Heroic

by Phil Earle

  It became a weird dance: Larry’s drunken stumblings pushing us round the floor like the last smooch at a long wedding party. I wouldn’t let her go, not if it wasn’t what she wanted, so I turned my head, and in the most sympathetic voice I could dredge up for him said:

  ‘Give her a minute, Larry, will you? She can hardly stand up here.’

  ‘Then she should be with me.’ His breath was indescribable, the grim aftermath of years of getting tanked. It didn’t smell of any one drink, just a rotting blend of anything he could get his hands on. It wasn’t just his breath: the stink clung to his clothes, his body; every pore leaked its foulness in a way that made it virtually impossible to breathe around him. Hitch flashed into my head. A horrid premonition.

  It had obviously reached Cam too as I felt her face press closer to my chest.

  ‘I don’t want him.’ Her words reached me through my t-shirt, loud enough for him to hear too. He didn’t take it well.

  ‘You don’t want me? I’m your dad!’

  A simple sentence, but enough to flick a switch in Cam’s head. She lifted her face, still clinging to me as she spoke.

  ‘You haven’t been my dad for years. You haven’t a clue what it even means.’

  Larry’s face creased in pain, but it was a pantomime expression that fooled no one. ‘They’ve killed my boy,’ he wailed. ‘My boy, your brother, but you’d rather cling to him?’

  He pushed me, almost sending us flying into Gill. I felt my heart leap and my blood simmer.

  ‘He’s shown me more love than you ever have!’

  ‘Oh, I bet he has, but if you want to blame anyone for Tommo, maybe you should blame his family. If it wasn’t for his brother signing up, our Tomm would never even have thought about it.’

  They were the first of his words to make sense, as there was no doubt Tommo had always looked up to Jammy: wanted nothing more than to step in his big shadow, the shadow I wanted to escape. What sort of brother was I compared to Tomm?

  The room felt like it was getting smaller, the floor no longer level under my feet. I had the feeling it was now Cam holding me up instead, except she wasn’t even doing that, as she launched herself at Larry, arms wild, nails glinting.

  ‘Don’t you do that!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t you dare blame anyone but yourself. The only reason Tomm signed up, the only reason he was desperate to go somewhere even worse than here was YOU! You drove him to it, you made him leave. You might not have pulled the trigger, but it was you that killed him.’ And with a ferocity that terrified me, she drove him to the floor, swarming all over him, pouring back on to him every minute of fear that he’d inflicted on her.

  I hoped he was as scared as she’d been her whole life.

  It was surreal and terrifying how quickly heartbreak had turned into anger, and as much as I’d dreamed of Larry getting what he deserved, this wasn’t the time for it. Gill was trying to get between them, but didn’t stand a chance. Even her grief-stricken screams weren’t enough, so I yelled for the lads, who, with a monumental effort, pulled Larry away to the settee, his right cheek wearing the marks of Cam’s rage.

  He gave in quicker than she did. It took the best part of a minute for my voice to reach Cam’s brain, for her to realize she didn’t have to fight any more. Tommo was gone, and killing her dad wouldn’t re-start her brother’s heart, despite how good it might feel.

  Her rage finally gave way, replaced again by tears and questions, why asked in a dozen different ways. I did what I could, smoothed her hair, kissed her face, yet inside all I had were questions of my own.

  How had this happened? They were so close to coming home.

  Where was Jamm now? How was he coping?

  I thought about Mum and how she would react, and I thought about us all, and how things were never going to be the same again.

  Sonny

  It didn’t make sense on this side of the street. I was only twenty metres from the lamp post where I’d watched the others come home, but I might as well have been in a different town, a different world.

  I didn’t belong on this side, had no business being here, or that’s how my head saw it. The reality was different. I had to be here, wanted to be here for Cam, and for Tommo of course, but a lot of my head wasn’t here at all.

  It was full of Jamm. We’d had no word from him since the news hit. We’d bombarded him with texts, calls, emails. I’d have sent a carrier pigeon if I thought it would work.

