Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  And then there’s a hand on my shoulder, and I turn in surprise. That gentle pressure.

  That was classic, he says. Yan, you really are a tool.

  Joe.

  He hovers in front of me for the moment it takes me to realize that it isn’t Joe, but the tenant from the upstairs flat, and that he’s put a hand on my shoulder because he wants me to move out of his way.

  Entschuldigung, he repeats softly, spectacles like moons. I move to make way, click the door shut after him. Slide down to the floor, back against the closed door.

  Joe, Horse Boy, Fabián. I’m walking down the stairwell of a block of flats. The stench of piss, graffiti on the walls. A plastic bag in my hand, bottles clinking. Whisky. I can smell it. When I look up I can see my own footprints coming down the stairs, the tread of my brogues.

  Stairs and stairwells. Over the months I linger a little longer, each time I leave the flat, feeling my heart palpitate and my gullet tighten. At the bottom, sunlight bristles through the panel of the street door. Smooth wooden banisters on the stairs at home, where Kate thought there were ghosts.

  Kate. Her name in my mouth like a sugared almond.

  And there were whitewashed stairs in an old farmhouse, back on the Falklands. I dreamed an attic and muzzle flashes and then nothing, like I cheated death there without even knowing. Or perhaps I really died there and now I’m a ghost, dwindling in the bright world.

  I finger the brass lighter in my pocket and it turns cold.

  There’s a third stairwell, somewhere close in a block of flats, and my shoes leaving great damp stains on the concrete.

  At first I linger in the square by the cathedral, soaking up the sun and feeding the pigeons. Birds crowd and tumble about my feet like jugglers, perch on my hands with those scaly feet, pink and crabbed. And then onto the U-Bahn, rattling through the city and suburbs, riding the different lines to places I’ve never heard of, enjoying the anonymity, the sense of ease. But underneath this lazy convalescence I’m looking for a scent. Narrowing down the options.

  And then I find it. That line north to Chorweiler with the stations like a poem learned many years ago and then forgotten. Altonaer Platz, Mollwitzstraße, Breslauer Platz. And one day I ride out to the end of the line and I recognize the buildings, the mazy concrete tenements blistered by the weather. Walking around with my collar turned up against the spluttering rain and the flowers of damp graffiti, walking past these Turkish kids playing football in an underpass and they look at me like I’m in a specimen bottle and I say merhaba and they shrill with laughter and the ball thuds into the wall close to my shoulder and they laugh again.

  I come out of the underpass and there’s an open space, and in the centre is a human fist cast from concrete. As if this form could vegetate under the ground, lie dormant for years under the skin of slab and hardcore and rebar and then casually break through and flower like a tulip with the blood drumming in its face. And now I know exactly where I am. I move like a dog on the scent, twisting and turning through the warren of buildings. Swing doors and piss in the lobby and kids yapping up and down the corridors, a woman’s voice tearing strips off somebody who never answers back, and the open stairwell rising up the corner of the building, damp light and cool air entering between wooden slats. Streetlights flick on with sodium glare and deep shadow, my feet leaving deep stains of dark.

  Blood.

  Now I get it. I stepped in blood. I tracked it down the stairs, slopping great wet stains across the concrete. I crouch down foetal against the slats and press my face deep into coatsleeve. Run a finger across concrete and raise it to my lips, cold and damp but no blood there now. Are they still there, inside the flat? Brace myself against the wall and haul upright and force myself to climb to the fourth-floor landing and to the door. Brass numbers on blistered blue paint. One five two.

  Knock and wait. The smell of cooking, onion and garlic. Joe could cook a mean chilli.

  Ja? There’s a slender, dark-skinned man standing there, buzz of small children behind.

  Meine Freunde waren hier, I say. Drei Mensch. Ausländer.

  He looks blank.

  Nein, he says flatly, breaking eye contact. Not here. We live here six years.

  But I was here. Only a few months ago.

  Entschuldigung, he says, eyes averted downward. Begins to close the door. I throw my bodyweight against it and slam the little man into the internal wall and rampage into the flat.

