Well to cut a long one short it wasn’t pretty, and Phil’s dad wasn’t around to gamble anymore, which was a shame for Phil til her indoors got him a new dad, when it was even worse. Phil’s dad had taken a trip to Brighton, he’d been told, and hadn’t come back. Maybe he enjoyed the bright lights too much. I reckon he took a long walk on Brighton Pier. Anyway, no matter. We never saw him again. And it was another ten years before Phil got to drink in the boozer once more. In the meantime, he missed those bottles of sweet, sour stuff that he’d nursed whilst reading his comics as his old man talked to smoky old farts. He was too well known to Wheatley to slip into the smoke room and pretend to be some other geezer’s son, and Phil’s new dad had a big enough temper even without pouring back a dozen pints.
But there were off sales, and Phil was able to save up enough happennies to get a couple of bottles a week to fuel his habit, and if he washed out the bottle to make it look all sparkly new he could take it back to the boozer and get some money for doing so. It wasn’t some do-gooding namby pamby let’s try to save the planet nonsense - after all, it must have been only a year or so since our lot had done something to nearly blow up the planet - but it was all to do with glass being expensive and breweries being cheap, and they wanted to refill and reuse those bottles. For all I know Wheatley’s mother made the stuff herself and corked it in her parlour. Don’t matter. Not an issue. Point is, take it back, get a penny or however much it was. It was money that would go a long way. It didn’t go far enough to buy a new bottle, but it was better than a kick up the arse with a hobnail.
We found an old pram in the Eg, and rescued it, and that wasn’t some eco fucking warrior stuff but my first venture into business. See some people didn’t look after the pennies, but left the bottles unreturned. If we could get hold of them, then we could take them back ourselves, get the money, pocket it, end of. We wouldn’t be millionaires by Christmas, but the odd quid here and there would be useful come Christmas, and it meant that we could buy a bigger box of sweets when we snuck into the Rialto.
It was already a point of pride that we never paid to see a movie, not even if we really wanted to see how Flash Gordon got out of the last week’s cliffhanger and went about his way to defeat the monkey women from Venus. Most often we snuck in the back, because someone always forgot to lock the back door. More than once we went in the front door with some geezer who’d never been able to keep it in his trousers and so had no idea which were his kids and which were somebody else’s so he paid for us thinking we were his kith and. Phil even ended up with one family for his tea before the missus clocked him and threw him out on his arse.
So we would spend Saturday afternoons trolling the streets for empties, take them to old Wheatley, and between then and bedtime we would drink what we got. It was tidy, but not enough, and it took all afternoon to find the bottles. We became experts in the snickets and binways of Gallows Field, round the back of the terraces where the people stored their rubbish. Sometimes we would sneak up on someone’s back step and get them, sometimes we would even spot someone drinking it and take it from their hands. We were good kids, they said. We kept the neighbourhood looking neat, and they had to respect that. I know I have since. But it weren’t enough, we wanted more than we were clearing.
Now some of them got their lemonade delivered by the milkos, and that was the best. Not only could we half inch a pristine bottle of lemonade from the cart, drink that, but we could then take them to Wheatley and get our pieces of silver. He got fuck all out of the deal, because he was paying out to us and hadn’t seen a farthing. Still, he didn’t object, not then anyway. Some days it would be me talking to the mester and admiring his horse, whilst Phil boosted a bottle from the crate, sometimes Phil would be the charming one and I’d do the dipping. We were caught I think only once, and we got a clip round the ear holes for our trouble, but that was much for breaking a bottle as nicking it. I’d not quite got into the right position to keep the cart still, and it must have moved when Phil was still pulling out his booty and the thing slipped from his fingers and smashed into a thousand pieces. After that we decided to leave it a couple of weeks before we tried it again, because we thought we’d been noted. I guess actually that one snot nose was pretty much another snot nose and the milko didn’t care enough to remember our mugs, but at the time it was a big deal. Like I say, I was seven.
