Thicker Than Water

3

Kenny Seddon was a name from another life — and the impact of memory, hitting from such an unexpected angle, was as grating and discontinuous as a bad special effect in a cheap old movie. Zoom in tight on my face, ripple dissolve.

I live in London these days, as you probably already noticed: London was where I fetched up when I’d had my fill of moving around, and it suits me pretty well. But I was born in Liverpool and I lived there until I was eighteen, the bulk of my childhood and adolescence falling across that black hole in space and time and good sense known as the 1980s.

So I grew up in a city that was in thrall to two different kinds of decay.

The first kind was historical — dating from World War Two — and it wasn’t anything that specially belonged to Liverpool or to the North-West. After all, the Luftwaffe hadn’t had it in for Scousers any more than they did for anyone else. It was just that most of the rest of the country seemed to have had the money to repair some of the damage: through some mysterious combination of municipal incompetence and cheeky mop-top corruption, Liverpool never did.

By the punk era the war had been over for more than three decades, but about half the streets I knew had gaps in the rows of terraced houses where bombs had hit — and the substrate in these random spaces, underneath the burgeoning weeds and sparse earth, was shattered brick and slate. We had a word for those places: we called them débris, pronounced ‘deb-ree’. We swam in ponds on the Walton Triangle that were not ponds at all but bomb craters, and on one memorable occasion when I was seven the whole of Breeze Hill was cordoned off for the best part of a day because an anomalous object had been found that some council functionary thought was an unexploded bomb. It turned out to be a hot-water tank of an esoteric design, but you really never knew.

The other kind of decay was different, because it moved and grew and shifted its outlines. It was a disease that we were all sick with, and didn’t even know we were — the slow, inexorable decline of Liverpool’s fortunes as a port and an industrial megapolis, which closed factories and shipyards, threw families out onto the street or more usually caused them to disappear without explanation, and turned my father’s life, like the lives of most of the men he knew, into a complicated game of abstract strategy where the goal was to find some place where they were prepared to pay you a day’s wage for a day’s work before some other bastard found it first and shut you out.

As kids, we experienced both of these things — the war damage and the economic meltdown — as almost unmixed blessings. Bomb-sites and boarded-up factories were our adventure playgrounds: spaces that the adult world had abandoned in its wake and took no further interest in, so that we were free to annex and colonise. The battlefield where I clashed with Kenny Seddon was a case in point — and so were the weapons that we chose for our duel to the death. But the reason why we became such bitter enemies was different. That came from me; from a third kind of decay that was mine and mine alone.

From as far back as I could remember, I lived in a city that was inhabited by the dead as well as the living. These communities existed side by side, and at first it was hard for me to tell them apart. Okay, some people could walk through walls and some couldn’t, but there are lots of things that work like that when you’re a kid: aspects of experience that you don’t understand and mostly can’t ask the adults around you to explain.

And there again, some people could move, the same way I could move, while some were inexplicably chained to one place. And some people grew older while some never changed at all: but the ones who stayed put and didn’t change were often terrifyingly marked by violence or disease, to the point where it was hard to look at them. Strange. Very strange.

Gradually I followed these clues to a great and unsuspected truth: that the word dead, spoken in whispers around us children and dripping with finality, didn’t denote an ending at all but a transition. What happened when you died was that you slipped away from the people you’d known and entered this other state: this state where you could look but not touch and where your appearance froze in the aspect of death as though you were a moving but unchanging photograph of what you’d been before.

I realised, too, that this was something most other people didn’t know, couldn’t see. In my snot-nosed innocence, I tried to fill in the dots for them, but that turned out to be harder than it looked. A lot of harsh language and a few smacks to the head taught me that nobody wants the mysteries of the universe explained to them by a kid with a tidemark on his neck and scabs on his knees.

Nobody ever did come up with a word that defined us for what we were — the sensitives, the dark-adapted eyes, the ones with the built-in death-sense. Later, by virtue of what we did, we were called exorcists: but back then that game hadn’t got started yet, and nobody could see it coming. As for the other stuff — the zombies, the were-kin, the demons — that was more than twenty years away. We were a bunch of John the Baptists who’d turned up to the party before the balloons and streamers had even been set out.

So if we were smart we learned not to talk about it. It was a strategy that saved you a world of pain in the short run.

Kind of a shame, then, that I let my guard down and said what I said to Kenny Seddon — the last person in the world who was going to take it lying down.

Kenny was one of those scary psychopaths you just have to work around when you’re a kid. His mum died when he was eight — of what my mum and dad, when they talked about it at all, called ‘the big C’ — and the rest of his growing-up followed a template of his own making. His dad worked at the Metal Box, then at Dunlop, then at Mother’s Pride, racing ahead of the bowwave of industrial collapse and chasing the work wherever it could be found. He turned his three sons over to his elderly mother to look after when he was away, but she was too old and they were too wayward, so they did their own thing and she lied to cover their tracks.

