Rule of Night (2 page)

The Seddons are a family of four: Brian, Margaret, Kenneth and Katrina. Brian and Margaret were married at eighteen (there's a four-month difference in their ages) and are now thirty-seven, which if you bother to work it out means they've been married nineteen years. Brian works at Turner Brothers Asbestos – or Turner & Newall as it now prefers to be called – the largest asbestos factory in the world and the biggest employer of labour in Rochdale. He's a service engineer in the maintenance section, a job he's had for almost seven years. Before this he flitted about, never staying more than a year or eighteen months with any one firm, finding it hard to settle down to a routine job; in his younger days he had been what they describe locally as ‘a bit of a tearaway', and had dabbled amateurishly on the fringes of petty crime.

Margaret – except for the times when she was child-bearing – has worked all her married life, as waitress, chambermaid, barmaid and pub cleaner. Now she serves tea, coffee, meat pies and sausage rolls six days a week from ten till three in a snack bar on Oldham Road. They would be able to manage without her wage, but only just. With it they can afford to rent a colour television set and take holidays abroad: they've been abroad twice, in fact, on package holidays to Majorca and Benidorm. Brian would like a car and every Saturday looks at the classified columns in the
Rochdale Observer
, knowing full well that if he bought one the cost of running and maintaining it would curtail his drinking throughout the week and his and Margaret's nights out at the Kirkholt Social Club on Saturdays and Sundays. Brian does the pools each week with a syndicate of workmates, occasionally has a bet on the horses, and follows Rochdale Hornets rugby team.

So much for the background.

KENNY SEDDON'S BOOT CRUSHES THE BROKEN EGGSHELL
into smaller fragments as he clomps down the concrete steps, past the chalked graffiti, and swings along the walkway dodging the puddles. A clinging veil of drizzle is whipped in to flurries by the buffeting wind; already the sodium-yellow street lamps are lit, each globe encased in a husk of damp.

He's fairly slim yet solidly constructed, this lad Kenny, with slightly bulbous eyes, a full loose mouth and large raw hands on which the nails are nearly bitten to the moons. On the fingers of his left hand are tattooed the letters L.O.V.E. while on those of the right, H.A.T.E. He has a nervous habit of clenching and unclenching his right fist, an involuntary spasm of nervous energy, as though he were constantly about to hit somebody. Having been a manual worker since he left school, his arms, particularly the forearms, are out of proportion to the rest of his body: solid, heavy and with a blunt purposeless strength as if the power contained within them were impatient to be used up.

Taking a short cut across a worn corner of the empty flowerbeds he feels a slight catch in his throat at the thought of the menacing night ahead. Night-time frightens and excites him: the dark prowling streets are his natural habitat where he can escape the eyes of parents, bosses, the law, and all the other snooping, interfering busy-bodies. He's out of sight there, out of reach. The bastards can't touch you in the streets; they're afraid of the dark, of the unknown.

The chill air strikes into his chest and Kenny shivers once, a swift tremor down the back of his neck and across his shoulders. It makes his testicles curl up like little blind slugs. The dim blurred cubes of the Estate behind him, Kenny barges through a swingdoor
and into the Friday-night warmth, beery smell and stale smoke of the Weavers. In the tap-room Crabby, Arthur and Skush are playing darts in the corner underneath the single dusty bulb; a path has been worn through the linoleum.

Crabby has a gaping grin. His eyes are imbecilic brown, semi-glazed from the vacuum within. The tap-room regulars continue to play their games of dominoes and crib, oblivious to everything except sclerosis, cancer and avarice. The hand-lettered sign on the nicotine-coated wall says:

POSITIVELY

NO GAMES OF CHANCE

ALLOWED HERE

Elsewhere in the town on this Friday night the pubs are packing them in: a multitude of hands passing money over the bars, like a close-packed legion of Nazi salutes, reaching for slopping pints and slim-stemmed glasses containing whisky at evaporation point. While in the Weavers the smoke has become so thick you could cut it with a shovel. An old wreck in the alcove near the fireplace – a foreigner by his accent – carries on a monologue about the price of eggs, pronouncing his ‘w's as ‘v's and wice-wersa.

