Thicker Than Water

was growing up they’d served the same function as clothes pegs, holding Matt’s and my smalls in place while they dried in the warm air coming up from the fire. Now the fire was a log-effect gas burner, and the bottles just looked like old soldiers who know that the ceasefire has sounded and are waiting for the order to stand down.

Mum came back into the room, carrying a mug of milky tea in which a teabag still floated. She’d never really been into the idea that we eat first with our eyes. She handed it to me, then kissed me on the cheek, putting her hands on my shoulders and squeezing tight.

I cast around for something to say, but found nothing. I wasn’t even sure if she knew, until she buried her face in my shoulder and let out a single, throat-tearing sob. Mum never cried: not actual tears. Maybe when Matt got his ordination, but tears of pride are different. The world had never wrung one millilitre of tribute out of her in any other way; and even now, her eyes were dry as she raised them to stare into mine. Hollow, troubled, red- rimmed, but dry.

‘If it had been you, Felix, I would have understood.’

‘Cheers, Mum,’ I said.

‘I don’t mean that I wouldn’t have cared, love. But Matty’s world is different from yours. It always was.’ She shook her head, giving it up. ‘I just don’t see how this could have happened,’ she said mournfully.

‘He didn’t do it,’ I said. ‘I can tell you that much.’

Mum flared up, but not against me: against the world that was misjudging her son. ‘I bloody well know that!’ she said. ‘Didn’t I raise him? Isn’t he mine? Of course he didn’t bloody do it!’

‘Well, okay then,’ I said. ‘Just making the point, that’s all.’

Mum sat down heavily in the armchair, picked up her glass and took a deep swig of beer, then refilled the glass with what was left in the bottle. I took the sofa, which meant I had to sit on the edge of a cushion, balanced on a single buttock, in order to face her. I put the mug of tea down on the table’s bare wood, adding another ring to the many already there. Maybe you could use them to tell its age.

Mum was looking at me with a solemn, musing expression, the heat of her anger gone as quickly as it had come. ‘Three years,’ she said, softly. ‘Three years, Fix.’

‘I did call,’ I countered, but it was a feeble defence. The last time had been more than a year before, to ask her how she was doing when Matt had told me she was recovering from a chest infection. It had turned out to be low-grade pneumonia, and I’d still found reasons not to come up and visit. Given the distances involved, there was no defence. From London to Liverpool is three hours or so with good traffic: in America people drive further than that to pick up a carton of milk.

So I brought her up to speed on my life, going light on the succubi, zombies and were-beasts and heavy on my recent wanderings after Pen kicked me out of her house. I know my audience, you see: Mum favours Matt because he went to God and I went to the devil. So when she asked me if I was seeing anyone, I ducked the whole story of my infatuation with Juliet, and how a demon from Hell had ditched me for a Sapphic fling with a church warden. ‘I’ve been seeing a nurse,’ I told her, which was unassailable truth and could be said without blushing.

All of this was really just a way of not talking about Matt, and when I ran out of anecdotes that were fit to print, I found I still wasn’t ready to go there.

‘You getting out much?’ I asked, throwing the ball of procrastination into her court.

Mum shook her head emphatically. ‘What for, Fix? I’ve got everything I need here in this room. I watch the telly, listen to the radio. Put a bet on, when it’s the flat season. You know me and my accumulators. Three cross doubles . . .’ ‘. . . And a treble,’ I finished. ‘The mini-Yankee. Yeah, I remember. Still listening to Sing Something Simple?’

‘It’s not on any more,’ she said. ‘But there’s still Billy Butler on a Saturday.’

Billy Butler, and his Sony bronze award-winning show, Hold Your Plums. It used to have Matt and me giggling our heads off when we were kids. Only Scousers could come up with a radio quiz based on a fruit machine, with a robotic voice telling you what was showing on each reel.

‘Billy Butler,’ I said. ‘Christ.’ It was the only comment that seemed to fit.

