In Cold Blood: A Brother’s Sworn Vengeance

Vinnie looked at the big guitar clock hanging from the wall. It was one of a batch he and his mates had stolen a while back. Half the houses on the estate now had one the same.

He gave her an odd look. Was he scared? She couldn’t tell. ‘About 10 minutes, our kid,’ he said. ‘But look, Titch, I’m not gonna be away for ages. I’ll probably be back after Christmas.’

‘After Christmas?’ Josie wailed. This news was too terrible to even think about. ‘But what about your presents and your Christmas dinner?’

Vinnie pulled her close and hugged her tight to him. He smelled of Hai Karate and Vosene, just like he always did, and his freshly washed hair tickled her cheek. ‘Just save ’em for me, eh?’ he said softly.

He then turned to his mum and grinned. ‘That’s right, innit, Mam? You’ll save me a Santa sack for when I get home, yeah? Cos I’m sure Saggy Tits Sally won’t be buying me a selection box this year.’

June frowned, her expression hardening. ‘God, I hate bleedin’ social workers, Vin!’

She was on one now, full throttle, and Josie watched in awe. She always did when her mum transformed from little sex-kitten June into this arm-swinging, neck-shaking, raving lunatic. ‘They’re all bastards, the lot of ’em!’ she railed now. ‘Locking up innocent kids …’

Then Jock kicked off too. ‘Innocent? For fuck’s sake, give this woman a fucking Oscar. That’s his trouble, June. You!’

‘Piss off, Jock,’ she snapped. ‘Who asked you?’

June glanced through the window, as she’d been doing every other minute for the last half hour. Josie could tell just by the way she stiffened that they must have come for him. And they had. ‘Oh fucking hell, Vinnie,’ her mum said. ‘They’re here. They’re outside!’

Vinnie jumped up. This was it. Josie scrambled up as well. Did Vin feel as terrified as she did? He must be feeling shit-scared by now, mustn’t he? But if he did, he wasn’t letting on. The only way she could tell that he might be was by the way he licked his lips before he spoke. ‘Go to the door, Mam,’ he said. ‘Don’t have ’em in. My stuff’s all here, I’m just gonna go out and get off. Don’t be showing me up, all coming out.’

Vinnie then turned once again to his sister and winked. ‘Never be ashamed of our tears,’ he whispered. ‘Remember that?’

Josie nodded and tried her best not to start wailing. Her mum and dad wouldn’t have a clue what Vinnie meant, but she did. It was a sad part in the book Great Expectations. That was another thing she’d miss and it made the tears well even more – her brother reading to her late at night when he was excited about one of his books.

She remembered the words from this one very well. Pip, the hero, had been sad about leaving for London and his life changing, and sad about Joe, but after he’d cried, he felt ready to go on again. Trust Vinnie to dig up one of his favourite stories, she thought, to try to make her feel better. And it did. And she’d have to hang on to it, because now he really was leaving her. He gave her shoulder another quick squeeze and then he was out the door.

Josie dragged her dad’s foot stool across the tatty linoleum, positioning it under the front-room window so she could climb up to wave Vinnie off. June was beside her, holding back the once-white net curtain, trying to put on a brave face, while Jock sat back in his armchair and rolled a cigarette.

‘Stop crying, Josie,’ June said gently, giving her an unexpected hug. ‘You’ll upset him if he sees you.’

She lowered the net, just as the black car pulled away, then walked away from the window, sighing heavily. Josie remained where she was till the car disappeared, and with it, her brother. Life was certainly going to be a lot quieter without Vinnie, she knew that. She felt strange, as though she had suddenly lost part of herself. She wondered if her mum felt the same. Like there was a hole in her stomach. She certainly looked angry as she turned to look at Jock. ‘Happy now?’ she asked him, waving his plume of smoke away.

Jock was having none of it. ‘You can blame me all you like, you stupid mare. But we all know whose fault it is, June. If he wasn’t such a little fucker, he’d be going nowhere, would he?’

‘Fuck off, Jock,’ she spat back. ‘You’ve never liked him, never stuck up for him, you’ll be loving this.’

Josie shook her head sadly. Was this what she had to look forward to now? These two at it all the time? As sure as she knew night followed day, she knew that her mum wouldn’t settle until Vinnie was home. That this argument would grind on till he was home, as well. Josie wrestled with emotions that sometimes felt wrong where her brother was concerned. She loved her brother every bit as much as her mum did, but she could also see her dad’s point. She knew that Vinnie had a bad streak. Was even nasty to her sometimes. She shuddered as she remembered some of the tricks he’d played on her, and yesterday’s had been no exception.

