Bully (11 page)

Chapter Seven

“
Oh, and there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again.”

The taxi driver from Manchester Airport back to Newton Mills couldn’t have been more different from the one that dropped me at the air strip out there in the desert. This guy sat low in his seat and virtually drove the car with his huge beer belly, so much did it protrude onto the steering wheel. His car was the old Sarcophagus model; the colour purple, which I’d never seen on a car before. The interior stunk so much of cigarettes that I reckoned that he probably ignored the proliferation of ‘no smoking’ stickers which were plastered over every surface. Indeed, the man was so heroically impolite in his manner that I began to think that his behaviour was his own well-practiced routine for grabbing tips from his jet-lagged passengers.

My driver had perfected the art of looking unmoved by anything. He’d not said anything about my missing foot, but neither – a true rarity – had his eyes. He simply threw my pack in the boot and got on with his job, which appeared to involve driving to Newton Mills using the longest route possible, although he did seem to avoid nearly every traffic light, so careful were his manoeuvres around deserted council estates and down unused country lanes. For some reason, his silence made me want to talk. I wanted to tell him a horror story which would make him think twice about doing another airport run. I didn’t. I simply stared out of the window and watched as we drew inexorably closer to Newton Mills.

There were a number of different ways to get to Newton Mills from Manchester, most of which I knew like the back of my hand. So it surprised me when he took a sharp right turn, apparently up someone’s driveway, and ploughed up what was little more than a farmer’s track up a steep hill.

‘Umm… where are we going?’ I asked, suddenly worried that this remarkably fat man might be some kind of agent that Tommy had employed in order to drive me off a cliff or something.

‘Short cut,’ he coughed. ‘Over this hill’s Grange Heights.’

Grange Heights; the memories flooded back thick and fast. And indeed, as we passed over the brow of the hill, there it was, in all its glory. It was an old viewing point. A bench had been erected there so idle ramblers could stop and take a lingering look over the panoramic view of the Peak District. A small, gravel car park had been laid in order that lazier sightseers could get up there too. But as the town of Newton Mills had grown, so less people had wanted to go up there to take a look. Newton Mills was not a pretty town. The youngsters hadn’t minded though. Driving up to Grange Heights, up past the last of the pubs, you could gain the kind of freedom that you couldn’t have anywhere else in the town. It was where we’d come to drink and smoke and where some had come to do something more, in the back of their rusting shit-can cars.

I felt a sudden yearning to experience the calmness which was Grange Heights in the day-time. It would allow me to collect my thoughts, and would, of course, delay the inevitable for a little longer.

‘Would you mind dropping me here?’ I asked, as the driver navigated around a particularly troublesome pothole.

Not at all sir; but sir, if you wouldn’t mind me asking; how are you going to get down that hill with… well, no foot?

My driver didn’t care. Instead of finding out how his crippled passenger planned to walk down to the town, he simply screeched to a halt, pulled down the sun-visor and pretended to stare at the knot of figures and fares which was sellotaped on the back. It was all for show; he already knew exactly how much he was going to charge me. I was obviously coming back from the war after all – my uniform and injury would have told him that – and would be full of money that I couldn’t spend out there and the army
payout.

‘Twenty-five, fifty mate,’ he said. And for some reason, the additional fifty pence annoyed the hell out of me. He’d simply tacked it on the end there so I’d be forced to give him thirty notes and then say keep the change while he fished around interminably in his big grey ‘loot’ bag.

I fished through my wallet for the exact change, forced to count up coppers in the end, but refusing to budge. As I handed it over, the driver sighed as though I’d short-changed him or asked for a discount. As I tried to climb out of the side door, I made sure that I allowed the edge of my crutch to clip him on the side of the head.

I hated the driver and everything he stood for, but as he drove away, scattering loose gravel into the grassy banks at the side of the narrow road, I almost wanted to call him back. For now he was gone, it was just Tommy and me; Tommy and me and Newton Mills.

