Manners Page 4

  The youngest Clanton was Tina. Nine years old, Tina was usually found hunching one shy shoulder after another as if someone were going to hit her. In more outgoing moments she'd be gnawing her fingers, with her long blonde hair hanging over one or both eyes. Beautiful with a wide nose and mouth like Lauren Bacall (crossed with the lead singer of UB40!). The other helpers called her a 'limpet' because she always wanted to be carried or to sit on my lap. The little she said was in a heart-stopping, sing-song whisper of a voice. An aerated, dreamy lilt which snagged on the scouse hard 'c's and 'k's and sounded like someone spinning a bright copper cog. Once when I was giving her a piggy-back, the soft, quiet voice in my ear said, 'I can read that word.'

  Her grubby finger pointed down at the large white letters painted on the car-park Tarmac we were walking over.

  'Go on then.'

  'A-L-L-O-W-E-D. Allowed.'

  'How do you know that word?' (She had problems spelling her own surname.) 'It says that by ours. NO BALL GAMES ALLOWED.'

  Another time, Tina was sitting on my lap one night in the back of the crowded van as we returned from the chippy. She was looking at a thicket of white moths against the night.

  'The moths look like they're dancing,' she whispered.

  'Tina, you're an angel.'

  'What's that?'

  She was a tough kid, too. She'd never wail when one of her brothers walked past and gave her a dig in the face or stomach. Just lower her head and bite her lip.

  'Where's Tina?' I joked one morning to a blonde curtain of matted hair where an eye peeped out over her cornflakes. (Breakfast served on three long trestle tables.) That same afternoon Tina took to the smooth floor of the roller-rink like a duck to its skateboard. Her shoulder-length fringe blew up and away from bold, assured eyes and a quiet, confident smile at thirty miles an hour.

  *

  Day Two I drove the leaky Transit full of singing kids to the swimming-pool.

  We're off we're off we're off in a motor car; Sixty coppers are after us, we don't know where we are.

  Turn round the corner eating a Christmas pie, Along came a copper I punched him in the eye.

  I went to tell me mother, me mother wasn't in, I went to tell me father, he kicked me in the bin.

  We're off, we're off …

  I was so proud of our children when we hit the swimming-pool. How fearless they were on the boards, how completely they took over the place, how quickly Robbie Clanton got thrown out. (For diving in from the balcony of the cafeteria.) Laughed out loud seeing Leanne Evans in her costume. Costume slightly too large.

  Turning around and around with Anna and Tina in each arm, wet bodies, slippery as soap, as alive as mice. Laughing close in each other's faces I wondered whether this was extreme happiness or just a selfconscious replica of that slow-motion frame. But there was a hypnotic field-effect keeping us chuckling in each other's wet faces, turning and turning. And though I was aware of it being a time-stand-still moment, time standing still all the same.

  The intense light, the bright-coloured swimsuits, the yellow armbands, the red and white life-belts and sky-blue diving board. All the beautiful, energetic bodies, tiny legs, bombing or on the side shivering with hunched shoulders and elbows, excited yelps, shouts echoing round the baths, wave upon wave.

  The little pelvic hollows where a municipal swimsuit didn't fit. One scrawny, wizened-faced boy in baggy nylon football shorts and whose name I can't remember dropped off the top boards as if he was dropping into a sofa. I stood in the shallow end watching Leanne Evans star-diving into the five foot. Jumping off the side in her stripy all-in-one, arms and legs out like a starfish, tiny little nates.

  'Having a good look?' probed Sarah, one of the helpers. 'Eh?'

  'Staring at semi-naked little girls,' she said, with a sharky inquisitor's smile. Arch. Float if I'm guilty, sink if I'm not.

  'Yes,' I said, turning to her but then looking down at the water and then the big windows. 'Not like that, but … but their bodies are beautiful.'

  'You like looking at their bodies?'

  'But it's not a sexual thing! I don't want to have sex with them.'

  'Lots of paedophiles don't actually have sex with their prey, or don't actually penetrate.'

  'What the fuck are you using a word like penetrate for? In this conversation. How did we get here?'

