Broken Ghost

by Niall Griffiths

  —What’s with all the butcher’s aprons?

  —Heart of England innit says Adam. —And there’s some fuckin thing going on, some royal bollox. Baby or a wedding or some such shite. I dunno. Birthday or something.

  —Is there? Passed me by, that has.

  —Something about it in the Metro there. Dunno, didn’t read it, just saw the headline.

  —Could’ve done with that when I had a shite just now. Two sheets left there was in the dispenser thing. Disgusting n all; bog full of bangers n mash. Made me fuckin heave so it did.

  —Aw man.

  —Telling ye, it’s privatisation. This is what happens. Fuckin Brexit n all. Fucked everything up, or it will do. Rich government cunts raking it in even more.

  The swells of Shropshire now, through the grey-streaked windows, the ruckles at the fringes of the central plain. The flags flop in the breezeless out-there and Adam sees the stasis of it all, how it unmoves, how it remains, and for one sickening second he gets it: the dull and diffuse docility punctuated by moments of state-approved mass distraction and intoxication. The heady hits of nostalgia. This, more than any other event in his recent past, makes him long for the needle, to dismantle the barrier between the stuff inside him and the stuff outside, violently and with bloodshed. It is this that makes him suck hard at his can and drain it as if it’s an oxygen tank and he is slipping beneath brine. He cracks open the last one.

  —No more after that, Browne says. —That’s yeer lot. After we’ve done our thing we’ll find a good boozer in the town, aye? Get as locked as we want to then, sure.

  —Alright.

  —Good mahn. We’re nearly there anyway.

  Shrewsbury, and beyond. Drawn deeper into the interior. Wellington and Telford stations are loud in their festoons. The union seems to be slipping out of favour, here, although a large crowd of people draped in that flag wave to the passing train from Cosford airfield. Waving their little flags on sticks. Browne regards them without expression and then mutters something inaudible.

  —What?

  —I said there’s something fucking wrong with this country. Something not right. It’s like a fucking madness or something. A psychosis.

  —You know it, man. It’s dead and it doesn’t realise. It’s just refusing to lie down and be buried and Brexit is just fucking digging up the corpse. Make Britain great again my hole. D’yeh know what it is? It just can’t let go of the fucking empire. That’s what it is.

  —Who’re ye telling? Don’t have to tell a mahn of the Six Counties that. Tis a fact that I’m well aware of. Sure they use the word ‘decline’ but it’s been fucking murdered, more accurately like, and it’s never fuckin coming back. Look where we are now; Black Country. Factory of the world at one time so it was. Didn’t me own granda used to get the boat over here to work, in the foundries n stuff? Sent money back in fuckin bricks, he did. Now look.

  And Adam does look, and he sees a clogged canal beneath some concrete struts and a cluster of white flowers flown about by white butterflies, purity all heartbreak, and he would like to watch more of their exquisite air-jerks but he is of course carried past them yet that glimpse has reawakened in him – torrential recollect today – his visit to the Cwm Rheidol butterfly house a few months ago, the big blue wings spread on his wrists and the tiniest of tickles as the sugar syrup he’d smeared there was slurped off. Blue Morpho it was called. The size of a bird. The wings beat and did not flutter in a vivid blizzard around him and he needed nothing more, at that time and in that place. Oh, yes, and the violin mantis in its case; a thing of points and lines, unbelievable, of bladed triangles. And outside the jungly heat of the house, in the spring, with his cheese roll and his cup of tea from the caff and the steam rising up out of the sessile oaks on the valley sides, he watched a man go into the caff and ask for a bucket of hot water and there he washed his car in the car park while his wife and kids went in to see the stunning things that flew and crawled and could stay motionless in their startlings for hours. The man washed his fucking car.

  Browne brings him back with a poke on the wrist.

  —What?

  —I said, d’ye know how many squaddies had Black Country accents? How many of them got sent over there, from this part of the country? To get their fuckin legs blown off? One feller, young feller, got caught by a bomb in a beer barrel. End of me road, this was. Walking past the pub yard and boom. The bhoys had been waiting nearby with their dogs and there’s the feller, the squaddie like, only a young lad, torn to bits, still alive, and they set the fuckin dogs on him so they did. He’s lying there, bits of him hanging off, and the fuckin hounds are tearing at him. The raw meat, see? Imagine that, mahn.

  Adam drinks. —Did he survive?

  —Far as I know he did, aye. Peelers and ambo came and the bhoys did a scarper with their dogs. I remember the paper saying that he’d survived. Bet there wasn’t much left of him to send back to his mammy.

