Real German lager, I say. Brewed in Luton.
She doesn’t smile.
I’m moving out, she says.
It’s like a blow in the stomach. I feel nauseous and light-headed, the beer rusty inside me.
There’s a flat, she goes on, over Miriam’s shop. She says I can have it in the short term, until I find somewhere permanent.
Hang on, I say. We can talk things through. It’s like you haven’t given me a chance.
She thinks for a moment before replying, twisted towards me on the sofa.
We don’t want the same things any more Dan. I think it’s had all the chance it’s going to get.
‘I can’t help feeling you need a little more excitement in your life.’
You read my letter.
Yeah, so I read your letter. Add that to the list of grievances. Nice to know you discuss me with your friends.
I put the beer can down half drunk, no longer have the stomach for it.
I thought once we were through the IVF. Once we were through –
My voice rising desperately. She interrupts.
You’d have found something else. After your dad’s dead, there’ll be something else. A crisis at work, whatever. As long as it keeps you paralysed, stops you from acting.
It’s not too late.
It’s just not right. Not any more. We could go upstairs now and have sex, but it wouldn’t be right. Something’s broken.
I sit for a moment, rub my thumbnails together.
You haven’t asked me whether there’s someone else, she says.
I wondered. All the nights you’ve been away.
Well, there wasn’t. Just stayed with a mate. Better than lying in that cold bed with you, back-to-back like bookends. Whereas you, she says, pointedly.
What?
Who is she Dan? Miranda saw her getting out of your car at the station. Nice little peck on the cheek, by all accounts. Someone classy, or just a whore from over the border?
Jesus, it’s like the fucking Stasi, I groan. It happened once. All them nights you weren’t here, the house cold and empty. I was lonely, I got drunk, and I slept with somebody. It was the first and last time.
She looks straight ahead, eyes boring into the wall.
Look, I say, I’ll spare you the platitudes. I crossed the line. I stepped outside our marriage, and it scared me. Not a day goes by when it doesn’t sicken me. And I know things haven’t been right. But we haven’t tried yet. Let’s work through it, eh? Marriage guidance, counselling, whatever it takes. I thought we were in this for the long haul.
She’s looking straight ahead, her face furrowed in concentration. She takes a deep breath.
We could spend a lot of time and effort working on it, she says, picking her words. And it might make things better. But it’s not what I want any more.
She delivers this verdict like a stone dropped through a grille, into an abandoned mineshaft. I listen as it descends silently through acres of bitter darkness, and hear the dull and empty echo as it strikes bottom.
I’ve had enough, says the skeleton in the bed, abruptly.
He swallows and I can see the sinews and tendons in his jaw scrape together under the skin and hear the sand and gravel in the voice. He sucks deep at the oxygen mask, chest wheezing and rattling.
Pull the curtains, he says, eyes burning larger than ever in the emaciated face.
I scan for a nurse in the darkened ward, but all seems quiet. Draw the pastel pink curtains around the bed. Diffuse pink light softens Yan’s expression.
It’s time, he says. I want to go. To the hospice. Get a wheelchair.
Are you sure? I say. Hospital were talking about getting you stabilized again, sending you home. They don’t think things are that far advanced.
His face cracks and a sharp laugh barks out.
Advanced. That’s a good one. Try drowning in my own fluids. Slowly. Ask them to give me. A leaflet about that one.
Outside the drawn curtain a trolley rattles up the long ward, crockery rattling.
Before too long. I’m going to be incapable Dan. I can’t let them have control over me. It’s got to be now.
I can do it, he says, when I offer to help him. He levers his body, still in the hospital gown, across the gap, his chest rattling and veins jumping out on his temples. He settles into the wheelchair, breathing heavy and shallow.
I could murder. A fucking ciggy, he says, grinning. Get the oxygen.
I raise an eyebrow, detach the oxygen cylinder from the wall and hang it from the back of the chair. Hand him the mask.
You’re still in your hospital gown, I say. You’ll freeze.
There’s a coat. In the locker, he says.
