Daniel, he said, by way of acknowledgement. His eyes glittered like Razia’s above the thin moustache. The door clicked shut behind him and I heard his engine rev outside. We didn’t speak much, just a word or two when he was going out to the taxi, or coming back in after a shift. He tolerated me in his house, at his kitchen table or on his sofa.
A ghost went through Gary Hagan, I said. Straight through him.
That means he’s going to die, said Raz. No bones about it.
Ghosts don’t have bones, I said. She wrinkled her nose at the lame joke. Seriously though, I asked her. Do you believe in them?
Aye, I reckon. Saw this old biddy once in Dhaka, going out to the well in the morning. Only she’d died the night before.
What do you think they are?
I don’t reckon it’s the dead coming back, rattling a chain. Maybe it’s because time and space are all folded and wrinkled and scrunched up, so one place can rub against another. Leave a mark like pressing on carbon paper.
So a ghost is like a bad photocopy?
She laughed. Aye, maybe. Have you had any dinner? I think there are frozen pizzas – I could heat some up.
Better get back to the pub Raz, I said, I’ve got stuff to do.
I shuffled into my overcoat. I had to squeeze close past her at the front door. She sparkled at me,
Take care Dan, she said.
I pulled her towards me, but she squirmed away expertly.
Don’t make things more complicated than you have to, she said.
Kate was in the living room with the TV blaring and the gas fire pumping out the heat on full whack and Trajan sprawled beside her toasting his bollocks. He was Yan’s dog and I never worked out what breeds made him up but he was a big leathery bugger whatever.
She grabbed my jumper as I went past, nostrils flared like a horse.
Don’t think, she said, her big brown eyes wandering aimlessly. Don’t think you can fucking swan back in here without a word. After three years, you bastard.
Half drawl and half croak, with a blast of Coke and Jack Daniels on her breath. Sweet and sticky.
Mam, I said. It’s Danny.
Looked down at her hand. Pastel-pink nails flaring against mahogany skin.
Don’t think, she said. Gave my jumper a hard yank, almost overbalancing me. The heat was oppressive, sweat patches heavy under my arms.
Mam.
Aye, she said. Tried to focus on me. Danny.
She reached over the arm of the sofa and found her glass and took a good hit. Then she rummaged in her bag for tablets and shovelled a few down and chased them with more whisky and Coke.
It’s Randall and Hopkirk, she said. I love this. Come and sit next to us and watch it like.
I sat.
Last night, she said. Did you notice anything?
Like what.
It got cold.
I didn’t notice.
I woke up in me bed and it was cold. It was so cold I couldn’t move and me breath was making crystals. I was frozen stiff as a board.
You were dreaming mam.
I was lying there paralysed. And there was someone standing at the foot of the bed. A man.
What did he look like?
You couldn’t see him. He was just there. And you could feel him. Just a feeling of malice, like he meant me harm. It was steaming off him.
So what happened?
I dunno. I sat up and he was gone and the room was warm again.
You were dreaming.
I need to know what he wants.
Why?
Ghosts want something, don’t they?
I dunno. I can’t breathe with this fucking gas fire.
Gary Hagan wandered in with a bottle of Mexican lager in one hand and calfskin loafers on his feet. He sat down in Yan’s chair.
What you watching Katie?
The way he was looking at her, seeing the long legs in tight stone-washed denim and the sunbed skin and blueblack hair like a fall of coaldust. Not seeing the nicotine stains on her teeth and the cracks in her skin, not smelling the raw panic on her breath. She was ten years older than him but she’d still pass for thirty.
Trajan padded over to him and sniffed at his groin and he looked worried but made a show of rubbing the dog’s ears.
Who’s behind the bar Gaz? said Kate.
Lads are looking after it.
You’ve got it under control, then.
Aye. Just leave it to me Katie.
She settled to watch the TV again. She flicked a sly look at Hagan.
You got big muscles Gaz.
Got to keep yourself in shape.
He was practically purring.
Aye. You’re almost as big as my Yan.
Right.
He was – He is –
She burst out laughing.
Which is it?
Laughed again.