Kenny was the toughest of a tough brood — only two years older than me if we’re talking strict chronology, but he was the kind of kid who seems to go straight from infancy to adolescence, becoming big and muscular and intractable and getting into the kind of fights that leave blood on the pavement while his peers were still making the difficult transition to lace-up shoes.

He was a bully’s bully, ruthless and arbitrary to a fault, and he brought fear and pain into my life on a number of occasions. In the urban wastelands that we swept through like a swarm of grubby locusts, he was a moving hazard that none of us ever figured out how to negotiate. Once he decided he was going to write his name on all the younger kids in the street — a literal sign of his authority over us. His rough-hewn scrawl on my upper arm turned into an archipelago of bruises that lasted a good few days after the ink had faded.

Another time he pushed me out of an apple tree that we were both scrumping from, in the high-walled cider orchard behind Walton hospital. We were twenty feet or so above the ground and I would have broken a leg or maybe my back if I’d fallen the full distance. As it was, I slammed into a branch four or five feet below the one I’d fallen from and managed to cling onto it. Kenny laughed uproariously: something about the spectacle of me dangling over nothing with my legs churning the air struck him as great slapstick humour. When my brother Matt climbed down to rescue me, Kenny pelted him with apples and swore at him, threatening to push him out of the tree too if he didn’t leave me to struggle back up onto the branch by myself. Matt ignored him and hauled me to safety, crab apples raining down around the pair of us.

None of this was personal, though: Kenny terrorised everyone with equal enthusiasm, including his own two kid brothers, Ronnie and Steven. He broke Ronnie’s leg once with a rough tackle during a game of street football, and then made Ronnie tell their dad that he’d fallen off a wall.

But the weird thing about all these incidents was that they never made much of a difference to our day-to-day customs and practices. All the kids of Arthur Street and of neighbouring Florence Road did pretty much everything together. Whether we were taking over the street with our huge sprawling games of kick-the-can, stealing from the allotments in Walton Hall Park or making one of our frequent raids on the kids of the Bootle Grammar School, we moved en masse. At these times Kenny was our psychopath: he was much valued both for his ability to handle himself in a barney and for being one of the privileged few who could decide what we did next and actually make it stick.

One raw day in Whitsun week, the year I turned thirteen, he decreed an expedition to the Seven Sisters, those ponds that marked where the bombs had fallen on the railway line forty years before. It was too early in the year to swim — even in high summer the Sisters were bonemeltingly cold — but we could collect tadpoles, fish for sticklebacks, muck around on the edge of the water and pretend to push each other in, explore the surrounding grass and weeds for metal bolts that you could shoot out of a catapult and have huge, ill-defined mock battles through the bulrushes and stinking shallows. It was guaranteed entertainment, on a bank holiday when the shops were shut and there was sod-all else to do, so we were all up for it.

And if ‘we all’ suggests a warm and inclusive cosiness, then strike it out and put something else in its place. There were lots of ways you could be bounced out of the collective. The gang of us, if you could corral us in one place for long enough to count, probably numbered around fifty on a good day, and we ranged in age from eight to fifteen. The frequency distribution was about what you’d expect. Very few of the youngest kids had the stamina to keep up with our wilder activities, and a lot of the fifteen-year-olds had discovered other, more absorbing pastimes that kept them busy elsewhere, so the thickest concentration was in the middle of the age breakdown.

As far as gender went, we were equal-opportunity delinquents. The hardier girls ran with us and did as we did, without question or challenge. The rest, for the most part, stayed back in Arthur Street close to the home fires, understudying with scaled-down Hoovers and plastic kitchen ranges the role that society had defined for them.

Anita Yeats was one of the ones who ran with us, even though she was around the same age as Kenny and my brother Matt — the top end of our spectrum. By that age, most of the girls weren’t allowed to knock about with us any more, and didn’t want to. They had better things to do with their time, and parental prohibitions had kicked in, making them put aside childish things. Anita’s body was in the middle of that scary, enthralling transition: she was developing adult curves, her aspect morphing mysteriously from pinch-faced gamine to shithouse rose.

So it was going to be the last year of running with the street pack for Anita, and probably for Kenny and Matt, too. Maybe that added an edge to things, I don’t know. Maybe it was part of the reason, in some indirect way, for Kenny picking an argument with Anita. And maybe, too, it was an offshoot of a broader inter-family feud, of the kind that were always breaking out whenever someone’s uncle’s son went to the bar and left someone’s cousin’s dog out of the round. But the main reason was that Kenny had been sniffing around Anita in a semi-obvious way ever since he hit puberty, and she’d never shown the slightest sign of returning his interest. It was only a question of when his arousal would finally topple over into aggression.

