AR’ BACK YARD

I honestly couldn’t feel my legs. Where the fuck had they gone? That was them right there in front of me wasn’t it? Yeah – they were still there… I could see them after all. So that was OK…at least I thought it was anyway. Shit! I think the question I should have been asking myself was where the hell my head was – Not my bloody legs.

The bag was filled with a powerful aroma that I’d always loved for some bizarre reason, despite what its actual contents did to me. The potent fumes were making their way through my mouth and nose like a hungry pack of wolves. As I opened my red raw eyes and tried to focus, everything around me was a haze of colours that blurred into one.

I pulled away the clear plastic bag that had covered the lower half of my face for the past five minu… hell, what was I saying - I had no idea how long the bag had been there. As I stared vacantly into the bag, its sides dripped with condensation as on a steamed window. I watched the spittle that had come from my gaping mouth spin and twist towards the yellow, rubbery substance that was to be found at the base of the bag.

I could hear the voice; at least I think I could. It was becoming louder and more urgent, at least I think it was.

‘C’mon Billllyyyy. Aren't you done with that bag of Evo yet ar’ kid?’ It was Scotty’s voice that I could make out. And even in my current state of mind, as the fumes from the glue continued to do their trick, I knew for certain that he was blatantly taking the piss out of me.

Yes, it was true that my name was Billy. However and he knew this better than anybody, I was never referred to by that name except by maybe my parents (or the police) Scotty, like everyone else had always referred to me as Chopper. The name referred to an old bike that I was never without back in the ‘70s. The name just seemed to have stuck as the years passed us by.

‘Ere’are Billy,’ laughed Scotty as my head rolled in slow motion towards what appeared to be his direction. ‘Ave some of this Chopper.’

He held in his hand – the hand which protruded comically like Mr. Stretch, from The Fantastic Four what appeared to be a gigantic spliff - although I realise now that it was probably no bigger than any normal sized joint we’d been slouched there smoking all afternoon.

I mumbled something that was obviously so incoherent that my best friend creased up in hysterics. His manic laughter gave him appearance of a psychotic clown on mind bending drugs. I took hold of the smouldering joint and pressed it tightly between my lips, inhaling even more crap that was only going to screw things up more than they already were.

But hey, what the hell? The two of us were only a couple of kids without pretty much a care in the world. All any of this was, was merely escapism from all that surrounded us on a day to day basis back in 1983. We did this, not because it was escapism. Quite simply, we did it because we enjoyed it; sniffing glue and smoking some freshly imported Skunk weed from Amsterdam, we were only thirteen years old after all. Enough time to grow out such shit. At least that’s what I kept telling myself, anyway.

‘What you laughing at Chopper?’ asked Scotty a little too intensely. He was paranoid.
I didn’t even reply I merely stared at Scotty O’Conner, as he twitched nervously, sprawled on floor against the wall where our latest piece of work was clearly on display. Graffiti, or Bombin’ as we preferred to call it, was part of lives back then.

We had just completed a new design featuring a couple of cat burglars we’d named Sneaker and Peaker. The empty spray cans were all around us, scattered between the empty beer crates and old decrepit barrels that looked as though they had been left there to rot back in the sixties. We were behind this filthy establishment known as The Greyhound. There was the stench that stank of old beer and even older piss. And there was another unpleasant aroma that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Or maybe that was merely the state we’d gotten ourselves into.

As I looked up to the dismal – yet very familiar – sky that hung heavily over the Salford skyline, I found myself smiling. It was a permanent perception that always appeared to hang so immensely over Manchester and its surrounding boroughs. There seemed to be a permanent impending peril of downpour at any given moment. Unlike anywhere else in the country, it always materialized at a moments notice.

As I glanced back down from the darkening clouds an intense array of colours protruded almost violently at me from all directions. The graffiti – the intense colours, the design itself was dancing my way and then the next as my hallucinations became, overwhelming.

In that precise moment with the clashing of the two opposites of what hung so dauntingly above me and what encircled me was like a scene that I seen only days before when Scotty and I had snuck into the cinema on Oxford Road and had watched a movie known as Rumblefish starring Mickey Rourke and Matt Dillon. I didn’t actually remember much about the movie itself as I was pretty stoned at the time and we merely ducked in there to escape the rain – other than it was filmed entirely in black and white apart from this scene with the fish that kept appearing – very bizarrely – in colour.

I glanced round at Scotty who was staring intently at his hands with the stupidest of smirks upon his long, drawn face that always appeared to be smiling back at you in any given situation. His appearance had always reminded me of that crazy mechanic character from the television show Taxi – I think it was Christopher Lloyd, but wasn’t certain.

There was no doubt in my mind that Scotty was my closest friend back then. His family had all emigrated from Northern Ireland to the streets of Manchester before Scotty had been born, though I didn’t think of them as emigrants, given the short distance.

We both lived in a part of Manchester known as Hulme. It was a large underdeveloped estate that had once been seen as a way forward, a solution around the inner city housing problems, which were so prevalent back then.

However, by then it was a sorry sight to look at; high rises with an endless amount of balconies upon balconies, decrepit flats that snaked their way around, making up the estate.

The city council had commissioned for the estate to be built as quickly as possible. A local company won the contract to build the flats and had put together, what can only be described as concrete jigsaw pieces in order to speed up the building process.

But as time passed, damage and decay began to take hold of it. And as we grew, we observed that over time, the estate ceased to belong to the city council in a manner of speaking.

