Rule of Night (3 page)

‘Isn't your name Kenny?'

‘Yeh.'

‘Mr Tripp doesn't like you. He thinks you're a tearaway.'

‘What – Diarrhoea Features?'

‘Is that what you call him?'

‘Yeh. What the fuck does he know?'

‘I don't know.' A shrug. ‘That's what he said.'

‘That twat,' Kenny says without any real malice, without expression. ‘Hey, where yoff to?' Sandra pauses in mid-stride and turns back. ‘Come and have a drink.'

‘I'll miss me bus.'

‘You what? It's only ten past ten.'

‘Me bus.'

‘Come on!'

She says something unintelligible and drifts away into the thinning crowd, small, a little lost, spidery legs in wedge shoes making her tread unnaturally, bent at the knees. Kenny clenches and unclenches his right fist. The sensation of the skin tightening over the knuckles is pleasurable but not consoling.

‘Go on,' he suddenly shouts. ‘It'd be like sticking it in a mouse's ear, anyway.'

It isn't so much the shattered anticipation of having it away with her that angers him (he's got Something Lined Up) as the unpleasant taste of rejection, the humiliation of being dismissed with such tame indifference by a cheap little scrubber. He thinks of the girls in the Fusilier and their gaudy laughter, the ring of shrieking faces sharing a private joke as though its exclusiveness placed them in some special and privileged position when all the time they sweated and puked and excreted like everybody else, and what he wanted to do was smash that fake superiority and shake them and shake them until they saw sense and stopped acting like a bunch of overgrown schoolgirls creaming their knicks …

He belches and farts together; his senses are beginning to drift; a rubbery numbness is creeping into his face and hands. The screams and chatter and guffaws in the Flying Horse merge into a dull background roar and his eyes keep sliding off objects. He can't see Janice anywhere – though it is difficult to take in at a beery glance any individual face in the crowd pressing itself several deep
to the bar. Crabby is acting the fool with a young bit who looks no older than thirteen. She has a couple of mates with her, all three weenies jiggling their bottoms in tight dresses and holding what appear to be outsize cigarettes in their chubby little paws. They puff at them tentatively as though they might explode at any moment, drawing the smoke shallowly into their throats and quickly exhaling through their nostrils. This place, with its carpets, colour TV and its hewn plastic beams overhead within touching distance, is the prime picking-up shop for the town's under-twenties. Indeed, most of them are under drinking-age, Kenny and three companions included. Since there's nothing much else to do, they drink.

The night is overwhelming Kenny. The sense of it is like an unexploded bomb ticking away quietly at the base of his brain: a thousand possibilities await him out there, none of which are within his power to realise. Through his semi-drunken stupor he perceives everything with a peculiar kind of clarity – sees, or rather feels in his gut, a bitter injustice. He realises, almost by instinct, that the game is rigged. It is like being slowly suffocated, crushed; he can't breathe, and wants to yell out at the top of his voice at the stupid senseless people in the bar who are drinking, smoking, babbling, shrieking, all to no purpose. Staring blearily around him, his head muffled in a haze of alcohol, he thinks: They deserve everything they get. They're parasites, the lot of them. They're neither use nor ornament to anybody. All they can do is guzzle and sup and act stupid. I wouldn't give them house-room. They deserve everything they get. Every fucking thing.

•    •    •

They walk towards the General Post Office, a square white building squatting opposite the Town Hall which looks like a shopsoiled
birthday cake on which the icing has faded. A few lads they know are lolling in the Castleton bus-shelter, idly kicking at the panes of glass. This is a game of skill and chance where the trick is to kick the glass as hard as you can without it breaking. Eventually of course it does break, but in the meantime they innocently pretend to themselves that the intention is not to do any damage; then if the glass breaks it's its own fault. An old man and a courting couple are in the shelter, huddled into obscurity. Crabby tells Kenny that the Lake Greasers were down earlier on their bikes, a dozen of them roaring round town, obviously asking for it.

‘We haven't been up there for a bit,' Kenny says. ‘Do they still go to the Lake Cafe?' This is Hollingworth Lake, a local beauty spot, three miles outside Rochdale heading towards Yorkshire. There's nothing much there in the winter: a couple of restaurants, a cafe with trestle tables and rickety chairs, a corporation car park, and a tiny concrete basin where the naked masts of small yachts point at forty-five degrees to the sky.

