So they headed off across the Heath and they didn’t even say anything to each other, perhaps they must have talked about it before, he had certainly described the place to her, he was sure now, but there was something making him think that Stan Ahmed would not be very pleased if he found out, still, he didn’t need to find out, and this was Sonia’s voice in his head now.
Just on the last stretch of Anvil Yards, past the South Gate at Greenfields and almost at the turn in the road near where Lionel’s car yard was, there was a paper shop, a paki shop as they would call it and then have Dee Dee go ‘Eh, eh, none of that,’ and have Liam stare at them, anyway, there was a shop on its own just before the road turned towards the Heath, always this old woman just sitting there on her own behind the till. Goldie and Sonia had worked it up into some story that the place made a fortune. It was a shithole. There was nothing on the shelves. No one went in there, no people to go in, Greenfields had been shut ten years by then and the South Gate was rusted shut.
He pulled up in front of the shop, there were parking spaces out in front, no one around. They never said anything to each other, knew what they were going to do from previous conversations. There was a baseball bat, well rounders bat, that he kept in the car and he knew that would do, picked it up from between his feet and opened the car door, intending to leave it open, so he could jump back in and make their getaway.
Then Sonia jumped out of the car as well. ‘Let me do it, Goldie,’ she said, grinning drunk, had dropped the cigarette. So they left both doors open. Alina was sat in her car seat in the back, listening to that Prince tape they always played. He would swear now that they were only in there for what twenty seconds, thirty maybe.
He walked in with the bat and, sure enough, it was the old woman behind the till, pointing the bat at her head and she was up off her seat and back against the wall without a sound, something like a whimper, maybe. It was Sonia who pulled the till drawer out, found a some fifty pound notes hidden under there, so maybe there was something in the idea the place wasn’t quite right. They thought they’d hit the big time, one big massive rush, and out of the shop they went, laughing and shouting, so fucking easy, and into the car, and he remembers swinging out so hard into the road that they almost ended up in a hedge then and that would have saved Sonia’s life and that was something he often thought about because he was no way in control of the car and it was just luck, plain luck, that they didn’t crash then. The other thing was that at the trial they said that it was all Goldie, that Sonia had not even been in the shop, that it was Goldie who had ripped open the till drawer and found those fifties, although they never mentioned the fifties either, said all they robbed was fourteen pound ninety, which was what they took in change and threw it onto the back seat next to Alina and it went rolling around the car floor.
The woman only spoke Tamil. The shop was Sri Lankan. His solicitor said it must have been misinterpreted, the business of Sonia and the till, Sonia wanting to do it in the first place, leaving her daughter in the car while she robbed the shop. In court it was just him. His solicitor shrugged.
Sonia took the money and it was Sonia who was laughing as they drove away, her legs kicking the dashboard, and then screaming at him to get away, to drive faster, when they heard the siren, Alina crying in the back now, ‘Oh God, Goldie, Oh God,’ Sonia said over and over then. She’d even done up her seat belt. This bad girl. If she’d left that off she might even still be here and the whole world different, that’s what he thinks.
…
Liam never answers his phone, never has, and with the way it was ringing for two days after the cup draw, he thinks that if people want to find him they know where he is, so the message is a couple of days old at least, maybe more than that. A mortgage advisor keeps ringing him and he assumed it was another of their calls. They want to know if he’s thought about leverage options, whatever they are. He could rent the place out, he supposes, but he could ask Devon about that kind of thing. When he hears her voice he stops, stands at the window, looks across the Anvil Yards towards the pub, realises he’s doing that as she speaks.
‘Hello Liam, it’s Dee Dee, I’m sorry for ringing you and I know you’re probably busy,’ she has been smoking, he can tell from the huskiness in her voice, smoking or drinking or crying or something, no good for her asthma, or her singing, but then, she didn’t sing any more. He wonders if someone is dead. ‘You’re probably not going to want to hear this either. I saw Mark today. You should see the state of his face, someone’s set about him. His face is a right state. Look, I think he’s doing OK generally. But I just wondered, I don’t know, if you could check on him or something.’
