Once Upon a Time in England

by Helen Walsh

  It’s a stupid remark but the entire table are creased up laughing. Ellie feels obliged to join in the merriment – and then, it hits her. They’re playing Fight the Barb – an everyday diversion for the giro wayfarers round these parts. Ellie’s no ingénue to this, either. What better way to fritter a dull Tuesday and help chivvy the week towards the weekend? Temazzies are ten-a-penny in Warrington. Depending on the strength and colour, most pensioners will sell you three for a quid, though one of the Legends shagbags, Lauren from Bewsey, once told her there’s a cripple up there who gives her five green eggs for a nosh as though she were letting Ellie in on some clan secret.

  The first time Ellie played Fight the Barb she just rolled off Cal’s couch, slapped the floor and slept for fifteen whole hours. He’d warned her to space them out but, keen to impress her new Legends buddies, she necked the lot. A bottle of beer or cider can help buffer the soporific kill of the jellies. But for first-time users it’s difficult not to yield to the cavernous slumber they unfurl. If it’s Monday or Tuesday and you haven’t slept for days and your head’s still banging to some subliminal sonic echo, those little ovoid capsules are heaven sent. But in order to play Fight the Barb properly you have to first override the initial balmy tiredness that washes over you. If you can stay up, fight through it and ward off the doldrums’ sweet succour, it’s a pretty beautiful buzz.

  She gives the young lad minding the jellies her best sultry look. ‘Giz a couple, then.’

  He dips into his pocket, pulls out a money bag stuffed full of yellow and green eggs. ‘Oner each,’ he says, bored, holding them out on the flat of his hand. Ellie goes to take them. His hand wraps shut around the eggs, and the tips of Ellie’s fingers. He’s foul, this spotty little dealer, but he thinks he’s got it. He rakes his lazy eyes all over her. ‘That’s two quid. Even to you.’

  Very firmly and with a minimum of fuss, she releases her fingers from his grip. She reaches inside her shoe. ‘I’ll take the lot off you,’ she sneers, and slaps her kite down on the table. The lad stares at the credit cards, suddenly lost for words. Ellie makes the most of it, turning to Marnie, then Larry with a cutesy-pie shrug of the shoulders. ‘If your friend’ll take plastic, that is.’

  There’s a groundswell of wild applause and mad, unnatural laughter. One of the girls gets up and moonwalks backwards across the room, pointing at Ellie and nodding her head in tribute as she goes. Marnie nudges Ellie, all smiles, impressed. ‘Just how hot are these, Els?’

  ‘Scorching,’ says Ellie, almost swooning at the attention. ‘They’re literally not even an hour old.’ She pauses, draws herself back for added impact. ‘So. Twenty jeds and five eggs.’

  The lad suddenly finds his voice again. ‘Koff, will yoh! I’ll give you a tenner and two barbs.’

  Ellie whips the plastic back off the table top. One of the cards is stuck firm in a suction trap from spilt cider. Ellie tries to look at the lad, hard. ‘It’s twenty.’

  He stuffs the bag of jellies back in his pocket. ‘Forget it then.’

  Ellie glances at Marnie. She nods. Ellie blows the air out of her cheeks, folding her arms across her chest. ‘Go on then. Only cos I’m in a good mood, mind.’

  He allows himself a horrible, yellow-toothed smile as he slots the cards and passes her a crumpled tenner and two green eggs. She holds the note up to the light, unsure of what she’s supposed to be looking for, but wanting him to know she’s streetwise, not just some daft schoolie with a pretty face and tricky fingers. The lad drains his glass and stands up. He jabs a finger at her. ‘Any problem with these, Metal Mickey …’ Having got his quip out, he seems stuck for words.

  ‘Yeah-yeah, nice grid yourself, Topex.’

  Again, the table collapses in riot. They’re easy to seduce, these. The lad just points at her. ‘I’m right back at you, you hear?’

  Ellie smiles back as sweetly as she’s able. Marnie drapes a sisterly arm around her, her fingers lightly grazing Ellie’s chest. Moonwalk Girl throws her a fleece to cover up her school uniform and marches over to the barb dealer. ‘Except she won’t give a fuck by then.’ She turns smartly to Ellie. ‘Will you, hon?’

  Ellie very deliberately cocks her head at him, places two eggs on her tongue and swallows.

