by David Wood
The walk from the lake down to the TheatreVillage was improved by the day's sun, the red brick and mortar of the buildings turned golden, the road molten. The only thing to spoil it, was Ciaran's disturbing insight walking in our footsteps, his words our longest shadow on a glorious day.
The building itself looked like an inverted shoebox – only two angles away from a coffin, I thought to myself. It was that new anaemic brick with jollified spars of colour that had delusions of being mock-Tudor. Nice enough in a soulless kind of way. The security gates were locked and I couldn't see any sign of the private parking the advert promised. I was all ready to chalk it up as disappointment number four when camouflaged roller doors chuntered into life and an expensive piece of male pride purred out of the underground garage.
The security doors opened automatically to let the beast out and us in.
Aimee announced our imminent arrival on the intercom and a dislocated voice suggested we take the lift to the top, promising to meet us there.
'No way are we going to be able to afford this,' I muttered, watching the floor indicators tick by. Even the bloody lift was closer to luxury than the flats we had seen that morning. Roomier, too.
'Be nice,' Aimee said, jabbing me in the ribs with a sharp elbow for my pains as the door opened on our hermetically sealed vacuum.
'Aimee and Declan, right?'
Tasteless tie, braces and spats were my first impression of the Cheshire Cat grin that greeted us out of the lift.
'First time,' I said, offering my hand.
His shake was clammy.
'Good to meet you. I'm Nathan.'
My instant character assassination had Nathan labelled as another upthrusting advertising executive of the kill or be killed school. Thirty seconds in the man's presence and I was already amusing myself with invented reasons for his North Eastern exile. Not a good start.
With a 'Walk this way,' Nathan ushered us towards an open door with that fixed smile of his.
Aimee's elbow dug into my ribcage before I could fall into my bottomless Groucho Marx and Monty Python repertoire.
Smiling mischievously, I followed her through the door, knowing she would want it before both feet were over the threshold.
It was like another world: polished floorboards and so much open space, glass and black blinds all down one side with a view of the gabled rooftops below, the kitchen and bathroom in alcoves off the main room. The furniture was at a premium, a huge Scandinavian bed, a black leather sofa, metal pipe bookcases lined with compact discs and tapes as a divide between living and sleeping areas, a coffee table with coffee table magazines, a cinema sized television and a space age hi-fi. There were no pictures and no plants and it fairly stank of money.
'It used to be one of the old bonded warehouses. It was converted into flats a couple of years ago,' Nathan explained. 'Want a coffee?'
I said yes, Aimee said no.
Nathan disappeared through the kitchen arch to grind the beans.
'We can't afford it,' I whispered to Aimee in response to that look in her eye, knowing I was on a loser before I started.
'You don't know that.'
I walked over to the windows. Looking out, I felt like a voyeur spying on the city below. I could see into the rooms of seven flats without particularly looking and the ant farm of people milling on the pavements nine floors down. I had an uninterrupted view to the brewery house and the copper sea-horses of Civic Centre to the north and the portico of the Central Station to the south and everything in between was crystal clear.
You couldn't put a price on a vista like that.
'Some view,' Nathan said, appearing behind me with the coffees.
'Pretty spectacular,' I agreed, taking mine.
'It's perfect,' Aimee whispered into my ear, circling her arms around my waist.
Nathan smiled, reading her body language loud and clear.
She was already planning the flat warming party.
Eight
As it turned out Nathan’s sky scraping apartment wasn't just out of our price range. It was way out of our price range, the pound sign piloting Columbia out of the stratosphere with a vapour trail of mad money in its wake, but the pounds and pennies hurdle didn't matter to Aimee. She had her heart set on rebuilding our lives nine floors above the city.
I made some excuse about needing a moment alone to mourn the passing of my solvency and left her to take care of the arrangements for the move. My head felt like it was going to explode.
Buskers were out on the streets, drawn like flies by the sun. Buskers and beggars.
