Danny boy, p.1
Danny Boy, page 1
DANNY BOY
Barry Walsh
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023
Copyright © Barry Walsh 2023
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023
Cover photograph © Estate of Roger Mayne/Mary Evans Picture Library
Barry Walsh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008518615
eBook Edition © January 2023 ISBN: 9780008518622
Version: 2022-10-27
Dedication
For my ‘very own and golden’ daughters,
Megan and Rachel.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Estate
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Acknowledgements
Inspirations
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Barry Walsh
About the Publisher
The Estate
In an area known as the mucky hem on Westminster’s fine robe, the housing estate sat insolently close to a palace, a cathedral, an abbey and two royal parks. On three of its corners stood pubs that didn’t serve food; occupying the fourth was a working-man’s cafe that did.
Scattered untidily throughout the estate to meet the daily needs of its 1,800 inhabitants were: a newsagent, a grocer, a greengrocer, a hairdresser, a butcher, a cobbler and a laundromat. It was a walk to the market for a fishmonger, but there was always the chip shop.
1
August 1965
Ten o’clock on a balmy Saturday morning. The cafe’s door stood open. Danny Byrne waited outside, nose up, like a Bisto Kid, savouring the smell of frying bacon which, once he went inside, would disappear in the dominant but still comforting aroma of warm fat.
Almost seventeen and six feet tall, he wore jeans, basketball boots and a polo shirt. After a growth spurt during which only his bones had stretched, his muscles had finally caught up, thanks to extra weight training in the boys’ club gym. This summer, possessed of visible biceps, long-sleeved shirts were no longer needed to hide skinny arms.
He had recently been spending more time looking in mirrors for what he hoped would soon be good looks. His face, unlike his arms, hadn’t firmed up enough to be thought handsome, but he felt he was getting there, although what he considered slightly girly lips remained a worry. After checking himself briefly in the window, he stepped inside.
The cream tiled walls and Formica tabletops hardened the cacophony of cutlery scrape, plate clack and the raucous banter of men who had been at work before Danny had got out of bed. Rising above the noise was the clatter and ding of a pinball machine being taken to its limits.
Nobby Clarke’s slender fingers were tapping lightly on the flipper buttons, while his body moved as if a gyroscope generated oiled hip thrusts inside his arse-empty Lee Coopers, and smooth shoulder rolls inside a red Harrington jacket. In this way, he could seduce any pinball machine into giving up its prizes. In the presence of greatness, Danny hung back while Nobby repeatedly sent the silver ball up the sloping table, to be punched around by pulsing rubber bands and illuminated mushrooms. Nobby glanced over his shoulder and through thin lips clamped around a skinny six-strander, said, ‘Danny boy! Sweet!’
Another soft shag of his hips and the ball rifled into a clown’s face that spun until a buzzer signalled ‘replay’. He gave a vain shrug and trapped the returning ball in the armpit of a flipper. With his free hand, he took the roll-up from his lips and held it vertically between thumb and second finger as the Buddha might, if he smoked.
Warm, watchful eyes widened beneath a high forehead that eventually reached thin fair hair. Lighter still were the hairs of a moustache he was trying to grow: lengthy bum fluff that signalled its presence only when fingered to monitor growth, or in a wind.
‘All right, Danny?’
‘Yes.’
‘Want to play.’
‘Please.’
‘How many games?’
‘Three will do, thanks.’
Nobby gave a master’s smile for an apprentice who thought three attempts would be enough to score a replay. ‘Fancy yourself today, then?’
‘Piss off, Nob!’
Three goes for the price of one was excellent value, but such deals required discretion because the cafe’s owner, Angelo, had called time on Nobby trading replays for cash. Danny went to slip the sixpence into Nobby’s jacket pocket.
‘No, tell you what, I’ll have a cheesecake instead … and a tea.’ This would cost more than sixpence. Danny was about to mention it, when Nobby winked and resumed easy thrusting and flipping.
Cordelia Hill was behind the counter, wiping it down. She looked older than sixteen and, in her white coat, reminded him of Westminster Hospital’s young radiographers, who occasionally appeared in his night-time fantasies.
‘Hello, Danny.’
‘When did you start working here again?’
‘Last week … Hello Danny!’
‘Sorry, it’s just that I didn’t expect to see you, I thought you’d stopped working here.’
She smiled. ‘Nice surprise?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, with an enthusiasm that surprised him because her smile had beamed with more than familiarity. Dodds and Crockett had recently talked of her as fanciable but, even though he hadn’t seen her for a while, he wondered why he hadn’t noticed how attractive she’d grown. Probably, he reasoned, because their friendship had never been like that. It began in their primary school. At a time when boys who played with girls were called cissies, Danny had resisted ridicule to spend time with Cordelia because, like him, she often read a book at playtime. Starting with Enid Blyton, they began reading the same books, agreeing and disagreeing.
