He already knew the valley well, of course. His family were farmers, smallholders, he had cousins spread across the Midlands and border country. His dad’s family farmed land near Bridgnorth. When the family fame grew, a story attached itself to them that an ancestor of his mother’s, a milkmaid, helped King Charles hide as he fled through Worcestershire. This country was no great biblical revelation. And it was not empty, there were mills all along the rivers, farmhouses and hamlets, forges out in the woods. Hightown Castle and the Lowtown markets which clustered below it came with the Normans, fortuitously beyond the crest of a wooded hill in the painting. The castle had been built on an old abandoned fortress; the earl’s masons worked standing stones into the castle walls. Offa had contemplated his dyke here. Blue men had once watched columns of centurions appear through the river mist.
He’d been apprenticed to Darby at some point, had followed Chamberlain and Baylies out to the Dolgun furnace at Dolgellau, realised there were hundreds of valleys like the one at Coalbrookdale.
That the future was made of iron he was certain.
…
Alina gets the 29 to the bus turnaround at Cowton sometimes. There are often plastic flowers tied to the stile, the odd card in the spring, where the fight had spilled into the scrubby field. She can’t remember the boy’s name now but it had been a big thing at the time, he’d been the same age as her. She can’t remember what he’d done or was meant to have done or if anyone was ever caught, which shames her every time she sees the shrine, and thinks to herself she’ll have found out for next time, but still never does. She does not think they left flowers and teddy bears for her mum. She used to want to, pestered her mum, her mum now, would not let it drop one year. Was it the year that Diana died or was she still too young to understand then? To take her down to the roadside and lay some flowers. Dee Dee said no, wouldn’t relent. Her mum had a plaque at the crem and a rose bush. They could go there instead. It was not what people did back then, the laying of roadside memorials, another of the many ways the actual fact of her death fell away into the past.
She walks the paths up where the fields start, looks for the place where the view becomes Greenfield’s. It isn’t there, of course. Or if it is, it is so changed you may as well say it was there in the next field, or under that line of trees up on the ridge, or exactly where the last kick ended the boy whose name she cannot remember.
Maybe there, because she sees herself taking pictures, posed portraits, like the one of her great-great-grandad, except he isn’t, of course, because her mum, this mum, the only one she has known, is not her real mum, and he is not her real great great-grandad in his sepia waxed moustache and robes. Pictures of people in Congolese suits and Polish football shirts looking down the valley at the end of the bus route, trying to believe this place was their destiny.
…
‘That is Liam all over. No mention of Tony in that article. No credit to anyone else. What, do they think he’s carving them tattoos on himself? He is a piece of work.’
Dee Dee’s free hand rests on the magazine. Nico, the new Vietnamese boy with the fringe, is doing her nails. They are at the front of her cousin Lily’s salon. Her aunties, Gracie and Marcia, sit under the dryers through the back. Lily has resurrected the old fittings since she took the place on.
Dee Dee was in a video which used dryers like these when she was singing. It had a kind of fifties cold-war feel. Aliens were beamed to earth through the dryers. They looked like crocodiles, or people wearing crocodile heads. The whole thing was intended to look cheap. It was post-modern, apparently. Dee Dee appeared briefly, pretending to scream as the crocodile women walked down the street. She’d sung backing vocals they used on the twelve-inch and ended up as an extra in the video. It was when she was about to pack it in. She remembered standing waiting to give her details in order to get paid, stood in a draughty corridor of some warehouse on the edge of London. She could see Wembley Stadium over the traffic. There was a pile of crumpled prosthetic crocodile heads. She was getting the bus home, meeting the lads at the bus station, Goldie was probably going to give her a lift. She’d had enough, her band had split up, which hadn’t been much of a band anyway, thrown together by the management company. She’d sacked her agent, the brief attention she’d got from being the girl who walked out of a chart act to sing backing for more ‘authentic’ bands had faded. Authentic, my arse, she thought, most of them. She’d got married, and although she didn’t know it, was less than a year away from adopting her best friend’s baby and getting divorced.
‘Tony seems pleased,’ Nico says.
