Mang-what?
Like a Japanese comic. Anyway, I still remember that sign on the gate.
The Doberman with the toothpick? Go ahead, make my day? It’s the only scrap yard I’ve ever been in that didn’t actually have a dog. Tubby was shit scared of them. He kept rabbits. Did you ever go inside?
Never. It’s a building site now.
Sounds like everything’s a building site now. His office was made from random bits that’d come in over the years, and he was always adding to it. He had like five grandfather clocks and a sideboard full of boiled rat skulls, arranged by size. French windows and guttering everywhere.
Was he fat, Tubby?
Have you seen them statues in Chineses?
Buddha?
I don’t know, but he was spitting dabs of one. He probably spent as much time in the Chineses, too.22 When I got made redundant from Littlefairs, I did a bit of driving for him. Anyway, Tubby said I could have the van, so we went over to get it.
22 According to people in the Burn Estate Labour Club, Tubby died of heart disease in the early 2000s. I couldn’t locate the other people mentioned in the following section of Ian’s story.
Wouldn’t it have been better to leave Doug in the flat?
Tried. He wouldn’t stay there. He didn’t like being anywhere on his own when the toilet wasn’t taped up.
I just wanted to get the van and go, but Tubby invited us in. There were two other fuckers with him, playing cards. One was this bloke called Grimes. I knew him, he was always round Tubby’s. Do you know them warehouses where the industrial park was, just past Peelaw Bank? He owned some of them and he flogged all kinds of weird shite. Like blow up dolls and that, the perv.
I can’t remember the other bloke’s name, this horrible looking fucker with a greasy comb-over. He kept giving Doug weird looks, and all I’m thinking is, Doug don’t flip out. Then the bloke was like, I know you. You were in the nick with me.
Doug had been to prison? Because of the girl?
The girl, yeah, and for what they found in his car after the crash.
What was in his car?
Drugs with weird names. I don’t know what – like I said, this is just what he told me that same night he mentioned being engaged. He was passing out and didn’t make any sense.
Why did he have weird drugs?
He wouldn’t say and I didn’t push it.
But you were friends. You seemed to have spent so much time together and yet you never really communicated?
He was a fucking drunk! That’s what drunks do – they drink and drink and drink ’til the milk bottles start piling up outside and the windows fill with flies and the smell gets bad enough that the neighbours ring the council. And are you, son of the Great Vincent Barr, are you seriously telling me you don’t have an inkling?
[Pause] I think I’ve drank too much lemonade. Excuse me.
[Several minutes pass in which I do not urinate. Ambient pub noise. Ian remains quiet. I return].
You alright? You were in there a while.
I have a small bladder. Please continue.
I’ve forgot where I was.
Tubby’s scrapyard, a greasy comb-over.
Oh yeah, so he was like, you were in the nick. But Doug didn’t flip like I thought, he kind of went green instead. I got the keys off Tubby and got him the fuck out.
Weren’t you ever curious to know more about Doug?
Knowing people gets you nowt but grief. All I wanted was to get the trainers to Kaspar.
How many pairs did you have?
Eighty-six. Worth over ten grand easy.
Wow. That much?
[Tuts]Why not just do that for everything, eh? Boil everything down to nowt? Shoes – they’re just bits of leather you wear on your feet. Fucking, history – it’s just a load of bollocks what happened. It’s reductionist – see, I know big words too. I feel sorry for people what think like that.
I didn’t mean to upset you.
I’m not upset. It’s just ignorance, that’s all.
Then tell me what got you interested.
Why? What’s your passion, eh?
[Ambient pub noise].
Come on, what?
WWE wrestling.
[Chuckling] What, the big lads in spandex?
The big lads in spandex, yes.
How old are you, again?
I’m forty-three.
[Whistles through teeth] But it’s not real, is it?
How do we define real? The story-lines might be fiction, but the pain isn’t.
