There was a car propped up, half dismantled, beside the fence of the Forsyths’ house. It was painted scarlet with white flashes, like Starsky and Hutch’s car. The lads were meant to be fixing it up for one of the Forsyth brothers, but Elsie never saw any car-fixing going on. They just stood around with their cans of lager and laughed long and raucously, fighting among themselves and playing the car radio as loud as it would go. Dance music night and day.
“Hip-hop,” Craig had snapped at her when she asked him, “What sort of music is that?” “Hip-hop,” he said, “it’s the latest thing.” It went right through her, the insistence of it, but she could see how it might appeal to the young. It seemed to go on for ever. Better than those songs that are over in three minutes flat, the ones she was used to. But when Craig said, almost belligerently, that his favourite music was hip-hop, her heart went out to him and he felt like her little lad again. Hip-hop and him with his broken, swollen, unmendable right foot. The one his stupid natural father had run over in a hired Transit van, the day he left them high and dry. Reversing down the street, still shouting at Elsie, he had driven over his only son. It was like a club foot, and the GP said he was lucky not to have needed a new plastic one, like Don off Coronation Street. That was her fault, not taking him for regular checkups. But going to the doctors gave her the heebie-jeebies. Craig would shout if he was in real pain and she would take him then. But then the doctor said there was gangrene and he was within a hair’s breadth of losing the foot altogether. Elsie felt ashamed. When Craig’s foot was unbound in consulting room it was all misshapen. It didn’t even look like a foot. It was like a big lump of gristle. Of course, this whole time, from his father running him over in the van, right until the present day, Craig hotly denied there was something wrong with him. But. he limped, he limped terribly. He was less steady in his feet than Big Sue round corner, or Jane’s stepdad, who had a wooden leg.
When you saw him from a distance, Craig looked fine. A figure of a lad, standing with all the other lads by the red Cortina, drinking their tinnies. In the summer they’d hid a campfire out there and a barbeque. And it looked as if they were having fun. Someone said they were burning the body of a pit-bull that belonged to some other gang of lads. Elsie didn’t think Craig would get involved in anything like that. He loved animals.
There was all that fuss, though, that August, when it was really hot, when the sweat stood out on you as soon as you went outdoors and everyone got fractious. The old couple in the bungalow by the Forsyths’ house kept complaining about the lads’ loud music from their Starsky and Hutch car. Elsie thought there was blame on all sides. The lads weren’t doing anything so very bad. They were rowdy, but they were just showing off, for each other and for the few lasses who, stringy-looking and snapping gum, would come wandering past to eye the boys up as they took off their shirts and lifted weights and bricks and reddened their muscled bodies in the late sun. The lads were wrong to tell the old couple to haddaway to fuck. The old couple went too far, calling the police out three times and causing an almighty racket. And then, eventually, the storm broke. Elsie knew about these things from living in places rougher than this over the years: when the storm really breaks, it’s the weakest who come off worst.
The old bloke went a bit doolally with bravado and he ran over to see to their radio himself with the baseball bat he kept in the downstairs toilet. The lads set their pit-bull onto him. His old wife watched, paralysed in their garden, as he was chased by the stubby black dog. It was a devil dog, like they said in the papers. She shook herself out of her shock and tried to unlatch the gate for him. But he’d fallen down dead in the street already. He died of fright. “He was a commando!” the old wife screamed at the lads. She was still screaming it when the paramedics were there and the lads had dragged and hidden their dog away. “He was a commando!” at the top of her voice.
Elsie watched all this from her upstairs window, in paralysis of her own. After the ambulance went, leaving the lads and their subdued dance music, she saw that Craig had noticed her watching their group. He stood at the back, uninvolved but implicated: the way he’d always been. His shirt was off and he had a broad, gym-toned chest that startled her almost as much as the sudden death in the street. He’s got a proper man’s body, she thought. At nineteen it seemed incongruous on him. As did his limp as he turned and went with the others into the Forsyths’ dark house.
This afternoon Elsie stood by the red Starsky and Hutch car and paused before going in the Forsyths’ gate. No one round here dared to knock on the Forsyths’ door. All the women she knew thought she was mad, letting her son hang around with their gang. Elsie thought that it was all right, though. The women didn’t understand. They didn’t have grown sons. That Jane, Fran and Nesta would see, when theirs got to an age. You can’t control them. Still, Elsie was relieved that the Forsyth brothers were away in prison. It was one thing hanging out with lads his own age, but she
