I could have been wrong. For all I knew he had a portrait of Britney across his pectorals and Made In England etched across his scalp. I found out what he actually had much later, under distressing circumstances.
We’ll get to that later.
‘Why?’ I once asked him. ‘Why go through all the pain and risk? All those stories you hear about people getting tattoos at little shops then going down with leprosy and melting into their cornflakes. Why not stick with jigsaws?’
‘It’s not that painful mate,’ he said. ‘Not as bad as going to the dentist.’
‘I thought you enjoyed going to the dentist.’
‘I do,’ he said, surprised. ‘Except the noise of the drill.’
‘So you like being hurt? It’s a masochism thing?’
‘No. It hurts, but that’s not all of it. That’s the start. You break your arm, you’ve got a bond with any other bloke with a broken arm. Start a conversation like that.’ He clicked his fingers without making a noise. He’d never got the hang of it. ‘Everyone pierced is with you. Everyone else is waiting to come in. It’s a ritual thing isn’t it? I don’t know, mate. You’re the fucking graduate. Why do you think I do it?’
‘Because you’re unstable.’
‘Could be that, granted.’
He had a mouthful of beer and looked thoughtful. At that time the eyebrow ring was new, and he was swollen and intrusively red. I couldn’t look him in the eye. I had to look at the wound.
‘You do it for attention,’ I thought out loud.
‘Course I don’t. What about all the stuff you can’t see? How’s that attracting attention? Take away the stuff in my face and I’m normal.’
‘I wouldn’t say you were normal.’
‘I wouldn’t say you were.’
‘At least I don’t set alarms off at airports.’
‘You don’t go to airports. You don’t go anywhere. That’s what this is. That’s why you don’t get it. I’ve gone somewhere else. I’ve become someone else. I’ve taken my body and changed it.’
I wasn’t sure about that. The more I knew about body modification, the more I thought it was all to do with filling in blanks. If you weren’t complete, if your identity wasn’t fully drawn, then you coloured yourself in or nailed a new identity to yourself. It was all about superheroes. Outwardly, they were normal, but under the clothes someone else, run through with metalwork, extravagantly tinted.
‘I set off alarms,’ he said, ‘because I transmit. I have wires and connections. I’m a radio. I pick up traffic reports. I pick up messages people like you don’t get. I send out signals.’
‘You’re sending some out now,’ I said. I’d known Jack for many years but I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure that he wouldn’t produce a knife and lay waste to the local population. Which, at the moment, was me. I looked for help. There was the landlord. He would be useless. It was down to me to deal with Jack’s insanity. I’d always thought he might have a screw loose. Possibly an actual screw, somewhere around his genitals. So I did what I had to do. I let Jack carry on, and I nodded from time to time. I can’t help it. I’m British.
‘Different signals,’ Jack was saying. I’d missed something.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘very true.’
‘I’ve become a matrix,’ he said.
‘Spin used to say there were matrices at building sites,’ I said.
‘The scaffolding?’
I nodded.
‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Jack.
That had been a month ago, in the same pub, at about the same time of night. Since then Jack had had the bodywork touched up in a few new places. He turned up late, halfway through my second pint. I knew he’d had something new pierced, because he was walking as though he had a porcupine between his thighs. He was wearing a jumper that had been washed on the incorrect cycle. The sleeves ended inches before his hands began. His wrists were covered in bright swirls and healing scabs. He bought us a pint each and sat, wincing.
‘Oof,’ he said, reaching under the table and tugging at something.
‘Do you mind?’
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Ow. Ow. I don’t think that’s where you belong, is it?’
He fidgeted and fiddled and finally settled, nicely uncomfortable.
‘What’s it this time?’ I asked. I had to know, even though I didn’t really want to. It was like watching operations on television. I’d want to switch channels or put my hands over my eyes. Instead I’d sit and watch, horrified. He shuffled carefully. When he winced, his eyebrow ring stood straight out from his brow.