If he walked in now, right. I’d deck him. One hard punch. It was that bastard showed me how to throw a good punch. You know, not a lass’s punch.
You’re a tough cookie Katie.
And after I’d decked him, she whispered, breathily. I’d drag him down on the floor and fuck his brains out. Fuck them right out.
She was looking right at Hagan with her face wide open.
When Kate was asleep on the sofa I went into her bedroom and found the shoebox of Yan’s stuff at the back of the bottom drawer in her dresser. There was an old paperweight and a wet shaver and a box of cufflinks, one of them old digital watches with the liquid crystal all faded away to nowt and a bunch of keys. I expected photos but there weren’t any. Maybe nobody could afford a camera when they were growing up. And there was Yan’s old diary for nineteen eighty-one.
I rifled through it in the green half-light seeping through bedroom curtains. There weren’t many names and addresses in the back and most of these I didn’t recognize. But a couple of them rang a bell. I jammed the little diary in my back pocket and closed the shoebox and buried it again at the back of Kate’s drawer.
The curtains were closed in the saloon and the darkness was prickling with dust so thick you could taste it. I moved over to the bar, feet squeaking on the lino tiles, and when I got there I lifted the flap and ducked through. I had my finger in the dial of the phone and then I thought you don’t just ring someone out of the blue and expect them to spill their guts. It has to be face to face.
Okay. I triggered the till and cushioned the noise when it opened. Plenty of notes in there. Hagan only cashed up once or twice a week. My breath was coming quick, spots swimming in my vision. But I stretched out a hand and brushed the pile of banknotes and then snatched it back when the front door banged and voices clattered in the hallway.
It’s showtime, Magoo was yelling.
I slammed the till shut and got back into the mixer store. Got the cellar trapdoor open and tumbled inside and lowered the lid again. Boots in the saloon, dockers and dealers, on the boarded floor behind the bar. Resounding through my head, the world filling up with boots. Paul’s boots in the cinder yard, Yan’s boots coming up the stairs.
I was a kid, lying in bed in the dark.
There were voices up there, and the clatter and sigh of the beer pump as Hagan shelled out pints and the bump of the full glasses when he planted them on the bar.
You’ve got to do him Franco.
Get him on the ground and lace his head till it bounces.
Aye, but make sure you stop short of killing the bastard.
Not too far short, mind.
Remember when you had that pikey lad. Had to drag you off him like a radge dog.
Never liked that O’Rourke kid, intoned Gary Hagan. Some bad wiring inside his head. Loose connection somewhere.
Needs kicking back into circuit, like. Do the cunt a favour.
He must be doing summat right. Franco’s lass is well tidy, like.
Was it his lass or his daughter?
It was both, I heard.
She’s only fucking fifteen.
/> Well, if there’s grass on the wicket.
Take the piss when he’s been through your daughter, the fucking baghead, growled Franco.
What are you gonna say to him Franco?
Aye. Go on. Do the voice.
Do you feel lucky punk? creaked Franco in a strange high voice. They erupted into laughter.
Sounds fuck all like Clint, that.
Well do yeh?
Down on the cellar steps I shivered. Dark and clammy in here, no light at all, not even the smallest glint from the metal kegs. I leaned my head against the brickwork and started to drift.
Rare birds drift off, sooner or later. When something tasty crashes into Teesmouth and word gets around there can be a bit of a circus. Twitchers come in from all over the gaff and you never need to ask where the bird is. Just follow the scopes and the cagoules.
The bird itself – Siberian rubythroat, semi-palmated sandpiper, whatever – is a wreck when it lands here. First landfall after the North Sea, the Arctic Ocean, the Atlantic, and it crashes down on the brink of death with its fat reserves empty. Needs to feed in a hurry so it stays put for a while, resting and replenishing. But in the end, after a few days or a few weeks, it disappears from the radar. No more sightings.
So what happens next? Some just die, of course. Exhaustion, starvation, predation. And there are records of birds trying to get back to where they should have been in the first place. What drives them I don’t know. Maybe the stars just look wrong here.
And some of them stay. Just get on with it. Immerse themselves in flocks of similar species and hope nobody will notice.
