I smell her rank perfume of mould
Squint through the mist to there behold
The (something?) of her icy36
36 The ‘kiss’ to which I assume he was referring. However, he never managed to write it. The rest of the page is rumpled and torn, save for the same kind of rusty smears my father left that night on
my duvet (see FN.25).
4/11/1986
Back in Wyndham now, but signed off work on account of broken rib, broken nose, cracked tooth. Same tooth I done on Day of the Dark. Same one from crash, the day I became a murderer. A fat bluebottle’s banging itself against tiny window opening as I write. Thing inches from rest of the world & too stupid to know.
Been in hospital last 3 days. Beds lining scuffed walls, silent human-lumps in some. Far-off squeak of soles. For a second after I first woke up, it was déjà vu. It was after the accident again & somewhere above or below me Emily37 was bleeding out on an operating table. But then I was chained to bed with a screw watching & my face felt like burst sausage casing & I remembered.
37 I believe this to be the first of several references to the young woman killed in the car accident. Getting hold of the crown court records (which, given the seriousness of Doug’s charges, it surely had to have been) proved impossible. Moreover, without a surname, any hope of finding Emily in the Births, Marriages and Deaths annals – an obituary, even – was similarly doomed. Another option was to trace her through the newspapers, but as stated in FN.10 the nationals hadn’t deemed this young woman’s death newsworthy, and the local archives are incomplete.
In a last-ditch effort, I got back in touch with Sarah Overgaard to see if she had a contact address for Douglas’ mother. I was secretly fantasising that Mrs Ward was the kind of diligent mother that kept pristine news-cutting scrapbooks of her son’s case, someone who, at the very least, would know Emily’s surname.
But Frances Ward, Sarah informed me, had died years earlier. All of which means that there is a hole in this story – yet another one
– where Emily X, 22, her whole life ahead of her, should be.
Had been lying on bunk writing poem when a shadow fell over page. Looked up expecting Lester, but it was Si & friends, shutting pad door behind them. My day dreams of man-to-man with him shrivelled & exposed me as the coward I’ve always known myself to be. Real-life beatings don’t last long. Si punched me square in teeth. Fireworks, blackness.
My last thought before waking up in hospital: What’s his name?
[Irregular, yellow-brown stain on page. A fragment of silver wing adhering].
Bluebottle ran out of time.
4am: Tooth agony. Darkness. Everyone else sleeps. Just me awake. Just me alone. Jus
5/11/1986
Dentist showed me tiny x-ray plate no bigger than stick of Juicy Fruit. Saw my jaw how it really is, under the meat. Same as the ones that rolled up out of ground when I was in Vincent’s digger.
I look at part of my own skull, ghost-blue in the x-ray. We are all bones below. I know that better than most. How fragile, too. How easy to cave in. My own. Sarah’s.
Vincent’s.
3rd root canal on same tooth. The gas made me feel like cheddar under grill. Dentist told me tooth was stable for now, but for how long? Multiple root canals were a risky business. It could hold a year, 5, 20. Could go tomorrow. A ticking timebomb. His words.
Sarah. Cont.
How did he take it? Well…he just sat there, on the side of my bath. I had been going to break up with him anyway, even before the accident. I didn’t like who he’d become. He’d go into these moods. He started drinking, and whenever I asked him what the matter was, he’d snap. He was working too much for that horrible man…oh, what was his name…?
Vincent?
Vincent! that was it, Vincent. He’d ring up and I’d say to Doug, no, let it ring, but he never would. Vincent made him work all hours, right through the night sometimes. Whoever heard of a garage doing that?
Short notice jobs, perhaps?
All I know was that Doug changed. When he went to prison, he started sending me a letter a day, literally – this was before they got nasty – pages and pages of how he loved me, how we were going to be together forever. And his mother would be ringing me up at all hours in floods of tears, stewing in the guilt she felt at never visiting him. She couldn’t bear it, she said, to see her son in a place like that. She’d read me the Bible down the phone, the parts about how she’d failed as a mother, then the contradicting parts about how it was all his fault – thy son shalt not besmirch thy mother, or whatever – I’ve never read the Bible – and she’d want me to tell her what bit trumped what.
