Skye Sweeney R.I.P - An Urban Legend

Many years before I had ever sucked in a lungful of crack cocaine, my schoolyard best friend was dead from it. He died lonelier than when he was born, scrunched up and frozen solid on a bench by the river with a crack coca-cola can besides him. His name was Skye Sweeney and he was 17 years old.

I first met Skye five years previously when we were first year juniors together in St Marks Secondary school. Skye was another kid from another battered home with nothing but bad lungs and asthma as a receipt for living. It was all football, fisticuffs, chewed ties and badly smoked cigarettes. After school we'd kick around the subdued Fulham streets prising badges off the grills of cars. If we were lucky enough to get a Mercedes star or strong enough to snap 'The Spirit of Ecstasy' from the bonnet of a Rolls Royce, we'd sell it back to the kid whose father owned the vehicle. That is how we paid for our books, pens, shoes and cigarettes. It was the late 1980's and we were the last generation not to be totally wowed by computer screens and joysticks. What we had was the Commodore 64 or the ZX Spectrum with pixels the size of Texas - it wasn't quite there yet. The streets and parks were still our primary means of escape.

One afternoon after skipping school and going on a half day shoplifting spree, Skye somehow managed to lose one of his shoes in the thick muddy sludge of the river bank. He came sprinting up the stairs of the bridge almost in tears: "We've gotta get my shoe back, my father'll kill me if I turn up at ours with only one shoe!" Well, we tried, but the thick brown green silt that beds the river is like quick sand. It sinks into itself and anything that falls into it is lost forever. After half an hour searching and prodding in the slime a lost shoe was no longer our priority - I was waist deep in mud with nine hundred thousand tonnes of water slowly coming in at me. With the help of a few planks of wood and an abandoned shopping trolley, Skye managed to fish me out, but not before the gloop had also prised off my new trainers. Out off the mud and up along the bank we stared down at our spoiled trousers, four feet and one shoe. We laughed and cursed the river, bouncing our insults off the incoming tide.

But it was not all laughs. It was in that little bond that Skye told me of his home life, of the horrendous and frequent beatings he took from his father. He ended by saying he probably wouldn't be in school the next day, that his parents usually keep him home after a trouncing. I thought of the times he had been absent, hospitalised after an asthma attack, and as so often happens during youth the truth came out as a sad realisation and dissolved another little part of life's innocence. "Does he beat you often?" I asked.
"Oh, not so much... and mostly I deserve it. I wish I could get my shoe back, though! Wot about yours...won't you be in trouble?"
I just laughed and thought of my mother paralytic drunk, staring down at my feet before collapsing back into sleep like it was some part of a hideous dream. "Trouble? Me? I doubt my mum will even notice."

Skye was correct, he was not in school the next day. In fact it was more than a week before I saw his spiked golden hair, milky teeth and London smile sitting in assembly again. As Mr Hunter rattled off morning prayers, Skye and I recounted our adventure, and by first bell we were confirmed best friends. Over the following months we studied, played, and swore along to hymns together. We both joined the football team and it was me who would cover his position when he collapsed on the sidelines desperately inhaling Salbutamol from his little blue pump.

Asthma was a permanent fixture in Skye's thoughts. He suffered acutely from it and I can barely recall a day that passed where he didn't need to unblock his airways. If his home life was unfortunate, his asthma was an impediment and was the reason that often left him stranded, restrained by a teacher or a policeman as the rest of us ran off to freedom. I think there was a sadness and an envy in him because of that. It was always him who would cop it, always him hauled up before justice but with street ethics clamping any waggling of his tongue.

Although we were best friends, and though we partook in school and city antics together, Skye and I were dark stars apart. We were the two kids that should never have collided but did... that should have hated each other but didn't. He came from a family with both parents in the upper echelons of the working class, and I came from a family of an underclass that has yet to be defined. His uniform, though scuffed (as any decent boy's should be) was not old, oversized or unwashed. In winter he had a nice Duffel Coat and his shirt collar was always immaculately clean. I on the other hand was the devil opposite of that. Cheap cheesecloth shirts, grubby neck and reckless. In winter the only thing to keep me warm was running away from the mischief I had caused. But though we had so little in common, we shared one important thread that bound us together: abuse. At that moment Skye didn't know what mine was, though he was to soon find out.

