Rule of Night (19 page)

‘You mean you stole something?'

‘Yeh, sort of.' He has to go on now that he's gone this far, and tells her the story of the break-in: four meters in one night: clean away without a smell of the law.

Eileen is impressed. He has her full undivided attention.

‘It's better than working,' Kenny boasts.

‘How much did you get?'

‘A few dabs.'

‘How much though?'

‘Seventeen quid.'

‘Seventy?'

‘Seven
teen
.'

‘Out of
four
meters?'

‘We'd have got more,' Kenny says quickly, ‘only they'd just been emptied. Still, it was better than nowt.'

‘Didn't the police ask any questions?'

‘The cops,' Kenny says as though she'd made a small joke. ‘Yeh, they asked Janice and her mother but her mother was away for the weekend and Janice said the place must have been broken into Sunday afternoon because everything was all right till then.'

‘I thought you said Friday night.'

‘We did the meters on Friday night,' Kenny says, lowering his voice, ‘but Jan told the police it was Sunday because that's when the new lodger was due to arrive. What we did was to break in the other three flats – except his – so they'd think it was him. We opened his door with the key and just did the meter. On the others we broke the locks as well.'

Eileen thinks this out and says admiringly, ‘You planned it all.'

‘Yeh, course I did,' Kenny says, lighting a cigarette and sinking back in the seat.

‘They suspected the lodger instead of you.'

‘Right.'

‘So they got him instead.'

‘No,' Kenny says. ‘He never showed up. He's still in Shrewsbury.'

•    •    •

After the match – which the visiting team lose 2-1 – Kenny and some of the Rochdale supporters go on a tiny rampage through the streets of Luton. It has to be tiny: there are only eight of them, Eileen and another girl included. At one point they are chased by a dozen-or-so Luton supporters and lose their way, and by the time they get back to the ground the car park is deserted: the coach has gone. It is dark and cold, although the rain has stopped.

Kenny, unblooded so far that day, leads the way to the nearest pub and they sit among the early drinkers feeding themselves with crisps, cheese snacks and cold meat pies. One of the lads says,
‘What are we going to do now?'

‘No use moaning,' Kenny says. ‘We've missed it and that's that.'

‘I'm not moaning; I'm just saying what are we going to do now? We've nowhere to kip.'

‘For Christ's sake stop worrying. You get on my bleeding nerves.'

‘I'm not worrying. I just said—'

‘All right. Forget it.'

‘How are we going to get back?' Eileen says. She asks the question out of interest, not in the least anxious or perturbed, and Kenny admires her for it.

‘Thumb it.'

‘Tonight?'

‘No, tomorrow.'

‘But what about tonight?'

‘We'll be all right,' Kenny says, holding her eyes with his own. She meets his look openly, on equal terms, without a trace of archness. He wonders what it is going to be like when his mouth is pressing against her open wet lips, his tongue working away behind her protruding teeth – anticipating the experience with a kind of scared lust.

Fortunately, between the eight of them, there is enough money to buy beer for the evening and by eight-thirty they are all merry and slightly bored. They are in a strange town, among people who speak with an unfamiliar accent, and the possibilities are endless: it is simply a matter of deciding on a course of action which promises the most thrills. Even roaming the streets is exhilarating because every corner brings a new and unexpected landscape; everything is so different from their northern industrial experience that the air itself seems charged with mystery and danger.

They try several pubs, working their way towards the centre of town. Kenny can't get used to the beer, which seems thick and dark and slightly sweet-tasting: northern beer is lighter with a sharper
edge to it. He walks with his arm around Eileen's waist and hers around his, now and then catching a passing whiff of her smell whose strangeness and unfamiliarity makes him conscious that beneath her clothes is an unknown body, with its dark recesses and secret places.

‘I hope they don't catch you,' Eileen says.

‘Who's that?'

‘The police.'

He gives her a sidelong glance. ‘Do you reckon they will?'

‘I don't know,' Eileen says. ‘Anyway, you can always say you were with me.'

