Bully (12 page)

I suppose that was why we liked Burt’s back in the day. It had an air of lawlessness about it which appealed to us. Two mouldy dogs wandered about the shop, in amongst the foodstuffs and the sweets, so if you ever bought a sandwich from there, you always had to check it first for stray black hairs. Towards the back of the shop, I remembered there being two old arcade machines which we could generally rob for a few extra coins if needs be.

Everything
was old and decaying in the shop, and that included Burt. He was a big brute of a man, but he wasn’t all there; half of his teeth were missing, the rest were little black gravestones which peeked out of his rotten gums. He spat when he talked and always had all kinds of crap all over his fingers. It was as though he wiped his arse with his hand.

Burt pretended he hated all us lads. He’d shout at us for a while about messing up his shop every time we went in, as though he thought that was what behaviour was demanded of a shopkeeper, but eventually, one of us would always get him onto the subject of his army years, and then he’d drone on at us for hours and hours. The irony of the whole thing was that in a town where everyone died young, the oldest resident was probably the unhealthiest, angriest, and most undesirable of the whole lot. We all thought that Burt would live forever. I wondered if he was still alive now, but concluded that it was impossible.

My dad had once showed me a picture of the exterior of Burt’s shop from a history book. It used to be a butchers shop, and right behind the windows you could see all these carcasses hanging up. The carcasses were the only thing that had changed in the seventy years from when that picture had been taken. It was still a grand old building, but one which looked as though it was halfway through being dismantled by a wrecking ball. It kinda leaned over to one side where the river had eaten away at the banks. Most of the walls were coated in a light covering of moss or mould.

We hadn’t really cared what the place looked like as long as Burt would give us the coffin nails, and fair play to the old chancer, he never questioned our right to decide to die. And in a way, by living in Newton Mills and slipping into the same traps as most of the generations of lads that had come before us, we were kind of deciding to die. Or certainly, we were deciding that our
hopes
would die.

Not one of us even thought about the possibility of leaving the town. I had thought about it in the darkest hours, but I pretty much know for a fact that it simply wasn’t an option for the rest of them.

‘Them’ was generally Paul Morton, Lee Crossett and Richard Featherstone, although none of them were ever referred to by their real names unless by teachers or by (unseen) parents. Paul was called ‘Twinnie’ by basically the whole town on account of the fact that he was born as one half of a set of twins. The fact that his brother Steven died at the age of two didn’t seem to put anyone off calling him that. It was as though once you’d been through the rite of passage of being given a nickname in Newton Mills, nobody or nothing could change that. It was like your destiny.

And nicknames ran across generations too; Lee Crossett was called ‘Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion’ or just ‘Lion’ for short, after some crap 1960s film that nobody of our age had ever heard of, let alone seen. But because his dad had been called ‘Cross-Eyed Lion’ back in the day, it was handed on like a baton which could not be dropped in the sprint relay which was life in the town. Richard Featherstone’s nickname was less interesting; he was simply called Dick, and not in the affectionate
Famous Five
kind of way, which was numb to the very idea of a dick being a body part.

‘Them’ was the reason that I’d come back to Newton Mills, I supposed. One day we’d all done something that still made my blood run cold. Then we’d
started
something that was coming back to haunt us now. I suppose, looking out over Newton Mills and all of the
old
buildings and dilapidated houses and unsafe graveyards, it was an accident waiting to happen to anyone, but the fact that it happened around us four should have been no surprise.

I pulled my fatigue jacket close around my shoulders against the cold. The shivering had started again. I could delay my return no longer. Newton Mills waited.

It wasn’t exactly a hero’s return, my traipsing back into Newton Mills that morning. Once, men returning from war might have expected bunting hanging from the front of the shops on the main street; they might have expected an endless amount of free drinks lined up on the bar of the Royal Oak or the Mason’s Arms. They’d certainly have expected the fluttering eyelashes of the local lovelies. Everyone loved a man in uniform.

