Rule of Night (5 page)

For a moment they stare at one another, the loud machinery hammering the air, locked eye to eye with nothing passing between; just a hard blank empty stare. The foreman's tough now all right, Kenny thinks, but out on the dark prowling streets a quick boot in the bollocks and it'd be a different story. Personally he always went for the eyes; he got quite excited when he knew he'd got somebody in the eyes. They were soft, naked, vulnerable, the eyes, and as he thinks about this he has to swallow to contain his nervous response. For the next half-hour he dreams about the foreman's eyes and how he'd like to kick them in: him, Crabby, Andy and Arthur.

He could really get worked up thinking about what he'd done or wanted to do, even things that had happened a long time ago. One incident – when he was about nine or ten – never failed to excite him when he thought about it. He'd been walking home from school in the rain with another kid who must have been about seven. They walked down a dirt back-alley with deep muddy puddles
everywhere and sharp broken housebricks poking above the surface. There was glass too; shattered bottles all over the place. Somehow or other (and he didn't know why) Kenny persuaded the kid to take his shoes and socks off. He took some persuading, and Kenny didn't use force because he wanted the climax of the incident to come as a complete surprise. The kid finally took them off: Kenny picked him up and carried him under the armpits to the centre of the largest puddle: he put him down on a couple of housebricks sticking out above the water and waded out again to watch what happened.

What happened, of course, was that the kid burst into tears. Kenny could still remember clearly the white, bare, wet feet on the broken housebricks; he could still remember how thrilling it had been to anticipate the kid having to walk through the dirty water in which bits of glass were embedded in the slime. What had thrilled him most of all, though, was the expression on the kid's face. He had one of those thin, pinched, snivelling kind of faces with a perpetual snotty nose, like two gobs of green candle-grease seeping from his nostrils. The face made Kenny sick; the scared, soft-as-shit expression on it made him want to throw up. He wanted the kid to suffer because of the expression on his face, and more than this, he wanted the kid to be hurt. Nothing would have pleased him more than to see those white smooth feet cut and bleeding. As it was the kid walked through the water, bawling his eyes out, and all his feet got were muddy. He did stumble once or twice, but nothing more. Thinking back on it Kenny was sorry he'd let the kid off so lightly. When he saw that the kid's feet weren't cut and bleeding he should have rushed up and pushed him full-length in the water. He was really sorry he hadn't done that.

On his way to the lavatory he passes Mr Tripp, a tall man with a beaked nose and the blackest of black hair slicked back and
brillianteened to a high gloss. Mr Tripp worked in the office: he was always coming down with a bundle of papers in his dark hairy fist. The rumour was that he was knocking off the telephonist in the dinner-hour, a shy dumpy girl who sat hidden all day in a box of frosted glass.

‘Official break ten past four,' Mr Tripp says.

Kenny pauses, astounded, outside the entrance to the lavatory. He might have been lost for an answer, but he isn't.

‘Who the fuck are you?'

‘What did you say?'

‘I said who the fuck are you?'

Mr Tripp is taller than Kenny; though he doesn't approach him. His eyes are black too, like his hair. Kenny recalls his nickname and his face cracks in a smile.

Mr Tripp grows tense. ‘I don't think it's funny.'

‘You would if you knew what I was laughing at.'

Mr Tripp takes a deep steadying breath, is about to say something, hesitates, opens his mouth again and closes it. None of it needs to be said: it is clear as daylight the antipathy between them. All the stuff about the generation gap and the lack of respect youth has for its elders, and how the country is going to the dogs, and bring back birching and flogging, and they don't know they're born, and how a hard day's work would kill most of them, and a stint in the army would sort them out, and it wasn't the same in his day, etc etc etc.

Kenny knows all this and he delights in the fact of Mr Tripp's impotent rage. As for Mr Tripp he detests everything about Kenny, and particularly his physical appearance. The boy looks like a great dumb sullen imbecile, his shoulders bursting out of his shirt, the slack wet mouth and the slightly pop-eyed stare: for all the world like a baboon gazing vacantly through the bars of its cage. The baboon goes into the lavatory and enters the end cubicle with a copy
of
Reveille
. It squats there for a while, reading and defecating, then quite deliberately, and with childish glee, shifts position so that the final turd drops on the floor. There's no toilet-paper, so the back page of
Reveille
, torn into strips, has to make do. Kenny grins at himself in the mirror: he has good teeth with only three fillings. He wets his forefinger under the tap and rubs it up and down against his front teeth. His toilet complete he goes back to his lathe.

