Ironopolis

by Glen James Brown

  Past lights out now. Don’t know how much longer I can write. Hand is killing & torch batteries dying. Need to buy more, but canteen will take days. Already starting to tell myself her ring finger was optical illusion. Something I’ve cooked up in my hot-house head.

  Thought: what kind of man am I?

  11/8/1986

  Weather finally broke. Black clouds swallowed the sky & rain so hard the sewers backed up & swamped shower block with turds. It’s showing no sign of stopping. Thunder & silent flashes of lightning scorching backs of my eyes. Still got no batteries, so am writing this by afterimage. Mellish, though, snores through.

  Storm reminds me of the Day of the Dark.32 We were in the playground when the sky went black & the rain like a cliff moving closer, lit from the inside by forks of green lightning. The bell rang & we scrambled to get inside & in the panic I fell & smashed teeth off floor. Shovelled up by a dinner-nanny into assembly hall where we sang hymns as the roof peeled off. Mrs Mearns, our teacher, warbling “Cross Over The Road My Friend” with one fist round the crucifix at her neck. Then the lights went out & the wind screamed & the thunder shook in my cracked tooth.

  32 Typed ‘Day of the Dark Teesside’ into Google and returned the front page of the Evening Gazette from 3rd July 1968. Headline: MIDNIGHT AT MIDDAY.

  Intrigued, I then read a Gazette article written in 2010: THE GREAT DARKNESS REMEMBERED: It was over 40 years ago that The Darkness fell on Teesside. Green fork lightning, tropical rains, and hailstones bigger than golf-balls fell on the terrified people of Middlesbrough, many of whom got on their knees and prayed.

  One local recalled: I thought it was the Rapture.

  The phenomenon, according to the article, was caused by a freak collision of nature and man: two huge weather fronts – one cool from the north, one humid from the south – clashing over Teesside, scooping up heavy pollution from the iron, steel and coal industries (of which there were still significant amounts in those days), stacking swirling vortex upon swirling vortex to form a jetblack maelstrom some seven miles thick, completely blotting out the sun.

  Mam still drummed her Bible shite into me in them days. Genesis 6:17: For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die. But I didn’t want to die. There were so many things I hadn’t had a chance to do yet. Like I wanted to be a footballer. I wanted a moustache. I wanted to find my dad & ask him how come he’d left. So there, in the assembly hall, my mouth pissing blood, I said the only prayer I’ve ever meant: Please, if you let me live I’ll believe in you forever.

  So what happened? The storm eased off & the sun came out. When Mr Plant the headmaster was sure it was safe, he sent us all home early. Picking our way around fallen trees, sloshing through puddles bigger than ponds.

  Mam was chain-smoking on the front step when I got back. She took one look at me & dragged me to the dentist where I spent the rest of the day getting drilled.

  Now I find myself here, in this pad, delivered into adulthood by way of my broken promise to God, having achieved none of my youthful dreams. Not even the moustache. So no prayers this time. Bring on the flood.

  15/8/1986

  Her letters have stopped.

  I need to be alone. Need to be alone, but there is no space. Snide, edgy bastards everywhere. No end to the farts & eyeballs. All month the vulture-shadow of a question circling: that scarf. What was under that scarf? Hickies are the only answer I can come up with. Loads & loads of hickies. Proper blackberry suckmarks [scribble].33

  33 Holding the page up to the light, I managed to make out: ‘[...suckmarks] going all the way down her neck to her [–]’. I suppose Doug didn’t want to follow that thought any further.

  Sarah’s mam answers every time I call. Continental shifts, she says. Continental shifts. Nowt you can do about these Continental shifts. Her voice in my ear like an oncoming stroke. I need to get her on side. Make her understand the agony of love slipping through grasp. But always there’s some cunt behind me, waiting for the phone, tapping foot. The lad from Hexham, pink bits dangling from his cauliflower cheese burns, reeking of chip pans.

  18/8/1986

  Rang own mam today. It rang & rang & rang, but I knew she was there. She never liked answering, even when I was a kid. She’d stare at the thing like it was from Neptune, waiting for the other end to hang up. But I wouldn’t. When she finally picked up, her voice sounded like 750,000 menthol Superkings.

