I don’t think I can drink any more lemonade.
Yeah, well, I should probably be getting back too, before the missus wonders where I am. I’ve got a batch of pristine München45 coming in what needs the paperwork doing. They’ve been sitting in some lock-up in Dusseldorf for years. I’ll be able to retire on these if I play my cards right.
45 1970s. Originally red or blue. Cult status
OK. Well, good luck.
You know, I don’t think about Doug much now. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but life doesn’t stop, does it? So this has been good. Remembering him makes me thankful for everything I’ve got.
I’ll be in touch if I need anything else. Could I have your number?
[Ian gives me his digits46] Hey, one more thing.
46 Later, after my conversation with Paula, I tried reaching Ian on this number. It was not recognised
Yes?
About this remuneration…
Recorded telephone conversation with Kaspar Kirsch, 13th April 201647
47 Kaspar Kirsch was not in business anymore, though several online articles and ‘casual’ forums reassured me it had at least once done so. I then entered ‘Kirsch’ into an online telephone directory and returned one ‘K.Kirsch.’ The man I was after.
A thought: since beginning this document, I’ve come to realise just how much everything hinges on the name we happen to be born into. How different would this all have turned out had the names of those involved been other than what they were? If I had not been born Barr?
Hello, Kaspar? My name’s Alan Barr and I believe you used to run a shop on Jesmond Road?
I did, but I’m not in that business anymore, sorry.
I realise that, I was just wondering if you could point me in the right direction? I’m looking for a pair of Adidas Atlantis.
What?
Adidas Atlantis. Ultramarine leather with white–
They don’t exist.
…white stripes, gold sole? Only 100 pairs ever made? A friend led me to believe you once purchased a pair.
This friend is having you on, trust me.
Are you sure?
Who is this? Rudy, is that you?48
48 ???
It’s Alan Barr, sir. I was told you came into possession of a pair on New Year’s Eve, 1993. They were part of a larger collection sold to you by a man called Ian Pavel.
Who?
Ian Pavel.
[Laughs] Come on Rudy, enough of this horseshit.
[Hangs up].
THE
FINAL
LEFT
Henry Szarka of Sober Hall
Take a right, Paula Yardley had said, past reception and the day room, then make another right and follow the corridor all the way to the end. One final left, and Henry’s room was at the far end. I couldn’t miss it.
Garlands of disconsolate tinsel drooped from the ceiling panels. On the walls, separating the whiteboard staff-rotas, framed old-timey advertisements echoed across the gulf of decades: Bovril: Puts BEEF into You, Lux WON’T Shrink Woollies, Lucozade: Replaces Lost Energy – Invaluable in Sickness and in Health. The smell of boiled lunch drifted wraith-like, infused with the tang of disinfectant and, fainter still – the bass note – whatever lingering human mishap that had required disinfecting. I walked carefully so that my soles wouldn’t squeak, avoiding the joins in the sea-green linoleum flooring.
The girl behind reception was too busy to notice me. Whatever she was looking for was evidently not among the sheaves of paper she was rifling. She spat a scissor-snick curse under her breath: ‘For effs sake.’ With her head lowered, the flakes in her parting betrayed need for medicated shampoo. I left her to it, and pressed on.
Since receiving my mother’s letters a month earlier, I’d attempted in all seriousness to conceal from myself the fact that I was afraid of coming here, of seeing the man at the end of the final left. In this endeavour, of course, I’d failed, as one cannot dupe oneself, merely shame oneself in the attempt. Therefore, in preparation for today, I’d dredged my memory for Henry-shaped fragments, tried tapping into the boy I’d once been as I waited for him on the kerb with my finished library books in my armpit. But I’d failed there, too. If only I’d known then what I knew now, I could have paid more attention. Instead, there was nothing but the dashed boundary around the man, a ‘cut here’ line along a bag of oven chips.
