It was the best time of the day for me: the fading hour when a long summer evening tips into the night, and mothers come to their doors to reel their grumbling children back in from patchy football games on scrubby grass. One of them was sitting on the brick wall near the waste ground as I walked past, scuffing his heels on the graffiti. He yelled after me in his reedy voice: ‘Mister, lend us a quid would you?’ I would have walked on, but there was something about the pally delicacy of his lend that made me laugh, the wily pretence that I had a hope in hell of ever getting it back.
I turned round to look at him. He was slouched up there, about eleven years old, puffing on a cigarette and screwing up his eyes like a bad imitation of James Dean. He wouldn’t have known who James Dean was, of course: he thought he had made up the squint himself. He had a ratty skinhead and one of those childish old man’s faces, the fine skin stretched over the sharp bones a bit too tightly for someone so young.
‘What would you do with a quid,’ I asked him. ‘Go and buy yourself some more fags?’
‘Sure a quid wouldn’t buy me a whole packet anyway,’ he answered, quick as a ferret.
‘At the corner shop, they sell them as singles,’ I said. A second’s pause. The wee dervish knew I had him on the hop.
‘I was gonna get a bag of chips,’ he countered, sliding his eyes away in expectation of defeat. I handed him the coin: ‘Don’t be spending it all in the one shop.’
He grinned, a sudden flash of pure joy, and faked falling off the wall in amazement as payment. I watched him saunter down the road to the chippy, trying to flick his fag-end into the gutter like a practised smoker. In about a month’s time, he’d have it just right.
The moment sticks in my mind: his dwindling, cocky figure in the grey light. It was the last time that things in my life seemed clean, the smiling photograph snapped minutes before the car crashes. Seconds after I walked into Titch’s house I could smell the first cracklings of trouble, like something softly burning in another room.
The years had dealt Titch’s mother a few thumping blows, and you could see their impact in the depressed sag of her shoulders. She was like a sofa that too many people had sat on, and the heaviest arse was Titch’s dad, a salesman and raconteur who drank up the housekeeping money, and then the rent money, and then buggered off to leave her precarious and alone with Titch, her hulking, simple-natured son with a penchant for stealing things from shops. Titch’s dad had since shacked up with a hairdresser from Omagh, by whom he had two more children in quick succession. He sent Titch occasional birthday cards with a fiver or tenner tucked inside, and the scrawled words ‘From Your Dad’ beneath the glaringly false inscription To The World’s Greatest Son.
When Titch was younger he hoarded all his dad’s cards from year to year and used to pore over them sentimentally. Then one year the dad’s card arrived ten days late, bearing the gold-piped legend Happy Birthday Son, and in his furious disappointment Titch threw the entire carefully saved stack on the fire. Now he filleted the money wearing a bored, sulky expression, plump fingers rustling speedily inside the envelope, and threw the card into the bin without even reading the message. At least, that’s what I had seen him do, but it might have been for effect. I bet he fished it back out and had a proper look at it later.
There was a kind of sweetness running through Titch’s mum: she wasn’t a whinger. She never hinted that God had dealt her a bad hand. She had dealt it to herself, she said, the day she first saw Titch’s dad relating a joke in a smoke-filled city centre bar, with his gleeful face shining as he approached the punchline, and the men crowding round him already in stitches at the way he was telling it. She should have seen he was a bad egg from the word go, she said, but then again that might have been why she had liked him. Maybe the whiff of sulphur had attracted her.
I knocked twice: the front door opened, more slowly than usual.
‘Ah hello, Jacky,’ she said. The day’s worries had seeped into her voice.
‘What’s up?’ I asked, hanging my jacket in the narrow hall. She ushered me into the front room and nodded towards Titch’s bedroom.
‘He got into bother at McGee’s shop. The old man caught him taking a packet of biscuits he hadn’t paid for and there was a bit of a row, I think.’
She watched me warily, the hazel eyes waiting for a definitive reply.
‘Oh dear,’ I said. It was worse than she knew. I had heard that the McGees were hardmen, heavily involved. The older McGee was a nasty piece of work: rancid with an unnamed resentment, quick to anger and loath to forget any slight. He hung about in a couple of local drinking clubs with a guy called McMullen, who had a pot belly and weaselly eyes, and who was said to have killed at least three people himself. I didn’t know if he had or not, but bad rumours clung to him.
There was no missus on the scene. People whispered that oul McGee’s wife had abandoned the family and Northern Ireland years ago, when her two boys were young, never to return. This was a maternal crime alluded to only in hushed voices, although I heard Titch’s mum say once – as though uttering a small heresy – that she was a good-looking woman and the only one in that family with a civil tongue in her head. For most people, though, the wife’s flight had given her husband a reason for the drop of arsenic in his soul.
From what I remembered, McGee’s grown son now called round after work twice a week to take him to a drinking club where he stayed until the small hours, diligently feeding the next day’s irritable mood with copious amounts of spirits. The son lived a few streets away from me. He had an Alsatian dog tied up in his back yard that growled if it heard anyone walking past.
As a shopkeeper, the da maintained a testy politeness with his regular customers, but he wouldn’t take kindly to some fat chancer just wandering in for a free packet of chocolate bourbons.
‘What exactly happened?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. You go and speak to him. I can’t get any more out of him.’
I started walking up the stairs towards Titch’s room. Titch was lying on his long-suffering bed, ostentatiously scrutinising one of his mother’s very old Hello! magazines. He had heard me come into the house long ago, which is why any moment now he would affect a sudden surprise at my appearance.
Titch. Physique: overweight, shambolic, implicitly threatening the trembling frame of his single bed. Eyes: pale blue, currently glued with manufactured attention to a picture of Ivana Trump. Mood today: laconic, with a strong undercurrent of surly defiance. His left hand dangled speculatively above a half-open packet of Jacob’s Custard Creams, like one of those mechanical claws you try to pick up prizes with at fairgrounds.
‘Hello,’ he said, without looking up.
‘Is that a tacit acknowledgement of my presence, or are you just rehearsing aloud the title of your reading matter?’ I said. I liked talking this way to Titch.
‘What?’ he said. You had to hand it to Titch, he was a genius of repartee. He was a lord of language, drunk on the endless permutations of the spoken word.
‘You’re a lord of language,’ I said.
‘Bugger off, Jacky,’ he said, mildly. He shifted slightly: the bed frame winced and shivered. I could see he was working up to some tremendous pronouncement. ‘How do you think that Trumpy woman gets her hair to stay like that?’
That did it. I went over and pulled his head round to face mine. The pale blue eyes carried a look of resentful surprise.
‘Listen, you big eejit,’ I hissed. ‘Never mind Ivana fucking Trump’s hairdo. What did you do today in McGee’s shop?’
The eyes widened slightly in recognition, and then floated lazily away from mine. ‘The old man caught me taking a packet of Jaffa Cakes.’
‘Why didn’t you take them from Hackett’s? At least your ma settles up with them at the end of the week.’
‘Hackett’s was