‘Wow!’ Grace said, a bit breathless. ‘I didn’t expect that. Are you OK?’
‘I’m all right,’ he said, a bit indignant at the calm way she spoke, expected she’d be a bit more shaken, wished she was.
She put her hand to her hair and picked something out. He wrung his right hand, could feel it starting to swell, had done something to it with that bad connection.
Jamie Iqbal moved between the tables in his expensive suit and tried to reassure people who were getting up to leave. When he reached Cairo, he held out his hand to shake, and Cairo had to offer him his left. ‘I thought you’d died,’ Jamie said, ‘it’s been so long.’
Jamie moved them to a table by the bar, joined them for a drink, brought them brandies and a couple of slices of cake while the waiters continued to right the chairs and lay out new tablecloths, and the UKIP meeting, which had indeed been the table Grace identified, handed out leaflets to the people who had stayed. A woman nodded enthusiastically at something another woman said to her.
‘There’ll be none of that kind of thing if we leave the EU,’ Grace said as a joke that neither Jamie nor Cairo acknowledged. Then, getting drunk, she told them a story of being in a bar somewhere in Serbia once, and a fight had broken out and the barman fired his gun into the ceiling, and Jamie and Cairo had looked suitably impressed, Cairo with his hand in a bucket of ice.
Cairo nearly told Jamie he wanted to fight again, right there, it was where the idea came to him. Jamie said he’d book them a car when they were ready, raised an eyebrow when Cairo said he was driving but said nothing else, apologized again for the trouble, shook his head at any offer of them paying, said, ‘Fuckers who cor hold their drink,’ then apologized for his bad language to Grace. ‘One minute we was about to fetch the birthday cake out, next minute all hell breaks loose. Fuckers from Brierley Hill. Some family feud erupted, just like that.’
‘Like they do,’ said Cairo.
‘Like they do,’ said Jamie.
And all the time Cairo was talking to Jamie, he could feel Grace looking at him, and he put his good hand on the table, and for a long time it seemed like their hands stayed there next to each other, and then their hands touched and Grace put her hand on his, and he didn’t look at her, could sense her looking at him, and felt her hand resting there.
‘Well, you look like you can still handle yerself, Cairo,’ Jamie said. ‘You take care, you hear that, mate. Try to make it less than a decade next time, eh?’
When Jamie left they moved their hands. Cairo said he was sorry and Grace said he had nothing to apologize for at all.
He rested his swollen right hand on top of the steering wheel, drove as best he could with that and the drink. They had the windows open and the fresh air helped him, the smell of flowers and exhaust fumes in the car. There was that sweet, sickly smell that came from the brewery on the wind when he was a kid. The brewery had gone, of course. They were nearly at the hotel, slowing down at the bottom of Castle Hill, and he intended to say something about the old train station, long since shut, thought to mention the flowers planted on the roundabout, EU-funded, when blue lights shone enormous through the back window. He saw the police car in the wing mirror. He felt his stomach turn, pulled over onto the track that ran down the side of the zoo, towards the old freight depot, decided he might tell them straight away about his licence, no point in letting them work it out for themselves. There was that and the drink. There was a burst of the siren and the traffic went haphazard at the lights, cars pulled up at strange angles to the white lines. The police car pulled alongside them – Cairo could see a young policewoman talking, she glanced at Cairo – and then it went for a gap in the stopped traffic, the siren blaring again now, and raced off towards the Wolverhampton Road. It took him a moment to realize that they were in the clear. He sighed, had been holding his breath.
‘We should have got a cab, Cairo. I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble, for you to feel you had to drive me around.’ Her voice broke calmly through the dark.
‘Yer day force the drink down me neck,’ he said, was aware of his accent as he said it, became aware that he had been softening it, of course he had, for her, not even fully conscious of this until now, and also thinking that it was good to say something about the drink, not to mention the licence. Without the car she wouldn’t be here.
‘Take your time,’ she said.