Plate glass reflected the sun and the shade like oil slicks. Cars grubbed along the streets in slow moving snails, engines and tempers overheating.
I walked with a purpose, my eyes fixed on the ancient clock set into the station's portico, the minute hand marking off my life with jerky motion.
Newcastle Central Station, haven for the city's huge population of drunkards, derelicts, and the segment I was interested in, runaways. The dome is a huge, lofty vault suffused with the echoes of past times bustle. It is also one of the loneliest places hewn by man, crammed with automatons that idly ignore the shames of the feebly crayoned 'hungry, homeless and helpless' cardboard signs in favour of microwaved hamburgers and brunch muffins from the Express Café.
The station is a gateway.
A place where those running to somewhere pass through and a place where others running from somewhere arrive.
Its shell emphasised all of Malachi's arguments in one sweep, the old ticket barriers and ticket booths gone to make way for a glass air bubble with automatic doors and neon lights to make an uneasy alliance of modernity and granite facings, serpentine girders and fluted archways.
I bought a rancid cup of coffee and settled down in one of the Express Café's more uncomfortable orange plastic seats to watch the world pass me by in a bustle of afternoon passengers.
Over on the side wall an antique one armed bandit chunked out a handful of copper coins to the delighted squeal of the shapeless girl with lipstick eyes feeding it.
At the table across from the bandit a dirty looking woman who wheezed like a clapped out shunter and coughed every few seconds, laboured over The Gazette's quick crossword, tutting and shaking her hair-netted head between blows as she scratched some wisdom out to make way for another five letter word meaning hopeless.
A clutch of school kids cluttered up most of the smoking corner with their bags and briefcases, squawking about everything and nothing.
By them, a young couple sat wrapped in each other, fingers entwined, whispering sweet secrets between stolen kisses.
Behind the counter a plump middle-aged woman with silver grey hair and an easy smile leaned down to reach for something and smiled her smile for another customer.
I found myself looking at the dilapidated lattice work of the roof above my head, at the flaking green paint on the benches, at the pigeons picking at the smearing of vomit on the pavement and the starlings sheltering in the nooks and crannies, stooped and curled, tiny feet firm on thin, rusting girders, tasting the rich, gritty aromas of every day and loving every one of them.
It didn't take long for the café to become crowded with a motley assortment of normality filing in to occupy its plastic seats. It was as good a place as any to watch the old world pass by.
An empty burger box jitterbugged to the tune of the wind, its dance carrying it onto the tracks in front of the next train.
The overhead tannoy announced the imminent arrival of the Glasgow Central train on platform nine.
The sound of wheels on track was muted by the thick glass but it was still jarringly loud.
I rolled myself a smoke and lit it, watching the procession of hopefuls and hopeless as they filed off the latest arrival. I finger-rubbed small circles on my temples, trying to work out the headache as I scanned the rows of blank faces shuffling past, looking for the one emotion I gambled would be lurking behind at least one set of eyes: The hung
er.
Businessmen in suits, mothers with children and emotional baggage, students weighed down by ridiculous sacks, and an ebony skinned boy in his denim jacket and pink baseball cap, so obviously on his own. A boy with that look burning in his eyes, drawn to this place by some instinct he couldn't refuse.
'My lucky number,' I said to the crossword lady with a wink: 'Nine down, coup de main,' and went out onto the platform to watch my ebony skinned boy taste the grit and the smoke of Newcastle for the first time as he orientated himself, knowing my retaliation had arrived in the guise of a thirteen year old boy lost on platform nine.
His skin was perfect, the rich ebony making his eyes look unnaturally white with its perfection. His white jeans rumpled around the flapping tongues of his oversized basketball boots, too long for his growing legs. The cap was on backwards, the bill digging into the nape of the boy's neck, hair cropped close to the scalp beneath it.
He put his backpack down between his legs and looked about, scrutinizing the blank faced commuters for a sign that one of them had come to meet him off the train.
