by Tim Roux
Mike may have been stupid about many things beyond DIY, but I guessed that in this case he was probably spot on. I had heard in London about all these corrupt northern cities where the police and the councillors sit in each other’s pockets raking in the cash, tying in the local magistrates who just want to hang somebody. I didn’t know where Hull stood in the pecking order of such places, but I soon had it pegged as a feudal society with a ruling class sitting pretty in their country mansions, lording it over the grovelling servant classes whom they employed. If you could square any issue with the elite, you could get away with it, that was my guess.
And where would I fit in? Well, immediately, I was about the lowest of the low-life, scum, which was tough on Fran and Tommy. I have always felt responsible for others, which was probably how I started out with Chrissie. Now I had to do something for my new family, and I was amazed what I was prepared to do. It felt like I was not really the one doing it. What Harry chose to do was not my doing. I had an escape hatch. If the situation got too hot, I might find a way of airlifting myself out of there. I was in the middle of a computer game. It wasn’t real, it was surreal. And all the time there was this little buried voice inside me egging me on. “You can do it. Prove you can do it. Get yourself a better life for Fran, Tommy, all of you. Be someone. Be a really big someone. You are made to be someone.” The way that I had wanted to make it big had been as an architect, but there was no chance of that for the time-being. Instead, I was following a path that no-one who realised that I had been brought up in a residential care home would have been surprised at. I had struggled to avoid this sort of life, and now I had been plunged down into it anyway.
And I thought to myself “Why not?” What did I have to lose? When I looked at myself in the mirror, it was obvious that the world hadn’t given Harry much in the first place, and had subsequently taken most of it away again.
Tommy still had some time for me, especially if I could break heads the way he had seen me do with Martin and his gang. Kathy, in desperate straights of her own, thought I was potentially useful, although there was some genuine affection there too. And Fran was persuadable, I guessed, although, for the present, she was completely switched off. I felt I had to win her back, which was idiotic as I had never won her in the first place beyond a one-night-and-one-morning stand.
Well, first off, I had better do something about keeping myself out of prison. At any moment the police would be kicking the door down and presenting the magistrates with a stitched up case, having done a deal with Mike the Hammer or Cut-Throat Carver. If I was going to survive, I would have to skip that bit. But how?
As Fran had predicted, Kathy did not drag herself home until seven in the morning, but when she did, I was waiting for her.
“Kathy, I need to talk to you,” I said as she fell through the door, hanging from the key which was still rattling in the latch.
“Oh come on, Harry. Give me a break. I’m bushed.”
“I still need to talk to you, Kathy, and you got me into this mess.”
“You’ve been in this mess all your life, Harry.”
“Yes, but I am not Harry, and I have only been here since yesterday.”
“OK, then, but I need some kip. You can talk to me until I start snoring.”
So I did, although Kathy did throw in a free strip show whilst she was at it.
“When will the police come for me, do you think?”
“I heard Mike say that you wouldn’t last past Thursday. Whether that was to do with the Inbies or the coppers, I don’t know.”
“Who are the Inbies?”
“Trevor Plant’s gang in Bransholme - North Bransholme Estate – NBE – Inbies.”
“Who is Mike working with here?”
“He said it in front of the whole gang - Cut-Throat, Fingers, Knitting Needles, ‘ull Bitter, Rackets and Welton Willy.”
“And have I got a nickname yet?”
“Yeah, you are Slasher.”
“Slasher?”
“Yeah, originally as in peeing in your pants, but now as in stabbing Martin. They do admire you for that.”
“It doesn’t exactly amount to loyalty, though.”
* * *
Hull, East Yorkshire, was a place as obscure to me as Hull, Canada, until I inadvertently turned up there.
Everyone in Hull knows that in 2005 it was officially considered to be the worst place to live in the country. Probably nobody outside Hull cared. Within a few days, I had decided that it looked a lot better than Stoke-on-Trent, which is a classic “I spent a fortnight there last weekend” sort of place, although people in Hull say that about Grimsby. I have never been there, but the name sounds right.
Hull is pronounced “’ull” by the locals who live below the salt. Harry Walker pronounces it that way too. Its official name is Kingston-upon-Hull, because Hull is really a river, not a city. It used to be the biggest fishing port in England, and the streets around Pease Street are where most of the trawlermen used to live. You can see some of these old-timers still hanging around, often wearing dark suits and reminiscing about the days when they travelled everywhere in taxis and got through three weeks’ wages in two days, leaving the missus and the kids to rely on the kindness of neighbours. They tell me that Hull was rugged and honest in those days, a community. The roughness came from the seas. Many trawlers went down over the years, drowning their entire crews. Up in the arctic, you last about a minute in the freezing waters. No-one quite knows why the ships sunk, but they suspected that the rigging became iced up, the boat then became top-heavy and ‘turned turtle’. Back in the ‘60s, three trawlers capsized within a few weeks of each other, killing everyone on board. Despite this, the old fisherman pub haunts, like Rayners down Hessle Road, are nostalgic for the way things were. You were surrounded by good mates you signed up alongside for trip after trip, serving legendary skippers who claimed to be able to smell where the fish was, and villainous, thieving trawler owners, who weren’t so bad really. Everything in Hull ain’t so bad really, even when it is.
