When Liam walked in the foyer door asking to see me I smelled the trouble I wanted. Liam was Marie Dillon's eldest, all my height but dark skint-eyed and black haired, pinched white skin, whisps of teenage below his earline. He wore grey and sniffed all the time, phlobbed a lot, his mouth pursed with the weighing up of getting away with anything he cared to. On the swivel that day, Liam was. Said he liked everything on the run, said he lived where everyone lived, down on the grey council estate that went on forever along the River Medway there.
Liam'd come up to Farm Villa, where his Mam was a night nurse, for a laugh at my expense, I knew that, expected it, just from the look of him anyway, and specially when he said straight off:
- Shaws yer fishin stoff then.
We moved over the buffed lino like a leak from humanity's tap. Through this indelible smell of mental wards, the 3-in-1 of cold piss, instant coffee and nicotine ghosts, sour-side up. My fishing stuff was beside my bed in the dormitory. I thought I could sell it for fag and tea money, to supplement the two quid a week pocket money you collected every Wednesday from the stats office. But there weren't many anglers in that place, the County Asylum, and the gear wasn’t much either, but it was more than Liam owned. The tackle of childhood, each item carried the bulk of all the treasured memories I had too. The stink of roach on a boy’s finger is for life. Blood on a shard of wine bottle washes off.
Liam was impressed with the gear but with that sly jealousy which meant he was getting his hands on it, you were just one of his mum's nutters. Even said he wanted to buy it, only he was short of cash. He was shrewd and meant this as stage one in a con he'd done before, his Mam the inside job. Just rip-off Queens, the fuckin nurses. Charge nurse Murphey told me to shut my face when I complained about the nicking.
Liam fingered my spinners, swooshed my rods and said my accent worried him. My fake accent that is, so faked it still wouldn't come off unless I scrubbed it with Low-Life soap. He was polishing me up for that fishing tackle by mentioning his mates, hinting I might join them in something going on, but talking posh would get the piss took and maybe a kicking. So I dropped it back to Boy of Kent and poured three years of two-timing dignity down the bog with relief, like I’d stuck my fingers down the voice box and up it came, and out it went, with a wretching yah-yah-ra-thar, and we carried on sounding like old times in vernacular. That place was doing me good.
- A' you allowed out this fockin plairce? Now, loike? he said.
- Oh yeah, fuck'em, I said. Anyway, there's two hours before the noight shift.
- Me mam's on tonoight any road. She's a'ome nor. She juss got 'erself up. Okay then, less go, but canya bring along that poike plug wi' them treble 'ooks on it, show me mates. Tanks.
Etcetera. I'd got a tongue like flypaper, ear like His Master’s Voices, an eye for the words. I was attractive to the vocabulary and the lilt. "Stuff" was one of Liam's all-purpose words. And course, first thing Liam actually wanted after my pike plug was stuff about girls and women. Like if there was any easy shags, you knaw, nymphos an' stuff. His mam'd said the hospital were packed with it.
I said I’d show him who they were. Liam slammed me on the back and said:
- You're a pal, but dorn say nott'n to nawn.
Liam's house was in a grey pebble-dashed terrace among the gloomy rows where one estate joined another like layers of dirt over the years. There were six Dillons in two bedrooms. Sam Dillon worked nights too, at the Paper Mills, eyes red and heavy. Nurse Dillon was just up like Liam said, but she was fresh as a daisy, dyed blonde, pointed tits and talking dirty from shit to shift. She was glad to see me but said don't be too late, old Marsden was charge nurse that night.
It was a grey spring evening, drizzlin’ but warm. Outside, we kicked a punctured football in the cinders back of the garages, then Liam showed off my pike plug to his two brothers, making me feel so proud to own it I let him keep it after all. They showed me the ten acres of allotments between their estate and the River Medway. That's where they went fishing, back of them allotments at night, for eels, and they sold the " fook'n 'orrible things" for 10p a pound.
We threw stones at each other, then Liam said he was going off with his two mates. He said to ask his dad to give me a lift back with his mum when he took her to work. On the way, Nurse Dillon said:
- Liam likes you.
I fixed him up with with Grace two days later because he promised to take me night fishing if I did.
- Snot the fishin’ season, I'd said.
- Fock the season. Eels don't count. It's a good laugh oi tellya, an' there's cash in it.
Grace was from another ward across the grounds under consultants you never saw. Their patients were from London catchments like Croydon, Penge, Sidcup. Grace looked like David Bowie and dressed like him too. She got herself admitted half way through her second year in art school. She drew Gothic, fantasy, creatures, warriors, broken columns, sweeping skies where hounded chariots flashed. She drew herself, fine pencil, perfect lines, manacled to a tree shaped like a witch's hand.
