Stewkey blues, p.6
Stewkey Blues, page 6
Gradually the afternoon wore on. It was, everyone who had remained on the premises agreed, one of the Sheldons’ best-ever performances. Several other books had been thrown and there was even some scuffling behind the till. Afterwards, flushed yet companionable, they went out for a cup of coffee, leaving him in charge of the shop. Later, in the pearl-grey light, propelled by some impulse he could not quite fathom, he found himself wandering down the Arcade again, where the boutiques and the coffee shops were closing for the day and picturesque old women with outsize carrier bags in their hands stood in doorways saying goodnight. The lights were still on at the Lite-a-Bite and he could see Angie’s figure silhouetted against the wall of chrome and the row of empty display cabinets. The badge that said I READ BRUNA BOOKS was still pinned his lapel and he took it off and stowed it in the pocket of his coat. The conclave of picturesque old women stirred like troubled dreamers and began to move away. Angie, catching sight of him at last, made a deft, bobbing motion of her head that might have been meant to convey brusque dismissal, the sealing of a private contract, or something else altogether, and sent him silently on his way.
HEARTLAND
Here beneath the humid pallor of a September Sunday afternoon, there was something weird about the Riverside. What was weird about it, Gary decided, skipping a few paces on the balls of his trainered feet to keep up with Big Kenny’s marauding stride, what was indisputably weird, was the smell. At two o’clock in the morning – their usual time to be out and about in this particular locale – the Riverside generally smelled of lager, vomit and gently diffusing cigarette smoke. Right now, ten hours in advance of this nightly stakeout in party-town, the mingled scents included cooking oil, popcorn and something that Gary was pretty sure could be identified as fresh air.
‘Where we off to anyhow?’ he demanded, as they swung past the bowling alley and the patch of gum-flecked concrete that abutted the multiplex.
‘Boudicca’s Chariot,’ Kenny said, exchanging a curt professional nod with the two big black guys ranged squarely outside the Queen of Iceni. Nearly all the clubs on Riverside had local heritage names like Nelson’s Porthole or the Kett Saloon.
‘New place, is it?’ They were well past the Queen of Iceni now, off into a debatable land of chi-chi hairdressing salons and rabbi- hutch flats.
‘Could call it a new place,’ Big Kenny conceded.
‘What’s the name of the geezer who owns it?’
‘Some Irish cunt,’ Big Kenny said, whose grandparents had arrived on the boat from Rosslare in 1935. ‘Brannigan or some such.’ By this time they had fetched up in a nondescript quadrant hemmed by boarded-up doors and spilled refuse sacks. ‘Jesus. You have any idea where we fucking are?’
After a certain amount of time spent ringing random doorbells and accosting know-nothing passers-by, they ran Boudicca’s Chariot to earth between a kebab shop and a row of lock-up garages. There was no one about except a lairy kid in a white tracksuit hunkered down in the doorway. Gary, who had been taking instructions from Big Kenny ever since they’d stashed the motor in the Rose Lane Car Park, grasped at the opportunity to reassert himself. ‘Go on son,’ he sternly counselled. ‘Fuck off out of it.’
The kid – he was about 17, with two of those stupid disks plugged into his ear lobes that made you look like the representative of some benighted Amazonian tribe crawling out into the jungle clearing to gaze upon the great white chief in his helicopter – looked up inquiringly, wondered about venturing some smart remark, only to be silenced by the brazen symbols of Gary and Kenny’s professional calling - the height, the muscle, the sleek Crombie coats – and slunk despairingly away. Cheered by this exercise of power, Gary sprang forward – Kenny was already ten feet ahead of him, racketing through the ghostly interior – over a tawdry expanse of cocoanut matting into the club’s dark and unwelcoming heart.
‘You lads a team then?’ Mr Brannigan wondered. He was a small, world-weary man for whom every aspect of their interview – the terse greeting at the door, the plod along trackless serpentine corridors, the ending up in the low-ceilinged, breeze-blocked cell with its single desk that was his office - was clearly far too much trouble.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Gary agreed.
‘How long?’
How long had he and Big Kenny been doing this? Christ, it was almost before they built the Riverside, back when the city’s nightlife, such as it was, had boiled away in the confines of the Prince of Wales Road. While he was pondering these memories of bygone mayhem, Big Kenny said: ‘Year Norwich went down from the Prem the first time.’
