Engines Beneath Us

I saw Lee again this morning. He was standing in the doorway of the boarded up butcher's shop opposite the hostel where I'd been living for the past three weeks. I stopped in the reception area, lingering in the shadow of the broken down drinks vending machine, and stared at him through the glass. He hadn't changed at all. A slim, lanky kid in denim and Doc Martens, he was leaning against the doorjamb where the white paint splintered to show the damp and blackened wood beneath. His hands were in his pockets and he wore that familiar expression of aloof contempt as the world passed him by.

I felt light-headed, because in a peculiar way it was such a blessed relief to see him again after so many years, it made me dizzy enough to grab for the vending machine to support myself. But at the same time I was incapable of taking another step forward, fearing my movement would draw his attention. I had no wish for that contempt of his to be directed at me. It would narrow and focus on where I stood like sunlight through a lens and I had no doubt I would burn up under its scrutiny.

We must have stood like that for a good few moments, together and apart, before a cherry-red Fiat Uno pulled up alongside the kerb and I watched him jog down the steps to the passenger door. The driver, a young woman with a bob of bright blonde hair, reached across the seat to unlatch the door, and as he smiled at her I saw that it wasn't Lee after all. The moment passed in a tumbling rush, the boy looked nothing like Lee anymore, and I wondered how I could have imagined he ever might have.

The day resumed as though it had stopped to watch me fooled. It reinstated its familiar sense of speed and colour, the sound of traffic and the everyday bustle of the street. The car took off and the empty doorway stared back at me, daring me to blink first, until I took the initiative to move on. I walked out of the hostel and into the street. There was the threat of rain in the air, the smell of ozone and exhaust fumes. I pulled my collar up higher around my neck and fell in step with the tide of blank-faced strangers on their morning commute, but the kid in the doorway had unanchored me, the Lee-who-was-not-Lee judging the world he perceived had let him down; and so as I walked onwards into the present, my thoughts trailed far behind.

Number 21 had been empty for nearly a year when the Thorel brothers were sent from The Works to clean it up.

It was several weeks before Lee and his da would get there, and with a few other kids from The Crescent, I watched from the road as the Thorels stripped the shutters from the windows and kicked in the door, which had swollen tight in its frame.

They found a colony of mice in the ground floor windows. A rodent city built between the shutters and the glass. It teemed with tiny pink infants; eyes blind to the brightness which had been so rudely revealed to them.

Mick and Dave Thorel were both big, and Mick alone was bigger than most. He had tats and a goatee and enough rings on his fingers he could have punched clean through plate glass. But even he shrieked in surprise when they pried off the metal shutters and he found himself caught beneath a tumbling rain of tiny, panicking creatures. The mice squealed too. The racket woke up the whole street and even Old Elsie turned up to stare, standing across the road, hunchbacked and laden with overstuffed shopping bags.

The Thorels gathered the mice into buckets and took them away. Later, when I asked what had happened to them, Mam said they'd found homes for them all and Da had snorted and told her she was going soft or worse.

Number 21 was in better nick by the time Lee and his da moved in. The window frames had been replaced and the rooms were aired out and given a new coat of paint.

One of the very first things we told Lee when we met him was that the house had been full of mice babies before he moved in.

"The whole ground floor was heaving," we said. "It was full, from floor to ceiling."

We told him about how they had to shovel them into sacks before they could even get into the place. We told him how the little bastards clawed and scratched and bit with hundreds and hundreds of needle teeth.

"A few guys ended up in hospital," we said. "They got completely overrun by the things. They came at them like a wave. They got inside of them. Two of them died."

Lee said we were a bunch of dumb fuck pikey bullshitters.

Took one to know one, his da said.

I turned thirteen that summer and I remember it was a hot one, hotter than I'd remembered it ever being before. The Crescent wasn't built for warm weather; it was a circle of grey rendered semis that soaked up the sun like clay-brick storage heaters, pumping it back at us when the evening looked like it might give us respite. Throughout most of July and August, Da was on night shift, so I wasn't allowed in the house during the day because the heat would keep him awake and the sound of me kicking around would have just wound him up further.

So I spent my days wandering around the neighbourhood or lying on the grass in the middle of The Crescent with a comic or a book. Da was going through a spy novel phase at the time. He had stacks of paperbacks around the house: Fleming, Deighton, le Carré. I'd sometimes grab one I didn't think he'd notice was gone, drawn in by the covers; sex and violence abstracted into silhouettes of nudes and firearms. I guessed I wasn't supposed to be reading them, and when you're that age, the idea that something might be forbidden can make even the dumbest things look awful appealing.

I'd see other kids sometimes. Sid Parry from Number 4 was a lump of a kid but a smart one. He had a buzz cut and an expression that seemed almost permanently bruised. The Bolam twins, Lisa and Nancy, were - to my mind - twins in name only. Lisa was wry and opinionated, black hair cut short so it was harder to pull if she got in a fight; Nancy was quiet and sweet, her freckled face shy behind a tumble of red curls.

There was Craig Peveril too, but he didn't really count. Craig's mam ran The Crescent Neighbourhood Association, which meant they were the ones who lived next door to Mr Olhouser. Craig's mam organised odd jobs for Mr Olhouser and spoke on his behalf when the association met. She wore thin-framed glasses and floral skirts, she tied her hair in a tight bun that yanked her eyebrows up her face so she looked a little bit surprised at everything. But there was steel in the way she sorted out neighbourhood disputes. She organised fundraisers, arranged maintenance crews and just made things work. Mrs Peveril was a formidable sort, but her son wasn't. Craig was thick as shit. He was younger than the rest of us by a few years, but he acted like he was younger still. He was short and impatient; all wound up like a clenched little fist. If it hadn't been for the way his mam would sashay around The Crescent, getting involved in every damn thing that happened, we'd have avoided having anything to do with him at all.

As it was, back then, we didn't really do much. Childhood summers always seem so full of incident until you see them from a distance. We did what kids on the loose usually do when the weather is hot enough to drive them a little crazy.

We ran around, we made shit up, and every day, without exception, we saved the world in time for tea.

We were only doing what every other kid in the city was doing. In every street, on every green, the same games were being played, the same dramas unfolded, but even so, The Crescent had a bit of a reputation back then. It was one of those parts of the city that people were wary of. You probably know the type. It was as though people believed it was the source of everything terrible that happened in the area. You'd sometimes see people stumble in by mistake, only to beat a hasty retreat when we all looked up from what we were doing at the time. I never really understood what they saw: something bleak, something violent, the fulcrum for all the city's ills.

In truth, it wasn't like that at all. In terms of statistics, the neighbouring estates were far worse: assaults, drugs, car theft, murder. More than that: there were whole wars going on between streets out there, if the local news was to be believed. Were anyone to process the numbers, they'd notice how no crimes were reported in The Crescent itself. Not that it was all sunshine and light, but The Crescent had its own way of maintaining the law. For the most part, the gangs from the estates kept their distance. Once in a while, one of them would try and make inroads into The Crescent, but they wouldn't get far. They just didn't understand. We had The Works after all, and you didn't mess with The Works, you didn't mess with Mr Olhouser. Not if you wanted the city to keep its head above the water.

You could feel the deep bass thrum of The Works when you were out on the grass, you could feel the distant, buried boom-boom-boom of it when you put your...