Rule of Night (15 page)

What depressed him was this: that he couldn't understand how Kenny and the others knew instinctively the correct things to say to people (girls) while he had forgotten (never knew) the secret code by which human beings communicated with one another. For instance, he had studied Kenny's strategy for dealing with girls – simple, direct, crude – and had tried to copy it. But when he did the girls either ignored him or took his blunt directness as a personal affront and reacted as though he had insulted them. Skush couldn't fathom it out. Had he said the wrong thing or said the
right thing wrongly? He wasn't deformed, was he? He wasn't a hunchback, he wasn't stupid, he wasn't an imbecile – so what was he? Was there something wrong with him? How come Kenny could get away with blatant and unsubtle advances while he was afraid to open his mouth in case he said the wrong thing (which he invariably did)?

Another instance: Fester and Shortarse, a couple of unattractive deadbeats if ever there were any, didn't seem to suffer the agonies of rejection that he did, yet from his own observations he knew that their failures and abortive attempts were equal to his. He had watched them clumsily chatting up birds in the pub and had squirmed at their shallowness and stupidity – and then been amazed when, occasionally, the girls responded. Or had they
not
responded, been equally amazed when Fester turned away with a crude remark and a beery grin, apparently unaffected by once again having been spurned and made to look a tool.

Skush was different. He couldn't bear it when the eyes of the girl he was talking to went cold and distant; it wasn't open antagonism he feared most, it was the cold glassy stare of indifference, as if she were looking straight through him, as if he didn't exist. So to avoid situations like this he stopped talking to girls altogether – apart from Jan and Cil, and even with them his conversation was monosyllabic and self-defensive. This closing in on himself evoked a nightmarish future for Skush in which his life had been sacrificed before he had had chance to live it. At certain moments it struck him (like a blow in the face) that the life he was living was the only life he had: if things were as bad as this now, what were they going to become? What about girlfriends, and engagement parties, and fiancées, and getting married, and buying a house, and choosing furniture, and having children? Were they not meant for him? Was this little shell of loneliness and anguish and quiet desperation the sum total of the future? Skush could think about this for just so
long, and then thankfully he didn't have to think about it any longer. Three white tablets shrunk his head to a dwindling speck of light and his awareness of conscious reality would have had acres of room on the head of a pin.

‘How much can we get?' Kenny asks.

‘Dollar apiece,' Skush says. He takes three large round pill boxes out of his pocket and counts the number of tablets; then calculates for a minute. ‘Thirty quid or more.'

‘Shit,' Kenny says wonderingly, staring out of the diesel window. ‘Ten dabs each.'

‘You won't get that,' Andy says. The three of them are on their way to Manchester, excited and nervous.

‘Why not?' Skush says.

‘You won't.'

‘Why not?'

‘You bloody won't.'

‘I've paid a dollar each before now.'

‘You would,' Andy says. ‘But you won't get that. You'll get half a dollar each or more likely three for a dollar.'

‘That's still a fiver each,' Kenny says optimistically.

‘If we don't get nabbed first.'

‘You're a cheerful bugger,' Skush tells Andy. His eyes are like great watery brown marbles. ‘Anyway we're not selling them all. I'm only selling two boxes.' He puts them back in his pocket. The train moves through the dark night, swaying and rattling between Middleton and Newton Heath. There's a girl in the carriage who keeps looking at Kenny, but girls who eye him up put him off; he's scared if they take the initiative.

‘Where should we try first?' Skush says.

‘Pendulum,' Andy says. His dark skin is glowing and he looks very handsome. In comparison, Skush's complexion is paperwhite: his movements are jerky and frenetic like a doll slowly winding down, and there is in him the faint hard edge of hysteria. Kenny
hasn't noticed anything he considers out of the ordinary but Andy feels he ought to say something, yet he doesn't know what.

This being Christmas-time, the Pendulum is packed to the doors, the low rectangular room crammed with bodies and the smoke writhing in thick layers above the assembled heads. As yet (this being before nine o'clock) nobody is dancing: a roughly square area of floor is set aside like a sacred patch of territory which can only be invaded when the time and circumstances are judged right. But the music pounds on – amongst the jostling bodies, through the thick blue smoke, against the dirty white-washed walls – as the three lads squirm their way to the bar and have the barmaid set up three pints of Tartan. Skush disappears into the crowd and comes back several minutes later jingling some coins in his pocket:

‘Seventy-five pence,' he says, ‘for eight.'