And it turned out to be that Whitsun morning. Kenny rounded on Anita as soon as we’d descended onto the Triangle at Breeze Hill — one of the points where the huge acreage of waste ground touched the real world.

‘Sod off home,’ he said brusquely. ‘We don’t want you, Yeats.’

‘Why not?’ Anita demanded reasonably. There were other girls in the party, so ‘you’re a girl’, besides sounding lame and even potentially unmanly, just wouldn’t wash. And it had to be a reason that wouldn’t extend to Anita’s kid brother Richard — known for the most part as Dick-Breath — who was also in the gang.

‘You’re too slow,’ Kenny snapped. ‘We’ll be waiting for you all the fucking time. Go home.’

‘I’ll keep up.’

‘You never do. And you’ll argue over which way to go. We’ll have to listen to you giving it this’ — imitating a yammering mouth with thumb and fingers — ‘all the frigging time.’

‘I won’t talk.’

‘Well, your mam’s a slag and we’ll catch something off you.’

Anita flushed phone-box red. Then, as now, bringing someone’s mother into the argument was moving directly to Defcon One: it was the Taunt Unendurable, and it required the Riposte Valiant. Dick-Breath kept his head down, having earned that derisory name for his willingness to do whatever was needed to curry favour with the bigger kids. But Anita was woven out of sturdier as well as more brightly coloured fabric. Mouthing off to her just wasn’t safe, and anybody with less heft than Kenny would have thought twice about doing it.

‘Fuck off, Kenny,’ she shouted, balling her fists. ‘You gobshite!’

Kenny smacked her, open-handed, across the face, hard enough to make her stagger.

‘Your mam’s a slag,’ he repeated. ‘She’s knocking off Georgie Lunt.’

Anita screamed and went for him, but Kenny was a head taller than her and he fended her off with a violent shove. ‘So you’re probably a slag too,’ he said. ‘It runs in families. Who are you knocking off, Anita?’

For some reason, this was shocking to me. I’d seen boys fight girls before: there was no real room for chivalry in our rough-and-tumble code of ethics, and girls could do you some serious damage if they fought like they meant it. It was just that this was so cold-bloodedly staged, and so obviously unfair — Kenny manufacturing the argument to pay Anita back for his blue balls — that it made my blood boil. And not just mine. I saw Matt, my big brother, lean forward as though he was about to step in between Anita and Kenny and take up the challenge on her behalf. My survival instinct — like Dick-Breath’s — was a bit better developed than that: Kenny had more or less the same height advantage over us as he did over Anita and, as we’d all learned on many occasions, he didn’t recognise the dividing line between what was legitimate and what was inconceivable.

But I did what I could. I replied to the taunt.

‘Well, your mam killed herself, Kenny,’ I called out. ‘It wasn’t cancer — that’s all my arse. She cut her throat with your dad’s razor.’

There are moments in life when you know you’ve gone too far: you can tell them by the eerie stillness that descends around you — only half a second long in reality, but in subjective time easily long enough for you to think ‘Oh Jesus, I wish I hadn’t done that’ and then start in on the Lord’s Prayer. Kenny swivelled to stare at me, his eyes bulging out of his head in cartoon slo-mo. He opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but no sound came out. Everyone else, including Anita and Matt, was watching him with strained, breathless curiosity. This was going to be bad.

But it was just such an easy call to make. I could tell the living from the dearly departed pretty accurately by this time, and Mrs Seddon’s ghost had a huge tear in the flesh of her throat and an apron of dried blood on her faded floral dress — a bit of a dead give-away, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’d seen her looking out of the window of Kenny’s house so many times that I’d lost count, and a couple of times I’d seen her hanging around Kenny himself, staring in miserable, befuddled longing at the wayward son she’d left behind along with her tired flesh. As for the razor, that was just a guess. But whatever she’d used to do herself in, it had been spectacularly effective: it hadn’t been a kitchen knife, unless the Seddons kept their kitchen knives a lot sharper than we did ours.

So I threw in the razor out of a nascent sense of drama, to add to the overall effect. And on that level, it was a roaring success. Kenny’s huge fists rose into my line of sight like a pair of half-bricks held up by a kung-fu master to demonstrate the cleanness of the break. Then one of them moved, and magically I was lying on my back with no understanding at all of how I’d got there. The left side of my mouth tingled unpleasantly, and there was something wet on my face.

