‘No? The cunts condemned it six months ago. Last year we ran a No Transfer campaign like before, when we stopped them taking over back in the early nineties. It was magic, man, like old times. There was this energy about us again…’ His voice softens. ‘But it wasn’t enough. We fought ’til the end but….aye.’
Jim looks across the courtyard, tries to see what Alive sees, but all he glimpses is his own ruined reflection. He gives Alive the money and Alive gives him the tiny plastic baggie containing two hexagonal-shaped pills.
‘Where will you go when they knock this place down?’ Jim asks.
Alive shrugs. ‘Wherever they put me, I suppose. Mickey’s still upstairs, but pretty much everyone else’s gone. Nobody tells you nowt.’ His eyes drift once more to Peel House. ‘But there’s still time.’
‘I should get off.’
Alive walks him out. ‘Dave, next time you see Cor, tell her I said hello, yeah?’
‘Sure,’ Jim says as Alive closes the door on him, shutting him off from light and warmth and human contact. ‘No worries.’
Lily Butler’s poster is still in his kitchen. He bins it and boils the kettle. The clock on the oven says 22:22. Time enough.
He has a cup with a special lid, designed for geriatrics who are no longer liquid-credible. He fills it with tea and takes it into the hall, removes the tarnished key from the string around his neck, and unlocks the living room door.
Inside, a solitary lamp does little to shore up the dark. An obsolete computer and printer on the fold-out dinner table (next to a volume of Internet for Dummies) throw monolithic shapes across the pictures on the walls, pictures printed from the internet. They are of women – woman, singular – the same woman interpreted a dozen ways. Nor is the term ‘woman’ entirely accurate. With its gaunt face and hobgoblin arms, the entity depicted isn’t strictly human. Until recently, crude hundred-year-old illustrations were the only evidence he’d managed to uncover, but that had all changed when, logging on one day, he’d stumbled across the print now taking pride of place above the bar fire. He’d ordered it direct from the London gallery displaying the original work: a glossy 27 x 40 poster. The Green Girl by Una Cruickshank. The same painting he’d blundered upon that night all those years ago.
Jim pops his cup and looks up at the print, looks up at her. She holds a skeletal hand over her beautifully cadaverous face, and between her parted fingers are eyes that have haunted him forever.
The tape rack is beside the fire. The tape he wants is in a green case near the bottom. He feels its weight – both physical and psychic – as he slides it into the stereo. Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk – ‘The Acid Life’. Though he’s listened to this track thousands of times, each time is new. Each time the 303s kicks in over the deep-space beat, his bones realign and grow solid. His organs unpuncture and his spine cracks straight. His jaw unshatters.
A large map comprising three layers lies in the centre of the room. The bottom layer is a 1928 civic plan of the local water supply from the then still-operational waterworks, which had supplied the St. Esther slums to the east, and High Leven and Maltby to the west; its mains and channels running beneath land on which the Burn Estate would be built a decade after the war. This was the second layer: the original 1954 estate plans, including a 1965 addendum to the north-western edge when the blocks were built. The final layer was Moorside, the first Rowan-Tree homes, completed in late 1994. Moorside now occupies the site of the waterworks and long-demolished St Esther slums, the resulting homes a stones-throw from the eastern-most boundary of the Burn Estate. He had found all the plans in the Teesside Municipal Online Archives, and painstakingly rescaled them onto sheets of tracing paper.
Jim lowers himself stiffly to the floor and smooths the layers of his map. A hundred years of superimposed history, each as ephemeral and brittle as the paper on which they were printed.
Beneath the traced layers of Moorside and the Burn Estate, he has, with coloured pens, highlighted every subterranean water channel into and out of the area. For months now, across dual carriageways and ice-stubbled fields and copses of rotting trees filled with fly-tipped TVs, he’d been tracking them, ensuring none let out above ground. That there was nowhere she could escape. But each pipe had stopped, blocked and forgotten, below ground. Now only one channel remains. Marked in dark green, it ends at the Cong Burn, out in the woods to the north. It’s a place he knows well. As a youth, from his bedroom window on the fourteenth floor, he’d stared nightly at that dark crosshatch of trees.
