by Danny Rhodes
‘Aye, well, it doesn’t matter,’ says Burrows. Then he starts laughing.
Finchy steps away, steps back.
‘One piece of advice,’ says Burrows. ‘If you’re going to tell tales, make sure your own story holds together, eh? Because I told them a few things myself. About what you were up to that night. About where you were and where you said you were. I’d be expecting another visit if I were you.’
Then he turns and leaves the locker room, leaves Finchy staring at Jack Stanley and Jack Stanley staring at Finchy.
‘Having some trouble?’ asks Jack.
Finchy shakes his head.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Everything’s fine and dandy.’
When he reaches Hope Close, it’s all he can do not to stare at the hedge bottom, the car park, the remnants of blue fucking tape still strung from the trees. There’s a car parked on the kerb, a blue fucking Sierra. There’s some fucker sat in it. He can’t tell if it’s Mr Moustache or Mr Notebook and he doesn’t dare look too closely in case it is. He keeps his head down, wanders his route, spends the rest of the morning going over and over it all in his head, what Burrows might know, what Spence might know, how any of them could know anything. He tells himself the answer is nothing. He tells himself Burrows is on a wind-up, desperate to get his own back. He tells himself these things but what if Burrows does know something? What if he knows about the American bird, about the pills, about what happened in the dark and black fucking hours, about the streaks of dirt and shit on his jeans.
What if Burrows knows about those things?
What the fuck happens then?
The blue Sierra appears outside his flat that evening. He’s staring out of his window when he spots it across the way. The blue Sierra sits there for nearly an hour. He closes the bedroom curtains, shuts out the light and peeks through the gap, watches the blue Sierra, half expecting at any moment for Mr Moustache and Mr Notebook to appear, to inform him they’ve had some new information, to ask him to go over the Friday evening again. The woman across the way is wandering around her flat in just a T-shirt. When she goes to the kitchen to fix tea he can almost make out the pert curves of her backside. He thinks of her fucking his flatmate, screaming the fucking place down. He’s meant to be watching the Sierra but he can’t help watching her. When he looks back down at the road, the Sierra is no longer there.
Days come and days go, days of blue Sierras, twitching curtains, rooms cast in shadow, disturbed sleep. Jen’s a distant figure, a captive in her own home. When he tries to call he can’t get at her to talk. When he waits in for her to call around she doesn’t appear. But they’re not over. They’re still not over.
Despite everything.
The weekends are different. The weekends are his time. Finchy and the boys on the town. Finchy and the boys on their weekly meanderings, pub to pub, bar to bar. Finchy and the boys, then just Finchy. He heads to the club alone, queues up alone, takes to the dance floor alone. In the toilet cubicle he takes one of his flatmate’s beans from his pocket and swallows the fucking thing.
He returns to the dance floor and throws himself about.
He’s out of control. He doesn’t give a shit.
He takes up with some brunette, leads her out of the door and into the night. There’s the ungainly scrape of her heels on the pavement as he pulls her through the sheltered housing, waking the oldies with her giggles and laughter. He doesn’t give a monkey’s toss.
On the bridge above the river, the dark allotment behind, he has her pressed against the rail, her hands in his jeans, his hands on her tits, his hands on her arse, his mouth on her mouth, her tongue on his tongue. Breathing hard he pulls her up the narrow street to the flat, up the slope between the terraced houses, fumbles for the key, fumbles at the door, stumbles on the steep stairs. Her skirt’s riding up. Her with no knickers in his flat, in his room, his mouth on her neck, on her tits, on her nipples, his teeth on her nipples, the black dress peeling away. On the floor, naked, his face on her cunt, his tongue in her cunt, his boxers around his ankles, her mouth at his cock. And then the two of them fucking, her squatting on top, her underneath, her on all fours. No fucking condom. No fucking sense. Just fucking.
Her skin against his skin in the single bed. Her soft skin. The wondrous texture of her bare backside against him in the single bed. The glow of the alarm clock. Him pressed against her, feeling the excitement and clarity of it, the relief and release.
