Crusaders (18 page)

‘What’ll he do now then, Jim? Eh?’

‘Don’t be asking me, Mary. Not my fault he’s ruined himself.’

‘Don’t you say that. You can do something for him, can’t you?’

‘Get away. I’ve a
team
, man. Working men. How are they
supposed
to put up with
that
dead loss?’

‘Is that all you can say? You his father now.’

Amazingly, what Steve overheard next was a painful silence.

Thus on Doggett’s site Stevie began carrying the hod, hoisting scaffold. Doggett’s gaffer was meaner still than Doggett, and no one fraternised with the new start, not even at lunch break. On his first afternoon he trod unsighted into a square of fresh cement and was vexed with himself, yet the censure he received was as if he had killed a man. A few days later he nearly severed his thumb with a hacksaw, and that raised a few chuckles. A few days back from hospital he stumbled over a concrete slab, so unloading a hod of bricks half upon himself and half onto a long pane of glass propped stupidly against a wall. Truly, Stevie thought he might never hear the end of
that
outrage. On the whole, he reckoned this gainful employment was probably worse than borstal.

On a freezing day before Christmas of 1978 Doggett’s brother Frank brought his family up from Darlington. Stevie was warned to
‘behave’, and the thought of more identikit Doggetts infesting the place was hateful to him. But Frank’s young daughter Lucy was blonde, a bit lush, and conspicuously friendly. As the day passed into evening and the adults grew merry, Stevie took his chance to cosy up. She smelled just marvellous, and didn’t turn away or
disdain
him but smiled very prettily. When she snuck off to the
bathroom
Stevie tailed her, and on the upstairs landing he took her into his arms without a battle. It was dark, the kiss was juicy – it was all magic. Then she tensed. Stevie did not believe he had read wrong. Then he knew his error in the creaky tread on the carpeted stair. They had been observed: Doggett, of course – now ascending, a vision of wrath, unleashing his belt from about his lardy waist.

Stevie wanted to laugh, until Lucy no longer hung on him and Doggett was lashing out with the buckle end. He managed to grab hold, but the great lump used his weight, forced Stevie to the floor. And now they had an audience. Doggett got him by the cuffs of his tracksuit bottoms and dragged him, bumping, down the stairs. The pants came half-off, exposing Stevie’s red Y-fronts and – most evil – his cock, semi-erect, poking midway through the vent. The humiliation burned white-hot, but barely for a moment before Doggett had hauled and shoved him out of the front door. There Stevie girded himself to trade punches when he heard the latch drop, realising he was to be left in the biting cold. He paced,
hearing
Mary within, her ‘Let him in’ rebuffed in irate tones. Adrenalin rushing, he strode directly round the back, swaddled his fist in his tee-shirt and thrust it through the glass of the door to the kitchen. Before he could fumble his way in, Uncle Frank had barrelled out, thrown two meaty arms around his chest, cursed him for an ‘animal’ and thrown him to the ground.

He stomped two miles to his nana’s and granddad’s in Mount Pleasant, refusing to admit the cause. His nana was all for putting on her coat and hat and going round. But Stevie had made up his mind. This fracture had been a long time coming, if no less a
misery
having come. He rose at first light the next morning, took a loan of George’s macintosh and got aboard the X30 bus to Newcastle.

For the first night and the next day he loitered in the bus station and around the arcades, looked into pubs, filched discarded
Chronicles
and
Journals
and checked the Wanteds. There was a job centre, but it was horribly bright and he couldn’t face anyone behind a desk. He wandered west, to Fenham and Arthur’s Hill, and passed a night on a park bench, shitting in a flower bed come the morn. The next night, he claimed a hard pew in an unlocked church. In the window of some villainous den of a pub he saw a card, ventured inside and sat near the toilets, staring at the framed shipyard photos until an approachable face appeared behind the bar. His name was Jeff, in his twenties, with a head of shaggy curls. There was indeed a room for a live-in barkeep, dirt wages but rent-free. Donnelly the landlord was an unsmiling sort but seemed contented with the deal he had struck. Stevie understood when he saw the room.