  Nine

  Vinnie lifts his face into the late winter sunlight as he waits for his boy. There are already one or two hopeful businessmen cruising the drag, trying to look as though they’re not here for sex. It amazes Vinnie, it does. He’s no stranger to fantasy, but to do this, to come here straight from work looking for rent, these men must have been obsessing about sex all day. How can anyone be that fucking desperate as to come here at the height of rush hour, solely to head off to some backstreet with a hollow-eyed wraith and get drained? And then they go home to the wife and kids and tuck into sole meuniere. Or cottage pie. Shocking, it really is.

  A couple of beefy biker clones walking down towards the Rembrandt see him in his school uniform and make the obvious conclusion. ‘Here around seven?’

  Vinnie winks back, eyeing him up and down. ‘I’ll wait all night for you, love,’ he purrs, letting them believe. He watches them walk off, his come-on adding an affected grind to the flattered queen’s walk.

  The melting sun is now a big fat disc, burning on the edge of the world. It pulses a dramatic red before it slips away behind the city skyline. Within minutes a noxious fog is weaving its way through the rush-hour headlights and drifting at knee height, creating a noirish film set of Manchester’s seedy backstreets. Vinnie becomes restive. What if his boy doesn’t come? The thought thrashes around his guts, strangling him. Vinnie tells himself it won’t be the end of the world – he’ll just have to head out even earlier on Saturday.

  The moon pulls itself up from the belly of the sky and the cityscape shifts again. These moody byways take on a dislocated, looted feel. Vinnie gags on the stench sweating out from the walls and back alleys, the stink of incontinence. Still no sign of his boy. Vinnie starts to accept it’s hometime.

  He hovers on the lip of the carriageway, waiting for a gap in the crazed Grand Prix mêlée. He tells himself he’s in no hurry. Let them belt back to the lives they think they have at home. Let them sit in silence, another night in suburbia. He lights up a rollie. The cold night air quickly kisses it down to the roach. He lights another. He squints into the blurred strafe of traffic and sees a gap. He’ll have to be quick. He’s ready to dash when he sees someone coming at him from the other side of the expressway. It’s him. It’s his boy. He hasn’t seen him yet – he’s all fixed on getting across the road, head bent into his crazy mechanical lurch. Vinnie’s heart gives a joyful flutter. He calls over to him. ‘Oi!’

  He’s been buying from him since before Christmas and he still doesn’t know his name. The lad freezes, raises his shoulders into a protective hunch as he squints into the soup. He hacks, sniffs and spits. Vinnie calls to him again and this time he sees him. He comes bounding over, his mouth curling up in a tragic stump-toothed leer. He’s beyond delighted at this unexpected opportunity for trade. ‘Sat-deh!’ he gurns. ‘You usually come Sat-deh, don’t yoh?’

  Vinnie smiles. ‘I can resist everything but temptation,’ he says.

  ‘Say ’gain?’ he says, eyes jittering up and down the street.

  Vinnie is shot through with a sad kind of affection for the lad. He pats him on the shoulder, leaving his hand there. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Forget it.’

  The lad remembers where he is, and who. ‘I can do you a good deal on some narc if you want it?’

  ‘Narc?’ Vinnie’s said it before he can stop himself. He curses himself for the slip, showing himself up as a tourist. The lad hasn’t picked up on it though – he just thinks Vinnie needs convincing.

  ‘Case yor oh dee, like. The ambos can take all night coming if they know it’s smack.’

  Vinnie nods gravely, piecing it together.

  ‘Sort yoh right out if yoh gerrin a mess. Up to you, our kid. Fresh from casualty th
ese.’

  Vinnie wonders if it’s worth asking him how you’d self-administer the antidote if you were actually overdosing. He pats his shoulder again. ‘No ta, matey,’ he says. ‘If that’s how I meet my maker, then I’m not gonna be arsed one way or the other. Nice way to go, hey?’

  The lad has none of Vinnie’s romance of heroin. He just stares at him, slightly alarmed, waiting for the order. ‘How about some Nazi crank then?’

  Vinnie doesn’t make the same mistake twice. He just raises an eyebrow, inviting the lad to pitch it to him.

