Larkin's Barkin'

Chapter 4

The Street

‘Allo Chas,’ drawn out and minacious. Mickey Saint junior at fourteen was not of big build, but he was menacing. It was in his genetic code. Even at this young age those fearsome bullying genes were fully developed into a playground gangster: Mickey Saint junior’s manor.

Chas Larkin was frozen to the spot. Even though it was a warm summer day and the sweat drained down his petrified spine, he was chilled to the marrow. In his daydreams he imagined himself in another part of the world. Somewhere safe at least. He didn’t ask for much, just to be safe. It was how he survived. He regressed into his dreams of a safe haven and, when he couldn’t do that, he did things he thought might be lucky, like avoiding the cracks in the pavement.

Whenever he managed to get in some words to his self-absorbed mum, asking could they move, maybe to the countryside, she laughed at him. "We"re EastEnders", and, “this is where we live”, she would say, waving her arms about her as if the still bombed out East End of London was a glorious place to be and Chas should be grateful. He wasn’t. The place was the pits and he hated it. It scared him. “But I don’t like it mum”, a statement that would be met with further derisive laughter and his mum would flounce, telling her friends, in his presence, mimicking a whining childlike voice “But I don’t like it mum”, to the great amusement of her audience, and deep embarrassment of Chas. She would flick his ear, or clump his head and, if she was drunk as a skunk, she would give Chas a right-hander that could knock him from Sunday to Monday.

‘Cat got yer tongue?’ Mickey Saint assayed as he strutted around the paralysed Chas, grasping his school satchel tight to his chest. It didn’t hold anything valuable, but he had learned it could shield a blow or two. Mickey’s g**g leaned back, casually, hands in the pockets of their short shorts and laughed to the sky as Mickey prodded and taunted the trembling scaredy-cat, Chas Larkin.

Chas had no answer. He’d quite like a cat, but truthfully would prefer a dog. A dog could protect him. “Some chance”, his mum had said, she had enough on her plate with six kids, of which Chas was the youngest and the burdensome runt of the litter, least this is what everyone told him, so he supposed he was. Chas was not sure what runt meant, but knew it wasn’t good, because he didn’t know of anything good. Nothing was good in his life.

Mickey flicked Chas’s nose with thumb and forefinger, looking to his g**g to bathe in accustomed glory as Chas rocked backwards in fear, which move gave Mickey the distance to wind up a haymaker. Chas knew it was coming, it always did, he wished he could run, to seek temporary respite in one of his many hideouts he had acquired as a means of self-preservation, but that wasn’t going to happen. You try running with eyes that looked in different directions, where do you go? And he wouldn’t get far with a club foot. His left foot twisted, not seriously, but enough that the sole could not be placed fully flat on the ground. Eventually he had been given a big shoe that had the sole and heel shaped and raised up. Chas was not sure what was worse, the sight of the club boot that so clearly did not match the shoe on his other foot, or his inability to walk like other kids, although he practiced, every day, desperate for some semblance of normality, which to Chas was the ability to blend into a safe background. Of course, it was the boot that everyone spotted first, the rest just followed as a natural consequence. It was Chas’s lot and, he had just to get on with it was the sage advice from a distracted and uncaring mother. No maternal safe haven there.

safeMickey’s blow landed square on the runt’s jaw. Chas was laid flat and had just enough time to curl into the foetal position before Mickey and each of his sick sycophants, popped in a kick or two as they passed by on their way to school.

Chas was going the other way; he had a doctor’s appointment. He often did. He was what his mum called, “a sickly wimp of a runt”, going on to say, in an amusing manner, that “her Charlie should ‘ave drowned him in the Thames at birth, it"s what they would’ve done in the old days”. Then she would tell all how she was a martyr to the kid, like she was the victim, it was she who had the task of raising a child so demanding, and she’d clip Chas around the ear again for being a burden to her. Her solution to everything, if she wasn’t flat on her back pissed, or shagging her way around the East India docks. Regularly, she would drag him off to the doctor"s surgery as though he were a trophy, enabling her to suck in sympathy and caring endearments like a sponge. For her, not him; nobody cared about him.

‘Get up ‘orf the f*****g floor, them cloves were clean on a week ago. What will the doc fink?’

