Ironopolis

by Glen James Brown

  Corina snaps on the radio.

  It’s always tuned to a local station, Shine FM 107.3. They’re half way through a news bulletin: …sentenced to eighteen months in prison for the destruction and illegal disposal of greyhounds estimated to be several thousand in number. The remains – discovered in a field north of Nunethorpe during housing construction – are believed to be connected to the racing industry. The court heard how the animals had been bludgeoned and mutilated to avoid identification, before being buried in large pits. Vincent Barr, 74, was found guilty of multiple counts of animal cruelty and conspiracy to –

  ‘He’s wrong ’un,’ Mrs Terry says. ‘That whole family’s nowt but scunners.’

  Vincent.

  She’d once asked Beech what happened to the dogs when they could no longer race; what befell the rest of the litter that never even made it to the track. Beech had smiled. Don’t worry, he’d said. People took care of them.

  The bulletin ends and the DJs attempt some awful banter. Corina wraps Mrs Terry’s hair in endpapers, winds rods tight against the roots, slathers the hairline in barrier cream. The stink of the perm lotion no longer even registers. Mrs Terry has been having the same perm since Corina opened for business back in the late 1990s. In fact, most of her remaining clients are perms. Over the past twenty years, how many perms is that? Too many, and that’s one problem with the job – as with life in general, people tend to stick with what they know. The Blank Slate, that person with the thick tresses who says, ‘it’s up to you’ – that person is rarer than condors.

  Corina stretches an elasticated plastic cap over Mrs Terry’s head so that the chemicals can do their work.

  ‘Fetch me my bag over,’ Mrs Terry says.

  Corina fetches.

  Mrs Terry takes out a Mills & Boon paperback. The hunk on the cover sports Wham!-era George Michael hair and a five o’clock shadow. A ghostly slip clings like the thinnest of atmospheres to the full chest and hips of the blonde swooning in his arms. The book is titled Behind Drawn Shades.

  ‘I prefer the doctors and nurses ones,’ Mrs Terry says.

  Sat in her elevated chrome chair, her head bulging under rods and plastic, the old woman looks like a high-priestess of some ancient, extra-terrestrial race. She licks her thumb, opens the book at page one, and begins to read.

  —

  Speaking of the cosmos…

  In New Jersey, 1964, physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson pointed their Matterhorn-shaped radio antenna at the universe and accidentally discovered what scientists had hypothesised since the end of the WWII: Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation – CMBR for short – the 13.8 billion-year-old thermal radiation left cooling in the wake of the Big Bang. The implications were startling. CMBR, they realised, was everywhere, evident in all directions at once, lacking any central point of origin, and thus utterly inescapable. It was a phenomenon which resisted relegation to the twin, frosty realms of interstellar space and academia because it penetrated to the very marrow of our collective existence. CMBR was – is – all around us: turn on the radio or television, and it’s the snow between channels. Reach out to touch someone, it’s the air between your fingers. It’s in our lungs. Our hearts.

  This somewhat oblique aside is pertinent because, out of all the stories before you here, Corina’s is perhaps hardest to tell. A life lived in the afterglow of its own past is extremely difficult to unpick, to sequence in a way that will make sense to anyone, including that person themselves, simply because everyone they’ve ever been is everywhere, always. N states superpositioned and entangled to the detriment of linear narrative; Time’s Arrow supplanted by every boomerang ever thrown since the Dawn of Man, all hurled skyward at once. This has consequences. Yes, in one way, when Corina sees Mrs Terry’s copy of Behind Drawn Shades, she is slung back in time to the early 1990s, to memories of her apprenticeship at In-Val-Uable; but in another, more accurate, sense she doesn’t go anywhere at all. Her distinctions between past, present, and future have long since begun to collapse, meaning that the young woman Corina was at twenty-two is right there beside the Corina of the present, and co-mingling with all the other Corinas she has been or will become. And there are others with her too: Annabelle and Max and Una-Lee – figures who may, to the untrained eye, appear to be gone, but who are in fact as omnipresent to Corina as CMBR. They fall like snow through the events you’re about to witness, dusting what passes for Corina’s present with the half-life of their absence.

