Thicker Than Water

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

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.

He was a bully’s bully, ruthless and arbitrary to a fault, and he brought fear and pain into my life on a number of occasions. In the urban wastelands that we swept through like a swarm of grubby locusts, he was a moving hazard that none of us ever figured out how to negotiate. Once he decided he was going to write his name on all the younger kids in the street - a literal sign of his authority over us. His rough-hewn scrawl on my upper arm turned into an archipelago of bruises that lasted a good few days after the ink had faded.

Another time he pushed me out of an apple tree that we were both scrumping from, in the high-walled cider orchard behind Walton hospital. We were twenty feet or so above the ground and I would have broken a leg or maybe my back if I’d fallen the full distance. As it was, I slammed into a branch four or five feet below the one I’d fallen from and managed to cling onto it. Kenny laughed uproariously: something about the spectacle of me dangling over nothing with my legs churning the air struck him as great slapstick humour. When my brother Matt climbed down to rescue me, Kenny pelted him with apples and swore at him, threatening to push him out of the tree too if he didn’t leave me to struggle back up onto the branch by myself. Matt ignored him and hauled me to safety, crab apples raining down around the pair of us.

None of this was personal, though: Kenny terrorised everyone with equal enthusiasm, including his own two kid brothers, Ronnie and Steven. He broke Ronnie’s leg once with a rough tackle during a game of street football, and then made Ronnie tell their dad that he’d fallen off a wall.

But the weird thing about all these incidents was that they never made much of a difference to our day-to-day customs and practices. All the kids of Arthur Street and of neighbouring Florence Road did pretty much everything together. Whether we were taking over the street with our huge sprawling games of kick-the-can, stealing from the allotments in Waltonushnts in Hall Park or making one of our frequent raids on the kids of the Bootle Grammar School, we moved en masse. At these times Kenny was our psychopath: he was much valued both for his ability to handle himself in a barney and for being one of the privileged few who could decide what we did next and actually make it stick."

"One raw day in Whitsun week, the year I turned thirteen, he decreed an expedition to the Seven Sisters, those ponds that marked where the bombs had fallen on the railway line forty years before. It was too early in the year to swim - even in high summer the Sisters were bonemeltingly cold - but we could collect tadpoles, fish for sticklebacks, muck around on the edge of the water and pretend to push each other in, explore the surrounding grass and weeds for metal bolts that you could shoot out of a catapult and have huge, ill-defined mock battles through the bulrushes and stinking shallows. It was guaranteed entertainment, on a bank holiday when the shops were shut and there was sod-all else to do, so we were all up for it.

And if ‘we all’ suggests a warm and inclusive cosiness, then strike it out and put something else in its place. There were lots of ways you could be bounced out of the collective. The gang of us, if you could corral us in one place for long enough to count, probably numbered around fifty on a good day, and we ranged in age from eight to fifteen.