She smiles.
Nowadays I even have to help him go to the bog. Laugh a minute. Might get one of them chemical ones for under the bed.
Her eyes are suddenly sprung with tears but I touch her arm and she steadies.
Anyway Danny. What’s going on with you?
Don’t ask.
I just did.
So I mop a plate with a damp teatowel, tell her about the letter from Martin. How Kelly left it lying around on the coffee table, the bright green envelope torn open.
You read her mail?
It was just a thank-you note, for the weekend. This one sentence though.
Go on.
‘I can’t help thinking you could do with a bit more excitement in your life.’
The words come out pat from where they’re stored.
You think he was talking about you?
Of course he was talking about me. Don’t know. We’ll sort it out. Once things have settled down.
Jean looks at me hard.
Don’t put it off, she says. Things might never settle down. Listen, I need to tell you something about your dad.
He’s dying, I say. I know.
She laughs but her face is stark and desperate under the harsh overhead lighting.
He has night terrors, she says. More and more these nights. He likes me to be there if he wakes up in the dark.
Some grim stuff happened in the Falklands, I say. It doesn’t lie down easy, that kind of shit.
It’s not that so much. But he wakes up and he doesn’t know who I am. Stares at me like a skull, like I’m a cockroach he’s about to crush. I’m scared he might hurt me one of these nights. Don’t know if I can take much more.
He won’t hurt you, I say.
Twelve-bar blues playing on the stereo in his room.
Charlie Musselwhite, he says. One of my favourites.
The band is ripping through a guitar break. He takes a deep suck of oxygen, the white pyjama cuff falling back to reveal a painfully thin forearm.
Charlie isn’t dead yet, he says.
He gasps painfully and spends a good minute behind the oxygen mask. The room is warm and the radiator throbbing out heat and the bedside lamp casts a pool of lucidity.
You spend years, he says. Watching birds. Each one a little separate being. A little world. No matter how hard you watch. You can’t touch. There’s always a windscreen between you. And you can put your fingers on the glass. But you can’t reach through.
Sometimes, I say. I think there’s more to birds. You know, when a flock moves like a twister, like it’s one being made of all them little cells. A collective consciousness. Maybe the individual doesn’t matter so much when it’s wired in to so many others. When I was a kid I used to imagine I could do that. Sort of empty my brain out and let other people’s thoughts and feelings move through me. Felt like I was connected to an endless grid of life.
Yan looks at me, the grey eyes mobile.
You’re as much a loner as me, he says. Look at you. You’re on your own inside your own head and your own dreams. And in there nobody else can touch you.
That’s not true.
He looks at me. Flock behaviour, he says. It’s an illusion of connectedness. It just suits the individual. Keeps it safer from predators. Like people, really.
There must be more than that.
He grins.
I was going to tell you, he says. About Mount Longdon.
Why?
Because you asked me.
But why now?
I told you I couldn’t remember. Not strictly true. I told you I felt drunk. But I didn’t. It was crystal-clear, that morning. One of them bell-like mornings. When your voice carries for miles. These fucking dago conscripts. Soaking wet and pale and shivering in them rain capes. I was shelling out fags. Wanted to share a smoke. And I never saw the kid go for his service pistol. Honestly Dan, I never did.
Barlow said he was only seventeen or eighteen.
None of them. Was much more than that. Secundino, his name was. Secundino Vargas.
How do you know?
Looked at his tags after. I never saw him go for the Beretta. And I never saw George pop him. Just heard the roar. You’re fucking deaf that close up. Your ears singing.
George shot him through the eye, didn’t he?
More like blew half his fucking head off. Only he wasn’t dead.
Of course he was dead.
Only he wasn’t. Fell on the floor with half his head missing. Started convulsing. Fitting. Jigging about with his feet fucking tapdancing. Boots banging a tattoo on the earth.
Christ.
Saw some kittens once. The tom had been at them. Eaten half their heads. Just dragging themselves round in circles. Crying. Had to drown them. And they fought against me. Fought to the fucking end.
So you put him out of his misery.