Jim finishes his tea. He puts new batteries in his torch and turns off the music. He takes a last look at the map before folding it into his rucksack. In his mind, he follows the glimmering dark green line as it curves back beneath the estate, beneath Vivienne Avenue, beneath Stanhope Street, and beneath his own flat on Hessle Rise; beneath street after street, towards its source: the ghost of the waterworks and the tightly drawn circle of the well.
Towards a monster.
He takes a final look around the room, turns off the lights, and heads into the night.
But monsters don’t scare him. He’s a monster himself.
II
(
…gone…
…Where are we? It’s proper misty. Is this where you’re from?
Tonight, I went back to where I’m from. The blocks. For the first time in twenty-odd year, and I was bricking it. I mean, I see them every day when I go out – you can’t miss them – but I do this trick where I keep them in the peripheral. Like the moon, like clouds. They’re there, but you sort of don’t see them. Tonight, though, I found that only works at a distance. Get close enough and you run out of space to kid yourself.
Living there used to be so…like have you heard The Smiths? Consider yourself lucky if you haven’t because the singer’s such a moaning twat. See, to me, music should lift you up, yeah? It should tell you things can be better than what they are, but bang The Smiths on and here’s this fucker telling you to stick a bag over your head and go to sleep? Haway, man – not for me. All my mates back then were into them though, and at the time I guess I pretended I liked it too because I didn’t know any other kinds of music existed. Like I’d make myself sit down with a Cure record, or a Cocteau Twins record, a Beatles or Bob Dylan record – and really study it like homework, trying to find a way in. Only I never could. It was the guitars, man. Guitars, guitars, guitars. Nobody cared about the beat. The drums on those records were all shite. My sister Corina used to be into hip hop – real pioneer stuff like MC Shan and Ultramagnetic MCs – and that was better, but there were too many words. I don’t like lyrics neither. I mean, when has anything what truly mattered to you ever rhymed?
Anyway, the point is, there’s this one Smiths’ song – or was it his solo stuff? – anyway, this song called ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’, which was the blocks to a T: grey. Miserable. Suffocating. I’d look out my bedroom window, up on the fourteenth floor, see concrete to the horizon, and wonder if maybe The Smiths guy had the flat below.
There were six blocks in a kind of half circle. I lived in Asquith House, Macca was in Chamberlin, Tracey and Kim were in Lloyd George, and Dano was in Attlee. We were all mates from school, but after we left there was nowt to do. Macca stayed on for some pointless NVQs, but I wanted to start earning. Fuck knows why. I think Mam was sad, but I’d be lying if that didn’t spur me on to some extent. Me and Dano started labouring, and Trace pulled pints down the Labour Club until the landlord tried to get her to do a ‘private show’ at a lock-in for the regulars, so she wrapped in.
Dad got laid off at the end of 1988, I think, and that’s when shite got bad because there’s nowt worse than someone who believes that guff about an honest day’s work not having an honest day’s work. Nightmare. He drove everyone crackers, and took it out on me especially – no son of mine’s going to be a dosser blah-blah-blah, even though technically, he was just as much of a dosser a
s me. Worse, even. At least I never dropped half my dole on the greyhounds. Only a proper mug does that – everyone knows they’re rigged. Me and Cor kept out the flat as much as possible in them days, and I think the main reason Mam joined the Tenants’ Association was just so’s to get out his way for a few hours at a time.
Like, the only peace I got was after everyone went to bed and I could watch horror films. Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman – they’re your mainstays, but there was all kinds of other naff crap nobody even remembers anymore. I loved this one from the 70s called The Stone Tape. It was about this old house which acted like a kind of supernatural tape recorder, the walls recording ghosts and playing them back on loop. I reckon whoever wrote that one must’ve done a stint in a council high-rise. So I’d sit watching this stuff in the dark, taping them for nights when the telly was shite. Sometimes Cor’d watch with me, but that was alright.