The shop floor is close from the heat of the machines. With the afternoon now well advanced the day has gone from the skylight overhead: the strip-lighting along the metal framework throws a curtain of hard brightness onto everything below; each man has several shadows. It may be cold and dark outside but in here it's warm and cosy.

Kenny goes to the stores for a half-inch Wimet cutter and stops to talk with the storekeeper for ten minutes, an enormous man with close-cropped hair and a bull-neck, known to everybody in the works as Big John. His forearms are like hairy tattooed thighs and his paunch hangs in the shape of a peardrop from chest to groin. Big John is the fountain of dirty jokes at Haigh's, a man whose mind invents endless tales of sick depravity involving schoolgirls, nuns, spinsters, old ladies and all the members of the female office staff. He has broad, meaty hands padded with flesh and a face dominated by thick red lips. Legend said that Big John had a truly gigantic member – which Kenny didn't believe until one day he was taken into a small hot cubby-hole lined with blistering pipes behind the main boiler and witnessed the phenomenon with his own eyes. There was a magazine propped against the wall showing a young girl with bare breasts and pubic hair (this to give Big John an erection) and when the legendary member was fully extended twelve two-pence pieces were balanced along it and as a final, triumphant flourish, a half-pence piece placed on the very tip. It was a ritual that was repeated each time a new young apprentice
came to work at Haigh's, so that Big John had the respect and envy of every lad there.

Kenny finishes the batch and humps the three skips of components to the checker's bench where a couple of middle-aged women sit listening to a transistor radio, their eyes downcast, their hands mechanically sorting through piles of polished components and stacking them like fat silver coins. He's heard rumours about these two old crones, in particular what they do to young apprentices, such as sticking their limp pricks inside a milk bottle and then getting one of the younger girls to lift her skirt so that the apprentice has an erection and finds himself trapped, having either to smash the bottle (a dangerous remedy) or tuck the bottle inside his trousers until the cause of his embarrassment has resumed its normal proportions and he can free himself. Kenny can't decide whether he's attracted or repelled by this – attracted, certainly, by the thought of a young girl willingly displaying her thighs but repelled at having himself exposed to the rapacious gaze of two disgusting old slags.

‘Wasn't you we read about in the paper, was it?' one of them, Doris, says, her voice coarsened with shouting above the machinery.

‘What?' Kenny says, standing there in a ragged shirt, his bare arms hanging at his side.

‘Did you see that, Mo?'

‘No?'

‘In the
News of the World
. About them lads at that football match.'

‘Aye?'

‘Ten of them attacked a young copper.'

‘Oh?'

‘Broke his ribs and fractured his skull.'

‘Eeeeh.'

‘He's on the fatal list.'

‘No.'

‘Ten of them on to one.'

‘Shame.'

‘Wife and two young kiddies.'

‘Well.'

‘Wasn't you, was it?' Doris says, not looking up.

‘Aye,' says Kenny, ‘it was me all right. Duff a copper up every night, don't I?'

‘Wouldn't put it past you,' Doris says, not altogether joking. She has hairs on her chin.

‘Have you finished that lot?' the foreman shouts at Kenny. Kenny stands looking at him. ‘What are you doing here, then?' the foreman says.

‘Waiting for a bus.'

‘Ha-bloody-ha. Go on, there's another lot wanted for tonight.' Kenny turns. ‘Hey.' Kenny stops. ‘We've had a complaint about you.'

‘Me?'

‘You.'

‘Who off?'

‘Mr Tripp in the office. Says you were giving him cheek.'

‘Did he?' Kenny says, bored.

