The White Room Read online

  The baby moved its arms and legs, its head. Lay there on a bed of blood and boards.

  She looked at it, at the cause of all her pain, at the cord that joined her to it.

  She felt something else move inside her and gasped again as the red and purple mass of afterbirth appeared.

  Monica looked again. At the body lying there. Helpless.

  And wondered what Brian would say. What kind of wedge it would drive between them?

  She didn’t want to, but she knew she would have to pick it up. Hold it.

  Then cut that cord as soon as possible.

  Brian leaned over the table, stick in hand, one eye closed. He lined up his shot, white on red, drew back the stick, pushed it forward. White rolled heavily into coloured – clack – like bone brought down on bone. He liked that sound. Drew comfort from it. He watched, eyes narrowed, lip corners twitching, anticipating the smile signal from his brain. The red rolled to the corner pocket, overhead light reflecting and bouncing from its surface as it travelled, to disappear silently into the black-leather-trimmed string pouch.

  Brian allowed a smile to reach his face, but not of joy: one acknowledging natural superiority, offering the pocketed ball as evidence. He straightened up, resisted the temptation to run his comb through his Tony Curtis and lined up the next shot.

  Behind him on the far wall, the jukebox was belting out ‘See You Later, Alligator’, Bill Haley and the Comets.

  Brian heard it through his one good ear. Fat old bloke, thought Brian. Ought to be ashamed of himself cavortin’ like a kid at his age.

  The song clattered to an end to be replaced by Elvis Presley: ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Now that bloke knew the score. Brian would have sung along if he were the sort who sang. He would have danced or at least shuffled his feet, but that just wasn’t him. Instead he took his smoking Woodbine from the ashtray, dragged deep, replaced it, narrowed his eyes at the table again. Calculated the angles.

  Black off left-hand side cushion, in at the right-hand middle pocket; not too much spin, only shave the corner of the coloured ball.

  Perfect.

  He leaned over, lined up, drew back, pushed forward. Hit. Left side cushion to right-hand middle pocket, shaving the corner of the coloured ball. And in.

  He stood up, took a drag. Elvis Presley declared himself so lonely he could cry. Brian blocked the sound from his ear, focused on the table.

  Brimson sat at the table keeping score, his cue unused at his side, working his way down a John Player and a pint of beer. Resigned to sitting there a long time.

  Brian looked at the table, worked out his next move. He stared at the balls, confident of winning; confident enough to let Presley in, let his thoughts stray towards Monica. Monica, Monica, Monica. Monica without a kid was fine. She serviced the punters. Brought in money. Kept the house clean and tidy. Monica pregnant and swollen was even better. In that state she broadened her appeal to two types of punter: those who wanted her like that, and those who didn’t care either way. Of the two, the first type was less plentiful but that was good. They paid more. Brian liked that. Enjoyed selling something rare.

  She was due to have the kid soon. A son and heir. That’s what it would be. He had heard that babies were hard work, needed a lot of looking after. Made demands, drained energy and money. That wasn’t his problem. Monica was the mother. That was her job. His was to bring in money. And once it had arrived and Monica had got used to it, she could carry on working. In fact, he might even get her pregnant again. He liked the extra money.

  Contemplating the green baize angles, he became aware of a figure moving quickly towards him in his peripheral vision. He instinctively grabbed the cue, turned, ready.

  It was Eddie. Hurrying, sweating, shirt untucked from the waist of his drainpipes, quiff collapsed on one side of his head like a dirty blond wave breaking against the shore of his forehead.

  ‘Brian …’

  He stood breathless, back bent, palms on thighs, mouth clutching at air.

  Brian grabbed for his drape, pulled it on. Brimson did the same, struggling his fat frame from the chair, shrugging his jacket over his meaty shoulders. Eddie’s condition could mean only one thing, Brian thought. The Bells.

  Brian mentally inventoried his pockets: brass knuckles. Sweeney Todd knife. Back-up blade in case he lost Sweeney. Comb, so he looked good while he was working. The tools of his trade.