Frankenstein was my favourite. And, aye, I know the monster’s just the monster and Victor Frankenstein’s the guy what made him, but it’s easier to call the monster Frankenstein, and besides, everyone deserves a name. There was something about Frankenstein I really got off on, the Boris Karloff ones especially. Like there’s this bit in the first Karloff one where Victor’s got Frankenstein in this chair in a dark room just after he’s made him. Frankenstein looks wrecked, man. Proper miserable. Victor pulls a chain to open a hatch in the roof, sunlight falls across Frankenstein’s face for the first time, and you can see something happening inside him. He stands up, staggering and wobbling, reaching – fingers moving in the light, like this – like he’s trying to hold onto a warmth he’s never known. Then Victor shuts the hatch. He’s like, No. No more for you. Then this close up of Frankenstein’s face. He’s utterly crushed, holding his stitched hands out like, Why are you doing this to me? That bit kills me. It’s no wonder he starts mashing everybody. I mean, wouldn’t you? At the end he always dies, too. Either he burns to death, or gets electrocuted, or gets chucked off the fucking roof, and the people – these scunner villagers – think, aye, everything’s back to normal. Sound. Nowt more to see here.
If you ask me, Frankenstein’s tragedy, not horror.
Anyhow, so that was pretty much my life back then. There used to be this climbing frame on the communal green – we called it the Thunderdome – and when you climbed it, the blocks panorama-ed around you and it was like you’d never escape. At the time, I thought it was bleak, but now we’ve got cunts ploughing trucks into crowds, cunts strapping bombs to kids, and I don’t know if bleak’s the right word. Maybe the word doesn’t exist. It was Teesside in the late 1980s, if that means owt to anyone. And I was seventeen.
Were you ever seventeen, Peg?
So the thing that led me to Adam and JJ, and then to acid music and everything I’m about to tell you, was us coming into possession of like three hundred vibrators, dildos, and sex toys of various shapes and sizes. There used to be this industrial estate south of the estate, on the other side of Peelaw Bank, about as far from the blocks as we’d get in those days. Just non-descript warehouses and lock ups and stuff, but there was this one with a flat roof that was easy to get on, so we’d knock about on it, drinking cider or whatever. One night me, Macca, and Dano were up on it, playing footie with stones, and one spooned off Dano’s foot and put this little skylight window out. Of course we legged it, but when we went back a few weeks later, it was still broken. Nobody had noticed, so we stuck our heads in to have a look. There were loads of crates inside, and it looked easy to get down the gangway thing. There didn’t seem to be any alarm or security bloke, so we had an idea. We’d leave it another week, and if there was no change we’d take it as a sign to go on the rob. At the time it was just a joke, but you know what lads are like – nobody wants to chicken out first – so that’s how we ended up back on the roof a week later, decked out in black Joy Division t-shirts, carrying two holdalls each, bricking it.
We didn’t know what we were doing. Just thought, aye, there’s bound to be something worth pinching. Easy-to-carry, top-end gear like VHS players or Nintendos. I think I can safely say that none of us were expecting dildos. Dano prised open about ten crates and they were all the same – hundreds of them packed in polystyrene bits. Then Macca swore he heard sirens, so we shovelled as many as we could into our bags and legged it.
We went to Dano’s because it was only him and his mam, and most nights she was passed out blotto in front of the telly by 8 o’clock. We tipped the bags onto his bed and tried to make sense of them. It was my first dildo experience. Some had two shafts, like big weird tuning forks. Some were double-ended and as long as my arm. There were strings of rubber balls I didn’t even want to guess at. This was before the internet, remember.
Macca held up a big glittery black one with veins along the sides. He was like, What the fuck are we going to do with these?
