Ironopolis

by Glen James Brown

  Not long after that I found a tooth in one of the mechanics pit. Long & yellow. An animal tooth.

  & now yes, Karen, I can see how sackless I was. Only a mug wouldn’t have put it together. But by that point I’d fallen in love & people in love deserve everything they fucking well get.

  Pen running out. Will pick up later.

  11/5/1986

  When I was little, Mam used to say there were good people & bad people & she knew which was which coz she could ‘see it in them.’ As a bairn I wondered what it was she saw exactly. No lie, I started examining myself in mirrors. But what was I looking for? Maybe I didn’t have it, this goodness? Or maybe I’d lost it already? It had faded away? Fell out like milk teeth?

  Years later, when I was grown up, I went out to Dunes nightclub in Redcar with Baz Stark & his lass & her friends, & Sarah was there. Sarah. She was wearing a green dress with green shoes. Green eyeshadow. Blonde hair over one eye. A vision floating in dry ice that I asked to dance. She said yes & as we danced, I tried wrapping my head round why I was alive & so close to someone that beautiful & I knew I’d regret it forever if I didn’t try to kiss her. So I did. She held the back of my head & kissed me back!

  If my life was mountains, that would be the one with the flag in it.

  I took her out the estate one Sunday. Planned a walk down a nice bit of the Tees. Egglescliffe way. Willow trees & no scunners. We swung arms, walked slow. She was telling me a story I was only half-listening to, one her folks had scared her with when she was a lass. About a woman what lived in the water & drowned kids or something. But I was too nervous to properly listen, what with the ring in my pocket. Expensive one from Allott’s Jewellers in town, bought with Vincent’s bag money.

  In the end I made a hash of it. Stopped her mid-sentence. Got the ring the out. Blurted words.

  She looked into my eyes, then nodded. Just a nod. But I didn’t think about that at the time. Didn’t think about anything. Not about those black sports bags, or the weird smells in the pit. The occasional clumps of fur I found. Or that me & Sarah had only known each other two months. All I thought was that I had it in me after all. That goodness.

  When I told Vincent the next morning he smiled & splashed whisky in my mug. Said, Welcome to the club.

  13/5/1986

  That very same night he rang me up. Said he had a short notice job on. Right now. Needed me. I rode my bike over. Front doors chained but light coming through the planks. Went round the unlocked side door to his office, which was empty except for Vincent’s clothes folded nice & neat on his desk beside his boots. The whiskey bottle sticking out of one like a foot severed at the ankle. I followed noises onto garage floor, saying Vincent’s name like some twat in a horror film whose guts are about to go up the bricks.

  Vincent was in Y-fronts & heavy leather apron. Blacksmith apron. Hair yanked back in a ponytail. Welding goggles like insect eyes. When I was close enough to see myself in them, he grinned.

  You’ve passed your probation, he said. You’ve kept your head down, grafted. Plus I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground & you haven’t been shooting your mouth off neither. That’s good. Means it’s time you took on more responsibility.

  Why are you dressed like that?

  Haway over here, he said. I’ll show you.

  & I should’ve ran. Anybody else would’ve ran coz running wasn’t the coward’s way. What I did was the coward’s way.

  I went with him to one of the mechanic’s pits. I’d been down it earlier that day but now it seemed deeper. A greyhound was looking up at us.

  Name’s Frieda, Vincent said. Steel Cup winner a few year back. But she’s been stopped a few too many times.17

  17 ‘Stopping’ a dog involves the administration of pharmaceuticals to artificially lower a dog’s ‘grade’ – i.e. its category of competition – in order to lengthen its odds. Lengthened odds mean that once the dog is taken off the drugs and regains its true performance levels, it is highly probable to win. ‘Stopping’ is a common and highly illegal practice that will, over time, destroy an animal’s internal organs.

  Suddenly he had a tyre-iron in his fist.

  Frieda trembled & shook. Ears flat.

  No good to anyone anymore, he said. But isn’t that true for us all eventually?

  He looked at me with those eyes.

  I said I didn’t want to be involved.