A pane cracks and the lads stifle their laughter. The old man looks over his coat-collar and the courting couple huddle deeper in a passive embrace.

‘Go on,' one of the lads encourages Crabby.

‘Do you think I daren't?'

‘You daren't.'

‘You
daren't.'

‘You're soft. Go on.'

‘Why, just because you tell me?'

‘Because you bloody daren't.'

‘Who says?'

‘I'm telling you.'

‘You're telling me?'

‘Yeh.'

‘You?'

‘Yeh.'

‘You?'

‘Yeh. Go on.'

‘Oh fuck it,' Kenny says, putting his foot through the glass. There should be a copper, or more probably two, floating about nearby, and there are. The lads retreat to the dark end of the shelter; the only trouble is, it's sealed off. They have two escape routes to go for, both at the top end of the shelter. One copper comes in each entrance, their helmets almost touching the roof. The lads wait, absolutely still, the blood pounding in their necks, their chests so full of air they can hardly breathe. One policeman moves past the old man and the courting couple: there's an iron rail running lengthways dividing the shelter in two and his body seems to fill the space between the rail and the glass panels. The other policeman waits by his entrance.

‘Right,' the advancing policeman says in an unnaturally steady voice.

‘What do you want us for?' Crabby says in a voice shaking with bravado.

‘Which one of you?' the policeman says. ‘Or I'll take the lot.'

‘Which one of us what?' Kenny says. He has slightly wet his trousers and he feels a dreadful excitement building up inside. His brain is churning and yet he's too preoccupied to pay it any attention. He thinks: Two steps nearer then right in the balls and over the top and up the Esplanade… six of us scatter and they won't know which to chase and whoever they catch it won't be me.

‘All right then, the lot of you,' the policeman says, and in a voice low enough so that the old man and the courting couple can't hear: ‘You cunts.'

He's not one of the younger constables, this one, he's a seasoned campaigner and as if by thought transference the lads realise that at least one of them – it could be two, even three – will get the chop
this night and be hauled by the scruff to the shiny new police headquarters which are no more than three minutes away even in a prone, semi-conscious, feet-in-the-gutter position. Kenny suddenly knows who the copper is: Sergeant S______, and simultaneously the Sergeant recognises him. He even smiles a little bit. Then he nods once, very quickly, to the other policeman (a young one) who takes out his pocket radio.

Arthur moves first, which Kenny is glad about, because the one who goes first always gets the worst of it. But Sergeant S______ lets him go and is still standing there, a big dark bulk between the rail and the glass-panelled wall. Two of the other lads try next and as they do Kenny goes in a blind headfirst rush at the young copper who is speaking on his pocket radio, catching him (for some reason Kenny can't understand) on the shoulder, feeling the rough scrape of thickish material against his face and smelling for an instant a clean, fresh smell of aftershave before he's out and free and running faster than you would suppose in his red leather boots across the two empty strips of tarmac, past the Town Hall and up the long flight of crooked steps into Broadfield Park. His heart is pounding as much with excitement as from the running and it's only when he reaches the top of the steps and stops to listen for pursuing footsteps, that he realises how badly he needs to urinate. He does so, splashing it into the dark shrubbery in a panic of relief, biting the nails on his left hand while he listens to the silence which is somehow muffled by the roaring in his head. He then walks through the park, off the footpaths, treading lightly on the moist grass. They'll have alerted the Pandas but he knows the park well and also the several streets and alleys which adjoin it at right-angles. Suddenly he remembers that Sergeant S______ recognised him; if they're not waiting on the Estate now they'll have a car round tomorrow and he's in schtuck anyhow. Several plans form in his mind all together. He could say that it wasn't him, that they were mistaken, but
they won't believe that. He could say he was in Heywood, missed the last bus and had to walk, but they won't believe that either. He could keep out of their way, but sooner or later they'll find him and pick him up. He could run away, hitch a lift on the motorway and go somewhere. Get right away from Rochdale, from Lancashire even, maybe down south somewhere, Birmingham or Coventry or somewhere. They'd never find him down there. He'd keep on the move. He could nick things and sell them to get money, moving from place to place. Kenny thinks of all the towns he's heard of, which to him are just names. He walks on the soft spongy grass in the middle of the park where it is very dark, the surrounding trees shading the yellow glare of the street lights. There must be somewhere he can go but he can't think of anywhere.