Not any longer, it seemed. As I limped down Eaves Knoll Road and out of the thick cover of trees, I saw numerous curtains twitched and a few cars slowed to see if they could ascertain my business. Eaves Knoll Road took me down a steep slope which I found incredibly difficult to creak down, but nobody emerged from their dark houses in order to give the footless man a hand. Newton Mills was a town of hills; the land rises and falls with the old contours as set by the river. It was not ideal terrain for me.

When I finally gained Main Street, I was breathless and windswept and my hair, as I saw in a shop window, was matted against the sides of my head. More people were out on the streets here; old dears going about their daily shop; old men drinking on the promenade; truants drinking their leftovers. Still nobody spoke to me though. I began to feel like an invisible man. Until I saw Dick, that was.

I saw him first. It was unmistakeably him. Although he’d let his hair grow a little longer than he usually had it, I would have still recognised that bullet-head of his anywhere. As I would the leer which was constantly plastered across his mean face and the way that he always slouched when he moved anywhere, even now. He was backing out of the Main Street Caff, trying simultaneously to drag out a purple twin-seater pushchair, swig from a bottle of White Lightning and ward off the attentions of the café owner. The pushchair was too wide for the doorway and kept getting stuck. The owner of the café kept reaching over and trying to make a grab for Dick’s bottle.

‘You can’t be drinking like this around kids,’ he shouted, small-town knowitall that he was.

‘Fuck off,’ blared Dick. He’d never had any volume control, that one.

A crowd had started to develop now. Tutting young mothers and disapproving local businessmen shook their heads and secretly enjoyed the little break from the day to day mundanity of small-town life. I tried to melt into the background a little longer, just so’s I could observe Dick in his natural state and surroundings, but he soon spotted me.

‘What you lookin’ at, soldier boy?’ he roared. And then he tried his death-stare on me. And then, even through his drink-stained eyes, something sparked within him and he knew me.

‘Gaz!’ he shouted. ‘Bully!’

He barged through the crowd, leaving his pushchair blocking the entrance to the shop. He was on me before I knew it; all daft, drunken-man bear-hugs and slaps on the back. As he reached to put his thick arm around me, he sloshed some of his cider onto my uniform.

‘Soz, man,’ he said, trying to wipe it away with the sleeve of his tracksuit top.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘Chill.’

And Dick certainly looked as though he needed to chill. He’d always been an edgy character, but now he seemed as though he was a walking time-bomb. His eyes constantly flickered from side to side. He masticated furiously on a piece of chewing gum; choddy, we used to call it. On close inspection, his face was deathly pale and covered with yellowy-green spots. He looked as though he was on something, and had been for a good while now. And whatever he was on, it was something harder than goddamn White Lightning.

‘Come on. Let’s go ferra pint,’ he continued, mouth going ten to the dozen. He pointed at the Royal Oak, as though I wasn’t aware that you could indeed buy a pint from a pub. ‘There’s something I need to tell you. Something bad…’

I narrowed my eyes and looked at him. In the background I could hear the café owner shouting for us to come and collect the pushchair from out front of his shop. I could hear the Main Street shoppers tutting in unison at Dick’s forgetting his own children. But above all of that, I could hear the sound of little Tommy Peaker’s laughter. It was echoing down to me from the creaking pub-sign for the Royal Oak. It was rustling through the shopping bags and creeping through the bins. It fair thunder-cracked across the Newton Mills promenade.

‘I know what you’re going to tell me,’ I said softly, feeling tears pricking at my eyes. ‘Lion’s dead, isn’t he?’

If it were possible, Dick’s face grew even more pallid. A simple nod told me that I’d followed death halfway across the world and that I was too late.

Chapter Eight

“
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye”

If some smarmy TV executive was looking for a decent location for a pub scene in some 1970s drama, they could have done worse than take a look at the Royal Oak (or the Royal Choke, as most Newton Millsians called it). It was a desperate place. Stuck in a time-warp; a living museum to the time when, most likely, women weren’t even allowed to cross the threshold and men defined themselves as men by spitting into their own pints, as well as those of their friends.

