Crusaders

by Richard T. Kelly

  Gore would have whistled under his breath, had the moment permitted. Her acuity had come at him from clear out of the blue, and he was abruptly and crushingly embarrassed by himself.

  ‘Do you hear us, John?’

  He hazarded a caress of the nape of her neck, a stroke of the thick hair gathered there, tangled and dulled.

  ‘I do, I do. Look I’m sorry. Really. But please don’t be thinking any of that. That’s not how I feel about you.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not, is it?’

  ‘No. You have to believe I care for you. You have to.’

  ‘Oh aye …?’ She bowed her head, rubbed at her eyes. But there was no more fight. Stroking her still, gently, cautiously, he followed her gaze to the floor. Resting by the coffee table was the orange Adidas sports bag, that now-familiar eyesore of her bedroom belongings. He prodded it idly with a toe.

  ‘Just leave that, man.’

  ‘Sorry, will it explode?’

  ‘It’s Stevie’s, he must’ve left it, just leave it.’

  There came a creak from the stairway, and they looked together to see Jake descending, one step, two step, his tummy protruding from pyjamas styled in England football colours. Gore smiled wanly at the boy, who stared back, impassive.

  ‘Aw, man … Look, it’d be better maybe if you just go, John.’

  He looked close at her, surprised – a little put out.

  ‘Then you’ll maybe sleep. We’ll all sleep.’

  She was already getting up, moving past him, taking her boy in hand and back upstairs to quarters. Gore sat for a moment in his discomfort. It was cold outside, and this seemed a sort of banishment – but, on reflection, he had no obvious grounds for appeal.

  *

  Alone again, her son safely stowed abed once more, Lindy sat and fingered a strand of her straggling hair. Now then, would she? Or wouldn’t she? Her late-favoured colour had been growing out awhile, the auburn roots making themselves heard again. Selfish, maybe – so late in the day, laundry unfolded, dishes unwashed, and here was Miss, thinking only of expending some care on herself. But she loathed the thought of creeping back into her pit so dissatisfied.

  No, she was resolved. She went to the kitchen drawers, located the big-handled scissors, headed for the stairs. Then she remembered Stevie’s magic bag, and plucked it from the floor. It was lighter than usual, rattling a little – clearly not stuffed to the gills, as she had observed once when she dared to peek and found it brimful with ten bagged kilo-weight of cocaine.

  What would that fella of hers make of the change she had in mind? He could think what he liked, the sod. In all the years she had finicked and finessed her appearance, she could honestly attest that the work had never been done for the benefit of any man. Quite often, the reverse was intended.

  Since they had first kept one another’s company, she had been puzzled, miffed, by his perpetual looks to the door, the glances to a wrist where there was no watch, his seeming need for a need to be elsewhere, as if fearful of tumbling into some vortex. It was almost amusing, up to a point – though a girl less tolerant or worldly could have taken the huff. But clearly he was a conflicted sort, and she had developed a mild fascination in watching him dare to shift his weight off the fence.

  That interest, she knew, had waned a little. The closing door now afforded her a share of the same relief she presumed in him.

  Physically it wasn’t what she was used to, far from it, though he smelled nice and was tidy, touched her with delicacy – maybe too much of it. That was part of his manners, and his manners did elevate him.

  But his personality – the weird silences, the show-off talk, that private little world, that freezing look of this – all of these were a faff and a bother. And now she had to put up with his judgement too. That she could have got from anyone, at a fraction of the cost. The lesson, she supposed, was that even when you tried to deal the cards afresh, make the safer or supposedly ‘better’ choice of a man, they didn’t necessarily treat you any better. And that, if true, was a glum state of affairs.

  In the bathroom she located the electric clippers, long neglected in their box under the sink. She ran the plug to the socket by the skirting, dusted the blades with the small stiff brush, and selected the quarter-inch fitting. Then, setting the tool aside, she took up the scissors, bent over the sink and, eyeing her reflection, seized a long lock of hair between her fingers, close to the roots. She snipped, and she snipped. Curls, soft and drab, began to tumble into the bowl, joined by others, soon a dark matted pile. Violence of a kind, she fancied – but still, it would feel good to get shorn again.

