Rule of Night (20 page)

‘I'm a bit peckish,' Kenny admits, ‘but first I need a piss.' He gets up and then goes quite still; he stands listening and waves his hand to stop Eileen rummaging in the waste paper for her shoes.

‘What's up?' Eileen says, her voice hushed by the way he waits silently in the darkness, the pale light outlining his head and shoulders in an attitude of frozen concentration. She listens also but can hear nothing. It occurs to her that it shouldn't be this quiet, unless, that is, the others are asleep or have gone away.

For some reason best known to himself Kenny is moving stealthily towards the door, placing the toe of each boot carefully before the next, and very slowly opens it the merest fraction so that a thin crack of yellow appears: Eileen can hear the low murmur of voices and smiles with relief. For a moment a dozen foolish notions had passed through her mind – the others had gone and left them, or the police had noticed the light and crept in to make an arrest, or…

Kenny hasn't moved and is intent on watching something. And then she sees him put his hand in his pocket and take out an object which catches the light.

•    •    •

The reason they hadn't heard anything was that the others were kettled and didn't realise what was happening until it was too late. When it had happened they stood blearily with their backs to the billiard table, wondering in their stupor how it was possible for seven people to get into the hall without being seen or heard. Kenny, on all fours behind the bar, his heart thumping in his chest, listens to what is being said. There hasn't been a fight yet (he would have heard it in the small back room) but it's shaping up nicely to a barney with what the Luton lads reckon are good odds: seven against five, not counting the girl. Kenny has weighed them up through the crack in the door: two of them are big bastards, six footers at least, a couple of real tough nuts wearing short leather jackets studded in fancy metal scrolls enclosing the names ‘Johnny' and ‘Sugar' – topple these two, Kenny knows, and the rest are a bag of shite tied in the middle with string. One of the others is a nig-nog in a blue and white bob-cap, short, stocky, with a squat ugly face and the makings of a scrubby beard; the remaining four are a nondescript ragbag of townies who look as though they couldn't raise a decent wank between them.

It's one of the big lads doing all the talking and Kenny bides his time. He's not daft enough to stick his neck out before he has to – and in any case the Luton mob will soon start something or one of his own mates will grab a billiard cue and splinter it over the head of one of the leather jackets.

‘What are you doing down here then?' the big lad is saying. He has a terrible complexion. Kenny knows this kind of talk well: it is
the gentle deception before the onslaught, the friendly gesture before the fist in the teeth. Answer them back, Kenny thinks, don't let them scare you.

‘Town were playing pathetic Rochdale today,' says one of the nondescript ragbags.

‘Do they play football up there?' says the big lad. ‘Do they? Well. I thought they didn't have any grass to play on up there. What do they play in then – clogs and flat caps?'

‘We're not a load of pansies at any rate.'

The big lad says, ‘Rate?' twisting his face and pronouncing it the northern way. ‘Raaate. What does raaate mean?' The others laugh. ‘Why don't you talk proper instead of talking stupid?'

‘They're not civilised north of Coventry, Johnny.'

‘It's a shame you don't understand us,' one of the Rochdale lads says. ‘You big dozy cunt.'

‘Take that back,' the big lad says swiftly, no longer sweetness and light. ‘I said: Take it back.'

‘I thought you didn't know what we were on about. You southern pouf.'

The odd thing about violence is that it comes so suddenly and happens so quickly that it doesn't seem real at all: the reality is delayed, like a bomb operated by a time-switch, ticking, deadly, with the devastation yet to come. In the hall with the hooded light it strikes with the swiftness of a venomous snake, happening here and now in front of everyone's eyes – yet finding them static, unprepared, wetting their pants.

After that opening incident Kenny lives through a bad moment when his legs won't seem to move. It's like a dream when your feet get stuck in treacle and it comes as a surprise when he finds himself on the other side of the bar swinging a bottle and running, actually running, at one of the leather jackets. There are three bodies on the billiard table, each body fighting the other two. Kenny is
annoyed and distracted by this and pauses to crack the head that doesn't seem familiar, and hopes, in the rush, he hasn't made a mistake. When he goes on the leather jacket he had in mind has disappeared and he has to seek a fresh target: the ugly nig-nog in the bob-cap who is kicking something along the floor, a sack, or a cat, or perhaps a human being.

