Ironopolis

by Glen James Brown

  Sometimes, to win big you need to bet big. My employee’s wages are in the safe and I try to resist, you know, I try keeping my head down, but some days there’s literally no customers and I spend hours mooning out the window. And that’s the dangerous bit, that’s when your worldview gets bent. Gambling becomes part of something more elaborate, doesn’t it? You had to have lost all those times, to pay your dues. It was vital you gambled the mortgage repayment and covered it with that secret credit card, otherwise you weren’t worthy of The Big Win. Even with what B’d told me about how common race fixing was, this was how I was still able to give myself the edge in my head. There is no luck, that’s what B liked to say. And maybe he meant it one way, but I took it another because to me, all that shady stuff was the insignificant work of mere humans, while my wins and losses were something more…I can’t think of the right word…

  In the dusty church hall, nobody offered pertinent vocabulary.

  I’m sure you can guess what I did next. It’s weird, isn’t it? It’s like you’re watching yourself going into the bookies and filling out the slip. You’re totally invested yet totally detached at the same time. Two yous – and in the space between, that’s where the bet gets made. It’s only after you hand the money over that they smash back together and the doubts flood in – What’ll I tell my employee? What’ll I tell B? What if this is the fuck up that lets Max find out?

  So I go home. Max is due back from his shift, but Annabelle’s still home alone. I run a bath. I just need time to get myself together. I find that the hardest part of addiction isn’t dealing with the fallout of your actions, it’s maintaining a semblance of normalcy the rest of the time. Just, like, eating a meal with your family, or having a conversation with your partner, or helping your daughter with her times-tables. Being present, you know? The constant stress of bring present.

  I have a soak, and when I come out there’s a wet patch at the bottom of the stairs and my bag is turned inside out on the hall radiator, and it’s empty.

  I’m like, Annabelle, what’s happened?

  Christ, she looks panicked. She says the dehumidifier beeped, so she’d tried emptying it herself – one less job for me, like – only as she was carrying it down, she stumbled on the last step and spilled the whole thing into my bag. She took everything out and put it on the radiators to dry. Naturally, I freak out. Has she seen the betting slip? Does she even understand what it is?

  Then Max comes home. I’m like, Where is it?

  And she’s like, Where’s what?

  A little square of paper with writing on it. Which radiator?

  She’s like, Mammy, I don’t know. And why would she? There’s so much crap in my bag – business letters, all kinds of crap. I grab Annabelle…I grab her wrists and she…she yelps…then I go into the living room just as Max’s coming through the other door. I can see the slip on the radiator, a foot away from him. The pen’s run but it’s still readable. My secret self, there in the open. All he has to do is look down, and if he had, maybe things would’ve gone different. But he’s knackered, as usual. He goes upstairs and I stuff the slip in my dressing gown.

  Annabelle was so sorry, she was only trying to help. But I’m livid, and not because the slip’s ruined – bookies have a policy for that – but because if I’m exposed, gambling would’ve got a lot harder.

  Anyway, long story short, the dogs came in and my employee got paid, and B eased off a bit. Annabelle had trouble holding her pen at school the next day because she’d sprained her wrist – I’d sprained her wrist – and when Max asked her about it, she was like, I think I did it playing hockey…So maybe you’re wondering how I can live with the guilt? It’s…I’m sorry…

  Take your time, said Bev. Take your time.

  …Thanks. I’m OK…But here’s the thing about guilt. When you’re gambling, guilt doesn’t factor. The streak is all that matters – either breaking a losing one, or keeping a winning one going. Winning becomes this eighteen-wheeler with fucked breaks going down a hill, gathering speed, and you’ll jeopardise everything before you jeopardise that. So yeah, maybe what you’ve done is bad enough for you to knock it on the head for a bit – like I did – but it never truly goes away. It always comes back worse. Which it did. Much worse.

  Bev put her hand on Corina’s knee.