‘Tony’s too soft.’
From where she sits she can just about see the small red neon sign that Tony had sent to America for. It says ‘Tattoos’ with a jagged arrow flashing underneath it. It hangs off the old snooker hall awning. Stan Ahmed owned all the buildings along this little stretch at one point, where Lascar runs into the Anvil Yards. His grandchildren and great-nieces and nephews pieced together what was left and were doing OK with the pub and the salon and tattooists and gym. Heads above water OK, not private hospital on the outskirts of Marbella, still on the run from the police OK like Stan.
Running a business, standing in front of the magistrates was one thing. They’d nod in that particular way when she gave her name, although even that was fading now with Stan and his brothers so long absent. Phoning the police to tell them about Goldie was something else. They wouldn’t listen anyway. Alina is twenty-one years old. Dee Dee thinks of phoning Liam and watches faces go past on the street. There has been no word from Goldie since that phone call, she has started to hope that nothing might come of it. There had been a few calls, years ago, when she took Alina in, just silence on the end of the line, not even breathing. But she knew he was safely out of the way then. In the faces in the street she looks for the Goldie from that photograph. God knows what he looks like now, then she realises that it was like he said on the phone, that he’s never really gone, not really, always there in the shadows. She’ll know him when she sees him that’s for sure.
She wonders when Liam goes to see Tony, whether he goes during shop hours, or even in the season at all. There was a match this afternoon, of course. She thought of Liam, angry and pretending everything was OK in the days before a big game. By the morning of matchday he could barely speak, would sometimes throw up before leaving the house. She wonders if it’s still like that. He must’ve got used to it by now.
She wants a cigarette. Nico works at her cuticle.
‘I just think they should’ve mentioned him by name, that’s all. Liam could’ve said, I want my tattooist acknowledged, they’d have put it in if he’d said.’ She stops herself, ‘It’s our Tony’s work, after all.’
Her aunties do not listen. Gracie looks to be asleep right now. Marcia flips through a TV magazine. She opens one eye, arches the painted brow.
‘You seem very interested in what Liam’s got to say for himself, Dee Dee, that’s all I can think, love.’
…
Another iron town. Their club crest shows a fist which holds a girder with the word iron forged into it. The old badge showed a blast furnace and ironstone fossils. The town itself exists because of its steelworks. They play in claret and blue shirts, modelled on Aston Villa’s, which for reasons that may now seem inexplicable, the people of Scunthorpe thought might bring them luck. Some say it was West Ham, though, another set of irons, echoing across the empty London docks, blowing bubbles over the car works at Dagenham. Liam has Hurst, Peters and Moore holding the Jules Rimet Trophy aloft tattooed on his right thigh. When the supporters pile out on the away car park in Anvil Yards, next to the yellow concrete of the bus station, the sun glints on the towers of scrap over by the canal, and they sing Gyppos and What a fucking shithole. Some of them take off their shirts. Their blond hair and white bellies move across the burning plain.
‘Who are yer? Who are yer?’
‘We are iron men, from the Iron Towns, come from the Anvil
Yards, come from the Anvil Yards,’ they reply from the Greenfield End.
Quieter, a low chant in the background, fewer people, they bang the corrugated iron at the back of the stand to create the sound of thunder, a storm coming.
‘We are the Spider Boys, we are the Spider Boys, we are the Spider Boys…’ into a sibilant hush.
The spider mythology did not begin with the building of the Spider House, that was just its height. The eighth James Greenfield joined the craze for zoo building in the 1930s. He had the arboretum landscaped and built the Spider House at its entrance. The visitors dwindled but it lingered on like much else in the Iron Towns. They still draped lights through the remaining arboretum trees every winter, decorated the branches with silver webs and plastic spiders.
The first mentions of the spider came with the Norman farmers, settlers. Young girls – it was always young girls, milkmaids and farmer’s daughters – would report seeing the movements of long thin legs high up in the trees, curtains of silver thread draped the branches and hedgerows. The land was cursed in some way. Rumours and strange stories lingered on.