The lights of the traffic illuminated their faces and he wondered if something might happen right here in the car, both of them aware of the other sitting in the half-dark. But then nothing happened, they sat in the car with the lights of the hotel visible across the lanes of traffic ahead and he did not want the night to finish yet.
‘I wanna show you something,’ he said, easing the car onto the track between a crumbling wall and a fence.
‘What’s down here?’ she said, a hint of concern in her voice which he didn’t mind at all. It made him feel good. Back in control. He’d protect her. He turned off the car headlights and the track ran into the dark as if into the hill itself.
‘Elephant bones,’ he said.
She’d mentioned the caves earlier, how she’d been to the new visitor centre on the canal and filmed the narrow-boats in the sunshine. He told her about the miles of tunnels down there, prohibited, unexplored, that they used to try to break into them as kids, told her a long rambling story about a bloke hiding down there years ago with a gun, some kind of siege. Sieges were his kind of thing, she knew that much already.
She was glad of the fresh air, told herself she wasn’t drunk. He opened the car boot and fumbled in it in the dark and with his bad hand, swore quietly, and she wondered for a moment about the clank of metal and what he might turn from the car with in his hands and how she did not know this man at all, not really, suddenly illuminated in a pool of light from the torch he held. He held a second torch out to her, which she took, and looked at rope and old rags and wood and lengths of chain strewn in the back of the car, the stuff of his work, she supposed, but it gave her a shiver.
‘There was a time when they’d sling the dead animals from the zoo down here in an old pit.’
Some way down the path there was a hole in the fence. There was a sign up of a guard dog but they heard no dogs, nothing, along the path that ran alongside what seemed like a cliff. They were somewhere under the castle. There were the grooves of old railway lines along the path.
‘Longer we stand here, the more chance of getting caught,’ he said, and he stepped through the gap.
‘Where are we going?’ she said. ‘What are we looking for?’
‘Elephant bones,’ he said again, and he shone the torch against the wall in front of them and the dark of an opening in the rock like something from a fairy tale.
‘Here we go,’ he said. The torches zigzagged across a curve in the tunnel wall and they walked into the side of the hill.
‘Slow,’ he said.
She looked at the rough stone floor in the two beams of torchlight, imagined strange creatures at the edge of the light. The floor disappeared and Cairo put his arm out to stop her. ‘Slow,’ he said again. ‘This is it.’
They crept forward to the edge of the hole in front of them, held the torches out over the rim. A long way below she could see something heaped, the texture of a shingle beach, could be bones. A beach made of bones, water down there too, there was something cool and damp in the air that rose from the hole.
‘They threw an elephant down here once,’ he said. ‘It had died at the zoo and no one knew how to get rid of it. The town was plagued with bluebottles that whole summer. It’s still there, I think. Tony will send us down for the ivory one day, I swear, when we’ve dug everything else up.’
He turned his torch off. There was the light from her torch in the pit below them. It was not as dark as she would have imagined, buried in a hill.
‘Look up,’ he said. The top of the shaft opened to the night sky. Shapes flickered across the area of lighter dark that was the
sky. There was a faint squeaking sound. ‘Bats,’ he said.
They stayed there for a while, on the edge of the collapsed hole, on the floor of the tunnel, looking up at the sky. A light blinked and for a moment she thought it was a star, but then saw it was a banking plane. Beautiful nonetheless.
He said to keep the torches low as they walked back, in case of security doing the rounds. He’d told her that in the war there had been a plan to put a whole munitions factory in the tunnels under the castle, that there was a shadow town under the real one, the whole place meshed with bones, fossils, zoo animals, plague and cholera pits. It seemed important to him, the idea that not everything could be seen. That there was some truth out of reach of filming or reason.