One afternoon in July we were perusing the snickets and we tried a gate to find it unlocked. We must have been stupid, yeah, we were seven, we were short of a plank, but we didn’t at first realise that it was the boozer’s backyard. These days it would be described as a courtyard-style garden, and they’d have gas canisters heating up the area. Back then it was where all the broken bar stools and pool cues got dumped, the odd empty barrel and a few crates of empties. It was like we’d been given the keys to the sweet shop and told to lock up once we were done. It was birthday and Christmas both at once. It was pay dirt. The first week we only took a couple, because we didn’t know whether someone might come out the backdoor and catch us at it. Ideally we’d have wheel our pram up to the pile and taken a whole crate, but we couldn’t get close enough and the crates were too heavy for us to lift, even the two of us. But we’d get a dozen or so, take the home, rinse them, then take them into the lounge and get our money back from the landlady.
Now I don’t know why they never clocked us, at least never clocked us for that. Milko might not have known us from any other ragged arse on the street, but the Wheatleys never forgot a face and never asked what the usual was a second time. They had photographic memories I reckon, only what the mister knew, the missus knew too and vice versa. Yet neither of them ever seemed to notice that we were more or less taking a crate from the back of their pub round to the front for them to put the empties back where we found them. They were happy, because we were spending, and at the end of the day nothing mattered more to Wheatley than the money in his till. One bloke did notice, but then he noticed anybody, that was Old Harry. Maybe the Wheatleys thought we were being public spirited. At least until he caught me at his till. We did have some cover story ready if we were caught, that I would say that i was doing it for all of my terrace, and Phil would say that it had just been his birthday and he’d had his mates in for one hell of a party, but it never came to that. Even then I knew the need for an alibi. I’d get more practice of that later, but back then I kept it simple. Always have an alibi. That’s one of the three things I live by these last thirty years. Forty years even. Christ. I got old.
It turns out that there’s a limit to how much lemonade a boy can drink, at least in my case, and I started saving up the pennies in my secret place on Gallows Field itself. Phil meanwhile was happily rotting his teeth and beginning to pile on the pounds. He was already a heavy, and he’d be a heavy all his life. One day that August I thought I’d spend some of my cash to go and see a movie with Phil. And pay for the two of us. Yes, I know I said it was a point of honour not to pay but I must have been nearly eight then, or maybe only nine, and I decided that I would put away childish things. Next week I went back to the back ways in, but for one week I was a gentleman. In those days the best films were in black and white and in fact I reckon that the whole world was actually in black and white, and in some ways it was better that way. I knew who the villains were. I reckon it was that night that altered that for me.
Those days the flicks changed twice a week, and of course it was a continuous cycle of films - these days the adverts are as long as the one film itself, and they come in and kick us out. That day we got there during the news reel, and we got to do the rooster with the other kids on the balcony. We found prime seats right at the front, where we could have gobbed on the people below if we’d wanted, but that day we were grown up and only did it once. Well, I did it twice because I spotted a bald head that practically had a target tattooed on it. The trick always was to aim carefully so that they weren’t bombed from above, because then they’d know who it was. Half of the joy of the indirect gob was seeing some snot nosed scrote having the shit kicked out of him by an usher for something he didn’t do.
I know that Phil had really wanted to see this film because it was set in Brighton, and that was where he’d been told his dad was. Of course, there’s no reason why he would have been in Brighton. It doesn’t make sense. I guess if he owed money to Goldner then maybe he thought he’d be safe across on the south coast, but even in them days there would have been some kind of contact between territories. The only thing I can think is that they took him there to get rid of him because no one craps on their own doorstep, but I reckon that if a message really needed to be sent they’d have strung him up in Gallows Field. But we kept looking in the crowd scenes for someone with Phil’s old dad’s mug, but I never saw him. Phil reckoned there was one scene on the pier where he thought he saw the back of his dad’s head but I never saw it when he was with us so I don’t reckon that I’d be able to pull his dad out of a line-up off people facing the wall. Phil was convinced enough that we’d stayed around to see the film a second time and even a third, though the serial bored me because I wanted to know whether Flash had really died in the crash and I wouldn’t know for another week. I liked doing the cockcrow though, and even did it a few times during that dull flick about pit ponies.