‘That's … how much is that each?' Kenny says.

‘Nine pence,' Andy says. ‘I told you, you won't get much more.'

‘Give us three,' Kenny says, and swallows them with his pint.

‘Your hand's still swollen,' Andy says.

‘You should have seen that knuckle the day after,' Kenny says. ‘Christ it was out here. The bastard; he must have hit me with a bottle.'

‘Is it still sore?'

‘A bit. Not sore: tender. I told the old lady I'd fallen down some steps.'

‘I bet it stopped you wanking,' Andy says with a brilliant grin.

‘I get Jan to do it for me.'

‘What does she say when you slap it in her hand: ‘No thanks, I don't smoke Woodbines'?'

Skush smiles wanly and orders another round. Kenny says, ‘Give us a box,' and goes into the crowd.

Almost precisely on the stroke of nine, a boy with short back and sides and dressed in an open-necked shirt, blue and yellow striped pullover, a pair of baggy trousers with turn-ups, and brown leather
shoes with hard soles begins to dance alone in the sacred square in front of the battery of amplifiers, behind which the dejay sits in darkness with a turntable and a stack of 45s. The boy's dance is a composite of styles: be-bop and rock n' roll, African tribal celebration and Voodoo ritual – but at its simplest it is free expression: the reactions of his body to the raw soul music which comes blistering from the speakers and makes the air seem solid with noise. He dances alone, looking down at his feet, intent on the movements and rhythms, as though what comes next is as much a surprise to him as to the people watching. For a while he is the focus of attention, and then in twos and groups of three and four other people come into the square and begin to take up the dance. Very soon the floor is filled with jerking, swaying, weaving bodies. Everyone dances with concentration; it is as though this is the serious part of the evening, to be pursued determinedly and with single-minded dedication.

Kenny returns and stuffs two pound notes into Skush's top pocket. They grin glassily at one another and Kenny leans his elbows on the bar and looks at the small varnished wooden sign which says:

OLD GOLFERS NEVER DIE

THEY JUST LOSE THEIR BALLS

He tips the pint of Tartan into his mouth and feels the cold rush of liquid down his throat: the sensation makes his senses start to slide. The bar becomes a dull noisy blur and he feels a sudden, tremendously strong urge for Janice. If she were here now he could go through it like a hot knife through butter. She was the first girl he had properly had it away with – the first one he didn't feel awkward or embarrassed with – no clumsy fingers fumbling for the catch on a bra-strap, or struggling to unzip a pair of tight jeans, or
trying to unfasten the buttons on the front of a dress which turn out to be solely for the purpose of decoration. In short, he didn't feel a fool when he was with Janice; they were like two children who together had made an exploration of hidden places – as though they alone had discovered certain secrets and were bound by the knowledge of their discovery.

They stayed at the Pendulum till just after half-past nine and then walked across town (it was freezing cold) to the Bier Keller on Charlotte Street, behind the Piccadilly Plaza Hotel. Down the green steps and into the dark smoky warmth where the Teds are gathered in sullen groups listening to Gene Vincent and Fats Domino and Elvis. They are dressed in drape jackets with velvet collars, close-fitting trousers wrapped tight to their ankles, and wear chunky wedge-like shoes. Their hair is glossy with Brylcreem, rising at the front in a smooth tidal wave and tapering to a DA licked into place and finished off with a neck shave. The three lads don't respond to this kind of music: to them it seems crude and obvious: Elvis's whining falsetto trying to reach the high notes on
That's All Right Mama
and Gene Vincent hiccuping to
Blue Jean Bop
. But there's a ready market and a good sale to be had here for blues and black bombers; the Teds won't touch acid or grass but rely on lager and pills to give them a charge.

Skush has lost interest in the proceedings and sits in a corner with a totally blank expression. The music reverberates inside his head, several light-years removed from that part of his brain which registers conscious reality. Kenny approaches a tall scowling youth with a boil on the end of his nose and thick sideburns that almost meet under his chin. He negotiates a deal and collects one pound and forty pence in fifty and ten pence pieces.