Yikes.
I felt like I was in prison. I should’ve never said yes to marrying him, but I was nineteen. I hadn’t wanted to disappoint him. I didn’t think you could say no. Do you know what? When he got sent to prison, I was relieved. What kind of person does that make me?
Probably a normal one.
[Silence].
Did you tell him any of that in the bathroom?
No.
Why?
How could it have helped either of us? Plus, by that point, my husband was threatening to call the police, so I opened the door and let him in. God, I shouldn’t laugh, but he was dressed as Morrisey, you know with the quiff? And he was waving these tulips about. Ridiculous, really.
You were green, weren’t you? Were you a zombie?
Oh yeah…my oldest, Fiona, she’d had chickenpox earlier that year and missed her School’s Halloween party. She loved The Munsters and had had her heart set on going as Eddie Munster, so when New Year came round she begged us to have a fancy dress party. I ended up being Herman because Toby’s allergic to the makeup. Actually, thinking about it, I don’t know why I couldn’t have just been the mother. How do you know about that, anyway?
I talked to the other person there with Doug that night.
Oh, him. He was pretty sheepish. Our friend kept him in the corner. When Doug came back down, they both left quietly. And that’s it, I never saw Doug again. I don’t know what else to tell you.
You’ve been more than helpful.
Actually, wait. There is something else. What’s your address?
[I tell her] Why?
I’m sending you something.
What?
You’ll see when they get to you.38
38 A week later I received a package. Seven journals (see FN.14) and a note: Doug left these to me in his will. They’ve been under the stairs for 25 years. I don’t know why I brought them with me when we moved. I’ve never opened them. They’re yours now. Sarah.
Ian. Cont.
So we went in [to Sarah’s house] and she had green makeup all over her face. She dragged him off, left me with all these dressed up dickheads. Some cunt pretending to be Winston Churchill, trying to intimidate me by saying he was in the Navy and knew Taekwondo. I was this close to kicking off, so everyone backed off. Left me to help myself to a sausage roll while the husband had a fucking eppy on the landing.
Doug looked shattered when we got back in the van. I was like, Doug, enough. I’ve got my own life, a woman what loves me. I don’t need this shite. I need to deliver these shoes. But he wouldn’t get back in the van, started necking a bottle of wine he’d somehow swiped from the party.
I hope, by now, I’ve managed to get across how much of a nightmare he was. Still, I sort of regret leaving him, because of what happened after. But if you hang around people like that long enough, it starts rubbing off on you. This doom mongering that life doesn’t mean owt.
You think our lives have some sort of cosmic order?
You don’t?
I’d like to believe.
Then believe. What’s stopping you?
Evidence to the contrary.
Listen, I’ll tell you a story. After
I took the job at the Middlesbrough depot, I got a flat on the estate. I didn’t know anyone. No mates, nowt. On weekends I might go to a Boro game, maybe, but otherwise I’d just sit around the flat. I suppose you could say I was lonely.
I know.
[Gives me a strange look] So one day I woke up and the only thought in my mind, crystal clear, even before I’d opened my eyes was today I’m going to roast a chicken. Fuck knows why, I’d never roasted a chicken in my life. All I’d been eating since I left home was beans on toast and pot noodles. I couldn’t cook. Still can’t, actually. That’s Paula’s thing. But all the same, I got on the bus to the supermarket and got a chicken, all the veg, gravy, the lot. Are you still with me?
Not entirely.
So I got back and started chopping the veg, making the stuffing and roasties, but when I went to put the chicken in, I realised I’d forgotten the fucking tinfoil. You have to cover the chicken otherwise it goes dry, doesn’t it?
Mam did the same. Her roasts were wonderful.