My old grandfather, old drunk that he was, used to tell an amusing tale about the Choke. Apparently, there was this one guy used to go in on his own and prop up the bar all day every day. But he was renowned for being a tight-arse. Wouldn’t stand even his next door neighbour a pint when the poor guy’s wife had topped herself. And I don’t know if the story’s true, and it would be a typically Newton Mills story if it was, but eventually, the old bastard’s tightness started to descend to new levels. Driven mad by the fact that someone
might
sup his ale when it was unguarded when he went to the toilet, he started to ask the landlord to stick the pint behind the bar, where nobody could get to it. But madness, and years and years of drink eventually made our guy even more paranoid. In the end, he started to suspect that the landlord himself was the one helping himself to the beer.

Eventually, he came up with a fool-proof plan. Or what he thought was a fool-proof plan. He wrote a brief, blunt note on a beer mat, with a pen he stole from the bookies for that very purpose. ‘I have spitted in this drink,’ he wrote, in his spidery, drunken hand. Oh the guy must have loved the fact that he could finally luxuriate in having a long horse-like beer-piss in peace, without that doubt constantly nagging at him. He could take the time to wash his hands and even try to use the broken old dryer in the corner.

But what he hadn’t reckoned on was that Newton Mills spirit. The one which said
fuck ‘em all.
The one which my grandfather and his pals held as their badge of honour. When our now totally-pleased-with-himself guy comes back from the toilet, he saw the beer mat still in place by the side of his pint glass. (And mind it was a pint glass one with no handles; my grandfather always used to add at this point: ‘never trust a man that needs handles on his pint.’) As our guy approached the bar, he saw, with a sinking heart, that his scrawl was not the only writing on the back of the beer mat. Underneath, in the confident block capitals of a younger man was written: ‘SO HAVE I!’

Of course, our guy didn’t know whether to drink or to look for any traces of spittle in the glass, or worse, hand the pint back. And as his internal monologue continued to play out in his head, he must have heard my grandfather and his mates from the toffee works spluttering with laughter; spilling their own pints in the desire to congratulate themselves on their own youthful ingenuity.

The sad conclusion to the story was the fact that the last time I saw my grandfather, it was he that propped up the bar of the Choke on his own. All of his mates were gone; dead, banged up, missing in action. And it was my grandfather that raged against the arrogance of youth, often reaching over to give me a clip round my ear for being too loud before he even realised that it was me he was chastising.

In a way, the Choke was the place that told the story of the misspent hopes and dreams of Newton Mills far more than the town library or the school or the graveyards. From the mottled brass table tops to the plates which were nailed to the walls, only slightly masking the yellowing stains from a hundred years of cigarette smoke; from the plastic carpet protector which surrounded the old bar and stuck to the soles of your shoes if you tried to walk away, to the constantly closed frilly blinds; nothing had changed. Every sad detail of the place seemed engineered to force the regulars to drink more. The place seemed to give off the same sense of hopeless decay as I’d felt clinging to me ever since Tommy’s return.

I smiled gingerly at the barman – a young lad, surprisingly – and hoped that he’d finish pouring our drinks before realising just how bad a state Dick was in. I’d had to drag Dick in off the street, and he was now drumming his impatient fingers on the top of the bar, furtive eyes darting off here, there and everywhere. Behind the bar, where the barman couldn’t see from his vantage point, Dick’s feet were performing some impromptu jig. I’d already had to shush his constant questions.

‘Wait until we sit down,’ I said, giving him an icy warning stare. We were lucky that none of the crowd from outside had chosen to follow us in.

Dick moaned under his breath. Leaned down closer to the bar. Looked as though he was going to start smashing his head against the taps. As it was, he seemed to take all of his aggression out on a new piece of chewing gum; rolling his mouth around it as though pummelling it into submission.

‘Is he all right?’ asked the young barman, fingers itching to stop pouring the lager. Itching to be able to assert his one and only right; to be able to bar people that were too pissed-up to stand up.