He thinks of rising, Sunday mornings. He and Jari run at the lakeside. The boy’s hand is small in his, grips hot and tight. The boy laughs, ‘Faster, Daddy.’ Liam quickens his step and the boy half-flies along the track. They are barefoot. Their feet skim the packed earth, they feel the cool of the water on their left, the light comes through the trees and flickers, light then shade, light then shade, like old film run fast. Along the path they see the jetty, a blue boat against it. Greta stands on the veranda, waves and smiles as she sees them come through the woods.
Finland is a dream to him now. That was him. That was a life he had, somehow.
He lies on the bed alone and runs through the woods with his son.
…
‘Albion, Albion, Albion…’ The song echoes off the dark brick of Chain Street at the away end.
‘Albion…’
Albion: the White Land.
‘…Albion!’
The giants sing this as they approach Brutus’ feast on the cliffs. The island has vanquished invaders since it became an island. Seas shift, land rises and falls, nothing lasts for ever.
The invaders are war hardened, Trojan refugees, delighted to find this empty white land. Brutus nods at Corineus. It must be done. The giants have grown soft in their isolation, despite their clamour and noise. They do not feel so much like giants, their arms and legs and heads scattered across the fields, their plump white bellies slit open.
They put Gogmagog in a cage. The bars twist to his shape but do not break, brand his flesh. He cannot move his head to look away from the ruin, from the feasting and celebration. They joke that they might keep him as their pet, tame him, lead him round on a collar. Brutus nods at Corineus again. He tips the cage over the cliff and Gogmagog is dashed on the rocks below.
‘Albion, Albion, Albion, Albion, Alb-i-on.’
…
‘Does he not want you in this morning, love?’
Alina walks into the kitchen, she wears a thin cardigan over her nightie. Her hair falls in her face. Groggy, she looks like she’s had a night out, Dee Dee thinks, but Alina never goes out.
‘No, he’s opening a bit later he says, never anybody there before eleven.’
Alina works in Rob’s record shop at the Lowtown indoor market, another of Dee Dee’s cousins. He sells vinyl, reggae and metal and dance twelve-inches, scrapes by like everyone else. Dee Dee’s voice locked in a groove on a record somewhere in the Lowton Bull Ring.
‘Kettle’s boiled,’ Dee Dee says. ‘Do you want some toast?’
‘I’ll do it, Mum.’
‘Sit down.’ There is suddenly not enough space for them here, with the leaves of the table drawn out. Dee Dee moves her widening hips through the space between the fridge and the back of the chair, feels Alina a head and shoulders above her. She thinks of her still as a gawky schoolgirl all arms and legs, and now she is this lovely long-limbed young woman. She thinks of Sonia, the way she could move hardly at all when she danced but everyone would still look at her, want to be her or be with her. Alina sits without saying anything else, pushes her hair back over her ear. She wears earrings with teardrop scales that shimmer in the light through the window.
‘I like your earrings.’
‘Thanks. They were yours, I think.’
Dee Dee puts her hand across the table to hold Alina’s hair back herself. She cannot place this jewellery at all. They look proper silver on the undersides, a peacock blue inlaid on the other side, meant to be feathers or fishscales.
‘I got them from one of the boxes upstairs.’
Always messing with things, this girl, poking into drawers and boxes, ever since as a sticky-handed toddler she found a photo of Sonia as a chubby little girl and pointed at it.
‘Look, it’s Lina,’ she had said, ‘it’s Lina.’
‘Might have been Nana’s,’ Dee Dee says and puts milk in the tea, gives herself a sugar, cannot get the energy this morning, barely dragged herself to let Roni in, banging on the door early, nearly half-seven, like the place needed such a thorough clean after a heavy Friday, when they had barely had half a dozen in all night, if they took a hundred quid they’d been lucky. This cannot go on.
‘What about, you know, anything else coming up?’
‘I don’t know, Mum. What like?’
