Crusaders (17 page)

On weekends Stevie knocked around glum Washington and its centrepiece, a commercial high-rise called the Galleries, all new shops and businesses under one roof. He and his mob – moody
Brian Shackleton, ginger Glen Howey, titchy Richey Gates – were of the same mind that the Galleries were shit. And yet people came in droves, sad shuffling zombies. And there, too, for all their disdain, were Stevie and the lads, lined up like hollyhocks under the escalators, watching folk go by – older folk in the main, often squashed and unshapely, lumpen and odd-looking. Brian, who claimed to know a few things, called them ‘in-breeders’.

‘Cos they shag their own, man, their sisters and that.’

‘Whey, they
never
, man.’

‘I’m
telling
yuhs.’

Jesus no
, Stevie decreed. That was not possible.

If the lads were chronically bored then they were lured – as if by the chlorine pong – to the swimming baths on the edge of a vast bleak parkland named for the Princess Royal. They would sit in the bleachers and watch to see if any lush lasses were in the water that day. There was one sleek miss who sometimes would rise out of the froth in a navy-blue one-piece.
Nowt wrang-shaped about her
, thought Stevie. He fancied he had strong and manly features where his pals’ faces were feral or bashed-in. The boys called him ‘Sharky’ in honour of his glaring overbite, and he liked that. (Brian, annoyingly, insisted on ‘Shack’ for himself.) But looking at that girl Stevie suddenly felt himself a crude job of work,
watermarked
second-rate.

Mary had always feared Stevie would get in with the wrong sort. Bobby was blithe: ‘Let him away.’ Their variance on this
matter
could turn surprisingly bitter – ‘Is that all you’re good for?’ – and such daylight fights conducted within Stevie’s earshot began to sound more like the night-fights, those where Bobby had Tartan beer onboard and Stevie sat on the top of the stairs but inched his way down, the better to hear. In the midst of such rows his dad always rammed Rod Stewart onto the record deck, the
Atlantic Crossing
album, and after a few bars of ‘Three Times a Loser’ – the time it took to cross their living room – came the silence of Mary wrenching the needle off the vinyl. Such was the bad odour about the house, Stevie was hardly surprised when Bobby’s great strife began to unfold, in the bleak winter months of ’72 and ’73.

It seemed that his mam and his granddad were correct in their dour forecasts. The Clan Company had been abruptly set on its uppers. Bobby was muttering that it was ‘out of their hands’ – all the fault of the miners, off work all winter. The government
didn’t
care. ‘They’d bail out bloody Leyland, mind, bloody
Rolls-Royce
.’ Then there was some vexation over petrol shortage, some war of which England had no part. Next, it was the bloody
taxman
. But whichever way it was sliced, Clan were making
perilously
fewer cars. That was bad enough. Then they stopped altogether.

On the night of the day that the Clan factory was locked and shuttered and bolted, Stevie and Mary didn’t see Bobby before they went to bed. Mary told Stevie the firm was ‘liquidated’, and that sounded like what had happened to Bobby too. The next day, once Bobby had crept past the worst of his hangover, Mary, still tight-lipped, made her point. ‘You’ll have to go back, Bob, you’ll have to ask them.’ It did seem hard to bear, but Bobby called upon Armstrong’s Garage, and had he a tail it would have been tucked into his shuffling gait. Yes, they had room for a panel beater, but no, it was no longer a space fit to be filled by Robert Coulson. He took his packet of pay-off money and rented garage space at a
filling
station, offering a basic mechanic’s service. Like any business, it didn’t take off overnight. Stevie lay in bed after dark, thinking,
Hell’s teeth but, what’ll happen to wuh?

Rarely did he feel he had his mother’s attention, but amid his father’s woes he believed he had fallen clean off her radar. She was reading the evening paper very intently, nipping out at odd hours ‘to see someone’, chiding silent Bobby that they weren’t ‘on the telephone’ – this grievance and that. Until, to Stevie’s great surprise, she came to his room and announced that henceforward she would be going out to work in the morning. She had been hired at a new plant for television sets near Durham. The firm was called Haan, they were Dutch, and Mary would be sitting on an assembly line. Outlandish though it seemed, his mam had rolled up her sleeves to save the day. He was dully aware that he and his
dad would be made to pay for it. For starters, Bobby had to shift himself earlier to drop Mary at Haan’s before he went into the garage. Some days he was sluggish, and Mary stomped out to the bus stop.