‘Perineum ring,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Perineum. It’s the hairy bit at the back of your bollocks.’
‘I know what it is. I meant, “What?”’
‘I hadn’t had it done yet.’ As if that explained it. ‘These stools are a bit hard, aren’t they?’ He adjusted himself indecorously.
‘Not really, no. Perhaps having your perineum pierced has made you sensitive.’
‘I won’t be riding my bike for a couple of weeks, that’s fucking certain.’
‘So it’s the bus, is it?’
‘It will be this week. Perhaps I’ll catch you on your way home. Everything nice at the office, is it? No sudden shortages of pens or anything?’
Jack often baited me like this. He was saying my life was mundane. I knew that. I was the one living it. I sometimes had an urge to hide a powerful magnet somewhere near Jack, just to see what happened. He settled at an angle, as though preparing to fart. The landlord eyed him sleepily.
‘You should try piercing,’ Jack said.
‘I don’t want to try it, but if I’m ever taken captive by the Spanish Inquisition I’ll put them on to you. You’d get on like a castle on fire.’
‘What’s that? History jokes from the history student? Three years taking drugs care of Johnny taxpayer and you think you know everything. Seeing as I kept you in beer all that time, while I was working for a living, I’ll let you get the next round in.’
I got the next round in.
‘Is he the full shilling?’ the landlord asked me, nodding at Jack.
‘He’s missing some loose change. Actually, he’s all loose change.’
‘Looks like he’s wearing it in his ears. My daughter goes in for all that. Face like a cheesegrater. I tell her she’ll end up no good, attracting some pervert into kitchenware.’ He subsided and looked miserably at the crisp boxes.
‘It’ll just be a phase,’ I said. He gave me a gloomy look.
‘They said that about bloody disco music.’ He returned to his inspection of the crisps and I returned to Jack.
‘Cheers,’ said Jack, taking his pint. His mouth was pierced but he didn’t have any liprings in. They interfered with drinking. He had a small barbell through his nasal septum, his eyebrow ring, and a cluster of rings and studs in each ear. It was all low-key. I saw worse at the bus stop. But it gave me an iceberg feeling; his most dangerous features were out of sight. Under his clothes there would be all sorts of awful things, tintacks and fishhooks, staples and cutlery. He didn’t have many in his face because of his job. He worked at a printers outside Oldbury and the management didn’t allow facial jewellery. They feared that some dangling item might get caught in the machinery, leading to death or litigation. At the least, that day’s print run would be ruined. It wasn’t a big company. They did special supplements for the local papers, posters for local rock groups, one-off histories of the local area, that sort of thing. Sometimes they’d bring out limited runs of the latest book by one of the local authors. These were sold in local shops to nobody I ever met. Jack had joined as an apprentice and had worked his way up to foreman.
I hadn’t been to the printers. I imagined it to be a huge dark building, enormously lengthy and tall, with remote thin windows. It would be full of complicated machinery, wheezing and huffing; wetly-printed papers would be shuffled all over the place by conveyor belts, carried to the
ceiling and thrown into loops and vertical drops like screaming people at a theme park. Apprentices in inky overalls would pull tall levers and operate sprockets; from time to time, with a thin shriek, one of them would be gathered by the machinery and whirled around the room.
Jack emptied his glass.
‘That’ll be your round,’ he said. He’d lost count. It wasn’t worth arguing about. That was all I seemed to do with Jack, hang about on the outskirts of an argument we never actually visited. I couldn’t remember how we’d been at school. Perhaps we’d been exactly the same. I got another two pints. When I took them back to the table, Jack was fiddling with a beermat. I was relieved to see that he’d stopped adjusting his metalwork. It was embarrassing, even though there was only the landlord there and he was more interested in his crisps. He held up the beermat and studied it.
‘We did a run of these,’ he said, ‘with jokes on. For a beer festival in Humberside. We all had to bring a joke in. They didn’t use mine.’
