Crusaders

by Richard T. Kelly

  ‘Who’s Jim Doggett then, Steve?’

  ‘He was me stepdad.’

  ‘Aw, right. Good bloke was he?’

  ‘He was an owld cunt.’ This said as calm as you please. ‘I tell you what, but’ – and Stevie would set down his glass – ‘he had his uses, that Doggett. He taught us the world’s full of his type. So you’d best know how to look after yersel. And you’ve gotta learn that yer’sel and all, cos nee bugger can give it you on a plate.’ And Stevie would shake his head, as to say that much more – too much – could be related, were there only more hours in an evening. ‘Aye, that Doggett. He raised his hand to wuh when I was just a bairn. And I knew it all then, right there.’

  ‘He hit you?’

  As chuckles went round the table, Stevie would give up a ghost of a smile, if only to deepen the mystery. ‘Aye. ’Til I hit him back. Then that was the end of that.’

  The story, such as it was, always passed muster if judged by the gravely nodding heads. Inwardly, Stevie knew, the truth was not so clean-cut. He was so familiar with the gauge of his temper, his capacity to shift from stationary to active, that it stung him – truly stung him, lashed him – to think of a past he could not alter, not by any measure of physical exertion. To bear such knowledge was to dwell in a jailhouse of impotent fury. And to have stood there and borne insult and injury, to feel his cheeks afire, to feel worse than worthless in the world – to think back on all of this amid calm and solitude was sufficient to make Stevie shudder and curse under his breath, like some ragbag beggar afflicted with Tourette’s. At such times he was gripped by an inner crisis that truly frightened him – a sense of watching himself from a studied distance, dumbstruck, appalled. Who are you, then? Just like the prodding nose-to-nose challenge he had heard a thousand times in dank doorways – off of some big Mackem lump, some little Geordie shite. Or the mass taunt of an unwashed horde in a full stadium. Who are ya? Who are ya? To Stevie it was devilment, purest evil, and alone he would count the numbers up to ten and back down, until some kind of tranquillity descended.

  He should have learned sooner, steeled himself quicker. It should not have happened.

  *

  ‘Get in, you! Get your shoes on!’

  Thus Stevie’s mam forever scolded him in his pint-sized days, calling him in from the mangy street where he played, since the Coulson yard was no fit size for sport. Rain or shine, Stevie didn’t much care if he was properly shod, indeed would happily run about in his pants. His mother, though, frowned long and hard. Mary had a sweetly lean figure, wore her black hair in friendly bangs, but it was that pinched, niggardly frown that defined her. She was the daughter of a stern man called Len Corbett, a stalwart of the jute mills of Dundee, in whose home Mary was raised to act demure and take no liberties. But a few months shy of her majority she had slipped over the border and been very peremptorily charmed, first into bed and then wedlock, by Bobby – né Robert – Coulson. And under Bobby’s roof there was leeway for liberties and laxities of all kinds. In the raising of young Steven, Bobby was soft as clarts, and while Mary expected to be heeded she didn’t carry a stick so big as to enforce the principle.

  It wasn’t even Bobby’s roof during Stevie’s formative years, since for a time Bobby and Mary were forced to run up an account on his parents’ hospitality. The baby was brought home to Mount Pleasant near Penshaw on Wearside, poor and unlovely terrain, all closes and bungalows, a few redbrick semis, those cramped concrete yards, and one big expanse of scruffy parkland onto which most properties backed out. But small Stevie liked the domestic set-up just fine. Nana Coulson was forever telling him he was a nice-looking lad, with a bonny smile full of good teeth. He never heard such praise out of his mam, but Nana was a wise bird and he believed her.

  For Mary, lodging at the Coulsons was undesirable but bearable, and for Bobby it was a source of unmanageable frustration. His father George had spent three decades working for Chappell’s the shipbuilder of Wearside, though the firm had lately been merged with a rival and George forced to hump his gear to a new yard. He was a joiner and worked among a hundred others, insulating holds and chambers between decks. Outside of George’s earshot, Bobby called him ‘the owld codger’. The slur always earned a sharp rebuke from Mary, who was otherwise unbothered by the upkeep of George’s dignities, yet insisted that hard graft be always applauded. Bobby respected his dad, for sure, yet seemed somehow bettered by him.

