Thicker Than Water

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. ‘It wasn’t cancer - that’s all my arse. She cut her throat with your dad’s razor.’

There are moments in life when you know you’ve gone too far: you can tell them by the eerie stillness that descends around you - only half a second long in reality, but in subjective time easily long enough for you to think ‘Oh Jesus, I wish I hadn’t done that’ and then start in on the Lord’s Prayer. Kenny swivelled to stare at me, his eyes bulging out of his head in cartoon slo-mo. He opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but no sound came out. Everyone else, including Anita and Matt, was watching him with strained, breathless curiosity. This was going to be bad.

But it was just such an easy call to make. I could tell the living from the dearly departed pretty accurately by this time, and Mrs Seddon’s ghost had a huge tear in the flesh of her throat and an apron of dried blood on her faded floral dress - a bit of a dead give-away, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’d seen her looking out of the window of Kenny’s house so many times that I’d lost count, and a couple of times I’d seen her hanging around Kenny himself, staring in miserable, befuddled longing at the wayward son she’d left behind along with her tired flesh. As for the razor, that was just a guess. But whatever she’d used to do herself in, it had been spectacularly effective: it hadn’t been a kitchen knife, unless the Seddons kept their kitchen knives a lot sharper than we did ours.

So I threw in the razor out of a nascent sense of drama, to add to the overall effect. And on that level, it was a roaring success. Kenny’s huge fists rose into my line of sight like a pair of half-bricks held up by a kung-fu master to demonstrate the cleanness of the break. Then one of them moved, and magically I was lying on my back with no understanding at all of how I’d got there. The left side of my mouth tingled unpleasantly, and there was something wet on my face.

‘You little bastard,’ Kenny said, and he stepped in for the inevitable follow-up, which would have been a kick to some unprotected part of my body.

But Matt stepped in too, and he caught Kenny on the side of the face with a hard jab that made him stagger and lurch before he got his balance back. A moment later the two of them were grappling like all-in wrestlers.

Kenny versus Matt wasn’t as ridiculous as Kenny versus me would have been. Matt didn’t have Kenny’s height or anything like his weight, and as a choirboy at Saint Mary’s church he was widely considered to be a pushover, but I knew from countless brotherly skirmishes that he was stronger than he looked and quick with it. None of that should have stopped it from being a foregone conclusion, though: the general consensus was that you couldn’t stand against Kenny when he got going any more than you could stop a freewheeling truck by standing in front of it.

But Matt was making a good showing - seeming in the first few frenzied seconds to be giving almost as good as he got. He managed to hook a thumb into Kenny’s eye socket and force his head back so that Kenny couldn’t butt him, and he landed a sucker punch to Kenny’s stomach when the opportunity presented itself. Kenny retaliated by slamming his fist into Matt’s jaw - a solid punch with all his weight behind it that made Matt’s ou made Mhead rock back and then forward again like one of those dogs in the backs of cars whose oversized craniums are mounted on springs. But Matt kept his guard up and blocked the vicious low blows and crotch kicks that would have ended the fight in one go.