Evil Relations (7 page)

The taxi carries me away from her, towards a new life. Our moments in the parlour and the attic are finished; young as I am, I realise this as the hot stink of stale beer fills the air inside the car.

Sometimes the big people really fuck things up for the little ones they’re supposed to love.

* * *

The taxi drove through the quiet, unlit streets for what seemed like an eternity to David. After a couple of left turns it pulled into a cul-de-sac and stopped outside the last house on the stunted street. Although David didn’t know it then, this was to be his home until he was 17.

Number 13 Wiles Street was only two miles from the house he had just left in Ardwick, but it felt like another country; Gorton’s streets were tightly huddled, a red warren zigzagging off the main thoroughfare of Hyde Road, punctuated every few spaces by weedy crofts, small corner shops whose windows were grey with industrial dirt, and four-square pubs almost never known by their given names. Wiles Street was a dog-leg from Gorton Lane, where the reedy Gothic spire of the monastery pierced the skyline towards the city, and the rumbling brick-and-iron sprawl of the foundry lay to the right, with the shabby Steelworks Tavern between. Nearby was the Plaza cinema, known by local kids as ‘the Bug Hut’, for obvious reasons.

David’s father bundled him out of the taxi. If another skeleton was rattling against the cupboard door, causing the family to panic, it was never allowed to break free: ‘No one ever came clean about why I was taken away that night,’ David affirms. ‘I was kept off school for a couple of weeks and wasn’t allowed to see Mum during that time. The older family members closed ranks on what happened and I never asked about it, either fearing the answer or expecting to be fobbed off. To this very day, I hate that house in Gorton; I hate every rotten brick in it with a passion.’ He shakes his head slowly, remembering: ‘I can still picture myself walking into it for the very first time . . .’

* * *

The front door opens straight into the sitting room. No welcoming hallway, no cosy parlour, just a cramped room that remains dark even with the bare fly-bulb switched on. We go through to the kitchen – a rotten, dirty room with a pot sink, short drainage board and an old table and chair near a cast-iron fire that doesn’t look as if it’s been cleared since the war.

The stairs in the kitchen lead up to two doors, two bedrooms. Dad flicks the light on in one and I gaze round fearfully at a small table covered in matchboxes and crumpled cigarette packets, and an unmade, sagging double bed. An old overcoat has been thrown on top of the coarse woollen blankets for extra warmth. Dad shows me the upstairs toilet: a foul-smelling, brown-stained bucket beneath the bed. I climb under the blankets as he gestures for me to do, trying to find a spot on the pillow that isn’t greasy with Brylcreem. He leaves the light on but goes out of the room and, to my surprise, I hear the door next to mine open, then two voices talking quietly. I can’t make out whether the second voice is male or female. When they fall silent, I listen to two sets of footsteps going down the wooden stairs, accompanied by the unmistakeable clipping patter of a dog.

I can’t sleep. I pass the hours looking straight upwards, where a low-voltage bulb dangles at the end of its cord alongside a curling brown fly-catcher encrusted with dozens of tiny black corpses. The ceiling is a sheet of peeling whitewash whose damp patches form shapes I don’t like: a bearded man, an old lady with a crooked back, a menacing elephant I wouldn’t want to meet in Belle Vue.

And when a pale glimmer of daylight unfurls across the rooftops I hear, for the first time, the sound of the monster.

Quietly at first, clattering in the distance, its noise getting closer by the second. Then it roars beneath a bridge and thunders past the house, rattling windows like bones, billowing thick, acrid smoke from its metal bowels. The locomotive passes less than 50 feet from the house, leaving its clinging breath behind, clouding the windows, fighting to enter and fill every room with the strong smell of burning coke.

The locomotive, I soon discover, is born out of the huge steel belly of the Beyer Peacock factory, 500 yards from Wiles Street. The building and its offspring form the thudding, filthy heart of Gorton.

I fall asleep just after daybreak. When I awake, I look for Mum and realise with a slow, creeping dread that she’s not there. For the first time, I’m sharing a bed with somebody else and there’s a wide chasm between us. I know this man, I belong to him, but Dad is a prickly stranger compared to the love I associate with Mum. I want to feel safe and comforted; I want not only Mum but the Duchess too – I want to go
home
. I’m so frightened I can’t speak. I don’t know where I am. Where has my world gone? I can’t get out what’s building up inside me like the steam that screams from the passing locomotives:
I want Mum.

