Rule of Night (11 page)

‘What a fucking team,' said another, yanking Kenny's scarf.

‘Does she do a bit then?'

‘Had your end away?'

‘Looks a dozy cunt to me,' Bowler Hat said. He winked slyly at the others and kicked Kenny on the ankle.

‘Shall we do him then, Mick?' one of them said.

Bowler Hat considered, and said slowly, ‘Yeah. Let's do him; then his bird. We'll do her too.' He grinned at the others and leaned close to Kenny's shoulder. ‘What did you say?' he asked
sharply, the smile vanishing. ‘What did you just call me? A dozy what? I'm asking you a question. What was it you called me? A dozy what?'

‘I heard him,' one of the others said.

‘Are you laughing at me?' Bowler Hat said. He thumped Kenny's shoulder. ‘Don't fucking laugh at me.'

‘Let's have him, Mick.'

‘These Rochdale lot. Soft as shit.'

‘Nobody calls me that,' Bowler Hat said. ‘Nobody.' He wasn't quite as tall as Kenny, leaning forward on his toes, his eyes afire.

‘You fucking try,' Kenny said quietly.

‘And?'

‘Just you try.'

‘And?'

‘Try it.'

Bowler Hat hit Kenny with incredible savagery in the lower back with his coiled fist, aiming for the kidneys. Janice couldn't make out what happened next except that Kenny was rolling down the grass embankment with the five of them kicking him. At the bottom he tried to get up but was surrounded, all of them taking short steps backwards and running in to kick him. She saw Bowler Hat land one in his face and another of the lads edging round the back to kick him in the neck. They all had weapons of various kinds in their hands but weren't using them, concentrating on the boots. Bowler Hat was in a fury, shouting, ‘Nobody calls me that,' and Janice was running – almost falling – down the embankment and hitting out at anything that happened to be in her way. She was screaming at the top of her voice and striking at heads and shoulders, not conscious of what she was doing, not feeling pain when they retaliated, aware only that he was on the ground and there was blood coming out of his mouth. She tried to get at Bowler Hat but there were bodies and limbs and feet in the way; something as solid
and unyielding as bone socked her in the mouth and for a moment the world went away and she was in a kind of dream where it was quiet and misty, dark shapes seen through a haze. When her brain cleared the two of them were lying on the grass, Kenny on his back and she kneeling in front of him, dizzy with shock. He was dead, she knew it. They had killed him. She started to weep.

Kenny sat up and said through puffy lips, ‘Who do you think you are? Joe Bugner?'

Then he came out with a mouthful of foul language concerning the five Bury lads and the state of his face and the blood on his shirt; and Janice knew he was all right. At this she cried even harder until Kenny told her to pack it in.

•    •    •

‘Jesus Ker-ist,' said Fester, ‘what happened to you?'

‘Me and Janice had a row.'

‘Bloody hell,' Arthur said.

‘Who was it, Blackburn supporters?' Andy said.

They stood near the refreshment hut eating meat pies and drinking coffee. The hot coffee made Kenny's gums ache. He hadn't lost any teeth but there was a nice lump on his jaw.

Janice said, ‘They were from Bury; they had Bury scarves on.'

‘I'll fucking bury them,' Kenny said.

‘I haven't seen any Bury supporters,' Arthur said.

‘One of them had a bowler hat on.'

‘Oh
him
,' little Pete known as Shortarse said. ‘I've seen him.'

Kenny was scanning the faces in the crowd, hardly able to contain the anger boiling inside, eager now to have a go at anything and anyone, it didn't matter who. He had the desire, but – like the Bury lads – he needed an excuse. Just a small excuse would do, a tiny one. His blood was singing and it was as though a million
impulses were swirling about inside his head and spilling out of his ears …

There was a commotion under the low stand: some of the Blackburn supporters were attempting to break through the thin cordon of police; high up on the banking above the terraces a policeman on a chestnut horse was patrolling the skyline; a sergeant walked along the red shale track with his eyes on the crowd, talking into his pocket transmitter. The P.A. system cleared its throat with a whine, a ping and a crackle, and Slade, fifteen times larger than life, crashed from the speakers fastened to the metal stanchions, and blasted the Saturday afternoon to Kingdom come.

