Brass Page 6

  I wasn’t supposed to be there.

  I stayed up there til I heard the horn of the taxi, the front door open, the slam of the door, the click of her heels on the path, the taxi pulling away and the low rumble of its engine fading into the night, gone, gone, gone. Along with my mother. I waited some more for the taxi to come back and when it didn’t, I finished my smoke and went inside.

  Grandad was sat at the kitchen table, eyes wide and unfocused, clutching a glass of brandy. He was shocked to see me. I wasn’t supposed to be there. Dad was stooped over the sink, filling the kettle with water. From the back, he looked as old as Grandad. I loitered in the doorway that separated the kitchen from the conservatory. Grandad pulled a chair out, signalled for me to sit down. There was an envelope on the table. He passed it to me. I tore it in four and tossed it into the bin. There could be no reason. Dad’s eyes burnt wearily, pleadingly, from a face that had suddenly acquired a lifetime of crevices. I couldn’t look at him, could not go to him. I slunk upstairs, packed an overnight bag and biked it over to the Keeley’s.

  Mrs Keeley put me in the boys’ room and the three of us drank bottled Makeson and stayed up for the Naseem fight. Naseem was up against a young Mexican, agile as hell, his punches quick and sure – but stripped of all confidence. He simply did not believe he should be in that ring with Prince Naseem. Naseem stood him up with a left hook thirty seconds into the second round and that was that. He tried to cling on, right through the count of ten – but his body was beat and finished. His face at the final bell reminded me so much of my stooped old Dad’s in the kitchen. Sad yet dignified. Soaked with loss.

  I crawled into bed around four but although my body was heavy from grief and shock and sheer exhaustion, I slept not a wink. The night was punctured by alien noises – a party from the house next door, water gurgling in the plumbing, a dog howling, the raw cry of help from a woman in the distance and the constant churn of Hackney cabs picking up and dropping off. I felt safe there, though. I felt happy in that room. The air throbbed with the soothing smells and sounds of the Keeley boys, and when the first shafts of daylight pierced the paper-thin curtains, I pulled the blanket over my head and clung to the night like a dying joint.

  When I eventually went back home, Dad had put the house up for sale. It was a big, airy Victorian. Five bedrooms, Belfast sinks, deep, old, cast-iron baths and beautifully manicured gardens. It sold quickly. Half the money from the sale went to Mum. She’d called a hundred times while I was at Jamie’s, but I didn’t phone her back. I couldn’t. Three or four times I saw her waiting for me – at the bus stop, at the end of the road, just waiting, waiting, waiting. I turned and walked away.

  We moved into our new house two weeks before Christmas, the day before my eighteenth. It was a box house, really – a Glovedale Road terrace on the other side of the railway line. It was a neat enough street, neat and nonedescript – the sort of street where the Masons’ live. It was fine. I hated it.

  When we moved in, we both, silently, independently, moved Mum out. At least I thought we had. Into the boxes and crates went all the feminine, the womanly, the motherly trappings. The touch and the soul that had capered through the old house was packed and sealed and taken away.

  The house now resembles a bachelor’s pad. The walls are dusty and unadorned. Our previous garden, a tumbling miasma of brilliant colours and sensations has now waned into a small ugly yard, brimming with empty whisky and wine bottles that never quite make it to the bottle bank. The fridge that was permanently stacked with organic produce and litres and litres of freshly squeezed juice is now filled with last night’s takeaway and curdled milk. In our stealthy endeavour to get over her, we have only carved her memory even deeper into our existence.

  Today, walking up Myrtle Street towards campus, she drifts through me again. It’s a patch of her favourite perfume, Gucci, lingering in the air. Gorgeous smelling Mum with her mahogany locks and her alabaster skin. She is out there. She is everywhere.

  Jamie

  I’m usually upbeat of a morning me. Work rarely gets us on a downer and that but every now and again I’ll admit it, I do – I get handicapped by the sheer fucken fruitlessness of it all. Get up, go to work, slog your guts out and come home too spent to enjoy the things that make it all worth the George. Life is shite at times. It is. But like I say, I’m not usually one that gets down in the mouth about it. I’ll just get on with it, me – what will be will be and that.

