This Road is Red Page 7

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘A letter about my kestrel.’

  The blue tit he’d taken as a chick and raised in the house was sitting quivering on top of the television.

  ‘There’s my blue tit,’ he said. He headed for the veranda and checked that the policeman was following him. Kes was there, on her perch.

  ‘And there’s my kestrel.’

  ‘Jings,’ said the policeman.

  He stared at the kestrel. ‘Are you allowed to keep kestrels on your veranda?’

  Oh shite. Davie felt sick. He wanted to launch himself at his brother and batter him.

  ‘Aye, I’m allowed. I’ve got a license.’

  ‘To keep a kestrel on a veranda? I really ought to see that license.’

  Davie felt his cheeks flush. He should have said he was shooting out windows; the polis would have given him a dress- ing down and would have been away up the road by now. Davie’s brother looked worried.

  ‘I think our ma threw your license away didn’t she?’ his brother said and Davie nearly gave up there and then. He wanted to lie down and thump his fists on the veranda floor.

  But he was saved. A brown shape fell from the sky. All three – and the kestrel – stared at it. It seemed to float past Davie’s veranda and then it splintered and shattered when it hit the ground. A wardrobe. Smashed. Gone. Cheers from somewhere up above. Calls of what the fuck? And that was the policeman gone too. He ran through the living room and flapped his hands as the blue tit flew close to his head.

  ‘I could do you for wasting police time,’ he said, looking back at them all.

  The brothers stood on the veranda.

  ‘Who do you think threw the wardrobe?’ Davie asked.

  ‘Who knows? Who cares?’

  ‘Do you think he’ll be back?’

  ‘I doubt it, the big diddy.’

  Davie bred mice on his veranda from then on and made sure he took his air gun far away from the Red Road Flats.

  Jennifer 1975

  Jennifer and James called them the doorstep weans; the four children who moved into the Campbells’ old house and waited on the landing for their mammy to come home. Their mammy went to work early and the children got themselves out for school and back from school on their own. They didn’t play.

  The doorstep weans were there again when Jennifer and James came in for their tea. The youngest boy lay on the floor and chewed the strap of his satchel, eyes fixed as a baby’s. The girl leaned against the door and drew pictures on her legs with a biro. The older boys blew across the top of their ginger bottles. Two Dunns bottles each.

  ‘Hiya,’ Jennifer said.

  The children stared, not rudely, but keenly. Jennifer put her key in the door then turned back to look at them. The elder two, the boys, were still staring. Their faces grey-pale. One of the boys blew across his bottle again and behind his head, their dog barked.

  ‘Your dog wants out,’ James said.

  The boy slammed his hand against the door and the dog stopped barking.

  ‘When’s your mammy coming home?’ Jennifer asked.

  The children shrugged and the small boy, the one lying on the floor, turned himself around and pressed the soles of his feet against the wall. Tatty, holey shoes. Ripped laces.

  Before Jennifer could turn her key, her mother had opened the door and stood there in her swirly dress and knee boots that Jennifer liked to try on.

  ‘In,’ Jennifer’s mother said. ‘All of you. Come on in.’

  The weans stood up and gathered their things. Gentle heads of hair and tough shoulders. Jennifer’s mother touched their backs as they walked past her through the doorway.

  ‘She’s staying out later and later because she knows I feed them,’ she said to Jennifer and Jennifer looked back at their door, behind which the dog had started up again.

  Jennifer’s mother fed them toast and beans with an egg and they sat around the table. She stood behind them and watched them eat. She poured milk into metal tumblers. The bigger children ate quickly but the youngest savoured every mouthful, eating one baked bean at a time. They all drank quickly and put their tumblers on the table, looking up for more.

  ‘Got any ginger bottles?’ one of the boys said.

  There were two empty ginger bottles by the sink. Jennifer’s mother picked up one and gave it to the boy.

  ‘What about that one?’ the other boy said.

  ‘That’s for James. You two will have to share.’

  James clenched his fist and put his elbows on the table. There was a knock at the door.

