Thicker Than Water

The frequency distribution was about what you’d expect. Very few of the youngest kids had the stamina to keep up with our wilder activities, and a lot of the fifteen-year-olds had discovered other, more absorbing pastimes that kept them busy elsewhere, so the thickest concentration was in the middle of the age breakdown.

As far as gender went, we were equal-opportunity delinquents. The hardier girls ran with us and did as we did, without question or challenge. The rest, for the most part, stayed back in Arthur Street close to the home fires, understudying with scaled-down Hoovers and plastic kitchen ranges the role that society had defined for them.

Anita Yeats was one of the ones who ran with us, even though she was around the same age as Kenny and my brother Matt - the top end of our spectrum. By that age, most of the girls weren’t allowed to knock about with us any more, and didn’t want to. They had better things to do with their time, and parental prohibitions had kicked in, making them put aside childish things. Anita’s body was in the middle of that scary, enthralling transition: she was developing adult curves, her aspect morphing mysteriously from pinch-faced gamine to shithouse rose.

So it was going to be the last year of running with the street pack for Anita, and probably for Kenny and Matt, too. Maybe that added an edge to things, I don’t know. Maybe it was part of the reason, in some indirect way, for Kenny picking an argument with Anita. And maybe, too, it was an offshoot of a broader inter-family feud, of the kind that were always breaking out whenever someone’s uncle’s son went to the bar and left someone’s cousin’s dog out of the round. But the main reason was that Kenny had been sniffing around Anita in a semi-obvious way ever since he hit puberty, and she’d never shown the slightest sign of returning his interest. It was only a question of when his arousal would finally topple over into aggression.

And it turned out to be that Whitsun morning. Kenny rounded on Anita as soon as we’d descended onto the Triangle at Breeze Hill - one of the pointsnt of the where the huge acreage of waste ground touched the real world.

‘Sod off home,’ he said brusquely. ‘We don’t want you, Yeats.’

‘Why not?’ Anita demanded reasonably. There were other girls in the party, so ‘you’re a girl’, besides sounding lame and even potentially unmanly, just wouldn’t wash. And it had to be a reason that wouldn’t extend to Anita’s kid brother Richard - known for the most part as Dick-Breath - who was also in the gang.

‘You’re too slow,’ Kenny snapped. ‘We’ll be waiting for you all the fucking time. Go home.’

‘I’ll keep up.’

‘You never do. And you’ll argue over which way to go. We’ll have to listen to you giving it this’ - imitating a yammering mouth with thumb and fingers - ‘all the frigging time.’

‘I won’t talk.’

‘Well, your mam’s a slag and we’ll catch something off you.’

Anita flushed phone-box red. Then, as now, bringing someone’s mother into the argument was moving directly to Defcon One: it was the Taunt Unendurable, and it required the Riposte Valiant. Dick-Breath kept his head down, having earned that derisory name for his willingness to do whatever was needed to curry favour with the bigger kids. But Anita was woven out of sturdier as well as more brightly coloured fabric. Mouthing off to her just wasn’t safe, and anybody with less heft than Kenny would have thought twice about doing it.

‘Fuck off, Kenny,’ she shouted, balling her fists. ‘You gobshite!’

Kenny smacked her, open-handed, across the face, hard enough to make her stagger.

‘Your mam’s a slag,’ he repeated. ‘She’s knocking off Georgie Lunt.’

Anita screamed and went for him, but Kenny was a head taller than her and he fended her off with a violent shove. ‘So you’re probably a slag too,’ he said. ‘It runs in families. Who are you knocking off, Anita?’"

"For some reason, this was shocking to me. I’d seen boys fight girls before: there was no real room for chivalry in our rough-and-tumble code of ethics, and girls could do you some serious damage if they fought like they meant it. It was just that this was so cold-bloodedly staged, and so obviously unfair - Kenny manufacturing the argument to pay Anita back for his blue balls - that it made my blood boil. And not just mine. I saw Matt, my big brother, lean forward as though he was about to step in between Anita and Kenny and take up the challenge on her behalf. My survival instinct - like Dick-Breath’s - was a bit better developed than that: Kenny had more or less the same height advantage over us as he did over Anita and, as we’d all learned on many occasions, he didn’t recognise the dividing line between what was legitimate and what was inconceivable.

But I did what I could. I replied to the taunt.

‘Well, your mam killed herself, Kenny,’ I called out.