Cool your jets, man. You want to know? Fine. In Easington Colliery,23 where I grew up, my brother Richie was the fucking king. He was six year older than me and down the pits with my dad. Richie and his mates were the first casuals round Easington. They used to go to the football, the away games, and it was the Liverpool fans what started it off in the late 70s – 77, 78. They picked up the gear when they went over for the European Cup. Richie and them started taking notice and dressing like that too. This was before the strikes, mind. People still had some coin.
23 Easington Colliery. Former mining town in County Durham. In 1951, a pit explosion killed 83 men. 1,400 jobs were lost when the mine was closed in 1993.
Richie was the first casual I ever seen. One Saturday he was going through Newcastle on the lash, and he came downstairs wearing a pair of brand-spanking new Tobaccos, done up with the laces tucked in. Fucking lush. You were going on about art before, well, to me, that’s it.24 Richie looked sharp as glass in his Lois jeans and Farah top. He looked taller and stronger than everyone.
24 Adidas Tobaccos, 1978. Brushed light-brown suede uppers, chocolate leather stripes and gum sole. Shape borrowed from 1970s ‘City Series’. The 2012 re-issue featured a tan leather upper, white rubber sole and chocolate heel. Tobacco insignia on tongue. Having seen pictures of both, I think I prefer the re-issue.
I was fourteen, fifteen, and my mind was fucking blown.
That’s a nice memory.
It put me into competition. I wanted to look like that, too, but I soon found out how dear it was. It was all import, you see, and only a few people were bringing it in. That place I was telling you about in Newcastle, Kaspar Kirsch, I went with Richie once when he bought a top – a Fila Settanta I think it was – for like £25. That was serious money in them days.
I was jealous-as. I was still in school, still only had a paper round. So I saved up and saved up and finally I went through Kaspar Kirsch to get a Settanta of my own. I couldn’t wait to get back and start swanning around Easington in it…but when Richie and his mates clocked me, they took the piss. They’d stopped wearing Fila last month. That was how fast it changed.
I think I’ve had this shirt a decade.
But that’s also the buzz. It wasn’t a code you cracked once, you had to keep cracking it. No half-arsing. Richie was always a step ahead, always had one eye on the next thing, and I sharp realised I had no chance of keeping up until I had proper money. I left school and got a job in the warehouses at Littlefairs Sweets, over in Chester-Le-Street. I could start showing him who was boss then.
You didn’t want to follow your dad and brother down the pit?
[Shakes head].
Why not?
Fucking mug’s game, mate. Like, I’d see Dad and Richie after a shift, their red eyes and faces filthy. Always hacking up black shite. Fuck that.
Did he say anything, your dad?
About me not going down? Not much. Richie was his favourite anyway. The pit was this world that I wasn’t part of.
I know how that feels.
You got a brother?
I’m an only child.25 I meant about feeling like you and your father are from different worlds.
25 This happened after Mam’s death, but before the N.Y.E incident with Douglas.
I woke in the middle of the night from fogshrouded dreams to see my father’s silhouette hulking on the edge of my bed. Streetlight struggled through the curtains and, in my discombobulation, I thought my subconscious had switched gears on me, that I was simply in another layer of dream, but then the silhouette put a bottle to its lips and said ‘I know you’re awake, boy.’
I didn’t stir. Through one cracked eye, I saw him drag knuckles across his mouth. ‘I come from men,’ he slurred. ‘My dad was one of five brothers and my mam – your grandma Doris – she was the only lass of seven. When they got together, they had four sons – Curley, Eddie, Kit and me...’
Silence crashed when he stopped speaking. My scarred leg itched.
‘...So when your mam got pregnant, I knew you were a boy. I thought, here we go, the first of many. And that’s when I changed. That was when I wanted a girl.’ He rolled the bottle against his forehead. It was almost empty. ‘Because men are crude. We are, we’re supposed to be. But there’s a gentleness to a girl. Your mother’s gentleness. I wanted to see if I was capable of that.’