  But you already are, he said. Them bags you’ve been picking up – what did you think they’re about? He held the tyre-iron out to me, said there was another apron on the hook if I didn’t fancy getting messy.

  I took the tyre-iron from Vincent & hung the apron over my head. The ladder into the pit felt twice its normal length. Frieda knew what was on the cards. She started whining. Circling & pissing. When I looked up, Vincent was there. We don’t have all night, he said. There’s six more coming in the van. Chop chop.

  All the way down that ladder I thought, this isn’t me. I’m not doing this. I can’t do this.

  Follow through with your swing, Vincent said. Demonstrated by extending arm like a fishing cast – swish. Do it right & she won’t feel a thing.

  Frieda wagged her tail. I edged forward, iron raised & stopped.

  I can take her home, I said. I’ve not got many friends so I can just take her home with me.

  Vincent’s voice low & powerful. You don’t want me coming down there.

  So I got close & hit her. Felt it go in her head. Freida folded over herself with no sound & Vincent laughed. Came round & hauled me out with one hand. In the light, there was no blood on me at all.

  Vincent’s little brown teeth. Well done, son. Well done.

  & do you know what I felt? Gratitude!

  Hanging on the wall was a long pole with a hook on the end that I’d never been able to figure out in all the time I’d worked there. Vincent swung it down into Frieda’s side. Wet crack of ribs. Hauled her up dripping with dead eyes open. The hole I’d done in her head somehow not serious-looking. Vincent crouched beside her & sliced her ear off.18

  18 English greyhounds have their I.D tattooed on the inside of the right ear. Irish dogs have I.Ds in both.

  I think I puked. Vincent dragged Frieda onto plastic sheet in corner & soon we heard an engine outside. Beech & Curley. Six more greyhounds, spinning in circles. Panting. Panicked. Spooked. Shit cloud wafting out of van’s back doors when they swung them open. Me & Vincent did them all, a pit each. Curley threw them down alive, hooked them out not. He turned the radio on & I swear down they played ‘Hounds of Love’. Beech didn’t help. He stayed in the office, boozing.

  Behind the garage was a field that Vincent said he’d won in a poker game years back, off the bloke who owns the scrapyard. I’d always wondered why Vincent had never done anything with it. But he had. Out back was a mini digger, the kind water companies use for pulling up streets to get at the pipes. Vincent got in & dug a trench. Beech & Curley watched from doorway as I pulled all seven dogs in, Frieda last. When Vincent dumped the earth back the field was a field again. The lights of the estate & blocks twinkled in the distance. How long had he been doing this? I went inside, got changed. Vincent handed me a cup of whisky & envelope with £100 in. Told me to put it towards honeymoon.

  When I turned up for work the next morning, the pits were already scrubbed & it was all just a bad dream. Vincent stuck his head out the office. Put the kettle on, sunshine, he said. Managed to get through that day by thinking of Sarah. How she’d seen the good in me & after my shift, I went to her. She always smelled so good, but that night when I breathed her in all I could smell were ears. Ears curling in a furnace.

  Karen keeps telling me the past is the past. It’s out of my hands. Only my future can be changed. That I should use that as A Jumping Off Point. But has Karen ever done something so inhumanly fucked that it stops being what you did & becomes what you are?


  15/5/1986

  To this day I don’t know why I got stopped. I wasn’t speeding. Wasn’t drunk. In films, it’s always a ‘broken taillight’ but with me it’s a mystery. Some copper sense maybe, what told him the sports bag on the passenger seat I kept glancing at was fishy. Or the way the vinyl steering wheel creaked under my white-knuckle fists after they pulled me onto hard shoulder.

  Whatever it was, when copper leaned in & said ‘What’s in the bag?’ I freaked & dropped into gear & stamped the accelerator with his head still in car. His ear came off without a sound. Blood-spray as I swerved into traffic felt nice almost. Warm. Then I was in two places at once. Metal tearing.

  Then I was gone.