I didn’t ask Jack what the joke was. His jokes were the sort Bernard Manning would have turned down as too offensive. ‘So how is the printing trade? Any interesting gossip from our local reporters?’
‘Someone’s filling the mines with stuff. Banned toxic stuff so horrible you couldn’t even offload it in fucking Guatemala, and someone’s lobbing it under Dudley. The hospital’s sinking into the ground. Teenage literacy is down, teenage pregnancies are up, and teenagers should be seen and not fucking heard.’
‘The usual, then,’ I said. Jack nodded his head in agreement.
‘I saw Eddie Finch the other week,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘Said he’d be in for a drink later. If nothing came up. He has to man the phones in case a story breaks. Pensioner loses cat, cat loses sense of direction, man paying by cheque is killed by everyone else in the supermarket. It must be all fucking go, working on the Herald.’
Eddie Finch worked on the Pensnett Herald, which covered the events in Pensnett. Pensnett was a stretch of road outside Dudley with three shops and a bad reputation. I’d never been there myself, but I knew someone who’d stopped for a newspaper and escaped with stitches and a persistent nervous twitch and was told he was lucky. There was a fun run there once a year, which was like the London Marathon only you ran a lot faster. The Herald was always full of crime reports and obituaries. Like the notices in the local shop windows, it suffered from displaced apostrophes. Eddie covered some of the reporting, most of the horoscopes and all of the frequent letters from ‘Angry of Kingswinford’. He was a minor reporter on a minuscule newspaper. He drank, however, as though he was auditioning for a place in Fleet Street before Fleet Street moved out of Fleet Street. From time to time he’d join us for a drink. Though I didn’t often drink much, if Eddie joined us, I would drink more. More than I could cope with, usually. Then I’d wake up dizzy and lost with a glutinous headache and vague memories of appalling things that, it would turn out, I had done.
‘He said he’d be in by nine,’ said Jack, checking his watch.
‘Is he?’
‘Not unless this is bolloxed. Probably just as well if he doesn’t come in. Lisa doesn’t like him much.’
‘Because he drinks?’
‘Because he’s a journalist. She doesn’t trust them. She says everything you tell them goes in the papers.’
‘I’ve told him lots of things and he hasn’t put any of them in the paper.’
‘You don’t have anything worth printing. Not these days. I think we could have kept him in material when we were young.’
‘I don’t know. Anyway, Lisa’s right. I don’t trust Eddie. Not when he’s drunk.’
‘He’s always fucking drunk.’
‘There you are then.’
I wasn’t sure where I was. The conversation kept heading off somewhere, then turning back before it got there. Jack was on his way to another subject. Perhaps he wanted to talk about Lisa. He usually did. She was his girlfriend. They had met at some sort of convention for body-piercing aficionados. It had been held at Stourbridge town hall. The two of them had noticed each other across a room full of pinned flesh. Chromed instruments curved out of the crowd; by the light of surgical lamps they started to chat, and snapped together like a ring binder. They had met again a day or two later and one thing had led to one more thing. One more thing had gone on for a month, and then Lisa moved in with Jack and Jack decorated several rooms.
It all sounded serious to me. I fell head over heels all the time, but I’d never done any decorating. I watched decorating on the television while I was waiting for a real programme to come on. Decorating happened at a stage of a relationship that I had either missed or never reached. I thought that it would probably be the latter. I could start relationships, but I wasn’t very good at them. It was like starting fights after a few drinks. It made sense at the time, but you ended up with a headache and no money and all of your mates wishing you’d shut up about it.
I hadn’t met Lisa. Jack said she was wonderful, but I wasn’t going to take his word for anything. He was hardly going to say she was an old boiler with a bosom full of rivets. That’s not the sort of thing you say in the first couple of months. If you get through the first six months you can say anything you like. I think. I’ve never got past four.
I must have been picking the wrong girls.