Guilty of everything.
In the morning things are stirred up again, skin against skin, mouth against mouth, sweat against sweat. He goes about his business whilst thinking about Jen. They’re over in every sense of the word and yet they’re not over.
Even now.
He takes the brunette home, drops her off, heads to work, knackered, thinking he should take a sickie, not able to, all that three strikes and out bollocks.
Fucking beans.
He wants to be back in bed but he’s at the frame instead, a country route he hardly knows with its farms and its cottages and its nonsensical place names. He has a headache, a deep, throbbing headache. He’s feeling sick in his stomach. Thoughts of the night before jostle for attention. His cock stirs despite the rest of him.
He’s out on the High Dyke, him and the van. With no fucking sleep. Everything’s a fog. And everything’s coming at him. The droning fucking engine. The monotonous drone. The monotonous landscape.
The thin black ribbon road is a causeway through the nothingness. There are only the drainage ditches and the droves and the nothingness.
And the grey, smothering sky.
The smell of cabbage.
No fucking sleep and no fucking radio.
Drifting. Pictures in his head. Indelible. Wire-mesh fencing. Faces pressed against wire-mesh fencing. A tangle of limbs. A mass of bodies. The dead standing up.
The road. The fields. The sky. The drone of the engine.
The car park. The hedge bottom. Wet foliage. Pink fucking panties. Skin like polished bone. Red hair. Matted. Tangled. Slugs. Black fucking slugs and snails. The hedge bottom. A body in the fucking hedge bottom.
Spiders. Fucking spiders.
Smudged and rubbed out.
A faint remnant.
There and gone.
The monotonous drone filling his head. Coming in waves. Drawing him down. Down amongst the shit. And no fucking radio. No fucking radio. An empty black place. Calling him in. Two wheels on the grass. The steering wheel shuddering against his palms.
Snapping out of it. Too fucking late.
Gripping the steering wheel, white knuckle tight, bracing himself, feeling the world slow to a crawl. But not the fucking van. On the grass verge now, the dial reading fifty miles an hour, the dial stuck there. No fucking chance. And now the van is careering across the grass verge. The van is heading for the drainage ditch. There are tree branches striking the windscreen. There is a sound of thunder all around him. The steering wheel dances in his grip. The van hits the ditch. There’s a crashing and tearing of branches. The sound of thunder. The van in the ditch. Him in the ditch. Eighteen years flashing before his eyes, his mam and dad, his brother, his grandparents, the garage block, the estate, the school. The TV at his mam’s place, the living-room carpet, his bedroom, his cot, his mam’s fucking womb. Over in a blink of time.
Staring into the laughing faces of the living, seeing only the bones of the dead.
The van rattles to a halt in the ditch. The van fills the ditch. But the ditch is shallow, thick with summer vegetation.
He stares at the blackness behind his eyelids.
The soothing blackness behind his eyelids.
He stares at his palms. He stares out of the van window.
He’s lucky. He’s so very, very lucky.
He clambers out of the driver’s window, clambers up out of the ditch to the edge of the road, into the road. A car swerves to avoid him.
Coming to his senses he gets off the road, stands in the long grass, wanders a
long the verge to a lay-by, stares back at the van. The van’s nose is buried in the ditch. The windscreen is fractured.
There’s a pheasant in the field.
He stares at the pheasant.
The pheasant stares back.
A still moment with him at its centre. A moment of absolute clarity. He’s still alive. He’s crashed the van, buried it in the good earth but he’s alive.
And he knows now.
He knows for certain.
He has to start again. Start again in a new place, put all of this shit behind him.
Put the beans behind him.
Put Hope Close behind him.
Put every fucking thing behind him.
He doesn’t have a clue where to begin the process, what the fuck to do.
BJ in the corner of the Crown, one eye on the TV. Some League of Ireland game. Sectarian bragging rights and all that. Something to bite on. BJ in a Celtic shirt that had seen better days. A game of darts going off in the lounge. When Finchy sloped off for a piss at half-time, he stopped to watch some bloke slamming in ton forties like they were going out of fashion.