Dee Dee doesn’t answer, puts the bread back down in the toaster, she can never get that setting right, doesn’t know what to say. Twenty-one years old, no boyfriend, barely any friends it seems to her now. What happened to Donna? she wants to ask her. Do you not see Taylor any more, love? Nothing in response, not much anyway; seems happy enough in herself, but it didn’t seem much of a life to Dee Dee, living in the rooms above a pub, bits of part-time work in your cousins’ and uncles’ – not even your actual cousins and uncles – shops and market stalls, not even doing much with her art now from what Dee Dee can see. When she finished college, Dee Dee thought Alina would do something else. She could’ve gone to university, something. The years start to drift.
‘Just, thinking about the future, you know.’
‘By the time you was my age you was married,’ Alina says in a neutral tone. Dee Dee isn’t sure if she is taking the piss or not, chooses to give her the benefit of the doubt.
‘Nearly divorced,’ Dee Dee replies in the same flat tone, looks at her. There’d been some big blow-ups as a teenager, some big rows, but that was to be expected, just the two of them together under one roof, needing one another. Never, not once, any ‘You’re not my real mum.’ Not once. The opposite, really. ‘I don’t care, I’m glad what happened,’ she said once, when she was eleven, twelve, just going up to secondary school, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t have been together.’
‘Don’t say that, Alina, don’t say that. Your mum loved you very much,’ she said to her even as she held her tight. Maybe that was when they started to move apart. Maybe Dee Dee had pushed her away, for her own good she thought.
And she wasn’t even sure it was true. Sonia had not wanted her, only as a little trophy, a little doll. When she cried as a baby, Goldie had been better with her, shushing her and letting her sleep on his chest.
‘She needs changing,’ Dee Dee had said to her one afternoon, early on, Sonia moping about saying she felt fat. Dee Dee looked after Bobby and Tony, plenty of other younger cousins.
‘She’ll get a rash, Son.’
‘You do it then, if you know so much about it.’
And she had. Old style nappies with safety pins because that was what Sonia’s mum knew. Dee Dee soon changed that when she got the chance.
‘And what’s all that rope doing in the yard?’
Alina has coils of rope sitting inside the back gate, too heavy to lift anywhere. Dee Dee has no idea where it’s from or how she got it there, the kind they used to tie things on ships with.
‘Where’s it from, even?’
‘It’s for a project.’
‘What project? For who? An art thing?’
‘Yeah, an art thing.’
‘Roni says it’ll attract rats.’
‘Roni’s bloody obsessed.’
‘Says she can’t put her bleach down properly.’
They both smile at this, at least, look at each other for the first time that morning.
‘What art thing?’
‘Just something, I don’t know…’ Alina’s voice tails off, then, ‘Tyrone’s collecting it in the van for me,’
‘Oh Tyrone is, is he?’ Should she ask, who is Tyrone and pretend not to know? Dee Dee tries to think on her feet, not as quick as she once was, she realises, understands that there’s still a smile on her face that she should probably try to lose. The rope is an utter mystery.
There’s the smell of burning, then a coil of smoke before the alarm goes off. She can never get this toaster right. The smoke rises from the grill and is drawn up behind the half-open blind, drifts across the ceiling.
Dee Dee swears, pushes the window open, grabs a tea towel to threaten the smoke alarm with. Al
ina scrapes her chair back, gets up.
‘Is the water on? I wanted a shower before I go,’ makes her escape, moves like the smoke through the kitchen door.
…
Like Zidane, Pirlo’s expression does not change, not one flicker from start to finish. If there is anything, there is just the tiniest hint of self-admonishment. It’s the face of a man who has been out and come back home and realised that he has forgotten to post the letter he’d meant to. He is wearied. He looks like he wants to sit on his arse and think about Dante. The English players chase the air between Pirlo and the ball. He passes it into the gaps between the players, it’s simple, he says.
Hart is on his back, like some great insect trying to right itself, Gregor Samsa in a red goalkeeper’s shirt. Maybe it’s all some joke that swirls back to Prague. Still, Pirlo’s face stays the same.
