Blood Relatives

by Stevan Alcock

  ‘Wi’ their curry houses? Which you like.’

  ‘You can think what you want. I don’t feel like a hypocrite. Christ, if it comes to hypocrites, the NF’s full of ’em. Rumour has it some of t’ NF top dogs are as gay as they come.’

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Wish I wor. If owt, they’re t’ worst, cos they’ve got more to hide.’

  He burrowed his head into my neck, and I kneaded his bristly hair. It felt nice, like a soft boot brush. He straightened himsen up and pulled me off t’ bar stool.

  ‘Let’s dance.’

  ‘To this?’

  This being Thelma Houston’s ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’.

  ‘Yeah. To this.’

  By t’ time we left the club it wor sleeting outside and the wind wor whipping round corners and rattling the lampposts. Tad had use of his mum’s mustard-yellow Austin Allegro. We drove out of t’ town and up into t’ wall of night, climbing onto t’ moors, the headlights scanning verges left and right as the single track twisted through t’ inky blackness. We juddered over a cattle-grid and the road dipped sharply, then suddenly we turned onto an unmade track.

  A farm loomed into view, the headlights arcing across one end and the side of a shippen as we pulled into t’ farmyard, setting the sheep dogs off into frantic barking. I caught a strong whiff of chicken droppings and manure. The farmhouse itsen had a long, low roof and small, deep-set windows, so it seemed to be cowering from t’ elements. Apart from a solitary light from an upstairs window, all wor pitch dark. Up here you could see all t’ stars.

  Tad killed the engine. An outhouse door, not properly tied, could be heard banging. Tad leaned over to me and we snogged. The upstairs light went out.

  ‘Mother,’ Tad said. ‘She always stays up ’til I get home, then goes to bed. Pretends she doesn’t, but she does. She won’t worry us.’

  ‘How much do they know?’

  In t’ shippen, the dogs wor still barking brainlessly.

  ‘They know what they need to. I do what I want, and there’s nowt they can say about it. Course, I can’t say they’d be too chuffed to find you here. Dad says I don’t get this place ’til I marry and breed some offspring. Like I’m a prize bull. Says if I don’t he’ll cut me out of t’ will. I’m only back here for a while ’til things blow over. I don’t want to inherit this fucking dump anyway.’

  The house creaked like old joints as I trailed Tad through low-ceilinged, darkened rooms full of heavy furniture and up the rickety stairs. My nerves jangled. Any moment Tad’s old man wor going to jump out t’ shadows wi’ a friggin’ axe. My innards would be pig feed. My bones would be groundmeal for t’ chickens. We crept along a narrow passageway and into Tad’s room.

  Tad clicked on a bedside lamp and drew t’ curtains. The shade had a pattern of pink roses and carmine tassels. The polished dark wood of a heavy wardrobe glinted in its soft beam. The old bed wor very high and a little short, wi’ a roughly carved headboard. Generations had slept in this bed, likely as not been conceived in it, born in it, died in it, and now two men wor going to fuck in it.

  Tad wor already down to his underpants. His firm, smooth body wor contoured by t’ lamplight, the tattoos like ink splodges applied in anger. The room wor icy cold, so we quickly dived under t’ covers. Tad squirmed.

  ‘Christ! Your feet are freezing!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He laughed and bit into my neck wi’ a playful growl. ‘I’ll soon warm you up!’

  Sometime in t’ night I awoke. My arm, which lay beneath Tad, had gone numb. I pulled mesen clear, shaking my fingers ’til t’ feeling returned.

  I lay awake, watching a small shadow dance on t’ ceiling. Tad wor having some dreaming argument. I spooned mesen against his back and curled my hand around his. His fingers gripped mine like a newborn’s and his dreaming grew still. I lay there, listening to t’ wind rattling in t’ trees, to t’ one dog still barking at the moon, to t’ restless complaining of t’ weary old house, ’til at some point I must have fallen back into sleep.

  I awoke early to t’ smell of burnt toast, hen shit from t’ yard below, and the keen edge of winter. I wor alone. Tad’s side of t’ bed wor still muskily warm. From somewhere outside came t’ high-pitched whine of a chainsaw.

  I wor ravenously hungry. I threw back the covers and quickly got dressed.