Aye, I did.
That’s not so bad. Any human being would have done that.
It was the anger. Like a cold wall of sea. The stupid little bastard. Dancing that dance. I blew the rest of his stupid head off. Just to make him stop. The details you remember. Wisps of cloud high up and lonely. Cirrus and cirro-stratus. A little tic in the corner of my eye. Ears throbbing in the wind. And the little ratchet of the selfloader. As it racked up the next round. Like a polite cough. Ears throbbing. Joe had to stop me. Putting rounds into him. But by then the magazine. Was empty anyway.
I understand, I say. I understand why you walked away.
No, he says. You don’t.
But then Charlie Musselwhite storms into a harmonica solo with the band swinging and stomping beneath him and Yan relaxes and beams and leans back on his pillow. Death is a cipher and past and future are mad dreams without interpretation, dead alphabets with no Rosetta Stone, and there is only the harp leaping and squealing and powered by Charlie’s breath.
I fall asleep in the chair, an uneasy slumber peopled with wild dreams. His voice, when it comes, is harsh like a walnut cracking.
You.
I spring upright, don’t know for a moment where I am. He flips the light on and I see him massing in the bed like a storm cloud.
Arse, I say. Must have fallen asleep. Long day at work.
I get up and yawn. He stares at me, eyes arctic.
Why did you come back? he says, glaring at me. After all these years.
I turn at the doorway and look at him and his eyes are those black coals at the centre of the fire.
I’ve always been here, I say. I’m not the one who came back.
He shuffles crablike across the bed towards me, like he wants to jump at my throat.
Don’t come back now, he says. When it’s too fucking late.
He fixes me with the boiling eyes, unblinking. Frustration inside me, cold and slow, and my voice haggard and roughened with sleep.
It’s not too late, I say. I don’t know why you left it till now, but even so it’s not too late.
You pushed me away. Didn’t want to know me.
I can’t make sense of you. Never could. You wax lyrical over lapwings and then you leave a man to burn in a hotel room. You’re a husband and father but you fuck some desperate barmaid in a car. You got to burn things up Yan, like some pyromaniac kid, just to watch the flames burning bright. And I pushed you away because I didn’t understand – don’t understand. But even now it’s not too late. I’m here and you’re here and you don’t need flames to remind you you’re alive. Just make me understand.
But he’s lying back on the pillow, shrunken and dazed. Hasn’t heard a word.
Dan, he says. Didn’t know you were still here.
The eyes are calm and grey again. He’s just a man. Walked around on the earth for a while. He happened to people and people happened to him. Not much walking to be done, now. To the toilet and back, a few more times.
You were talking in your sleep, I say. It’s nothing. Nothing at all.
Downstairs, Jean is going out of the back door. Looks flustered whe
n I come downstairs and see her, turns and stands framed in the light with a holdall in her hand like she’s been caught.
I can’t do this, she says.
The light on her hair, lifting out the silver threads.
It doesn’t matter, I say. I understand.
Tell him, she says. Tell him I’ll be thinking of him.
I will.
He’s got you, she says. He’s not on his own.
Aye.
She tries to smile, her face gaunt, and then she’s gone. I go out and stand for a moment in the darkened yard, smelling the smoky air of February and listening to dogs bark in a hundred, in a thousand back yards, growing fainter and fainter across Hartlepool and dying away like smoke.
23. Eider
(Somateria mollissima)
Yan had a smell that was peculiar to him and real like an old sofa. It encompassed cigarettes and stale sweat, leather and blood. But it was more than those things and less. I’d more or less airbrushed the man out of the official photos. There was a gap on the balcony where he once stood, between me and Kate and Lenin. But I couldn’t legislate for that smell and if he’d said something or done something right then I would have thrown myself on that smell and foundered upon it. But he didn’t, and I didn’t. We sat back down in the armchairs by the fire.
Dan, he said.
He began rolling up a cigarette, nimbly twisting the paper in the fingers of one hand, dispensing a wisp of tobacco and securing it with a dab of spit. A match flared and he sucked at the tiny roll-up. Clots of smoke dribbled from his nostrils.