Preoccupied as I was with such thoughts, I almost walked past the day room without giving it a glance, but at the last moment I happened to look up and promptly stopped dead. The room was full of birds of prey, a dozen at least: barn owls, kites, kestrels – I’ve leafed through my fair share of twitcher tomes – peregrines and sparrowhawks; all bob-and-weave on the arms of residents wearing heavy, medieval–looking leather gauntlets. The residents themselves were frowsy. Tatterdemalion nightwear and boil-washed undershirts, clear plastic tubes disappearing up nostrils. The birds turned their heads towards me in that eerie way birds do, their petulant tar-drop eyes glaring, and it was several moments more before the residents themselves – their senses not as serrated as the killers on their arms – followed suit.
Are you afraid of birds of prey? Paula had asked earlier while I secretly recorded her, but who, after truly considering such a question – after taking into account the blinding speed and merciless talons of such creatures – who could sincerely claim they weren’t?
The elderly lady nearest me sat in a high-backed, throne-like chair and her eyebrows were drawn on. ‘I’ve got a sparrowhawk,’ she said, ‘isn’t he handsome?’ The sparrowhawk itself eyed me with prehistoric coldness. Its perma-scowling beak sent a familiar trickle of unease down my spine.
‘Handsome, yes,’ I said.
A younger woman in the middle of the room looked over and said, ‘Please, no sudden movements. You don’t want to spook them,’ though I was unclear as to whether she was referring to the birds or the residents. She tacked her way towards me, through the clutter of chairs, past several other bird handlers wearing the same black polo shirt she was. Some of them crouched by the sides of chairs, murmuring comforting words to the residents. The birds themselves, as far as I could tell, seemed above it all.
The younger woman reached me. ‘Didn’t they tell you we were here today?’ she asked.
I shook my head. ‘Well, actually, the manager said something just now…’
She was blonde – natural, I thought – fortyish. Pretty. Embroidered in yellow thread above her left breast: KIMBERLY. She was not, I noticed, wearing a ring. ‘We come into places like this a lot,’ she said. ‘It helps them, you know? Brings them out of themselves. There’s been studies.’
I scanned the room, remembering descriptions of Henry. Paula: He’s still very popular with the other residents, the ladies especially. It must be the hair. And my mother’s letter: His hair was still ducks-arsed, but now had a touch of grey at the temples. There would be more than a touch now, but regardless, I could see no corresponding head of hair in the day room. Nothing before me but wisps, tufts, straggles, and at least one toupee.
The old woman lifted the sparrowhawk on her arm and addressed Kimberly. ‘He looks like a Gus. They mate for life, don’t they?’
Kimberly’s practised smile just about reached her eyes. ‘No, they don’t.’ She turned to me. ‘So, who’re you visiting?’
Gus glared at me. I’d only ever seen a sparrowhawk once before, when I was a child, and only then for about three seconds. The bird was stunning up close: his striped chest feathers exquisite; his irises the same cadmium-yellow as his razor-tipped feet. The same colour as Kimberly’s stitched name.
‘My Dad,’ I said. ‘But he must be in his room.’
Kimberly nodded sympathetically. ‘You should get him to participate. These birds do wonders. There’s been studies.’
‘This one’s giving m
e the eye,’ I said, meaning Gus. He didn’t look like a Gus to me.
‘I’m sure he likes you.’ Unusual parts of me tingled when she smiled at me.
‘Can he fly?’ I asked.
‘Oh aye. In the wild they’d be swooping down to feed on small mammals, but we’ve trained these ones. They’re really very docile.’
I saw myself reflected in the tranquil murder of Gus’ dilated pupil, and remembered the death I’d witnessed all those years ago at my father’s bird-table – the black lightning-bolt leaving naught but free-falling down and viscera in its wake – and I thought, Is that so?
Kimberly’s polo top was hanging out at one side. As she tucked it into her jeans, I caught a glimpse of delicate pink flesh. My surge of longing collapsed instantly into self-flagellation. You think she’s interested in YOU, limpy? Haven’t you enough to contend with today? Do you really need to add rejection to the list? Recently, I’ll admit, I’d been getting worse. What had started as the surreptitious checking of ring fingers, the glancing at of women in search of the tell-tale signs of loneliness in and around the eyes, had gradually been incorporated into a full-blown Science of Yearning which included – but was not limited to – ascertaining potential romantic compatibility with women on the bus via the contents of their shopping bags. I was becoming, in a word, strange.
