AS YOU DRIVE EAST ALONG THE M62 YOU SEE ON YOUR left-hand side, between interchanges 20 and 21, a large council estate of several hundred houses – Kirkholt – which is the biggest estate in Rochdale, with its own church, schools, shopping centre and social club. Running parallel with the motorway is Hilltop Drive, which you can look down on as you speed along the asphalt ribbon that follows the contours of the moors over into Yorkshire; and off Hilltop Drive is Rudyard Grove, a cul-de-sac comprising twenty houses or so. At number 18 lives Kenny’s Auntie Doll. She’s a plump, jovial woman with a beautiful set of pot teeth: a dazzling National Health smile that by its very brightness seems to hide a lifelong history of personal upsets and family crises. Auntie Doll is Kenny’s mother’s elder sister – sixteen years her elder, in fact, which puts her in the mid-fifties. Invariably she’s smiling; this makes it difficult, if not impossible, to guess whether or not she’s genuinely happy or yet again hiding one more miniature trauma to add to the catalogue of woes and calamities and misfortunes she has suffered since her marriage to Jimmy Mangan thirty-one years ago come April 3rd. If you don’t have to live with him, Jimmy is a character; if you do, he’s a drunkard. Although if drunkard is too strong a word for someone who at least manages to hold down a job now and again, then soak, inebriate and other such similar euphemisms make light of a situation in which every penny that finds its way into his pocket goes on drink before it has time to go anywhere else – rent, gas bill, holiday money, poor box. Doll has borne this state of affairs with forbearance and equanimity for so long that it’s now become second nature to her; even more remarkable when you know that her father was afflicted with the same disease. She escaped from a penny-pinching adolescence with a father who at weekends was transformed into a raging madman, to a married life in which bringing up three daughters and a son single-handed on the slops left over from the pub turned out to be a daily trial of strength. Yet, incredibly, she still smiles, and with her pot teeth she has something to smile with if not about.
Jimmy sits dozing in front of the fire, his feet bare, the flesh scorched a mottled pink. He grunts and slobbers in deep sunken sleep and comes sluggishly awake, eyes like peeled grapes, as Doll says, ‘Look who’s here you drunken sod,’ and wrestles with his shoulder, the muscle run to fat. She even says this with a smile.
‘Hey up,’ Kenny says, setting a pint bottle of Blue Bass in the hearth.
‘Ken,’ Jimmy says, blinking foolishly, the eyes permanently out of focus. ‘Ken.’ He makes a slurping noise to take the taste away and then yawns cavernously. Kenny turns his face to the wall to avoid the sight as much as the smell. ‘Where’s me tea?’
‘You’ve had your tea. It’s half-past eight.’
‘Get some glasses,’ Kenny says.
The man and the boy drink thirstily, the pale golden Bass sliding into their mouths. They talk about football, in which neither one is interested, while Doll moves to and fro in a parody of normal domestic activity. Although she spends, on average, an hour a day cleaning the house, the rooms never lose that appearance of shabbiness and untidiness which characterises certain working class homes. There are always crumbs on the table, newspapers on the floor and pieces of coal in the hearth, and the pattern on the wallpaper has been worn away in a faint streak where the backs of chairs have rubbed against it. When things get broken they stay broken until they’re eventually thrown out, because Jimmy hasn’t lifted a finger in the household for the last fifteen years.
‘Dale went down again.’
‘Yeh.’
‘Yeh.’
‘Good game?’
‘Not bad.’
‘Big crowd?’
‘No.’
‘Who scored?’
Kenny doesn’t know. He was groping Janice behind the Sandy Lane stand when they scored. He shifts awkwardly on the lumpy chair in his groin-tight trousers, trying to quell the memory. She’s all right, Janice: a good laugh and a good grope, though he hasn’t plonked it yet. He could plonk it right now though; if she was here, Christ could he plonk it.
‘How’s your mam?’ Doll asks, smiling. (She would smile, Doll, were the heavens to erupt in chaos and the hydrogen bomb to fall on number 18 Rudyard Grove.)
Kenny can’t be bothered to reply to this question. He up-ends the bottle into his glass and blinks once: that’s the only answer she’s going to get. He likes Doll but she’s a woman and therefore of no account.
Jimmy puts the empty glass in the cracked hearth and asks what time is it? The pubs shut at half-past ten on Sundays which means less time to sleep off the afternoon binge before preparing for the final mind-blinding bevvy – all that separates him from the chilling black vacuum of Monday morning with its raw air and stiff greasy overalls scraping the skin and the upper deck choking on Park Drive. If he didn’t have to work what a fine life Jimmy Mangan would have. As it is, he exists from pint to pint, hopeless, cheerful, indefatigably defeated: a human sponge with glassy eyes and a good body gone to pot.
