Rule of Night (16 page)

‘Fucking come on!' (Kenny speaking.)

‘Get out of it.' (Andy.)

‘Get him.'

‘They're here.'

‘Leave him.'

Three Panda cars are standing at strange angles at the kerb and five policemen pick Skush out of the wreckage, setting him on his feet in the middle of the pavement. One of them looks quickly round the deserted square and slams a fist into his kidneys. Skush goes down into the gutter and slowly gets up again, without assistance. Another of the policemen moves casually to one side and kicks him on the point of the ankle-bone; Skush yelps and goes down on his knees: they set him up again.

‘Where's your mates?'

‘Golfers,' Skush says.

A policeman stands directly in front of him and shines a light in his eyes. ‘Why don't you fight back, laddie?' He turns to the others and says, ‘Get the van,' and turning back to Skush clubs
him across the ear with the torch.

‘Balls,' Skush says, shaking his head a little to clear the buzzing noise.

‘Well laddie,' the policeman says, ‘why don't you fight back? Eh? Come on, hit me.'

‘I'm only small,' Skush says (which is true).

‘Come on, laddie,' the policeman says, and smashes the torch against the other ear. Skush nearly goes down but they save him from falling.

‘Not on the head,' one of the other policemen says. They are all young, strong and clean-shaven, and giants compared to Skush. The policeman is about to have another go when the van arrives. It has mesh across the windows. They carry Skush to the back of the van and throw him in. A fat policeman in a flat hat with a shiny peak shuts the doors and sits down on the bench-seat. Skush raises his head from the floor and looks at the policeman's shoes. He notices they have crepe soles.

‘Are you all right?' the fat policeman asks, supporting him under the arms and lifting him to an upright position; and then before Skush can reply knocks him down again.

ON NEW YEAR'S EVE – A MONDAY – KENNY HAD HIS TEA AT
Janice's and then with Janice and her mother went on the booze. It was very cold, the real chill of winter holding the town in an icy grip. They caught a bus to the town-centre and got off outside the General Post Office as the Town Hall clock was striking half past eight. Vera was full of revelry, perfumed, talcumed and all dolled up, expansive with the promise of the evening's festivities to come. Janice was wearing make-up and under her coat had on a multicoloured blouse in silken material and a full-length black skirt; Kenny was wearing a suit. He linked arms with the woman and the girl and they turned the corner to Yates's Wine Lodge. It seemed to Kenny that half the men in the room looked up and nodded to Vera as they came through the swing-doors: she was popular, all right, which might explain (he thought) why she was never short of money despite not having a job.

‘Hello Vera,' a man said. ‘Can I buy you a drink?'

‘I'm with me daughter tonight, Harry, and her boyfriend.'

‘Well?' Harry said. ‘It's New Year. What are you having?'

This was going to be a good night, Kenny decided.

‘I'll have a tot,' Vera said.

‘Oh aye,' Harry said. ‘Living in hope, eh?' Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

‘Brandy,' Vera said, giving him the smile he expected. ‘What do you two want?'

Kenny had a pint and Janice a sweet sherry and the man brought the round to the table. A couple of old slags were sitting nearby, crouched over their schooners of Australian White Wine, like two crows concealing something unpleasant under their black
folded wings. Kenny had only been in Yates's once or twice before: it was the refuge of the aged and decrepit and of those who would rather spend money on a night's drink instead of food for the next day; and of course it was the prime picking-up shop for those who weren't young any more.

‘What do you do?' Harry said to Kenny.

‘How do you mean?'

‘For a job.'

‘Fuck all,' Kenny said.

‘Don't you work?'

‘Not if I can help it.'

The man wasn't too pleased with this answer. Lancashire folk don't take kindly to loafers, parasites and shirkers. Vera threw back the brandy with a practised hand and banged the glass down.

‘My round,' she said.

Kenny didn't argue, but went to get them, standing in line behind the chest-high wooden barrier which formed the drinkers into a queue so that each customer would be dealt with strictly by rota; it was a bit like queueing for the dole. Yates's ran a tight ship: drinking was a serious business.