…
She tried it with wool before, had not taken the scale into account. Spent half a day deeper than she’d ever been into the works, part of Lysaght’s, Greenfields itself, Alina is not sure of the demarcation line, the railway tracks maybe, heavy iron wagons sat in the sidings, grass growing in tufts around the wheels, tall thin reeds with yellow flowers that she does not know the name of grew between the wooden slats. She stopped to photograph them. There was the long wall of one of the sheds in the background, and the contrast with sun on the hillside beyond, a corner of the cemetery fairly indistinct at this distance, an angel’s wings just about visible. So she had something to show for the day, they’d come out well. She wanted to do something with the colour, deepen it, heighten it. She didn’t even have the language for this stuff. The material was too big, she thought. It would take a life-time to learn how to do it, how to say anything of what she wanted. There was a lot to learn. The scale, for one thing. She spent a couple of hours trailing the wool through what had once been rolling mills, the sound of pigeons from the roof, she was shat on twice. As she walked she thought she should record their sounds, the splatter of wings and shit, the vibrating murmur in their throat as they slept. Just the sounds, maybe pictures with it. This was more of a complete piece. Ariadne, she’d call it. And it was strange, because she never got scared in there, never, although she knew she probably should, but that day she had the feeling that every turn she took she would come face to face with the monster, some monster or other, anyhow. No one who came over here was up to any good.
It was wrong for the space. It wasn’t a maze, not this part, this wide abandoned factory floor. The wool did not work. She’d wanted to suggest frailty, of course. You could barely see it in the pictures, just a slight thread, but then maybe it was good, maybe that was the point. When she started to think in this way everything just went in circles and she’d ask herself what was the point of it all, tell herself to get out of there. It was why she always took photos, there was always a fall back, and in the imaginary conversation she had in her head of what she was doing in there she would say taking photographs because it was clear, to anyone who looked at the place for more than a few seconds, really looked at it, that surely this was something worth capturing. But the Ariadne thing kept playing on her mind. Hence the ropes.
‘You should watch yourself, wandering about them factories all on your own,’ that was the first thing he said to her, she thinks, but he had a smile on his face as he said it and it was like he was setting her a question, like how would he know about what she did, where she went. Afterwards, she thought she should’ve been more freaked out than she was, his earring glinted in the sun.
‘I’m taking photographs,’ is what she said.
‘What for college or something?’
‘For meself. I was at art college, so sort of, but I’ve packed it in. This is my own thing.’
‘But you do need to be careful. For real. There’s people living over there, I swear. There was a kid in a tent last summer. You get all sorts. And the animals, a whole pack of dogs, foxes everywhere, skinny little wild cats. One of our lads said he saw a tarantula over there, it come up out of a pipe by the old docks. It’s the blokes who end up over there you need to watch out for, though, obviously.’
She laughed. ‘A tarantula?’
‘That’s what he said. Escaped from the Spider House, or left over from the days of the docks. Things would hide in ships.’
‘They’d hide in ships, not canal barges come from Birmingham. People really believe them spider stories.’
‘I didn’t say it was true. But the people thing is. And you should be careful. You ever play that spider game, when you were a kid? Hey, where did you go to school?’
‘The Ironport,’ she said, ‘then Lowtown.’
He was from the Pengwern.
‘I’m off the Peng,’ is what he said, ruefully, defensively. He started naming people he thought she might know and she didn’t know any of them.
‘But you’re Nathan’s cousin, right?’
‘Yeah, second cousin, really.’ That would do. Sometimes it was useful to be an Ahmed.
‘I used to train with Bobby sometimes,’ he said this sadly too.
‘Do you ever see him now?’
‘Funnily enough, over the Yards sometimes. I think he might sleep over there himself some nights. I don’t know. I told Lionel. He wasn’t so sure.’
‘My mum looks out for him. I’ll tell her. You tell him he can come here if he needs anything.’
‘I don’t know for sure, but he’s sometimes around there, round and about. If he sees the car or the uniform then he runs off, even if he sees it’s me. I’ll give him sandwiches or something if he stops. Not money, because you know where that goes. He don’t need money, though he acts like he does.’
