself what would be the … the …
An anyways am not all tabbed out yet inner Globe. So that’s me, that’s me first step. Globe. No messin round. Gerrouter this fuckin rain n all.
DRIZZLE
This is not the time of cumulus, colossal drifting cauliflowers, or of cirrus like high white slashes sharply across the bright blue, sunlight permitted through their thinness. It is the time of stratus, so much so that the sky appears one cloud only, simply a grey and murky ceiling spread from horizon to horizon over the city entire from the brown lappings of the Dee and the Mersey and out to the vast thick splat of the Celtic Sea as featureless and monochrome as the sky itself so that the city could be wedged in an envelope or between two mirrors reflecting each other’s emptinesses. Tarmac-coloured ceiling very low, so low indeed that it grounds planes at Speke, covers the stranded and marooned and frustrated with no shadow and no difference just this single spread and lightless tarpaulin turning all similar, robbed of depth.
The precipitation is orographic, that decocted in air forced to rise when landform barriers lie across the paths of winds in this case the bulwarks of Eryri unseeable from this citified coastal plain yet sensed somehow as a creeping mass rising flinging shadow and felt certainly in their climactic effects as here in this forced air ascent and the resulting rainfall of drops with diameter smaller than 0.02 of an inch and descending very close together this thin drizzle defined. Slowly upwards the air moves, launched from the vast ramps of the nearby mountains carrying with it the condensed cloud droplets which have little time to grow before they become too heavy for the weak air currents to support and they fall softly, appearing rather to drift and float than fall, making a kind of moist air, a hanging sail of damp. Clean they begin but gather grease as they descend drifting through smog and thus glutinous some gather into larger drops and one of these forms in the thermals above the city’s main rail terminus made sticky it is by the viscous vapours from kitchen and exhaust and the many rising methanes of the hurrying inhabitants with scalp-stuck hair and it drifts slower than the billion others, its trajectory earthwards straightening as it gathers mass until above a side street adjacent to the station it begins to fall vertical, passing soot-fluffed chimneys and rain-run skylights and gleaming slates and gutterings choked with weed and birdshit and then it passes perching pigeons with heads wing-pitted and then windows then window boxes and the limp growths in them and then a lintel and the door beneath and then it passes below the cap-peak of a laid-low man his face turned up towards the leaking sky and this droplet lands and bursts with a tiny ‘pop’ in the tear duct of his left eye, the one remaining unswollen and undiscoloured by the blunt-instrument trauma recently visited on this face. It bursts clammy and humid and the eye flickers blinking open unlike its twin which cannot, damaged as it is, cannot twitch open and regard the high unbothered sky, the huge and complete shrug uncoloured, unconcerned. This one eye gazes out and up at the world then attempts to slide shut again as if too great is the exertion to take this in. As if the mere act of blinking is too much here, in this small water from far away, as hissingly insubstantial as all human plan.
A voice:
—YOU FUCKING CUNT, ALASTAIR! FUCKIN FUCKIN FUCKIN –
TOMMY: HIS CHILDHOOD
See the squat boy in the corner of the school playground. Thickset, fat some would say. See his black pumps burst at the toe joint to reveal his grubby grey socks that gather around his ankles beneath his grazed and grass-stained knees. See the much smaller boy below him cowering against the chain-link fence that separates the playground from the bomb site, the nettle-clogged heaps of rubble that were a storage depot for ack-ack guns in the not-too-distant-war. See the fence shake as the smaller boy is shoved repeatedly back against it. See the bigger boy ask yet again for money, see the smaller boy shake his weepy, snotty face, see the fence clatter and shudder yet again. Hear the sound of fist on face and then a high-pitched wailing.
It is the year of Alice Cooper and ‘School’s Out’. It is the year of The Godfather.
See Miss Wilson running across the playground as fast as her white leather zip-up stack-heeled knee boots will allow.
—Thomas Maguire! Stop that right now! You big bully!
Nimbly for a fat child Thomas skips away from the smaller boy now curled foetally and whimpering on the ground with a bleeding nose.
—Pick on someone your own size, you bully!
