Rule of Night (6 page)

They started going to the match together, which at first was sacrilege to the others who stood with Kenny behind the goal at the Sandy Lane end. There had always been female hangers-on, of course, but they were anybody's. Taking an actual
girlfriend
to the match was definitely setting a precedent and took a bit of getting used to. Kenny never had, and didn't now, take much notice of other people's opinions; he really didn't give a monkey's; if they didn't like it they could stick it. Crabby made the usual remarks until Kenny told him to shut his hole. It wasn't Janice he was protecting, or rather, it wasn't Janice as a person: it was his property, and nobody took the piss out of Kenny's property.

Janice was still going to school around this time and had one more year to do before she left. In many ways she wasn't typical of her generation, who with hardly an exception were rabid Donny Osmond and/or David Cassidy fans. Janice preferred Tamla Motown, which is probably why she and Kenny hit it off in the first
place. The Pendulum was where you went to listen to this kind of music, a gloomy basement with a low ceiling, a concrete floor and inadequate lighting that shared the premises with MSG (Manchester Sports Guild) Club on Lower Millgate just along from Victoria Station. Membership was 22½ pence, the beer was at pub prices and nobody bothered if you turned up in Wranglers, an old sweater and baseball boots. It was a dive in every sense of the word, a focal point for working-class kids from within a radius of ten miles of Manchester. In complete contrast to the Pendulum you had Time & Place, a disco in the basement of the next block, with its thickly carpeted stairs, flashing strobe lights, bouncers in tuxedos and, in the narrow street outside behind Manchester Cathedral, the ranks of Spitfires, MGBs, souped-up Minis and Volvos parked nonchalantly on the pavement. The girls who went there wore long evening dresses with cleavages that showed foreign tans, more often than not came from Prestwich, and their fathers had small businesses in the Ancoats district. The men who accompanied them were tall and slim; their chins were covered in Brut and their hair had been washed, cut and styled by Harvey and Rupert on Bridge Street.

To Kenny they might have been Martians. Their lives, their background, their upbringing, what they did for a job, and they themselves, were incomprehensible to him. They could have been a totally alien species for all he knew – and at the same time (it goes without saying) he despised them, partly through not understanding them and partly because they possessed worthless things like nice clothes, cars and self-assurance – worthless because he didn't believe they had really worked to obtain these things. But neither did he believe in work himself. It was a mug's game: senseless, futile and boring. A good job was a job that combined the maximum amount of money with the maximum amount of skiving. But neither did he desire a lot of money, nor the things that
money could buy. It wasn't a case of opting out; it was a case of never having joined.

If looks were anything to go by, Janice could have done a lot better than Kenny. But of course looks, for a woman, are rarely anything to go by. Janice had first been attracted to him because he didn't seem to care about anybody or anything, her included. He wasn't bothered whether she liked him or didn't like him. The second thing that she found attracted her to him was that he made her laugh. He didn't crack jokes, he didn't go out of his way to be funny, and yet he made her laugh. He made outrageous statements with a perfectly straight pokerface so that she never knew whether he was being serious or taking the piss. (It's probable that Kenny didn't know either: he never did anything for calculated effect but blundered haphazardly through life, reacting blindly to people and circumstances in much the same way that a large, slack-jawed dog might inadvertantly wreck a living-room, breaking ornaments and spoiling the carpet.)

In the winter months of that year they used to see each other almost every night of the week, as well as going to the match on Saturdays and visiting each other's homes on Sunday afternoons. On some evenings they walked from the pub along Sandy Lane, the cemetery on their right-hand cold and silent behind its dirty millstone wall, a kind of thin blue haze in the air and people appearing suddenly before them muffled to the ears. They walked arm-in-arm, his thigh against her hip. Janice was proud of his bigness and liked the solid bulk of his arm around her shoulders; she was also frightened of him, of the unexpected, of not knowing him all that well. He had moods she didn't understand, for instance, which took her by surprise: a total lack of feeling – a vacancy – followed by a vicious spasm of anger which made him act with instinctive brutality, a mindless violence without any apparent justification.