‘Listen,' says Crabby, ‘I vote we go to the Pendulum.' His eyes are a-gleam. ‘I know this bird, fit as a butcher's dog. A right goer. Like a rattlesnake.'

‘Yeh,' says Arthur. ‘We heard it.'

‘We heard it,' says Kenny, swilling beer into his mouth. ‘It'd be like dipping it in a bill-paster's bucket.' He doesn't like making quick decisions, particularly on a Friday night, because once you've decided where you're going it precludes the possibility of going anywhere else. Anyway he's got Something Lined Up for later on, so why go looking for it? A sudden pain in his left knee – an old footballing momento – makes his face twinge. Arthur is ripping
up beermats, his long black oil-rimmed nails tearing absent-mindedly at the fibrous material.

Skush is the quiet one; he drinks his pint slow and calm and waits for the others to make up their minds. He's never been out with a girl, never had it (unless you can count his experience as a five-year-old behind the garages with Marlene Hiller, pulling down her fluffy blue knicks), and now and then he wonders if it's possible to get his end away without involving a female. That's what he'd like most: getting his end away without the acute pain and torture of having to approach a girl, talk to her, make easy conversation while all the time his lips are numb and his throat squeezed tight and dry. He has a couple of pills in his pocket that he's saving for later on.

They clatter down the narrow streets, echoes banging back and forth from wall to wall. A cat sneaks into the shadows. An empty milk bottle stands on a doorstep until Crabby kicks it into the gutter. The owner of the house opens the door and closes it again.

On Drake Street, merry with drink and laughing like drains, they cram into the Fusilier. The Irish landlord looks askance and pulls three pints without moving his eyes. Near the small platform with piano and drums a hen party is in riotous progress, a dozen girls telling dirty jokes and shrieking into their Cherry Bs and port and lemons. Kenny is attracted and disgusted by this behaviour; he reckons women should keep their gobs shut and not make a display of themselves – yet a gang of birds on the town is always game for a bit of the old how's-your-father. And if you don't buy a ticket you can't win the raffle, he thinks, standing above the circle of bright faces and attempting to make with the repartee.

‘Ooo-ell,' one of them says, all ringlets and sticky lips, ‘if it isn't Omar Sharif.'

Kenny smiles; but he's holding himself inside. His eyes are like cold black marbles. Round and about people are grinning with their backs turned, but he knows they're thickheads and can take it.

He says, ‘Thank you Miss United Kingdom.'

‘Go home and send your dad,' the eldest in the party, a woman of about twenty-seven, tells him. More shrieks and stricken laughter.

‘You couldn't afford him on your pension.' The old boot.

‘Run along, sonny, and drink your Tizer.'

Arthur is chatting up a girl with a pale round face and startling green eye-shadow, resting his forearms on the back of the chair and chewing gum in her ear. She looks as though she might be tempted, glancing up now and then at Arthur and giving him a small timid smile.

Crabby turns his back on the table and mutters to Kenny out of the corner of his mouth. ‘There's bugger-all here. We should have gone to the Pendulum. Least there's some decent music there.' He has a fine faint scar on his jawline which shows through the soft adolescent stubble. ‘Come on, let's piss off.'

‘Hang about,' Kenny says, watching Arthur and the girl: he wants to see what happens. At the same time he's trying to think of a remark he can toss over his shoulder at the hen party. Women in a group are all the same, they get cocky and smart and think they're being dead clever. But he wouldn't mind tackling the older one, taking her on Rochdale market after the pubs shut and giving her a good grope in the shadows; she has a big firm pair.

‘You don't get many of them to a pound,' he says to Crabby.

‘You wouldn't get within sniffing distance.'

‘Who's bothered anyway; they're a load of old slags.'