Each time the end came, I wondered what the bird would say when she finally heard the record that her dead boyfriend had recorded for her. It was nothing but hate, and I could see where he was coming from, because he was a proper lad, and I could respect him, but she was nothing but a drip, but then all girls were boring in those days. It took me another ten years - and funnily it was fumbling around on the back row of the gallery at that very cinema that made the scales drop from my eyes. But the movie men cheated and I never got to see her get her comeuppance. The record skipped and she just got part of his message. That was a real shame. The second time I saw it, I hoped that she’d hear it properly, but of course she had to do what the film made her do. The frames were fixed. She still loved him. He still loved her, she thought. Even if he had gone off the pier. And every day for the next two weeks I would try to sneak in to see the flick.
Now if I had been Phil, and I’d thought my guvnor was in Brighton, I don’t think I would have wanted to know about that gang. It would have put ideas in my head. I think I would have headed off down there myself to sort them out if I thought they’d sliced my dad’s face open with a razor or thrown acid in his face. I would have taken a belt to them if I’d had a belt. I don’t know. I reckon that Phil just thought his father hung out and threw balls at the coconuts all day. All I know is that likely I would have been sorted by the gang if I’d gone to see them, and then properly belted by my dad for running away from home. Not that he was in Brighton, but had he been in Brighton he would have done it even if I’d come to rescue him from the flying monkeys. For worrying my mother, no doubt. Lots of things worried my mother, bless her.
I got belted across the head that night, for worrying my mother. I left Phil in the cinema, because I knew that it must have been getting late, and it was getting dark as I ran the back ways home, using that knowledge of the alleyways and bin runs that we’d acquired since that Spring. I figured that if I went the back way I’d be less likely to run into an aunt or an uncle who would wallop me for being out so late and worrying my mother. Of course, I know now that Granda didn’t have quite so many children, and that my ma’s dad had kept it in his trousers after her, so that these people weren’t really aunts and uncles. It was all to do with respect, and I respected them proper for slapping me because it never did me any real harm because it was done with love. Still, I didn’t want any love that night, I just wanted to be tucked up before anyone had twigged I wasn’t in the box room. I knew George wouldn’t tell, because I’d seen him do stuff to himself that he didn’t like talking about, and he knew I would tell if he told, but even so I had to get from the street to my bed without waking up the old man.
Now people go on about the old days and talk a whole lot of crap about how no one ever locked their doors because they trusted everybody and no one would come in to nick stuff and shit on the carpet. Of course, we didn’t have anything to nick, maybe only the old Bakelite radio which give anyone a hernia who tried to inch it. There was no telly - we didn’t get one of those until the Coronation and that must have been later. Now if nobody ever locked their doors, how come they used to give people the key to the door on their twenty-first. It don’t add up. Maybe we were different. All I know is that when I got home the front door was locked. Later I remember great play about my old man going to lock the door at ten, and that if I weren’t back by then I’d be stuck out all night like the cat. Maybe that was the night he’d started locking it because he knew I wasn’t there. Later than that I remember him not locking it until eleven, so that I had to run home at last shout, and I know even to this day I don’t stay til time. Still, and I know there is an awful lot of laters here because it’s nearly fifty years ago, by the time he started locking it at eleven I wasn’t necessarily going to be sleeping in my own bed.
I knew the gate squeaked, so I climbed over the wall of the postage stamp sized garden where ma had grown vegetables during the war but was now back to roses. I pushed at the front door, but it wouldn’t shift. I knew there was no point in reaching in for a key on a string, because there wouldn’t be one. There wasn’t a key hidden somewhere - and I’m not even going to say where I hide mine - so I couldn’t get in that way. For all I knew it was bolted as well as locked. It was only the need to get in quickly that had sent me to the front - I’d thrown caution to the wind after escaping all eyes up to that point. It was four houses along to the door in the terrace that would let me through to the back, and it was dark in the passageway between the houses. I half thought I was going to run into Spicer or Dallow who I later knew as Doctor Who. I was worried about nightmares about the flick, even though I had thought that these were people who I wanted to be like.