  Ad’s eyes seek out a hill but there aren’t any. All is flat, the high parts now only buildings. The train begins to decelerate. The sun remains a flat weight.

  —And now it might all start again, Browne says. —All this talk about hard borders. Last time I was over there I could feel it, so Ah could, this fucking charge in the air. People getting antsy. Unsure, see? They don’t know what’s gunner happen. Fought for thirty fuckin years, all that fuckin misery, just started to learn to live with each other and then fuckin Brexit comes along. Did one of them cunts ever give one second’s thought to the Six Counties? Yer mahn Johnson, Gove, them cunts. That sicko fuckin Farage. Did it ever cross their tiny fuckin minds?

  Adam shakes his head. —Course it didn’t, feller. To people like them, it never fuckin did. Ever. Why would it? Why would they care?

  Browne blasts air out through his mouth and rasps a palm over his skull. The scars there now maroon. Big brick warehouse outside, greenery in its gutterings, a yard filled only with broken pallets. Jeremy Clarkson’s face on a billboard.

  —This cunt, look.

  —Who? says Browne. —Yer mahn Clarkson there?

  —Aye, him. He’s an English thing, inny? Like Farage.

  —Well, aye. He’s from England.

  —No, I mean, what he is, like. What he stands for. Worrying about yer car. Sooner wash yer fucking car than go and look at mad butterflies.

  —Ah, ye’ve lost me there, so ye have. How’d ye get onto butterflies?

  —Yeah but. The concept is a clot in Adam’s throat. Somehow it is linked, this is what he wants to say, all of it is linked but in ways that he cannot understand much less articulate. Gristle from a cheap and dirty burger, that’s how it feels – that an obsession with cars is seen as an achievement, as doing something unique and interesting with your only life. Like losing sleep over the fact that someone somewhere might be getting something that you’re not. Desperation; an awful lack, and then the crash in the world and the eye-searing flash and the slaver and the tearing teeth. How to explain all this … Orange Barred Sulphur. Painted Jezebel. And the flower mantis looked like a flower; it had evolved to do that. Ambush predator, miraculous, stone-still in blooms with its scalpels mounted on a lightning bolt. The car has to shine.

  —Anyway. We’re getting off now. Our stop sure.

  Big station. A platform lined with waiting people. Adam and Browne disembark, climb the stairs, cross the footbridge, the booze heavy and sloshy in Adam’s belly. Heat from the sky and up from the concrete and this is the Midlands and outside the station there is a dusty grumble of cars and taxis. The stream of people leaving the station meets the counter-flow of people going in and they break around each other smoothly in shoals. A zephyr arrives from somewhere, brief half-relief, brings up a fine grit of track-cinders, gravel detritus and pulverised precursors, forebears now tough talcum that are crunched between the teeth and Browne and Adam move towards the taxi rank and climb in the back of one and the Sikh driver asks Where to, boss?, and Browne takes a scrap of paper out of his pocke
t and reads out the address that is scribbled thereon and the cab turns left into the city and things move fast, very fast.

  Happening, now. A captured thump going through Adam, the drink and the adrenaline and the heat. Something is about to occur.

  Browne speaks into his phone: – Ey, Sameer. It’s me, mahn. Browne … on me way, aye. In a cab. Be with ye in a wee bit sure.

  Trucks and buses slide through the streets, steel hills in a landslip. Knives of sunlight thrown from their chrome and glass. People, people.

  Browne elbows Adam. —How ye feeling?

  —Alright. Sound.

  —Don’t say anything. Browne drops his voice. —A mean when we get there. Just stand behind me and don’t say anything. Leave all the talking to me. It’ll be grand.

  Ring road, the wide traffic-way all heat-speed and boiled hate. A big dark church that bakes and the bulk of the university and the vast waspy feat of Molineux, gold and black, a glimpse of the turf through the barred gate – an instant of mint in the flash of pampered grass. Sweat. Behind the stadium, down onto the Newhampton Road and its tight terraces. The bricks blackened over sooty centuries. It is here that the taxi stops. Sweat.

  —This is yow, boss.

  Browne pays the driver and they get out. This is Adam, temulent in the heat and the strangeness. He looks up at the roofscape – the blinding tiles and the ariel ideograms. The sun high and beneath it nothing fantastic will appear amongst the black chimneys.