She still shuddered as she brought it to mind. The sight, the sounds, the smell – the horrible smell. If Vinnie hadn’t been leaving her today things would have been different. She’d still be fuming with her brother about that.

She should have seen it coming though. That was the thing. What possessed her? Him asking her if she wanted to go to the cemmy with him and his mates should have told her he’d have mischief in mind. And it wasn’t like she agreed because she thought they’d include her much – they wouldn’t. She’d only said yes because she didn’t have anything else to do and because she liked to look at the inscriptions on the gravestones.

She always had. Since she was little and had gone to the cemetery with some nuns from her school and they’d done rubbings with paper and a pencil on some of the more ornate graves. It was on that visit that she’d come across the resting place of one of her uncles. She’d been shocked at first, to think of Uncle Brian being buried right there with all the other dead people, but after a while she’d got used to the idea. In fact, she’d often go back, after that, to see if she could find other dead relatives. The rest of the family would tease her and call her a nutter but she didn’t care. She felt at ease with the dead.

And that’s what she’d been doing, mostly, while the boys messed about, trying to scare each other by telling ghost stories, when Vinnie, without warning, but who must have planned it all beforehand, had grabbed his little sister and pushed her backwards. She had fallen straight into the open grave just behind her, which had been freshly dug ready to take a new coffin. Yes, it had been empty, but still she’d screamed and screamed, terrified – imagining all sorts, scrabbling down there among the worms and the maggots, while the boys just stood and laughed at her, tipping their heads back. That was typical of Vinnie, and Brendan and Pete too, they were thick as thieves – they were thieves – and bad as each other. It felt like forever before they finally deigned to haul her out, by which time she was out of her mind with fear and disgust.

Oh yes, Josie knew what her brother was, but she loved him even so, and listening to her parents now, screaming at each other like she wasn’t even there she wondered just how she was going to get through till Christmas. It seemed like such a long way away. Today though, she just had to get out of there. She’d go and get dressed, she decided, and see if there was anybody knocking about on the estate who she could play with. She’d been allowed off school today because of Vinnie, so she didn’t hold out much hope of seeing her friends, but anything was better than being stuck indoors with her warring parents.

Josie went up to her bedroom and dressed in the one pair of jeans that she owned; tatty flares passed on to her from an older cousin, which she was just about short and skinny enough still to fit. Though only just – she grimaced as she pulled them up and then, looking down, lowered them again, pushing them down on her hips so that the bottoms touched the floor. Grabbing her cowboy shirt and sniffing the armpits, she sighed. It hadn’t been washed and she could smell it – though that was nothing new. Her mam had never been much of a housewife.

Josie sometimes envied her best mate, Carol; her mam always did the washing and Caz always smelled nice. As she pushed her arms into the sleeves anyway – there was nothing else to wear – she wondered what it would be like to live in a family where the kids had everything done for them. If Josie needed something clean, she usually had to wash it herself, more often than not in her own dirty bath water.

She made a final check of herself in the mirror on her window ledge. Her ginger hair, as ever, annoyed her. She kept it short. That way there was less of it for people to remark on. She spat on her hands and ran them through it, trying to tame it a little further, then checked her teeth – which were white as white; the thing she was most proud of – and headed back downstairs into the hall.

She slammed the door as she left, just to make a point. She felt angry. Defiant. Rebellious. Though she knew it was probably a waste of time as her parents probably wouldn’t even notice she had gone. After walking around the streets for an hour, she realised that she had been right. Nobody was about. Nobody she wanted to see, anyway. She thought about calling at her sister’s as a last resort. Though she didn’t particularly want to. She couldn’t stand Lyndsey – even though she loved her nieces and nephew – and knew all about her drugs and her thieving. She decided that she might as well go anyway – see if they were off school. Plus she was getting cold. It might be nice to go indoors for a while.

She started to walk the familiar route when she thought she heard someone call her name. She looked around but couldn’t see anyone.

‘Titch!’ the voice called again. It was a man’s voice. ‘It’s me, love.’

She looked across the road, finding it impossible to place it. It had seemed to come from there but there was no one on the street. Then something seemed to move at the edge of her vision and she looked up and realised she was across the road from Mucky Melvin’s. He was waving at her out of his upstairs window.

Mucky Melvin was really old and really smelly; one of the people her mum and dad always told her to keep away from. She wasn’t quite sure why – though the estate kids always speculated about it, if any of them ever asked a grown-up, they got the usual answer: ‘Because I said so.’ She knew he was disgusting though, because the council had to keep coming up to his house to fumigate it and get rid of all the rats. Hundreds of them, apparently. He lived like a tramp. He barely left his house, but when he did venture out, all the kids used to torment him and call him names. Noncey Melvin, they used to taunt him, and Smelly Melly. She didn’t know what a nonce was, but she knew it was something bad. It was why they threw eggs at his house all the time too and, as Josie crossed the road, she could see the tell-tale streaks down the walls and the windows – only some of which still had panes of glass in.

