‘Thank you,’ said Basquiat. There was no inflection in her voice at all.
‘You’re welcome,’ Coldwood answered, still without looking round.
Basquiat looked at me with her lips set in a tight line. ‘You said you don’t know the man,’ she reminded me.
‘Right.’
‘But if I tell you his name, maybe you can have a little think about it.’
I nodded. My throat was still dry and my stomach hadn’t made up its mind to settle yet. I wasn’t in the mood to be coy, even if it played to my advantage. ‘Sure.’
‘Kenneth Seddon.’
My stomach made an instant decision. I swallowed acid bile.
‘Oh,’ I said, on such a dying fall that Coldwood swivelled round to stare at me. Basquiat was staring too, her eyes narrowing with a slightly indecorous eagerness.
‘Rings a bell,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.
‘Yeah,’ I admitted.
‘So you do know him?’
‘Knew him,’ I hedged. ‘Once. Not recently. Not for years.’
‘In what capacity were the two of you—?’
Fuck it. Save the subterfuge for stuff that you’ve actually got a chance of hiding.
‘He tried to kill me once,’ I said. ‘But he messed it up.’
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 alclass="underline" 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.