Manners

by Robert Newman

  'Oops!'

  'There's nothing on me,' he says, hand on heart and smiling. He halts at three paces and holds his arms out crucifixion-style in like a stop-and-search mode.

  'You're nicked, Lee Andrew.' Let him know I know what he's done.

  My guts sink: he's going to fight. When someone squares up for imminent violence with you there's a sort of obscene intimacy. In a stand-off comes vile, sonar knowledge, a penetrating, instantaneous exchange of core secrets; there's like an overload of physical awareness, a sickening glut of it, a supervividness about, say, the shape of his head. I have an imprint of his physicality on my jelly self even before it's kicked off. Horrible.

  We stare some more.

  Kevin Rowland.

  I can see him doing mental arithmetic.

  He shoots off to my right. Gets past me. British Bulldog. I chase after him, build to a sprint. He stops, spins and I'm running full-face into the rings on his fist. I tear the tendons of my neck trying to avoid the bomb-blast. His fist crashes into my ear. Deafening rather than crippling me. If he'd caught me full-face then my head would've joined the helmet now rolling into the street.

  An upper-cut clatters my teeth and I sort of fall straight down like a detonated high-rise.

  Roll away, scrambling up just out of reach of a vicious kick. My heart sinks as it whirrs past me loud like a fluting kite. Staggering up to my feet I throw something approaching a left hook but it skims past, perfectly describing the shape of his head, smoothing his bristly side-crop.

  His underarm punch shows me how it's done, landing in my guts like instant cholera. No! This can't happen! This can't be! Is a decision made below the level of thought on which my soul swings my whole being around, aligning itself to a new shape like iron filings under a magnet? It is the only way to … win? Survive? All my fury, hate and evil enter me. A deal with the devil. The most vital decision I will ever make? Feet find primal steps, ancient steps, and with an open left hand in front of his face, I whirl my shoulders, throw my lurching weight into jerking a short, dervish right as hard as I can. I let go the very thing you must never let go to feel his nostrils hot on my knuckles. His head humps hack and up. The only clean blow I land in the whole fight.

  I don't see the kick until my kneecap burns. I howl, hopping, limping back (who would think a soft Nike could cause so much pain?), my hand out to stay him. He steps in and drops me with a solid hayraker. Fall on to my good knee and PHHTURRPP! take a faceful of trainer. I grab the crook of his knee.

  Now suddenly at the same time I'm doing all the following things: getting punched on the top of my head pulling his knee towards me and rising …

  I step in, still holding his leg off the ground, and trip his other foot. He goes down, I fall on top of him. Yes. His multigym strength whirls me on my back with him on top. No.

  Scuffling and wrestling, him trying to get a clean blow, me trying not to die. To press the panic-button on my PR will cost me a clean blow from him. I will have to use the hand that's holding him off.

  '10-9 — Acklam Street!'

  BANG! The back of my head cracks on to the road as he hits me under the eye. I reach up and try and pull his head down towards me, to lessen the distance between us.

  Floor fighting's a bitch. It's all instinctive struggle, tuning into the sound of each other's breathing, distribution of each other's weight and movement until suddenly I'm check-mated: one arm stuck behind my back under both our straining body weights, my other arm pinned to the asphalt by his foot. It crosses my mind to say T give'.

  I gag as his forearm lithely finds my throat and tries to push down on my windpipe. That's the pipe that carries oxygen from the air to my brain and body. I feel him relaxing as if to compose himself for the killer push, breathing heavily. I nearly puke with his coat sleeve on my throat. I'm being killed here and now, but it's not my life that passes before my eyes, just his freckles, his aftershave, the cold leather sleeve.

  He relaxes even more. Too casual. Maybe there's a way out of this. Maybe if he thinks I'm out cold …

  He slumps heavily on me. A weird, long noise comes out his mouth, unblocking the drain. He is still and heavy. Very heavy. I lift the hand which had been sanding my knuckles on the road and find it to be as light and cooperative as a lost child's. I roll out from under him and straddle him, my shins pinning his upper-arms like kids playing in the rec. He lies more perfectly still than anything I've ever seen.