  The Bell brothers and the Mooney brothers went back years. Brian’s older brother Nabs, or Noel as he preferred to be called now, and his gang had declared the Bells potential rivals. No real reason: Noel’s chief employment was cigarette hijacking, debt collecting and protection strong-arming. The Bells, he said, wanted a piece of all that. The Bell brothers, Kenny and Johnny, were informed. Whether it was true or not, they had been more than ready to fight. So it became a turf war. Pecking order. Respect. This town ain’t big enough. All to play for.

  ‘The Bells?’ asked Brian.

  Eddie nodded.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Goin’ into the Ropemakers. I ran straight here.’

  ‘Good.’ Brian thought, mind flicking through possibilities, seeking UN-like justification for intervention. ‘On our turf. Let’s go.’

  Brian made for the door, a panting Eddie following. Brimson drained his pint glass and rolled behind them. The three left the snooker hall.

  Elvis Presley sang that he’d been so long on Lonely Street he wasn’t able to look back.

  *

  They walked down Raby Street in Byker, all the while looking behind them for a bus that would stop. They were keyed up, tense. Building themselves up for a fight. Brian’s intensity was deepest. He moved like he had a sci-fi film force field around him, a plastic bubble; he could see out but he couldn’t be touched.

  No bus in sight; they had a walk ahead of them. Eddie and Brimson smoked, talked. Pumped themselves up. Brian said nothing. His face gave nothing away: blank, smooth and hard like stones on a beach. But inside, his guts squirmed like a snake pit: serpents of different sizes, weights and aspects, all writhing, biting, fighting for prominence.

  Eddie and Brimson left him alone, assumed he was thinking of the impending ruck. But he wasn’t. It was Monica again. Impending birth and imminent fatherhood; the two songs on the jukebox. He knew he should dismiss the thoughts: they were dangerous; they’d weigh him down in the fight to come, make him heavy when he should be nimble.

  But to dismiss the thoughts he had to confront them. Honestly.

  Monica. And his guts churned further. And there were the doubts again. Not just doubts – fears. That she was turning into his mother. That he was turning her into his mother.

  A slag. A whore.

  Brian had grown up in a house of hate. He hated his father, because of or in spite of the fact that he left them early. His mother had never given him any romantic, embroidered excuses as to his absence: just that he was a bastard who had left them. Brian had speculated for years, the younger he was the more fanciful the explanation: a fighter pilot shot down and taken prisoner during a secret mission after the Second World War, about to walk through the door at any moment. And then, when that didn’t happen: not missing, but heroically killed in action. As Brian got older, his heroes changed: maybe his dad was in prison for a daring jewel robbery. Maybe he was an undercover policeman who couldn’t reveal his identity. Maybe he was in the secret service, spying in an exotic foreign country. Then with age came gradual realization: he was living with another woman. He didn’t care about Brian, Noel or his mother. He was in prison, but not for anything glamorous. He was drunk in a gutter somewhere. Brian didn’t know what was worse: knowing or not knowing. It didn’t matter. He hated both equally.

  He hated his mother because she was a slag with no love in her body. She would never give them anything of herself, never even tell them anything. Brian didn’t even know whether he and Noel shared the same father. He could never remember his mother looking happy. Always shouting and hitting him. It
didn’t matter what he did, whether he was good or bad, the result was the same. He tried to be good, tried to make her love him by doing things to make her smile, make her happy. He would tidy up the house, wash the dishes. But it didn’t work. She would still shout at him, still hit him. After a while he stopped trying.

  Sometimes she would get upset and give him a hug, cry and say she was sorry. That she was going to be good to him and Noel, look after them properly from now on. Brian used to smile and hug her back. Tell her he loved her. Wait for the next day to come, hoping everything would change, life would get better. But it didn’t. Next day would be the same. And the day after that. He cried at first, but after a while even that ceased.

  She had a powerful arm on her. He would carry with him a ringing memory of that for his whole life. She had once smacked him with her open palm on the side of his face for some imagined upset. The blow left a livid, red handprint on his skin that took nearly a week to disappear. It also caught his ear full on, bursting not only his eardrum but causing so much internal damage that his loss of hearing in that one ear became permanent.

