Crusaders (19 page)

‘He’s a canny lad, this one,’ Eunice declared to anyone and no one as Stevie slid her gin-and-bitter-lemon under her nose. If in earshot then Donnelly the Gunnery landlord tended to snort. Stevie kept his own counsel. In no position to scorn a friendly
gesture
, he still despised the thought of being mothered. His efforts were trained on establishing some rapport with Jeff, his partner behind the bar on alternate nights. When Jeff peeled down to his black Rainbow tee-shirt a startling musculature was unveiled, even though he wore bookworm specs and a swottish air. Sometimes, when Stevie sought out his room between shifts, Jeff would be on the stairs perusing
Black Belt Magazine
or
World of Judo
. Stevie took care to let Jeff see his interest and Jeff, at length, took pity, proposing that Stevie accompany him east of town to a place called Morton’s of Wallsend.

It was a timber-frame shed with a pitched roof and one frosted window. Within, on a concrete floor laid with rubber mats, were stacks of free weights, a row of clunking machines, and a dozen or so big grunting half-naked men. Stevie ignored the sharp
commingled
stench of cheese and embrocation. For these men looked like
he
wanted to look. They glowered back at him, some with eyes alarmingly close-set. But Jeff steered him about, urged him to try his hand, spotted him under the bench-press bar. Then he engaged the proprietor, a retired shot-putter, in a muttered
conference
, and a deal was cut on Stevie’s behalf. After changing, they sat by a small service counter and Jeff bought them both gloopy refreshments of dried protein powder in milk. He waved away Stevie’s halting gratitude. ‘Do unto others, Steve lad, do unto
others. It’s about treating people decent. That way, they treat you the same. You’ll do summat for me someday.’

Stevie pledged himself then to the discipline of iron. ‘There are principles,’ Jeff told him, near-comically hushed and earnest. ‘They go from man to man. You won’t get them out of books.’ For that much, Stevie was glad. Morton’s became his home from the Gunnery, and a model home at that – a safe haven. Its members respected one other’s purpose and work-rate, there was no posing or picking-on, and a man was as anonymous as he cared to be. Why couldn’t the world be like that? Stevie fell hard for the iron – the pull and the push, the sweet ache of the exertion, his confident management of it – but, above all, its visible benefits. Gazing from the fastened stacks of weights to the size and shape of his
burgeoning
cuts of muscle, he had a pin-sharp sense that some inner faculty of his was being weighed in the balance and found favourable. Jeff prodded him helpfully. ‘Try to see in your mind the person you want to be. Hold that picture. Work toward it.’ It became clearer to Stevie from whence Jeff had acquired his odd air of abstraction. Jeff also started to slip him wraps of bland little tablets, Dianabol, to have with his meals. ‘They’ll build you up.’ And there was something to it, he knew as much whenever he took his turn in one of Morton’s two dank little shower cubicles and inspected himself – bulkier by the day, it seemed.

Waiting his turn by the dumb-bell rack one evening he made the acquaintance of Dicko, a big burring Bristolian, ex-army, or so he said, shiny-scalped but with a walrus moustache and a fine fuzz all over his barrel-like, slightly bloated upper body. Dicko had a little entourage, and Stevie found them appealing, for they bantered about football and cheeked one another easily. They were pub-and-club doormen, the gym a grapevine of such
musclework
. And they exuded assurance, but they weren’t vain
arseholes
, not like Jim Doggett. Stevie only wished he had the lip or the strut to fraternise.

Jeff didn’t rate Dicko, but Stevie didn’t cleave to Jeff’s views on all things. On the odd free night, they would have a pint of Guinness after Morton’s, and Jeff put his finger on what had been
a growing unease in Stevie. ‘Gets boring, doesn’t it?’ he offered. ‘Same old work-out?’ Stevie agreed keenly. ‘It’s good, like, but it doesn’t
go
anywhere …’

So Jeff marched him to the local community hall and a weekly martial arts dojo. ‘Just watch the groups for a bit,’ he said. ‘See what you might like.’ Stevie sat on a low bench and studied the range of styles being practised – judo, aikido, ju jitsu, taisudo, tae kwan do. Grappling looked a bit queer – two blokes grunting into each other’s necks – and he fancied kicking, but he wanted to be able to punch too. So he plumped for Shotokan karate, based on techniques of what the brochure called ‘street defence’. For a while, he limped along at a lowly belt in an intermediate-weight class, for he found it surprisingly hard to rouse himself into attack mode. ‘Visualise an enemy,’ Jeff advised. Stevie pictured a wet comb dragged through a pompous thatch of rusty hair. The
sessions
then grew a little edgy, until Stevie came to sense that other lads shrank from pairing up with him.

