CRACKHOUSE
Built as part of a terrace out of Shropshire brick and Blaenau slate shortly after the First World War and largely by veterans of that conflict, the first tenants of number 18 were the Jones family, stonemason patriarch employed on the construction of the Anglican cathedral, with wife and small child and two further children born under that roof. In 1929 Mr Jones fell eighty feet to his death from scaffolding and Mrs Jones took her three now fatherless children deeper into Cheshire, to be closer to her parents. The house lay empty for three months and was then occupied by a single old lady whose son had made much money in the armaments industry and had purchased the house specifically for her to age and die in which she duly did, shortly before another global horror sent flame and steel shrieking from the sky to obliterate surrounding houses, seeking to destroy the ack-ack guns which had been stationed in the streets roundabout, one of whose crew lived in the house for much of the war and, like the house itself, survived it with only minor damage; an eye here, a window there. After hostilities ended the local council bought up many of the houses in the locality and number 18 was rented out to a convalescent nurse from North Wales who had entered the city initially to be in service but was now employed as a carer for soldiers mutilated in both body and mind. Kate was her name, and her heavy drinking led to a neglect of her civic duties and she was soon forced to vacate number 18 after long periods of rent-avoidance and she was replaced by a Jamaican family who had been shipped to the port on a sister-ship of the Windrush at the invitation of the Attlee government with the promise of paid work in the restructuring of bomb-damaged British cities. The head of the family was employed as a labourer on the reconstruction of the docks centred on the site of the Malarkand explosion and his wife worked in service for a family on Faulkner Street whose forefathers had made their giant fortune through using people of her skin colour as a mere barterable commodity. Relentless hard work allowed this couple to save enough money to move out to a more desirable property on the northern outskirts of the city and they were replaced by another Jamaican family whose stay in the house was brief, swiftly driven out as they were by the small but viciously vocal group of locals who were offended by their melanin. From 1970 to 1972 a Chinese family occupied the house, newly come from Shanghai, but they drifted down dockwards where for several centuries their compatriots have gathered and still do. Three Irishmen then moved in, two of them employed on the underground rail system then being extended and the third remaining in or close to the house to attend to the various outlaw Republicans who had been invited to use it as sanctuary; he kept them company, offered support, maintained a watchful eye at the window. These men moved out when the exigencies of their secret calling demanded that they should, to break any possible trail, and were replaced by a docker recently made redundant who lived alone and who, in 1981, watched in terror and awe from the overgrown back garden as Toxteth burned, the flames so high that they spat above the roofs of the Coronation Buildings below the only just completed cathedral. Disappointment and depression and a form of free-floating fear led this man to a reclusive existence in number 18 and in the late eighties he became the second person to die in the house in a static storm of horded and rotting items of a thousand sorts. He lay undiscovered for three weeks. The clean-up operation took days and after it the house was thought unlettable so it lay empty apart from the various junkies and drifters who used it for shelter until the doors and windows were replaced by thick boards and it was bought for a quarter of its original worth by a man called Herbert who had accrued much money from dealing in illegal drugs and owned several such places scattered around the city and its environs and he is there still and is at this moment attempting to subdue the rage and hysteria that has followed an horrific facial wounding in the house’s main living area. Shurrup, he is shouting. You’ll attract the fucking bizzies. The wounded man has been driven to the hospital and his attacker has long fled into the city and there is bloodspray on the walls and TV screen and it will remain on the walls turning blacker then greyer for two years until Herbie will be shot dead in an altercation along Granby Street and the ownership of the property will revert to the council, Herbie of course dying intestate, and the council will sell it and others like it to a multimillionaire from Ireland who will renovate them all extensively and impressively and will make more millions selling them to those who will relocate or return to the city in 2008, drawn there by the City of Culture celebrations and the global attention they will receive. A family will be made in number 18, two families in fact, the second of which will be forced to flee during the Peace Riots of 2011 when the house and its immediate neighbours will be firebombed and will be so damaged as to warrant demolition and they will be flattened and will be no more.