I’ll take one of them, I said.
He looked at me sharply.
It’s a mug’s game. You should give it up, before it does you some damage.
I will. Just not tonight.
He seemed to relax, handed me the tobacco pouch.
Keep forgetting you’re seventeen.
Sixteen.
Aye. Sixteen.
I clumsily fashioned a cigarette and lit up. Smoke sprouted in the room as the day collapsed into exhaustion, and the coals of our cigarettes flared.
So, he said, tell me. How did you get your face rearranged? How’s your mam?
I told him, as night gathered and rain still thrummed outside. About the afternoon on the beach, only hours ago but already dropping into eclipse. Watched his face grow gaunt and bleak and the firelight across his skin turn to ash. Thoughts in his head congealing into a cold hard mass like a neutron star and the smoke flickering from his mouth like dragon’s breath. When I finished he ground the nub of his cigarette into the ashtray, mashing the filter right into the glass. Jonah appeared with two more cans. Yan took one and popped the ring pull with a hiss. Took a long gulp of the yeasty fluid.
Now you, I said.
He yawned and stretched. What?
Tell me about you.
We’ve got unfinished business, you and me. We’ll get that out of the way first. Get my head down for a bit, and we’ll go in the morning.
Jonah hovered.
You’ve kept the boy waiting three years, he said. We’ve got all night, and there’s plenty of sleeping when you’re dead.
Yan looked at him hard. It’s a long story, he said. It can wait.
He rummaged in his pocket, held out a big old-fashioned lighter. Firelight trickled over the brass skin.
Brought this back from the Falklands. You can have it.
He dropped it into my hand. I tested its weight, shook it. Put it down on the arm of the chair.
It’s empty, I said.
Here you go, said Jonah, standing by the bed. This’ll keep you warm. Real eiderdown, this. Warm as toast. Used to belong to the old man. When he first came over from Barbados he didn’t half feel the cold.
He tossed a thick maroon quilt down over me, threadbare but miraculously warm. I tucked it around me, up and over my aching head, the feathers of long-dead birds trapping my fugitive body heat in a secure cocoon.
So I slid into sleep and a curtain of rain swept aside and a raft of ducks huddled on the sea, wrinkles of grey water lifting and falling beneath the large soft bodies. Big vermiculated females like brindled cats in tabby and tortoiseshell, shrugging and shuffling their backs as the rain pockmarked the water, deep and watchful black eyes on the half-grown chicks clustered between. Rain craters grew and spread as the sea squall passed over, and the coast swam into view, the mouth of the Tees with the long sweep of pale sand to the north.
The estuary tide lifted and fell with a sleeper’s breath and slipped back like a skin over miles of wet and metallic mudflats and mudbanks, creeks and runnels. And befuddling numbers of dunlin and sanderling, redshank and greenshank and knot, godwit and ruff, curlew and whimbrel and oystercatcher, grey plover and golden plover, scampered and delved like black ants and rose into the air and blew and twisted like hanks of dark smoke. The rain parted and I startled awake in a grey room in a grey house in Seaton Carew. A grey wind toyed with the win dow glass and it groaned like a wobbleboard. Everything hurt. I raised a hand to my throbbing face, felt the tracery of dried blood across my nose.
I lay for a while gazing at the ceiling of Jonah’s box room. There was a broken patch in it. He must have slipped, up in the loft, put his foot through the ceiling. Cracks radiated from the point of impact like a star. I thought of the luminous stars I had stuck to my bedroom ceiling in the pub, how they glowed with a sick green light in the dark. A child’s universe made of plastic. There wasn’t much left of that universe. Less and less with each day.
Could you do with a cup of tea Dan? said Jonah, shouldering through the door and offering a mug to me, steam billowing. I rubbed my eyes and propped myself up on the pillows, then took the mug, cupping its heat between my palms. Sipped at the scalding liquid, felt the peaty tannins nibbling at my stomach.
It’s nearly dinnertime, said Jonah. He’s already up.
