His name was Jim.
Jim passes the building site that was once Loom Street, then onto Stanhope Street, then Mill Road, the stink from his pulled-up Parka collar rising. Teenagers mooch around the phoneless phone box, but it’s too late for Jim to volte-face. They’ve spotted him.
The first stone strikes the wall ahead, the second clips the pavement at his heel, the third bullseyes his elbow, right on the hinge of bone. Move! He tangles feet in crutch as more stones arc against the lowering sky, only just swerving onto Bathurst Drive to escape.
A brick wall frosted with shards of pitted glass protects the electricity transformer. It looks like a contraption a demented scientist might tear a dustsheet from in the B-movies he used to obsess over, its concentric coils of steel sprouting into a late November sky. The Missing poster is pasted to the wall. Someone has torn it so only the top half of Lily Butler’s head survives, but her photocopied eyes glower at him. Knowing eyes.
Jim catches his breath. His elbow throbs, but there’s no time to lick wounds.
Sticks and stones, etc.
Full dark by the time he drags himself to his flat on Hessle Rise, and his top lip is crusted with snot. He jitters the key into the lock just as a voice says his name. The only person left to say his name.
Corina, his sister.
‘Where the hell’ve you been?’ she says. ‘I’ve been ringing.’ Wearing only a denim jacket, she hugs herself against the night like that schoolyard game where, from behind, it looks like you’re Frenching.
‘Fat Gary’s,’ he says. ‘I needed batteries.’
He sees her see the damage to his front door. Red paint splatters, the zigzagging cracks across the glass.
‘What this?’ she asks.
‘Nowt. Kids. Twats.’
‘Are you going to let me in? I’m brass.’
He hobbles past the toilet and the closed living room door, towards the kitchen, praying she’ll follow. Corina has a habit of poking her head through doors just to see what’s what, but if she tried that now, questions such as Why’s your living room locked? What’ve you got in there? would be raised. Bad questions. Very bad questions. But she doesn’t even glance at it. In his kitchen, she opens cupboards.
‘There’s nowt in,’ she says. ‘What do you eat?’
‘Soup.’
‘You’re thinner every time I see you.’
He sheds his coat to reveal a grey, sweat-stained T-shirt beneath which his bones and humps and gnarls are visible. His head a baroque pearl gleaming under the strip light. He feels his sister’s eyes on him as he starts making tea; his reduced hand shoving cups around the counter top.
‘Let me,’ Corina says, but when he doesn’t respond she doesn’t offer again.
They watch the kettle boil in silence. There’s milk in the fridge but it’s separated. Corina, at the small kitchen table, takes her cup in both hands. ‘Black’s fine,’ she says.
He lowers himself into the chair opposite.
‘Radio reckons there’s thousands of sheep up in Scotland suffocating under snow drifts,’ she says. ‘They say it’s the coldest winter since 1960-something.’
‘I hate the cold.’
‘Is your heating on?’
He doesn’t answer. The hot cup in his chapped hands sends skewers of pain through cold bones. Corina hunches over her own drink, blowing steam. ‘You heard any more about your incapacity review?’ she asks.
He shakes his head.
‘Fucking DWP. Do you want me to get onto them?’
‘I can do it.’
‘What about finding a new place? Have you started looking yet?’
‘I’m going to.’
Corina starts to say something, stops, takes a breath. ‘Jim, you need to get a move on. It’s no picnic – just ask my clients. You need to be on the computer every single day.’
‘I don’t have a computer.’
‘Talk to the council, they’ll register you. Do you want me to–’
‘I can do it.’
‘Fine,’ Corina snaps. ‘But there’s less places going if you live on your own. Loads less. From what I hear, they’re shifting people miles away.’
‘Shame I can’t come and live with you guys.’
Corina’s clear, green eyes find his. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nowt.’
The wind moans in the window.
Finally, he says, ‘Blonde?’
She touches her hair self-consciously. ‘Thought I’d try it. What do you think?’