  Annabelle’s grown up now and we haven’t spoken for a long time. She has a daughter of her own who I’ve never met. My husband left, too…he wants a divorce and is trying to get me to sell the house, but I’m dragging my feet because I don’t want it all to be over. This is why I’m here today, for them. If I can admit I have a problem maybe I can win them back… (but she doesn’t mention how, of late, the old feeling had returned. Like being chained to a cement block dumped into a canal, the sinking sensation was on her before she even opened her eyes in the mornings).

  Maybe, for the first time, I can win without leaving it to chance.

  —

  ‘I’ve got things in my walls,’ Meredith says, eyes closed.

  ‘Things?’ Corina says.

  ‘Mice. Rats. They scrabble around at night.’

  ‘Have you set traps?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to hurt them, it’s not their fault. The empty houses attract them.’

  From Behind Drawn Shades, Mrs Terry says, ‘Vermin is vermin. You can’t be soft. They got into my brother’s wife’s kitchen once and carried off her gammon.’

  Meredith opens one eye. ‘Her gammon?’

  ‘Her gammon,’ Mrs Terry replies, ominously.

  Meredith looks up at Corina. ‘I saw Gail Barnett last week. She’s been offered some lovely sheltered accommodation in Thornaby.’

  ‘Lucky her,’ Corina says, handing Meredith a towel.

  ‘So I asked them why I couldn’t be in Thornaby. I said, I’m sure I’ve been on the list longer than Gail Barnett, but they said they couldn’t discuss individual cases. I said, but I’m seventy-three and I’ve got things in my walls. One of these days they’ll find me dead in my chair.’

  ‘Meredith,’ Corina says.

  ‘I always thought I’d end my days here,’ Meredith says. ‘I remember even after David and I were married, we still couldn’t get on the list because we didn’t have children. That was the rule. We had to live with his mother, and I can say this now because they’ve both passed, but she was a bitter, bitter woman. I think I prefer living with mice than I did her.’

  Hair damp against her head, Meredith looks even tinier. A preserved peat-bog woman. Corina helps her into the chair.

  Meredith says, ‘But even once I was in the family way, Rosanna was almost born before they gave us a house. That’s how prestigious they were.’

  ‘I got my two-bedroom place no questions asked,’ Corina says.

  ‘Oh, but they were lovely when they were first built. All round here, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. The council even had leaflets on how to cut your grass and scrub your doorstep. You needed written permission to put up a picture hook! It was a month before David could hang his auntie Florence over the wireless…’

  As Corina rolls and pins Meredith’s long hair, she tries to imagine the estate like this – rows of brand new houses gleaming beneath a Cold War sun, the gardens shimmering with Cabbage Whites and Red Admirals. But she can’t. It feels flimsy, two-dimensional, like the family on the Rowan-Tree billboards. Her own house is draughty and damp, the brickwork seamed with mother-of-pearl slug trails and a raw-boned cold pulsing off the solid cement floors. Yet when she’d first moved in – her own home! – such things had seemed inconsequential in the face of the sheer silence greeting her each time she turned the key in the lock. It was a silence she thought would also do Jim some good, though Mam protested at first. Corina argued that a new environment – even if it was just the estate – might help him out of himself. But Jim kept sinking. She would come home slack-jawed from colleg
e, or In-Val-Uable, or her weekend checkout job, and put her head round his door to see him passed out with an empty bottle, twitching in dreams. Lips moving. Shattered hand caressing something she herself could not see.

  Meredith is still talking. ‘People were respectable. You left your door open and folk’d pop their heads in. Everyone knew everyone, not like now. Now new folk move in and six months later they’re gone.’ Meredith looks at herself in the mirror. ‘How things change.’ She turns to Mrs Terry. ‘Folk were nicer back then, don’t you think?’

  Mrs Terry makes a show of finishing her sentence before studying Meredith thoughtfully. ‘How’s your memory?’

  ‘A few holes,’ Meredith says, ‘but sound enough. Why?’

  ‘So I take it you’ll recall the events of the second of July, 1968? Around midday?’