  Bobby worked on cars. He left school free of qualification, and began at a good-sized garage in Birtley, washing, polishing and vacuuming. He would return home in the evening smelling waxy and astringent, however grubby his gear or the tack-cloth wagging from his trouser pocket. A joker by nature – ‘dafty’, in Mary’s parlance – he was stern and emphatic when he talked motors. ‘Car’s a man’s pride and joy. He wants to look after it proper. Part of how he carries himself. Who he is.’ Whenever George heard such talk he pulled a constipated face – ‘You talk some flannel, you’ – and Bobby would glower. It unnerved young Stevie to see the two men at odds across the table, and when his mam and dad finally secured a home of their own he could stand the loss of his Nana’s cooing, for his dad at least was master of his house now.

  The move took them two miles north to Washington, lately designated a ‘new town’. Old Washington had been coal mines and colliery houses, but the new town had raised up purpose-built ‘villages’ and multiplied the population, with schools, shops and facilities. Whatever its novelty, Washington still wasn’t postcard-pretty. But Bobby got work as a panel beater for a decent garage, Armstrong Motors. Mary seemed content to have a functional home she could keep clean. And Stevie had a brand-new school to mope along to, much as he loathed it.

  Unleashed from school hours, Stevie would often dawdle to Armstrong’s and watch his dad at work on some motor up on a jig. Bobby weaved round the cramped space in his oily gear, trading shouts, wielding a spanner and a gas-fired cutting torch, hefting panels, diligently bashing at dents with a dinky hammer. He seemed assured, meticulous, versed in the magic of what went where and why, capable still of banter in the act. Stevie felt himself a lumbering and dafty lad in his dad’s mercurial presence. Yet he saw how some of Bobby’s workmates jibbed him, with a notable edge. It seemed that Bobby truly fancied himself a mechanic. He would replace the odd belt or spark-plug, and there were electrical issues on which he pronounced confidently. But those opinions were generally jeered. ‘You’re no mechanic, Bob. You’re a mouth, you are.’

  Bobby persisted, and began to come home with his blue overalls and moon face streaked and smeared by black grease. Then there would be some disreputable excuse for a motor vehicle sat outside the front gate of their semi for weeks. Stevie spied as Bobby roamed about, ‘improving it’ in some inscrutable manner, removing and stripping the alternator, fiddling with the starter motor. Worse, at times these parts might be given a temporary home swaddled in rags on the kitchen floor. Stevie felt complicit in these offences, for he knew that he, too, was a messy clot in his mam’s eyes, always straying into reefs of fresh mud, the first among his mates to try to scale a barbed fence or ford a swift-running stream. Bobby’s charm extended to the purchase of a washing machine one Christmas, but such largesse was not a cure for all ills.

  For many were the nights Bobby would roll home late, with a red nose and red cheeks, the key having clinked uselessly round the keyhole for some moments previous. Bobby thought he was at his most riotously funny when he was insensibly drunk. Stevie sometimes thought his dad had to be play-acting, so comically stiff-legged was he, his gaze drowsy, fighting for focus. ‘Angels wi’ dorty faces, yee and me, kidder,’ he would say. Bobby was indeed cherubic, if flushed and sweaty, dark curls adhered to his forehead. Mostly, though, Mary didn’t think Bobby was funny, and didn’t want to play the game. Their exchanges could turn sharp. ‘Hell’s teeth, can I not have a bit fun?’ his dad would roar with disturbing bite. ‘Can I not? Not a bit?’ There was no threat there, but maybe something worse.
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  Still, over a month of nights round the tea-table some of Bobby’s low talk actually seemed to acquire a serious shape. For he knew a bloke who had a mate whose mate could, conceivably, get Bobby in on the ground floor of a brand-new venture. A pair of smart engineers from the firm of Lotus had struck out on their own, and were taking steps to found a new company, its nursery factory earmarked for Washington New Town on the strength of some government money pledged to the cause of ‘local development’. They had worked up a prototype for a sports car, a coupé, of all things. On first hearing, Mary did not so much frown as snort. True, it was far-fetched, and for this vivid fancy Bobby talked of quitting Armstrong’s. He told Mary most vehemently, though, that she should bloody well watch out, because things were going to change. ‘You want me to get on, don’t you? That’s what you’re always saying. You want a new suite, you want this and that, and what’s-her-face is off to Benidorm. You divvint get ahead by standing still, eh? Well, I’m bloody not.’