It was one afternoon after receiving a disastrous school report that Skye decided he had suffered enough vicious beatings at the hands of his father and was going to run away from home. Always ready to incite trouble in those around me I helped hatch his plan and offered up my own home as a place of stay. The both of us wedged in a phone booth, I listened in as Skye broke down and told his mother he would not be coming home from school that evening. His mother didn't even attempt to persuade him otherwise, she knew he had good reason, that all that awaited him was a muddy pair of working men's boots ready to kick themselves clean against his fragile lungs. Skye put the phone down, wiped hisb tears into his sleeve and then smiled as only city boys can do.

The bus journey through to Maida Vale was a tense affair. Skye was visibly nervous imagining his mother telling his father what had happened and the anger which that would cause. "Maybe I should go home?" he said as a question, "He'll only turn up at school tomorrow."
"Then we'll skip school... we'll run away from it all. We can hang around the shops, see Notting Hill, walk along the canal. We can look for clay pipes and old bottles... certain ones are worth a fortune!" I suppose my fantasy and romanticism even at that young age seemed too good to turn up - sunny days spent wasting youth and trekking through the city whilst school whistles blew out in the distance. It was a paradise that left us dreaming.

I pushed Skye off the bus and led him on the short walk to my house. I pointed out the little football pitch where we would play, the adventure playground that we could scale after dark to be alone, and the spot on Sutherland Avenue where Richard Branson had almost killed me as I darted out in front of his car. This was North London, a distinct district with tall scary Georgian houses and strange shadows standing behind dark
curtains five floors up holding glasses of wine, knives, or both. It was a place where celebrities hid their problems or went to before rehab. It was a place very far from the large village of Fulham where we had both grown up and grown rotten.

Opening my front door I crept in leaving Skye out on the doorstep. "MUM!" I yelled, "is it Okay if my friend stays for a few days? He's having trouble at home and his Dad wants to kill him. It's Skye." From behind the half closed bedroom door came a contemptuous sound not quite human and certainly not English: "Urrerrrghhhh!!!" Being too long to mean "No!" I interpreted as: "Well if he has to, but close my fucking door!" I pulled the door shut and shouted Skye in. He entered cautiously, tiptoeing as if the wrong step could send him falling through the floorboards.
"Why are all the lights off?" he whispered, "and where's the TV?"
"Oh, my mum likes the dark… she suffers terribly from migraine. The TV's broken but we can still listen to the sound."

I showed Skye my bedroom and the fold up mattress which he would sleep on. Then I took him to the kitchen where he looked in horror at the overflowing sink, mouldy soup tins and half full saucepans. Before he had the chance to say anything I explained that my mothers migraines incapacitated her, that the house wasn't usually in such a state. As I led Skye back to my bedroom the toilet door opened and my mother staggered out completely naked. Like a pinball she ricocheted her way off the walls and down the hallway. Just before I died, she swung her pale sick saggy drunken arse around, and advertising a 60's forest of pubic hair she slurred: "Shane, yew mite as well tell SKYE that he's a new face around this manor... that I pay the fucking rent, and if I want to drink, piss and shit ma money up the wall and not do the fucking dishes I WILL. He don't own shit here. He go 'ome, back ta Babylon if he don't fucking like it. CHAR!!!" As often was the case when my mother was drunk she said this whilst alternating between a thick Northern Irish accent and a Jamaican one, both put on and both equally as ridiculous as the other. With a kissing of the lips, she fell into her room and the door slammed shut... silence hung as shocked in the air as I knew Skye was behind me. Like a gambler who has just lost his house and kids on the nose of a horse I stood frozen, staring  disbelievingly down the hallway… hoping that by some miracle of nature the world would undo the event that had just passed… that a new result would flash up on the screen. Of course, it never did.

And so as I had months earlier heard Skye relate his home life to me, now he had seen mine. He had witnessed first hand why I could stay out at all hours of night, return home shoeless and laugh in the face of detentions, bad reports and school suspensions. It also dawned on him that he had run away to a hell far worse than his own. In light of that, there was only one thing left for him to do: run back home and curl up quietly as his father put the boot in. That he immediately and gratefully chose this option  saddened me… it was one of only a few times when I realised that the darkness in my house didn't come from a lack of light.

After that episode my friendship with Skye deteriorated. We fought a lot and I was forever trying to impose my superior strength over his and scare him into silence. My school life would be a miserable existence if stories of my home life crept out and the streetkid ethics that had clamped his mouth in the past were far too flimsy for me to rely upon. It would be for fear of violent repercussions that Skye would be quiet now.

