Our Vinnie (32 page)

He stopped hacking and stared at Devanney, who was whimpering and barely conscious. ‘You’re one lucky fucker,’ he said to him, ‘you dirty bastard nonce. You were gonna die tonight. I’d have done fucking life for you, you know that? But not for these fuckers –’ He raised his voice. ‘You hear? Not a fucking chance. Sleep well,
Joseph
, because when I spread the word about you, trust me – you’re gonna wish I
had
finished you off.’

He climbed off the bunk then, wiped the blood from his eyes and face, and, plastering a smile on his face, raised his arms high. ‘Right, you fuckers,’ he called, dropping the shank and clasping his hands behind his head, ‘I’m ready for you now! Come and fucking get me!’

Finally,
finally
, the machine rumbled into action. Whistles blew, feet stamped, shouts and clanking keys could be heard. Then light, then the batons, then oblivion.

Robert Malvern – on early duty the following morning – stood and listened to Stuart Halliwell filling him in on what had happened overnight. Halliwell was a junior officer, relatively new, and Malvern could see he had been badly shocked by the night’s events. So it was his job to set an example. To maintain the cool professional detachment expected from a man in his position; something he’d developed over many years.

Even so, something about it made his jaw clench. ‘I’m taking the block breakfasts down,’ he told his young colleague. And Halliwell, clearly keen to knock off and get away from the place, wasn’t about to object.

Malvern had been in the service for long enough to have seen plenty. He’d seen things he’d rather not have seen and things he was glad he
had
seen; the prison service was certainly good at giving you life lessons. But opening the cell door that morning was to be greeted by a sight that, gruesome as it was – and, shit, they’d clearly gone to work on him – just made him feel overwhelmingly sad.

Vinnie was covered in blood. There was barely an inch of him not stippled or smeared with the stuff, and Malvern, both sickened and familiar with the way of things in prisons, looked immediately and keenly at his chest. The boy was face up, and it was rising and falling in a slow steady rhythm, and Malvern exhaled, not having even consciously realised he’d been automatically holding his own breath. McKellan, probably exhausted, was simply asleep, eyes swollen tight shut, hair matted, body beaten and, given the shit he was going to wake up to, sleep, Malvern decided, was the best thing for him.

Malvern looked around, then, and taking in one of the long walls of the cell, realised that something had been daubed in blood along the length of it. He looked again at McKellan, homing in on what he thought he’d probably find. A particularly nasty gash on his forearm, congealed now and glossy, and almost definitely very purposefully self-inflicted.

Squinting slightly in the gloom of the windowless room, he followed the line of large, carefully painted words on the wall.
I am what you designed me to be
, he read, taking time to make the words out.
I am your blade. You cannot now complain if you also feel the hurt
.

Malvern put the breakfast tray down carefully, so as not to wake the sleeping prisoner, and took a moment to re-read the message. It was apparently by Charles Dickens – Vinnie had scrawled that beneath it – and it took Malvern’s mind immediately to the lad’s small stack of books, his precious library job, his unquenchable thirst for reading and learning. And it bothered him – even humbled him – that he didn’t know the quote himself. But mostly he stood there and tried to take in the bloodied mess of the young man currently sprawled on the floor beneath it.

On some days – on most days – Malvern was proud of his profession. And on others … He squatted down and thought about his own son, just nine years old. Well, on others, he decided, he fucking wasn’t.

1979

Chapter 25

March, Josie decided, was probably the very best time imaginable to have a baby. Yes, it had its negatives: it had been hard being so pregnant in the bitterest part of winter, waddling around, always scared that she might slip and fall, but to have had her daughter at the start of spring meant enjoying it with her – the expanding days, the sunshine, the knowledge that summer was just around the corner. And best of all, having someone of her very own who loved and needed her.

She was on her way to the post office, a trip she made every Monday morning; a short and currently sunny walk through the cul de sac at the top of the estate. It was there that she picked up her family allowance, usually pushing little Paula, all snug in her pram, more often than not dressed in something Eddie’s mum had knitted for her.

