He was swearing, she wasn’t sure what he was saying. He blocked her path and she was scared. She turned to run back the way she’d come, up the steps to the road, she had the minicab number in her phone, could see the hotel across an empty factory site, lanes of traffic, the castle up there on the hill. He didn’t come after her.
She could hear him on the towpath shouting, ‘Grace, Grace, Grace,’ the words getting further away in the traffic.
Later, she phoned him, left a message, then another, no word from him at all.
The doctor, a locum, didn’t say much, no questions, no congratulations, nothing, only to decide on a hospital. That the birthing centre was in the same building as the ward seemed a good idea to the doctor. She’d get a letter about a scan.
She thought of the girl, Ann, in the clinic. ‘I don’t really see his dad,’ she’d said, ‘but I wouldn’t change it, wouldn’t change him,’ and for a moment she was not sure if she meant the baby or the father.
She phoned every few days, got a dead tone.
She even went to vote that night, when she got back. In part, to placate her mother, who texted when she was on the train asking if she had been to vote before she left. So she dragged herself up the hill to the primary school she had attended as a girl, even though she was so tired she wanted to sit down on the kerb outside the gates, and would have if she hadn’t been cutting it so fine to make it in time, pointless as it was, the result preordained, and she would have gladly missed it except that it wasn’t worth the aggravation from her mother.
In the booth she leaned on the little shelf, almost closed her eyes, could have gone to sleep right there. When voting she often became paranoid she’d put her cross in the wrong box. She looked at the ballot paper now, held the pencil in her hand, looked at the black lines on the paper. After a while she put the pencil down, folded the paper, walked out across the schoolroom and dropped it unmarked into the box.
She did sit on the kerb, bought a carton of orange juice and a packet of Monster Munch from the shop, the snack she used to buy from the same shop as a young girl. The clink of glasses and the sound of voices and laughter rose from the pub garden into the darkening sky. The sound of someone playing a piano came from one of the houses. She sat on the kerb and listened to the piano and the swish of cycle tyres on the road and the babble of voices from the pub. She would walk home in a moment, sleep through well into the morning, awake in another country.
After
Grace looks out of the window here at the café, sees Franco come along the road, checking his phone. There are boys stood round a bike on the corner looking at him. He carries his camera in a bag on his shoulder, equipment in another backpack. His clothes are a nondescript black, his hair is dark and falls half across his face and he sometimes ties it back when he is filming, but he is not ostentatious, should not stand out, but he does, somehow. She can see the boys watching him. And at first she can’t identify what is so different. The equipment? The bags? He squints at the café sign. Confidence. Privilege.
A group of men turn at the corner, go up the steps of the pub. She sees one of them look back at Franco, hitch his trousers, say something to the younger man next to him, who laughs. The man with the eye, she is sure she has seen him before, he was with Cairo that first day, when she was asking people to talk. Ally or Alan, something like that. She wants to get up and cross the street and call him back, that was the man who swore at her, told her to go back where she belonged. The possibility that Cairo might be with them rises in her and her hand shakes, she can see it against the plastic tabletop.
‘This place is a hole,’ Franco says to her, and sits down.
‘I’ve never heard you say that anywhere. Hungary, the border camps, Serbia, when you came back from Syria. Never. But Dudley is the end of the road for you. Look out of the window. It’s a sunny afternoon in the English Midlands.’
Franco is thrown for a moment, has never heard cynicism, anger, in her voice before.
‘Those places have got an excuse, a reason for being how they are, but these people,’ Franco says.
‘Ah, these people,’ she says, ‘these people. There is them and us. These fucking people.’
She takes the headphones plug from the socket. Turns the volume low but beckons for him to lean in and listen. There is Cairo’s face on the screen.
‘A lot of it is gone, erased. The industrial past. And a lot of it is hidden away. The point is the people here built the country as it was to become. Now you act – we act – like there’s some sort of shame to it all. The rest of the country is ashamed of us. You want us gone in one way or the other. It’ll end in camps, it’ll end in walls, you watch, and it won’t be my people who build them, Grace, it’ll be yours. It’s already happening, in your well-meaning ways.’
Before
The queues had gone by the time he went up the road to vote. He wouldn’t have gone at all but wanted to give the impression that everything was all right, that he was holding it all together.
‘They was queuing up to vote this afternoon, Cairo,’ his dad said to him, more cheerful than he’d been for years. ‘I’ve never seen nothing like it. Queuing out the door.’
He had work the following morning. It had been patchy since they finished up at the abattoir but Tony wanted him and Alan to go and unload a lorry at a yard in Wednesbury. He was getting picked up at Burnt Tree at seven, that suited him fine. He tried not to think about anything at all.
In the polling booth he looked at the paper, closed his hands into fists, thought he might go there in the booth, lose it, pictured lifting the flimsy partitions, slinging them across the room. He wished he had a lighter, would have set it under the paper, stuck the burning paper in the box, see what they all might do, the officials sitting with their knees squashed under the schoolroom tables. The smell of the school had never changed all these years. He looked at the ballot paper, made his X, folded the paper carefully, put it in the box and left. He could breathe more easily outside. There was music coming from the flats, a dog barked and someone shouted. He thought about all the bones that filled the hill. The helicopter was up already, earlier than was usual, chasing miscreants.
