Barry Walsh - The Pimlico Kid

Rooksy, eyes closed, is chanting softly while pretending that he’s wanking ‘… ninety-nine, a hundred, change hands, don’t care if I do die.’

I shuffle away from him and settle for just thinking about girls and what nestles under bras and knickers. I often ache, really ache, to see breasts close up on women like Madge – or girls like Christine Cassidy, who sticks hers out in case you don’t notice them. Some chance, she’s built like a young Aunt Winnie. I’d still love to know what they feel like. I’ve seen naked women on a pack of Rooksy’s playing cards but the pictures were disappointingly indistinct in areas where I’d have welcomed more detail. When you flicked through them, the women cavorted about, arching back or bending over, while always managing to look as if they were about to give you a kiss. Of course, I made the appreciative noises that Rooksy expected but closer examination revealed that there weren’t fifty-two different women but a hard-working half-dozen. Viewed one at a time, there was nothing happy or sexy about their smiles and, although I didn’t mention it to Rooksy, their flesh was far from fabulous.

The best pictures are in my head. Lying in bed, eyes shut; I can picture girls I actually know, without their clothes. These images are hard to hang on to and my brain could do with a ‘vertical hold’ button to stop them sliding from view. But no matter how fleetingly they appear before me, at least their flesh is fabulous.

‘You still here?’

Madge’s face looms over us like God’s on the church ceiling.

Rooksy rolls to one side, pulling his hand from inside the top of his trousers. Madge notices but she focuses on me. ‘Get out of here, Billy Driscoll, now, and don’t think that what he’s doing is clever, ’cos it’s not!’

‘No, Mrs Smith’.

Rooksy catches my eye. His smile disappears and I wince at having betrayed the shameful truth that I agree with Madge.

As he scrambles to his feet, he makes the mistake of pushing down on John’s shoulders. John spins around, fists clenched. ‘Get off me.’

‘John!’ Madge screams. John freezes. Rooksy’s smile returns as he holds up his hands. Madge points a finger at him. ‘And you, Peter Rooker, next time you’ll be sorry.’

‘Sorry … Cheerio then Madge.’

‘What?’ She scoots after him as far as she can along her side of the wall.

He jogs away laughing.

Before she goes indoors, she flashes me an angry glance. When I look at John, he gives me the gasping-fish face.

I’m sitting, feet up, on the bench in the shady corner of our backyard. Lord of the Flies is face down on my knees while I picture the dead parachutist swinging in the trees.

I’ve just come to the uncomfortable conclusion that if I were one of the boys on the island, I’d soon be exposed as less than heroic. For relief I ponder the easier subject of how quickly the dead parachutist’s face would rot in heat like this.

‘Billy, ducks, run and get us a packet of Weights and a bit of fish for Chris will you?’ Ada Holt is leaning out of her kitchen window above me. What could be her last fag is hanging from the corner of her mouth.

‘Up in a minute Mrs Holt.’

Ada lives on the ground floor. Getting to her flat involves going up to the street and in through the main front door. It’s never locked because no one in the flats upstairs wants to answer knocks that might not be for them. Our street is made up of large terraced houses that were once Victorian family homes but have now been carved into flats and single-room lets. The houses are fronted by iron railings at street level from where stone steps dogleg down to the ‘areas’ belonging to basement homes like ours. In another era, our front door would have been opened only to tradesmen.

On the wall at the top of our steps, the cheap cream paint fails to cover the words AIR RAID SHELTER and an arrow pointing down to our two coal cellars. During the War, they were damp, distempered refuges from German bombs. Ada cowered in one of them the night her house next door was firebombed. Today she lives on the same floor in our house with only a party wall between her and the charred shell of her old home. Twenty years on, it remains open to the weather and when it rains, damp seeps down through to our flat and glistens on the passage wall. In winter, John and I can play noughts and crosses in the condensation.

Only one cellar is used for coal. The other is used as a storeroom, where all the things that Mum won’t throw away, ‘just in case’, are packed in. She went on at Dad for ages to seal the manhole cover above it. He finally got around to it, and did a thorough job, the day after a new coalman opened it to pour in five hundredweight of best anthracite – proving Mum right, again, about doing things straightaway. Being right isn’t her most endearing trait.

Ada does her crushed-slipper shuffle to the door.

‘Hello ducks, come in.’ She’s wearing her quilted ‘all-day’ housecoat that, in Ada’s case, could be described as ‘all week’.

‘No thanks, Mrs Holt, think I’ll get going straightaway.’

Wafting past her is one reason for staying outside. Our house has its own smell; the main ingredients are cabbage and cigarette smoke. Ada’s flat is a prime source. A second reason crouches behind her, glaring at me, tail twitching. Chris is a black-and-white tom that terrorizes other cats, most dogs and me. A real sour puss, his mouth is already open in full feline snarl. Only Ada is allowed to stroke him and even she waits until his mealtimes. Get within range and he slashes like Zorro at exposed skin, and he’s undeterred by gloved hands or trousered legs. His lair is by the fire, inside the fender on the scored brown tiles – an ingrate in the grate. Because Chris hasn’t been ‘seen to’, he adds a bitter edge to the distinctive smell of Ada’s flat and of Ada herself.

She calls his malevolent behaviour his ‘funny little ways’ and carries the livid lines of his affection on hands, wrists and legs. She deems most of them ‘he’s only playing’ scratches. But she has deeper wounds from his ‘you little bugger’ attacks, usually provoked by absent-minded attempts to brush cigarette ash off his back as he snoozes beside her.

Ada squints at me through smoke rising from the fag that clings to her bottom lip. ‘Just ten Weights and a tanner’s worth of whiting please, ducks.’ Her right eyebrow arrows up above her open eye and the left crouches around the one that’s closed. It makes her look as if she doubts everything she sees.

She takes a deep drag, which pulls her jaw to one side and gets her goitre on the move. The cigarette rises and falls like a railway signal but fails to dislodge the lengthening ash, which also resists the buffeting of her speech. Only when it’s longer than the unsmoked bit does Ada notice. She taps it into a cupped hand and goes inside to cast it vaguely towards the fireplace and provokes an acid spit from Chris. She returns with a string bag and, with a nicotine-stained index finger, stirs the money in her purse to find the right coins. ‘Here you are, ducks. Keep the change.’

Ada isn’t the nicest of old dears but she’s not tight, and errands to get fish for her devil cat always bring a bit of pocket money.

‘Oh, just a sec,’ she says with an irritated lift of her chin. ‘I think her ladyship upstairs wants you to get her something.’ She’s referring to Miss Rush, who lives on the first floor. Ada doesn’t her like because of what she claims are her posh, hoity-toity ways. But she dislikes her most because everyone else does like her.

Miss Rush opens the door just enough to frame her tiny body. She tucks a duster into a full-length floral pinny; I’ve caught her ‘mid clean’. She’s bright-eyed and her rosy cheeks seem out of place on her bony face, which is haloed by a perm of white hair. Miss Rush neither smokes nor, as far as anyone can tell, does she ever eat cabbage. The smell emerging from behind her is a blend of Mansion floor polish and Sunlight soap. Her passion for cleaning extends to polishing the lino outside on the landing; a practice that Ada thinks is showing off. Miss Rush’s home must be spotless but no one knows for sure because, unlike Ada, she never asks anyone in.