Thicker Than Water (37 page)

Mum was looking at me with a solemn, musing expression, the heat of her anger gone as quickly as it had come. ‘Three years,’ she said, softly. ‘Three years, Fix.’

‘I did call,’ I countered, but it was a feeble defence. The last time had been more than a year before, to ask her how she was doing when Matt had told me she was recovering from a chest infection. It had turned out to be low-grade pneumonia, and I’d still found reasons not to come up and visit. Given the dista›Givhe nces involved, there
was
no defence. From London to Liverpool is three hours or so with good traffic: in America people drive further than that to pick up a carton of milk.

So I brought her up to speed on my life, going light on the succubi, zombies and were-beasts and heavy on my recent wanderings after Pen kicked me out of her house. I know my audience, you see: Mum favours Matt because he went to God and I went to the devil. So when she asked me if I was seeing anyone, I ducked the whole story of my infatuation with Juliet, and how a demon from Hell had ditched me for a Sapphic fling with a church warden. ‘I’ve been seeing a nurse,’ I told her, which was unassailable truth and could be said without blushing.

All of this was really just a way of not talking about Matt, and when I ran out of anecdotes that were fit to print, I found I still wasn’t ready to go there.

‘You getting out much?’ I asked, throwing the ball of procrastination into her court.

Mum shook her head emphatically. ‘What for, Fix? I’ve got everything I need here in this room. I watch the telly, listen to the radio. Put a bet on, when it’s the flat season. You know me and my accumulators. Three cross doubles . . .’ ‘. . . And a treble,’ I finished. ‘The mini-Yankee. Yeah, I remember. Still listening to Sing Something Simple?’

‘It’s not on any more,’ she said. ‘But there’s still Billy Butler on a Saturday.’

Billy Butler, and his Sony bronze award-winning show,
Hold Your Plums
. It used to have Matt and me giggling our heads off when we were kids. Only Scousers could come up with a radio quiz based on a fruit machine, with a robotic voice telling you what was showing on each reel.

‘Billy Butler,’ I said. ‘Christ.’ It was the only comment that seemed to fit.

‘Oh aye,’ Mum agreed. ‘I never change, me. I’ve had enough changes in my life, Fix. I’m happy with what I’ve got, these days.’

What you’ve got is nothing, Mum, I thought but didn’t say. Everyone you used to know is dead or somewhere else. And you’re stuck here in Walton like a fly caught in amber. Although pale ale doesn’t quite have that golden-brown lustre to it. It’s more the colour of piss.

‘Ever see anyone from Arthur Street?’ I asked.

This time Mum didn’t answer. She looked at me thoughtfully, waiting for more. ‘Anyone from the old days, I mean,’ I clarified.

Still nothing. She took another long swig from her glass.

‘I know a lot of people moved to the Triangle,’ I went on. ‘After they knocked down—’

‘What are you here for, Fix?’ Mum asked, putting down her empty glass. ‘Really?’

‘You mean besides seeing you?’

‘That’s what I mean, yes.’

‘It’s about Matt,’ I said, bluntly. ‘You know who it is he’s meant to have attacked?’

‘Kenny Seddon.’

‘So I was thinking I’d shake the tree a bit. Talk to some people who might know more than I do about what Kenny was up to before—’

‘Before someone sliced him up like a bacon joint.’

‘Well, essentially. Yeah.’

Mum nodded, straight-faced. ‘Go on, then. Who’s on your list?’

‘Anita and Richie Yeats,’ I said. ‘And Kenny’s brothers, Ronnie and Steve. Do you have any idea where they ended up?’

‘The Yeatses are over in Bootle now,’ Mum said, counting them off on her fingers. ‘That’s Eddie and Rita Yeats, I mean – Rita Brydon as was. I haven’t seen Anita in donkey’s years. Richie was living with them, or so Ernie Hampson said, but I heard they gave him down the banks and showed him the door.’

Her expression told me that something momentous was being left unsaid. ‘Why was that, then?’ I asked. ‘Gave him down the banks for what?’

Mum pursed her lips. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know. A grown man, and he’s never done a day’s bloody work in his life. He’s a waster, Fix, and there’s nothing down for him. Some people are never going to do any good for themselves if you give them a hundred years. And he’s – you know . . .’ Mum made the limp-wrist gesture.

‘He’s gay?’ I said blankly.

Mum pursed her lips and nodded.