  —Thirty-six, Browne says, and his eyes scan. All those net-curtained windows and the wheelie bins, some windows tinned up and scrawled on: WANDERERS on one, and, below it, BAGGIES SCUM. Hot, hot. Touch that steel and there’d be a hiss and a blistering. —There. At me shoulder, now, Adam son. Stay at me shoulder. Don’t speak.

  They cross the road. Browne raps his knuckle on a door. Adam stands at Browne’s right shoulder and then takes a step to the left and he has no idea why he does so. The door is red and with three long, thin, vertical frosted windows in it, behind which there is blurred and scumbled movement and then the door is opened by a short Asian guy.

  —Sameer, yeh? Browne.

  Browne holds out his hand. Sameer drops his eyes to Browne’s lower leg. —There’s the scar, he says. —Knew it’d be yow, robbing Irish cunt, and then Browne is yanked by the hand into the house and a big hand reaches out from behind the door and clamps around Adam’s nape and then there is a hallway and the pissy stink of skunk going past and a green carpet with brown swirls and some sort of magnetic vice and then there is a kitchen and there is a fridge which Adam is hurled at and bounced off and things leap in his vision, black commas and ticks flickering and sharp, a whirl of animal impulses that rave and snap. Only three words can rise: – What the fuck?

  —Down’t spake, says a local voice. —Or Oy’ll hurt yow. Really fuckin bad.

  The senses snatching at stimulus before shutdown: the glass phials on the worktop and the scorch-sided saucepans on the cooker. The walls with stains on. Bare lightbulb. Stuff everywhere, tools and clutter. It’s like, it’s like—

  —Who the fuck are yow? Matey’s supposed to be on his own.

  And a man. There’s a man, here, in the gulping senses: the home-made tats on the face and neck and hands and the reddish stubble and the one eye that appears unnaturally fixed while the other one circles. The scoop taken out of the ear. Such a face. A kind of click in the voice, too, the voice that comes out of that face. Big before Adam, all details enlarged; pores like craters and the lip-cracks trenches. That ear; it’s been bitten. There are four smaller scoops within the larger scoop where teeth once met and held and tore.

  —Oy said: who the fuck are yow?

  Adam’s dad would’ve hurricaned, would’ve grabbed at tools, furniture. Adam says: – I’m, I’m fuckin no one, mate. Don’t even know Browne. Just along for the ride. Only met him a couple of days ago, honest. In a pub.

  He comes at you with a knife, son, you go at him with an axe. An if he comes at you with an axe, you—

  —So why are yow here?

  —Just told yeh, I don’t really know. Browne asked me to come along, that’s all. Bit of support, like. Few quid. Whatever’s goin on with him is fuck all to do with me.

  A noise from elsewhere in the house; a kind of yelp. Adam hears himself blink; two damp clicks. —What’s happening to him?

  The man curls a lip. —Nothing good. There’s bad blood.

  Reach out and grab. This is a big man, a big scarred man, a big fucking violent man, shove him, shove him hard and he’ll stumble and go down and then you can stamp on his fucking face, stamp—

  —It is, innit. It’s fuckin yow.

  —What?

  —It’s yow, innit? Oy fuckin knew it. Knew there was a reason why yow were still fuckin conscious.

  —Ey?

  —Little fuckin voice in moy head there was. Soon as Oy saw yow at the door.

  Now, the fucker’s rambling, now, do it now, the stiff fingers in the eyes, blind the cunt, lunge and—

  The man drags a chair to him and sits.

  —Down’t recognise me, no?

  Something, something outside, shakes Adam’s head for him; it reaches down from the yellowy ceiling and makes his head move. —I don’t, mate, no. When did I meet yeh?

  The man just looks. There’s even what appears to be a small smile on the wreck of his face. The one good eye kind of roves over Adam’s face, taking in the details, while the other one remains fixed to a place on Adam’s thorax.

  —Yow don’t remember. Yow don’t remember the little thing. Now the man, bafflingly, tickles the back of one inked hand with a finger of the other. A secret sign or something. Kind of Masonic. —Little spotted thing, no?

  —No, mate. You’ve got me scoobied. Sorry.

  And who knows why the mind recalls what it does and by what strange routes. The thud of Adam’s heart now retreats from his skull.

  —Yow towld me things, before it was clowsed down. Oy met yow. Yam were going to the kitchen. Yow towld me things but they clowsed it down an here Oy am but Oym still not using. This is just work. Mun-aye. Are yow?

  A flicker, now – a tiny twitch in the recall. Something about identity, yes, but other, bigger things get in the way, as they’ve started to do. Of everything that is not them. —No. Just drink.

