—Yeh, well, knob’ed’s gone AWOL. Need to find him soon as.
—Ach, you’ve got time for a pint, sure. Yer mother’s been askin about yeh, worried sick she is. Cheer her up a wee bit if I can tell her I shared a glass with yeh, won’t it? Surely yeh not so busy that ye can’t share a pint with yer grandad, by fuck.
Darren sighs and rubs a hand across his face then winces and sucks air as he irritates a tender spot beneath his eye. The old man opposite him, he is of his blood. The old man opposite him still limps from a wound suffered when fighting overwhelming odds, a fight which he seems to recall sharply and clearly because he has recounted it to Darren in tremendous detail and often enough so that Darren could tell the tale too. The old man opposite him and who is of his blood, he fought his way hand-to-hand out of an irrigation ditch in France into which a shellburst had blown him and armed only with a pistol and a knife and an entrenching tool and trying to protect his old schoolmate Ernie Riley who sadly died of his wounds. The old man opposite, he has seen and done things at the furthest extremes of human experience. He is of the rarest breed of men and also of his blood. The closest thing to a hero Darren has ever encountered and something of what drives him and has driven him through the shocks and horrors of the world successfully for nearly eighty years in some wise must drive Darren too.
—Aye, go on then, Grandad. I could merda a Guinness.
—Good boy.
The old man shouts to the barman and holds up two fingers, lumped and warty and arthritically crooked of knuckle and with deep orange nicotine discolorations at the tips. The barman nods and pours the pints.
—Have ye eaten, son?
—Nah.
—Could yiz go a ham roll?
—Nah, yer alright, Grandad. Guinness’ll do.
—Pint of the black soup, eh?
—Yeh.
Without counting in and thus seemingly of telepathic timing precise and coordinated completely the band launch into a reel, a frantic swirling tune which instantly into this quiet mid-afternoon fuggy pub injects a note of hysteria or rather concretises the hysteria that constantly hovers in such places, in the grey layers of smoke that hang and drift and the sets of boots and trainers on the dusty floor or bar rail and certainly the contours of the faces that confront alcohol with aggression, isolated as they are and must always be from the sun and traffic both human and mechanical that blares beyond the windows of frosted glass. The lifting loops and movements of this music expanding then contracting and repeating themselves more frenzied with each fevered recalled phrase jabbers of the ditch and drink and desperation it was born in like a secret tongue concocted subterranean or in some other place where the sanctioned thief could never reach between sweating stone or sap-bubbling branch, any place where steam might gather both surrounding and enervated by the heart heated by all defiance and insistent in its relentless hypnosis of the reaching blood. Behind sockets and sterna such common force could stamp itself on the indifferent world only in this one unique expression and its high-tensile resistance, each instrument fluent and conversant with the next in this language alien to the human tongue yet familiar to and in fact borne over in many breasts, able to reflect the landscape it leaps from even if that be smoke-yellow ceilings and booze-stained wood and torn cushion, providing these brush against the tingling skin and the gulping eye. Only that these bellies have sifted a hundred hungers and found one they can accommodate, that the hearts are aware that the staying of their pain will be brief and fleeting, only until each instrument and the fleshy hands and throats that draw such huge sounds from them will dwindle and fall mute.
—D’yeh like the reel, Darren?
—Aye, Grandad, yeh. It’s sound.
—In ’45 I was demobbed with a bunch of Irish fellers over in Galway. Stayed there months, I did, months. Loved it, me. Learnt to play the banjo. Bet yeh didn’t know I could play thee ahl banjo, did yeh?
—News to me.
—Aye, well, there’s a packet of things yeh don’t know about me, lad.
—Bet there is, Grandad.
