Ironopolis

by Glen James Brown

  Finally. Something that made sense.

  Yet sense is not necessarily synonymous with peace. My entire life, I’d been the gritty chaff to my father’s magnificent wheat, but now that the bonds of blood were apparently rescinded, was I now at liberty to simply forget? Was it really that simple? Our relationship had forever glinted with the dark, contra logic of an Escher staircase: me, climbing endlessly in his wake, never wanting to be like him, yet agonised that I could not. While Dad…well, who knows what he really thought of me? So, to hop suddenly off that Sisyphean cycle seemed a gross over-simplification, paradoxically requiring a strength I knew I didn’t have by dint of being trapped in the cycle in the first place. And even if I were to somehow manage it, to who would I then turn? Henry? If Henry’s involvement in those missing children were true, did I really want to attribute my anomalies to him?

  The woman with the Pizzips! got off at the next stop. As she reached the stairs, she looked right at me. Seared with shame, I dropped my gaze. In fading black marker on the back of the seat in front of me, someone had written:

  SCOTT ♥ BETH 4 EVA.

  An empty pop can rolled about under the seats as we barrelled down the dual carriageway. I was the only person left on the top deck, and I could sense the estate and blocks ahead, in the dark, impending. We turned off at the usual place, down a gentle incline to the outskirts of the estate, and I wiped a gloved hand across the glass to see better the black bulks of derelict houses, the fenced-off building sites. Sounds like everything’s a building site now, Ian had said, and I couldn’t disagree. Drills and hammers now permeated my every waking moment. The very air rang with collapse. Maybe that was the root of my current malaise? Pop-psychologists could make something of it, probably.

  The bus passed some Rowan-Tree hoardings: IT’S WHERE YOUR HEART IS. I’d never felt that way about my home. Granted, everywhere I looked there were memories, but that was hardly the same thing, was it? Where was my heart? Not inside me, I knew that much. What beat there was its ghost. At the danger of sounding melodramatic, I sometimes felt that the real organ resided in a place I’d once glimpsed in a dream. Somewhere out in the fog…

  We moved deeper into the estate and the houses began to show signs of life. Sad-looking Christmas lights glowed in windows of Sommers Road, at the end of which we would turn left onto Hollis Road, then onto the Crescent, towards my house. This left was so ingrained in me that my internal gyroscope took several moments to register we had in fact turned right. I struggled down the bottom deck. Except for me, the bus was entirely empty. I swung ape-like from a handrail and asked the driver to explain himself.

  ‘The water main burst about an hour ago, and the whole of Hollis Road’s flooded,’ he said. ‘So we’re taking the scenic route.’

  I crashed into a seat and peered out of the window. We appeared to be making a clockwise circuit of the estate, and soon the shabby Burn Estate terraces fell away to be replaced by the modern semi-detached homes of Moorside – double garages, pale festive lights twinkling tastefully in front-garden conifers; beautiful, spacious homes that had been built over the old waterworks, scene of my life’s deepest terror and humiliation.

  Do you remember that night, Peg? It was the first time we spoke.

  After Frank Hulme and his friend left me at the well, after night fell like a vat of tar, and the blood pumping from me went stony cold, I cried. This was it, death…yet the knowledge was entirely without epiphany. No life flashed before my eyes, no tentacle of calming white light telescoped towards me from the next realm. Instead, as I curled into a snivelling ball, my mind reacted to the shock by firing off on bizarre tangents. I imagined myself shrinking in size until the earth dry-pressed me into a sedimentary layer, so that millions of years in the future my final death throes would be fossilised like those of the dinosaurs, and just as academic to whoever exhumed them. My thoughts drifted further into the abstract, slipping into what felt like dream, and I let them slip, still aware – just – of the consequences of doing so. But then your voice cut across the grain of my consciousness.

  Boy.

  I opened my eyes, unsure as to whether the voice hadn’t in some way been my own. I listened. The knotweed whispered around me.

  Smell. You. A female voice unlike any female I’d ever heard.

  I didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

  Smell. Your. Blood.