Back near the tunnel mouth, they heard car wheels on the path, saw headlights illuminate the walls for a moment and then move away. The car seemed very near, and the engine echoed in the tunnel, then it passed, and the rumble of it stayed, and the sound of it going away again. They stood close together while they waited for the car to pass, their torches switched off. When they were sure the car had gone they went to move and bumped into each other, half by accident, their faces close in the dark, and then they kissed, hidden there inside the tunnel for a while, leaning against the wall where the surface changed from concrete to limestone.
After
There’s something gone wrong with his mother’s tablets and Cairo watches her, dizzy and bad-tempered as she bends to the oven door, warming the plates for his old man to get back from the chip shop. Cairo had said he’d go back out, but his dad took it as an insult. He said he’d do the plates too but she motioned for him to sit down.
They miss the dog, it’s one of the times of day his dad used to take him out. They said they wouldn’t have another, said it would be too much after Titan died, and regret that now, but can’t have one with Stacey-Ann and the baby here. Stacey-Ann butters the bread, waits for the baby’s bottle to warm, and his mother looks over her shoulder. She’s doing OK is what Cairo wants to say to her, stop mithering.
His dad rattles the back door and stands on the mat to take off his jacket. Stacey-Ann unwraps the fish and chips, a doner for her, and they step around each other, too many people in the room, to the kitchen table.
‘I cor eat that, I cor, our Stacey-Ann.’ His dad jabs his knife across the table at the grey meat that lies across Stacey-Ann’s chips.
‘I ay askin yer to, Grandad,’ Stacey-Ann says.
‘Yer doh know what they put in it, yer doh.’
‘I like it,’ she says.
Cairo stands at the grill, turns his chicken breasts over with a fork. He’d bought a pack of frozen chicken, in the belief that work would be regular for a bit longer, had counted on being paid a full week. The beans bubble in the saucepan, and that and the smell of the chips that fills the room now make him hungry. He wills the chicken to cook under the blue flame.
‘Nice fish, Nan?’ Stacey-Ann says.
‘Iss all right,’ his mother says. The girl deserves a medal for her cheerfulness.
He dishes up his chicken and beans on one of the warmed plates, eases into the chair next to Stacey-Ann. He can see through the door to the baby who lies on his play mat. The boy’s fist paws at a soft teddy bear that hangs suspended above him. He catches it a blow and gurgles contentedly. Something eases in Cairo for a moment. He tries a mouthful of beans, too hot.
‘Yow in training?’ His dad jabs his knife again, towards Cairo’s plate this time, something accusatory, mocking, is what he hears in the tone.
‘What? No, what yer on about?’
‘What with that and the running.’
‘No, just fancied summat different. I’ve gorra try and keep in a bit of shape wi the work.’
His old man looks at him across the table.
‘Iss too much for yer now, Cairo, that work. He’ll work yer to jeth, that bloody Clancey. They’m all the same,’ his mother says, and shakes her head.
‘What, the Clanceys? Half of em never done a bloody day’s work in their life.’ His dad sounds like he’s having a row even when he asks if anyone wants a cup of tea. With talk of the Clanceys, he looks like he might kill someone. He continues to jab his fork in the air.
‘The gaffers, I mean. The gaffers am all the same,’ his mom says.
‘I doh know what else yow expect me to do, Mother.’
‘Yome hard worker, I know that, love. They tek advantage of yer.’
The way she says this, something about the light falling into the kitchen and the way he sits in a different chair to usual so that he watches her side on, and can see her work her new teeth off her lower jaw and then back on again, and look somewhere over the sink as if she is blind and merely senses the presence of her family somewhere near, moves him. Get through a day at a time, that’s what people did, he knew that. There were people here in front of him doing exactly that.
It is hot in the kitchen now, their food almost gone. His dad smears a last round of bread across his plate and leans back in his chair.
‘I’ll put the kettle on, before we go,’ Stacey-Ann says. ‘D’yer want to give Zach his bottle, Dad?’
‘Goo on, then,’ Cairo says, wishes he could say more, something like, of course I do, I’d love to. He picks the boy up, holds him, remembers for a moment how he did this with Stacey-Ann. And he sees again that other baby that will not be. Blood and remains, like something the fox might nose through. Is the horror in the world or in his head, or both? ‘What to do about it,’ is what she said.
