The Dead

14

‘Benwell’s not the smartest part of Newcastle,’ admitted Kinane, with something like under-statement, as he drove the car along one of its side streets with boarded-up shop fronts, ‘but it’s not as bad as they say.’

‘Bits of it I wouldn’t walk around on my own,’ I said, and he grunted a begrudging agreement to that, ‘loads of druggies and alkies who’d rob you and give you a serious kicking for the spite of it, there’s dog shit everywhere, the lasses are all pregnant by the time they’re thirteen and none of them ever know who the father is,’ he grunted at that too, ‘and then… there’s the rough part.’

‘Fuck off,’ but he was laughing when he said that.

‘And unfortunately for Jinky, that’s the bit he lives in.’

I remembered Jinky from the very early years of my involvement with Bobby’s crew, when I was just a nipper, long before I officially joined the firm. I was little more than an errand boy. I was handy for certain low-risk, low-consequence jobs and didn’t cost much. They were a source of pocket money and made me feel like I belonged somewhere when my ma was usually working at two, or even three, jobs at a time, some of them in Bobby Mahoney’s pubs, and my older brother didn’t want to look after me.

Unsupervised, I took to hanging round anywhere I reckoned I could make myself useful to Bobby or his main men. Some of them, as you might expect, were horrible to me. The last thing they wanted was a runty kid cramping their style. Others tolerated my presence and some were pretty decent. I knew that if I kept my mouth shut and did what was asked of me, I’d occasionally get some extra grub or some cash. Nobody in Bobby’s crew was ever broke. They were always flush with money and they liked to spend it, or even give it away, to show how minted they were. Some weeks I’d take home almost as much as my mum. I’d give most of it to her and when she asked how I’d got it I’d say, ‘running errands for Bobby’ and she’d snap, ‘make sure that’s all you’re doing’. But she never stopped me from going there and I think I knew why. My mother was honest all of her bloody life and look where it got her. She never had jack shit. The husband ran off and left her in the lurch, with two boys to bring up on her own and Our young’un was a bloody tearaway. He was uncontrollable at that age and she’d already credited me with having more sense than him, even then. I think, in the end, she didn’t have the energy left to argue with me about hanging around with Bobby Mahoney’s crew. Maybe she just thought I’d be safer if I was with them than on the streets on my own or as part of a gang. The older kids didn’t bother to pick a fight with me because they knew I was in with Bobby. He never tolerated drugs either, which was something my mother and he could agree upon.

‘Jinky’ Smith’s real name was Jimmy Smith and he shared the same name as a legendary footballer from the seventies. The real Jimmy Smith was a flair player with bags of style on the pitch who was called ‘Jinky’ off it. That sense of style seemed to sum our Jimmy Smith up, so he got landed with the same nickname and it stuck, long after the player had left St James’ Park.

Jinky was what members of our crew would nowadays call a ‘fanny rat’. He was a ladies man, who could charm the birds off the trees, though I remember my mother being less than impressed by him. ‘He’s all wind and piss,’ she said once and I was sufficiently shocked by her extremely infrequent use of a swear word to recall the cause of her scorn. ‘He thinks he’s God’s gift to women, does Jinky Smith. Well, if he is, I hope they remember to keep the receipt so they can take him back to the store.’ And I realised that whatever charms Jinky had in the eyes of other women, she could see right through him. He drove her home from the club a few times, after she finished her shifts behind the bar, but I suspect that was on Bobby’s orders and she never once let him in the house.

Then one day Jinky was arrested, charged and sent down for being part of an armed robbery Bobby had organised. He kept his gob shut and ended up doing nine years. When he came out it was obvious he was a changed man, by which I mean he had lost his nerve, along with his good looks, and it was clear he had no part to play in the firm any more. This was in the late eighties. His era was over before mine had even properly begun. Bobby paid him off. Knowing Bobby it would have been a generous settlement for his loyalty, knowing Jinky it wouldn’t have been enough. The proof of that was here in front of me now; the ground floor flat I wouldn’t have housed an Alsatian in.

Kinane waited outside. He made himself visible and stood by the car so nobody had any foolish notions about damaging his precious Lexus. He was one of the few people in the city who could stand calmly next to a posh car in Benwell without either the tyres or the owner being slashed. A gang of teenagers watched him from across the road, but they didn’t make a move and he wasn’t the slightest bit bothered by their presence.

I hadn’t seen Jinky in a long while and I knew he would have changed a hell of a lot, but even I was surprised to see the state he was in. The man who answered the door took a long time to reach it. I could hear him shuffling about inside the tiny one-bedroom, ground-floor flat, then he called out ‘just a minute’ in a weak and raspy voice. The effort required for that set him off on an exhausting, phlegmy coughing fit. He was still hacking it up when he pulled the chain back on the door and opened it to squint out at me. While he frowned, probably wondering if I was a council official, a policeman or a debt collector, I took in the stooped and prematurely aged former jack-the-lad. The famously luxuriant hair was long and straggly, the face lined and haggard and the eyes grey and watery. For a man still in his sixties, he didn’t look great.

‘Fuck me senseless,’ he finally muttered, ‘it’s only Davey Blake,’ and then he laughed like he couldn’t quite believe it. ‘Come in, man.’

I stepped inside. There was a smell of burnt onions and sour milk coming from a tiny galley kitchen, which was separated from the living room by a sliding door. There was a sofa, but it was covered in black bin bags, which I hoped were full of old clothes, rather than rubbish.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked me. ‘I must have something in here,’ and he headed for the kitchen.