Unconcerned at first whether they were boys’ or girls’ books, they later drew lines, either side of which they accepted each other’s enthusiasm for the likes of Little Women or The Call of the Wild, but didn’t read them. This had stopped when Danny left for a boys’ grammar school but, on the rare occasions they met, they ended up talking about books.
Cordelia’s raised eyebrows told him she was waiting.
Danny gave her Nobby’s order and returned her smile, at which she pushed both palms over her ears to smooth blonde hair, even though it was already held neatly in a ponytail.
‘That’s a shilling please, Danny. Had your exam results yet?’
He gave her two sixpences. ‘Sometime this week.’
‘I’m sure they’ll be good.’
Yellow flecks lit her green eyes as they locked on to his, making him feel as if he’d left his curtains open. Extended eye contact bothered Danny: with boys it could lead to confrontation; with girls it was tricky. Her gaze stirred a strange excitement in him, as if they had walked together through a familiar door but into an unfamiliar room.
‘Hope so.’ He looked away, but not before she had seen in a bit.
Holding the large, chromed teapot with two hands, she filled a white mug, added milk, and popped the cheesecake on a plate. She pushed them towards him with a smile that died when Angelo passed by and prodded her backside.
She wheeled around, h and raised to slap. He held up a tea towel like a matador and grinned at Danny.
Rich from Angelo, who would pull the face off anyone who did that to his own daughter.
Yet, in his natural impulse to please, Danny hadn’t been able to stop himself returning Angelo’s grin. Cordelia noticed and gave him a look of silent fury. Instantly ashamed, he hoped he had got the brunt of her anger because Angelo paid her wages. She closed her eyes for a few seconds. When she opened them and turned to Angelo, it was with the controlled grimace of pretended tolerance. ‘Dirty old bugger.’
Angelo shrugged, disappointed that his bit of fun hadn’t been funny. ‘Sorry, lovely girl.’ He thwacked the towel over his shoulder and disappeared into the kitchen. Cordelia snatched her ponytail out of its rubber band, yanked her hair back through it three times, while glaring at Danny. ‘Anything else?’
He shook his head.
No, except he’d like to say sorry.
He hoped this unspoken response had shown in his face, as it was more honest than his smile for Angelo. If it had, Cordelia hadn’t noticed. He picked up Nobby’s tea and the London cheesecake with its topping of iced-coconut strings that had nothing in common with what non-Londoners call a cheesecake – except that it, too, didn’t taste of cheese.
Nobby now sat at a table. Danny gave him his shilling’s worth.
‘Sweet,’ said Nobby, who rose, hand twirling in a Regency courtier’s bow to usher Danny to the pinball machine. Four replays had been racked up, and a shilling sat on the glass top. ‘A little bonus for you.’
Unsurprised by Nobby’s generosity, Danny bridled at being patronised by his oldest friend. ‘Thanks.’
As he launched the first ball, he heard the scratch-patter of a dog’s unclipped nails on the quarry tiles. Banger, an overweight black Labrador, made for the counter where he sat and waited with imploring, seal eyes for anyone who might feed him. The noise in the cafe dropped. Behind Danny, the mouth-organ whine of laboured breathing grew louder. Before Danny could turn around, Gasping George had barged him aside in the way only very big men can, while leaving their victims unsure whether they’ve done it deliberately. Danny bumped into the pinball machine, causing all the lights to go out save for the illuminated ‘Tilt’ sign that signalled ‘game over’.
‘All right Pages?’ The ‘a’ in Pages disappeared in a wheezy dash to get it said before taking his next breath.
‘Pages’ was an old nickname for Danny, because from an early age he had carried a book or its torn-out sections to read whenever he was on his own and, to the irritation of his mother and friends, when he wasn’t. His mates no longer used the name, but George kept it going as a put-down for the local bookworm.
‘Yes, thanks George. You?’
Apart from being an ignorant, clumsy bastard.
‘Would be if there was a bit more oxygen in the world.’
George Kelly was a chronic asthmatic of brick shit-house dimensions, at whose approach people would move to the kerb. In his late forties, ruined lungs and huge bulk had him fighting for air after the slightest exertion. These days he got others to do most of his physical stuff but, under the flab, his muscles remained powerful. It paid to keep clear when he got upset, as he remained capable of three-yard rushes to nab victims and hold them in a crushing grip, while hissing in their ear to, ‘Fucking hold still till I get me breath.’