  Woke up in the car pointing back the way I’d came. Broken glass & steel. Ambulances & police. Blue lights in daytime. I didn’t know where I was. In front of me, firemen were cutting a woman out of a silver car crumpled like a foil ashtray. She was young. Black hair all over her face. Mouth hanging with blood. Not moving.

  I felt wind on my face. Windscreen gone. Felt my weak tooth, the one I’d had a root canal on as a kid, banging in time with my heart. Steering wheel bent around my chest. Hard to breathe. The bag still on the passenger seat, its fake leather peeling. I wished it gone. Thought about reaching over but my arm wouldn’t work. Nowt worked. A cloud of pain forming somewhere below my head. An ear stuck to the dashboard with crusting red. A jokeshop rubber one.

  Black out.

  Came to in a hospital with coppers standing over me. You’re in deep shite, they said. An officer disfigured. The ear couldn’t be re-attached. He was getting married later that month, they said, in the Bahamas. Sunglasses weather. Plus a woman was dead. 22 years old, just passed her test, just graduated university. Whole life ahead of her, they said. Then there was the matter of that sports bag. The EPO inside. Anabolic Steroids. Phenobarbitone – that was the controlled one – What was I doing with all that? Who was that for? As they talked I willed the pain to come & take me away.

  One day I opened my eyes & Vincent was sitting in the chair. I wanted to run bare-arsed out of bed with tubes in my arms. He had a bottle of Lucozade. From Beech, he said. Sends his condolences. Hopes I’ll be back on my feet soon. Vincent’s hand crept into mine, the one with drip sticking out of my veins the same cold blue as his eyes. He said, Remember when we talked about the two kinds of loyalty? Man & beast? Remember you said you were the first kind? Well, I’m going to hold you to that coz you…

  I woke up & the chair was empty. Copper stationed at top of ward as always. Impossible for Vincent to have been there. Morphine hallucinations. But if so, how come I could still feel his hand squeezing mine? Squeezing as if to say: You remember what happens to beasts on my watch, don’t you?

  Ian. Cont.

  When I heard everything kicking off, I got on the wheelie bins and looked over your back wall. Doug running into the yard.

  Chopin crashed into the kitchen table. Lucky for Doug that he did, really.

  I was like, Get on the kennel!

  No, you missed a bit. First, he ran to the back gate but it was locked. I had the key in my pocket. Then he got on the kennel.

  So what?

  So it’s important to record the truth, no matter how inconsequential. Otherwise we’re just swapping fictions.

  Well, whatever happened, he ended up on the kennel and the dog – you might not have seen this – but the fucker got hold of Doug’s trouser leg and shredded it. Still, he managed to get up on the wall. Then he slipped. Fell right on top of me, the twat.

  Dad was screaming, You’re dead! You’re effing dead!’

  I thought he’d come through the gate.

  Like I said, the keys were in my coat. The back-gate key and the washhouse key were on the same ring. We kept the pop in the washhouse, locked, and I always forget to put it back on the hook after I’d been in. Dad hated when I did that. Where did you two go?

  Mine. I lived on the blocks, so I thought it was less likely anyone would find us. Please tell me they’ve knocked those things down?

  The blocks? No, they’re still there. They’re due to be demolished in a few months actually. They’re a bit run down now.

  Now? They were fucked even when I was there! I remember the council tried fixing them up back in the early 90s, but they didn’t have the money, so this housing association said they would. We’d have got new kitchens, new windows, the lot, but what did everyone do? Voted fucking no. Made out like it was some grand cause, but really they just liked living like that. What’s that look for?

  No, nothing…it’s just, ah, maybe it’s not that simple? Housing associations are perceived as being profit-first, but there’s this vicious circle of deprivation and depression that’s–

  Blah, blah, blah. I don’t know why you use big words when small ones do the job. It’s the misery, mate. They’re addicted to it. They wanted the audience, just like Doug did. I’m telling you. I lived there.

  I live there too.

  You’re from the estate, not the blocks.

  It’s the same place, we’re the same people. We don’t go looking for chaos and misery.