He surveyed the crusty curling carpet, the mouse holes in the skirting, the bleak vista out the window through the smoke-grey piss-yellow net curtains. It was a death’s-door of a lodging. He refused to crumple, but this adversity was bitter. Over the days that followed he managed to serve the old soaks and tough nuts who were the Gunnery’s regulars. But there was no friendliness here, save for the odd sozzled endearment from some batty old baggage. It was an effort of will to leave the room and face another shift, another shower of mean buggers. And yet he hated that room – the size of his world. The small shitter on the landing was his one other refuge, and in its lousy cracked and smeared mirror he confronted himself.

No one will ever see me cry,
he told his reflection.

And a voice replied,
Why fight it? Why should you have to? Why should anyone?

And another voice said,
This is your
life,
man. It’s
you
. You’re Steven Leonard Coulson, you’ve not got nowt else. That’s why.

Reverend Gore mounted the concrete steps of the stairwell to the third floor of Biddle House, Crossman Estate. At the entrance below, sheltered from the muddy rain, he had fumbled with wet fingers and gaffa tape to stick up his printed circular on red A4, the text set beneath a curlicue cross. Its corners flapped in the draught.

A NEW CHURCH FOR HOXHEATH!

WE WANT
YOUR
VIEWS!

COME MEET THE REVEREND JOHN GORE!

Open Meeting to Discuss a New Service (Anglican)

All Welcome

Main Assembly, St. Luke’s School

7.30 Tuesday 1 October 1996

Once more into the breach
, he pondered as he climbed – another try at shaking a hand, making a friend, even in this sinkhole. No,
especially
here, he cautioned himself. At least, he had call to expect a welcome from Mrs Eunice Dodd at number seventeen. If he had always shrunk from this sort of visitation, he had equally resolved to do better. And in this case, he had given his word.

His sole wavered on a step, for something foul was assailing his nostrils. Up ahead on the half-landing was a curled mound of dog excreta, evidently fresh-laid. Despite himself, Gore stood and stared, gloom stealing over him. Not the worst sign in the world, merely and deeply dispiriting. He stood, indeterminate, feeling a chill up his trouser legs, whistling up from the door at ground
level that had refused to close. He was still gazing in absent
dismay
when he was struck a glancing blow on the crown of the head by something light but sodden.

Looking to his feet, he saw a stained egg-box and the strewn debris of cracked shells. Then he heard the jeering giggles, and his eyes shot upward. Two floors higher, a cluster of hard young faces bobbed over the balustrade edge. Gore was still watching,
nonplussed
, as a deep plastic waste bin was heaved to that edge, until some better angel urged him to take evasive action. Then garbage rained upon him – wadded teabags, gnawed chicken bones, spent nappies, tumbling down about his head and shoulders.

Jubilation from on high.

Umpteen hard responses occurred to Gore, yet the one that spoke strongest to him was
hold your ground
. He brushed some rancid flecks and specks from his chest and resumed his climb, hearing ahead the squeak of rubber soles and a door slamming. When he attained the third-floor walkway – open to the pelting elements, six front doors arrayed down its length – one boy stood there still, bold as headland, barring his path. Gore stood in silence. Then he began to speak softly.

‘Hello. I’ve something for you.’

Did the boy have any curiosity? His face was imperturbable.

‘I have, you know. I’ve got something for you.’

He was making it up on the spot, but inspiration came
blessedly
hard upon. He raised his right forearm, shrugged down his sleeve, and unbuckled his wristwatch – Jessie Bradbeer’s one-time gift, accepted guiltily, now deemed expendable. He proffered it to the boy, whose brow crumpled briefly with suspicion before he snatched the token from the open palm. Gore nodded. ‘Now I’ll see you later maybe. I’m just here to see a friend of mine, see.’

