Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  It feels like that, I say. You just have to take it easy. Just look after yourself for a few days. Don’t do too much thinking.

  Yeah, she says, uncertainly.

  I was thinking Kel. Why don’t I take a day off work tomorrow. We could drive down to Whitby, you know, like the old days. Walk on the beach, fish and chips on the pier, lob a week’s wages in the fruities.

  She smiles, reluctantly. Don’t think I’ve got the energy, she says.

  Do you good to get away. Change the scenery, blow some cobwebs away. Remember that hotel we used to stay at?

  She giggles.

  Fucking hell, that squeaky bed. Didn’t get much sleep, did we?

  We’re both quiet for a moment but it doesn’t feel uncomfortable.

  Aye, she says, eventually. Let’s go. Maybe you’re right.

  I’ll put a brew on, I say, levering myself up from the sofa. Then I remember.

  Shit. Said I’d meet Yan tomorrow, up the Headland.

  I hover in the doorway waiting for her response.

  Thick as thieves, you two, is all she says.

  She sits up, and her voice is flat again, and weary.

  I don’t know, I say, shrugging.

  You always made him out to be a bit of an ogre. Self-obsessed, short fuse, wanderlust.

  That’s all true. But he’s growing on me. I spent all those years resisting the idea of him, I’d forgotten how likeable he is in reality. Even though he’s dying, it doesn’t feel uncomfortable.

  He’s working the charm on you, she says. That’s what it is. The blarney.

  I know. But I can handle it.

  What do you talk about?

  Nothing important. Just banter, really.

  You don’t talk about us. The fertility stuff.

  Of course not.

  Because that’s private.

  She crosses her legs under the dressing gown, purses her lips.

  Dan. Flip him off tomorrow. Let’s do Whitby anyway.

  I hesitate.

  Can’t stand up a dying man, I say, my voice wheedling. We can go Sunday instead.

  She breathes out, long and slow, deflating like a balloon.

  No, she says. You can’t stand up a dying man.

  So the next day me and Yan and more than a dozen others are peering over a back garden wall close to the church on Hartlepool Headland. The doctor’s garden, they call it, though who the doctor was or what he thought about the army of anoraks at the bottom of his garden is not recorded. After October storms and spring gales the Headland can be teeming with migrants blown off course from Siberia, Scandinavia, the Arctic. It’s the first landfall after the North Sea.

  Pallas’ warbler, says Yan. And she’s a beauty.

  On the other side of the garden there’s a tiny bird, pirouetting like a leaf among the tendrils of a bedraggled climber. Yellow stripes through the eyes and across the crown of the head, yellow wing bars and rump flashing whenever it flutters to a new perch. It’s not a life tick for either of us, but enough to get us out here on a raw Saturday morning.

  There’s a chippie just across the road with a crowd of kids hanging around outside. Lads in baseball hats and baggy sportswear, lasses with bare and blotchy legs. They smoke, swear raucously to impress. But the crowd of birders doesn’t merit comment. Just part of the scenery here. Saturday morning cars drone past bound for out-of-town superstores.

  All the way from Siberia, says Yan.

  The bird is deftly picking small insects from the leaves and bark, intent and exhaustive.

  No wonder she needs to feed up, he says. She’s not much bigger than a mouse, blown right across from the far side of Europe. Pound for pound that’s like you or me trying to hitch-hike to the moon.

  I don’t answer him because his words barely register. I’m thinking about Kelly, the failed IVF cycle.

  What’s eating you, anyway? he asks.

  Have I missed something and you’ve turned into Jeremy Kyle overnight?

  He laughs.

  Fair dos, he says. I know we haven’t talked much over the years. But sometimes it helps to blurt it out, kick it around.

  I’ll bear that in mind.

  We watch the bird again for a while in silence, following its delicate movements, the green and yellow plumage like spring sun dripping through new leaves, a splinter of stained glass in the dour October day.

  She’s intent on surviving, he says. Isn’t she? Totally single-minded. The chances of that tiny thing making it here must be a million to one against.

  But she’s here, I say.

  Aye. She’s still here.

