Risk Street 3

There was a ghoul in Risk Street. Berto Porter had told John Summerville who told Rab Morrison, who told wee Smudger, who knew just about everybody in Glendevon and those he didn’t know he was somehow related to.

Wendy Moran had to go one better and said she’d actually seen it. Angela grabbed Helen Forsyth’s arm, her long fingernails nipping into her bare arm and pulling her off balance. They were standing beside the phone box, up from the huts and across from the grass triangle. Wendy kept threatening to put 2p in and call John McFadden, because she liked him that much they were practically girlfriend-boyfreind, but she didn’t know his number. Helen’s mum was always telling her to bite her tongue and for once she did what she was told. She didn’t say anything about the ghoul.

‘It’s got fangs and big eyes, and it was, eh, pretty scary.’ Wendy shrugged.

‘I think Dracula was on the telly last night,’ snorted Angela, moving away from the telegraph pole she’d been leaning on and examining her beige Fred Perry top for black oil marks.

‘When did you see it?’ Helen would usually have weighed in with her own catty comment, but her whole outlook of how the normal nine to five world worked had been thrown by what had happened to her, so that she sounded unsure.

‘Last night!’ Wendy looked down her perfectly pointed nose at her and her firebrand red fingernails rubbed at the sunburn at the back of her neck, as if she had a crick in it and then eyeballed her again, daring her to say something else.

‘Where did you see it?’ Helen started chewing on her thumbnail, looking at her sideways.

‘It was floating outside my window.’

Angela imagined that the John Mc Fadden phone call scenario was as bad as that morning could get. She looked at Wendy, her gaze shifting to Helen. She shook the stupidity of their conversation from her head, her lips pursed to say something, but Helen asked another question and there was something broken in her voice that stopped her.

‘What did it look like again?’ asked Helen.

Wendy’s finger painted its attributes once more in the air and turned with a smug grin to catch Angela signalling to Helen not to ask any more questions. But it was as if Helen couldn’t help herself.

‘What did you do?’

They both looked at Helen. It sounded as if she was going to cry.

‘I opened my window and shooed it away, of course.’ Wendy’s pink lipstick settled into a perfect OO, but she couldn’t help spoiling it by grinning with her big yellow horses’ teeth and licking at her lips and bustling forward, showing how she did it, clicking her lurid talons like an advancing crab.

‘I’m going,’ said Angela.

‘Going where?’ Berto Porter, with Summerville stomping behind him, caught her words and flung his own back.

Angela’s gaze flickered away from the boys and with an almost imperceptible shake of her blond hair hooked her arm through Helen’s and turned away. ‘Away from you,’ she said. Wendy’s six-inch platform shoes clattered behind them like a pit pony on a hill.

‘We’ll sort your ghoul out for you,’ shouted Berto. ‘There’s a gang of us going up there tonight. We’re going to beat the shit out of it.’

‘Yeh, we’re going to beat the shit out of it,’ mumbled Summerville. His red Adidas t-shit was tied around his waist. He scratched the pubescent fat of his chest, flicking at his arms, then with a contended sigh, sandpapered the itch in his balls, not even flinching, carrying right on, when Helen turned and looked straight at him.

‘Probably the whole of Glendevon will be there,’ Berto squealed shrilly, trying to make the girls turn and come back. ‘Wait and see what you’re missing!’

It was just getting dark when Berto and Summeville wormed their way through the hole in the fence at Risk Street. But they were too late. The place was mobbed and they could hardly find a blade of grass never mind a stick big enough to beat the ghoul with in the old orchard.

Tam Smith rushed up followed by his slack-jawed and slobbering Golden Labrador Sandy. ‘Did you hear? Did you hear? Somebody seen something.’ Then he lumbered away, the dog barking with excitement, crashing through the rhododendrons.

A bonfire blazed outside the old house. The oil black smoke funnelled into the night and the creak and crack of burning fuelled the rumour-mill of those that stood and choked, but refused to be chicken enough to move away. A hoarse voice whispered that the ashes would contain the bones of the Risk Street boys that had went missing years ago.

Boys were hanging off the garden’s walls, climbing in and out of the sockets of empty windows, beating the walls of the old house with sticks as if to make them talk and tell them where the ghoul was. They didn’t seem to grow tired, only restless, until the crashing sticks began to play out a sound like reed music. As it got darker a smell of escaped gas seemed to hang in the air and ebb out like fingers, gently touching this one and that and moving on.

Summerville squinted, his eyes watering, opening and shutting as if they were allergic to the light in rapid eye movements. His red-rimmed eyes kept closing as if he was drunk. Berto looked so far away that he stretched his arm out and laughed when he touched him. There was a buzzing sound in his ear and he cocked his head to listen. ‘Your mother’s an alcoholic. She drinks every night until she passes out.’ He blurted it out. The voice that echoed inside his head didn’t sound like his own, but it felt good. ‘She’s an Alky. She’s an Alky.’ His feet couldn’t help playing the truth of his word out, dancing in front of Berto’s face.

Berto didn’t seem to notice. He sniffed at the air. His eyelids creeping back towards albino pink and flickering in rapid eye movements, like a pinball machine. There was a tang, almost a metallic taste, of a fishing boat that had emptied its crumbling hull. ‘Your dad,’ he said, almost catching the words from the air around them, ‘sleeps with other men,’ he added with finality.

‘So does your mother.’ Summerville heard what Berto had said, but he wasn’t really listening. He just knew it was important that he found a stick, a big stick, or a brick, as quickly as he could.