  In the kitchen there’s a woman cooking on the electric stove. Bright clothes and headscarf, terror in her eyes. I remember the stainless steel sink and the drip from the cold tap and the chessboard tiles on the floor. The formica-topped table with the wonky leg.

  Where are they? I shout at her.

  She gabbles with fear and backs against the stove. Into the living room and the same worn leather sofas and ghastly orange carpet and the same smell of damp and the same black mildew patches on the ceiling. A small cigarette burn on the carpet, just inside the door. The television babbles and three small children stare at me in fear. Toys all over the carpet, plastic cars, building bricks, naked dolls.

  Joe made that burn, I tell them, gesturing idiotically. He dropped ash. Who cleaned up the blood?

  The little girl screams and begins to cry noisily, and then I’m seized from behind and turned round. Several men in the hallway, including the small man who opened the door. He’s been to round up the neighbours.

  Du, says one of them. Time to go. Abhauen.

  Jerks a thumb towards the front door, a kitchen blade flashing in his hand like a silver fish. I raise both hands in a gesture of appeasement.

  Nicht schießen. I’m going.

  Edge through the pack of men towards the door. A final glance into the living room. There’s a small imperfection in the wall, at head height above a shabby armchair. Somebody’s filled in a hole in the plaster, painted over the top without sanding down the filler. The repair shows as a rough patch of fresh paint.

  My fingers close around the lighter, deep in my pocket. No question that this was the flat. They grab my arms, try to propel me out, and the lighter spills onto the floor with a thud, brass glinting like cheap whisky. I go down on all fours to retrieve it.

  In the cathedral there was the shrine of the Magi and the jewels on its golden skin. A noseless face. Medusa in turquoise and white. A garnet carved with Theseus slaying the Minotaur. And then I was standing right here. Right here. And brass shellcases glittered where they’d fallen like sloughed skins and Glühwein on my breath and the smell of cordite, bitter and green.

  See, they must have shouldered the door because the latch is splintered. Into the living room where Joe was sitting in the armchair and the first shot missed above his head and left that raw wound in the plaster, now patched. But the second was point blank to the face and the entry wound took away his nose and the exit took his brains and the back of his skull into the headrest of the chair. There’s still one of them Rote Händle cancer sticks in his hand, burned right down to the knuckle with a long column of ash clinging on.

  The noseless man.

  Fabián was sat on the sofa marshalling a line on that picture frame when they pumped three rounds into his chest and he sat slumped with the black blood draining like tar from mouth and nose. It’s drying in his long locks now and they’re snaking at improbable angles like a gorgon’s head.

  Medusa, in turquoise and white.

  And in the shower room Horse Boy was coming out of the cubicle naked and steaming and they emptied a gun into his unprotected belly and he collapsed like a slaughtered bull on the threshold with offal spilling from his burst abdomen.

  The Minotaur.

  This is the flat, but every trace of the three of them has been carefully rubbed out. They lived, and now they have never lived.

  Night in the centre of Europe. Dustbins upended across the city and stars strewn like trash across the backyard of the universe. In Cally’s apartment a small fire breathes in the woodburner, tiny
flakes of wood ash tinkling like glass.

  Cally, I say. She angles her chin towards me, firelight brindling her flesh. What happened in the flat. To Joe and the others. I caused it. I brought them here.

  She smiles sleepily.

  It’s complicated, she says. How things come to be. Perhaps there is no cause. No why and wherefore. We are where we are, right now. No cause leading up to us, and no effect running away from us. Me, you, that old brass lighter of yours. We’re all present in this moment and how we got here doesn’t figure.

  And where we go now?

  Doesn’t figure either.

  I like that thought.

  Draw myself up close to her on the sofa, feel the warmth of her through the dressing gown.

  Yan, she yawns. I like your name. Glad you remembered it. But I’m sad too, because now you will want to go home.

  Why does that make you sad?

  Because I love you.

  We sit for a minute in silence.

  You’ve gone tense, she says. Why?

  Love, I say.

