by A. J. Kirby
I smiled gingerly at the barman – a young lad, surprisingly – and hoped that he’d finish pouring our drinks before realising just how bad a state Dick was in. I’d had to drag Dick in off the street, and he was now drumming his impatient fingers on the top of the bar, furtive eyes darting off here, there and everywhere. Behind the bar, where the barman couldn’t see from his vantage point, Dick’s feet were performing some impromptu jig. I’d already had to shush his constant questions.
‘Wait until we sit down,’ I said, giving him an icy warning stare. We were lucky that none of the crowd from outside had chosen to follow us in.
Dick moaned under his breath. Leaned down closer to the bar. Looked as though he was going to start smashing his head against the taps. As it was, he seemed to take all of his aggression out on a new piece of chewing gum; rolling his mouth around it as though pummelling it into submission.
‘Is he all right?’ asked the young barman, fingers itching to stop pouring the lager. Itching to be able to assert his one and only right; to be able to bar people that were too pissed-up to stand up.
‘He’s fine,’ I breathed, taking care to smooth down the collars of my uniform. Making sure that he recognised me as a man of action, despite the leg.
‘Hey; don’t I recognise you from somewhere?’ asked the barman. ‘Are you from round here originally?’
I narrowed my eyes. It wouldn’t do for too many people to know of my return. Not yet. Dick muttered something about people minding their own business and I faced the young barman down. It didn’t take long for him to give up; they breed them that way at the Choke. Sighing, he passed over two over-full lagers, took my proffered note and returned to his crossword.
The pub was quiet again. So quiet that we could hear the whistling from an old man’s nose as we passed him on our way to the back of the lounge. The man had smoked so many cigarettes that he’d practically turned cigarette now. And despite the fact that he could barely breathe, he was trying to light a new one off the dying embers of the last one in the ashtray. Involuntarily, I shuddered.
‘How did you know?’ whispered Dick as we took up our seats; under-sized stools which seemed as though designed for children. Perhaps they were; perhaps the Choke were so desperate for custom these days that they let primary school kids in to sup alcopops here, where they couldn’t quite be seen if any passing policeman happened to pop their head round the door. ‘How did you know about Lion?’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said, firmly. ‘None of that crowd’s going to come in here looking for you are they? Not that bloke from the café? We don’t want some kind of scene…’
Dick took a long drink of his pint. Too long; bubbles must have gone up his nose and he choked some of the suspicious-smelling liquid straight back out over his tracksuit top. Now we both had matching booze-stains. Within an hour of getting back to Newton Mills, things were – on the face of them – right back to normal.
‘Sorry Bully,’ he gasped. ‘This is all just…’
He made an extravagant gesture, taking in the whole of the pub and its dilapidated, condemned men. I knew exactly what he meant.
‘We need to talk,’ I repeated. ‘But first: are we going to be followed in? What about your kids?’
Dick smiled bitterly: ‘Let that Frank in the caff look after him for a while. He’s the bastard that’s been knocking-off my Laura. If he wants her, he can damn well take on the whole shebang.’
‘Sure?’
‘It’s not the first time I’ve just left them up there with him,’ said Dick. ‘He’ll be all right about it. He’s actually an okay guy in a fucked-up kinda way.’
‘Where’s Laura?’ I asked, not knowing who Laura was. Not really. Not knowing any of the story of Dick and Laura at all, come to think of it.
Dick waved my question away, pulled a half-smoked cigarette from his tracksuit pocket and tried to light it. Problem was, his hands were shaking too much, he couldn’t get the lighter’s little wheel to move. Quietly, I whipped out my Zippo and lit it for him, without the usual extravagant flourish I reserved for those kind of occasions.
He was in a bad way; in the harsher light towards the back of the pub – they needed a guiding light to ensure the more renowned drunks actually made the toilet – his complexion looked, if anything, worse than it had outside. Now his spots were spot-lit; his cracked and bleeding gums looked red raw and his eyes were framed by fear.
‘Did the army tell you about Lion?’ asked Dick, after taking a long drag from his cigarette. He bent low over the table, emitting the smoke. Looked like some kind of shady, underworld figure indulging in a spot of haggling.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean; I’ve seen the films. The army know all sorts. They can get information about anyone,’ said Dick. He looked around him furtively, before lowering his voice: ‘They probably know you’re here.’
‘Calm down mate,’ I said in what I hoped to be a soothing voice. Obviously things with Dick were even worse than I’d first suspected. His paranoia, whether drug induced or Tommy induced, was even worse than I remembered, just before I left for what I believed was the final time. For the second time, I showed him my foot. ‘The army’s not looking for me, you or anybody, Dicko.’
Dick raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
‘Tell me what happened to Lion,’ I continued.
Dick’s bruise-coloured bottom eyelid started to quiver. He started to scratch at his hairline. Seemed about to break down. I should have reached out to him; shown him my… my what?... My support? My compassion? My complicity in the whole damn thing? But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I just sat on my too-small stool and watched him try to wrestle with the tears that had clearly been building up inside him for some time now. I watched him try to keep playing the big man as we had when we were kids. I watched him try to maintain his grip on reality.