‘Oh aye,’ Mum agreed. ‘I never change, me. I’ve had enough changes in my life, Fix. I’m happy with what I’ve got, these days.’

What you’ve got is nothing, Mum, I thought but didn’t say. Everyone you used to know is dead or somewhere else. And you’re stuck here in Walton like a fly caught in amber. Although pale ale doesn’t quite have that golden- brown lustre to it. It’s more the colour of piss.

‘Ever see anyone from Arthur Street?’ I asked.

This time Mum didn’t answer. She looked at me thoughtfully, waiting for more. ‘Anyone from the old days, I mean,’ I clarified.

Still nothing. She took another long swig from her glass.

‘I know a lot of people moved to the Triangle,’ I went on. ‘After they knocked down–’

‘What are you here for, Fix?’ Mum asked, putting down her empty glass. ‘Really?’

‘You mean besides seeing you?’

‘That’s what I mean, yes.’

‘It’s about Matt,’ I said, bluntly. ‘You know who it is he’s meant to have attacked?’

‘Kenny Seddon.’

‘So I was thinking I’d shake the tree a bit. Talk to some people who might know more than I do about what Kenny was up to before–’

‘Before someone sliced him up like a bacon joint.’

‘Well, essentially. Yeah.’

Mum nodded, straight-faced. ‘Go on, then. Who’s on your list?’

‘Anita and Richie Yeats,’ I said. ‘And Kenny’s brothers, Ronnie and Steve. Do you have any idea where they ended up?’

‘The Yeatses are over in Bootle now,’ Mum said, counting them off on her fingers. ‘That’s Eddie and Rita Yeats, I mean — Rita Brydon as was. I haven’t seen Anita in donkey’s years. Richie was living with them, or so Ernie Hampson said, but I heard they gave him down the banks and showed him the door.’

Her expression told me that something momentous was being left unsaid. ‘Why was that, then?’ I asked. ‘Gave him down the banks for what?’

Mum pursed her lips. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know. A grown man, and he’s never done a day’s bloody work in his life. He’s a waster, Fix, and there’s nothing down for him. Some people are never going to do any good for themselves if you give them a hundred years. And he’s — you know . . .’ Mum made the limp-wrist gesture.

‘He’s gay?’ I said blankly.

Mum pursed her lips and nodded.

‘You’re saying they kicked him out because he’s gay?’

Mum stood her ground. ‘Well, you don’t want your son bringing strange men into the house, do you?’ she demanded. ‘Some of these people–’

‘Thanks for the tip, Mum,’ I said, cutting her off. And thinking of Juliet I added, ‘At least he didn’t go outside his own species.’

I think the homophobia must be a generational thing: it’s certainly not class or geography, because you can meet the same bullshit in Hampstead just as easily. I remembered now that Richie had made some non-standard life choices even as a kid — he was the only boy in my circle of acquaintances with a skipping rope — but I’d never read anything into that. Maybe someone else had, though: maybe the nickname Dick-Breath was more than just a whimsical jeu de mots.

‘Now Ronnie Seddon –’ another finger went down ‘he was selling drugs at the Palm Tree, until he tried to sell them to a couple of plain-clothes coppers, so that was the end of him. He got three years in Walton. Mind you, there’s more drugs in there than there is anywhere else, from what I hear, so he’s probably happy. Teresa Size’s lad, Philip, was saying they smuggle them in over the wall from the cemetery on Hornby Road. They use catapults, he said. Just tie Jiffy bags full of heroin to old batteries and shoot them in with catapults.’

Mum recounted this with relish. Her favourite reading matter had always been true crime, although she preferred a good murder to any amount of aggravated robbery.

‘Then there’s Steven Seddon,’ she said. ‘He was at the docks for a while, back when they still had a few ships coming in every now and then. But he gave that up in the end and went to some night-school thing. He’s at a law