Crusaders

by Richard T. Kelly

  ‘I’m canny, man,’ Stevie muttered.

  The night was passing without major incident, even getting dull. Then Dicko had his arm around a raddled redhead and then, with a wink, he vanished from view. Stevie was alone, stationed once more at the door, breathing the sharp night air and thinking about the bus home, when the landlord of the Loose Box appeared at his side in a tizzy.

  ‘It’s Steve, aye? Look, Steve, we’ve got this bugger, he’s bother and he’s not leaving, but I want him out, right now, son.’

  ‘Fuck. Right. Where’s Dicko?’

  ‘He’ll be shaggin’, won’t he?’

  ‘Hang on, I’ll get him.’

  ‘Now, Steve, this needs doing now.’

  Bollocks, thought Stevie, for the landlord was tugging at his arm and there was no backing down from the belly-stabbing sense that this was make-or-break time. Still, he tried.

  ‘What’s his bother, this gadgy? Will he not just gan on, like?’

  ‘I’d rather not ask him, son. What am I paying you for?’

  Stevie strode into the disco, his legs shaky beneath him as he crossed the spongy floor, girding up his sinews as if to inflate himself and still the quake in his bowels. In his mind’s eye he was headed in the opposite direction, out the door, free and clear. But headed where? The owner was pointing out the enemy – a shaven-headed pudding of a bloke with a dead-eyed scowl, probably forty years old and twenty stone in weight, a big lump cosseted by a few big-lump pals. As he bore down, the gadgy’s mates were clocking him, cockily, alerting their leader, who barely half-turned his head from the pint of beer raised to his mouth. ‘Aw aye, then, he spat. ‘Yee and what army, you little prick?’

  Stevie threw a straight right at the side of that meaty face, which cannoned gloriously into the mouth of the glass. Another right to the head, then another, then a left hook to the ribs – Stevie’s hands weren’t fast but they had clout – and then the gadgy’s legs were failing him, his cause forlorn, collapsing him to the floor. One of his pals made a poor feint of a move, Stevie lashed out a boot at his shins, and the howl was louder than the music in the room. Two men down, a third looking like he might shit his pants, the area clearing, and all eyes on Stevie – all in seeming awe but he. The gadgy was on all fours so Stevie booted him in his sagging belly, and he voided the watery contents of his stomach onto the carpet. Now there was a grasping hand at Stevie’s shoulder and he beat it off, before he was seized about the chest by twine-like arms. It was Dicko, bearing reinforcements, and the fire-exit doors were being kicked open, bodies manhandled from the space. But Stevie was blazingly content, for truly he had felt it – the rush of hormones from the adrenals, his fear turning to propulsive hate, hate that even now overrode the raw burning pulse in his knuckles. He delegated the rest of the kicking to Dicko, and waved away the landlord’s ferrety gratitude, as he supposed a professional would.

  *

  Donnelly exuded displeasure over Stevie’s ever more erratic hours at the Gunnery, yet seemed somehow shy of saying as much. Finally it was Stevie who determined it was time to move on – for it had become his custom to call by Dicko’s functional flat in Byker for a shit and a shower before a night’s work, sometimes sleeping over on the shedding couch, sometimes with a docile female if Dicko’s ‘entertainment’ of the evening had a friend. One day Stevie simply lingered over a pot of tea, long after the plates of egg and bacon congealed. Upon fetching his small Adidas holdall from the Gunnery, he had successfully swapped one small room for another.

  Batman and Robin they became, two fairly carefree bachelors even with twenty years between them. Dicko, too, was on Luke Ridley’s juice, only longer and stronger cycles, heavy fuel, Testaviron and Sustanon. Over mugs of tea one morning Dicko advised Stevie that Luke had gone south and they wouldn’t see him again. Stevie was panicked but Dicko assured him they would not go short, for he knew a bloke who knew a bloke. As for Luke, it transpired that his grim old dad had been nosing around and found his stash. The set-to had resulted in Luke’s expulsion from the family home. Stevie wished he had had a chance to say goodbye, to tell his unlikely friend that these things happened, and it was okay, dads were like that. Jack Ridley, for sure, had seemed an excessively miserable cunt.

