Broken Ghost

by Niall Griffiths

  The last time Cowley hitched down to the capital he’d acquired a lift as far as Llangurig and then one from there to just outside Rhayader where he stood in the pissing rain for three hours until a milk-tanker took him to Brecon. And there he’d stood with his thumb out like a dickhead, two hours or more, half-empty vans ignoring him, some faces openly jeering, pointing, giving the wanker sign, and him there boiling inside sending the wet rage off himself in rising vapour. Some bear of a bloke had taken pity and stopped for him but then put his hand on his knee on the outskirts of Merthyr and then there’d been a red splatter on the dashboard and Cowley had then to crash in a garden shed before dragging himself in the morning up to the motorway again where some rugby fans heading down to the Millennium Stadium had stopped for him and put a spliff and a tinny in his hand and dropped him off at the castle, smack in the city centre, so it turned out okay in the end but the shite leading up to that was not to be repeated, ever. Two days to reach the capital; would’ve been quicker on a horse and fucking cart. Four hours and a fortune on the train and the barriers are unjumpable these days. Free movement: the passage of bodies. With restrictions, in this country, chains pulled ever tighter. And so the lived-in flesh crumples and draws in upon itself and all the worlds it does contain.

  He makes a kind of wee encampment for himself at the back of the bus, a cwtch in the furthest corner; coat on the seat as a barrier, a shop-bought butty and a half-bottle of voddy. Coast road, turn off at Aberaeron, veer away from where she will be, her and that waster fucking junkie and that lovely little girl. Hills and churches – the steeples, the way they can be seen above everything; each one a painful probe into a shame-hole, a corroded place inside. Imagine them all in flames. Lampeter. Students from the university get on. The accents – a couple of American, most English. Cooing over the landscape. Cowley nips at the burn of the vodka and wants to tell them that there is nothing out there, that it’s just empty. That this is ancient Cymru, here, in the furthest corner of the bus, and all of it that you’ve never seen so why the fuck wouldn’t you want to gawp? Yet behind his shades his eyes are often closed, and when they’re open they stare out at the emptiness, dry in the heat and so many people unclothed in any kind of light except the sun’s ceaseless sear. Fuck it all. Imagine everything on fire. Doze.

  And then Carmarthen. Ten-minute break. Cowley hauls himself off the bus to stand leaning against its exhaust-reeking and heated steel and smoke. The driver, smoking too, makes an attempt at conversation, asks him what he’s heading to Cardiff for, but Cowley does not hear, gone as he is in recall; easiest purse ever, not far from here and recently, the toppling McBride, that remembered rapist in the form of his face, stamp, three breakages. Had to be dragged off, didn’t he? Would’ve killed the cunt. And money enough for life is what Aney said. No money worries ever again, sor. Take every belonging – house, car, the lot. Get a private car down to Cardiff. Limo. Or do what every other fucker with a lot of money and some Welsh ancestry does and buy a flat in fucking Pontcanna. Or emigrate to Patagonia. Or just fucking London, where you can sit in the bar of the Welsh Centre and whinge about hiraeth and the old soil when you can be standing on it again two hours out of Paddington. Hiraeth, bollax; that’s what the Great Western is for. It’s just another thing to enrich the sense of self. How can the world retain its shape, not crumple like an empty chip wrapper, when it is made up of more hole than substance?

  The bus rumbles against Cowley’s back. He re-boards. Re-snuggles himself in his nest, re-nips at the vodka. Keeps his eyes behind his shades and, as the bus shudders again into motion, takes the little machine out of his pocket and cradles it in his hands, doesn’t examine it, just feels the small weight of it in his palm. Then he returns it, to the safety of the pocket over his heart. A few quid in the Cash Converters. But there are other ways of getting money.