From that point forth we still remained pals but our friendship was corrupted by inequality - that he was only free to say certain things. Also, I suppose I now had a certain shame in front of him and as a means of warding off even a discussion over what had happened I put an air of terror into the very subject. When I was finally expelled from school I imagine Skye was more relieved than anything else. Yet curiously, it was that very expulsion and him suffering the same fate a few weeks later, that resulted in our friendship blooming and then wilting one final time.

With our days free and not much to do with our new found liberty we done what neither of us could  ever have predicted: we went back to school. We met up at first bell and hung outside and around the schoolyard until our classmates were let out for their ten minute morning break or the hour long lunch. We'd flaunt our independence insulting teachers and chasing down the headmaster's car as he left each afternoon. We were like two ravens eternally perched on the top of the school wall, jumping down and driving away anything we didn't like or had problems with. And it was that school wall that Skye would leap off bleeding one day and show me his back for the very last time.

It was the late summer of 1989 and Skye and I were sat mischievously as ever on the high school wall. As often he was shirtless, bones and muscles to the sun. I was wrapped up in my badgeless blazer that I now wore eagerly. "So where's this 'thing' that you want to show me?" asked Skye "Let us see!"
"Ok, give us a minute. Turn your back and don't turn 'round till I say, OK!"
Skye span around laughing and stared across at the school. I remember the sun bouncing off the windows and shining in blinding streaks through the top of his hair. I opened my bag and a few seconds later told him he could look. When he turned around I was sitting there with a cricket glove on and five sharp carpet blades sticking dangerously out off each finger. "It's a Krueger glove," I laughed "I'll cut you into ribbons!"
"Give us it 'ere! Let's 'ave a go?!" he urged.
"In a moment… first I'm gonna slice you into pieces. Welcome to primetime Bitch!"
As Skye lent forward to take the glove I swung a threatening paw at him. He moved away and then leant in once again. This time my play was a little too daring and I brought the glove down across his bare chest. At first there was nothing and then four little mouths of wounds materialised and stretched open as only skin and meat can do. And as scarlet started flowing Skye looked up at me bemused and with a universe of sadness in his eyes, he cried: "What the fuck have you done? what's wrong with you!" I barely had time to apologize before Skye had scampered down from the wall and was running off into the distance… off into history. I never waited for my classmates to be let out at bell that day, instead I climbed down myself, tossed the glove over the school wall and made my way back home.

In the following years I got wind of Skye and caught sight of him once from a bus. The last news I had before learning of his death was he had taken up karate and was flooring people and catching them in headlocks at the local sports club. Word also was that he had gotten into drugs and was a mess. I didn't really consider what was the truth at the time… I was on a road of frequent drug use myself and had no time for the condition of others.

It was some time in the early 90's that I bumped into Skye Sweeney's past girlfriend and learnt what had become of the boy whose name had always summoned up ideas of certain fame. On asking how he was she said: "But don't you know? He's dead! He died last year after suffering an asthma attack down by the river."
In disbelief I sat down with her at a nearby bus-stop and listened as she told me all the awful details and how his mother had lost her mind and ended up in a psychiatric hospital after his passing. It transpired that his evening 'karate' classes were just a ruse to slip away each evening and allow him space and time to lick the rock in peace. Alone, one freezing cold January night, he sat on a sheltered bench alongside the river, burning and sucking in the fumes of several rocks of crack cocaine from a perforated Coca Cola can. At some point during the evening he had suffered a massive asthma attack and died as a result of respiratory failure. It was not until the next morning that an early dog walker found him. He was bent up double and frozen solid and in such a hideous way that initially it was thought that he was a homeless OAP or drunk. It was only during post-mortem where it was realised that this was no pensioner but the corpse of a young boy with barely 17 years of death in his body.

As with all close fatalities I was shocked and saddened. When someone you have known physically dies you feel the breath of death upon your neck and for a few brief moments realise your own mortality. I left Skye's former girlfriend and walked away thinking of my young friend and his demise. The river... that place where years ago we had lost our shoes and where he had later confessed the beatings he was taking at home. The same river that has always horrified me and which snakes slowly disquietedly through this town. God, what a place to die... alone, in the cold by centuries of dark waters. What sadistic world had pushed him there? And then I wondered if I had a miniscule role to play in this history... if our last parting was a tiny but important cog in the mechanics leading to his death. I thought a thousand things as I walked away, as the wind blew the past over and across the afternoon. And then it hit me, it was just another legend... just another tale that will take me back through time... another lost spirit that makes up the soul of this town.

My Very Best Thoughts, Hopes & Wishes to All.
Take care & I'll see you back here in 2010... it's going to be a wonderful, wonderful year.

Shane. X