  Stevie and Dicko ate together, drank together, injected together, and double-dated. Dicko introduced him to a voluble redhead named Debbie, who seemed to like him hugely. Certainly her libido was pronounced and naked. She was not a bad looker, compared to her hefty mates, her complexion smoothed by copious pancake, her lips surprisingly delicious. At Morton’s, though, Stevie overheard some crack about ‘Drippy Debbie’, and his nascent composure cracked. ‘You, round the back wi’ me now’ was his riposte to the joker, but Dicko’s hand fell on his shoulder. Analysing his anger in quiet he understood – once again, he had found himself starting from the back of the queue, and that had to stop. He dumped Debbie double-quick and she called him a bastard, but the charge ran off his back, for he knew he would need to be a bigger bastard yet.

  It was she, running post-coital fingers through Stevie’s hair, who had teased him for going bald. He knew it, glumly, had long sensed it getting patchy and stringy and poor, one more unsightly offshoot of the juice. He chose his course quickly, took a loan of Dicko’s electric clippers, and shaved his scalp clean. Afterward, scooping sodden wads of clippings from the plughole, he felt a powerful tristesse. It was almost as though he had aged in an hour, been abruptly stripped of his youth, joined Dicko on a craggy far shore of maturity. And yet there was undeniable solace: that shaven pate bestowed on him a certain sort of a look, his strong-boned face and ravenous grin thrown very strikingly into relief. As he strutted past the mirrors in Morton’s he practised impassivity, an occasional roil of his thickened neck, as though something immensely displeased were stirring within him. This man in the mirror had size and authority, and his thoughts could not be guessed. The outward Stevie was stern and fierce as an ogre. Inside he was grinning like a kid.

  *

  Come the summer of 1983 Stevie could feel the sun on his face. Newcastle nightlife was reviving, several bigger and brighter and much-fancied venues springing up near the river – Roxanne’s, the Love Boat, Club Zeus, Brilliant! Some TV pop show was broadcasting live from a studio on Fridays, so there were pop stars round town, and tidy-looking girls in tow. Dicko drafted Stevie into a job beside him at a club called the Matinee where the light was fluorescent, the music was funk, and the bar purveyed sickly cocktails. On first inspection the manager was bluntly disparaging of Stevie’s boots and bomber jacket – ‘That’s nee fucking good, son, you get yourself a black suit for here.’ Newly suited and booted, Stevie started to enjoy himself about the bouncer’s craft. His greatest laugh was the early expulsion of bare-legged girls overpowered by cocktails, some so helplessly bladdered as to require shifting by a fireman’s hold. ‘Just you mind they don’t spew up down your back,’ Dicko roared. Certain other lasses – not quite so insensible but rowdy nonetheless – Stevie simply hefted off their feet as they hammered his chest and berated him in the crudest terms, their gussets exposed to gleeful watching Geordies. When he set them down out of doors, right side up, he sometimes received a very breathless look, and then sometimes a phone number, or even a straight proposition. He preferred to think himself a gent in such matters, but there was a certain sort of female on whom the courtesy, quite clearly, was wasted.

  Shagging then became a principle and a competition in which Stevie steadily surpassed Dicko, who in turn grew a little censorious – or was it envious? – of the younger girls Stevie brought back to the flat. The deed was not always a simple matter. Stevie’s scrotum was shrivelled much of the time by the steroids, and on occasions, before tackling the girl, he had to give himself a helping hand in the toilet – a quick five-knuckle shuffle, drawing on his skills of visualisation. Sometimes, to his own disquiet, he pictured himself, post-workout – stiff all over his body, biceps tight. It was a weird thing, perhaps, but it work
ed. And once he was on, he was on – one hundred per cent hard man, dispenser of physical sensation.

  There was, he found, an upper echelon of female – certain rather foxy creatures who frequented the Matinee, consorted with the pop stars, wholly unresponsive to his rough-and-ready routine. Perhaps it was something else they sought, judging by the flounce and effeminacy of the Flash Harries to whom they clung. But he wasn’t wholly convinced. ‘Everybody likes a bit naughty’ – that was the Guv’nor’s catchphrase.

