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They're playing football in the streets, with the same old leather ball as always and which is so scuffed now that it's more white than brown. It's that bit deflated so that it takes a hell of a kick to get it to go far but no-one seems to mind. Or, at least, they're still all dead happy to climb over a wall or venture onto enemy turf to retrieve it.
There are a whole load of them boys, all of them poor. Except Tommy Shelby who's rich in everything but class or close to rich as you can get and still live in Small Heath. Freddie Thorne is just like the rest of them with his dad employed at the BSA factory down on Armoury Road.
Freddie Thorne has the ball and he's running with it, dribbling, eyes fixed on the goal which is marked out by two discarded brown jackets and guarded by a fat kid with an uncle instead of a dad. Freddie has already decided how he's going to make the shot, how he'll fake like he's going for the far corner of the goal and then get it in the near side. Only then something collides with his right shin and the world comes out from under him.
Tommy Shelby likes to wait until the ball comes to him and it isn't really his fault that Freddie wasn't looking. He takes the ball and calmly passes it up the pitch back toward the opposing goal, his hands buried deep in his pockets. He watches the ball as it's received and passed on up the other side of their street-wide pitch before he turns around and looks at Freddie.
He takes a hand out of his pocket and extends it to the boy who's sprawled on the ground, looking wide-eyed and winded. “Sorry about that,” he says, “but it was hard to pass up the opportunity.”
Freddie takes his hand and lets Tommy Shelby pull him to his feet, just as the shouts and cheers go up as Tommy's team scores.
“Watch where you're going next time, eh?” Tommy says with a grin. Tommy's hand is now dark with the mud and factory coal dust which form a sort of crust on the streets and he wipes it off on his trousers just as Freddie does the same with both of his.
“Thanks,” Freddie says, as he looks up. He isn't sure what he has to thank Tommy for or why he's smiling. He's eight years old and he knows Tommy Shelby better by name than by acquaintance but that's about to change.
They're the two smartest boys in the class and it's a big class. There are about fifty of them all lined up in rows by age and then by name. Tommy Shelby sits at the desk in front of Freddie Thorne and he never answers a question unless asked directly.
Freddie likes to answer anything and everything he knows. He makes it clear how much he's read and how much he knows, where Tommy shrugs and acts like he doesn't spend long afternoons at the library to avoid the chaos of the Shelby house and the quick rising rage of his father. Freddie knows about that though, he's seen him there. Though it took him a long time to get Tommy to say anything about his father.
Freddie's own father is as proud as can be of his son the scholar, talks about how Freddie is going to make something of himself. He's proud because he imagines it might mean that Freddie Thorne will never have to work at the BSA and break his back for pay which is so meagre that it isn't enough to properly feed their family.
Freddie starts working at the BSA when he's thirteen just to help pay the family's way and his father never properly forgives him, for all that his mother no longer looks quite so thin and his little brother even smiles sometimes now.
Tommy Shelby's father leaves and Tommy never has to work in any factory before or after that fact. No-one ever heard of any Shelby going short of food in any case.
Tommy is standing outside of the factory doors with his cap set low over his eyes. He's fifteen and Freddie sees how differently he holds himself from all the factory men and feels a pang of something he doesn't know how to put a name to. It's something like injustice but it's also something like admiration and once it's all simmered down and settled in his blood, all he recognises is something as bitter as the beer they end up drinking.
Tommy says he's there to get Freddie drunk and Freddie objects at first. He hasn't got money to be drinking away. But Tommy shrugs and says it'll be on the house, as though that's a simple and irrefutable truth.
It is on the house and Freddie gets dizzy with it, with the thrill of it and with the rush of alcohol and with the way Tommy still laughs and jokes with him as if it were the old days, as if they were equals. Two boys at the top of the class whose differences were only clear from their names and the age of their clothes. It had been easier then to forget that they never would be equals.
But that night Freddie almost forgets again. Or, at least, he forgets to care. He tells Tommy that he cares and somehow that makes it easier because Tommy doesn't seem offended.
Tommy laughs and Freddie watches as he does, sees white teeth and a mouth full of clever words and well-guarded secrets. He knows he should stop looking but he's drunk enough that he forgets.