  What about it?

  Well, it kind of springs up unexpected – like a sword with that point sheer against your breastbone. And the invitation is to push yourself right on, like a Japanese samurai or one of them old Roman senators, yeah? Transfix yourself right through the chest until the tip comes out at the back, underneath your shoulderblade where you can’t even see it no more.

  That’s about right, she says. And once you’re on, you can’t back off. Not without making a mess.

  Every time someone makes me that offer, I say. Well, I’m honoured and I’m perplexed in just about equal parts, but I just got to make my excuses.

  Then I’m a little bit sorry for you, she says.

  I sigh.

  Crazy, really. I’ve come this far. War and tempest, desert and darkness, flood and madness. And I’ve learned nothing. Just my own name.

  Who wants to learn? You have a story, that’s what matters.

  She picks up the lighter from the coffee table and rattles it.

  You’re not an empty shell any more.

  She runs her fingertips over the bare skin of my arms.

  Silver, she says. Your scars, where that guy stabbed you all those times. They were red and angry. But now they’re silver. Like little fish.

  She rests her chin on updrawn knees.

  Tell me the whole story. Beginning to end.

  It can wait until the morning. We both need some sleep.

  Her hand strokes my forearm slowly, raising the hairs.

  Yan, darling. The night is without end, and sleep is not for the likes of us. I can prop my eyelids open until dawn, if necessary. Just tell the story.

  I smile and sigh. Then I begin.

  I was once a man, walking on the earth.

  22. Thrush Nightingale

  (Luscinia luscinia)

  Two lads framed in the empty gaze of the streetlights, eleven or twelve years old and skinny as cobras, faces hidden from above by the peaks of their baseball caps. From Yan’s bedroom window I watch one of them twirl out into the street on a little silver scooter. The other stands quiet with his body slouched into a nonchalant question mark. Something dangles casually from his hand, a stave from a wooden fence. He tests it for strength, thwacks it into the opposite palm, and the other boy spirals round him on the scooter like a moth.

  Did you. Go to the Heugh?

  There’s a metallic edge to his voice you could cut yourself on, like the ragged rim of a tin can. You can hear his lung volume shrinking day by day. I turn away from the window into the darkened room, letting sodium light billow through the gap in the curtains.

  Aye, I say. I went.

  A hiss as he takes a suck from the oxygen mask, the inside of it beading with his moisture. The tank’s mounted on the wall now, beside the bed. Fitted the house up so they can send him home from hospital. Seems to be the way now. Pressure on beds. A home help calls once a day and he has a panic button in case of emergency. And there’s Jean. And there’s me. The mask hisses again.

  Don’t keep me. In suspense, he says.

  I’m watching the boys in the street. The scooter is still, the rider saying something. The other boy listens and the stave swings from his hand like a makeshift pendulum.

  Did you see it? he says.

  Yes, I saw it. It was there all right. There was quite a crowd, too.

  The pendulum tracks from side to side and rests in the middle. Then the boy pivots like a baseball pitcher and thrashes the scooter rider over the head with the stave. The younger lad sprawls on the floor, scooter clattering onto concrete and bewilderment on his face.

  Dan, he says. The oxygen whispers. I didn’t expect it. To get worse so soon. Jim isn’t as friendly. As he was. I thought there would be another. Tick or two.

  The boy lashes out again with the stave, but the other lad rolls out of the way and jumps to his feet and grabs the scooter. He scoots away out of range and then he turns and gives it large, the voice thin and yappy.

  You can describe it anyway, he says. Sort of tick it for me. Vicariously.

  Okay, I say. You know the Heugh Battery. You go through that tumbledown brick wall off the Headland. There’s a plaque there. Something about the war.

  It was shelled, he interrupts. By German battleships. Enormous great things. Must have seemed as terrible. As nuclear bombs. At the time.

  The boy with the stave strides towards the other one and swings again but the scooter rider loops lazily back out of range, then sets off slowly down the street. The other boy walks purposefully after him, rangy and spare, twirling the stave.