  *

  After, we head to the chippie. Yan’s still not looking too bad if you consider the radical therapy he’s getting. Red rims around his eyes and a flush at his cheekbones, but otherwise fine. I follow him into the shop. It’s warm inside, the air heavy with grease. The girl at the counter looks at him blearily, crusts of pea mush on her apron and a short denim skirt underneath.

  Small chips and mushies, he says. Salt and vinegar.

  She goes for the scoop, sweat on her forehead, frayed ends of hair stuck to it.

  Had a long day, he says.

  Tell us about it.

  What time do you finish?

  Don’t be nosey.

  She plonks a scoop of chips onto the paper, sprays salt and vinegar on top. Grabs a plastic cup and ladles mushies into it, thick and vivid green.

  Industrial relations, he says. Got to make sure you’re not being exploited. Long hours and that.

  Righto, she says. Rolls up the paper over the tray.

  Three o’clock, she says.

  That’s not so bad.

  He hands over the money.

  Might have to sit outside in the car, he says. Just to check.

  You do that, she says.

  She hands him the change, looks down and flushes, trying to push her hair out of the way.

  Still got it, he says, when we’re out of the door.

  We walk past St Hilda’s church, named for the abbess who planted a monastery on this rock fourteen hundred years ago, and continue through streets of terraces to the sea. Cast-iron railings along the front and jumbled flat rocks below where waders dart and skim at low tide. Turnstone and purple sandpiper, the smell of rotting seaweed. We lean on the railings and look out into the distance, into the mist. Yan grazes on his chips. Then we turn and walk along the front, past big Victorian townhouses three and four storeys high with attic windows towering over the sea. Dirty wood and paint decaying in the constant salt wind, falling away. Televisions flicker behind replacement plastic windows.

  How’s Jim? I ask.

  Getting on like a house on fire, says Yan. Apart from his taste in music. He’s a modern jazz kind of carcinoma, and you know I’m strictly rock and blues.

  We had a cycle of IVF, I tell him, surprising myself. It didn’t work.

  He takes this on board, worries at the buttons of his donkey jacket.

  I feel the cold more since the chemo, he says. You ever think about adoption?

  I shake my head, feeling the words tickle inside me, but leaving them unspoken. Blood’s thicker than water.

  And then I change the subject, tell him about the archaeologists and the webcam.

  Always wondered about being an archaeologist, says Yan, sucking on a cigarette. But then I never stayed on at school. Taught meself everything I know. Must be fascinating, digging in the ground. You never know what you’re going to find. I bet that’s a thrill, when the blade of the excavator bites into the soil.

  You’re more educated than anybody I know.

  That’s because I decided what I was going to read. Never let the schoolteachers decide for me.

  We’re walking down the Heugh breakwater. Silent grey waves rush down the seaward side in the mist. The other side, towards the docks, is calmer. In the mist there is no view towards Teesside. The world is blanked out. The moment, now, shrinks to two people, perhaps a father and son, walking along
a breakwater.

  At the time it didn’t feel like there was an option, he says. Leave school, get a job. Everybody was doing it. Billingham site and the shipyards. I just drifted into it. Worked out later that I wanted something else. You fucking get a sniff of the world and you want more. You want it all. Sat on St Helena watching the sun rise out of the Atlantic. Sweating your balls off in an armoured car in West Belfast with cunts busting petrol bombs against your hide. Down on the Falklands with the wind straight off the Antarctic and the tundra grass rippling like catfur. Tagteaming some sweaty tart in Famagusta.

  Don’t.

  It’s the truth. The army gave me all that, but in the end even that wasn’t enough. I needed more.

  We reach the end of the breakwater, watch the visible patch of sea heaving restlessly in the mist.

  I always wondered Dan, why you came back here after university. You had a degree in computers. The world was your lobster in the nineties. You could have gone anywhere. Silicon Valley, Europe, the Far East.

  He sounds almost starry-eyed as he rattles off the list of places.

  But you came back here to this dump, and set up your own business. You’re scratching a living and you could have been raking it in.