I keep the scream inside and let the locomotives rend the air instead.

I sit at the table in the kitchen, hands away from the sticky plastic oilcloth. I’m still wearing my pyjamas and slippers, as I will for the next few days – Dad doesn’t bother to pick up my clothes for a while. I’m not on my own; an old lady is making me tea and toast. She owns the house and the first time I catch a glimpse of her outside my bedroom, I’m terrified. On the side of her head is a huge purple cyst. It isn’t her fault, of course, and I’m used to deformities in my small world – Mum’s hump that comes to a point between her shoulders and her wedding-ring finger that’s no more than half a stump – but Elizabeth Jones has a cyst the size of a cricket ball on her forehead. Even apart from that, she’s small and ugly, and in my young eyes she’s the Wicked Witch of the West. It was her voice I’d heard at the top of the stairs and her dog, Minnie, scrabbling on the wooden steps. I like animals but not Minnie, who sits by the fire on her fat haunches, baring her teeth every time I move. Miss Jones tries to be kind, but I’m too repelled by her appearance to respond. I don’t see much of her, though: she has a cleaning job through the day and in the evenings she drinks herself to oblivion at the Steelie.

Dad keeps me under a sort of benevolent ‘house arrest’ for a fortnight, hoping I’ll acclimatise to the place, and him. We while away the hours playing noughts and crosses and snakes and ladders; he saves his clean shirts for the pub in the evening and sits opposite me in his vest and trousers, fingers mottled with nicotine. I feel slightly better when he collects my clothes from Mum: they’re at the bottom of my bed one morning, bagged up, neatly folded and freshly ironed. Among them is Geoffrey, a white plastic giraffe. In Aked Street, he used to listen to all my woes without saying anything in return. I’m ridiculously pleased to find my oddball friend tucked among the tops, trousers, underpants and socks.

When Dad and Miss Jones are out, I stand on the doorstep gazing up and down the street, wondering which direction might carry me home. At one end of the cul-de-sac is a wall of railway sleepers and at the other, a corner shop. Sometimes, two children come out of the house next door but one to mine. The boy is fairly thick-set and wears National Health glasses with lenses like milk bottle bottoms. The girl is slightly older than me, but only by a couple of years; she has dark hair and a very sweet face. She smiles shyly at me. Her mother appears at the door to watch them leave for school. I hang back, embarrassed but curious.

Slowly, I get into a routine, helped by returning to school. For a couple of weeks, Dad travels with me on the 109 bus to Ross Place and at the end of the school day he’s there again, waiting for me among the cluster of mothers. I’m still not allowed to see Mum, but he’s making supreme efforts to create something real for us. Wiles Street is a tiny house with tiny, dirty rooms; sunshine never enters it, but Dad proudly produces a television, a few new chairs and a clean single bed for me. I’m especially pleased with the bed because now I can sleep alone without his chronic flatulence and beery breath as a nightcap. He gets the place fumigated, too. Until then, I sleep on a pillow streaked with red squish marks and slithers from the infestation, and at night I crush bugs beneath my fingernails against the wall. Then the fumigator arrives, sealing up the house and bringing in a cumbersome contraption to smoke ’em out. The insects return later, though.

A few days after the fumigator’s visit, I sit in the living room surrounded by rolls of wallpaper and tins of paint. Dad grins at me, rolls up his sleeves and gets stuck in, and over the weekend a major transformation is achieved. He works into the night, stripping walls and mixing paint, a cigarette hanging permanently from his lip as he toils. His vest turns grey with sweat and is splattered with paint. Miss Jones cleans up in his wake, bagging and binning the debris. Every now and then Dad rests for a while in his new chair, a well-earned bottle of beer in his hand, satisfaction etched in the gritty furrows of his forehead. Together, we watch our new television and the house breathes again, becoming lighter and smelling fresher. Dad is happy and rejuvenated, the hideous but kindly Miss Jones becomes house proud at last and we all feel different about ourselves. Only bad-tempered Minnie seems not to notice the phenomenal change that one person has achieved.

The stink of the locomotives returns gradually, together with the rolling smoke. There’s no plumbed-in hot water either, just a cold tap drizzling into the pot sink. Bath night means boiling water in a pan on the stove and having a scrub-down at the sink. But it’s still better than when I first arrived.