He walked back with the tray across the bare boards, stepping round the groups of people who stood sipping their drinks. The place had an air of tired and somewhat desperate conviviality, as though all the people here were seeking shelter from the cold modern world outside by returning to the nineteenth century. They wouldn't have been out of place in a sepia photograph.

‘A quiet lass,' Harry observed of Janice.

‘Takes after me,' Vera Singleton said, flashing him a brief vivid smile, her bracelets glinting and jangling as she rummaged in her handbag for cigarettes and lighter. Somebody came up and whispered in her ear and she gave a bellow of laughter.

There was a world of experience in her laugh that was completely alien to Kenny, although he had heard that laugh a hundred times from as many women in dozens of public houses. It reminded him – for a reason he couldn't place immediately – of a cold and lonely time waiting for someone. It reminded him of sitting on a doorstep in short trousers, the dank misty gloom of a November night pressing against his face and bare legs, waiting on the step of number twenty-two Cayley Street, the door locked, for his mother to come click-clacking along the pavement in her stiletto heels, returning from a mysterious night out in the equally mysterious night-time town of Rochdale.

He remembered it clearly now: the old man had gone away, on business so his mother had said, and that one simple fact seemed to have altered the entire pattern of his life. For one thing there never seemed to be any food in the house. He went to the cupboard and looked behind the cups and saucers and plates for anything that was edible. He stood on a chair and looked in the bread-bin and then in the meat-safe at the top of the cellar steps, but all he could ever find were greasy margarine wrappers and bits of what looked like an old pork pie. Another memory stirred: of sitting up in bed, alone in the house, reading the
Dandy Annual
or
Boys Amazing Stories
, his eyelids tight and stinging for want of sleep but sticking it out till he heard the key in the lock and the front door scraping over those three lumps in the red and green linoleum.

And before she returned, the silence of the house – silent except for the creaking – silence extending beyond the bedroom door to the steep, dark stairs leading down to the kitchen which was forbidden and frightening territory. He would tiptoe to the bedroom window and look through the leaded panes at the street light shining on the stone setts, rubbing each foot alternately on the other to lessen the chill contact of the lino.

‘I bet Kenneth's a randy beast,' Vera Singleton said, a little the worse for the five brandies she had consumed.

Janice reddened and hid behind her glass of sherry; Kenny awoke from his stupor. ‘I know what it's all about,' he said in a slurred voice.

‘We're not letting the New Year in here,' Vera said.

‘They'll be shutting before twelve,' Harry said.

‘That's what I said. Come on. Drink up.'

‘Where to?' Harry said in-between swallows.

‘Marlborough Con Club.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Oldham,' Vera said. ‘You've got a car, haven't you? Well then.'

It was gone eleven when they arrived at the Marlborough Conservative Club on Abbey Hills Road and at first the man on the door wouldn't let them in. Then he recognised Vera and the four of them sailed into the smoke and noise of a couple of hundred people, many of whom seemed to have brought their children with them. Because of the crush the billiard table had been draped with a brown dust sheet and families sat around it eating sandwiches and cakes off paper plates. Vera disappeared for ten minutes, and when Janice went to the toilet she came across her mother talking to a man outside the ladies' lavatory.

‘Won't be a minute, love,' Vera said. ‘Tell Harry to get some drinks in.'

‘Who's this?' asked the man. He was fleshy and middle-aged and wore a ring with a stone that sparkled under the bland fluorescent lighting.

‘Our Janice,' Vera said, smiling and cuddling Janice's shoulder under her arm.

‘Well well.'

‘Eyes off, you,' Vera said. ‘Randy bugger.' She gently propelled Janice forward a few paces. ‘I won't be a sec, love,' she mouthed. ‘Get me a brandy, all right?'

‘What a dump,' was the first thing Kenny said when she got back to the table.

‘What's up with it?' Janice said, edging up to him and leaning her elbow on the table so that their shoulders touched.

‘Look at them,' Kenny said; he was flushed and slightly drunk. ‘Guzzling. That's all they can do. Guzzle.'

‘So are you.'