  ‘It’s got, like, the rush of fuckin’ crack, yeah? But it fuckin’ buh-lasts yoh, man. Pure wipe yorrout. Lasts for, like, free fuckin’ days yeah, this fuckin’ shit. It’s … you’re just like talking and buzzing and out there.’ A little opportunistic glimmer flits across his faded eyes. ‘Know what, our kid – bang the Nazi yeah, then bring yourself down with a bit a hatch and there’s absolutely no fuckin’ hangover. I swear to yoh, man – fuckin’ perfect.’

  Vinnie can’t think of anything more terrifying. The lad’s outstayed his use now. Vinnie needs rid of him. He wiggles his fingertips into his hip pocket, prises out a folded note. ‘Give us a ten bag this time, yeah?’

  He was supposed to be saving it for Saturday – all of it – but now that it’s there within shooting distance, his loins are screaming out for the greedy thrill. Not even the knowledge that Mum will be trailing the aisles of Visions right now, excitedly sourcing out a film, can compete with its balmy promise. The need to devour and be devoured has saturated his every fibre.

  The multi-storey still has cars here and there, so he heads off along the canal. He hits a dank stretch beyond the flyover. There’s a little humpback bridge ahead. He crouches and cooks up. The ground is littered with shit: rubbers and needles and spent gas canisters. He’d much rather be up on top of the roof of the city, smashed on its gorgeous night glow; but he knows that once the honey’s coarsing his veins, he could be anywhere. Anywhere will do just fine.

  There’s a moment, just before he slides the needle into his vein, when he pictures Kenny’s beautiful face succumbing to all this. He lies down flat on his back with the spike still hanging out of his forearm. ‘Saturday,’ he whispers. He’ll love it. Saturday night they’ll get drunk on honey, and Kenny will see heaven with him.

  He passes out. The cold damp breeze wakes him. Reedy voices, the sound of shattering glass. His gaze swoons in and out of focus across a sky that is lean and black, little swabs of lint drifting dreamily across its surface. He grins up at the moon, a huge clown’s smile, the kind that Ellie used to draw in lurid crayola: U-shaped, with the corners of the mouth nearly touching the eyes. Swimming. Soaring. He can’t move.

  Ten

  She’s still tingling pleasantly from the barbs as she lets herself in the front door. She makes a show of hanging up her blazer, dumping her school bag on the stairs. She needn’t have worried. The TV’s cathode glow frames Sheila’s silhouette on the couch, lost in some love story.

  ‘Ellie? That you, love? How was hockey?’

  An awful jab of piteous love for her beautiful mother. She hopes she never finds out; prays she never hurts her. She wonders if Dad ever got her letter. Probably not. Probably moved flat five times since she was last there. But she’ll go ahead, anyway. On Saturday, to make things up to her mum, she’ll surprise her and cook the grill. ‘Yeah. Good, ta,’ she calls back, quickening her pace as she mounts the stairs in dreamy moonwalk sequence, clearing two at a time. She brushes her teeth, slaps cold water on her face and consults her reflection. She doesn’t feel stoned, but fuck, does she look it!

  The sound of Mum stirring to action in the kitchen below licks a hot flame of panic around her thoughts. She rolls up her sleeves, fixes her hair on the top of her head and sets about scrubbing her face sensible. She applies a fresh daub of makeup, shading in the whey satellite of her face with bright pink lipstick and rouge. Her mother’s at the bottom of the stairs now, whisking a pan of gravy. Ellie ducks behind the bathroom door.

  ‘Did you score, darling?’

  The quip’s there, waiting to be hit. And if Vinnie were within earshot, she’d probably slug it, for sure. She can’t help feeling crushed by her mum’s credulousness. She takes a breath, tries to kick a bit of life into her voice, give her something back. ‘Nah, Mum. Tight game. Nil-nil.’

  ‘Oh.’ It’s just a hitch of breath, the curtest of semicolons, but it tells Ellie everything. ‘I didn’t know it was a match.’

  She hears all her mother’s hurt sucked down to a gulp, and she feels wretched.

  ‘I would have come,’ she ventures gingerly, and the whisk slows to a scrape.

  Ellie feels dizzy. She tries to say something in melioration. ‘It wasn’t really a match. Well it was, if you know what I mean. An inter-house kind of thing.’