And he stepped past the boy, past a cluster of dead or dying plants in pots, their soil uselessly drowned, past four front doors until he came to number seventeen, two laminate digits adhered to the red-painted surface, albeit crooked and peeling. He stared at the back of his fist, poised close, then knocked – first one rap, unanswered, then a second. ‘Wait!’ came a cry from within, and he
heard erratic footfalls. Who might Mrs Dodd expect at this hour, he wondered. A neighbour? The door opened just a little. The face in the crack was pale, aged, but violently made up – arched brows, green eye-shadow, blusher and mauve lipstick.

‘Yes? What you want?’

‘Eunice? I’m John Gore, I’m the new vicar in these parts, Stevie Coulson asked me to call in on you.’

‘Stevie! Eeeh! Whey come
in
, hinny, get yer’sel in out of that …’

As Mrs Dodd slipped the chain, Gore glanced aside and saw the boy, his antagonist, slipping away down the stairs and out of sight.

Fully unveiled, Mrs Dodd was perhaps in her late sixties, but her nest of fibrous jet-black hair was – Gore quickly decided – a wig. She wore a long green woollen skirt, a purple roll-neck sweater, and two strings of yellow beads slung about her wattle neck. Had he encountered her in the streets of London he might have taken her for an unpublished poetess. A cloying smell of attar rose
suffused
the cramped flat. Temperature, though, was blood-freezing. Eunice hobbled ahead, aided by a stick, and Gore tried to assist her in the brewing of tea, but she refused. He peered into the kitchen from the hallway, long enough to see she had no
refrigerator
and was heating water in a pan. The scarcity struck him as so plangent that he retreated to her parlour and a seat on a ruined sofa, draped in a tartan rug and crawling with crumbs. It took Mrs Dodd three trips back and forth from the kitchen to present a tea tray and a plate laden with just two bourbon biscuits.

‘Aw, he was allus special, Stevie. Always give us a hand, that un.’

Gore nodded keenly, masking his sharp certainty that he had just tasted something wrong in the tea – maybe the water, maybe the milk, or whatever substitute Eunice had mustered.

‘How did
you
meet him then, hinny?’

‘It was in the Gunnery pub, really …’

‘The
Gunnery
. Like a drink, do you? Good man.’ She winked. ‘Aye well that’s where ah knaa him from an’ all. Divvint see him so much now, of course. But he’s a busy lad, isn’t he?’

‘He’s a worker, for sure.’

‘Aw, he’s a treasure but, that un. I’m as proud of him as I am me own. Such a good soul. He’d allus see us right, a bit this and that. He’d gan to market for his bait, come back wi’ a bit boiling bacon for wuh. That’s when there was nowt on him, mind. He was
lean
. ‘Fore he got to be that
big
.’

Gore nodded. ‘He is a big, big man.’

‘
Huge
. Here, I tell you what an’ all. He helped us out with my Terry. When it come to it. After he went bad …’

Eunice began to speak of a man Gore took to be her ex-husband, but the details were fragmented, filled in only by knowing looks. At length he had to conclude that she was describing a petty
villain
– a man given to sell his wife’s possessions for his own ends, without prior arrangement. A violent man too, it seemed, one from whom Eunice had been forced to seek legal separation so that she could claim custody of the giro cheque essential to her and their daughter.

‘So he helped you then, Stevie? With Terry …?’

She shot him a look as to say this was an understatement. ‘He had a word. I mean, I only
heard
what happened, mind. But they said he got hold of him, proper …’ Eunice looked askance. ‘
Any
road, all I know is, I never saw that Terry again.’

‘They had a … a fight?’

‘
Might
have give him a clout, Reverend.
Might
.
I
don’t know. All
I
know, we had things settled from then. Here, let us show you.’

She gestured towards a set of photographs in fussy frames on a precarious shelf over the hearth-mounted three-bar heater that sat dormant in the arctic room.

‘Now that’s our Dusty and her two boys.’

Gore’s eyes fell first onto an image of Eunice, perhaps a couple of decades younger, looking pie-eyed beside a grinning Stevie, he clad in white karate pyjamas, his hair amusingly long and
straggly
. He forced himself instead to inspect the picture of a fretful dark-haired woman between two sheepish lads.