  Don’t know, I say. Was it me who made them decisions? It doesn’t feel like me. More like I’ve just inherited them. I don’t share an atom in common with him, whoever he was.

  There’s a cormorant fishing on the misty sea. Every now and then it resolves into view, low and black on the surface of the water, diving and resurfacing, fading out like white noise on the television.

  Perhaps I’m not like you, I say. This is the place I know, where I grew up. I know people. It feels comfortable. I’ve travelled around and seen stuff, but I don’t need to keep pushing at the boundaries.

  I don’t know, he says. Where did you and me drift apart? We’re made of the same piss and wind boy. The same blood. Only a whisker between us but sometimes it’s like we don’t even speak the same fucking language.

  Matt said that today. You can never really touch another person, just kind of overlap for a bit.

  Ha. Wise fella.

  He stops, and the mist closes down around us. Globes of moisture in his stubble, in the tufts of his hair.

  Dan, he says. I don’t know where to start.

  Start with Mount Longdon, and carry on from there.

  Christ. Why would you want to know about all that?

  Because you never told me, like all the times you went walkabout. Just left us joining the dots for ourselves. Like there’s this whole side of you I never saw. Not Danny’s dad and Kate’s fella. Someone else.

  The dark side of the moon, he says.

  Don’t.

  Okay. You want to know everything, I’ll tell you everything. But it’s a long time ago now.

  I know.

  Where did you get Longdon from anyway? It wasn’t from me.

  When I was sixteen I robbed the till and went to see some of your old mates. George Barlow and Charlie Fraser. They opened my eyes a bit.

  He looks surprised.

  Never knew you had it in you Dan, he says. But Christ knows what they told you. You need it from the horse’s mouth, I reckon.

  I’ll tell you all about it, I say. It’s only fair. A story for a story, eh? Maybe, he says.

  Maybe you’re more like me than you care to admit. Am I fuck.

  You’re in denial, he says. It’s understandable.

  Then he spins away, laughing, fighting back a cough, laughing again. Thumps me on the back so I almost choke. And we continue walking back towards dry land. The mist thickens, the visible world shrinks to nothing, and the two people on the breakwater disappear from view.

  8. Nightjar

  (Caprimulgus europaeus)

  It was Barlow I went to see first. He had a caravan park down on the Isle of Purbeck somewhere round Wareham. I remembered him faintly, a florid barrel of a man who stayed at the Cape once when I was small. He tied up the arms of my cardigan so I couldn’t get my hands out and then he laughed and I cried.

  It was a long night, chainsmoking on trains until my throat was sore, lying sleepless on the platform at Temple Meads like a corpse on a slab and watching dawn precipitate slowly through the glass roof. I checked Barlow’s address in a street atlas in the station bookshop and the girl on the till had a face on her like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle.

  And then more trains through a hot early summer day, stuffy and rattling and painfully slow, stopping in sidings and fagsmoke swarming in sunlight. Body and brain at fever pitch, bitter with adrenaline.

  I walked out of Wareham station into the late afternoon, the sky fresh and blue as a clean sheet and the unwashed smell rising as the sun dried out the sweat from my shirt. Holiday traffic on the roads and the fishtank looks of other kids behind the safety glass. Beyond the town the road was quiet and when I crested a hill there was heathland stretching away. Heather, gorse and furze scrabbling down towards the sea, the heather buds just showing a pale lilac which shimmered in the distance like a field of stars. And on this moonscape gorse and broom spattered their yellow blossom like a chipfat fire roaring in the late sun and the scratching songs of warblers dribbled from thorn scrub. The sea in the distance, a blue strip beginning to smoke and merge with the sky.

  A mile or two further on I turned onto an unsurfaced track sign-posted to the caravan park, straggling pine trees on either side. A horse was coming slowly towards me, ridden by a girl about my age. She looked down at me disdainfully and when we’d passed I glanced back a couple of times but she never turned round. Inside the park I wandered between the vans, statics and a few tourers set in an ocean of clipped grass stretching downhill towards the sea. And there he was, loading gobs of water with a hosepipe into troughs of gaudy summer annuals. He moved patiently, stealthily even, from trough to trough.