‘You’re saying they kicked him out because he’s
gay
?’

Mum stood her ground. ‘Well, you don’t want your son bringing strange men into the house, do you?’ she demanded. ‘Some of these people—’

‘Thanks for the tip, Mum,’ I said, cutting her off. And thinking of Juliet I added, ‘At least he didn’t go outside his own species.’

I think the homophobia must be a generational thing: it’s certainly not class or geography, because you can meet the same bullshit in Hampstead just as easily. I remembered now that Richie had made some non-standard life choices even as a kid – he was the only boy in my circle of acquaintances with a skipping rope – but I’d never read anything into that. Maybe someone else had, though: maybe the nickname Dick-Breath was more than just a whimsical
jeu de mots
.

‘Now Ronnie Seddon -‘ another finger went down ‘- he was selling drugs at the Palm Tree, until he tried to sell them to a couple of plain-clothes coppers, so that was the end of him. He got three years in Walton. Mind yo›Wal dru, there’s more drugs in there than there is anywhere else, from what I hear, so he’s probably happy. Teresa Size’s lad, Philip, was saying they smuggle them in over the wall from the cemetery on Hornby Road. They use catapults, he said. Just tie Jiffy bags full of heroin to old batteries and shoot them in with catapults.’

Mum recounted this with relish. Her favourite reading matter had always been true crime, although she preferred a good murder to any amount of aggravated robbery.

‘Then there’s Steven Seddon,’ she said. ‘He was at the docks for a while, back when they still had a few ships coming in every now and then. But he gave that up in the end and went to some night-school thing. He’s at a law office in the Cunard, now, and he wears a suit. I’ve seen him waiting for the bus up at the broo, looking like Lord Muck. I wouldn’t trust him with a bloody paper clip.’

‘Would any of them still drink at the Breeze?’ I asked.

Mum made a sour face. ‘Richie might, though it’s a bloody mystery to me why anyone would go back to that place. Harold Keighley is the most miserable bastard of a landlord I’ve ever met, God forgive my language. He opens the doors when he puts the towel up, so the place gets as cold as a fridge.’

The description made me grin: I remembered those winter nights when the determination to finish your last drink clashed with the onset of hypothermia. ‘Does he still do that, then?’ I asked.

‘It’s hard for a leopard to change its spots, Fix,’ she said sententiously. ‘And Keighley doesn’t even change his bloody underwear more than twice a year.’

Mum got up and went into the kitchen again, coming back with two bottles of pale this time. She opened both with a kitchen tin opener – one of the old kind that have two hooked blades, one large and one small, and look like exotic torture implements. She handed a bottle to me, and I took it because I knew if I refused she’d drink them both herself.

We drank, and reminisced, as evening fell outside. At half past seven there was a pause while Mum watched
Coronation Street
and I made a foray to the off-licence at the top of the street. Then we drank and reminisced some more.

‘Mum,’ I said, when I judged that she was mellow enough to roll with the impact, ‘Matt left home around the same time I did, didn’t he?’

Mum nodded. ‘Same year,’ she confirmed. ‘His first parish was in Birmingham. Our Lady of Zion. You went to Oxford in September, and Matty left in December. He gave his first sermon two weeks before Christmas. You remember? We all came up for it.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I remember. But he was ordained in April. So what was he doing in between times?’

Mum gave me a look that was a couple of centuries too ripe to be merely old-fashioned. ‘He was learning to be a priest,’ she said. ‘He’d been ordained, aye, so he wasn’t a deacon any more, but it isn’t like an assembly line, Fix. They had all sorts of things he had to ›ingriedo first. Seminars, he called them. A seminar here and a seminar there. All up and down the country, he was, and living out of a suitcase. Except it wasn’t a suitcase, it was just a big shapeless bag with two handles that he got from the Army and Navy. Six feet long.’ She illustrated with her hands. ‘He looked like he was carrying a bloody bazooka, honest to God. If it was nowadays, someone would think he was a terrorist and shoot him.’

That brought her too close to the painful subject of Matt’s current situation, so she shied away from it again. ‘He was everywhere,’ she concluded. ‘Running around like a blue-arsed fly.’

‘But he was still living at the seminary? Over in Skem?’

‘In Upholland? No, after that big – you know, passing-out parade thing, where the bishop put the oil on him, and gave him his Jezebel – they needed his room for someone else. He stayed there until the autumn, when they had the new lads in, then he came back here.’