  My thumb on his carotid artery. No pulse. Delayed reaction from the one blow I landed, his nose is too high in his head, higher than it was. Too high, a different face. I tighten thumb and finger on his throat and punch the slag who's died and left me in a street with all the hate of the night. The world and its witness come round the corner, a mob of feet and sirens, van doors and shouts. I hit him again. Blind with tears I'm punching his lump-face slower and slower and slower and slower. Two TSG lift me off the dead man.

  Vigil

  Lots of people talking at me in the TSG van, and then on some steps, and in the nick, but all I'm thinking is: why did it have to happen? Why did it happen to me? Why then? Why wasn't I somewhere else? It would've been so easy for me to be somewhere else. If just five minutes in my twenty-seven years had been spent doing one thing instead of the other.

  Mickey drove me home. And now I'm here. Just me. It feels audacious that I'm allowed to be alone in my flat tonight, that I'm allowed to do all the small things everyone else does: I turn the tap and water still comes just like it would for any rate-payer.

  I clean my teeth which hurts swelling mouth and wobbly gums. There is blood in the sink and spits of caramel and wafer too. Not two hours ago I got a Twix from the vending machine. 'Twix or Crunchie?' I remember having to decide back then. I waited for the crane to shuffle forward, I bent down and lifted the Twix out the flap. And at that point I could still have done anything with my life. I could have walked out the door and gone to live in a beach-hut in Thailand. I could have done anything and gone anywhere. But now all spheres of movement are gone, leaving just … this, and whatever this holds, allows, dictates.

  I stare at a jutting right-angle in this bathroom wall. I tread on unremitting floor-tiles, then wood. The world is made of hard edges among which I have no place. A detachment in which I feel dangerously exposed, like a live crab unshelled and shuttling careful-careful around. Light switches are connected to dangerous wires and high-voltage substations of muzzled, terrible fury (like the thicket of massive electrodes south of Birmingham I see on my way to see Beverley — can't think about her yet). This flat is a collection of pipes and wires concealed by plaster and tacked-on wooden boards which nature will destroy.

  I am now a man putting the lid back on the coffee, a man putting his hand on the side of the kettle to see how near it is to boiling. A man. I hear my shoes tread on the floor, hear the delicate tap-tap as I set my lighter flat on the formica table. I imagine very clearly, it seems, what everyone else is doing now and elsewhere: there will be youths still out on the streets discussing what happened; Kieran in bed maybe; Mickey driving home; Mrs Andrew is just having the bad news broken to her.

  Strangely, the only friendly things in the world are my busted lip, the bulging bruise under my eye and my grated face: pain gives my self some definition when the world would take it all away. Yet each time I'm aware of these wounds — the bump of veins pumping, the graze contracting right now as I open my mouth for a cigarette — I'm brought back again, brought up face to pulpy face with where I am, with what has happened, with what I've done.

  What I've done, what has happened tonight is hugely present and yet each time I go over it I remember less and less. And so I sit in this hard, straight-back Shaker chair, picking bits of cracked, black formica from the table. Sit and wait.

  Outside a group of people on the corner are chatting after-hours. I'll never know them, they'll never know me. I will die and it won't matter a shiver.

  Tomorrow I have to go in and see the bosses. I should
be preparing what I'm gonna say in my defence. Not just sitting here. But my head is all atomized to fuck, whizzing too fast to engage.

  All I get is flashbacks; pelting memories which share the same spectral clarity of bathroom and floor and the tip-tap of my lighter on the table, and seem to reveal new connections between events. Before tonight my past life was like a shed skin, but now it's come back like someone claiming a bad debt, like repossession bailiffs who want you out by morning.

  A bluebottle rattles against the pane on the sill, dying in impotent fury. One minute stunned, groping, the next frenetic, upside down. A long night's work ahead of him.

  In another world I'd be able to do some simple penance, to run about the forest and gather stuff, find hidden sacraments and, once my task was done, be accepted back into the tribe. Or I'd have to make some kind of symbolic sacrifice. But here and now I just sit in this chair, staring at the table, still picking and peeling off the black plastic coating in little snappy bits. The congealed spastic glue underneath looks like a septic wound.

