‘Aw, he was allus special, Stevie. Always give us a hand, that un.’
Gore nodded keenly, masking his sharp certainty that he had just tasted something wrong in the tea – maybe the water, maybe the milk, or whatever substitute Eunice had mustered.
‘How did you meet him then, hinny?’
‘It was in the Gunnery pub, really …’
‘The Gunnery. Like a drink, do you? Good man.’ She winked. ‘Aye well that’s where ah knaa him from an’ all. Divvint see him so much now, of course. But he’s a busy lad, isn’t he?’
‘He’s a worker, for sure.’
‘Aw, he’s a treasure but, that un. I’m as proud of him as I am me own. Such a good soul. He’d allus see us right, a bit this and that. He’d gan to market for his bait, come back wi’ a bit boiling bacon for wuh. That’s when there was nowt on him, mind. He was lean. ‘Fore he got to be that big.’
Gore nodded. ‘He is a big, big man.’
‘Huge. Here, I tell you what an’ all. He helped us out with my Terry. When it come to it. After he went bad …’
Eunice began to speak of a man Gore took to be her ex-husband, but the details were fragmented, filled in only by knowing looks. At length he had to conclude that she was describing a petty villain – a man given to sell his wife’s possessions for his own ends, without prior arrangement. A violent man too, it seemed, one from whom Eunice had been forced to seek legal separation so that she could claim custody of the giro cheque essential to her and their daughter.
‘So he helped you then, Stevie? With Terry …?’
She shot him a look as to say this was an understatement. ‘He had a word. I mean, I only heard what happened, mind. But they said he got hold of him, proper …’ Eunice looked askance. ‘Any road, all I know is, I never saw that Terry again.’
‘They had a … a fight?’
‘Might have give him a clout, Reverend. Might. I don’t know. All I know, we had things settled from then. Here, let us show you.’
She gestured towards a set of photographs in fussy frames on a precarious shelf over the hearth-mounted three-bar heater that sat dormant in the arctic room.
‘Now that’s our Dusty and her two boys.’
Gore’s eyes fell first onto an image of Eunice, perhaps a couple of decades younger, looking pie-eyed beside a grinning Stevie, he clad in white karate pyjamas, his hair amusingly long and straggly. He forced himself instead to inspect the picture of a fretful dark-haired woman between two sheepish lads.
‘It’s not easy for her, not easy. But she tries. Them boys have got to share everything between them. Their shoes even.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Oh, she can’t afford shoes for both. They take it in turns, you know?’
Could he believe it? It was almost too flabbergasting – too upsetting. It seemed, though, his cue to segue. ‘I should say, one of the reasons for my church, I’m hoping, will be to try and do something about just that sort of – deprivation, people have.’
‘Eh?’
‘I’m saying it’s a wicked thing, that that sort of thing should happen.’
‘Aw aye, wicked it is.’ She nodded keenly. ‘Wickedness. Oh, that’s what your lot are here for, no buts about it. Isn’t it, though?’
‘Well, we – yes, obviously – it’s my job to minister to anyone who feels themselves – what we call “oppressed by evil”.’
‘That’s it. Aye, that’s it. I see him and all, I do. I see him in the corner of the room.’
She was offering him a sort of a slow-dawning complicit smile. But it was another mad alley he was disinclined to venture down.
‘What I’d like to do,’ he ventured, ‘is get people out of the house, get them together. More of a neighbourhood atmosphere. Do you think that’s a good idea?’
The smile was still there but with a new glimmer – as if indeed she had heard something of interest. And yet somehow he was not convinced she had taken in a single word.
‘Well, I tell you, people round here, whey … you’ll know how they talk around these parts, whey … There’s some very bad families, you know? Some bad characters moved in. Wicked, aye. They’ve come in and they’ve spoiled it. Gangs and that, I don’t know how they get started but they spread, they do. Like a rotten old stain.’
‘That is … a shame,’ Gore offered.
‘Eh? Aye. And you tell the council what happens and they say they won’t stand for it, they’ll evict them. But council still has to re-house them. It does, doesn’t it? How about that?’
‘Yes, I suppose … not everybody is a good neighbour.’
‘Whey. And then you’ve got the Sikhs and whatnot. I’ve no axe to grind, me. But them uns what wear the turbans, they’ve the look of wolves to me.’
Gore pondered his knees, wishing now that he had not surrendered his watch, for it would have been a valuable prop in these circumstances. When he looked up again Eunice was looking at him plaintively.
