Tomorrow is my thirteenth birthday. Mum and a coach-driver called Kenneth are posing for pictures outside the registry office. On the grass beneath their feet my dad is represented by a thin and threadbare covering of snow.
My stepfather Kenneth is, if not the most evil man in the world, then surely among the most evil coach-drivers in the world.
'How old do you think you'll be when you can have me?'
'Eighteen … ?' I mumble-whine.
'Eighteen! Six, seven years' time! I'll be an old man by then. But you'll never be able to beat me. You know why? I've killed people. That's why. And I can take pain. And that's another reason,' he says, pointing at my nose, 'you're what we used to call in boxing a "bleeder".'
He makes a big show of looking after my mum like it's my fault the nervous state she is in — like he could ever 've got a shag off someone so fit if she wasn't a basket-case.
He is one of those cockney wankers who thinks that criminals are gents. 'Ronnie Knight? I had a drink with him in Torremolinos.' All that shite and Kray bollocks. Then again, he may be winding me up because he knows what my dad did for a living. Just like how he winds up me and my Misty in Roots album by doing a 'darkie' dance in my bedroom doorway, or by going, 'Goo on, mah sone' when a white South African soldier clubs down a Soweto runner on the News at Ten.
Oddly, he was never violent when he'd been drinking. In fact he was weirdly gentle then. One night he came home from the pub and rang the bell because I'd accidentally put the mortise on. (He'd been on my case about that before, as well as an unconscious habit I'd got into of leaving a room with him and my mum and turning out the light as I did so as if they weren't there. 'Oi!' they'd go.) I let him in, nervously spilling loose shekels all over the noisy floor. I can't remember how I did this, whether I jerked my hand out of my pocket in my haste to open the door, or whether I knocked a stack of coins off the side, or how it happened. I just remember all these coins on the floor which were mine and what happened next … Squatting down, face flushed with drinking, he strangely picked them up for me one by one, and then handed them to me like a humble man with his overbearing boss! Strange, strange, strange.
Thinking back now, maybe I gave him funny looks. Because when his fists were clenched in my bedroom and he was building up to it, he'd say, 'I've been in the war! I'm clean! I earn £10,000 a year! I'm clean, I shower twice a day! I've gone three rounds with the All-England Amateur Boxing Champion!' And the next thing I know I'm on the carpet and he's kneeling on me, with his tongue between his teeth and trying to land one which will sound like the one he has in his mind. Clean. But not being able to and getting madder and madder. And my mum in the doorway saying at first 'Leave that poor child alone!' but then changing her tune to 'It's your own fault, John.' At the container depot I once saw him punch a man in the face and then, pointing with the index finger of the same hand, say, 'Manners!'
There was a lucky, lucky star over my childhood, however, and Kenneth was only around for a few years. Kenneth got a new job and him and Mum moved up north. I wished just he'd gone and not Mum as well, but it was like I'd struck a deal in some smoke-filled room of my soul. I was always cutting deals then: if I catch the bread knife I've spun in the air my mum will cheer up; if I go back and touch the lamp-post with my left hand (now that I've touched it with my right) then I will be the first Englishman asked to play football, say, for Brazil and England and will have to make a speech saying, 'Much as I hate to disappoint one of you, I have, reluctantly, to make a choice. I wish I didn't, hut what with my Formula One commitments [wise nodding from assembled dignitaries] and until I can stand down as President of the United States and Prime Minister of England, l must, l have to say, choose between one of you two great nations. And when I say that my choice has been much influenced by my growing friendship with Fanerson Fittipaldi, you will know what my final decision … '. Would I want Kenneth to leave even if it meant Mum went with him? I must've asked myself in that smoke-filled deal room. On balance this was better. I was free and went to live in a nearby village with my nan.
Nan lived in a grey-white prefab. Four rooms in all — her room, my room, bathroom, and the sitting-room which had a kind of kitchenette against the back window. Nan always pronounced it priffib, like triffid, and the whole thing stood not much taller than a grown man. There was an odd contrast between the ErectorSet walls and the ancient, loving detail of the well-stocked garden which ran round the front and side of it. Painstakingly nurtured and weeded, her garden had bits of wooden fence made into little archways with pretty red and yellow roses growing up them, which I had to stoop through even at that age.
