by M. T Hill
‘My brother,’ Toby tries again, ‘was…’
A long exhalation; a rippling through the congregation.
‘You know what, right,’ he says, ‘bollocks to it. This is the first time our Ste’s shut up since I’ve known him.’
A murmur of anxious laughter in the family pews. Freya glances along the aisle, follows the gravestones towards the coffin, the altar. She smiles, desperate to look normal, correct – even as she feels more and more alien to these people, to Stephen. Her distance from his coffin, that silent box, is starting to make the whole church seem false. A stage set. The vicar’s figure, his shadow on the organ pipes, only multiplies the dissonance. When Freya concentrates on him, he takes on the aspect of an illusion – as if turning him would reveal a cardboard cut-out. Panic seizes her. Everyone here can tell. They can see her. She holds in a breath.
South Yorkshire police are currently questioning two men seen with Stephen at the scene—
The person next to Freya taps her arm and offers a tissue with a whisper: ‘Need these more than I do.’ It’s another middle-aged woman. Her face is open and her breath smells like make-up. Freya looks down and blinks; an inky droplet explodes between two buttons of her blouse. She takes the tissue.
‘Thank you,’ Freya says. Sitting outside herself, now. Where the shame and the guilt can’t reach.
In the pulpit, Toby has found his grit. He talks about Stephen’s obsessive climbing; his strength and ability; their weekends wild-camping; Stephen’s ‘urban exploring’; and, when they were both a lot younger, their run-ins with the police. Stephen’s upcoming project was Mont Blanc. ‘He was forever training for that,’ his brother says. Then, partway through an anecdote about Stephen climbing a cliff in Anglesey without any ropes, Freya has had enough. She can’t do it. She gets up, clammy, and stumbles towards the doors, realising everyone in the church will cast her as one of Stephen’s exes after all.
‘And Ste was teetotal,’ she hears Toby say. ‘So it doesn’t even make sense. He’d not touched a drop as long as I remember. Never drank, never smoked, never ate meat. Not in the whole time I knew him, and that was quite a while—’
Freya stops, and realises Toby has stopped too. She glances back. He looks disgusted by her.
Teetotal?
They’d missed this back at the office. The coroner’s toxicology report, backhanded to the editor, said Stephen was at least seven times the legal driving limit. He’d had too much, got cocky, taken the risk. But if he was teetotal, why would he drink that much? Was this why those men were arrested – because his family had protested about the inquest’s findings?
Freya mouths, ‘Sorry.’ She wants to stay, to hear more, but it’s too late: she’s made a scene, drawn attention to herself. She pushes outside. Gulps the damp air. Her fringe is stuck to her forehead. She scuffs her shoes on the path as she goes towards the car and wrestles the door open. Her head is full. Who are the men being interviewed? Was there a suggestion he hadn’t fallen, but was pushed? Or had he jumped?
Freya tells the car where to drive her. Unable to shake the questions, the tightness in her chest, she slips back into the leaded margins of the north. Maybe this hasn’t been a waste of time. Maybe the questions are enough.
The Steeplejack
After long jobs away, a free weekend can feel to a steeplejack like washing up on a strange island. Friday nights are especially disorientating. If a jack isn’t pulling overtime on some power station in the arse-end of nowhere – an industrial plant grafted to a post-industrial town – they might seem listless, lost. Having returned to empty homes or weary partners (dumping rancid overalls and safety gear in the hall), a jack will head straight to their local to decompress. In towns near a firm’s headquarters, you’ll likely find at least one jack at the bar, focusing on something indistinct, something far away. A remembered view – a vista of concrete, a blackened frame, a row of filthy brick megaliths. A power station lit up like an airport at night.
For Shep, though, this Friday is worse than disorientating. After the blood, the sirens and the horror, he’d left Scarborough under a black cloud. He’d desperately wanted updates from the hospital; to call Gunny’s wife; to seek forgiveness – or at the very least to be forgotten. To get his inevitable sacking over and done with. But then his phone died a few miles out, and he realised he’d left his charger in his locker. So, he drove straight to the Pea and Ham.
* * *
A few double-vodkas have just about dulled the brightest edges of Shep’s guilt. It isn’t enough, but it’s getting there. Luckily, being alone is also a mercy for Shep. He can escape into his own world this way. That, and coming to the Pea and Ham completes a cycle, because this pub is where Shep met his first boss, Mr Mallory himself.