Fester said: ‘They're breaking.'

Kenny crumpled the plastic cup in his fist and leapt the barrier, amongst the front-runners as the mob surged like a black tide across the vibrant green of the pitch, charging towards the neat white goalposts at the opposite end behind which a pattern of pink dots wavered, shifted, and finally converged – like a family of corpuscles massing to repel an invader.

As he ran on the smooth grass Kenny took the steel washers out of his pocket and distributed them on either hand. He was sucking in great exhilarating breaths, his boots pounding along, others all round screaming and yelling, and he screamed and yelled too, the white framework of the goal square in his sights and the pink dots turning into faces with eyes, noses and mouths as he got nearer and they got bigger. But Kenny saw no face individually; it was a shoal of faces, a herd of faces, a pack of faces that he saw. They might have been Blackburn supporters, or Luton supporters, or Brighton supporters, or even Rochdale supporters: it didn't matter. Neither was he bothered as he threw himself in a full-length dive on to their heads whose body got in the way of his threshing arms and legs. He was like a machine having convulsions, four stiff limbs each with a steel-tipped extremity swirling like propeller blades, his bone head
butting the faces, his body and thick neck jerking as if controlled by a mechanical brain.

Living things moved underneath and against him: soft, squashy, hairy, rough, warm, sharp, skin, cloth, leather, metal; yet Kenny was only aware of these things in the sense that they were outside of himself. He struck out at them passionately, almost with a kind of joy, feeling to be in the middle of a crawling, staggering mess of human life: at the centre of an experience in which all were equal, none were spared, each in turn victor and victim. When the flashing sharp razor sliced a clean red line on his forearm he recognised the pain but didn't feel it, straightening his left arm with the blood flowing down into the face in front of him, at the same time thrusting out right boot, left boot, right boot, left boot in a calculated ground-level attack. The steel-rimmed fists and the metal-reinforced boots might have achieved the necessary damage; Kenny didn't know and wasn't concerned; he was too busy elsewhere, head down, arms flailing, boots striking sparks on the concrete as they swung in a constant arc from front to rear.

From the way the ten hands took hold of him (simultaneously it seemed, like a ten-armed monster with lightning co-ordination) the thought occurred to Kenny that their object was to tear him limb from limb, ripping his arms out of their sockets and tearing his legs off as he had once torn the wings off flies before dousing them with petrol and setting their jitterbugging bodies alight. It was impossible to move, much less resist, with his arms and legs spreadeagled, his wrists and ankles held firm, and a knee like an iron wedge against his spinal column. He arched his body and bucked furiously, like a fish flopping about on a wet deck, and felt one of his arms go free; but as he was about to smile in triumph the monster took his testicles in one of its metal claws and squoze them. He nearly fainted. His neck went rigid and all the muscles seized up. He tried to scream but instead of words coming out bitter-tasting
bile filled his throat and mouth, nearly choking him. As they carried him along the red shale track to the tunnel where the players were clattering from the darkness into the sunlight, Kenny – alone, blind and practically insensible in a little private world of pain and illness – Kenny could hear the sound he had lived with all his life: mingled with the roar and the cheering that greeted the teams were the jeers of the crowd: the sounds of hatred, fear, and derision.

WHILE IT LASTED THE JOB IN THE STOCKROOM AT
Woolworth's on Yorkshire Street was all right; it didn't last long, however, three weeks to the day, because during the Saturday rush Mr Irwin, the store manager, caught Kenny sitting in the boiler room in front of the cold boiler he was supposed to be stoking, eating a half-pound slab of fruit cake and smoking cigarettes. As a job it had its perks: there were loads of birds floating around, and in the stockroom above the sales floor the racks of shelves reaching to the ceiling – ‘bins' – formed a labyrinth into which it was easy to slip away unnoticed for half-an-hour at a time. There was plenty to nick too: a box carelessly off-loaded from a trolley would split its corners and spill bars of chocolate or packets of crisps or slabs of fruit cake, several of which could be hidden in the tiny room above the lift shaft which housed the winding gear, to be consumed later that day in a moment of relaxation. Harold Marsh, the bloke in charge of the stockroom and Kenny's immediate boss (and not much older than Kenny), said Easter was always a good time because Easter eggs were that fragile and you only had to look at one of the brown cartons containing a gross to break half-a-dozen inside it; and smashed Easter eggs were no use to anybody, were they?

