‘Count yourself lucky you’re not getting a good booting. You get us in trouble with the filth again, I’ll fucking kill you.’
If Steve had been sure which panel in the fence opened, he might have tried to make a run for it, but it was too late. Jimmy led the way along a winding path trodden through the matted grass. The house seemed very large, close up like this, in the hushed wilderness inside the fencing. The windows and doors were all boarded up with plywood, but Dave prised back the screen on the back door far enough for them to slip inside. Had the house been for sale, rather than awaiting replacement by a block of retirement flatlets, the estate agents might have described it as ‘a rare opportunity to purchase a property offering considerable scope for imaginative refurbishment’. Alex, one of the other residents and good with his hands, had hot-wired the electricity supply, bypassing the meter, and at one time there had been talk of installing heating and even a cooker. But this had come to nothing, and the stairs, doors and skirting-boards, as well as much of the flooring, had been broken up for firewood. On the retreating island of intact floorboards, a number of mattresses lay scattered around a television and video recorder. These had been donated by a contact of Jimmy’s who occasionally needed help in enforcing his various business interests. Unfortunately he had ended up on the wrong end of a knife just before Christmas, since when things had been a bit tight.
When Steve and the others came in, Alex was flat out on one mattress watching TV. A girl with white hair and black lips, wearing a lime-green T-shirt, a short silvery skirt, zebra-stripe tights and pink socks, was lying on her belly on another mattress, listening to a Sony Walkman. Her legs were raised behind her and her left foot idly caressed the curve of her right calf. Her name was Tracy, and both she and Alex, a runty street urchin from Belfast, seemed mildly puzzled at first by Steve’s presence. But Jimmy was in charge — no one disputed that, except Dave when he had one of his turns — and like the glue itself, his fantasy proved stronger than the reality to which it was attached. Once the Woolworth’s bag had circulated a few times, no one except Steve himself had the slightest doubt that he was Jimmy’s younger brother and that he lived there with them, looking after them, keeping them half-way straight.
Steve soon settled into the role in which he’d been cast. For the first time in his life — well, the first that bore thinking about, anyway — he filled a gap, completed a family, belonged. He went to the shop further down Trencham Road marked OOD S ORE. This satisfied most of the stotters’ needs, consisting as it did of a grocery and off-licence which also hired videos. He reminded them when it was time to go and sign on at the DHSS, and then trekked to a distant block of council flats early in the morning to extract the cheques from the broken letter-box which they used as a convenience address. He did his best to keep them from electrocuting or poisoning themselves when they were completely out of it, which was all of every evening and most of most days. Their mediator, their go-between, their shabbes goy, he ran errands between them and reality.
Faithful to the letter of Jimmy’s scenario, the stotters never allowed Steve to take part in their rituals. He remained a spectator as they inhaled the muddling vapours and passed the plastic cylinders of cider from hand to hand. He watched them gibber and gesticulate, their faces distorted with terror or stupefaction. He watched them fight, usually with clumsy harmless blows that whirled astray, although one night Dave got Jimmy by the throat and squeezed and squeezed with those gristly hands of his until Alex pulled a burning plank from the fire and smashed him over the head with it. He watched them fuck, mounting Tracy one after another with expressions which suggested that the activity was a tedious necessity not unlike defecation. Afterwards they fell asleep where they lay, then got up next day and did it all over again. It was like sharing a cage with a pack of grouchy wild animals, violent and unpredictable, but not too bright. Steve was well aware of the risks he was running, but he reckoned that he could probably keep one step ahead, sensing the stotters’ mood shifts before they were aware of them themselves. All in all, he was better off than he had been for a very long time.
Not that his memories went very far back, or were especially detailed. All he had was a selection of images as unconnected and apparently inconsequential as a handful of snapshots. As usual in photographs, everyone was smiling, but Steve didn’t make the common mistake of concluding from this that the past was a happy place. The camera often seemed to have been badly aimed, missing the main action, whatever that might have been, to focus instead on the leg of a chair, a section of carpet, or an electric fire with a gleaming concave back which reflected two elements, the lower of which sometimes glowed dully red. When people appeared in the photographs, it seemed to be by accident, as if they’d blundered in unexpectedly, so that only some odd bit of them — a shoulder, part of a dress, a length of hair — emerged clearly. Despite this, Steve was quite content with his memories, even though the crucial one, which would account for the existence of the collection and explain why it was in his possession, was missing.
The finer points of Steve’s relationship with his past were, however, lost on Jimmy, who couldn’t understand why he didn’t just go down the fucking DHSS like everyone else. What did he think he was, some sort of special wanker? After the boy had been living there for a few weeks, he and Dave dragged him down to the offices with them, but as soon as Steve saw the row of cubicles where people sat being quizzed by officials he bolted. It was as bad as the police.
That evening things came to a head.
‘Look at this muck!’ Jimmy exclaimed suddenly. He pointed to the stotters’ dinner, consisting of a pack of chicken loaf slices, a packet of crackers and the remains of a tin of cold rice pudding. ‘Make you sick! And it’s fucking near all gone.’
‘You know how they make this?’ Dave said, holding up the last slice of pale grey meat. ‘First they cut their heads off, then they chuck them in this acid bath, burns off all the feathers and that. Then they hose them down, cut them open, yoik out the guts and chuck them in this fucking great press which crushes them, bones and all …’
Jimmy turned accusingly to Steve.
‘You been stuffing yourself, haven’t you? We go out to sign on and you eat all the fucking food in the house!’
‘To each according to his ability and from each according to his need,’ muttered Alex.
Tracy looked up from painting her fingernails a penetrating shade of purple.
‘I’d do anything for a hamburger and chips,’ she murmured wistfully.
‘What a bunch of wankers!’ Jimmy exploded, pounding the floor. ‘Never take a single thought for the future, do you? Look at this place! What a dump! And they’re going to come and tear it down any day now. And what do you do about it? Bring this useless young prick home!’
He pointed at Steve. The others turned to look at the boy as if seeing him for the first time.
‘But I thought he’s, like, your brother, isn’t he?’ Dave frowned.
Jimmy gazed at him incredulously.
‘My brother! He’s not my brother! He’s nothing like my brother. I haven’t even got a fucking brother!’
Dave’s frown deepened.
‘You mean he’s been pissing us about all this time? Oh well, that’s, fuck, that’s, I mean one thing I can’t stand is, I mean you can come up to me, face to face, man to man, and say anything you like …’