‘Have you seen him over there?’
‘You’re a daft cunt,’ said BJ.
‘Eh?’ ‘You’re a daft cunt who’s been away too fucking long to
know his arse from his elbow.’
‘Who is it?’
‘You know who it is.’
‘I’m not seeing…’
‘You’re not fucking looking.’
‘Not Forest…’
‘No, but of our time…’
Finchy watched the guy step up to the oche once again, watched the way he caressed each dart before the automatic motion kicked in, before the dart thudded into the board front and centre. And he watched him lean away again immediately afterwards, somehow lessened in that moment, weakened by an absence of tungsten.
‘Leppings Lane,’ said BJ.
‘No fucking way.’
‘Serious.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘You still don’t recognise him?’
‘How about you tell me? How about we do it that way?’
‘Doddy…’
A trip switch somewhere in the back of his head.
What’s in a fucking name?
Everything.
Doddy.
Doddy. Dodd. Jamie Dodd. They played together as kids, went fucking fishing together in the long-drawn-out summer before secondary school.
Every fucking day.
Doddy lived at the top of the road, had a sister, was forced down the other educational pathway aged eleven so that they hardly spoke to one another save jokes about football when their paths crossed in the pubs and clubs. The Semi of 88 top of the list, the 5–0 drubbing at Anfield a close second.
The match of the fucking century.
And here he was all these years later. So much fucking fatter. So much balder. Back at the oche, garnering another smattering of applause for another ton forty, shrinking back, standing to one side, a separate being amongst a pub full of blokes and a dartboard that had seen better days.
And worse.
‘He looks half decent.’
BJ smiled.
‘District champion since fuck knows when. Blokes tell me he’s good enough to move up a notch or two, but he doesn’t fucking bother.’
‘Isn’t that the fucking way around here?’
‘Aye, mate.’
Finchy stared at Doddy, watched him sink the double he needed to win the match, watched his opponent shrug in resignation, watched Doddy slip his darts into their case. The guy at the scoreboard was still wiping the thing clear when Doddy slipped out the pub door.
‘Thirty-five-year-old bachelor,’ said BJ. ‘Thirty-five-year-old nobody. He’s gone in the head.’
‘You think he’d talk to me?’
‘What do you want to talk to him for?’
‘Dunno. Old time’s sake. What do you fucking think?’
‘What do you want to talk to him about that for?’
‘I don’t. You’re fucking right. I want to forget it ever happened like the rest of you.’
BJ pushed his pint glass to one side.
‘What is this, John?’
‘Eh?’
‘What is this? Some sort of fucking therapy? If it is you can fuck off. I’m not a shrink. Jen fucking White’s not a shrink. Doddy certainly isn’t. None of us are. We don’t have any fucking answers.’
BJ stared Finchy down and Finchy stared back. Because it mattered, didn’t it, to talk to people, to share things. Surely it fucking mattered.
‘I’ll see you later,’ said Finchy.
‘I thought we were watching this.’
BJ pointed to the TV, at twenty-two blokes lining up for the second half on a freezing fucking night in Belfast.
‘I’m going after him,’ said Finchy. ‘I’ll see you at yours.’
He raced out of the door, knowing he was a mad bastard for leaving the confines of the Crown, opening himself up to all sorts of trouble if Jen’s brother was about, or any of his crowd come to think of it. All it would take was to be spotted. All it would take was one fucking phone call.
In the kebab shop on the corner he shifted himself alongside Doddy, waited to catch his eye.
‘I knew it was you,’ said Doddy, without turning his head, without looking at Finchy at all. ‘I saw you when you came out of the toilet. I never forget a face.’
‘BJ pointed you out,’ said Finchy. ‘I’ve been away a while.’
‘Ah, the Forest faithful. The Hillsborough hoodoo. I suspect the likes of him think I’m emotionally scarred. The fat fucking Scouse fan who never got over the horrors of Leppings Lane.’
