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yellow, red, red.
I wasn’t happy with Mr Lewis (Number 17). His colours didn’t match. Maybe he didn’t realise. I wished that I had the courage to talk to him about it.
There was a little wall in front of the garden. A dwarf wall. A dwarf wall for Snow White’s friends to play on. There was also a drive for my father’s Mini. There was a garden to the front and a slightly larger one to the back. The front lawn was just big enough to squeeze onto it a folded tartan picnic blanket. The soil surrounding the perfect square of grass was always packed with flowers. I watched the flowers. I noted them all in a little lined book. It was green and lived on my windowsill. Thorny rose bushes, coordinating colours and then down to a mixture of blossoms. Depending on the month.
Gaillardia ‘Burgunder’.
Shiny red flower, with light yellow centre.
June–October. 30cm.
Dahlia.
Really orange and red.
June–November. 60cm.
Narcissum ‘Amergate.’
Orange outside with a darker orange in the middle.
March–April. 45cm.
I liked to write things down. In the green notebook that I kept on my windowsill. Flowers. Colours. Number plates. Full names. Times. Routines. All of the first chapter of Danny, the Champion ofthe World. So I wouldn’t forget.
Number 1 (#ulink_75d184a9-f1ec-5d82-85c2-b09544a1b832)
Mr and Mrs North
Green front door
Green garage door
Red car
DFT 678T
Martin North leaves home
I was the first lad from Disraeli Avenue to get into uni. There’d been this lad Paul Hodgson who used to live at Number 2, he went on to study law but they’d moved out of the road by then. So I’m saying that he doesn’t count.
Getting into Liverpool Uni was fucking huge. I managed two As and a B at A level and my mam was beyond happy. She was right chuffed and painted my results on a white sheet, then hung it from the front room window. It was a right sunny day and all the neighbours slowed down to look at what me mam had painted on the sheet. I told me mam that it didn’t really make much sense. So she got another sheet, asked is how to spell university and then wrote ‘Wor bairn Martin is ganin to university’ in fuck off huge red letters. She was practically dancing around the house. I’ve made me mam so proud.
Mam, Dad and me Nana North gave is a lift to Liverpool last week. The car was packed with everything I’d need. Pans, a kettle and a load of food. Me Nana North had baked is pies and scones and stuff. They all wanted to give is a right good start. My going to uni is the most major thing in me mam’s life and I have to try me hardest not to fuck it all up.
I’m sharing a flat with two other lads, Ginger Matt and Charlie. They’re sound lads. We’re right in the centre of Liverpool, just off Mount Pleasant, around the corner from the Everyman Theatre. It’s sound being right central. We can walk everywhere and don’t have to bother with the last bus or with hailing a taxi. Charlie’s a private school lad. He’s right posh and his dad’s mates with Jeffrey Archer. He’s studying French and Spanish. Ginger Matt’s a Manc and so fucking sound. He’s writing a novel and studying English Lit. They’re both a bit off their heads. Charlie has a never-ending supply of pot and is determined to roll the longest joint he can. He reckons he’s going to get in the Guinness Book of Records with it. We’re out every night and I’m spending me money far too fast. The Guild’s a laugh and there are thousands of fit lasses wearing hardly any clothes. I’ve shagged two lasses already and I’ve only been here a week.
Early this morning, I reckon it was just after two. We’d left the Casa before closing and were having a few tins in the kitchen. The kitchen has massive windows and looks out onto Oxford Road. Charlie managed to pull a lass by shouting out to her from the window. The silly tart came up and let him shag her before he chucked her out. We were laughing about that, so I reckon it must have been about three when we heard screams. Charlie was first to see and ran straight out the flat. He’d had first aid training and even though he must have been stoned, he seemed to know what to do. Ginger Matt had some lass straddling him on one of the kitchen chairs. He was on a promise. I stood at the window and saw her lying, curled up on the road and there were already a few people screeching around her.
The taxi driver was out of his car and was looking down on her. I could see that he wasn’t right. He was lighting a fag when he puked all over his shoes. Charlie was on the floor giving the lass mouth to mouth. I could only catch glimpses of him through gaps in the crowd. Another lad, who I kinda recognised from downstairs, was in the phone box, must have been calling for help.