‘Don't stir it round here, laddie. Just get on with the job; all right? We can do without…'

Kenny's face has suddenly gone stiff. His heart feels to be expanding like an oversized fist. He hates the foreman, he hates Doris and Mo, and above all he hates Mr Tripp. He pictures the boot going into the eyes. His right hand closes, opens, closes. The foreman registers none of this; his voice goes remorselessly on:

‘We've had troublemakers here before but they've never lasted long. Just get on with the job. No need for any backchat, no call for it. If you want to give cheek wait till you get outside. You come here to do a job of work, that's all, nothing else. If you can't keep a civil tongue in your head then you'd be better off keeping it shut. You're
not indispensable, you know. I can't weigh it up, you youngsters today, you think the world owes you a living. When I was a lad we buckled down and got on with the job, we had to, but not you lot today. No. Never satisfied, never content. If I'd cheeked anyone when I was your age I'd've been out. Out. No messing. Trouble is, there's no discipline any more, you're not kept in check like we were. Nothing clever, you know, in shooting your mouth off, anybody can do it, any silly twerp. Of course your generation never went in the army, did you? They'd have sorted you out all right, two years' square-bashing with a sar'major on your back all the time, that'd have knocked some sense into you. By the left. Five years I did, during the war, and it never did me any harm.
And
I was prepared to work when I came out, had to; but not you lot, not any more. You can't go two minutes without coming out with a mouthful, effing this and effing that. Causing trouble. I don't know what gets into you. I suppose it's your parents who're to blame, not checking you when you get stroppy. A good leathering when you were a kid wouldn't have gone amiss, but no, not today, they think the sun shines out of their little bleeders' aresoles. Anyway, think on, let's have less of it. Any jawing to be done and I'll do it. Right?' He puts his hand on Kenny's shoulder in a not unfriendly gesture and Kenny knocks it off.

‘Wasting your time,' Doris says. ‘Talk till you're blue in the face. They don't take a blind bit of notice even when you tell them.'

‘Well,' the foreman says, ‘we'll see.'

‘I'm telling you,' Doris says.

Kenny goes back to his lathe and puts the first component into the jaws of the chuck, tightening them up with the key. He presses the green button and the motor starts, and keeping his foot on the metal brake lever increases the power to give maximum revolutions. After a few minutes sparks can be seen flashing through the ventilation grille in the dark interior of the casing and smoke comes out in a thick blue cloud.

KENNY STOPPED GOING TO THE CHAMBERS UNDERNEATH
Rochdale Town Hall when he was fifteen because it was – as he described it – ‘baby soul'. It's one of the few places in town, pubs apart, that caters for kids of twelve and upwards, and Kenny had some good times there. It was at the Chambers that he first met Janice: Andy had made a date with Janice's friend and this friend had asked Andy if he had a mate to go with Janice, who at that time was thirteen and a half. Kenny wasn't all that keen but he agreed for Andy's sake, and the four of them used to meet at the Chambers on Wednesday nights. It didn't last long, though, just two or three dates, and after that they went their separate ways. She was a scraggy, timid-looking creature who always had a wad of chewing-gum in her cheek, and Kenny wasn't sorry to see her go. About a year later, at the Seven Stars in Heywood, Kenny saw Janice dancing on the floor and for a minute couldn't believe his eyes; she wasn't any longer a sickly weenybopper; had in fact developed into something he could almost fancy, and when she came off the floor started chatting it up. In a lackadaisical fashion they started going out together, both of them pretending that it wasn't a steady relationship but more often that not happening to be in the same place at the same time.

Kenny had to take some stick from his mates (Andy excepted) who were all really desperate for girls but sublimated their yearning in beer, dirty jokes, piss-taking and rowdy behaviour. Kenny didn't give a toss: he found that he liked Janice, enjoyed her company, and it was a challenge because she wouldn't let him have it straight off. He reasoned that if it was that precious it might be something special and worth getting hold of. (Like most men he
was attracted by goods that were openly on display but not for immediate sale.) Kenny met her mother too, an easy-going sort in her mid-thirties with a full high bosom and a ripe laugh that was all the riper after half a dozen Guinness. He couldn't figure out how mother and daughter could be so different, because Janice was essentially a quiet, almost shy person whereas her mother was larger than life and always seemed to have a fella in tow. She was generous as well and never seemed to be short of money even though she didn't appear to have a regular job. It occurred to Kenny that she might be on the game; however, he never said anything to Janice because it wasn't all that important. Janice and her mother lived in a private flat on Bury Road that was one of four above a row of new shops. There was some arrangement whereby the mother was in charge of the flats – caretaker or manageress or something – although Kenny never could fathom it out, even after Janice had explained it to him.