The outsiders, p.1
The Outsiders, page 1
Published in 2021
by Lightning Books Ltd
Imprint of Eye Books Ltd
29A Barrow Street
Much Wenlock
Shropshire
TF13 6EN
www.lightning-books.com
ISBN: 9781785632594
Copyright © James Corbett 2021
Cover by Ifan Bates
Typeset in Adobe Jenson Pro
The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
For Catherine
Contents
Prologue: Liverpool, 2021
Part 1: Liverpool, 1981
Part 2: 1989
Part 3: Nadezhda
Part 4: 1993-2021
Part 5: Sarah
Note on Historical Sources & Acknowledgements
Prologue: Liverpool, 2021
Paul couldn’t find it at first.
This secret garden lay hidden in one of the city’s best loved public spaces, amidst the cool shadows cast by the largest Anglican cathedral in the world. He had been here many times, but until a few moments earlier had never known of this little enclave within it.
The cemetery was an oasis in the middle of the city. Gravestones lined its walls, freeing the ancient burial grounds to serve as gardens that existed in a man-made valley between the street above and the cathedral’s Gothic magnificence. The sound of children playing in puddles after a recent downpour sang in the humid air.
Yet, in this corner, municipal order gave way to decay and neglect. Nature had taken over. Trees shot up from every free space of dirt they could find, wreaking chaos amidst the memorial stones. One grave-bed was uprooted by a tree, the roots pushing the headstone out of its resting place.
As he wandered deeper into the garden, the path began to get more cluttered as the fighting between trees for soil – and, ultimately, light – grew fiercer. The earth which wasn’t taken by the trees was claimed by bracken, fallen branches, dead saplings and browned leaves. All of it lay coated by moss or snared by ivy. Ivy crawled all over the back of one headstone and hung over its front like a wispy fringe.
Paul momentarily lost his balance, tripping on some low railings forged a century or more ago in a vain attempt to protect its crypt from invaders. All ownership had long since been ceded to nature, the inscription washed off its sandstone page by years of wind and rain. The next place along, a headless statue lay on a bed of rotting leaves. She looked peaceful in the brown mulch with her bedfellows: unripe horse chestnuts, a juvenile fern and a couple of snails. An open marble book sat over an accompanying tomb, its original inscription lost under the scrawl of faded graffiti.
In another spot, a clearing, poppies and other wild flowers lived, awoken from their seedlings by the sun which earlier had shone so intensely.
He read the inscriptions, looking for the name imprinted on his consciousness for four decades. Madeleine Reichwald: Sadly Missed, Lovingly Remembered. Robert Darwin: In Memory of My Father, His Daughter Sarah. Maurice Jones: Deeply Mourned. Samuel Cornish. Joseph Bellefied. David Andrews. Hannah Jones. Suzanne Pontremoli. Each one was sadly missed, lovingly remembered, deeply mourned. Each had the briefest epigraph. There were no pebbles left by visiting friends or family adorning the tops of headstones, no flowers. None had died after 1939. It was as if life itself had ended that year.
Then, at last, he saw what he had come for: a small white stone, more recent than the other memorials but nevertheless stained by decades of moss and lichen. The inscription, still bearing gold leaf, was modest for someone who assumed such importance, barely hinting at the many lives she had lived. He had thought of her so often over the years, but in the pursuit of her past had come to consider her almost solely as a foreign being, when this city which they once both called home – where she now rested – had formed such a central part of her existence.
He thought of her fate, of her end and how its mysteries consumed so much of his life. And then he started to cry. Barely suppressed tears at first, and then more sustained weeping. He stood there alone, crying until the rain came.
Part 1: Liverpool, 1981
1
You didn’t become a Liverpudlian simply by living there. You could be from the city, but not of it; call it home, but never really belong. Other cities chewed you up then spat you out, but Liverpool was different: it would turn up its nose and shrug you off with an ambivalence so damning that it made it feel as though you had never even fallen under its contemptuous glare. Everybody spoke of the sense of community, but once away from the vicinity of family, friends and neighbours, and out into the wider city, you were nobody. Because of the intra-city apartheid that seemed to rear its head in every loose encounter – the whole I’m more local than you swagger – everybody was, in their way, an outsider.
These things kept coming back to Paul as he made the journey from the suburban outlands and into the heart of the city where he was meeting his friends for a night out. In a vapid summer, the chance to see Echo and the Bunnymen at the university was one of the few fixtures in Paul’s calendar.
It was early evening and men in suits were disembarking from the Southport train to go home to their wives and children, their squares of garden and the last of the day’s sun. Liverpool had broiled again under clear skies and a high sun. Beyond the city the expanse of the Irish sea lay flat, brown and benevolent, the coastal breeze which usually cooled it on such days conspicuous by its very absence. The air was still and dense.