‘You little bastard,’ Kenny said, and he stepped in for the inevitable follow-up, which would have been a kick to some unprotected part of my body.

But Matt stepped in too, and he caught Kenny on the side of the face with a hard jab that made him stagger and lurch before he got his balance back. A moment later the two of them were grappling like all-in wrestlers.

Kenny versus Matt wasn’t as ridiculous as Kenny versus me would have been. Matt didn’t have Kenny’s height or anything like his weight, and as a choirboy at Saint Mary’s church he was widely considered to be a pushover, but I knew from countless brotherly skirmishes that he was stronger than he looked and quick with it. None of that should have stopped it from being a foregone conclusion, though: the general consensus was that you couldn’t stand against Kenny when he got going any more than you could stop a freewheeling truck by standing in front of it.

But Matt was making a good showing — seeming in the first few frenzied seconds to be giving almost as good as he got. He managed to hook a thumb into Kenny’s eye socket and force his head back so that Kenny couldn’t butt him, and he landed a sucker punch to Kenny’s stomach when the opportunity presented itself. Kenny retaliated by slamming his fist into Matt’s jaw — a solid punch with all his weight behind it that made Matt’s head rock back and then forward again like one of those dogs in the backs of cars whose oversized craniums are mounted on springs. But Matt kept his guard up and blocked the vicious low blows and crotch kicks that would have ended the fight in one go.

Then there were a few moments when the two of them were so tightly pressed together that they couldn’t really punch or kick at all: they just swayed backwards and forwards, struggling for leverage. I could see a few people in the group — Kenny’s brother Steven, who was my age, and his best mate Davey Barlow who was red-haired and rangy and almost as big a psychopath as Kenny — looking doubtful and unhappy, as if they weren’t sure whether or not to intervene. The protocols were complicated. If Kenny invited them, they could wade in and kick the shit out of Matt with no loss of honour: if he didn’t and they joined in anyway, there was always the chance that someone would say later that Kenny couldn’t have won the fight on his own. In any case, I tensed to jump in on Matt’s side if they intervened on Kenny’s.

Then Kenny broke free, got in another devastating punch to Matt’s face but jumped back, not pressing his advantage. The two of them stood panting, dishevelled, Matt’s nose and Kenny’s lip bleeding.

It couldn’t end in a stand-off. Kenny’s status in the gang, however vaguely it was defined, wouldn’t allow it. I was expecting him to wade in again at once and finish what he’d started: then, when he hesitated, I thought he’d decided to throw the fight open to his brothers, to Davey, and to anyone else who wanted to earn his doubtful and short-lived favour.

But he didn’t lower his head and charge, and he didn’t shout ‘Twat him!’ He just stood for a second or two, on the balls of his feet, breathing like a bellows. And then fate intervened, in the shape of a policeman coming down the gravel bank towards us, shouting a challenge that we couldn’t hear at this distance. Given how quickly all this had happened, it wasn’t likely that he’d been alerted by the noise we were making: he must have seen us as we descended from the road above and decided on the balance of probabilities that we were up to mischief. The railway land was council-owned and we were trespassing, which was reason enough to send us on our way.

We scattered. We always did, when we were an all-ages mixed rabble: a few older lads on their own could have bearded a rozzer and then legged it when he gave chase, but the presence of the younger kids guaranteed that someone would be caught and brought to book. So the order of the day was to explode in all directions like a cluster bomb and hope the multiplicity of targets would slow the copper down long enough to allow us all to get away.

Matt cut off across the tracks towards the ragged borders of Walton Hall Park, with Anita almost keeping pace beside him. I retreated with a few of the smaller kids through the tunnel, which led to another railway cutting a quarter of a mile up the line behind Bedford Road. I didn’t see where Kenny and his cohorts went.

So a stand-off was what we got in the end, whether we liked it or not — and for most of the gang that would be a ‘not’, because an unresolved fight left a sort of tension in the air like the hair-prickling feel of undischarged lightning. Better to get it over and done with, pick up any busted teeth and move on to the next big thing.

But for some reason that wasn’t what happened. Everybody expected Kenny to take the first opportunity to finish the fight. Instead he let it lie, and the next few times when we all met up he gave a good impression of having forgotten that it had ever happened.

I wondered why. I considered asking Matt, but the two of us seemed to be growing apart very quickly around then. Matt still looked out for me on the street, and at home too since we were yet another one-parent family by this stage (our mum had left home the year before after a matrimonial bloodletting that I was considered too young to have fully explained to me). But cooking baked beans and sausages out of a tin and making sure I didn’t get my head kicked in marked the limit of Matt’s involvement with me: he had nothing to say to me any more, and since dad had always been the taciturn type there was a silence around the Castor household that had gone beyond pregnant into stillborn.