In the weeks leading up to this encounter, my father and I’s already-fraught relationship had taken an additional turn into strange territory. I’d long since mastered the art of staying out of his way, but whenever our paths did cross – if, say, he came into the kitchen for another bottle while I was microwaving a pizza – I now felt him watching me. This was as unusual as it was unsettling, as an unspoken rule stipulating that our respective gazes be averted when we did meet had been firmly in place for over a decade. Yet now I found myself being inspected as if I were a forged bank note held up to the light of my father’s new-found and inexplicable scrutiny. I thought, What have I done now? How could I have possibly disappointed you further?
But Dad wasn’t finished: ‘So after you were born, we started trying for a girl, but Jean wasn’t getting pregnant. Still, I wasn’t worried, like. Time we had. And anyway, I already had you, the son who was going to one day take the reins...’ He finished the bottle and sighed. ‘But then you got older and I forgot all about girls because I needed another son.’ He leaned closer, bed springs creaking, his sheer size blocking out what little light there was. His wiry beard scratched my cheek and I could smell the caustic sourness of his breath. ‘But there were no more boys either. There was just you, and...’ He didn’t finish this next. He withdrew to the edge of the bed. ‘And what does it matter now?’
He clomped downstairs. A minute later I heard a glass smash.
Sleep was impossible. I lay there and tried to understand what had happened. By degrees, the birds began their dawn chorus and daylight filtered into the room. That was when I noticed the rusty stains on my sheets where Dad had been sitting. Blood, by the look of it, and quite a lot of it.
But whose?
I wasn’t arsed. I passed my HGV and started on the lorries, started earning a decent wage. I got to go all over the country and the first thing I’d do whenever I had a few hours lay-over was check out the gear. There was Nik Naks in Soho, which was good, and Walsh’s in Liverpool. That was Mecca. It all started at Walsh’s .
Like, with the amount of away-games he went to, you’d think Richie would’ve at least once had a look in, but I guess he preferred knocking heads together in a car park. He liked a ruction, you know? All that firm shite. It got to the point where it was his gear that was old hat, and he didn’t like that one bit. But by then the strike was on.
I was twelve or thirteen. I remember watching it on telly.
Easington was a warzone. Dad and Richie went out on the pickets every day and it just dragged on and on. Then, when winter rolled round, there was no coal to heat the fucking houses. Funny, eh? People did whatever it took. Everything that could burn, burned. They sawed down trees, the fences, the allotment sheds. Even the telephone poles. I’m not joking. No fucker could afford a telephone anyway. Dad and Richie used to get up at 3am to get to the coast and rake for seacoal.26 They’d sell it door to door or swap it for food.
26 Coal fragments washed back onto the beach after being dumped out to sea along with the slag.
And you didn’t help?
Wasn’t my fight, was it? I knew what Dad was thinking – you’re not one of us. I gave Mam what she needed for the house, and he despised me for it.
Maybe he didn’t?
He did. Richie hated me too because I bought his gear off him. I offered him a fiver for his Tobaccos and he was so skint he had no choice.
Then, one day, I was over in Liverpool, in Walsh’s, and they were just sitting on the counter – Adidas Atlantis, the rarest of the rare.
They’re good?
Good? Only 100 pairs ever made. Ultramarine leather, white stripes, gold sole.27 And they were right there, in front of me. I was in love. Have you ever been in love?
27 See the final pages of this document – Recorded Telephone Conversation with Kaspar Kirsch.
I don’t know.28
28 My longest (read: only) relationship was with a woman called Jennifer. Like me, she worked part-time at the library. I was thirty, thirty-one, she a mature student doing some kind of finance course at the university. One night at the staff Christmas dinner the year I was made redundant, she had a little too much to drink and kissed me at the bus stop. I liked Jennifer well enough, but when she broke it off a few months later claiming that I was ‘stunted’, I mostly felt relieved. I never took Jennifer back to Vivienne Avenue. As far as I know, Dad never knew she existed.
