Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

Some of the smaller kids tried not to look at the puddles without being too obvious about it. One of them bleated to his big sister that he wanted to go home, and was coldly ignored.

‘What happened to the lads?’ someone asked.

‘He killed them in their sleep,’ said Ronnie. ‘One by one, like. They dreamed he was throwing them into the machine and they had heart attacks. And the last one, when they went into the bedroom the next morning, they found him all ripped apart. Bits of him all over the room, like. Blood and bits of bone everywhere.’

This was shite on a heroic scale, and I felt it was down to me to light the beacon of truth.

‘How did anyone know what they dreamed about,’ I asked, sardonically, ‘if they died in their bloody sleep?’

Ronnie didn’t falter. ‘They screamed “Get me out! I’m dying in the machine!”’ he said.

But I was getting into my stride now. ‘Anyway, ghosts don’t have reflections. Ghosts don’t even have shadows. And what’s he doing haunting the frigging roof if he died down in the machines? It’s bollocks.’

Ronnie bridled, and jug-eared Davey jeered from my left. ‘Who asked you, Castor? How many ghosts have you seen?’

I launched into an answer, realised part-way through the sentence that I might be getting myself in too deep and began to stammer. Before I could pull back and regroup, Kenny stepped up between his kid brother and his brick-built enforcer and glared down at me.

‘Castor’s an expert on ghosts, isn’t he?’ he sneered. ‘Sees them all over the place. He’s got the I-Spy book and everything.’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t like the way this was going, not least because the mood of the gang was against me. I was being a smart-arse. A smart-arse is always lower on the pecking order than anyone except a chicken or a grass. Very few of the faces that were surrounding us were showing anything like sympathy.

‘He saw our mam, didn’t he?’ Kenny pursued. ‘With her throat cut and blood all over her. Didn’t you, Castor?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I did.’

Kenny’s face set hard. ‘Well, you’re a lying cunt,’ he said, ‘because she died down in the ozzie in the cancer ward. You’d shit yourself if you saw a real ghost, you wanker.’

‘ You would,’ I retorted, groping for a response that would knock him back on his heels. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘You’re a chicken, Castor.’

‘I’m not.’

Kenny shoved me in the chest, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to reinforce the challenge.

‘Prove it,’ he suggested. And before I could answer he bellowed ‘Gauntlet!’, punching the air with his fists.

‘Gauntlet! Gauntlet!’ Ronnie and Steven crowed, and the shout was taken up on all sides.

The gauntlet was just a piece of casual sadism that usually looked a lot worse than it was. Everyone lined up in front of you. You ran past them, down the line, and people kicked you and punched you as you passed. It was a test of manhood, invoked when someone had allegedly brought the gang or the street into disrepute. You collected a few bumps and bruises, but you had a certain amount of control over your own vector and if you fell you could angle your fall outwards, away from the line, and take a time-out: the people making up the gauntlet weren’t allowed to move until you got to the other end.

‘Okay,’ I said, shouting to make myself heard over the din. ‘Fine. I’m not scared.’

‘Over there,’ said Kenny, pointing. I turned to look in the direction he was indicating, and like Gertrude Stein said on a different occasion, there wasn’t any there there. The slightly pitched coping stones of the ledge were only a step away, and beyond that there was a sheer drop to the street. He couldn’t mean . . . ?

Kenny’s hand clamped on the back of my neck and he pushed me forward. I flailed in his grasp, thinking that he was going to push me over the edge. He didn’t. He just stood me up on the narrow parapet and then stepped away, warning me with a wagging finger not to move.

‘Gauntlet,’ he said, pointing to left and right. ‘There and back again, you little twat. Or else say you’re a chicken.’

‘Fuck off,’ I riposted.

‘Right, then,’ said Kenny, with a gleam of malicious triumph in his eye.

He set Ronnie and Steven to work collecting offcuts, and then arranged the gang in a long line from end to end of the roof, about twenty feet away from the ledge where I stood and wobbled, trying to look nonchalant. The three stooges handed out the offcuts so that everyone had two or three — except that a lot of people, Anita among them, had dropped out by this stage and were refusing to play. It was a hard core of about twenty kids who faced me, their faces radiant with the thrill of the hunt.

Enough was enough. I put one foot down off the parapet.

‘You come down,’ Kenny snarled, ‘and you’re a fucking chicken. You admit you’re a chicken. We don’t have chickens in the gang. Ready . . . aim . . .’

The sane response would have been some pithier version of the proverb about live jackals and dead lions, but I hesitated. I didn’t want to be faced down by Kenny, because at that moment his face represented everything that I hated in the world — including Matt running off and leaving me so he could look for God.

The pause was just long enough.

‘Fire!’ Kenny bawled, and the air was filled with whistling steel. I ran, because the alternative was to be sliced to pieces where I stood. To be fair, I was probably exaggerating the danger from the offcuts themselves. They were absolutely useless from an aerodynamic point of view because they were too thin and light to hold to a line — but there were a fuck of a lot of them, and it would only take one hit to make me flinch backwards reflexively and make the long swallow-dive onto the rutted asphalt of the factory’s forecourt.

I ran head down, only looking at the stone under my feet. I got lucky. A spinning steel rhombus took a small nick out of my cheek, but it was turning in the wind and had spent most of its momentum when it hit me. Another bit into my arm, but again very shallowly and with no real force. Apart from that I reached the corner unscathed — and unopposed for the last ten yards because everyone had spent their ammo in the first few exuberant moments.

‘Time out to reload!’ Ronnie shouted, and Kenny nodded his imperial assent. They all went looking for their own ammo this time, and they were a bit more liberal in interpreting the rules. Some of the kids came back with lumps of shattered brick and one or two had taken out home-made catapults.

This had started out way beyond a joke, and now it was in Lord of the Flies territory. If I made the return journey, a single hit would knock me off the ledge.

‘Fuck this,’ I said, stepping down off the parapet onto safe, solid ground.

‘Get back up there, you little piss-pants bastard,’ Kenny commanded, striding across to me, ‘or I’ll throw you off my fucking self.’ He grabbed a double handful of my lapels and shoved me backwards, trying to make me stand up on the ledge again. I resisted, leaning back without letting my feet leave the ground, although that exposed me to the very real danger of losing my balance and falling backwards over the edge.

‘Sod off, Kenny!’ I said. ‘I’m not doing it. I’ve had enough.’

‘Not yet you haven’t,’ Kenny said grimly. ‘We’re not finished yet.’

I struggled in his grasp, trying ineffectually to trip him so I could break free. His superior weight made it a forlorn gesture, but I had to try. I stumbled backwards, planting my feet on the ledge because there was nowhere else to go, but when Kenny tried to disengage I went with him, gripping his left arm tightly. He punched me in the face to loosen my grip, and once again set me up on my perch. I staggered, seeing stars.