There is a game the children still play. Liam sees them through the rain-dashed tram windows, over the wall of the Ironport primary school. Girls and boys – always one girl, one boy – back to back with arms linked, four arms, four legs, staggering around, pulling each other this way and that, trying to catch their screaming, taunting mates.
The spiders had moved over the years, become subterranean. Liam remembers lying on the furry rug in front of his grandparents’ coal fire. He could lie for ages, watching the shape of the flames, seeing mountains, dark tunnels, fathomless pit shafts he knew his grandad crawled through when Black Park was still open.
‘There’s summat down there, I don’t care what they say.’
‘What you going on about, Dad?’
‘You watch what yome saying Eli, you’ll scare the boy.’ His nan’s voice from the kitchen, the flames flickering blue-edged around the coals. He remembers the rough black finish on the scuttle handle. It still sits in a coal bucket in his grandad’s outhouse, lined with ancient dust.
‘He takes some scaring.’ His grandad ruffled his hair. ‘All I’m saying is there’s summat in it. There’s none of you ever been down there, and a good thing too.’
‘It’s dangerous enough without talk of giant spiders. You know what you sound like?’
‘I ain’t saying what it is, whether it’s the spider or what. Just sometimes you get the sense of summat else, that’s all. I ain’t even saying it’s a bad thing, that it means any harm. Just that there’s summat there. There’s things people don’t understand, can’t explain, no matter how many degrees or bits of paper they’ve got, that’s all I’m saying, so then they say there’s nothing in it, it’s just an old wives’ tale, just to make thereselves look clever, everyone else seem stupid for thinking it.’
‘You’ll be telling us to say our prayers next.’
‘You know what I think about that nonsense.’
That his grandad, who had dug coal from deep underground every day like his dad and his dad before that, who believed in Marxist dialectics and liked a pint of mild and a bet on a Saturday, a week in Llandudno and his October trip to the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, also believed a giant spider lived in the tunnels that dragged down the hills they lived on never struck Liam as that strange. You could hold plenty of different things in your head, he knew that even then. That you could be a good man who did bad things or a bad man who did good things, and that they might amount to much the same, was something he understood from somewhere deep within him, like the coal in the hillside.
…
The lad takes a touch, half-turns just inside the centre circle. Not here you don’t. Liam is in. Takes the ball, man, everything. He hears the air leave the kid’s body as he falls. First big cheer of the afternoon. Liam stays standing, above him, says nothing. The ref blows up. Calls Liam over and warns him, talks in a low, calm voice to him. Liam nods but doesn’t listen. He would’ve booked him had it been any later than the second minute, that’s for certain. It’s a free shot this early in the match, the season. There’s a voice chipping away at the ref. Liam stares straight ahead. The striker is on his feet, jogs forward, doesn’t look at Liam. They stick the free kick straight down the middle. Liam is up, bodies bounce off him, heads it back towards the sun. Out they go. Out. Out. A deep-throated growl goes through the crowd. They sing his name.
…
That she is the great-aunt of the dreadlocked man who stands on the ladder, with wires trailing over his shoulder and down the other side of the bar, is something that fills her with wonder. She knows it’s a trick of big families, this overlap of generations. They joke about it. She has not seen Nathan for a few years, she remembers a shy boy fiddling with an electronic game, half-hiding behind his mum, Natalie, Dee Dee’s niece, though Dee Dee is four years younger. The joke doesn’t seem that funny to her. As a kid she had great-aunts with silver hair that they always tied in buns, who could remember when they brought electricity to the villages up on the Welsh Ridge. Maybe she is those women now. Sitting in a high-backed chair, lips moving with no sound coming out, remembering times of darkness. She tries to work out what relation Lionel is to Nathan. Lionel is her uncle but not Natalie’s, she doesn’t think, can’t remember for a moment.
‘Thanks again, Lionel,’ she says to him as he comes back in from the van. They sit at a table with a beaten copper top in the lounge in the net curtain light.
‘Don’t mention it love. I’m glad you’ve seen a bit of sense installing those cameras. We worry about yer, chick, living down here on yer own. It ain’t safe, love. I wish I could say it was. It ain’t the place it used to be.’