No one had.
Disappointment creased his smooth skin. Loneliness wasn't part of the plan that had put him on the train to Newcastle.
He took a cigarette packet from his jacket and teased one between his lips, still looking about until he locked eyes with a puffed-up porter who was forcibly ushering a wino with a 'help me' card out of the station. The boy locked horns and held his ground as if he expected a challenge from the self-important official, lighting the cigarette with the blue tipped flame from his petrol lighter.
The porter pushed too hard and the wino's cap spilled its contents, about twenty five pence in mixed copper and small silver. The poor bugger was shaking, trying to break from the porter's grip to get his change but the guy was having none of it. When the wino twisted again the porter put a fist into his gut hard enough to double him up; the porter's grip the only thing keeping him from falling. Very deliberately, he spat in the wino's face.
The afternoon's commuters were equally deliberately ignoring the scene, not seeing officialdom's spitting punches because they were something they didn't want to see.
But not the boy. He crushed his barely smoked cigarette underfoot and ran straight at the porter. It was a giddily hallucinogenic moment, the distance between us seemed to contract and the track lighting was suddenly flickering in and out of neon. Only it wasn't an effect of the lighting. I felt myself begin to swoon. I pressed a hand to my eyes, feeling the pressure that had built up inside them. Blood pressed up behind my corneas in an agonizing haemorrhage swell. Feeling giddy, sick, I started to move. In that disorientating second the boy was on the porter, swinging his bag around in a vicious arc that ended at the man's head. The porter didn't see it coming, and took the full force of the backpack in the face. He went down like a felled tree, holding his nose, blood oozing through the chinks in his fingers.
The boy drove a disabling kick between the porter's curled legs before he dropped his sack and gathered together the wino's scattered change. No one else moved. He pressed the coins into the grateful derelict's trembling hands and turned to lace a basketball booted foot into the porter's face before he grabbed his sack and bolted out under the station's main arches, looking back once to check who was chasing.
Only me, and I was too far away for him to see, I was sure.
A rumpled suit was helping the porter to his feet as I dodged around spectators and sour looks. Step by step I felt as though I were struggling to keep my head above the press of the crowd as it jostled and elbowed and gawked. I pressed harder on my eyes, because I couldn't focus and because I saw more than simply faces, I saw rings, like smoke, hanging over their heads, colours bleeding from the bodies into the smoke.
It almost made me scream. I was under the main arches of the portico, but the roof seemed to have given out, colours beyond my wildest imaginings were sprouting from gutters and drains and mechanisms and cornices, licks of smoke curling towards the vault of the heavens. The last time I had seen these colours they had been inside Malachi and I had been falling, falling. . . The sensation was distressingly similar. All around me plumes of coloured smoke were rising from the flesh of ignorant commuters, some subdued, others alive with peacock ribbons.
Fires burned in the eyes that shone with blind intensity.
I couldn't see the boy for the smoke of others.
Something, a pulse of red, flickered across the roof with dizzying rapidity. My legs tied up, my head tilted up. The pressure against my right eye finally eased as something burst, glazing more than half of the vaulted ceiling with a thin patina of scarlet, and suddenly confronting me with twin realities seen through different eyes. Through my left eye, the mundane, the world I had eaten, slept and breathed all of my life, and through my right that hideous other world of glass Malachi had unveiled, where everything was so full of colour.
I staggered, bowed under the weight of it.
I was no white knight to be manipulated in this crazy game of chess.
The wino was at my side, his leathery, lined face ashen. His skin smelt stale. His hair was falling out in clumps, balls of it clinging to the shoulders of his filthy coats.
'Help me,' he begged. 'Take me out of here. . .' He clutched hold of my sleeve with one hand, clawing, pulling, as he pointed towards the Westgate Road exit. Flakes of dry, colour-blanched skin curled away from his knuckles like a bizarre shedding.
Was it possible that he saw what I saw? The possibility shook me.
