Manchester Slingback

by Manchester Slingback (retail) (epub)

  Jake nodded.

  ‘It’s a story, so please be patient. I don’t want you smashing things because you think I’m going too slow.’

  ‘I’ll wait until you’ve finished.’

  He began, ‘Okay. When I was a kid… is that too early for you? Well it started when I was a very little kid. People used to say, “They think we eat babies.” I remember I had an aunty, she would bounce me up and down on her knee, hugging me and saying: “They think we eat little babies.” And I’d get maybe a kiss or maybe sent to the kitchen where I’d be given a biscuit, and my mother or another aunty would be there to give me another “They think we eat little babies” — you imagine? And so I knew right from the beginning that They were out there and They were spreading these ridiculous lies and probably They even believed them. Then, when I was older, maybe nineteen, I read this history book about the old days. I found out, back then, the traditional way to perform circumcision was the rabbi would make the cut, take a swig of red wine, then lift the baby up and gargle with the baby’s dickie in his mouth. It was the best way to sterilize the cut, probably anaesthetize it too. But can you imagine some dumb Slav peasant creeping up to a Jew’s hut in the middle of the countryside and looking through the window? He sees everyone standing around an altar, the candles lit, and, at the centre, some weird priest, half in robes and half in undertaker’s clothes, his hair sticking out in all directions from under a great big hat, gnawing at a baby’s groin and the blood and wine running over his huge grey beard? What the fuck do you think they would have thought? They run out, they start screaming: “Those Jews eat babies.” Reading that, I couldn’t believe it was all so simple. It could be explained…’

  Benny Silver was shaking his head, like he’d come into the world gullible. It wasn’t how he was leaving it. ‘I know now, because so many stupid things are getting revived by the Hasidim; gargling wine with the baby’s dickie is the traditional way. I’ve even seen it done. But I know why no one’s ever bothered to explain how it was the gentiles came to think we ate babies. Because it wouldn’t do any good. I’m not saying it’s because they already decided to hate us, so they wouldn’t ever listen. That may be true; it maybe isn’t. I don’t know. But I do know the whole thing sounds too awful. Gargling a baby’s dick after you cut it up, how are you supposed to explain that? What can you say?’

  ‘It’s disgusting.’

  ‘Yeah, and you’ve been around. Imagine how it sounds to other people. It wouldn’t do any good because they’d think, well, it’s not eating babies but it’s disgusting enough. So – to cut back to the point – I knew about Gary Halliday and the reason I knew was because he thought I was like him, another kiddie-fucker. When I found out why he was cultivating my acquaintance, I kept well out of his way, but it scared me. If he thought I was like him, what would everyone else think?’

  Now he was going for the confessional. ‘I’m a dirty old man. What I like are what I always called boys. But I didn’t really mean boys boys. I meant people like you. I was a dirty old man, and what I liked were nubiles. I did my best to persuade them to get naked and get in my sack. There must be millions out there like me, maybe a majority of men. The difference, though, most of them like girls. Meaning inappropriately young women. And because I like inappropriately young men, I was scared to say anything. To most people it sounded disgusting enough, what does it matter that I’m innocent of that specific charge when I’m guilty as hell of something else? How old were you back then: seventeen, eighteen?’

  ‘Seventeen and eighteen.’

  ‘Suppose I ever managed to worm some favour out of you, I could have been locked up for that.’

  ‘You could have. Though the law’s changed now, eighteen’s okay.’

  They sat in silence for a moment until Jake said, ‘Basically you’re saying you were scared.’

  ‘After Johnny was murdered, I was terrified.‘

  ‘Gary Halliday told you he killed Johnny?’

  ‘As good as.’

  ‘He say why?’

  ‘Johnny had videos of him and his friends doing what they did. He was going to take them to the police.’

  ‘What about Kevin? Why was he killed?’

  ‘Same reason. Somehow he managed to get his hands on the same videos – or copies of them.’

  ‘Halliday told you this?’

  ‘He screamed it at me. He was running around looking up everyone who might know where Kevin Donnelly was, trying to get to him before Kevin got to the police.’