Dad trusts me now to travel to and from school on my own. In the mornings I leave early with Miss Jones and we walk to a house in nearby Benster Street. I push my hands deep into my pockets, clutching my bus fare and a few extra pennies for spends. I’m happy to make this short journey every weekday morning. Miss Jones opens a door into a backyard and my heart lifts as she leaves me to walk past the outside loo and in through the kitchen door, where a voice is calling me to ‘Come right in.’

I enter a world of noisy, happy-go-lucky family bedlam. I come here every day to be ‘minded’ before catching the bus to school and it’s always the same. Mrs Cummings stands in her apron, swathed in steam that makes her hair stick to her forehead, busily ironing the creases out of a mountain of newly laundered school clothes. Around her, children of all sizes and ages – proper ragamuffins – dart about in vests, knickers, underpants and socks, reaching for clothes to dress themselves, grooming each other like monkeys, arguing, laughing and teasing. One of the older kids holds a long toasting fork in front of the open coal fire, burning a slice of bread, then passes it to a sibling who splatters it with margarine before pushing it towards the waiting hungry mouth of a toddler.

I’m mesmerised by this family; I feel like Oliver Twist in Fagin’s chaotic lair and I love it. There are twelve kids – seven boys and five girls – under the roof of a house exactly like the one I’ve just left in Wiles Street, but
this
hovel teems with happiness, even though Mr Cummings has tuberculosis and doesn’t work. His wife has an occasional job at a local pie factory. The couple, together with their yelling, laughing brood, offer me safety and care – and morning toast that’s never tasted better.

After school each day I exit the gates, turn left and stand for a while on the corner of Aked Street, daring myself to go ‘home’. But when I eventually find the courage to run down the street and hammer on the door, no one answers. I change my tactics: gulping down my dinner, I sneak past the ‘gate lady’ in the schoolyard and rattle the letterbox of number 39, then stand to one side so that I can’t be seen through the glass door panels. Mum receives me sternly and we go through to the kitchen. She sits opposite me and the firm facade softens as she struggles to explain the situation: I can’t come ‘home’, I’m not a naughty boy but there are new rules to follow. Nonetheless I manage to extract a promise from her that she’ll talk to Dad and ‘sort something out’.

We return to school, where she speaks quietly to the lady on gate duty. I’m never able to sneak out again, but a few days later I emerge to find Mum standing in her usual spot, alone and apart from the other much younger mums. She’s kept her promise as I knew she would, and I’m allowed to go home to Aked Street every day after school for an hour or two, provided Mum puts me on the bus to Gorton at teatime. I travel back with a bag of goodies and my usual comic books; the order for them is never cancelled. My daily existence has become a lot less dark – I’ve won visiting rights.

But I don’t know why I’ve got to be back at Wiles Street for teatime. The house is always locked and empty until late. I sink down on the doorstep, day after day, whatever the weather, reading my comics and munching the last of my treats, to await the inebriated Miss Jones.

Often, the pretty girl from next door but one joins me, keeping me company even in the rain. Her mother sends her out to me with cups of tea and jam butties. We sit shoulder to shoulder, talking quietly. In time, we graduate to holding hands and dare a sweet, secret kiss. She is pure innocence and her name is Pauline Reade.

* * *

David’s last year at Ross Place Primary was his most troubled. At home in Wiles Street, he and his father argued regularly, and the fights quickly became physical. ‘Dad had never laid a finger on me before,’ David explains with a frown, ‘but it was a different story once we were living together. There were many, many fights and I always came off worst – I was only eight when he took me away from Mum, remember. But as I got older and learned how to handle myself, the fights started to be less weighed in his favour. When I was about ten or eleven, I got up one morning and couldn’t find a clean shirt to put on, and moaned at Dad. He grabbed a dog-chain and hit me with it, right across my back. I retaliated and punched him in the face. I regret it now because he was my dad, when all’s said and done, but I never lost another fight with him after that.’

There were other battles, more evenly balanced, at Ross Place. ‘I was rebelling by then and saw myself as the cock of the school,’ David laughs. ‘Us illegitimates were
always
cock of the school. I suppose we felt we had something to prove. I stopped concentrating in class and started smoking when I was nine. Mum would give me a bag of sweets to take to school and often she’d hand me a two-shilling piece, which was a lot of money in those days. I’d spend it on fags in the school tuck shop, where they used to split packets of cigarettes – you’d buy only what you needed or could afford. It sounds shocking now, smoking from such a young age, but kids then were brought up in a smoker’s world.
Everybody
smoked.’