Chas raised his bruised, emaciated, and deformed, elongated frame, to face his mum. If his self-esteem would allow it, and were he to stand upright, Chas considered he would be tall, but his body, like his ego, was seriously dented and emotionally curved inward, as if to form a hunchback"s defensive shell. He leaned into his mother as she tugged his ear and pulled him towards the doctor’s surgery, his tiny pleas choked off in a cloud of cheap, brassy perfume and the acrid aroma of lacquer from her beehive hair. He knew better than to tell her he hurt, his mother didn’t care, and he often wondered why she so regularly took him to the doctor.

His mum was a looker, he had to agree with that. She dressed stylishly and often he wondered how come she had money for such lovely clothes, yet his own un-glad rags came from the Salvation Army? Another question he would never ask, as he clumped along following his mum who had not released his ear, and he buried his tears, buried his pain, and stifled his anger. Chas Larkin knew no other way. He repressed his so called fourteen years, so that inside he was still a small and vulnerable boy. He had no idea how old he was, or even his birthday and, what would be the point.

Salvation Army-------

The Doctor

The Doctor‘Allo Chas.’

Chas liked Thelma, the doctor’s receptionist. She was a warm buxom lady with mountainous bosoms that Chas loved to sink into when he received her motherly embrace, before showing them into the consulting room. Always sending him off with a fond ruffle of his hair. It was the closest he got to any stirrings that might encourage the growth of his inhibited adolescence. Chas had regular check-ups at the Docs. His mother made an inordinate fuss about all of Chas’s distorted limbs, organs, and bits and pieces. It seemed to him to be the only time she cared and, oh how she and the doc laughed at his stunted growth, his inability to make that step into manhood.

‘Lazy eye.’

‘Lazy eye?’

"Lazy eye.’

‘Lazy...?’

‘Lazy eye,’ the doctor reaffirmed, a brief nod that permitted him a cursory squint up Betsy Larkin’s skirt: stocking tops. There was nothing lazy about his eye.

‘Lazy eye?’ Chas mumbled, trying to offer some substance to his still high-pitched and squeaky voice. Betsy clipped her son’s ear, the Doc seeming to approve the chastisement with a glancing blow himself whilst distracted by Betsy’s physical charms. Chas said nothing, not even ouch. He was used to it, though his temper, which bubbled and grew within him, permitted a rebellious clump of his club foot onto the polished floorboards of the surgery. He felt a little better. He had always had a squint, so why now? Why had the doctor at last thought his eye needed attention?

‘What shall we do?’ Chas’s mum asked insincerely. She found the Doctor inordinately attractive and he had such a lovely touch.

Doctor Byrne sashayed to the front of his desk like a lounge lizard, perched on the corner, and leaned over, facilitating an improved inspection of the creamy white thighs of Mrs Larkin and, whilst remaining focused on the black nylon tops, he scrabbled around Chas’s face to remove the National Health, circular, wire framed glasses, scratching Chas’s nose in the process. A trickle of blood trailed, to be ignored. Chas said nothing, he was used to being clumped, scratched, and beaten up generally.

Betsy slapped her son again. It was her default action, although her response seemed to have a reasonable motive, at least in her mind and, taking the spectacles from the doctor, she admonished her son. ‘Look at the state of these bins, yer filfy...’ and she demonstrably lifted the hem of her flowery cotton dress and, leaning down, adjacent to the doctor’s fly region, she exaggerated exhaling a throaty breath onto the lenses and, with excessive and suggestive vigour, she cleaned them. The doctor was thus afforded a clearer view of Madam Larkin’s under garments, which was of course the intention and the resultant mounding in the doctor’s trousers was noticeable. Not to Chas though, he was as blind as a bat without his glasses, compounded with a lazy eye he had just learned, but he knew what was happening. It had happened before and his disabilities he thought to himself, were more often than not used as an excuse for his mother to visit the doctor. Still, it got him off school for a short while. He hated school. It was t*****e, even though he was academically gifted. The teacher had said this, but his mother had not listened, after all, in the East End what use were sums and writing, and clearly Chas did not have the where-wiv-all to follow his brothers into the family business. He was viewed as a waste of space.

motherwhere-wiv-allDoctor Byrne, hunched over, raised himself from his perch. Chas heard a ripping of sticky Elastoplast and, still distracted by the intimate lady view, now fully exposed, Doctor Byrne roughly taped up the lens that serviced Chas’s good eye and thrust the glasses back to the intimidated boy, dismissively telling him to wait outside.

ElastoplastBetsy glanced at Chas and told him to f**k off to school.