I open the door and pull out his old donkey jacket, huge and black and frayed. It gives off that sharp scent of old sweat and cigarettes. Tears spring to my eyes and I force them back. Drape the jacket around his thin shoulders, tuck it behind his back. He reaches out a hand and turns the collar up and we move out through the pink curtain and into the ward, heading for the lift.
Out in the car park the black bulk of the hospital juts into a night sky low and damp with the orange gloaming of Stockton. I look up at the windows, postage stamps of light in the flanks of the vast building. Yan transfers himself from the chair to the passenger seat, straining and grunting but accepting no help. I slot the oxygen cylinder into the footwell between his knees, hand him the mask.
Thanks Doris, he says. Fold up the chair and. Put it in the boot. Have you got a tyre lever? And a torch?
In the boot, I say. Why?
He smiles enigmatically, skin puckering like vellum.
At the Glebe shops he taps my arm and motions for me to pull over. I find a parking space.
Golden Virginia, he says. Green Rizla. You’re paying.
I look at him in disbelief.
Last request of. A dying man, he croaks, eyes twinkling.
I get out of the car, swearing under my breath. Buy the tobacco and papers, dodge through a group of kids banging a football against the parade of shops. They look at me blankly with eyes like stones and I hurry back to the car and hand him the little bundle. He takes it and palms it into his jacket pocket with a wink. As we approach Norton roundabout he leans over.
Straight on here, he says, tapping my arm.
Hospice is right, I say, flipping the indicator on and drifting over into the right-hand lane.
We’re going. Straight on, says Yan, in a firm metallic voice.
He flips the indicator off and I cut back into the middle lane. A horn blares behind me.
Where are we going? I say, irritated.
You’ll see, he says. How’s Kelly?
I fight back tears again, grimly.
She’s fine, I say. More than fine. She’s really sorting herself out.
Good, he says. She’s a smart lass.
*
Julie levers her body down into the pit from above. It’s another leaden day, still dark around the edges, and the developer’s machines are at work on the plot next door, a flock of metal geese on the winter fields with yellow articulated necks rising and falling, taking huge bites of soil and subsoil and clay. She kneels down next to the skeleton, pulls a large finds bag from her pocket, and begins with the tip of her trowel to lift a bone at a time and slip it inside. Beginning at the feet. No reason, just personal preference. Jelly babies, chocolate santas, gingerbread men. Saving the best bit for last. The head, studded with sweets. The brute beak like a bludgeon. Tarsals and metatarsals first, the long toes and claws. Then she moves on to the legs, the strange flexures of ankle and knee, the bones flipping easily from the crumbly soil inside the pit.
The Cape of Good Hope, he says. Funny to see part of your life. Turned into archaeology.
He plonks himself down on the stump of the chimney breast. Surveys the rubble, wall footings poking out among the brick fragments, the chunks of concrete, the broken glass. I can see his bony legs under the gown, purple with varic
ose veins, hospital slippers still on his feet. The donkey jacket, now securely buttoned up, looks incongruous above this.
Ever been back Dan?
No. I’ve driven past, like. Never wanted to stop.
He produces a roll-up from his jacket pocket, already assembled into that characteristic matchstick-thin form. The lighter blossoms like a pallid moth in the darkness and I hear him cough gently. He pulls smoke wilfully into the ruined lungs, but not with the usual deep and satisfied inhalations. Instead, he takes short and furtive drags, the smoke emerging from mouth and nostrils almost immediately. I can’t equate this little plot with the rambling building where I spent my childhood. Above us floats the space where we ate and slept and dreamed and argued, now liberated from earth and materiality.
Kate, he says. Used to see ghosts. Right where you’re standing.
Me too, I think. They never hung around long enough to be sure. Always out of the corner of my eye. Something moving or shimmering. Turned out to be a fucking gas leak anyway.
Oh aye?
Yeah. That old boiler was pissing carbon monoxide. Not enough to kill us but enough to give you weird dreams. Hallucinations, like.
The ghosts were just gas dreams, he says. I’m almost sorry about that. Maybe we’re just gas dreams Danny. The whole thing.