‘He’s… he fell… he was…’ mumbled Dick.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
‘The gorge,’ breathed Dick. ‘The river…’
‘He fell off the bridge into the gorge?’
Dick nodded, mutely. Stared at the mottled brass of the table; the thin trail of beer which was flowing from his side of the table to mine.
‘Accidentally?’
‘It weren’t suicide if that’s what you’re thinking,’ said Dick, raising his eyes to meet mine. There was fire in those eyes now. Sheer, stubborn will.
‘From the start then,’ I said, in the style of some interrogator from the military police; the new Tommy Lee Jones or Chewing-Gum Breath perhaps.
Dick took a moment to compose himself and then began: ‘Lion wasn’t right in the head. Hadn’t been for a while. Not since… You know?’
I nodded. He looked back, almost accusing.
‘I suppose all of us apart from you got a bit fucked up by what happened. You got out. We had to live here with what happened. Every day. Worried that we’d get found out. Worried that the next knock on the door would be the filth with their handcuffs and their fucking moustaches.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘After a while, we couldn’t bear to be around each other, the three of us. I think we all found it out after you upped and left. Twinnie got bad first; you know what he was like. Always this close to the edge. He’s been inside a few times. They let him out a couple of weeks ago, and I haven’t seen him, but I’ve heard rumours. Stuff about what he’s up to and that. It ain’t good, mate.’
‘What about Lion?’
‘The big bastard thought Twinnie blamed him that first time he got sent down. Got scared, you know? First time Twinnie got let out, Lion admitted himself to the Looney Bin down at Stockport. After that, every time I saw him, Lion was a bleedin’ mess. Kept saying all this stuff about needing to change his identity. And then there was the drinking.
Anyway, this went on for a few years. I’d hear stuff on the grapevine about the two of them. I worried something terrible was going to happen.’
‘Som
ething terrible did happen.’
‘Yeah, but it wasn’t like what the police said it were.’
I took a Dick-sized gulp from my beer. Prepared for the galling confirmation of what I already knew.
‘They said that Lion tried to walk along the railing on the bridge. Two hundred feet up. All them rocks and shit at the bottom. Jagged like teeth. They said he was probably doing it to impress a bird. But Lion’s not had no birds. Not since school, Bully. And he had no friends. No nothing. Thing is, and I only know this from a lad I know that happened to over-hear something at the police station when it all went off… Thing is, they found this… thing… on his chest. And even though the filth are playing it down as a suicide, it ain’t.’
‘What thing? Who’s this lad?’
Dick winced at the thought of having to repeat what he’d heard out loud. I knew sort of what he was going through. Saying that kind of thing makes it real. When it’s just in your head, you can kinda believe that it’s just your fucked-up imagination playing tricks with you.
‘There was this mark, above his heart. Like a scratch you get from claws, apparently. One of the police blokes said it looked a lot like a number one.’
I felt the colour drain from my face. And I felt that stabbing sensation in my chest, right where the spear had been.
‘Lad at the cop shop that overheard all this was my dealer,’ continued Dick. ‘Said he heard the names of Twinnie and Lion mentioned in that same conversation. Oh, Bully, you don’t think it was Twinnie that did Lion in do you?’
‘Tommy?’
‘Twinnie,’ said Dick, looking a little confused. ‘I said Twinnie… What you talking about Tommy for?’
‘That’s what I needed to tell you,’ I said, slowly. ‘Tommy’s back…’
‘Shut up,’ shouted Dick. ‘Shut the fuck up. What are you; mad?’
Dick’s outburst stilled the steady lull of conversation in the Choke. The barman craned his neck to look round a pillar to see what all the fuss was about. The old, wheezing, chain-smoking bloke creaked on his stool and gave us a dirty look. Dick immediately flopped back down onto his stool. For a moment, nobody spoke. We could hear the unsteady ticking of the Choke’s clock, once set ten minutes slow so extra last orders drinks could be bought, but now probably set ten years too slow.
‘All right you two,’ said the barman. ‘You’ve had your fun. Now simmer down or you’ll be out.’
‘Sorry,’ I called over to him. ‘Won’t happen again.’
Dick continued to stare at me with those same confused eyes.
Finally, he spoke. Actually, it was more like a snarl: ‘Don’t ever say anything like that again, Bully. I mean it. Don’t mess with my head like that. I’ve got enough to worry about with Twinnie and Lion without you bringing up what happened all them years ago.’
‘But we can’t get away from it… Everything stems from that point.’
‘You’re starting to sound like Lion,’ sighed Dick. ‘Just as fucking-well mad as that big bastard.’
‘He said it too… about Tommy?’ I breathed, leaning forward on the stool, almost displacing my pint.
Dick shook his head. Sighed again.
‘Do you remember that time we all went up to Grange Heights that time? When we took them tents and sleeping bags we robbed from the Outdoor Store?
I hardly knew what Dick was talking about now, but couldn’t risk upsetting him again. One more scene from us would see us out on our ear, back on the main street of Newton Mills and visible again… Visible to Tommy.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that the time Twinnie and me set fire to the bottom of Lion’s purple sleeping bag when he was passed out?’
