The Man Without

by Ray Robinson

  * * *

  — Eddie died this morning.

  Antony was working at the high school when Ada rang. He’d gotten a job as a cleaner, blitzing the place through the summer holidays and polishing floors. It was the only work, beside the ice cream factory, that he could find.

  The news of a death, the way it focuses the mind, hardens the senses to a distinct point of indivisibility, where nothing exists but death and decay. Getting on a bus or making a phone call or eating a sandwich or having a shower, all sensory activities experienced through the cold, hard lens of mortality.

  So Antony abandoned his squeegee, and walking down the nettle-margined lane he looked up to the window Eddie used to wave from, waiting to be pushed to the pub or around the park.

  The nurse hugged Antony on the doorstep.

  — I’m sorry for your loss.

  — What happened?

  — It was very peaceful. He just squeezed my hand and was gone.

  — Did he say anything?

  — No. He said nowt.

  The shape of Eddie in the half-light, not responding, not wishing Antony a good morning. Just the rude scratch of a clock, and cancer’s saccharine stench.

  He moved closer.

  Eddie’s eyes were like a dead rabbit’s: whites yellowed, filmy. And those marks on his face: little red scratches, cuts. He’d looked so weird without the beard. Antony used to do it so well, lathering up the bowl, taking his time, Eddie’s face so still as he drew the blade across.

  He kissed Eddie’s face, ears. He tried to close Eddie’s eyes but they refused and so he kissed them too.

  — I won’t forget you, Eddie.

  Remembering Eddie barely living, dying in that bed. Remembering the scrubby hairs on the back of Eddie’s neck, the way he stroked them gently with his eyes closed, so vulnerable-looking. His pate, paler than his face. Remembering these things because he knew that soon Eddie would be gone.

  Antony took Eddie’s dead body in his arms and squeezed him tight. Eddie gurgled heavily, his breath sickly in Antony’s face. He dropped Eddie’s body and held himself, thinking Eddie had come back to life. That he was trying to speak.

  He ran from the nursing home and went up onto the moor, falling silently through himself. The same moors he’d walk at night, stood in the wilderness at the Blue Hour in a pretty dress, listening to the life in the undergrowth, feeding on the thrill of it. He slumped to a heap on the heather and dug his hands into the hard ground.

  Then suddenly it was the day of the funeral, people lining the streets, tipping hats and heads as the hearse rolled by, him and Ada in the car behind, the crowd over yon park, the look on Val’s face.

  — I never knew he’d touched so many, Ada said.

  And when Antony returned home that day, his mother told him, bold-faced, — We want to be on our own.

  Her and Lou, they wanted him out.

  But then the letter and bit of money Eddie left. Antony’s three lost years in black-and-white. When he got back from Poland, he stuck a pin in a map. He arrived in Manchester early one Monday and found a flat and signed on. Then he got the job at the Day Centre. It was meant to be his anti-sabbatical, a year skivvying away wiping arses to save enough to go to Australia, to get as far away as possible. But then he met Rebecca. He spent his Saturdays peering at her over the R&B section, working up the courage to ask her out. He was riddled with love.

  But now he wished he’d never met her at all.

  He took one last look at the dovecote and made his way back to the pub.

  * * *

  The following morning—at 11:59 precisely—he was standing between the cemetery gates with a bouquet in each hand, looking up at the hands on the blue-faced church clock as they made a golden slit.

  He stepped into the graveyard between the thick understory of rhododendron, flicking the V-sign at the stone angels. Rounding the corner, it felt as if someone was walking at his heel, slightly out-of-step. He stopped and turned, heard his own breathing, and noticed the new part of the church, built after the fire all those years ago.

  * * *

  He placed the lilies against the headstone and ran his fingers over the timeworn words. Eddie. The day he was born, the day he died.

  Six months Ada lasted.