My mam’s too. Anyway, I couldn’t be arsed going all the way back to the supermarket, so I popped over to Fat Gary’s.
He always had stuff like that.
Good old Fat Gary. He had two rolls of foil left, remember that – two rolls. So I bought one, and for whatever reason I decided to walk back along Bathurst, past the electricity transformer. Now, I never did that because it was the long way, but for some reason that day, I did. And I was just walking past, minding my own business, when I heard a voice hey, hey over here. I couldn’t see anybody. I reckoned someone was having me on, but then the voice went in here – meaning over the wall, inside. There was the high wall, wasn’t there? With the glass on the top and the gate bit? So I looked through the gate, but still couldn’t see anyone. I was like, fuck this, but then he came out from behind the transformer, this naked bloke.
Pardon?
A naked ginger bloke from behind the thing with his hands over his cock and balls.
What was he doing?
He wanted to buy my trousers off me, but I didn’t see a wallet on him. I think he’d been crying.
Did you give him your trousers?
I chucked him the tinfoil. He kind of scuttled out like a crab to get it, then scuttled back round the thing. I could hear him ripping and scrunching, then he came out wearing this massive silver space nappy [laughs in a somewhat forced manner].
When was this?
Oh, yonks ago.
But when exactly? What year?
It would’ve been…86, 87. 1986. What’s up with your face?
Nothing. Please go on. What happened then?
He climbed over the gate and wrapped the rest of the tinfoil round his head and poked some eyeholes and a nose hole. We had this moment of, like, just looking at each other. Then he ran off. Weird, eh? Are you alright? You’re sweating again.
Sorry. I’m just thinking.
But that’s not the end of the story. I still had to roast my chicken, didn’t I? I went back to Fat Gary’s to get the last roll of foil, and I was just paying when Paula walked in. When I saw her my heart just…stopped. I’ve got a picture, if you want to see?
I’d like that.
[He takes out the wallet he’d earlier claimed to have forgotten and hands me a small, cut-to-fit photograph which is surely now much older than the woman it depicts. She has equine features, straight dark hair, green eyes. A small but prominent port-wine birthmark on her temple, shaped like a boomerang or a torn-off fingernail].
She’s beautiful.
I didn’t know I could feel like that, you know, about anyone…
[Ian gets up suddenly and leaves. I’m unsure as to whether he is going to come back. I wait, still holding the picture of Paula. The edges are so worn that they feel like linen. Ian returns ten minutes later].
Are you alright?
Me? Yeah. Just having a slash. Too much beer. Just…[Removes Paula from my fingers].
Do you still want to go on?
It was a slash, not open-heart surgery. Right, OK, so Paula needed tinfoil too, and Fat Gary, he was like, sorry, this customer – meaning me – he’s just got the last one. But I handed it over to her without a word. We pretty much got together there and then, and I never did roast that chicken.
If you don’t mind me asking, how exactly did you do that, get together? What did you say to each other? I’m not…I just struggle with the mechanics of it.
When it hits you hard like that, you don’t need to think. It was like I’d always known her. That sounds like some shite you’d hear in a film, but there you go.
It sounds really nice. I guess I’m just never able to get a concrete answer.
There is no concrete answer, that’s the point. The world had already set it in motion. Like, if whatever happened to that naked bloke hadn’t happened, then he wouldn’t have been naked. And if he hadn’t have been naked, I’d never have met Paula. You see? You have to be open to it, that’s what I’m saying. And Doug wasn’t. That’s what done him in in the end. More so than the booze, even.
What happened to that naked man must have been traumatic. Would you consider sparing him from it, if it meant that you wouldn’t have met your wife?
Not a chance.
So after Sarah’s, you parted ways?
Aye. I drove off. I was at a crossroads, metaphorically like. The estate had already got him, but it hadn’t got me, and do you know how I knew? [Pause] No, I’m asking you. Do you know how I knew?
How did you know?