So I had to come to my own conclusions about what had happened that day on the Triangle, and my mind went back to those two seconds when Kenny had hesitated after breaking Matt’s hold on him. It occurred to me, incredible as it seemed, that Kenny might actually have been afraid. Of my brother. Because Matt had taken everything that Kenny could throw at him and he hadn’t gone down. Maybe Kenny wasn’t certain that if he took up the fight where he’d left off, he’d be able to win it: and maybe that uncertainty kept him from doing the obvious and calling down a general fatwa on Matt. You did that to weak kids, where there was no question that your own alpha status was at issue. If you did it to a potential rival, people would notice. Kenny was a wily little bastard, and at fifteen he already knew what Hitler and Napoleon and Attila the Hun had learned the hard way: that the appearance of strength is strength.

And, by the same token, people would notice if Kenny went after me. It was Matt who was his contemporary, so it was Matt who was his legitimate target. I was protected by the bizarre unspoken gospels of the street, which were the measure of our lives and our souls right then.

It was only a matter of time, though, and I could see whenever Kenny looked at me that he hadn’t forgotten my remark about his mother’s suicide. I’d spoken of death to the king, and one way or another he was going to make sure I paid for it.

His opportunity came sooner than either of us expected. That summer Matt dropped out of school, immediately after taking his O levels, and transferred to Saint Joseph’s Catholic seminary at Upholland, about eight miles away from Walton. It was unusual for Saint Joe’s to take someone into holy orders at sixteen, but the Jesuit who ran the place had noticed Matt when he was doing a talent-spotting trawl through the parishes inside the Queen’s Drive ring road, and he’d been impressed. He was prepared to stretch a point, he told our dad, and let Matt enter the college now. He’d take his A levels at the same time as he started his holy orders, rather than finishing his studies at the attached high school first. Matt would be expected to live at the college, and although he could see his family at weekends they wouldn’t be encouraged to visit him and break his concentration at other times.

Dad wasn’t thrilled. His plans for Matt’s future involved Matt getting a job and turning up some money for his keep. But he was a good Catholic himself, and he knew better than to throw down with the Pope and his bare-knuckled posse. He bought Matt a suitcase from the secondhand shop and away my brother went without a backward glance. As far as I can remember, we didn’t even say goodbye.

But at least I knew now where Matt had got the balls to fight Kenny Seddon to a standstill: he had God on his side.

So now there was nobody to run interference for me, and no strict reason according to the Walton book of etiquette why Kenny shouldn’t beat me into tenderised steak. But he bided his time for a good three days after Matt left, waiting for the perfect place and time.

The place was up on the roof of the Metal Box factory — the Tinnie. It was a favourite spot for the gang that summer, now that the owners had finally given up on maintaining any kind of security over the disused site. We’d found a way in by levering out one of the uprights of the back fence and tearing the plywood sheet off a door marked AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.

With the electricity turned off and all the windows boarded up, the interior of the factory was a three-dimensional maze of absolute darkness. You brought torches, and you stuck together, because on your own in the dark you were fucked. Previous parties had mapped out routes, but you could only find them with a torch. We filed through the cavernous machine shops and silent corridors and scaled the echoing stairs like mountaineers conquering an indoor Annapurna, finally breaking out into the daylight through a hole in the roof underneath which someone had set up a precarious folding ladder dragged in from God knows where.

From the roof — since the whole of Walton is built on the side of a hill and we were close to the top of it — you could see the city set out below you. You could also swing on the flagpole over an eighty-foot drop, and collect metal offcuts which for some reason lay around the place like forgotten treasure. They were the pieces left behind when steel sheets were pressed out into box templates, and they came in a range of intriguing shapes: some like capital letter Es, others in the form of triangles (always right-angled) or diamonds with one vertex shaved off flat. They were all about two millimetres thick, and they were highly collectible because of their lethal sharpness and their resemblance to the shurikens we’d all seen or at least heard about in Enter the Dragon.

There was the usual horseplay as we fanned out to look for hitherto unknown shapes and sizes of offcut. Davey jostled Steven Seddon, pretending to shove him over the foot-high parapet down into the street far below, and Steven went complaining to Kenny who kicked his arse for being so pathetic. John Lunt, who was one of my millions of cousins, stationed himself over the hole in the roof so that he could gob on the stragglers as they came up the ladder. Peter Gore tried to get a game of off-ground tick going, and foundered immediately on the fact that we were all a long way off the ground already. Peter tried to establish some rules that would work in this anomalous situation, but he was shouted down.

And Kenny’s other brother, Ronnie, started to tell the story of the Tinnie Ghost.