Hulme became the resident’s estate; thus ensuring its rapid demise. The place was built up of mainly a mass of squats. A large percentage of people residing there never paid rent and never had any intention to. The way they saw it, Hulme belonged to them anyway. The way the two of us perceived it was quite simply this. Hulme was one giant playground for all ages, all sizes and all races. It was ours. Or so we liked to believe at that age anyway.

The two of us had been the best of friends for well over a decade already, doing just about everything together. We never went to school anymore, finding it much more educational to bunk off, dossing around both the estate and town.

We were both always in and out of trouble with the law, and had been since little kids. Scotty had always been like a brother to me. And with neither of us having any siblings of our own, the same could be said for Scotty’s feelings towards me. That’s the way it had always been. I imagined that it would never change.

The two of us did whatever we could to get by, money wise. Generally, we were going into town on a daily basis, shoplifting anything we could possibly get away with. We’d then blow the money made from our hauls on newly imported records or top of the range sports clothing such as Adidas, Nike and Kappa to name but a few.

With the rise of the hip hop and the Breakin’ craze that had arrived in the early eighties, we were always decked out in the expensive sports gear that was the staple of that sub culture back then. Basically we dressed as we wanted to and we’d just get wasted from smoking weed and sniffing glue.

So Scotty and I were just a couple of young scallies enjoying ourselves during a time of change.

We did what we did and didn’t care about anything or anybody else… I mean we were only a couple of kids right? So what did it matter anyway, right?

‘Fuck me!’ Scotty laughed, breaking my train of thought as my head began to clear. ‘We’re taking pure liberties ‘ere Chopper. If that landlord comes out the back door we’ll be fucked for sure.’

Suddenly remembering where we were, I shook my head. We‘d just sprayed our latest piece of graffiti (or bombin’ as we used to refer to it) against The Greyhound’s back wall, but we were actually here for more than that tonight.

The early evening had brought us round from our drug-addled state of consciousness. I said to Scotty, ‘We’ll be alright mate.’ I was smirking away like some complete idiot in my heightened state. ‘Don’t worry about it… ‘Ere have some more of this,’ I added, handing him back the bag filled with the potent Evo Stick Adhesive and watching intensely as he buried his comical face into it without a second thought.

Leaning back against the cold wall behind me and relighting the heavily loaded spliff, I began to inhale the pungent smoke. My head began to spin again as its density filled my lungs. I admired the piece that we had been working on, and full as I was with a mixture of glue, paint and weed fumes, the design suddenly became even more animated than before. The colours became so much more enhanced that they were almost dazzling to my eyes usually as I was only accustomed to dismal Manchester sky.

I swear that the two characters I’d designed Sneaker and Peaker were dancing all over the wall to an imaginary beat that was now pounding its way through into my own mind, I even began to rock back and forth the non-existent track.

Scotty was still smiling as he removed the bag form his face. He suddenly sat up straight, looking all serious. ‘You hear that Chopper?’

‘Hear what? What you on about Scotty,’ I sniggered, stoned out of my mind, still hallucinating intensely from the colourful artwork a moving before me. ‘I can’t hear shit.’ I shook my head frantically, my eyes rolling around, and the colours still blinding my perception of anything.

‘Shush… listen. Can’t you hear that?’ His face appeared to be actually strained with concentration. I’m sure that he even had his hand to his ear to enhance the audible noises that were buzzing about his head. The sight of this seemed really humorous to me and I began laughing feverishly. I’m not even sure why it seemed so bloody funny, but it did.

Suddenly the sound of shattering glass and screams and loud shouting brought the two of us round as we jumped to our feet without thinking. We both stared at each other for which seemed like an eternity, both frozen to the spot.

‘Fuck me!’ I gasped out loud, realising how shocked I must have looked as Scotty grinned at my expression. ‘This has gotta be it Scotty.’ As I said the words we both began laughing for no apparent reason – fuck. We were in a worst state than I had ever realised.

The next thing I was fully aware of was that the two of us were charging on unsteady legs in the direction of the commotion. We were completely wasted from the weed, glue and fumes from the spray cans. I don’t think either of us were at all sure exactly where the hell we were – or exactly what we were doing there.

But just as we emerged into the car park situated at the front of The Greyhound, reality momentarily kicked in.

Clear as day, we saw Paddy’s right arm slicing through the warm summer’s air with deadly accuracy and in his right hand, he was holding one ugly looking machete.

Fact was – it almost looked to be an extension of his arm. Paddy’s face was screwed up in sheer rage, giving him the appearance of a deranged psychotic inmate from the local psychiatric hospital.

But then Paddy always looked that way – whether he was enraged or not. He had the appearance of someone who had never had anything to smile about in life, forcing his features into a permanent scowl that was set in stone.

As the blade swished through the air I witnessed Paddy’s victim’s head swerve around violently towards to us as we stood rooted to the spot, unable to move as the violence unfolded before our very eyes.

The sharpened steel split open the left side of his face with no effort whatsoever. He made no sound as the flesh tore open, gaping. The dark crimson blood sprayed wildly from the wound, which ran the entire length of his face winding up in his short, dreadlocked hairline.

With no warning Scotty suddenly threw up the Jamaican jerk fried chicken and dumplings that we had ate earlier in the day from Sampson’s.

Totally ignoring this, I glanced rapidly from Scotty back to Prey, the victim, who merely grimaced at what must have been an agonising injury, just as the razor sharp blade again stuck viciously down with deadly accuracy...