‘Suits you.’
‘You reckon? I wasn’t sure.’ She tucks a stray strand behind her ear. The gesture reminds him wonderfully, appallingly, of JJ.
They drink their tea in silence. Or rather, Corina drinks hers. Drinking – like eating – in front of people fills Jim with dread.
She asks, ‘So how are you for money?’
‘How are you for money?’
‘Jim, I’m just asking.’
‘And I’m just telling.’
All kinds of darkness waves around outside.
‘The salon’s probably going to close,’ she says quietly.
‘Why?’
‘Like I said, my clients are being rehoused all over, and they won’t be coming back. There’ll be nowhere for most of them to come back to. Not that I can even blame that, really…’ She rolls her cup between her palms. ‘Besides, it’s only a matter of time before they knock everything down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
She pushes her drink forward, clasps her hands together as if in prayer. ‘Maybe someone’s trying to tell me something?’
‘What’s Max say?’
She looks at him from between raised forearms. ‘I wouldn’t know. He moved out.’
‘When?’
‘A while back.’
‘Why?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ There’s a fissure in the table’s plastic coating. She picks at it with her thumbnail. ‘Anyway, I’ve been thinking about moving on.’
Something colourless and cold spreads its wings in his chest. ‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about Mam?’
‘What about Mam? Why don’t you see her yourself?’
‘You know why.’
‘Haway Jim, that was half a fucking lifetime ago. You’re not a bairn anymore. Every day she drifts further away. Soon she’ll not remember us at all.’
‘Is she still knitting that thing?’
Corina nods.
‘How big is it now?’
‘I don’t know. Big. Look, just go, OK? They miss you.’
‘They?’
‘Dad, too.’
His bent mouth twitches.
Corina rubs her pink eyes. ‘Look, I’m not here to get into this again.’
‘Then why are you here?’
She searches his face for something she doesn’t seem to find. ‘You do know what they’re saying about you, don’t you?’
‘Who? What who are saying?’
‘People. Rumours.’ From her large, overfilled handbag she removes a sheet of paper folded almost into a cube. Fear furs the chambers of Jim’s heart as she unfolds it and, suddenly, Lily’s eyes are in his kitchen. Stark red text burning like molten steel:
M I S S I N G
LILY BUTLER.
LAST SEEN 28TH OCTOBER 2015, NEAR CONG BURN.
IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION REGARDING
HER WHEREABOUTS THEN CONTACT
CLEVELAND POLICE ON:
0164 226 0800
In the accompanying photograph, Lily is no more than ten years old and her skin is smooth and blameless. Hair dark, eyes persecuting. A crudely drawn speech bubble emanates from her mouth:
JIM THE FREEKS GO
T ME
The cold, colourless thing in his chest beats its wings. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘Off the side of the chippy, but there’s more. I’ve been pulling down as many as I can.’
‘I’ve got nowt to do with her.’
‘I know, but Jim…people round here don’t understand you. Sometimes, frankly, neither do I.’
‘You think I’m a freak?’
She touches the back of her hand to her forehead. ‘You know I don’t, but you’re not doing yourself any favours. The way you go on, man, you scare people.’
He turns his clawed hand in his lap. ‘I wonder why.’
‘You know what happens once enough people start gabbing. Who did that to your door? What’s going to happen when the likes of Vincent Barr get wind?’
‘I didn’t do nowt.’
She smokes too much, you can see it in the lines around her mouth. She goes around the table, rests her head on his. He smells, he knows he does, and he’s embarrassed, but the sensation of being touched is too precious to forgo.
‘I have to get on,’ she says. ‘Just let me use your loo.’
When Corina clicks shut the toilet door, he snags her bag with the tip of his crutch. The chances of her still having Alive’s number – and of Alive still plying the same trade – aren’t great, but if they both did it would be the final kink straightened in a plan that might very well have no precedent in human history. With his good hand, he rummages to find her old Nokia, scrolls through her contacts and there, there he is! There’s no time to scribble down the number, he just barely manages to prod the bag back under the chair before the toilet flushes and Corina returns, drying her hands on her denim buttocks.
