I appreciate the job you’ve given us Arty, I say. But I’m not your man.
What ye gobbing on about?
I’m not into drugs. They turn you daft. You of all people should know that. I don’t touch them mesel. Never have.
What, not even a puff?
Na.
Bloody hell, you’re a rarity, you are. But divvent worry, lad. I’ll see you right. Like I say, I’ve been waiting for someone like you.
Eyes, I think. On sticks.
Watching us.
*
The wedding was the best of it. The happiest memory. The golden time.
Mebbes it rained that summer but if it did I don’t remember. I was drunk on the amber light of the summer – and the love for this dark man whose eyes said more than his mouth ever would.
But now the season was over and we were living in a van on Edenside. The wind was getting shifty like a weasel and the burning of the leaves was in the air. Autumn was in the post.
There was never any chance of moving into a house. Your Dad would not have that. We’re no chickens, he’d say, so why would we want to live like them, all caged up like that, pecking oursels to death?
They said at the time the council in the town had a list, and on that list was names, and to have a house your name had to be one of them – and the less work you did and the more bairns you had, the better the house they gave you. Well now, I thought. Where’s the sense in that. A house is nowt but the payment of rents, with nowt left at the end to show for it. It might be as well you spend what little you have on something you can own.
Travellers look down on others that stop and settle, think they’ve gone loopy or summat. Think they’re giving up the ghosts of them ancestors that lived in the hedgerows. We’d have sooner slept in a damp stable or in a shed with the cattle than a house that belonged to the council. Anything other than being called a settler.
The gifted money was gone. New china cups had been broken and the pans already had dents in them, but I knew we’d not go hungry, not when Mac could pull a fish out the river with a piece of grass or take a chicken from the jaws of a stoat. But we still wanted for fuel and clothes and a future we’d given no thought to. And money didn’t grow on trees no more than turnips fall from the sky. Beer didn’t flow from hill-top streams either and Mac Wisdom had quite a taste for it, all told.
Quite a taste for it.
He would have to go to work if we were to get through the coming winter. Then come the spring we’d get to moving.
So he got himsel a job sorting scrap. He went out and got it just like that, and was I proud. He was to work at a yard that belonged to a friend of his cousin’s just off the A690. An alcoholic gorger owned it. A big fat drinker called Wally Milburn; a real scrap man through and through, and a right tight one at that. No piece of copper wire or lead piping was too small for Milburn to scavenge and sell on if there was a pound note or a drink in it. And if he could short-change you along the way then alls the better.
And so Mac was up with the spuggies for a cold water wash and a cup of tea, then he’d walk the three miles or so through woods and fields to the yard with his baitpoke on his back, then he’d work all day on the auld bangers that Milburn and his boys brought in, stopping only for lunch and brew breaks and the odd tab. Then around about five he’d walk the hour back through the woods and fields and down the lanes.
Oh, he could work then, could Mac. He was the strongest of the lot, and strength was what was needed to haul those tatty wrecks up onto flat-bed trucks to strip them of their salvageable valuables – tyres, windscreens, bumpers and mirrors – then take what was left and crush it down into compact cubes of metal that they stacked in piles that shone in the moonlight all watched over by two underfed German Shepherds. Mac was the best worker. Milburn said so.
The crushing down was what he liked best. Seeing those big cars reduced to gleaming shapes like that. A whole car shrunk down to the size of a washing machine. He reckoned it was magical.
Betimes he’d loop up some fishing wire and set off early to string up a half dozen snares by a warren that he’d have spotted out on the edge of an open field, then he would stop off to check them on the way back. More often than not he’d find at least one rabbit, strangulated and stiff in the slipknot, wide eyes staring up at him, glassy marbles not yet taken by the birds.
Then he’d skin and gut them and pass them to me to stew the auld way, on an open fire, with plenty of carrots and onions in there, and served with spuds. Joey Grey, we call it. Mac gave me the recipe himself. Told me to cook it the Wisdom way, like his Ma did, with flour dumplings sat on top.
We had a wood burning stove in the van and a fresh water tap nearby. A pile of newly-split logs drying nicely under a tarp.
And after he’d eaten Mac would go have a few drinks with some of his brothers and the lads and whoever else was stopping nearby, at one of the two pubs down in Edenside village or on the nicer nights sat outside the van on upturned crates around the fire. But Mac made sure he was up at five, hangover or not.
These were the times of plenty.
Then Milburn started to take the piss. One Friday evening your Dad’s pay packet was down from the previous week. A lot down.
“What gives Wally?” says Mac.
“We’ve had a quiet spell. It’s the best I can do.”
“I’ve been breaking sweat all week for youse. I’m not on commission you know.”
“Sorry, but times are tight. You’re going to have to like it or lump it, lad.”
“I’ll lump it then,” said Mac, and knocked Milburn sparko with one punch.
Your man did fall like a sack of King Eddies and before some of the lads could help him up, Mac had got his bait bag and was striding off through the fields, steaming and cursing as he kicked the heads off daisies all the way home.
*
Nowt’s changed on the Nook.