Darren drinks his Guinness quickly and orders two more and hears the old man’s voice like glass against glass in his ear, behind the music. And further behind it there is Alastair and those two fucking neds and vengeance like a hooded shade with spread vulture wings and behind that further still is a thing burning hot and blood red but as long as the music leaps and frantics and the old warrior who is of his blood continues to growl words Darren can drown it, let it momentarily fade like the throb of pain in his bruised face and scalp split and stuck. Can, while his head is otherwise engaged, convince himself that there is no shame here, in this mid-city pub on a weekday early afternoon, among these people of courage and defiance, no shame whatsoever. Little fucking scallies just caught him unawares, that’s all. Bushwhacked him from behind, like. Little fucking cowards. They’ll get it. Like all cowards the world over, as the old man says, they’ll get fucking theirs.
The music must stop, eventually. It always does. But Darren’ll be up and moving long before then.
Alastair needs a piss. There’s a growing pressure in his bladder as if in there a fist is slowly clenching. He’s not bursting yet but he’s getting there and as he walks down Rice Lane and past Ye Cracke he hears an Irish jig start up suddenly inside and considers availing himself of the toilets in there but reasons that it will probably be dead busy and the two fucking neds, that Robbo and Freddy they call themselves, won’t be in there because Ye Cracke doesn’t have a pool table and they seemed big big fans of the game when he first met them in Lime Street Station bar. That and betrayal, oh fuck yeh, big frigging fans of that as well. Little pair of shites. Probably down Bold Street now spunking the entire wedge on trainees and fucking anoraks but not for bleeding long, oh fuck no.
He exits Rice Lane, traverses the cobbles on to Hardman Street where outside the ten-til-ten offy he gets begged on four times and God he thinks these must be frigging desperate if they’re asking me for odds. Do I look like I’ve got any spare change, lar? He passes St Luke’s, destroyed sixty years ago by Luftwaffe bombs and left as a charred shell to commemorate that war and in the grounds of its blackened wreckage just beyond the padlocked gates some stela has been erected, a tall upright monolith attached to which is an empty bowl, monument to those who died in the Great Hunger and too to those who fled from that wasting many of whom washed up on these shores here and built the railways and the waterfront and also places of worship like this one now devastated, a scorched hulk central to this city of many edifices flame-gutted alike although not all at Nazi hands. ‘An babhla folamh’ are the words carved into this standing stone above the empty bowl which to Alastair has always looked horribly, howlingly empty, a terrible void that never fails to make his stomach groan whenever he passes it. Sometimes the sky will fill it with slimy rain and it then becomes a birdbath for sparrows and starlings and pigeons and other city birds but for the most part it remains empty adjacent to the charred church hollowed by flame and sprouted around by large flowering shrubs through which once drifted the attenuated shapes of junkies jacking up until for a reason recondite and known only to their peculiar migratory instincts they moved to the gardens of the Anglican cathedral, the spire of which can be seen skyscraping over the burnt twin of St Luke’s like an overlord, a terrible perpetual reminder of this world’s wrecking whims.
Alastair remembers the unveiling of the empty-bowl monument. Remembers Mary Robinson getting out of the limo, and all the cheering crowds. And remembers too her phalanx of bodyguards, big fridge-like men in overcoats with cropped hair and reflector shades and gun bulges. They were dead cool, he thought. Dead friggin don’t-mess-with-me-cunt. He’d like to be one of them.
He crosses the road on to Renshaw Street and sticks his head around the door of the Dispensary but sees only old men and a pool table unattended and slanting beams of diluted light and he intends to cut across on to Bold Street to check the greater number of pubs and caffs there
but the need to urinate is now urgent so he veers into the Egg, climbs the narrow stairwell plastered with flyers for bands and plays and readings and squeezes through the thin doors into the caff proper where ah good fuckin Jesus there’s a poet. He’s between Alastair and the toilets, standing there before a small audience single figures and going on in a poncey non-local voice about ‘savers’ or something, some such shite. About ‘wanting whisky’ or something. Ally shifts from foot to foot, not wanting to disturb this reader embarrassing as he is or indeed expose himself to the audience small as it is but it’s no good, he’s gunner pee his kex, so he darts across between the poet and his audience and hears a sudden silence broken only by a tut and a snigger and can feel eyes on him but fucks to that he’s in the bogs and his knob is out of his trackies he’s letting it all out steaming, relief.
