Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  Waiting to have another crack at him, you mean, I said.

  Aye, he agreed, with a grin. It was a blood sport. Like that bear baiting they used to do. What’s it about, anyway?

  Bloke kills an old woman with an axe. And her sister. Just to prove that he can. That he’s got the power to act, to do something.

  That sounds good, said Paul. Bit of mindless bloodshed like.

  It’s more the psychology of it. You know, what’s going on inside his head. What makes him do it.

  You know Dan, he said. Forget what I was saying to you before. About quitting school. I reckon you got the brains for it, all these books you read. You could go to university, be one of them yuppies on the stock market.

  I’ll do what I want pal, I said. Thanks all the same.

  Steady on daft cunt. What’s got into you?

  Careers advice from a landfill operative (retired), I said. I can do without it.

  Fair enough like.

  He lit up a straight and blew smoke at me.

  Away Paul, I said. Lighten the mood. What about them three lasses? Prickteasers, he said.

  Do you reckon we’re going to get any sleep on here?

  Cold concrete was already leaching into my bones, bruising the joints.

  Going to be a long night, said Paul. Endless. Plenty of fags to see us through.

  I jolted awake on the platform. Tendrils of cloud drifted across the face of the moon and the light spilled along them in shallow mercury rivers, braiding across the lush water meadows of space. It was cold, earth’s heat spilling into space.

  Did I ever tell you about the mercury? said Paul.

  What mercury?

  It was one of me grandad’s scams. At least they said that’s who he was. Gadgie called Jed Wallace. I think he just had a ride off of our nan once upon a time.

  He pulled a face.

  Jed used to work as a pipefitter on LP Ammonia. Always thieving, the little cunt. See, he went to work on this little pushbike every day, cycled in past the security on the North Gate. And at the end of his shift he cycled out again, only he was weaving all over the road like he was either pissed or giving Giant Haystacks a croggy uphill. These secur ity charvers used to stop him and search him, but they never found owt. Even had the bobbies down once to give him a breath test, but he come out clean.

  He paused and lit a fag, shielding it from the wind. Flame between his fingers.

  There you go, he said. Fill your boots. Handed it to me and lit another for himself.

  They never worked it out, he said. Jed had a little tap-hole in his bike frame, with a rubber bung. Used to fill the frame up with merc ury off the site. Weighed a fuck of a lot, sloshing around in there fit to bust. He used to come round to our back door and wheel his bike right into the bathroom and empty it out into our bath. It’s amazing stuff, liquid metal.

  Quicksilver, they used to call it.

  He only took a day or two to sell it on, but while it was there we couldn’t go in the bath. Mam said not to touch because it was poisonous.

  I bet you did though.

  I was fascinated by it. Couldn’t leave it alone. Just sat and watched the light play off the surface of it. It was always quivering, like it couldn’t sit still, and it used to bounce the light all over the walls and the ceiling. Sometimes I couldn’t resist touching it. I had to know what liquid metal felt like. I’d scoop some up in me hands and let it drop into the bath. When it hit the bathtub it split up into hundreds of tiny globes and they flew apart, like a shoal of little silver fish swimming away. Then they’d slide back into the middle and start to join back together, the big fish gulping up the minnows.

  What happened to Jed? Is he still around?

  Nah, he said. It was weird.

  What was weird?

  He was working in a vessel on the site – one of them ones with the inert atmosphere inside, no oxygen so you can’t get a fire or explosion.

  Full of nitrogen, aren’t they? It doesn’t react but you can’t breathe it.

  Paul shrugged.

  Jed was wearing breathing apparatus, he said. But when he got to the middle of the tank he stripped the mask off.

  Why?

  They reckoned he might have puked in his mask. The rubber does that to you sometimes. Pulled it off to clear it. But his mate reckoned he never even tried to get it back on again. Stood there like he was waiting for something, with this look on his face and his eyes glittering. He was dead before anybody could get to him. No oxygen, you see.

  Sorry.

  Paul ground his cigarette out on the platform. The nub wasn’t properly extinguished, and continued to leak stale, sour smoke.

  Good way to go, he said. Quick and clean. Better than cancer or something like that.