So that Kimberly wouldn’t be able to read any of this madness on my face, I turned back to the day room. A line of something I’d read came back to me: These predatory birds are evil. Where had I read that? Whose words? It didn’t matter. I said goodbye to Kimberly and left the Day Room, walking with a stiff-legged gait I hoped concealed from her the worst of my limp.
My clammy palms squeaked the wooden guiderail running along both walls of the deserted corridor. Outside the windows, the day was dying; jaundiced clouds distending under their own weight, sleet splattering the panes and gathering on the sills. I walked on, each step removing me incrementally from the warmth and light of the day room, from Kimberly’s smooth unattainability. I fell into daydream: Kimberly and I at a party, the host’s breathless question: So how did the two of you meet? Kimberly smiles at me as if to say: Do you want to tell him, or shall I? Then I say: Well, I was paying a visit to an old folk’s home to see my Dad – or maybe he’s not, but that’s a different story – and there she was with a sparrowhawk. We just hit it off – I snake my arm around her waist, our hip bones clinking like champagne flutes – and the rest, as they say, is history.
When I was younger, my Grandad Ronnie would ask me if I was courting. He’d say things like, I saw you canoodling with some lass round the back of the shops, or Who you smooching this week? It made him laugh to see me squirm, and Mam would slap his arm, Knock it off! He’s going red! But in truth I didn’t mind. His playfulness implied that regardless of how late a bloomer I was, he had confidence that I would eventually align myself with the broad curve of human experience. With Dad, however, it was different. He never said a word regarding my lack of success with the opposite sex, and I detected within his silence a whole howling world of expectant consternation. Like most other boys my age, I thought a lot about girls, but I began to do so increasingly through the lens of my father’s disappointment. To even entertain the idea of, say, asking a girl to Wimpey, or to the Ritzy, was to also envisage Dad’s chagrin at then having what he’d always suspected of me confirmed when I was inevitably turned down. In the end I never asked anyone, though I became increasingly desperate to do so. It wouldn’t have mattered whether I even liked her – I’d have gone out with anyone if it meant he left me alone.
I reached the end of the corridor and turned right. Nobody was around. Laminated posters were on every door, each including the name of that room’s resident and a montage of pictures I imagined represented pastimes that person enjoyed. For example, Elizabeth Treelaw’s poster displayed stock-images of ballroom dancers, while Spitfires and Messerschmitts dogfought to the death in the cobalt-blue skies taped to Cliff Wood’s door. Cakes decorated Dorothy Volk’s door, which was open enough for me to see that her room was utterly devoid of possessions – the mattress stripped, the plastic bed rails lowered in the massing gloom. Don’t jump to conclusions, Alan. Perhaps Dorothy was in the day room with the others, affording staff the opportunity to give her place the once over? Perhaps Dorothy was the lady with the sparrowhawk I’d talked to? Sweet, happy Dorothy with the drawn-on eyebrows, who wasn’t at all cooling on a slab somewhere?
The second corridor was the same as the first. At the junction, a mop and steel bucket leaned against the wall. The bucket itself was rusted and had evidently been in use for some time. It appealed to me, the bucket. We had a plastic one at home that felt perpetually on the verge of cracking whenever I attempted to wring the mop out into it. The kitchen floor had always been my chore, a battle I’d been losing since I was head-high to the mop itself. Too many large dogs, you see, and when it rained they’d pad into the kitchen to shake out their coats. Dad never took off his boots, either. The trails he left on the lino were Arthur Murray-numbered footprints to a dance the rhythms of which would always elude me.
For a moment, I wished myself to be the mop bucket. Things would be so much easier if I were the mop bucket. I’d have but one expectation made of me – a simple task with a definitive end.
‘I’d be the greatest mop bucket the world has ever know,’ I said aloud as I turned the final left.
