Thicker Than Water (7 page)

I wondered why. I considered asking Matt, but the two of us seemed to be growing apart very quickly around then. Matt still looked out for me on the street, and at home too since we were yet another one-parent family by this stage (our mum had left home the year before after a matrimonial bloodletting that I was considered too young to have fully explained to me). But cooking baked beans and sausages out of a tin and making sure I didn’t get my head kicked in marked the limit of Matt’s involvement with me: he had nothing to say to me any more, and since dad had always been the taciturn type there was a silence around the Castor household that had gone beyond pregnant into stillborn.

So I had to come to my own conclusions about what had happened that day on the Triangle, and my mind went back to those two seconds when Kenny had hesitated after breaking Matt’s hold on him. It occurred to me, incredible as it seemed, that Kenny might actually have been afraid. Of my brother. Because Matt had taken everything that Kenny could throw at him and he hadn’t gone down. Maybe Kenny wasn’t certain that if he took up the fight where he’d left off, he’d be able to win it: and maybe that uncertainty kept him from doing the obvious and calling down a general
fatwa
on Matt. You did that to weak kids, where there was no question that your own alpha status was at issue. If you did it to a potential rival, people would notice. Kenny was a wily little bastard, and at fifteen he already knew what Hitler and Napoleon and Attila the Hun had learned the hard way: that the appearance of strength
is
strength.

And, by the same token, people would notice if Kenny went after me. It was Matt who was his contemporary, so it was Matt who was his legitimate target. I was protected by the bizarre unspoken gospels of the street, which were the measure of our lives and our souls right then.

It was only a matter of time, though, and I could see whenever Kenny looked at me that he hadn’t forgotten my remark about his mother’s suicide. I’d spoken of death to the king, and one way or another he was going to make sure I paid for it.

His opportunity came sooner than either of us expected. That summer Matt dropped out of school, immediately after taking his O levels, and transferred to Saint Joseph’s Catholic seminary at Upholland, about eight miles away from Walton. It was unusual for Saint Joe’s to take someone into holy orders at sixteen, but the Jesuit who ran the place had noticed Matt when he was doing a talent-spotting trawl through the parishes inside the Queen’s Drive ring road, and he’d been impressed. He was prepared to stretch a point, he told our dad, and let Matt enter the college now. He’d take his A levels at the same time as he started his holy orders, rather than finishing his studies at the attached high school first. Matt would be expected to live at the college, and although he could see his family at weekends they wouldn’t be encouraged to visit him and break his concentration at other times.

Dad wasn’t thrilled. His plans for Matt’s future involved Matt getting a job and turning up some money for his keep. But he wasen p. But a good Catholic himself, and he knew better than to throw down with the Pope and his bare-knuckled posse. He bought Matt a suitcase from the secondhand shop and away my brother went without a backward glance. As far as I can remember, we didn’t even say goodbye.

But at least I knew now where Matt had got the balls to fight Kenny Seddon to a standstill: he had God on his side.

So now there was nobody to run interference for me, and no strict reason according to the Walton book of etiquette why Kenny shouldn’t beat me into tenderised steak. But he bided his time for a good three days after Matt left, waiting for the perfect place and time.

The place was up on the roof of the Metal Box factory – the Tinnie. It was a favourite spot for the gang that summer, now that the owners had finally given up on maintaining any kind of security over the disused site. We’d found a way in by levering out one of the uprights of the back fence and tearing the plywood sheet off a door marked
AUTHORISED
PERSONNEL
ONLY
.

With the electricity turned off and all the windows boarded up, the interior of the factory was a three-dimensional maze of absolute darkness. You brought torches, and you stuck together, because on your own in the dark you were fucked. Previous parties had mapped out routes, but you could only find them with a torch. We filed through the cavernous machine shops and silent corridors and scaled the echoing stairs like mountaineers conquering an indoor Annapurna, finally breaking out into the daylight through a hole in the roof underneath which someone had set up a precarious folding ladder dragged in from God knows where.