  What do you want?

  Good question. What did I want? I wanted her to make it all better, like mams are supposed to. As simple & as impossible as that.

  She sparked a lighter on her end. I’ll pray for you, she said.

  Not once has she visited me in here. Not once. This, a woman who goes to church every Sunday to raise money for little swollen-bellied African bairns, but who can’t find it in her fucking tar-packed heart to get on a bus & see her only child as he rots behind bars. Instead, she sends me a few quid canteen money for pens & batteries. Guilt money, like Sarah’s donkeys.

  So I say how Christian of you & hang up.

  19/8/1986

  I don’t care who she’s with. Or where she is. Or who she is. Don’t care who’s sucking on her neck coz there are parts of me she doesn’t know. I am a man.

  20/8/1986

  Heart smashed.

  21/8/1986

  2 litres of Scrumpy Jack, cold out the fridge. Condensation trembling like chipped diamond.

  22/8/1986

  Tonight, as he had a horrific, splattering shite on the bucket not five feet away from me, Mellish said Si was looking to “do me in”.

  But I’ve never done anything to him, I said. My voice sounded all floaty & small.

  He reckons you’re in with – hhnnnuuugggghhhh – someone on the outside who he isn’t a fan of.

  Vincent.

  That’s the fella. Apparently, this Vincent’s rubbed him up the wrong way a few times.

  Vincent isn’t my mate. Tell him that, will you?

  Mellish chuckled in shitty dark. I ain’t getting involved. This Si was in the Falklands from what I hear. He’s seen stuff. Exocets & that.

  I started saying again how I hated Vincent more than Si, but Mellish’s exploding guts drowned me out & anyway, is it true? Do I hate Vincent? Karen says this diary is for honesty, so that’s what I’ll do. That night when I got to walk into the Labour Club with him & everybody saw us together I felt like his [scribble for several lines]34

  34 No amount of sunlight would reveal what this had once said.

  23/8/1986

  I rang him.

  Vincent didn’t interrupt while I explained. Waited till I finished to say he hadn’t heard anything about Sarah carrying on with anyone.

  Please, I said. You know everything.

  Silence down his end.

  Speak to me! Surprised myself with that. Desperation making me brave. Or maybe it was all the concrete & steel between us.

  He sighed. Just let it go.

  Let what go? Who’s she with?

  Some lad. Dunno who.

  Some lad? What lad? What’s his name?

  Never seen him before. Think he comes from up Thornaby-way. Anyway, not from round here. That’s all I know. I’ve got better things to do.

  Find out who he is.

  Pause. Then: Look, I’m going to tell you this once more – Let. It. Go. What good’s it going to do you? The outside can twist your head when you’re inside. Trust me, I know.

  I want you to sort him for me.

  Silence again. Telephone crackle.

  Coz that’s what you do, isn’t it, sort people? I want you to take him down the pit.

  Careful, he said. Careful what you’re saying here.

  But I was ready to chew through guts.
You owe me. I kept my mouth shut too like you wanted. I’m in here coz of you.

  No, he said. You’re in there coz you’re weak.

  Then line went dead.

  25/8/1986

  Her letter came:

  Dear Doug,

  I feel horrible for doing it like this, but I don’t think things are going to work out…

  More paragraphs after that, but I can’t process. Something about how I’ll always be “special” to her. Always be her “friend”. Some shite about the right person being “out there” for me, somewhere, waiting for fate to bring us together. Her words. She’s sent the engagement ring to my mam.

  Letter ends: “Sarah.” Not even a kiss.

  No mention of a lad from Thornaby.

  I wrote back saying I know about him. Saying I still had eyes in her world. Said I hoped he gives her AIDS & that I’d be out in time to watch her die.

  28/8/1986

  Told Mellish I was going to talk to screws about Si & his meaty little mouth puckered like an arsehole. Was I barmy or summat? Nobody likes a grass, he said. Grasses got what they deserved. I had to fight my own battles. Deal with Si face to face. Man to man.

