Thicker Than Water

Then, as now, bringing someone’s mother into the argument was moving directly to Defcon One: it was the Taunt Unendurable, and it required the Riposte Valiant. Dick-Breath kept his head down, having earned that derisory name for his willingness to do whatever was needed to curry favour with the bigger kids. But Anita was woven out of sturdier as well as more brightly coloured fabric. Mouthing off to her just wasn’t safe, and anybody with less heft than Kenny would have thought twice about doing it.

‘Fuck off, Kenny,’ she shouted, balling her fists.

‘You gobshite!’

Kenny smacked her, open-handed, across the face, hard enough to make her stagger.

‘Your mam’s a slag,’ he repeated. ‘She’s knocking off Georgie Lunt.’

Anita screamed and went for him, but Kenny was a head taller than her and he fended her off with a violent shove. ‘So you’re probably a slag too,’ he said. ‘It runs in families. Who are you knocking off, Anita?’"

"For some reason, this was shocking to me. I’d seen boys fight girls before: there was no real room for chivalry in our rough-and-tumble code of ethics, and girls could do you some serious damage if they fought like they meant it.

It was just that this was so cold-bloodedly staged, and so obviously unfair - Kenny manufacturing the argument to pay Anita back for his blue balls - that it made my blood boil. And not just mine. I saw Matt, my big brother, lean forward as though he was about to step in between Anita and Kenny and take up the challenge on her behalf. My survival instinct - like Dick-Breath’s - was a bit better developed than that: Kenny had more or less the same height advantage over us as he did over Anita and, as we’d all learned on many occasions, he didn’t recognise the dividing line between what was legitimate and what was inconceivable.

But I did what I could. I replied to the taunt.

‘Well, your mam killed herself, Kenny,’ I called out. ‘It wasn’t cancer - that’s all my arse. She cut her throat with your dad’s razor.’

There are moments in life when you know you’ve gone too far: you can tell them by the eerie stillness that descends around you - only half a second long in reality, but in subjective time easily long enough for you to think ‘Oh Jesus, I wish I hadn’t done that’ and then start in on the Lord’s Prayer.

Kenny swivelled to stare at me, his eyes bulging out of his head in cartoon slo-mo. He opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but no sound came out.