  He recalled that terrible week after Eddie died, when Ada watched TV day and night, and the last time he saw her at the house—how she’d asked him to kill her budgie. He’d walked over to the cage; the budgie laid leaning in one corner. Ada had looked at Antony with blood-filled eyes and said,

  — Wring its neck.

  He’d carried the weightless bird into the back yard. It had blinked at him once, but he couldn’t feel its heartbeat. He’d twisted the bird in his hands, and when he’d looked down, he had its head in one hand and the body in the other.

  He looked at the daisies, the long unruly grass around the headstone. Eddie’s last word: ‘coo’. The birds trapped in his head. The dark workings of it. Gone. Down into the soil. But soil can’t hold that. Soil can’t sing.

  He pictured the three of them down in the wormy earth.

  Skin. Flesh. Bone. Teeth. Nails. Hair. Blood.

  How Eddie would put his knuckles to his cheek and whisper, — Son.

  The soil fat with it all.

  He headed down to the bottom of the graveyard, towards fresh mounds of soil. The interrupted earth.

  * * *

  He placed the other bunch of flowers against Val’s headstone and then read the names on the withered, faded bouquets that already rested there. One from Barry and one from Jack. But nothing from Lily. Nothing from Mikey. And he couldn’t find one from his mother either.

  Valerie O’Connor. Born 1947. Died 2001.

  No Beloved Mother. No Beloved Sister.

  Just her name, dates.

  When he closed his eyes, he saw a small slab of moonlight falling through Val’s curtains, revealing her unmade face: a cartoonish blur of colour. Her thumb across the cut on his eyebrow; how he’d flinched and given her a wounded look—because he wanted her to know his pain. He remembered being momentarily hypnotised by Val’s touch, but he couldn’t remember going home one day and telling his mother he wanted to be a girl.

  There was nothing. No images. No sounds.

  A void.

  * * *

  Walking down Briggate bank, past the pub and across the bridge to the waterfall, he noticed the westering sun had smeared the horizon an appropriately fiery pink. As a boy, he used to come here to be apart from the world, to sit beside the hubble-bubble of the beck, to smoke, to think.

  The brickwork of the derelict auction rooms shot skyward to his right, broken only by windows boarded with huge sheets of graffiti’d chipboard.

  He walked across the small wooden bridge and found the old, gnarled oak. Its shadow seemed to hug him.

  He stood on tiptoes and peered into Cynthia’s back garden.

  Cynthia. Her deep smile. The scalpy chemical pong of the salon. Her tobacco-blonde hair and Malteser eyes. Her body in his mind.

  He looked up and recognised the branch where he used to stand, watching her windows through the halo of his parka hood.

  He would dress in her underwear, holding himself.

  * * *

  He cut through the snicket and walked onto the council estate. Children in school uniforms were playing in the road. They stopped, they stared. The houses seemed so small. These streets that had held him for so long, they looked so different. Each house held a memory. Hard scenes.

  * * *

  He turned the corner and stopped outside his house. Children’s toys lay scattered across the lawn; fancy curtains hung at the clean windows.

  He looked up at his bedroom and saw himself as a boy, elbows on sill, peering up into the hills, wondering will it ever change? The nights he’d stood in the darkness of the garden, keeping warm on a wrapped bag of chips, listening to his mother and Lou inside. Looking at his old house, he wanted something to give. Mother, gone.
Inside, the tears were streaming down his face, but when he put his hand up… His face was dry.

  He headed back to the pub, cowering through the streets of his childhood.

  It was time to prepare.

  * * *

  It was 1986. He ran back into the house and razed the tent in his bedroom, ramming things into his backpack, frantically grabbing everything he thought he might need up on Cloud Hill, and all the while, listening out for her footsteps, ready for her to return and drag him to the coal shed again. He took the bottle from beside her bed, ramming it into the bag and hurling himself down the stairs, taking firelighters, matches, bits of food from the kitchen, smashing things on the way. The pack was awkward, slapping out its burden as he mounted his bike and cycled away, snorting blood out of each nostril and fuck you is what he shouted, — FUCK YOOOOUUUU! Cracking into a scream on the oo sound.