Arthur Reilly, Gasping George’s ginger-haired pilot fish, stood in the doorway, turning a matchstick over in his mouth while scanning the cafe like a hood covering his boss’s progress through a speakeasy. An unfortunate lack of space between his nose and top lip turned smiles into threatening sneers, but he became less scary every few seconds, when his face crinkled in a squeezed blink, as if everything he saw merited a double take.
Danny started another game. Reilly passed by. His shove was deliberate.
Tilt!
‘Oh dear!’ said Reilly, laughing, and pushed Danny again to emphasise the fun of it all.
‘You really must be …’ George snatched a shallow breath ‘… more careful, Arthur.’
Reilly stayed close, took the matchstick from his mouth and blinked into Danny’s face. ‘Well?’
A couple of years older than Danny but no longer bigger, Reilly reminded him of Abraham Lincoln with his loose-limbed strength and visible tendons on freckled forearms that could well have developed from chopping wood. Yet, for the first time, Danny wondered if he could take him. Reilly’s street radar picked this up. He blinked and stepped back to give himself room to swing.
‘Leave it!’ said George.
Reilly swaggered over to the counter. Danny started his third game but, in trying to steady his shaking hands, he gripped the table too tightly.
Tilt! He marvelled again, as everyone else did, how Nobby got away with all those gentle pulls and nudges without turning the lights out.
George raised an arm and in a wheezed command of low-volume menace, said, ‘Nobby, over here, my son!’ Tea in hand, shoulders slumped, Nobby got up and followed George as he made his way to a window seat that only strangers made the mistake of using.
He called to Angelo. ‘All right about the dog?’ A question he asked every time, never expecting an answer. He sat down and the noise level picked up again. Nobby waited. George took his tea away from him. ‘Have you drunk from this yet?’ Nobby shook his head. ‘How many sugars?’
‘Two,’ said Nobby.
‘This’ll do. Don’t forget your cake.’
Nobby fetched it.
‘Cheer up my son, I ain’t gonna bite,’ said George, and buried his teeth in the cheesecake. ‘Why don’t you get yourself another one?’
When Nobby turned to go, George slapped the table. ‘Money!’
‘Oh, sorry, George.’
Nobby pulled an envelope from inside his jacket and handed it over. George waved him away, extracted a slim wad of fivers, dropped the envelope on the table and flicked it to the floor. He counted the notes and tucked them into his ‘readies’ pocket on the front of his jacket: the top half of a suit that had never been out with the matching trousers. Nobby returned, put down his second mug of tea and remained standing.
‘No cake?’ said George.
‘Not hungry any more.’
George shifted his bulk, stretched out a leg and fiddled in his pocket to make more room for his right bollock. ‘What’d he say today?’
‘Who?’ said Nobby.
‘Who d’ya think?’
‘Nothing much, except that he was sorry to be a bit late.’
‘He didn’t have it all when we collared him yesterday. Wonder where he got the rest?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘How was his finger?’
‘Didn’t notice, George.’
Danny looked up from his game at the wrong moment and caught George’s eye.
‘Pages, my son! Here a minute.’ Danny felt a childish rage at not being allowed to finish and raised a just-a-minute hand. George rasped, ‘I ain’t got all day!’
At the same time, he shoved Nobby away. ‘Why don’t you go and finish his game for him.’
As they crossed, Nobby wouldn’t look at him and Danny felt a twinge of pity. Gone was the once smug satisfaction at being one of George’s crew, and the money that came with it, and the illusory status of driving around in his white Ford Zodiac. He was now a bullied runner for a man who frightened him.
‘Have a seat, Danny,’ said George.
His proper name: it must be serious.
George bared his teeth – his way of smiling – and rubbed a hand over his head as if hair grew on it, when all he had was a greying monk’s-worth circling below. ‘Now, my grammar-school boy, I might have a bit of work for you.’
George’s eyes narrowed when Danny didn’t answer.
Danny swallowed hard. ‘What’s that then, George?’
‘Want you to do a bit of work for me, like what Nobby does. Not so much taking messages or making collections … although I ain’t sure I can rely on him to do that like I used to.’ He shook his head. ‘No, something different.’
‘Oh, Nobby’s all right,’ said Danny without thinking but, on seeing George’s displeasure, added, ‘isn’t he?’
George closed one eye as if taking aim. ‘Not all right enough. Been having trouble finding those who owe me. Makes me look soft. Can’t be having that now, can I?’
‘No, George.’
‘Anyway, I want to make changes to the way I do things, become a little more, you know, professional. Some people reckon that because I’m common I’m also thick.’