So it was 1995 then. Big Kenny’s chronology was entirely football-related. If you asked him when his daughter was born he’d tell you it was the year Darren Huckerby signed. For the first time in their conversation Mr Brannigan expressed a mild interest.
‘Remember a place called the Spinning Wheel?’
‘Fucking horrible dump in Timberhill? Went there a couple of times … No offence,’ Big Kenny added, suddenly divining why Mr Brannigan was so keen on remembering the Spinning Wheel.
‘None taken.’ For a moment Mr Brannigan looked more than ever like one of the gargoyles that hung over the west door of Norwich Cathedral. From far away, in some remote passage, they could hear the relentless drip of water. ‘Now then, about your present duties. Eight till one on the doors. Bit of clearing up afterwards. Might have to shift the odd crate or two. We’re not a big operation.’
‘I ain’t re-stocking no fucking fridges,’ Big Kenny said, stung by the memory of previous humiliations in this line.
‘No one’s expecting you to restock the fucking fridge,’ Mr Brannigan said, as one leisure industry veteran to another. ‘As for the money, it’s eighty quid a night. No chatting up the birds on the bar and no charging taxis up to the club’s account. Am I making myself clear?’
They nodded. The owners usually went off like this at the start. Then, if you were lucky, they started giving you bottles of Babycham or asking you to drive their wives to the airport.
‘You see a lad hanging around outside when you come in?’ Mr Brannigan demanded as they headed back along the corridors to the receding warmth of the September afternoon.
‘Kid in a trackie and them fucking rings?’
‘My boy, Shane,’ Mr Brannigan said, in a tone that suggested he felt the same way as Gary about distended earlobes.
‘Oh yeah? What’s he do?’ Gary tried to remember how kids of 17 occupied their time these days. ‘City College? One of them new apprenticeships?’
‘Sweet fuck all,’ Mr Brannigan said. ‘Helps out in the kitchen sometimes. You’ll see him around, I daresay.’ They were back at Boudicca’s Chariot’s shabby vestibule, with its peeling posters and unpacked crates. ‘You lads take care now.’
It was a needless injunction. They were doormen. They always took care. Big Kenny leading, Gary bringing up the rear, calm and officious, big hands fending off the swinging doors as they bounced back, feet sinking into the over-moist carpet, they scrambled out into the edgy sunshine.
Back on Riverside, the breeze was coming in from across the Wensum, rattling the ships’ masts and setting the window panes of the frail newbuild houses delicately aquiver.
‘Let’s go and have a drink,’ Big Kenny said. ‘Celebrate and all.’
‘Celebrate what?’
‘It’s a fucking job, isn’t it?’
‘Last a fortnight in there you will,’ Gary prophesied. ‘Could see you eyeing up that cunt in his basement. You’ll go and lob him one and we’ll both be out on our arses. Like at the Saxon Spire.’
‘Not gonna happen,’ Big Kenny insisted. ‘No way José. Not this time. Now, where we gonna go?’
And this, it had to be acknowledged, was a good question. Over the past 35 years – longer if you counted the hundreds of times they’d got in under-age – many a Norvicensian hostelry had enjoyed Gary and Big Kenny’s sober patronage. The Volunteer in the Earlham Road. The Mitre, also in the Earlham Road. The Romany Rye, half a mile away on Bunnet Square. The Woodman – a long trip up to Catton but worth it once you got there. The University Arms at the end of South Park. Christ, half those pubs no longer existed, or if they did, had been turned into shops or veggie restaurants. In the end they settled on the Ten Bells in St Benedict’s, which, it being a Sunday afternoon, was half-way deserted apart from a few teenagers for whom the downing of vodka shots was clearly a hugely exciting business.
‘Where you living right now?’ Gary asked, once the usual preliminaries had been dispensed with.
‘Bullus Road, mate. Up the Bowthorpe.’
‘Oh yeah. What’s that like?’ Bullus Road had been featured in the Eastern Evening News a couple of years back after an actual riot had taken place on the corner from which it debouched into Larkman Lane.
‘They’re fucking maniacs. You know what? Couple of weeks ago, after I’d gone to bed, the nutter next door only goes and jacks up my motor, takes the tyres off and tries to put them on some fucking Robin Reliant or something he’s got dying on the pavement.’