Spook Wood has creepers on that you could swing from like Tarzan. I can jump from the second-floor scaffolding on to the builder's sandpit below, but Alex and Sean can jump off the third. The cool way of walking is to have your thumbs hooked into the pockets of your jeans. Dingo and me glue our names in glitter on the back of our Harringtons.
One schoolday just after I bought The Clash's London Calling, I stood on the top field after Upal had been beaten up. Upal, who everyone said was an untouchable in Indian culture (even though, looking back now, he must have been Sikh not Hindu anyway). Dirt-poor, strange-smelling Upal, with a milky cast in one eye. That afternoon he lay on his back, his unravelled purple turban strewn impossibly long on the top field. I stayed behind after everyone had gone but I never helped him up or offered a kind word. Just stood there and watched him lying on his back loudly sobbing out and crying, 'Not again! Oh God! Not again!' to the God who wouldn't hear his outcast cry.
When I was a puny thirteen-year-old mod-punk-prat I used to have these long arguments with eighteen-year-old skins at the Youth Centre. I knew that at school these same skins had black friends; I knew that they'd only get up for Prince Buster at a dance, and so, as an idealistic little Clash fan, I couldn't understand their C18 shit, or why Vimhead had marker-penned Bad Manners down the back of his sheepskin in vertical columns so that it spelt BM in bold across the shoulders. And so, sitting on the table football, we'd have these long, interminable arguments that never got anywhere until one night I understood that we were arguing at cross purposes. Black and white wasn't the issue; hate was the issue. They had all this hate and they'd found somewhere for it to go. I gave up arguing with the skins after that and started going to a different youth club.
*
The burglar alarm outside has stopped howling. I get up and make a coffee.
*
Liverpool University, PPS (Politics, Philosophy, Sociology). A breakdown but 'considered honours'. Smoke rises out of Luton crematorium chimney scattering Mum's ashes to the four winds (in accordance with the agoraphobic's last wishes).
They couldn't believe their luck at the interview. Here was I, a graduate but whose dad was a cop and who wanted to start as a Permanent Beat Officer rather than on the much-sneered-at Bramshill Special Entry which whisks top-notch wankers into Inspector in five years.
All through the interview I felt like a liar, a guilty fraud. Yes, my dad was a cop, but I knew and they didn't that he'd had no influence on me at all. They didn't ask how young I was when he died. The sense of fraud and deception may also have been just fear of authority. But it was to do with something much deeper too and maybe there was even a glimpse of it when, the interview having subsided into chit-chat, I made a little joke. It came in a long pause during which the three interviewers were looking at me, each waiting for the other to speak: 'All right,' I said, 'I did it.'
Outside my window I hear the steel roller-shutter of the late-night corner shop rattle down. They bang the steel lock into place. Clunk.
*
I got off to a flying start in my chosen career, so they gave me a lot of autonomy. Six months after I transferred down to the Met., me and Kieran got Special Commendations for pulling some Senegalese women out of an arson attack. (The papers said it was a race thing but it was the mad old dad come back to destroy what he could not possess. We reckon he'd s
kipped the country but the terrified women couldn't be persuaded he wasn't still around.) The Special Commendations were given out at a big dinner for cops, firemen, nurses and coastguards in the Dorchester Hotel. The Home Secretary — I still can't bring myself to say his name — stuck the medals on. I'd been watching him out the corner of my eye pinning the sport-shop Your-Inscription-Here-type medal on everyone's left breast along the line to my right. We'd all been told about protocol for him, but no fucker had told him about protocol for me. I can't stand being touched by someone I don't know. (I don't know why. Handshakes are OK. But not shoulder-jostling on the tube — none of that sort of thing. Or doctors, dentists, tailors. None of that. No one, for example, has ever slapped me on the back. Luckily, they just know.) I hadn't even thought about this aspect of the ceremony — that it would involve physical contact, the pinning-on bit with the flat of his hand fidgeting around all knuckly fingerly on my breast, and I still hadn't thought about it until the back of my hand had knocked his wrist away from me in a sudden flinch and my left hand was stayed in mid-air like 'Off!' A hard-knotted little hiatus followed, then he put the free gift in my hand with a country-vicar smile. (Luckily Kieran was a few people up the line as they'd stood us, so I didn't spoil his day, I think. ) Outside the shopkeeper kicks the steel roller-shutter to check it's locked. Clunk. Locked securely into place for the night ahead.