‘Jezebel’ was Mum’s mispronunciation of chasuble, the sleeveless robe that a priest wears on top of all his other vestments when he does the business at Mass. I was never sure whether it was a joke or an actual mistake: after all, her mangled renderings of song lyrics, including turning Fun Boy Three’s ‘Our Lips are Sealed’ into ‘Olives to See You’, were legendary.

But what made my ears prick up was the revelation that Matt had come back home in between the seminary and his first ministry. I was already off out in the world by that time, screwing up my degree course, and I don’t think I came home once in the first two terms.

‘Back to Walton?’ I asked, making sure I was getting this straight.

‘Back to this house, Fix. Where else was he going to go?’

I nodded, conceding the point. ‘So he was around for three months,’ I said. ‘Back in circulation. Looking up old friends.’

Mum sniffed. ‘I don’t know about that. He saw some of them, aye, but he wasn’t going to walk in the Breeze and stand at the bar with them, was he? It’s not that kind of life, when you’re a man of the cloth. You’ve got to stand aloof.’

The conversation veered off in other directions, by virtue of some unspoken agreement that passed between us. Nostalgia and beer are a potent combination in themselves; and when Mum got the photo album out and cracked it open in the middle we had the emotional perfect storm. There we all were: Matt and me in short trousers, Dad all tanned and handsome – ‘a dark horse’, my grandma used to call him, with mingled disapproval and admiration – and Mum looking like a million dollars.

‘Where did it go?’ I asked, wonderingly. ‘We just—’ I couldn’t find a word for it, so I pantomimed it instead – holding my hand in front of my face with the fingers pursed together, then opening it wide. ‘Where did that come from? One minute we’re a family, the next we’re . . . in the wind.’

Mum didn’t answer. She just turned a few pages in the book back and folded i›ck eigt open at a page we hadn’t seen yet. There were three photos on the page: the first, Mum holding a baby, the baby all swathed in pink blankets and pink bonnet and pink everything; the second, the three Castor siblings in school uniforms, wearing the pained grimaces children always put on when they’re told to smile; and the third, Katie by herself, aged four, smiling a smile that was altogether more believable – a smile with secret, solemn little-kid thoughts behind it.

I stared at the photos, suddenly sober despite the seven or eight beers I’d downed.

‘It took a while,’ Mum said, her tone soft. ‘It didn’t happen all at once.’

I didn’t leave Nimrod Street until almost ten p.m., by which time I’d drowned that little nugget of cold, hard sobriety in a few more beers and a lot more talk. But the talk was getting harder and harder to sustain, and the question of where I was going to spend the night was getting more and more pressing.

Mum had offered me a bed, which I’d declined with thanks. The impassable ground again: the conversation leading us into the middle of a minefield and leaving us there without a map or a metal detector. She’d asked me about Matt. When had I last seen him and how was he doing? I’d passed the question off with some made-up bit of news about his teaching work, because the truth was that I never asked Matt about his life. I never had asked him, I realised now, since the day when he’d walked out of mine.

I walked back up to County Road and grabbed a cab up to Breeze Lane. I could have walked it, but I wanted to get to the Breeze – my Mum and Dad’s old local, ruled over with a rod of rusty iron by the aforementioned Harold Keighley – before the towel went up.

The pub hadn’t changed. They’d rebuilt the entire neighbourhood around it, but the Breeze remained its own sad-ass self, like the filament of platinum in that bullshit metaphor of T. S. Eliot’s. You dip it into a mixture of oxygen and sulphur dioxide and blam, you’ve got sulphuric acid – but the platinum stays the same, unaffected by the reactions it catalyses. The metaphor sort of falls apart at that point, though, because the Breeze was never the catalyst for anything apart from a thousand drunken fights about who was looking cross-eyed at our Karen and whose grandad had stolen whose great-uncle’s ration book back in the austerity years.

It’s a Tetley pub, probably built around 1920, and since the size of the plot gave the architect no room in which to exercise his imagination it’s just a big blockhouse coated in rough-cast and painted white. The sign is a little classier, because it’s topped with an iron silhouette, painted in bright red, of the liver bird – the mythical short-necked cormorant invented for the purpose by the desperate gofers of the school of heraldry back in the eighteenth century. That was when the city – flush with its winnings from the slave trade – slipped the heralds a backhander and asked them to run up a quick coat of arms.