I lurched across the car park and made for the bench. It was surrounded by flotsam and jetsam; ten years-worth of empty beer cans, white cider bottles and cigarette ends. I almost became nostalgic for some of the old names: Thunderbird, Mad-Dog Twenty-Twenty, and Ice Dragon. Some of these discarded bottles may have been drunk by the much younger, much prettier Gary Bull in his heyday.

I slumped onto the bench and allowed myself to see my town; the place that corrupted my bloodstream and gave me the desire to drink at the age of thirteen. I hated and loved the place. I knew I’d have been a completely different person if I’d been brought up somewhere else. I knew that I’d probably have had a far better life, but still, when I looked at it, and my own history inscribed into the landmarks, I couldn’t help but smile. I cracked open a new deck of cigarettes, making sure that I didn’t add any more litter to the site but instead crinkling up the cellophane wrapper and sticking it in my pocket.

The Dorchester and Grey felt strange between my lips. I’d long grown used to the army’s standard brand and the cigarette felt thinner and more tightly packed somehow. But longer, always longer than standard cigarettes. I drank down the sulphurous smoke.

Newton Mills was built in the bottom of this deep gorge. That’s how it got its name in the old days, on account of the river which ran through it and powered the massive cotton mills. Grange Heights overlooked all of this, and stood in judgement of the factories and the industrial estates which had started to spring up. The town was intersected by a railway; on the one side was the new town with its garish red brick, but on the other was the town I knew. In the old town, most of the houses were built from the local stone and when it rained, seemed to take on the water and darkened from light grey to almost black.

Now, Newton Mills was shadowed by threatening clouds and the place looked depressing; lifeless even. But I knew that life teemed within it; within the small dome of the school library which glistened with wetness and the corrugated metal sides of the new leisure centre and the main street and its countless pubs.

But more than anything else, what this aerial picture of Newton Mills showed me was the graveyards. Hell, even the damn taxi driver would have spotted the fact that there was a graveyard at the end of virtually every street. There were scores of them; grey gravestones pebbledashed the town. I remember when I first came up here and I felt this slight chill creeping up the back of my neck when I tried to count them all.

I don’t know when I first noticed it. As a kid, you don’t really go around comparing and contrasting towns. Measuring the number of shops or restaurants or houses and then coming to some kind of conclusion about the nature of the town was not really anything any of us ever paid any mind to. Newton Mills was simply home to us, and we wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was a known quantity, a given. Even when changes occurred, such as when a shop came under new ownership or new houses were built, we never thought of it as change. It was on the periphery of our vision, and as long as the shop that changed hands wasn’t Burt’s sweet shop, and as long as the new residents of the new garish redbrick houses across the tracks were not going to be introduced into our classes and clubs, we simply didn’t care.

But one day the understanding had washed over me. I suppose it was as though I’d finally given voice to that silent knowledge which I’d always known, deep down. Newton Mills had an unnatural amount of graveyards. And I mean there were a lot; miles more than such a town that size should have had.

‘The Graveyards of Newton Mills’ was the first school project that I ever aced. It was the first that I’d ever tried in. I suppose I was morbidly fascinated by them. I put together this lever-arch file full of photographs and maps, pencil rubbings of some of the gravestones. I even tried to draw some conclusions about why there were so many graveyards.

My dad loved that I was getting interested in history, and helped me out at the local library. We dug out loads of old books and newspapers. Gradually, he edged me towards his own conclusion about the graveyards. He suggested that working on the mills was a terrible, life-sucking existence and that most of the folk would die young. But because the farming industry was doing so badly, people kept coming into the town from the surrounding countryside, looking for work. He suggested, in his fiery working class hero way, that the mills were doing more than manufacturing cotton. They were cleansing the local area of the undesirables. They were
processing
the workers; depositing them straight into the graveyards at the end of the shift.