Aaaaahhh.
Shakes off, washes his hands. Thinks about waiting in here for the poet to finish but that might take ages and he’s got important stuff to do so he leaves the toilets and re-enters the caff. The poet’s now saying something about a frigging bee or something for God’s sakes and as Alastair reappears he gets caught on one word stuttering:
—I, I, I, I …
Eyes again on Alastair. Oo such disapproving eyes in a soft groomed face scar-free and creaseless a face in which the fiercest thing that has ever resided is a perverse desire for more worse hurt. Alastair addresses it:
—The fucker you lookin at, knob’ed? Fancy a photograph, do yeh?
The poet sniffs. —What am I looking at? Evidently someone without the manners and bladder control to wait for me to finish.
This amuses Alastair. He laughs loudly and leaves the caff shaking his hatted head in humoured bemusement at the people of this world and their forever estranging ways and turns left on to busy Bold Street and checks out several emporia thereon, pubs and bars and caffs and also the shops selling designer clothes and shoes because truly where else if not such places would a pair of teenage scallies suddenly monied possibly be.
At the bottom of Bold Street by the side entrance to Central Station a swaying beggar is being addressed by two policemen. One of these officers looks a lot to Ally like one of those who gave him a wellying in the Copperas Hill bridewell some time ago although he does not recall much about that night nor indeed since it of his life before, not in any great detail any more, no, not really. As he draws level Alastair stares hard into this officer’s face and is met by pebble eyes and a muzzied smirk which might mean that he is one of Alastair’s assailants or might just as easily mean that he isn’t, Ally isn’t sure. He doesn’t with any certainty know. Only that there is a knotty fibrous lump on his skull beneath the skin and he has headaches with a greater frequency and of greater pain than before, just that.
Fuckers. Fuckin bizzies. Bad, bad scallies, no lie.
He moves on through the city. Sock-tucked shelly and basey and shaven skull beneath that and stubble and blue eyes and ears like satellite dishes on each side of his head, no different from a thousand others yet unique in his stride and purpose although many others roundabout seek money too and also revenge. In many faces he sees Darren’s unyielding glare and that spurs his steps down on to Matthew Street and into all the bars there and through the tourists milling around the Beatles Experience and up then into the business district and down past Ma Boyle’s and on to the Dock Road and along that thoroughfare until he re-enters the city via Chinatown and there is no Robbo, no Freddy, although there are very many of their sort. Drizzle has yet again begun to hang and drift and at the sides of hissing roads people gather in doorways and bus stops and under brollies and St Luke’s reappears again rain-darkened, fallen timbers akimbo through the glassless webs of the windows and giant-leaved plants deeply green and visible through those holes and the entire thing hulked and harmed and scorched and steaming and apocalyptic, this ever-present ruin bellowing of wreckage among the unheeding human commerce about.
Drifting Alastair, yet how he drifts with one purpose, that purpose becoming need. Need becoming desperation. Fucking Darren. That hammer. That old lady falling. Fucking two little scallies Robbo and Freddy they call themselves can’t trust anyone these days man no lie. Whole world’s falling apart.
Mid-afternoonish, he finds himself at the hospital. He is tired and pissed off and gritting his teeth against futility and the attendant frustration. He is thinking about extinction and has been doing so for some time so he stands in a bus shelter away from the rain and smokes a cigarette and then enters the hospital into a too-high disinfectant heat and retraces the route he has taken many times before, along corridors and up several flights of stairs as if seeking a destination made deliberately difficult to reach, this hot scoured warren seemingly designed by a race of mortals agog to deny or at least hide that which makes them so. As he nears his destination he starts to smell it again, coppery rot, a ferric morbidity and if this is mere fancy or otherwise he cares not either way because he can smell it, smell it, he always can.
A nurse stops him. A big woman with a kindly face despite the hairy wart on her upper lip like a beauty spot in negative. Her name tag says: WENDY MURRAY RGN.
—Can I help you? You look a bit lost.