‘That's all they're good for,' Kenny said, ignoring her. ‘Useless, the lot of them. Neither use nor fucking ornament.' His foot kicked out in a sudden fit of temper and a chair fell over. Several heads turned.

‘Kenny, not here.'

‘What?' He narrowed his eyes and peered at her hazily as though through a cloud of smoke. There was a dribble of saliva on his chin.

‘It's New Year's Eve.'

‘So fucking what?'

‘Same again?' Harry said, standing up, his tie hanging on his belly and his belly hanging over the table.

‘Aye,' Kenny said. ‘Pint.'

‘Me mum wants another brandy,' Janice said.

‘Where's she got to?' Harry wanted to know.

‘In the ladies',' Janice said with hardly a flicker of hesitation.

Midnight approached, the funny hats were put on, the coloured paper streamers stockpiled on each table ready for the fray. Kenny refused to join hands when
Auld Lang Syne
was played and sat staring sullenly at the rows of people swaying to and fro, their beer-glazed faces opening and shutting in what to him was a mindless, pointless exercise. The waste of it all appalled him: what did it mean, what was its purpose – this guzzling, shouting, screaming, endlessly
consuming
mob hysteria? They were like a pack of animals, with no other desires than to feed their appetites and indulge their bodily sensations. He was sickened. Janice watched
him fearfully. It seemed that his only reaction nowadays was instant, savage emotion leading, sooner or later, to violence. She wondered why he couldn't settle down a bit; she wanted him to. She slipped her hand into his but his own hand remained passive, disinterested; she stroked his palm with her fingertips but there was no response.

Vera and Harry were in the line, singing away. Then, the New Year safely in, the line transformed itself and changed direction, from linked hands to clasping the waist of the person in front, from
Auld Lang Syne
to the Conga.

Kenny watched them with a sneer on his face. This pathetic charging about was what amused people. This was what he had to look forward to when he got old and past it. It was obvious to him what they were: they were all dead thick.

•    •    •

Harry stopped the car outside the flat, and before he could get out Vera said, ‘Thanks Harry. All the best now. Goodnight.' He sat puzzled behind the wheel for a moment and then drove off. ‘Silly sod,' Vera said, pulling a bunch of keys out of her handbag.

‘Why do you bother with him?' Janice asked.

‘He's a good payer, that's why,' Vera said. She came between her daughter and Kenny and put her arms through theirs. ‘Come on, future son-in-law,' she said. ‘Up the wooden hill.'

‘Have you any booze in?' Kenny said. He stumbled over the doorstep and went sprawling into the small dark hallway at the foot of the stairs.

‘You're pissed,' Vera told him.

‘I was fucking tripped,' Kenny mumbled.

‘Language,' Vera said. With Janice's help she hoisted him to his feet and somehow or other they got him to the top of the stairs. He
was a dead, floundering weight, crashing into the door jamb and rebounding into the living-room, carried forward by his own momentum. They manoeuvred him into an armchair and dumped him, his head lolling about and his arms hanging down on either side.

‘It's freezing in here, mam,' Janice said.

‘I should have left a bar on. Do you want owt to eat? Kenny, are you hungry?'

‘Aye,' Kenny said, hardly able to form the word. His lips felt numb, as though they were made of rubber. He put his hand up and touched his face and it was like a stranger's hand touching a mask. ‘I'll have a chicken butty.'

‘It's turkey,' Vera said. ‘Janice, go and put the blanket on in my bed.' She picked up her handbag to get cigarettes and all the contents fell out. ‘Shit,' she said softly, and got down unsteadily on to her knees to shovel them back in.

Kenny started snoring, his head on one side, his mouth hanging open. It was a shallow, dreamless sleep and he came instantly awake when Janice gently nudged his foot. She was standing in front of him with two rounds of sandwiches on a plate and a beaker of coffee.

‘Would you like a leg?' Vera called from the kitchen.

‘I would that,' Kenny said.

‘I mean a leg of turkey. Randy bugger.'

‘This'll do me.'

Vera came into the living-room and sat on the carpet in front of the electric fire. ‘I haven't been warm all night. Did you put that blanket on?' she said to Janice.

‘You know a lot of folk in Rochdale,' Kenny said.