Crusaders (16 page)

He had assessed and named them. Big Chief Numpty, the
eldest
, the broadest, likely the hardest, undoubtedly the one in charge. His probable deputy? Shoulders, broader there than in the chest, but potentially a handful. And then the Squirt – physically negligible, making up the numbers, therefore most likely to be hiding tools about his person. Hardly the world’s most shit-scary troops. It was their very presence, though, that rattled him – here, of all places, at this unlikely hour. On whose intelligence? Worse, he had been warned, he could not say he hadn’t, he had frankly discounted the threat, and now here it was.

Shack, at least, had seen it too. Why was it only ever Shack with his eyes and his wits about him? The rest of them talked like they were combat veterans. And yet here they sat, yacking still,
horizons
no higher than the next round, the next pub, Keegan’s best eleven, what one would pay for a cordless drill at Argos. Lately he had thought a fair bit about the role of delegation in leadership. Nights such as these reminded him sharply that he remained the chief asset of his business. At 9.47 p.m. he stood, pushed back his chair, vodka-tonic in hand, and strode toward the trio at the bar. The two juniors made to drain their glasses in unison, a pleasing
sign. The eyes of Shoulders darted to the door. As for the Squirt, both eyes and body seemed to jerk in that direction – a bag of nerves, Stevie decided, the sort who would fill his lungs before throwing a punch. But Chief Numpty stood firm in his black suede jerkin, meeting Stevie’s eye. A roll of cash lolled before him on the bar, as if that was cool. How much was he acting it? How true the show of strength? This much Stevie was bent on establishing.

‘Ye’s not for another there, lads?’

‘No chance pal, just dropped in,’ said the Chief. ‘Reckon we can do a little better than this old shithouse the night, right?’

‘Where’ve you’s come from?’ North-west was what Stevie was hearing.

‘Roundabouts,’ said the Chief.

‘What’s it to you?’ offered Shoulders, another Manc.

‘Divvint let us see you back in here.’

Silence. The Chief seemed to be chewing over the challenge.

‘What’s the matter wi’
yee
, like?’ piped the Squirt, in broad Gateshead.

‘You fucken know, you little bollox, so shut yer yap.’

‘Well, see, Steve, we saw that Lexus of yours outside, so we had to look in.’ And Shoulders grinned, as if the knowledge revealed implied mastery.

Stevie levelled a finger. ‘You’d better not have touched that, mind.’

Chief Numpty laid a comradely hand upon Shoulders. ‘Look, here’s what it is, Steve. We’d a friend of yours in our local the other night. Lad name of Mickey, yeh?’

Inwardly Stevie kicked the wall. These days he had more
associates
than he was comfortable with, and Mickey Ash was not the one he would have chosen to represent him in a tight corner.

‘Where the fuck’s your local then? Old Trafford?’

‘
Waallsend
, Stevie, Waallsend,’ said Numpty, in a gruesome stab at an accent. It was contemptible, yes, but Stevie’s spirits were
rising
on the assumption that this shifty shower of shit was the best that Big Mister Skinner of Manchester could send in his direction. The threat had declared itself, but with merely a fraction of the
heft he had been keyed up for. Were matters graver, then Shoulders would not have his hand so near the heavy glass
ashtray
on the bar – though the detail was certainly noteworthy.

‘Aye, right, so you saw Mickey, so the fuck what?’

‘Well, he didn’t stop. Ran off again sharpish.’ As if this Numpty would stand his ground in all weather, outnumbered by however many. ‘Now,
he’s
the one you wanna tell not to be back,’ he added, terse. ‘Best do that, Steven.’

‘Am I your fucken messenger boy?’

‘You’ve been telt,’ offered the Squirt, squeakily excitable.

‘And this’ll be from Lawrie Skinner, right?’

‘You’ve been
telt
, man.’

‘I hear you. Just tell us who I’m telt off.’

‘I speak for meself, Steve,’ said the Chief, chest forward.

‘Whey you maybe do, but you divvint think I’ll listen to a word out of a long streak of piss like you?’

The Chief took a step closer, which Stevie thought intriguing. ‘I’ll tell you this, Steven. We see any more of your ratty little scrote pals round where they know fine well they’re barred – we’ll have to give ’em a proper spanking, yeh? Then we’ll have to take it up with you. And we’ll find you. If it means coming back to this
shithouse
. Then there’ll be more of us, knobhead. And if
that
happens, Steven son, then
you
– are fookin’ –
dead
– yeh?’

Stevie didn’t weigh up the singsong threat: in truth he hardly heard it. He had decided to deck this insufferable cunt during the trashing of Mickey Ash. The mere talk, the rash swagger, had
dispelled
his worry about weapons inside those down-filled coats. And now – like a rank amateur – the cunt had only done him the favour of stepping into Stevie’s sweet spot, just a little to his left, where any excuse for a right he might throw would take about a week to land, time in which Stevie could play at leisure. His
choices
made, Stevie switched his drink to his left hand, reweighed and confirmed his advantage, then took the executive decision to ram it home.