But they weren’t real and I got to our rotten back gate, and pushed that open. At least he hadn’t locked that. I thought I was home and dry. But he must have been behind me. He must have been in the khazi. The first I knew about it was a blow across my head, and he was right to do it, because I should not have stayed out so late. It was only because I yelped that he didn’t take it any further, because my mother appeared at the backdoor, demanding to know what was going on. As it was he only knocked me into the middle of next week. I respected him for that. It made sure I was never caught coming late again. Which is not to say I was never late home again, especially during my teen years as I’ve already said.
I was up early the next day, as well, and I was the first to be off. Dad was going to be up soon, I knew, and I didn’t fancy staying around to face him. Ma had stopped me from getting a thrashing, and he was frightened enough of his old duchess not to beat me any further for what I’d done, but that would not stop the cuffs and bruises where they wouldn’t show. It was a death by a thousand clips. I stood in the kitchen, imaging that I was the only person in the house, that my father and my mother and my brothers were all dead and buried and this place was mine alone.
I stared at the razor blade that was in an enamel mug on the windowsill, and reached for it. I unclasped the blade and made as if to touch the edge, pulling back at the last second. I’d seen my dad shave himself with this a thousand times, by the murky light of the kitchen window, a bowl full of suds and soap, remains of a white beard across his chin which mocked his attempts to grow a real one. I remember sitting on the draining board once, maybe I was three, watching him, and reaching out to touch it. He slapped my hand even then.
But now I had it in my power. It was sharp enough to slit skin, and I brought the blade up to my own face, thinking to make a cut that would scar me like the kid in that movie. Call me Pinkie. I hesitated. It was sharp enough to slice skin, bladed enough to cut a throat, and I thought that maybe that was what I was meant to do with it. Slice them open. Leave them for dead. Unfortunately it was too late. They would be stirring soon. I ran out of the house and into the alleyways, and followed my secret route to my secret place where I hid the blade in a place that only I would know.
That afternoon I was looking for bottles again, but without Phil. It was in the closed hours, after lunchtime opening but before the evening, and no one was about. I got up to the space behind the pub where the empty bottles and barrels were kept, but that day there were just wooden crates, nothing that I could take. However, it was clear that the back door was open, and that inside there might be a bigger prize. I walked as softly as I could to the back door and peered through the gap into the room beyond. I listened hard. As far as I could tell there was no one there, and so I slipped inside.
The place reeked of chemicals and smoke, but it was indeed empty. I moved through the smoke room to the bar and there was a bottle on the side. I removed the lid and tipped into my mouth. I spat out the brown, smoky liquid again and nearly dropped the bottle. My gran had given me a few mouthfuls of stout before, and I had sort of liked that, but this was disgusting. How could people drink this? I decided that there was nothing there to take, aside from the packets of crisps, and so I was about to leave when I saw the cash register.
To this day I swear it was calling to me. I walked across towards it, and my head was just about on a level with the drawer. There was bound to be money in there, and so I thought I’d help myself. I reached up and tried to press the levers on it. After a few false attempts, the drawer shot out and I nearly lost an eye. I waited for the silence to return, and then groped inside for the coins.
It was then that the second attack in twenty four hours happened, and the till drawer was shut, towards the tips of my fingers. I went flying, and hit the tiles of the floor. I lay there, winded. Above me an ogre ranted and raved and at some point I realised that it was old man Wheatley. I don’t know whether my father heard him, or whether Wheatley’s missus went to get him or whether my dad had come down for a drink, but he was there at some point, not intervening in the endless tirade that Wheatley was heaping on my head. He made no attempt to intervene to save me, or to protect me, he just stood there and looked at me, his eyes clearly telling me that his turn was next.
Eventually the verbal attack was over, and my father dragged me by the ear to our home. I stood there where I had stood that morning, in the kitchen, shivering, I didn’t cry. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. He would just take that as a signal to hit me even harder. I decided then and there I would never cry again. He pulled the black leather belt out from his trousers, and reached across to take me in his left arm. I waited for the blows of the belt to begin.