Charlie came back up to the flat with the lass’s blood all over his face and T-shirt. He told us that she was dead and then he went and got himself washed.
It turned out that her name was Laura. Well that’s what a copper said when he came to get statements from us all a bit ago. She was a fresher and studying English Lit, must have been in the same lectures as Ginger Matt. She was pissed after a night in the Casa. She’d been in the phone box calling her boyfriend who was still back home somewhere in Wales. The copper said that she’d been giving the lad shit. The last thing that she’d said to him was ‘fuck off’. Then she’d staggered out from the phone box and straight onto the road. He told us that she’d died on impact, and although Charlie had done his best, well there was nothing that he could have done to save the lass.
And now it’s pissing it down outside. The cars are going up and down the road, over her blood and it’s as if nothing’s happened. I reckon there’ll be flowers by the side of the road at some point and a few people will come and stare at the spot. And maybe that’s a good thing, because at least if there are flowers people will wonder and ask questions and the poor lass won’t have died without anyone noticing. She was eighteen years old and she died after saying ‘fuck off’. I’m not going in to uni today. None of us are. We’re all going out to the Guild to get pissed. I was going to phone me mam and tell her about Laura, but I don’t want her to worry about is. I guess what I’m learning is that life’s too fucking short and that I shouldn’t waste any of it.
Number 2 (#ulink_14d549b7-4a97-5e17-8dfb-275bf41f3601)
Mrs Hodgson and Paul
Yellow front door
Yellow garage door
Red car
GYS 606S
The making of Paul Hodgson’s legend
Mam and Sam had met through a dating agency. It’d been advertised in the local Guardian free paper and we’d had a laugh about it. My nana was the one who made my mam fill out the form, because she reckoned that my mam needed a man about the house. My mam had been to see Mrs Curtis from Number 20 for a tarot reading, she was holding out for a ginger bloke, on a horse in a field full of pumpkins. My nana told mam that she was holding out for a pile of crap and that she had to make her own future, that no one got anything by sitting on their arse waiting for the world to come to them. So Mam got the form and, although we took the piss out of her, she filled it out and sent it back with a postal order for £15 (meet your ideal man within six months or get another six months free).
Sam was Mam’s first date. He had no kids and was divorced, because his first wife had shagged his best mate. Sam’s a decent bloke. He’s a teacher at the local college, earns pretty good money and treats my mam like a princess. Nana likes him and I do too. I can’t really fault him as a person, but his dress sense is shit.
We moved in with him three months after Mam met him. He lives on the new estate, in a canny posh detached house with three proper big bedrooms. Mam was a bit stressed about leaving Disraeli Avenue. It was more to do with her independence than anything else and I think that my dad leaving all those years ago made it difficult for her to let go. My nana helped out and gave her a good talking to and then we moved in with Sam. We’d been here just over five weeks when my dad turned up.
Legend has it that my dad left us when I was a toddler. I can’t remember much about him. The story goes that he’d been on jury service when he’d met a lass called Sky Thursday. Two weeks after the end of the jury service, after he’d eaten a plate of egg and chips, my dad had packed his bags, taken a pint of milk and pissed off.
That was the last we heard from him.
My dad didn’t bother with us and I’m not too sure how that’s supposed to make me feel. He was too busy shagging Sky fucking Thursday, selling crystals from a stall in Coastend indoor market and being a dad to the three kids that he’d had with Sky fucking Thursday. He didn’t give my mam any money for me and he never bothered with my birthdays or with Christmas.
I used to care.
Of course I fucking used to care. My dad abandoned me and then went on to be a dad to three other kids. I’d see Karen Johnson with her dad and Jude Williams with hers and I’d feel like shit. I didn’t know what I’d done to make my dad hate me, but he must have. My mam’s been great and my nana made sure that I had as much as she could afford. She’s canny kind. And next week I’m starting university, studying law. How the fuck did that happen? I’m going to Newcastle, so I’ll still live at home with Mam and Sam.
