Thicker Than Water

‘But if he thinks she’s getting that money down the bingo, he’s living in a fool’s paradise.’

‘She’s a dirty mare.’

‘She’s a hoo-er, is what she is.’

That was how my mother always pronounced the word. Not whore: hoo-er. Two syllables, drawn out with censorious relish.

Concentrate on business.

Anita.

Kenny.

And one other outstanding item, which had to come first.

The bus took me out of town along St Anne’s Street, and then up through the asphalt and concrete runway which is all that remains of Scotland Road. As you drive out from the centre, Liverpool opens itelf up to you in concentric bands of squalor and almost-affluence — although for real affluence you had to swing all the way east to Woolton, and that was nowhere near my destination.

I got off two stops past where I should have done, at the Queen’s Drive flyover. Queen’s Drive is the Liverpool ring road, although Liverpool being a crescent-shaped city jammed in against the banks of the Mersey it’s really only half a ring. When John Brodie started building it in 1903, Walton was a village. By the time he downed tools and signed off on the job two and a half decades later, it had become a borough of the city, but there were streets behind St Mary’s Church that still kept that parochial charm. Other parts, particularly the streets around Walton Hospital, underwent a further metamorphosis into a slum, but as kids we had no standard of comparison. For all we knew, the queen had bedbugs too.

The hospital stands just outside of Queen’s Drive’s tight embrace, at the northern end of Breeze Hill. But when I got off the bus I turned the other way, past the church and on down County Road. In the mid-1980s the city council had finally decided to pull the beam out of its eye and had torn down the shithole where I’d been born, relocating most of the inhabitants either to a new development on the Walton Triangle or to council houses a couple of miles further in towards the centre.

A couple of miles. Tops. But geography is destiny in Liverpool, too, and for some reason the distances are strangely compressed. A hundred yards can be decisive in determining who you are, and what you are.

For my dad, who’d already lost his daughter and his marriage, moving out of Walton into Everton Valley was the third strike: the one that finally took him out of the game. It meant leaving behind an ecosystem as complex and fragile and non-portable as a coral reef: an ecosystem where kids tended to end up living in houses on the same street as their parents, or the next street over, where you could call on twenty or thirty cousins within a half-mile radius, and where every family had inherited alliances and feuds stretching back at least as far as the First World War.

Cut loose from that support mechanism, John Castor succumbed to colonic cancer and died within the space of a year. It was as though he’d made his mind up to it and saw no point in hanging about.

I was travelling backwards in time as I walked: County Road was my bathysphere. From my father’s death, I descended a decade or so to my parents’ break-up. Probably that would have happened a lot sooner, too, if they’d been living in Everton back then. Probably conservatism is a kind of social cement. The kind of conservatism that comes without a capital letter, I mean: we all know what the other kind is. At any rate, my mother’s infidelities and my dad’s heroic binge drinking might have made their marriage shake like a Tokyo skyscraper, but it took actually walking in on Mum in flagrante to make Dad finally call time, and even then it was all nuance. You find your wife naked with another man, you beat him senseless and throw him through the bedroom window onto the shed, that’s understood. But the ‘don’t darken my door’ routine was probably for form’s sake. Mum just chose to take it literally this time.

My life, and Matt’s life, became a strange and fractured thing after that. Mum went away, we lived with Dad. Matt went away, and I still lived with Dad but it was more like two guys just sharing rooms, seeing each other occasionally and finding they had less and less to say to each other when they did. Then Mum came back, which raised the possibility of us all being a proper family again, but she moved in with her lover, Terry Lackland, instead and it just meant that Dad’s bad temper got an additional scary edge to it, and that there was one more place where I didn’t really feel at home.

Now Dad was dead, and Terry was dead, and none of it meant anything any more. Except that the impassable terrain was still there between us shell-shocked survivors. The débris. I was walking on it now.

Mum’s house was ex-council, now owned by a private landlord called the Inner City Partnership. Mentioning their name was a quick way to elicit a spectacular torrent of abuse from her, but there was no denying that this was a step — if not a whole damn staircase — up from Arthur Street. The door wasn’t covered by a slab of particle board, for one thing. And it had a bell.

I rang, and silence answered. After a while, I rang again.

Mum answered on the fourth ring, just as I was giving up. She opened the door and stared at me for a moment or two, blank-faced and bleary-eyed, before recognition kicked in.

It was hard for me, too. In my mind, Barbie Castor always has a heroic, larger-than-life stature, as one of those Walton women of whom it was said, with approval and respect, ‘she fights like a man’. As a kid I used to look up to her in a literal and physical sense too, but her generous build and rugged independence made her the sort of person who it was easy to hide behind, easy to shelter in and rely on. Even her walking out on us hadn’t tarnished that image of her: if anything it had helped, because just when I was hitting my iconoclastic teens she wasn’t around any more to be measured against reality and found wanting. Consequently, when I thought of her at all, I saw her from the ten-year-old Felix’s perspective, which meant looking up from close to ground level.

Mum was still big, but — like one of those packages sold by weight, not volume — her contents had shifted in transit between the past and the present. Her bulk had a softer edge to it now, and her short-sleeved top showed me that some of the definition had gone from her finely muscled upper arms. It had gone from her face, too, her eyes passing over me once and then twice rather than pinning me to the wall until she was good and done with me.

‘Felix,’ she said, with a rising inflection, and then again, with slightly more conviction, ‘Felix!’ She took me in her arms, briefly but with feeling.

‘Hello, Mum,’ I said. Anything was going to sound banal under the circumstances, so I settled for, ‘How’s it going?’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m all right. Come on in.’

She led the way into the living room, which in true Walton style opened directly off the street with nothing in the way of a porch or hall. It was a room that exemplified my mother’s virtues: four-square, clean, and without a book or an ornament to be seen, apart from her much-loved print of Edward John Poynter’s Faithful Unto Death — which shows a Roman soldier remaining at his post, nervous but steadfast, as the ashes of Vesuvius rain down around him. The picture has taken on a darker and darker yellow-brown cast over the years, caused by nicotine deposits staining the glass despite regular and vigorous polishing.

There was a single armchair and a narrow two-seater sofa, both in gaudily patterned fabrics, a portable TV about the size of a matchbox with an indoor aerial sitting on top of it, and a coffee table much marked with the whitened rings left by a thousand cups of hot tea — which brought to mind, rather too vividly, the young loup-garou on the train. There were no teacups on it now, though: just two bottles of Worthington’s pale ale, one empty and one half-full, and a glass with beer froth around the rim.

‘Bit early in the day, Mum,’ I said, trying to make it sound like a joke.

‘Away, away with rum,’ my mother said, quoting Mike Harding’s mock-temperance song: that was always her answer, whenever anyone commented on her drinking. She’s not an alcoholic, not by her own definition: she never lets herself get drunker than the business of the day requires. ‘You’ll be sticking to tea, then, will you, love?’ she added, with a meaningful roll of her eyes.

‘I will for now,’ I said, hedging my bets.

She went through into the kitchen, and I stayed behind in the living room. Channelling Sherlock Holmes, I looked around for fag ends. But if Mum had started smoking again, she wouldn’t need anything as formal as an actual ashtray, and in any case I would have noticed as soon as I walked into the room: because it would have had that smell — somewhere between despair and dysentery — that smoking rooms in old hotels have.

Lots of empty beer bottles on the mantelpiece, though. Putting them there was an atavistic impulse: when I