He's drunk enough that Tommy half-carries him home as he says all kinds of things he shouldn't mean about how “I missed you, you know, Tommy” and “you know, I think we used to be friends.”
And Tommy says “We are friends, Freddie, and I won't ever forget that.” Tommy's words are a little slurred even though Freddie realises, in retrospect, that he'd only had one pint for every two Freddie had called for; and this was just going to be one more time Tommy Shelby got the better of him.
Freddie is laughing as he strips off his shirt. His jacket has already hit the wood boards behind him and he can't stop the ridiculous electric thrill of the thing.
It's a Sunday and Tommy Shelby's cried off church which, for all Freddie knows, he does weekly. And Tommy's made a bet that he'll beat Freddie across the canal, so now Freddie is wrestling loose the laces of his boots because he knows whoever gets into the water first is going to have a good head start. There are no rules after all.
Only Freddie looks up after he's unbuttoned his trousers and let them pool around his feet and he steps out of them clumsily because his eye has caught on Tommy Shelby, blurred at the edges as he stands in front of the light of the low rising sun but radiant with it. Tommy Shelby: the silhouette of his shoulders twitching as he undoes his own trousers, the pale spread of his back dappled with freckles and seamed by his spine.
Freddie forgets about the water until Tommy turns to look at him and says “hurry up then,” and, before Freddie sees what he's doing, pushes him in.
He comes up spluttering and Tommy's already a good two lengths ahead of him and he wants to start laughing all over again with the joy bubbling up in his chest but the water's cold, with the sun not directly on it, so he starts swimming.
He watches Tommy in the water ahead of him, watches his arms making certain and determined strokes nothing like Freddie's own frantic ones. And Freddie Thorne follows him, desperate to catch up but, for once, without the blight of resentment that he's following behind.
They spend more time together that summer than they have since they were twelve years old. They spend half of it laughing and half of it arguing and Freddie thinks he spends far too much of it staring at Tommy in ways he shouldn't. It isn't much comfort that sometimes he catches Tommy staring back.
They drink and they fight and Tommy asks why Freddie is so angry with him. Freddie is tired of telling Tommy how he hates what the Shelby family does while trying to hide that he's envious of everything it's bestowed on Tommy. He always says that, if he were Tommy, he'd quit the family line of business and strike out on his own because the Shelbys are thugs and thieves and no good for anyone but themselves; but he catches himself thinking far too often about how Tommy spends long afternoons smoking cigarettes, knowing there'll be meat for dinner with fresh vegetables and no outstanding bill to pay at the grocer's.
Freddie is tired of saying the same thing over and over and tired of making parts for motor bicycles and guns, the same way over and over. And because Tommy's asked him one too many times, and because he's tired and they've left the pub, heading home down a deadened factory side alley, Freddie shoves Tommy when persists after Freddie's said he doesn't want to talk about it.
When Tommy shoves him back, Freddie pushes him into the brick factory wall. He stands there then, breathing deep, wide-eyed and unsure of what to do next, until Tommy kisses him.
He comes awake then, alive, angry and wanting and shocked more than if Tommy had punched him. He gives Tommy another violent shove back into the wall and then starts walking. He feels less glad than he expects to when he doesn't hear Tommy's footsteps following. Tommy never was one for following.
The war comes and it strips everything away.
They organise the regiments so that the local boys all stay together but, even with that, there are so many men in the regiment from bigger places than Small Heath that hardly anyone knows of the name of Shelby. Their commanding officers are all rich men's sons who are far beyond the reach of the Shelbys' buying off.
In the war, they are all just men. They are units and bodies to be commanded and sent to die. This means that, in the war, they can truly be equals and truly be friends.
“We could die tomorrow,” Tommy says, his voice calmer than it has any right to be. And it makes it okay when he kisses him, and Freddie's hands bracket his skull, hair short all over, shorter than it ever used to be. They press their foreheads together after their lips break apart, listening to the sound of artillery fire.
“It's only a band starting up,” Freddie says and he feels as Tommy makes his shoulders loosen, tries to will away the tension.
They sleep bracketed together in the dark, knowing that it doesn't make them safe but feeling better for it anyway.