He jerked his left wrist, tossing what remained of the vodka into the face of the hated one, who was blinking and spitting still
as Stevie dropped the glass and raised his fists. The glass shattered as Stevie threw the right-hand jab, breaking Numpty’s nose – he felt the pleasing give – and dumping him onto his arse. As Shoulders ran at him, Stevie was atop his momentum, shoulders relaxed, all power in his hips, and he pivoted smartly, swung a left-leg roundhouse kick to the abdomen, booting the twat, who crumpled and crashed back into the Squirt – a poor outcome for the pair of them. Now Stevie heard scraping chairs behind him, knew without looking that his boys were up and at his back. Shack would shortly be wading in. He glanced to the door, for the front bar was fast emptying of its patrons, much too fast for the Squirt to push his way through to the street. So now he was
groping
in his coat, and – yes, there it was, predictable as rain – a
flashing
blade, of an evil length. Stevie revised his estimate quickly, but not dramatically. There was no conceivable outcome – not a cat in hell’s chance – but that the Squirt and friends were bound for the General tonight. They would not be home for
Match of the Day
.

Stevie didn’t speak of his past, not with mates nor lovers nor
comrades
. As far as he was concerned he had been born unto himself, somewhere round the age of eighteen. The years before had amounted, he would say, to ‘a sack of fucking misery’, from which nothing useful or pleasing or consoling could be fished. There was, though, one sole fragment of an anecdote he would gouge from himself, if set before a receptive audience, strong drink taken, and one or more parties unable to stay silent on the matter of how Big Steve ever got to be so rock – when and how those quads and lats and biceps began their fearsome inflation. If Stevie didn’t mind his inquisitor – thought him genuine, not some chancer probing about for a sore spot – then his tumbler of Johnny Walker was raised to the light, the amber inspected.

‘To Jim Doggett. Who made us what I am the day.’

Invariably the toast was fudged and muttered in the seconding, the big lads almost pitifully solemn to Stevie’s eye – believing, perhaps, that they were saluting some hard-wearing owner of a fighter’s gym or, better yet, a professional trainer. Inevitably a lad who was no fool would decide it were a better thing to stick one’s head above the parapet than to persist in vulnerable ignorance.

‘Who’s Jim Doggett then, Steve?’

‘He was me stepdad.’

‘Aw, right. Good bloke was he?’

‘He was an owld cunt.’ This said as calm as you please. ‘I tell you what, but’ – and Stevie would set down his glass – ‘he had his uses, that Doggett. He taught us the world’s full of his type. So you’d best know how to look after yersel. And you’ve gotta learn
that yer’sel and all, cos nee bugger can give it you on a plate.’ And Stevie would shake his head, as to say that much more – too much – could be related, were there only more hours in an evening. ‘Aye, that Doggett. He raised his hand to wuh when I was just a bairn. And I knew it all then, right there.’

‘He hit
you
?’

As chuckles went round the table, Stevie would give up a ghost of a smile, if only to deepen the mystery. ‘Aye. ’Til I hit him back. Then that was the end of that.’

The story, such as it was, always passed muster if judged by the gravely nodding heads. Inwardly, Stevie knew, the truth was not so clean-cut. He was so familiar with the gauge of his temper, his capacity to shift from stationary to active, that it stung him – truly stung him,
lashed
him – to think of a past he could not alter, not by any measure of physical exertion. To bear such knowledge was to dwell in a jailhouse of impotent fury. And to have stood there and borne insult and injury, to feel his cheeks afire, to feel worse than worthless in the world – to think back on all of this amid calm and solitude was sufficient to make Stevie shudder and curse under his breath, like some ragbag beggar afflicted with Tourette’s. At such times he was gripped by an inner crisis that truly frightened him – a sense of watching himself from a studied distance,
dumbstruck
, appalled.
Who are
you,
then?
Just like the prodding
nose-to-nose
challenge he had heard a thousand times in dank doorways – off of some big Mackem lump, some little Geordie shite. Or the mass taunt of an unwashed horde in a full stadium.
Who are ya? Who are ya?
To Stevie it was devilment, purest evil, and alone he would count the numbers up to ten and back down, until some kind of tranquillity descended.

He should have learned sooner, steeled himself quicker. It should not have happened.

‘Get in, you! Get your shoes on!’