  On a bit of a downer right now though, to be fair. I had a pint with our Billy last night, didn’t I? He said a few things that got us thinking. About lil’ Millie. He’s been working on the houses up near Knight Street this past month and he’s said, she’s always out – daytimes and all, too. And my aul’ fella saw her staggering up Hope Street last week – on a school night too.

  Fair do’s and that, I know it’s thingio for them students to get fucken hammered every night of the week, and I know most of em come out with half-decent grades end of the day but I can’t help myself – it still burns my head out, all that. Makes us boil if the truth be known. I feel like going over to the hoards of em that congregate in Kinsellas of a morning, all terifically hungover and too done in to go to their lectures, and just laying into em. Fucken made up with emselves, they are. So fucken proud and smug to have gotten emselves in that state – think that’s what it’s all about, they do. Cunts.

  And that’s the one thing that’s always been iffy between Millie and myself, truth be known – she’s fucken blasé. She is, la. I’m not arsed where she’s from or what fucken privileges she’s had from her aul’ folks and that – none of that means fuck all to me. What does my head in is the way she don’t use it. It’s all so fucken easy for the girl. And fuck la, I don’t like saying none of this, I truly do not like having to even think this shite, but there’s times when I know she’s just slumming it. She is. Pissing her days away in them slimy hovels up behind the Uni – fuck’s she trying to prove end of the day?

  I take a slash and peer over my shoulder, into the mirror. My reflection flinches back, guilty as fuck.

  Fuck are you kidding, anyway? It’s not even that that’s bringing you down this morning – not if you’re honest with yourself. It’s all to do with the other thing what Billy’s told you isn’t it? He’s meeting Millie for a couple after he knocks off this avvy. Said he whistled down to her from his ladder. Said she was made up. Never mentioned you. Couldn’t exactly push the lad could you, but he never said nothing. Never said she’d mentioned you.

  Millie

  None of the course books are in the library. And the ones which should be in the ‘Do Not Remove’ section have of course been removed, which means I’ll have to buy them. I begrudge blowing fifteen quid on a book I’ll only plagiarise and chuck to the back of a cupboard. My guts pucker when I think about the selfish cunt who’s done that – someone who was sitting in the same lecture room less than twenty minutes ago. Looks like I’ll be piloting my new shoplifting system at Waterstones, then.

  I discovered last week on entering the shop, that our University library books activate their alarm system. I was asked by Security to empty my bag. When his search yielded nothing more than two dishevelled library books, he simpered his apologies. And that got me thinking. As long as I make a point of showing my library books on the way in, I can exit with whatever I want – can’t I?

  In the library I get my own back by removing a couple of third year key texts and placing them on a shelf devoted to urban regeneration in Korea. It’ll take weeks for the library staff to locate them. See how someone else likes it. Then feeling a little more cheerful I go to the obese and elaborate section that is Sociology and find row P. And then the book with code number P 654 1769 AB which is as familiar as a best friend’s number. Crime and Deviance in Contemporary Britain by Jerry O’Reilley. I pull the book down and flick to the fourth page in. ‘To Andrea and Millie’ it reads – ‘For all your love and support.’ I read it again and again and I am filled wi
th such a deep gush of happiness that it hurts. I stand on my tiptoes and slide it back on the top shelf, where it belongs. Alongside Marx and Engels and the other founding fathers of Sociology.

  By the time I reach Waterstones, I’m radiant as hell. The sun is shining – a gorgeous late October sun. Warm, but not oppressive. And Billy has left a message on my mobile confirming our drink for three o’clock at The Grapes. Fantastic! That’ll give me time to plough through some work and steal a few Stellas at The Blackburne beforehand. (All bottled beers half price between 12 and 2.)

  I swipe the necessary course books, Deconstructing Shakespeare and Postfeminism and Literature and march out, head held high. On leaving the shop, I am struck with a childish sense of getting away with it and celebrate by handing over a couple of quid to a Big Issue vendor and insist that he keeps the mag. I light us each a cigarette, flash him a devastating smile then caper back uptown towards The Number Seven where I aim to drink obscene amounts of coffee and write an essay that amounts to genius.