He shivers and the rain drifts across.
Time has moved past me, he says. Pretty soon I’ll be marooned. Like some island you look back at. When you’re steaming past on the ferry.
That’ll be some island, I say. A dramatic landscape.
Oh aye. Contorted mountains and brooding lochs. Snowfields and glaciers. Volcanoes blasting lava.
That’s the difference between you and me, I say. I’d settle for the warm house and the cat curled up on my lap, for a patch of garden and a patch of sky. I’d be watching a flock of starlings unfurl like a silk scarf. You’d be scouring the bushes for a Siberian vagrant.
Yan opens his mouth. Closes it again.
Remember Paul? I say. Coming through the door right there with that maniac smile on his face, steaming right into Franco.
Aye. I remember.
Tell me what you and Paul did with Hagan. You wrapped him in black plastic and you put him in the boot. You drove off and nobody saw him again.
Pest control, he says.
Did you kill him?
The question seems to spill from the ruined fabric of the pub.
He laughs, shakes his head.
All in good time.
And what about Michelle?
She was a smack rat.
Only after you kicked her out. They took her baby into care. Found Michelle strung up from a light socket in the Social Club bogs.
I never made her sleep with them spare pricks, he snaps. Stupid bitch. And I never sold her the gear.
He gets painfully to his feet.
Danny, he says. I’m running out of breath.
I catch him by the arm and we totter back to the car where he drinks hungrily from the mask.
After the feet and legs, Julie moves on to the spine and the ribcage. The vertebrae come first, little knurled punctuation marks of bone knotted into one another like a jigsaw. She picks each one out separately, beginning at the tail end, revealing the empty channel where the spinal column of the bird once ran, where neural signals pulsed and jumped like a river of electricity. She drops the last of the vertebrae into the skeleton bag like a strange variety of boiled sweet. Then she moves on to the ribs, peeling them up from the ground, long and slender and easy.
Yan hunches in the car like an old feller with his spine sagging. We drive back along the northern edge of the site. It was once an impenetrable forest of steel and pipework but now it’s much sparser, clearings of open ground between the surviving plantations, expanses of gravel and rubble where colonies of willow herb flutter in summer.
Pull over, he says. Into the car park.
But there are concrete blocks across the entrance so I stop on the roadside and we look up at the building, a cast concrete hulk eight storeys high. Used to be the main admin offices for the whole site, the largest chemical operation in Europe. Now it’s derelict and surrounded by mesh fencing with the windows and doors boarded shut. Stark notices warn of dog patrols. Plants have got their roots in between the concrete panels in the car park and are prising them apart.
Billingham House, he says. Had my first job here, way back. Didn’t last long, mind. Get the wheelchair. And the tyre lever.
He opens the door and begins to prise himself out. I grab at his sleeve.
Hang on, I say. What’s going on?
He rights himself outside the car and bends creakily down to peer inside.
We’re going. For a walk.
I kill the engine and walk wearily round to retrieve the chair. It snaps back into shape without putting up much of a struggle. Yan subsides into it.
Where to? I say.
He points into the car park like a maharajah directing an elephant.
It’s locked up, I protest. There’s security. Asbestos.
Asbestos, he barks. Now I’m fucking scared.
I make my way over to the fencing. The nuts joining the panels are only finger tight, so I fumble at the cold metal and free a panel to create a path for the chair. Then we’re in the car park, wheels rumbling gently across the perishing concrete. We reach the base of the offices, where the barbed wire of bramble and elder is starting to coil from cracks and crevices.
Use the tyre lever, Yan says. Open some of the boarding. And we can get in.
This is mental, I blurt out in exasperation, passing a hand across my crown. It’s dangerous in there. They’ve stripped out everything – there are open shafts from top to bottom, eight floors deep. And you’re in no condition to go in. We’ll get ourselves arrested.
A long pause. Yan raises himself slowly from the chair, hands braced against the frame, and stands facing me.