  You remember how it used to be? I continue. Overgrown with bushes and rubbish, them old gun emplacements like empty eye sockets, bunkers full of fly-tipped junk and all sorts. Condoms, druggy stuff.

  Yan snorts.

  In Hartlepool. We know the best. Places to take a lady.

  He grins broadly.

  Well, they’ve started clearing it up. A lot of the rubbish is gone, the bushes cut down, grass cut. I think they’re going to refurbish the gun emplacements.

  Fucking gentrification, he says. They don’t realize. A bit of untidiness. Is what birds need. They’ll make it sterile.

  He’s quiet for a minute, the oxygen tank clanking.

  Tell me about the sea, he says.

  I could tell him how the sea looks enormous from up there, how it quakes like corrugated iron in the wind, how it seems bleaker now the place is tidied up, less sheltered. You could get blown away.

  You know about the sea, I say.

  The two boys are receding into the distance and the rider’s showboating on his scooter, blowing just out of reach of the stave. He’s the one with all the moves, now that the shock has worn off. The other one looks plodding and predictable, wastes his strength on great scything strokes, connecting only with raw February air. They disappear, the two of them, behind the flaking frame of the window.

  Who was there? he asks, craning towards me.

  Well, the artillery was out in force, I laugh. Some of them scopes cost more than my house. It’s all about the gear for some of them.

  He chuckles croakily.

  Frank was there. He sent his best wishes. Tommo and big Steve as well.

  Is Tommo. Still with that lass? The traffic warden.

  I don’t know. She wasn’t there today. Perhaps he’s gone back to his first love. Yan grins.

  Twitchers, he says. So. Hit me with the gravy stroke.

  I look blank.

  The bird, he says, impatiently. Make me see it.

  I call it to mind, blowing about the top of an old emplacement like a little splinter of breezeblock. Never seen a bird shiver before, but I swear it was shaking with cold. Kept puffing up like a small grey cloud, a bleary dark eye popping open and shut. Looking for cover, angling itself against the wind, the sea rattling. And you could sense the discomfort and the cold air tugging at the plumage, at that shy sharp nightingale shape. It
was blurred, somehow, like someone had smeared a rubber over the feathers and smudged everything. And it was yearning for a nice bit of deep thicket to get immersed in, like a warm tropical sea.

  Not much to tell, I say. Thrush nightingale. It’s the ultimate little brown job. It hopped around, flew towards that boundary wall. You should have seen the scopes all juddering round like Jodrell fucking Bank.

  He laughs. Then he sucks at the oxygen and the tank clacks against the wall. And outside there’s a clutch of young lasses striding up the street, deep in counsel, with stifled giggles and headlong glances.

  You can’t really do it second hand, he says. I guess you’ve got to be there. In the moment. That small life beating against yours. The tick.

  I know what you mean, I say.

  You see it doesn’t care, he carries on. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The bird wears it lightly. It doesn’t care. About the past. Just right now. The tick. The match flaring in the dark.

  Human history is a piss in the sea, I say. When you think about it.

  Birds are free. From all that, he croaks. Birds are liberating.

  There’s a long pause. Then he almost whispers.

  And what about Paul?

  Aye, I say wearily. I found him. But he wouldn’t believe me. Wouldn’t come back.

  Didn’t have a bunch of twitchers. On his tail.

  No. Just the one.

  What did he say?

  If you were really his father, you’d have helped him out, when he was going down the pan. You’d have stopped it happening.

  Yan doesn’t say anything. Sits up in the bed, duvet at his chin, staring into space. Stays like that for a long time.

  Jean looks worn out, grey circles around her eyes. She bends over the washing-up, suds rising around her slender forearms.

  Didn’t realize he ate so little, I say.

  She shrugs.

  Oh aye, love. Just picks at it now. Never has much of an appetite.

  She rinses the petroleum sheen from a mug under the cold tap.

  He’s getting skinny, she says, pensive. Can’t believe how much worse it’s got, the last couple of month. He says it’s like breathing through a straw. Christmas time he was like a rabbit.