‘Nigger,' Kenny says into his black ear and as the boy turns – he is about fourteen, Kenny sees, with odd-coloured eyes – smashes the bottle across the bridge of his nose and the bottle does something he has seen in movies but never before in real life: it actually breaks.

There is an instant mess of splinters and blood, a brilliant gash with the nose laid open to the bone, amid gobs of red stuff flying in all directions. The result is so spectacular that for a moment Kenny is lost in dreadful contemplation, a little awestruck by his own handiwork. He steps back in wonder and is taken hold of by the throat and his spine rammed against the edge of the billiard table, bent backwards at a terrible angle, the light hitting him in the eyes and somewhere on the edge of his vision the smooth brown butt of a billiard cue sliding – or is it swinging? – coming at his head. He twists left and feels the impact rattle the coloured balls and vibrate through the table to his skull. Kenny is amazed. He has never met anyone with the strength to pin him down with one hand and strike with the other.

He thinks… he is about to think when he sees the butt coming again and three things happen simultaneously: urine runs down his leg and the black meter on the wall clicks and the light goes out. For an instant – it can be no more – everything stops: blackness and silence cover everything, and when it is over Kenny is thankful that he can withdraw the knife blade as silently and unobtrusively as it went in.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END WAS AT HAND FOR KENNY
Seddon. On the 25th of January (a week before his seventeenth birthday) WPC T______, the local Juvenile Liaison Officer, paid a visit to the flat and asked why he hadn't reported the Friday before to the Rochdale Police headquarters. Kenny told her he had been ill with stomach trouble, and Miss T______ asked who his doctor was.

‘I didn't bother going to the doctor,' Kenny said. ‘I just stayed in bed. I've had it before; it's nowt serious.'

‘Next time get a doctor's note. You know you can get into serious trouble if you fail to report when you're supposed to.'

‘Yeh,' Kenny said. ‘I'll remember that.' He looked into her face. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?'

‘No thank you. Did you hear what I said?'

‘Yeh. I'll remember, don't worry.' He tucked his vest into his jeans and flopped down on the settee. He was okay now but it had been a bad moment when he had opened the door and seen her standing there – his heart had lurched and he had felt his face going red. Even as she followed him down the dark staircase he had had the sense of terror that this was it, had actually expected her opening sentence to contain the words ‘Luton' and ‘knifing' and ‘arrest'. But now it was fine: he was relaxed: nothing could touch him.

Miss T______ said, ‘
I'm
not worried, Kenneth. It's up to you, it's your look-out.' Her eyes were hard but she couldn't hold his gaze for long and glanced round the flat at the discarded clothing on the chairs and the empty mug and breakfast plate on the floor. There were crumbs on the settee where Kenny lay sprawled.

‘See you,' Kenny said as she prepared to leave.

Miss T______ stopped at the door. ‘I thought you were going to try and get a job? Have you done anything about it?'

‘I've been looking in the
Observer
,' Kenny lied smoothly. ‘There is nowt though.'

‘You don't call that really trying, do you?'

‘What else can I do?'

‘Go to the Youth Employment near the station. Tell them what kind of job you'd like and they'll send you a postcard if anything comes along that would suit you. You've worked in engineering haven't you?'

‘Yeh,' Kenny said indifferently.

‘Well then: put your name down.'

‘I don't really fancy doing that again.'

‘What job do you fancy?'

‘Millionaire's pig,' Kenny said, watching her lazily.

‘Don't be silly, Kenneth,' Miss T______ said. ‘How do you expect to stay out of trouble if you don't have a job?'

‘There's nowt I fancy doing. I can't get a soft touch like yours, you know.' He lit a cigarette and crossed his arms behind his head; Miss T______ looked at his hairy armpits and quickly turned away, almost imagining she could smell the unwashed sweat.