Looking back at the award ceremony tonight I feel fitted up by life just like I did about the Great Experiment when I was a boy.
The fridge finds another gear, one lower, as if the God of Indesit is satisfied for the moment.
I sit as still as this hard-backed wooden chair. It is right to sit in darkness and see haphazard bits of streetlight and night cross the table-top and my folded, harmful hands. The light and shade that I don't control, and to which I am irrelevant. To know for the first time properly that nature doesn't give a fuck if I live or die.
The burglar alarm shuts off. I hover, suspended on a new silence, scanning for the next memory on the night-dial.
Stay Free
I was out on my first home beat after the commendation when I saw Mick Jones off The Clash. Excellent! Mick Jones! Mick Jones off The Clash! Mick Jones that sung 'Stay Free', my favourite-ever Clash song: I practised daily in my room, You were down the Crown planning your next move — Go on a nicking spree, Hit the wrong guy, Each of you get three Years in Brixton.
I was twenty-four, he was down the Angel with his girlfriend, a tall, worried-looking blonde. I crossed the street grinning in my uniform. 'Hiya Mick, The Clash changed my life!'
'Oh no!' he said without stopping, 'Where did we go wrong?'
Fuck you too, I thought, stranded on the pavement. Fuck you too. Should've stopped and searched the druggie-cunt.
Couldn't listen to any Clash after that. He'd no idea what he'd done. Up till then I'd played The Clash as much as all my other tapes and CDs put together. But after that, I couldn't listen to them or even hum them. Why did he have to say that? Why couldn't he see that maybe I was trying to be the better cop? What my motives might be? Fucking slag.
I remember at school all the black kids used to let on to me and I never knew why. Still don't. I told Beverley about it once, and, typically skew-whiff, she said it was a spiritual connection. By which she meant I think that I was probably less hard-faced than the other white boys, or looked at black kids less coldly. Maybe I under-estimate how off the other white boys were. Even little black first-years I didn't know would say hello. Wish I could have told Mick Jones that maybe there might've been something of that in the weave of my blue uniform. Or Upal on the top field. Or Colin Sparrow. Or the feelings I'd had at the Dorchester the week before.
I never get offended when some civilian calls me a fascist pig — unless he used to be in The Clash — because I know that their souls would be even worse if they had to do only six weeks of the duty I do. It has to happen. It's just how much of your powder you can keep dry. That's all. And if there was one thing above all else that stopped my cynicism curdling into fascism it was the eight-to thirteen-year-olds I met on Liverpool Summer Action before I transferred down. I feel this memory is coming to me for a reason: logging itself somewhere as a stave against the despair that will soon crash in on my head.
How did I get from there to here? So isolated. Few cops are single. And I couldn't get off my high horse and make friends with any colleagues save Kieran. But with the Liverpool kids life was more collective than I've ever known. Then again, it led to something else though, didn't it? Something that might have been a warning of all what's come on top. The nearest I came before tonight to 'doing my legs'.
The force were running Summer Action, sponsored by Midland Bank and some charities/trust funds. We took Liverpool kids who wouldn't otherwise get a holiday to Anglesey or the Lake District.
Carri-mats and sleeping bags in the Llangoed church hall, Anglesey, and a big old army tent pitched in a farmer's field a mile away for the brave to sleep in. We glued together a huge bouncy inflatable at the church hall.
The kids had a song they sang as we drove from canoeing to pony trekking: I'll sing you twelve-oh, Red fly the banners-oh, What is your twelve-oh?
Twelve for the chimes of the Kremlin clock, Eleven for the Moscow dynamos And ten for the works of Lenin Nine for the nine bright satellite states And eight for the 8th Red Army, Seven for the days of the working week And six for the Tolpuddle martyrs, Five for the years of the Five Year Plan And four for the years it's taken Three, three the rights of people, Two, two the workers' hands working for a living-oh, One is workers' unity and evermore shall he so.