  What if I can? What if I can break him in front of everyone while he’s playing day room dominoes? Then get out & go round Vincent’s & make him beg? Make him go, Please, please – I’ll do anything, just don’t hurt me. Leave him on his knees on the hearth rug, crying in front of his wife & sackless bairn?

  Sarah will regret it then. Will regret leaving a man who handles himself like that.

  She hasn’t responded to my last letter. I send another.

  31/8/1986

  WHAT’S HIS NAME? How can she be with somebody with no name? Is it normal name like Steven or Karl? Or foreign? Pierre? What’s he look like, this Pierre? What would his skull feel like if I brought a tyre-iron down on it?

  30/9/1986

  Used to be important to keep track of time. What day it was. How many days in month etc. For sake of head. Structure important in a place like this. But not me. Not anymore.

  Still no letter. I write again. 11 pages this time. Last of notepad.

  13/10/1986

  Dragged into governor’s office. Cunt sat there flanked by coppers. One copper showed me pages in sealed plastic bag, like on telly: a letter I’d written to Sarah. Seeing it in plastic made it different somehow. Words I don’t remember writing. Bad words.

  She wasn’t pressing charges, copper said. This time. Then they took away my letter & phone privileges.

  15/10/1986

  Mellish has been shipped out! His wife’s arthritis was so bad she couldn’t make the coach trips anymore so he put in a request. Ticket back across the Pennines. Bet she’s thrilled. As a goodbye present he dropped one last shite in the bucket for me to slop out. I hope his van goes off a cliff.

  So last few nights I’ve been alone in pad. Moved onto top bunk. Finally: the peace I thought I craved, but after bang-up I still can’t sleep. Can never sleep. Will never sleep again.

  18/10/1986

  Mellish, wherever you & your rotten arse are, I take back everything I ever said about you. You are a saint next to Lester, my new padmate. Lester’s in his mid-60s with 1 green tooth sticking out of top gum that you could open beans with. Flaky glop in the folds of his neck fat & the Cunt. Never. Shuts. Up. He starts gabbing right after bang-up & keeps going till his diabetes knocks him out. He told me my fortune within 10 minutes of meeting him. He rubbed his hairy, stretch-marked gut like crystal ball & said: ‘You will meet a tall, dark stranger tonight…in the showers. Hur Hur Hur.’ Laughing like if slime from beginning of time could laugh.

  Came back from dinner tonight & he was on top bunk, thumbing through a fishing magazine. My stuff on bottom again. Air smelling of dead eggs.

  & what did I do about it?

  Guess.

  Hur Hur Hur.

  27/10/1986

  Does Pierre have wheels? Takes her out for drives at the weekend? To the beach? The moors? Does he have a tartan picnic blanket? Lowers her onto tartan picnic blanket in tall grass?

  30/10/1986

  Don’t want to admit it, but writing in this thing is all I’ve got left. When my pen is moving I can forget. But the problem is I have nobody to write to & nowt to write about. No further need to untangle past, coz future’s dead. So I record what’s around me & at the moment, what’s around me is Lester.

  I fucking despise Lester, but after bang-up there’s no getting away from him. Still, every now & again he’ll say something interesting. Like tonight.

  It’s best to shower as late as you can. It means all the hot water’s gone, but also less people. Less chance of bumping naked into someone you don’t want to bump naked into. So it was getting on to bang up when I got back to the pad & found Lester stretched out on my old bunk with the contents of my poetry folder across his disgusting guts. Cunt flapped a page at me.

  What the bleeding hell’s this? he said. Chocolate from the Marathon bar he was eating smeared all over the page.

  I was annoyed, but not as much as I made out. I know Lester noses through my stuff when I’m not there, which is why I leave the poems in the drawer where he can see them. Decoy for this journal, which goes in mattress slit.

  I told him we sometimes got photocopies in the poetry class to take away & study for imagery & rhyme & that.

  Lester wrinkled his nose. & this is considered good poetry, is it?