  Within months this Clan Motor Company was operational and said to be close to turning out cars. Bobby’s mate’s mate, good as his word, smuggled him in as an assistant mechanic. The car was to be called the ‘Crusader’, intended as a nippy little number, light and aerodynamic, a fibreglass body atop a sporty engine. Bobby was soon expounding on the attendant problems of heat and noise and the clutch’s heaviness, though he was short on solutions. ‘Still sounds dafty to me,’ muttered Mary. ‘Bliddy fly by night,’ was George Coulson’s verdict. ‘Whey it’s not meant for the likes of you’s, man,’ Bobby shot back. ‘Not the pair of you’s.’ And the production line rolled in the autumn of 1971. Wearside was making sports cars, and it made a gleeful sense to Stevie, for his dad was a character and had found himself a characterful calling.

  *

  Their routine was sacred. Every Saturday Bobby would take him for snooker at the Excelsior Working Men’s Club. They would contest a frame or two, then Bobby would mingle with his pals and Stevie would sit it out patiently, the bairn in the corner with a bag of Tudor crisps and a glass of iced Cresta. Such was Stevie’s treat. And yet he grew to hate these outings. For, somehow, old Doggett was always there, holding court. And Jim Doggett, somehow, was Bobby’s best mate.

  It had been so since school, but Doggett became a bricklayer, a rated one, and in short order he was a site boss with hopes of advancement. He carried himself about the Excelsior as though he were boss-man of all he surveyed – smoking odious panatella cigarillos, drinking Johnny Walker whisky chased by a straight glass of ale, fond of producing a black plastic comb, spitting upon it, and dragging it through his pompous thatch of rusty hair and meaty sideburns. ‘Hello, tiger,’ he would wink at his reflection behind the optics. From Stevie’s vantage this was the behaviour of an outright ponce, and yet Doggett seemed to think he had bottled the very essence of machismo. Bobby and others in his retinue would tease him a little, for Doggett was a bachelor, but the man himself merely grinned at them glancingly, shooting back without apparent irony, ‘Aw lads, see, but, I’m saving me’sel for Miss Right.’

  Doggett had a few such stock gags. To wit, ‘That’s a smart top you’ve on there, son’ was his customary greeting to Stevie whenever the boy drew near, clad in whatever cut-off tee-shirt he had clean to wear with his flares. Doggett affected a fly-collar shirt and a black waistcoat, his packet of tabs tucked into a dainty pocket, and seemed to think himself the very glass of fashion. Stevie would have been first to confess he cared nothing for clothes, considered them girls’ stuff in any case – but he was quite certain Doggett looked about as smart as a sack of fucking spuds, whatever fancy gear he squeezed his lard arse into. His breath stank and all, what with the rotgut Scotch and the foul smokes. Stevie just couldn’t tell the bastard to his face. If Doggett was a bully, bloated with talk, nonetheless he carried some weight and threw it about, and Bobby, too, deferred to him plainly. It pained Stevie. He felt himself a foursquare lad – no squirt, no titch. He had no fear of his teachers, not even Finlayson, the blackbeard yob who taught physics and picked the football team. He had no fear of classmates who told him he smelled, or called his dad ‘grease monkey’, for what did theirs do that was so bloody great? Doggett, though, was a different case, and Stevie coveted a share in that kind of size and authority. At thirteen, he knew, he just didn’t have it.

  *

  On weekends Stevie knocked around glum Washington and its centrepiece, a commercial high-rise called the Galleries, all new shops and businesses under one roof. He and his mob – moody Brian Shackleton, ginger Glen Howey, titchy Richey Gates – were of the same mind that the Galleries were shit. And yet people came in droves, sad shuffling zombies. And there, too, for all their disdain, were Stevie and the lads, lined up like hollyhocks under the escalators, watching folk go by – older folk in the main, often squashed and unshapely, lumpen and odd-looking. Brian, who claimed to know a few things, called them ‘in-breeders’.

  ‘Cos they shag their own, man, their sisters and that.’

  ‘Whey, they never, man.’

  ‘I’m telling yuhs.’

  Jesus no, Stevie decreed. That was not possible.

