Easter 1992
Jay and Matt came around to see if I wanted to join them going out for a drive. Naively, I said yes. Matt’s former school friend Nick was waiting in the car. We called back at Matt’s where dumbbells were silently loaded into the boot. The weights were taken off under cover of the raised boot door, and the bars tested for heft in hand. Strange. I sat in the back next to Nick and we headed off, bound for Huyton. Equally strange. Not somewhere we’d gone before, nor anywhere nearby.
I heard stories on the way about a man we were going to meet, how he needed some help from us. How he wasn’t someone you’d say no to. How in his youth he stole cars just to get to school. It transpired that he intended to go and retrieve some televisions someone had stolen, one of which belonged to a member of his family. He knew the stolen goods were being held in a particular house. A thief about to take another thief to task. Had the perpetrator unwittingly stolen from his own? Or done so knowingly, true to the infamous lack of honour among thieves? Did both cases justify a beating regardless? How on earth was this going to pan out, and what on earth was I doing here?
I was so out of my depth, so inappropriately selected. After all, I had once been informed by one of the sixth form hard boys that I actively reduced his street cred simply by being in the same minibus back from a football match. So why me? Weight of numbers? Does that count when one of the number is featherweight? A feather and a hammer may plunge at the same speed in a vacuum, but Huyton is a highly pressurised anti-vacuum where a feather is undoubtedly no substitute for a hammer.
As each detail emerged and each mile passed I felt increasingly anxious. I was trapped, and once our thief chief was picked up I was shuffled over to the middle of the back seat, the classic small kid’s spot. Too cowardly to speak up or refuse, while knowing beyond doubt that I was not going to take part should it come to a fight. I was going to run, however shameful that might be.
We held back at the end of the road as the ringleader went and knocked on the door. Luckily, only the other thief’s sister was at home. There was flat denial answered by a round of shouting and threats, then we simply went home. Some disappointed with the anticlimax, one mighty relieved. With each mile on the way back my shoulders dropped half an inch, my locked jaw loosened, and the colour finally came back into my face.
There was no next time, for me at least. Perhaps they knew.