She was from Lewisham, and sounded like all my cousins. Jesus, she stood in the carpark outside Farm Villa in the rain everyday till I went out with her. Just gritting up our flares in the wet, slogging round the grounds, patients' canteen, shoplifting down Maidstone.
One night there was a disco on Female Nines, a long stay ward, so me and Grace went over there and ate sausage rolls and took the piss out the old hags with nurses making their arms go up and down to Beatles crap on an old Philips record player. Grace was weird, not me-type weird in Liam's eyes, but scarey-jagged weird and I wanted to dump her. After the disco we stood under the iron fire escape in the rain and lit Number 10s. An hour to go before night medication. She wouldn't stop talking, thousand words a minute, all about her weird like feelings and that, so I was fungling her and smoking at the same time till I chucked the nub down and levered both her tits out like playing marbles. But she was staring into the lamps and the rain like I wasn't there, yattin and yattin then singing some great new song she'd just heard by 10 cc: ah'm nod in la-arve, s'doan forgeddit, 's juss a silly phase ah'm goin'frew...
I scubbed myself against her as she sang till I came in my trousers.
- Less go back now, I said.
She hadn't noticed anything. It was early May, windy drizzle, blowing hot and cold, a foot in two seasons, the kind of day I caught my first chub on a fly down Bodiam, on the cane rod too and the old flyline my neighbour give me. I remembered it because I'd felt on the verge of something, a twelve year old achieving a thing incredibly sensible. This was the furthest off I could think of, the furthest off I wanted to be right then. A boy who knew who he was in a world where the horizon stopped where it was supposed to stop. I'd even tied the fly myself, and maybe if I'd heeded this opportunity I wouldn't've been wasting these moments in a mental hospital. Going with Grace down the slope to impurity. If there'd been someone there right then to pick up the pieces, someone with a vision of things, someone to tell me who I was, what I could be, where I'd fit, well, I think I could've walked away from that place sooner. There would be a vision of myself. I knew it was out there. It was like, in the meantime, I just had to be 16 again, as it had been just before I read my first poem and it all went wrong. Just nip back into that kid, but with some insight. I knew that being working class was like having epilepsy a hundred years ago. They bunged away the key so you had to keep filing away at the bars.
We walked over the grass and stopped just outside the ring of light from Farm Villa. She laid down and said:
-Yer c'n screw me up t'the eyeballs tomorrer. I'm flyin the red flag today.
I told Liam about it and he said okay, it were worth a fockin try.
- Oi wouldn'moind a bidda groin, he said.
He knew who she was now. Some of his mates'd gang banged her behind the chipshop in Barming. I'd arranged to meet her at seven by the driveway inside the grounds near Oakwood Common, so I said all Liam had to do was turn up and say I couldn't make it, but he'd felt like a walk if she didn't mind.
- Sinch, I said.
Next day Liam said:
- No trobble. Jesus doz she knaw what it is, chroist, jigging the ol'hips about...
He took me eel fishing in the middle of May as promised. Liam's mam was on duty and she fixed it so I could stay out all night, unnoticed. There was me, Liam and his brother Fin and a mate of their’n called Scab. On the way down to the river we raided the allotments and rooted up several fence posts for firewood. Scab busted into a shed and wogged a can of paraffin to get the fire going. We had the billy kettle too and I'd grabbed handfulls of teabags from Farm Villa kitchen and a fresh white Sunblest. Scab said he only ate Jaffa Cakes and Snowballs cause it was all his mum could nick from work and his shit was a funny colour because of it.
Liam'd said not to take too much stuff in case we had to leg it. All they had was a rod each, a bucket, and a carrier bag with their stuff in. I had my two rods, tackle box, landing net, and they were all over it before we even got there, borrowing stuff I’d never get back.
They showed me what to do when it was dark and the fire was lit. We had weak torches we kept having to smack or bounce off the ground to get them to come on again. What you did was thread on a big drilled bullet or coffin lead, stop it with a swan shot, big hook, bunch of worms. Liam said you don't want fockin bootlaces to grab it and run off in ten directions with the one worm so you get four lobworms on a big size 2 rusty seahook. Big bastards you're after, two bob eels, packet of fags every time you get a bite.
They snapped prods from branches for rod rests. We cast into deep brown sluggish water with a great clonk of leads and clish of knotty-coiled lines impacted from years of misuse on filthy spools. Their rods were solid glass spinning rods with the top eyes missing or a good foot snapped off. Liam borrowed one of mine.