She doesn’t know where else he thinks she could go.
Lionel sighs, sits back. He’s enjoying this, this show of concern. The subtext is it ain’t safe since your uncle Stan stopped keeping things in order down here and had to do a runner to Spain. ‘When yer uncles was around,’ she hears quite a bit from the drinkers in the bar, said in the same tone as ‘When the works was open’. Nostalgia has replaced fear, a trick of time. There was a lot more to the collapse of the Anvil Yards than the demise of the Ahmed family.
Lionel is the last of his brothers still around. He runs a car yard and a security firm that won the contract to guard much of the abandoned works sites. He runs the men on the doors in the fancier pubs of Heathside and Hightown, sends someone to watch the pub doors on matchdays, even though Dee Dee never asks. He still sails close to the wind, but hasn’t been in any trouble, except over VAT receipts, as far as she knows, for years. He prefers the quiet life these days, Sunday roasts up at the golf club and so on.
She can hear voices from the kitchen and thinks for a moment that Alina is talking to Nathan but he remains with his head through a missing ceiling panel and Dee Dee sees the other boy – when she came to think of men in their twenties as boys, she is not sure, finds her own ageing unbelievable in some way – who stands in his blue overalls smiling at something Alina must have said. She didn’t even know she was in.
‘I didn’t know Alina was here,’ she said and watches the boy as he nods and says something and smiles again. A lovely looking boy, tall, with clear, golden skin and long eyelashes she can see. This is good, will do Alina good, she thinks, to be flirted with by a handsome boy. Alina is too serious, although maybe there is plenty to be serious about.
Lionel dips his biscuit into his tea and there is a moment of quiet while Dee Dee decides to say anything or not.
‘You seen Bobby?’
Lionel flinches at the mention of his son, knew it was coming though, and she can’t tell how much that reaction is rehearsed or genuine. She does not have such a high opinion of her own family these days. There is custard cream smeared on Lionel’s lip.
‘I told him,’ he says, ‘I told him not to come back. He’s upset his mother too much now, crossed the line. I don’t know what�
��s the matter with him. I’ve washed me hands of him, told him don’t come back. He’s had too many chances, should’ve been harder with him from the start.’
From the start of what, she’s not sure. He doesn’t ask her if she’s seen him, which she hasn’t, she was out on the morning Paul told Bobby he couldn’t serve him at just turned eleven o’clock in the morning with Bobby all glassy eyed and looking for an argument and Bobby had smashed the glass in the bar door with the fire extinguisher. That had been a couple of months ago, but it would be nice to be asked.
‘I look at you here, and Tony and Natalie with the salon now. None of yer had it that easy, one thing and another. He had everything he ever wanted and what do we get in return? Everything throwed back in our faces. No, I’ve told him.’
‘What about if he got cleaned up?’
‘He won’t get cleaned up. I’ve told his mother, one day there’ll be a phone call, a knock at the door, yer know. We’ve got to steel ourselves for it.’
‘He’s only a kid, Lionel.’
‘Some people am no good.’
‘Your own son,’ she says quietly but Lionel is not listening.
He nods towards Nathan pulling the wire for the new cameras up through his dreadlocks.
‘These two here, great workers. You couldn’t meet a nicer lad than our Nathan. And this other kid’s his mate. I was employing him over the Yards, security work, you know, and some stuff on the doors, but he’s a fast learner, he’s worth more than that. I’ve got him out with me on jobs some of the time now. You could trust these with your life. The kid, Tyrone, he’s off the Peng, right, background you wouldn’t believe, even for there, unbelievable. Yet, here he is, getting on with things. And then you’ve got our Bobby. We spoilt him, Dee Dee, that’s for sure. Hundred pound trainers for Christmas, remember? Florida and what have you. I told Gracie at the time, this is too much, he’s out of control, this one. And then with the boxing, we should have held him back a bit more. He believed what people said about him. Would her listen? I’ve told him, don’t come back this time.’
Iron Towns Page 6