  The noisy fridge gnashes and lows and wails and simmers and buzzes and drones.

  In the nick tonight someone handed me a safety-pin to hold my shirt together. Sitting back down now with my coffee, its cold metal sticks in my turn and reminds me of a latchkey, of Mum and me, and …

  No. Try and think in a straight line, get your defence together. Maybe all these random memories that seem so important are nothing more than that deliberate jabbering you do to get an ugly thought out of your head. Is that what all these memory flashes are about — evasion? Returning to a past full of possibilities now that I'm in a present that has none? It's comforting, certainly, now that everything's come on top, to crawl back to skiver afternoons, when I was seven or eight and we were curled up together on the couch, Mum and me, and feel as safe as I did then. But it's not escapism. These memories pelting the back of my eyes all seem instantly relevant to what happened between me and Lee Andrew two hours ago, like I can't know exactly what happened tonight without looking at my whole life. And not a trawl for mitigating circumstances, either. They all seem more like incriminating prosecution evidence: secret stores of anger, the hate-stash and all like my life is a guilty secret, suppressed evidence … previous.

  A life for a life.

  The burglar alarm of one of the shops has been howling away for a while. It keeps going off of its own accord, its siren wailing louder and louder the more it's ignored.

  Return To The Flightpath Estate

  The time is 1976, we are in the front room of 47 Tower Road. Present in the room are John Manners and his mum …

  I've just taken my bike apart and now I can't put it back together again. I'm getting more and more het up, about to throw what my mum would call 'a paddy'. She looks at me, nodding slowly to herself, in that particular manner which means peace is on its way. Without a word I go and sit at the kitchen table. She runs me a beaker of lemon squash. Popping the loud-as-BOO! cap from tinted-brown-plastic jar of her prescription tranquillizers, she goes, 'One for you, one for me.' I feel the large dryness of her fingers in the wetness of my mouth and the shiny-smooth capsule on my tongue like communion wafer.

  We sit curled in each other's arms on the orange woollen sofa, watching this programme called Yoga with Lyn Marshall. Lyn Marshall has long, blonde hair. She demonstrates yoga on green mats against an orange background along with a Japanese Zen master who has black-framed glasses like a deposed dictator.

  'Inhale,' says the Japanese man, while Mum sucks deep on her Dunhill Superking, 'And … exhale!' he says, disappearing behind a cloud of smoke in the shape of an expanding lotus lily.

  She never minds me skiving because it means she doesn't have to trek out for bifters. She doesn't like going outdoors in case she gets lost, and also because, she says, 'there's too much of it' — 'it' meaning outside, which for her just goes on and on.

  Yoga with Lyn Marshall is followed by Playschool (which we are both too old for but watch all the same). Then she gets up and stares rigidly out the sitting-room window.

  Through the square window is an endless sprawl of houses just like ours for miles around. Light and roomy council terraces, all brand new bricks and white, wooden slatted panels on the front. Some windows still have yellow glass-crayon crosses on the pane and bits of Cellophane in the sill. Garden-shaped plots of mud, learner street lamps and seeded verges. Everything new, trim and shiny and full of possibility as the hundred children just moved in. The streets and estates are triumphantly named after what they destroyed: Meadow Roundabout, Cherry Tree Estate, Five Elms Flyover.

  I've got into the habit of going back five steps when I've gone round a corner. I'm checking on a theory: am I in an experiment that everyone knows about except me? Hypothesis: given a particular society and told it is normal, how long will it take nine-year-old John Manners to cotton on? Am I the guinea pig in an experiment to test human gullibility? Every time I turn the corner of my street, I go back five steps to check if they've flipped the switch and the 'houses' have rolled over to reveal how people really live. They all emerge from their real dwellings grinning and chatting to each other. They suppose they'll have to tell me soon. Isn't it amazing that he still hasn't tumbled. How much longer will it take him?

