Pig Iron

by Benjamin Myers

  *

  They’d left him with a stutter and a limp and other things you couldn’t see.

  He needed help with everything. Tying his shoes.

  Rolling a bine. Wiping his scut.

  The rest of the time he just had to lie there on his bed in the van up at the Buckle site, staring out the window at the empty farm house and the piles of junk, too tired to seethe or swear vengeance. His bones and gums and limbs ached as his body tried to restore itself. And though they took his teeth and an eye, they couldn’t take the blood that was roiling in his veins now. He was still alive – just.

  Your Uncle Eddie visited in November and stopped for a week. He brought Pete Dimes with him and the pair swore vengeance on Mac’s behalf. Your Dad was too dismantled to think about it. He tried to summon up the details they would need but all he knew was the quarry and the name Cliff Pike. Everything was mist in his memory, an agonising void.

  And then winter was on the breeze and we needed to get back up north.

  Finally when the frost had come and the trees were stripped of leaves, and the summer’s bounty had been flattened by wind and rain and ice and Mac was well enough to walk unaided, we left.

  Big Slice had Little Tater hitch up the trailer and drive us north.

  Your Dad said nothing the whole way, his head leaning against the cool glass of the window as he watched the telegraph poles and the fields fly by, his one eye seeing England anew.

  *

  I don’t feel bad about twocking Arty’s van. Well, mebbes a bit bad because he did give us a job, but then again he has stitched us up over all this drug-selling stuff, so bollards to him. He knows I‘m on probation and still he fed us to the Bannons and that lot. He must have known they’d be after us when I telt them I wasn’t interested in getting involved in any of that shite. Silly twat.

  I’m just thinking about getting away from here once and for all, and doing what needs to be done so that little Coughdrop can rest in pieces.

  The roads are quiet and the van hums on the tarmac. The hedgerows slip by. I keep the radio turned off.

  It’s still the middle of night but over to the east, off towards the coast, the sky is already starting to crack with light. It’s like a curtain is being drawn back an inch and the first chink of light is breaking through to offer the faintest suggestion of a new day dawning. It is the colour of hope. I’ve never lost hope, me. Hope and the glass eye are the only two things I’ve held on to these past few years.

  Even at the worse of times like when the polis came and took us away that time when I were fifteen or when that judge sent us down or all them nights all alone, no marrers, no family and the odds stacked against us, I kept hope going. Because where there’s a heartbeat, there’s a hope.

  I want to drive towards that strip of light, to chase it, but I’m headed in the other direction, inland towards the darkness but decide to give the town the body swerve in case I get a pull.

  So I turn off and take the back roads. The B-roads. The hedgerow highways me Dad used to roam before the limp and madness limited his wanderings.

  I tighten my hands on the wheel and light another tab and between drags I try a tune to keep mesel awake and my morale up, just like they do in the army – Cha-cha-cha, livin’ la vida loca – but it’s not the same with just the one of us singing it, and at this time of the day and in these circumstances it sounds like the saddest song ever sung.

  So I shut it.

  It feels good just to go where the road goes though. Just to let the white line lead us.

  I pass through villages and hamlets I don’t recognise. I’m in the land of the pit yackers now, driving past shitty little nowhere holes and big country estates. I see broken barns and lonely copses sat in the middle of vast empty fields; turf-topped slag heaps and quarry holes gaping like ugly mouths.

  Road signs flash by in my beam and I see I’m heading east towards the sea after all, towards the rising sun and that little orange ray of hope.

  There’s fallow fields and flattened hills that once held all the carbonised riches of the county and the way it all levels out makes it easier to see the sky above because there’s less to block it, less to crowd you in. It’s more whatsit out this way. Aye – expansive. And between the spaces, more villages. Places that once offered new houses and jobs and pensions and that. They all had their own way of talking in these places too; a language you’d not even recognise ten miles down the road.

  Not now though.

