Thicker Than Water

He got three years in Walton. Mind yo›Wal dru, there’s more drugs in there than there is anywhere else, from what I hear, so he’s probably happy. Teresa Size’s lad, Philip, was saying they smuggle them in over the wall from the cemetery on Hornby Road. They use catapults, he said. Just tie Jiffy bags full of heroin to old batteries and shoot them in with catapults.’

Mum recounted this with relish. Her favourite reading matter had always been true crime, although she preferred a good murder to any amount of aggravated robbery.

‘Then there’s Steven Seddon,’ she said. ‘He was at the docks for a while, back when they still had a few ships coming in every now and then. But he gave that up in the end and went to some night-school thing. He’s at a law office in the Cunard, now, and he wears a suit. I’ve seen him waiting for the bus up at the broo, looking like Lord Muck. I wouldn’t trust him with a bloody paper clip.’

‘Would any of them still drink at the Breeze?’ I asked.

Mum made a sour face.

The description made me grin: I remembered those winter nights when the determination to finish your last drink clashed with the onset of hypothermia. ‘Does he still do that, then?’ I asked.

‘It’s hard for a leopard to change its spots, Fix,’ she said sententiously.

Mum got up and went into the kitchen again, coming back with two bottles of pale this time. She opened both with a kitchen tin opener - one of the old kind that have two hooked blades, one large and one small, and look like exotic torture implements. She handed a bottle to me, and I took it because I knew if I refused she’d drink them both herself.

We drank, and reminisced, as evening fell outside. At half past seven there was a pause while Mum watched Coronation Street and I made a foray to the off-licence at the top of the street. Then we drank and reminisced some more.

‘Mum,’ I said, when I judged that she was mellow enough to roll with the impact, ‘Matt left home around the same time I did, didn’t he?’

Mum nodded. ‘Same year,’ she confirmed. ‘His first parish was in Birmingham. Our Lady of Zion.