‘No need,’ I told him and I took the whisky bottle out of the bag I was carrying.

‘Eeh, you’re a grand lad,’ he said and he shuffled off to get us a couple of glasses. They were just about clean enough, so I poured us both a generous measure. I chose a rickety wooden dining-chair and it wobbled on loose legs when I sat on it. He settled into his one grubby, green arm chair.

‘I’d have cleaned up a bit if I’d known you were coming like,’ he assured me, ‘but it’s the maid’s day off and the butler must be shagging the cook ‘cos I haven’t seen either of them all day.’ Then he laughed at his own joke and I smiled gamely.

‘It’s nae bother Jinky,’ I told him, ‘how are you keeping?’

‘I’m grand,’ he said, despite the evidence of my own eyes. ‘Newcastle manager’s been on the blower, wants me to play centre forward on Saturday. I’ve said I’ll think about it.’

This was the Jinky I remembered, always joking, always taking the piss, usually out of himself, ‘I don’t go near the ground these days mind, on principle,’ he was absolutely serious about that, ‘it used to be a cathedral but that fat man’s turned it into a whore house. You should send that Joe Kinane round to have a word.’

‘He offered to do it.’

‘Aye, well, he should then,’ he conceded, ‘but I know you wouldn’t want anyone’s name in the papers.’

‘We were always too professional for that Jinky. Leave the headlines for the hard men who like to fight and feud with each other, while we hold the real power. That was always our way.’

‘That’s what I always liked about working for Bobby. We were a classy bunch,’ and when I gave him a look, he chuckled, ‘well, for villains,’ then he was serious for a moment. ‘I was sorry to hear about your ma,’ he told me solemnly, ‘truly sorry,’ and he looked like he meant it, ‘she was a touch of class that one, a cut above every other woman who worked in any of Bobby’s places and none of us ever forgot it,’ and he chuckled to himself. ‘None of us dared swear in front of her. She was a proper lady and we’d mind our manners when she was around, even Bobby… especially Bobby.’

‘Thanks Jinky,’

‘So,’ he said, ‘what can I do for you?’

I took my time and explained why I was there. Jinky listened intently and screwed up his face like he was trying hard to recall long-forgotten events. When I finished, he said, ‘Well he was always there, your dad, hanging around, and then one day he wasn’t. It wasn’t so unusual back then, for people just to go off and do something new, even if they did have a wife and bairns. There’s always easier money to be made some place else,’ he chuckled, ‘you’ve seen Auf Wiedersehen Pet. This has always been a place people left to go and do other things. I love it here,’ he assured me, ‘couldn’t live anywhere else me, but it isn’t exactly the land of opportunity. Geordies are like the Irish, we’re scattered all over the world. Your dad probably opened a bar in Marbella or somewhere and just never came back.’

‘He did do that,’ I said, ‘not the bar in Marbella. I’m talking about the leaving for work. My ma told me all about it. He’d been working away for years, but then she went to see him to talk about their future together. He was in London and they were going to work it all out between them. We were going to live down there, but it never happened. He wrote to her for a while and phoned her. One day the letters and the calls stopped. I wasn’t that old when she told me he probably wasn’t coming back. I don’t even remember him.’

‘Aye, well,’ he said, looking a bit uncomfortable at what probably sounded to him like a sob story. ‘Look on the bright side,’ he added, ‘if you’d have gone down there all them years ago you’d probably be a Chelsea fan by now.’

‘Aye,’ I said, ‘and think of all the glory I’d have missed out on.’ I didn’t want to stay too much longer in Jinky’s flat. It was a depressing place to call a home and I wondered why he’d allowed himself to end up like this. ‘What about you Jinky? Didn’t fancy the married life?’

‘No, not me. It’s a mug’s game. Women are more cunning than any man and I ought to know,’ and he chuckled to himself, ‘if it wasn’t for other men’s wives, I’d still be a virgin.’

‘They’re not all like that Jinky.’

‘Tell any woman what she wants to hear and she’ll climb into bed with you, whether she’s single, courting or married,’ he told me earnestly, ‘and by the time she’s climbed out again she’ll have convinced herself it was all her fella’s fault, so she won’t even feel guilty about it.’

‘I thought I was a horrible old cynic Jinky, but you take the proverbial Garibaldi.’

‘I’m telling you man. There’s only two kinds of blokes in this world; the ones who do the shagging and the poor mugs who know nowt about what’s going on behind their backs. Make sure you take wor lass out before some other man does… er… no offence like.’

‘None taken,’ I told him, ‘just don’t go round my house while I’m out or my lads will have to have a word.’

He started laughing heartily at that and the laugh became a spectacular coughing fit. I realised that poor old Jinky had become the victim of his own success. He’d been so adept at charming neglected lasses into his bed that he was left with an inbuilt distrust of all women. But look where that had got him, a loveless existence, in a squalid little flat. There was a certain cruel irony in that.

‘Do you want us to ask around, quiet like, to see if anyone knows anything about your dad? I see a lot of the old guys in the club.’

‘Cheers Jinky, I’d appreciate that. I figure someone might know what happened to him. Tell them there’s a few quid in it for them if they have information I can use,’ and I reached inside my wallet and took out a ton. He made a half-hearted attempt to wave it away. ‘You’ll need to buy a few pints if you’re asking around on my behalf,’ I said and I left the hundred quid on the little table next to his half-filled whisky glass. Then I wrote my mobile number on the top of his Racing Post.

‘It’s been canny craic,’ I told him, as I picked up the bottle and poured him a larger measure.

‘Thanks bonny lad,’ he said as I left him with the bottle and his memories.