  ‘You need to get ready for Guides if you’re going,’ Jennifer’s mother said.

  The knock again and Jennifer’s mother went to the door. Sounds came through to the kitchen; rapid speech and a high laugh. The four doorstep weans looked up and smiled at their mother when she came in, unbuttoning her raincoat.

  ‘Oh, you’ve been fed!’

  The children looked at their plates.

  ‘I’ll have that wee bit of toast if you’re not eating it, Daniel.’ She pressed her fingers against her lips as she ate and seemed distracted, busy, her voice filling the room.

  ‘Sit down,’ Jennifer’s mother said.

  ‘No no, hen. I’m in a rush. I can’t keep up with myself today.’

  The youngest child put his arms around his mother’s legs.

  ‘Aiden, you big sook,’ she said, but hugged him.

  ‘I want you to stay home with us.’

  She told her children to stand up and come with her. ‘You’ve bothered Mrs Ryan enough already.’

  ‘Thank you for feeding them,’ she said. ‘We’ll have tonight’s tea tomorrow then, won’t we, eh?’

  The older boys wrapped their arms around their ginger bottles. James stayed at the table. Jennifer got up to put her Girl Guide uniform on and saw her mother and the weans’ mother talking at the door.

  ‘Look, Colleen, you’re helping me out greatly,’ their neigh- bour said. ‘I can’t keep up with myself. I’m working round the clock. I don’t get a penny off their dad.’

  The woman’s dark eyes seemed to demand a response. She stood too close to Jennifer’s mother. Beyond her, the weans fidgeted and agitated on the landing. Their mother turned to look at the floor.

  ‘It was my turn wasn’t it? I’ll do it tomorrow.’ She raised her voice. ‘Right, you lot, in, I’m not in the mood for any nonsense.’

  Jennifer’s mother closed the door and walked back into the house, a shade of worry on her face.

  As she got changed, Jennifer heard her mother say to James, ‘When you’ve had your peaches, take that ginger bottle over to the boys across the landing.’

  If her brother said anything Jennifer didn’t hear, and when she was buttoning her blue blouse she heard the click of her front door opening and then closing a few seconds later.

  Jennifer called the lift and heard shouts behind the doorstep weans’ door. While she waited, their door opened and one of the boys came out with the dog.

  ‘He’s already done his jobby on the veranda,’ the boy said,

  ‘but my mammy told me to take him out anyway.’

  When they were in the lift he put his fingers to the burnt plastic lift buttons and said, ‘Who done that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Someone who likes burning things. My sister likes burning things.’

  Jennifer realised she hadn’t even heard his sister speak.

  Davie 1975

  Waving to his granny out the window, away home after her Sunday dinner, and his wee brother walking her down to the bus stop. A beautiful day. A meal and a laugh round the table.

  Three guys approach two guys, casual, as if they would share a smoke. The wind picks up. Litter rolls in the road.

  His wee brother recognises it just as Davie and his brothers do, standing at the window. His brother stops and holds his granny’s arm. One guy runs away. Gone. The three casual guys they grab the guy who is left and push him to the ground, face down. T
wo of them hold him and the other guy takes a blade, like a blade from a pair of garden shears, and holds the handle and stands astride the man and stabs him in the back. The man screams and the two men keep him down while the man with the blade takes it out of his back and stabs him again. And when he stabs him the next time he jumps up first and he keeps jumping and he keeps stabbing.

  Davie’s granny, she shrugs off Davie’s brother’s arm and runs to the men and hits them with her handbag. No, Granny, no, Davie’s brothers at the window say and watch their wee brother try to pull their granny away. There is blood on the pavement, blood in the daylight, and the man on the ground isn’t moving. His back is bloodied. Davie’s granny is pointing and shouting and her handbag is going crazy. The man has stopped stabbing and all the men, the three of them, step away and turn in circles, staring at the onlookers, holding their arms out from their sides as if to say anyone got anything to say about this? They glance at Davie’s granny who is shaking her head.