‘That’s pretty much the sum of it.’
‘Aye, well. It’s a convenient untruth.’
‘It’s the reputation you’ve gained,’ said Finchy.
‘Ironic that, seeing as I’ve spent much of the last decade trying not to have a reputation.’
Finchy forced a smile.
‘The darts keep you in the spotlight.’
‘Yeah? Well these are the only thing I do that gets me out.’
He patted his pocket where the darts were snug and warm.
‘Nothing to do with Leppings Lane, mind,’ said Doddy. ‘I dealt with that years ago. I told myself rather than dwell on what didn’t happen that could have, I’d concentrate on what might have happened that didn’t.’
‘Aren’t those two things the same?’
Doddy shook his head.
‘Are they fuck! I stood in Leppings Lane, got shoved around a bit, fell to the ground, broke a couple of ribs and got pulled out of the place. There were seven hundred like me and ninety-six a whole lot worse. The other stuff, the things I saw, the things happening around me, I put them all to bed.’
Finchy wondered how that could be.
‘I came up for Stimmo’s funeral.’
‘Aye. I heard all about it. Bit of a shame. He was half decent with the arrows himself. Can understand it though, living with a bird like that.’
‘How do you mean?’
Doddy laughed to himself.
‘Living with a bird that didn’t love him, mate. I know something about that. If your mates really want to know why I keep myself to myself they should try barking up that tree.’
The guy behind the counter presented Doddy with his food, a great fuck-off pile of kebab meat and chips. Finchy ordered the same for himself.
‘Where are you staying?’ asked Doddy.
‘North Hotel. Or I was. I’m at BJ’s now.’
‘BJ,’ Doddy chuckled to himself. ‘Now there’s a character. We can walk together. I’ve a flat on Cyril Street.’
‘Just you?’
‘Fuck me,’ said Doddy. ‘I made that clear as mud.’
They started down the High Street, two souls reconnected after twenty-five years.
‘You remember the reservoir?’ Doddy asked. ‘Biking out there day
after day. Morning, noon and half the fucking night?’
‘Good days,’ Finchy said.
‘Never fucking bettered,’ said Doddy. ‘Not that I hark back to it. I don’t do that either. I just know we had it good then, had it simple. Not like the kids today. You got kids?’
Finchy shook his head.
‘And you’re not married either?’
‘I live with my fiancée. We’ve reached a crossroads…’
Doddy laughed.
‘To the left happiness, to the right drudgery. Straight on for abject failure.’
‘You’re a wordy cunt, do you know that? You should take up teaching.’
‘Not for me, mate. I don’t fancy anything that involves those bastards in government. Where is your missus wanting to go that you don’t then?’
‘She wants kids,’ he said.
‘That’s usually the way,’ said Doddy.
‘I’m not convinced.’
‘Yeah, that too. But what’s the alternative? Give her up and start again with Jen fucking White?’
Finchy kept his mouth shut, started wondering if Doddy was one of Stimmo’s lot after all.
‘My ex didn’t want kids,’ said Doddy. ‘Now she’s shacked up with some bloke and three of the little bastards. So what she meant was she didn’t want kids with me. What’s your missus up to now you’re here?’
Finchy thought of the dark stairwell, the bedroom door. He thought of Kelly fucking some stranger behind it, one of her call-centre toy boys, gathering his seed. He thought of the other potential scenario, the one he’d almost managed to suppress. Fucking Doddy and his questions. He shrugged.
‘Do you remember that summer after Hillsborough?’ he asked. ‘Do you remember the killings?’
‘Fuck me,’ said Doddy. ‘Are you sure you’re carrying enough baggage around the place?’
Finchy shrugged.
‘Let’s just say I’ve been turning over a few stones,’ he said.
‘I remember one better than the other,’ said Doddy. ‘It was the talk of the fucking estate for long enough. Right on the bloody doorstep. Nasty fucking business that. Nasty horrible business.’
‘I walked past the scrub the other day. I got thinking about it. It was on my delivery.’