AS YOU DRIVE EAST ALONG THE M62 YOU SEE ON YOUR
left-hand side, between interchanges 20 and 21, a large council estate of several hundred houses – Kirkholt – which is the biggest estate in Rochdale, with its own church, schools, shopping centre and social club. Running parallel with the motorway is Hilltop Drive, which you can look down on as you speed along the asphalt ribbon that follows the contours of the moors over into Yorkshire; and off Hilltop Drive is Rudyard Grove, a cul-de-sac comprising twenty houses or so. At number 18 lives Kenny's Auntie Doll. She's a plump, jovial woman with a beautiful set of pot teeth: a dazzling National Health smile that by its very brightness seems to hide a lifelong history of personal upsets and family crises. Auntie Doll is Kenny's mother's elder sister – sixteen years her elder, in fact, which puts her in the mid-fifties. Invariably she's smiling; this makes it difficult, if not impossible, to guess whether or not she's genuinely happy or yet again hiding one more miniature trauma to add to the catalogue of woes and calamities and misfortunes she has suffered since her marriage to Jimmy Mangan thirty-one years ago come April 3rd. If you don't have to live with him, Jimmy is a character; if you do, he's a drunkard. Although if drunkard is too strong a word for someone who at least manages to hold down a job now and again, then soak, inebriate and other such similar euphemisms make light of a situation in which every penny that finds its way into his pocket goes on drink before it has time to go anywhere else – rent, gas bill, holiday money, poor box. Doll has borne this state of affairs with forbearance and equanimity for so long that it's now become second nature to her; even more remarkable when you know that her father was afflicted with the same disease.
She escaped from a penny-pinching adolescence with a father who at weekends was transformed into a raging madman, to a married life in which bringing up three daughters and a son single-handed on the slops left over from the pub turned out to be a daily trial of strength. Yet, incredibly, she still smiles, and with her pot teeth she has something to smile with if not about.

Jimmy sits dozing in front of the fire, his feet bare, the flesh scorched a mottled pink. He grunts and slobbers in deep sunken sleep and comes sluggishly awake, eyes like peeled grapes, as Doll says, ‘Look who's here you drunken sod,' and wrestles with his shoulder, the muscle run to fat. She even says this with a smile.

‘Hey up,' Kenny says, setting a pint bottle of Blue Bass in the hearth.

‘Ken,' Jimmy says, blinking foolishly, the eyes permanently out of focus. ‘Ken.' He makes a slurping noise to take the taste away and then yawns cavernously. Kenny turns his face to the wall to avoid the sight as much as the smell. ‘Where's me tea?'

‘You've had your tea. It's half-past eight.'

‘Get some glasses,' Kenny says.

The man and the boy drink thirstily, the pale golden Bass sliding into their mouths. They talk about football, in which neither one is interested, while Doll moves to and fro in a parody of normal domestic activity. Although she spends, on average, an hour a day cleaning the house, the rooms never lose that appearance of shabbiness and untidiness which characterises certain working class homes. There are always crumbs on the table, newspapers on the floor and pieces of coal in the hearth, and the pattern on the wallpaper has been worn away in a faint streak where the backs of chairs have rubbed against it. When things get broken they stay broken until they're eventually thrown out, because Jimmy hasn't lifted a finger in the household for the last fifteen years.

‘Dale went down again.'

‘Yeh.'

‘Did you go, then?'

‘Yeh.'

‘Good game?'

‘Not bad.'

‘Big crowd?'

‘No.'

‘Who scored?'

Kenny doesn't know. He was groping Janice behind the Sandy Lane stand when they scored. He shifts awkwardly on the lumpy chair in his groin-tight trousers, trying to quell the memory. She's all right, Janice: a good laugh and a good grope, though he hasn't plonked it yet. He could plonk it right now though; if she was here, Christ could he plonk it.