Other bodies around us were being robbed of their colour, their skin blanching until all the pigmentation that remained was a sickly colourless hue. Slowly, the flesh beneath began to do the same.
I turned, pulling the wino more forcefully than I intended, and started to push my way toward the exit, not caring who blocked my path.
As we reached the mock-Doric archway the wino shrieked, hands thrust up before his face as if he were trying to shield his eyes or his skin from the insidious touch of sunlight.
I saw two things: in my left eye, the sunlight and the street; in my right, a thick glaze of red like a membranous sac that was growing over the exit through the archway, pulsing, throbbing. Channels like veins seemed to be forcing colour through the screen. There was no red sac, I knew. The nauseous effect was somehow linked to the film of blood glazing my right eye.
That knowledge didn't stop me, I closed my left eye to shut out reality and tried to touch the miracle, to feel the ridges and bumps of the jellied blood vessels growing across the station's exit. My head filled with screams which carried a kind of blind panic that made my skin clammy. I released my grip on the wino, closed both my eyes and stepped into the sac, knowing it wasn't there in the world I was walking in, knowing that the hallucination was brought on by the haemorrhage, but still expecting to feel the slick membrane envelop me like a jellied glove, blocking my nose with pulsing plugs, filling my ears, suffocating me.
The world smelt ripe, my senses picking out the cloying tang of exhaust fumes, the bouquets on display at the station corner florist, spilled petrol, cigarettes, beer, bodies, sweat, and something else. . .
That smell:
Smoking hickory wood. . .
The touch of Crohak's hand in all of this. . .
I opened my eyes and I was on the street, the vision wrenched violently from my eyes. The effect was both immediate and comprehensive. I felt a moan echo through my mind, as though in loss at being forsaken by such horrific wonderment, and then in disbelief as the wino staggered past me, spitting a gobbit of bile onto the pavement before he disappeared among the maddening throng, cursing under his sour breath as he straightened his filthy clothes.
My eye was bleeding. That was the top and bottom of it. The be all and end all of the miraculous. I stood rooted to the spot as the parade of normality flowed around me, no smoking haloes, no birthing sacs, feeling sick, claustrophobic, hemmed in by the jostling pedestrians. My eye was bleeding. My head sp
inning. My mind playing wild tricks. Newcastle was as real as it always had been, that was all the anchor I needed. I had to keep telling myself that, a litany going over and over inside my head. Newcastle was real. Newcastle was real.
The boy's back was one hundred and fifty feet away and slowing as he came to the lights. He checked back over his shoulder, then seeing no one was close enough to hassle him, he slowed to a walk.
My feet seemed to be moving in slow motion, the pavement, like treacle, sucking at my shoes and slowing me down. Running was making me increasingly nauseous.
Starlings and pigeons billed and cooed and cawed from the eaves and buttresses above me, their tiny bodies jostling and winging in a parody of the Central Station.
As he waited for the lights the boy appeared to shrink in on himself; he didn't stoop, just seemed to shrivel, the heavy burden of 'what next?' on his young shoulders bringing him down. With no one to guide him he appeared unsure where to go.
The ‘green man’ sign blinked, ushering him across the road.
I jogged to close the gap between us, half running, half walking in his footsteps past the burnt out building of the Cattle Market with its rotunda and handless clockface and on, towards the bright lights of the city.
He stopped checking back over his shoulder after a few minutes, content no one was going to catch up with him.
He ducked down a narrow alley between the Post Office building and the husk of an abandoned bank, its blue eagle riddled with white streaks let loose from above, heading down toward the river. Bundled up newspapers and other litter made a carpet across the cobbles, dispelling the old world illusion the tight alley conjured. There were no lights and no other walkers. I gave up any pretence of stealth and followed him.
His pace quickened slightly, more purpose to it than before. He didn't need to glance back to know I was there.
I touched my eye then looked at my fingers, there was no blood, no external damage. Small mercy, I supposed.