Chas fumbled the floor to pick up his glasses that had received no purchase on his face as the distracted doctor had attempted to replace them. Having found them and put them on, he found that now everything was a blur. His one good eye, though often facing the wrong way, was blinded, to teach the other one a lesson. He stood and with outstretched hands, he fumbled his way to the door and into the waiting room. The door closed to a squeal of feminine exquisite pleasure, and then a thud.

Chas stood still for a moment getting his blurred bearings, fighting the desire to cry. He felt the warm embrace of the comfortably plump receptionist who tugged Chas into her ample bosoms. This was what Chas looked forward to on every visit to the Docs. It was his only comfort. Now he cried. He was for the moment, safe, and Thelma removed the plastered glasses and dabbed his eyes with a perfume drenched handkerchief, caressed his head and kissed his damp cheeks. ‘f*****g the Doc, is she?’ Chas nodded, squashing himself into her body and she hugged him tight as she walked him to the door. ‘Lazy eye?’ she asked, and Chas nodded again, knowing the embrace and the comfort would end as the indistinct image of the door neared. Just the last kiss to go and he will have to face school.

Thelma kissed Chas. He didn’t know, but there was a strawberry pair of lips printed on his cheek. He wouldn"t care anyway because he relished the warmth, the milk of maternal nurturing and Thelma"s kindness. He’d been standing on one leg having learned this was lucky and, so he thanked the Gods as he cherished the last vestiges of the luck and, the receptionist’s cuddle, the final wisps of her womanly scent. He loved it, but he had to get to school.

School

SchoolAlthough the streets were familiar, Chas’s drastically reduced vision made his walk to school difficult, treacherous even. Busy roads had to be negotiated. Shouts and car horns filled his extrasensory ears, serving him well, but much occluded by the pulsing thump of his heart.

Eventually the familiar smell of dog s**t and disinfectant told him he’d reached the school entrance, not the playground gates, they would be locked by now to keep the kids from escaping. It was a short flight of stone steps to the double doors of the imposing, if you could see, Victorian portico. He stepped inside, knowing what would be waiting for him.

‘Larkin, you’re late,’ the stern voice of the school secretary echoed in the voluminous gothic vestibule. Chas needed a wee and was not sure he could hold on as the dragon neared. Sensing the fire of her breath, he was able to anticipate the swing of the slap, so it took some of the momentum and sting out.

‘Me mum sent a note. I’ve been...’

Slap, he didn’t sense that one. ‘We got no note from that strumpet of a mother of yours.’

Chas waited, no slap, no more berating.

‘Mrs Coggan, perhaps I can take Chas to his class?’

Oh, the wondrous breath of respite, the elation of escape. ‘Miss, er, Doyle? Is that you, I cannot see very well, er.’

Slap.

Slap‘Mrs Coggan, enough of that now.’

Chas sensed the secretary withdraw from the vestibule arena of conflict, retreating into her lair, and he leaned into the gentle caress of Miss Doyle as she stroked his reddened cheek, a slight abrasion from her handkerchief as she erased the imprint of Thelma’s voluptuous lips. ‘Come along Chas, let me get you to your class.’

‘Thank you, miss, but I need a wee.’ Chas imagined the caring smile of Miss Doyle rather than witnessed it.

‘Can you find your way to the loo? Lazy eye, is it?’

‘Yes, miss, lazy eye,’ and Miss Doyle spiralled away, just a gentle smoothing of Chas’s cheek that he pressed into, to savour, until the dragon breathed fire through the glazed portal of her secretarial den, insisting he get a move on, and to ask his mum to contact the school. Well, he’d tell her, but fat chance she would comply.

Chas felt his way into the corridor and, assisted by the smell of poorly aimed urine and, inadequate disinfectant, he found the door, entered, and panicked. The distinctive aroma that was the Boy"s toilet was compounded with the smell of cigarette smoke. This could only be Mickey Saint and his g**g. Somehow teachers allowed him and his brethren to get away with murder, perhaps because they had murderous back-up outside the school. The teachers didn’t care, just longing for the day when he and his entourage would graduate to the streets.

Mickey Junior whooped with glee when he saw Chas Larkin enter the lavatories. Chas considered legging it, but he couldn’t see and his second beating up of the morning would probably be less debilitating than an accident running the corridor, maybe even a tumble down the stairs. So, he braced himself, but was unable to prevent whizzing in his pants, the resultant streaming down his legs unavoidable and visible. This act of incontinence was greeted by the Saints with convulsive derision and cavorting depraved merry japes, regaling Chas with names, all toilet humour based, the hoodlums not having an expansive knowledge of the English dictionary, and this served only to scare Chas more and to turn his bowels to water.