  —Glad to hear it. Clean as a fucking whistle, Oy am. Still.

  That eye takes it all in. Then it closes, briefly, and the man rubs a hand over his face and there is another anguished cry from somewhere in the house and the man points to the back door.

  —Gow out there, there’s a ginnel. Turn left onto the rowd, go round the Molineux and yow’ll be back in the town. Easy. Alroyt? Someone up there’s looking out for yow, must be. Oy’ll tell Sameer yow did a runner. Get away with yow, now. Quickquick.

  And then Adam is outside in a small yard full of junk and then he’s through a gate and in an alleyway and then there’s the stadium and then there’s a scrawled underpass and then there’s a pub and over it all is the heat, always the heat. Then there is drink. There is a jumbling in the brain and everywhere else. Browne has gone, out of the world that Adam is in now and he is looking at his face in the mirror behind the bar and he is imagining it inked, tattooed, say with a skull, or decorated as if the skin has been peeled away and the muscles bared in glistening maroon sheets, or, or, just the one word CUNT on his forehead because maybe then it would come back, the inferno found within him, these eating flames. Because it’s not about the display of disarray or not wholly – there is immolation, too. The Vietnamese monk, unmoving in the agony, only here it is raucous; it must riot and roar. This plea of his must deafen. There is drink – lager and whisky nips, again and again. There is a woman reaching past Adam to take her bottle of BrewDog from the barman and there are words, more ink, on the inside of her pale arm, cursive: what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

  —I know some paraplegics who’d disagree with that, a voice is saying. —Or this feller I
met once who got blinded by a rubber bullet. Or this other feller with no artery in his leg. None of them are dead but they’re a fuck of a lot weaker than they were. It’s, it’s all just plat. Platitudes.

  —Ah. That’s nice, bab, the woman says. She has ear-rings like tiny chandeliers.

  —Yeh, an, and, y’know the feller, even the feller who wrote them words? He had a breakdown, he did, ended up in a fuckin asylum. Did that make him stronger?

  —Who, Kanye? Rubbish. He’s playing at the NEC next month. I’m off to see him, chick. Got tickets.

  —It’s like, it’s like … things happen for a reason. This shite that people come out with all the time. Things happen for a reason they say. Oh do they? the voice is saying, all slurred. —A mean, fuckin do they? What reasons might there be? The rape and murder of children. What fuckin reason can there be? What? Platitudes. Bollox. Fucking meaningless, all of it.

  —Let go of me arm.

  —Oi. Stop bothering my regulars, you. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave.

  And then there are street lights in a humid night and there are many moths around those yellow bulbs. There is a train station in the haze, and far people who move like zombies, under the lights, between the buildings. And they must see him in the street-shine and haze moving like the bones have been taken from him but the water in the booze and the oxygen in the boiled air – oh the toothsome metabolic components of the still-here, still breathing and moving, if brokenly, around. Better not to think, just let machines take you to wherever you need to go. Drink.

  The question of what-will-spring-out: the unknowability of it. Hard, already, and craning; or maybe limp and sad. Clean and soapy or thickly cheddary, putrid in the pastes. Clean-shaven or thicketed; pendulous of gizzardy bollock or sprouted out from a wrinkled and seemingly empty skin-fold. Roped with veins or smooth as a sliced potato. In this beats being. An attractor, her, these things drawn by her very biomass; that and the smile she gives out and the availability in her limbs’ open arrangements. And something like the accessibility always in desperation, too, in the eyes that would seek an eternity in the crust of dried semen between her breasts, a forever in that instant when the eyes roll back in the head. Her dark matter; she bends the light. Some circumcised, some not: the hoopy nodules of gristle. Twists of fluff on some that must be picked off. Ones that swing like clubs; others, like Rang’s, that poke and prod rudely, without manners. And always behind these never-duplicated things the needy flesh-engines that fade into shadow, that pant back in the distance somewhere, pushing out hands to grab her shoulders or hair or tits or her throat. Astonishing, really, all of it, but briefly so; agonisingly briefly so. There will be sparks, in the things that move on two legs towards her; in this meat you may meet me, or something very like it – that is the promise that is its own scourge. That scoops itself out. But they tend to come at her from light – out of the gantries behind bars or the doorways of illuminated rooms or from windows where they’ve been standing, those framed holes into the wider world where nothing glows in this season, the big sun making only the smallest trickles of shade that puddle at shoes like the piss of the incontinent.