Septembers

by Christopher Prendergast

  The lift doors parted ahead of me. On the platform I could see a balding man with an SLR around his neck. He looked shocked and indecisive. A woman standing to my right was on her phone. She was calling the police. I asked her to call an ambulance.

  Jaroslaw was lying on his front, bellied like a seal. One arm was bent underneath him at an unnatural angle. The shield had been left halfway up the stairs and had snapped in two. The straps around his calves remained undisturbed, and, looking at his legs you would have thought he might get up at any second. The toes jutting out from his sandals seemed to be bent towards the ground. The cruellest act was their removal of his helmet. Although it was next to him, I was later told it had probably been thrown down after he fell. All the head injuries were consistent with this. I picked it up and brushed off the dirt and dust in the plume of hair. I carried it for him in the ambulance.

  Franz von Papen wanted to join the military from a very young age. His family came from a long line of salters. In his days as a Second Lieutenant in Düsseldorf, he liked to exercise the horses after a long night of partying. He didn’t sleep much. His riding improved on visits to England. Looking back on his life Papen thought the hazards of the steeplechase were a worthy preparation for an exhaustive career in politics.

  In June 1934, Papen gave a speech in Marburg as Vice-Chancellor. He criticised the direction of the government under Hitler. He voiced growing fears over the brutal tactics of the SA. Papen lost two of his closest friends and confidants, Edgar Julius Jung and Herbert von Bose, in the ensuing purges. They had helped him draft the Marburg speech.

  Papen himself was held under house arrest.

  Goering called after three days, seemingly oblivious, and asked why he hadn’t appeared in Cabinet.

  3

  MY FRIEND LAY in a hospital bed for a long time from that day, on the wrong side of the survival instinct he had lauded to me in his messages. Maybe this was his way of making a point. They had to remove the chainmail with an orthopaedic cast cutter. A rushed nurse undid the straps of his boots and threw them into a bag. She asked if there was anything I wanted to keep but I only held onto the helmet. The doctor came in. After talking to the nurse he said that they’d better take a look at my eye. He did all sorts of exercises to check I wasn’t concussed. He shone a light into my eyes but whatever he was looking for he couldn’t see it. He shook his head. Then he said the nurse would put some Steri-Strips on my eyebrow.

  I gave my statements, over and over, to the police. They said they would compare my account with some footage they had pulled off the CCTV. The doctor told me someone would ring the flat if anything happened to Jaroslaw. With that I walked out of the hospital. I trudged home, cutting across parks and backstreets to avoid being spotted by anyone. All my feelings had dried up after the third statement. All my words had been scrutinised. The officers had been just about to finish their shift. They talked to each other like I wasn’t there.

  At dusk, whilst I was walking, I heard a tapping sound. It was distant but had been carried on the wind to the path. The streetlights came on and lit the pavement ahead. The tapping sound would stop and then return. I was moving around the edge of an old industrial park, long abandoned. I told myself that the sound was some swinging beam, hitting a wall close to an aperture in one of the buildings. Or it was the overflow of rainwater onto a disconnected pipe system. It had a hollow ring. But the rain was nothing more than drizzle and the more I listened the more I heard a rhythm, lost in the swill of rain and wind, then briefly recovered, often interrupted by the sounds of buses on the main road and then finding its place again.

  The rhythm was familiar but so out of context it took me a while to place it. It was more at home in the braggadocio of the football stadium, beat out in the claps of fans or blasted from car-horns during a tournament. Here, it was limp and distant. I found myself on the other side of the fence, via an unlocked gate. I walked between piles of brick, rubble and empty crates. I followed the drifting sounds.

  The tapping echoed through a large warehouse that had lost its shutters. Its high walls enveloped me and sealed in the thick layers of dust on the concrete floor. Even as it darkened outside, the warehouse still let in enough light to reveal itself. I went through a small door and once again out into the rain. I thought I had taken a wrong turn as a flat expanse of waste, mudflats with large, crosscutting tyre prints, unfolded ahead. There was this boy, fast becoming a shadow, manoeuvring between the outcrops of debris, sinking into the mud then rising again.

