Crusaders Read online

  ‘Do you knaa then, Bob?’

  ‘Listen I knaa you wouldn’t catch us grafting for Dutchmen.’

  ‘Whey man, what does it matter they’re Dutch? Money’s the same colour.’

  ‘Whey then let’s just give all wor jobs to the Krauts, aye? Or the Japs, eh? Just like the ships, Dad?’

  George Coulson appeared to want no part of his son’s case. ‘Government will always see the shipyards right,’ he muttered.

  ‘Then what are we gannin’ into Common bloody Market for? So wor yards get shut? We used to make the ships for the Japs. Now they make their own. Out of bloody kits and all. That’s what’s doing him in.’

  ‘I’m alright, thank you, Robert, you speak for yourself.’

  ‘Dead right, George,’ Doggett boomed. ‘Shut your moaning face, Bob man, you ought to be proud of your lady.’

  Come the final whistle, Sunderland’s shock victory saw general delight, but Bobby had not recovered his pomp. Stevie felt rotten. His old man was surely in a slump, in need of a change, a plan – akin to what his mam had pulled off, somehow.

  *

  He bunked an afternoon’s school, very sure that the settee and telly would be his, for Bobby was at the garage and his mam was at Haan’s until five. Instead he surprised her at the kitchen table with her tea in a cup and saucer, but the cold exchanges for which he was braced did not come. It was much worse than that.

  ‘Steven, your father and I have had a falling-out. It’s very serious, I ought to tell you. So your father’s not going to live here for a while …’ He was, allegedly, already at a bed-and-breakfast in Birtley. Stevie nodded, giving nothing away, inwardly disbelieving, for whatever the rotten household weather of late it was not possible that such ties could be undone. What would Nana and Grandpa think? And yet, one and two and three nights without Bobby grew into a week, then a second and a third. Stevie needed to question his father, even trekking out to the bed-and-breakfast place by bus. But Bobby wasn’t there, nor at the garage.

  And thus began the Little Visits of Jim Doggett. He would greet Stevie as if kindly. ‘Alright there, son?’ The next outrage was Doggett and his mother stepping out for the evening. Bobby had always liked to be ‘out with Jim’. Now Bobby was out on his ear, and Jim began to settle indoors some nights too – the intruder, in like a shot, like Flynn, like shit off a stick. Oh yes, he had been saving himself. His grin as he came through the door let Stevie know that he considered Mary bought and paid for. He shared her tidiness, that was for sure. He ferried stuff with him from his flat on the other side of town – a dressing gown, toiletries. The steamy bathroom started to reek of him. But neither his seafaring aftershave nor Mary’s virulent air-freshener could ever mask the odour of Doggett’s obnoxious dumps.

  How could this man be in his house? Bobby, whatever his failings, was surely more appealing? But how could his dad have just fucked off, without a fight?

  One Saturday of early October 1976, Doggett announced he would take Stevie to see Sunderland play Everton at Roker Park, as if this were the finest fare imaginable. Stevie was not about to be bought off. That same morning, Bobby pulled up outside in a red Cortina Mark Three. He had a lady friend, Jeannette by name, but she remained in the car, and in any case she didn’t look as if she would suit a tidy living room. The couple took Stevie to the Excelsior, this at quarter past eleven. Jeanette was loud, drank too much and too fast. To Stevie’s eye, Mary’s primness for once seemed appropriate. Alone with the boy, Bobby stressed his enmity for Doggett. But, he was clear, he would not fight. ‘Let them live with it.’ But dad, man! – Stevie wanted to shout – They’re living with it fine! When Bobby dropped him home his hand was pumped a little too long. ‘There’ll always be a bed and a plate for you,’ Bobby said, and Jeannette nodded, as if it were any of her business. Only when Stevie was indoors did Mary inform him that Bobby and his friend were moving to be near her people in Nottingham.

  He stared at his bedroom ceiling for hours, feeling a stone-like cold seeping into his bones. Doggett, he was only the bollocks that he was, but Stevie could not forgive his mother – not after all that dark-haired decorousness in the past, that oh-so-sureness of the done thing. So his dad had failed to come up to scratch. So his mam had moved him along. He needed Mary to know what he thought of all that.

  *

  Glen Howey and Richey Gates fancied they were brilliant at shoplifting from the Galleries. Stevie resolved to show them what for. He knew enough to force entry to a parked car with a wrecking bar and, within, to locate and mingle the ignition leads. Often, though, a mile or two down a quiet stretch of road, he pulled up abruptly and told Glen and Richey to get out and fuck off. That was part of being a leader – a little bit of picking on your weaker associates. At such moments he felt like his gloominess made an inch-thick carapace against argument.

  He and Brian Shackleton had stopped knocking around – in the interim ‘Shack’ had assembled a little retinue of his own, and would sneer at Stevie across Princess Anne Park. One Saturday night they had a minor scrap that ended a draw, though Stevie felt he had shaded it. They settled their difference over a bottle of cider. Shack knew a moody girl called Tracy who sneaked out late to share a drink and a smoke. ‘You’ve got sad eyes, you,’ she told Stevie quietly. He and Shack fucked her in turn behind the brick bus shelter that backed into Biddick Wood, the experience scarcely more sexy than had he pushed his three-quarter-length erection through a hole in the shelter wall, but he humped his way through it, and when the frisson came and went he felt himself well shot of it.

  Housebreaking was Shack’s hobby. Round Washington it seemed a simple matter to loiter down the back-to-back rows, looking for the promising gap – then one foot over the wall into the yard, another up and through the fanlight. To Stevie there was something delicious to invading some bugger’s home, getting one over them. He steeled himself to stay cool in the act – not cocky, but carefree – and made a signature of helping himself to anything worth scoffing in the fridge. Looting was of less interest – there was rarely much that seemed of value. But this was precisely Shack’s obsession, zeroing in on the bedroom drawers. Richey, who never had a clue, just stood and gawped at one or other of them.

  The trio were inside a respectable semi in Fallowfield Way. Stevie had found a pot of crimson matt paint under the sink and was indulging a mad notion to daub a slogan – TEAM SHARKY – on the kitchen wall. Then hefty thumps sounded overhead, and he dropped the brush and hurdled the stairs. The action was all coming out of a kid’s boxy bedroom, painted that same warm crimson, but therein was Shack sitting on Richey’s back, trussing his hands with a skipping rope. ‘Just a bit fun, man,’ Shack cackled over his shoulder. ‘Fuck off, man,’ Richey groaned, hopelessly. Stevie was torn between panic and giggles. Then Shack was wrenching Richey’s jeans down to his knees, toying with a half-size snooker cue.

  ‘You scared yet, Richey?’

  In retrospect, Stevie accepted, it was scarcely a surprise – perhaps a stroke of fate – when they registered the sound of the key in the door below, froze and heard chatter in the hall, then a step on the stairs. Stevie and Shack ran, Shack using his shoulder to crash past the gentleman of the house, his wife and child gawping as they positively flew out the front door. In the chest-pounding euphoria of being back at large, neither had thought of aught but their own skins. When they remembered Richey, the matter still seemed somehow comical. It was hard to blame the lad for squealing, though they did. That same night Stevie was inside the cop shop at Glebe giving a statement to a patient officer, who corrected him on certain points of obvious fiction. Stevie felt a nagging penitence. It had been dafty behaviour. But he could not – would not – say as much. He was not charged, only cautioned – Shack, though, had had his chips – but the liaison officer informed the school, who had a policy in these matters.

  ‘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.

  Chapter II

  DUTY CALLS

  Sunday, 29 September 1996

  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, w
hose 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.