  But that’s just it – in the blocks, you didn’t have to go looking, it found you. Pre-fabs, man. The walls worked loose over time, like fucking teeth. All these sounds and smells mixing – people arguing and shagging and tellies and radios going, and some cunt’s rancid soup stink, all day, all night, forever. Sometimes I’d be having a shite, and I could swear someone was whispering in my ear. Coming out of the fucking taps. I felt like I was losing my mind.19

  19 I decided against telling Ian about the snatches of conversations I’d heard taking place in my own house ever since I was a child: the 1am comings-and-goings of people I never saw. Nor did I describe the months and years following my mother’s death; how, in my bedroom, Dad’s weeping reached me from the other end of the house, transmitted to me night after night through the walls and wires.

  Then surely you can appreciate, ah, how some lose the drive to escape a place like that?

  [Pause] There’s always a choice. Either start listening to those voices, or don’t. I didn’t. I wasn’t going to get dragged down by all that shite. Or by Doug. That’s why by the time we got back to mine, I’d made my decision. I was going to sell my collection and get the fuck out.

  Collection?

  Look at me. What do you see?

  [Pause] I don’t know what you want me to say.

  What am I wearing?

  A tracksuit top?

  Pfft. This is an Ellesse Trasimeno. Look under the table.

  Cords and trainers?

  Lois Jumbo Cords and Stan Smiths.20 So what’s that make me?

  20 His corduroys had what looked like white paint splattered on them; his trainers had holes in the toes. They reminded me of the old pairs I’d had as a child explicitly for playing in. ‘Knocking around shoes’ Mam called them.

  Sorry, I’m a little slow…

  A casual.

  Casual clothes?

  A casual. That’s the style. Back then, you either wore your brother’s hand-me-downs, or some old hippy shite, or else you were a skinhead or some other daft thing. But being a casual was about looking smart and showing respect for yourself. It was about the brands, you know? Sergio Tacchini, Fila, Ellesse.

  Lots of shops sell that, don’t they? Everyone wears that kind of thing now.

  And why’s that, eh? Because we made it popular and it got – what’s the word? – mass marketed. Anyone can get a pair of Samba now, stitched by some Indian kid on 10p a week, but back in the day it was all quality European gear. There was only a handful of shops – I’m talking three or four – what sold it.

  You had limited runs, serial numbers. Some guy walking down the street in a pair of size eight Baltics was literally the only guy in the country walking down the street in a pai
r of size eight Baltics.21 Think about that.

  21 Adidas ‘Baltic Cup’, released in the 1970s (cannot ascertain exact year). Blue suede upper with yellow leather stripes and chocolate gum sole. Streamline shape, similar to that of the Adidas ‘Spezial’, originally designed for indoor sports and, apparently, extremely rare.

  Like, it’s just copies now. Kids don’t know the history. The stuff I had, though, was pure history. My thing was Adidas trainers.

  This is all new to me. How popular was it?

  There was always a violent side, scraping at the football and shite like that. But then this acid house malarkey came along – boom, boom, boom music – and a lot of them drifted into that. Drugs and that. To be honest, I don’t know which was worse. I was only ever about the trainers, me. There was a shop in Newcastle called Kaspar Kirsch, on Jesmond Road. It was a German lad what ran it, and he got everything straight from the continent.

  Kaspar had been on at me for years to sell him my collection, and I’d always said no. But after the jumper business, and Curley, and what happened round your gaff, I was like, what’s really important here? So I decided to sell to Kaspar. I’d use the money to set me and Paula up somewhere far away. I still had his number – Kaspar’s – so I rang him up, told him I was ready, but it had to be that night. Kaspar said he’d take everything off my hands if I could get up to him. He couldn’t go anywhere because his missus had just had an operation or something. So I rang Tubby to get a lend of his van.

  Sorry, Tubby? You mentioned him earlier.

  He owned the scrap yard off the roundabout before the dual carriageway.

  I used to ride my bike past there sometimes. The big tyre walls and barbed wire? It seemed post-apocalyptic, the outpost in the radioactive desert, like something out of Sunabouza.

  I don’t know what that is.

  Oh, ah, it’s a manga.