Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

We scattered. We always did, when we were an all-ages mixed rabble: a few older lads on their own could have bearded a rozzer and then legged it when he gave chase, but the presence of the younger kids guaranteed that someone would be caught and brought to book. So the order of the day was to explode in all directions like a cluster bomb and hope the multiplicity of targets would slow the copper down long enough to allow us all to get away.

Matt cut off across the tracks towards the ragged borders of Walton Hall Park, with Anita almost keeping pace beside him. I retreated with a few of the smaller kids through the tunnel, which led to another railway cutting a quarter of a mile up the line behind Bedford Road. I didn’t see where Kenny and his cohorts went.

So a stand-off was what we got in the end, whether we liked it or not — and for most of the gang that would be a ‘not’, because an unresolved fight left a sort of tension in the air like the hair-prickling feel of undischarged lightning. Better to get it over and done with, pick up any busted teeth and move on to the next big thing.

But for some reason that wasn’t what happened. Everybody expected Kenny to take the first opportunity to finish the fight. Instead he let it lie, and the next few times when we all met up he gave a good impression of having forgotten that it had ever happened.

I wondered why. I considered asking Matt, but the two of us seemed to be growing apart very quickly around then. Matt still looked out for me on the street, and at home too since we were yet another one-parent family by this stage (our mum had left home the year before after a matrimonial bloodletting that I was considered too young to have fully explained to me). But cooking baked beans and sausages out of a tin and making sure I didn’t get my head kicked in marked the limit of Matt’s involvement with me: he had nothing to say to me any more, and since dad had always been the taciturn type there was a silence around the Castor household that had gone beyond pregnant into stillborn.

So I had to come to my own conclusions about what had happened that day on the Triangle, and my mind went back to those two seconds when Kenny had hesitated after breaking Matt’s hold on him. It occurred to me, incredible as it seemed, that Kenny might actually have been afraid. Of my brother. Because Matt had taken everything that Kenny could throw at him and he hadn’t gone down. Maybe Kenny wasn’t certain that if he took up the fight where he’d left off, he’d be able to win it: and maybe that uncertainty kept him from doing the obvious and calling down a general fatwa on Matt. You did that to weak kids, where there was no question that your own alpha status was at issue. If you did it to a potential rival, people would notice. Kenny was a wily little bastard, and at fifteen he already knew what Hitler and Napoleon and Attila the Hun had learned the hard way: that the appearance of strength is strength.

And, by the same token, people would notice if Kenny went after me. It was Matt who was his contemporary, so it was Matt who was his legitimate target. I was protected by the bizarre unspoken gospels of the street, which were the measure of our lives and our souls right then.

It was only a matter of time, though, and I could see whenever Kenny looked at me that he hadn’t forgotten my remark about his mother’s suicide. I’d spoken of death to the king, and one way or another he was going to make sure I paid for it.

His opportunity came sooner than either of us expected. That summer Matt dropped out of school, immediately after taking his O levels, and transferred to Saint Joseph’s Catholic seminary at Upholland, about eight miles away from Walton. It was unusual for Saint Joe’s to take someone into holy orders at sixteen, but the Jesuit who ran the place had noticed Matt when he was doing a talent-spotting trawl through the parishes inside the Queen’s Drive ring road, and he’d been impressed. He was prepared to stretch a point, he told our dad, and let Matt enter the college now. He’d take his A levels at the same time as he started his holy orders, rather than finishing his studies at the attached high school first. Matt would be expected to live at the college, and although he could see his family at weekends they wouldn’t be encouraged to visit him and break his concentration at other times.

Dad wasn’t thrilled. His plans for Matt’s future involved Matt getting a job and turning up some money for his keep. But he was a good Catholic himself, and he knew better than to throw down with the Pope and his bare-knuckled posse. He bought Matt a suitcase from the secondhand shop and away my brother went without a backward glance. As far as I can remember, we didn’t even say goodbye.

But at least I knew now where Matt had got the balls to fight Kenny Seddon to a standstill: he had God on his side.

So now there was nobody to run interference for me, and no strict reason according to the Walton book of etiquette why Kenny shouldn’t beat me into tenderised steak. But he bided his time for a good three days after Matt left, waiting for the perfect place and time.

The place was up on the roof of the Metal Box factory — the Tinnie. It was a favourite spot for the gang that summer, now that the owners had finally given up on maintaining any kind of security over the disused site. We’d found a way in by levering out one of the uprights of the back fence and tearing the plywood sheet off a door marked AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.

With the electricity turned off and all the windows boarded up, the interior of the factory was a three-dimensional maze of absolute darkness. You brought torches, and you stuck together, because on your own in the dark you were fucked. Previous parties had mapped out routes, but you could only find them with a torch. We filed through the cavernous machine shops and silent corridors and scaled the echoing stairs like mountaineers conquering an indoor Annapurna, finally breaking out into the daylight through a hole in the roof underneath which someone had set up a precarious folding ladder dragged in from God knows where.

From the roof — since the whole of Walton is built on the side of a hill and we were close to the top of it — you could see the city set out below you. You could also swing on the flagpole over an eighty-foot drop, and collect metal offcuts which for some reason lay around the place like forgotten treasure. They were the pieces left behind when steel sheets were pressed out into box templates, and they came in a range of intriguing shapes: some like capital letter Es, others in the form of triangles (always right-angled) or diamonds with one vertex shaved off flat. They were all about two millimetres thick, and they were highly collectible because of their lethal sharpness and their resemblance to the shurikens we’d all seen or at least heard about in Enter the Dragon .

There was the usual horseplay as we fanned out to look for hitherto unknown shapes and sizes of offcut. Davey jostled Steven Seddon, pretending to shove him over the foot-high parapet down into the street far below, and Steven went complaining to Kenny who kicked his arse for being so pathetic. John Lunt, who was one of my millions of cousins, stationed himself over the hole in the roof so that he could gob on the stragglers as they came up the ladder. Peter Gore tried to get a game of off-ground tick going, and foundered immediately on the fact that we were all a long way off the ground already. Peter tried to establish some rules that would work in this anomalous situation, but he was shouted down.

And Kenny’s other brother, Ronnie, started to tell the story of the Tinnie Ghost.

‘It was the watchman, you know. These lads broke in, and the watchman went after them, but they threw him into one of the machines and he got all squashed and ripped apart, like. And that’s why he’s still here. On the roof. If you look into the puddles you might see his reflection, you know, and if you do then you’re gonna die. Everyone who sees him dies before they get back down to the ground.’