  Struggling upright, trembling, mewling, snot dangling from my chin, I said, ‘Who’s there? Where are you?’

  Down. Here.

  With sheeting horror, I realised that you meant down the well. My bladder betrayed me and fresh, shameful warmth spread over my crotch. The urine sang in my gashed thigh as I began dragging myself away from the hole.

  Stay.

  ‘Go away!’ Maybe I was dead already? Maybe Heaven and Hell weren’t metaphors after all, and my suspicions of them being such had earmarked me for the latter? Keeping my wounded leg stiffly out in front, I wobbled to my feet like a punch-drunk fighter several rounds beyond his threshold. To my left, the waterworks and the water tower – dark and portentous – reached into the night.

  Where. I. Be?

  ‘You’re in England,’ I said. ‘Teesside. You’re…you’re down a well.’

  River?

  ‘I don’t know. North somewhere.’

  Show. Me.

  ‘I can’t…go yourself.’

  RIVER. GONE.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  LOST. I. BE.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered.

  AFRAID.

  I took a step back.

  COME. DOWN. HERE.

  I felt your words in my head and wanted nothing else but to step into that black hole and let everything resolve itself. But then I thought about Mam. I couldn’t do that to her. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m going.’

  Boy.

  Each lurching step I took towards the knotweed was agony.

  I. See. You. Again.

  ‘So sorry!’

  The last thing I heard you say: HELP. ME.

  Only fragments of recollection after that: stumbling through the knotweed, falling, cutting my palms on broken glass, everything going the wrong way down the plughole. Then I was under streetlights with vomit down my front, barely able to hold myself upright. Finally, I remember being on hands and knees, pawing weakly at the same blood-red front door I still live behind all these years later. A door which opened and basked me in warmth. My father’s boots so close to my face I could smell the dubbing he rubbed daily into them. His voice above me and all encompassing, like that of God’s on the First Day, giving light to His creation.

  One word and one word only: son.

  Daft, I know, but more than a year had passed since Ludwig’s death and I still half-expected him to greet me at the door. But there was nothing but silence, darkness. Snow followed me inside. I tugged my bobble hat off gingerly, mindful of Ranjit’s handiwork, and watched the snowflakes melt into the wool. I went further into the house, flicking on lights. In the backroom, I peeled off my gloves and shucked my coat. Removed my boots the way children do, by standing on a heel and wriggling the other loose.

  My books, papers, and pens were everywhere. The coffee table, once the domain of my father’s newspapers and ashtrays, his ale bottles and television remotes, was now where I did my work, such as it was. The dozens of holes Dad had drilled into the walls remained. I’d thought about filling them in, but wasn’t sure how. I could still see the shield-shape outlined in nicotine, where Ludwig had been mounted until I’d taken him down and buried him in the allotment.

  Here is what I don’t understand: how could Dad, a man who – however misguidedly – had gone to such surreal lengths in order to preserve the memories of his beloved dogs, who planted a different species of rose on each of their graves, how could the same man have presided over a secret anima
l killing-field not five miles down the road from their bones? What superhuman feat of compartmentalisation permits such a scenario? That image in Doug’s journals, of my father in underwear and welding goggles, descending into a mechanics’ pit, it haunts me; as do the pictures the prosecution showed in court during his trial. The remains of greyhounds exhumed from the field by Rowan-Tree did not remotely resemble once-living creatures (and in the dock, Dad stared serenely into middle distance).

  But then I think, are we not all thus conflicted? Exhibit A: the cuajada. Earlier, I left something out. I fudged the story, used the heat of my shame to make events just malleable enough to distort. You see, in Corina’s salon, right at the crucial moment, when her exquisitely tired eyes met mine, my mouth fat with my practised words and my heart coursing with angst, I had deliberately wrenched the lid off that tub. What happened inside my cagoule was no accident – it was sabotage.

  Meaning even this late in the game, I’m still finding ways of keeping myself here, in this house, on Vivienne Avenue.

  I called the number from the old, tattered remains of the Lily Butler poster I’d torn off the alley wall on the way home. A man with a flat, serious voice answered on the third ring and listened to everything I had to say. At intervals, he made notes or asked questions. He got me to spell Henry’s last name. He’d be in touch, he said, before hanging up.