The first time this happened, as they were walking, she experienced fear and excitement in the self-same instant. Then they were running from the scene of the incident, Kenny telling her to keep up, their chests hammering, and when they finally stopped, breathless, bursting into giggles because they were safe and together and the thought of the silly old man lying on the pavement with his false teeth in the gutter was irresistibly funny. Kenny hadn't intended to do it, the notion hadn't entered his head; but for the old man's dog yapping at their feet, and Kenny landing a kick up its hind-quarters, and the old man calling him a hooligan, and Kenny asking him to repeat it, and the old man being stupid enough to do so – none of it would have happened. Janice was glad somehow that it had happened. For one thing it made her feel closer to Kenny: it was a secret they shared together, and from now on they could refer to it in the company of others as ‘that night near the cemetery' and nobody would be any the wiser. She liked the feeling that they, the two of them, were all alone in the world.

She remembered particularly, thinking back on it, the part when they were running hard up the blue misty road, Kenny's hand clutching hers and almost dragging her, the sound of their footsteps echoing from the high black wall, and the feeling – for the first time in her life – that she was a separate person who could now do as she pleased. She could choose her own way of life, decide for herself what she wanted to be; she was Janice Singleton; the thought beat in her head in time to the steps, and the feel of his hand in her hand made her aware that it had been Kenny who had been the first one to awaken this reponse. Then they were giggling and gasping in the darkness (it was down a dark rutted track where they finally stopped) and her head was pressing against his hard chest and his heart was thumping in her ear. She was in a wonderful dream. She was aware and proud of her small sprouting breasts and knew that this night was one she would remember always. A
mawkish pop tune hummed in her mind … ‘young love, first love, filled with true emotion…', and for the first time it actually meant something. This was young love, first love, this feel of his shirt scraping her cheek and his real body pressing against hers. She was in love with his strength, his big shoulders and warm solid arms.

Janice never again thought of the old man in any other connection than with the running, the breathlessness, the fear and excitement, and of Kenny's heart pounding close to her skull. And she thought about the secret they shared, and that feeling – very strong when they were running – of being closer to a human being than she had ever been before. And not only close, but one, indivisible, as though they were joined together and could never again be separated.

There was a postscript that proved to Janice the significance of the incident. The following Saturday morning her mother noticed an item in the
Rochdale Observer
about an old man who had been beaten up: she remarked on it because Sandy Lane was only a few minutes away down Bury Road, adjoining the cemetery. Janice listened with a bland expression, controlling a little smile which kept tugging at the corners of her mouth. It might have been a coincidence that her mother should have spotted this particular news item but Janice didn't think so. No, it meant that something had conspired to set her and Kenny apart from everyone else. The secret they shared was now even more
their
secret because what had taken place was common knowledge and yet only the two of them, of all the people in the world, knew the full truth. Sitting at the kitchen table watching her mother – still with the vestiges of last night's make-up on her face and her blonde hair uncombed – reading from the paper, Janice experienced a warm enveloping glow; her breathing became loose and she suddenly felt that she had to go to the toilet. And she would be seeing him again soon, that very afternoon at the match. A record came on the radio, ‘young
love, first love, filled with true emotion…' and it was as if her life, endlessly circular, had at last assumed a pattern, and all at once it came to her that she was a young woman growing up: that her mother sitting opposite her was, after all, only her mother.