Eddie and his family had saved her, there was no doubt about it. Meeting Eddie three years back had felt like nothing short of a miracle for Josie, not just because the unimaginable had happened – that a boy, a lovely boy, actually wanted to be her boyfriend – but because she felt something she’d never before felt in her life; that she wanted to be with him too.

Though it had taken many months to get to that point. At first she’d shunned him, just like she’d vowed she’d shun any male, ever. But Eddie had been patient. Patient to a fault. It had been an Easter Monday when they’d met – three years next month, in fact – when he’d sprung to her defence down the youthy one evening when a gang of older girls from Southfield Lane were being mean to her and Caz. He’d been a proper knight in shining armour, just like in the fairy tales.

For which Josie had been grateful, albeit a bit grudgingly, because she had a rule: she didn’t need any rescuing. Well, not once they’d been seen off and she’d regained her composure and reminded herself that, while it was kind of him to step in, she really didn’t need
anything
from a bloke. So by the time Eddie asked her if she’d go out with him, back in the youthy a few days later, she had no hesitation in refusing him; he’d only be after what every other bloke was after, after all. And that was something she wasn’t giving anyone.

‘So can we be friends, then?’ he’d suggested, and had looked so doe-eyed about it that she felt mean in refusing that too. And that was how it had been, for the best part of the following year; they’d see each other often, going for walks, going swimming down at Grange Baths, and now and again, when they had some money, getting the bus into Bradford to see a film at the Odeon. Which was all fine, as far as Josie thought, until one day it hit her that, to the outside world, anyway, she apparently wasn’t being fair.

And it seemed she was about to have competition. From Janet Hawkins, one of the girls who lived on Canterbury Front, and who’d told her at a youth club disco, and in no uncertain terms, that if Josie didn’t want him, she
did
.

‘He’s a catch, he is,’ she’d said to her. ‘You must want your head testing, Titch!’ And that had been a shock, that. A
big
shock. Not the fact that someone fancied him; after all, he was tall and nice looking, and he also had a good job as a painter and decorator, rather than idling around the estate doing fuck all, like so many of the lads did once they’d left school. No, it was more the shock of how she felt about the idea of him getting a girlfriend, which was something she’d not thought about before. So she did think, and realised that she felt pretty strongly; that if Janet Hawkins went near him – if
any
girl went near him she would … what? Threaten them? Send them packing? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she was feeling something pretty physical about it and that, annoyingly, it wouldn’t go away.

Josie looked into the pram at her brand new baby and she smiled. She had her dad’s curly hair, and his big smiley eyes and – well, if you were to believe her mam’s opinion on the matter, anyway – her granddad McKellan’s ‘bleeding great conk of a nose’. Which she might have – as the health visitor had said, it was too early to tell yet. But Josie didn’t care anyway – her dad’s nose was fine. And though she’d never say so to June, not wanting to give her mam anything to sneer about, she thought baby Paula also looked quite a lot like Vinnie.

She parked the pram outside the post office carefully, so as not to wake her sleeping baby. It really didn’t matter who she did or didn’t look like. To her and Eddie, she was perfect in every way.

Josie put the brake on and rummaged under the rain cover for her bag. She had a letter she needed to get in the post today as well. It was for her brother, her first in a while, what with having the baby and everything, and she couldn’t wait for him to get it – particularly the photos. She’d borrowed Caz’s Polaroid to take them, and couldn’t wait to see his face when he saw his baby niece, and realised she had inherited their wiry ginger hair.

She felt a rush of excitement at the thought of Vinnie meeting Paula. Excited at the thought that, if he managed to stay out of trouble, he’d be home again in less than six weeks, and she was counting the days.

It had been a long time, such a very long time. And for a long time she’d raged, unable to forgive him for leaving her, unable to feel anything but betrayed and abandoned by the only person (bar Caz – whose pragmatism was sometimes infuriating) who knew what she’d been through and cared.

But not enough, clearly. This had fuelled her anger constantly, and she found it hard to imagine ever forgiving him, until the day when, a year or so after them first being together, Eddie had told her something that blew everything away.