Everyone knew old Mallory was a steeplejack. You recognised him by his flat cap, hunting vest, Dr Martens. He was a hodgepodge of fashions and eras, though not consciously; it was more like he’d stepped out of time to pick the garments he found most practical. Then there was his size: unmissably squat and wide, without definition or tone, yet solid all the same, his skin the rolled steel that held in the mass of him. You’d likely find him holding forth on politics and politicians – particularly Thatcher, whom he admired vocally despite Mallory’s older brother being a Sheffield collier, a foot soldier in the Battle of Orgreave.
Back then, Shep was earnest but terminally unemployed. Every week he collected his dole money and came up to the Ham to ask Mallory if there were any apprenticeships going at the firm. In return, Shep would get the stout nod that came to be a simple appreciation of his tenacity. Mallory would rear back and clink Shep’s glass and say, ‘Not this week! But let me tell you about a place where only knots matter.’
Then Mallory would relate to Shep a short tale about jacking in the good old days. About felling chimneys with prop fires, which involved taking the side out of a chimney and filling the hole with firewood – deadly sounding for sure, but accurate to the metre. A probably apocryphal story about some jack who climbed a flare-stack for a bet, fell inside and didn’t come out before they turned it on again. Or a reminder: only respect people who do things with their hands.
So it was a shock when Mallory gave Shep the yes. The old jack eyed him over the table, didn’t clink his glass or nod at him or even move his head. ‘No more stories from me,’ he said. ‘Got an opening for apprentices, and I couldn’t bloody well say “this lad down the pub wants in”, as I’ve never heard your bloody surname. But if you do, Billy – want in, that is – then you do. The gates to paradise are open.’
Mallory died a few months after that, with his son Mallory Junior taking over the firm. A heart attack, so the barman told Shep. Afterwards, whenever Shep went up to the Ham, he would take his old boss’s seat, heir to the bosun’s throne.
Still. That’s history. That’s a story. And right now, there’s no one Shep resents more than old Mallory, because Shep has soiled that story by maiming a crewmate he respected.
Which means Shep only has his other life to live.
He turns his glass, picturing Gunny’s mangled hand. The pub lights warm and diffuse. What Shep needs now is an opportunity, and some opportunities you have to make for yourself.
Using the pub’s payphone, a living relic, Shep dials a number.
‘Oh,’ a man answers. ‘You’re eager.’
‘Are you working?’
‘Not tonight, Josephine.’
‘Your other work. Have you got anything for me?’
‘Depends. How long can you hang about?’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
The line dies. Shep finishes his drink and orders another. A little after nine, a broad man lumbers up to the bar. He’s holding a battered laptop base, and laughs when he sees Shep.
‘Christ,’ the man says, rubbing his cheek. ‘Tough week, or what?’
Shep ignores the question.
‘Got a tasty proposition,’ the man says. ‘One I mentioned a while back.
’
And Shep nods like a dog, like he’s forgotten Clemens and Gunny already. Five vodkas down and he’s finally fit to escape. The broad man has just lowered a ladder.
The thing is, Shep is a spare-time urban explorer. That means he breaks into forbidden places – mansions and bunkers and mothballed industrial plants – then writes about them online. Exploring these places isn’t that simple. It’s lonely and dangerous and highly criminalised; it takes obsession and preparation; it demands good intelligence. You have to guard your sources jealously.
‘Meet me in the bogs,’ Shep tells the man. ‘Five minutes.’
The broad man is Shep’s favourite source of tips. A freelance drone operator who pulls unsociable hours airdropping for Tescaldi, and most Fridays comes up from his festering cell for a gin and tonic. Shep wonders if the droner knows what time it is, if his shift work merges the days into an unbroken line of wakefulness and sleep. But if the droner is tired or vitamin-deficient – he’s certainly an off colour – he still finds enthusiasm for Shep.
‘I like it when you talk dirty,’ the droner says, and he slopes away to the gents.