  When he was almost out of sight I started to run after him. As I got closer I could hear him. It was as if he was talking to someone and my presence was an interruption. I got closer and I refrained from saying anything. He swore a lot. He started walking with more determination, looping around the piles of crates so he could beat out his rhythm. I was still dressed in parts of my legionnaire uniform. He came around the back of a hollow crate and stopped a few metres from me.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said. ‘This is no place to play.’

  He spat some words down into the mud.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you,’ I said.

  I could see him clearly as he looked up. He had a face that might have been grinning but wasn’t. In fact he was missing teeth on one side of his mouth. He had a hue of dirt on his cheeks that was spread thick over his hands. One of his hands was clasped around a wooden stick and, shy of tapping now he had company, he ran it across the wheel of a tyre in one of the piles. Around the back of the site there was some parkland and it wouldn’t have surprised me if he was part of a gypsy family that had set up over there. He could have wandered through the gates like me, although not chasing any sounds, just his own boredom. The stick looked like the painted arm of a chair or a table.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ he said, and before I could answer he shouted, ‘You fucking queer.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ I said, trying not to get angry.

  ‘You look like a queer.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. I raised my hands to try and call a truce. ‘Where’s your mom, or your dad? Do they know you’re in here?’

  He glanced to the far line of the horizon, beyond the fencing, as if he had no notion of being in anything. Containment was not this, the ragged line of fencing and the abandoned museum within the walls of the warehouse. Inside or outside might well have meant the same thing to him. He was like a bird that was half-heartedly attacking an empty seed-container, long after the cage door had been opened, long after he’d been expected to leave. It had been enough trouble for him to hear my voice the first few times. He continued walking now and neglected to answer my question. My right eye throbbed.

  ‘What’s that song?’ I asked. ‘The one from before?’

  ‘I wasn’t singing.’

  I called after him, ‘I know you weren’t singing. What were you playing?’

  Again he stung me with an insult. He was so blatantly free of self-consciousness that he might have been considered above it, were it not for that cruel streak of prejudice. The use of the word ‘queer’ was so malevolent and instinctual to him. What little his family had imparted on him for good didn’t matter. They had managed to etch so distinctly onto his blank slate this sense of hatred. I looked at the boy walking through the churned mud of tyre tracks. I thought of the bigots that had raised him. I felt hot and my right eye throbbed faster. I lifted Jaroslaw’s helmet over my shoulder and threw it at his hooded shape.

  The helmet missed but the boy lost his footing and fell flat into the mud. I caught up quickly, retrieving it along the way. He struggled onto his back and I fixed my boot on part of his neck. It was hard to tell, as his legs kicked out and he scratched at my ankles, how much fight he really had. Was he clinging onto life because he wanted it or because someone was taking it away from him? He could have been driven by the same instinct that forces a kid to react when someone takes his chair or scribbles o
n his exercise book. His hands scrabbled at the brown, sodden leather of my ankles, briefly succeeding in ripping one of those straps away.

  Spit bubbled out the side of his mouth and I watched him try to cuss again. He was trying to form the word that had come so easily only moments earlier. I lifted my foot up and snatched the stick, holding it in one hand and Jaroslaw’s helmet in the other. Even as he got up to run he was not sure which direction to go in. He made the pivotal mistake of trying to cut back across me. He bit my hand. He was a vicious, obnoxious thing. Hatred in every pore. As one of his teeth broke the skin on the knuckle of my thumb, I smashed the helmet into his head and guided his limp body to the ground. I pushed him away so he wouldn’t fall against me.

  It seemed like he was still breathing. There were flickers of movement. His little finger twitched. I could hear air whistling through his nose. I threw the stick down and went back towards the warehouse.