  Wiping a hole in t’ frost on t’ windowpane, I looked out over a sloping field, sparsely dotted by raggedy sheep. Below my window, in t’ yard, stood the rusting hulk of an old car. Overnight, the moor tops had been dusted wi’ snow that gleamed where it wor caught in t’ pale morning sun.

  Tad came back from t’ bathroom, towelling down his hair and neck. I wanted to explore t’ farm, but Tad made it clear that worn’t an option. His folks, he explained as we headed for t’ kitchen, had been up and working for two hour already. And they weren’t well-disposed to him bringing strange men home at all hours. Which made me wonder if he’d done this before.

  Seated at the old farmhouse kitchen table wor a young woman having breakfast. On seeing me she scowled at Tad.

  ‘This is Rachel, my ever-loving sister,’ Tad said. ‘I’d offer you coffee, but I don’t think Rachel will make us any. No, I thought not. You see, Rick, my folks really would prefer it if you wor a sheep.’

  ‘Baa,’ I went, unable to help mesen. Tad sniggered. Rachel’s face hardened as she rose from t’ table and stomped out into t’ yard, slamming the back door so hard it rebounded ajar.

  Tad drove me back into town. We drove in thick silence. In my head I wor going over t’ right way to say it: ‘Are we going to see each other?’ ‘Will you call me?’ ‘So, is this it then?’ – but none of it felt right. Whatever wor t’ right thing lay buried beneath all t’ wrong’uns.

  As we approached Huddersfield town centre Tad said, ‘I’ll drop you near t’ station.’

  ‘I want to walk a bit. You can drop me here if you like.’

  He pulled the Allegro into a bus layby. We sat there, Tad waiting for me to get out, me waiting for Tad to kiss me, only just then two burly blokes wor passing by on t’ pavement, so nowt happened.

  As I got out Tad stretched out an arm as if to hold me back, but it wor too late. I walked a little up the road, then looked back over my shoulder. Tad wor drumming both his fists on t’ steering wheel. I took a couple of steps back toward t’ car. Then he gunned the engine, did a u-turn and drove off wi’ a squeal of tyres.

  Gordon set his battered old camera and light meter on t’ table and ordered tea and two rum truffles, one for himsen and one for me. The absurdity of it: Gordon in his threadbare three-piece, and me wi’ my spiked-up hair and proto-punk attire, pale as a pall-bearer, sitting in Betty’s posh caf in snooty old Harrogate.

  We’d spent a goodly portion of t’ previous hour photographing the cottage opposite t’ park gates. I told Gordon that if we carried on like this, snapping pics of men’s lavs, we’d get oursens arrested for being pervs.

  ‘I’m on a mission,’ he explained, ‘to save as many as I can from closure and dereliction. You would hardly credit how many marvellous public facilities have been closed down in the last few years. Take the cottage in the park at Burley in Wharfedale, for example. It has the most superb original Victorian faucet, and some excellent architectural features. And now it’s threatened with closure. It’s an absolute scandal. I’ve written to the local council about it.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To try and get it listed. If I can get the cottages listed, they can’t knock them down. Seeing no one is interested in my book, Urinals of Yorkshire, that’s my next plan of action.’

  ‘Your book?’

  ‘The Burley cottage,’ Gordon enthused, ‘has wrought-iron finials.’

  ‘Has what?’

  ‘Finials! Finials!’

  He drew me a finial on a piece of notebook paper. I toyed wi’ t’ fringes of t’ tablecloth, trying to pay heed. Post-punk growlers Magazine had been playing the FK
Club the night before, and even now, sitting amongst all these posh grannies, the guitar riff of ‘Shot by Both Sides’ wor assaulting my head. I’d stood down by t’ stage, motionless and still fired up about t’ whole Tad episode. Howard Devoto wor spitting out his words for me and me alone. By t’ end of t’ night I wor proper khalied. Jugs the bouncer chucked me down t’ club steps, and I’d lain there on t’ pavement, curled up in a ball, calling Jugs a cunt.

  ‘Rick?’

  ‘Oh, sorry Gordon. So that’s what a finial looks like.’ I looked about us and chuckled. ‘Look at me, Gordon. Look at you and then look at me. And look at them.’

  ‘The bustling blue-rinse ladies of Harrogate! They’ll think we’re uncle and nephew. Of course, in my time that was what one always said – uncle and nephew. Especially if an older man was living with a younger one.’