‘What did you do?’
‘What did I do?’ Big Kenny plucked a pickled onion out of the two-gallon jar on the counter and juggled it in his palm, like a vengeful fast bowler about to set off on his sprint to the crease. ‘I jacked his car up and took them off again. Then I put a brick through his front door window. Nah, it’s all right.’
‘How’s your Carole?’ Gary wondered, keeping it low-key and casual, for you had to be careful when you asked how Carole was. Big Kenny gave a tiny, non-committal shake of his head.
‘Actually, she’s all right mate. Just now we got her – what are those things called you hang off the ceiling with all them wires and paper lanterns and such?’
‘Mobiles?’
‘Mobiles. Got her one of them. Loves it,’ Big Kenny said.
The reason you had to be careful asking Big Kenny how Carole was was that he might not like the question and you might not like the answer. Basically Carole’s 17 – was it? – years on the planet had been a fucking disaster right from the star. All the stepping stones on this path to ruin were still fresh in Gary’s head: the three days it took Carole’s mum, Celeste, to give birth to her in the old Norfolk & Norwich Hospital in St Stephen’s, with Big Kenny going spare in the corridor outside the delivery suite; the six incubator-bound months that followed, during which, to be frank, nobody really knew if the kid was alive or dead; her eventual discharge – she would have been about a year old by then; the semi-triumphant homecoming – Kenny had all his mates there on the doorstep to cheer her in – and installation in a nursery that looked like Emergency Ward Ten an hour after a bomb had gone off, full of pulleys and stretchers and winking lights and machines that beeped whenever you went near them. When she was six she started having fits – and not just your ordinary fits like the kids in the TV soaps who haven’t yet been diagnosed with Tourette’s or ADHT, but the proper screaming abdabs. Gary had been round there once, shooting the breeze with a cup of tea in his hand, when she kicked off and it was like some shell-shocked Tommy thinking he was back in the trenches. No, you didn’t want to be there when Carole was away on one, or indeed on the more routine occasions when she was chewing up the ends of blankets or banging Tupperware boxes against her forehead, or chanting erk-erk-erk for half an hour at a stretch. Gary’s domestic situation over in Costessey with Michaela and little Kayleigh was a picnic by comparison.
Except, that was, for those small-hours conversations.
Those small-hours conversations? Usually when he came home – this was at about three o’clock in the morning – stowed the Rover in the car port, checked on little Kayleigh under her magenta coverlet beneath the giant Frozen poster, examined his Twitter feed for any up-to-date news that @ CanaryCitizen and @YellowandGreenArmy might have procured from their sources at Carrow Road and rolled silently into bed, he would find Michaela vigilant beside him asking things like: would he take her into the nursery tomorrow morning, or when was he going to fix the sodding drainpipe in the yard like he’d said he would. Last night, on the other hand, when he’d stumbled in, mazy and exhausted, shaking his head over the rumour that Toddy Cantwell might be signing for the Villa, it was to find her sitting bolt upright in bed with the light on, a cardigan draped around her ample shoulders and demanding: ‘Do you believe in God?’
‘Do I believe in what?’
Outside the window it was just your ordinary night in Costessey, which meant that there were sirens going off in the distance and the student rabble who rented the house three doors down were having one of their parties.
‘Do you – you. Do you believe in God?’
It was, he supposed, a reasonable question. And in the course of a great many years spent tip-toeing into women’s bedrooms when their occupants were supposed to be asleep he had been faced with enquiries that were a whole lot worse than this. The very worst had been ‘Are you shagging my sister?’ But not now, not in the small hours, not in Costessey, with the bump and judder of that crappy hip-hop nonsense bouncing away from three doors down.
‘Jesus, Mickey. What sort of a question is that for three o’clock in the morning?’
‘Well, you think about it, and come daylight you can tell me what you’ve decided.’
‘All right then.’