  Walking past Slater Street I notice that the area is gradually becoming pedestrianised. There are new bars, coffee shops and restaurants cropping up all over the place. I don’t like it. The city is starting to take on the guise of a salesman who lacks faith in what he is selling. Artificial. Insincere. A barrage of plush eateries bought by drug money and run by pseudo gangsters who lack the erudition to pull it off. Menu’s that try too hard and waitresses with ugly vernaculars and kindergarten understanding of wines. I love this city, I do. I love these streets and all the hunger and resoluteness that throbs through them. I’ll miss them. I’ll miss them like fuck, but once I’ve finished Uni, I’m off.

  * * *

  As I’m crossing Falkner street, I catch sight of a man in a maroon Rover, parked up outside The Number Seven. I half recognise the registration but the sun has cast a blinding shield across the window so the man is nothing more than a silhouette. I draw closer and the sun dips behind a cloud. It takes a while for my eyes to recover from the dramatic experience of light but when they do, I see that the silhouette has a face.

  It belongs to Terry Matthews.

  He’s staring right into me.

  My legs turn to liquid. I stare into the nowhere of the cobbled street and scud headlong past his car, past The Seven and across Catherine Street. I swerve hard right onto Little Percy Street and when I’m sure I’m out of sight, I break into a run. I sprint through a maze of side streets and alleyways, this way and that, doubling back on myself lest he snare me. Everything around me is hyper-real. Intense and slow. I drift past a hooker and her john, past a gaggle of tramps glugging greedily on bottles of raw liquor, laughing raucously. I cross a decrepit housing estate that spews me back out onto Parliament Street, where the freshly laid tar of the street sucks at my trainies and slows my pace. When I reach Princess Avenue I pick up my pace again and run faster and faster down the grassy central reservation where people and trees recede on either side like the dark sides of a tunnel, finally collapsing at the side of a duck pond in Sefton Park.

  I met Terry Matthews in Shenanigans – another solitary drinking haunt, the Christmas we moved into Glovedale. I was savouring a pint of Stella before heading off to the Mandarin for Mr Keeley’s 50th. Terry walked in and my heart vaulted. His face was spellbinding – nefariously chiselled with thick lips and steely blue eyes. He looked like a thug. As I was leaving, I downed a couple of stiffs and handed him a box of matches with my name and number scribbled on. He called within seconds of me walking out of the door and we arranged to meet the next day.

  He picked me up outside Moorfields and took me to a café on the Dock Road, where the smell of rancid fat clung like a skin to your clothes and your hair. He was telling me something, Terry. By bringing me here, he was telling me how it would be. He was warning me. My cunt was almost sick with anticipation.

  He drove me to an industrial estate and he fucked me. It was shattering, draining – I rode him in the seat of his car, but it was him fucking me. I’d never, never been fucked that way before. His eyes never left me throughout. As he drove deep inside me, his steely eyes never left my face – and they told me nothing.

  I was dizzy with him. Madly in love. And when he dropped me off later I willed him to die on his way home, so I could preserve the last forty-eight hours forever. So that nothing we could do or say would taint that chink of history.

  He didn’t call the next day.

  I texted him.

  He didn’t reply.

  I felt anxious for days. Empty. Debilitated. Despondent. It hurt. Hurt like fuck. I made love to him in my head one last time then purged him from my memory for good.

  Five months later, I saw him at the Mayday fair in Sefton Park. He was carrying a little girl on his shoulders with golden locks and a button-cute face sticky with candyfloss. I couldn’t help smiling at her. They ran to meet a woman with a severe red bob and a face so perfect and symmetrical it looked airbrushed. I followed them for a while, my thudding heart lurching over empty beer cans, weaving through bodies, bruised and nearly broken. And when he slipped an arm around her tiny nipped in waist, and planted a kiss on top of her head, something inside me curled up and died. What I lost right there and then were the last remnants of my girlhood – lost in one simple and crushing moment. The invincibility of adolescence was gone. And as I sobbed and fought my way beyond the screaming crowds and blurred mechanical beats, I swore I would never allow myself to fall so helplessly, pathetically in love again.