  Gordon often referred to ‘his time’, as if he’d been dumped in t’ present by aliens.

  ‘Have you ever lived wi’ anyone, Gordon? Anyone special?’

  He clasped his hands together, as if in prayer. ‘There was someone once. Brendan. I had a thriving radio repair business. Brendan helped out. Everyone brought their radios to us. I could take a radio apart, have it all laid out on the table – filleted, I used to say, because everything was laid out flat, the valves, the wires, the whole caboodle – and put it back together again in no time at all. And it would work.’

  ‘But were you in love?’

  ‘Of course we were.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘It was a bad time, back then. All these high-profile cases in the papers of men being arrested for loving other men – like the chap from Bletchley Park who worked on cracking the Ultra code.’

  ‘The what code?’

  ‘The Ult … Oh, never mind. There was a Nazi machine that transmitted in code, and the man who first cracked it, whose name eludes me just now, bloody hero of course, turned the whole course of the war. Well anyway, he was homosexual, and after the war he was arrested and charged with “gross indecency”. He committed suicide.’

  Hearing the word ‘homosexual’, one of t’ old dears at the next table stiffened and peered at us sternly. If Gordon noticed, he didn’t show it. I didn’t give a rat’s backside what the posh old biddies thought or heard.

  ‘Turing! Alan Turing. I knew it would come to me.’

  ‘Can’t say I’ve heard of him, Gordon.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, he made the mistake of falling in love.’ He paused, tapping out another ciggie from t’ packet, then added wistfully, ‘There was someone else, much later, but …’

  ‘Thing is,’ I interrupted, ‘I’m in love.’

  ‘Ah. At your age I would have called it an infatuation.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘That would certainly account for your somewhat distracted demeanour. One moment all sunshine and light, and the next snapping like a crocodile on heat.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Don’t worry! Embrace it!’

  Embrace what, I wor thinking. Playing listlessly wi’ t’ cake fork, I said, ‘So did it end badly wi’ Brendan?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Gordon murmured. ‘Ah, the tea.’

  A teapot wor planted between us, then t’ rum truffles, nestling in their pleated cases like chocolate golf balls. I leant my chair onto its back legs. The biddies at the next table had gone quiet.

  ‘I’ll be Mother,’ Gordon said, and poured the tea through t’ strainer into t’ china cups. He should have let it stew a little longer.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever fall in love again?’ I asked.

  Gordon stubbed out his ciggie and stabbed the truffle wi’ his cake fork.

  ‘Oh, one never loses the capacity for love,’ he said, pausing to raise the fork to his mouth, ‘only the opportunity.’

  He coughed, took a large slurp of tea.

  ‘So? Spill the beans. About t’other one. After Brendan.’

  Gordon’s face darkened. ‘Not many beans to spill, my boy. He was married, we saw each other off and on for about … about ten years. We used to go to the races. York, Wetherby, the St Leger at Doncaster – we even went to Aintree. Mind you, if you want to bet, make sure you have enough to lose. These days, I don’t.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  Gordon set down his fork. ‘He died. Not all that long ago, as it happens.’ He eyeballed me levelly.

  ‘Sorry to hear that, Gordon. Truly I am.’

  ‘You know, Rick, I really shouldn’t smoke so much.’

  On t’ weekend it wor made known that HE had struck again. In Huddersfield. It wor a bit of a shock to realise that it wor t’ same night, and about t’ same time, that I’d been searching for t’ Gemini. The latest victim, Helen Rytka, had been reported missing by her twin sister Rita. They’d both been on t’ game together, working team-handed, only t’ arrangement had gone awry somehow. It had taken the twin three days to pluck up the courage to open her gob. I wor thinking what she must have gone through in them three days, waiting, not knowing, fearing t’ worst. Somehow, it being her twin sister made it all t’ worse.

  A few days later Rita appeared on Yorkshire TV in an appeal for information. She stared out at us, a round-eyed, olive-skinned, frizzy-haired teenager, and said she and her sister had ‘a psyche between our minds. If she had a problem I knew. I could feel it.’

  In t’ Marquis of Granby a Catch the Ripper collection box wor going round. I added fifty pence. The Yorkshire Post announced a ten-grand reward for information leading to t’ conviction and arrest. The depot wor buzzing wi’ news of it. Craner said, ‘If anyone here is the Ripper, would they please come and tell me privately – I could do wi’ a fucking holiday.’