  The poem was the Betjeman one about the bombs.35

  35 John Betjeman’s ‘Slough’ (1937).

  You don’t like it? I said.

  Squire knows nuffink about bombs.

  & you do?

  Lester sucked his fingers clean. Too right, he said. I was in the Blitz.

  I thought of the cartoon bomb fizzling inside me.

  Let me tell you about the Blitz, he said.

  He was 15, he said, when it started. 7th September, 1940. He lived in Poplar, that’s East London, right behind West India Docks with his Mam, Dad, 4 brothers & sisters. Their neighbour was an old bloke with a shelter in his back garden, who let Lester & family join him during air-raids. While the city split apart around them, Lester would feel the perv’s bony old hand creeping up his thigh. Every night the docks got bombed. Week long firestorms that cracked your skin from a mile away. After the sugar warehouses were put out, they’d go down & chip lumps off the 6-inch layer of toffee tarmacking the ground.

  What him & his mates used to do mornings after a raid was pick through the rubble looking for treasure: prising coins out of gas metres, sifting bricks for miracle bottles of unshattered plonk. Once they’d even found snaps of someone’s missus in the all-together.

  Had to scrap a few lads for them, Lester said, his fat arse forcing the mattress through bunk slats above my head. Nice big udders on her, if I remember. Mind you, you’d swing if you were caught. People looked down on that kind of thing. You heard stories. Ghouls what tinsnipped fingers off bodies to get the rings. Stripped them naked for clothes. But that wasn’t us, Lester said. We weren’t grave robbers.

  I kept silent.

  Then, one night, Jerry hit all the houses along Ricardo Street & in the morning Lester & his shithead friends went over to see what they could find. What they found was ruins: mountains of brick & timber pocked with guttering fires. Charred fragments that had been sucked up into inferno now floating down through greasy brown dragnets of smoke. Back walls blown off houses so you could see all the different wallpapers inside. Armchair balanced over thin-air. Books lying open like shot birds. The street was deserted, seemed they’d even beat the corpse-strippers to the punch that morning. They scrambled the sloughing heaps of masonry in search of loot & that’s when they saw it. Lying in the smithereens. The bomb.

  Lester shifted on his bunk & released jazz-trumpet fart. Thing was b
igger than I was, he said. Massive. So guess what we did?

  What they did was start bouncing bricks off it, coz they thought it was a dud. Then the police came & whistles blew & they scarpered & soon the whole place was closed off. What was left of the neighbourhood gathered to gawk.

  Would’ve thought people would’ve been sick to the back teeth of bombs, Lester said.

  Lester & Co. hid in the crowd as the bomb squad went down into the crater & then KABOOM! A red mushroom cloud raining bricks. Some poor fucker next to him laid out cold.

  We didn’t know at the time, Lester said, but there’s no such thing as a dud bomb. Only dud timers. All it took was a knock to start them up again & there was us, lobbing bricks off it. Mugs.

  When the dust cleared nothing was left. The crater itself now a crater. The bomb disposal men a pink mist drifting over Isle of Dogs.

  In the dark, his voice thick with sleep & diabetes, Lester said: I mean, that was just one bomb…& we were dropping tens of thousands of ’em on each other every day. That’s when I realised there was no surviving this war, that I was just waiting to die. Waiting for the bomb with my name on it to whistle through the flack & spotlights & end me.

  It did something to me, he said. I stopped caring. Maybe it’s the reason I did all the things I later done.

  I wanted to say he did those things coz he’s a fat, evil cunt. But I didn’t & besides, he was already snoring.

  2/11/1986

  Did this in poetry class tonight. Needs work. Used “mist” twice in 2nd bit & can’t think of a word in the kiss line.

  Reoccurring Nightmare

  Beyond the reeds & willow trees

  Past the river’s watery sound

  The Tees that here is not the Tees

  (Where she’d once seen the good in me)

  His field & what’s buried in the ground

  The fog rolls over all my crimes

  Them rotting horrors make no sound

  Jaws & Claws & Skulls & Spines

  Waiting, waiting to be found.

  My naked body knows this cold

  & that she’s out there in the mist