This is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to Kenny. That – and the beer – fills his stomach with a rosy warmth. He hugs her to him as they walk along and then says in a low voice so the others can't hear, ‘I fancied you a lot when I worked at Woolies.'

‘You never said owt.'

‘We don't where I come from.'

‘I fancied you,' Eileen says after a slight pause.

This is Kenny's cue to slip his hand inside her coat and squeeze her breast. She makes a sound, a moan that is almost inaudible, which thrills Kenny down to his boots. He feels the tug of a gathering erection.

Much of the bravado seems to leave the group after the pubs shut at eleven, though the hard reality of a cold night ahead with nowhere to sleep is disoriented by the beer swimming in their heads: it is an inarticulate fear hovering just out of reach outside the periphery of an alcoholic haze. Down a dark windy backstreet Kenny stops suddenly at the sight of a white plastic sign swinging on creaking hinges. It reads:
Liberal Club
. Two of the lads run to the street corners to keep an eye out while the others examine the door, studded with iron rivets.

‘We'll never do this,' one of them says.

Kenny calls them together. ‘Round the back. Try the windows.' Eileen goes with Kenny and helps him shin up to a window with a long vertical rectangular fanlight. He stands on her shoulders to reach the ledge, scrabbling in the darkness for a handhold, and grips the lower edge of the fanlight which stands proud of the main window. He feels along it, standing with the toes of his boots on the ledge and his arms outstretched overhead, hoping to find a catch or a projection of some kind which he can use as a point of leverage. There isn't one. He curses and in a fit of temper pulls at the lower edge of the fanlight, which swings open and upwards without a sound. The abruptness of it, the silence – and the shock – nearly send him off-balance, and for a moment he hovers on the toes of his boots before grabbing the frame of the open window and hauling himself upright.

‘What's wrong?' Eileen says, alarmed at the flurry of movement above her.

‘I've fucking done it!' Kenny whispers, ‘get the others.'

‘Fucking great!' Eileen says.

Kenny wants to shout in jubilation. The bastards can knock him down as much as they want to but Kenny Seddon always has the last laugh. It's easy to beat the system: a doddle – a meter here, a break-in there, a girlfriend at home and a fast bird away. Why work and sweat when the world lies defenceless before you, begging to be plundered and fucked and made to look a prize tool?

The first thing the lads do is help themselves to drinks at the bar. The pumps are working and it's pints all round. Kenny opens the cash-register but it's too much to hope for that he will find any money; in fact there's a handful of one and two-pence pieces.

One of the lads says, ‘Find summat to eat, I'm starving.'

‘What is there? Look in that tin.'

‘Crisps.'

‘Is that all?'

‘Salted peanuts.'

‘Shit, look at all these fags. Kenny!'

‘Keep it down, for fucks sake,' Kenny says. ‘Take what you want but pipe down.'

They guzzle several pints of beer each and then start on shorts. Glasses are smashed and bodies crash about in the gloomy depths of the hall, footsteps thumping on the bare dusty boards. Somebody puts money into the black meter on the wall and the oblong canopy hanging on grimy chains from the ceiling floods the billiard table in a blaze of vivid green. The lads grab cues from the rack and empty the wooden box of snooker balls onto the table. At first there is an attempt at a sensible, orderly game but before long it's a free-for-all with everyone cracking away at whatever comes within range. They start acting the fool, hitting the balls harder and harder, until inevitably somebody mis-cues and rips a long ragged gash in the smooth green baize. It makes a sound like somebody farting. Eileen falls against Kenny, laughing helplessly, and the glass of neat rum slips from her fingers and shatters on the floor.

Kenny too is drunk, but not drunk enough not to know what he wants. The ripping and smashing goes on while he pulls her through a door behind the bar and into a room with crates stacked against the walls and brown cartons of Golden Wonder crisps piled on top of one another: the pale rectangular window gives enough light to make out a row of varnished light switches and a cheap calendar reproduction of Windsor Castle (with the Queen not at home). They stumble about amidst the dim clutter, trying to lend each other support and at the same time hang on.

‘Here,' Eileen says, ‘down here.'