A visit to a theme-park called Camelot based on the Arthurian legend: Merlin's Dragon, space rockets and the OK Corral; a barbecue on the beach; a play written and performed by some of the kids.
The harder kids resisted the whole deal for a couple of days. Didn't we know they were adults? That they'd had to be adults for years? So you had a couple of days of throwing rocks at cows, of running away, or shoplifting from a village shop which didn't slip your Twix and change through a flip-flop security hatch in the steel-mesh. A couple of days of spitting in your face, pointing at you and saying, 'Don't talk him he's a fookin' scuffer!'
But then they became kids again. I remember the curious way Perry, a long-chinned, pale-skinned black kid with bags under his eleven-year-old eyes, said 'wheee!' as he rode a BMX down a footpath. Curious because it had the selfconsciousness of a married man sliding on an iced-over path in front of his wife, like 'Look at me, I'm a big kid.' Instead of throwing stones at cattle, they started fighting over who got the right to take the cows scraps and leftovers. 'Eeee!' they'd go, every time the full nine yards of the cow's tongue sanded tiny palms clean of trifle. Tony Clanton and Perry spent long hours leaning on the five-bar like farmers, staring at the unstressed movements of the Frisians. Perry got all steamed-up in the high-pitched wail of complaining scousers when one of the herd had a limp and nothing was done about it day after day.
Working with these kids made me feel complete, strong, whole. Before I first worked with them I was in the worst depression of my life (although I think there's a bigger one on the way). Yet as soon as I was a helper — as we were called — all my insecurities and gaps disappeared. I had a definite outline, a working self, I knew what to do in situations, I had a purpose: I felt I was making a difference. I could see the results of my work. And was it something to do with being able to get through to the wildest kids that had made me go and become a police-officer? Thinking I'd be the cool cop.
I did Liverpool Summer Action for two summers. And what with it being the same kids both years, plus the winter project in Aigburth, plus seeing them or their families as a CBO when I was still in Liverpool, we got close. Me and the Clantons, especially.
The thing I was proudest of was when one of the coordinators said at a planning meeting of all the helpers, 'John is the key to the Clanton family, he's the can-opener.' I was the only one who could f
orm a relationship with the Clantons, who were the wildest family. I wanted to adopt them but I was single and boiled my dinner in a bag.
The Clantons: Tony, Robbie, Jamie and Tina.
The first time I saw Tony, Robbie and Jamie, they tore into the hall and threw themselves on the folded inflatable singing 'We Are Family' with fists in the air.
Tony had a husky twenty-a-day voice. A twelve-year-old skinhead with facial sores. A lot of knowledge in his face. Too much too young.
We were on a beach having a barbecue and toasting marshmallows round a fire and singing 'You'll Never Get To Heaven'. The slow integration of the Clantons began with Tony looking down at the sand, grinning to no one and adding a verse of his own: Oh, you'll never get to heaven in a biscuit-tin, 'cos a biscuit tin's got sponkies in.
And then a curious mixed smile — part I've-been-cool-and-naughty and part what-a-twat-I-am-to-actually-join-in.
Another time, I was driving the shaky Ford Transit when Tony leans over from the back and asks, 'What time is it, John?'
'About eleven.'
'So it's about one o'clock in Liverpool now then?'
'No, it's eleven there too.'
'No, it can't be. It's about two hours different.'
Robbie looked like how the lead singer off of UB40 perhaps looked when he was eleven (if he was also a hyperactive, freckle-faced skinhead).
Jamie didn't have the guile of his two older brothers. Tony and Robbie had blond no. 2 crops; Jamie, though, had a blondy-brown fringe of greasy Three Stooges hair on a Munster face. Where Tony and Robbie had a containment in their movements, trim in Adidas, Jamie was chaotic, walked with his feet splayed, saggy-arsed in grubby cords and a lopsided grin. His voice was shriller and louder, too, which would earn him the occasional punch from one of his brothers.
Manners Page 3