A soft Irish accent, a girlish lilt and, a gentle touch, ushered Chas back into the corridor. ‘Roisin?’ (Pronounced Ro-sheen) he enquired. Chas was the only person who called Roisin by her baptised Irish name, most called her Rosie, or Ginger Nut, and Chas’s determination to name her correctly meant he was a firm favourite of this vivacious and head-strong girl from an Irish immigrant family. He respected this girl. She had withstood all the banter about her unruly mop of ginger curls, freckles, and her lanky ungainliness, generally with a swift right hander, followed up with a threat of a belt from her Dah, if any of the parents felt like taking issue with her, and the threat of the O’Neill family had sway.

Pronounced Ro-sheenThe O’Neills, although new to England and this East End neighbourhood, were establishing a firm don’t touch reputation, Dah O’Neil reportedly earning substantial money as a successful bare-knuckle fighter back in the Emerald Isle, and along with a host of equally capable and protective brothers, Roisin had confidence aplenty. Chas admired it, admired her. Not much else was known of the O’Neills and people presumed that eventually they would be dealt with by either the Saints or the Larkins.

don’t touchdealt withIn the meantime, their reputation preceded any O"Neill. ‘Hey, Rosie, we were just ‘aving a larf like,’ Chas heard a cowering Mickey say, his disciple backup having faded into the toilet cubicles. Nobody messed with this red-headed lunatic who carried her fifteen years, maybe older, status to great effect.

‘It’s Roisin, Mickey, and I thought I told you to leave Chas Larkin alone, so?’

‘It’s okay, Roisin,’ Chas mumbled, extending the end of her name out of respect, the dampness of his trousers and his wet legs causing him to feel a chill from the draughty corridor.

The Police

The PoliceMiss Doyle, sensing she ought to check on the toilets, found Chas shivering and hunched in a crouch in the corridor. She embraced the wreck of a child and not letting go of her hug, she took him off to the gymnasium. After cleaning him, she gave him some lost property gym shorts, saying she would wash his school ones and dry them in time for when he went home. Chas was so grateful he cried more, welcomed the further tug into the waist of the teacher’s skirts and lingered as she calmed and soothed him, but eventually, ‘Okay, we"ve been some time. So, let"s get you to your classroom.’

Chas murmured a reluctant yes, knowing full well that by the time he got to the classroom the Saint boys will have spread the word of his accident and he would have to bear this along with the additional ribald comments about his PE shorts. But the anticipated cacophony of cajoling lackey school children, all scared of the Saints and equally relieved Larkin took the brunt of the g**g torment, did not happen. The classroom was silent. No Saint g**g, just an attentive class facing the front, paying attention to the Headmistress while a police constable stood behind the formidable woman, springing backward and forward, heel to toe, hands clasped behind his back, occasionally dipping and bobbing up with bent knees, full of self-importance.

As Chas and Miss Doyle entered, the spell of torpid, benumbed attention, was broken as the kids swung their gaze, relieved, distraction had entered like the cavalry over the hill. Chas, intuitively knowing he had to seek shelter, dived under the skirts of Miss Doyle, to the immediate merriment of the children. The pressure valve was released, and the class engaged in a thunderous cachinnation of belly laughs that resisted even the stare of the teacher but was brought under immediate control when the headmistress clapped her hands.

‘Larkin,’ the Headmistress barked.

‘Yes?’ Larkin replied, his response muffled by Miss Doyle’s skirted tepee.

‘Come out now!’

Miss Doyle made to say something but was immediately hushed, and Chas felt he had no choice but to reveal himself and accept all that was obviously coming his way.

As Chas emerged, the teacher made a hand gesture to silence the children who were fit to burst again.

‘Miss?’

‘Larkin,’ and the head looked to the constable, ‘PC Arbuthnot...’ she paused as the kids laughed at the name, then froze in response to the harridan"s stare. Quiet achieved, she continued, ‘PC. Arbuthnot has some questions for you.’

Chas’s curiosity was piqued, but he knew enough to know that whatever the questions were, it would be a formality. The headmistress already swished the cane.