Thomas flicking the V with both hands, laughing, capering.
—Fuck off yeh ahl witch.
Gasp. —What did you just say?
—You heard. I said fuck off yeh ahl cow.
—Right, that’s it, it’s Mr Powell’s office for you, my lad. Stay there.
See the chase; the wobble and teeter of the beehive hairdo. The laughing and the jeering and then the intervention of Mr Lyons the geography/PE teacher who tweaks Thomas by the ear and leads him tiptoe and full of grimaces across the playground. Many big eyes and gawps surrounding, a few hidden sneers also.
—Ow geroff me al get me dad on youse! An me brother!
—I don’t give two shits, son. Bring them up here. How d’yeh think yer dad’ll feel when he finds out his son’s been abusing women? Think he’ll be proud, do yeh?
—He’ll stove yer stupid head in!
—You’re only making it worse for yourself.
—Ow! Ow! Fuckin gerroff! Yeh big pig!
* * *
Mr Powell has long hairs coming out of his nose and a funny growth on his eyelid like a tiny brain. His breath pongs.
—Extortion! At your age! What in blazes possessed you, lad?
Thomas a wee bit tearful now on the seat too large for him swings his feet above the floor. There are big men around him, proper grown-ups, Lyons and Powell, and he feels very small despite his relative size. Around people of his own age he feels very, very big but here in this office he appears as puny to himself as those he daily torments.
—I mean what do you think this is? Chicago? Think you’re a little Al Capone, do you, is that what this is all about? Is it?
Thomas sniffs. —Don’t know.
—Don’t know what?
—Don’t know nothing.
—Don’t know nothing, sir.
Sniffsniff.
Mr Lyons chips in: —And it’s by far from the first time this has happened, Mr Powell. Seems to me that young Maguire here fancies himself as a bit of a gangster, don’t you, lad, ey? Just like your brother did. He was just the same, your Joseph.
And now Tommy nods because this is exactly what he fancies himself as or rather and anathema to Lyons and Powell and their like what he for certain knows he already is. He’s heard his dad and his uncles talking; he’s sat with his mam and his aunties and drunk lemonade and eaten crisps as the grown-up men discussed things in the foggy kitchen. He’s snuck under-aged into the flicks and watched huge-eyed the films, those men in hats and suits with guns. He gets free Fabs and Screwballs from the man in the Mr Whippy van and he has always wondered why. There is never any comeuppance from the parents and elder siblings of the local boys and girls he routinely beats up and he has always wondered why and on the s
ole occasion when there was redress, a public face-slapping and forced apology in the precinct, he always wondered why this same big-brother avenger approached him the following week with one arm in plaster and offered him a long and earnest apology. So what can he do now but just nod and say:
—Yeh.
—I beg your pardon?
—Oh is that right? Mr Lyons says with a sneer. —Got a little Godfather here, have we? A right little Don Corleone. What do we do with gangsters, Mr Powell?
—Nowt cos yer both gunner be fuckin dead!
Tommy pushes a pile of papers and books over on the desk and bolts across the office for the door. A hand clamps his shoulder.
—Hold him there, Mr Lyons! I’m contacting his mother!
The clomp and scrape of Dr Scholl clogs sound down the corridor. Tommy’s heart thuds. The sound gets louder then the office door bursts open and his mother comes in and glances once at him all fire-eyed then turns to the two teachers.
—Youse! Either of youse ever touches my child again any of my kids and I’ll take yer fuckin eyes out! Yiz hear me?
Tommy loves the looks on their stupid faces. Loves the sudden shock, the swift widening of mouths and eyes. And he loves his mother.
—Mrs Maguire, I can assure you we –
—I’ll give yiz fuckin assure! Right across yer fuckin gobs either of youse ever lay a finger on my fuckin kids again! I mean it! Don’t believe me an just fuckin dare it! Dare it well!
She stands and stares panting. Lyons and Powell look from her to each other and then back at her again.
—Friggin manhandlin little kids … should be ashamed of yerselves yer should … fuckin disgrace yerrah … call yerselves teachers?
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