  We sat in silence and watched the moon crash-land in slow motion into the plain of the Fens. As her belly sagged into the ground the light rippled out along the horizon, like a shoal of little silver fish swimming away. And then the floor of the wetland swallowed her whole. Her silver tail waved pitifully from the black maw, and vanished.

  12. Southern Lapwing

  (Vanellus chilensis)

  Count them off.

  Yan is the pylon, close by us, soaring into the clean spring sky. The tracery of steel superstructure, high voltage lines loping across this flat country wrenched from the sea. And the next pylon and the next, the giants becoming smaller and more delicate with distance. I can smell her. Her hand is on my chest.

  Tean is Kate. Kate Murphy as she was. The two of us. Dark and slender, smooth and acrid as seacoal, a black mole beneath one breast where the globe of flesh rejoins the taut drumskin of her belly. She was with her boyfriend in the pub, her dad’s pub in Greatham, and I couldn’t stop looking at her. I was embarrassing myself. Too much to drink. I could barely stand up. She came over, something in her eyes taunting me. Salt and seaweed on her tongue.

  Tether is the boyfriend. Motorcycle boots and black leather. We were outside, the moon swimming at the bottom of a deep deep glass. He was saying something. Angry, dismissive words, buzzing like night moths around my head. He punched me in the face but I didn’t feel nothing, just sat down gently on the floor. It was a soft cushion made from the silver sand of stars. He was astride the bike, the engine blaring like a foghorn. He beckoned Kate to sit behind him but she didn’t move. She was so still I mistook her for a shaft of moonlight.

  Mether is the river. The Romans called it Dunum Sinus. Kate turned away and looked out over the breakwater and the wind caught her hair and whipped it away from her face. I was looking at the curve of her cheek, at the saltglaze of downy hairs and Hartlepool Headland brooding to the north. The wind is amazing, she said. It goes right through me. I am made of oxygen. Pure oxygen.

  Pip is the towers. Refraction columns, flare stacks, cooling towers. The waste gases are burning with blue and orange flame, tropical fish flashing in the night. At night you would think it was a city, like New York, with a million lights blinking from the soaring tower blocks. But it’s an empty city, humming to itself. A few lonely men in control rooms turn dials, sit and watch the panels.

  If you count off every lump of time that dribbles past you, it makes them all the same. Give it a number, assign it to the past. Charlie Fraser told us this is what you should do under torture. You withdraw your mind from the body and take it somewhere else. Deep inside. So now I’m eighteen years old and she’s moving on top of me in the corner of a field at Back Saltholme between the feet of a giant pylon. Danger Of Death, read the signs, and there’s a stick man being struck down by a thunderbolt. I’m counting to stave off the inevitable and her back arches like a flying buttress and her bony shoulders are flashing in the weak sun and her breath is coming fast.

  See, it was a beautiful morning today, sailing into Puerto Angelmo, with sunlight hovering over the sea, trailing its fingers in the salt water. A long trek from Tierra del Fuego, up the west coast past the glaciers and the mountains dribbling down to the Pacific. We drew
into the harbour with its wooden staithes and fishing boats tied up and crates stacked up bulging with the silver bodies of salmon. The islands low and green around us, iridescent like plovers, and the old men squatting on the dockside appraising us through narrowed eyes. And when the boat nudged the quay Fabián jumped down with an easy confidence and began making the lines fast. And we walked into town, board-built houses two and three storeys high, bristling streets, brightly coloured roofs ripped along the river.

  After months at sea, everything assaults the senses. Colours and smells of the town, not salt and wind but sweat and woodsmoke and rancid fat. The girls on the street, impossibly beautiful. The incredulous joy of being clean and showered, free from the sting of salt in every crease. The softness of the bed in our hotel room, where I decided to remain, cocooned for ever. But then the rumbling of my stomach became imperative, and we went out to a bar, hungry for real food, real beer. And it was pure pleasure to taste fresh seafood, great brimming bowls of caldillo steaming with heat. The beer was cold and citrus and beautiful. And Fabián was talking to a girl who sucked on a long cigarette and fixed him with her black eyes. During the meal they got up and left and I drank a silent toast to him. My glass was still raised, foolishly, when I felt cold metal at the back of my neck. The muzzle of a sub-machine gun.

