‘Well, your mam’s a slag and we’ll catch something off you.’
Anita flushed phone-box red. Then, as now, bringing someone’s mother into the argument was moving directly to Defcon One: it was the Taunt Unendurable, and it required the Riposte Valiant. Dick-Breath kept his head down, having earned that derisory name for his willingness to do whatever was needed to curry favour with the bigger kids. But Anita was woven out of sturdier as well as more brightly coloured fabric. Mouthing off to her just wasn’t safe, and anybody with less heft than Kenny would have thought twice about doing it.
‘Fuck off, Kenny,’ she shouted, balling her fists. ‘You gobshite!’
Kenny smacked her, open-handed, across the face, hard enough to make her stagger.
‘Your mam’s a slag,’ he repeated. ‘She’s knocking off Georgie Lunt.’
Anita screamed and went for him, but Kenny was a head taller than her and he fended her off with a violent shove. ‘So you’re probably a slag too,’ he said. ‘It runs in families. Who are you knocking off, Anita?’
For some reason, this was shocking to me. I’d seen boys fight girls before: there was no real room for chivalry in our rough-and-tumble code of ethics, and girls could do you some serious damage if they fought like they meant it. It was just that this was so cold-bloodedly staged, and so obviously unfair — Kenny manufacturing the argument to pay Anita back for his blue balls — that it made my blood boil. And not just mine. I saw Matt, my big brother, lean forward as though he was about to step in between Anita and Kenny and take up the challenge on her behalf. My survival instinct — like Dick-Breath’s — was a bit better developed than that: Kenny had more or less the same height advantage over us as he did over Anita and, as we’d all learned on many occasions, he didn’t recognise the dividing line between what was legitimate and what was inconceivable.
But I did what I could. I replied to the taunt.
‘Well, your mam killed herself, Kenny,’ I called out. ‘It wasn’t cancer — that’s all my arse. She cut her throat with your dad’s razor.’
There are moments in life when you know you’ve gone too far: you can tell them by the eerie stillness that descends around you — only half a second long in reality, but in subjective time easily long enough for you to think ‘Oh Jesus, I wish I hadn’t done that’ and then start in on the Lord’s Prayer. Kenny swivelled to stare at me, his eyes bulging out of his head in cartoon slo-mo. He opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but no sound came out. Everyone else, including Anita and Matt, was watching him with strained, breathless curiosity. This was going to be bad.
But it was just such an easy call to make. I could tell the living from the dearly departed pretty accurately by this time, and Mrs Seddon’s ghost had a huge tear in the flesh of her throat and an apron of dried blood on her faded floral dress — a bit of a dead give-away, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’d seen her looking out of the window of Kenny’s house so many times that I’d lost count, and a couple of times I’d seen her hanging around Kenny himself, staring in miserable, befuddled longing at the wayward son she’d left behind along with her tired flesh. As for the razor, that was just a guess. But whatever she’d used to do herself in, it had been spectacularly effective: it hadn’t been a kitchen knife, unless the Seddons kept their kitchen knives a lot sharper than we did ours.
So I threw in the razor out of a nascent sense of drama, to add to the overall effect. And on that level, it was a roaring success. Kenny’s huge fists rose into my line of sight like a pair of half-bricks held up by a kung-fu master to demonstrate the cleanness of the break. Then one of them moved, and magically I was lying on my back with no understanding at all of how I’d got there. The left side of my mouth tingled unpleasantly, and there was something wet on my face.
‘You little bastard,’ Kenny said, and he stepped in for the inevitable follow-up, which would have been a kick to some unprotected part of my body.
But Matt stepped in too, and he caught Kenny on the side of the face with a hard jab that made him stagger and lurch before he got his balance back. A moment later the two of them were grappling like all-in wrestlers.
Kenny versus Matt wasn’t as ridiculous as Kenny versus me would have been. Matt didn’t have Kenny’s height or anything like his weight, and as a choirboy at Saint Mary’s church he was widely considered to be a pushover, but I knew from countless brotherly skirmishes that he was stronger than he looked and quick with it. None of that should have stopped it from being a foregone conclusion, though: the general consensus was that you couldn’t stand against Kenny when he got going any more than you could stop a freewheeling truck by standing in front of it.