Once, not long after Stacey-Ann was born, he’d fought down in London, stepped in at the last minute on the undercard of a Howard Eastman fight, because they knew he’d give them value even with taking a fight at the last minute, and they’d stayed in a hotel afterwards. Both his eyes had been shut from the fight, closed to slits, and they’d worried about the baby, Stacey-Ann, seeing them, and he remembers that she hadn’t cried and he’d laid her on his chest, propped up on the bed, and she’d touched his closed eyes gently with her fingertips and then settled down to sleep.
He remembers Natalie moving silently around the hotel bedroom, the biggest room they had ever slept in. She was wearing a silk dressing gown that he’d bought her to wear in the hospital after having Stacey-Ann. They had been kids, really. What would he have been then, twenty-three? Nat was only twenty. Maybe they were kids, but it seems to him that he had more idea of who he was then. He’d fought that Welsh boy, Iolo Farr, who they made out was a relation of Tommy Farr to build some story up around him, talking him up as the next big thing. They’d gone the distance, and the kid had closed both of Cairo’s eyes but couldn’t finish him off, and he didn’t amount to anything much in the end, faded away soon after. That was a fight Cairo might have won, he realizes now, years too late, and his life might have taken a different course. Natalie kissed his closed eyes while Stacey-Ann slept on his chest. They had some money in the bank. Not enough. She walked out not long after her twenty-first birthday. Natalie is doing fine now. Stacey-Ann tries not to say too much. When she was younger they’d sit in the McDonald’s, or in the window in the Beatties café, and she’d complain endlessly about her mother and he’d find himself defending Nat to her. Natalie could look after herself, of that he has always been certain. She lent him that money to tide him over, without Tony knowing, charged him interest.
The kettle boils.
‘You having tea, Dad?’
He nods. ‘Where am yer going anyway?’ he asks her.
Before
‘You have no tattoos,’ she said to him, a week or so after they kissed, the day he took the dressing off his hand.
She had a tattoo. Two, in fact. Small ones, a Cornish knot on her right ankle, a small dolphin above her left wrist.
‘You’ve given yourself hands for radio,’ her mother said in the kitchen when Grace pulled back the bandage, and cried.
He smiled and said, ‘What did you expect? Some big eagle across me chest?’ He kissed the do
lphin. She found them silly, embarrassing, the tattoos, her ankle more so than her wrist, although that was daft enough, which she got not long after her dad died and had hurt much more, the needle right against the bone, and she had wanted the pain, she supposed. The dolphin she got with her sister, when Esther had been old enough to know better and Grace not, according to their mother, when Grace was a student, back for the holidays, wandering around Camden Lock like they had done as kids, pretending it was Ibiza, that they were some lost children of the raves, rather than home on vacation from Lady Margaret Hall.
‘I could get an old work scene,’ Cairo said. ‘Some bloke bashing metal, by the canal, the castle in the distance. The myth of the Black Country worker. You could film it.’
That view is exactly what they filmed one morning. She tried to get him to say what he had in the interview in the hotel lounge in Dudley but it didn’t come out right. The view was exactly right: rusting metal and overhanging trees, and the castle indeed in the distance.
After a while, he said, ‘Does that disappoint yer? No tattoos. Not authentic enough.’ But he was still smiling.
‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘I regret having these done now. They don’t seem to belong to me.’
‘I might have considered one. You know, when Stacey-Ann was born, her name or date of birth or summat. I cor stand the idea of the needle.’
‘Like it was someone else, another person altogether who got them done. The dolphin was my sister’s idea.’
‘Or like Tyson’s one of Arthur Ashe. You know, the tennis player. Days of Grace, it says.’
‘People change, I suppose, that might be a reason to have one, to remind yourself of who you once were.’
‘Or a reason not to have one,’ he said.
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