  * * *

  Past the mud-hole farm, two collies shot out of their kennels, scattering a frenzy of skittish chickens. The dogs lunged at him on their hind legs, tongues lolling out, long white teeth snapping, snapping. He took a left at the top of the hill and followed the scar of footway that led to the foot of Cloud Hill. He remembered Eddie with the rifle crooked over his forearm, his chequered flat-cap at a jaunty tilt. His small, pigeon-gait steps. These wild places, stained with him.

  Antony gyred higher, concentrating on his step and the burn in his legs, stopping every few minutes to sit down and let the ground below him take the weight of the pack. At times it felt like his younger-self was walking beside him, the adult Antony and boy Antony, walking at each other’s heel.

  * * *

  Denuded firs, canted by the winds, stood twisted like gnarled old fingers reaching for the sky. He could see the dung-coloured town a mile-or-so away, and the Co-op sign on the High Street was a vivid blue-and-white beacon.

  He eyed the slopes on the nearby hillsides, narrow sylvan glens trailed by stanchions of electricity pylons like stroppy matchstick giants, arms akimbo. Slopes Antony used to glissade down in winter, legs in fertiliser bags, fingers burning with cold, clothes sodden with snowmelt.

  Picturing his mother climbing up here as a girl, wondering what it meant for her.

  He remembered the day he ran away from home, after the fight, how he’d sat on this mountain slope hugging his legs, watching the thin column of black smoke rising from the church. The box of palm leaves had exploded and the curtain and gowns went up with a whoosh. Sitting not far from this very spot, he’d imagined the smash of glass and pop of wood in the church below, waiting for the klaxons of fire engines to come hee-hawing through the streets, twirling their lights and causing a fair old hullabaloo.

  He’d made that eye go out.

  Clambering to his feet, he resumed the climb, eyeing the summit above. Beside him the wind-bent plants petered out, and soon he was above the tree line and passing between gritstone tors drenched in murky cloud.

  * * *

  Underdusk, he reached the summit plateau. It felt like the most isolated place on Earth. The sky was ecstatic, tumultuous. Behind him, the short walk along the drover’s track to Dante’s Cornice. That massive jut of escarpment, the ledge where he’d sat as a teenager, screaming into the sky, emptying the barrel-hot rifle, drinking, bagging, shuffling his arse along to the tip of the ledge. Beneath: a thousand-metre drop of sheer, razor-sharp scree. Knowing that one teensy-weensy push, one miniscule heave-ho, could send him hurtling to the rocks below. He remembered how he’d stood on that very spot and hurled the poker into the dark, and then rushed back to the tent and got Eddie’s rifle. He’d lifted the barrel skyward, his mother’s face: a bleary backdrop against the stars.

  * * *

  The derelict barn with the roof blown off. It was where it all began. Antony ran a finger along the top of the broken doorframe, caked in bird shit. The weird nostalgia of it, the way the events of 1986 were echoing his journey now, except this time he had no ropes, only fireworks and ashes.

  He sat beside the pack, remembering how he’d scanned these hills one last time for some sort of clue, the clue that would get him home to Mum and Lou, to make things right. He’d slid the noose over his head and tied the running end to the top of the doorframe with a Reef Knot, securing it with a Clove- and Half-Hitch. Taking a deep breath he’d looked out into the nothingness of Cloud Hill’s high summit, he saw the image of his mother passed out on the kitchen floor, and so he’d pushed himself into the air, dancing in spark-light as a voice shouted down his veins, — STOP.

  * * *

  He ran for cover, worried her cremains were too heavy, and gasped as the Satellite Busters ignited, one after the other, trails of red light shooting skyward with incredible force. Up, up she went.