  My desk-sergeant dad had died when I was too young to remember him. Driving home pissed from the police social one night, his Vauxhall Viva got stuck in the snow. He struck out for home on foot, passed out face-down in a snowdrift and suffocated. I remember being proud of the fact that my dad had been a policeman if only for the fact that other kids' dads never seemed to know what exactly their job was. Other kids' dads knew where they worked: Roche Chemical, Vauxhall, the airport; they could narrow it down to shopfloor, machines or assembly, but they hadn't the foggiest, it seemed, of what they actually did. And then, in the middle of secondary school when for most of them it suddenly became what they used to do, the same dads would say defiantly and definitely what it was they once did: I made cars, I had to make sure all the different chemicals went to the right places.

  It was about this time that the Great Experiment got stuck. One day they couldn't press the switch and flip the houses over any more, and now none of them knew quite what to do. They were left where I was. The mums and dads looked stumped as if they'd mislaid something, but as if the really worrying thing was that they couldn't remember what it was they had mislaid.

  When the Great Experiment was still up and running, they used to lean casually against a kitchen fitment and tell their sons, 'Well, if John gets three pound pocket-money' (police-widow'spension bonanza) 'go and live with him, then.' And smiling, say, 'No, you can't have a bike/skateboard yet.' But now the Experiment had crumbled they set their teeth in determination that their children would have a bike or skateboard or three pound pocket-money. They lost confidence about what to put in sandwiches, how late to let my friends stay out, how much to insist on homework, which rules to enforce. Now they all seemed to be watching each other, and had more time to do so.

  *

  The time is eight-twenty a.m. in the front room of 47 Tower Road. Present is John Manners, back from his paper round.

  I'm staring at the picture on the wall. An oil painting of the dark and moody man with shiny, black, greased-back hair and sideboards who understands all the things about my mum that I don't. He is dressed all in white, white flares and a white cape studded with emeralds. Hawaiian flowers are wreathed around his neck. He stands on two twinkly stars in the warmth of outer space, from where he holds out a hand with rings on his fingers. His eye-level in the painting is Mum's height, not mine … when she's in the room, that is. But she hasn't got up this morning.

  I knock on her door. No reply. Enter.

  There is a thin cord of goo between her bottom lip and the pillow. On the other end of Mum's bedside phone the ambulance man asks me to read out the labels of the little jars I find among crumpled tissues by her bed. Long words for a twelve-year-old but I make use of
Meaty Mrs Beaty's English tip about how you shouldn't be frightened by long words because they're just short words stuck together. The temaz and the zep and the pam.

  Our school was integrated with another and they still tried to tell us they hadn't changed the essentials. But they were like bad liars in the interview room changing their story on the hoof. 'Er, did we say the Napoleonic wars were the most important thing in world history? No, what we, er, meant was, ah, that the American Indians, their terrible plight you know, and colonialism, that that was the most important thing.' Ho-hum, we went, and didn't give a shit about either.

  At break we all stand round in a circle, hands in pockets, and talk in level voices about violence: He was just standing at the urinal and this geezer slashes his dick with a Stanley knife and he just dies of shock.

  Why?

  No reason. He just did it.

  And there was the same randomness about how every Saturday in the Arndale Centre another shop would have shut down, and there was no reason, it seemed, about whose dad became the next lay-off from Vauxhall, Roche or the airport.

  … Yeah, the Cherry Tree went over the George and they climbed the wall into where everyone drinks outside and the people couldn't get away 'cos of the wall and they beat them up, to like a pulp …

  … and Sham 69 at the Conway Hall — all these skins were rushing the punks and the bouncers said 'Shut the doors f and some skins were trapped between the two doors and they were just slaughtered …

  … and this kid Sandy Doolan from New York, he's the hardest kid at St Joe s and he wrapped some barbed wire round this kid's head and he was just hanging his head again and again against the concrete — bang bang bang.

  Colin Sparrow and Robert Gower were playing headers and volleys in the rec. I repeated this last one like I knew Sandy Doolan, like it was first-hand. Colin Sparrow turned to me and said, 'And you think that's good, do you? You think that makes him a man.' I was ashamed. I knew what Colin Sparrow was saying was what I really thought. I'd just needed to hear someone else say it. I'd been caught out on the wrong side. They carried on playing and when Robert Gower skied the ball over the bar I went and got it. Colin Sparrow was a big, quiet seventeen-year-old. And a police cadet.