  The silence hit Mum ferociously. Her mobile was always in view, on the table, in her palm. I caught her calling it from the landline to make sure it was working. I tried to calm her, remind her he was due home in days, but the only time she looked even vaguely at ease was when she was preparing for the parade, making sure I did it right. In a weird way that helped me too, stopped my head from coming up with the grimmest of reasons for the lack of a call.

  She started by demanding I buy a suit. It had to be a suit. There was no way I was welcoming Tommo home in jeans and a t-shirt, and this meant trawling the charity shops until I found something that wasn’t a) ancient and b) terrible.

  Charity shops weren’t new to me; Mum had had us trawling them since we could walk. Our wardrobes were eighty per cent cast-offs, so I should’ve been used to it. I wasn’t, though. No matter how many years passed, it still felt like I was wearing dead man’s trousers.

  I had a strategy for using charity shops now. Whenever I went in one I always had a full carrier bag with me. That way, if anyone from the estate spotted me, I could say I was here to donate. It’s only embarrassing if you’re caught spending in one.

  The suit was OK, though. Not black … the nearest I could find was dark grey. I knew it was the one for me when I tried it on and found a twenty pound note in the pocket. That was the kind of charity I could deal with.

  Mum looked almost impressed when I brought it home, standing me on a chair as she pinned the trousers and cuffs. Made me realize how much she probably would’ve liked a girl, someone to dress up and make fancy. She was never going to get that from me.

  By the time I left the flat for the parade I was wobbling. Couldn’t look at the statue on the estate for fear of losing it. As I walked, a couple of girls from Pickard House wolf-whistled, and as I caught a glance of myself I didn’t feel like me. Didn’t look like me either. On any other day Cam might have been impressed. I mean, this was the kind of kit you went to your prom in. That’s what kids my age were doing, not burying one of their best mates.

  It felt like we’d been stood on the roadside forever. People had been kind. There was one guy, part Hell’s Angel, part squaddie, who met us by the town hall and guided us to our spot. He walked with a stick, but never grimaced at the impact of his leg. I had no idea if the damage was war-related. From the look of him, he’d been in a ruck or two, but the way he spoke, the care he showed Cam and Gill, it didn’t matter. He had ‘GOOD’ running right the way through him.

  So we stood in front of the whole town. Cam, Gill, Larry, Den, Wiggy, Mum and me. I’d called Hitch, course I had, but got no joy. The phone kicked to answerphone every time. He didn’t want to be reached and, wherever he was, I doubted he was reading the paper. It felt like we’d lost two of us when one was bad enough.

  The crowd gathered and swelled ten deep. Passions never ran higher than when one of our own was brought home. People talked us down, the residents of the Ghost, but it felt like every one of us was there now, when it mattered.

  The only problem was that we were on show, the centre point for everyone else’s grief. Once that hearse stopped in front of us, every single pair of eyes would be staring in our direction, and I doubted any of us were ready for that.

  I looked at Larry, wavering on the kerb edge, dressed in a suit worse-fitting and older than mine. I could see the shape of the hip flask through his inside pocket, the weight of it pulling his jacket clumsily to the left. His face was clammy; every minute without a drink was torture, and I knew that was all he could think of, not his s
on. His hands fidgeted at his side, occasionally grappling for a hand to hold. His wife and daughter stood either side of him, yet neither wanted to acknowledge that he was even there.

  The bell chimed as it always did, the crowd falling silent, necks craning for a better view. I couldn’t look. Closed my eyes and wished harder than I had in my life that this wasn’t happening. But once I opened them again, there they were, the hearses, rolling so slowly that the wheels hardly appeared to turn. Cam leaned against me, tears falling, her face scrunched up so tightly in pain that it made me wince too. I had to get her through this, keep her on her feet when all she wanted to do was lie in the gutter and wail.

  People threw flowers like they always did, collecting untidily on the roof, others falling under the wheels, petals collecting in the tread of the tyres.

  Finally, after what felt like an age, the first hearse pulled up in front of us and stopped, its paintwork gleaming so brightly we could see our tears in it.