From the roof – since the whole of Walton is built on the side of a hill and we were close to the top of it – you could see the city set out below you. You could also swing on the flagpole over an eighty-foot drop, and collect metal offcuts which for some reason lay around the place like forgotten treasure. They were the pieces left behind when steel sheets were pressed out into box templates, and they came in a range of intriguing shapes: some like capital letter Es, others in the form of triangles (always right-angled) or diamonds with one vertex shaved off flat. They were all about two millimetres thick, and they were highly collectible because of their lethal sharpness and their resemblance to the shurikens we’d all seen or at least heard about in
Enter the Dragon
.

There was the usual horseplay as we fanned out to look for hitherto unknown shapes and sizes of offcut. Davey jostled Steven Seddon, pretending to shove him over the foot-high parapet down into the street far below, and Steven went complaining to Kenny who kicked his arse for being so pathetic. John Lunt, who was one of my millions of cousins, stationed himself over the hole in the roof so that he could gob on the stragglers as they came up the ladder. Peter Gore tried to get a game of off-ground tick going, and foundered immediately on the fact that we were all a long way off the ground already. Peter tried to establish some rules that would work in this anomalous situation, but he was shouted down.

And Kenny’s other brother, Ronnie, started to tell the story of the Tinnie Ghost.

‘It was the watchman, you know. These lads broke in, and the watchman went after them, butereter the they threw him into one of the machines and he got all squashed and ripped apart, like. And that’s why he’s still here. On the roof. If you look into the puddles you might see his reflection, you know, and if you do then you’re gonna die. Everyone who sees him dies before they get back down to the ground.’

Some of the smaller kids tried not to look at the puddles without being too obvious about it. One of them bleated to his big sister that he wanted to go home, and was coldly ignored.

‘What happened to the lads?’ someone asked.

‘He killed them in their sleep,’ said Ronnie. ‘One by one, like. They dreamed he was throwing them into the machine and they had heart attacks. And the last one, when they went into the bedroom the next morning, they found him all ripped apart. Bits of him all over the room, like. Blood and bits of bone everywhere.’

This was shite on a heroic scale, and I felt it was down to me to light the beacon of truth.

‘How did anyone know what they dreamed about,’ I asked, sardonically, ‘if they died in their bloody sleep?’

Ronnie didn’t falter. ‘They screamed “Get me out! I’m dying in the machine!”’ he said.

But I was getting into my stride now. ‘Anyway, ghosts don’t have reflections. Ghosts don’t even have shadows. And what’s he doing haunting the frigging roof if he died down in the machines? It’s bollocks.’

Ronnie bridled, and jug-eared Davey jeered from my left. ‘Who asked you, Castor? How many ghosts have you seen?’

I launched into an answer, realised part-way through the sentence that I might be getting myself in too deep and began to stammer. Before I could pull back and regroup, Kenny stepped up between his kid brother and his brick-built enforcer and glared down at me.

‘Castor’s an expert on ghosts, isn’t he?’ he sneered. ‘Sees them all over the place. He’s got the I-Spy book and everything.’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t like the way this was going, not least because the mood of the gang was against me. I was being a smart-arse. A smart-arse is always lower on the pecking order than anyone except a chicken or a grass. Very few of the faces that were surrounding us were showing anything like sympathy.

‘He saw our mam, didn’t he?’ Kenny pursued. ‘With her throat cut and blood all over her. Didn’t you, Castor?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I did.’

Kenny’s face set hard. ‘Well, you’re a lying cunt,’ he said, ‘because she died down in the ozzie in the cancer ward. You’d shit yourself if you saw a real ghost, you wanker.’

‘
You
would,’ I retorted, groping for a response that would knock him back on his heels. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘You’re a chicken, Castor.’

‘I’m not.’

Kenny shoved me in the chest, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to reinforce the challenge.

‘Prove it,’ he suggested. And before I could answer he bellowed ‘Gauntlet!’, punching the air with his fists.

‘Gauntlet! Gauntlet!’ Ronnie and Steven crowed, and the shout was taken up on all sides.

The gauntlet was just a piece of casual sadism that usually looked a lot worse than it was. Everyone lined up in front of you. You ran past them, down the line, and people kicked you and punched you as you passed. It was a test of manhood, invoked when someone had allegedly brought the gang or the street into disrepute. You collected a few bumps and bruises, but you had a certain amount of control over your own vector and if you fell you could angle your fall outwards, away from the line, and take a time-out: the people making up the gauntlet weren’t allowed to move until you got to the other end.