‘Here, but, I’ve an aaful problem. Would you ever have a look for us?’
Oh God, thought Gore. ‘Why, yes, of course. I’ll try. What is it?’
‘Well, it’s damp, I think. Council won’t bother themselves. Stevie used to do this sort of thing for us, see …’
They rose and she led him off the hallway into a gloomy and musty bedroom. Yes, thought Gore, I smell rainfall, ingress, rot. He pulled aside the narrow single bed with its cheap frilled orange bedspread, and the painted wall behind the headboard was indeed horrendous – hopelessly blistered, a picture of dereliction. He touched a finger to the plaster, finding it cool and moist. Gently drawing aside the curtain, he saw a hopeless little window-fan fixed in the glass, its blades barely fluttering.
‘You see, hinny, if I could just get all the rotten off, and fresh paint on …’
‘To be honest, Eunice, I think it needs a proper damp course.’
‘Eee, when am I going to get that done? Who’ll pay for that? Council?’
‘Well, they ought to.’
‘I knaa, I just wish I could get a man round … it’s bad, you see.’
Gore looked at his hands. Obligation – it seemed to make a chain in life.
‘I’ll do it for you. I’ll sort it out.’ Jack Ridley, he was thinking.
And she took his hand in hers, surprisingly tightly. He worried she might do herself an injury. Her smile was tight and troubled, but a smile nonetheless. ‘Now, that service of yours,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there, you can count on me.’
‘Oh, now only so long as it suits …’
‘No.’ The grip tightened yet. ‘You can count on me. Cos you’re a good un, you.’ She looked very serious. Gore smiled tightly and patted her arm with his free hand, grateful for the old lady’s endorsement but keen she deliver no hostage to fortune.
Chapter III
IRON AND JUICE
1979–1983
‘He’s a canny lad, this one,’ Eunice declared to anyone and no one as Stevie slid her gin-and-bitter-lemon under her nose. If in earshot then Donnelly the Gunnery landlord tended to snort. Stevie kept his own counsel. In no position to scorn a friendly gesture, he still despised the thought of being mothered. His efforts were trained on establishing some rapport with Jeff, his partner behind the bar on alternate nights. When Jeff peeled down to his black Rainbow tee-shirt a startling musculature was unveiled, even though he wore bookworm specs and a swottish air. Sometimes, when Stevie sought out his room between shifts, Jeff would be on the stairs perusing Black Belt Magazine or World of Judo. Stevie took care to let Jeff see his interest and Jeff, at length, took pity, proposing that Stevie accompany him east of town to a place called Morton’s of Wallsend.
It was a timber-frame shed with a pitched roof and one frosted window. Within, on a concrete floor laid with rubber mats, were stacks of free weights, a row of clunking machines, and a dozen or so big grunting half-naked men. Stevie ignored the sharp commingled stench of cheese and embrocation. For these men looked like he wante
d to look. They glowered back at him, some with eyes alarmingly close-set. But Jeff steered him about, urged him to try his hand, spotted him under the bench-press bar. Then he engaged the proprietor, a retired shot-putter, in a muttered conference, and a deal was cut on Stevie’s behalf. After changing, they sat by a small service counter and Jeff bought them both gloopy refreshments of dried protein powder in milk. He waved away Stevie’s halting gratitude. ‘Do unto others, Steve lad, do unto others. It’s about treating people decent. That way, they treat you the same. You’ll do summat for me someday.’
Stevie pledged himself then to the discipline of iron. ‘There are principles,’ Jeff told him, near-comically hushed and earnest. ‘They go from man to man. You won’t get them out of books.’ For that much, Stevie was glad. Morton’s became his home from the Gunnery, and a model home at that – a safe haven. Its members respected one other’s purpose and work-rate, there was no posing or picking-on, and a man was as anonymous as he cared to be. Why couldn’t the world be like that? Stevie fell hard for the iron – the pull and the push, the sweet ache of the exertion, his confident management of it – but, above all, its visible benefits. Gazing from the fastened stacks of weights to the size and shape of his burgeoning cuts of muscle, he had a pin-sharp sense that some inner faculty of his was being weighed in the balance and found favourable. Jeff prodded him helpfully. ‘Try to see in your mind the person you want to be. Hold that picture. Work toward it.’ It became clearer to Stevie from whence Jeff had acquired his odd air of abstraction. Jeff also started to slip him wraps of bland little tablets, Dianabol, to have with his meals. ‘They’ll build you up.’ And there was something to it, he knew as much whenever he took his turn in one of Morton’s two dank little shower cubicles and inspected himself – bulkier by the day, it seemed.
