smiled seductively. 'On the house.'
Ryan looked back at Norrell, his eyes like flint. 'You still here?'
Norrell hastily swallowed his lager as Mickey Ryan picked up his drink and headed back to the pool table where a couple of nineteen-year-olds, in skintight hot pants and platforms shoes, waited for the territorial pat of his hand on their young backsides, marking ownership. He'd have liked to pick up a pool cue and smash it across Ryan's smug face. But as the blue-eyed man turned back to look at him pointedly, Norrell put his empty glass on the counter and scurried for the door. You didn't mess with Mickey Ryan. Not ever. Sean Norrell knew where to pick his fights and it wasn't at the Hunter's Moon.
He stepped out from the pub, blinking as the driving rain lashed his face and made his way across the street to the block of flats where he lived. He stumbled into the stairwell and held his hand against a concrete pillar to steady himself, and shake water rain from his long hair. He grunted and walked up the steps to his flat and fumbled his key into the lock of the faded red door of 13 Paradise Villas. They got that about right. Paradise in neon and street lamp. Nirvana by substance abuse. Heaven and hell in a fucking handcart.
He fumbled the door open and stumbled inside to domestic bliss. The theme tune to
'For fuck's sake, Linda. How fucking hard is it to cook a sausage?'
His wife, Linda Norrell, glared at him from the kitchen set off the small lounge. She was thirty-two but looked fifty, a sick fifty at that. Rail-thin, with straggly mousy hair that had, at some time, been dyed blonde, she was wearing a pair of tight, drainpipe jeans that made her legs look like sticks, a mauve shirt and a white tank top. The make-up on her face was applied with the delicacy of roadworks and did little to hide the bruising, or the emptiness, around her eyes. A cigarette dangled from tightly pursed lips as she flipped some sausages in a smoking pan, she looked across at her husband, expressionless for a moment, and then a light flickered somewhere in her eyes. 'Fuck you, Sean.'
On the sofa Kevin Norrell tensed. He knew what was about to happen next. On the television screen Barbara Good was telling her husband off for not wiping his wellies before coming into her kitchen. In his kitchen his father was slapping his wife openhanded across the mouth, opening up her lip to bleed afresh. Her screams of abuse mingled with his father shouting back at her, slapping the side of her head like a contrapuntal melody. And suddenly Kevin Norrell had had enough. Tom and Barbara Good might not have a television, but he did, and all he wanted to do was watch it.
The thin boy uncurled himself and stood up from the sofa. At school they called him Pencil Norrell. A gangly boy, tall for his age, his head disproportionately large, a head his neck seemed to struggle to hold up. Once of the older boys had stuck a condom over his head, and laughed as he almost suffocated. Pencil Norrell with a rubber top!
Kevin walked over to the kitchen table and picked up the almost empty bottle of cheap vodka that was stood on it. Lipstick marks smeared the spiralled glass at the top. He held it for a moment listening to the sound of his parents' invective mixing with the cutting bray of Tom Good's laugh. Then he smashed it against the wall. His parents stopped, and looked back at him astonished, their mouths agape like cartoon characters.
Sean Norrell was the first to find voice. 'What the fuck you think you're doing?'
And Kevin Norrell punched the jagged, broken bottle forward, as hard as he could, stabbing it into his father's thigh. Sean Norrell squealed like a snared rabbit and dropped to his knees, his hands cupping the wound, watching horrified as blood spilled through his spread fingers.
Thirty-two years later on and Norrell held up his own hand, letting the shower water run through his fingers, shaking his head as if to clear the memories.