The part that Kenny didn't like was the humping – sacks of potatoes, crates of hardware, trays of potted plants, barrels of pottery, tea-chests of stationery, and endless brown paper packages which he seemed to spend all his days picking up, carrying, and putting down. Miss Crabtree, the woman who came up from the office to check the daily inventory, was a bit of a bastard too. She was a short, dumpy woman somewhere in her fifties who always
wore the same two-piece grey suit and sensible low-heeled black shoes: she reminded him of the Israeli Prime Minister, and she would insist – though Kenny couldn't understand why – on his checking
every
item in
every
package to see that it tallied with the delivery note.

‘What's the use of the note if I've got to check the stuff anyway?' Kenny asked her, and it took Miss Crabtree all her time to explain to him:

‘That's what it's for, so you can check everything is in the package as it says.' It annoyed her that he required an explanation at all; he was there to do a job, not to ask questions; anyone would think the system had sprung up without any thought, planning, or the most careful consideration.

It was the kind of job as well (which again niggled Kenny) that you never got to the end of: there were never any results, never anything to show for the work that had been put in. The area of scarred and pitted wooden floor from the lift-gates to the small corner office, with the rows of bins running off it, was never once completely clear during all the three weeks that he worked there. On Monday morning at about nine-thirty British Rail made its first delivery, and the area was filled with crates, boxes, cartons and packages piled ten deep, all of which had to be unpacked, sorted, checked, and the goods trundled off to be stacked on shelves in the dark maze of bins. Two hours later, say, having just begun to make a slight impression on the mountain of cardboard, wood and paper, the lift-bell would shrill and this time it was BRS with another jolly consignment that, for want of space, Harold and Kenny piled on top of the previous one. Thus the mountain grew.

By Thursday afternoon – Friday at the latest – the mountain had become an Everest, but by now they were making real inroads, undisturbed by fresh deliveries, and were able to reduce the mountain to a manageable hill, the vision of a bare space empty
of packages now a definite possibility and not merely a foolish daydream. Then, on Saturday morning, their goal in sight, the potted plants and shrubs arrived: a full lorry-load that had to be shifted one crate at a time to avoid breakages. By lunchtime they had finished off-loading and – with the help of the girl in charge of the horticulture counter – had stacked the trays of plants against the wall of the cool damp cellar at the base of the lift-shaft, which left the afternoon to concentrate their attack on clearing the stockroom floor; but on Saturday afternoon it was one of Kenny's jobs to take the broom with the yard-wide head and sweep the sales floor, a job he detested because of the legs and prams and dogs that got in the way. This proved to him how stupid people could be. Even when they saw him with his broom, hugging the side of the counter, they wouldn't budge (the bastards), so he kept his eyes down and went through the lot, regardless of age, sex, colour or creed.

Harold battled on in the stockroom for an hour or so during the afternoon, tunnelling away at what remained of the mountain, but at about three o'clock he usually disappeared – either to eat slab cake in the machine-room above the lift, or to chat up the manageress in the staff canteen, or he sneaked out for a crafty stroll round the indoor market. Kenny never found out where he got to: the crates and cartons and packages and boxes remained unopened: the mountain – or what was left of it – was never ultimately conquered, and on Monday morning at half-past nine the lift-bell shrilled to warn them that British Rail was parked in the street, loaded to the gunnels with the first bad news of the week.

But perhaps the worst job of all, and the one that Kenny hated more than any other, was having to tend the boiler, and – the last straw – whenever it went out, rake the dead coke from the firebox and relight it. He came up from the boiler-room looking like a miner after a ten-hour shift, cokedust in his nostrils and stuck to his lips, his face grey and his eyes smarting. Mr Irwin got mad when
the boiler went out because it meant that the store was without heat and hot water, but Kenny didn't give a toss for Mr Irwin: he never went near the boiler-room if he could possibly avoid it, and twice when he should have been shovelling coke went on the skive, sitting on the parapet at the edge of the flat roof, shivering in his brown smock and watching the heads of the shoppers in Yorkshire Street.