But Dad turned up.
I answered the door and of course I didn’t recognise him. He looked a state in a knitted cardigan covered in wolves and a moon. His hair was long, grey, thin, scraggy and he was wearing flip-flops with trackie bottoms. I thought he was collecting for something. Anyway he started talking and it turns out that he’d heard about my mam and Sam and thought that seeing as my mam had come into money, that we’d all be able to be one big happy fucking family. Apparently my three brothers were waiting around the corner to meet me too. I don’t know why him having three more lads pissed me off quite so much, but I seriously needed to deck the bloke.
It was then that my mam came to the door.
I was standing with my fist clenched leaning forward, my mam was in front of me pushing me back with her huge arse and she was staying canny cool. She looked my dad up and down, then she did her fake laughing thing that she does when she’s actually scared shitless. She told my dad that we’d managed sixteen years without him and that really he should just fuck off. Then she closed the door in my dad’s face.
I used to make up a story for the kids in my primary school class. I’d tell them the legend of hundreds and thousands of small green men with orange hair living in the lighthouse in Lymouth Bay. I even told them that I’d met one when I was buying a quarter of Toasted Teacakes from Brian’s newsagents. Jude Williams and Karen Johnson believed me.
Now for the real legend.
Legend has it that I once had a dad who went on jury service and pissed off with some woman who he’d known for all of three weeks. He left me and his wife of ten years for a fucking weird tart who changed her name from Wendy Jackson to Sky Thursday and made my dad want to live in a council flat and play the didgeridoo. Legend has it, that my dad ate his egg and chips, then packed his bags, took a pint of milk from the fridge and then pissed off. It took him nearly sixteen years to remember me.
Number 3 (#ulink_99d8bf41-b596-5933-a9f3-f61b64eac50c)
Mr and Mrs Drake
Red car matches red front door
Red car matches red garage door
EVS 343V
A tarot reading
() indicates the length of pause, in seconds
(.) indicates a pause of less than one second
‘What question would you like to ask of the cards?’
I’m only allowed one question?
(.)
My thoughts are all over the place
(5.0)
I’m sort of thinking that everyone needs a partner.
(.)
For some I guess it’s sexual, for others convenience.
For some I guess that it’s a chance to be eternally mothered, for others something else. I wish I knew what that something else was.
(3.2)
No that’s not my question. That’s not even a question.
(.)
Some people don’t enquire. They accept what they’re given. They say ‘thank you very much’ to the first man or woman who happens upon them. They panic, they grab, they accept. They can relax then. They can mate.
(2.0)
And I’m kind of sure that most people can go through life feeling content. They accept, they embrace; they make do with whoever it was who happened to stumble onto them, into them, beside them.
(.)
I’m beginning to sound cynical.
Really this isn’t a bad thing.
I’m just saying.
(1.2)
I’ve been thinking too much about life and death. It comes from living on this bloody street. The bed hopping, the suicide, the abandoning, the repression. It’s all getting to me a bit, but we can’t move. We’ve got too much debt, we’re trapped.
(3.0)
I’m looking at him and wondering if I’ve made a big mistake. I didn’t know who else to turn to and so I thought I’d try you. I thought you’d understand. I thought you’d be able to see into my lives and give me an answer.
(.)
But I’m only allowed one question.
I’ll have to formulate all my ramblings into one, all of these floating thoughts into one question.
(.)
You see I’ve got to thinking that maybe life is continual.
I know that this goes against what you, what some people believe in. Well it sort of does. Doesn’t it?
(2.3)
That’s not my question.
(.)
I just think that life is one big series of livings and deaths. And the more that I think about it, the more I get to worrying that there may be one true soul mate for each of us.
(1.5)
I’m rambling on. I’m trying not to sound too manic. Too confused. But I guess that I am.
(.)
You see, I’m wondering if there is just one special person for each of us. And then I’m wondering if life is really simply about bumping into them. If that one special person keeps coming in and out of our lives. And if only true believers, I mean believers in true love, could ever realise.
(.)
Does that make any sense?
(4.1)
That’s not my question.