‘It’s not easy for her, not easy. But she tries. Them boys have got to share everything between them. Their shoes even.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Oh, she can’t afford shoes for both. They take it in turns, you know?’

Could he believe it? It was almost too flabbergasting – too upsetting. It seemed, though, his cue to segue. ‘I should say, one of the reasons for my church, I’m hoping, will be to try and do
something
about just that sort of – deprivation, people have.’

‘Eh?’

‘I’m saying it’s a wicked thing, that that sort of thing should happen.’

‘Aw aye, wicked it is.’ She nodded keenly. ‘Wickedness. Oh, that’s what your lot are here for, no buts about it. Isn’t it, though?’

‘Well, we – yes, obviously – it’s my job to minister to anyone who feels themselves – what we call “oppressed by evil”.’

‘That’s it. Aye, that’s it. I see him and all, I do. I see him in the corner of the room.’

She was offering him a sort of a slow-dawning complicit smile. But it was another mad alley he was disinclined to venture down.

‘What I’d like to do,’ he ventured, ‘is get people out of the house, get them together. More of a neighbourhood atmosphere. Do you think that’s a good idea?’

The smile was still there but with a new glimmer – as if indeed she had heard something of interest. And yet somehow he was not convinced she had taken in a single word.

‘Well, I tell you, people round here, whey … you’ll know how they talk around these parts,
whey
… There’s some
very
bad families, you know? Some bad characters moved in. Wicked, aye. They’ve come in and they’ve spoiled it.
Gangs
and that, I don’t know
how
they get started but they spread, they do. Like a rotten old stain.’

‘That is … a shame,’ Gore offered.

‘Eh? Aye. And you tell the council what happens and they say they won’t stand for it, they’ll evict them. But council still has to re-house them. It does, doesn’t it? How about that?’

‘Yes, I suppose … not everybody is a good neighbour.’

‘
Whey
. And then you’ve got the Sikhs and whatnot. I’ve no axe to grind, me. But them uns what wear the turbans, they’ve the look of
wolves
to me.’

Gore pondered his knees, wishing now that he had not
surrendered
his watch, for it would have been a valuable prop in these circumstances. When he looked up again Eunice was looking at him plaintively.

‘Here, but, I’ve an aaful problem. Would you ever have a look for us?’

Oh God
, thought Gore. ‘Why, yes, of course. I’ll try. What is it?’

‘Well, it’s damp, I think. Council won’t bother themselves. Stevie used to do this sort of thing for us, see …’

They rose and she led him off the hallway into a gloomy and musty bedroom.
Yes
, thought Gore,
I smell rainfall, ingress, rot
. He pulled aside the narrow single bed with its cheap frilled orange bedspread, and the painted wall behind the headboard was indeed horrendous – hopelessly blistered, a picture of dereliction. He touched a finger to the plaster, finding it cool and moist. Gently drawing aside the curtain, he saw a hopeless little
window-fan
fixed in the glass, its blades barely fluttering.

‘You see, hinny, if I could just get all the rotten off, and fresh paint on …’

‘To be honest, Eunice, I think it needs a proper damp course.’

‘Eee, when am I going to get that done? Who’ll pay for that? Council?’

‘Well, they ought to.’

‘I knaa, I just wish I could get a man round … it’s bad, you see.’

Gore looked at his hands. Obligation – it seemed to make a chain in life.

‘I’ll do it for you. I’ll sort it out.’
Jack Ridley
, he was thinking.

And she took his hand in hers, surprisingly tightly. He worried she might do herself an injury. Her smile was tight and troubled, but a smile nonetheless. ‘Now, that service of yours,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there, you can count on me.’

‘Oh, now only so long as it suits …’

‘No.’ The grip tightened yet. ‘
You
can count on
me
. Cos you’re a good un, you.’ She looked very serious. Gore smiled tightly and patted her arm with his free hand, grateful for the old lady’s endorsement but keen she deliver no hostage to fortune.