I’m not coming, I said. I’ve had enough of it.
You’re coming, he said.
Grey eyes and a bald patch. Sparse and wispy hair. A cigarette clamped between his lips. Seized me by the upper arm, fingers like an iron grab. Propelled me out of the door into bitter morning light, into a car I’d never seen before. Then he was driving and I was in the passenger seat next to him.
Where did you get the car?
Cologne. She bought it for me.
Who?
I lost my soul. She helped me get it back.
The red car ran quietly along the edge of the estuary, across the reclaimed land, taut green fields lifting and falling in the wind, pylons striding out alongside. Ahead was the blue skeleton of the Transporter and the giant sheds of the Swan Hunter yards. We drove for years without speaking. On the southern shore, blast furnaces coughed themselves into life one by one, and a small town shimmered into being, reticent at first, then spreading in wrinkle upon wrinkle of terraced housing, rippling like a tattooed skin across the land until it broke against the dark flanks of the Eston Hills. From the outermost points of the estuary twin breakwaters grew like the shy horns of a snail, shaped from cold impurities shattered like brittle toffee. The swollen furnaces roared day and night and the sky bloomed orange. Tides lifted and fell, and behind the northern breakwater new sea walls snaked across the mud like varicose veins. Mudflats hardened into fields as green and square as stamps blowing in an album, and from the fields sprang a silver forest of metallic vines and creepers, mushrooms and tubers, stamens and stigmata, sepals and petals, breathing the sour spores of transpiration into the sky. Gas flares wove their delicate flames and the whole estuary was a living thing, hissing and humming and grumbling inside my head.
The car drifted up past the old shipyards to where a solitary building stood on the corner. Tired paintwork, peeling maroon gloss around the windows and the door. Turned onto the abandoned lot next door and the tyres crunched over gravel and cinder. The engine stopped and nothing happened for a long time. The man next to me sat drumming on the wheel with his thumbs.
One by one t
he furnaces blinked out, melting into landscapes of rubble and wire mesh. The metallic jungle was in retreat, whole swathes clear-felled and logged out, leaving isolated stands back-to-back in defiance. The concrete husk of a power station blew along the shore before gripping the marram grass and putting down roots.
You go in first, he said. Check it out. Don’t acknowledge me when I come in. When it all kicks off, we’ll get busy.
The room was busy. Sunday lunch, always a few in. The mouths of the drinkers flapped open and shut, disclosing pimpled and discoloured tongues, rows of uneven tobacco-stained teeth. Their faces distended in laughter, they gesticulated across the bar, clouds of smoke bloomed from them. Hagan and his mates were clustered around the pool tables, fagsmoke curdling beneath the overhead lights. Cue leapt into ball and ball thumped into pocket.
They didn’t see me, and I sidled over to the bar. Michelle’s rodent eyes flickered to me as she worked the pump but she didn’t say nothing. The place felt clean and sharp, hard light on dark wood. Swept clean by sea and wind.
And a man came through the door. A tramp, or a pikey. He came to the bar and Michelle served him and his eyes moved over her, lingered on her bare legs. When he had his pint he knocked it back and put the glass back on the bar and rubbed tentatively at his bald spot. The dregs of the beer sank down the sides of the glass and pooled in the base. Then he walked over to the pool table and put some change down.
Magoo looked at him.
It’s a closed table, he said. No pikeys.
He picked up the money and hurled it and it ricocheted from walls and tables in hailstones of light and metal. Franco pushed the tramp in the chest and he slipped and went down and sprawled on his arse on the floor. You could see it in his face, biting into the touchpaper, cold as the sea. Michelle was smirking behind the bar and he looked over at her, just for a moment. Then he got carefully to his feet and went over to where Hagan was leaning against one of the tables with them slabby arms crossed over his chest. Behind him Lovebite fed the jukebox and began to dance with an imaginary lass.
They looked at each other. The hardbitten derelict in the shabby leather jacket and Hagan inflated double his size with that steroid face and gelled hair and single gold hoop.
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