The Bloody Red Viscounts

Old coal.

Old coal and mould. The houses had become rotten. A dying world waiting to fall so that the new one could stand on its bones and pretend it was the first. Old coal, lost souls and folk memories, warping like weather-beaten wood with each recollection, cherry-picking golden moments from ragged-tin years and cherishing them as if they were only children.

Smoke tainted the air, thousands of belching chimneys clogged nostrils and top-coated lungs ready-tarred by nicotine and subterranean silicates. Broken, yet stoic people who had weathered bombs and bronchitis now wore their scars with resignation. They thumbed magazines in waiting rooms and corner cafes tarrying over alien palm beaches and shining cars, warm sun on unblemished backs and photographs of drinks the colour of funeral flowers.

Into this world, on a day when sleet hissed against windows and bus queues squinted into the murk for salvation, came Spikey, who arrived cursed with two aberrations that would define his early life - and as that was the only life he was destined to have, it made them all the more profound and significant.

The first, of course, was his name.

He had been called Spikey after an army comrade of his father who had been killed in action. There had been a conversation between his parents just moments after his birth where she had argued (Quite reasonably Spikey though when he became old enough to understand) that since the man's real name had been Ian, calling the boy the same would be a meaningful and acceptable tribute. However, Father had insisted that no one, but no one, ever called Lance Corporal McIver anything other than Spikey and so it was that a boy, born with a quite unusual physical aberration, was subsequently given another cross to bear by an overbearing parent.

It was apparent as soon as the infant emerged into the stark light of the delivery room that there was something fundamentally wrong. His right arm was significantly larger than the left. It was longer and thicker and the right hand at birth would not have looked out of place on an adolescent. Looking at the child inevitably brought to mind a fiddler crab and as Spikey grew, the limb defied medical prediction as well as physiological reason and grew proportionately until, at the age of ten, Spikey's right arm was as long, broad and muscular as that of an adult.

Mother had to have his new big-school blazer specially made and the boy, accustomed to barbs from his contemporaries about his name and shape, now suffered the additional ignominy of a muttering tailor with a tutting and fussy tape measure.

'You've got a big arm, haven't you?'

Spikey sighed, 'Yes.'

'A very big arm,' the man, soft-lipped and pink, peered over half-moon glasses at Mother.

'He's got a very big arm, hasn't he?'

'Yes, he has, but...'

The man knelt with a wince to measure Spikey's reassuringly symmetric legs,

'His legs seem ok, thankfully.'

'Yes, that's always been a source of comfort to us,' Mother sounded tired.

Spikey would sit alone on the rail tracks carved into the side of the hill overlooking his village, sometimes on the polished steel of the rails and sometimes on the tarred sleepers, picking stones from the rail bed and throwing them at a target - a discarded can or electrocuted bird. He played a tournament, left against right. Left always won for accuracy but right triumphed easily in the distance event.

Other times he would walk in the park, off the beaten track, among trees and long-neglected rhododendrons older than his grandparents. Sometimes he would be alone but more often with Sandy the dog and his friend Monka who sucked dew from leaves and shared his meal of mushrooms which allowed those who ate them to see the colour of motion and midnight rainbows.

Neither Monka or the dog ever went home when Spikey did. He would turn and wave goodbye and Monka would wave back before skipping off into the trees with Sandy bounding at his heels. They would remain in the park, waiting somewhere, until the next time Spikey visited; bounding up to meet him, always eager for adventure or simple companionship on an aimless walk through the chilled mist and inscrutable sycamores.

On his twelfth birthday, Spikey formed his gang. Initially called The Red Arrows, he changed the name on discovering it was already taken by a troupe of display pilots. He shortened it to Aryans and scrawled it on the doors of empty, condemned houses and buildings all along the street where he lived.

A pair of middle-aged ladies, well-dressed and smelling of lavender, told him gently that ‘Aryans’ was not a very nice thing to call his gang, carrying as it did the implication that he was afflicted with a racial superiority delusion.

Spikey had never believed anything of the kind. He had seen a black man once on a bus; the man had worn a jaunty straw hat and sang to himself as he watched the world go by on the other side of the grimy glass and the boy had, if anything, quite liked him. He had made him think of exotic, beachy, blue sky places where there was white sand, warm sunshine, rolling seas and fruit to pick right off the trees.

And so he decided on a new name, a name which would instil fear into other gangs, a name with a hint of rebellion, authority and downright badness. He would call them, The Bloody Red Viscounts!

Spikey was leader of the Bloody Red Viscounts. His actual rank was, 'Commander of the First Legion' which automatically ranked him above Commanders of the Second and Third Legions.

Members were ranked according to their combative prowess, intelligence and skills. Spikey's First Legion were the crème de la crème of fighting boys, the Spartans, Immortals, Red Berets and Samurai of gangs, feared and respected, as indomitable as mountains.

They wore red uniforms loosely based on nineteenth-century US Cavalry and lived in an underground barracks whose entrance was known to members only. A small and unobtrusive entrance buried by turf, moss and snagging bramble on a hillside in a wood. It was where Spikey belonged - where he was admired and where his big arm was a symbol of his authority.