  It took every ounce of strength I had to look in the window, to see the garlands in his honour.

  Tommo

  Brother

  One in red, one in amber and black to match Tommo’s team.

  We’d talked about the wreath a lot, wanted one that read True Original but couldn’t afford it, the florist charged by the letter. ‘Brother’ still worked, summed up what he was to us as well as to Cam.

  It wasn’t the wreaths that killed me, though, it was the coffin, wrapped in the Union Jack. Tomm had never been the tallest, but as I stared at the box I couldn’t believe it was big enough to hold him and everything he meant to us. There was no space for the laughs, the banter or the scraps he’d fought. To fit all that in they would have needed a bus, not a hearse.

  We knew what we had to do once the hearse arrived, but as Cam stepped forward with me to guide her, I felt every muscle in her body tremble. She stumbled into the bodywork, forehead pressing against the window as she reached to drop her flowers on to the roof. There were so many things I wanted to scratch from my memory about this day, but none of them got close to the noise she made as she stepped back. Neither a sob or a wail: I’d never heard pain like it, could only hope I never would again.

  In turn we stepped forward, and paid our respects. It wasn’t until I placed my own flowers that I saw the blood on my palm, a thorn dug deep into the skin where I’d pressed without even knowing. I felt guilty for noticing: it was hardly going to kill me.

  Finally, with each of us back on the kerb, I heard the hum of the hearse again, another wave of emotion crashing over me.

  It could have been tiredness, relief or guilt, but whatever it was, something weird happened as I took one final look at the coffin. For a split second, through the windows of the hearse, I saw Jammy.

  He was dressed in his kit, beret sat proudly, face set like stone. There was no mistaking it was him. I stood transfixed as the car edged by, not daring to blink until I clocked him properly. But as the last of the coffin disappeared, so did he. He wasn’t there, just another veteran, decked out in his medals, a maroon beret slicked across his head.

  It was like one of those comedy moments when you want to rub your eyes and look again, but there was no point. It wasn’t real, but my tears were. They fell so hard I didn’t think they would ever stop. There was no faking this kind of pain.

  Sonny

  I wasn’t sure which was worse, grieving in private or in public, but by the time Tommo’s funeral was over, some six hours after the parade, I knew I was done in.

  Any emotion that we’d hidden from the rest of the town flowed once we were in the crematorium. There weren’t many of us invited to watch Tomm’s body slide behind the curtains, but I could guarantee none of us would ever forget it.

  Mum sat next to me, not a crease on her, but I knew inside she was in absolute chaos, not believing her own son was still alive until she laid eyes on him herself. For both of our sakes I hoped that was soon.

  We headed back to Cam’s afterwards, to swap stories and eat dry, curling sandwiches. Well, I say ‘we’, but predictably Larry went missing between the ceremony and the flat, and although we all knew that he’d disappeared to one of his watering holes, none of us commented on it. Let him stay there for as long as he wanted. No one would miss him.

  It was dark by the time I left Cam’s, my head swimming with the memories of Tommo that we’d dredged up over the afternoon. I was the last to leave. Wiggs had struggled all day, not knowing where to put himself when there were no jokes to be made, so him and Den had disappeared about six-ish. Mum had gone earlier, couldn’t afford to miss two shifts in a day. She engulfed me with a hug as she left, like she thought she might never see me again, and as the door closed behind her I felt an overwhelming wave of guilt. It was a day for big emotions.

  There was nothing complicated about Cam’s day, though, just the most overpowering grief. The tears stopped occasionally, replaced by the briefest of smiles at the thought of Tommo, but they were never far away, so it was no surprise that by eight o’clock she looked like death. Her mum spotted it too, palming one of her sleeping pills with a demand that Cam took it. She didn’t need any persuading.

  I sat with her when she’d got into bed, stroking her forehead until she dropped off, sleep taking back every line on her face. I’d never felt so relieved to see anyone pass out. I knew I could’ve stayed, slept on the floor so as not to disturb her, but somehow I needed my own bed. I felt like I should be back when Mum got in from work, in case she needed me. So, as silently as I could, I let myself out and walked across the Ghost, ignoring the usual banter around me as I headed towards the statue.