  I stooped at the hearth to check the fire. Not an ember in the grate and no logs in the basket. I’d have to get more from the washhouse. When I straightened up (issuing an Old Man ooff as I did so), I came face to face with Mam’s urn on the mantelpiece, my speccy, elephantine head mooning back at me in the minute brass plaque screwed into its base. Her full name: JEAN PENELOPE ANNE BARR. I’ve never taken succour in her ashes; I dislike being so close to her in such an altered state. The urn itself was the size and shape of an egg cup and represented all of her Dad had been able to salvage from the rug after Doug’s catastrophic New Year visit. That night had been important for me. Trying to uncover what had driven Doug to visit was where everything started, the guiding thread I’d wrap around my thumb as I stumbled into the labyrinth of my own history. But I failed. Unlike Theseus, somewhere along the line my thread snapped and I found myself alone in the dark with the Minotaur.

  Next to the urn was a picture of my parents. It was taken in the late 1960s, before I was born; Dad still firmly in the rape-and-pillage of his Blackbeard Years, one sequoia-trunk arm casually yoking my mother, who, hair in an elaborate blonde beehive, gazed demurely into the camera. Over the years I must have clocked up hours studying this picture, scrutinising it for some encoded clue to their ensuing future, some ley-line thrum of my own eventuality in its emotional composition, but found nothing. As far as I could see, they were just young and happy. Maybe sometimes that’s all that’s required.

  The washhouse keys were in my pocket, as usual. I snagged the torch from under the kitchen sink and unlocked the back door. Snow up to my ankles lay like primed canvas over the yard, and my boots crumped gorgeously as only boots in fresh snow can. The kennels stood empty against the back wall. After Ludwig, Dad had briefly got another dog – Amadeus – a gangling, shaggy monster sprung direct from the pages of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Amadeus’ eyes had leaked a continuous stream of brown pus and, once Dad was imprisoned, I gave the creature to a shelter.

  I unlocked the washhouse and scooped up an armful of logs, doing my best not to think about spiders. I walked back to the house in my existing footprints and began building a new fire on the ashes of the old one. There was only a handful of kindling in the pile and, looking around for something to burn, I saw on the coffee table beside my laptop and notebooks, stained with tea rings and Pizzip! sauce, The Document. The one I’d provisionally entitled UXO.

  I’d started it some months earlier because, as I’ve said, I’d been convinced that Doug was my way in. Like Corina with her brother Jim’s disappearance, I could almost see the obsidian threads tying it all together, thought the more people I talked to about that New Year’s Eve, the more confused and contradictory things became. In fact, I’d been on the verge of throwing in the towel when Mam’s letters arrived.

  Reading them that first time, I felt so juiced I could taste pennies. So many new threads! Strong threads! Henry to my mother, my mother to the Great Una Cruickshank, and more – Stephan Santerre, I realised, had been the author of the article that first introduced me to Una. Online digging revealed that Una’s life’s work had been discovered by the property redevelopment company Luxe, the managing director of which was one Yohan Santerre, younger frère of Stephan, the influential collector, curator, and head of art-dealership Ananke Acquisitions, the man who’d championed and exhibited Una’s work, and for whose correspondence with my Mam I’d acted as middle man.

  Stephan died a few scant weeks before Dad. According to the obituary, he was survived by his wife and son, Aiden Santerre – ‘Armitage Shanks’ in some rags – who had, in 1989, been fined heavily in relation to the rave at the old waterworks. Was this, then, how my mother’s letters had found their way back to me? Had Shanks been going through his deceased father’s papers in much the same way as I’d be going through mine, stumbled upon Mam’s correspondence and, having ground his axe all these years, posted them to Dad in revenge, unaware that he, too, had recently joined the choir invisible? I can only speculate.I decided to locate Stephan’s original letters to Mam. They had to be in the house somewhere. I started my hunt in the loft. My search was long and spidery, and ultimately a failure in that I didn’t find his letters.

  I did, however, find something else.