Shep sucks air through his teeth. Downs his drink. The droner isn’t the type he usually interacts with. Not if he isn’t using them. Like the old man Mallory, Shep finds remote-working repulsive, pathetic. Over-automated, too removed from what he understands to be proper work. And yet the droner’s tips are golden. Thousands of hours of remote-flight time have given him an unmatched knowledge of the north’s hidden geography, and helped him develop a knack for the tease. Using hacked map data, he sells illicit images of sites to urban explorers, salvagers, environmentalists wanting to keep tabs on developments. Even the odd doomsday prepper.
The droner had recently told Shep about a rural installation in the Lake District, and Shep had asked for a second look. Now, laptop bag open in the pub toilets, the droner delivers: aerials of the site – hints of concrete, old foundations, sagging walls – with esoteric markings and annotations in wipeable ink. It ticks Shep’s boxes, but it’s the final print that seals the deal: a ragged clearing in which some sort of light aircraft has crashed and broken up. Vehicle tracks, boot holes. Maybe some attempt to tidy the place up.
‘How the hell did you spot this?’ Shep asks.
The droner taps his nose. ‘Call it the Touch.’
‘Implants, more like.’
The droner laughs. ‘Your eyes learn. Like screen-burn on an old plasma. I don’t see like you normies – not any more.’
‘How do I get in?’
‘West Lakes,’ the droner says, wheezing a little. He produces a ruined A to Z and taps along the Cumbrian coast, then drags his finger inland. ‘Go in here for a clean run. There’s a marina in Whitehaven with long-stay parking. Easy-ish access – there’s a hiking trail to here, then you’re off-piste to the perimeter.’
Shep pictures the drab bulk and rocky footing of Scafell Pike, England’s highest mountain. He sets it against infinite space, with Wastwater Lake below – mirror-flat, long shores hued orange by campfire. Though it feels like years ago, he was bouldering up there recently. ‘Is it guarded?’ he asks the droner.
‘Private, quiet,’ the droner says. ‘No dogs or sentries.’
Shep grimaces. Quiet doesn’t always mean good. The authorities could still stuff you on terror legislation for trespassing or ‘preparing an attack’ – exactly how they bag tourists taking photos of landmarks. And that’s only half the equation. Shep once knew a woman who fell through a rotten roof on a quiet mission and copped for a broken pelvis. It took Mountain Rescue three nights to find her, except animals had found her first.
‘Anything else?’ the droner asks.
‘Nah,’ Shep says. ‘Unless you’ve sold these elsewhere.’
The droner tuts. A gleam of wet brown teeth. ‘Really? You have to check?’
Shep shakes his head. ‘You know how it goes. I’ll do this next, anyway. Before some other bastard gets the chance.’
And then, maybe then, out there in the nothingness, he’ll forget about Gunny’s hand.
‘Ace,’ the droner says. ‘And seriously – on my mam’s grave – you’ve got first dibs.’
‘A bunker,’ Shep says.
‘A bunker. It’s a hundred for these exactly.’
Shep pays the droner in dirty notes and leaves the toilet with a map drawn on a paper napkin. He drains his drink, nods bye to the landlord, and heads outside.
Back in the van, Shep sits and memorises the map’s lines. Sticks the van in auto and keys in home.
On the way, he chews the napkin map into a paste. Then he throws his dead work phone out of the window with it. What matters now is leaving, heading north to that raw coast, with its blasted grass and filthy beach. No Gunny there – only the roiling green sea.
The Journalist
Home for Freya is her parents’ bungalow in Dillock, a dying market town in the elbow of a valley between Sheffield and Manchester. Nothing much changes in Dillock except the cost of charging your car, and being back there makes Freya feel like she’s regressed.
Hearing the lock jangle, the door squeak open, her mother peeps around the kitchen doorframe. ‘Hiya love,’ she calls down the hall. Their little weekday subroutine. ‘Good day?’
‘Hi,’ Freya calls back.
‘What’s up with you, then?’
‘Knackered,’ Freya says, coming into the kitchen. A few seconds’ silence as she stares at the pallet of milk cartons on the breakfast bar. ‘And homesick.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Just muttering.’ But homesick is right enough: she mourns the city centre flat she shared with her ex. The lack of questioning. The absence of an unspoken curfew. Even the freedom to eat whenever. Suddenly angry with herself, she kicks off her shoes against the skirting board. There’s a faint smell of soil, and a set of boot prints leading into the study.
