The eight boys aged between six and seventeen prowled warily around one another on the estate—aware of the tenuous bond they all resented. There were long periods of uneasy quiet, punctured by flurries of sharp but generally minor violence. Their father flitted between families, staying only until everything wasn’t going his way, then he’d move on and start again. He had no favorites—barely seemed to acknowledge the boys—and made no contribution other than drawing regular late-night or early-morning visits from the police.
Gary Lumsden was first taken into custody at the age of nine for stealing a tube of toothpaste from the corner shop. His mother had sent him for the toothpaste; she didn’t give him any money and Gary didn’t expect her to. The shopkeeper held his shirt so tight until the police came that Gary had red marks under his armpits for days.
He knew shoplifting was wrong, but only in an abstract way. At school it was wrong and at home it was all he knew. The thought of going to work somewhere, earning money, and buying stuff with it was alien to him; he had no experience of anyone in his family doing such a thing—and would have thought them foolish to attempt it. Toothpaste was in the shop; all he had to do was transfer it to his mother’s bathroom with the minimum of fuss.
The police came and took him home, instead of to the police station. The copper led him from the patrol car to the front door in a death grip that told Gary he’d like to do much more to him than this pointless exercise. Something inside the young Gary had understood that this wasn’t just about him; that the policeman’s rough handling had been primed by other, older experiences that Gary had no knowledge of. But for now he was at the sharp end.
His mother had been unable to muster the required sobriety to appear even vaguely interested in a policeman at her door and—apart from her later bitching about no toothpaste—that had been that. Given that Gary had been relieving the corner shop of its shabby stock since the age of four, his first brush with the law seemed a ridiculously small price to pay.
Mason Dingle occasionally “went away,” but he always came back and never seemed embarrassed, chastened, or changed by the experience, and Gary and Mark had no doubt that they would one day follow him into the family trade.
Until they saw
Suddenly Gary and Mark Lumsden were the good guys—staunch, courageous, noble—if only in their own minds. They stopped being famous footballers and gangsters and started being soldiers.
It wasn’t all good. At first, soldiers meant they moved from sneak-thieving and shoplifting to all-out noisy attacks, using threats, diversionary tactics, and confusion to cover their actions. Military strategy, they learned to call it.
There was a hiccup in their game when they found a dull black pistol in a box in the shed. It had MADE IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA down one side with the letters CZ inside a circle at either end of that. It was dirty and scratched and was the most beautiful thing either of them had ever encountered. For a heady six hours, Mark and Gary Lumsden held each other hostage, gunned each other down, pressed bruising rings into each other’s temples and backs with the muzzle of the pistol in a barely suppressed excitement of violence.
Then their father caught them with it and beat them both black and blue.
Mark had no ambition anyway and the beating laid to rest any daring he possessed regarding the CZ, but slowly—with the memory of the heavy pistol in his small hands always fresh—Gary started to aspire to a gun.
A big gun.
A gun he could call his own. A gun he would not even have to steal. A gun he could—possibly—fire at real people with minimal repercussions.
The British Army beckoned loudly, and Gary Lumsden was far from deaf.
He picked up leaflets, he called Freephone numbers; he learned that a criminal record would bar him from recruitment—and he cleaned up his act.
For seven years Gary Lumsden had talked and dreamed of little other than achieving that gun. He joined the army cadets and was the only boy who attended every week, come rain or shine. Intellect that had not been exercised in English or history classes was suddenly stretched by signals, rule books, drill patterns, boot polishing, and uniform pressing. He hated it all, but every shined button, every measured turnup, every jealous insult hurled by other blue-eyed boys on the estate—each brought him a few seconds closer to the gun.
And everything he’d been through—the pain, the hard work, the humiliation, the fear, the poverty—everything had become worth it the second he pulled that trigger and felt the rush of holding death in his hands.
Although his turn to shoot was over for now, Gary Lumsden did not join his mates in shuffling into a more comfortable position on the wet grass, or in turning to watch his fanned-out companions pull their own triggers.