  A couple of years ago he was with Llŷr in Llŷr’s van going, where, he can’t remember now, Tenby it might’ve been for a weekend on the piss, and on this road out of Carmarthen they’d hit a sheep. Well, not much bigger than a lamb, although it’d left a big bloody dent in the wing panel. Llŷr had stopped the van and they’d gotten out and gone over to the animal, lying broken at the roadside. Squatted down next to it. Its breath – how shocking loud that’d been, and how fast, the quick rips of it, the ribs going in and out, the eyes clouded over already but the bellows of the breath, frantic, and then everything had just stopped. In a nanosecond, from one state to the other, and so great the breach between the two seemed – eyes to pebbles in one quick trip of the heart. They’d carried the carcass into the van and Llŷr had taken it to a farmer boy he knew outside Saundersfoot and they’d had free Sunday roasts for ages.

  Doze. He wakes, finishes what’s left of the vodka, dozes again. And when he next wakes there is a strong sense of conurbation, of heavy traffic and big buildings nearby; it’s Merthyr, he thinks, but there is somehow a sense of looming – not only in the velocity of traffic, the torrent of which the bus now joins, but in the sense of some largeness pressing up against the sky, slipping now from blue to a darker blue. A feeling that whatever’s on the ground nearby is thickening the sky. Through Cowley’s half-awakeness two faces drift; the girl with the tattooed stars behind her ear and the skinny lad with the scouse accent. Unclear shapes, just noses and eyes and lips. Where are they now and what have they been doing since.

  So much traffic outside. It was a whomping sound that the lamb made, not very loud, when it hit the van; not a sound of lethality, really. And the ease of transitioning that followed … pantpantpant then nothing. That easy; no fuss or bother. And think of free lamb roasts for the rest of your life or, rather, having so much fucking money that they might as well be free. You could pay people just to stand there, in front of a light like a searchlight while you just stood and looked. Women, like; get that shape outlined. And the freedom of the body. Free to not be shunted and controlled. Free to not be chipped at so that the struggle to hold on to any kind of reliable structure in it becomes something to which every fucking second and every remaining cell must be devoted. Whomp – just once. It’d be that fucking easy.

  At Swansea, Cowley is fully awake, and there is a hunger in the way he now sits upright. Taking everything in. By the time the Millennium Stadium is in sight, the lofted struts of it all lit up sharp and a-shimmer in the haze of evening, he is thirsty again.

  Need calls to need. Microscopically precise. Close as it is to a vortex that calls it grasps for hostage or if not that then just the co-doomed. Like proteins call to proteins in the gutweed on a shore; the chains such sugars are called to form. In both there is growth, of a sort.

  Adam smells the burning; it is brought to him not by any breeze, because there is none, and the heat stamps on his head like the heel of a boot, but still he smells it – something aflame on the beach. A suggestion of a party. He makes to stand up from the bench on which he’s sitting but in doing so his knees go puddingy and he falls back, hard, an oof leaving him, the drunk’s innate gimble letting the bottle in his hand trace his movements so that not one drop is spilt. He spreads himself on the bench. In front of him is the sea and its far red ridge. See them all outside the Glengower, in their couples and crowds, every shaded face turned to the blaze. Trade route, once, out there. High eyes on the hills on watch for the boats coming from Ireland. Some contemporary commentators calling it the avatar of the Internet, he read that not too long ago, when he was reading, before.

  —And it’s shite. Bollox. Fucking bollox.

  Some strolling people stare at him.

  —It’s cack. They just don’t fucking get it. It’s new, man. We’ve never had anything like it before. That’s what they just can’t understand.

  All the legs quicken. Adam notices hairless male legs, a kind of white scale at the ankle bone, so sharp in his vision; the senses heightened before the shutdown. Is he talking aloud? He takes a pull at the wine bottle. Sour, sour. He has been the crust on the crotch of kex discard
ed. He has been the fly, spoilt for choice. And God he’s been a zombie and he is that zombie. The disconnect from the soul – look into the O of the bottle’s neck. Put it to your eye and have a good look in.

  —Mam what’s that man doing?

  —Nothing now come away.

  Adam looks up. The woman has back-flaps of flesh that hang over her belt and her child is bright blue and holding a shield. A boy; he looks back at Adam over his blue shoulder and then is tugged away again by his mum.

  —Why’ve yeh gone that colour, lad? Why are yeh blue?