But Matt was making a good showing — seeming in the first few frenzied seconds to be giving almost as good as he got. He managed to hook a thumb into Kenny’s eye socket and force his head back so that Kenny couldn’t butt him, and he landed a sucker punch to Kenny’s stomach when the opportunity presented itself. Kenny retaliated by slamming his fist into Matt’s jaw — a solid punch with all his weight behind it that made Matt’s head rock back and then forward again like one of those dogs in the backs of cars whose oversized craniums are mounted on springs. But Matt kept his guard up and blocked the vicious low blows and crotch kicks that would have ended the fight in one go.
Then there were a few moments when the two of them were so tightly pressed together that they couldn’t really punch or kick at all: they just swayed backwards and forwards, struggling for leverage. I could see a few people in the group — Kenny’s brother Steven, who was my age, and his best mate Davey Barlow who was red- haired and rangy and almost as big a psychopath as Kenny — looking doubtful and unhappy, as if they weren’t sure whether or not to intervene. The protocols were complicated. If Kenny invited them, they could wade in and kick the shit out of Matt with no loss of honour: if he didn’t and they joined in anyway, there was always the chance that someone would say later that Kenny couldn’t have won the fight on his own. In any case, I tensed to jump in on Matt’s side if they intervened on Kenny’s.
Then Kenny broke free, got in another devastating punch to Matt’s face but jumped back, not pressing his advantage. The two of them stood panting, dishevelled, Matt’s nose and Kenny’s lip bleeding.
It couldn’t end in a stand-off. Kenny’s status in the gang, however vaguely it was defined, wouldn’t allow it. I was expecting him to wade in again at once and finish what he’d started: then, when he hesitated, I thought he’d decided to throw the fight open to his brothers, to Davey, and to anyone else who wanted to earn his doubtful and short-lived favour.
But he didn’t lower his head and charge, and he didn’t shout ‘Twat him!’ He just stood for a second or two, on the balls of his feet, breathing like a bellows. And then fate intervened, in the shape of a policeman coming down the gravel bank towards us, shouting a challenge that we couldn’t hear at this distance. Given how quickly all this had happened, it wasn’t likely that he’d been alerted by the noise we were making: he must have seen us as we descended from the road above and decided on the balance of probabilities that we were up to mischief. The railway land was council-owned and we were trespassing, which was reason enough to send us on our way.
We scattered. We always did, when we were an all-ages mixed rabble: a few older lads on their own could have bearded a rozzer and then legged it when he gave chase, but the presence of the younger kids guaranteed that someone would be caught and brought to book. So the order of the day was to explode in all directions like a cluster bomb and hope the multiplicity of targets would slow the copper down long enough to allow us all to get away.
Matt cut off across the tracks towards the ragged borders of Walton Hall Park, with Anita almost keeping pace beside him. I retreated with a few of the smaller kids through the tunnel, which led to another railway cutting a quarter of a mile up the line behind Bedford Road. I didn’t see where Kenny and his cohorts went.
So a stand-off was what we got in the end, whether we liked it or not — and for most of the gang that would be a ‘not’, because an unresolved fight left a sort of tension in the air like the hair-prickling feel of undischarged lightning. Better to get it over and done with, pick up any busted teeth and move on to the next big thing.
But for some reason that wasn’t what happened. Everybody expected Kenny to take the first opportunity to finish the fight. Instead he let it lie, and the next few times when we all met up he gave a good impression of having forgotten that it had ever happened.
I wondered why. I considered asking Matt, but the two of us seemed to be growing apart very quickly around then. Matt still looked out for me on the street, and at home too since we were yet another one-parent family by this stage (our mum had left home the year before after a matrimonial bloodletting that I was considered too young to have fully explained to me). But cooking baked beans and sausages out of a tin and making sure I didn’t get my head kicked in marked the limit of Matt’s involvement with me: he had nothing to say to me any more, and since dad had always been the taciturn type there was a silence around the Castor household that had gone beyond pregnant into stillborn.
