The Likes of Us

by Stan Barstow

  ‘He’s comin’. Can you hear him whistlin’? We’ll give the bastard summat to whistle about!’

  They crouched on both sides of the path, hearing the scuff of a shoe-sole on a stone, then seeing Jackson’s figure silhouetted against the lightening sky as he topped the rise.

  ‘Remember,’ Vince whispered. ‘Don’t talk.’

  They closed with him as he came off the open common and into the shadow of the trees. Vince had visualised the attack as being quick, concerted and silent. As it was, there was a moment’s hesitation as they became visible to Jackson, as though no one knew who was to lead the assault.

  Jackson stopped and stepped back. ‘Now then, what’s this?’

  ‘You’ll find out in a minute, Jackson!’ Finch said, and Bob said quickly, but too late, ‘Shurrup, fool!’

  Jackson came for them, his fists at the ready. His first blow swung little Finch off his feet and sent him crashing helplessly into the bushes. Vince yelped as the toe of Jackson’s shoe cracked against his shin. Then Jackson went down with Sam and Bob hanging on to him and Vince held back, rubbing his calf and waiting to see where he could help to best effect. He watched as the three bodies rolled about on the ground and heard the grunts and curses that came from them. Then the sound of someone crashing through the dry bracken diverted his attention and the next moment he saw Finch break clear of the wood and scurry up the path over the hillock. He opened his mouth to shout for Finch, then checked himself, muttering under his breath, ‘The miserable little shit. The yellow little bleeder.’

  Two of those struggling on the ground came to their feet, leaving the third bent almost double, holding his belly and moaning. Vince thought it was Sam. It wasn’t going right. Jackson was too much even for the four of them. With Finch gone and Sam out of the fight it was time he looked to himself. But it was already too late. Jackson broke free of Bob’s hug, felled him with a blow, and turned to Vince.

  ‘Now you,’ Jackson said. His voice was thick, as though he was swallowing blood. He was breathing heavily too and he was unsteady on his feet. He had taken a lot of punishment from Sam and Bob but he was far from finished.

  Vince cursed Finch again as he backed away. He knew that once Jackson closed with him he was done for. Before he hardly knew it the knife was open in his hand.

  ‘Hold it, Jackson, or you’ll get some o’ this.’ He flourished the weapon in an attempt at bravado and the blade glinted dully in the moonlight filtering down through the trees.

  Jackson stopped for a second, then came on more slowly, his arms wide apart, his body poised ready to jump at the lunge of the knife. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool. Put that thing away before you hurt somebody.’

  There was no reason left in Vince, only a sobbing rage and hatred for Jackson, who would beat him unmercifully if he once got in close enough. It had all gone wrong and it was Jackson’s fault. Hatred seemed to swim in a hot wave before his eyes. He felt then the trunk of a tree behind him and knew he could retreat no farther without partly turning his back on Jackson. A trickle of warm liquid ran down the inside of his leg and he thought with stupid anger that he should have stopped when Finch had. His voice raised itself, shrill with fear and the knowledge that he was afraid.

  ‘It’ll be you ’at’ll get hurt, Jackson. I’ll carve the bloody tripes out of you, you dirty stinkin’ bastard, if you come any nearer.’

  Jackson came warily and steadily on, his eyes fixed on the blade of the knife.

  ‘I’ve warned you. Keep back!’

  There was a movement from behind Jackson. In the same second he sprang, Bob jumped him from the rear and Vince drove forward and upward with the knife, the force of the blow taking his fist hard against Jackson’s belly. They all went down together in a heap.

  Vince and Bob extricated themselves and got up together. They looked down at Jackson. There was blood on the fingers of Vince’s right hand. He moved them and felt its sticky warmth. In a kind of daze he half lifted his hand to look.

  ‘That’s settled him,’ Bob was saying. ‘Now let’s get out of here.’ A second later he saw the knife. ‘Christ, what you doin’ with that?’