  Flowers had been left for Tommo, notes, even teddies, which seemed a bit weird. The sentiment was right, though: it wasn’t like he knew all these people, but maybe they were just grateful for what he’d done, his sacrifice. Either that or they were just relieved it wasn’t their son who had died.

  I stopped and read a few messages, felt myself getting upset again, got angry, cursed Jamm for not being in touch, then turned for home.

  Where was he? It wouldn’t take much for him to hammer out a text. It wasn’t even like he had to send it to me; Mum would do fine. She just needed to know he was OK. We both did.

  All the way home, my head filled with scenarios, the places he could be, each of them disturbing me more and more. By the time I reached our landing I was practically begging him to be OK, promising I’d sort myself out, treat Mum right, whatever it took to have him back and safe, even if it was only for two weeks R&R.

  He’d make contact tomorrow, I told myself as I reached for my keys.

  I was still telling myself that as I searched my pockets for the fourth time, realizing that I’d left them in Cam’s room. With no chance of waking her and no desire to anyway, I was left with three options: sit and wait for Mum, crash at Den’s or Wiggy’s, or revert to type and use my brains to get in.

  It was the easiest decision of the day, made easier when I explained to Old Man Gash next door that I had to borrow his balcony for a minute. The old fool never usually gave me the time of day, but word of what had happened to Tommo had changed things. I was suddenly decent by association, so after a quick explanation and a gummy smile from him, he waved me through to the back of his flat.

  The gap between balconies was centimetres, so getting between them wasn’t a problem. I didn’t look down as I scooted over, though, didn’t need to be reminded of my run-in with the Cudas. All I hoped was that I’d been the last one through the sliding doors, as I never bothered locking them. What was the point? Anyone with the motivation to climb fifteen storeys of breeze-block and barbed wire deserved a twenty-inch telly. They could have the kettle too. It wasn’t like it worked properly.

  I felt my heart leap as the door slid open, the first joyful moment of the day. It was warm inside, the central heating from a hundred flats around us toasting ours nicely.

  I would’ve padded straight to bed had I not smelt smoke. I checked the ki
tchen, but the cooker rings were switched off. Anyway, it wasn’t a burning kind of smell; someone was having a cigarette.

  I thought of Wiggy instantly. He had a set of keys in case stuff kicked off round his, but he’d been battered by Mum once too often to light up in here.

  Next I thought someone must have broken in, but not even the biggest smackhead on the estate would have the balls to smoke while he was on the rob. I felt paranoid; little wonder given the day we’d all had. Picking up the rolling pin from the knife drawer, I tiptoed towards our bedroom, the smell getting stronger. I didn’t let my pace drop – if someone was in there, they’d made a massive mistake. With a deep breath I raised my knife arm to shoulder height and piled through the door.

  What happened next was a blur. It was dark, but I definitely saw a cig burning. It was attached to a figure that jumped me from behind the door.

  I was handy in a scrap, but couldn’t get near the speed of this guy. He was so quick I didn’t see the arc of his arm as his fist flashed towards me.

  I did see one thing, though, before the lights went out. I saw his face, but it wasn’t one I was expecting. It didn’t belong to a bigger chancer than me, or even to a Ghost estate skaghead.

  It belonged to my brother. Jammy was home.

  Sonny

  I came round to water. Not a reviving cup pressed gently to my lips, but splashes flicked irritably by Jammy’s fingers.

  A roar of delight left me as I stumbled dizzily to my feet, arms outstretched. But our hug was sad and one-sided; his arms levered me roughly away.

  ‘What were you doing, creeping round in the dark?’ he spat. ‘I thought you were turning the place over. And what’s going on with your hair?’

  I ignored the last question, didn’t know how to tackle that one.

  ‘I was locked out. Old Man Gash let me in by the balcony, cos I left the sliding door unlocked.’ I was rambling, couldn’t believe he was here in front of me. ‘Anyway, where the hell have you been? Mum’s been going mental.’