The first boon of the new start was a colour television acquired on a very favourable hire-purchase. ‘There’s nowt on it,’ Bobby scowled, and yet he began to watch quite a bit of stuff from the grasp of the settee. Springtime brought an FA Cup final between Sunderland and Leeds. Bobby wanted to invite ‘a few mates’, but Mary, too, had a notion for ‘some people round’ that day. The resultant party was ill-assorted, and Stevie lurked by the door watching Bobby’s pals sprawled over the carpet around a tray of Tartan cans, while Mary’s associates squashed onto the settee and she poured them sherry. Granddad George occupied the sole
armchair
. At half-time the very telly itself became the locus of some sort of argument between his dad and the hated Doggett. ‘It’s not the same as making stuff with your own
hands
,’ Bobby was
insisting
. ‘It’s just stuff out of
kits
, man. Like the bairn’s model planes. Mary’s not a clue how it works, ask her.’

‘Do
you
knaa then, Bob?’

‘Listen I knaa you wouldn’t catch us grafting for Dutchmen.’

‘Whey man, what does it matter they’re Dutch? Money’s the same colour.’

‘Whey then let’s just give all wor jobs to the Krauts, aye? Or the Japs, eh? Just like the ships, Dad?’

George Coulson appeared to want no part of his son’s case. ‘Government will always see the shipyards right,’ he muttered.

‘Then what are we gannin’ into Common bloody Market for? So wor yards get shut? We used to
make
the ships for the Japs. Now they make their own. Out of bloody
kits
and all. That’s what’s doing
him
in.’

‘I’m alright, thank you, Robert, you speak for yourself.’

‘Dead right, George,’ Doggett boomed. ‘Shut your moaning face, Bob man, you ought to be proud of your lady.’

Come the final whistle, Sunderland’s shock victory saw general delight, but Bobby had not recovered his pomp. Stevie felt rotten.
His old man was surely in a slump, in need of a change, a plan – akin to what his mam had pulled off, somehow.

He bunked an afternoon’s school, very sure that the settee and telly would be his, for Bobby was at the garage and his mam was at Haan’s until five. Instead he surprised her at the kitchen table with her tea in a cup and saucer, but the cold exchanges for which he was braced did not come. It was much worse than that.

‘Steven, your father and I have had a falling-out. It’s very
serious
, I ought to tell you. So your father’s not going to live here for a while …’ He was, allegedly, already at a bed-and-breakfast in Birtley. Stevie nodded, giving nothing away, inwardly
disbelieving
, for whatever the rotten household weather of late it was not possible that such ties could be undone. What would Nana and Grandpa think? And yet, one and two and three nights without Bobby grew into a week, then a second and a third. Stevie needed to question his father, even trekking out to the bed-and-breakfast place by bus. But Bobby wasn’t there, nor at the garage.

And thus began the Little Visits of Jim Doggett. He would greet Stevie as if kindly. ‘Alright there, son?’ The next outrage was Doggett and his mother stepping out for the evening. Bobby had always liked to be ‘out with Jim’. Now Bobby was out on his ear, and Jim began to settle indoors some nights too – the intruder, in like a shot, like Flynn, like shit off a stick. Oh yes, he had been
saving
himself. His grin as he came through the door let Stevie know that he considered Mary bought and paid for. He shared her
tidiness
, that was for sure. He ferried stuff with him from his flat on the other side of town – a dressing gown, toiletries. The steamy bathroom started to reek of him. But neither his seafaring
aftershave
nor Mary’s virulent air-freshener could ever mask the odour of Doggett’s obnoxious dumps.

How could this man be in his house? Bobby, whatever his
failings
, was surely more appealing? But how could his dad have just fucked off, without a fight?