  One such person is Val, proprietor of In-Val-Uable, who kept a stack of Mills & Boons for customers to muck-mine while they waited for their appointments. On slow days, Corina leafed through them herself, and one in particular stood out: Black Forest Lust. The plot, she recalls, concerned a wager made by two jaded Bavarian princes who lived together in an isolated castle: who would be first to defile Ophelia, the raven-haired climber their flunkies had yanked half-dead from a remote ravine after a rockslide? The princely creeps employed all manner of subterfuge. They cut the phone lines to stop her calling her diplomat daddy, they slipped knock-out drops into her Chablis (which, thanks to her third kidney’s superior toxin-metabolising abilities, failed) and once, while she was bathing, resorted to actual Scooby-Doo eyeholes cut into an ancestral portrait. Things looked bleak for Ophelia until, that was, she encountered the shirtless underling Klaus, the princes’ stable hand, who rescued her honour, stole her heart, and popped her cherry (because Ophelia was a three-kidneyed, international mountaineering virgin). Ridiculous? Perhaps, but there was a scene in chapter three which crackled with enough premonition to give Corina pause. The moment Klaus and Ophelia met for the first time: Shadows swung wildly in the stable of spooked, bucking colts. A bolt of lightning split the sky just as Ophelia’s cerulean eyes met his russet ones, and at that moment their two worlds exploded…

  Val leered in the staffroom doorway. Wouldn’t mind riding bareback on that Klaus, she said.

  Corina threw the book onto the pile, embarrassed. It’s all bollocks, she said. That’s not how people are. They don’t explode when they meet.

  Fuschia pink lipstick smudged Val’s fag-stained teeth. You sound so sure, she said.

  And Corina was. Back then at least. Before Max.

  Because who can predict when their life will go kablooey?

  —

  Enter Gary. Newspapers tucked under one arm, sweating buckets.

  ‘Thought I’d just pop these round,’ he says. Then, registering the old lady in the chair, ‘Good morning, Mrs Terry.’

  In the mirror, Mrs Terry’s good eye crests the edge of her book.

  Corina motions to the papers under his arm. ‘You needn’t have.’

  ‘Oh, it’s no bother. Really, I just wanted to stop round to say you’ll be missed.’ His green sweater is speckled dark with perspiration and stretches nigh to transparency when he bends to put the papers on the waiting table.

  ‘Are you feeling any better today?’ Corina asks.

  ‘Oh, never better, never better. Though I had to get rid of Danny, so I’m on the hunt for a new paperboy. He’s been pilfering the Sunday Sport, grubby little sod.’

  ‘Fourteen-year-olds and boobs, Gary. It’s a dangerous mix. How much do I owe you?’

  Gary waves a stubby hand. ‘No, hinny, please…’

  She brandishes a fiver from her purse, but almost recoils at how hot and clammy his hand is when she forces it on him. The man is burning.

  ‘But we’re friends,’ he says.

  ‘You’re running a business, same as me…same as I was.’

  Wispy tufts of hair dust the sides of Gary’s pear-shaped head. Small, twinkly eyes; child’s eyes in a flushed face. ‘Promise you’ll pop in from time to time.’

  ‘Scout’s honour.’

  ‘Because me and Suzy will – wuh – gakh…’

  ‘Gary? Gary?’

  His face is a boili
ng red lozenge.

  ‘Gary, I’m calling an ambulance.’

  He pincers his chest with one hand, wagging a finger violently with the other. White stuff flecks his puckering mouth. Corina runs to the phone on the desk but before she can lift it, Gary unleashes a series of coughs – hard and wet and absolute, like bones breaking deep in their meat – that bend him double. Saliva dangles from his chins. Gradually, it passes. The blocked blood drains from his face and he starts breathing again. Just.

  The pipes shudder and clank when Corina fills a mug with water from the backroom. A few years ago, the council had finally got around to filling in the worst of the potholes on Peelaw Bank. There’d been a cement mixer outside her house for several days, and the rough grozzle of spades in gravel sounded a lot like Gary’s chest.