  Jake couldn’t think. He didn’t know whether to smash up the whole room, or whether he could justify doing it. Maybe he would be doing the man a favour, making him reassess everything one more time.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jake set the bag of videos down on the smoky-blue cover of the hi-fi. The room was almost dark and wherever he stepped there was party debris underfoot: cups and cans, up-ended saucers full of cigarette stubs. There was a boy and girl asleep on the settee, someone else spread on the floor and covered in a coat. As Jake walked by, an eye opened.

  ‘Alright, Jake, how’s it going?’

  Could be a great deal better, but Jake just nodded, fine, and stepped over the lad’s body.

  Fairy’s lean-to was still standing intact at the back of the room; the party couldn’t have been that wild. Jake pulled back the pink, furry-swirled bedcover that made the opening flap and looked inside. It was Kevin Donnelly lying there, and he was on his own. Jake let the cover fall and walked out to the stairs. He remembered now, Sean had moved to Perry-loving Flixton. Probably Fairy had taken over his old bed. He had first bagsies on it.

  At the top of the stairs, Jake saw a slash of daylight around the edge of Johnny’s door and pushed it open. Johnny was in bed with two girls. It was a moment before Jake recognized them as Rebecca and her friend Debs. In that flush of embarrassment, he was just glad no one seemed to have heard him.

  But, as he began to close the door, Johnny lifted his head and said, ‘Jake, that you? What time is it?’

  ‘Nine-thirty.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Johnny’s face was screwed against the daylight, although it was still weak. ‘What happened to you?’

  Jake didn’t know what to say. He thought, I got stoned and ran around.

  ‘You got a black eye?’

  Jake knew all about it, though he wouldn’t have said it was a black eye… it didn’t go deep enough. He guessed he got it in the fight last night, outside the Bus Station.

  He said, ‘I ran into the guy Kevin Donnelly told you about, the one who wanted some videos copying. I put them downstairs on the record player.’

  ‘Right. I’ll take them round to Junk’ – Johnny waved a hand over the girls – ‘later. What price did you give him?’

  Halliday hadn’t seemed worried about price, just discretion. Jake shrugged, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well how many does he want?’

  ‘Four of each, all VHS.’ He remembered that. ‘I’m fucked, Johnny. I got to crash. I’ll catch you later.’

  Rebecca stirred against Johnny’s body and opened sleep-mired eyes, as buggy and vulnerable as a baby ET doll. Strange since her night-time eyes were her best feature. Even so, her Cleopatra make-up was still in place. Jake pulled the bedroom door behind him before she wakened completely.

  The door to his own room was closed. Jake pushed it open, feeling the soft weight of clothes piled carelessly on the other side of the door. They were Domino’s clothes. It was Domino lying in his bed. Jake stared at him for a moment without knowing what to do, then turned and tried Sean’s room. He was right about Fairy: it was his room now. The boy was asleep there, lying naked on a near-naked bed, just a tartan dog blanket and the hairdresser Stevie to keep him warm. Jake could smell the breath of the animal but not the smell of sex. It didn’t mean that it wasn’t there, only that he carried it too and was already numb to it. He turned back to his own room, swept along on a bellying wave of nausea.

  Jake kept a sleepin
g-bag at the bottom of his wardrobe, below the shelf with his folded shirts. He shook the bag out, laid it on the floor in the shadow of his bed, and crept inside. For half an hour the tinny jangling of the amphetamine in his blood and brain kept him from sleeping. Then, suddenly, it didn’t any more.

  Once, and briefly, he was pulled out of sleep by Domino but he buried his head and the boy gave up. It was much much later when Johnny came and woke him, sitting above him on the edge of the bed, an arm stretching into his dreams to shake him awake.

  ‘Jake, Jake.’

  He slurped into the light. Someone had drawn back the curtains on his window. ‘What?’

  Johnny had a plastic bag at his feet. The video tapes.

  ‘Jake. Do you know what’s on these?’

  Jake shook his head. ‘Porn?’

  ‘No. Not porn.’