‘I want to hear that you've put your name down the next time I see you,' she said curtly. ‘That'll be on the 15th of February.'

‘I'll be there,' Kenny said. ‘You can find your own way out, can't you?'

When he heard the front door close he had a quiet snigger to himself, lying back with the smoke drifting past his eyes, wriggling his toes in the stiff wrinkled socks. There was no need to get alarmed; no need at all. If they had anything on him they'd have picked him up days ago. It had even made the national newspapers (he still had the cutting from the
Mirror)
 – which had given him a
shock at first, he had to admit, the big black headline on page three and underneath it the story of the ‘Luton gangfight' in which a lad had to be rushed to hospital and given an emergency transfusion. It was all over now, he kept telling himself, blood under the bridge. Yet still he had to be careful, to keep a check on what he said: the trouble was that he found himself wanting to tell people – even strangers – that Kenny Seddon had knifed somebody in a gangfight. He got a thrill whenever he thought about it – a terrifying thrill that crawled up inside his belly and stuck fast in his throat. He wanted to say, ‘Do you know who you're talking to? I knifed a bloke. It was in the paper.'

The rest of the afternoon he sat watching
Crown Court, Play School
and
Magpie
on television, smoking the last of the cigarettes he had nicked from the Liberal Club, eating salted peanuts and picking the hard skin off the soles of his feet. Kat came in at ten-past four and made him a mug of instant coffee sweetened with three spoonfuls of condensed milk; then Margaret appeared and without a word dumped her bag on the chair and went into the kitchen to make the tea. Brian usually came home at five-thirty and at twenty minutes past Kenny shoved his socks into his pocket and went to his room. He couldn't stand to be in the same room as Brian. The air seemed to be charged with negative particles of hate. They would enter and leave the room without looking at one another, circling the furniture with their eyes carefully averted and making it clear that when they spoke it was to the other members of the family.

Kenny waited till the others had finished eating and then had his tea in the kitchen alone. By seven-thirty he was clomping along the concrete walkways in the direction of the Weavers. There was a thin scattering of snow over the Estate, scooped into corners by the wind and lying like icing sugar on the frozen puddles. He didn't stay long there, had a swift pint and carried on under the railway
viaduct and up New Barn Lane to the new bypass which linked Rochdale to the M62. The traffic whipped by in an icy blast, the red tail-lights streaking along the dual carriageway to the roundabout at the junction of Half Acre and the motorway access road.

Kenny was undecided what to do: whether to walk up to Janice's or catch the bus to town. It was early for the lads to be about but at the same time he didn't feel like traipsing all the way up Bury Road. And ever since the break-in he had kept away from the flat as much as possible; he somehow felt safer at a distance. The cold wind made the rims of his ears sting and he hunched himself in the corner of the bus shelter to conserve as much warmth as he could inside the thin shirt and flimsy jacket. The cars went past in an endless procession. All the rich bastards, Kenny reflected, safe and snug behind the curved glass with the dashboard illuminating the lower parts of their smug faces. Get them out here though, in the freezing cold, away from their cars, and they were frightened, timid, spineless. Not one of them would have a notion what to do against a boot or a sharpened spindle or a fistful of steel washers. The real world belonged to him; theirs was confined to the semi-detached bungalow behind its tidy lawn and a few choice pubs which catered for passing trade – and in-between,
his
territory, the night-time streets, which they could cross only in the sealed comfort and security of steel and glass and moulded rubber trim. He shouted something and laughed, and the laughter sounded hollow and bounced back in his face from the walls and ceiling of the shelter.

The town itself was barely alive at this hour, but with each bus-load from the districts the crowds multiplied and grew, the tempo building up as the bars got full and the bingo halls prepared for the first session of eyes down, look in. As the bus swayed along the Esplanade Kenny ran full tilt down the metal stairs and jumped off as the automatic doors were opening in front of the GPO. The pavements were slushy underfoot and a few flakes of snow
still lingered in the cold night air, floating down under the yellow lights.

•    •    •