The most significant things about Hull are its white telephone boxes, and its inclusion in the phrase “Hell, Hull and Halifax”, because Hull and Halifax were the hanging towns in Yorkshire. I have never been to Halifax, but maybe they were grateful in Hull to be put out of their misery.
I needed to dig myself out of my immediate misery and, for that, I needed help. The only two people I knew were Fran and Kathy, both of whom I had just met. Fran was not speaking to me; Kathy was dead to the world (and she was right, she did snore). If anyone knocked on the door, it was a toss-up between it being the police or the Inbies.
There was only one way I could think of to knock both out of the equation.
Fran and Tommy were downstairs in the kitchen. Tommy was still drawing. He smiled at me while Fran turned away.
“Fran,” I started. She busied herself with a task that did not require her to look at me. “Fran!”
“She’s cross with you, Dad. She thinks you are going to get us all killed.”
“I am going to give us all a better life,” I contradicted him.
“What do you mean, Dad?”
“Don’t listen to him, Tommy, he is talking pipe dreams.”
“Those too,” I confirmed. “If we are going to make it really big, we have to have a pipe dream.”
Fran turned on me, sneering. “What do you mean ‘really big’, Harry? You are a small-time crook. In fact, you are smaller than that, and you have even messed that up.”
“I haven’t messed anything up, Fran. I have been here a day, let me remind you.”
“What do you mean, Dad?” Tommy was smiling broadly in concerned disbelief.
“Don’t listen to him, Tommy. He is raving.”
“Do you have any contacts in the police, Fran?”
“I haven’t, but you certainly have. You have been nabbed about a thousand times.”
“Who has nabbed me?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“I need just one name, Fran.”
“What about the guy from the other night, when you stabbed that Martin guy? Why do you want to know, anyway?”
“I need to do a deal.”
“You are going to be a grass?” Fran exclaimed incredulously.
“I don’t have any other choice.”
“You’ll get yourself killed, and like as not us besides.”
“Let’s look on the positive side.”
“What side is that, then?”
“At least I won’t be going to prison.”
“You call that the bright side? I call it a crying shame.”
I winked at Tommy, but he was too stunned to respond.
“Fran, if we are going to pull this off, I need you and Kathy to help me out.”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you are on about.”
“Well, there I can help you.” She shrugged her shoulders and went to fetch something from the sitting room, which was just as well, as I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about either.
* * *
“Dad,” Tommy pleaded with me. “What is going on?”
“I don’t know, Tommy.”
“How do you not know, Dad?”
“Tommy, come here,” I coaxed him although, in fact, I pulled up a stool next to him. I gave him a hug. It was a genuine one. I was already beginning to feel fond of this boy. It was as if I belonged to both of them in a shadowy sort of way, to him and his mother; as if I always had. “Life is sometimes confusing.”
“What is confusing?” I think he was asking me to define ‘confusing’, but I answered as if he was seeking more information.
“Tommy, a few days ago, I thought I was somebody else. Now I feel like I am that somebody else and your dad, as if the old me has been superimposed on your old dad, producing I don’t know quite what.”
Tommy eyed me as if I had gone completely mad. “Do you need to see a doctor, Dad?”
“No, I need to consult a metaphysician.” He stared back at me blankly. “Metaphysicians address the questions of ultimate knowledge; the truth behind the illusion.”
Tommy didn’t know how to respond so he clutched me tight, as if trying to cling me to reality, or to cling onto it himself.
“Tommy, shall I tell you about the man I think I used to be?”
“Yes, please, Dad.”
I led him to the sitting room. Fran was no longer there. She must have gone upstairs. We sat down side-by-side on the sofa. Tommy cuddled up against me with a sense of total intimacy, and trust, and need, as only a small child can achieve. How did this pillock Harry manage to spawn and live alongside such a child?
“The man I think I used to be lost his parents before he even knew he had them. His father was killed in a fight in a pub before he was born ……”
“Why was he fighting?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened to the man who killed him?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“And then what?”
“My mother died giving birth to me.”
“What did she die of?”
“She started bleeding heavily, and they couldn’t stop it. She bled to death.”
“Why couldn’t they stop it?”
“It happens sometimes. Giving birth is not as easy as everybody makes out.”
“Was it easy for Mum when I was born?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
“Where were you?”
“I was this other man.”
He frowned, as if trying to come to terms with something. “And then …..”
“And then I went to live in a residential care home. I had no relatives, or at least none that they could trace.”