She picks up her bag. She seems troubled. ‘I’ll see you, love,’ she says.
He holds his breath to see whether she’ll try the living room door, but she doesn’t. Once she’s gone, he can speak aloud the numbers in his head, ‘…91 7176, 291 7176, 291 7176, 29…’
Between himself and the blocks stand the empty streets earmarked for regeneration. He passes what was once The Avenues – First, Second, Third, Fourth – now desolate expanses of muck and rubble. A steel fence jangles against the night; signs attached at intervals to its diamond links:
ROWAN-TREE HOMES:
IT’S WHERE YOUR HEART IS.
Beyond that, the blocks burden the sky; huge high-rises with only a scattering of tiny windows glinting amid floors of darkness. Each step toward them increases his anxiety. How many years since he was last there?
His parents live in Asquith House, the block at the apex of a horseshoe of six. He can see them now: Dad steeped in irradiated TV-glow, stubbing out his rollies into his spiralled orange peel. And Mam – Corina had told him about the thing she was knitting; how it collected in folds at her swollen feet. How monstrous it was, how without end.
Alive lives six floors up in Palmerston House, and the lift is kaput. In nuclear orange across its metal doors, someone has tagged: MONGSTEPA.
The funk of the place slaps him from across two decades: cold, old piss haunting the stairwells as he climbs. There’s another Missing poster somewhere in the middle of his ascent, but he dodges Lily’s eyes, stopping only to shake a mummified condom from the tip of his crutch. Somehow, he ends up overshooting the sixth floor and is half way along the seventh-floor walkway before he realises. This high up the wind is pitiless. He leans over the side and sees the circle of black earth in the centre of the communal green. A climbing frame had stood there once: the Thunderdome. Lethal, it was. What had happened to it? Doesn’t matter. He hobbles back to the stairwell, past dozens of abandoned flats. The urge to step inside one of them, to slide the deadbolt behind him, is overpowering.
He stops. Light and music is coming from a flat. The beat is one he recognises: ‘Spinach Power’ by MTS! A classic from ’89, back when he was young. Back when his heart was still a weightless ball of white light.
In the dark and cold – though for that fleeting moment he is unaware of either – he listens.
The walkway halogens on the sixth floor cut and splutter. Jim locates Alive’s door and regulates his breathing. The smell of himself rising up out of his Parka is atrocious. He smells like an old man.
‘You are an old man,’ he whispers, and buzzes the doorbell.
The door jolts open on two inches of chain: ‘Yeah?’
Jim’s voice is saliva-thick, slurred. ‘Alive, it’s Dave. I rang before, remember? Corina gave me your number.’
The door closes and stays closed. Panic descends, and he’s either about to buzz again or flee – he’s not quite sure which – when locks revolve and the door opens.
Alive’s reaction upon seeing Jim is, unfortunately, textbook: his shoulders jerk back while his head snaps to the side and away, his nose hauling up top lip as it wrinkles: imagine someone taking a whiff of badly gone-off milk. Jim’s resolve wobbles. Coming here was a mistake.
But Alive gathers himself quickly. ‘Sound. Dave, yeah,’ he says, though a little cautiously, pressing himself to the wall to allow Jim entry.
Alive’s living room is exactly as he remembers it: settees draped in resin-burned ethnic throws, strings of fairy lights drooping against mauve walls heavy with pictures, posters, and photographs. The twin-deck setup in the corner and one entire wall of breezeblock shelves bowing under the weight of three-plus decades of wax. The large, low coffee table is still the same frenzy of ashtrays, stems, rolled-empty B&Hs, and methodically-roached pizza flyers. Even the same cactus on the subwoofer.
Jim centres himself on his crutch. He isn’t expecting this. Too much. Too much to take. He’d once been seventeen and beautiful in this room.