  Watched you coming up the road, he said. That was my girl you went past. Polly. Fucking bitch.

  He went back to splashing water, moved on to some hanging baskets around the steps of a static van. The eyepatch was the first thing I’d noticed. I tried not to stare. He was a stocky man, built like a barrel, a beige flannel shirt buttoned tightly over the paunch. A florid face topped with crisp greying hair and the black patch stretched tight across it on elastic.

  What do you want? he said. Ent got no casual work this time of year. Me and the wife do that, and Pol. When I can get the cow to lift a finger. Who told you we was hiring? Were it that slut at MSC again?

  No pal, I wasn’t after work. You’re Georgie Barlow, aren’t you?

  And he came right at me and knocked me off my feet and down to the floor on my stomach. Face pressed against the grass, right arm dragged up behind my back ready to pop out of the socket.

  Who are you, you little turd, eh? a voice hissed in my ear.

  He jammed the side of my head down harder, grass stems pressing an imprint into my cheek.

  What you’re thinking is, that was pretty nifty for a fat one-eyed fucker. Aren’t you? See, the training never leaves you. I’d fucking crush your windpipe soon as look at you. Who sent you?

  I struggled but he held me firm. I was starting to black out.

  Yan, I croaked. He slackened the grip on my throat. Yan Thomas. I’m Danny, his son.

  Let’s look at you, he said. Rolled me over on my back like a prize trout.

  I met you, he said. Up at the pub. It’s no joke, that place – so far fucking north I nearly got a nosebleed. You were a humourless little bugger.

  He stood up.

  Yan Thomas, he said, shaking his head. That lunatic. You know where the word lunatic comes from, don’t you?

  Nah.

  The moon son. Lunar. They used to reckon she’d send you mad if you spent too much time under her belly. Your old man was a moonstruck bastard if ever I met one.

  He put his hands on his hips.

  Sorry I kicked off back there, he said. But I can’t be too careful, you kno
w. There’s all sorts after me. Inland Revenue, loan sharks, the bank.

  He lowered his voice, tapped the side of his nose.

  And they’re just the civilized ones, he said. There’s others I can’t even tell you about.

  I got to my feet gingerly, brushed the grass off.

  So what can I do you for son? Don’t tell me they’ve finally found the body.

  No, I faltered. I just wanted to talk to you. About what happened when he went missing. I need to understand it.

  I don’t tell them stories any more, he said. Like a little kid shutting up shop. He retrieved the hose from the hanging basket which was now dripping like a sponge, and dropped it onto the ground. Silver snakes of water looping through the grass.

  It was a mess, he said. It was all a mess. Best forgotten. Best left alone.

  He stomped over to the standpipe tap, looked at it, tapped at his eyepatch. The girl on the horse was coming slowly back up the drive, sitting absolutely erect. Black hair coursing down her back.

  Look, he said. I’ll give you a van for the night. On the house, like.

  The hose was still on the ground, water pissing away into the grass. The horse passed behind the pine trees and disappeared. Barlow shifted on his feet, pulled some keys from his pocket and tossed them at me.

  Number twelve. She’s a leaky bitch but if it rains you can stick a sauce pan under it. Tomorrow I’ll run you down to the station.

  He turned and stalked away towards the house at the top of the site. I watched his rolling gait and broad back retreating up the site. The hosepipe at my feet, still hissing, the silver slick of water swelling and spreading, punctured by the sharp stems of grass, starting to gather momentum and flow downhill. I walked to the standpipe and turned off the tap. The hissing stopped and Barlow turned to look at me and his face was startled.

  In the caravan I sat down at the table, breathed that indefinable caravan smell of furniture polish, spent matches, propane fumes. Always tricky to work out exactly what you’re feeling, what you’re supposed to be feeling. You’ve come all this way for a sniff of a story, so why do you feel half relieved when he won’t spill? Can’t fathom yourself Danny, never could.

  If in doubt, there are two solutions. Brew up or skin up. I was trying to light the gas hob when there was a knock on the door of the van. She came in before I could answer.