  A sharper tug. They cross the road where, outside the old courthouse, they meet another plump woman and another tiny smurf.

  Kids’ fancy-dress party. That’s what it must be. Or some kind of environmental protest because some of the adults are blue too. And holding placards. The Na’vi – that’s what they’re meant to be. Some gurgle leaves Adam which could be taken to be a sort of laugh. There were people dressed like that when he went to see Avatar, with that mad woman from St Helens; they dropped some mild acid beforehand but all he got was irritated. And in the cinema bar, following the film, he’d cornered one of them and told him about how there were people here, on this planet, suffering, being shat on, and there’s this prick painted blue getting all emotional about pixels. The St Helens woman had been laughing hysterically. The information world has become more real than the world of sense, that’s what he’d said. He’s all for ecology and liberation and all that nice stuff but these twats, these humourless, pious blue bastards which don’t even exist – go on, the baddies! Blast the shite out of Hometree! He’d still been ranting when he’d been ejected from the multiplex. Carried on ranting in the pub over the sliproad. Never stopped, really.

  And yes he’s been the gnat that whines in your ear when you’re falling into sleep. He can smell something burning on the beach.

  It’s a lovely sound that the waves make, a soft sigh and collapse. A lull. Each suck of water back into the sea, across the tinkling shingle, he feels something of him get tugged back with it, a small and fluid part of him taken back into a vast absorption and it is not bad. He drinks, and in that way makes himself more fluid – to give the sea more to take. Dissolve the body for the soul needs no flesh. Offer it all up. No fear, just deliquescence, and the shore is awash with it, in the dead creatures, in the reefs of bleached weed. Laughable, really, that thing about eternal life in the optimum physical state when dissolution is the aim and that we were sure of up until recently. Until power and its props became valued above all. Oh the squalor.

  He hears the unmistakable sound of happy young women, a lit-up sound but it puts the hairs on his nape and forearms into horripilation. He hides the bottle beneath his jacket and arranges himself roughly sober – arms folded, back straight. The nice noise nears. Voices that shine and a glistening laughter. Please let it not be Jess and her friends. He keeps his eyes low as the women pass and God he sees the skin of their legs and feet, honey, and the shapes, he burns, and the scissoring shadows and he will not watch as they move away from him, further up the promenade. Will not watch their arses and backs for he understands that there is no room in their vision for the sight of him or if there is it would be only to assess for threat. Which is the way it is. The way it must be. If he had looked up as they passed they would’ve been between his eyes and the sunset and Christ they would’ve glowed. All of them, surrounded by the blaze. But they might’ve seen the direction of his stare and ruin would’ve come.

  That there needs to be some level of shame: he gets that. He knows that, always has, and he accepts. But there is a level of murder that has come about and a sickness in the hate of the weak, of the vulnerable. Rhos has closed down. There will be boards nailed to its windows. And there is a fawning infatuation with such. Were he upright the sickness of this, an instant glimpsed, would no doubt knock him back down again, but because he sits he just takes the bottle out of its hiding place and raises it to his lips. Sour. But it is wine. Which does its thing.

  Stronger, now, that burning smell. He counts to five then surges to a stand, steadies himself with a hand on the back of the bench then very carefully moves over to the gap in the railings and descends the stone steps to the beach. Tide long out and the weed on the steps has baked to a crust so there is no danger of slippage but it is a crippled descent that he makes, putting both feet on each step like a child. A sweetish smell rises and there is a group of them at the foot of the steps, spliffs on the go, talking in the one accent that can be pinpointed to no locale.

  —Ah, now, fuck, here yis are. Students. Look at yis.

  He stands amongst them. Sways amongst them. The bottle clasped by the neck between two fingers and swinging like a pendulum.

  —This is it, lads, innit? Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. This is your fuckin chance, innit? This is your time. It’s come.

  He’s not even sure if he’s talking out loud – he’s not really sure of anything. They’re mostly not even regarding him, just silently looking down at the stones on which they sit.

