Heartland

by Neil Cross

  I couldn’t call out. The humiliation of that would be far worse, and far longer lasting, than a kicking. So I did what I always did: I laughed. So he did what they always did: he got angry because I was laughing. He hit me again, harder. I laughed again. He got angrier. We were trapped.

  I glanced at home. The car wasn’t there any more, but Mum was gone from the window.

  Tam Higgins’s brother pressed me into the climbing frame. Its cold rungs dug into my back and my ribs. He grabbed a handful of hair and tugged it until I was looking at him. He puffed on the cigarette a couple of times, to get the coal good and red. Then he began to move the cigarette towards my eye. He told me to fukken laugh at this. The coal was red and black.

  It was an old woman who stopped it, a passer-by. She wore a powder-blue mac, buttoned to the throat, and a headscarf. She carried two string shopping-bags.

  She stopped, halfway across the road. She called out, ‘You. What do you think you’re doing?’

  Tam Higgins’s brother stopped moving the cigarette. He kept it hanging there, in front of my eye. He said nothing. The old woman told him to leave the laddie alone.

  He swore and spat, then walked off, swaggering, bandy-legged, puffing the cigarette. From behind the fence, the old woman asked if I was okay, if she should get my mum. The bags were still in her rooty hands.

  I said, ‘I only live over there,’ and I pointed.

  She told me I’d best away home then, and I ran across the concrete playground, scattered with half-bricks and broken glass and through the door to the stairs. I ran, because Tam Higgin’s brother lived in the downstairs flat and I was scared he’d be waiting for me in the piss-stinking shadows. But he wasn’t.

  The man I’d seen talking to Mum had stopped his car to ask if she was open for business. She told me this, thin-lipped. She told the man to bugger off, then came inside to calm down.

  I asked what he’d meant.

  ‘Some men,’ she said, ‘like to buy sex.’

  That was interesting. I said, ‘Why?’

  ‘For relief.’

  ‘Relief from what?’

  She said, ‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’

  I didn’t want to wait until I was older. But I could see that Mum wasn’t going to tell me any more, so I waited until Derek got home. I asked him what it meant, asking Mum if she was open for business. He raised an eyebrow at Mum.

  He said, ‘And where does this come from?’

  Mum told him about the man in the car, and he laughed.

  He told me the same things Mum had.

  I said, ‘But why do some men want to buy sex?’

  ‘Because some men are lonely. They live alone, or their wives are sick, and part of being a man is needing sex. Men need sex like you need water or food or sleep.’

  ‘But why do they have to buy it?’

  ‘Because when somebody needs something, someone else will sell it to them. No matter what it is. And some women get their money by selling sex to men who need it. They’re called prostitutes.’

  ‘And that man thought Mum was a prostitute?’

  Derek said yes without saying anything. I was angry at the strange man. I wanted to throw something at his stupid car.

  I didn’t tell Mum or Derek that Tam Higgins’s big brother had tried to stub out a cigarette on my eye. And later, when Tam Higgins and I became friends and I spent weekends with him, his brother was older and married. He’d surprise us with bags of chips or pirate videos.

  He was nice by then, even when he had the opportunity not to be, when he and I were alone in the front room. I wondered if he had forgotten trying to blind me, or if he had confused me with somebody else, another boy. Or if he remembered very well and, like me, was too embarrassed to think about it.

  12

  In the Autumn of 1977, I was eight years old and in Miss Galloway’s class.

  Derek had given up looking for a church and, once again we spent our Sundays in the hills, walking. Mum stayed at home–she enjoyed the time to herself–so it was just Derek and me. We put a picnic in our rucksacks and caught a bus to the foot of the Pentlands. Sometimes we left on Saturday and spent the night on the hillside. We slept in sleeping-bags in a two-man tent that Derek carried rolled-up beneath the frame of his rucksack.

  When it rained we put on kagouls and waterproof trousers and I liked that. I liked the hissy concussion on the nylon hood. I liked the misty-prickle on my exposed cheeks and forehead. We trudged in near-silence up stony paths. Even when it was raining, I liked to drink from burns. When it was hot, the water was refreshing. When it was cold, it made me feel hardy and self-sufficient.