  ‘I told him,’ Vince said stupidly. ‘I warned him he’d get it.’ He touched Jackson’s leg with the toe of his shoe. ‘Jackson! Come on, now.’

  ‘You’ve finished him,’ Bob said. There was raw panic in his voice. ‘Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ!’

  Sam came up behind them, still rubbing his belly. ‘God, me guts... What we hangin’ about here for?’

  ‘He’s knifed him,’ Bob said. ‘The bloody fool’s finished him.’

  ‘Don’t talk daft,’ Vince said. ‘He’s okay. He’s just reckonin’. We only roughed him up a bit, didn’t we? That’s all we said we’d do, in’t it? Nobody said owt about killing the stupid bastard, did they?’

  ‘Jesus,’ Sam said. ‘Oh, Christ Jesus. I’m not in this.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Bob said. ‘I didn’t do it. They can’t touch me for it.’

  He turned and blundered to the path, breaking into a run over the rise.

  ‘Jackson!’ Vince said. ‘Give over reckonin’, you lousy sod.’ He pushed at Jackson with his foot. ‘Jackson!’

  He heard Sam say something from behind him but did not take in the words. He dropped the knife and went down on his knees beside Jackson.

  ‘Jackson. Come on. Jackson, wake up. I know you’re actin’. You can’t kid me. C’mon you lousy dog, c’mon. Stop reckonin’!’

  His hand came in contact with the mess of blood on the front of Jackson’s shirt and he recoiled and stood up, staring in horror at the dark smear across his palm and fingers. It was as though this finally released in him a tremendous force of uncontrollable fury and hatred. He began to kick Jackson’s body in a frenzy, assaulting it with savage blows of his feet and swearing in a torrent of words. And when, at last, he stopped, exhausted, his body suddenly sagging from the hips, his arms hanging limp at his sides, he raised his head and looked round. The moon rose from behind a ragged edge of cloud and the pale light fell on his upturned face. It was quiet. He was alone.

  A SEASON WITH EROS

  A Season with Eros

  Ruffo had waited a long time, kept at bay through his two-year courtship of that girl whose body turned men’s heads in the street by the discipline imposed by her cold-eyed watchful mother. A certain amount of boy-girl contact was expected, even approved of: holding hands while watching television in her front room; kisses and tight straining cuddles when the parents were absent; but any attempt to get closer to Maureen than the clutching of her resilient flesh through her clothes was met with an automatic and persistent response: ‘No, I can’t.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Me mam says I’ve to wait till I get married.’ Beyond this Ruffo found it impossible to go. At best she was stupid, childlike in her reiteration of ‘Me mam says…’; at worst Ruffo wondered whether in her he had found that most sexually maddening of combinations – a girl whose body yelled promise but whose mind and emotions had no real interest in the subject at all. Exasperated, he drew away from her until his continual casual excuses for not seeing her made his neglect obvious and she, ingenuous in her directness, faced him with it.

  ‘I don’t see much point.’

  ‘Oh…What’s made you change your mind?’

  ‘Your mother. She runs your life for you.’

  ‘She’s only trying to do her best for me. Anyway, if that’s all you want me for...’

  ‘If that’s all I want you for I’ve been seeing you a long time for bugger-all, haven’t I?’ Ruffo said. ‘If you want the truth, I can’t stand it any more.’

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t think it’s right when you’re not married.’

  ‘You mean your mam doesn’t.’

  ‘Well, I’ve always taken notice of what she says.’

  ‘I’m not tal
king about going the whole hog,’ Ruffo said.

  ‘But one thing leads to another, doesn’t it?’

  Ruffo might have looked at the mother and discerned, more than the person who was keeping him from what he wanted, the woman the daughter could become. But he saw only, behind the canteen buildings where they had met, the creature of his long-repressed desire, the pout of her lips, the rise and fall of her breasts under the thin nylon overall, and he knew that he must have her.

  ‘We’d better get married, then.’

  ‘Oh!’ She took it with apparent surprise as though she’d been prepared to go on as they were indefinitely. ‘Well, we’d better get engaged first.’