Waiting his turn by the dumb-bell rack one evening he made the acquaintance of Dicko, a big burring Bristolian, ex-army, or so he said, shiny-scalped but with a walrus moustache and a fine fuzz all over his barrel-like, slightly bloated upper body. Dicko had a little entourage, and Stevie found them appealing, for they bantered about football and cheeked one another easily. They were pub-and-club doormen, the gym a grapevine of such musclework. And they exuded assurance, but they weren’t vain arseholes, not like Jim Doggett. Stevie only wished he had the lip or the strut to fraternise.
Jeff didn’t rate Dicko, but Stevie didn’t cleave to Jeff’s views on all things. On the odd free night, they would have a pint of Guinness after Morton’s, and Jeff put his finger on what had been a growing unease in Stevie. ‘Gets boring, doesn’t it?’ he offered. ‘Same old work-out?’ Stevie agreed keenly. ‘It’s good, like, but it doesn’t go anywhere …’
So Jeff marched him to the local community hall and a weekly martial arts dojo. ‘Just watch the groups for a bit,’ he said. ‘See what you might like.’ Stevie sat on a low bench and studied the range of styles being practised – judo, aikido, ju jitsu, taisudo, tae kwan do. Grappling looked a bit queer – two blokes grunting into each other’s necks – and he fancied kicking, but he wanted to be able to punch too. So he plumped for Shotokan karate, based on techniques of what the brochure called ‘street defence’. For a while, he limped along at a lowly belt in an intermediate-weight class, for he found it surprisingly hard to rouse himself into attack mode. ‘Visualise an enemy,’ Jeff advised. Stevie pictured a wet comb dragged through a pompous thatch of rusty hair. The sessions then grew a little edgy, until Stevie came to sense that other lads shrank from pairing up with him.
One night in the Gunnery, voices were raised and an awful fight erupted, the object some poor-looking woman, but it was some poor bloke who got a pint glass broken over his nose. The assailant, not a regular, took to his heels, but Jeff and Stevie waited for the cops with the luckless victim, a long evil shard of glass sunk into his cheek like some mad scientist’s transplant. Stevie, silent, felt a shiver of nausea. Truly, there was the thought and there was the deed. Jeff too looked ashen, and three days later he handed in his notice. He took Stevie aside, murmured that he and his lass had some plans together. But Stevie was shipwrecked, with no plans larger than a few half-formed notions. He had believed himself an apprentice hardman, but the leap to professional status now seemed very stark.
*
He was sat in Morton’s rest area, alone as was his way now, hunched over the oaten dregs of a protein shake, the sweat of a session drying on his muscles and his Lonsdale singlet. On the outer edge of his vision a lean young squirt of a bloke – not in gym-sweats but jeans and windcheater – was perched on a plastic chair, eyeing him. Smirking, even. And he didn’t want to be doing that.
‘The fuck yee looking at?’
‘Looking at you, pal. You’re some pup.’ He had a wispy moustache, this squirt, and he chuckled like an old lag, for all that he looked not long out of the schoolyard. ‘I’ve watched you, man. You train like a loony. It’s a waste, but. You’ve peaked, your body’s had it. You need to tak’ on more fuel if you wanna get proper big.’
His name was Luke Ridley and he claimed to know some science. Stevie asserted he knew better, for didn’t he swallow magic little pills with every meal? ‘Waste of money, pal,’ this Ridley shot back. ‘You only shite them back out. You’ve got to stack. Proper chemical supplements. Everybody else does.’
Funny how no one else had mentioned it. And Luke Ridley had lowered his voice. But, surveying the clientele at Morton’s, it did seem bulgingly plausible. Luke suggested they step outside to his vehicle. As they walked, Stevie saw Dicko glance his way.
The tariff for Luke’s ‘supplements’ was alarming, but he offered a starter’s discount, plus aftercare. So Stevie consented to part with a fiver a week for an ampoule of Deca Durabolin, designed to go directly into the top of his right arse cheek. Stevie wasn’t keen on needles but he believed in discipline, and in the wisdom that one could get used to anything, at least in pursuit of the higher call of becoming something other. So, cloistered in his tiny Gunnery bedroom, he grimaced and contorted and drove the needle home – his very own mad science project.