  All the streetlights had come on down the main road. It was fast getting dark amongst the piles of crates and the old car machinery. I caught my breath leaning against some boxes, looking back, hoping to see the boy scurry into the darkness again. After five minutes of quiet and stillness I began running. I ran through the open gate and across the road. All I could think was, he should have run.

  4

  IN THE HALLWAY the tiny neon blue lights of the modem lit up my shoes as I put them down. I didn’t turn on the main light. Instead I could smell, as I walked through the narrow kitchen, the grease from pots and pans dispersing into the rooms. In the living room I was sure that over the outline of chairs and a small television there was a layer of smoke sitting at about head height. At first I thought the stoners downstairs had begun to permeate my room. But there was a full ashtray in the middle of my coffee table and I realised I had been smoking constantly myself. Whenever I came back home to try and sleep I forgot to open any windows.

  I walked into every room and put them all on the latch. The curtains began billowing inwards. The red light on my landline flickered. New messages. I hit the button to listen. There was a hesitation. I stopped. It was the recognisable pause of an old man about to launch into a polemic about a chapter he had read. Jaroslaw’s stuttering attempts at reason came back to me. I sat down on the arm of the chair and squeezed the sofa cushions. It was him. He was back.

  Matt, I know you’re there. I don’t know how much longer I can put up with this. I was told you’d be all right. I’ve got mouths to feed. This just isn’t worth my while. Not any more. If I don’t hear from you in a week you’ll hear from someone. I don’t like to do this to you, Matt, but for fuck’s sake, you’re not giving me a choice.

  I rubbed my eyes. It was early. The hospital still hadn’t called. I changed my clothes and pulled my waterproof jacket out from behind the sofa. The pack of Mayfair cigarettes on the coffee table was empty. I put on one of Jaroslaw’s voicemails and listened to him. I had to roll myself a ciggy from some very dried-out tobacco that was left over in a tin in one of the kitchen drawers. The tobacco gave me a headache. It was too dry.

  I left my flat soon after. The corridor was quiet. The warm smell of marijuana lingered on the staircase, slowly rising to obscurity.

  I crossed the park, going around the lake with the cricket ground’s shadow fixed on the horizon. The housing changed after a few streets to Victorian terraces. After that it started getting sparser and shrubbery tended to hide the homes from the roadside. Soon I came to Jaroslaw’s drive. I groped around in the hanging basket and untangled the keys from a plant stem.

  Moses was ageing. I had taken her for walks but she had been hesitant about going through the canal tunnels. The Edgbaston tunnel took a good few minutes to pass through and was the longest I had seen on that stretch. Sometimes Moses would turn back. Once we had gone nearly halfway when she stopped. I had to put my foot on her haunch, pushing a little until she agreed to carry on. She dragged her back paws. We walked towards the light. The tunnel was too narrow for people to pass by each other.

  That morning, I was almost discovered in the house. I was down in the basement getting a tin of dog food. I heard footsteps. It could have been the police. They seemed to stay in the living room. I could hear only one half of a conversation. When the talking stopped, doors were slammed. My hearing had sharpened in the quiet but not enough to hear what was being said. I stayed put. I turned out the light that was fixed to a beam by a single nail.

  Moses paused at the door. I was crouched on the top step. She began sniffing my hair. She was confused and agitated by the continued absence of her master. I gave her a final pet and she watched me leave with her big black eyes reflecting moonlight. I clicked the door shut gently and moved away, crossing the unlaid drive.

  I found a bench, checked it wasn’t wet and lay down to sleep. I kept thinking about Lillie Langtry. I woke up with my hands between my thighs. My coat was lain over my shoulder. Footsteps – heels, brogues – passed by me on the pavement. I sat up and a small crowd was walking past, heading out from Five Ways train station. I checked the time and got up. I walked to Centenary Square again. It was getting busier and busier.

