CHAPTER 30
It started quietly, but it gathered speed as it continued. Bob didn’t say anything, but I caught little hints in the pubs and when I visited his place. The odd snide remark, almost always from the younger drinkers; the bit of broken glass he’d missed picking up from his carpet. It was harder to miss the dog shit smeared over his street door, though. His float was kept at the dairy overnight, so they couldn’t get at it, but I soon realised that it was a steady and concerted campaign.

“How long, Bob? How long has this been going on?”

We were sitting outside the Blacksmith’s Arms on a warm April evening, the buds out and Summer already knocking at the door. He just looked up to a skylark shouting its joy to the air and made no answer.

“Bob, you aren’t on your own, not here. There’s lads who’ll stand by thee. You know that. Don’t you?”

That last was added on as I suddenly asked myself how much he believed me, how much trust he had in his friends.

“Bob, you’ve got friends here”

He looked at me at last, head cocked slightly. “No, Ginge, you’ve got friends here. Your friends. There’s people here say they owe me, like, the man who brought lads back alive. They’re your friends, though, not really mine”

“And me, and Tricia? Ernie?”

He was silent for a while, staring into his glass. “Aye, Ginge, happen you’re right there. But…”

He took a mouthful of his ale. “Not like the foreign piss, this. Proper ale. Tells me I’m home. And that’s the problem, my friend. I can’t really have a home, can I?”

“This is your home, Bob”

“Tell me, Ginge: you planning on having children, you and your girl?”

“Um…”

We were actually trying as often and as enthusiastically as we could, but married life is not something to discuss with anyone outside the bedroom door.

“Er, aye, we would like kids. Dad would be right made up, and Mam. Cyril, dad in law, aye? He says he’d like a lad to take up Moors, show him what’s what”

“Ginge, you don’t have to answer this, aye? Just listen. You and your lass, you share something. It’s physical, and that’s fun, but it’s more than that. You don’t stay with Tricia cause you get a bit of how’s your father, but because you fit together, and I don’t mean like that”

I knew I was red, but he was right. He took another mouthful before continuing in his quiet way.

“Ginge, she completes you. It’s what a man should have, like, it is not good that the man should be alone”

“Genesis”

“Aye. I know what Rodney said to you, about the bumboys at his school, how it were all about fucking and nowt else, but that’s not what life is about, what a man’s life should be about. I’ve done a lot of thinking, my friend, a lot over the years. A man shouldn’t be alone, it’s not right, and it’s bloody lonely”

“Tricia’s got mates—“

“I don’t do women, Ginge. Sorry to be blunt, but that’s me. I can see them as people, I can hold fast to them as friends, but more, no. I can’t share with them, not the way a man, a human fucking being should. Why God made me like this I will never, ever know, not till Last Trump. Happen He might tell me then, but it’ll be a bit late”

“There must be others like you, round City, like”

“Aye, lad, happen there are, and the police will be watching me like hawks. I meet up with someone like me, and he goes to prison, like as not. I couldn’t do that to anyone; lads get killed in places like that”

He wouldn’t say more, but he had said more than enough. I could never understand what it felt like, wanting to be with a man; it was all wrong, and I knew that every time I was with Tricia. Still I felt for him. It is not good that the man should be alone.

It was a fortnight later when I went round to his place again, May bringing real warmth to the narrow streets, and I went to call up to his window when I saw that it was shut. Shut on such a warm day? I hammered on the front door till one of the other tenants answered, and both smells hit me at once. The old man who had answered looked puzzled as I stepped over the fresh dog shit that had been posted through the letterbox and ran up the stairs to Bob’s room. That smell…

“GET OUT! GAS! GAS! GAS!”

It took three goes before I put the door in, and he was there, calm and rosy-cheeked in his chair, the whisky bottle empty beside him and the hiss of the unlit oven louder than anything I had heard since the AT round had smashed our tank and crew to pieces. I flung the windows open after shutting the gas off, and saw that he had actually turned out the pilot light, thank God.

“CALL AN AMBULANCE!”

I got an arm under him and hauled him out of the armchair, so limp, so heavy, and half lifted, half dragged his body to the door, wanting to throw up. A couple of passers-by arrived at the top of the stairs as I came out of the room, and we got him out to the street where one of them, who clearly had some knowledge, checked for a pulse before looking at me sadly and shaking his head.

I found out where the bastard drank, and three days after Bob had been taken away under a blanket, two days before the inquest was due, I was waiting for him. He had three mates with him, but I didn’t care.

I stepped out of the ginnel I had been waiting in. “I want a word with you, Taylor”

“Oh fuck off you long streak of ginger piss. Four of us? You think you’re a hard man cause you drove around in a tank once?”

A calm and measured voice spoke from behind me.

“Thomas Armstrong, Will Elson, Colin Dykes. You run off home now before I have to remember your names officially. Be good gentlemen. Now”

The four looked at each other.

“Sharpish now, lads”

Taylor’s three mates left in a hurry, and I looked round to see the copper who had been at the Museum Gardens in November. He touched his helmet in salute to me. “Better you lads go down the ginnel a bit. Happen I won’t be able to see what goes on from here”

Taylor looked pale in the street lights, pale and nervous, but as we entered the narrow alley he turned quickly and punched me hard in the face. I staggered back, so his next swing missed me, and my training came back as I jabbed him in the face three times, blocking another wild swing with my left forearm before I really caught him full in the face. I felt and heard his nose go, and as his head went back I closed the gap and hit him with a combination of six or seven punches before deciding that I really didn’t care what people thought of me and kicking him hard between the legs.

He went down in a heap, whimpering, and as I was deciding whether or not to kick him again I saw how close his head was to the kerbstone. I knelt down and took a handful of his thinning hair. Just lift, get it over the edge of the stone and smash, one less problem for humanity.

“Now now, Mr Barker. Happen I couldn’t let that one go by unseen. You leave this vermin here and get yourself home to your wife. Amazing how much damage a man can do to himself when he’s had a few too many, isn’t it, Mr Taylor? Off home now, Gerald. You have to give Mr Wainwright a proper send-off, and you won’t do it from inside a cell”

I did take time to do one thing, though, before I got my bike and rode home, and that was to spit on Taylor. Tricia was waiting up for me when I got home, silent as she bathed the wounds to my face, and that night in bed she was tender at first, so gentle, and then more passionate than she had ever been before, as if to show how she approved of what she knew I had done, what I had had no choice in doing.

She came back to bed after cleaning herself up, and wrapped herself around me as if to anchor me to her.

“Well done, love”

“I should have killed him. I had the chance”

“No, love. You shouldn’t have. That wouldn’t be the man I married, the man I loved. That wouldn’t be the dad you’ll be to our kids”

She kissed me on the cheek. “I’m two weeks late with my monthlies, love. I think we need to start thinking of names”