  If the lads were chronically bored then they were lured – as if by the chlorine pong – to the swimming baths on the edge of a vast bleak parkland named for the Princess Royal. They would sit in the bleachers and watch to see if any lush lasses were in the water that day. There was one sleek miss who sometimes would rise out of the froth in a navy-blue one-piece. Nowt wrang-shaped about her, thought Stevie. He fancied he had strong and manly features where his pals’ faces were feral or bashed-in. The boys called him ‘Sharky’ in honour of his glaring overbite, and he liked that. (Brian, annoyingly, insisted on ‘Shack’ for himself.) But looking at that girl Stevie suddenly felt himself a crude job of work, watermarked second-rate.

  Mary had always feared Stevie would get in with the wrong sort. Bobby was blithe: ‘Let him away.’ Their variance on this matter could turn surprisingly bitter – ‘Is that all you’re good for?’ – and such daylight fights conducted within Stevie’s earshot began to sound more like the night-fights, those where Bobby had Tartan beer onboard and Stevie sat on the top of the stairs but inched his way down, the better to hear. In the midst of such rows his dad always rammed Rod Stewart onto the record deck, the Atlantic Crossing album, and after a few bars of ‘Three Times a Loser’ – the time it took to cross their living room – came the silence of Mary wrenching the needle off the vinyl. Such was the bad odour about the house, Stevie was hardly surprised when Bobby’s great strife began to unfold, in the bleak winter months of ’72 and ’73.

  It seemed that his mam and his granddad were correct in their dour forecasts. The Clan Company had been abruptly set on its uppers. Bobby was muttering that it was ‘out of their hands’ – all the fault of the miners, off work all winter. The government didn’t care. ‘They’d bail out bloody Leyland, mind, bloody Rolls-Royce.’ Then there was some vexation over petrol shortage, some war of which England had no part. Next, it was the bloody taxman. But whichever way it was sliced, Clan were making perilously fewer cars. That was bad enough. Then they stopped altogether.

  On the night of the day that the Clan factory was locked and shuttered and bolted, Stevie and Mary didn’t see Bobby before they went to bed. Mary told Stevie the firm was ‘liquidated’, and that sounded like what had happened to Bobby too. The next day, once Bobby had crept past the worst of his hangover, Mary, still tight-lipped, made her point. ‘You’ll have to go back, Bob, you’ll have to ask them.’ It did seem hard to bear, but Bobby called upon Armstrong’s Garage, and had he a tail it would have been tucked into his shuffling gait. Yes, they had room for a panel beater, but no, it was no longer a space fit to be filled by Robert Coulson. He took his packet of pay-off money and rented garage space at a filling station, offering a basic mechanic’s service. Like any business, it didn’t take off overnight. Stevie lay in bed after dark, thinking, Hell’s teeth but, what’ll happen to wuh?<
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  *

  Rarely did he feel he had his mother’s attention, but amid his father’s woes he believed he had fallen clean off her radar. She was reading the evening paper very intently, nipping out at odd hours ‘to see someone’, chiding silent Bobby that they weren’t ‘on the telephone’ – this grievance and that. Until, to Stevie’s great surprise, she came to his room and announced that henceforward she would be going out to work in the morning. She had been hired at a new plant for television sets near Durham. The firm was called Haan, they were Dutch, and Mary would be sitting on an assembly line. Outlandish though it seemed, his mam had rolled up her sleeves to save the day. He was dully aware that he and his dad would be made to pay for it. For starters, Bobby had to shift himself earlier to drop Mary at Haan’s before he went into the garage. Some days he was sluggish, and Mary stomped out to the bus stop.

  The first boon of the new start was a colour television acquired on a very favourable hire-purchase. ‘There’s nowt on it,’ Bobby scowled, and yet he began to watch quite a bit of stuff from the grasp of the settee. Springtime brought an FA Cup final between Sunderland and Leeds. Bobby wanted to invite ‘a few mates’, but Mary, too, had a notion for ‘some people round’ that day. The resultant party was ill-assorted, and Stevie lurked by the door watching Bobby’s pals sprawled over the carpet around a tray of Tartan cans, while Mary’s associates squashed onto the settee and she poured them sherry. Granddad George occupied the sole armchair. At half-time the very telly itself became the locus of some sort of argument between his dad and the hated Doggett. ‘It’s not the same as making stuff with your own hands,’ Bobby was insisting. ‘It’s just stuff out of kits, man. Like the bairn’s model planes. Mary’s not a clue how it works, ask her.’