Jack was happy with Lisa. I knew this because he kept telling me so. He told me so more often than I wanted him to, and after he’d had a few more drinks he’d tell me about it non-stop.
He had a few more drinks.
‘She’s lovely,’ he said, ‘she’s a peach. You hear that? She’s a peach.’
‘Round and hairy?’ I asked.
‘None of yours,’ he said, ‘as it happens. None of your business. She’s wonderful. I don’t know what she’s doing with me.’
‘Perhaps she got one of her rings caught in one of yours. What are you going to do? Is there room between the tattoos to fit her name in? Or is it just going to be her initials?’
Jack went several shades darker. ‘That’s you, isn’t it? Always having a go. You’ve never got this far. Know why? Because you’d rather be out there taking the piss. Have you ever been in love?’
‘Yes,’ I said, truthfully. I was forever falling in love. It was easy; like falling off a bike. I was in love right then. I was going steady with a girl, as it happened.
I’ll tell you about her later.
‘Well then,’ he said, ‘well then. This is real. Lisa is different. This is different.’
‘They’re all different. You said that Jo Branigan and Andrea Horton were different. You thought both of them were different at the same time, for a week. Then you decided they were actually the same.’
‘Lisa is different differently.’
He looked at me helplessly, drunk and infatuated.
‘It’s the same,’ I said, not knowing why I was pushing him. It was instinctive. It was easier than falling off a bike.
‘This is different,’ he insisted.
‘Oh yes, you work in a printers so naturally you know more about anything than I do, I’m just the one who went to university.’
‘What do you know about? Books. You wouldn’t know the real world if it smacked you in the face.’
‘If I smacked you in the face you’d know about it.’
I wasn’t sure how the conversation had turned nasty. Beer, probably.
‘How about if you murdered me?’ asked Jack, leaning into the conversation. ‘You’re the history man. You know why? Because you don’t want to remember your own history. You want to go back before that. You want other people’s memories. I remember everything.’ He rolled back his sleeve; swirls and spirals ran up his arm, between swellings and scabs. ‘Look at this,’ he said, ‘I’m receptive. You with me? I’m receptive.’
‘Receptive to hepatitis B, septicaemia, traffic reports …’
That calmed him down. ‘Have it your way then,’ he said. ‘H
ow’s the niece?’
‘Haven’t seen her since I went to university.’
‘Typical student. How old is she now then? Three, four?’
‘Four.’
‘You know she’s never met her Uncle Jack?’
I did know that. I liked it that way.
‘I’ll tell you what, I’m not doing anything Saturday. We’ll pop round and see her. And your brother, we don’t see him much now.’
‘We fell out. Family things.’
‘Oh yes. Right. So I’ll pick you up about eleven then, and we’ll go and see what they’re up to these days.’
Wonderful, I thought. That’d be a smashing day out.
II
The next day I waited for my hangover to leave and Jack to arrive. My money was on Jack getting there first. Eddie Finch had turned up eventually, and he was better at drinking than I was. Reporters are like that because they don’t have to get up and go to work in the mornings. Although I knew I couldn’t out-drink him, it had seemed important to keep up. It was my competitive edge.
I fed the hangover coffee and Nurofen until it calmed down. Jack turned up late, driving his van. He’d had it for years, since we were seventeen. It had been his first car. It looked like it might have been his grandfather’s first car. The last time I’d seen it, it had been blue. He’d sprayed it white.
‘A white van gives you the freedom of the road,’ he explained on the way to my brother’s house. ‘People see a white van, they know it’s going to go all over the shop. White vans have their own rules. Cut people up, park on lawns, run over dogs and children. It’s accepted … What the fuck is she doing?’
‘The speed limit?’
‘Not in this baby, baby,’ he said in what he thought was an American accent.
‘Hasn’t your sister got a baby?’
‘Little boy,’ Jack admitted. ‘Called it Liam.’
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘No it fucking isn’t. Hold on, I can skirt round this lot.’
Seeing the Wires Page 3