In the end this eventuality was forestalled by their waking up to discover that little Kayleigh had been sick all over her magenta coverlet and the gerbil had died in the night (what was all that about? It had been fine when he’d filled up its water bottle the afternoon before). Still, as the day unfurled, as he negotiated the snarling traffic to drop Michaela off at the day nursery, as he slid and crashed around the shining leather sofa that Michaela had thought a suitable ornament to their cramped front room, browsing the sports pages of the Eastern Daily Press, as, finally, he stashed the Rover in the Riverside multi-storey and made his way through increasingly chilly streets to Boudicca’s Chariot, he found the question leaching back into his consciousness. Did he believe in God? What was all that about? He had no objection to people going to church; and he knew that Michaela, always susceptible to the idea of spirit hands and ghostly presences, had started frequenting this place called the Big Hope Tabernacle on Sunday mornings. But asking you if you believed in God was a different thing. Did he believe in God? Was another, even bigger man up there somewhere looking down on him, seeing how he shaped up? Silently, disdainful yet perturbed, he passed on through the Chariot’s garish vestibule to the company of Big Kenny, Mr Brannigan, weaselly Shane and the confines of the world he knew.
It was October now and he and Big Kenny were well established in their new routines. Clock-on at 7.30, uniform (the coat, the tie, the black Oxfords) in place, doors at eight. At half ten, if you were lucky, one of the girls from the bar – Julee, or Shirleen or the black one called Rita – would bring you tea in a Styrofoam cup. Close up at one, with a final shufti round the blighted alley at the back to make sure some tea leaf wasn’t hanging about with an eye to the safe. Sometimes some mad girl would be found passed out in the toilets and you’d have to call an ambulance, and sometimes you’d see someone who was a bit too obviously dealing speed out of an imperfectly concealed plastic bag, but that was about it. Boudicca’s Chariot was open five nights a week, Tuesday to Saturday, and oddly enough the worst night was Thursday. Thursday, for some reason, was when the tough boys came in on the train from Diss and Thetford and steamed through the place letting off fire extinguishers and jumping on tables. Or they did until they caught sight of Big Kenny, who had once – admittedly in his long-ago prime, when on duty outside the Nelson Hotel - chucked three Ipswich Town supporters one by one into the river.
Curiously, the most disagreeable thing about the Chariot was not the raiding parties from Diss or Thetford, or the lads off the estates peddling weed, or the white-faced girls throwing up in the khazi, but young Shane Brannigan, bastard cunt Shane, as Kenny, always handy with the prefixes, had christened him. What was it with those weaselly kids, Gary wondered. There had been half a dozen of them at school and several more at Lawrence & Scott Electromotors where he’d done – or hadn’t done – his apprenticeship: undersized nonentities with parchment skin, shifty expressions and a mouthful of sarky chat, always treading that fine line between keeping the company amused and taking it way too far, and Shane, advised the thirty years of bitter experience gained in such venues as the woodwork room of the Hewett School or the despatch desk of Goldcrest Taxis, where he’d filled in for a couple of years after leaving the engineering shop, was the worst yet. Shane, who when not making workshy cameos in the establishment’s foyer with a steam cleaner, spent his time cadging drinks off the punters and hanging out at the bar. Another thing about Shane, too, was that he didn’t seem to realise how far he was pushing his luck. ‘Here come the Costessey boys,’ he’d murmur as Gary and Big Kenny made their nightly appearance, which was not just disrespectful but plain wrong, seeing that Kenny lived off the Larkman, and Kenny would give him a not-quite jovial ‘fuck off son’ which Gary knew – again, that thirty years of experiencing bending his ear – meant not trouble exactly, but the promise of it glimpsed from afar, like the outriders of a gale shaking the tree tops half a mile away.
It was on the night that Kenny had added to his customary ‘fuck off son’ the words ‘and I’m not telling you again’ that the extraordinary thing happened. Well, not the extraordinary thing, perhaps, but the near-unprecedented thing. Usually, once the Chariot had closed down and the bar staff had been ushered into the waiting cabs, they’d saunter back along the Prince of Wales Road, past the crowds of milling kids and the volunteers from the rescue bus tending to the herberts who were being sick into gutters and the anxious coppers, for tea and toast in an after-hours joint Kenny knew about in Rose Lane where the taxi drivers and the girls from the clubs hung out. This particular evening, though, as soon as they were out into the street – there was a chill in the air and a big October moon glinting off the surface of the river – Kenny, with the air of powerful deliberation he brought to pools coupons and each-way bets, said: ‘Come back to my place, mate?’