  Meredith looks troubled. ‘Should I?’

  ‘Aye, you should. Second of July, 1968 – the Day of the Dark.’ She looks at Corina. ‘You mightn’t have been born.’

  ‘I’ve never even heard of it.’

  ‘No, I remember now,’ Meredith says. ‘I was visiting my auntie in Cromer that week, but my mam kept the Gazette for me.’

  ‘It was in the paper?’ Corina says.

  ‘Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and can’t move?’ Mrs Terry says. ‘You’re paralysed, and you know something’s coming up the stairs, getting closer? Well it was like that, this feeling creeping over the estate. It started mid-morning. First the sky went green, then black. Dogs howling, all the birds taking off at once – huge, black balls of birds. Colin was on shift, so I was in on my own. I told myself, don’t be daft, lass, don’t be daft. It’s just some bad weather, just a thunderstorm, only it kept getting darker and darker. I felt like I was being buried alive.’ Mrs Terry massages her tortured hands and neither Meredith nor Corina speak. ‘But then the rain started and the lightning blew the lights, and I knew it wasn’t no ordinary storm.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Meredith whispers.

  ‘I went to the upstairs window and it was like midnight outside. Darker even, because there were no streetlights. I looked up the street and in the lightning flashes I saw a river rushing. Bikes, sheds, bins, all sorts being swept away. The hailstones were big enough to crack the roof slate.’

  ‘Why the hell have I never heard about this?’ Corina says.

  Mrs Terry plucks at the hairs on her chin. ‘Folk don’t like to remember what they don’t like to remember.’ She coughs into a hanky and continues. ‘Nathan Deacon was our next-door neighbour. He was a quiet lad, with a young wife and bairn – a boy, I forget his name – no more than four or five at the time. Nathan was out in the storm, on his knees, in his front garden. I banged on the window but the wind was too loud, so I pulled the bedding over me and went out. I was young then, light on my feet, but the hail still nearly flattened me. Nathan was in some kind of trance and when I slung a blanket over him, I realised he was praying. The sixth seal’s broken, that’s what he was saying. The sixth seal’s broken – something, something, blood. Oh, and I should mention he was only wearing his briefs.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Meredith says.

  ‘I got him into his house and lit a candle – folk still had candles in them days – and he looked like he’d gone ten rounds with Jack Bodell. Welts all over him, his eyes closing up, gore all down his face. I’m not sure he knew where he was.’

  Corina thinks of Max, what those men did to him; his blood, his eyelids fluttering. The rose petal stuck to his cheek.

  Mrs Terry says, ‘He thought it was the apocalypse, and he wanted to get square before it was too late. That’s when he told me how, when he was a lad, he used to take his little brother down to the coal shed and rape him.’

  Corina gasps.

  ‘And how, when the bairn got TB and died, he’d been relieved.’ Mrs Terry reclines in her chair. ‘So I left him there, in the dark. I went home and locked the door and waited for whatever was next. I’m not religious, but I’ll admit I said a prayer.’ She shakes her head at herself. ‘Then the storm let up, the hail stopped, and the clouds went away. Half an hour later it was like nowt had happened.’

  ‘What caused it?’

  ‘The storm? I’m not going to sit here and say it was owt but bad weather, but I’d be lying if Nathan’s Biblical business hadn’t crossed my mind.’

  ‘And Nathan? What did you do about him?’

  ‘Took him off the Christmas card list for starters. Aside from that…I’d seen what the dark had done to him. That was enough. Besides, they moved away not long after.’ Mrs Terry looks at Meredith. ‘So in answer to your question as to whether folk were nicer back then, I learned it takes the end of the world to see inside another.’

  The radio plays a jingle for pet insurance. Mrs Terry picks up her book.

  ‘Cromer was lovely,’ Meredith says. ‘The crabs were delicious.’

  Hair rolled, pinned, and netted, Corina puts Meredith under a brainsucker before slipping into the back to ring the bookies. Heart of Chrome’s odds haven’t changed, but all it takes is a handful of inordinate bets for the system to flag a dog, slash odds. How long can she hedge this?