  One of t’ drivers had been reported for being seen repeatedly in Manningham. He wor questioned; turned out his girlfriend lived in t’ area. No one questioned me. If they did, I’d keep shtumm or make up a lie.

  The next Gay Lib meeting wor all about two things: the Gay News editor Denis Lemon’s appeal against his conviction for blasphemy, and the safety of womenfolk in t’ light of all t’ Ripper murders.

  Someone blathered on for a friggin’ age about t’ cops spending hundreds of man hours staking out public lavs to snag a couple of old fumblers when ‘their resources would surely be better employed trying to catch this maniac and protecting the public’. Someone else wanted a show of hands on how many men had been stopped by t’ cops and questioned in connection wi’ t’ Ripper. Five hands went up.

  After t’ meeting I made my excuses and went up the road to t’ Fenton to see t’ damage done. There worn’t much evidence of t’ fight. The broken glasses and stools had been replaced. One of t’ large mirrors behind t’ bar had a crack in it. The broken windows had been repaired. The stool Dora always sat on wor back in its position, an indent in t’ plastic seat. The atmosphere wor muted, as if a TV had been turned down to a background murmur.

  I asked the barmaid after Dora. She shook her head. I sat mesen on Dora’s stool.

  ‘Give me a gin and tonic. A double.’

  Next morn at the Corona depot Eric and I wor loading the wagon when two friggin’ coppers showed up in Craner’s office. Craner shut the door, but we could see what wor going on through t’ glass. The coppers wor stood either side of Craner, like two gateposts. I wor sweating and my skin wor starting to crawl. I wor thinking that maybe I’d been spotted in Huddersfield, or on t’ train. Or Tad’s licence plate had been clocked. I kept telling mesen that the chances wor about nil. I didn’t want it coming out where I’d been or where I’d spent the night. I worn’t sure I could even remember t’ way to t’ farm. And I certainly didn’t want Craner knowing owt about it.

  Craner wor tapping his finger on t’ page of a round-book. The coppers, I could tell, wor asking him some questions, or having a few quiet words. Craner took off his specs and then put them back on again. Then he took a small book from his jacket pocket and handed it to one of t’ coppers. It had gold-edged paper, like a
pocket diary or a phonebook. The one copper thumbed through it while t’other one moseyed about, opening cabinet drawers. There wor more words, and Craner wor looking edgy. After a while they shook Craner’s hand and left.

  The newspaper billboards wor all about t’ discovery of Yvonne Pearson’s body under an upturned sofa on waste ground in Bradford, just behind Drummond’s Mill. She’d been missing for several week, and wor certainly murdered before Helen Rytka. It wor said that cos she hadn’t been discovered HE had gone back to t’ scene and moved the body into view.

  It wor made known in t’ press that Yvonne had an address book of clients wi’ ‘special tastes’. The police wor working their way through it. There wor one who liked to be burned wi’ lighted ciggies. Someone at Gay Lib said James Dean had liked the same done to him.

  For some reason this brought Craner to mind, and the coppers I’d seen flitting through t’ pages in his little black book. I couldn’t help looking at Craner and wondering.

  Eric said he wouldn’t be surprised if t’ Ripper turned out to be a Corona van driver. We wor still confabbing on this and the meaning of t’ cops’ visit when we reached Mrs Husk’s.

  ‘After all,’ Eric said, ‘it has to be someone who knows his way about. Knows the streets, knows the red-light areas. Van driver, lorry driver or taxi driver. Mark my words.’

  I wor still mulling on this when I rapped on Mrs Husk’s door.

  ‘It’s open, luv.’

  Mrs Husk wor listening to t’ radio. She had both her hands on t’ back of t’ chair to support hersen. The radio sat on t’ table in front of her. Her lower leg wor still bandaged up, and her ankles had swollen like they wor oozing over her feet.

  The radio wor a brand-new portable wi’ crimson casing, a soft handle and a light-grey dial. I’d never clapped eyes on it before. Where had it come from? Who’d paid for it?

  Mrs Husk hushed me wi’ a raised finger before I could speak. She wor listening to The Jimmy Young Show. I recognised his smarmy, jokey delivery. His unfailing friggin’ happiness.