  Gary takes the cup with both hands. ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘Fine. Just a nasty cough I can’t shake,’ he says. The mug trembles. ‘Something going around.’

  ‘Come and sit down a sec.’

  He sips the water, hands it back. ‘Pet, I’ve got to get on. The place’ll be ransacked by now. Do you need any more boxes?’

  ‘I’m fine, Gary, thanks.’

  Once the door closes behind him, Mrs Terry speaks. ‘That man is not long for this world.’

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Corina says quietly.

  ‘My Colin went the same way. Dropped dead.’

  ‘Or coffee, maybe?’

  Mrs Terry licks a thumb, turns a page. ‘Two lumps.’

  In the back, Corina reads the boxes while the kettle boils: CLINK FARMS BACON GRILL, ECONOMIX NON-BIO DETERGENT, BLASZCZYK HERBATNIKI WAFEL WANILIA. Gary did fourteen-hour-days in that sarcophagus of a paper shop, with no help. She’d once picked up a tin of garden peas in there and it had been two years out of date. Nevertheless, he did better business that either her or Yvette for the simple reason that he was the only off licence on the estate. Over the years she’d seen every type of drinker imaginable cross his threshold, from the functioning citizen in for a few tins after work, to the sweat-soaked shambles counting out a can of special brew in coppers.

  The kettle rumbles to climax. Corina spoons granules and wonders where on that scale she fell.

  Where did Jim?

  —

  Twenty-four-year-old Corina on the settee in her new house on Peelaw Bank. She had one bloodshot eye on the TV, massaging from her temples ten hours of In-Val-Uable where, after the completion of her apprenticeship, she now worked full time.

  The soap was just going to the adverts when Jim clattered home.

  He said, Who the fuck do you think you are?

  What?

  You know what. Fat Gary.

  Jim I –

  You’ve been on at him, haven’t you?

  I’m worried about you. I asked him because I’m worried.

  The wheezing in his chest sparked a coughing fit. He wiped his pulverised mouth with his pulverised hand. It’s like being back home, he said. Like I’m a fucking child – worse – a thing what’s got to be kept locked up.

  You think I don’t know about the bottles under your bed? Jim, you clink.

  So? What else is there, eh?

  On TV, a young couple ran through a meadow in a washing powder advert.

  There’s me, she said.

  Jim’s scars were still pink then. They flexed as he laughed a laugh that sounded like vomiting. He said, But for how long?

  What do you mean but for how long?

  Pretty soon Max’ll be moving in, then it’s curtains for me.

  Max has nothing to do with this. This is your home.

  He thinks that too, does he?

  He’s not family.

  Jim teetered on his crutch. Not yet he’s not, but one day…or if not him, someone. Then what about me? Am I going to be Jolly Uncle Jim? For fucks sake, can you imagine your kids wanting to sit on my knee?

  He staggered back when she stood up.

  They should’ve left me down that well, he said.

  Don’t say that.

  They should’ve left me with her.

  With who?

  His gaze drifted to the television. A radiant teenager was applying spot cream to a face that would never require it. He Parka-sleeved tears. Nowt, he said.

  Jim…

  Promise, he said. Promise me.

  She ignored the roiling in her stomach, that hallmark of lousy gamblers everywhere. I promise, Jim. Of course I promise.

  He lurched to the stairs and said, Tell Gary next time he doesn’t serve me, I’m putting his windows through.

  —

  ‘Ta.’

  Mrs Terry takes her drink without looking up from Behind Drawn Shades. Corina goes to the window. Across the green, people are moving furniture out of a house on Alexandria Terrace and into a dirty white van.

  ‘Godspeed,’ Corina whispers.

  And then, just like that – it comes to her.

  She spreads Gary’s newspapers on the waiting table like a croupier would cards. The back pages, the day’s race information; her fingers brush the columns of names and times, odds and form, and there it is: the 8:39pm at Stockton, 515m flat. Heart of Chrome – an A4 bitch at 30/1. Her heart thumps at the thought of the wall-safe in the back, embedded in the cupboard under the sink. The month’s takings inside, just shy a grand.

  Think of what you could do with that kind of money.

  Cor, no.