  I cannot help but wonder where Maria is at and what she’s up to this very second. I wonder if she knows about Coughdrop, and about what I done to that Shotter. I wonder if she’s really going to have a bairn. I wonder if she’s going to let this mess seep into another generation.

  And I wonder if she telt them where I’ve been living.

  I cannot allow mesel to believe that. Not yet.

  Because even if she did, she’s still the nicest, sweetest person I’ve ever met and the stupid thing is, even if she did set us up, the few times we’ve had together this summer still cancel out any shite I’m facing now.

  *

  He became another kind of animal.

  He moved differently now. He spoke differently. Everything about him had changed. The rages became more intense.

  A winter passed in convalescence eased into a spring of slow mobility. Your Dad stopped washing and eating and the weight fell off him even more. The stream of visitors who has passed through the van that Christmas soon tailed off. They couldn’t handle seeing big Mac Wisdom sat in the dark, chewing his lips, spilling his tea, a stammering mess.

  Only Eddie kept coming, squeezing a roll of fivers into me hand when he left. He got us a second van for the bairns’ safety.

  Spring became summer and one morning Mac left the van, blinking into the sunlight like the creature of hibernation that he had become. Nature brought him back, pulled him out into the fields and woods.

  His movements did become slower. But he was volatile too. He could only be approached head-on. There was no sneaking up on Mac Wisdom. No surprises. Not after what had happened.

  No.

  Because even after everything the violent burning had stayed alive in his blood, and it sat there in his veins, and when the time was right that blood would start pumping again, and it would spread to his limbs and his eyes and his mouth and flashes of the auld Mac would return. Then he’d be lashing out and punching and biting and kicking and smashing anything within reach – me and Charmaine and Bobby too. He’d grab them and yank them and punch them and shake them. He was a mad auld dog that had survived a kicking to bite anyone that came within an inch of him.

  And that’s what life became. Rage and rain and animals and mud and the sky and the paddock and the trees. Frosted winter mornings and hazy summer evenings. Hushed silences. Bubbling anger. The violence of Mac Wisdom.

  *

  Villages flash by through the gaps in the hedges as I carry on chasing the light towards the coast. More road signs tell of places I’ve heard of but never been, places where the Wisdom name is still known. Places I’ve avoided for that very reason.

  South Hetton and Haswell.

  Shotton and Thornley.

  Wheatley Hill and Wingate.

  Trimdon Foundry.

  And then I’ve crossed the A19 and am passing round the outskirts of Peterlee where I see a milk cart clinking in the dark blue light; the first human signs of a new day approaching.

  The sea is close enough to smell the briny seaweed and the salt-sharpness of air that always reminds us of childhood and then suddenly it’s there before us like a slice of sky that’s slipped below the line of the horizon and turned darker; a shadow of the sky in liquid form.

  The North Sea.

  I pass through Horden and it’s in a sleepy stupor. There’s nowt here but houses and offies and a power station. It’s the last outpost of the land; a place to fester and rot and die. They can’t even be arsed to name the streets here. There’s just Si
xth Street, Seventh Street, Eighth Street and so on. It’s living reduced to numbers.

  Some bloke who looks like he’s been on the beer all night tries to flag us down but I fly past because I’m stopping for nee-one today. Then Thorpe Road leads to the Sunderland Road which leads to the Coast Road. I hit it going southbound, the sea to my left and nowt but a strip of cliff-top allotments and the water below between me and Denmark.

  The Coast Road takes us to Blackhall Rocks which would be ugly as fug any day except at this time of the morning, just as the August sun is sticking its hot head ower the wall of the brown north sea and sending shards of light across the water towards us, changing it from shit-brown to golden in the blink of an eye. I swear down it’s bloody beautiful. More beautiful than owt I’ve seen.

  The rocks are on fire.

  There’s a village perched above them. It teeters near the edge where the land starts to fall away to nowt, and it’s somewhere just past there that I turn the van down a little track and pull ower.