There’s a pause, the sound of Dee Dee listening to her own voice, her own silence.
‘Anyway, I hope you’re OK. I hope the results get better soon, they’re not very happy in the pub, maybe they’ll drink more. Listen, I’m rambling, and there is something else, Liam. There is something else. If you could call me back that would be great.’
He is leaning against the window glass. He can see the cranes just about, the top of the flats, but he can’t make out which block is which from this distance, across time and space. From the hotel roof he’d be able to see the pub. He has thought a few times that he should ask Amir if he could change rooms every now and again, get a different view. He leaves his head against the glass, breathes onto it.
Her voice, he always loved her voice, singing, talking, whatever. She used to read poems out loud, lyrics, half-singing, half-talking. There is something else, she said. There is something else.
…
He is dressed as Father Christmas when Greta phones him, the day before they are meant to arrive, to say they aren’t coming. It was all arranged, they would get here on the 20th and stay until the 29th. He had it all written down on a pad of hotel stationery. Ally told him not to worry about Boxing Day, to be ready for Shrewsbury on the 21st, for York on the following Saturday, to keep himself fit for United. Things are on the up. His mum has got the rooms ready at the house, made Jari’s bed for him, although Liam knows that the boy would sleep with them, although maybe not, so much will have changed in six months, the seventh or so of his son’s whole life that he has just missed, and he tries not to think about it. Probably not with both of them in the same bed either, more like in the summer when Liam slept in a chair at the side of the bed with Greta and Jari in it, and he would hold the boy’s foot or hand, apart from that one night they went for a meal in Heathside and things had felt good, but then they’d argued afterwards about something which he now can’t remember at all.
‘You can’t do this to me, Greta, to us.’
‘It is too much, Liam. I am sorry, I am sorry. I should have said something earlier. It is too much for Jari. He is settled and happy. He is looking forward to Christmas here.’
‘Without his dad.’
‘You are not here, Liam.’
‘It’s not right.’
‘We did not leave anywhere. We belong here.’
He hadn’t asked her about coming back to England, had just assumed that was what they’d do. They weren’t really living together when he agreed to come home, things had already gone wrong. He couldn’t work her out. He tries not to think of his beautiful son. She is right that they belong there. He thinks of the cold hitting his face when they got out of the car at the shops near the lake once, the wind coming across the frozen water and the dark forest beyond it, straight from the Arctic, winds from places from storybooks, from Lapland, from Siberia; or the procession to the church that time, Jari strapped to him and under his coat, the baby’s face poking out from under a fur-lined hood, the crunch of snow under their boots, the line of candles, Greta holding his arm.
‘What about all his stuff that’s here, his presents and things? It’s too late for the post.’
‘He does not need plastic robots, Liam. He needs a father.’
He is dressed as Father Christmas and sits on the edge of the bed he slept in as a boy. He w
onders how he might tell his parents. They want to see their grandson. Just say it straight out, he supposes. They aren’t coming. He guesses Greta will never come here now. Part of him can’t blame her. He never told her he was coming back.
He has seen the way she watched the streets as they drove through the Iron Towns, a place she could not believe existed. England was a disappointment to her, she had thought of it as a land of kings and queens, country cottages and hedgerows and winding lanes. And it is that. But what she saw was the rust and the people, his people, shuffling up the Anvil Yards pavements.
She’d visited Russia as a student during the days of the collapse, she’d say the names of the towns to him, show him photos, Baikalsk and Vydrino, and a place called Asbest, named for asbestos, the worst place on earth she’d said, and then shown him photos from her dissertation, and there was something in the look in people’s faces, he wanted to tell her that he knew them, these people. The worst place on earth, she said. But that couldn’t be true. They joked about it in his parents’ kitchen one time, one of the few visits. It was the Jubilee. Spitfires had flown up the valley. There was Union Jack bunting strung up and down the street. She held up a jar of instant coffee and a carton of sterilised milk.
‘But the war is over, Liam. What’s more, you won.’
‘There’s always a war,’ is all he said, joking, not sure what that meant, like something his grandad would mutter, but certain there was something hard and true underneath it all.
