The Runners Read online

  Every Saturday morning Anto brought Bobby and Jay on a sixty-minute run. Out past Fairview Park and along the coast road to Clontarf and the wooden bridge that Bobby always thought was going to collapse. Jay would bounce up and down, holding on to the side of the bridge, trying to make it shake. It would give Bobby a horrible, nervous knot in his stomach.

  ‘Running is great for the cardiovascular system,’ Bobby would explain.’

  ‘The what?’ asked Jay.

  ‘The heart.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you just say that?’

  ‘Because that’s what it’s called.’

  Anto liked the quiet and breathing in the sea air as he ran.

  ‘I’m sick of listening to the two of you, will you shut up and concentrate.’

  Anto knew how to shut them up. He would pick up the pace of the run to a point where they were just about hanging on and unable to speak.

  ‘I’m moving into a house on Foster Terrace. It’s number 8, four houses down from Ballybough Road,’ announced Anto. ‘Call over when you get back.’

  Anto sprinted away from the two of them with a few miles left. Bobby stared at the size of the muscles in his legs as he disappeared into the distance.

  Foster Terrace was parallel to Sackville Avenue. Ardilaun Road, where Bobby lived, joined the two roads together.

  ‘I’ll need a hand moving some of my stuff. The garden is in bits too, so I’ll have some work for the two of you.’

  ‘Now Jay will call you a poshie!’

  Jay would slag Bobby, saying he was a poshie because he lived in a house. He couldn’t have really meant it, because his flat was bigger than Bobby’s house, and his mam worked and was on the social welfare, whereas Bobby’s dad was just on the social welfare. Bobby hated it when he called him a poshie. Kevin was a poshie. He had oxblood Doc Martens and a fringe. The one thing Bobby didn’t want to be was a poshie. He wanted to be a Ballybough boy, just like Jay.

  Bobby’s mam said that the people in the flats were different. Bobby didn’t think they were different, he wanted to be like the people in the flats. He thought all people were the same. Some just had more money than others.

  From the front balcony of Anto’s house you could see the houses on Foster Terrace, and all the way down Ballybough Road to the Tolka River. You could see four of the seven pubs in Ballybough from the front balcony and the other three from the back. That was an average of one pub every one hundred metres.

  Inside the house, Anto had all his stuff in boxes. One was marked ‘Boxing Videos’.

  ‘How many boxing videos have you got?’ asked Bobby.

  ‘So many I’ve lost count. I have all the classic fights.’

  Bobby didn’t have a video recorder. Neither did Jay.

  ‘Can we watch a few of them?’

  ‘You can watch them all if you get these boxes around to the house and bring this video up to a friend of mine.’

  Anto handed them a video with the Thriller in Manila written on the side. It was in a snap-shut box and had a picture of Ali with the world title belt on the front and back.

  ‘Here you go. Johnny is another boxing fan. He lives in number 19 in the Strand flats.’

  Bobby hated everything about the Strand flats. It was rival territory. He felt safe in Ballybough flats. Jay was fearless and Bobby kept his agitation to himself. The stairwells were the same as Ballybough flats. They had the same smell. It was a lingering smell of urine, mixed with boiled cabbage and the rubbish bins that overflowed from the shop at the entrance to the stairs.

  Bobby couldn’t understand why people would pee in their own stairwells. Or throw bags of rubbish on the ground outside their front door. The smell in one stairwell of the Strand flats was smellier than all the stairwells put together in Ballybough flats.

  There were forty-two steps to get to the top. Each step was eighteen inches wide on the left-hand side going up and two inches wide on the left hand side coming down. Bobby and Jay never walked up or down the stairwells. They would sprint flat out to limit the amount of toxic fumes going up their nostrils.

  Number 19 had a yellow door, with no knocker or bell. It used to have two frosted glass panes, but now it had plywood nailed on from the inside. The remnants of the old glass pane were sticking up from the corner of the window frame.

  Jay gave a loud knock on the plywood. Johnny answered the door. Shirtless and skinny.

  ‘Howyis lads, me oul friend Anto is a good lad. What video did he send you up with?’

  ‘The Thriller in Manila,’ said Bobby.

  ‘Ah, great, Cassius Clay and George Foreman, lovely stuff, happy days. Tell me oul friend Anto I’ll see him later. Nice one, nice one.’

  The door closed and Bobby looked at Jay.

  ‘Last one down is a bag of shit.’

  The two of them took off down the stairs, Bobby just ahead of Jay. They got about half way down and flew around the constant bend, swerving to avoid somebody on the way up. Bobby stopped to apologise, and Jay kept going, shouting ‘bag of shit’ as he passed. Bobby turned to say sorry and realised it was Angela.

  ‘Eh, he wasn’t calling you a bag of shit, we were racing down and last one down was a bag of shit.’

  ‘You are the bag of shit, so,’ smiled Angela.

  Bobby couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  ‘Are you all right, you bag of shit?’ shouted Jay from the bottom.

  ‘You’d better go.’

  ‘OK, see ya.’

  Bobby turned to walk away and glanced behind to get one last glimpse. Angela turned at the same time and smiled.

  ‘What were you doing up there?’

