Thicker Than Water

The gang had me enclosed in a hollow semicircle now, and a metallic snikt sound from waist height told me that at least one of these likely lads had a flick knife. That first insidious sound was followed by several more from the same stable, and I could see blades sliding into hands in glittering profusion. It was as if a switch had been pulled somewhere. This had just stopped being a general for-form’s-sake intimidation and become something else: something more ritualised and more inevitable. If I couldn’t talk these little sods down this was going to get really messy.

‘What are you doing on my soil, you fucking queer?’ Johnno demanded, but his voice was dreamy rather than aggressive.

‘This?’ I said, making a circular gesture with my raised index finger. ‘This is your soil?’

‘That’s right.’ Johnno nodded twice, slowly, almost like a genuflection.

‘How far?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘How far is it yours? I mean, where does your soil begin and end?’

Johnno raised his hand, letting me see the knife for the first time.

The blade was long and slender, barely tapering at all towards the point because it was more or less an ice-pick to begin with. He tapped the point of it against my chin.

‘I own the fucking blocks.’

‘All of them?’ I asked.

‘Johnno!’ Bic’s voice, calling from the distant outskirts, where he was invisible behind the wall of his elders and biggers. ‘He didn’t touch me.’

‘Shut up, Bic. Yeah. All of them.’

‘St size=""3"">‘So you’d be the one to ask about anything that was going down here?’

The briefest of pauses.

‘You don’t ask anything, cunt,’ Johnno said, and again his mild tone was at odds with the words. ‘I ask, and you answer. You sneak around here in the middle of the night. Touch up my fucking brother—’

He shoved me in the chest with his free hand to emphasise how pissed off this made him. My back was already to the parapet, so there was nowhere to go but down. Pity. Down was the one place where I was determined not to go.

I tried one last time. ‘I was looking for some information, ’ I said. ‘But if you’d rather I came back another time . . .’

Johnno laughed softly and suggestively. ‘Come back when they take the fucking stitches out,’ he suggested, and his hand drew back. In the gap between conception and execution I brought my head forward and nutted him on the bridge of the nose with all the force I could bring to it.