‘So how d’you know Corina?’ Alive says from the doorway, still on his guard.
Struggling to haul himself back into the present, Jim repeats the line he’s been practising all the way over. ‘Oh, you know, Krissy Mackenzie and that lot. Years ago now.’
Alive seems to relax upon hearing this. Absently, he shows his eyeteeth and scratches his belly. Make no mistake, Alive used to be ripped – did sit ups, pull ups, press ups all day every day. People used to poke at his abdomen, not quite believing he didn’t have an oven tray under his vest. Now he is doughier, his kinky black curtains replaced by close-cropped stubble betraying a receding hairline. And yet, there also survived aspects of the man Jim had once known: the same wide-set brown eyes and Roman nose, the same needle-and-bic-ink butterfly tattooed on his left bicep. He was still Alive; still the same man Jim occasionally summons to mind the rare times he masturbates these days.
Alive sits, nods at Jim to do the same, who perches on the arm of the settee.
Alive skins up. His hands move autonomously, perfectly. He says, ‘Me and Cor used to kick it quite a bit. She’d come round for a smoke. Is she still doing hair? Last I heard she was doing hair.’
‘She’s got the salon on the precinct,’ Jim says.
‘Yeah. Right, yeah.’
‘I heard she’s moving away, though.’
Alive lights the joint and drags. ‘Ah, no way. Where to?’
‘I don’t know. Just what I heard.’
Smoke leaks from between the gaps in Alive’s teeth. ‘She was sound, Cor. I knew her little bro, too. He was a proper little raver.’
‘I don’t think I met him.’
‘Didn’t Vincent Barr throw him down a fucking well or something? At that rave? Remember that waterworks rave?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jim says.
He offers the joint to Jim, who refuses. Alive exhales slowly and when he speaks, he’s speaking mostly to himself. ‘Me and Cor drifted apart. I guess that was always on the cards back in them days. You’d just be off on one all the time, you know?’
‘I was at Sunrise,’ Jim says.
Alive’s face lights up. ‘No fucking way. Which
one?’
‘The June one. Midsummer Nights.’
‘Mental. I never made it down, but a few mates did. What was it like?’
Jim finds himself smiling. ‘We were just…gone.’
From within laurels of blue-grey smoke, Alive shakes his head in admiration.
Jim fingers the adjustment holes drilled along his crutch. ‘Best days of my life.’
‘Tell me to fuck off if you want,’ Alive says, ‘but can I ask…?’ He motions up and down Jim’s body with the orange ember of the joint.
‘I had a car accident about twenty year ago now. Totally my fault.’
‘Shit…’ A moment goes by, after which Alive says, ‘I’ll just go get your stuff.’ He leaves in a whorl of smoke while Jim – ignoring the pain in his hip and leg – thuds across the dirty shag carpet to take a closer look at the walls. There’s more pictures now, a lifetime: photographs of people Jim doesn’t know; posters and flyers for club nights long gone. One such poster in a simple wooden frame catches his eye. A woman’s face rises from a cerulean matrix, floating in the void, her features melting into the gridded neon lines.
Alive comes back. ‘I fell in love with her that night. Couldn’t take my eyes off her.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Dreamscape at Denbigh Leisure Centre, December ’91. Mental. Were you there?’
‘I’d had my accident by then, so no.’
Alive rubs his shorn head and gazes at the woman’s face in the frame. ‘Everything was breaking up by that point. You had your Hardcore, Jungle on the way…but we were all too deep into it to stop. There was no going back.’ He walks over to the window. Across the courtyard is Peel House; Alive juts his chin in its direction. ‘I was part of that crew from the start. Everyone was up for it. Everyone sound-as.’
Jim limps to join Alive at the window. Peel House is Blitz-black, not a single light on anywhere. A few bedsheets hang forlornly from windows, the slogans written on them too washed out and far away to read. They are the only indications that life ever dwelled within.
‘I never went to any Peel House parties,’ Jim says.
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