FATHER DONAGHY
Lord give me the strength. Give me the power to find the words to make solace for these lost souls. Lord You have chosen me as a mouthpiece for You down here on earth in this desolate city and fallen so far we. Help me, grant me the strength and the wisdom to calm these terrified souls and allay their fears and give them in turn the strength the resilience to to to. To cope. To survive down here among all this. To find some peaceful place which I know is attainable tho chain of loss and canyon of grief this is and always has been.
What can I do? Feeble and fallen, tell me what can I do?
Lord grant me the. Give me the. Bestow upon or let me find –
Mrs Taylor again. She came to confession this morning and to what did she confess? To nothing but fear and sadness and concern for her children and no sins they. Only maybe in the doubt but which of us is pure enough is strong enough to never feel such doubt, to never hear or heed that persuasive voice? Faith, that’s all I can tell her; keep faith in your heart. His ways perplex us poor as we are in our faculties to approach an understanding of His plan and it may seem like every waking day is a trial of our faith but accept that trial we must. Faith itself is irrational and strange and seemingly foolish too and that adds to the difficulty of its sustenance. But keep it we must for it is all we may have.
But He shreds innocence, she told me. Innocence apparently offends Him for He shatters it at every turn and why is He so eager to augment that which we turn to Him in desperation to oppose? These were not her words but were her meaning. Why is His guidance not so immediate, so tangible, why are His ways discrete from us so that life’s struggle itself becomes further, driven as we are to fight to find any suggestion of strength to offer a possible way to face up to each daily obstacle? These were not her words but were her meaning, and whenever she addressed me as ‘Father’ her accent rendered it as ‘farther’, and it is apt, that, suggestive as it is of the ways in which these people hereabouts push things, the world, their lives, push themselves away from firm ground to the lip of a chasm incessantly. And this is a plan we must trust, I told her. To question is healthy spiritually but to expect an immediate answer is hubristic and the core of it all is faith and trust. Then she told me that she cannot trust in a scheme that apparently seeks to destroy innocence and all it brings her is more suffering. And I could not answer her except again to repeat the word ‘faith’ even though that word could barely leave my lips such platitude it had become.
What can I do, here? What do You expect me to do? What do You think I can do? Why choose a man to represent You here on the soil who lacks entirely the skills to do so? Send me guidance. The reward of understanding for this endurance is surely not too much to ask.
And she spoke about her son again, she always does, the bad one or rather the baddest one; Darren. I remember him when he was a boy, at the masses. On several occasions I had need to speak to him alone and I could see it in him even then, how he was coming apart even then. The mischief in him and oh sure there is mischief in all healthy children but in him I could see the potential of it to curdle and sour and it has. It has. It has become malign in him. The yearning in his heart has broken a hinge and offered ingress to something that should have been resisted and
sure where should he have gone? Where could he have sought instruction in how to resist? Alone here we are. I am approached for guidance by these souls adrift and I just don’t know what to say or what to do I am rudderless myself I am lost too.
And now to visit St Mary’s primary school, where last week the chapel was desecrated. Foul words painted on the walls and the floors urinated on and I must calm the children and the teachers too and attempt to explain to them why such a thing happened. It’s been cleaned up now, but I saw the devastation and felt the shock of recognition of a prayer so pure, so articulate, so full of longing. The expression of a roaring soul dissatisfied and disappointed and set aimless on this world and of course our hearts will remain restless until they rest in You. And a broken and contrite heart, O Lord, You will not despise. There will be forty children looking to me to make some sense of the destruction and what shall I tell them? I need Your strength, here. This burden is great. Mrs Taylor is right now for all I know at the edge of Victoria Dock contemplating the dark and oily waters in which so many of Your children have died cold and alone and terrified. She needs strength. I need strength. Until it arrives from You I will find it in whiskey. Just a glass or two before I visit the school because I am too weak without it, too weak in the basic which is true of Your creation entirely. Your favoured creation. Us screaming billions. And suddenly as the whiskey burns me within I realise that You too have Your Hell and it is Your love for us. And suddenly I feel strong.
