Thicker Than Water

The rest of the journey was without incident. I couldn’t shake off a sombre mood, though. I was thinking about kids: about Mark Seddon, and about Bic. Even about the cocky little bastard I’d just tangled with. I hadn’t picked the fight; and once I was in it, I’d won it in the only way I could think of. And he might even have survived, because loup-garous are as tough as weeds. If not, his spirit could find another animal host and start the make-over process all over again in its own sweet time.

I still felt like I’d just pulled a switchblade on a puppy dog. But then again, I hadn’t had the option of a rolled-up newspaper.

Pulling into Lime Street for the first time in so long gave me a peculiar kind of double vision.

Three years. Not so very long, really, if you count it in calendar terms: but in terms of what I’d lived through since, it was about two ice ages ago. The last time I’d walked out through those oversized doors and got the Mersey’s gusty, vinegary breath full in my face, it had been before Juliet. Before Rafi, even. Back when banishing the dead for fun and profit had seemed like a reasonable way of making a living.

Coming north had taken me a piddling two hundred miles closer to the Arctic circle, but the afternoon air had a slight chill in it all the same. A green double-decker in the livery of the MPTE rolled past me, and as I crossed the road I glimpsed first the tower of the Playhouse rising above Forster Square and then, off to the right, the heroic frontage of St George’s Hall. Amidst the welter of new roads and shitty poured-concrete frontages, they were like old friends standing on the fringes of a party where they didn’t know anybody.

I waited at the bus stop, out of sheer force of habit, for the number 93. I could have grabbed a cab, but I’d always gone in and out of town by bus. Neither of my parents had ever driven, and I hadn’t even taken lessons myself until I’d moved down to the Smoke.

I checked my itinerary off in my mind. I was looking for Anita, first and foremost: notwithstanding my own bad example, those born and bred in Liverpool 9 have a strong homing instinct, and this was my best guess as to where she would have come after life with Kenny lost its lustre. I was thinking that I’d shake down her brother Richard - Dick-Breath - and see if he knew where I could find her. If not, I’d get what I could by putting my questions to him instead.

I was also thinking of talking to some of the other Seddons if any of them had hung around in Walton. Kenny’s brothers Ronnie and Steven might know something about Kenny’s state of ›nnylkimind in recent weeks, and it was always possible he could have let something slip in a phone call or an e-mail.

Two women talking behind me in the queue disrupted my thoughts. After so long an absence, it was impossible not to tune in to the nasal poetry of Scouse.

‘He loves the bones of her, he does.’

‘Oh, aye. You’ve only got to look, haven’t you?’

‘But if he thinks she’s getting that money down the bingo, he’s living in a fool’s paradise.’

‘She’s a dirty mare.’

‘She’s a hoo-er, is what she is.’

That was how my mother always pronounced the word. Not whore: hoo-er. Two syllables, drawn out with censorious relish.

Concentrate on business.

Anita.

Kenny.

And one other outstanding item, which had to come first.

The bus took me out of town along St Anne’s Street, and then up through the asphalt and concrete runway which is all that remains of Scotland Road. As you drive out from the centre, Liverpool opens itelf up to you in concentric bands of squalor and almost-affluence - although for real affluence you had to swing all the way east to Woolton, and that was nowhere near my destination.

I got off two stops past where I should have done, at the Queen’s Drive flyover. Queen’s Drive is the Liverpool ring road, although Liverpool being a crescent-shaped city jammed in against the banks of the Mersey it’s really only half a ring. When John Brodie started building it in 1903, Walton was a village. By the time he downed tools and signed off on the job two and a half decades later, it had become a borough of the city, but there were streets behind St Mary’s Church that still kept that parochial charm. Other parts, particularly the streets around Walton Hospital, underwent a further metamorphosis into a slum, but as kids we had no standard of comparison. For all we knew, the queen had bedbugs too.

The hospital stands just outside of Queen’s Drive’s tight embrace, at the northern end of Breeze Hill. But when I got off the bus I turned the other way, past the church and on down County Road. In the mid-1980s the city council had finally decided to pull the beam out of its eye and had torn down the shithole where I’d been born, relocating most of the inhabitants either to a new development on the Walton Triangle or to council houses a couple of miles further in towards the centre.