  She never apologized: something else to add to the hate list.

  And gradually he became the person she turned him into.

  Then there was his brother. He hated Noel for many reasons. His two working ears, his constant attempts to get his mother’s attention. The fact that he might have had a different, better father. The fact that he knew Brian better than anyone else, knew his secrets, had seen him cry.

  His mother had brought Brian and Noel up alone. Brian knew where the money had come from, what his mother had to do to earn it. And he hated that. His mother never discussed, never explained. Sometimes she would go out smelling of cheap perfume and come back reeking of cheap booze, fag smoke and other people’s bodies. Brian didn’t like that, but disliked it even more when she brought the men back with her. Brian and Noel hated them. All of them. They would stand and stare at them, eyes angry the first few times, but over the years that passion dulling. Eventually they just stared blankly at the men or just ignored them. But they never stopped hating: deep inside the fires kindled, the embers smouldered. At first his mother would send the boys outside, but after a time she stopped worrying about their presence in the house, although she never fucked in front of the boys, not even if a punter wanted to. And she never let the boys join in, even if the punter was offering very favourable terms.

  She always took them through to the back room and closed the door. The boys could still hear through the walls. They would turn the radio up – Educating Archie, Arthur Askey – but the jokes weren’t funny and the laughter made him sick. It was the sound of a world without worries enjoying itself. Brian knew that world existed; he just didn’t have a clue how to get into it.

  The men were all different: tall, short, fat, skinny, hairy, bald, smelly, clean, and everything in between. But they all made the same noises. Grunting, sweating, shouting, begging. Sometimes they sounded funny – funnier than that stuff on the radio. His mother’s sounds were always the same too: quick and sharp, gasping and sighing. Like the men were punishing her and she was taking it.

  The years passed. Brian tried not to be in when the men came calling. He hated them and all that they represented. His mother didn’t notice the absence of her sons, and Brian and Noel began to see how the world really was, how things worked. The necessity of making a living. How important money was, and it didn’t matter what you had to do to get it. Brian began to understand what his mother was doing and why she was doing it. And he still hated her for it. He hated the world for it. But he wasn’t going to let the world do that to him.

  Then there was Monica. He had thought she was different at first. But she wasn’t. Just another slag, another whore. Another woman.

  Just like his mother.

  They crossed Walker Road towards Glasshouse Street.

  The snake pit squirmed: different sizes, weights and aspects, all writhing, biting, fighting for prominence.

  Mental confrontation had helped. He hadn’t solved his problems, but the memories had stoked him up. Given him anger and ire. A focus for the fight.

  ‘Nearly there, lads,’ he said.

  The Ropemakers Arms. Out of the city centre towards Byker, down Glasshouse Street in among old factories and wasteland. A person had to have a reason to visit, or no reason to leave. Grim enough in the daytime, but the night gave it a layer of almost impenetrable blackness, the large buildings creating deep, dark shadows. The Tyne curved away from the city towards the North Sea, giving oily slaps at the banks, chugging away its accumulated debris. The Ropemakers sat squat and ugly on the last corner before the river. The windows were dark, a faint light barely discernible from within. The walls once whitewashed, now sooted and dusted down to a dull grey, the wooden door closed, rotting from the base up. No attempt made at enticement or invitation. A casual drinker would have had to be very, very thirsty to enter.

  Brian, Eddie and Brimson were not casual drinkers. They were purposeful. They stopped outside, slid brass knucks into place, practised easy blade access. They pushed open the door, entered.

  The air was thick with smoke, stale beer and grime. The few drinkers in the place were old and tired-looking. There because they had nowhere else to go. Dotted about were small, shifty individuals, human rats scurrying about in the skirting boards of society. They all looked up. Hands quickly replaced objects in pockets. They recognized Brian and his two lieutenants. Guessed what was about to happen. Froze.

  Brian looked around, scoping for the Bells. He heard laughter from the back of the pub, looked at the other two. They nodded. As one, they made their way through the pub.

  ‘Aw, now, lads …’ said the barman. ‘Not here, not again, lads, leave them be …’

  They ignored him, kept on walking.

