Philip Nutman - Cities of Night

“See you next week,” Dawson said as he walked off toward his car, a green Morris Minor predating the Ark.

“Monday. History test.” Alex couldn’t resist the dig; a month into their first term in Sixth Form and Dawson’s grades were slipping. The other teenager smirked, flashing him the finger.

“Wanker,” Staff said, holding out his hand as he exhaled smoke. Alex pulled a book of Rizlas from his leather jacket.

“Who’s going to Tully’s?”

“Pricks from King Edwards. Tarts from the High School,” Staff replied, taking the papers. “Who cares? I just want to see the look on his face when we turn up.”

Alex chuckled.

“He’ll probably be drunk out of his skull by the time we get there.”

“Good.” Staff belched. “Maybe he’ll fall down the fuckin’ stairs.”

He finished skinning up the joint, passed it to Alex. The flame from his Zippo spluttered in the wind despite the shelter of his cupped hands. He inhaled deeply.

Staff had never liked Tully. No real reason, he just had a bloody-mindedness about some of the kids they’d been to school with — or in Alex’s case, still went to school with — and Tully’s boarding school accent and wisecracks were enough to mark him out as top turd in Staff’s shit stakes. Usually his friend’s prejudices were unfounded, a randomness Alex found entertaining. But if Alex were honest, there were a lot of people he didn’t like either for no apparent reason, although there were many he hated because of the way they treated him.

He coughed as he passed the joint to Staff. “It’s good.” The dope washed through his arteries, making his head rush. He smiled contentedly. Smoking alone never quite cut it, but dragging with a mate put all the boring shit into perspective. He looked up the hill toward Ralph Taylor Lower School, its Victorian workhouse exterior standing firm against the darkness as the final strip of sunlight thinned on the horizon. In that headrush moment, the dope rolling through his mind, he felt time compress, contract, back flip on itself. Ralph Taylor Lower School, all gothic grimness, had been the crucible in which their friendship had been forged.

The first day he started at Ralph Taylor, an all-boys secondary school with twelve hundred pupils spread over two sites, Alex found Stafford Rivers — like most things — intimidating. It wasn’t the violent way Staff kicked a football around the playground or his four-letter vocabulary, it was his ability to jump right into a scrap and beat the shit out of the other troublemaker that made Alex — all skinny, four-feet-ten inches of him — mentally sidestep. But within minutes of laying eyes on Rivers, all flowing control and assurance as he punted the Webley ball around the yard, Alex found he had other people to worry about. Really worry about.

Like Marc Hougan.

If there was a scale for rating preteen psychos, then Hougan scored an eight. At age eleven, the black-haired kid with mean eyes like a whipped Doberman was five-five and broad-shouldered with an attitude to match. Hougan was trouble with a capital T. Alex knew that story, having spent the best part of the previous six years trying to avoid the other kid’s violent temper while they attended Newbridge Junior School.

But on this bright, sunny September day, Hougan’s shadow suddenly cast a black cloud over his hopes for a better time. Alex’s reputation at Newbridge hadn’t been good either: afraid of certain teachers and wary of the other kids, most of whom didn’t like him, he was a frequent truant. It was either face the terrors of Mrs. Bergen’s math lessons or endure repeated scuffles with or torments from the kids who lived in the Weston housing estates. With at least one fight a fortnight to his credit, he was considered an outcast, making it easier for Hougan to pick on him. Mothers walking their children home avoided the sullen, unhappy, and ultimately misunderstood boy who at age six was trying to make sense of his father’s death and the injustice of peer group rejection. All Alex had wanted was acceptance; all his long-suffering mother wanted was for him to be like his older brother Julian, eight years his senior and a picture of docile, studious piety, or his goody-two-shoes little brother Jamie, who never cried and was popular with teachers and kids alike. The week before Alex had started secondary school, she’d almost gone down on bended knee, begging him to wipe the slate clean, avoid trouble, and behave. Alex, sick of fighting, agreed, wanting to be popular like that little snot Jamie, but most of all wanting to please his mother. Yet Hougan, a curse on legs shaped by a brutal father, seemed to be a constant shadow at his heels.

Alex stood in the playground that morning watching Rivers and his mate Evans kicking the ball between them, thinking about Newbridge and how all that was in the past. Then Evans punted the ball to him. Surprised, he stopped it, sending it back with a swift sweep of his foot…

…only to find himself face down on the tarmac with grazed hands, a scraped knee, and torn trouser leg. He looked up, stunned.

“Hurst.” Hougan spoke his name with a grimace, then spat close to his head. Evans and the others laughed. Except Rivers, who stared coldly at the two of them, his eyes narrowing slowly.

“Gimme the ball.” Hougan stepped over Alex, whose hands were stinging from the fall, knee bleeding. “The ball.”

“No,” Rivers said softly. Hougan grinned sardonically, then charged him.

The fight lasted thirty seconds, the two boys pounding each other at full strength, fists, feet, and knees pummelling in a blur of movement before Mr. Palmer, the fey music teacher whose thinness belied his strength, appeared to separate them, whacking Hougan round the ear when he didn’t stop. Rivers’s nose was bloody but Hougan’s top lip was split.

“Names,” Palmer demanded.

“Stafford Rivers.”

“Stafford Rivers, sir !”

Rivers refused to repeat his name.

“You?”

Hougan was silent.

“Name, boy.”

“Marc Hougan,” he replied, punctuating it with a bolus of bloody snot aimed at the teacher’s feet.

“The infamous Hougan, eh? We’ve been warned about you.” Palmer turned his attention to Hurst. “Get up lad.”

Two minutes later, with seconds to go before the school day was officially due to start, Alex stood outside the headmaster’s office, flanked by Hougan and Rivers. No one spoke or looked at the others. He knew then that nothing would change. It was the same as it had always been and looked likely to get a whole lot worse. If he was going to survive the next five years, he was going to need an ally. Standing in the gray, disinfectant-reeking corridor, his stomach churning with nerves, he decided Rivers would be that ally — regardless of what it took to get him on his side — unaware that the bond between them was already being woven by the Fates.

After a couple of thickly rolled spliffs, Staff was calm. He mangled an empty beer can as he sat in the torn armchair while Alex reclined on the bed, a bottle of Guinness in one hand, a joint in the other. Yeah, Ralph Taylor. What a long, strange trip it had been. Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry looked down on him from the wall. Go ahead punk, make my day . More like make my night, he chuckled silently to himself. Staff was hidden in thought, his face carved in sand, his expression shifting as the wind of those thoughts altered the angles of his high cheek bones, his wide mouth. Alex flicked ash onto the cracked linoleum. The Floyd were playing again, the strains of “Dark Side of the Moon” this time. Yeah, some night. Staff hadn’t spoken for nearly an hour.

“Money” started to play, and Alex began toying with his keys, examining them with stoned, languid fascination. The ring was a plastic holder containing two pictures. On one side there was a small photograph of the New York City skyline at night, the Empire State building looking incomplete without King Kong astride it; the other was a skull and crossbones under which the legend LIVE FAST, DIE YOUNG was inscribed. He wanted to live in New York one day, yearned to taste all it promised. Big cities in Britain seemed insignificant in comparison; even London lacked something when you held it up to the Big Apple he’d read so much about. But then anywhere was better than Bath, he guessed, feeling nothing but scorn for the West Country town in which he’d spent all his life; New York appeared as one huge adult Disneyland. Okay, so Bath had over two thousand years of history and culture, but that didn’t mean a thing when you were seventeen, you had no money, and the future looked as promising as an old black-and-white photo you’d kept in your back pocket — faded and crumpled.