  ‘I told Angela you fancied her, she is going to call over to you later.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘She’s not bad though, is she?’ asked Bobby, not knowing what Jay’s response would be.

  ‘Not bad for a nig…nig… Ballybough girl!’

  Jay would never call her a nigger. She was the only black girl in Ballybough. He knew Bobby fancied her. Bobby knew Jay did, too. She was so beautiful that Bobby could never imagine her fancying him. He had never kissed a girl. His brother had. He had overheard Kevin talking to his friend about kissing a girl called Cheryl at a school disco. Bobby was too young to go to a school disco. He kissed his pillow at night pretending it was Angela. He knew you were supposed to use your tongue, but he didn’t know what you were supposed to do with it. The pillow was too dry to lick, so he just tipped his tongue off it instead.

  It was a really short walk up the avenue and down the four doors to Anto’s new house. Jay took the key out and opened the door. They put the first two boxes in the living room at the front of the house and made seven journeys up and down the avenue, carrying Anto’s belongings. He let them watch Ali v Frazier when they were finished their work. It wasn’t an original. Anto had a way of copying videos: he had two video recorders and he hired all the boxing videos he could find. And he copied and sold them. Ali v Frazier was his favourite. They had fought each other before, but the Thriller in Manila was their last, brutal fight. President Marcos of the Philippines had paid them millions of dollars to bring the fight to his country. And, because of time-zone differences, it had to be staged at the hottest part of a sweltering day, so that viewers in America could watch the fight live. Anto told them all the details before leaving them to watch the fourteen rounds. He was an encyclopaedia on boxing. Jay and Bobby were transfixed by the brutality. Ali and Frazier had once been friends. Frazier had given Ali money when he was banned from boxing for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. In the build-up to their fight in the Philippines, Ali had goaded Frazier, calling him a gorilla and an Uncle Tom. Bobby didn’t know what an Uncle Tom was.

  ‘Did you like the fight?’ asked Anto.

  ‘It was amazing, how many more have you got?’

  ‘I have them all.’

  Anto gave them a fiver each for their two hours’ work.

  ‘That won’t be the end of it lads, if
you’re interested in more work around the house. I’m going to paint it and gut the garden. There’ll be a lot more fivers. It’ll be great exercise too.’

  Bobby and Jay were delighted. A fiver was a lot of money. Bobby only got twenty-five pence for his pocket money. He didn’t tell his mam. He knew she’d say ‘that’s too much money’. Bobby’s dad used to have a car, but he had amassed a thousand pounds in parking fines and had received a two-year driving ban for another traffic offence. Bobby didn’t know what the offence was. His dad didn’t believe in using parking meters or in reading the fine that would appear on the window as a result. He was eventually summonsed to court, where he agreed to pay a fiver a week to the parking fines man, who would always call to the house on a Friday evening around seven o’clock. Bobby’s mam either took a fiver out of her purse to give to Bobby for him, or he was told to say that there was nobody home. Bobby knew that, at five pounds a week, the man would be calling for a long time. In one hundred weeks, he would have handed over five hundred, so it would take two hundred weeks to pay off the fines. Nearly four years. He had heard a row one Friday night after his dad came home from the Sunset. Bobby had been told to say his dad wasn’t in when the fines’ man called. His mam was shouting at him that if they didn’t pay the fines, he would end up in prison. He didn’t go to the Sunset the next Friday. The fines man got paid. When he had sold the car after the driving ban, he had got fifty pounds for it. It was a Morris Traveller and a banger. Bobby was embarrassed getting into it. The floors in the back had holes in them, so if you sat in there you had to be careful your feet didn’t touch the road as the car was moving.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘I’ll have the seven bananas for a pound special please.’

  ‘Here you go, love.’

  Bernie put the fruit in a plastic bag and handed it to the customer. The young woman opened the bag and took out one of the bananas. It had black spots on it. It was very ripe. Bobby hated them with black spots. He preferred them a little bit green. They were a bit drier and didn’t have as much of a banana taste off them. He couldn’t eat them at all if they had a black spot on the inside of them.

  ‘Can I have the greener ones instead, please?’ asked the woman.

  Bobby knew what she meant. The ones she had been given would be too ripe within hours.

  ‘If you want to choose them yourself, it’s only five for a pound.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘That’s the way it is, if you don’t like it you can go somewhere else.’

  The fruit sellers were like actresses and Bernie was queen amongst them. Her mother had been a fruit seller before her. They were constantly putting on a show. They would always be gathered in groups of two or three, and when anyone stopped at their stall they would invariably say, ‘Do you want something, love?’ like you were interrupting a good chat. They never had lessons in customer service; they made up the rules themselves. One side of Moore Street had fruit sellers; the other side had fish sellers. The smell on the street was horrible. On a summer’s day there would be loads of bluebottles flying around the fish. The sellers just laid the fish out on their tables. Flies or not, people still bought the fish. Molly Malone had sold cockles and mussels on Moore Street. It was mainly cod and whiting now, with the odd bluebottle thrown in for free. Bobby had never seen a cockle or a mussel.