  Eric Manners was a professional photographer who regularly pitched up at the club and called for a bottle of Moët. He wore a burgundy leather blouson, stone-washed jeans with a hint of pink, and kept his white hair piled on his head like day-old candyfloss, only nicotine-stained like the net curtains in the Gunnery. It was a nonce-like ensemble, and Eric the sort of fellow at whom Stevie was inclined to look askance. He was touchy-feely too, and known for a connoisseur’s interest in the male body, since his framed monochrome photos of torsos were all over the walls of the Matinee. Yet he was usually squiring some fit lass, and over a drink Stevie found he had a wife and grown kids and could talk knowledgeably about football – Newcastle, not Sunderland. Very candidly he told Stevie that there was no job he would not take, and as such he did his fashion stuff and his arty snaps and then also shot the occasional spread for mucky books. ‘I’m not ashamed, Stevie, I work hard for me packet. I just don’t pay tax.’ And he nudged Stevie and laughed. ‘Do you know, son, what is the sexiest part of the body?’

  Stevie hadn’t mulled it over and yet his preference leapt to mind. It was the back of a lass’s neck – that nicely hollowed and contoured shape if the hair was swept away, eliciting cascades of giggles when nuzzled. That was true loveliness. He was all for the tits and the fanny, of course, but not wedded to them. This he kept to himself and merely shook his head for Eric, who tapped his forehead. ‘The brain, bonny lad. That’s the bit does the most work. Way more than the owld fella doon there. See, your average bloke’s brain is thinking about sex at least once every ten seconds. Scientists have proved that. Ten seconds. That’s more naughty than your owld fella knows what to do with. And that’s where the owld muckies come in, see.’

  Manners laughed and touched Stevie’s shoulder. Stevie didn’t believe any of this pontificating was quite as scientific as Eric claimed – he was, after all, a bullshitter. But it was impressive to him that Eric had applied such thought to his game, that he was pragmatic, aware of the customer’s needs. There was a solidity to him, and Stevie saw and respected it. After Eric invested in new video gear, he came to Stevie for a quiet word, with a modest proposal. To Stevie it seemed a worthwhile test, even a bit of a laugh, and the offer in cash was terrific. On the appointed day he climbed the creaking stairs to a second-floor flat on the Westgate Road, where Eric and his assistant were already engrossed in fiddling with the video camera, the fluid-head tripod, the clunky cassette recorder and a large white cotton bedsheet clipped to a frame by clothes pegs. Stevie’s accomplice for the day was perched on a bed in a flannel nightgown – a dark-haired lass called Michelle who might have come directly from working the chip van outside the Matinee – no great looker, but no tart neither, and perfectly sweet-natured about what she was being asked to do. Stevie donned a pair of blue overalls as instructed, and Eric led them patiently through rehearsal, punctuated by Michelle’s giggles. But Stevie was soon into his stride – he had easy access to the needful exhibitionism, now that his body was both tool and thing of wonder to him.

  He and Michelle were bollock naked, atop one another and near enough engaged, when Eric called a brief halt for a change of setup, asking them both to hold very still. The assistant fiddled with the white balance and the clothes pegs. Eric patted Stevie’s shoulder. ‘You’re a pro, you are, my son.’ Underneath him, Michelle made a cooing sound, ran a fingernail up his taut bicep. Not the girl of his dreams, not by any means – any more than the many lasses he had been diddling of late without the benefit of today’s pay-wedge. But she was out there somewhere, that special girl, and his ongoing graft and application would surely only bring her closer.