Because Paula was mine.
Did you sell the shoes to Kaspar?
Every single pair, even the Atlantis. Kaspar’s eyes popped out. After, my plan was to drop the van back round Tubby’s, take Paula to a hotel in town, and then figure out where to go from there. I was nearly home – just up Crane Street, past the building site – when the bomb went off. The whole van lifted off the road. Where were you when it happened?
In bed, but not sleeping. There was a strange feeling immediately before, like when you go through a tunnel and your ears pop.
All the windows blew out on Crane Street.
My first thought was it was a natural disaster. Pompeii or something…
Gas leak, I thought. I didn’t know it was a bomb ’til I saw the telly the next day, but even then, they never said owt about anyone being killed. It was like a week after, one of his fingers was found in someone’s gutter and they got his prints off it. Then more bits started turning up. They only said it was Doug about a month later, when it was in the paper.39
39 Again, this didn’t make the national papers, but at this point what’s one more loose end to contend with? Bundy, Geordie, Ian – see FN.9, see effing-FN.579 blah blah blah. What if everyone’s having me on? What if I’m trying to reconstruct something that never was? What if I long ago lost my effing marbles?? Jesus, Alan! What are you doing???
You hadn’t wondered where he was?
It was normal for me to not see him. I keep telling you, I had my own life to lead.
I guess he wouldn’t have felt any pain.
He was in enough as it was.
So what did you do then, that night, after the explosion?
What did I do? Got the van back to Tubby, rang Paula at work and told her I was coming to get her. And that was that, we never looked back.
And she agreed? Just like that?
We loved each other. What’s more important than that?
What about her job?
What about it? She worked in an old people’s home. That’s the good thing about old people: wherever you go, there’ll always be some.
Do you ever regret leaving?
Not once.
Do you miss Doug?
[Pause] Some people are just marked. I did what I could for him, but at the end of the day, some people are just mar
ked.
Interview with Archibald ‘Geordie’ Coombes. Burn Estate Labour Club. 5th November 201540
40 My meeting with Geordie was a direct consequence of a conversation I’d had with Corina Clarke, local hairstylist and possible woman of my dreams. She told me of her worries over the troubling and bizarre aspects of her brother Jim’s disappearance. Her exact words: “Something awful’s gone on, I know it, but I’m never going to know what.” I sympathised as I, too, laboured under my own familial enigmas.
Thus, I found my thoughts returning again and again to my mother’s tiny urn, and to Doug’s N.Y.E visit. It had been Doug who spoke of the voice coming from the bottom of the well. Doug who had told me ‘Your dad’s not who you think he is.’ As soon as he’d said this, I realised that I had been thinking it my whole life. I wanted to find Doug, ask him to expand on what he’d meant. Perhaps I could even write it down, attempt to finally make sense of things?
To this end, Geordie was the first person I spoke to in the compilation of this document. I found him in the Labour Club after having no luck in coaxing Doug’s memory from any of the other patrons. He was sitting alone near the piebald dartboard, nursing a creamy half-pint of mild. Age-wise, I judged Geordie to be in his mid-seventies but he had, he informed me, just turned sixty-two.
His voice crackled-and-popped like a warped vinyl record, delivered in self-contained bursts that gave the impression, somehow, of being part of a pre-recorded monologue on which the needle was being lifted and lowered by unseen forces.
Thank you for speaking to me.
[Tilts mild slightly in my direction].
Right, ah, well, like I said, I’m trying to find a man who used to live round here. His name is, ah, was Doug. That’s all I know, really. I don’t have a second name.
I remember him. He was a lost lad.
Lost? What do you mean?
Plenty of them round here.
Did you know him well?
[Shakes head] I’d just see him about when I was out with Claudette.
Claudette?
My dog. I’d take her out at night, so we’d meet less dogs. Claudette didn’t like other dogs because she didn’t think she was one. That’s when I’d see him, Doug, out and about.
Ironopolis Page 32