Thicker Than Water

Mum sniffed. ‘I don’t know about that. He saw some of them, aye, but he wasn’t going to walk in the Breeze and stand at the bar with them, was he? It’s not that kind of life, when you’re a man of the cloth. You’ve got to stand aloof.’

The conversation veered off in other directions, by virtue of some unspoken agreement that passed between us. Nostalgia and beer are a potent combination in themselves; and when Mum got the photo album out and cracked it open in the middle we had the emotional perfect storm. There we all were: Matt and me in short trousers, Dad all tanned and handsome - ‘a dark horse’, my grandma used to call him, with mingled disapproval and admiration - and Mum looking like a million dollars.

‘Where did it go?’ I asked, wonderingly. ‘We just—’ I couldn’t find a word for it, so I pantomimed it instead - holding my hand in front of my face with the fingers pursed together, then opening it wide. ‘Where did that come from? One minute we’re a family, the next we’re . . . in the wind.’

Mum didn’t answer. She just turned a few pages in the book back and folded i›ck eigt open at a page we hadn’t seen yet. There were three photos on the page: the first, Mum holding a baby, the baby all swathed in pink blankets and pink bonnet and pink everything; the second, the three Castor siblings in school uniforms, wearing the pained grimaces children always put on when they’re told to smile; and the third, Katie by herself, aged four, smiling a smile that was altogether more believable - a smile with secret, solemn little-kid thoughts behind it.

I stared at the photos, suddenly sober despite the seven or eight beers I’d downed.

‘It took a while,’ Mum said, her tone soft. ‘It didn’t happen all at once.’

17

I didn’t leave Nimrod Street until almost ten p.m., by which time I’d drowned that little nugget of cold, hard sobriety in a few more beers and a lot more talk. But the talk was getting harder and harder to sustain, and the question of where I was going to spend the night was getting more and more pressing.

Mum had offered me a bed, which I’d declined with thanks. The impassable ground again: the conversation leading us into the middle of a minefield and leaving us there without a map or a metal detector. She’d asked me about Matt. When had I last seen him and how was he doing? I’d passed the question off with some made-up bit of news about his teaching work, because the truth was that I never asked Matt about his life. I never had asked him, I realised now, since the day when he’d walked out of mine.

I walked back up to County Road and grabbed a cab up to Breeze Lane. I could have walked it, but I wanted to get to the Breeze - my Mum and Dad’s old local, ruled over with a rod of rusty iron by the aforementioned Harold Keighley - before the towel went up.

The pub hadn’t changed. They’d rebuilt the entire neighbourhood around it, but the Breeze remained its own sad-ass self, like the filament of platinum in that bullshit metaphor of T. S. Eliot’s. You dip it into a mixture of oxygen and sulphur dioxide and blam, you’ve got sulphuric acid - but the platinum stays the same, unaffected by the reactions it catalyses. The metaphor sort of falls apart at that point, though, because the Breeze was never the catalyst for anything apart from a thousand drunken fights about who was looking cross-eyed at our Karen and whose grandad had stolen whose great-uncle’s ration book back in the austerity years.

It’s a Tetley pub, probably built around 1920, and since the size of the plot gave the architect no room in which to exercise his imagination it’s just a big blockhouse coated in rough-cast and painted white. The sign is a little classier, because it’s topped with an iron silhouette, painted in bright red, of the liver bird - the mythical short-necked cormorant invented for the purpose by the desperate gofers of the school of heraldry back in the eighteenth century. That was when the city - flush with its winnings from the slave trade - slipped the heralds a backhander and asked them to run up a quick coat of arms.

Call me a sentimentalist, but I’ve always felt a sort of kinship with that bird. It belongs to no genus, but everyone confidently declares it to be a stork, a pelican, or whatever else they need it to be to fit the ž kitheory in hand. Whereas actually it’s a sleight of hand, a brazen forgery passed off on man and nature. As a symbol for my home town, it’s not bad: everybody thinks they know what Scousers are like, but the closer you look at us, the less neatly the individual details seem to add up.