  I get out and walk across a bit of scrubland, towards the edge of England. It’s a wild empty place with nowt but the cracking sky and the shimmering water and silent miles of nothingness.

  *

  Charmaine was becoming a young woman. Turning early. Sprouting, as your Dad called it.

  He always said she was a queer one an all. He couldn’t read his daughter’s mind, and that bothered him.

  Bobby he understood. Bobby was a boy. Bobby was strong and surly and tough. He liked simple things, lads things, like the fighting and the poaching and wreaking havoc in the village. Stuff his Dad understood.

  But Charmaine, she was different. Always brooding and scowling. Off doing her own thing. And when she was twelve, thirteen, she took to reading The Bible. Carried it with her everywhere for a while. This little leather-bound Bible she picked up some place.

  And then one day Charmaine – little quiet coal-eyed Charm – fetched up with a seed in her belly. Thirteen years old and already showing. Pregnant and refusing to tell a soul who it was that did this to her.

  He blamed me. Of course he did. And he went on the rampage again, smashing more plates and kicking bigger holes in the walls than ever before. He said some terrible things to her. Unforgiveable things. Things that would turn me mouth sour to say to you now son.

  Then he took to the woods for two days and two nights.

  Because deep down he understood perfectly. He knew. He knew who the father was. He knew what had been done and what was next for the Wisdom line, and all about how the blood had got mixed up all funny.

  *

  Seen close the North Sea is still shite-coloured and well choppy, but there’s a thousand million flickering flames of orange dancing across it through the darkness as the sun peeps it’s head ower the brow of the horizon.

  The flashes of gold make it look like there’s a shoal of herring sat just beneath the surface. A proper good catch of sun fish.

  I’m looking down on it all and smoking another tab and even though everything is crumbling I’m starting to accept that I must have been sold down the river by the lass to the povs on the estate. There’s nee way I can return to me flat, me job or Dickhead Derek without getting grief one way or another – and even though what’s left of me family rejected us long ago, and everyone else thinks I’m a weirdo, the way the sun is illuminating the stack of rocks like the cathedral at night and the thousand million dancing flames are setting the North Sea ablaze, reminds me that hope is still there. Just. The fires still burn.

  I sit like this for a while, smoking tabs down to the dimp and watching the flashes of gold disappear as the day gets lighter and the sea loses its magic and mystery and returns to just being the choppy, sloshy, brown angry thing I always remembered it to be.

  Far down below us on the pebble beach I can see some wifey walking a dog that’s chasing the tide in and out and yelping like a maniac. The dog is black and right away I’m thinking about little Coughdrop and how he’s now just a stain on the carpet and a bag buried in the woods, and I’m wondering why violence poisons everything that’s good, and if it’s this way for everyone, or if mebbes I really was just born under a queer moon or summat.

  *

  He had tried to hide it, of course. He tried to nip it in the bud early on, your Dad.

  He had heard all the horror stories and the jokes and he knew things could get twisted; that the bairn could come out backward or weird or inside out, like. That it could be born with tiny eyes or extra teeth. Too many fingers. Or mebbes not enough.

  It had happened before. He’d heard all about it. Of course he had. All those stories passed down the vine.

  Blood stories. Family myths. Wisdom accounts.

  And he’d seen it plenty too and not just amongst us travellers neither. It went on in some of them places he used to hang about. Them little one-track hamlets and farm settlements up in the dales where people would nod and nudge and wink and say see that couple over there, with the bairn? Brother and sister, they are. Why else do you think their kiddie wears them callipers?

  And hadn’t he known plenty of cousins that had married?

  Anyway, this was different. This was any father’s right.

  Better me than some young hooligan coming in, he reckoned.

  And that’s exactly what he’d telt her that first time he took her down the woods.

  “It’s only natural,” he’d whispered. “The love between a father and his first born is the most naturalest thing in the world. It’s a bond, see. And you can bet your last red penny that none of the lads round the town would be as caring and as loving as I am.”