‘It was the watchman, you know. These lads broke in, and the watchman went after them, but they threw him into one of the machines and he got all squashed and ripped apart, like. And that’s why he’s still here. On the roof. If you look into the puddles you might see his reflection, you know, and if you do then you’re gonna die. Everyone who sees him dies before they get back down to the ground.’

Some of the smaller kids tried not to look at the puddles without being too obvious about it. One of them bleated to his big sister that he wanted to go home, and was coldly ignored.

‘What happened to the lads?’ someone asked.

‘He killed them in their sleep,’ said Ronnie. ‘One by one, like. They dreamed he was throwing them into the machine and they had heart attacks. And the last one, when they went into the bedroom the next morning, they found him all ripped apart. Bits of him all over the room, like. Blood and bits of bone everywhere.’

This was shite on a heroic scale, and I felt it was down to me to light the beacon of truth.

‘How did anyone know what they dreamed about,’ I asked, sardonically, ‘if they died in their bloody sleep?’

Ronnie didn’t falter. ‘They screamed “Get me out! I’m dying in the machine!”’ he said.

But I was getting into my stride now. ‘Anyway, ghosts don’t have reflections. Ghosts don’t even have shadows. And what’s he doing haunting the frigging roof if he died down in the machines? It’s bollocks.’

Ronnie bridled, and jug-eared Davey jeered from my left. ‘Who asked you, Castor? How many ghosts have you seen?’

I launched into an answer, realised part-way through the sentence that I might be getting myself in too deep and began to stammer. Before I could pull back and regroup, Kenny stepped up between his kid brother and his brick-built enforcer and glared down at me.

‘Castor’s an expert on ghosts, isn’t he?’ he sneered. ‘Sees them all over the place. He’s got the I-Spy book and everything.’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t like the way this was going, not least because the mood of the gang was against me. I was being a smart-arse. A smart-arse is always lower on the pecking order than anyone except a chicken or a grass. Very few of the faces that were surrounding us were showing anything like sympathy.

‘He saw our mam, didn’t he?’ Kenny pursued. ‘With her throat cut and blood all over her. Didn’t you, Castor?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I did.’

Kenny’s face set hard. ‘Well, you’re a lying cunt,’ he said, ‘because she died down in the ozzie in the cancer ward. You’d shit yourself if you saw a real ghost, you wanker.’

‘You would,’ I retorted, groping for a response that would knock him back on his heels. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘You’re a chicken, Castor.’

‘I’m not.’

Kenny shoved me in the chest, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to reinforce the challenge.

‘Prove it,’ he suggested. And before I could answer he bellowed ‘Gauntlet!’, punching the air with his fists.

‘Gauntlet! Gauntlet!’ Ronnie and Steven crowed, and the shout was taken up on all sides.

The gauntlet was just a piece of casual sadism that usually looked a lot worse than it was. Everyone lined up in front of you. You ran past them, down the line, and people kicked you and punched you as you passed. It was a test of manhood, invoked when someone had allegedly brought the gang or the street into disrepute. You collected a few bumps and bruises, but you had a certain amount of control over your own vector and if you fell you could angle your fall outwards, away from the line, and take a time-out: the people making up the gauntlet weren’t allowed to move until you got to the other end.

‘Okay,’ I said, shouting to make myself heard over the din. ‘Fine. I’m not scared.’

‘Over there,’ said Kenny, pointing. I turned to look in the direction he was indicating, and like Gertrude Stein said on a different occasion, there wasn’t any there there. The slightly pitched coping stones of the ledge were only a step away, and beyond that there was a sheer drop to the street. He couldn’t mean . . . ?

Kenny’s hand clamped on the back of my neck and he pushed me forward. I flailed in his grasp, thinking that he was going to push me over the edge. He didn’t. He just stood me up on the narrow parapet and then stepped away, warning me with a wagging finger not to move.

‘Gauntlet,’ he said, pointing to left and right. ‘There and back again, you little twat. Or else say you’re a chicken.’

‘Fuck off,’ I riposted.

‘Right, then,’ said Kenny, with a gleam of malicious triumph in his eye.

He set Ronnie and Steven to work collecting offcuts, and then arranged the gang in a long line from end to end of the roof, about twenty feet away from the ledge where I stood and wobbled, trying to look nonchalant. The three stooges handed out the offcuts so that everyone had two or three — except that a lot of people, Anita among them, had dropped out by this stage and were refusing to play. It was a hard core of about twenty kids who faced me, their faces radiant with the thrill of the hunt.

Enough was enough. I put one foot down off the parapet.

‘You come down,’ Kenny snarled, ‘and you’re a fucking chicken. You admit you’re a chicken. We don’t have chickens in the gang. Ready . . . aim . . .’