There was a window at the end of the corridor. Pitch dark outside, sleet on the cusp of snow proper, and as I approached I saw myself reflected in the glass. Behold Alan Barr: those horrible NHS specs, that stubby button nose. Balding from front to back…and how had I let myself get so fat? Certainly, a case could be made that my lack of exercise was due to mobility issues arising from my boyhood injuries, but that would negate the influence of a certain brand of microwavable mini-pizzas unappetisingly named Pizzips!. These delicacies came in such flavours as Texan BBQ, Pork Pileup, and Tandoori Chicken. I probably partook three to four times a week, and had done so for more years than I cared to count.
I turned from my reflected bloat. Henry’s poster was embellished with black-and-white photographs of Teddy Boys: young men in the sort of ostentatiously tight-fitting suits I associated with Victorian Mourning – all ornate lapels, cravats, and drainpipe trousers, their hair slicked into outrageous edifices. Eyes brooding through curtains of cigarette smoke. Women whirling in centrifugal dresses. Rock ‘n’ Roll-possessed greasers wrestling huge guitars, caterwauling into chromed microphones. The names of some of those singers came to me: Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent. Elvis too, of course, before the deep-fried paranoia took hold. And my mother’s favourite, Marty Wilde. I had memories of her playing his record for me – the reverential way she held the disc in its musty cardboard sleeve, which was unadorned save for a handwritten price in an old-fashioned currency I didn’t understand. The LP itself didn’t sit quite flush for the needle, which somehow complimented Wilde’s metallic yip-yelped croon. The song itself was beautiful. It wasn’t until I played it again years after her death that I realised he had been singing about suicide.
Outside Henry’s door, I braced myself and knocked.
No answer. Maybe he was sleeping? Zonked out on medication? Or, you know…
These predatory birds are evil.
I put a hand to my breast pocket, felt the letter there above the thump of my punch-bagged heart, and let myself in.
Henry Szarka sat in the chair by the window, sucking on an oxygen tank. He wore a grey velvet-cuffed drape coat over an A-Bomb-white shirt and a dude-rancher’s choker – a silver bull skull cinched by two rawhide tongs. On his feet were scarlet-suede brothel creepers, the soles at least three inches thick, and his hair…Paula had been right, his hair was magnificent. The same mercurial silver-grey as his suit, it jutted majestically out over the precipice of his forehead like a brylcreemed Hindenburg seconds before the fireball. A tu
be ran from the gauge at the top of his oxygen tank to a clear plastic mask he pressed to his face with a hand, I noticed, tattooed with the faded ghosts of swallows. He had to be almost eighty, and looked it.
Henry’s eyes flicked between me and the other door in the room, which I assumed was the bathroom. The oxygen mask fogged when he spoke. ‘Who – wheeze – you?’
‘I’m Alan.’ I was shaking. Why was I shaking? Why hadn’t I practised this? The door closed behind me.
‘No – wheeze – leave it open!’
I wedged the rubber stopper under the door. ‘Are you OK?’
‘You’ve got to – wheeze – help me.’
‘Do you want a carer?’ I reached for the emergency cord dangling near the radiator.
‘No! – wheeze – you.’ His hand rose and fell on his immaculately tailored chest. What would I do if he keeled over? I’d skimmed a first-aid manual once, but if ever there was a subject beyond the realm of books, it was CPR.
‘Henry, try to calm down. I’m Alan Barr. You were a friend of my mother’s, Jean.’
‘I don’t know – wheeze – no Jean,’ he said.
‘Jean Barr? From Loom Street? You used to lend her books?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Loom Street? I knew a – wheeze – lass from Loom Street once.’
‘Yes, well, I’m sorry to have to tell you that she passed away some years ago now. But that’s, ah, that’s by the by. The reason I’m here today is that before she died, she, ah, well, she was corresponding with someone. Actually…anyway…’ – Damn it, Alan! – ‘Anyway, those letters were recently sent to me…’ Was he even listening to me? He kept glancing nervously at the bathroom door. But I couldn’t falter now. If I did, I’d never get it out. I marshalled myself.
‘Well, Henry, to cut a long story short, her final letter appears to suggest that you…that you might perhaps be–’
‘I remember.’ Henry said in a viscous voice. ‘We’d take her up the old – wheeze – waterworks and – wheeze – oh…’
Ironopolis Page 34