  We rested and talked about the end of the world. It would be soon. The Americans and the Russians had hundreds of nuclear weapons pointed at each other–

  ‘Because they’re madmen,’ said Derek. ‘All madmen.’

  –and sooner or later, something would happen. Most likely it would be a mistake. A big meteor would hit somewhere. Thousands of them hit the earth every second, but they were tiny, the size of dust particles; it was only a matter of time before a larger one came along. All it would take was a piece of rock the size of a small car, a Mini perhaps, but travelling at such speed that its impact would be like a nuclear bomb. Something like that had already happened: in Siberia in 1908, the blast from a large meteorite flattened trees and killed wildlife over an area of 800 square miles. That night, the London skies were bright enough to stand outside reading a newspaper.

  If it happened today, one president, or perhaps both of them, would mistake it for a deliberate nuclear attack. From there, the escalation to doomsday was inevitable.

  I asked when it would be. Derek shrugged, stoical. He said, ‘Soon, I expect.’

  I enjoyed the rushing, terrified thrill. I knew what a nuclear bomb would do. Cities would be destroyed like toys. Billions of people would die. Those few who remained would have to start again. I liked the idea of starting again. It would probably involve something like this, being in the hills with a rucksack on my back, in a kagoul and walking boots.

  Derek said, ‘We’d need a gun.’

  ‘Where can you get a gun?’

  ‘I can get us a gun.’

  ‘Where from?’

  He tapped the side of his nose with a rigid index finger. We were sitting beneath a wind-leant tree, looking over Edinburgh in the grey rain.

  I said, ‘Can you shoot a gun?’

  He chewed his answer like a toffee. ‘I’m rather a good shot, actually.’

  I knew he would be.

  ‘My Dad’s got a gun,’ I said. ‘Alan. He’s got a gun. A flare gun. He keeps it on top of the wardrobe.’

  Derek assessed this intelligence.

  ‘A flare gun might be useful. But you can only use it once. What you’d need is a decent rifle. And a couple of handguns.’

  ‘Can you fire one of them? A rifle.’

  ‘When I was your age, I spent all my time in the bush, practising. Target practice. A bit of hunting.’

  ‘What did you hunt?’

  An enigmatic smile. A pause.

  ‘This and that.’

  ‘Lions and that?’

  ‘Not lions, no. Different animals.’

  I assessed this. I mirrored his posture.

  I said, ‘If it’s going to happen soon, we should get a gun soon.’

  ‘It’s not quite time to get a gun,’ he said. ‘The time for guns is later.’

  I enjoyed getting home that afternoon. I’d gone a long way. I’d been given a glimpse of the future: an empty city. Desolation, the low boiling sky. And being alive and self-sufficient and free.

  After that, whenever military jets roared low overhead, I looked up with a tingle of elation and thought, Here it comes. I scanned the horizon, expecting to glimpse a flash: a regal, silently unfolding mushroom cloud. Light travelled faster than sound. So I’d sneak a glimpse–just to say I’d seen it–and then I’d throw myself under the desk, or into a doorway o
r a handy basement. All around me the city would be ripped asunder, torn like paper. A vast conflagration would whip around my head, a bedlam of orange and red and blue. Everything would be consumed, and when it was all over I’d emerge from my hiding place. My clothes would be torn, black-crisped at the edges. My hair would be awry and my face would be smudged. Blood would trail from one nostril. I’d scramble over the still-hot rubble, the fallen blocks of ancient houses, the higgledy-piggledy wreckage of cars and buses.

  I’d make my way beneath still-furious skies, from which rained damned aircraft. And I’d find Derek. Nobody else. Just Derek. We’d gather our rucksacks, full of tinned food and bottled water, and we’d make our epic way to the safety of the hills. We’d fight past the near-dead and the undead, the blind and the burning, and we’d sit under a blasted tree that stood on the burned hillside, and we’d watch the city blaze, and we’d turn to the west and see the horizon bright with the death of Glasgow. We wouldn’t speak. We’d grimace, a way to admit to our aches and pains, our injuries. I’d reach into my rucksack and withdraw a bottle of water. I’d take a grim sip, then wipe my lips and pass the bottle into Derek’s sooty hand. And that would be the first day of the end of the world.