O God, I am sorry for having offended You. I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pain of Hell. But most of all because I have offended You, O God, who are all good and deserving of all my love. I resolve with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, do penance and amend my life. Amen.
And now: outside. A collar Your armour. Outside, to explain to children the darkness of Your plan and what can children know of this? What can any of us know?
JAMIE ‘GOZZY’ SQUIRES
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Tommy, you prick. Darren, you little fuckin gobshite tied to a chair in a puddle of yer own piss an yer dim fuckin dial uglier than it normally is an that’s sayin somethin. An Joey, you, Joseph fuckin Ferdia Maguire; you soft fuckin no-mark shite-for-brains fuckin has-been. This is thee end of youse, oh aye, this is thee end of youse. Don’t wanner punch fists with me, Joey, no? Well fuck yiz then. All’s I was tryna do was say tara. Fuck yiz.
Go off an meet them Irish lads, he says. Two Coggies name of Stevie an Ray. They’re waitin for me in a Transit van down the Pier Head an in the backer the van should be four AKs in good nick, two Brocock ME 38s (shite if yer ask me; them airgun conversions always are), an a Mach 10. Okey-doke says I, an off I friggin goes. To meet a coupla Irish mushers, oh aye, but the ones I’m gunner be meetin ain’t gunner av no shamrock tats on the backs of ther hands, oh fuck no.
I take out me moby an tap in a number. Ulster accent answers:
—Aye, Jamie. How about ye?
—All ready an waitin, Willie. Do yer stuff, lar.
—Ther on the dock?
—Yeh.
—Sound, so. See ye down thur.
I close me phone. Can’t help laughin. This is me, Jamie Squires, about to set imself up in biz an I’ve got evrythin I fuckin well need; pieces enough to arm a small fuckin army an a pair of loyal wacko Billyboys to fuckin shoot em. Fuckin sound as. This time next year it’ll be: The Maguires? Remember them? Wharrever happened to them two fuckin arsewipes? An Willy Hunter n all an that soft get Stega an all the fuckin others, all of em.
I nip into Ma Boyle’s for a Guinness, give Willie an his twin Wally time to do the job. Am calm enough even to pick at a pinter prawns with me stout, an halfway through it me moby goes off. It’s Willie an all’s he says is:
—Ye all set thur, Jamie? Glug-glug time.
Sound. I neck me ale, leave the pub. I can see the Transit just over the road, two fellers wearing Rangers shirts in the cab. An there’ll be two blerts wearin Celtic shirts tied up in the back an tonight them same green-an-white hoops are gunner be feedin the fuckin fishes in the slime at the bottom of Vicky Dock.
Oh yeh.
The van beeps. Willie or it could be Wally waves over at me an I wave back an cross the road. Cross the road to a better fuckin life, aye, a better fuckin world. No more Tommy, no more Joey, just Jamie Squires without the ‘Gozzy’. An Willie n Wally as well, of course.
So first stop: Victoria Dock.
Second stop: To see Fat Tommy. His fuckin number’s up an that’s that.
Money. Guns. Power. The world is fuckin mine, lar.
Could yeh go a sausage supper, Bobby Sands?
Could yeh go a sausage supper, Bobby Sands?
Could yeh go a sausage supper, yeh filthy Fenian fucker,
Could yeh go a sausage supper, Bobby Sands?
YES! OH FUCKIN YES!!!
Helicopter. Dead low helicopter. Germans! But dead fuckin low.
A voice in a megaphone. A big loud voice. What the fuck is
DARREN: HIS STANLEY KNIFE
noun: Brit. trademark: a utility knife with a short, strong replaceable blade (Concise OED).
The basic model, designed and developed in the late nineteenth century by the Stanley Rule and Level Company in New Britain, Connecticut, and widely cloned since then, is fifteen centimetres long with a ridged slider on the top by whose operation a triangular section of blade can be made to protrude from one end and lock in place. This blade is extremely sharp and double-ended, trapezoid in shape and reversible. The handle contains storage space for spare blades and consists of two die-cast sections of steel (or, increasingly, plastic) screwed together. The blade can be locked in both stored and deployed positions. The artefact displays a considerable finesse of design; it possesses perfect weight and comfortable grip. Nor is there need of a screwdriver to open the handle; a small coin, or a sturdy fingernail, will suffice.
