Nicholas Royle - Regicide

‘You’re safe here,’ I heard Giff saying in a low voice as I stretched out on the sofa and closed my eyes. ‘At least for a couple of days.’

I had no intention of sticking around that long and it was only as I was drifting off to sleep that I remembered the map in my back pocket. Too tired to reach for it, I spread it out in my head and sought to trace a circuitous route out of this dark place back to my car on the hard shoulder of the motorway.

As my conscious mind gradually closed down, however, the streets changed to those of my childhood: the interlocking rows of terraced houses around the corner from our street of semis, the back entries smelling of rotten fruit and old prams, the 16-year-old girls who walked along the street across the top of the entry with their short pleated skirts and bouncing red hair, the tiny sky-blue invalid carriages parked outside the prefabs near the railway line, the dogs that snatched free ad-filled newspapers out of my hand as I stuck them through letter boxes, our flame-haired window cleaner Jim and his sleepy wife in her half-undone dressing gown, the advancing shadow of the only neighbourhood boy who was bigger than me.

Stamford Jackson was an unusually fair-minded bully. Most adolescent terrorists would pick on the smallest kids around and make their lives miserable but Stamford Jackson chose me, the second tallest child in all those roads off Heath Street, perhaps because he worked out that if he established his dominance over a big kid it would prove just how powerful he was to everyone else. Maybe he could sense also that I was a pushover — literally: the first time he hit me I fell and bruised my ankle on the cobbles down one of the entries at the top of Heath Street.

The first time I saw Stamford Jackson was on my paper round. I was nearing the end, having done Jim’s house — and failed to spot his half-naked wife through the curtains — and Sally Darke’s. I’d seen Jim’s wife once when I’d happened to look in through their front window and she’d been bending down to pick something up and her dressing gown had fallen open. She hadn’t seen me but I had of course looked in their window every week after that and never seen her again. Sally Darke was a girl who’d been a couple of years above me at primary school and who had once said something vaguely encouraging to me like ‘Lanky bastard’. Occasionally I saw her going in or coming out of her house and she sometimes flicked Vs at me and skipped past. I knew that if I said anything to her it would ruin it and she’d never look at me again. If I didn’t speak to her I could maintain the fantasy of a perfect relationship.

I’d also done all the houses that had dogs — I knew them well — and I’d not had my hand bitten off. At the top of Heath Street there was a funny little road that had a cul-de-sac going off it and that’s where Stamford Jackson lived. I didn’t know this at the time though I had heard of him from the kids I used to hang around with. I was delivering to the houses in the cul-de-sac, running up and down the paths and banging the gates, and I came to a house that had its front door standing open. The hallway was spectacularly untidy and dirty and I stood and looked at it in amazement. I didn’t know how anyone could live in such filth. Half-empty tins of Dulux Non-Drip Gloss, upended coffee mugs, an ashtray with about two thousand cigarette ends in it, a pair of dark blue underpants with dirty white piping, a copy of the Sun open at page three and some obscenity scrawled across it in red ballpoint, a crushed box of Mr Kipling’s Bakewell Tarts and a Wilbur Smith paperback with the spine broken in several places. And this was just the hall.

What I didn’t know was that I was being watched from the front room bay window. A sharp rap on the glass made me jump. There was a grey-haired old man wearing a vest that swelled over his belt, and his son who towered over him.

‘What are you fucking looking at, you nosy cunt?’ the old man snapped.

‘Fuck off,’ the boy added.

‘Just delivering a paper,’ I said.

The old man came striding into the hall at full tilt. He grabbed the paper from the floor and threw it at me.

‘Take your fucking paper. We don’t want it, nancy boy. Fuck off .’ He was practically screaming at me. The huge boy, still standing in the bay window, was grinning. I turned and ran as far as the embankment to the new road that had turned this street into a cul-de-sac. I was shaking. I ran up the embankment and crossed the new road which, unfinished, was still a sea of mud, thinking that I would finish the papers later.

I hung around on the footbridge over the railway line for twenty minutes, watching the electric trains scuttling into the station, their pantographs sparking against the wires. I thought of my father saying there was no romance left in the railways since the end of the steam era. I didn’t agree but I understood why he said it: he missed the trains he’d watched in his youth, whereas these electrics and the diesels that pulled freight wagons through Skelton Junction and over Broadheath were all I’d ever known and I couldn’t imagine them ever changing. I tried to imagine standing on the bridge and being enveloped by a cloud of steam from a locomotive passing underneath.

When I thought it was safe I crept back to the cul-de-sac to complete my paper round.

Stamford Jackson was waiting for me in the entry two doors down from his house.

‘What you fucking doing here, kid?’ he barked. ‘My dad told you, we don’t want your fucking paper.’

I started to back off but he said, ‘Come here.’

I should probably have done anything but obey his command. I should have flicked him the Vs and legged it. But I went to him. I didn’t know why. Simply because he told me to, perhaps. I walked into the entry, my long legs wobbly on the slippery cobbles, and he took one swing at me, hitting the side of my head. I went straight down with a deafening ringing in my ears and feeling sudden pain from my ankle.

‘Don’t fuck about round here,’ he said while deciding whether to kick me as I lay on the ground catching my breath. After a while he wandered off and I felt my head gingerly to see if it was cut. My fingers came away red and I felt tears pushing at the corners of my eyes. I hated bleeding.

When I’d limped home, I told my mother I’d slipped taking a short cut down one of the entries. She fussed over me, which was nice, and I didn’t feel guilty till I had to lie again about the newspapers. ‘They were over,’ I said of the dozen or so papers still in the bag.

‘You don’t often have any over,’ she said as she pressed a cold butter knife to the rapidly swelling cut on the side of my head.

When my father came home, huge and reassuring in his dark double-breasted suit which smelt of damp wool and cigars, it was my mother who told him what had happened. He looked at me in a particular way he had when he knew there was more going on than he was being told. It was a very direct look which only lasted a moment and I never knew if my mother saw or understood it. I didn’t want to tell them about Stamford Jackson for shame. I felt that my father would have expected me to put up a fight. He would have done so in a similar situation. He’d worked down the pit and in the docks before getting where he was today, which was in fact a bit of a mystery to me. I knew it had something to do with a club and a group of other men. Sometimes they came around and sat in front of the fire in the front room in a huddle of smoke and steaming cloth and I heard them using phrases like ‘venture capital’ and ‘fixed assets’. If my mother saw me listening she shooed me away and closed the lounge door quietly before retreating to the kitchen where she would be preparing a huge plate of sandwiches. The front room smelt for days afterwards. I used to sit in there for as long as possible, thinking it was good training for being grown up.