Kenny thinks she means the cellar but she means down on the floor in the corner where there's a pile of sacking, discarded packaging and old display cards advertising Babycham. The strong
beery smell in the small room is mingled faintly with that of disinfectant; paper and cellophane crackle under their weight as they collapse into it, befuddled, unco-ordinated; and Kenny can't help laughing at the thought that they'll both end up smelling like a brewery.

Eileen's wet mouth fastens to his and stops both laughter and thought: her coat is open and she wraps her legs round the back of his. There is something desperate in her kisses, a blind insatiable seeking like that of a burrowing creature anxious to hide away from the daylight. Composure has gone: the mask of cool self-possession replaced by shut eyes and hot urging mouth. Kenny is hard and randy, but he wants to pee. The lump is painful in his trousers, part erection and part pissproud. He gropes for her breasts, encounters their soft rise and fall beneath the material of her dress, and Eileen makes a guttural noise which vibrates against his gums. She wrenches her mouth away and reaches below.

‘Is it out?'

‘What?' Kenny says, taken aback.

‘Get it out… I want it, I want it.'

Her hands are at his belt, unfastening the buckle and drawing the end through the loops. She unzips him and Kenny feels the rush of cold air between his legs and then the luxurious sense of release as it uncoils itself from its cramped hiding place and stands up at full stretch, giving off heat and a delicate but unmistakable odour.

‘Fucking hell,' Eileen whispers, taking hold.

Kenny has never been appreciated in this way before; it brings him quickly to the boil so that he wants to get on with the job without further delay. But Eileen is in control of the situation: she is like a greedy little girl who can't wait to get at the chocolate eclairs but knows the feast will be all the more enjoyable if only she can be patient.

‘Isn't it nice,' she says in a breath, holding on to him. ‘And big.'

‘You're fantastic,' Kenny tells her.

‘I love it. I love holding it. I bet it feels great sticking up hard. Does it feel great?'

‘Yeh.'

‘Do you like me holding it? What do you like best: if I hold it or work it up and down like this?'

‘I don't really mind,' Kenny says breathing in and out slowly. He can't believe what is happening is actually happening. He's heard about girls like this but didn't credit the stories as being true. The tension is too much: he is nearly coming: he says, ‘Go easy, kid. Bloody hell. Jesus. You're fantastic.'

Eileen smiles at him in the darkened corner, the weak light from the window shining on her protruding teeth and wet lips. She moves below and encircles him with her mouth, her head moving rhythmically up and down, her hair brushing the insides of his thighs. Kenny lies back amongst the waste paper and cellophane wrappings, lost to the world, the focal point of his existence concentrated on the incredible smooth sliding hotness.

He is nearly at the point of no return and has to stop her before it is too late. Eileen raises her head and brings her open sticky mouth down on his. They fight each other with their tongues, their lips snarling in silent rage. Eileen frees herself from her clothing and murmurs in his ear, ‘Do it to me. Go on, Kenny, do it.'

He thinks he understands her but he doesn't – until she pushes his head lower and lower, past her breasts and the bunched clothing at her waist to the warm furry place which is prickly against his cheeks. Tentatively he pokes about, inhaling the heavy intoxicating smell, caught between the two conflicting emotions that if he doesn't fuck her right this minute he will have to go for a piss.

Eileen begins to moan and move her legs, then starts to gasp like a distance runner on the final sprint; her breathing is hoarse,
shocked, between ecstasy and a cry for help, and just when Kenny is debating the next move grips him by the hair and one ear and hauls him up to lie full-length on top of her. In a moment – a mad jerking panic – it is all over. The tension is released, the iron weight in his belly turns into a balloon, and apart from wanting badly to urinate he feels quite peaceful.

‘Do you think we'll get back all right?' Eileen asks, pulling her tights up.

‘We'll thumb it,' Kenny says, disentangling his underpants from his boots. ‘I've done it before. If we start off early we should be home by teatime.'

‘All the lot of us?'

‘We'll split up. You and me together and the rest of them in ones and twos.'

The cellophane crackles as Eileen stands up and smoothes the wrinkles from her dress. ‘I'm starving.'