—No, I’m sound. I know the way. Just looking for me granny.
—D’you mind telling me her name? Sorry to have to ask but y’know. Can never be too careful these days.
Alastair gives a name and the nurse gives a small smile.
—Oh yes, Katie? She’s down on the left in Ward H.
—I know, yeh.
—She’s asleep at the moment, I think. Try not to wake her. She’s over a hundred years old, you know. You should be proud. Did she get a telegram off the Queen?
—Erm …
—Well, be gentle with her. She, erm, she hasn’t been quite with us for the last few weeks …
Alastair nods. Comprehends fully the world in which his granny lives now and has done for some time and can almost grasp how torn and scrambled it must be in her head. Spatial, temporal, shredded and dispersed. Can almost imagine how blasted everything must get after passing through the sharkskin desiccation of such old ears, such old eyes.
He thanks the nurse and squeaks down the corridor to Ward H. Skeletons in beds with candyfloss hair. Eyes implore through rheum and some colourless sunken lips attempt to smile, one or two to speak. One withered hand like a fistful of driftwood twigs reaches towards him out of a nightie sleeve hanging loose.
The end bed. Kate. His grandmother.
THUNK.
Christ she looks old. Not surprising; she was born in nineteen friggin hundred or something like that. Aye but she’s always seemed ancient anyway cos she was dead late having Ally’s mum but fuckin hell she was always there for him and she fed him he would’ve starved if it wasn’t for her cos the mother was never out of the bleedin pub. Aye and Katie’d drink too often to excess but when bevvied she wouldn’t hit Alastair she’d hold him she was always there when he was sad and the stories she’d tell about being in service for the rich people in Toxteth when that place was wealthy and the hospitals she worked in looking after war victims both world wars no arms legs eyes ears faces minds some of them. God the life
God the fucking life
—Nan? Nan? Can yeh hear me, Nan?
The shut eyelids do not twitch or flicker much less open. Alastair takes her hand very gently, feels it just tepid with what wanes within it and the skin like the fibre of his tracksuit, somewhat satiny, unmoist. Feels the faint pulse in it as if a separate life more animate is ensnared there, a smaller yet mightier animal kicking to be free with the final scrap of its strength.
—Nan? It’s me, Alastair. Can yeh hear me?
THUNK.
That bastard. That evil bastard.
God her face. All her hard history written in this face, life with its razors and the harrowing of years. And, at her birth, say we were presented with an itinerary of her life to come, a blueprint for the years ahead and told th
at this is how it will be for her, this is the pattern her life will take; would it not appear utterly unbearable? We’d think no, surely, one person cannot take that much anguish. Any one person does not deserve that much pain. And seem it must as a pre-planned scheme to wreck a life with suffering and reel we would at the cruelty and the record that nor is this unique. That this begins to hover an inch below the ceiling at the moment of the click of the first formed zygote. And any response alternative to mere endurance would be favoured completely but that is all this carapace mudbent and moribund immediately has.
Alastair bites his lip.
—Nain?
Soft but instant response. Eyelids flutter and the pulse seems to quicken and does the handskin warm or is that merely the fancied wish of the scally who clasps that hand.
—Nain?
The lips part with a delicate rip, almost undetectable. A word escapes:
—Eira.
And then another:
—Mynyddoedd.
Words which Alastair does not clearly hear but he feels them on his face as the gentlest breeze or as the soul departing a minute life, a songbird, say, or a skink. A cold and bare whispered drifting like the breath of ryegrass or animus of ice.
He holds her hand a touch tighter then releases it and stands to leave. He sees the tiny rise and fall of her sunken chest beneath the bedclothes and sees her eyelids ripple as she dreams and would stay longer, perhaps to fathom those dreams or at least attempt to, but there are things of huge importance that he is compelled to do.
THUNK.
That bastard.
Leave here, Alastair, and rejoin the city, move among those with life enough able still to betray. Pure got to find that fucking money, lad.
* * *
—Onions on that, love?
—Yeh, loads.
—Eeyar. One sixty please, love.
—Ta.
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