In nineteen eighty-two there was a Wilson’s phalarope on Reclamation Pond. It was a transatlantic vagrant, the first record for Tees mouth, and it became a local celebrity for a couple of weeks. We didn’t get down there straight away because Yan was about to go back to the regiment, the Task Force assembling for the Falklands. He knew he was going, even when it wasn’t clear how the government would respond or whether these remote sheep-encrusted rocks were even worth fighting over. The day it started, when they reported the Argentine invasion on the news, he snapped off the TV.
Well, he said. I’m going for a little holiday. It’s good birding down there Dan.
By the time we got out to Reclamation it was quiet. A vacant early Saturday morning, cold and blue. We parked up on the rise behind Dorman’s and looked out over the open water and the tall reedbanks and the exoskeleton of the refinery beyond. Picked out the phalarope straight away, a small delicate wader swimming on the open water, head bowed in prayer with the needle-fine bill tucked down. It span slow in the water, white and grey and silver in the lucid dawn like a small apologetic ghost. Like a swimming moon.
We watched it from the window of the rusty Renault Twelve and I could smell Yan beside me in the donkey jacket which had absorbed years of his scent. Cigarette smoke and a raw tang of sweat. He had a few days’ stubble on his chin.
Phalarope, he said, comes from the Greek, like. For ‘coot-footed’.
You’re making it up.
Nah, honest. They have these lobed feet. You know, like a coot or a moorhen. When they swim the feet stir up the sediment from the bottom, full of nice invertebrates, and then the bird spins round and snaps up the goodies from the water.
Right.
When your mam was pregnant with you I used to wash her feet. She couldn’t reach round the bump. They swelled right up from the weight of the baby.
Why are you telling me this?
Dunno. Just came into my head.
The bird bobbed and span gently for a few seconds longer, and then it rose from the water and sprang into the sky like a pale swallow, dark wings and silver body. We tracked it in our bins, south over the reeds, a white punctuation mark in the blue sky. Eventually it became too small to see.
And that was it. The phalarope wasn’t seen again on Teesmouth, and Yan left for the Falklands on the Tuesday.
Yan Thomas would have killed him, boomed Magoo, from above. Remember what happened to Jimmy Dillon?
And I was wide awake, questing into the darkness like a dog, heartbeat flaring. I heard Magoo subside heavily onto a bar stool which complained under his weight.
Jimmy Bananas? came Kurt’s voice, muffled and indistinct.
Aye. The bloke came on to Kate, while Yan was on a tour in Belfast.
She’s a canny splitarse man. I cannot blame the gadge.
Well he was shiteing his duds when Yan came back and she told him about it. Now then Bananas, he said. You and me need to go for a drive. Jimmy was browning it but he went along anyway. They got into that rustbucket of his, that old white Renault, and drove off. No fucker ever saw Bananas again.
Pal, said Gary Hagan, you’re talking out of your jug. Yan took him down the bus station in Boro, stuck him on a National Express to sheepshagger land and told him not to come back.
Tommy Hatton reckons Yan killed the gadge. Told him about it one night, when it was just the two of them in the bar. Somewhere lonely out on the brinefields, one of them places only birders go. Ripped his fucking throat out with a Stanley knife, let him bleed out on the mud so he wouldn’t mess up the car seats. Told Tom he couldn’t let it go, not even the once.
Ripped his balls off as well, I heard, said Franco, and fed them to his dog.
You’re joking, aren’t you? interrupted Kurt.
There was a pause and I heard him stifle a yawn. Pints clattered against the bar top.
Tommy Hatton talks out of his back door, he continued. He once tried to tell me his cousin was Muhammad fucking Ali, just so I’d buy him a pint.
A raw splurge of laughter. Hagan plonked his meaty forearms against the bar.
Local hardmen, he said, are ten-a-penny round here. No fucking shortage. Yan was mean enough, when he wanted to be. But when I was on the rigs I knew plenty of lads could have knocked seven shades off of him.
Fucking cable-pullers, laughed Franco. They’re all meatheads. Every cable-puller you meet has a black eye, apart from the ones who’ve got two.
