"Fat Bird?" asked Tony, referring to a much-frequented council estate pub, actually called 'The Swan'. None of its clientele had ever seen a swan in real life, up close, and to be fair the faded pub sign portrait did resemble a kind of fat, white chicken. We were packing our bags at the end of the school day (or, more precisely, at the end of our school day - it was 2.30pm and we had had quite enough).
The walk to the pub, a little over a mile, was relatively scenic. Many of the boarded-up terraced houses had overgrown front gardens, which were a haven for sparrows, starlings and the odd rat, although the latter tended to keep inside the buildings themselves, beyond the reach of marauding tabbies. In the near distance stood high raise tenements blocks, quite beautiful in their own way, windows winking in the sun like the flashing scales on some reptilian colossus.
Tony kicked an empty beer can. It leapt off the pavement and grazed the hub of a parked car, the geriatric owner of which was lounging in a deckchair in his untidy front yard (one of just two occupied properties on the street). The man gave a half-hearted rebuke, and was shown the finger.
"Cocky prick," muttered the old man. Tony shouted something obscene in reply. He was normally economical with words, preferring to brood and speak only after a long consideration of what he would say, but in this instance it was a knee-jerk reaction. Swearing when sworn at was like flinching when hit, or recoiling from a hot implement.
We reached the pub a short time later. It was, like most council estate drinking holes, a poorly lit and generally quite depressing affair. The air inside was thick with smoke and dust, and the linoleum floor was sticky with spilt drinks. The corrosive tang of cleaning products wafted through from the toilets. (At least they used cleaning products, I suppose - better than the smell of the toilets themselves.)
"Usual please, Smithy," said Tony, and the skinhead behind the bar nodded moodily. A minute later we had our respective palms around two pints of snakebite, each with a dash of what the publican claimed to be blackcurrant cordial, but which was in fact Ribena decanted from a child's half-empty carton.
We drank for the most part in silence. This was not unusual; neither of us were especially chatty. I considered mentioning Gareth's blundering into the bathroom, but decided against it. In spite of being the pervee to Gareth's perver, the whole curious episode was one I preferred to forget.
Eventually Tony piped up. His sister's boyfriend's sister was having a party that evening, he said. Should we go? I mulled it over.
"Not sure if I want a late one," I said. "It's a Tuesday, after all."
"So?" said Tony. "Bunk school, have a lie-in."
It was an attractive prospect. Tabby and Darren didn't really care whether I went to school or not. Their task was merely to ensure I survived in order that they could claim benefits in respect of me. To be honest, even if I did die, I wouldn't have put it beyond them to continue collecting benefits - a bit like those stories you hear of Japanese families continuing to draw their grandfather's state pension, years after he's given up the ghost. I read somewhere that one family had effectively mummified the corpse in the old boy's bedroom, telling prying officials that he was very ill and in no condition to receive visitors. There was, I suppose, a kernel of truth in the statement. Or perhaps not - being dead doesn't mean you can't receive visitors; it simply means you won't contribute much to the conversation.
Tony and I arrived at the party at a little past 9pm that evening. We were with the preposterously-named Darth (his parents were Star Wars fans, and hadn't grasped that, in the SW universe, "Darth" is an prefixed honorific for Sith Lords and not a name in itself; the approximate equivalent of naming a child "Mister" or "Reverend"), from whose house we had recently emerged. Darth's brother, called Spotty Luke (although not to his face), was a local dealer and had sold us a small amount of weed at marginally preferential rates. We had smoked in his bedroom until his mother came home, at which point we moved into the bathroom, where the ventilation fan - Darth explained - would help to extract the smell. What his mother imagined we three were doing crowded in the bathroom, I don't know.
The door was opened by an Asian-looking girl of about nineteen.
"Yes?" she said, giving her most sullen, proprietorial stare. This was Naeha, Tony's sister's house-mate. She invariably pretended not to know us.