The sane response would have been some pithier version of the proverb about live jackals and dead lions, but I hesitated. I didn’t want to be faced down by Kenny, because at that moment his face represented everything that I hated in the world — including Matt running off and leaving me so he could look for God.

The pause was just long enough.

‘Fire!’ Kenny bawled, and the air was filled with whistling steel. I ran, because the alternative was to be sliced to pieces where I stood. To be fair, I was probably exaggerating the danger from the offcuts themselves. They were absolutely useless from an aerodynamic point of view because they were too thin and light to hold to a line — but there were a fuck of a lot of them, and it would only take one hit to make me flinch backwards reflexively and make the long swallow-dive onto the rutted asphalt of the factory’s forecourt.

I ran head down, only looking at the stone under my feet. I got lucky. A spinning steel rhombus took a small nick out of my cheek, but it was turning in the wind and had spent most of its momentum when it hit me. Another bit into my arm, but again very shallowly and with no real force. Apart from that I reached the corner unscathed — and unopposed for the last ten yards because everyone had spent their ammo in the first few exuberant moments.

‘Time out to reload!’ Ronnie shouted, and Kenny nodded his imperial assent. They all went looking for their own ammo this time, and they were a bit more liberal in interpreting the rules. Some of the kids came back with lumps of shattered brick and one or two had taken out home-made catapults.

This had started out way beyond a joke, and now it was in Lord of the Flies territory. If I made the return journey, a single hit would knock me off the ledge.

‘Fuck this,’ I said, stepping down off the parapet onto safe, solid ground.

‘Get back up there, you little piss-pants bastard,’ Kenny commanded, striding across to me, ‘or I’ll throw you off my fucking self.’ He grabbed a double handful of my lapels and shoved me backwards, trying to make me stand up on the ledge again. I resisted, leaning back without letting my feet leave the ground, although that exposed me to the very real danger of losing my balance and falling backwards over the edge.

‘Sod off, Kenny!’ I said. ‘I’m not doing it. I’ve had enough.’

‘Not yet you haven’t,’ Kenny said grimly. ‘We’re not finished yet.’

I struggled in his grasp, trying ineffectually to trip him so I could break free. His superior weight made it a forlorn gesture, but I had to try. I stumbled backwards, planting my feet on the ledge because there was nowhere else to go, but when Kenny tried to disengage I went with him, gripping his left arm tightly. He punched me in the face to loosen my grip, and once again set me up on my perch. I staggered, seeing stars.

‘Now you fucking run!’ he snarled, stepping back quickly. ‘Ready . . . aim . . .’

I don’t know what I would have done on the word ‘fire’: fortunately I never got to find out, because the command never came. Instead, Kenny made a really unlovely noise: a sucking gurgle that cut off before its time and ended on a terrifying silence. His mouth opened and closed and his arms spasmed, as though he was trying to get a good grip on a parcel of a peculiar shape and heft.

He turned around a hundred and eighty degrees, presenting his back to me. There was something odd about it: his shirt was gaping open, split from side to side as though he’d started to turn from Bill Bixby into Lou Ferrigno. And then from within the shirt — filling it miraculously like the endlessly rising bubbles in the plastic trim of an old-fashioned Wurlitzer — blood welled, saturating the cloth in an instant, to spill down his jeans in a lapping tide.

He hadn’t turned around on purpose to show me this: he’d turned to stare at Anita, who was still standing there with a slender length of steel in her hands. It was one that we would have discarded in our hunt because it was far too long and thin to throw. As a makeshift scimitar it clearly had its drawbacks, because Anita’s hands were bloody too, dark red beads sliding down her fingers onto the pale metal. She held Kenny’s gaze as she let go of the steel strip so that it clattered down on the ground between them.

‘Kick the can,’ Anita said, in a very level, very matter-of-fact tone. In the game of the same name, it was the phrase you shouted as you freed all the kids who’d already been caught.

Kenny opened his mouth to answer and vomited a huge amount of dark red blood. Then he collapsed, and Anita fled. Ronnie and Davey made a half-hearted attempt to catch her, but their coordination was shot to hell by the shock of what they’d just seen. She got away clean, and in the mess and chaos that followed so did I.

Like I said earlier, you had to go down through the levels of the factory in convoy unless you had your own torch, so I was stuck with my former tormentors until we were back on terra firma. But the business of lowering Kenny down the ladder and then carrying him in blood-boltered relay from floor to floor occupied so much of the gang’s attention that they paid none at all to me. The game was over in any case, and it had turned out to be a game of two halves with a vengeance.