‘And where do you think you’re going?’ Doll asks. Jimmy is staggering about the kitchen looking for shoes and socks, tucking his collarless shirt into his trousers with one hand while supporting himself with the other. He cracks his toes on the leg of a chair and comes out with a mouthful. His previous good humour vanishes and he snarls and curses, pushing things out of his way, knocking stuff onto the floor. The house is a prison now; he gets into a blind rage and hates Doll and wants to harm her physically. She retreats into a corner, adopting a defensive posture (the smile gone for the moment) as Jimmy swings around the kitchen, colliding with the furniture. Once he attacked her with the bread knife and she retaliated by breaking his collarbone with a chair.
Kenny sits drinking his Bass, not unduly perturbed. He hasn’t many illusions so far as people are concerned and very little they do surprises or alarms him. His own mother and father have a barney at least once a week, usually on a Friday night; it’s the way folk live.
• • •
Jimmy is wonderful at the bar of the Dicken Green. The ale makes him quick-witted and hilarious, standing there unshaven in his collarless working shirt with a jacket draped across his shoulders. Andy, a mate of Kenny’s, comes through the tables in the L-shaped tap-room. A wreath of smoke hugs the ceiling, slow streamers of it trickling down the walls. Although Kenny can’t stand coloureds in general and Pakis at any price he doesn’t mind Andy, who is West Indian.
‘Hey up,’ says Kenny.
Jimmy Mangan stops. Then he stares. Then before tipping the pint into his mouth he says, ‘I always call a Spade a Spade’, to the crowd clustering the bar, who respond appreciatively, digging each other in the ribs and laughing because they think Jimmy is genuinely funny and because if they don’t he might throw something.
‘Where you bin?’ Kenny asks in an aside.
‘Seven Stars.’
‘Dead.’
‘Seen Crabby?’
‘No.’
‘Bin to town?’
‘No.’
‘What you drinking?’
‘Pint.’
Kenny orders three pints and tells the barmaid she’s got a tight little bum, like two hardboiled eggs in a navvy’s hanky. She pulls her face in a kind of leering smile, undecided as to whether she should be flattered by the attentions of this strongly-built youth with the sloppy mouth and the tattooed knuckles. Kenny rests his meaty forearms on the bar and looks directly at her breasts.
‘Do you want a photo?’
‘What of?’ Kenny responds, letting his jaw go slack and his mouth droop open in a dumb show of calculated insolence. His heavy-lidded eyes peruse the outlines of her black bra through her pale yellow blouse. He puts out his lower lip and continues to watch her sullenly as she lines up the pints in front of him.
‘I dreamt about you last night.’
‘Did you?’
‘No, you wouldn’t let—’
A car screeches outside and everybody rushes to the doors to see a blue Ford Cortina sticking out of a lamp-post. There is glass all over Queensway and a man gets out with blood running down his face, which looks like black treacle in the anaemic light. Everybody watches to see whether he’ll fall down or merely come into the pub to use the phone. Some people at the bus stop escort him across the road and sit him down on the pavement. The car doesn’t burn. Kenny goes back to where Jimmy is halfway through somebody else’s pint.
‘Did he get the chop?’ Jimmy asks between gulps. Kenny lights a Number 6 and shakes his head as he blows smoke out.
Andy says, ‘They’re ringing for an ambulance.’
‘Bloody Spade,’ Jimmy says, standing there unsteadily at the slopping bar, his coat hanging half off his shoulders and the sleeve of his shirt wringing wet.
‘It’s all right now,’ Kenny says.
‘What did he say?’ Andy says. He’s a biggish lad too, with a broad handsome face and a thick sensitive mouth. He has a razor-blade in his pocket with a strip of adhesive plaster down one side. Kenny grips the wrist of the hand that goes in the pocket in a gesture that is partly restraining, partly conciliatory.
‘Go easy, he’s had a skinful.’
‘Listen, dad—’
‘It’s okay,’ Kenny mouths.
‘What’s he on about?’ Andy says.
‘Nowt. He’s bevvied.’
‘Spades.’ Jimmy emits a gust of air to signify what he thinks of Spades. The movement almost sends him reeling and he has to grab the bar, blinking with surprise, his head wobbling on springs.
‘Now listen—’
‘It’s all right, he’s me uncle.’
‘Well then,’ Andy says, ‘you’d better tell him,’ and staggers back, his hand nearly out of his pocket, as Jimmy slaps him on the shoulder in what is meant to be a friendly pat but is in actual fact a forcible blow.
‘No fence, codger, me yold son, me yold son, me yold …’
Jimmy tries to make his left hand (the right still clutching the bar) express what his tongue can’t, waving it to and fro with a cigarette very nearly scorching his index finger. Andy looks at this beer-sodden wreck and decides it isn’t worth it. But Jimmy Mangan has only to say ‘Spades’ one more time and he’ll have a razor in his gullet. ‘We’d better shoot off,’ Kenny says, giving Andy his pint.