This footnote bears no impact on the rest of the story. I suppose I just want to include for posterity that I was once capable of inspiring desire.
I gave Walsh a week’s pay there and then. Richie’s eyes were hanging out of his head when he saw, and if he didn’t hate me before, he did now. And, sure enough, back I come from work one night, and they were gone. I was like, Where are they Richie? And he was like, Where’s what? That was him all over, still entitled. So I was like, You’re nowt, mate. Freezing your arse off on that fucking picket – if you think that’s achieving owt, then you’re thicker than you look.
Did he give them back?
After I broke his nose he did. He went running to Dad like a bairn – big, hard Richie – so I told Dad to fuck off too. They could all fuck off, I’d had enough. There was a job going at the Middlesbrough depot, so I applied the next day.
How are things between you now?
Last I heard, Richie was in Sunderland at the Nissan factory. I think he’s got a bairn. I don’t talk to Mam much, and Dad’s dead. I didn’t even go to the funeral.
Do you miss him?
What’s it matter? He’s dead.
You’re still allowed to miss him. I miss mine.
You can still see yours.
No…I can’t. He died, too. A month ago.
So you fucking lied to me.
I thought there’d be a higher likelihood of you staying if you thought he was still a threat.
I already told you I wasn’t scared of him.
You could have, ah, left. Why didn’t you?
Because you needed my help! Because I was trying to do you a favour! You came in here with your tape, scribbling in your little book. A forty-three-year-old wrestling fan. Mate, I pitied you.
I didn’t ask you about your dad. I didn’t ask for your life story. You offered those.
Think what you want.
I’m sorry I lied to you. I hate lying, I can’t even do it properly. I start sweating and I get all, ah, tongue-tied. This whole deception has taken years of my life, but look – now neither of us need put on an act.
Who’s putting on an act? You don’t know me. Nobody knows me. I can walk anytime.
You’re free to do that. I’d like it if you didn’t, though.
[Pause]No…I said I’d help you, so I’ll help. I’m a man of my word, unlike some.
I deserved
that. And thank you.
So how did he die, your dad?
It was a heart attack. They found him in his cell. I suppose he had it coming, what with his lifestyle. What about yours?
Same as most miners – lungs. I read about your dad in the paper not long ago, about them greyhounds. They said he’d been at it for decades. I mean, did he ever say why?
He wouldn’t tell anyone anything.
Not even you?
Not even me. In a roundabout way, that’s why I’m here, to try and get answers.
So I’m not the only one with communication issues?
Touché.
I didn’t know Vincent like Doug did. I just knew of him. Bits and pieces.
But if I get enough pieces, maybe I can start putting them together.
Like a jigsaw.
I’ve never been very good at them. I just want to know who my father was. Wouldn’t you?
I always knew who my dad was.
[Pause]Do you still collect trainers?
The stuff’s all changed now. There’s still some new runs coming out, but I’m more about the Old School.
Did you sell the Atlantis’ to Kaspar too?
Had to. It was for Paula. It’s called taking control of your life, and it’s what people lacked back in Easington, and on that estate.
So you and Doug got Tubby’s van and went back to yours…
Loaded up and set off. Doug was passed out in the passenger seat, or at least I thought he was…until he jumped out of the fucking moving van.
What?
He jumped out. I thought he’d be lying in the road with his brain coming out, but he was looking up at one of them posh houses out of the estate.
Moorside.29
29 Moorside. The houses to the east of the estate, built on the site of the old waterworks and the notorious St. Esther slums. Rowan-Tree began a three-phase regeneration of the land in the late 1980s, finally completing it in 1994. In many ways, Moorside foreshadowed what lay in store for the Burn Estate a generation later. Sarah’s house was located in the first phase.
It was big. Two garages and a front garden and a whatjimicallit? A sundial. There was a party going on inside. Doug was like, this is Sarah’s house.
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