The river was wide there, the paths worn flat, dog shit and litter, dead fires and Durex. We sat in the fire glow, the rods all propped up high with sea fishing bells clipped to the tips, little pet bells attached to clothes pegs by a spring. Then one of them dinged off, shaking like a baby with a rattle. We all ran to the rods shining our torches up in the air.
- A-hey, it's moine lads, Liam said, waiting for the bell to rittle again before he struck. Yeah's, fock'n on, jeez, biggun Scab.
His reel handle fell off and he dragged the eel in by walking up the bank. It slapped the ground so Scab put a foot on it.
- Swallered the 'ook, he said. Yank'arder.
- Naw, where's the knoife.
He cut the line and chucked the eel in the bucket. We all looked. It curled twice round the bottom.
- Twenny foive pee that one.
I caught eleven eels that night myself. Liam gave me 50p and kept the rod and all my weights. I took the 50p to Maidstone Market and bought this pair of platform shoes, the latest fad, moulded plastic, two-tone red. Put them right on and chucked the desert boots in the river behind the market. My drainpipes were pinstripes and didn't go with the platforms but it was too late to get the boots back. Going modern had to hurt, and looking a pratt was the price of avant garde. I walked like a horse in stilettos up the main Tonbridge Road, and passing drivers lost the wheel for a look.
- Caw, fucking oil rig walking up the pavement...
- 'Ere mate, you on the stage?
- Your 'usband know you're at work darlin?
By the time I got to the hospital gates my feet bled. Liam was there waiting and was really pissed off when he saw the shoes. He said I couldn't go fishing with his mates looking like a fockin clockwork robot so I'd better just lend him my gear.
- No way, I said. I 'ad to buy these shoes coz you only gave me 50p fer them eels.
He said fair do's, I could earn some more but I'd have to wear his football boots, he didn't have another pair of shoes.
It was Friday night and Liam said we’d have to be ready to leg it because there'd be a fight in town, it was all arranged, skinheads up from Rochester. There were other eel fishers in the dark and word spread along the bank that 20 skins were working their way along from the town end kicking rods in. Liam said I'd be alright, just had to kick'em back with his football boots. We were only half a mile from the market stretch, and when we heard shouting we packed in and legged it to the allotments, dropping live eels on the way, trying to stop them snaking off into the grass. Some Skins got hold of the kids just round the bend from us, chucked them in and kicked shit through their gear. We lobbed our stuff over the allotments fence and lit it up Liam's house, giving it an hour till the police came along. We got the gear back when it was quiet and even caught five more eels, but Liam threw up after eating a whole Hostess Roll and a bottle of cherryade he'd knicked from his mam's cupboard. The police came along at dawn and took our names and addresses.
- Fucking hell, the copper said. Three tinkers an' a nutcase.
They were talking of chucking me out, the nurses. They were doing the court assessment and said I showed no signs of criminal psychopathy or grief or trauma. Every day now Pat Murphy said he knew my game. I said well I wish you’d tell me so I could win at it. He was a sharp Alec. He said you can’t win at losing. Anyway, I thought I had to throw them off the scent because I was enjoying this eel fishing and doing it independently of Liam. The alternative was back home in with my old woman in her bungalow. I was working on funding that vision of myself, but I needed to catch a thousand eels to get anywhere near the target. The authorities weren’t even offering me a half-way house. The only way to get an extention was make a fake suicide attempt. Everyone there did it, you gained four weeks observation. So one other night I walked into town, tried to find some portion of the river where I could simply baptise myself without danger, being a non-swimmer. The river was hungry and the streetlamps made it look greasy and ready to suck me under. I found an ornamental rock garden instead, hidden behind some bushes, a little tumbling stream and a pool like a washbasin. I took my fags out to keep them dry, then bit by bit I wet myself, scooping the water in timidity onto my head till I thought I looked authentically plunged out.
The police station wasn't far off. I just went up to the desk and said I'd tried to drown myself, somebody pulled me out. They must’ve run off before I could scream and shout: let me drown you cunt. I was put in a side-room and given a blanket. There was hardly any dripping on the floor. A detective came in. Took one look.
- You're bloody stupid. Show us them fags.
Five Sovereigns, all dry as tinder.
THE ASSISTANT - Bernard Malamud
ANYWHERE BUT HERE - Mona Simpson
A PIECE OF MY HEART - Richard Ford
UNDERTONES OF WAR - Edmund Blunden
ALL THE WILLIAM STORIES - Richmal Crompton