  It was in the deepest, darkest recesses of the double loft, at the bottom of a cardboard box that had once contained McADAM’S HEARTY IRISH-STYLE STEW. At first glance there was nothing special. Business ledgers mostly, packed with columns of numbers in Dad’s rune-like hand, but also solicitor letters detailing his lost battle with Rowan-Tree over ownership of the field behind his garage. Below those, however, I found a small burgundy photo album filled with pictures of Mam as a girl. I’d never seen them before: there she was at maybe five years old, sat on her nana’s knee, Mam and Aunty Agnes on the swings, Mam in her uniform on her first day of grammar school, Mam in a crimplene dress, blowing bubbles into her limeade through a straw. At the back of the album was a single loose photograph tucked into the pages. Mam with another girl, both in their mid-teens, backdropped by varnished chipboard and decorative brass horseshoes. Mam was beautiful. Her bobbed hair effortlessly framing her face as she smiled the kind of easy smile that even I, inexperienced in such matters, could see was a heart-wrecker. Una was behind her. I don’t know how I knew it was her, I just did. She was tall and pale, her wiry cloud of black hair almost a physical manifestation of her thoughts. She wasn’t looking at the camera, instead she gazed at something beyond the frame, already uncoupling from this world, already fading away.

  This isn’t what I want to tell you about. I want to tell you about the letter I found crumpled right at the very bottom of the box. Not Stephan’s letter, but one from the hospital. It was addressed to Dad, dated September 1993, nine months after Mam’s death.

  It was a sperm test. Dad had nine million sperm per millilitre of semen. Oligozoospermia. Or in laymen’s terms: a low sperm count.

  I put down UXO and picked up Dad’s hospital letter. I read it for a final time, then screwed it into a twist and stuck it into the logs. I struck a cook’s match, touched the flame to the tip of the paper. The fire consumed it greedily and spread to the rest of the kindling, licking at the logs.

  Once the fire was roaring and Dad’s room – my room – had heated up, I went to the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea. Then I sat down, opened my laptop, and started to write.

  *

  The book you have almost finished reading is the product of that writing. One night, many years ago, after I’d read to her the end of a Judith Krantz, Mam told me
she used to write stories. When I asked her what they’d been about, she shrugged and said, Just silly little things that I never showed anyone.

  Maybe you could write a new story? I said.

  No, pet. No.

  Why not? What could you write about?

  The travel clocked ticked on her bedside table. Propped up in bed, surrounded by her pills and exhaustion, she said, I wish I knew.

  So I decided to write the story for her, the only story I could think to tell: hers, which is also mine, and Dad’s, and Jim’s, and Corina’s, and Doug’s and Frank Hulme’s and his boy’s. And yours too, Peg. Especially yours. For so long I tried to follow the threads of our lives as they weaved together, but sooner or later they always snapped or snarled, and I became lost. Then I remembered what Corina told me in the salon, what Dad had said to her the night she’d confronted him over what happened to Jim – you either let the loose ends drive you mad, or you tie them together in whatever way that lets you keep going. So that’s what I’ve done, tied them together as best I could. I used to fret about the truth, about swapping one fiction for another, but then, what other option do any of us have? Truth is a trap. It lures you deeper into the labyrinth of itself, always just out of reach, leading you past enough of your own failure and disappointment and humiliation and regret to convince you that you won’t ever be strong enough to turn around, to head back.

  Which is why I decided on a different path. Like with wrestling, the stories may be fictional, but the pain isn’t.

  Last month they tore down the precinct. Soon they’ll do the same to this house. I accepted Rowan-Tree’s offer. It was much less than what the house is worth, but eff it. Perhaps I’ll take a long holiday. Australia, maybe. Check out Ayres Rock. But first I need to finish writing this. It’s been a race to get the stories finished in time, but I’m almost done. This is the last page. I’ll leave this manuscript in the Burn Pipe for you, Peg, because I want you to know that while the wrecking balls may be circling the last of this place, and while the final few souls who still keep your name in their hearts are scattered and gone for good, I still remember you. I still know you’re trapped down there.