  ‘Poor Granny,’ Davie says.

  ‘Your poor Granny’s seen it all before,’ Davie’s mother says who has come to stand by the window. ‘Ian, go down and see if she’s all right. Davie, go next door and phone for an ambulance.’

  The caretaker comes out when the ambulance is away and cleans up the blood. Pink suds remain on the road and pavement. A patch of wet that dries in the light and breezy day.

  Jennifer 1975

  Half-past eight and the sky was serene, music came from some of the houses, teenagers hung about. Outside Ten Red Road two policemen ran towards a group of boys with sticks and cigarettes but they didn’t stop at the teenagers. They ran inside the doors.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Jennifer said to the boys.

  ‘Go round the corner and look up.’

  She walked around the building and stepped away from it.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  A boy’s body was flat against the side of the building. Way up. His hands gripping the window frame, his feet on the tiny ledge. Skinny. Motionless. Jennifer was sure he was the boy from across the landing, the youngest boy, because he clung to the building three floors from the top, on floor twenty-eight, her floor. Across in the slab block people stood on their verandas watching. A woman stood on a high-up veranda and waved her arms. The boy stayed flat against the building. Tiny.

  Jennifer ran into the foyer and called for the lift. When she got to the twenty-eighth floor all four front doors were open. Jennifer’s mother and brother and their two other sets of neighbours were there.

  ‘They broke open the door,’ Jennifer’s mother said. ‘Come on, we’ll see if we can do anything.’

  They went into the fragile house. Nothing there. No pictures, no furniture. Three of the doorstep weans standing by the milk crates they used as chairs. The policemen had their hands on the youngest boy’s shoulders and walked him into the living room. His face was grey with terror, his body shook, his wee legs buckled. And then he cried ‘mammy, mammy!’ and his cries ripped his face and his eyes shut tight.

  Jennifer looked at the children.

  ‘It was a dare,’ the girl said. ‘But he said he wasn’t going to do it so we forgot about it and then we heard him shout and we saw he was already out there.’

  ‘We thought he’d climb back in,’ one of the boys said.

  ‘But he got stuck. He kept saying he was going to fall.’

  ‘Mammy told us never to open the windows.’

  ‘Sit down,’ Jennifer’s mother said to the children, and to

  Jennifer, ‘Get a blanket or something.’

  She pushed the milk crates together and the four children sat close, their hands tight around their knees. Jennifer looked in the bedroom for a blanket and found one. The bedroom was as bare as the living room. Just a mattress on the floor, two dolls and two crossbows. Her mother put the blanket round the children’s shoulders and they sat quietly. The youngest boy still shook and his brothers and sister put their heads close to his.

  Jennifer watched the adults talk. One of the police asked her mother where the children’s mammy was and she said she worked nights as well as days.

  ‘The wee man was petrified,’ the policeman said.

  ‘Whatever possessed him?’

  ‘Are there no safety catches on the windows?’

  ‘There are, but they’re easy to undo,’ Jennifer’s mother said. The police took notes and their radios crackled. A pile of mail lay on the floor by the television set next to another pile of coats. The doorstep weans made sobbing sounds; tiny squeaks and gasps. Heads together, the girl’s long hair spilling over her brothers’ shaven heads. Jennifer felt terrible for them and wondered if she should kneel down and say something. But they weren’t crying, they were laughing. Jennifer put her hand to her mouth and the weans looked up at her, their eyelashes wet, their eyes shining. They drew their heads back together and Jennifer tried to listen to the words they whispered to each other but she couldn’t make them out. The boy who asked for the ginger bottle was saying something through his laughter, his face red right up to his shorn blond hair and the other three were creased up, shaking their heads, sounds catching their throats, and finding something so funny. Eventually the girl drew the blanket up over their heads and they sat on the crates with it covering them completely. That’s when the police and the adults turned to look at them.

  Jennifer’s mother took the children back to their house when the police said they weren’t to stay on their own in the house and if nobody took them in they would call the social and have them taken away. They would need to call the social anyway. Jennifer’s mother took cushions from her couch and the children lay down and slept.