‘Th’all know me, th’all know me,’ Jimmy insists. ‘No fence to no man.’ He rifts deeply and the stench is putrescent. ‘Evry man his own, no matter what religion, colour, creed. Ask anybody here. Anybody. Th’all know me. Ask them about Jim-iny Magnan – Manginum. He’ll tell you, he’ll tell you – this lad. Ken. Myyyyyyyyyy nefu. Neff-yoo. One of the bezt. He doesn’t like Spades either.’
‘Oh fucking hell,’ Andy says.
There’s going to be a barney, only Kenny doesn’t like fighting with relations. Jimmy is a pain in the arse but when all’s said and done he’s a harmless old fart; and occasionally he slips Kenny half-a-bar which Kenny forgets to return and Jimmy simply forgets.
The gathering of old faithfuls round the bar looks on happily, awaiting with interest the next development. Jimmy is too bevvied to fight, of course, but he could put up a struggle that might be worth watching. Even seeing him fall on his arse would be good for laugh.
‘Tell him, Ken; for fuck’s sake,’ Andy says with a pained expression.
‘Look … cool it.’
‘Don’t tell me – tell him!’
‘He’s old, he’s past it, he’s pissed.’
‘Then he should know better. I’m not going to take it, whether he’s your uncle or not.’
‘He’s just a useless old drunk.’
‘Tell him then. And make him shut up.’
Kenny sighs; the world is on top of him. ‘Come on now, Jimmy, you’ve had enough. Doll will be waiting up for you.’
‘My neff-yoo.’
‘Aye, your nephew.’ He takes Jimmy by the arm and half-drags, half-carries him to the door. ‘I’ll see him across the road,’ Kenny says to Andy. ‘Get us a pint in.’
‘Don’t do owt I wouldn’t do!’
‘Watch yon bugger, he’ll have you under a bus!’
‘Don’t knock any lamp-posts over on your way home!’
Kenny comes back a few minutes later and picks up his pint with the weariness of somebody returning from a Siberian labour camp. It’s nearly time for last orders so he drinks the pint in one long gulping swallow and orders two more, wiping his mouth. Tomorrow it’s work again: getting out of a warm bed and putting on overalls stiff with grease, shivering in the pre-dawn gloom of approaching winter as he walks through the Estate to catch the Deeplish bus on Milkstone Road. The walk is like the taste of iron in his mouth, with the Estate looking grey and unwashed in the dim glow of the wall-lights set in frosted globes. The bus is foul at this hour of the morning, thick with cigarette smoke from the close-packed seats, the smell of diesel oil dense in the nostrils, and the continual sound of hawking coughs and throat-clearings. There is hardly any talk as he sits there, cramped between the streaming window and somebody’s arm holding the Sun, aware only that his bones feel like brittle sticks as the bus jolts over the humped canal bridge past the Kwik-Save supermarket on Well’ith Lane. Monday is always the worst morning of all, Tuesday is slightly better, and by Wednesday he is looking forward to the week-end.
Andy has made contact with the barmaid. She’s thrown the towel over the pumps and stands with her hard round breasts resting on the bar. Kenny wasn’t there to see the initial overtures and innuendos and he wonders for the umpteenth time how it is that Andy can never go wrong with the birds; he must have a great technique – unless it’s simply because they fancy a bit of black for a change. He’s talking to her in a low confidential voice, the two of them isolated amidst the noise and movement in a private cocoon of soft phrases and small intimacies.
The lights are flashing and the landlord calls, ‘All right, gentlemen, let’s have you. Come along now. Your glasses please.’
The barmaid looks straight at Andy and nods once. She mouths something with an exaggerated motion of her red lips, the lipstick faded at the corners, and goes to get her coat.
‘What you doing?’ Kenny asks.
‘I’m okay.’ Andy drags on his cigarette and stubs it out in the ashtray.
‘Have you trapped?’
‘Could be,’ Andy says, never one to over-commit himself.
‘Two’s up.’
‘You must be joking.’
‘I’ll push off.’
‘See you Ken.’
‘Yeh,’ Kenny says.
Queensway is humming with late-night traffic as he walks back to the Estate. He could do very badly with Janice tonight but it looks – as usual – as though he’s going to have to settle for a hand gallop.
Rochdale Observer, 16 February 1974
BOROUGH MAGISTRATES
WEDNESDAY
PROBATION FOR YOUTH – A youth told police that as he and his companion were passing a grocer’s shop in Oldham Road they saw a window was broken and decided to take goods. D______ A______ C______, aged 17, of Rhodes Crescent, Kirkholt, was put on probation for three years when he admitted stealing food valued at £7.04 from James Duckworth Ltd. Sergeant B Edmondson said two policemen on crime patrol saw C______ and another youth carrying objects under their coats. They ran, dropping a quantity of foodstuffs in the road. C______ told the court he had nothing to say.