Kenny's world became the real world for Janice. It dazzled her, intrigued her, scared her, thrilled her. Whereas before she had lived a kind of half-life, literally half-alive, now it became a strange adventure, dark with mystery. She couldn't express it in words… it was something she felt… something her body responded to which she herself didn't properly understand. School became a shadowy interlude through which she drifted in a dream-like state thinking about the night before or the night ahead. Marjorie, Janice's best friend, knew about Kenny and didn't think much of him. In her opinion he was a great lummox. Neither did she like it when Janice stopped going to the youth club on Thursday nights and even less when they ceased to visit each other's homes and play records while they discussed boys, make-up and popstars. As for Janice's mother, she noticed very little anyway. Maybe Janice wasn't in the flat as much as she used to be, and when she was seemed to spend most of the time in her room listening to soul records, but apart from that it didn't strike her that there was anything markedly different in her daughter's behaviour. Even when Janice started going away every other Saturday to places like Grimsby and Plymouth and Wrexham she took it for granted that this was a natural stage in the development of a fourteen-year-old girl.

Perhaps if Janice had had the influence of a father (who had died when she was three) she wouldn't have been allowed to roam where and as she pleased. Questions might have been asked, rules imposed, and a stricter watch kept on the company she sought. However, this is hypothetical: the fact was that never at any time was Janice asked to account for her movements, whom she met and what took place. Mr Casson, her teacher, once became concerned
about her welfare and he might have mentioned it at the end-of-term Open Day. But Mrs Singleton hadn't bothered to turn up; consequently Mr Casson lost interest too.

One thing that might have made her sit up and take notice: if Janice had become pregnant, but as this possibility was unthinkable it was simply never thought of. Despite being an avid reader of the
News of the World
Janice's mother never once entertained the notion that a fate worse than death could ever befall her Janice.

ONE SATURDAY NIGHT A GANG OF THEM MET OUTSIDE THE
ABC cinema and couldn't decide where to go. They clustered round the brightly-lit entrance keeping out of the slanting rain, jostling one another and making rude remarks about the film that was advertised in the illuminated panel:
The Four Dimensions of Greta
. Inside, in the warmth behind the glass doors, the cashier (an old dear with a hearing-aid) exchanged outraged glances with the woman selling sweets, cigarettes and Butterkist from her cubbyhole barricaded with confectionery.

Crabby voted for the Pendulum but as usual was shouted down. Skush said, ‘What about the White House?' – a pub right on top of the moors a few yards from the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. Everybody jeered, ‘What about the White House?' and Skush turned his back, going red, and continued looking at Greta. He felt dizzy from the pills he had been taking, which so far that evening hadn't had time to produce the desired effect; he needed a couple of pints to really get them working in his head. What he really needed was a girl. What wouldn't he have given for a girl.

After a lot of pushing, laughing, falling about and futile discussion somebody came up with a plan of action: get the diesel to Manchester Victoria and buy a ticket for the next train scheduled to leave, no matter where it was going.

‘We could end up in bloody Brighton!' Arthur said, excited at the idea.

‘They don't go to Brighton from Victoria,' Kenny said, and twisting his mouth to make the word sound even more scathing: ‘Twat.'

‘They could,' Arthur said, sticking his chin out. ‘They could. All the lines join up so you could get to Brighton from Victoria. Nothing to stop you.'

‘Nothing to stop you except they don't bloody go from Victoria.'

‘I didn't say they
did
. I said they
could
. Could!'

‘You bloody well said they did.'

‘I said they could.'

‘
Did
, you said.'

‘Could.'

Crabby said, ‘We followed the Dale to Brighton.'

‘You didn't go on the train though,' Arthur said, behind him on the stairs leading to the upper deck of the bus. There were seven of them and they each took a seat to themselves.

‘I didn't say owt about a train,' Crabby snarled.

‘You went on the coach.'

‘I know we went on the coach.'

‘Ellen Smith's.'

‘Yelloway,' Crabby said.

‘Was it buggery Yelloway – Yelloway don't go to Brighton.'

‘How do you know when you weren't there?'

‘Yelloway don't go to Brighton.'

‘How do you know when you weren't there?'

‘I'm telling you.'

‘How do you know when you weren't there?'