I stared out over the town and remembered. I remembered my dad and the way that he’d been a little obsessed with the graveyards; after my project, the teacher invited him in to talk to the class about them. Later, my friends gave me no end of crap for having a loony-tune dad. Nobody but nobody ever wanted their parents to come to the school, let alone if they came in and ‘talked to the class.’ That was the lowest of the low. But despite my embarrassment, I had found myself becoming interested in what my dad had to say. He was talking about the amount of different burial sites; there were some for the Protestants, some for the Catholics, some for the rich, and some for the poor. There were some that weren’t affiliated to any church. In fact, he said, only two of the graveyards in the whole town came with your traditional church spire in the scene too. I’ll always remember what he said at the end of that talk. It was like he’d shaped that voice in my head even further. He’d let me see the light.

‘Newton Mills,’ he said, ‘is a town which has always been surrounded by an awareness of death. We’re comfortable with it, even. But we shouldn’t be. We don’t have to allow ourselves to simply sleep our way along the conveyor belt and succumb to our fate.’

Suddenly, I remembered the taxi driver that had dropped me off at the airstrip in the desert in Afghanistan. I remembered what he’d said about the ‘awareness of death.’ I also remembered that I now knew what death and pain really were, in the end. Involuntarily, I shuddered.

Dad wasn’t invited back to the school again after the talk. I think the teacher thought that it wasn’t his place to rant about stuff like that and put ideas like that in children’s heads. The teacher was from out of town though, and probably hadn’t grasped the fact that Newton Mills life was
exactly
how dad said it was. Most of us were surrounded by an awareness of death. We saw it in the heavy grey stone of the suffering houses. We saw it in the faces of the men and women that had grown up in the town.

As I stared out, I picked out some of the graveyards that I knew. And we did
know
some of the graveyards fairly well. Unconsciously, all of the lads I grew up with spent times in the graveyards. We were a little scared of them, of course, but what kids don’t like doing things that are a little dangerous; a little close to the bone?

What we really liked were the old abandoned ones, like the one off Dye Lane, which I could pick out as it scarred across the land, running parallel to the river. Back then, we knew that we could play in the graveyards to our hearts’ content and no adults would come asking questions or telling us to shove off. They were kind of like secret gardens or something. I didn’t tell anyone, but I thought of them as magical places, like the plateau in
The Lost World.
I thought that time stood still in those places and that lurking in the dense bushes would be prehistoric creatures and mythical demons and the like.

As we got older, the yards had begun to mean less to us in terms of fright-value. Instead, they were places where you could go and let loose; rid yourself of the existential teenage angst by pushing over gravestones or writing other kid’s names in the place where an old name had worn away. My friend Lee (Twinnie), the first of us to become sexually active (by a long way), chose the graveyard at the end of Cutter Street as the ideal place to lose his virginity to the local bike, Lisa Fletcher. In the end, she became his missus, and he told us that he loved nothing more than boning his bony missus in the bone-yards. Lee was right about his missus being bony; her face was downright skeletal and sometimes if you looked at her in the right/ wrong light you got to thinking that you could see right through her skin. I couldn’t see the graveyard at the end of Cutter Street now; it had most likely been concreted over to act as a car park in the new industrial estate. But the knowledge that it had been there… well, it was enough.

Most of us had used the graveyards as a better place to go and smoke than up at Grange Heights. My dad used to call cigarettes ‘coffin nails,’ and I kind of liked the way that this image played out there amongst the real coffins and stuff. At fourteen, I was a hardened smoker. I puffed away about as much as the old mills would have done back in the day. Smoking helped me relax a little. I was always a bit nervous around other people and liked to hide away the fact that I was probably a lot more intelligent than the other lads I hung around with. I could hide behind a coffin nail and look as stupid as the rest of them.

We got our cigs from Burt’s shop, which was just over the road-bridge on the river, and closest to the oldest of the graveyards on Dye Lane. At the start of the school day, the lads and I would pool together our pocket money and purchase ten cigs, or if we couldn’t get enough, Burt would sell us individual cigarettes and a book of matches. I always wondered who the single cigarettes were aimed for if not schoolchildren. I mean, what right-minded working man would go and buy a single cig when they could buy the whole packet?