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Widnes, the muck and stink of it. The huddled red-brick terraces and the towering, tangled heaps of scrap metal. The bloody fights that broke out every five minutes for no good reason. Sometimes you’d find teeth in the gutter, or a clump of hair. When Widnes played arch-rivals Warrington at Naughton Park, the coaches bringing in the visitors would have to run a gauntlet of stones and bottles, and the police took dogs along to keep the two sets of fans apart. Then the game itself, with half the players on amphetamines, the tackling so brutal that Billy’s bones would shudder—and he was only watching…Afterwards, he and a few other bobbies would call in at the pie shop, pork-and-apple fillings or hamburger-and-baked-beans. You’d get stomach-ache just looking at those pies, but you’d still have two, and you’d wash them down with tea that had brewed so long you could have used it to stain furniture. Later, there would be trouble at one of the nightclubs, the Landmark or Big Jim’s, and they’d go down there mob-handed to sort it out. The women were even more ferocious than the men, especially if they’d had a drink. “Don’t let them get you on the floor,” a sergeant told him early on. “You won’t get up again.” There was the night three pubs spilled out at the same time, and an almighty punch-up started in front of the chip shop on Victoria Road. Billy tried to nick somebody in a black shirt who was only about half his height. The bloke turned out to be some sort of martial-arts expert, and Billy came away with one side of his face swollen up like a melon and his left arm fractured in two places. But the way the bobbies pulled together, Neil and Terry and Vomit Molloy and the Perv and Dad, even Light Duties Livermore, everybody looking out for everybody else, that was really something…Ipswich felt tame by comparison, less vivid. If asked, though, Susie could explain exactly what was better about their lives. She seemed happier, and that was Billy’s one great wish, to make her happy.
    But before the year was out, Susie began to feel that something was missing. She wasn’t homesick for the north; it was more like a kind of restlessness or hollowness, the sense that she hadn’t fully occupied the space around her. The space inside her too: in early 1991, she’d had a miscarriage, and she was frightened she might not be able to have children. Words like “security” and “the future” crept into her conversation; she worried about what she called “missing the boat.” These were things that mattered to her, and he considered it his duty to provide them. After months of searching, they found a property a few miles out of town. It was a small place, semidetached, the end house in a row of eight, and there was noise from the railway line on the far side of the road, but it would be their first real home. Billy waited until they had settled in—the house had needed painting inside and out, and it took weeks to clear the garden—and then, on a cloudy, drowsy afternoon in late July, he reached for Susie’s hand and led her out into the field. “Where are you taking me?” He wouldn’t say. Only when they got to the middle did he stop. The corn waist-high, and seeming to whisper, even though there wasn’t any wind. Then, holding Susie’s hand in both of his, he knelt in front of her and asked her to marry him. She looked away into the sky, and a dreamy smile rose on to her face, as if he’d reminded her of something that had happened a long time ago, in her childhood. When she said, “Yes, I’d love to,” he was still on his knees, invisible to everybody in the world but her. Anyone watching would have thought she was talking to herself.
    They didn’t invite Susie’s father to the wedding. Billy wouldn’t allow it. “He’d ruin everything,” Billy said, and then added, somewhat hysterically, “It’s him or me,” which made Susie laugh. “My father won’t be coming either,” Billy