He sits on the edge of the bed with the phone in his hands. A horn sounds from outside. Devon is collecting him. He and some of the others are taking presents to the children’s ward at the Bethel. He opens the window, shouts, ‘Hang on a minute,’ goes downstairs and takes a couple of black bin bags from the kitchen drawer, pushes Jari’s presents into them, heads outside and motions to Devon to open the boot. He wonders if he might even look at flights to Helsinki, there is time still for that, just. He has always been a man for the grand gesture.
…
The same routine every morning. She opens the bar doors dead on eleven. It used to be that a straggle of old men would be waiting out on the pavement, hats on, their morning shopping done and a bag of potatoes or sausages wrapped in paper in their hands. Those men had gone now, but you still got the odd early morning drinker. She can remember weekday mornings with men stood shoulder to shoulder in the bar, the days of the old livestock market, or at the shift-change at Greenfields. Not much this morning except hard shadows in low winter sun. There is a swirl of grit across the road they put down with the meagre snow, the bottom of Meeting House Lane is a brown puddle, the shape of the buildings murky on its surface. She likes these mornings best of all, quiet with the sun as it angles across the road. She latches the door open to air the bar, considers a cigarette on the step, queen of all she surveys. It isn’t cold, winter still not here, not really, in spite of the snow flurry. Instead, she heads back behind the bar and through the darkened lounge to the doors. She doesn’t know why she still opens up so early. Perhaps hopeful of some stray Christmas shoppers, men on the roads finishing up for the holidays maybe, a few up from the bakery. Court was sitting today, so it’s possible she’d get a few of them in from there.
The lock makes a solid click as it slides back with the key, and it’s as she does this, and moves her hand up towards the bolt, that maybe a shape catches the corner of her eye that she remembers an old man, a tramp of the old sort with a piece of rope tied round his middle holding his clothes together that used to come to the hatch for her nana to give him tobacco and papers and a bottle of something. He had a great beard, grey and white, tobacco stained, and he’d take off his hat, a battered version of the ones the men wore to market, and scratch at the skin peeling from his head. They had a name for him. She can’t remember it. A stray line comes into her head, My many-coated man. The rest of that stays at the edge of her memory, something just out of reach.
‘Got something for me dog, Dee Dee?’ she thinks of Mark.
And then of Goldie. ‘Yer dad’s here Goldie.’ She remembers Sonia, after some argument they’d had, saying it in reference to the old tramp at the off sales hatch, but no, it couldn’t have been him, because he was a memory from years before that, when Dee Dee toddled about behind her nana through the daytime pub and her mum and dad were still here. With the same meaning, though, one of the ragged old men in the bar. ‘Yer dad’s here Goldie.’ Sonia said it with a smirk, she had that streak in her, Sonia, and they must have had a row. Goldie didn’t see his dad, it was said to hurt him, to dig into him. His face would flinch with pain but it was a kind of habit. They’d have a row about nothing in particular, the way she looked at some bloke, or where he’d been the night before, both jealous like that, needing to cling to one another, to someone. They were an accident waiting to happen, the old saying. Then the accident happened.
And there he is in front of her. She turns back from the lounge doors, touches the frosted glass in the window and then stands in mid-step. He is there in front of her, sitting on one of the heavy wrought iron chairs, the shape of him part reflected in the hammered copper table at which he sits. There he is from across the years.
‘All right, Dee Dee,’ he says.
All right?
All right?
All right?
She feels everything fall away from her. And she thinks of that idea of your life flashing before your eyes and has never believed it, never believed in any of that stuff, she has seen people die, but that is what happens now, even as she thinks that all that stuff is rubbish. She sees herself toddling after her nana and hears the sound of glasses and singing and voices in the bar, the glamour of blue smoke and pub chandeliers, the warm press of drinking, dancing crowds, tiny rooms off hospital wards, where she was told she’d have to say goodbye to her daddy, to her mum.