  Sixteen she had been when she first stepped over the scored threshold of Bob Craven’s the Barber – nominally a cutter only of lads’ hair – and asked him to shave her head. The shop was quiet and Bob wasn’t fazed by much, so he soon had her cranked up in the high chair, swaddled in a plastic cape, inhaling the tonic and talc. At the very last, she bottled it, unsure she could withstand a grade-one crop – and so settled for number two. It proved to be an error. The visual effect she had sought was a kind of gravity, a strength and serenity, from the crown of her scalp to the nape of her neck. What she wound up with seemed dour and dowdy at first – she looked at best like some punky American lesbian, at worst like one of those fat Mod girls in fishtail parkas who dawdled round Eldon Square scoffing chips.

  And yet, it was a change, and that was for the better. She had tried the other route – soft and shiny and girly – and it hadn’t paid dividends. She was never set firm on what she thought of her looks – sometimes she despaired, at others she saw certain strengths – but by her mid-teens it was piercingly apparent that her plump lips and downy hair were some kind of red rag, encouraging lads to pull and push her and generally aspire to misuse her. Her first full-on boyfriend – Lee Quint from Sceptre Street, of the sneering smile and the scarred cheek – had seemed a surprise charmer, fiercely absorbed by her every curve and hollow, right up until hours after he first ejaculated inside her. The falling-off thereafter was supremely hurtful, and she struggled for a while to regain her sense of self. In due course she took as some solace that she was possibly fortunate to have skipped an allotted place on the pram-pushing roster.

  Now she beheld herself and her handiwork in the mirror awhile – Raggedy Annie, the butchered doll. She pulled the door to, took up the clippers and clicked the switch that made them buzz. Then she stooped, craned her neck and commenced the shearing – up the sides and round the back, blade snug to skin, steering close to the planes and contours, then over the top in good straight rows, and back to the nape to finish. At intervals she shook little snippets like iron filings onto the gathering carpet in the bowl. Shutting off the warm tool, she effected some finishing touches with a disposable razor normally deployed on her legs. Finally she made her inspection – ran her fingers over the fresh bristles, always a pleasing sensation – then scrunched up her face for the mirror, tearing her mouth open wide in a silent shout, just like a warrior woman. The sight had long since ceased to alarm her, for all that it retained its power to appal certain others. ‘Oh you’ve spoiled yourself, Melinda.’ That was what her mother shrieked, foolishly, on the day she trooped home from Bob Craven’s. And that was the name Mairead gave her, one of which she tired, as of so much else besides.

  Chapter III

  ECONOMIES

  Friday, 15 November 1996

  She levered herself out of her pit to beat the alarm at eight, had despatched her restorative cuppa and toast and shaken Jake’s Rice Crispies into the bowl before trooping back upstairs to shake the boy awake. For some moments after his lids unglued he looked at her as though she had harrowed his own fair head and not hers.

  ‘Do you not think your mam’s nice-looking any more then?’

  ‘It’s ’orrible, man.’

  ‘Oh, thank you. Well, your mam’s got to have her little ways, okay?’

  Fifteen minutes later, cereal untouched, shoes not yet on, he was making a lugubrio
us face and reporting a stomach ache. ‘I don’ wan’ oo!’ he protested, and grimly she supposed that his froth and vigour would have floored a lesser female.

  ‘How, Jake man, just get on. We’ve all of us gotta do things we don’t want to sometimes. What do you think it’s like for me?’

  She had a full day ahead, the place was looking more than ‘lived in’ – it was a sty – on top of which she was starting to feel November-fluey, which always crept over her with maximum charm in a week she was due to menstruate. She had him inserted in those shoes by the time the neighbour rang the bell. She gave herself a cursory seeing-to with lipstick and hairbrush, and was out the door ten minutes later.