  Gentlemen, would you please to come with us, said a voice in imperfect English.

  We stood and they herded us outside. Nobody in the bar batted an eyelid. I took a last, longing look at my unfinished caldillo, still steaming in the bowl. You can do whatever you like to me, I thought, if only I could stay and finish that bowl of caldillo. No matter what darkness comes after.

  Yan, the pylon. Tean, Kate Murphy. Tether, the boyfriend. Mether, the river. Pip, the towers. The numbers are the old language, right back before the Romans. Before every bugger. Old men still use them to count sheep, up in Teesdale. And I use them to count away the time in a windowless cellar below a detention centre in a medium-sized Chilean town.

  Lezar is the old man. Never misses a day on the chemicals, not one. Six proud walkers, silhouettes in the icy dawn, striding out towards the North Gate, snap tins in hand. Work, drinking, the football. A cyclical world. I don’t want cyclical. I want linear. The long downstream with backswamps and oxbow lakes, eyots and wharves and the slow sea.

  Azar is death. Seven-footed and seven-handed. She always called it women’s troubles, and we didn’t ask. Polite words were spoken. Complications. Passed away quietly. Bone stone fucking dead, I want to shout. But instead I look out of the window where the Pleiades are rising, quiet and icy.

  Catrah is the cards. Five to deal and three to change. Branigan showed me in the pub, smoke and Guinness and April rain fat and soft and lovely. I was a quick learner. Played the dunce, the jack of fools, and lost and lost and lost. And then I cleaned them out. Three aces, said Branigan, slamming his cards down on the table. What about that then son, what about that? His jowls were round and slobbery with stout, soft and vegetated with his whiskers. Four eights Mr Branigan, I said. Laid them down nice and slow. Matteo, Marco, Luca, Giovanni. You fucking little cheat, he snarled. Don’t come back again or I’ll purloin your gonads, so help me.

  Borna is the magpies. Nine of them on the high-voltage line. Kate quivers, lips drawn back from her teeth in a grimace, nails clawing my chest. They never get electrocuted, never touch both lines. How does it feel, a river of blue power screaming between your toes?

  Dick is the army. Ten men to a tent, ten contubernia to a century, ten centuries to a cohort, ten cohorts to a legion. Twenty-five years coming, long and hard. The northern frontier. It’s fucking scratched with a stick, a line in the dirt. On one side it’s the empire. On the other side it’s chaos, hills straining at the leash, sniffing with brutal noses, giving tongue.

  A shout erupts from Kate’s throat. Not yet. There’s a burst of blue sparks from the high-voltage wires, like a heart stopping. I watch, deaf and dumb and paralysed. The cable breaks and comes dancing down onto us like a charmed snake. Kate fries in an electrified dance and the cable burrows into the base of my spine, into my coccyx. And sends a billion volts of blue power, gruelling as the sun, slamming up my nerve pathways and into the base of my skull. It’s seeking out the one part of the brain, that tiny hazelnut where the essence of me is resident. It finds it, squeezes it, and everything is black.

  It was kind of unfortunate that you came here, says a voice. It’s quiet, resigned, gentle. I open my mouth but no sound comes out.

  You lost your voice a while back, he says. After you had been screaming for the first twelve hours.

  I’m lying on my stomach. My eyes don’t seem to work at the moment. Either that or there’s no light. Ghost lights are firing off in the field of my vision. Reminds me of a firework display. A shower of blue sparks. I’m lying in wetness. It has a bitter, acrid smell. A balloon of pain erupts in my head.

  Who am I?

  I am Yan. One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.

  You can do anything you like, says the voice. Piss, shit, swear, blubber like a child, spit at God. But you can’t go to sleep. Get up.

  Another bubble of pain, this time in my kidneys. I am being kicked. Yan, the pylon. My arms are grabbed from behind. There must be two or three people present, because they lift me off the ground, off my feet, until I think the arms will come out of the sockets. I imagine my tendons tearing like the pages of a book flipping out of the spine. They set me upright on my feet and surprisingly I remain upright. I can feel liquids dribbling down my thighs, my calves, pooling on the floor.