The relay carried on all the way to the casualty department at Walton hospital, which was right next door to the factory. It turned out later that Anita had cut deep enough with her wild swipe to puncture Kenny’s lung, which had started to deflate. She’d also hit his posterolateral artery, which supplies blood to the spine. The bumps and stresses of Kenny’s forced descent hadn’t helped the situation either, and he was down to four pints of blood by the time the doctors got to him.

He was away from the street for a long time — first of all in intensive care, then on a normal ward, and finally with an aunt way out in Kirkby where his dad sent him to recuperate. All of this was relayed to us by Ronnie and Steven, who without their big brother to make up the trinity were now humble rank-and-filers in the gang. Davey Barlow, the Igor to Kenny’s Frankenstein, faded out around then too, so we experienced something of a renaissance. I remember the rest of that summer as a good time, marred only by the fact that Anita also abandoned the gang after that day, and by occasional letters from Matt that made me resent his absence all the more.

When Kenny did come back, he came back as someone else. His sixteenth birthday had taken place while he was still away from the street, but it was obvious when we saw him walking up Breeze Lane eight months later that he was carrying an unaccustomed weight on his shoulders. He had a job now, at Plunkett’s garage, and a girlfriend out in Kirkby who he visited every Saturday night. He had a context that kept me safe in perpetuity from his vicious streak, like a Walton get-out-of-jail-free card. Grown men didn’t hit kids, unless the kids were their own.

So these were the events that passed in review before my eyes after Basquiat spoke the fateful name. They didn’t come in exactly that order, as a clean and coherent sequence: they were mixed in with a lot of other things. For me, thinking about Liverpool was always like trying to take one tissue out of one of those little hotel-room boxes where the bloody things are interleaved and as thin and fragile as the Turin Shroud: one tug and you take the whole box.

So I also remembered my mum coming home to Liverpool three years later to face my dad down and move in with her former fancy man, Big Terry Lackland. I remembered Matt’s finishing his holy orders and becoming Father Matthew Castor, on a spring day in torrential rain, wearing a rough-hewn but beautiful scrimshaw crucifix that Mum had bought from the pawnshop as his ordination present. I remembered — with confused emotions — my own escape, when I aced my A levels against everyone’s expectations including mine and pissed off to Oxford without a backward glance: the best way to leave, in my experience, if you can make it stick.

And as the cascade reached its inevitable conclusion, I remembered the one Castor who wasn’t around to see all this stuff happen. The one whose death taught me what I was and launched me on my path, bringing me by insensible degrees to this moment and this place.

I remembered Katie.

And the rest was silence, until Gary Coldwood broke it with a blunt question, pulling me by the heels back into the present day.

‘So you and Mister Seddon weren’t on the best of terms?’ he demanded.

I shrugged, as casually as I could manage. ‘It’s not a Batman and Joker thing, Gary,’ I said. ‘It was a hell of a long time ago, and I haven’t seen him since. Haven’t even thought about him.’

‘It’s probably fair to say that he’s thought about you,’ Basquiat pointed out, her tone hard. ‘He painted your name in his blood.’

I shrugged again. ‘Maybe he was starting to write his will,’ I suggested. Well, what the fuck? My conscience was clean, at least as far as attempted murders were concerned. Whatever this looked like, I knew what it wasn’t: it wasn’t The Tell-Tale Heart.

‘You still want to leave this hanging?’ Basquiat asked Coldwood.

Gary shook his head once, brusque and emphatic. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll need to take you in for questioning, Fix, and we’ll need a formal statement. I’m sorry.’ That one hit me before I was ready for it.

‘What about the other seventeen Castors?’ I asked, aghast.

‘They stopped being relevant when you told us you knew this bloke.’

‘So am I being charged?’

Coldwood opened his mouth, but Basquiat’s snarl cut across whatever he was going to say.

‘That would look great in court, wouldn’t it? Invite you down here to read the scene, then arrest you when you get here? No, Castor, you’re just assisting us with our inquiries. Anything else will have to wait until we’ve got the forensics in.’

She was looking at Gary rather than at me as she said all this, and it was clear that there was an unspoken question between them.

‘Under the circumstances, Detective Sergeant Basquiat,’ Coldwood said with clipped formality, ‘I think it advisable that you conduct the interview with Mister Castor. My personal and professional relationship with him probably precludes my being involved in interrogating him or taking a statement from him.’

There was a momentary silence, then Basquiat nodded, seemingly satisfied.

‘But if you’re thinking of having a testicle roast,’ Gary added, ‘then think again.’

‘He’s as safe as if he was in God’s pocket,’ Basquiat promised blandly.

She jerked her head in a way that obviously conveyed a lot of information to her entourage of bluebottles. Two of them fell in on either side of me and led me away.