One Saturday of early October 1976, Doggett announced he would take Stevie to see Sunderland play Everton at Roker Park,
as if this were the finest fare imaginable. Stevie was not about to be bought off. That same morning, Bobby pulled up outside in a red Cortina Mark Three. He had a lady friend, Jeannette by name, but she remained in the car, and in any case she didn’t look as if she would suit a tidy living room. The couple took Stevie to the Excelsior, this at quarter past eleven. Jeanette was loud, drank too much and too fast. To Stevie’s eye, Mary’s primness for once seemed appropriate. Alone with the boy, Bobby stressed his enmity for Doggett. But, he was clear, he would not fight. ‘Let them
live
with it.’
But dad, man!
– Stevie wanted to shout –
They’re living with it fine!
When Bobby dropped him home his hand was pumped a little too long. ‘There’ll always be a bed and a plate for you,’ Bobby said, and Jeannette nodded, as if it were any of her business. Only when Stevie was indoors did Mary inform him that Bobby and his friend were moving to be near her people in Nottingham.

He stared at his bedroom ceiling for hours, feeling a stone-like cold seeping into his bones. Doggett, he was only the bollocks that he was, but Stevie could not forgive his mother – not after all that dark-haired decorousness in the past, that oh-so-sureness of the done thing. So his dad had failed to come up to scratch. So his mam had moved him along. He needed Mary to know what he thought of all that.

Glen Howey and Richey Gates fancied they were brilliant at shoplifting from the Galleries. Stevie resolved to show them what for. He knew enough to force entry to a parked car with a
wrecking
bar and, within, to locate and mingle the ignition leads. Often, though, a mile or two down a quiet stretch of road, he pulled up abruptly and told Glen and Richey to get out and fuck off. That was part of being a leader – a little bit of picking on your weaker associates. At such moments he felt like his gloominess made an inch-thick carapace against argument.

He and Brian Shackleton had stopped knocking around – in the interim ‘Shack’ had assembled a little retinue of his own, and would sneer at Stevie across Princess Anne Park. One Saturday
night they had a minor scrap that ended a draw, though Stevie felt he had shaded it. They settled their difference over a bottle of cider. Shack knew a moody girl called Tracy who sneaked out late to share a drink and a smoke. ‘You’ve got sad eyes, you,’ she told Stevie quietly. He and Shack fucked her in turn behind the brick bus shelter that backed into Biddick Wood, the experience scarcely more sexy than had he pushed his three-quarter-length erection through a hole in the shelter wall, but he humped his way through it, and when the frisson came and went he felt himself well shot of it.

Housebreaking was Shack’s hobby. Round Washington it seemed a simple matter to loiter down the back-to-back rows, looking for the promising gap – then one foot over the wall into the yard, another up and through the fanlight. To Stevie there was something delicious to invading some bugger’s home, getting one over them. He steeled himself to stay cool in the act – not cocky, but carefree – and made a signature of helping himself to anything worth scoffing in the fridge. Looting was of less interest – there was rarely much that seemed of value. But this was precisely Shack’s obsession, zeroing in on the bedroom drawers. Richey, who never had a clue, just stood and gawped at one or other of them.

The trio were inside a respectable semi in Fallowfield Way. Stevie had found a pot of crimson matt paint under the sink and was indulging a mad notion to daub a slogan – TEAM SHARKY – on the kitchen wall. Then hefty thumps sounded overhead, and he dropped the brush and hurdled the stairs. The action was all coming out of a kid’s boxy bedroom, painted that same warm crimson, but therein was Shack sitting on Richey’s back, trussing his hands with a skipping rope. ‘Just a bit fun, man,’ Shack
cackled
over his shoulder. ‘Fuck
off
, man,’ Richey groaned, hopelessly. Stevie was torn between panic and giggles. Then Shack was wrenching Richey’s jeans down to his knees, toying with a
half-size
snooker cue.

‘You scared yet, Richey?’

In retrospect, Stevie accepted, it was scarcely a surprise –
perhaps
a stroke of fate – when they registered the sound of the key
in the door below, froze and heard chatter in the hall, then a step on the stairs. Stevie and Shack ran, Shack using his shoulder to crash past the gentleman of the house, his wife and child gawping as they positively flew out the front door. In the chest-pounding euphoria of being back at large, neither had thought of aught but their own skins. When they remembered Richey, the matter still seemed somehow comical. It was hard to blame the lad for
squealing
, though they did. That same night Stevie was inside the cop shop at Glebe giving a statement to a patient officer, who
corrected
him on certain points of obvious fiction. Stevie felt a nagging penitence. It had been dafty behaviour. But he could not – would not – say as much. He was not charged, only cautioned – Shack, though, had had his chips – but the liaison officer informed the school, who had a policy in these matters.