  Peak-time, then, at Mankad’s News’n’Booze. Lindy sold fizzy cans to the schoolkids, twenty Lamberts to the mums, scratch-cards to the pensioners and Suns and Mirrors to the drivers of transits. This most perfunctory of all her wage-labours was also the least remunerative, but the least bother for all that. The Greek restaurant in town could not be relied on for hours or even custom, and the owner was a red-eyed lech. Tending bar at Teflon was starting to make her feel careworn, spinsterish, though she was by no means the oldest on display – indeed, still a dish next to some of the heifers who piled in. As for the Damask Rose, one or two of the girls there were good sorts, making up in laughs for the nature of the job, but not entirely. Elevenses at Mankad’s offered at least the perk of a paddle through the newest Elle, Cosmo, Vogue, Marie Claire, She, Zest, Company … She chided herself for the curiosity, the ritual succumbing to nonsense – that stuff, it never changed. And yet, it was for her an area of expertise. Her eye was trained to assess the vying claims of models, and she fancied she could tell the better sorts from the scores of kohl-eyed anorexics clearly rating themselves hotter than newly lain shit.

  *

  She had only been loitering down Northumberland Street, cocking a snook at the windows of Zara and Next and Hennes, on her way to buy a sandwich that she planned to consume alone at the foot of Grey’s Monument. Newly seventeen, she was trying out as a junior in a solicitor’s office. The job had seemed a boon, but it amounted only to filing while several haughty blokes cast long looks at her arse. The girls weren’t any nicer.

  In the dim reflection of Zara’s glass frontage her radar sensed a hovering presence – an older bloke in a jerkin of mauve-ish coloured leather, hair like a meringue, casting stealthy looks of his own. He asked her if she’d ever been told she could model? Bollocks or not, she had no fear – and it wasn’t like anybody else had asked her a friendly question all morning. He enquired if he might speak to her parents? She muttered that there was only Mairead, and that he’d have to catch her early in the day. He gave her a card, which looked and felt legitimate. Better yet, there was something laconically take-it-or-leave-it in his manner, one that encouraged her to believe. And she wanted to.

  Two days later she took a bus to his studio out by Low Walker, overlooking the Tyne. His name was Eric Manners – ‘Call us Guv’nor, eh?’ – and he treated her carefully, called her ‘Miss Clark’ as he asked her to tilt her chin, told her categorically that she had what was known in the biz as ‘a European body’. He thence conveyed her to Vivian Beer, the hardy old bird who ran the Viva Model Agency, and Viv took her on the books as if routinely. Lindy found herself sitting through classes in skincare, hair-care, maquillage, wardrobe. And this time – so unlike her schooldays, where the kudos came from caring less – this time, she paid attention.

  After a few tetchily dreadful styling sessions that made her look ugly, and a live PA for hair-gel where she forgot to smile and was made to feel incompetent, Viva came up with an image for her, and in retrospect it seemed obvious – her hair in a short, inky-black, super-glossy feathered bob, putting Lindy in mind of the one Madonna used to wear when she was acting the peepshow girl. A photographer from Newcastle Poly, a bony lad called Phil, shot some angular black-and-whites that really made her book into something a bit different, and earned her some play in Blitz magazine. Phil squired Lindy to Club Zeus by way of celebration, and after two strong ciders he surprised the life from her by lacing his fingers in hers. She let him kiss her mouth, and found it not unpleasant.

  Mairead couldn’t just be pleased for her – it couldn’t be that sweet and simple. Mairead had thought herself a glamour girl back in the seventies, knocking around with all the local bands. Lindy assumed she had been drunk most of the time back then, and that had only got worse, while there was nothing glamorous about scrubbing other people’s toilet bowls in West Jesmond. Lindy had never intended to rub her mother’s face in it, but nor would she defer to any sozzled pretensions of wisdom. With benefits thrown in to her pay she had enough to get out into a communal flat with two other Viva girls – Jill who’d been cast in a telly drama for kids, Holly who sang and danced. They carried themselves unabashedly as talents, this pair, natural blondes both, but Lindy found them not the worst company. Then she snagged a fashion campaign for British Home Stores, a naff ‘hip-hop’ range that nevertheless set her upright as life-size cardboard in the window of the Eldon Square store. She began to lead a bit of a mad life. She could waltz into clubs, her drinks paid for, and she met all sorts. She was inherently wary of boozing – that was what Mairead did. But Lindy believed she could do it better, with a bit of flair – a kir royale and a rasping line of charlie. She found it heady, pleasing, to see silly money chucked about for silly and selfish and wholly ephemeral treats.