When he discovered, via a spy, that the rival Blue Daniels had anti-aircraft guns he called a meeting of the legion commanders and seconds-in-command. They decided to launch a pre-emptive strike. Spikey sent in the Second Legion and after fierce hand-to-hand fighting in which twelve legionnaires lost their lives, the weapons were destroyed – all but one which was turned on the Blue Daniels’ Air Force, smashing six jet fighters and a scout plane.

Spikey promoted the Leader of the Second Legion to the rank of First Legion Captain, and at the celebration which followed, several Blue Daniels prisoners who had made his life a misery in school were forced to parade with short-cropped hair and no trousers or underpants past a crowd of girls while Spikey, resplendent in winkle pickers, drainpipes and collarless jacket, fronted a band of swinging Beatle lookalikes as Marcia Blake looked admiringly on.

When the radio announced that Winston Churchill had died, Spikey, lacking appropriately solemn music, played the only LP in his record collection - The soundtrack to South Pacific. Skipping ‘Happy Talk’ because this was not the time for it, he settled on ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair’, allowing the record to play on into ‘Bali Hai’ while he looked out into the freezing fog of the pre-dawn sky for owls. Following a tired shout from his parent’s bedroom he had turned the record player’s volume down until it was barely audible

The sky was hidden behind a curtain of liquid soot. Spikey sat in pyjama bottoms and white vest on the corner of his bed – a vantage from where he could watch a rusting bracket protruding from the wall on the empty and windowless house across the road. The bracket had, decades before, supported an inn sign for, ‘The Swan.’ An owl had once paused during its nocturnal foraging to perch on the bracket and Spikey had fallen into the habit of irregularly watching and waiting for its return.

On the bedroom wall were two patches of damp that had stained the floral-pattern wallpaper. Spikey had Rorschached the shapes and named them ‘Barking Dog’ and ‘Howling Head’ and in order to avoid him or his parents dying in a terrible accident within twenty-four hours, Spikey had to say, ‘Barking Dog’ and ‘Howling Head’ ten times each before and after the evening streetlights came on, even if he had influenza. Fortunately, he did not have to be home to do it, nor did it matter if it was not said out loud, the Devil had given him dispensation to whisper - or even simply think them, which meant he could go to the pictures or play out late on dry evenings.

Spikey crept out into the passageway and through the thin door that led to the living room. As he passed his parent’s bedroom door, he could hear Father snoring within. Father always slept with his cap on, while Mother talked in her sleep, broadcasting her REM world out into the waking one.

‘Old Joe Parfitt has got one!’, she called out, causing Spikey to wonder what it was in Mother’s private universe of the night that Old Joe Parfitt currently had. Spikey mentally attempted to spell one of Father’s snores, settling on ‘Sqhaffummmm.’

He headed into the living room and sat in Mother’s fireside chair. In the anaemic pre-dawn light filtering through thin curtains, he could see in the grate tightly crunched paper squirls beneath sticks upon which lumps of coal and half burnt cinders from the previous fire sat, counting down the last few hours of their 300 million years of existence and waiting for the scratch of Mother’s match, the smell of smoke and the squealing and popping of damp twigs which Spikey imagined sounded like the cracking bones of frozen newts. He went back to his room, put on his school uniform and lay on his bed watching a small oblong of indifferent sky the colour of a dying grandfather.

School day, cold day, never-growing-old day.

Spikey’s walk to school took him down a black ash path bordered by feral trees, delinquent bushes, rotting frogskin logs and broken blocks half-reclaimed by Nature’s advance guard of moss and lichen. He rarely paused on this stretch because a man with long greasy hair and brown teeth lived among the soaking bushes and he killed boys and threw them down the mineshaft where the winds wept for the men they never became and the children they never fathered.

At the end of the path was the Old Shop, closed long ago and boarded up after the witch that owned it was killed after cursing her own reflection while sleepwalking.

Beyond lay the stone bridge that carried the road over the railway. Sometimes, if no-one was around, Spikey would cross the bridge by walking along the parapet, looking down on to the tracks below. If he was really lucky, a train would come along and immerse him in steam for a few priceless seconds. And on this morning the bridge was his.

Standing on the ancient, slick stone of the parapet, Spikey stared up into the drizzle and then outward, along the tracks below to where, in the distance, a column of grey steam heralded the approach of a train. As it drew closer, he could make out individual puffs dissipating into the morning murk.

The steam would envelop him for the briefest of times, gifting him a world all of his own, a small Venus that could never survive this far from the Sun. He would live cocooned in his very own atmosphere like the tiny froghopper that lives in cuckoo spit.

Steam World - a warm, damp humid world of perpetual motion, as transient as a father’s promise and as mercurial as a mother’s love.

Closer…

‘PHUMM phum phum phum PHUMM phum phum phum PHUMM phum phum phum…’

Spikey took a deep breath as the great engine passed below and a world of ghosts cloaked him and spoke…

‘Welcome back.’

He could hear Monka and Sandy playing below, laughing, barking, chasing each other through the steam. He called out to them.

‘Bali Hai is calling, every night every day,

Here I am, your special island,

Come away, come away…’

He fell forward into the steam. Monka cheered and Sandy yelped with joy at his approach and the rumble of the retreating train was drowned out by a sudden ground-shaking thunder as twenty-one cannons of the Bloody Red Viscount’s artillery punched fiery holes in the smog.