One night in the Gunnery, voices were raised and an awful fight erupted, the object some poor-looking woman, but it was some poor bloke who got a pint glass broken over his nose. The assailant, not a regular, took to his heels, but Jeff and Stevie
waited
for the cops with the luckless victim, a long evil shard of glass sunk into his cheek like some mad scientist’s transplant. Stevie, silent, felt a shiver of nausea. Truly, there was the thought and there was the deed. Jeff too looked ashen, and three days later he handed in his notice. He took Stevie aside, murmured that he and his lass had some plans together. But Stevie was shipwrecked, with no plans larger than a few half-formed notions. He had believed himself an apprentice hardman, but the leap to
professional
status now seemed very stark.

He was sat in Morton’s rest area, alone as was his way now, hunched over the oaten dregs of a protein shake, the sweat of a session drying on his muscles and his Lonsdale singlet. On the outer edge of his vision a lean young squirt of a bloke – not in gym-sweats but jeans and windcheater – was perched on a plastic
chair, eyeing him. Smirking, even. And he didn’t want to be doing that.

‘The fuck
yee
looking at?’

‘Looking at you, pal. You’re some pup.’ He had a wispy
moustache
, this squirt, and he chuckled like an old lag, for all that he looked not long out of the schoolyard. ‘I’ve
watched
you, man. You train like a loony. It’s a waste, but. You’ve peaked, your body’s had it. You need to tak’ on more
fuel
if you wanna get proper big.’

His name was Luke Ridley and he claimed to know some
science
. Stevie asserted he knew better, for didn’t he swallow magic little pills with every meal? ‘Waste of money, pal,’ this Ridley shot back. ‘You only shite them back out. You’ve got to
stack
. Proper chemical supplements. Everybody else does.’

Funny how no one else had mentioned it. And Luke Ridley had lowered his voice. But, surveying the clientele at Morton’s, it did seem bulgingly plausible. Luke suggested they step outside to his vehicle. As they walked, Stevie saw Dicko glance his way.

The tariff for Luke’s ‘supplements’ was alarming, but he offered a starter’s discount, plus aftercare. So Stevie consented to part with a fiver a week for an ampoule of Deca Durabolin, designed to go directly into the top of his right arse cheek. Stevie wasn’t keen on needles but he believed in discipline, and in the wisdom that one could get used to anything, at least in pursuit of the higher call of becoming something other. So, cloistered in his tiny Gunnery bedroom, he grimaced and contorted and drove the
needle
home – his very own mad science project.

He was impatient for change and moped for a week or two, but really it was soon that he sensed a new tightness and bulge in the wake of his workouts. Euphoric, he reported back to Luke, who counselled that the manly way forward was a boosted dosage, and something of a cocktail thereof. Thus Stevie introduced his right buttock to Testaviron. There were remedial drugs, too, for the tail-end of each six-week cycle. ‘They’re serious
hormones
, these, man, you divvint wanna grow women’s tits.’ Luke giggled, cupping a pair of imaginary bouncers. Stevie saw the point, and didn’t resent the investment. His pint-puller’s wage was good for
nothing else. But he fast found himself creeping ahead of his given schedule, and so called round one day to Luke’s home address in Fenham, ringing the doorbell only to be faced by Mr Ridley Senior – a stern, stocky customer, with a squashed nose and a stony glare. Luke was not best pleased when he next saw Stevie, instructing him to never show such initiative again.

As the days fell away Stevie had growing discomfort in his back and his arse, and when he got himself naked and back-to-front before a full mirror he was appalled to see a livid Petri dish of buckshot acne. Now, on top of the ache of the needle’s gouge, came the itch and sting of weeping boils. Worse, he was aware of a worrying contraction about his bollocks, and the lads at Morton’s ribbed him for a perpetual protective cupping of his scrotum. He attacked his work, though, with rising vigour and fierceness, hammering the iron in longer, harder sessions. In his mind the purpose had passed from simple self-improvement to some impending but yet undated confrontation, the antagonist but half-glimpsed, if not imagined. He pictured, too, unknown but approving eyes, the nod of heads, solemn respect in any room he entered. In the midst of one frenzied workout he had to be ousted from his seat at the pectoral machine by Dicko, politely but firmly, and it was only when Stevie stared down at the dark droplets dotting the rubber mat that he realised his nose was streaming blood.