  No more dealing with housing association and council bastards. You could get Mam in somewhere nice, somewhere private.

  Listen to yourself.

  You could –

  A woman in a floral-print sundress steps into the salon, fanning herself with a polaroid. Her hair is mousy, streaked white and pineappled atop her head with the kind of thick elastic band postmen drop everywhere.

  ‘Can you fit me in?’ she asks. She’s a big woman, husky, smelling of Nivea and sweat when she hands Corina the photograph.

  Corina wrinkles her nose. ‘Are you sure? Christ, I haven’t done one of these since my apprenticeship.’

  ‘I’m sure, pet.’ The woman shakes her hair loose. ‘Sorry it’s a bit greasy.’

  The polaroid is of the woman decades younger, at a barbeque by the looks of it. She’s wearing a lurid knitted jumper and the sun lights up her Whitesnake hair-metal hairdo from behind, making it holy. Corina shows the woman to the sink chair. Unlike Mrs Terry, she closes her eyes as soon as she’s reclined. The floor judders when Corina turns on the showerhead.

  The woman chuckles. ‘You should get that seen to.’

  Her hair is greasy. Corina lathers it up and, for a while, the silence holds, but she can tell the woman’s a talker…

  ‘It’s for a play, the hair,’ the woman says.

  ‘Come again?’

  She cracks an eye. ‘We’re putting a play on at the Civic Hall. It’s set in 1992, hence the hair. Mickey said I could wear a wig, but I want immersion. Like whatjimicallim? That actor. The squinty one.’

  Corina shakes her head.

  ‘It’s called Right to Live. It’s about the first time the council tried palming the blocks off onto that housing association.’

  ‘Did you live there?’ Corina asks.

  ‘Still do. I’ve been in Palmerston thirty year now. We were actually going to perform it there, but the Rec. centre’s been condemned.’

  ‘My parents are in Asquith.’

  ‘I know, pet. You’re Nora’s lass.’

  ‘You know my Mam?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. She was still part of the group when I was just getting involved, which is going back ten, fifteen year now. I was only there a few months before she stopped coming. Everyone loved her though. How’s she keeping?’

  The Terrible Thing spilling from the soft cli
ck-click of her mother’s knitting needles had spread across most of the living room carpet, almost to the bar fire.

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘Tell her I’m asking after her.’

  Hair washed and towelled, Corina sits the actress in the cutting chair next to Mrs Terry. The necessary hairdryer-break in conversation will, she hopes, carry over into the rest of the appointment, but as soon as Corina turns off the machine the actress says, ‘I’m the lead you know. Well, co-lead. It’s me and a man a called Peter, who’s from the housing association. His character I mean, not him.’

  ‘Are you nervous?’

  ‘Pet,’ she said, ‘I’m a natural show off. But seriously, confidence comes from believing in the material. We didn’t want to tell other people’s stories anymore, especially as this year’s going to be our last. We wanted to tell our story, so we did, we wrote it. Well, Mickey – that’s Mickey who ran it with your Nora – he did most of it, but we all chipped in. It’s an important play. People need to know what that government did to the working class.’

  Corina makes one of the listening noises she’s perfected over the years and curls random sections of hair with hot irons. Controlled chaos, that’s what this style is all about.

  ‘The eight months we’ve spent putting this together have been wonderful,’ says the actress. ‘It really brought back how folks used to look out for the community.’

  Beside them, Mrs Terry spits something nasty into a tissue.

  ‘Do you want to know what it’s about?’ The actress asks.

  Corina reasons saying yes will at least keep the conversation mostly one-way.

  ‘Well,’ the actress says, ‘it’s not going to sound as good when I tell it, but I play Maureen Taylor, the heroine. Picture the scene: its 1992, and she’s been made redundant from the steelworks where she’s been a secretary for umpteen years. Her husband, done in by the dole, has drunk himself into an early grave, and a Fiesta’s just gone over her cat. All she’s got left is her little flat in Lloyd George, but it’s dropping to bits. Windows loose, boiler knackered. Damp across the walls.’

  Corina thinks of spores watching her as she strips naked in her own bathroom.