He was impatient for change and moped for a week or two, but really it was soon that he sensed a new tightness and bulge in the wake of his workouts. Euphoric, he reported back to Luke, who counselled that the manly way forward was a boosted dosage, and something of a cocktail thereof. Thus Stevie introduced his right buttock to Testaviron. There were remedial drugs, too, for the tail-end of each six-week cycle. ‘They’re serious hormones, these, man, you divvint wanna grow women’s tits.’ Luke giggled, cupping a pair of imaginary bouncers. Stevie saw the point, and didn’t resent the investment. His pint-puller’s wage was good for nothing else. But he fast found himself creeping ahead of his given schedule, and so called round one day to Luke’s home address in Fenham, ringing the doorbell only to be faced by Mr Ridley Senior – a stern, stocky customer, with a squashed nose and a stony glare. Luke was not best pleased when he next saw Stevie, instructing him to never show such initiative again.
As the days fell away Stevie had growing discomfort in his back and his arse, and when he got himself naked and back-to-front before a full mirror he was appalled to see a livid Petri dish of buckshot acne. Now, on top of the ache of the needle’s gouge, came the itch and sting of weeping boils. Worse, he was aware of a worrying contraction about his bollocks, and the lads at Morton’s ribbed him for a perpetual protective cupping of his scrotum. He attacked his work, though, with rising vigour and fierceness, hammering the iron in longer, harder sessions. In his mind the purpose had passed from simple self-improvement to some impending but yet undated confrontation, the antagonist but half-glimpsed, if not imagined. He pictured, too, unknown but approving eyes, the nod of heads, solemn respect in any room he entered. In the midst of one frenzied workout he had to be ousted from his seat at the pectoral machine by Dicko, politely but firmly, and it was only when Stevie stared down at the dark droplets dotting the rubber mat that he realised his nose was streaming blood.
‘Ragin’ bull, this young beggar,’ Dicko chortled.
*
On the day Stevie was drawn aside by Dicko and sounded out about ‘working the doors’, he felt his fortunes in ascent at last. First, though, there was a sort of interview to be navigated.
‘Can you box?’
‘Nah. Not really. I’ve done a bit karate, but.’
‘Oh blimey,’ Dicko shook his head. ‘Not the old Hoo-Flung-Dung. You shoulda boxed, flower, then you’d move better.’
Stevie felt stung, defensive. ‘I’ve got plenty moves on us, Dicko man.’
‘Oh, I bet you have. But if it’s me and you against Fat Mick and five mates and one of them’s got a jack-knife, then I don’t want to look over and see you working out what dance you’re gonna do. I need to know you’re gonna whack ’em. Hard. In the throat. The nadgers. Whatever it takes.’
Stevie nodded as to say he took the point, relieved at least that he had this affable furry ogre for his tutor.
Dicko had several pitches, but it was at a ‘disco pub’ in Gateshead by name of the Loose Box that Stevie presented himself on the appointed hour for his first night’s shift, clad in a thick black cable sweater and steel-capped Dr Martens. Dicko surveyed him critically. ‘Okay, flower, stand up big, listen to me, and keep your mouth shut.’ As the punters arrived, the duo manned the narrow doorway and counted heads for an hour. Only when a bumptious pair tried to push their way forward did Dicko step out and make a wall of himself. Afterward, he grunted into Stevie’s ear. ‘Them that wave their arms about, they’re just trying to fool you. Stare ’em out, talk it down, nice and easy.’
In time they were relieved, whereupon Dicko escorted Stevie up a flight of stairs for a tour of the disco – desultory groups of females and larger packs of drinking males, under spotlights and mirror-balls. The dance floor felt spongy under Stevie’s boots, and Dicko, rolling his eyes, advised that it had been laid on top of the old pub carpet. ‘In here you get yourself positioned right.’ This, it seemed, was lesson number two. ‘Assess the room. Get yourself good at observation. Observation means anticipation. You see something you don’t like, send out the stare. Let ’em know you’re watching.’ Within minutes Dicko had spotted the makings of a push-and-shove altercation by the bar, and once again, from the vantage of Dicko’s burly shoulder, Stevie was intrigued to see how fast the hostility fizzled down to nowt like butter in a pan. ‘Don’t be getting demob happy,’ Dicko cautioned. ‘Breaking things up is easy. Lot of these tossers are just waitin’ for you to step in, they want it broken up before they get hurt.’ He grinned. ‘Now, there’s others – they want to do you. But, y’know, proper fight, you don’t feel nothing anyway. Not less it really hurts.’ And he looked askance at Stevie. ‘Not scared yet, flower?’
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