  But by the time I reach the Grapes, I’m tipsy and content and that gnawing knot in my chest has begun to loosen. Terry Matthews – who can blame him? Not me. Not any more. As I made my way back into town, a burst of rain had plunged me into The Belvedere. It was like walking into the front parlour – like coming home. A belligerent throng of original denizens was holding court in there – Horris, Miss Mary, Vinnie and Kenny, all chattering effusively, nonsensically, about days long gone. I sat with them for a while, a one woman audience, drinking in their madness, storing their conversations and before I knew it I was late. I bribed Kenny into sneaking me a fingernail’s worth of Miss Mary’s beak and skeddadled.

  Billy Keeley is sat in a corner with two lads of similar age, both sporting skins and hard faces. He introduces us all to each other but I don’t digest their names. The better looking of the two has a lively intelligent face, with a deep scar that tracks from the side of his mouth to his chin. He’s in workwear – navy kecks and a ribbed Army and Navy store pullover, rolled up at the arms. Glowering from under his left sleeve are a gang of indecipherable prison tattoos that look as though they’ve been scribbled on with a fading biro. His eyes are brilliantly astute, flickering with questions, slashed with deep, dark thoughts. He catches me studying him and holds my gaze.

  My tummy dips and I look away.

  I sit down opposite the three of them and divert my attention to The Sport on the table. Kelly Brook’s on the front cover in a lime bikini. I pick up the paper. She’s looking straight into the lens but her body is turned away slightly. The result is unflattering. She looks wide. Not fat – just wide. I chuck the paper back and stand to get the round in. Billy can’t decide between a Stella and a JD and the expression he’s wearing tells me he wants both. But his mates have other plans. They decline with phoney pride and gulp down the remains of their pints conclusively. When I return from the bar they’ve gone. I throw my eyebrows together and feel the corners of my mouth slide down my face.

  ‘Something I said?’

  ‘Nah babe – official clocking off time innit? Stay out any longer and their wives’ll come a looking.’

  My heart sinks for a moment.

  ‘Wives? How old are they?’

  ‘Twenty-one, twenty-two.’

  Billy’s eyes match what I’m thinking.

  ‘Bin lids?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Then… why?’

  ‘Dunno, kidder.’

  ‘Like – how can anyone –
especially a young bloke – entertain a life sentence of monogamy at that age?’

  He shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘I mean could you, Billy? Even if you thought you’d met the love of your life. Could you confine yourself to one pair of tits and one hole forever?’

  ‘No. Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. But for most fellas, marriage ain’t about that, is it?’

  ‘So you’re saying they put it about.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  A feeling of relief seeps through me. Confirmation of the impossibility of monogamy – and the impossibility of true love.

  Billy stares beyond me philosophically, then without warning thrusts his eyes into mine.

  ‘So tell us then, Mill – and you’re not allowed time to think on this, I just want you to give us an honest answer, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, a mantle of panic grazing my arms.

  ‘What did you think of our kid’s announcement – him and her?’

  The bluntness of the question shocks me a little. I scour his face to see if it’s some kind of trick question but all I see is a mildly tipsy Billy.

  ‘Fantastic,’ I say, ‘I think they’re really good for each other.’

  And I say it with such a seamless sincerity that I almost convince myself of it.

  ‘Aaah, suppose you’re right. He could do worse than that Anne Marie, end of the day. Thinks the fucken world of her, he does.’

  I immediately regret answering so disingenuously. I could’ve given him a lead-in, there. If I’d have presented him with the opportunity to say how he really felt, it might’ve offered me some fucking insight to why I so badly resent Jamie’s happiness. I’ve exhausted every possibility, even the most painful and unlikely explanation, I’ve dragged to the surface and analysed to fuck and still I come no closer to understanding why I feel the way I do. All I know is that there’s suddenly a rift between me and Jamie that is gently but immutably nudging us off in our own different directions. I take a sup of my pint and try raising the subject again, but the expression on Billy’s face has already moved on.