  It works. The whisk starts up again, beating out her mum’s guilty relief as she shuffles back into the kitchen. Ellie’s heart is racing away again. How much longer can she keep this up – the chicanery, the deceit? How long before her alibis backfire and shoot her down? She steels herself up to her reflection once again and it’s futile: no amount of washing or daubing can shock the telltale pinholes of her eyes back to life. Paranoia creeps in, sprays a dark shadow around her thoughts.

  ‘Ell-eee? What are you doing up there?’

  She becomes aware of her mother calling her from halfway up the stairs. She’s sitting on her window sill and there seems to have been some sort of time disconnect. She can’t trace back her journey – how she got from the bathroom to the bedroom; she doesn’t remember. It doesn’t make sense.

  ‘Come on! It’s your favourite – toad in the hole with bubble and squeak – and it’s going cold!’

  Back in the bathroom, Ellie brushes some sense and order into her mane, then climbs up onto the rim of the bath, opens up the window slat and wedges her head sideways into the cold night air. She gulps hard and deep on it. One more lash of rouge, and then, with her ears banging out the rapid blood boom of her panic, she’s making the descent down the stairs.

  ‘So. Did you talk to Miss Kelvin about Rome …?’

  It seems to take Ellie an eternity to digest and compute her words. ‘Oh. yeah. It’s fine. No problem.’

  Sheila fixes her daughter with a stare. ‘Ellie, what’s wrong with you tonight?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Something is amiss, and Sheila simply can’t leave it untouched for the sake of keeping the peace. Ellie has hardly touched her dinner – her favourite too – and Sheila can see now that it’s an effort for her to focus, her thoughts zigzagging all over the place. Taking in the giddy lurch of her daughter’s eyes, the weighted levers of her arms rising in snail-slow motion as she lifts her fork to her lips, Sheila leans across the table. Her heart is punching up through her throat. She’s scared and shocked and she’s suddenly out of her depth. She wishes Vincent would hurry home.

  ‘Ellie, honey. I’m going to ask you something.’ She stalls a moment, feeling the emotion race through her neck, stinging hot, up to her stoked and pulsing forehead. She tries to steady herself, dredging up every flake of her resolve. ‘I need you to answer me honestly.’

  How desperately she wants to sound stern enough to precipitate the tumbling confession she knows is locked up there. But Sheila is all too aware of the pleading in her gaze, beseeching Ellie not to answer her honestly, and instead to reassure her there’s absolutely nothing for her to worry about. She gropes again for some degree of authority. ‘Ellie. Did you go to hockey after school? Or were you somewhere else?’

  Ellie says nothing. Her sphinx-like expression, cool and cold and challenging, gives nothing away. She’s on her feet now, her hands gripping the edge of the table in preparation for flight. Sheila’s stomach sinks another fraction, her misgivings vindicated. She’s a fighter, Ellie, and if she was standing trial for a crime she hadn’t committed, then the last thing she’d do is walk. She’d hang in there till the final
bell. She’d make you believe and then she’d make you suffer for not believing in the first place.

  ‘You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?’ It’s nothing more than a hunch. And in guessing so wildly, Sheila hands the initiative right back to her wayward child. Ellie snorts. There’s something defiant and mocking in the short consonant of air. She shakes her head, kicks back the chair and flounces out of the room.

  Sheila hovers at the bottom of the stairs, the creaking floorboards singing out her panic as she shifts her weight from left to right, right to left. She tries to deep-breathe some rationale into her thinking.

  It’s been brewing for a while. Ellie’s vaulting moods, her voids, her sullen and gradual withdrawal from their Saturday night ritual of takeout and a video were all portents that flagged up the looming storm long before it broke. If she’s being honest with herself, it’s not the fact that her daughter might have lied, might have been drinking in the park with boys instead of playing hockey that’s so distressing. It’s more about her own insecurities as a parent – as a mother. Perhaps if she hadn’t been so eager to adopt the role of confidante with Ellie, if she had been more of a mother and less of an elder sister, she might have been able to quell the crisis before it hit. It’s times like this that she finds herself pining for Robbie. Not that he’d be any better equipped to deal with such matters, but if he were around, she might not feel so wretched about reproaching her children. These showdowns would be less profound, less painful. A few heated words, a grand finale of tears and it would all be resolved by now. But with Robbie gone, each and every tactic of parenting has to be carefully thought out. Strategically executed. There can be no room for trial and error. A one-parent family simply cannot afford the luxury of discipline.