  The city centre was a ten-minute walk from Ballybough. There was a brand-new shopping centre built beside where Jay’s ma worked her stall. The people at the Ilac Centre thought it would be a good idea to put a fountain in the middle of it where people could throw their pennies. Jay thought it was a good idea too. He had longer arms than Bobby and could reach in farther. The security guard caught them one day and kicked them out. Not before Jay got fourteen pennies. They bought two JR ice pops and licked them all the way home. The fountain was eventually emptied of water because there were loads of people stealing the pennies.

  ‘Come on into Dunnes Stores and I’ll show you the jeans.’

  When they did go into the shops in town, they would be followed by security, or not let in. Bobby knew it was because they were inner-city boys. Some shops were more security conscious than others. Jay decided he wanted to buy a new pair of jeans with the money they were getting from Anto. And if Jay wanted a pair, then Bobby had to have a pair too.

  The two of them went in and didn’t get followed. The jeans were on the second floor of Dunnes. An escalator took them up. They walked past the shoes and jumpers and there they were. About ten different types of jeans to choose from.

  Bobby picked up a pair of light blue jeans that had a dark blue line running down the side. It was barely visible.

  ‘What do you think of these, Jay?’

  ‘Not bad, try them on.’

  ‘No, this is my size. I don’t need to try them on.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, try them on, I’m going to try on this black pair.’

  ‘They are twenty pounds.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You haven’t got twenty pounds.’

  ‘I’m only trying them on.’

  Bobby’s jeans were so tight at the bottom that he nearly lost his balance and fell through the curtain trying to get them off. The new jeans slipped on easily. He looked in the mirror and thought the jeans looked good. He pulled back the curtain to show Jay.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You’re gorgeous, Angela will be chasing you later.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘She’ll knock you out with her basketballs.’

  ‘Are you getting the black ones?’

  ‘Nope, I just wanted to see what they look like. Hurry up.’

  Bobby could hear Jay laughing at him trying to get the tight jeans back on.

  ‘Have those jeans got holes to put your feet through?’

  Bobby came out, jeans in hand.

  ‘Leave them there, we have to go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Questions later.’

  Jay started walking more briskly than normal.

  ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute.’

  ‘I wanted to buy those jeans.’

  ‘I bought the black ones.’

  ‘What?’

  Jay pulled out the waist of his tracksuit bottoms. Bobby could see the black jeans underneath.

  ‘You’re a fucking lunatic. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do that?’

  ‘Because you would have tried to stop me.’

  ‘You have the money to buy a pair.’

  ‘Not these ones. The buzz is in robbing them. Do you think you could do it?’

  ‘Why would I do it when I can buy them? My ma would kill me if she found out.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a poshie.’

  ‘Piss off, how am I a poshie?’

  ‘Your ma is posh and your brother goes to school in Clontarf.’

  ‘She’s not posh. And my dad is on the social welfare.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘I bet your ma makes more money than my dad ever will.’

  They walked in silence until they got to Barney’s amusement arcade. Bobby thought it would be better to be called a piss-in-the-bed than a poshie. All he wanted was to be the same as Jay. He robbed orchards and bonked in to Croker. They had squirted each other with red sauce. They had been in every derelict house in Ballybough snaring pigeons with their bare hands. Jay’s flat was bigger than Bobby’s house. Jay was his best friend. He had never slagged Jay about his da being in prison. Bobby felt betrayed. Maybe he was different. He couldn’t concentrate on playing Mario Brothers.

  ‘I’m going to the bookies. Are you coming?’

  ‘No, poshie.’

  Bobby walked out of the amusement arcade with his head feeling fuzzy. He never fought with Jay and it made him feel sick. He thought about going back to Dunnes to rob a pair of jeans. He thought about what would happen if Jay didn’t want to be friends with him. He was the best f
riend Bobby could ever have. He walked into Ladbrokes and stared at the Sporting Life. The early afternoon always had loads of greyhound races on. The voice came over the tannoy to announce the starting prices for the 1.33 at Catford. The man wrote them onto a board with his black marker. Trap two was 2–1 favourite. It had won its last four races.

  ‘Put it on trap two.’

  Bobby turned around to see Jay smiling at him.

  ‘I was thinking trap two.’

  Bobby took out a docket and picked up a bookie’s pencil. He wrote £1 win T-2 1:33 Catford on the docket.

  ‘That is one pound and ten pence, please.’

  The hare is running at Catford.

  A race only lasted about thirty seconds. If the dog got to the first bend in the lead, it had a good chance of winning. If it was last to the first bend, you could tear up your docket. The voice came over the tannoy again with the commentary for the race. Trap 2 was last out of the traps. Bobby thought his trap was spiked with a tin of Pedigree Chum. The race was over before it started, unless the other five dogs collapsed.

  Trap six wins, second is trap three, and the dog with the red jacket, trap one, is third. Close for fourth between five and four. Trap two trails in last.

  If Bobby didn’t make it as a boxer, he wanted to be a tannoy announcer in Ladbrokes.

  ‘How much did you lose?’

  ‘Only a pound.’

  Bobby didn’t care about losing the bet. Jay was back by his side. He had only been gone for a few minutes and Bobby had thought it could be forever.