  One of the kids swam up. Little Annie with her granny face (grey-eyed and washer-womany for all her slender, chirpy frame). She sensed a spat and turned and swam off again. I watched her confiding importantly in the other kids not to come near, with the respect for adult rows an alkie dad had taught her.

  'Well, would you look at the boys like that?'

  'Like what?'

  'Well, would you say their bodies were beautiful?'

  'That's not the same, well, no but yes, they've got a certain life … but … '

  'Ah!'

  My mouth gaped open and shut like a landed fish. In the back of my stung mind was a sense that it wasn't anything like lust. It was a cheery benign thing. The freedom of their bodies. The neat compactness. The lack of shame. The quick of life in their bodies. Their faces more individual than adults'. Brighter than adult faces that have had a lifetime of disappointing answers to all those eager questions. And know that the moon is a big ball of dust.

  A whistle blew. Robbie Clanton had just dived in off the balcony and I had to accompany him out.

  Me and Robbie crossed the car park with wet hair and crisps. Two social outcasts. I couldn't find the van for about ten minutes.

  'You glad you're here?' I asked him as we searched.

  'It's all right,' he said. 'Your food's shit though.'

  'What's your favourite food?'

  'Chopped pork.'

  'What's that?'

  'It comes in a tin.'

  'OK, we got an hour — let's go and get some.'

  I gave him a fiver of my own money outside Londis.

  'I'll be wanting some change and don't peg off to Acapulco.'

  When he came out with the tin and my present and correct change, I made a show of patting down his pockets.

  'You arlarse,' he said.

  There were a few shekels in his jacket pocket.

  'Ah, my change,' I said.

  'Fuck off, that's mine!'

  'I gave you a tenner.'

  'Fiver.'

  'I clearly remember giving you a twenty. It was purple.'

  'Arlarse!' he said as I handed back his few coins.

  Driving back to the pool, I saw a gate open and drove into an empty field.

  'If you make me a cup of tea when we get back to the hall, you can drive the van now round this field.'

  'Go 'ead!'

  'But it will have to be a very special cup of tea. You have to soak the tea-bag for exactly fifty-eight seconds, two sugars and plenty of milk and it has to be stirred with love.'

  'Yeah, yeah.'

  'Yeah?'

  'Yeah, I'll make you a cup of tea.'

  'How do I have it?'

  'Flob in it, wipe my arse on the teabag, no sugars, no milk.'

  'No driving,' I said, pretending to be about to turn the van round.

  'Two sugars, some fucking milk, fifty seconds … '

  'No, Robbie, not fifty seconds.'

  'Fifty-four.'

  I shook my head.

  'Fifty-eight.'

  'Fight-eight seconds and then you whip that tea-bag out. And what do you stir it with?'

  'Give me the keys you queer!'

  'That's near enough,' I said, sliding off the seat, but holding on to the keys until I'd walked round and got in the passenger side.

  Robbie drove the van gently round the field with no handbrake turns.

  *

  One night we had a ghost hunt. We drove to a deserted spot, the van headlights went off, and a Pifco-underlit helper told the kids a ghost story which he said had happened on this very footpath.

  The village we were billeted in was haunted by souvenir
witches, leering from tea-towels, pub signs and china mugs.

  The kids had all seen these as we walked through the village, which helped our ghosts' sheet cred.

  On the first ghost hunt me and Robbie Clanton, Jason Macarthy and Donna Craig were the acting ghosts. (It was meant to be Tony too but he had to stay back at the hall with Sue for beating up a 'woollyback' local.) Amazingly I got Robbie to paint his face white, wear a long black robe and paint my face white too. We painted some blood on each other. Robbie got the plastic fangs.

  When the four of us got to the ruin just off the footpath where the ghost-busters would come, my kids were too scared by the ruin to haunt it. This was strange as two of the ghost-children — Robbie and Donna — had burglary convictions back in the ghost town.

  *

  On the last day we had a party with games like Port! Aft! Starboard! Bow! The kids charged into wall after wall — Aft! Starboard! Starboard! — not wanting to be the stranded, picked off last. And the next morning we drove them back to stranded Liverpool.