  Chapter IV

  THE FOCUS GROUP

  Tuesday, 1 October 1996

  Gore believed he was making a passable show of immersion in the logbook before him, and so at intervals he let his gaze flick upward and fall upon the girl. A young woman, in truth – mid-twenties, he supposed – seated on her own, slowly wreathing herself in smoke as if resolved to inhabit fully the role of pariah. Thirteen souls had presented themselves thus far to the assembly hall, and most had tried to spread themselves evenly about the available seating – sixty-four red plastic chairs set out with exacting symmetry in eight rows of eight. She, though, had made like a shot for the back row. She wore a chocolate velour tracksuit, her brownish hair hennaed and pinned into slides, her face painted, traces of purple about her cheekbones detectable from thirty paces. With a slight frisson Gore placed his recognition of her – the newsagent, on the morning he first walked out to St Luke’s. The prettier of the two … though this particular prettiness he sensed as brittle, bought across a counter in a shop, put in place carefully each morning. But allure was allure, however sulky or cosmetic.

  He turned again to the ruled columns of the registration book he had asked allcomers to inscribe. Before him, Albert Robinson, Pensioner. Rod Moncur, Retailer. Sharon Price, Housewife. Sean Goddard, Porter (Hospital). Alan Day, Teacher. Lizzie Spence, Legal Secretary. Kully Gates, Community Worker – no doubt the intently bespectacled brown-skinned woman four rows back. Susan Carrow, the former hairdresser on his parish council, had sat herself briskly without signing her name. At the foot of the page, one Lindy Clark had neglected to make an entry in the occupational column, but gave her address as Oakwell Estate.

  ‘Are we getting marked for wor handwriting?’

  The jest came from the front row, where sat a pug-faced fellow with a toothy grin, his hair a mop of dark curls, an affable mien only damaged by an unfortunate resemblance to the murderer Fred West.

  ‘I’ll let you know, Mr Moncur. It’s just for my reference, a database, you know?’

  An elderly gent – Albert Robinson, surely – sat with his flat cap on, hands folded in his lap, now and then peering about him as if troubled. His face was milky and craggy, a cupid-bow purse to his upper lip, a trait Gore considered distinctively Geordie. He sucked on his dentures doggedly and loudly, as though an entire meal – rather than remnants thereof – were adhered to their sides. His visible scepticism was the outward gauge of Gore’s own inner doubt. The clock said 7.23. He had taken some cares, and they now contributed to his feeling a little foolish.

  The assembly hall of St Luke’s was chill and unwelcoming, as if hostile to the intrusion. Aperiodic clanking and groaning emanated from the radiators arrayed down its length of the hall. Gore watched as the caretaker bashed at one with a hammer. ‘I can’t blame him for being peeved,’ whispered Monica Bruce, now at Gore’s side. ‘They’re not in his job description, nights. Not this night anyway. At least he showed up.’

  ‘Quite. So where are our punters, do you think?’

  ‘Well,’ said Monica. ‘I told the kids in assembly, be sure and tell their parents. You put your little posters up?’

  Gore nodded. He had visited the library, the town hall, newsagents, he had pinned up on every available pinboard.

  ‘We maybe would have been better in the staff room,’ said Monica.

  ‘This is the space we’ve got to fill. We might as well start trying.’

  Evidently Moncur had been eavesdropping from the front row, for now he chipped in. ‘We could always move to the Gunnery.’

  ‘Oh, there’ll be refreshment,’ murmured Gore, gesturing to a table laid with cups, a sizeable urn and plates of biscuits.

  ‘I must say I’m quite dry already,’ said Susan Carrow, wincing, twee in a pink sweater, fanning her fingers before her face. Then Monica was striding down the aisle and stooping
to the side of that girl, gesturing to the fuming cigarette. ‘Linda, pet. Would you mind not?’

  ‘Bet I’m not the only one wants a smoke,’ she groused, eyes darting heavenward. But she offered a parody of an obliging smile before screwing the butt to death under her trainer.

  Clacking back down the aisle, Monica nodded at Gore, then turned to the assembly and joined her hands. ‘Good evening, all, thank you for coming, most of you’ll know me already so you won’t want to hear me ask for money. But the Reverend will be too shy, so I’d just like to say refreshments are provided and please avail yourself, and if you enjoy them then a few coins would be appreciated, because Reverend Gore’s on a tight budget here. Over to you, John.’

  Suppressing a slight irritation, Gore stepped forward, lines prepared.