  He thought about the whispering town below, heads turning as his mother began to scream and explode in fantastic aerial bursts, staccato explosions of purple, blooming 3D globes of light, his mother bursting through the sky, flaring so brightly across the hillsides. Then a pause, followed by a fringed crimson curtain, softly falling. Charred canisters landing in back gardens.

  Mother, blowing through the streets of the estate.

  He walked back over to the launch site.

  * * *

  Embers pulsed.

  Ashes danced.

  14.

  Some mornings he drove up over the tops, the Rover shifting through second and third past the whirring wind turbines of Coal Clough, and sometimes he parked the car and looked at the bobbled landscape of the Hushings, remembering the day he walked through there with Jade, when they sat against the humanoid boulders of Gorple Stones and moor-winds blew tears from her cheeks. And he’d think about Hattie down in Mevagissey, and felt that through her he could reconnect with a part of himself, a part that he’d forgotten.

  * * *

  Frank asked him to take a seat. Shaking his head, he opened the final draft of Antony’s report and began to read,

  — Implementation of Interim Measures. Methodology and Research Techniques. Local Topography. Summary of Interview Responses and Focus Group Meetings. Current Service Provision and Mapping Exercise. Options for Integrated Community Provision. I mean?

  Frank flicked the front of the report and laughed good-humouredly.

  — Is it not detailed enough? Antony asked.

  — Have you any idea how good this is? Honestly, Ant…

  — Thanks.

  — Head Office, they’ve had everyone on the phone: the Asian Disability Network; Multicultural Liaison officers; the Imams you’ve visited. All of them singing your praises.

  — That’s great, really. I’m honoured. But what happens now? I don’t think I can go back to cleaning arses. Don’t send me back to the dark place, Frank.

  — Well, you’ve still got a few weeks to get this distributed yet.

  — And translated into Urdu.

  — Don’t worry, Frank said. I’ll see what I can do.

  * * *

  The Net became something of a saviour. There was a whole world out there at the click of a mouse, a whole community who knew something of what he was going through, and he felt as if he’d stepped through the back of the wardrobe. Chat rooms and support networks and fetish sites, interminable information on make-up and clothes and wigs and femme forms, TVs surfing the Net in their virtual closets, millions of them speeding down the superhighway in their six inch heels.

  He found the names and addresses of all the tranny friendly bars around Canal Street and some had dressing rooms, so you didn’t have to worry about being stabbed to death en route. He’d even found a tranny clothes shop.

  * * *

  He straightened the orange and brown chequered rug over the upside-down question mark, and then repositioned the painting on the mantelpiece. It wasn’t the best painting he’d ever done, but it was his first effort in years, and the nostalgic smell of the linseed and turpentine made him swoon. Next to the painting sat the photograph of him and Daniel that Carla had taken at the airport.
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  Daniel’s smile in the picture: an invitation.

  He stood before the window, the city sky cadmium-orange in the closing day. She’d be here soon.

  On the window was a square Post-it note. He read it aloud,

  — Finestra.

  Along with the new rugs and brightly coloured throws and the colourful large canvas, Catalan nouns decorated his flat on yellow Post-it notes:

  CORBERTS

  PLAT i BOL

  LAVABO

  CAMBRA

  ESCRIPTORI

  He wondered whether Carla was pregnant yet.

  The smell of baking pizza and bubble bath filled the flat. He pulled a long pink hair from his dressing gown and held it up to the light. Persian Rose. He pulled it through his lips, over his tongue, and let it fall to the carpet. He remembered meeting Jade in the Fox and Goose, and how he thought he’d never see her again. And she was right: there was only room for one woman in his life right now. He watched the city wink outside. He didn’t have to wait very long.

  * * *

  They stood looking down at the outfit on the bed.

  The excitement of doing it in public, of presenting himself to the outside world. The clothes were like something explosive in the room, volatile, vying for attention. They couldn’t keep their eyes off the dress, the tights, the heels.

  The consummation of his fantasy.

  I’ll look awful, he thought. I’ll look totally shit.