Thicker Than Water

Kenny’s brothers Ronnie and Steven might know something about Kenny’s state of ›nnylkimind in recent weeks, and it was always possible he could have let something slip in a phone call or an e-mail.

Two women talking behind me in the queue disrupted my thoughts. After so long an absence, it was impossible not to tune in to the nasal poetry of Scouse.

‘He loves the bones of her, he does.’

‘Oh, aye. You’ve only got to look, haven’t you?’

‘But if he thinks she’s getting that money down the bingo, he’s living in a fool’s paradise.

’

‘She’s a dirty mare.’

‘She’s a hoo-er, is what she is.’

That was how my mother always pronounced the word. Not whore: hoo-er. Two syllables, drawn out with censorious relish.

Concentrate on business.

Anita.

Kenny.

And one other outstanding item, which had to come first.

The bus took me out of town along St Anne’s Street, and then up through the asphalt and concrete runway which is all that remains of Scotland Road. As you drive out from the centre, Liverpool opens itelf up to you in concentric bands of squalor and almost-affluence - although for real affluence you had to swing all the way east to Woolton, and that was nowhere near my destination.

I got off two stops past where I should have done, at the Queen’s Drive flyover. Queen’s Drive is the Liverpool ring road, although Liverpool being a crescent-shaped city jammed in against the banks of the Mersey it’s really only half a ring. When John Brodie started building it in 1903, Walton was a village.

By the time he downed tools and signed off on the job two and a half decades later, it had become a borough of the city, but there were streets behind St Mary’s Church that still kept that parochial charm. Other parts, particularly the streets around Walton Hospital, underwent a further metamorphosis into a slum, but as kids we had no standard of comparison. For all we knew, the queen had bedbugs too.

The hospital stands just outside of Queen’s Drive’s tight embrace, at the northern end of Breeze Hill.

But when I got off the bus I turned the other way, past the church and on down County Road. In the mid-1980s the city council had finally decided to pull the beam out of its eye and had torn down the shithole where I’d been born, relocating most of the inhabitants either to a new development on the Walton Triangle or to council houses a couple of miles further in towards the centre."

"A couple of miles. Tops.