Darren uses the Stanley 10-079 5-3/8” Retractable Utility Knife (catalogue description). He stole it from the carpenter for whom he mated when he left school and undertook one of his very rare occasions of socially acceptable work; on the third day the carpenter called him a lazy twat so Darren stole his knife and walked off the job. It is grey of colour, once gloss, now matt, and it is sleek like a shark or a missile. The attractiveness and efficacy of its design is not lost on him. Darren first brandished it as a threat in the late 1980s when he had just turned twenty and he accompanied Joey on a debt-collecting job over the Mersey in Birkenhead. Darren showed the indebtor, a Don Johnson fancier with the sleeves rolled up on his suit jacket and an orange tan and blond highlights in his hair, the knife while Joey showed him photographs of what such a knife could do; the freshly ribboned face of a man held up by a grinning Tommy and Sully. Did you kill him? the man asked. Joey replied: Bits of him I did, yeh. The man paid up. And the knife first tasted blood shortly after that event during a fracas in Leeds city centre after a Liverpool–Leeds United game. Darren does not recall many of the details only that, as his victim lay on the road holding his cheek together, it was not Darren but the knife itself that seemed to say: You don’t know how to deal with this, do yeh? I’ve scarred you for life. What the fuck are yeh gunner do now?
And then the brief moment of fame on 11 September 2001. Box-cutters, the hijackers used. People in Britain asked: What is a box-cutter? Deployed on that day for cutting anything but boxes it is the transatlantic name for Darren’s companion used as if in strange denial of its origins, as if in deliberate neglect of the man who gave it its name. And maybe that is as it should be concomitant as it is with the adopting culture that loves to fight and wound but which baulks generally at murder. That, like the knife itself in the apposite hands, parades the ability to cause horrific injuries and hideous scarring with little or no possibility of death.
So Darren and his blade flee from number 18, from another opened face. How easy it is to cause chaos; how little physical expenditure it takes
to become the most important person in a crowd. Darren used to tally his victims with a notch cut into the handle of his knife, but he has long since grown out of that affectation. Although, when he watches Gangs of New York for the second time (on video, fast-forwarding through all the boring bits), it is a practice he will think of taking up again.
Darren and his knife, they hum through the city.
YARDIE GUY
Me knew im gunna be baaaaaad news d’moment im come through do’. No, befo’; d’moment me hurd im voice on intercom, seen. D’moment im carl me neerms. Only man carl me dem neerms be either fuller barls or loathin for im life an eager t’lose it, mon. Knahmean?
But dat bad bwoy no way gunna mash my mellowness, mon. D’ganj be doin im good, good work seen an me be atinkin about ow well a nice lil rock go down right now at diss mo-ment but fo’ de time heer bein me happy jessa sit right heer, mon, see all de boys an girls awatchin theer fillum, that maaaaad fillum wid all-a dem flyin people tink dey be so cooool in theer shades, mon. Jessa fillum, my brothas, my sistas. Jessa fillum. Not be real life, mon, seen.
Dat man, dat baaaad bwoy, im dat my bwoy Herbie carl ‘Darren’; now, im is de real life, oho mon, yes. Dis be d’real world, wid dat man in it. Im an is bleerd, me meanin, an ow quick im be to use dat ting, mon. Bwoy jess ax im be quiet so’s ee can enjoy is fillum dat’s arl im do an nex ting im on flo’. Straight, nex ting im arl bleedin on de flo’ an badbwoy Darren doin is run. Me mellowness done fucked heer mon, knahmean? Done be pure fucked, seen. No room fo’ dat bleedin in me mellowness.
An dis Darren, im her in me feerce starin at me gold. Im gotta look on im kite dat might be carld a sneer, knowomsayin? Baaaad teeth on d’boy. Baaaaaaaad breath out of im.
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