He had been at that party, and he’d seen what had happened, and like everyone on Canterbury Estate – bar, it seemed, Josie – knew what the fight had been about:
her
. And Eddie hadn’t wanted to tell her, obviously, because who
would
want to tell their girlfriend nasty stuff like that? But, oh, once he had, how she’d wished she had known. Why, for God’s sake, hadn’t
Vinnie
told her?

‘Christ, Titch, Why do
you
think?’ Eddie had asked her, exasperated. ‘For the same reason I didn’t. Because that’s not what you do! You’re so hard on him, love, but he was only trying to protect you.’

‘But he shouldn’t have done!’ she’d railed anyway, refusing to be mollified. ‘I can fight my own battles! Christ, I haven’t had much choice, have I?’

And Eddie had told her to grow up, and he’d been right.

Josie was just closing her purse when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around to see an elderly lady standing behind her, who was gesturing back through the shop to the front door. ‘There’s a little ’un out there,’ she said, ‘Wailing fit to bust, she is. Might it be yours, love?’

Josie thanked the woman and hurried back outside, thinking, as she always did, that it was completely ridiculous that you couldn’t take prams into shops. It was indeed Paula; she could now hear the cries for herself. Another of June’s great pronouncements (and this
was
probably true) was that her latest grand-daughter had a great pair of lungs on her; something she, being a bit of a singer, invariably took credit for. Whether Paula could
actually
sing, like most of her mam’s side of the family, was something else they wouldn’t find out for a while yet, but in the meantime, she was doing a good job of practising.

Paula was scarlet and furious when Josie got back to her, and her plaintive cries had even attracted a small audience; a scraggy-looking terrier, straining at the lead that was tethering it to a nearby drainpipe, and a couple of boys of about eight, both in school shorts and shirts, who she thought she recognised but couldn’t place. Whoever they were, they were wearing the sort of expressions that made Josie sure it had been them who’d probably set Paula off.

Seeing lads like these two hanging about really got to Josie these days. Seeing any boys looking shifty tended to get to Josie these days, and not because they always put her in mind of Vinnie – and that didn’t take much – but because of little Robbie, her once-lovely nephew, who was no longer so little and no longer so nice. He was 16 now and dealing drugs, which was really no surprise to anyone (given doing drugs was his mam’s full-time occupation these days) even if that idiot Robbo had been long since kicked out. And when he wasn’t dealing, Robbie was usually out robbing round the estate with his gang of cronies, and she could find no way to reach him anymore.

Josie narrowed her eyes at the pair of lads that were now observing her. ‘Shouldn’t you two be in school?’ she said, scooping the angry pink bundle from her pram.

‘None of yer business,’ one of the boys answered.

‘How d’you know it isn’t?’ she asked. ‘It might be.’ She clutched Paula close against her shoulder, cradling her head into her neck, and jiggling her up and down a little to try and soothe her. ‘How d’you know I’m not a teacher?’ she added. ‘How d’you know I’m not the Board man, for that matter?’

‘You’re not, though,’ the other answered cockily. ‘Cos you’re a
girl
. Anyway, we already know who you are. You’re Titch McKellan, Vinnie’s sister, ain’t you?’

It was a statement rather than a question. Which was no surprise either. You were never quite so notorious as when one of your family was holidaying at her majesty’s pleasure. Not round Canterbury, anyway, which made her sad. That and the fact that made her big brother a kind of hero to these two. Which was all wrong even though a part of her knew it was also right – and trying to decide which left her head in a mess every time. He’d always been
her
hero, and he shouldn’t have gone back inside, that was all. It was just such a terrible
waste
.

Paula was quietening down now, probably because she could smell her mum again. And it might have been the dog that set her off, truth be told, Josie decided. ‘Is that so?’ she said to the boys, carefully placing Paula back into the pram again. ‘Well, makes no difference, anyway. You should still be in school. How you ever going to make anything of yourselves if you don’t go to school and learn anything?’

‘School’s for sissies,’ one of the boys said. ‘You don’t learn nothing useful. You learn much betterer stuff on the streets.’