Nah, said Magoo, persisting. Yan’s another one with some loose wiring. Fucking psycho on the sly, I reckon.
But he’s not coming back, said Hagan. Is he?
The conversation drifted away, Hagan reminiscing about his years offshore. Chew. Women. Throwing up on the helicopter, watching Debbie Does Dallas on freezeframe. More chew. More women. My feet were cramped up beneath me on the cellar steps, toes becoming numb, my arm folded awkwardly against the wall. But I fell asleep anyway, descended into a place where boots reverberated in the sky like thunder, kicked and stomped at the wooden clouds until they split.
Can’t believe it, said Paul, leaning back against the bus stop and necking the can I’d given him. You’re doing a runner.
You want to watch Franco and them. They’re after giving you a kicking.
I can handle meself.
Was it his daughter or his missus you went through?
He shrugged. The grey-green eyes looked bored.
I’m down to London next Saturday meself, he said. Crystal Palace. Always good for a barney like.
Thought you were working.
He shrugged again.
Day off, he said. If you’re in that neck of the woods you could meet us at King’s Cross after the game. Six o’clock, top of the main escalators.
How are you going to afford the train?
He looked at me like I was remedial.
I’m bunking the fucker, he said.
Later I lay on my bed in the box room and waited. Fully clothed, boots on, the red glow of the radio alarm on my bedside table. Numbers cycling painfully, time grinding to a halt. In my hand was Yan’s diary, curled up into a tube. I wound it tighter.
There was something going on in Michelle’s room next door. Bumping, shuffling, a sudden loud laugh and then a long female moan. She put it on a plate for just about anybody them days.
She was an odd one, Michelle. Always semi-bewildered, like you ask
ed her a question and her eyes roved around in confusion before she hit on the right thing to say. I never worked out why Yan gave her the hours behind the bar, but fair play to him, she turned out to be a natural. Yan had this habit of adopting waifs and strays now and then. Paul O’Rourke was another one he helped out a couple of times when his mam had kicked him out. He was staying at ours when he first had the bonehead done but Yan didn’t say owt, just looked at him funny.
You ever get that done, he said to me later, you’ll be moving out.
No shit. I smiled as I plugged in the clippers and turned them on and then my hair began to fall across the pages of yesterday’s Gazette, the soundless precipitation obscuring the newsprint. The blades ranged across my scalp, buzzing dispassionately. When it was finished I brushed stray hairs away and looked in the mirror at my own head gleaming nude like a pool ball. Ran a hand across the shorn scalp, felt it tickling like the new pink skin under a blister.
Downstairs in the bar it was pitch dark. I’d waited long after the last sound, long after the last arsehole had pitched out into the night. I counted out nine steps to the bar, hands stretched in front of me until I felt the pitted wood of the counter. Lifted the flap and sidled through, ran my fingers along the cold metal sides of the till, the drawer springing open and butting against my palm. Fingertips danced across the compartments inside, scooped up a wad of notes and smuggled it into my pocket. It felt like a lot. I stopped to listen. Nothing. Just the night-time breath of an old building. The bleating of water in copper pipes, the scratchy stubble of stale plaster, the insect legs of the clock crawling. I picked up the phone and dialled, flinching each time the dial clicked back against the stops.
I waited under the railway bridge, just a hundred yards down the road. I was nervous, skittering the sports bag against my ankles, fingering the notes in my pocket. There was no traffic here in the small hours. A street lamp flickered on and off, alive, dead, alive, and the air was cold. A minicab pulled up next to me, engine idling, and the driver wound his window down. It was Mr Shahid, eyes sharpened above the moustache.
Daniel, he said.
Darlo station, I said.
The train carriage was brightly lit and almost deserted. Flickering through the sleeping country like the calendar riffling past, the lighted windows of the year. Bright and rattling, and then gone, a memory. I leaned back in my seat and lit a cigarette. It gurgled as I did so, the flame searing into the paper and the dry tobacco. I unzipped the sports bag and looked over my supplies. Chocolate bars and crisps, a token apple. Some cans from the bar. I pulled out a can of McEwan’s and ripped it open. It wasn’t cold, but was rich and malty in the throat. I gulped at it.
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