  One afternoon, the council tested Edinburgh’s air-raid sirens. I was on the street when the wailing began. It was a newsreel sound, the sound of the Blitz. I swelled with exultation, because it was here. I orientated myself to Leith, because that would be where the bomb fell; the place from which the mushroom cloud would unfold into the sky, from where the awesome concussion would rumble and spread.

  I waited. I fingered the black-handled lock-knife I carried in my pocket. It secured me to the purity of the moment. After the blast came, I’d need it for jemmying open doors and windows, and opening cans of food, and stabbing people.

  The siren slowed to a lament, then stopped.

  The end of the world didn’t come, and I went back to school and sat in Miss Galloway’s class, next to Nicola Barton and Judith Collins. The disappointment was a mortal pain, a kind of grief.

  I thought of a family story, one of the few I knew. One Christmas before I was born, Dad gave Caroline a sack of broken toys. It was full of bald and eyeless dolls’ heads and naked, limbless bodies.

  Caroline was bereft. She could not be consoled, even when her real presents were given to her, properly gift-wrapped.

  At school, the morning and afternoon breaks were fifteen minutes long, which made them easier to handle than lunch-breaks. During break, pupils weren’t permitted in the school building–not even kids who wanted to hit you. It was a deep, structural rule they obeyed without deliberation.

  But I’d learned to penetrate the school’s defences. The hallways were patrolled by teachers on dinner duty, but not diligently. It was easy enough to nip through the empty school and out through another exit, or onto the street, where I could use parked cars for cover. If I was desperate, I could nip into Bessie’s sweet shop across the way and pretend to be choosing sweets until the bell was rung.

  Sometimes, it was possible to take such evasive action over the course of a dinner hour: but not every dinner hour, five days a week. Sometimes, it was easier just to accept whatever was dished out, whenever it came. But it was even easier to sit safely in the classroom, and for a year I’d taken a packed lunch and eaten it alone, munching on fishpaste sandwiches and reading Iron Man.

  But that autumn, it became fashionable to have lunch in a café. It was called the Junction because it stood where Dalry met Gorgie Road. Eight or nine of my classmates started going there together and, one day, Colin Fairgreaves invited me along.

  I hectored Mum until she agreed to give me dinner money instead of a packed lunch. By the time she said yes, the fashion for eating at the Junction Café had flared and abated. Only two or three kids still went. I went with Colin Fairgreaves and Brian Hunt.

  Brian Hunt was called Babs. He was the only kid I knew who had a proper nickname. Everyone called him Babs, even the older kids. He was sandy-haired and freckly and overweight and under very slightly different circumstances, his experience of school might not have been so congenial. But the nickname marked him out as okay. It was like a magic talisman, a name that had been earned.

  Colin Fairgreaves was a skinny kid with a German-helmet haircut and a Rod Stewart nose. Other kids teased him about it, sometimes.

  I didn’t know why they invited me along. I felt privileged and blundering.

  They’d seen Star Wars, and they had liked it: but that had been ages ago and their attention had long since moved on. It did me no good that I’d read the tie-in novel six times and could quote passages from it. (Han Solo walked with the ‘loose-limbed gait of the experienced space-traveller’. I wanted to walk like that too.)

  So I kept my counsel and I listened to them discuss Hearts, who were the local football team, and their big brothers and sisters and their mums and dads, and what they watched on TV. I listened to them mutter dirty jokes that none of us really understood, and I laughed when they did.

  I ordered what they ordered: beans and chips and an ice-cream float. That was a sundae glass of cola topped with slowly dissolving vanilla ice-cream.

  Our food was brought to us by a middle-aged woman who was not much taller than me. She wore big spectacles. When we left the café, she waved her hand and said, ‘Bye, lads.’

  That felt good. It was how things were supposed to be. My clumsiness evaporated. I was watching myself behaving like a normal kid.