After
He sees her and tells himself that it isn’t her, but knows that it is all the same. She sees him at the same time, it seems, or doesn’t see him but somehow senses him, looks blindly towards the pub steps, where she saw the men and where she now sees him come round the corner. She had worried about this moment and now it is here.
‘Grace.’ She has forgotten about Franco, who has gone a dozen steps up the road ahead of her. ‘Grace,’ he says, and it is Franco’s voice, she realizes, startled, as she looks at Cairo and Cairo raises his arm and seems to say her name.
He waves to her. He looks at his hand raised in front of him. He is not usually a man for waving in the street, without a care in the world, it looks. He lets his hand fall to his side and walks towards her.
‘Give me a few minutes, Franco,’ she says, her throat gone dry, doesn’t look at Franco at all, hears him swear under his breath, this petulant boy, thirty years old, and she keeps watching Cairo as he steps out into the road to cross to her. She does not know what she is going to say. And yet she knows suddenly – really knows, not simply knowing things from what people have told her, second-hand knowledge, abstract, the kind of knowledge of which he is so suspicious – that there really are moments on which your life turns.
‘Grace,’ he says again, and his face is open. The rage is gone and she almost tells him right there, for a second she thinks that he will step up the kerb, and she towards him, and into each other’s arms.
He looks at her, the glow of her skin, the light in her eyes, and he wants to touch her, reaches out to her jacket sleeve, holds it gently between his fingers, would like to touch her face, her hair.
‘I day think I’d see you again, Grace.’ His voice is quiet, she can barely catch what he says, although he looks straight at her. They s
ee themselves in each other’s eyes.
‘Come to finish the filming, finish everything up,’ she says. There are tears at the corners of her eyes, he can see. ‘I got that funding, backing, you know, so I need to finish it.’
He nods at this.
‘Back where we started, eh?’ he says.
But they aren’t. And she knows she is not going to tell him, and it shocks her, the way the realization comes suddenly, as if there is a fissure opening between them, the ground opening and the two of them on opposite banks.
‘And you?’ he says. ‘Everything, you all right, you know. Everything gone all right for yer?’
She nods, will not cry. Is uncertain again, that sense of the ground shifting. When she can, she says, ‘Everything’s OK, yeah, everything went fine, everything’s going fine.’
He nods and looks down, glances up the street, looks down again. She feels briefly afraid.
‘Look, do you want to get a drink or something,’ he says, ‘or a cup of tea?’
She can see the light going out in his eyes.
‘I tried to phone you,’ she says.
‘I broke my phone.’
‘A last bit of filming. The marketplace, you know. Then I’m done. I’m on the train back in a little while.’
‘Well,’ he says, ‘you take care of yourself, Grace. You take care.’
‘Goodbye, Cairo.’ She kisses his cheek, gives his hands a squeeze.
And he walks back across the road, turning this time at the dark entrance to the pub.
She places one foot in front of the other. A little over an hour and a half to her train, and you need to allow time for a taxi and the traffic, the station not in the town it says it is, and she’ll let Franco take a few shots in the marketplace and back up towards the castle, not talk to anyone, not even try. She tells herself she is not a cruel person, not really. She expects a great flood of tears to come, great aching sobs, but nothing comes. She might have told him. Thinks too late that she might have made a mistake.
In the pub he stands at the bar, away from Alan and the others at the table, swallows a pint and orders another, fumbles with the money in his pocket, not much, not much to stay out with. He wonders where the others who sit there have got the money to do this with, he might go for these fuckers here, wants to ask them why they are laughing.
He sees Alan looking across, walk over to him.
‘Come and sit down mate, eh?’ Alan holds Cairo’s arm and Cairo swings his elbow in a wide arc so Alan steps back, his hands up in front of him. ‘All right, mate, all right, take it easy. Do whatever you want. Come over when yome ready. All right, all right.’
Alan walks backwards, keeping his good eye on Cairo, who stares back at him and then turns to look at his pint on the bar, sees it off. He hears them call after him but he is away and down the steps and knows what he is going to do, can see himself, as if from a great distance. It happened sometimes, happens more and more these days, like there is the person who acts and the person who looks on, and they are both him, but not the same, like something cleaved in two.
Alan stands on the pub steps and smokes a cigarette. You are meant to go around the back to smoke, away from the door, but who is going to tell him otherwise? He shakes his head. Cairo is better off away from them, although God knows where he’s off to now, God knows what’s up with him.
He’s back in his seat when the woman walks in. He knows who she is, the woman who interviewed Cairo, put him on the telly, one more thing to mess up his head.
‘Excuse me,’ she says, breathless.
Everything in the barroom has stopped. The men at the table all look at her.
‘Excuse me,’ she says, tries to smile, looks on the edge of some kind of panic, unmoored. ‘You work with Cairo Jukes, I think. Is it Alan?’