‘Alright, Melvin,’ she said, stepping onto the opposite pavement. ‘What’s up?’

He was leaning out, one hand on the handle of the window, his shoulder-length hair, which was greying, hanging in stringy curtains either side of his filthy face. He was wearing the same thick brown cardigan he usually did – the cardigan someone had once pointed out was the same colour as his few remaining teeth. ‘If I throw you some money down,’ he asked her, ‘will you get me some fags from the Paki shop?’ He pulled his features into what might have been a smile. ‘You can get yourself some sweets.’

Josie thought about it. She knew very well that she was meant to keep away from Melvin. Her mum was always telling her she had to ignore him. Given today, this was what made her mind up.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Chuck us it down then. How much can I have for sweets?’

Melvin grinned. ‘You can have a tanner, but don’t be spending it on separates. I’ll let you have one of my cigs when you come back.’

Result! Sweets and fags! Maybe this wasn’t going to be such a bad day after all. Cheered up, for the moment anyway, Josie skipped back from her errand at the Paki shop, carrying the cigs – a packet of Woodbines – and the promised sweets. She’d chosen a quarter of Yorkshire mixture because of how long they lasted. A delicious mix of glassy sweets that you could suck for hours. She took her time though, to savour the first, which was pear shaped. So instead of walking the way she’d gone to the shop, she used the back-garden route. It made sense anyway – just in case her mam or dad were watching out for her.

She knocked at Mucky Melvin’s back door and shouted through the hole in the smashed glass at the side, shuddering automatically as she took in her surroundings. She’d never been round here before and felt a little sick and scared. What about the rats? They’d all be in here somewhere, wouldn’t they? There were certainly plenty of places for them to hide; the grass was massively overgrown, only flattened in small patches, where it had been used as a dumping ground for God knew what. There was currently an old, filthy armchair, what looked like a metal kitchen sink, and at least 20 overflowing bin bags strewn around. A playground, she decided, for all those filthy scary rats. She turned and banged harder on the rotting back door.

‘Melvin, it’s Titch,’ she called. ‘I’m back!’

Instead of coming to the door, Melvin opened another upstairs window.

‘Good lass,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to fetch ’em up for me though, Titch, I’ve hurt my back. Just come up – door’s open!’

Josie watched as he closed the window and disappeared. She sighed. This hadn’t been part of the plan and she stood on the doorstep undecided. Bleeding hell, his house stank, and now she had to go inside it. The other kids would take the mick if they even knew she had done his shopping, let alone actually gone in his house. Pulling a face, in advance of the stink that she knew would hit her nostrils, she took a deep breath as she turned the handle and stepped inside. And it was worse than she’d imagined. She felt immediately nauseous, seeing it and smelling it. What a bleeding pigsty it was. There was filth everywhere. Wallpaper was peeling from the walls, and someone had written all over them in red paint. Words like ‘nonce’, ‘Mucky Mel’ and ‘dirty bastard’ were scrawled over the entire downstairs room.

‘Hurry up, Titch!’ Melvin called down. ‘I’m dying for a fag. Don’t take all fucking day!’

Josie had to swallow her nerves as she made her way up the stairs. The filthy, threadbare carpet stuck to the soles of her shoes, but she took her time, careful not to have to grab the handrail. She was beginning to feel a prickle of fear, and despite having her coat and scarf on she shivered as she realised that she could see her breath. God, this house was even colder than hers was. She wanted to hold her nose, so offensive was the putrid smell, but she was afraid that Melvin might catch her doing it.

Reaching the landing, she realised she didn’t know where to go. There was one door to the left and two to the right, all of them closed. ‘Where are you, Melvin?’ she called.

The response was immediate and she almost jumped up in the air, dropping her bounty, as a door shot open just to her left.

‘Boo!’ Melvin said, chuckling at her startled expression. ‘Come on in, kiddo. I have to sit back down. My back’s buggered.’

Melvin’s laugh was disgusting, Josie decided, as she followed him back in. Like he had a throat full of phlegm that he needed to spit out. His feet were bare, and he had on some filthy, striped pyjama bottoms over which the dirty brown cardigan hung open. His face was wrinkled and, close up, she could see how much his greasy hair was matted. It was easy to see why the other kids teased him so much. He was mucky. Filthy, dirty, mucky. Like he hadn’t had a wash in a year. Josie didn’t want to go anywhere near him and flinched from his touch as she handed him his fags and her hand brushed his long, yellow-brown fingernails.