  Babs and Colin Fairgreaves eventually tired of the Junction Café. They missed the lunchtime kickarounds. Soon, I was the only person going.

  The moment I stepped off school grounds, I stepped into a drama, a Play for Today; the kind that opens with an Everyday Kid walking down a familiar street, passing familiar faces, walking into a familiar café–a place where he is a regular.

  The woman always greeted me with a smile and said, ‘Hiya, son.’

  Soon, I was such a regular, she didn’t need to ask what I wanted. That was even better: as soon as I opened the door, she looked up and said, ‘Beans and chips and an ice-cream drink?’ and I said ‘Aye’ in my mongrel accent and sat down.

  I ate my meal, looking out of the window. The bean juice soaked into the chips, and the ice-cream melted into the cola.

  I went to the till to pay. The woman took my money and put it in the drawer. Then she closed the till and gave me my change. Into my palm, she secretly pressed a little bit more money than I’d just spent. I always left the Junction Café five or ten pence richer than when I entered. It wasn’t the money that I loved about it. It was the knowing and lovely look in her eye.

  One afternoon, I forgot to pay. I just stood up and got my jacket and walked out the door and went back to school. I remembered in class, with a start and a drowning gasp. I stood up. My chair scraped on the floor. I explained to Miss Galloway, who excused me from class, and I ran the length of Dalry Road, weaving between pedestrians.

  I arrived at the Junction Café breathless and sweating. I was scared the woman might think I’d taken her secret kindness for granted. But she didn’t think that. She greeted me by saying, ‘Here he is!’

  At the till, she said she knew I’d be back, the minute she saw how quickly I’d gone through the door.

  She said, ‘Laddies your age are always in a hurry to be somewhere.’

  When I paid my 50p, she put it in the drawer. Then she palmed two more 50p pieces and pressed them into my hand, a pound, and she closed my fingers round them and she smiled. I walked back to school, holding the money.

  One lunchtime, before the end of term, I found the Junction Café’s windows blinded with loops of whitewash. The sign on the door had been reversed to read Closed.

  I never saw the woman again. But I still dream about her sometimes.

  13

  In the morning, Derek’s first duty was to beat the dog.

  Once, she gouged a long, powdery scar in the wall, just above the skirting b
oard, as if she’d been trying to tunnel free. When Derek entered the room, she whimpered and pressed back her ears and squirmed as far into the corner as her bones would allow.

  Derek was pale. He said, ‘What has this pig dog done now?’

  Mum said, ‘It looks much worse than it is.’

  Derek kicked the dog in the belly, just under the ribs. Then he slapped her, open-handed, in the face. She trembled and cowered further into the corner. But she took it, even though she was a big dog by now.

  Once, it got too much and she twisted at the spine and bared her teeth. Derek went to the bedroom and returned with a yellow golf umbrella. He grabbed it with two hands, like a club, and smashed it down across the dog until it snapped. Then he kicked her. The kick was weak, half-hearted. He was tired. He went back to the bedroom, taking the fractured umbrella with him.

  He began once again to talk about God. His desire to find the right church hadn’t been the passing fancy it had appeared: it was Derek’s fundamental requirement. He never specifically articulated or gave shape to the true nature of this longing, but it squatted inside him like a cane toad.

  His need for God often manifested as a fascination with the enigmatic: the Bermuda Triangle, the Pyramids at Giza, the Marie Celeste. He told me about rains of frogs and fishes, the yeti, big foot.

  He kept a number of paperbacks on the paranormal. When I turned nine, he let me borrow from this secret library books by Erich Von Daniken and Charles Berlitz–Chariots of the Gods? and The Bermuda Triangle.

  Their emphatic, declarative covers unnerved me, and their pages had a fearful solemnity, so at night I made sure they were stacked under the bed: I didn’t want to glimpse them in the darkness. I didn’t want to think about aliens experimenting on abducted human beings, or about secret continents, or Nazi black magic, or about midnight visits from the Men in Black.

  One tale in particular tormented me; the story of a Tennessee farmer called David Lang. In 1880, Lang was working in the fields. His wife watched from the porch of the house and his two children played in the front yard. In full view of them all, David Lang vanished.