Liverpool also sweated under the gaze of a hundred television cameras as a media frenzy descended upon the city. Liverpool 8, the inner-city district that incorporated Toxteth, had exploded into violence after local residents took an aggressive stand against police brutality. Overnight it became a latter-day Saigon as journalists filled its streets and ran with the rioters. Buildings burned, vehicles were overturned and set alight, while youths hacked away at the wreckages, creating a makeshift arsenal of bricks and masonry. Social commentators lined up to condemn the moral degradation that bred the violence, while police deflected accusations of brutality by inviting camera crews into local hospitals, where entire wards were handed over to bruised bobbies. One man was dead, hundreds of others injured. Bishops appealed for calm; community leaders claimed the battles were over.
For the rest of the city, however, life carried on as normal. People went to work, women shopped, and children played. Concerned relatives telephoned from afar to check up on family, but in a city of suburbs Toxteth’s riots were a TV phenomenon for most people: remote, somewhere else.
With his parents, Paul watched the previous evening’s nine o’clock news with a rising sense of bewilderment as the sombre voice of Richard Whitmore spoke over footage of burning buildings: ‘Liverpool burns as its inner cities rampage.’ As the picture cut to a line of policemen forming across the top of a Victorian street, Paul’s father leant over and turned up the volume. The police held plastic riot shields in one hand, while in the other metal batons glistened menacingly. ‘One hundred and fifty injured as police battle rioters,’ said Whitmore and the picture cut to Margaret Thatcher climbing from a ministerial Jaguar and up the steps of 10 Downing Street. ‘The Prime Minister convenes an emergency meeting of the cabinet as tensions rise and police anticipate more trouble this evening.’
‘It’s the darkies,’ Paul’s father pronounced. ‘On the rampage because one of their lot got pulled over by the police.’
Paul winced at his father’s easy distillation of the report. His mother walked urgently towards the netted curtains and looked out anxiously onto their darkened cul-de-sac. There was a sudden nervousness about her, as if a mob might also come rampaging down their little street several miles away.
But the riots, although just eight miles away, may as well have existed on another planet.
* * *
‘Have you ever heard of Nadezhda Semilinski?’ Paul’s best friend Christopher had asked him three weeks earlier. It was late, and they were sat out in the sand dunes after a night drinking at their local pub, The Swan. They were accompanied by a half-bottle of whisky, which they passed between themselves, swigging the burning liquid as marram grass flicked in their ears and sand filled their shoes.
‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’
‘She’s a poet. She was big in the Sixties and won all sorts of awards. She’s local, like.’
‘She doesn’t sound very local.’
‘I mean she lives in the city. I think she was a Jewish immigrant from after the war.’
He changed the subject and they started talking about football. It was close season, a time of wheeler-dealing and expectation. Previous disappointments palled in the hope that new signings and fresh momentum made for a successful new campaign. To them, football and all its possibilities offered unending topics for conversation, but by the time the whisky bottle had less than an inch o f liquid in its bottom, the boys, drunk and tired, had run out of talk. They lay in the sand, their eyes glazed with fatigue, silently looking up at the stars.
Christopher was a handsome green-eyed boy; his black hair was matted with Brylcreem and brushed artfully into a quiff that was incongruous to any prevailing fashion, but which he somehow managed to pull off. He possessed a silent charisma, an intensity that gave him presence among his suburban friends. He and Paul had been friends, best friends, for as long as either could remember. There was a bond between them that made each to the other like the brother they had never had. But like all brothers they were at once friends and adversaries, and this unspoken rivalry, which seemed to heighten as they grew older, seeped beneath their kinship.
Paul knew Christopher had no interest in poetry, no interest in anything, really; but sometimes he dropped the name of an avant-garde or cult figure to create the impression that he was cultured, that he knew more than he actually did.
Christopher took a swig from the whisky bottle. ‘Here, you finish this,’ he said, passing the dregs to Paul. He took a mouthful and looked up at the stars, the whisky burning his throat. After a minute’s silence, Christopher spoke. ‘You know I mentioned the poet,’ he said, ‘There was a reason.’ He sat up. ‘I pulled her daughter earlier today, at the beach.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘What’s it to you?’ he said, sullenly. ‘You’ve never even heard of this esteemed poet anyway.’ He was quite drunk now, slurring ‘esteemed’ so that he sounded as if he were mocking the poet’s credentials.
His womanising was at once a self-created myth and a reality. Amongst a circle of friends that coveted girls, but outside school rarely came into contact with them, no one quite knew how to unpick the truth from his idle boasting. Christopher claimed to have lost his virginity when he was thirteen, though no one believed him. And yet for years he was seen again and again with one or other of his twin sister Helen’s friends on his arm before he cast them away, as though it were his inviolable duty to work his way through them all. Rarely did he bring his two worlds into contact, friends and girlfriends, as though one might test the limits of the other. At the same time he used this purported prowess as a stick to beat his other friends, particularly Paul. Nothing was more wounding to a teenager than to be tarred with the truth: you’re a virgin.
But Paul had learned not to rise to him, and so merely shrugged his shoulders.
‘It’s true,’ said Christopher. ‘I got off with her and I’m seeing her again tomorrow.’