She sees him as she first saw him, as she first saw Liam and Mark, all the swagger and laughter and dead certainty that life owed them all something. It owed them something, all right. A kick in the guts for being so sure of themselves. And then another and another. More than that. He has crawled from the wreckage of his life and everyone else’s. She wants this to stop, to turn back to the doors and he will not be there, sitting with two coats on, her own many-coated man. His face wears the years. He is dirty. There is a smell coming off him. She sees the knife on the table top.
‘Get me a drink please, Dee Dee,’ he says in that voice that was always a bit too soft, a country lilt or lisp that did not match his hard, sharp edges, leans back on the chair like a king restored to his throne.
…
Liam sits on the tram, pulls stray white strands of beard from his chin. There were a couple of kids on the ward who might not make it to Christmas Day. He’d watched Kyran sit at one boy’s bedside, holding his hand, reading him a story. He’d underestimated Kyran, just a young lad himself, growing a beard now which somehow made him look even younger, a boy who’d gone to the Ironport school, same as Liam, grew up on Cowton, this latest great hope of the Iron Towns. He held the boy’s hand, who lay very still in the bed, just his eyes watching Kyran as he read a story about Rudolph lost in the snow on Christmas Eve, trying to get back home so that he could pull the sleigh. When he finished the story the boy’s eyes started to close. Kyran leaned over and kissed the top of his head. Liam thought he might not hold it together, watched the nurses coming past with tinsel in their hair, and the kids in their dressing gowns, smiles on their faces, Kyran walking towards him now, and told himself he better had.
‘Ho, Ho, Ho,’ he boomed down the ward, felt the ripple of excitement, felt his own son’s toys in the sack over his shoulder.
Outside in the car, after Liam had changed in the toilets and stuffed his Santa suit into one of the torn bin bags, Kyran sat in the passenger seat with his head against the glove compartment. Devon had his hand on the lad’s back. Liam motioned to Devon that he had somewhere to get to, headed towards the tram stop.
…
The boy Merlin tells of times to come, times that have gone, of better days, and days of rage. He says the streams and valleys will boil with blood, tells of a red dragon and a white in endless struggle. That lion cubs will become fishes, that silver will flow from cows’ hooves, that the hills will be hollowed and their black insides burned. He tells of kings that will come and go, of war and plague and famine, of how Arthur will die on a riverbank, his insides leaking into the mud, and how they will set him off downstream in a coracle, to his island of apple blossom, to sleep and wait. He tells of life enduring, in the rocks and the trees, of people biding time out in lost valleys, of dispersing and reforming, of things changed, transformed, but enduring still, of death by fire and death by water. All things come again, he says.
…
There is the deep tick of the clock. It hangs high in the lounge. Someone comes from the museum to wind it every third week, then Dee Dee gets up on the stepladder when they’ve gone to push it forward a few more minutes.
Anvil Yards, England, it says, and it is too loud for this empty room, for her head, and she needs to think. She pours him a brandy, gets him a little bottle of coke, remembers he and Sonia drank that for a while when they came back from the holiday they had in Majorca, when her uncle had given Goldie a load of money for god knows what, and she hadn’t wanted to ask.
‘Do you want ice?’ she says.
‘Yes please, Dee Dee,’ he says, ‘and get one for yourself,’ and he smiles faintly and she feels her legs go a bit, and says, ‘Fuckin’ hell, Goldie,’ but she pours the drink just the same, and does herself a glass of water from the tap, and thinks that if she had any sense at all she’d have had a panic button fitted, or something, Lionel had even mentioned it. From here at the bar she hears a footstep on the loose floorboards upstairs, prays for a moment that maybe Tyrone has stayed over, something she was expecting to happen soon enough, but she can tell from the movement that it is Alina and her legs go again, just a bit. Nowhere to go but back here, to the table that Roni has rubbed a shine into. Nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide. She thinks to herself that this is how people go, with old songs playing through their heads, and what they might do on Tuesday, and what they might do in twenty years’ time, and how there are always thoughts of a happy ending right up until the end and maybe even beyond, because there is the knife on the table and what else has he come back for after all these years other than damage, more damage.
Iron Towns Page 14