‘How you doing?' Andy says when they meet back at the table.

‘They're a load of twats,' Kenny says succinctly.

‘Won't they buy?'

‘They'll buy anything; we should have mixed aspirin in with them, they'd never know the difference. What's up with him?' he says, nodding at Skush.

‘Blocked to the eyeballs. Leave him be.'

‘We'll have to carry him to the station.'

‘We can get a taxi.'

‘Aye,' Kenny says, his face slowly lighting up, ‘we can.'

By the time eleven-fifteen comes round the three of them are staggering through the frosty grass in Piccadilly Gardens, tripping each other up and giggling like schoolgirls: they have the mistaken notion that they're walking to Victoria Station when in fact they're going in the direction of Albert Square. On Mosley Street a passer by stares just a fraction too closely at their antics and Kenny follows him and grabs the back of his collar and thrusts him bodily against the wall. He's never felt more in the mood to batter a face in than right now.

He says sneeringly into the face of the man, ‘Did you get a good look or do you want a photograph?' And then says, ‘Cunt,' and goes on repeating, ‘Cunt. Cunt.'

Fucking Jesus, he wants to hit the man. Fucking Cunting Christ, the man's pale frightened face sickens him so much that nothing would feel better than kneeing him in the bollocks and seeing that awful fear he loves and yet despises turn into pain. He can see it in his mind's eye – the face crumbling as the pain reaches up from the groin and shoots into the brain.

An arm is holding Kenny and he knocks it away. The arm comes across his chest and he knocks it away again. He keeps repeating the one word, ‘Cunt', over and over, his face inches away from the man's.

‘Come on,' says a slurred voice in his ear. Kenny's large hands are bunching the man's collar under his chin: the man hasn't said a word: he is trying to keep his face under control.

‘Ken,' the slurred voice says in his ear.

‘Cunt,' Kenny says. He wants the man to struggle, to resist, but the man is like a rag doll. The instinct of self-preservation tells him that Kenny is short only of an excuse; by adopting the line of least resistance he hopes to make himself unworthy of Kenny's attention, not even worth the effort of duffing up.

‘Listen, cunt—#8217;

‘Kenny, come
on,'
Andy says, dragging him along the empty street.

‘Cunt.'

‘Yeh.'

‘Cunt.'

‘Yeh. Come on.'

The city is like a grey dream. Buildings disappearing into the darkness overhead, intersected by rivers of gleaming tarmac. They walk along Princess Street, past the side of the silent Town Hall, into Albert Square. Everything is asleep, lost, dead, forgotten. The beacons at the crossings flicker on and off. Skush stumbles into the gutter and falls against the edge of the kerb. He might as well just lay here and die; it is a fitting end. People will be sorry when they hear of his death, they will wish they had treated him better, taken notice of him. It is all their fault. He knows that he hasn't yet begun to live and already he is dying. He wishes there was a girl here who could watch him die. The others pick him up and carry him along but he knows he is still in the gutter. They can't fool him, although they might think they're pretty smart.

There's a window in front of him which he knows isn't really a window at all: it's the bottom of a deep hole down which he is falling. He sees Kenny's lips move and the sound takes a long time to travel the distance to his ear and when it arrives it is slowed down in time with his heartbeats.

‘Old golfers never die …' the words say.

Golfers. The word is irresistibly funny to Skush. He can see mechanical men swinging clockwork sticks – hundreds of them in unison. They are walking stiffly in ranks along the gutter, dropping in row after row down the deep, dark hole. He starts to giggle and the others giggle with him. All three are giggling as they fall towards the glass-bottomed hole.

‘… they just lose their balls.'

Skush holds out his fists straight in front of him and is the first to break through the glass-bottomed hole. It is a new world: bright, glistening, sharp, and filled with ladies' hats. He knows with part of his mind that Kenny and Andy are moving fast but to him they appear to be moving with the wearying slowness of a dream. Is this death? Is he dead? If he is they must have bells in heaven because – quite distinctly – he can hear them ringing.