Dano was freaking out. He wanted to dump them, but I was like, Haway, we took the risk, we should at least try and get something. And Dano was like, Oh, you’re going to go door to door? Avon calling? So we decided what we needed was to find someone to take them all off our hands in one go and pay a lump sum. But who? Plus we didn’t even know how much they went for. We didn’t want to look like amateurs and get ripped off, did we? The only people we thought might know were Trace and Kim. They were girls at least. Nonchalantly, we were like, Would you ladies happen to know how much a decent dildo goes for these days? They looked at us like we were fucked in the head. Then about three days later, Cor came in my room. She was like, Anywhere from £5-£20. Then she said, Jim, Mam’s birthday’s coming up, and I’m a bit worried what you’ve got in mind. Cor knew Kim, see, and Kim must have said something. I feigned ignorance, but Cor knows me. Knew me. She sat on my bed with this little smile on her face and waited for me to crack, and I lasted about thirty seconds before I spilled my guts. She pissed herself laughing as I told her. Proper tears, rolling on the bed trying to breathe – the kind of pure-as laughter you might only get a handful of times in your life. Anyway, a few days later, she took me to see Clive Alive. Alive’s not his real name of course, it just suits him. He lived on the blocks – still does actually. I saw him earlier tonight, to get those pills.
Speaking of which, are you feeling it yet? I think I am. I can feel it…
Back then, Alive was Cor’s mate and weed dealer. He was also proper into his music. Before Acid, he was a hip hop-head, which is how Cor first got into it. Alive had hundreds of records, like loads of white labels and imports and shite what was solid to get hold of. They weren’t cheap, hence the dealing, but Cor told me he only sold to mates because sooner or later you had to butt heads with a psycho, and he was too nice for that. To be honest, I always thought she was a bit sweet on him.
He was older than her, and looked like a dude from a muscle mag. I liked him straight away, but not just because of that. It was the way he shook my hand when Cor introduced me. Like he wanted to, right? Not like he was just humouring his mate’s kid brother. He lit a spliff and passed it to me and I’d never smoked before – I mean, I’d smoked cigs – so I was a bit wary, but Cor was like, whatever. I didn’t want to look clueless, so I took a proper harsh drag while Alive told me the plan.
He knew this guy Adam, who lived on the estate, who had a cousin who ran a sex shop in Soho, London. Soho, apparently, was a place where people looked at you funny if you weren’t in the market for a big rubber dick. This cousin wanted to give us £1,500 for the dildos! Even split three ways, it was the most money possible in the world. All we had to do was get them over to Adam, who’d take them down to his cousin. Alive wrote Adam’s address and telephone number down for me.
When I rang Adam the next day – from the phone box – he said he couldn’t pick them up because his car was knackered, so we’d have to take them over to him. I reckon Dano would’ve carried them all the way to London himself he was so desperate to have them out of his flat. See, he’d hidden the
m all over his room and was shitting himself in case his mam went on one of her sporadic cleaning binges, which she did whenever she sobered up enough. Would’ve been bad if she had. Sex toys tumbling out of every available storage space in your teenage son’s room would drive anyone back to drink.
Right, this next bit’s going to sound dramatic, but it’s true: when Adam opened his door and I saw this lanky, freckled lad with neon-blue hair twisting out of the top of his head like a Bunsen burner flame, my whole life changed. Just like that, I was in love – couldn’t take my eyes off him. The first words I heard him say, in his weirdly deep voice, were, My cocks have arrived! which didn’t impress Macca and Dano, but I was grinning like a moron. I mean, it’d been there all along, of course. I’m not going to pretend I hadn’t, like, snuck glances at Macca when he took his shirt off on hot days, but I’d been able to deal with it up to that point in the same way I deal with seeing the blocks now – that peripheral trick. Adam, though, he blasted all that apart.
In the living room, he unzipped the bags and took a closer look. This serious face on, hefting the dildos like they were ripe fruit. I couldn’t get enough of him. He was like, These are quality items, gents, and such an array. He worked the shaft of a big black one, winking at Macca, and Macca looked like he was about to dive through the window.
That was when I became aware of the music, and for a second everything else – even Adam – vanished. That beat! Hissing hi-hats that sent my balls crawling back up inside me, the evil stabs of bass – three notes only – and then a sound I’d never heard before in my life, this completely inhuman squelching that shook my guts.
I was like, I need to know what this is.
‘The Acid Life’, Adam said. Farley Jackmaster Funk.
Aye, but what music?
His smile ruptured me. Acid, he said.
I was floored. Felt the bolts burning in my neck, my eyes opening for the first time, a voice screaming: It’s Alive! It’s Alive!…
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