  A ratty old curtain partitioned the back room from the main bar. Brian pulled it back. Dust rose from it along with the smell of decay. Revealed were Kenny and Johnny Bell plus two of their cronies. Kenny hard-faced, lip curled in a perpetual snarl, Johnny the softer, more thoughtful, sneakier of the two. All dressed in teddy boy thug chic, DAs shining and perfectly crafted, winkle-pickers and brothel-creepers shined, cigarettes perched on ashtrays. Kenny Bell was at the snooker table, lining up a shot. Blond and mousy, small and smug. He looked up in surprise.

  ‘What the fuck—’

  He stopped, saw who it was, straightened up. Saw the light glinting off the brass knucks. Didn’t smile. Behind him the others stiffened, ready.

  ‘Hello, Kenny,’ said Brian. ‘You’re trespassing.’

  Kenny looked at him.

  ‘Fuck off, Mooney. This isn’t your patch an’ you know it.’

  No messing. Straight down to business.

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Kenny. This is my patch. An’ I’m ask in’ you all to be gents an’ leave.’

  The barman put his head around the doorframe.

  ‘Listen, lads, not in here. Take it outside, will youse? I mean it. I’ll call the police.’

  Everyone in the room ignored him. They knew he wouldn’t call the police. They would ask him too many uncomfortable questions.

  Kenny held the snooker cue across his body, grasped it in both hands.

  ‘No deaf little cunt tells me where to go.’

  Brian balled his fist, felt the metal around it, his body charge, swung.

  Kenny Bell ducked to his left, the swing went right, catching him on the shoulder. Ignoring the pain, he turned, arcing the air with his cue. Brian stepped back out of range.

  ‘Right, lads, that’s it. I’m callin’ the police.’

  With that, the barman made his exit.

  ‘Howay!’ said Brian.

  Eddie and Brimson waded in. Kenny’s brother Johnny picked up his cue and swung. It connected with the side of Brimson’s head. Brimson hit the filthy floorboards with a crash and a moan, hair exploded, a DA atom bomb.

  Johnny allowed himself a small snigger
that annoyed Brian all the more.

  Kenny Bell was coming at him again, swinging the snooker cue at his face. To his left, one of Kenny’s gang was making his way quickly towards him. Brian darted around the side of the snooker table, laid a quick punch to the advancing gang member, catching him in the throat. His hands went towards the injury, Brian was in again, another punch. Same place. The man went down.

  Brian’s head was yanked swiftly back. He couldn’t breathe. He put his hands to his throat, found Kenny’s cue constricting air, Kenny pulling hard, pushing his knee into Brian’s back. Air and spit gurgled in Brian’s throat.

  ‘Cunt …’

  Brian heard Kenny Bell’s voice in his ear, smelled his beery, tabby breath. Black spots danced before his eyes. He was choking; air cut off from his lungs, blood from his brain. He had to do something.

  He felt up his sleeve for his blade. Sweeney, hidden in his sleeve. He worked the blade out, let the handle fall into his palm. Turning it backwards, he thrust it with as much strength as he had left. It connected with Kenny’s thigh, sunk in. Nothing for a few seconds, then, as the pain hit, Kenny screamed and let loose his grip. The cue fell to the floor. Brian pulled the knife free, turned. Kenny was standing, both hands on his leg trying to stem the blood with his fingers.

  ‘Fuckin’ ’ell, man. Look what you’ve done …’

  Brian heard movement behind him: breaking glass, feet. Johnny Bell was charging at him, the jagged neck of a brown ale bottle stretched outright in his hand, anger twisting his face. He lunged.

  Brian sliced the knife at the air in front of him, missing the bottle’s arc. It caught Johnny on the arm. He dropped the broken bottle. It hit the faded baize of the snooker table and rolled away, clanking lightly against the white.

  Johnny grasped his arm where the cut had been made. Brian swung again. Johnny put his hand out to ward off the blow. The knife caught the palm of his hand. Blood spurted. Brian, seeing that, seeing the expression on Johnny’s face, laughed.

  ‘Ha! Like that, eh? Want some more, do you?’