I remember coming here as a kid on me wanderings and even then I knew it was a bad place. There were always stories about robberies and stabbings and prossies doing business in the bottom flats. Stories of teen gang bangs and wild methadone parties. Dark gatherings; a place of retribution and revenge. It’s where they put all the scumbags in the sixties. Then them scumbags bred. And the bairns of them scumbags bred with each other. And on it goes.
Divvent gan up there, they’d say around town. They divvent like strangers.
Even travellers avoided it. Nee-one ever bothered us though. My Dad knew half the gadgies up here. All the crooks and hard auld povvy bastards who had somehow stayed alive despite the years of tough living. The Nook was full of them and their tired wives, their battered girlfriends and bruised mistresses and their whatsit families – aye, dysfunctional.
And now they’ve got all these eyes on sticks up here and they’ve cleaned up the outsides of the houses, scrubbed off the sooty blackness to reveal the red brick beneath and tarted up the pointing. They’ve given them all new winders and filled in the pot-holes, stuck grills on the ground floors and put these concrete posts in the entrances to all the alleys to stop the joyriders.
But it still feels all wrong. As wrong as it ever did, like. All the eyes looking in.
They’ve spruced it up, but they’ve not got rid of all the povvy little gets that have grown up here. Five year on it’s still not a place you’d go on your holidays.
Arty’s yacking like the clappers as we drive. He’s just like everyone else: he talks too much. There’s enough hot air coming out of him to float a balloon to the sun.
*
We sell a few cones and then leave the Nook, turning out past where they’ve built a massive new supermarket on what I remember as being nowt but scrubland ten years ago, and we take the country road up to the villages, then beyond that up to the auld coal fields that bleed on down all the way to the sea. We’re sticking to the route. Always the route.
And all the while Arty is talking out the side of his neck as he fills us in on the complete hist
ory of the family empire.
It’s a proper source of pride to him is this ice cream business. He’s telling us how it was his great-great granda who first left Italy ower a hundred and twenty years ago to move up to Glasgow, to the West End – where they’re so hard they shit girders, he reckons – to open up the first ice cream parlour north of the border: Vicari’s Ices.
Just imagine the vision and balls it took to open an ice cream parlour in bloody Scotland during the industrial age, he laughs.
Ice cream, he says again, shaking his napper. In bloody Glasgow. In the winter.
He tells us how later on his granda was working the pumps before he could kick a football, and then when he got a bit older he was such a promising opera singer that his Dad paid for him to gan ower to Naples for voice training and schooling, what with there not being much opportunity for opera in Govan and the Gorbals and all that, and how he got himself a few small singing parts but really it was too late to get into it all by then.
Why, I ask.
Because ice cream was in his blood son, Arty says all serious and sombre. In his blood. It happens that way. You’ll see.
Will I shite, I think, but I keep quiet and let him carry on with his blethering. I can’t keep up with all the grandas, great-grandas and all the other old-timers but I listen anyway because Arty has a good way with words and it’s better than hearing about the route and the cones and where to store the hundreds and thousands for the millionth bloody time.
Aye, he gave up the singing and went into the family business soon after, says Arty. More parlours were opened, but it was his son – my auld man and our Antony’s granda – who decided to seek out lucrative new territories by moving his young family south of the border, to England, to the north-east, where he built up a small fleet of vans. Proper entrepreneurial, he was.
Aye, I grunt.
Aye. Well that was forty years ago and here we are today, heading up a winning franchise of frozen confectionery that’s spread right across the county and north up to Tyneside, south to Teesside and North Yorkshire and trickling all the way down the East Riding too. Fourth generation Italian ice cream empire, still going strong.
As he says this I can’t help but wonder what the original auld man Vicari would make of his descendents knocking out teenths and eights of crappy black leb on the side, or his great, great grandson Tony’s brief and unsuccessful career in kidnapping, but I’m not daft me, I know when to keep quiet. I’ve been doing it all my life and I’ve got proper good at it.
Then as if he’s reading my mind Arty’s off talking about knocking out gear. It’s as if he feels the need to explain himsel to us, but I don’t want to know. Because the more I know the more I’ll be involved. Ignorance is whatsit.
Things have changed while you’ve been away you know, he says. I’m just following the laws of supply and demand, that’s all. Rolling a spliff is like making a brew these days. They’re all at it. The twenty-first century will all be about diversification, specialisation and convenience, kidder. You’ll see. If Mohammad won’t gan to the mountain then the mountain must gan to Mohammad. We’re on the cusp of a new era.
I don’t know what to say to that so I tell him, I knew a Mohammad inside.
Arty laughs.
Oh aye.
Aye.
Muslim was he?
Eh?
Was he a Muslim lad?
I don’t know. He was from Chester-le-Street.
Arty laughs again, harder this time. Then he leans ower and switches the grinding ice cream music back on and even though it’s a right bloody din I’m glad of the break from him mithering and yacking like an auld biddy.
Then he climbs out of the driver’s seat
Howay then, he says. Your turn.
He gives me a map too, as if I need it. The entire route is already seared on me retinas.
It is imperative that you stick to the route he says, tapping the map. At all times.
He’s even drawn the route on in fresh red pen for my benefit, the silly sod.
Right, I say. The route.
At all times.