  —I know you. I’ve met yis a thousand fuckin times. And you’ve always been the same, you have. You’ve always envied people who, to you, to you have led more, more fuckin, realer lives, haven’t yeh? Yis, yis’ve always fuckin wished you were poor. Jarvis Cocker. When you hear ‘Common People’ you’re not the, the Greek girl, are yeh? He burps, hugely. —You’re the singer in that song. In your fucking tiny minds.

  A lad with white spikes for hair looks at a lad in a beanie hat. —Jarvis what?

  —Aye, yeh. You’re the fuckin singer. Now, tho, now, the time has come that yeh don’t have to hide. Hide yer fuckin sheltered and your, your fuckin privilege anymore cos, fuck, you’re encouraged to fuckin flaunt it. Aren’t yeh? Look at me, I can afford nine fuckin grand a year to spend on me education. Or, or, or Mummy and fuckin Daddy can. Doesn’t bother me, no. Sitting here on the beach with yer weed. Nine grand a year man. An yeh know what?

  For effect, Adam takes a big pull at the bottle and swallows with a noise.

  —Yer still wankers. Even more now than you’ve ever been. Pamp, pampered bastards. Mummy and Daddy will always think the world of their little fuckin rays of sunshine. What you think youse know, you don’t. You really fuckin don’t. None of you have ever seen what I’ve seen.

  He thumps the bottle twice against his chest. The drama.

  —Predictable, yis are. Boring. For all your fuckin money. You’ll never. Never burn inside.

  He moves away. Did he just say all that out loud? Behind him he hears a mutter and a burst of several laughters. There is the sea and the sinking sun in its distant sear and there is the sea wall which he stays close to as if famished for shadow and because he can steady himself with a hand on its stones. Further up the beach, he can see some small flames beneath the jetty; in the darkness under the wooden slats, a small fire flickers. He can smell it and he can see it.

  The music is dumph-dumph-dumph shite and the back room of the pub is too bright, no interesting shadowing going on, but at the core of it is her and she’s incredible; not because of what she’s made of but because of what she’s made of what she’s made of. She moves sinuous, joyous in her skin, her face aglitter with rings and bolts, a swoosh of inky hair down over one eye, the tattoos crawling across her bare arms and the spangly maroon dress tight to all her swells. Her cleavage is a creamy fold and above it a raven has spread its drilled-in wings. Emma cannot take her eyes off her: the confidence, the pleasure declaimed in being here, in all of her zinging skin, in this overlit too-warm back room of this pub. A tattooed sheela-na-gig in a tight sparkly dress.

  And Emma’s not the only one to gawp. People dance around the woman and there are many eyes turned her way over shoulders and through hair. Emma necks her Cheeky Vimto and puts the empty glass on a sticky tabletop and sways over to the woman.

  —I love watching you. You’re cool as fuck.

  —Thanks.

  The woman’s hand, chunky with r
ings, clamps on Emma’s skinny hip. The fingers dig in and Emma wonders if they now blister, if the woman wants to instantly jerk her hand away because of the scald. She looks at Emma’s face.

  —Are you not going to dance with me?

  —What? Oh.

  Emma’s been standing still, while the brilliant woman serpented around her. Again this has happened; she’s realised she’s been statuesque when it’s seemed she’s been in motion, twitching and scratching and nodding her head. So she dances; she mirrors the woman, her opposite hand on the opposite hip and God how small it looks, there, clutching like that. With each step Emma smarts a little down there – that barman had been rough and she hadn’t really been ready for him but the bar could not be left unmanned for long – but that doesn’t matter and she feels the eyes on her and her partner, all the different eyes and the histories etched in them, but soon she feels no eyes on her at all; very quickly there’s just her and the otherness held between her hands, the fact of it, all its charged knowledge, and it would not matter if there were no other people or even no music. Just this yielding warmth in each of her pressing palms, and they do press, as if they need to meet through the flesh that separates them. So the body between them writhes all the more. Like an accordion.

  A time goes by. Then the woman whooshes air upwards through her fig-coloured lips and the swoosh of hair jumps for a moment and reveals her black-rimmed eye and falls back down to conceal again.

  —I need a drink. Let’s get a drink.