‘What about the Pendulum?' Crabby whines. His face has a debauched pallor under the fluorescent lights. Not a single thought worth preserving has ever passed through that shaven skull. He left Holborn Street School in Brimrod when he was fifteen and started work in the stockroom at Asda Queens, which is an old defunct cotton mill in Castleton that's been converted into a giant supermarket. He was fired when they caught him with eleven packets of
Lyons Quick-Brew Tea and four bars (one partly eaten) of Galaxy chocolate stuffed into various pockets and down the inside of his boots. Whether it was because he had a passion for tea and chocolate was never satisfactorily explained. His next job was in the dispatch department of the Dexine Rubber Company, sending out parcels of ebonite washers to firms manufacturing washing-machines and refrigerators. He stuck it for three months and then didn't bother to come in one Monday morning. Since then he's worked intermittently in a garage, as a coalman, and on a building-site. At present he fixes television aerials to people's chimneys. Kenny knew him at school and their friendship was cemented when they played hookey and went on a joint shoplifting expedition to Woolworth's.

Kenny's heavy eyelids are drooping – partly the beer and partly the dull sluggish excitement rising in his throat. He stares insolently at the older woman and she wrinkles her nose as though at an unpleasant smell, sending the girls into fits of giggles.

‘Past your bedtime, innit?' the woman says, the receptive captive audience making her rash and confident.

For a moment Kenny's face is contorted, and then he smiles slowly. The woman's handbag is underneath her chair, and accidentally on purpose he places the heel of his boot on the shiny black plastic and puts his full weight on it. There is a splintering crunch of plastic and glass.

‘You bloody moron,' the woman says. ‘What do you think you're doing?'

‘What's the matter with you?' Kenny says, looking mildly surprised.

‘You and your great clodhoppers.'

‘Is that your handbag? Daft place to leave it, under a chair.'

‘Paddy,' the woman says, ‘throw this yobbo out.'

‘I'd like to see him fucking try.'

‘You bloody hooligan.'

‘Get stuffed.'

‘Paddy!'

Kenny suddenly wearies of this confrontation. Everybody in the pub is watching, but because he doesn't give a damn his hands are perfectly steady as he offers a packet of Number 6 to the other three. ‘Come on, let's drift.' The four of them drink up and wander casually to the door, not meeting a single pair of eyes all the way.

On the corner of Drake Street by the Wellington Hotel they buy hamburgers from a young boy in a soiled apron who stands in the gutter with a strange contraption that resembles the mutation of a washing-machine on bicycle wheels. At this hour people are drifting aimlessly about from pub to pub. The town centre is awash with streetlight, everything pale yellow and slightly sickly-looking. Like being inside a fish tank filled with urine.

‘What did your old lady say?' Arthur inquires of Kenny.

‘What about?'

‘Taking that bird home.'

‘What could she say?'

Skush laughs under his breath, embarrassed and envious.

Crabby brandishes his fist. ‘I bet you didn't have it away.'

‘I bet she's still a virgin.'

‘I bet my boot would fit into your gob.'

‘Smooth talker,' Arthur says. They all laugh and start kicking at each other. A crush of women emerges from the Empire Bingo, vacuous expressions on pallid faces, the wafting odour of cheap perfume softly cloying in their nostrils on the cold dark air. The women scurry along in pairs, linking, their hard white hands clutching each other's sleeves and holding their handbags tight to their bodies.

The lads shoulder through them disdainfully. In actual fact Kenny – the others too – is afraid of these grim squat women
with their set lips and stiff lacquered hair, yet won't admit it to themselves, let alone the others.

Kenny spies a girl he knows coming towards him. She works in the office of the engineering firm where Kenny drives a lathe all day. He think's she's called Sandra: longish blonde hair sweeping either side of a small, pretty, weak face: a pointed chin and almost no lips.

‘Hello Sandra.'

‘Hello.' She's like a child, standing there unflinchingly under their collective stare.

‘Where yoff to?'

‘Home.'

‘Yad enough?'

‘She hasn't had any.' Arthur.

A slow grimace sours Kenny's face. ‘Excuse my friend, he's got a spastic brain.'

‘Better than a spastic prick.'

‘See you,' Sandra says, preparing to go.

‘Hey,' says Kenny, putting his arm round her. She has small bones and he can feel her tiny sharp shoulders through her coat. Not a bad little sparrow to make a nest with. He could show her a couple of things. She could show him two or three things. The beer has warmed his gut so that suddenly the night appears to him as a mysterious and almost a magical thing: his territory, his world in which daydreams become realities, and he experiences a sudden release as if from a strait-jacket. It's the simple combination of the beer and the dark.