  He said it wasn’t his fault. Said it didn’t matter. Said they were already bonded in Wisdom blood.

  That’s what he said. That’s what he whispered.

  And he said he couldn’t be blamed. Said his head wasn’t right. Not since Pike and the quarry.

  She’d thank him for it later, he said.

  Soon she’d be out dating lads, he said.

  Soon she’d be engaged to be married. Now she’d be broken in. Ready for them. Less mess this way, he said.

  So he broke the girl, my daughter, and he kept going back and breaking her some more.

  And there was no loving tenderness. The gentle instruction about what goes where was forgotten when Mac Wisdom got his knotted hands on my daughter down there in the trees. That had just been talk. Words to coax her down with. Down into the wood. Down onto the ground.

  And he kept at it. Taking her away. Our Charmaine. Piece by piece. Just chipping away. Taking bits of her. Holding her and breaking her, his gnarled fist on her face, his thick legs spreading hers.

  “Don’t you dare tell your mother.”

  I’d seen it all myself. Experienced it. That grimace of his. That twisted look.

  Spittle on his lips. The hair in his nostrils. His dirty fingernails.

  Her Dad’s arse bobbing up and down above her. Cloying. “Don’t you tell nee fucker.”

  He’d been at it for months until he’d filled her mould with a new version. His own daughter. Like a devil.

  *

  It’s still the best part of the day when I get to the woods. Early.

  Clean slate o’clock.

  It’s so hazy it’s like the air is wobbling. Everything is perfectly still but distorted by distance. An orchestra of unseen birds argues in song. The natural perfumes of the country lanes chill us out a bit.

  I’ve been driving around for a while weighing up me options, thinking about the implications and the whatsits – the repercussions. Even though me brain is working double-time it’s like I still want to believe there’s some goodness in her. Maria. Because she’s what I’m really thinking about. All I’m thinking about.

  So I’ve headed to the place that makes us happy. The place that made us both happy, the green cathedral of Mother Nature’s making.

  I’m parked up in the woods with nowt but me bag with me bits in, a van containing a quarter
of a tank of petrol and about four hundred cones, wafers, flakes, a miscellaneous assortment of confectionery and a massive fugging chip on me shoulder.

  I’m feeling proper shagged, like I can’t be arsed to run any more, like I just want to roll over and curl up and pull the soil over us like a blanket and sleep forever in silence.

  But I cannot do that here, in the front seat of Arty Vicari’s van, so I jam a few chocolate bars, packets of crisps and bottles of water into my army bag, lock up and head into the woods.

  As I walk through the trees there’s that same smell of Balsam again that I’ll always associate with Maria. And there’s the lingering smell of perfumed sap being squeezed through timber and bark an all. And the wild garlic. And a hundred other smells besides, all of them proper lush.

  The trees are like auld friends. The dry, impacted dirt is a carpet and the birdsong symphonic.

  It’s still a place of worship this. This green cathedral of mine. A last refuge.

  As I walk I’m thinking about how if only that sackless Banny twat could have took his defeat like a man, like men used to, all of this could have been avoided. But things have changed from them auld days. Twats like him would rather slit your throat than show weakness in front of their marrers. There’s nee courage or conviction left. It’s all just knives and gang-bangs and that.

  I mean, we’re only weeks from the end of a millennium and it’s like nowt’s changed since the end of the last one. It’s still the ruthless heartless animals that reign in this living hell. We’re all just savages. Beasts.

  And I’m sick of it, me. Properly.

  *

  He couldn’t let it enter the world. No way, he said. Not a bairn. No way. Not a bairn by his own daughter. No chance. People might know. And people might be able to tell. They might tell just by looking. No chance. Not a babby; a new-born by his first born. No. Not a bloody half-breed. That’s bad blood, that is. Bad news for everyone. You have to think of the family. The Wisdoms. The future.

  And he never even telt us, the bastard. He let it all come out in the wash, over time. That poor wee girl. My girl. My Charm.