Thus Stevie’s mam forever scolded him in his pint-sized days,
calling him in from the mangy street where he played, since the Coulson yard was no fit size for sport. Rain or shine, Stevie didn’t much care if he was properly shod, indeed would happily run about in his pants. His mother, though, frowned long and hard. Mary had a sweetly lean figure, wore her black hair in friendly bangs, but it was that pinched, niggardly frown that defined her. She was the daughter of a stern man called Len Corbett, a stalwart of the jute mills of Dundee, in whose home Mary was raised to act demure and take no liberties. But a few months shy of her
majority
she had slipped over the border and been very peremptorily charmed, first into bed and then wedlock, by Bobby –
né
Robert – Coulson. And under Bobby’s roof there was leeway for liberties and laxities of all kinds. In the raising of young Steven, Bobby was soft as clarts, and while Mary expected to be heeded she didn’t carry a stick so big as to enforce the principle.

It wasn’t even Bobby’s roof during Stevie’s formative years, since for a time Bobby and Mary were forced to run up an account on his parents’ hospitality. The baby was brought home to Mount Pleasant near Penshaw on Wearside, poor and unlovely terrain, all closes and bungalows, a few redbrick semis, those cramped concrete yards, and one big expanse of scruffy parkland onto which most properties backed out. But small Stevie liked the domestic set-up just fine. Nana Coulson was forever telling him he was a nice-looking lad, with a bonny smile full of good teeth. He never heard such praise out of his mam, but Nana was a wise bird and he believed her.

For Mary, lodging at the Coulsons was undesirable but
bearable
, and for Bobby it was a source of unmanageable frustration. His father George had spent three decades working for Chappell’s the shipbuilder of Wearside, though the firm had lately been merged with a rival and George forced to hump his gear to a new yard. He was a joiner and worked among a hundred others,
insulating
holds and chambers between decks. Outside of George’s earshot, Bobby called him ‘the owld codger’. The slur always earned a sharp rebuke from Mary, who was otherwise unbothered by the upkeep of George’s dignities, yet insisted that hard graft be
always applauded. Bobby respected his dad, for sure, yet seemed somehow bettered by him.

Bobby worked on cars. He left school free of qualification, and began at a good-sized garage in Birtley, washing, polishing and vacuuming. He would return home in the evening smelling waxy and astringent, however grubby his gear or the tack-cloth
wagging
from his trouser pocket. A joker by nature – ‘dafty’, in Mary’s parlance – he was stern and emphatic when he talked motors. ‘Car’s a man’s pride and joy. He wants to look after it proper. Part of how he
carries
himself. Who he
is
.’ Whenever George heard such talk he pulled a constipated face – ‘You talk some flannel, you’ – and Bobby would glower. It unnerved young Stevie to see the two men at odds across the table, and when his mam and dad finally secured a home of their own he could stand the loss of his Nana’s cooing, for his dad at least was master of his house now.

The move took them two miles north to Washington, lately
designated
a ‘new town’. Old Washington had been coal mines and colliery houses, but the new town had raised up purpose-built ‘villages’ and multiplied the population, with schools, shops and facilities. Whatever its novelty, Washington still wasn’t
postcard-pretty
. But Bobby got work as a panel beater for a decent garage, Armstrong Motors. Mary seemed content to have a functional home she could keep clean. And Stevie had a brand-new school to mope along to, much as he loathed it.

Unleashed from school hours, Stevie would often dawdle to Armstrong’s and watch his dad at work on some motor up on a jig. Bobby weaved round the cramped space in his oily gear,
trading
shouts, wielding a spanner and a gas-fired cutting torch,
hefting
panels, diligently bashing at dents with a dinky hammer. He seemed assured, meticulous, versed in the magic of what went where and why, capable still of banter in the act. Stevie felt himself a lumbering and dafty lad in his dad’s mercurial presence. Yet he saw how some of Bobby’s workmates jibbed him, with a notable edge. It seemed that Bobby truly fancied himself a mechanic. He would replace the odd belt or spark-plug, and there were
electrical
issues on which he pronounced confidently. But those opinions
were generally jeered. ‘You’re no mechanic, Bob. You’re a mouth, you are.’

Bobby persisted, and began to come home with his blue
overalls
and moon face streaked and smeared by black grease. Then there would be some disreputable excuse for a motor vehicle sat outside the front gate of their semi for weeks. Stevie spied as Bobby roamed about, ‘improving it’ in some inscrutable manner, removing and stripping the alternator, fiddling with the starter motor. Worse, at times these parts might be given a temporary home swaddled in rags on the kitchen floor. Stevie felt complicit in these offences, for he knew that he, too, was a messy clot in his mam’s eyes, always straying into reefs of fresh mud, the first among his mates to try to scale a barbed fence or ford a
swift-running
stream. Bobby’s charm extended to the purchase of a
washing
machine one Christmas, but such largesse was not a cure for all ills.