‘Dad in there?’ Freya asks. ‘I’ve got a bit more to do, really.’
‘Playing one of his games,’ her mother says.’Eat your tea first. It’s in the microwave. Stroganoff…’ She gestures to the back. ‘Not as good as usual, he tells me, but I’m saying top ten.’
‘Mum…’
‘What, the milk? It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? The sodding fridge ordered it without my say-so, and the Tescaldi girl could only goggle when I told her it wasn’t us. I still don’t understand the future.’
‘No. I mean you don’t have to fuss.’
Freya’s mother frowns. ‘I only want to help.’
‘I’m thirty.’
‘Yes, and you’re still my baby. Now, do you want to tell me why you look so preoccupied? Dickhead’s not been in touch, has he?’
Freya pouts. Her shoulders ache.
‘Come on,’ her mother says, patting the stool at the breakfast bar. ‘You’ll waste away.’
Freya huffs as her mother starts the microwave.
‘You’re working too hard,’ her mother goes on. ‘Way too hard. It’s not going to… it’s hardly going to make things better.’ From the study comes the sound of a computer mouse being slammed about. Freya’s mother rolls her eyes. ‘I keep telling him. Why doesn’t he upgrade to all this haptics stuff your cousin prattles on about? He takes chunks out of the desk, then moans at me… Tell me about your day while I load the dishwasher.’
‘Court reporting,’ Freya says. ‘Minshull Street. Bog-standard, really. A carjacking, a retina theft.’
Her mother raises her eyebrows. Lying to her is a bad habit, a means to insulate Freya, a barrier against guilt. It also stops her from indulging a secret excitement. When it comes to seedy assignments like recording Stephen Parsons’ funeral, there is – always has been – a sense of getting away with something. Now, with this teetotal thing, she’s hungry to find out more, and it’s hard to care what her parents are doing. She keeps wanting to—
The microwave dings.
Freya leans over the breakfast bar. She can still smell the coldness of
the church on her clothes. Once more she imagines Stephen alive – he’s climbing, elongated on a wall, hips twisted and navel turned out.
‘Bit of luck,’ Freya tells her mother, ‘I’m trying to get a byline. Might even be a leader. So then you can read about how my day went.’
Her mother beams. ‘Oh, see. Isn’t that special?’
Freya flashes a false smile. Her name hasn’t been in print since the Metrolink crash in Hyde six months ago – and that was only for ‘additional reporting’ because she vox-popped some pensioners who’d sat and watched the fire engines for something to do.
* * *
After a cheap potted pudding in front of rolling news, Freya kicks her father, grumbling, from the study. She sits at his vintage Mac and spends a while trawling job feeds. As usual, the North West is barren – most writing jobs outside London are subcontracted to content mills in low-rent enterprise parks – but she’s too bitter to expand her search to the capital, despite it being the only place to step up career-wise. She resigns herself to transcribing what she recorded at Stephen’s funeral, then types up the shorthand she’d jotted down as the car brought her home. She checks her phone: the editor still hasn’t replied to her messages about the police interviews.
Why would a teetotaller go out on a bender?
Ten o’clock swings round, and Freya’s article sits there half written. There isn’t much heft to it – none of the sentiment she wanted to get across, anyway. But no matter. That’s not the point, and Freya going to the funeral is only the start of a process. The heavy stuff starts here, when the follow-up teams go hounding Stephen’s relatives for magazine features. She rubs her eyes. Does it rankle that she doesn’t do death-knocks any more? She’d love the chance to ask them a few things herself. To find out where the tensions are, and where she could push.
Freya prints the doc and checks it for passive language, clunky phrasing. It scans fine. It’s fine. She could probably crowdsource something more, some extra ballast, but it’s too late and next to impossible from home. She recently deleted her social stream in a fit of isolationism – a protest at narcissism, albeit her own. After she moved back in with her parents, it was feeling like everything she posted online was written by imagined committee, and that anything even remotely controversial – like, say, an opinion – would damage her prospects if she ever went freelance. Or land her on a blacklist. Freya knows plenty of reporters who’ve been ushered out of press conferences, escorted from swanky dinners, doxxed and threatened with rape and assorted violence. The picture editor, with whom she’d had the brief affair that scuttled her long-term relationship, was actually recognised and beaten up as he cycled home from her flat one night.