I need to die on my feet, he says. Not in a bed. Not swimming in a night sweat of morphine. On my feet, like a king in the Dark Ages. This has gone on too long. I’ve been letting you. Do it your way. But now I’m taking back control. I need to see the flames of the Chimera. One last time.
You can do what you like, I say, bitterly. You always did. But I don’t have to be part of it. I’ll be in the car.
I turn away and start to walk back towards the broken fence.
Danny.
The power of his voice stops me and I turn round. He is still standing, gaunt and unsupported, by the chair, the tails of his gown blowing about his ankles in the spare wind.
I can’t get up there. Without you. If you help me, I’ll finish the story. You’ll know everything.
She looks at the outstretched wings and feels loath to disturb them. Once the wrists and fingerbones of an earthbound reptile, stretched by time into these miraculous structures. Birds don’t even think about it, do they? The way crows just stroll into the air without thinking. You’re about to hit the brakes, but they simply step backwards and gust into the air, out of harm’s way. Julie begins to prise up the meta-carpals and carpals, and then the delicate radius and ulna, entwined like creepers.
Inside the building I flip the torch on. Concentric circles of watery light illuminate the bare interior of a lobby with a concrete stair leading up towards the next floor. There’s a corridor running away into darkness like a derelict mineral working, and the torch throws deep, startling shadows of Old Testament black. Yan points towards the stairwell and waves away my offer of help. He holds on to the banister and begins to drag himself up the stairs, lifting and placing each foot deliberately, veins standing out in his neck and sweat clustering at his temples. We reach the next landing and he pauses, gasping for breath. I flick the torch down abandoned galleries running away along the seams of the night, and we climb on, footfall echoing dully through the empty concrete halls.
By the sixth floor he’s almost gone. Visibly diminished, shrivelling slowly into the night.
/> I knew, he says. I’d have to climb those stairs. In the end. Face what was at the top.
Your dream, I say.
Yes. It’s funny. How you end up. In the same place. However much you struggle. Maybe that was the truth. I died there. And this track is shrivelling up now. Almost nothing left.
There’s plenty left, I say.
I give him my arm and he grips it and we struggle up the last two flights and our shadows are mocking us in the deepest bitterest black.
Along here, he coughs, showing me the corridor.
We stumble along, looking for the service stairs up onto the roof. Halfway along the corridor two panes of darkness open up in the floor and I shine the torch into one of them and see the light ricochet down eight floors. The damp sides of the lift shaft glitter a dull metallic blue. I stand on the edge and look down and my insides are tingling and one more step would ensnare me in that long slow delicious tumble into the neutron star.
There’s a limpid gust of flame as Yan sparks his lighter. The smell of petrol, shadows dancing.
Brought this all the way with me, he says. All the way from the Falklands.
Thought you didn’t believe in talismans.
No. Didn’t do Jonah no good. Can’t believe he span you that line. About Schrödinger’s cat.
Said we were caught between life and death. All I had to do was open the box.
It’s still shut, he says. Did I die there, or do I die here? Am I a man or a ghost or a gas dream? You bring the hammer down and sparks fly up. Thousands of them. Tunnelling into the night. But every track cools and shrivels and dies.
You’re real enough Yan.
Look, he says. What you got to remember is. You aren’t in control. You aren’t the egghead in the lab coat Danny.
What am I then?
You’re the fucking cat boy. We both are. You can never open the box. Live your whole life. Trapped inside it.
Aye, I reckon.
Mind, he says. We can still wave our tails about. Let some fucking air in, eh?
He takes a step but the knotted purple legs give way and before I can reach him he crumples to the floor. I bend down and scoop him up, one arm under his knees and the other round his shoulders. He weighs fuck all and the flesh behind his knee is cold and scaly to the touch and his body close up gives off this sweet odour of decay. I find the doorway and the service stairs and lug him up, trying not to scrape his feet against the walls. He grunts and sighs and drops in and out of consciousness. And we emerge onto the roof, where the mouths of vent shafts and heating flues blossom from the concrete surface. At the edge I set him on his feet. He seems to wake up, supports himself.
Hemispheres Page 30