  In retrospect? She had one good year. It was almost cruel, how swiftly the work grew thin. She suspected she was not favoured at Viva, not thought golden, even when her flatmates – the Blonde Alliance – upped and left together for London. Newer girls seemed to have the edge on her within days of signing on. When it was all over, she sometimes brooded. Why hadn’t she applied herself? Why did she act as if by one poxy campaign she had ‘arrived’? Why did she go on the lash so hard? Why not protect her assets? It wasn’t, she knew, for want of advice – but the advice from Viv Beer always came sourly coated, dispensed in an uppity manner. It reeked of the whole ‘spoiling yourself’ business, and she couldn’t but feel it was worth ignoring that stuff, whatever the cost – just to be her own person, sovereign, real, free of airs and bullshit.

  In the event she was highly wired, nursing a sharpener of rum and Coke, on the early morning that police attended her flat to inform her that her mother’s body had been found in Hoxheath Park, positively identified by Yvonne, stone dead of alcohol poisoning. The officers’ cursory manner was a strike against them, one she wouldn’t forget. It was nothing, though, next to some of the mingey faces at the funeral – the crowd from the Queen’s Head who had kept her mother steeped in drink, acting now as if she had driven her poor mam into the ground. They weren’t to know her feelings, and it was past time for them all to take a hard look at themselves.

  *

  She pulled her knees up into the armchair, cupped the cigarette into her palm between draws, and watched him crafting with plasticine, laid out flat on his belly, tip of his tongue pressed against his teeth, his eyes stony with concentration as his fingers modelled a stocky humanoid figure from the laminate floor up. He made her want to cry, sometimes – the little dough-boy, her half-pint welterweight champ. It amazed her, thinking back, that this robust boy-child had come forth from her body. He could be surly, yes, but there was sweetness there too.

  She had no regrets. It hadn’t been sanguine from the get-go. The dawning blue cross of the test had brought on a lurching, prickling fear. I’m a daughter, not a mother, was her first clear fit of panic. Over the ensuing hours she learned to chide herself. The light of day was chilly, and she belonged to no one now. She was meant to know better, too – not to fall to ashen pieces, none of that soft shit. Complete mongs had kids, and they managed. A good attitude was called for. She had to view it as a job of work – no, a project, an opportunity to make something special, in her own image, altogether loveable.

  Getting great with child wa
s the last thing her clubbing crew had expected of her, back in the Summer of Love. She found herself relishing the outrage. Just how well did those cronies imagine they knew her anyway? Junior among them, she began to feel like the old soul. It all added up to the end of a good time that had been ending anyway. And they duly melted away, those pals. Not a problem. She had not for one minute expected Phil to stick around, not when the kid wasn’t his and she wasn’t saying whose it was. A hand to grasp in the delivery room, that she could have wished for, but wishes weren’t for living on.

  Instead she crossed alone into the askew world of fraught nights and grey mornings, smarting breasts, bottle regimens, playgroups and sitters. The fear that stayed plangent was that her precious private time would be consumed, lost – that she was never to be herself ever again. And yet, denied the gallivant, the wired nights on the piss, a new vista of reflection had opened up to her. In that place, though, she found also a new and debilitating tendency to brood.

  Then the taxman kicked her with both boots, for she had never quite got round to declaring some of those Viva earnings. It was only that her former and fleeting livelihood had now closed off to her, one more blind doorway. There was no joke, no mere attitude, that could shrug off this burden. Now she had to accept certain charities, swallow down certain unhappy realities, be glad of such friendships as endured. For Jake’s sake she knew that much.

  And there was the door. Her babysitting fairy, her mother’s dowdy elder sister – a little early, but dependable as rain.

  *

  An easy walk at this time of night, up the Hoxheath Road, onto the Westgate. She turned the key in the unmarked door and climbed the poor carpet of the stairs to the white-gloss door of the converted flat – a classically creaky Irish bodge job. Into the reception, the little cubby of a kitchen, bounded by the breakfast bar that doubled as front desk. No one visibly manning the fort, though – just Dougie Petrie, his back to the wall, tonight’s regulation ox in black bomber and DMs, sufficient to scare off any ditherers by his pudding face, broad squashed nose and monobrow. Preferable, at least, to Shackleton, who made plain his hate for this work.