  I walked past the ICC. The ferris wheel had gone. The seagulls circled overhead. I drifted back towards Paradise Circus and thought about going to the library. I changed route and cut across a flowerbed to go into the Hall of Memory. I had to push the oversized door really hard at first but it soon gave. Straight ahead of me a book lay on a pulpit in the centre. It was quiet. I walked up some steps and looked down at the two open pages. There were names and dates carefully handwritten. Any commotion or noise from outside was obliterated by the hall’s Portland stone.

  After a few minutes of circling the pulpit and reading the names of churches and sects who had pledged wreaths, I eventually realised a door was open to the left of the entrance. It revealed a kitchenette. Sitting on a chair, with his head buried in his chest, was a security man. The high-visibility jacket was crumpled under his folded arms. He was soundless. His chest did not rise or fall. He was asleep but he looked dead. He looked as if he’d died whilst leaning down to hear the beating of his own heart.

  Distracted, I elbowed a poppy wreath and sent it clattering into some bronze ornaments below. I closed my eyes, feeling my heart pounding. There it was. The sounds rang through the room. It was an echo chamber in there. Just as the ringing died down, a low cough replaced it.

  ‘Are you trying to think of something to add?’ the security man said, with his arms still folded. ‘Add to the book, I mean. I can lend you a pen if you need it.’

  I apologised for waking him and he pinched a white moustache thoughtfully. ‘There’s no need to apologise. I’m sorry I wasn’t doing my job and keeping an eye on you. Has Naeem been in here? The other security guy . . .’

  I shook my head. He looked at his watch, then produced a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘If you’d excuse me, I think I’m due a fag break. I can leave you in here unsupervised, can’t I?’ I nodded and drew back from the steps to pick up the wreath whilst he continued, ‘Thanks a bunch. Now – please don’t set fire to anything or scratch a penis on the glass. It’d be on my head otherwise.’ After a pause and a haughty chuckle he added, ‘The blame that is, not the dick.’

  I called after him. I did have something to write down. I asked for some paper.

  He went back into the kitchenette and said there were some prayer cards that they’d been given boxes of – for the schoolchildren. As they were going spare he passed one to me along with a biro and left me to my thoughts and the clear echoes of the hall. The card had a drawing of a dove on it. It held an olive branch in its bill. I opened the card up and, opposite the pre-printed prayer, a lamentation for the dead, I wrote my own message.

  I added a name to all those kept in the hall that day, the name of a good friend of mine. There was someone else I wanted to add but I didn’t know anything about him, not even his name.
Instead I wrote a different kind of message. I called him the gypsy boy. The gypsy boy – I know you shouldn’t say things like that. My hand shook as I placed the pen down.

  Almost every day I was going to the Hall of Memory. I was walking from the flat and saving my change for the local newspaper. I’d sit on the benches and comb through every article, dissecting every inch of the columns. I was picking through it like the jackdaws picked through the discarded styrofoam boxes in the city gardens. Every death I found in print reassured me in its blandness: a car crash or a pub fight, a quiet death on the top floor, the surrender to illness.

  When I would catch a word like ‘discovery’ in a headline I would panic. The same fear gripped me whenever I read of a teen reported missing. Fortunately the photographs were all recent and clear so I had no doubt that it wasn’t him. I had just scanned through an article when the security man sat down next to me. He lit a cigarette and commented on the terrible state of the weather.

  ‘Yeah, I guess it’s bad,’ I said and I closed the paper. Each time he came to sit with me I postponed my search.

  He began to tell me about his old job which he had worked for about twelve years. He was toiling on the Rover production line. It was night shift work so he didn’t see much of his kids, or his wife, but he came to enjoy the hours. He was soldering car doors or something. I didn’t listen properly but he said he got to use his hands. That was until they dispensed with him after the first round of the factory troubles. Not the one that sent it under. He went quietly when there was no one looking.

  ‘How do you feel about that?’ I asked.