  Later that night, the doorstep weans’ mother knocked on the door. She was subdued when Jennifer’s mother told her about her youngest boy.

  ‘I can manage,’ she said and carried each sleeping child back to her house, mouth open, fingers curled, a soft bundle in her arms. Her eyes had tears in them when she came for the last child.

  It took a few days to work out what she’d done because the flat was nearly empty anyway and peeking through the let- terbox to see the bare floors and walls was no different to before. But when the children no longer sat on their doorstep waiting for their mother to come home and when the police and the social work knocked at Jennifer’s house to enquire after the family and after that the caretaker arrived to let the man from the Corporation in, it was obvious. She’d done a moonlight and taken the kids with her.

  Matt Barr

  There was gang stuff that happened. I was about sixteen. A couple of boys. They came from Avonspark Street, the gang, and they got them over the railway, they caught these two boys from Blackhill. They weren’t actually bad guys, they seemed like nice boys. The ringleaders started attacking them and there was a big crowd, there was maybe about forty kids, aged from ten right through to about nineteen. The boys had been punched, blood all over, their noses were bust, teeth were knocked out and the rest of the crowd were joining in, they were really going to get seriously hurt, you know. I sort of felt sorry, I could see the fear in their eyes, and I felt really sorry for them and I thought I’ve got to do something here otherwise these guys are going to get really badly hurt. One of the boys from a really notorious family he said we’ve got to do something here and I said if you’re with me, let’s step in, so we said, ah, come on, they’ve had enough, they’ve had enough, and because there were two of us we stopped it. And I couldn’t believe it, he took the two guys, he said you’ve got to get away from here, come on follow me. He took them into his house, he hid them in his house for the afternoon, you know, and cleaned them up and everything and helped them get away from the area, before they got caught in an area they weren’t supposed to be in. So there were some kind things happened that you didn’t expect.

  Davie 1976

  They started slow and relaxed, a Sunday, a dewy, bright morning, the most beautiful day of the year. Six boys. Davie was there, Brendan, Brendan’s younge
r brother Paul, Malcolm from Avonspark Street and two more boys from Ten Red Road, Tam and wee James Ryan. The boys walked south along the train tracks, bird-nesting. It was too early for trouble from the Gyto across the tracks and there were no trains on a Sunday – the electricity was on overhead but there was no need to listen out for the rattle of carriages. Peace. They climbed the cool walls of one of the tunnels and felt for holes and nests. It was too dark to see what kind of eggs they’d pulled out but they were able to guess at them from their size. Outside the tunnel in the bright morning they held out the eggs on dirt-blackened hands and any they did not need they returned to the nests. Always, they left ample eggs in a nest.

  Malcolm from Avonspark Street had a bag of pear drops and he shared them with the other boys. Davie scraped his tongue on the edge of his sweet and thought there might be blood mixed with his spit, but he didn’t care, he was having a brilliant day. Some of the boys walked along the rails, the sea- grey tracks going on and on beyond their outstretched arms. Davie found a stick and beat the weeds at the side of the tracks. There were mice and rabbits for shooting but he hadn’t

  brought his air gun. The air was thick with pollen and his eyes watered. Because the weather was warm the boys shed jumpers and tied the arms around their waists. There was an agitation to the way they smacked their sticks against the weeds at the foot of the embankment or spun the stones they aimed at tree trunks. They stopped to light cigarettes and kick the toes of their trainers against the bolts on the sleepers. Girls. They’d all winched a girl, except for Brendan’s younger brother. They’d all pressed their cocks against a girl on the back stairs and felt under her top for bare skin and nipples. They’d all been punched. They’d all been belted. They’d all dogged school. They’d all asked men outside the off-license to buy them cider or wine.

  So the bird-nesting was a comfort. Nostalgia, almost. They walked in single file through a tunnel. Brendan hooted and his echo filled the black air. Coming out into the light they listened for noise of other boys or gangs but heard nothing.