  On the morning of their departure I crouched down in front of this shivering gawky kid whose name I forget. He was seven or eight with slightly goofy teeth and brown hair. A shivering outsider, he had seldom mixed in with any of the others, and once when we were all walking back in the early evening sun from a kickabout, I watched him, alone, thinking he was unobserved. As cars passed up the hill we were walking down he introvertedly mimed that he was kicking or punching each car.

  As we were about to leave, I crouched down in front of him, his sparrow rib-cage in my hand and asked, 'Did you have a good time on camp?'

  Eyes staring wildly at the distance, and with shrill panic in his voice, he anguishedly cried, 'No! It was crap!'

  Two vans took the kids home, and always the same ritual. As the van left the kids flicked the Vs out the windows. We grinned and flicked the Vs back, so they'd give it to wanker hand or swivel digit as the distance between you grew.

  I drove the second van, which included the Clantons, on the drop-off.

  Heading for home fourteen kids sang songs as we bowled along.

  We are ace, we are cool, We all come from Liverpool …

  … We are the scousers, Mighty, mighty scousers …

  … And you'll never walk alone.

  The complete hymn sheet. But as the van turned off the A-road and started bumping over the mean, mean streets of home, the songs dropped off like loose tiling.

  The kids were silent, watching anxiously, gathering their things. Fourteen individual kids, or sudden families again. Gina Grant talked quietly to her younger brother Joey, making sure he'd got both bags. And that his cozzy was in her bag. After that little flurry of activity, a tense silence again as the kids stared anxiously out the window, hoping to spot home a split second before anyone else did. Worried perhaps in case anything 'made a show of them'.

  I dropped each of them all back off again until it was just me and the Clantons. When we got to the Linden Estate where they lived I wondered if we'd done them a favour at all.

  Was it cruel to show them how different life could be before throwing them back in the hole? A taste of honey's worse than none at all. Or was it worth it perhaps just to have seen an alternative way of being; something else might do some enriching work, like the rain from two years ago — rain that lies down in the water-table and stops the ground cracking in a dry season.

  And you'll never walk alone …

  They insisted I didn't walk them to the door. (This from the same Tina and Robbie who'd wanted a carry/swing-round/piggy-back all week.) So I just walked them to the end of the street. They walked off about twenty paces carrying their heavy bags back into the real world, heads bowed like name-tagged evacuees returning to the city in 1941. They walked towards the Linden Estate's anti-personnel lights, twenty yards until they were back on the other side of that invisible Checkpoint Charlie. Then they stopped, turned and flicked the Vs. Like the whole week had been a practical joke they'd played on us. Adult faced again. Throwers of rocks at cows again.

  *

  One of the students, Sue Dornan, was from Oxford University on attachment. She arranged a February-half-term weekend down there for about eleven kids who were driven down by me and two women students. Tina turned up with a bandaged hand. She'd picked up some ice on Smithdown Road L8 and it was broken glass.

  'What do they do in all those old buildings?' asked Jamie outside one of the colleges.

  … What's that saying the Jesuits had? 'Give me a child at the age of four … ' These kids were between eight and thirteen, but it was the same thing … Some of those bright Liverpool kids were so obviously university material — although not Jamie! — yet they'd never get there.

  Me, Robbie, Jamie and Tina went with Sue Dornan to her Oxford tutor's for 'supper'. The kindly tutor and her husband made me and the Clanton kids twisty pasta and those thin, crispy, straggly chips you get in posh restaurants. They let the Clantons light the dinner candles, hold the baby and gave them Cornettos for pud. How would the Clantons react to this ambience: would the 'cello end up halfway through the Matisse print?

  'Can we come again tomorrow?' asked Robbie when we walked home in the night air.

  'Depends how much stuff they notice missing.'

  'Fuck off!' he scowled.

  'Sorry.'

  We shared an attic room in Sue Dornan's shared student house. Me on the bed, him on a lilo.

  'Can we go there again tomorrow?'

  'No, we're going home tomorrow, aren't we?'

  'Before we leave, then … '

  'They're probably doing something tomorrow. You like it here?'

  'Their house was mad!'