  It was rather unfortunate that you came here, he says. Because now we’re obliged to make you disappear.

  Why did I leave Kate? Not once but twice. This is the stark question that pops into my head. The two of us.

  Why don’t you have something to eat? It must be two days since we brought you in.

  I’m ravenously hungry. I open my mouth but only dribble comes out. Laughter. I nod my head.

  Excellent, he says. Gentlemen, perhaps you could bring Mr Thomas a spot of supper.

  I hear suppressed giggling behind me. The voice isn’t English. A good accent but a trace of something else behind it.

  You might be wondering how I know your name. Your friend told us, you see. The fat one, the one who doesn’t like pain. He told me all your names. Ah, here is your food.

  Somebody standing in front of me. A rich, thick, sickening smell hits me in the face. More laughter.

  I don’t think he can see it Juan, says the voice. You might have to feed him.

  An explosion of mirth, just behind me and to the right. I try to pinpoint the position of his face in my head. The smell becomes stronger and I start to gag. I recognize the heady aroma of shit and understand what I was lying in, what’s now running down my legs. Something brushes against my lips. I clamp my jaws shut.

  Come now, he says. You really must eat. Especially after Juan has gone to all the trouble of producing your meal for you.

  Without warning I’m slammed down onto the concrete floor on my back. I’m gaping like a fish slapped on the dockside, my spine bruised. Can’t move.

  Open your mouth, he says, gently.

  Something else begins pushing at my lips, nudging towards my teeth, something hard and metallic. A star explodes inside my head, goes supernova, swallows the world in blue fire, and just as suddenly shrinks to a cold walnut. He has a cattle prod in my mouth.

  Eat him up, he says. There’s a good boy.

  Another burst of energy, colder than the moon, and my jaw bounces around in rictus, in spasm after spasm. I can no longer close my mouth. It sags open like a burst stomach.

  That’s better. Feed him Juan.

  The one called Juan mashes his shit into my idiotic, paralysed, sagging mouth, sniggering as he does it. Must be the best entertainment he’s had in years. My tongue lolls as my mouth fills up, and when the glutinous material touches the back of my throat the reflex kicks in an
d I swallow. And then I’m vomiting, hot and sharp like desert sand being ripped from my body in waves. I could puke the Sahara desert. Lie there doubled up, jack-knifing.

  I’m starting to drift, like one of them sand dunes. Yan, the pylon. It comes from Hartlepool now, the power. The nuclear facility squatting like a concrete gnome on the estuary. They think the pylons are frying the kids, giving them brain cancer. Tean, Kate Murphy. That was it. These numbers have an end, you see. They don’t wank on for ever like the integers. They only go up to jiggit, twenty. If you get to jiggit there are no more.

  There’s another squeal of electricity, this time in the side of my neck. My vision comes back and the room flashes into negative. I see black faces and ghostly white darkness. A man holding a white wand. Black sparks of power dribble from it.

  Get up, he says, the inside of his mouth glowing white like a phosphorescent cave.

  I wait for the hands to haul me up again to my feet.

  Deserters, he says.

  Dave has really spilled the beans. Console myself with the fact that he doesn’t know where I hid the thermos.

  Really, you should have gone home, the voice continues. Why did you have to come here?

  I hear Juan clear his throat, and try to pinpoint him. Behind me, to the right again. Close. The other one is to the left. He’s much quieter, much harder to find.

  You know, now we are into the endgame, he says.

  I look at him, for the first time. Moderate height, snowy white hair and grey skin. His eyes are large, with jet-black irises and white pupils. Wormholes of light pour from his nostrils. He takes something from his breast pocket with a dark grey hand. A cream-coloured cylinder. He snips one end off, then takes a lighter from his pocket. He puts the cigar in his mouth.

  Just tell me who your contact is, he says. One name. Who were you going to buy the drugs from? You can do it now and die painlessly, or we can stretch it out for an unbelievable long time, and we can pump you full of antibiotics to keep you alive while we do it.

  What drugs? I try to say. My voice formless in the dark.