  Jake tried to pull himself up. There was a headache deep behind his eyes. ‘Not porn?’

  ‘It’s real stuff, real abuse. The man fucking the kids in his home.’

  Jake was awake now. ‘You’ve seen it?’

  ‘About a minute’s worth. Junk refused to copy them. He couldn’t look at them. What I want to know, why did Kevin Donnelly send the man to me? What the fuck’s up with that lad?’

  Johnny was out of the room now, stamping down the steps and into the living-room. Jake slithered out of his sleeping bag and followed behind.

  He found Johnny hunched over the settee talking to Fairy. No one knew where Kevin Donnelly had gone. Fairy suggested he was working. Johnny couldn’t believe that.

  ‘It’s fucking Sunday. What’s he going to be doing on a Sunday?’

  Jake said, ‘Anyone want tea?’

  ‘Tea? I couldn’t hold it down.’ Johnny was waving a video out of the bag. ‘A little fucking kid, bawling his eyes out. I don’t get Kevin. The same man who fucked him up and now he’s helping him out. Helping him while he does the same thing to someone new.’

  *

  In the end, Johnny did have a cup of tea. Over the next hour he had several, thick and syrupy mugs, and he held them all down. Kevin Donnelly returned while he was sucking at the third.

  Stood in front of their settee, the three of them staring up at him, he looked smaller and more feeble than ever. He was back in his everyday clothes now: Harrington jacket and tight jeans. A little Borstal-boy shoplifter and they had him in the dock.

  Johnny said, ‘Who the fuck does this man think he is?’

  ‘Gary Halliday.’

  Johnny said he didn’t give a fuck what his name was, why had Kevin sent him to them? The kid had nothing to say, his thin lips twisted under his biting teeth. Johnny told him, ‘I don’t fucking get you…’ and to Fairy, ‘Do you fucking believe this?’ Johnny felt unclean. He said it more than once and, sitting on the settee, he looked uncomfortable in his clothes, in his skin. Jake had never seen him like that before.

  Donnelly said, ‘He tells me what to do.’

  ‘And you do it?’

  ‘If I don’t, it’s always worse.’

  Jake remembered the story again, that after he’d spent a year in the home, Kevin’s social worker had suggested it might be time for him to leave. Gary Halliday had said, no, the kid wasn’t ready, another few months and maybe… but not yet. And that was that. What would something like that do a fourteen-year-old kid? Another story: every time Kevin ran away he got another few months added on to his total. Forget everything else, just that one thing alone would convince Donnelly he had no choice but to go on and on doing whatever Halliday told him.

  Johnny’s voice was clear and firm, even pompous. Again, Jake had never heard him sound like that. ‘You don’t live there now. You live here. You’re seventeen, you make your own money, you do what you want.’

  Kevin was twisting on the carpet in front of them. ‘He tells me what to do, I try and do it if I can.’

  ‘No. No. No.’ Johnny’s voice was getting even slower, even louder; like he was explaining the obvious to an idiot. ‘This fat, bald cunt comes crawling up to you and you do what he says? No. Listen to me, the next time you kick him in the fucking bollocks. You put a glass through his face. Do you understand?’

  Kevin was shaking his head. ‘He’s not fat and bald. That’s Mr Ford, not Gary.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Ford, the man in charge of Drake Block. Gary’s the housemaster for Raleigh.’

  Johnny still didn’t get it, he’d seen the guy on the video.

  Donnelly was still saying, ‘Gary’s not fat and bald. Is he?’

  Jake realized the boy was staring straight at him. He shook his head. ‘No. The guy’s youngish. He’s got hair.’

  Johnny was saying again, ‘So who’s Ford?’

  Kevin explained in a breaking mumble, there were four housemasters: for Drake, Raleigh, Nelson and Scott.

  ‘All four of them are kiddie-fuckers?’

  Donnelly nodded, ‘Four of them at Colchester Hall. Sometimes they took us to parties at other homes.’

  Johnny’s voice had lost its pompous edge; he was beginning to understand this thing was too complex. He couldn’t go out and bottle one man – castrate the problem in one easy step. But he couldn’t believe the truth either.