‘Okay,’ I said, shouting to make myself heard over the din. ‘Fine. I’m not scared.’

‘Over there,’ said Kenny, pointing. I turned to look in the direction he was indicating, and like Gertrude Stein said on a different occasion, there wasn’t any there there. The slightly pitched coping stones of the ledge were only a step away, and beyond that there was a sheer drop to the street. He couldn’t mean . . . ?

Kenny’s hand clamped on the back of my neck and he pushed me forward. I flailed in his grasp, thinking that he was going to push me over the edge. He didn’t. He just stood me up on the narrow parapet and then stepped away, warning me with a wagging finger not to move.

‘Gauntlet,’ he said, pointing to left and right. ‘There and back again, you little twat. Or else say you’re a chicken.’

‘Fuck off,’ I riposted.

‘Right, then,’ said Kenny, with a gleam of malicious triumph in his eye.

He set Ronnie and Steven to work collecting offcuts, and then arranged the gang in a long line from end to end of the roof, about twenty feet away from the ledge where I stood and wobbled, trying to look nonchalant. The three stooges handed out the offcuts so that everyone had two or three – except that a lot of people, Anita among them, had dropped out by this stage and were refusing to play. It was a hard core of about twenty kids who faced me, their faces radiant with the thrill of the hunt.

Enough was enough. I put one foot down off the parapet.

‘You come down,’ Kenny snarled, ‘and you’re a fucking chicken. You admit you’re a chicken. We don’t have chickens in the gang. Ready . . . aim . . .’

The sane response would have been sve.d have ome pithier version of the proverb about live jackals and dead lions, but I hesitated. I didn’t want to be faced down by Kenny, because at that moment his face represented everything that I hated in the world – including Matt running off and leaving me so he could look for God.

The pause was just long enough.

‘Fire!’ Kenny bawled, and the air was filled with whistling steel. I ran, because the alternative was to be sliced to pieces where I stood. To be fair, I was probably exaggerating the danger from the offcuts themselves. They were absolutely useless from an aerodynamic point of view because they were too thin and light to hold to a line – but there were a fuck of a lot of them, and it would only take one hit to make me flinch backwards reflexively and make the long swallow-dive onto the rutted asphalt of the factory’s forecourt.

I ran head down, only looking at the stone under my feet. I got lucky. A spinning steel rhombus took a small nick out of my cheek, but it was turning in the wind and had spent most of its momentum when it hit me. Another bit into my arm, but again very shallowly and with no real force. Apart from that I reached the corner unscathed – and unopposed for the last ten yards because everyone had spent their ammo in the first few exuberant moments.

‘Time out to reload!’ Ronnie shouted, and Kenny nodded his imperial assent. They all went looking for their own ammo this time, and they were a bit more liberal in interpreting the rules. Some of the kids came back with lumps of shattered brick and one or two had taken out home-made catapults.

This had started out way beyond a joke, and now it was in
Lord of the Flies
territory. If I made the return journey, a single hit would knock me off the ledge.

‘Fuck this,’ I said, stepping down off the parapet onto safe, solid ground.

‘Get back up there, you little piss-pants bastard,’ Kenny commanded, striding across to me, ‘or I’ll throw you off my fucking self.’ He grabbed a double handful of my lapels and shoved me backwards, trying to make me stand up on the ledge again. I resisted, leaning back without letting my feet leave the ground, although that exposed me to the very real danger of losing my balance and falling backwards over the edge.

‘Sod off, Kenny!’ I said. ‘I’m not doing it. I’ve had enough.’

‘Not yet you haven’t,’ Kenny said grimly. ‘We’re not finished yet.’

I struggled in his grasp, trying ineffectually to trip him so I could break free. His superior weight made it a forlorn gesture, but I had to try. I stumbled backwards, planting my feet on the ledge because there was nowhere else to go, but when Kenny tried to disengage I went with him, gripping his left arm tightly. He punched me in the face to loosen my grip, and once again set me up on my perch. I staggered, seeing stars.