  'No, it wasn't. It wasn't at all.'

  'It was full of crazy things. Big mad fucking violins and off-his-head drawings and pictures, and mad food.'

  'Did you like the food?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Yeah, it was nice. I'm knackered. Good-night.'

  'Yeah. Good-night.'

  I turned out the light, and rolled over to the wall. In a small voice, Robbie said, 'You wouldn't think I was scared of the dark, would you?'

  We fell asleep with the light on.

  *

  That weekend was the last time I saw any of the Clantons. The second summer of hate was a few months away. And during that summer's 'mini'-riots, community beat-officers like me were used to point out the known faces and lead TSG divisions through the back-doubles. Liverpool 8 never trusted community police again, and I transferred down to Holloway.

  After my transfer I did a bit of work in the local youth club for a while. (Kyle Trevorrow was a member back then, all bumfluff and Tacchini and excited about girls.) But there was nothing doing. These kids were seventeen not thirteen and by then the damage had been done, the cynicism had set in. Like them, I'd inherited a culture I had no part in making but was powerless to resist. I soon jacked it in and my police work improved as a result. At the time I felt that it was because I was no longer splitting myself in two, but now I realize I was better at the job because I did split myself in two. I stopped questioning things. I just hunted.

  You're meant to look back and sneer at idealism, to give yourself the wanker gesture out the back window of the National Express Adulthood coach. But I look back on it as something fine that I lost, pratty but fine. And now after seven years in a black clip-on tie, with a two-way chip on my shoulder, it's gone.

  Or maybe it's there somewhere like old rain down in the water-table that stops the earth from cracking in a dry season. Maybe. I'd like to think so. Now it's come on top I'll soon find out.

  Now when I try talking to kids on home beat … I always get it wrong. When you try and caution them they react like there's another voice in their head that's been on at them for days, and my caution is the last straw. Is their shit fit just a ruse, or is that how they feel? And if so, what is that other voice telling them they're shit? It won't be a dad because there's a dad drought. What is it then? />
  Three years after I transferred down, during a slack afternoon in Holloway nick I looked up my old family on HOLMES (our computer programme). Robbie and Tony had convictions for train robberies. Jumping a train at a slow corner to boost Giros, cheque books, tax discs, credit cards, driving licences. Spells in Youth Custody for Tony, and Robbie in Risley Remand for three months. I wondered how the hardest kid on the estate coped with lights off at ten. TDA, TDA, TDA (some people never tire of joy-riding). One of Jamie's TDA arrests read 'refused charge due to broken hip and leg'. And then under his distinguishing marks: 'pronounced limp'. Bless you, Jamie. Ah, Jamie you limping fool. Ah well, at least you didn't knock over some stray tot. Ah shit.

  Shocked to find that even Tina my angel had form. A oneliner thankfully: shoplifting.

  The party of my life and soul, the Clantons took up the whole seventeen-inch computer screen between them. Way to go, kids!

  I rocked back in the swivel seat. Looked around. Clicked the seat into upright.

  CTRL + DEL

  Are you authorized to DELETE this information?

  Click YES or NO

  YES

  Enter officer no. and division code EH 72

  (Superintendent Sandra. A. Rowse. Cheers.) I walked out into the fine, delicate, pleasant rain (halfway between spitting rain and the gentlest misty spray) and found I was singing under my breath a song I hadn't heard in a long while: And I'll never forget the feeling I got When I heard that you got home, And I'll never forget the smile on my face, 'cos I knew where you would be – And if you're in the Crown tonight Have a drink on me.

  Go easy, step lightly, stay free.

  Next morning the Super told me to come along with her to the planning meeting. This confused me. To sit in on a planning meeting was a rare honour. But what was she thinking? Was it just so all the bosses could observe me? All the skippers and Duty Officers and DIs were there. DC Kieran too.

  'First up,' she began, leaning forward on the flat of both forearms like a sinking sphinx, chin almost touching the polished wood, 'first up — Arsenal-Tottenham on Sunday. Crowd trouble expected … so I thought we'd all go to the seaside instead.' She bounces both palms on the table, sits up straight. Business underway.