For many were the nights Bobby would roll home late, with a red nose and red cheeks, the key having clinked uselessly round the keyhole for some moments previous. Bobby thought he was at his most riotously funny when he was insensibly drunk. Stevie sometimes thought his dad
had
to be play-acting, so comically stiff-legged was he, his gaze drowsy, fighting for focus. ‘Angels wi’ dorty faces, yee and me, kidder,’ he would say. Bobby was indeed cherubic, if flushed and sweaty, dark curls adhered to his forehead. Mostly, though, Mary didn’t think Bobby was funny, and didn’t want to play the game. Their exchanges could turn sharp. ‘Hell’s
teeth
, can I not have a bit
fun
?’ his dad would roar with disturbing bite. ‘Can I not? Not a bit?’ There was no threat there, but maybe something worse.

Still, over a month of nights round the tea-table some of Bobby’s low talk actually seemed to acquire a serious shape. For he knew a bloke who had a mate whose mate could, conceivably, get Bobby in on the ground floor of a brand-new venture. A pair of smart engineers from the firm of Lotus had struck out on their own, and were taking steps to found a new company, its nursery factory earmarked for Washington New Town on the strength of some
government money pledged to the cause of ‘local development’. They had worked up a prototype for a sports car, a coupé, of all things. On first hearing, Mary did not so much frown as snort. True, it was far-fetched, and for this vivid fancy Bobby talked of quitting Armstrong’s. He told Mary most vehemently, though, that she should bloody well watch out, because things were going to change. ‘You want me to get on, don’t you? That’s what you’re always saying. You want a new suite, you want this and that, and what’s-her-face is off to Benidorm. You divvint get ahead by standing still, eh? Well, I’m bloody not.’

Within months this Clan Motor Company was operational and said to be close to turning out cars. Bobby’s mate’s mate, good as his word, smuggled him in as an assistant mechanic. The car was to be called the ‘Crusader’, intended as a nippy little number, light and aerodynamic, a fibreglass body atop a sporty engine. Bobby was soon expounding on the attendant problems of heat and noise and the clutch’s heaviness, though he was short on
solutions
. ‘Still sounds dafty to me,’ muttered Mary. ‘Bliddy fly by night,’ was George Coulson’s verdict. ‘Whey it’s not meant for the likes of you’s, man,’ Bobby shot back. ‘Not the
pair
of you’s.’ And the production line rolled in the autumn of 1971. Wearside was making sports cars, and it made a gleeful sense to Stevie, for his dad was a character and had found himself a characterful calling.

Their routine was sacred. Every Saturday Bobby would take him for snooker at the Excelsior Working Men’s Club. They would contest a frame or two, then Bobby would mingle with his pals and Stevie would sit it out patiently, the bairn in the corner with a bag of Tudor crisps and a glass of iced Cresta. Such was Stevie’s treat. And yet he grew to hate these outings. For, somehow, old Doggett was always there, holding court. And Jim Doggett,
somehow
, was Bobby’s best mate.

It had been so since school, but Doggett became a bricklayer, a rated one, and in short order he was a site boss with hopes of advancement. He carried himself about the Excelsior as though he were boss-man of all he surveyed – smoking odious panatella
cigarillos
,
drinking Johnny Walker whisky chased by a straight glass of ale, fond of producing a black plastic comb, spitting upon it, and dragging it through his pompous thatch of rusty hair and meaty sideburns. ‘Hello,
tiger
,’ he would wink at his reflection behind the optics. From Stevie’s vantage this was the behaviour of an outright ponce, and yet Doggett seemed to think he had bottled the very essence of machismo. Bobby and others in his retinue would tease him a little, for Doggett was a bachelor, but the man himself merely grinned at them glancingly, shooting back without apparent irony, ‘Aw lads, see, but, I’m saving me’sel for Miss Right.’

Doggett had a few such stock gags. To wit, ‘That’s a smart top you’ve on there, son’ was his customary greeting to Stevie
whenever
the boy drew near, clad in whatever cut-off tee-shirt he had clean to wear with his flares. Doggett affected a fly-collar shirt and a black waistcoat, his packet of tabs tucked into a dainty pocket, and seemed to think himself the very glass of fashion. Stevie would have been first to confess he cared nothing for clothes,
considered
them girls’ stuff in any case – but he was quite certain Doggett looked about as smart as a sack of fucking spuds,
whatever
fancy gear he squeezed his lard arse into. His breath stank and all, what with the rotgut Scotch and the foul smokes. Stevie just couldn’t tell the bastard to his face. If Doggett was a bully, bloated with talk, nonetheless he carried some weight and threw it about, and Bobby, too, deferred to him plainly. It pained Stevie. He felt himself a foursquare lad – no squirt, no titch. He had no fear of his teachers, not even Finlayson, the blackbeard yob who taught physics and picked the football team. He had no fear of classmates who told him he smelled, or called his dad ‘grease monkey’, for what did theirs do that was so bloody great? Doggett, though, was a different case, and Stevie coveted a share in that kind of size and authority. At thirteen, he knew, he just didn’t have it.