It was nearly one am now, and as they ambled drunkenly home the streets were entirely empty. ‘She’s called Julia,’ Christopher told him, slurring her name. He was so drunk now that Paul knew he was incapable of lying coherently. ‘She’s dark and pretty – like me!’ Paul joined him in laughing at his own joke. ‘She’s from out Aigburth way. And she’s a Jew, man! She’s a Jew!’ This seemed an impossibly exotic notion, for neither knew any Jews. Indeed they knew very few non-Catholics whatsoever. ‘She’s lovely, Paul!’ he said. ‘Very lovely indeed!’ And then he added caustically, ‘When are you going to get a lovely girl, Paul?’
But Paul was too tired and drunk to respond to his taunt, or even be upset by it. He was intrigued by this new girl: he knew nobody like that. Everyone in his world was Catholic and they were the sons of doctors, social workers, teachers, taxi drivers, civil servants, or, like him, a tax inspector. If there was foreign blood in their veins it was Irish or Welsh. They were workers, not creators or artists. He had never met anybody who had published a word. For Paul, such people existed only on the pages of newspapers, books or on film. To be a writer was something exotic, alluring and entirely foreign.
Indeed this notion of a Jewish poet’s daughter would not leave his head. Even when he entered his home, climbed the stairs, and sat on the edge of his bed, emptying sand from the inside of his shoes, the poet’s name sang in his drunken mind:
Nadezhda Semilinski, Nadezhda Semilinski.
* * *
In snatched conversations over the next few weeks, in between Christopher’s forays ‘shagging around the city’, his friend gave updates on his new girlfriend.
‘She’s different to all the rest,’ he said, lowering his voice and smiling. ‘There’s something about her; she’s smart and sensual and worldly. She’s something else. She’s not just easy. Quite the opposite. I get the sense that she’s always testing me, seeing what I’m like.’
‘But she still puts out only a few days after meeting you.’
Christopher gave him a delighted smile and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Jewish girls, eh?’
Had he met her mother yet, the poet?
Christopher lit another cigarette and blew out a small cloud of smoke. He shook his head. ‘It’s very strange,’ he said. ‘They live in this huge dilapidated house, but she stayed in her room the whole time. “Her rooms” is how Julia describes them, like they’re a separate part of the house. It’s a bit weird. She’s spoken about in the past tense, as if she’s dead.’
‘I’d never even heard about her before last week,’ Paul admitted.
‘Nor had I,’ Christopher said. ‘I think she was quite famous. Faber published her – I saw her books.’ He pulled himself even nearer to Paul and said in a low, conspiratorial tone, ‘I think there was some sort of great scandal, some sort of disgrace that turned her into a recluse.’
* * *
A few days later, Paul was introduced to the new girlfriend. They gathered in the Caernarfon Castle, a city centre pub that was dark and cool and smoky.
Like Liverpool itself, the pub seemed to carry equal measures of faded elegance and seediness. It had ornate tiled floors, and an intricately carved balustrade around the top of the mirrored bar, showcasing the landlord’s collection of Dinky cars. A barman arranged ashtrays on the mahogany counter. Sitting around it, old men idled on their own, reading copies of the Liverpool Echo and drinking mild. It was an eccentric place: a mix of office workers, male pensioners waiting for their wives to finish shopping, a couple of purple-faced ex-dockers stuck to the bar as permanently as the brass rail, and curious onlookers like himself, hopelessly out of place.
He ordered a pint of bitter and sat at an empty table, overlooking the pub. In the pit of his stomach there was a hint of nervousness, as if he were about to be examined or judged.
And then, quite abruptly, the poet’s daughter was sat opposite him, shaking his hand, telling him how pleased she was to meet him. She was rakishly thin and as tall as him, taller than Christopher by several inches, which surprised Paul. Her long black hair curled around in a demi-fringe and flicked on her white, flawless face. Her cheeks arced elegantly over high, strong bones and she had intent brown eyes. It was a strange face, certainly beautiful, but in a way that was different to other girls he’d met – although he couldn’t quite decide why. Maybe it was because she looked like she belonged on a film set and not some backstreet Liverpool pub. She seemed to exude a confidence that came with knowing she was beautiful.
‘It’s a proper old man’s pub, isn’t it?’ she said, gesturing around. Christopher was at the bar, ordering drinks. She spoke in an oddly inflected accent that hinted only slightly that she was of the city. ‘My mother calls these sort of fellas “twerlys”.’
‘Twerlys?’
‘As in the sort of blokes that badger bus inspectors: “Am I too early to use my bus pass?”’
Paul was momentarily perplexed, then laughed and the unease lifted. She grinned back.
She was a foundation art student, a contemporary of Christopher’s twin, Helen. She was funny and vivacious and talked of art, cinema and music as easily and knowledgeably as his own friends talked about their twin passions of football and beer. Christopher leered all over her, pawing at her like a middle-aged man with a much younger mistress. She paid scant attention to her boyfriend, talking intently to Paul, seeming to revel in anybody’s company other than her boyfriend’s. Paul had half-expected a loose girl who exuded sexual charisma, but there was no hint of this. They looked an odd couple and he wondered what she could possibly see in his friend.