“What was it like there?”
“I didn’t know any different. It was probably a bit like being brought up in a hospital, and then like being brought up in a prison, with frequent remands.”
“What is a remand?”
“A remand is when you are let out of prison to see if you can live a better life than you did. In my case, I was sent to live with foster parents to see if I could live with them.”
“Could you?”
“I don’t know. They couldn’t live with me. I was sent to six foster homes in my first ten years, and they all decided that it wasn’t working, that I did not fit into their families.”
“Why couldn’t you?”
“I thought I could. It thought I was doing well, but each time they decided that it wasn’t working. It always ended up with them shouting at me. I don’t think that foster parents have the same tolerance of other people’s children as they have of their own.”
“Do you love me? Would you ever send me away?”
“Never.” I answered his question genuinely, sincerely, then I thought about what I had just promised. I had committed never to leave him, and yet I had two children of my own that I could not abandon either. How was I going to get around that?
“I love you too, Dad. More than ever.”
“Thank you, Tommy.”
“And then what?”
“Then, when I was twelve, I fell madly in love with a girl called Chrissie.”
“Was that before you met Mum?”
“Long before I met your mum. Eighteen years ago.”
“What was she like?”
“She was wonderful. She still is wonderful. I love her very much.”
“More than you love Mum?” He lifted his head to search my eyes.
“I have only known your mum for two days. She seems really, really nice, but I don’t know her.”
“Dad, why are you teasing me? You have known her for years. You have known her all the time that I have been born.”
“Not in my mind, Tommy. To the best of my recollection, I only met her for the first time the other day.”
“That’s stupid, Dad, don’t tease.”
“I am not trying to tease you, Tommy. I am trying to tell you the truth; my truth.”
“How could that be true?”
“That is what I don’t understand.”
“I don’t like what you are saying, Dad. You are frightening me.”
“I am not trying to frighten you, Tommy.”
He got up sharply, tears in his eyes, shaking. “I want Mum. Where is she?”
“Probably upstairs.”
He ran into the hallway. “Mum! Mum!”
“Yes, Tommy?”
“Where are you?”
“Up here? What’s the matter?”
“Dad is lying to me. He is being horrible. He is pretending that he is not my dad.”
I heard Fran swiftly descending the stairs. She poked her head round the door to give me a scowl. “Don’t worry, Tommy,” she consoled him. “Dad has his crazy turns.”
“Is he my dad?”
“Of course he is.”
“So why does he say that he isn’t?”
“Something funny happened to him the other day when he went to see the doctor. He has not been quite himself since. In some ways he is much nicer. In others he is behaving like a complete twerp.”
“Will he get better?”
“I sincerely hope so. I can’t put up with him the way he is now forever. It’s exhausting, and he is doing and saying some very silly things.”
Tommy came back into the room and gave me another hug. “Dad,” he declared, “I still love you, even when you hurt me.”
“Come on, Tommy,” Fran called. “Let’s go shopping.”
“Do you have some money?” Tommy exclaimed, all excited.
“That’ll be the day,” Fran replied, “but a cat can look at a king.”
“What cat?”
“It’s an expression, Tommy. It means that we can still look at the things we could buy if we had the money.”
“Will we ever have any money?”
“Your dad says that we will someday, although your dad is not that reliable. It is best not to believ
e too much of what he says at the moment, or to get upset by it. He’ll be himself again soon.”
I listened to the sounds of an expedition preparing itself in the hallway and the kitchen, until the voices began to fade, and I heard the front door shudder behind them.
* * *
Chapter 8
I managed to find the name of the detective who called round after I killed Martin Jenson on a sheet of paper in a drawer in the kitchen – Detective Inspector Richard Martin, coincidentally, from Humberside Police, Queen’s Gardens – so I left the house shortly after Fran and Tommy.
I had to ask directions at the end of the road to Queen’s Gardens. Luckily, the location was well known and the middle-aged woman whom I accosted pointed the way and suggested that I ask again once I was in town. In all, I had to flag down three people before I got there.
DI Martin was out when I inquired, so I waited for three hours in total until he arrived back, and for another hour until he would see me. He led me to an interview room.
“Sit down, Harry.”
“Thank you.”
“Well?”
“I have come to ask a favour?”
“A favour? What would that be?”
“I was wondering if I could help you.”
His eyes narrowed alarmingly. “In what way?”
“I would like to become an informer.”
DI Martin sat back in his chair and roared with laughter. “Now I have heard it all,” he commented. “Harry Walker an informer, eh? What do you want to inform us about?”
“The Royals have invited me to become their leader.”
“Congratulations, Harry. It is quite a promotion for the likes of you. What did you say?”
“I said yes.”
“And now you want to stitch them up?”
“I think it is more that they are trying to stitch me up.”
“So what are you proposing to tell us?”