‘Ragin’ bull, this young beggar,’ Dicko chortled.

On the day Stevie was drawn aside by Dicko and sounded out about ‘working the doors’, he felt his fortunes in ascent at last. First, though, there was a sort of interview to be navigated.

‘Can you box?’

‘Nah. Not really. I’ve done a bit karate, but.’

‘Oh blimey,’ Dicko shook his head. ‘Not the old
Hoo-Flung-Dung
. You shoulda boxed, flower, then you’d move better.’

Stevie felt stung, defensive. ‘I’ve got plenty moves on us, Dicko man.’

‘Oh, I bet you have. But if it’s me and you against Fat Mick and
five mates and one of them’s got a jack-knife, then I don’t want to look over and see you working out what dance you’re gonna do. I need to know you’re gonna whack ’em. Hard. In the throat. The nadgers. Whatever it takes.’

Stevie nodded as to say he took the point, relieved at least that he had this affable furry ogre for his tutor.

Dicko had several pitches, but it was at a ‘disco pub’ in Gateshead by name of the Loose Box that Stevie presented himself on the appointed hour for his first night’s shift, clad in a thick black cable sweater and steel-capped Dr Martens. Dicko surveyed him critically. ‘Okay, flower, stand up big, listen to me, and keep your mouth shut.’ As the punters arrived, the duo manned the narrow doorway and counted heads for an hour. Only when a bumptious pair tried to push their way forward did Dicko step out and make a wall of himself. Afterward, he grunted into Stevie’s ear. ‘Them that wave their arms about, they’re just trying to fool you. Stare ’em out, talk it down, nice and easy.’

In time they were relieved, whereupon Dicko escorted Stevie up a flight of stairs for a tour of the disco – desultory groups of females and larger packs of drinking males, under spotlights and mirror-balls. The dance floor felt spongy under Stevie’s boots, and Dicko, rolling his eyes, advised that it had been laid on top of the old pub carpet. ‘In here you get yourself positioned right.’ This, it seemed, was lesson number two. ‘Assess the room. Get yourself good at observation. Observation means
anticipation
. You see something you don’t like, send out the stare. Let ’em
know
you’re watching.’ Within minutes Dicko had spotted the makings of a push-and-shove altercation by the bar, and once again, from the vantage of Dicko’s burly shoulder, Stevie was intrigued to see how fast the hostility fizzled down to nowt like butter in a pan. ‘Don’t be getting demob happy,’ Dicko cautioned. ‘Breaking things up is easy. Lot of these tossers are just waitin’ for you to step in, they
want
it broken up before they get hurt.’ He grinned. ‘Now, there’s others –
they
want to do you. But, y’know, proper fight, you don’t feel nothing anyway. Not less it
really
hurts.’ And he looked askance at Stevie. ‘Not scared yet, flower?’

‘I’m canny, man,’ Stevie muttered.

The night was passing without major incident, even getting dull. Then Dicko had his arm around a raddled redhead and then, with a wink, he vanished from view. Stevie was alone, stationed once more at the door, breathing the sharp night air and thinking about the bus home, when the landlord of the Loose Box appeared at his side in a tizzy.

‘It’s Steve, aye? Look, Steve, we’ve got this bugger, he’s bother and he’s not leaving, but I want him out, right now, son.’

‘Fuck. Right. Where’s Dicko?’

‘He’ll be shaggin’, won’t he?’

‘Hang on, I’ll get him.’

‘
Now
, Steve, this needs doing
now
.’

Bollocks
, thought Stevie, for the landlord was tugging at his arm and there was no backing down from the belly-stabbing sense that this was make-or-break time. Still, he tried.

‘What’s his bother, this gadgy? Will he not just gan on, like?’

‘I’d rather not
ask
him, son. What am I paying
you
for?’

Stevie strode into the disco, his legs shaky beneath him as he crossed the spongy floor, girding up his sinews as if to inflate
himself
and still the quake in his bowels. In his mind’s eye he was headed in the opposite direction, out the door, free and clear. But headed where? The owner was pointing out the enemy – a shaven-headed pudding of a bloke with a dead-eyed scowl,
probably
forty years old and twenty stone in weight, a big lump
cosseted
by a few big-lump pals. As he bore down, the gadgy’s mates were clocking him, cockily, alerting their leader, who barely
half-turned
his head from the pint of beer raised to his mouth. ‘Aw aye, then, he spat. ‘Yee and what army, you little prick?’