Thicker Than Water

I never had asked him, I realised now, since the day when he’d walked out of mine.

I walked back up to County Road and grabbed a cab up to Breeze Lane. I could have walked it, but I wanted to get to the Breeze - my Mum and Dad’s old local, ruled over with a rod of rusty iron by the aforementioned Harold Keighley - before the towel went up.

The pub hadn’t changed. They’d rebuilt the entire neighbourhood around it, but the Breeze remained its own sad-ass self, like the filament of platinum in that bullshit metaphor of T.

S. Eliot’s. You dip it into a mixture of oxygen and sulphur dioxide and blam, you’ve got sulphuric acid - but the platinum stays the same, unaffected by the reactions it catalyses. The metaphor sort of falls apart at that point, though, because the Breeze was never the catalyst for anything apart from a thousand drunken fights about who was looking cross-eyed at our Karen and whose grandad had stolen whose great-uncle’s ration book back in the austerity years.

It’s a Tetley pub, probably built around 1920, and since the size of the plot gave the architect no room in which to exercise his imagination it’s just a big blockhouse coated in rough-cast and painted white. The sign is a little classier, because it’s topped with an iron silhouette, painted in bright red, of the liver bird - the mythical short-necked cormorant invented for the purpose by the desperate gofers of the school of heraldry back in the eighteenth century.

That was when the city - flush with its winnings from the slave trade - slipped the heralds a backhander and asked them to run up a quick coat of arms.

Call me a sentimentalist, but I’ve always felt a sort of kinship with that bird. It belongs to no genus, but everyone confidently declares it to be a stork, a pelican, or whatever else they need it to be to fit the ž kitheory in hand. Whereas actually it’s a sleight of hand, a brazen forgery passed off on man and nature. As a symbol for my home town, it’s not bad: everybody thinks they know what Scousers are like, but the closer you look at us, the less neatly the individual details seem to add up.

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"Inside, the Breeze continued to give that same impression of inelegant confinement. The main room is long and narrow, with the bar running the whole length of it: there’s just enough room between the bar and the wall for one row of people standing up and one row sitting down.