She texted him the picture of the angel’s wings, the one with sun and shadow, and he texted straight back. She asked him if he’d help her move the rope. He said no problem, and how about getting a pizza or something afterwards.
…
The second painting hanging in the Hightown Town Council chamber is from the same aspect, looks down the valley from the hills. They say de Loutherbourg painted it on his way to or from the Bedlam works but it is not attributed, hangs on the opposite wall to the other painting.
It is night lit as day by the furnaces which bloom along the rivers. The Samson Foundry is there, the Watkins Cylinder Works, the fires which form the first incarnation of Greenfields. Bridges span the rivers. Canal mania has hit and barges throng the cut and the half-built Ironport docks. Smaller fires illuminate the shanty town of navvies from Ireland and the Black Country who live in shacks and tents in the mud. There is winding gear on the hilltops. The shallow coal is already gone, buildings sag down the hillsides with the ground dug out from under them. There are people everywhere in the valley bottom, tiny swarming black figures, ants on a burning log.
…
The Quakers is the old Quaker Burial Ground halfway to Burnt Village. They built their factories here in the valley, built the village for their workers to live in. It’s where people go to drink when they’ve got nowhere else left. Saturday teatimes Mark Fala heads up there to give alms to the destitute. Matchdays are still hard for him. If he ever loses it again it will be a matchday. But he feels calm today. Liam has started, he knows that. He listened to the radio quietly for a while this afternoon. He pictures Ally standing naked in the showers, talking at Liam, ‘You are not a footballer, son, do you hear me? You are a fucking warrior, a fucking gladiator. You go out in that second half and dominate that cunt, you understand me, son?’
For ages after Mark and Liam would put that voice on, try to get that wild look in their eyes. They would laugh about it, but the truth was they believed it too. That talk did the trick as well, Mark remembers, an away game at Port Vale or somewhere. Some old cunt playing for one last contract, to pay his mortgage, and Liam giving it all back to him, kicking lumps off him, taking an elbow and giving one back, grinning at the bloke and then taking the ball off him, shutting him up, dominating him. That was Liam: a fucking g
ladiator. He can see the floodlight pylons from here as he climbs the lane past the last houses and gets the feeling that sometimes comes, that he could be there right now, sitting in that dressing room, unlacing his boots, joking with Liam, or sat staring at the tiles, beaten. He doesn’t know today’s score. Burton Albion. They’ve started the season well, Irontown haven’t. It doesn’t matter. In the wheel of the days, there’s always another match coming. Until there isn’t. Even then, look at Ally, at Archie Hill, old Ted Groves who does the kit. Mark could’ve stayed for ever. He knows he has to shut out these thoughts. He’ll have a can with the others in the Quakers if it’s calm there, you can never predict. He doesn’t drink that much these days, though, barely at all, contrary to what people think. Nothing compared with what he did. Let them think it, it suits him, means people leave him alone. If ever reporters come and bang on the door, track him down for some story of one of England’s great lost football talents, he pretends to be so pissed as not to be able to speak. They can write what they want.
He puts a foot on the low wall. You have to be careful here. He is usually fine, it’s usually just drink in here, the lifers. Crackheads and the like don’t climb the hill, not this late in the year. The drinkers enjoy a sunset, appreciate the autumn colours. Gravestones lean at angles against the wall. Drummer Pete salutes him, his belly bare and red and a can of cider resting on it.
‘All right, Mark. Here he is look. Told yer he’d be here.’
A couple lie sleeping up the slope from where Pete reclines. A bloke called Jigsaw pisses loudly against the far wall. Stevie from Oxton stands a little way from Pete, his face to the sun, the last wisp of a roll-up tucked in the corner of his mouth. Mark pulls a couple of the Superkings from the pack in his pocket and presses them into his cracked hand. Stevie smiles at him, his eyes not quite there, whispers a thanks. When he’s had a big session his voice goes.
Iron Towns Page 8