  ‘I don’t want any long engagements dragging on. We’ve been seeing each other for two years now.’

  ‘But we’ve nowhere to live. And no stuff collected.’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere.’

  ‘I suppose me mam ’ud let us live at our house for a while.’

  ‘No,’ Ruffo said. ‘We want to be on our own. I’ll find somewhere.’

  He began scanning the property columns of the evening newspaper and asking round among the men in the engineering shop. In the meantime, Maureen broke the news to her mother, who said that Ruffo ought to make his intentions public by buying her a ring. The thirty pounds that this cost Ruffo he parted with grudgingly, feeling that it was money he could ill-afford. Houses were expensive and whatever they found they would need all the cash they could scrape together to put in it even the necessary minimum of furniture. He worked all the overtime offered him, cut out his weekly drinking night with his mates, and stopped taking Maureen anywhere it cost money. He didn’t smoke, so there was no saving to be made there. Thinking that he should have a clear idea of their combined resources, he asked Maureen about her savings, only to find to his dismay that was she still giving her wages to her mother, who returned her a weekly sum of pocket money which she spent on make-up and small luxuries.

  ‘Me mam always said I could start paying me own way when I was twenty-one,’ Maureen said. ‘And, of course, that’s still a couple of months off.’

  ‘So you’re coming to me empty handed.’

  ‘I’ve a few sheets an’ pillow-cases ’at me mam’s giving me.’

  ‘That’s bloody generous of her.’

  ‘An’ of course they’ll be paying for the wedding.’ Ruffo thought with some regret of the passing of the dowry system. ‘What we need is brass,’ he said. ‘Hard cash, to pay the deposit on a house and furnish it.’

  ‘They’re building some lovely ones up Lime Lane,’ she said.

  ‘You must be out of your mind. They’re a four-and-a-half thousand quid touch. That means at least five hundred deposit.’

  Which Ruffo hadn’t got. And as he went on looking and making enquiries he came to see the nature of the trap he had laid for himself. Marriage to Maureen had seemed an obvious way of getting what he wanted; but marriage was not, it seemed, a state easily achieved. And now he was worse off than before: still deprived, but robbed by that engagement ring of the freedom to come and go which he had held in reserve and thought of as a bargaining counter.

  Then he struck lucky, hearing from a workmate about a house occupied by an old lady who had just been taken into hospital with what looked like a fatal illness.

  ‘You want to get round there. Put your word in afore anybody else does.’

  ‘I’ll bet there’s five hundred after it already.’

  ‘You never know. You’ll lose nowt by trying.’

  And gain nothing if I don’t, Ruffo thought.

  He went straight to the owner, a wholesale grocer who received him in the hall of his grand new bungalow.

  ‘A house? I don’t know that there’s one coming vacant.’

  Ruffo saw the delicacy of the situation and chose his words accordingly. ‘An old lady lived there. I heard she’d died in hospital.’

  ‘It’s news to me if she’s dead.’ The man eyed him shrewdly. ‘You mean you want to be first in line if she does pop off? By God, you’re quick off the mark, some of you. You don’t let the breath leave the corpse.’

  ‘I expect there’s plenty before me, anyway,’ Ruffo said. ‘You don’t stand much chance of dropping across a house to rent nowadays.’

  ‘Why don’t you buy one?’

  ‘Because I haven’t got the money. If I could find a place in the meantime it’d give me a chance to save up. Everybody’s got to start somewhere.’

  ‘Otherwise it’s in-laws, is that it?’

  Ruffo shook his head. ‘I’m not having that.’

  ‘No, happen you’re wise there. What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Billy Roughsedge.’

  ‘Did they call your father Walter?’

  ‘Aye, that’s right.’

  ‘I knew him. Played bowls with him many a time in days gone by. Dead now, though, isn’t he?’

  ‘Aye, me mother as well. I live with me married sister.’