Yip.
Don’t get tempted to stray from it. This is a highly thought-out route. It’s tried and tested lad, and if you deviate from it I can’t even begin to explain the amount of shit it could cause.
OK Arty. I get the idea.
You can drive can’t you?
Aye. Since I was eight.
*
The stork must have been up Edenside or the moon must have looked me sharp in the eye because the next thing we know I did fall pregnant.
“How did that happen, like?” says your Dad.
“How do yer think you daft bugger?”
Mac said nowt. He stared at the floor for a while, then he stared into the fire, then he spoke.
“We’ll need a bigger van.”
Then he stood up and went to the pub.
There was summat else that happened around that time that sent our lives off in a different direction. Your Dad fetches up saying he’s been offered a fight by a travelling man by the name of Lovell. Barker Lovell.
“Well, what does he want to fight you for?” I says.
“Not him. With some other gadgie, for money like.”
Turns out this Lovell one was a friend of Mac’s cousin John Wisdom – one of many cousins he called John Wisdom – and a good man with it. Staunch as they come, your Dad said. He was what you’d call a gambler, a fixer and a middle man. A traveller all the way.
Barker already knew all about Mac. He knew about him before he even heard the story about him mullering Wally the scrap man. Things like that have a habit of getting about. They get passed around the sites and spoken about over pints. Because the travelling vine is far-reaching.
“He wants us to fight up Consett way,” your Dad said. “Something just for the travellers.”
I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. What good God-fearing wife would?
And I saw the future that day. A future of black blood and broken bones; of bandages and broken hearts. Because no good can come of the fighting, no matter what anyone says – traveller or house-dweller or the holy Mary herself.
But the seed was already planted, and it did take root in Mac, for he was never one to shy away from any challenge no matter how big or small.
“The fight’s in two weeks time,” said Barker. “There’s two ton in it for you, and owt you make on side bets is your lookout. You reckon ye can handle it?”
“Handle it? I’ll bloody murder it.”
Then as an after-thought: “Wait a minute – who am I fighting?”
“Henry Bradley.”
“Our Henry Bradley?”
“The one and only.”
“Bloody hell, Barker.”
Henry Bradley was your Dad’s uncle. Your Great Uncle. Family. And he was near enough twice Mac’s age with it, a good traveller with a brood of kids, all made in his image. Henry was the man who used to give Mac little brown paper twists of sour pips or cinder toffees when he was a nipper. He was the man who brought something for their pot when their Dad had disappeared off for days on his wanderings. He had even taught Mac a few boxing moves.
“You can always say no,” I said.
“Don’t be so bloody stupid, woman,” said your Dad. “You can never so no to nothing.”
*
As soon as I get me first day off I gan into town to get some bits for me flat. I’m near enough twenty year old and I’m in me first proper home that doesn’t have wheels or bars on it. I might as well make a bit of a bloody effort.
Mind, I’m not intending on stopping in that little hole long. I telt the parole bods that, and I telt Arty that too. Aye, as well as telling him I wouldn’t be knocking out gear for him I says, here boss I appreciate the job and that, but just so’s you know, in the long run like, I plan on moving away from the town, a fresh break and that. Arty nodded, but I could see by the way he raised his eyebrows like an opening drawbridge he was
thinking aye that’s what they all say, which just made us all the more determined not to end up still following the route when I’m sixty-bloody-five-year-old.
Town’s rammed when I get there. Proper chocker.
All these people make us nervous after so long away. Edgy and that. I’m waiting to be recognised an all. Waiting to see hands raised up to mouths and hear the whispers – looker, it’s that John-John Wisdom – as people turn to get a proper gleg at us and muttering just loud enough for us to hear summat like are you sure that’s him, he’s bloody tiny?
So I get me head down and concentrate on getting me bits and bats for the flat.
Up at Cash Converters I get mesel this mint telly that has a built-in video player that the lad in the shop reckons can record stuff that’s on when you’re out. He tries to sell us a DVD player an all but I’ve nee need for one of them. I’ve not even seen one before, but I divvent let on.
Nor, I say. I’ll stick with the video, ta.
They’ll soon be obsolete, them, he says.
Aye.
He pauses.
What I mean is, he says, pretty soon they’ll be non-existent.
I know what obsolete means you gleaming bloody bell-end, I snap back.
Bloody students, I’m thinking. Reckon they know everything. But he doesn’t know I’ve been reading two books a week for five year though, does he. Do the maths. That’s a lot of books. Daft sod.
What about a Sony Walkman then, he says.
A what?
A Sony Walkman, he says, with this little smirk that I’d dearly love to wipe off his mush with a bullhammer. It’s a CD player, he says.
Aye, I know that. What a-bloody-bout it.
It’s portable. Perhaps you’d like one.
Nah, I sniff. They’ll soon be obsolete, them.
He says nowt to this because the look I give him is enough to get him to shut his flapping cake-hole.
I count out the money for the little telly then head down to the Army & Navy to get mesel some bits and pieces. Clothes and that. It’s five year since I’ve been in a clothes shop and I spend a good while picking things up and feeling and sniffing them, then having a gleg at the price tags.
Pig Iron Page 4