  ‘Why’s no one done anything? You can’t keep this thing secret when there’s so many of them.’

  Johnny was forgetting he knew it about it, too. Long before today. Or at least he’d heard the rumours. The difference now was that he’d seen a video of a fat bald man whaling on a crying kid. It had got too graphic. He wanted to know why had no one gone to the police?

  Donnelly said, ‘I think the police know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They have to. They send us there, they take us back there. I know some kids have told them. They either know about it and don’t give a fuck, or they don’t believe it.’

  Johnny was waving a video. ‘You got the fucking proof here. You make them believe.’

  Donnelly was fast shrinking into his clothes, disappearing from the head and feet, as though he was being sucked down into the most abused part of himself. He didn’t care about proof; he didn’t want to know what Johnny had seen on the video tape.

  Johnny flung the tape down. ‘The Manchester police hate gays. How can they let this stuff go on, and still go out raiding the Village every other night?’

  Johnny couldn’t let it go. Two hours later, he was still ripping at the blind stupidity. No one had an answer. ‘The hypocritical fucking bastards.’

  *

  It was just Jake and Johnny now, walking across the stretch of dirt, grass and diesel tarmac, back towards Junk’s flat at the other side of Hulme.

  Jake had one suggestion, the only thing he could think of. ‘The police can’t see it. What’s happening at Colchester Hall, it’s like a blind spot.’

  ‘Fuck that. It’s happening right under their noses.’

  ‘No. It’s happening behind their backs.What they’ve got under their noses are places like Moss Side, Whalley Range or the Village. They think they’re fighting a war against evil, so they aren’t going to start looking into the remand homes and stuff, start questioning the places that help them do their job.’

  Where they were walking, beside the five-a-side pitches, the fence was half ripped down and the concrete uprights stolen. They were probably taken in the riots earlier that year and used as battering rams. Across Moss Side and Hulme, walls had been reduced to rubble as they were pulled apart, brick by brick, and used as ammunition. There were scorch marks on the road where cars had been set alight and barricades built. One night it was like a replay of Fort Apache – The Bronx: TV cameras out in force as a mob swarmed on Moss Side police station and threatened to burn it to the ground. That was a war. The police believed it and so did everyone else, whichever side they were on.

  ‘Anderton knows everyone hates him. The City Council’s full of Trots, the student union’s campaigning against police brutality, half the city’s had riots. He’s locked
in a siege, so why’s he going to go after people like Halliday?’

  ‘It’s not a fucking siege. It’s a game,’ said Johnny. ‘It’s got to be in the police’s favour to play up the risks of Black Trotsky Race Rioters just so they can scare ordinary decent twats into supporting them.’

  ‘Raiding the Village every night? That’s war. After Moss Side they treat the Village as a second front.’

  Johnny didn’t believe it. ‘Bollocks. People like Pascal don’t hate the Village. It’s just an easy target.’ The way Johnny saw it, the police force was a home for pragmatists and hypocrites. An institute for the dumb with just enough political savvy not to show how stupid they were.

  But Johnny had it wrong, Jake was sure. If they were talking about the essence of the police, about its core and about its values… he had to understand there were real principles at stake. Maybe the police in general, the foot-sloggers, were hazy, shady chancers. But Anderton and Pascal were zealots. The way their world worked, it was good versus evil. He wasn’t saying they were geniuses but they had an unswerving plan: bad out there, good in here. He tried to get it through to Johnny, but Johnny hadn’t had his say.

  ‘Fuck that, Jake. If they got any deep reason to focus on the Village, it’s because they enjoy prowling us so much they assume everyone else is on the sniff. They think we’re infectious and want to make sure the contagion doesn’t spread. Because they think it’s what the world wants, to give in to people like us.’

  Maybe Johnny had something after all. Jake could see Anderton or Pascal falling for that: the idea that temptation is the one earthly power that’s all but unanswerable and always irresistible without spiritual grace. It was the one point where their faith could cross with his and Johnny’s one unshakable belief: the conviction that everyone in the world wanted to shag them.