The constable opened up. ‘Larkin, you took advantage of a distracted Mickey Saint and smashed him over his head with a lump of four by two in the toilets.’ It wasn’t a question, as Chas had already surmised, but he could not disguise his shocked face. It was a look that said, what on earth are you talking about and, hope, that the persecutor of his short life might be dead and on his way to a fiery hell. ‘Saint is in hospital, in a coma, but he was sufficiently coherent as he was taken to the ambulance, to name you as his attacker, and this has been supported by his cohorts, all of whom you equally knocked about.’ The Constable looked for a response, a denial, or a confession. Chas knew it made no odds either way, he was bang to rights regardless and was dreading what would happen now.

hopeChas’s plaintive cry, "But Roisin," was met with confusion and was very soon dismissed. The Headmistress intervened as the class, Miss Doyle, and Chas were dumbstruck, not that Chas could see anything; all was a blur to him, his sight and his memory. Certainly, he had dreamed of the day he would be able to pound to death Mickey Saint and his g**g and, in silent reflection, he thought a piece of four by two wood was a pretty good idea, but he couldn’t remember doing it? Did he do it? And whilst he mused in his little dream world, he could not avoid a generating a nervous grin and, realising his error, straightened his lips in panic, but they mischievously curved upwards again, his previously crimped innocent countenance cast aside.

innocent This was all the headmistress needed to affirm guilt and she beckoned the miscreant boy with a crooked finger that Chas could not see, but he did hear, ‘Larkin, come here boy and bend over.’

He was drawn into the ingesting voice of the cane swishing crone, longing desperately for a saviour. There was the suggestion of a temporary reprieve as Miss Doyle made a plea for sanity to prevail but was immediately dismissed from the classroom. Chas felt doomed as his only ally departed, challenging the decision, but with no authority to countermand. It was the way of the world and nobody knew this better than Chas Larkin.

Chas felt the back of his collar being seized and, he was tugged so hard, momentarily, his one good foot left the ground. His club boot dragged noisily on the wooden floor of the dais as he was yanked to the teacher’s desk, folded over and, to Chas’s excruciating embarrassment, the headmistress tugged down his PE shorts expecting to bare Chas’s underpants, but he had none. He hoped this would stop the Headmistress in her tracks, but it didn’t. She gained additional strength from the shocked communal sucking in of breath from the class of children, who up until now had hardly dared breathe. She held Chas’s head down and began swishing, barking in time admonishing comments as she stroked painfully hard. Chas cried out to stop, but this seemed only to enthuse the demented woman who made the strokes land harder. So, he stopped and bottled up all his cries and feelings and dreamed he had the four by two and could strike back. It was how he weathered and suffered the searing pain, which made it difficult to focus even on a safe haven as the Head explained, stroke by stroke, that after this beating he will be taken to the police station and charged with attempted murder.

All Chas could think was this would be a relief. Could a police cell be a safe haven? Eventually, the swishing stopped, and, beyond his internalised sobs, he now thought, what would his mum say? And then, what was the silence? He heard Roisin’s voice. That distinct lilt was increasing in vehemence as it got nearer and louder. It was a sound he had never heard before; she was raging.

He dared to look behind him and, across his striped lambent bottom, he saw in a blur, a red-headed Valkyrie land a powerful swinging punch to the chin of the headmistress who went careering across the classroom stage. The copper went to grab the girl, but she stopped him with a fearsome stare and, through gritted teeth said, ‘Don’t you lay a feckin’ finger on me bluebottle, or you will answer to me Dah and his O"Neill brothers.’

The copper stepped back and began to weigh up the multiple threats that faced him. The O’Neills were still an unknown quantity, but the Saints were brute force incarnate, what you call in the law enforcement field, a rock and a hard place.

In the meantime, Roisin had lifted Chas’s shorts, threatened the class blue b****y murder in the form of the wrath of the O’Neills if they grassed, ‘And that goes for you, woodentop,’ she added to the floundering copper. He nodded his understanding and passed an advisory glance to the headmistress who looked back at the unfolding events from the floor, not realising more was to come for her as Roisin grabbed the woman’s hair and towed her, feet scrabbling to catch up with this slip of a teenage gangly girl, who seemed to have such amazing strength. Roisin forced the woman to the desk, where she was folded over, and prone, the headmistress felt a cold draught as her skirt was lifted and Roisin tugged down her old girl’s bloomers and set about caning the viperous woman, calling out with each stroke what would happen to her should she consider becoming a "duck’s arse" and grass on her.

Considering Roisin had only been in London a short while, her assimilation of the cockney slang was quite remarkable and that was all Chas could think as he relished the humiliation of the headmistress. Although he did consider with stark realisation that his trip to Kilburn, the Irish sector of London, in a futile attempt at running away, had borne remarkable fruit. Pleased now he had walked all of that way not treading on one cracked paving flag.