  The phone rings as soon as she hangs up. The line is awful. ‘Hi? Hello? Hello? Are you there?’

  ‘I’m here!’ Corina shouts.

  ‘Oh, good. Can you fit me in today?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, yes. Yes I can. When are you coming in?’

  ‘In about fift–.’

  ‘Fifteen minutes? That’s fine. What’s your nam–’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes. What’s your name?’

  ‘That’s won–’ the line goes dead.

  In the salon, Mrs Terry is almost half way through Behind Drawn Shades. Meredith sits serenely under her brainsucker, hands folded in her lap, bandaged foot jutting like some monstrous cartoon golf club. The sun begins its slow slide. Corina wanders over to the desk and turns the pages of her appointment book. Her first client of the year, she reads, had been Mrs Minto, another former regular. Between Mrs Minto’s name and Meredith’s, the pages are mostly blank.

  The phone rings.

  ‘Busy today,’ Meredith says.

  ‘It’s probably that woman again. Good afternoon. Hair by Corina, Corina sp-’

  It isn’t the woman. ‘Not answering your phone these days?’

  A feeling like falling.

  ‘I said you’re not answering –’

  ‘It’s in the house.’

  He eats as he talks. ‘Some bitch picked up before. Haway, ask me how I’ve been.’

  ‘How’ve you been, Beech?’

  He chuckles. ‘Keeping my pecker up.’

  ‘Did I ring you last night?’

  ‘I can’t remember the last time you rung me, and it cuts me up. Did you get my message?’

  ‘…Aye.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Don’t fuck around. You know and what?’

  ‘OK, then. No.’

  A pause on his end. Noises, voices in the background – a pub probably. ‘You do understand what this is? This is gilded. This is from Martha, to me, to you. No bollocks.’

  She looks up. Mrs Terry is a split-second too slow in going back to her book. Corina goes into the back and takes Beech on the phone there. ‘You think you can ring me up after what those men did to Max?’

  Beech swallows whatever he’s chewing. ‘Listen, they worked for Martha, not me. Selling on debts is pretty standard practice, it’s how you stay liquid. You–’

  ‘But I–’

  ‘You owed me money – quite a lot of money – and I could’ve been a cunt about it, could’ve got nasty, but did I? I gave you all the time in the world, but I’ve got my own shite on the go n’al
l.’ His voice so close in her ear she can almost smell him. The thin cigars, the empty junk food wrappers in the footwell of his Vauxhall.

  ‘So why now? Why Heart of Chrome?’ she said.

  ‘Because we’re mates.’

  ‘We were never mates.’

  ‘Haway, this is my way of saying sorry. This is a whatsit? An olive branch.’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘I know you haven’t forgotten what it’s like,’ he says. ‘Waiting for them traps to open. The rush of it.’

  She cups the receiver so hopefully neither Meredith nor Mrs Terry can earwig. ‘That’s why you did it, isn’t it? Because I wouldn’t sleep with you? You tried it on, I shot you down, so you let me get as deep as I did. I lost everything because of you.’

  ‘Pet, you did that all by yourself. Think about tonight, eh? This dog’s a real rocket.’

  ‘I’m with a customer.’

  ‘I’ll ring again in a bit,’ he says and hangs up.

  In the salon, Meredith and Mrs Terry are watching her.

  ‘Hold the fort,’ she says weakly, and leaves before either woman can respond.

  The newsagent is deserted.

  ‘Gary?’

  No answer.

  ‘Are you in the back?’

  He’s probably nipped upstairs to check on Suzy. He does that. She works her way between the shelves to where the paracetamol ought to be, but there isn’t any. In fact, looking around, there isn’t much of anything. Behind the counter, a beaded curtain separates the shop from the storeroom and the steep flight of stairs leading up to Gary’s flat. Is that a radio coming from up there? According to Gary, Suzy prefers Radio 4 in the daytime and Smooth FM at nights.