  ‘Well, like I say, I don’t know that there’s anything coming vacant, but I’ll keep you in mind. Give us your address.’

  Ruffo thought little more of it; but a fortnight later he got a note through the post to say that the house was now empty and if he still wanted it would he go to see the agents.

  It stood in a terrace on a back street; two rooms down, two up; no hot water, and a lavatory – shared with another family – in the long communal yard. Everything in that area was probably due for demolition during the next few years, Ruffo thought. But programmes like that had a way of being put back and before then he and Maureen would have got out; or if they hadn’t the Corporation would be compelled to offer them alternative accommodation, along with everyone else. It was a start, a place to live, on their own; nothing to shout about but no worse than either of them had known before at some time in their lives. And it could be made cosy enough.

  They fixed a date for the wedding and Ruffo went through the house stripping paint and wallpaper and redecorating from top to bottom. Before that, with the help of a friend, he pulled out the black old range and replaced it with a tiled fireplace. He also fitted over the corner sink an electric water-heater which he’d bought second-hand through the small ads in the evening paper. For their furniture they went to sale rooms. Maureen would have liked more new pieces, but Ruffo showed her the balance in his Post Office Bank book and made it clear that he did not intend to start out with a load of hire-purchase debts.

  Marriage suited Ruffo. He had lived for too long in someone else’s house; and though the people involved were his sister and his brother-in-law there had been occasional small points of friction. Their children were growing up, needing more space, and he’d had for some time the feeling that he was beginning to get in the way. Now he had his own place and a wife: a home where he could do as he liked, and as much sex as he wanted with the girl he’d always wanted it with. Any lingering fears that she might not find pleasure in it were quickly dispelled. With the wedding over, and a ring on her finger, she became willing and compliant, following wherever he led with no more protest than an occasional indulgent ‘Ruffo! Whatever will you think of next?’

  For Ruffo, in possession of her at last, had thrown himself from the cliff of frustrated deprivation into a protracted sexual binge. Impossible for him to have too much of her, he liked her to go without pants and bra in the house so that at any moment he could catch at her, one hand into her blouse to knead at a breast, the other under her skirt where, to her coy whinnies of delight, his probing fingers would draw the juices of her instant response. His fondling of her like this in the early evening, sometimes by the sink as she washed-up after their meal, would often lead to his taking her there and then, she standing, back arched, legs apart and braced, panting to the electric contact of his flesh. On other evenings, with the f
ire built high and the television picture flickering silently in the corner, she would dress for him in items of exotic underwear and lingerie which he bought through the post to accentuate or semi-conceal the objects of his never-ending desire: briefs whose flimsy transparency held like a dark stain the tufty triangle of her crotch; brassieres cut low to lift those already splendidly jutting breasts and thrust them up and out, rampant-nippled, like great pale tropical fruits. Nor did any of this tire them for later when, in bed together, his earlier spending gave him a restraint which could carry them through an hour of intertwined limbs, bringing her time after time until it seemed to her that each night was one long moan of love.

  He was confident, in command his ego strutted and he carried himself with an assurance which bordered on the insolent. It was not lost on other women: Ruffo felt their awareness. One who served behind the counter of the canteen watched him as he stood in line for his meal. When he got to the head of the queue she put a double portion of cabbage on his plate.

  ‘There y’are. That’ll put some lead in your pencil.’

  ‘I’ve got plenty, thanks.’

  ‘You could run short, the way you’re going on.’

  Ruffo’s head came up. ‘What d’you mean by that?’

  ‘Nay, lad, I’m only kidding you. If you’ve any to spare you can bring it round to my house. My old man’s forgotten what it’s all about.’

  Ruffo grinned. ‘Sorry. It’s all spoken for.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ the woman said with mock regret, ‘you can but try.’

  Ruffo challenged Maureen that evening.

  ‘What have you been saying to them women in the canteen?’

  ‘Oh, you know how they kid about things like that, Ruffo. They got on at me and somehow or other it came out that we do it every day. Sometimes more. They’re only jealous.’