He is surprised to hear his own name, that this woman would somehow know it. What Cairo has got himself involved with here, he can only guess at.
‘He was here, love, but now he’s gone.’
‘Do you know where?’
‘I ay got a clue,’ Alan says, looks at the woman, leans on the legs of his chair, tries to weigh things up and can’t. ‘He looked about as good as you do, though, but I couldn’t tell yer where he’s gone, or what he’s up to. Have yer phoned him?’
‘His phone’s bost,’ one of the men says.
‘Not still?’ Alan says, shakes his head.
‘If you see him, can you tell him Grace came to look for him.’
‘I’d be delighted to, yeah,’ he says. ‘Grace.’
She turns for the door, eyes following her, she will go to his house, his parents’ house. She hears the sound of the men laughing back in the pub. Ann, she thinks, the girl Ann, she has her number, she will ring her, doesn’t know why she didn’t do this before, why the indecision, the not wanting him to know.
The deal is that Luke leaves the car key under a flowerpot inside his unlocked back gate. The kids don’t steal cars any more, not like when they were kids. Maybe they steal better cars than this one. The system works anyway. When he starts the car, Cairo remembers to reach for the glove compartment. There are a couple of lighters in there, half a pack of Mayfair cigarettes.
He nearly simply walked home, lay on his bed, waited for sleep and for Saturday and for Stacey-Ann and Zachariah to come to the door. Cairo has nearly done many things in his life. And now this. He wants them to still be filming. They want a show and he will give them one. The petrol can moves and clangs in the boot, along with the tools and the rags and the last bits of iron, the detritus of the world he is from, and he reverses and turns into the Friday traffic.
The old man, for that is exactly what he is these days, shuffles towards the table in his carpet slippers and says Dudley into the receiver when he answers the phone, says the string of numbers. No one answers the phone like that any more, he supposes, and the voice on the other end of the line speaks over him anyway.
‘Grandad, iss Stacey-Ann. Is me dad there?’ The girl sounds out of breath, could not have been back at her mother’s for more than five minutes and, please God, no more upset.
‘I doh know, Stacey-Ann, I doh. Let me have a look? Bear with me. Everything all right, bab?’
‘I’m OK, Grandad, all OK. Iss just somebody’s trying to get hold of me dad and it’s urgent, I think.’
‘But yome all right, love? And the babby?’
‘Everything’s all right, Grandad. Can yer just get me dad?’
He can hear the tension in her voice, everything a drama, all your feelings out in the open all the while, it’s what the world has become like. He used to think Cairo was like it, had got like it. And that girl Natalie, terrible, the drama, the ups and downs. Stacey-Ann had got it from her mother, that was for sure. Anybody wants to get hold of you urgently, then it’s always bad news. It had happened to them once, years ago, before they had Cairo, they’d gone on holiday to Weston, one of the big hotels along the front, they were on their way out of the evening meal, past the polished dance floor, when a voice had called from reception, ‘Mr Jukes?’
There was an urgent message to phone home. His mother had been hit by a bus reversing in Dudley bus station, not even a bus station then, the sloping ground between the Empire Tavern and the Birdcage, under the castle, where there had once been cramped terraces and that had become the hillside bus terminus. So stupid they hadn’t flattened the ground out, or found somewhere else for the buses, and coaches, coaches too, it was where they’d got the bloody coach to Weston from, and that is what had killed his mother. She’d been on the way to visit her sister in the Dudley Guest Hospital. Her shopping bag had been open and potatoes went rolling down the hill when the bus hit her, crushed her against another bus long enough to kill her, and he could never understand why she had bought the potatoes first and then gone for the bus and why she couldn’t have bought them on the way back and that would probably have saved her life, because she’d have got on the earlier bus, or would have walked
without the potatoes to drag her down, or at least wouldn’t have been trying to cross between the buses when she did. That is how life comes and goes, he thinks.
‘Who is it?’ Joan sits in the chair by the kitchen door. He’d been meaning to ask Cairo to set a phone up on the table there, so she wouldn’t have to move to answer it when he wasn’t there.
‘Iss our Stacey-Ann, wants her dad.’
Joan tuts. ‘Her ay been gone five minutes. Shouldn’t have left in the first place. Probably summat her’s done now.’ She has referred to Natalie as her, as she, for all the years she and Cairo have been separated, even during some of the time before they split. ‘I bet her’s locked her out again, changed her mind.’
‘Is he out the back?’
The door is on the latch, he notices. The breeze lifts the net curtain. He stands on the path for a moment. All quiet. The murmur of pigeons and the sound of the leaves in the trees, which always makes him think of the sea. There is the sound of the traffic from the New Road. It is not even called the New Road there, although it is what he has always called it and he has lived here all his life, and he is struck for a moment regarding who owns the names of things. There are the names that appear on maps and signs and there are the names the people use and they are not always the same at all. The traffic, too, has a tidal murmur to it, like waves breaking on a beach, a constancy, something you might normally only notice through its absence. The sound came and went in the afternoon lull.
The Cut Page 8