LITMIR.BIZ

      Comanche Spite

      John and I are playing knockout. The game involves kicking the plastic football at a goal on the primary school wall and, with one touch, returning it on target, a sort of football squash. The rules are enforced as much by what we hear as what we see. The goal is an oblong of cement render surrounded by glazed bricks. Hitting its crumbling surface makes the flat sound of goal; striking both render and brick is post and the ping of ball on brick, means a miss. Neither of us is trying to win but simply to keep the game going in satisfying thuds that eventually bring Mrs Johnson to the front door of her prefab.

      ‘Boys, I hope this wretched game will be over soon, the Archers is starting shortly.’

      Plump Mrs Johnson is Akela for the local cub pack. Her loud voice is ideal for conducting games for excited small boys in the church hall but she has trouble speaking quietly, even when she’s standing close. At Sunday Service, hymns don’t really get going until she joins in.

      ‘OK, Mrs Johnson.’

      ‘Thank you, Billy.’ She gives me smile and goes back indoors.

      John kicks the ball extra hard against the wall. ‘OK Mithith Johnthon.’ He points to the sign on the nearby lamppost. ‘This is a bloody Play Street!’

      In Play Streets, kids have priority and passing cars have to slow to walking pace. No one knows this better than John. When motorists toot him to get out of the way, he goes into slow motion, or kneels down in the road to do up a shoelace. If they toot again, he puts his hands on his hips and tells them that kids have rights here.

      He’s a natural resister, who meets requests or orders with silence or slow, sullen acceptance. His standard answer to challenges from other kids, no matter how big they are, is ‘gonna make me?’ He prefers to leave me to do the talking when adults ask questions but he’s quick to attack goody-goodness. Grown-ups like me. Kids prefer John.

      Michael O’Rourke is perched on the end of Mrs Johnson’s garden wall. Behind him, smoke rises from a concealed cigarette. Between hunched, furtive drags, he looks up and down the street like a spy in a doorway. He blows the smoke down between his legs and his fat cheeks flap out to ‘thtup’ real and imagined bits of tobacco from the tip of his tongue, followed by a squirt of saliva through the gap in his top front teeth. Michael admits to being a ‘heavy ould lad’ and his bulk makes describing sport easier than taking part. He’s reporting our game as if it’s the Cup Final.

      ‘A great attempt by Billy Driscoll, roising star of English football … and what a clearance from his kid brother, surely de foinest young fullback in de country.’

      Today he’s broadcasting from his commentary box but he often strolls around in the middle of our football or cricket matches, speaking into an imaginary microphone. It’s like having Kenneth Wolstenholme or John Arlott down on the pitch. However, Michael’s knowledge of cricketing terms remains extremely Irish. ‘Driscoll is after firin’ de ball past de bowler’s kisser.’

      Michael loves all things American, especially Westerns and gangster films. So do we, but he wants to be an American. In the weeks after he arrived from Ireland, we knew him as ‘Gene’, after the cowboy, Gene Autry, until we heard his mother call him Michael. When explaining, he said, ‘Tell me now, what kinda cowboy, goody or baddy, was ever called Michael?’ He had a point.

      I was delighted when he christened me ‘the Kid’ to go with my name and, with most of the street cowboys, I was won over by his colourful language in our Wild West games. Outdrawing the fastest gunslingers and saving settlers from marauding Indians had never been more fun. And he’d never say, ‘stick ’em up’ when he had enemies cornered; instead he’d slowly waggle his revolver under their noses and say, ‘Now I’d be obloiged if ye’d be after hand’n me your weapons, and den reachin’ for de skoy.’ Sometimes, in the heat of battle, he’d confuse cowboys and gangsters, ‘vamanos muchachos, dey’re packin’ heat’ or ‘dirty hoodlums are speaking wid forked tongues’.

      We no longer play cowboys but Michael continues to ‘mosey on home’, eat ‘chow’ and greet you with ‘howdy’.

      Further along, Madge Smith’s son, little Jojo, is astride the same wall, spurring it to a gallop while swivelling left and right to fire his cap guns at chasing Indians. He’s wearing a fawn Roy Rogers hat that was once John’s pride and joy. He gave it – grudgingly – to Jojo last year when I told him he was too old to be playing cowboys. John wanted so badly to be a real cowboy. Even now, it irks him that the Wild West is no longer a place he can go to fight outlaws and Indians.

      Cowboys are the kind of men we all want to be. Other TV heroes like Robin Hood, William Tell or Ivanhoe can’t hold a candle to Flint McCulloch in Wagon Train, Bronco Layne or scary Richard Boone in Have Gun Will Travel – it’s something to do with guns or ‘equaloizers’, as Michael calls them. In the cinema, our favourite is Audie Murphy whose films we sit through at least twice when they’re showing at the Biograph.

      Jojo is blasting away when, worse than Indians, he sees David Griggs loping up behind him. ‘Griggsy’ is the son of ‘Scrapman’ Griggs, who rides around calling out for ‘old iron’ or ‘any lumber’ from a cart pulled by a muscular skewbald pony who is as gentle as a lamb, until he gets near enough to bite.

      Like his dad, Griggsy is a street scavenger, only he takes stuff from other kids: sometimes sweets, sometimes money and – always – any fun they might be having.

      He’s a year older than I am but we were in the same class for the last year of primary school as he was too thick to go on to secondary school. He hates anyone cleverer than him, which is most people – especially me, ever since an encounter at the bus stop on Vauxhall Bridge Road. As a bus approached, he jabbed me in the back because I hadn’t put my hand out to hail it.

      ‘You want this bus?’

      I couldn’t help myself. ‘Why, are you selling it?’

      He jumped ahead of me on to the rear platform and as he grabbed the white pole, swung a fist into the side of my head. ‘That’s all I’m selling today, shitbag, very cheap.’

      Pretty good for a moron.

      Today he’s wearing a baggy plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up his beefy arms and, even in high summer, he’s in heavy brown corduroy trousers held up with braces. He bounces towards us on spring heels that launch him on to the balls of his feet the moment they touch the ground. He comes to a halt in front of us, rising and falling on the spot like a nasty copper.

      Jojo sits petrified on his brick horse as if the whole Sioux nation has appeared on the skyline. Michael stares at the ground and I smile an appeasing welcome. John, who smiles only when he finds something funny, waits.

      ‘Gis a kick then, brains.’

      This is no friendly request to join in. I pass him the ball. He steadies it and thumps it against the wall. The kick is hard and uncontrolled, like Griggsy himself. The loud thud on the bricks is intimidating and he knows it, but he’s missed the goal. This angers him and he smashes the returning ball back at the wall; another miss! He makes a mess of retrieving the rebound and lurches after the ball. Once he has it under control, he folds his arms and scans us for any sign of piss-take for his complete absence of skill.

      Why doesn’t Mrs Johnson or, better

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