‘It was my sleeping bag,’ said Dick, wearily. ‘My sleeping bag you set fire to… Ruined my trainers and everything.’
‘Shit, sorry mate,’ I said, wondering where all this was leading.
Dick waved away my apology.
‘That isn’t what I wanted to talk about. Do you not remember what else happened up there?’
‘Uh…’
‘If you remember, that was the time all those people claimed that they saw that Black Panther roaming around. There was that rumour that it had bitten a child and eaten some goats and stuff. Nobody could get a photo, like, but everyone said it was massive…’
I remembered the stories now. How, for a while, the Black Panther had been blamed for every accident or injury that took place in Newton Mills. How even the stuff that happened to Tommy had been pinned on the beast, which was probably just some over-sized neighbourhood cat.
‘Anyway, we all sneaked out that night, remember? Even though the school had tried to get all us kids to be on a curfew? And up at Grange Heights, you started talking about the Black Panther, Bully. You told us all about how it had this real scary type of breathing. How you’d know even before it got hold of your neck that the Black Panther was about to kill you, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. I got shit-scared by your story. Believed every word. And do you know what? You even had me convinced that it was the Panther that did for… for, you know?’
Finally, Dick’s tears were starting to come now, but he soldiered on with his story.
‘In the middle of the night, after all that with the sleeping bag, I woke up again. I heard all this raggedy breathing. I heard what I thought was the padding of gigantic paws on the rocks. And it was sort of half-light but there were still shadows. The rocks and that sort of thing. And I became convinced that it was me that the Panther was after. I knew it was going to kill me…’
‘Sorry,’ I breathed.
‘Do you not understand what I’m saying? You had us all convinced, Gaz. We believed every word that came out of your mouth. You were always more intelligent than any of us no-marks. And what you said went. Even for Twinnie. When we had to go down to the graveyard that day, it was all because of you. When I smashed my head running down from Grange Heights that morning, that was all because of you. And now you’re saying something like this? The things you make up follow you around, Bully. And it’s bad shit. You create bad shit.’
Dick stood up from his stool again. He didn’t shout this time though. He simply walked out of the Choke with his tail between his legs. And I stared at my pint and wondered if what he’d said was true. Over the years I’d managed to convince myself that I’d been the one being led – the one under the bad influence of people like Twinnie and Dick – but had I somehow managed to block out what really happened? Was the only way I’d been able to build a life for myself because I’d built it on foundations which were actually a lie?
And now Lion was dead, and Tommy was back and I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do about it all. Well, that wasn’t strictly true; I did have one idea, but to do that would require Dutch courage. Seeing Twinnie was not something that anyone should undertake on a beer-empty stomach.
Chapter Nine
“Moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone”
I propped up the bar like my grandfather had done before me, mangled leg well hidden by my pack. Occasionally, some regular or other would try to engage me in conversation, but soon took my grunted responses as a sure-fire sign that I didn’t want to talk. I had more pressing matters to take care of. Like pouring enough lager and whisky down my gullet that I could numb the pain.
Only the wheezing, chain-smoking old man managed to even get me to stop staring at my reflection in the dirty mirror behind the Choke’s bar.
‘Guilt does funny things to a feller,’ he wheezed to me while waiting for his next half of bitter.
‘What?’ I asked, swinging round on my bar stool to meet his eyes, bristling with indignation. His face was as stained as the wallpaper and his eyes were rheumy and weak. I could hear the death’s rattle of his lungs when he breathed, but his chin jutted out with something resembling pride.
‘Whoah there, feller. Just saying: guilt does funny things to folk,’ he more or less repeated, before undertaking some emergency repair work
on his dentures with his tongue. In an instant, I knew without doubt who the old man was. It was Burt, the man that used to run the old sweet shop where we used to buy our single cigarettes. Where we’d have to brush off the dog hairs before smoking them. God, the man must have been in his eighties now, surely. How had he managed to survive so long in this rotten town?
‘I can see you been in the forces, son. Been away from here for a while, no doubt,’ he continued. ‘And those that are left behind may feel slighted by your going away. Like your pal that left a while back. But don’t let them get to you, son…’
Burt had been in the forces himself, I recalled, but now his face resembled more of a retired shop-keeper’s face than that of a soldier. It was round and jowly, and kinda loose-fitted. But deep down, underneath the wrinkles and the jaundice, it was definitely the same man that had often shouted at us boys in his shop.
‘Do you remember me?’ I gasped.
Burt tried to smile. Old gravestone teeth collapsed in his mouth.
‘I’m sorry, son. Got no recollection of nobody these days,’ he said. But something about the new light in his eyes told me that he knew more than he was letting on.
‘I had to come back,’ I told him, without quite knowing why.
‘I know, son,’ he said. ‘Everybody does. There’s a pull about this place that you can’t quite put your finger on, isn’t there?’
I nodded. Spun my tot of whisky around the bottom of my glass. Watched how the liquid seemed to cling to the sides. Like it was hoping to escape.
