‘I wanna see her, Dee Dee.’
‘You can’t.’
‘I stayed away, Dee Dee, I kept away.’
‘And now you’re back,’ she says.
‘And now I’m back.’
When he reaches for the drink she thinks he’s going for the knife and her heart stops, she can feel it actually stop, and he takes the bottle and pours some coke into the brandy and it fizzes and the ice cracks and she is back in the world again and her heart thumps and the clock ticks. It is a proper brandy glass, fresh ice. She has wet herself, she can feel it under her, not too much, and she shifts in the chair with a small puddle to sit in, glad to be still breathing, a crackle to her breath like that of the ice.
‘Fuckin’ hell, Goldie,’ she says again and he lifts the glass towards his lips and she can see that his hand shakes, and it gives her a bit of hope.
‘Cheers,’ he says.
…
Liam watches the pub doors from the tram shelter, and then from under the sign at Tony’s shop, a flickering arrow that says ‘tattoos’, and Liam stood under it thinks it would make a great photo if they do any more magazine stuff. There is no one on the street, not a soul. The winter has not been cold but he shivers now, looks at the pub doors and then at his watch, a few minutes past already and the pub not open.
It was a ritual, opening up, he used to help Dee Dee with her nana, when he and Dee Dee were first together. After the cleaning and whatever needed doing in the cellar, the walk down to the post office for change, or the counting of tomato juice bottles and the like in their green crates, the filling of the ice machine, the placing out of beer towels and mats and ashtrays, in those days, a last dust over of the tables. All this in the same order, depending on which day of the week, like on a Thursday, for instance, the shifting of empty barrels and unbolting the cellar hatch and waiting for the drays.
There was a ritual to observe, all through the day, from half-seven when you let the cleaners in, to a last check of the locks at half-eleven, a nip of something warm from the shelf and the kettle on. He remembers that Dee Dee’s nana would set the clock to the one at the Lowtown market and then push it a couple of minutes forward. When the market one rusted to a standstill, she’d phone the speaking clock and do the same thing using that. These same things each morning, every morning.
It’s not like Dee Dee to be late, he thinks, but then wonders really how many times he’s seen her in these years. Since they split up, perhaps only a dozen times, if that, twenty years gone by. To have someone in your head, there and not there, all those years, that’s how they all live, he supposes.
He can see a light on in the lounge, thinks of the old chandeliers and flock wallpaper and wood and brass, and then realises the bar might be open. Perhaps they only open the bar in the daytime now, it’s not like they’ve got any punters, god knows how the place stays open.
So he crosses the road and walks towards the pub and he swears he can see someone at the bar, people sat at a table, through the frosted glass of the only window with the curtains half-drawn back.
…
He wears the years on his face, the pain, she can see that. Something, maybe that she can see the lad she once used to flirt with and then deny, and she thought she has hated all these years, makes her pause.
‘She’s my daughter, Dee Dee, and I kept away.’
Because he did. And why did he have to anyway? She could’ve written to him, sent him photos of Alina growing up. There was nothing from the courts about not doing that. She managed to get some message to him inside, though, through her uncles, Stan was still here then, maybe she never had any choice. Don’t come near, don’t come back to the Iron Towns ever again, or you’re a dead man.
She sees his face now and the years on it, the face of a man with just the thoughts of what he has done, and she thinks that a few words of comfort would not have gone amiss. A visit might have taken something out of his eyes, something that she sees now, a shadow across them.
And maybe for Alina, to have known her dad, at least a bit, and not just through old photographs or worse, through newspaper clippings that she knows she has pored over at the Hightown library. He pulled her out of the river, after all.
Dee Dee does not speak. His hand does not move towards the knife.
‘I saved her, Dee Dee. I pulled her out that car, out of the water.’
And something inside her, like the weather shifting, because she wants to say, but you put her in there in the first place, and you left Sonia in there, and she knows deep inside herself, like the way she feels when she opens the cellar door and sees the wooden steps drop into the dark, that there will always be a part of her, hidden and unspoken even to herself almost all of the time, that wishes he’d done the opposite and it appals her, scares her, the layers beneath. So all she says is, ‘I know Goldie, I know.’
She jokes to Alina that she wears the years on her hips, and here they are on his face, and on Mark’s face, she thinks, these coats they have wrapped themselves in, these lost boys. It’s a secret joke to herself, a solace, that Alina really is her daughter and that she wears her on her hips, like all mothers. She gave up so much. Maybe it is on all their faces, in all their eyes. She doesn’t look in the mirror so often these days.
And she sees his eyes change now, like the way they see the light across the valley here in summer and things that are there are suddenly gone and the hills appear out of the haze, and his face does look lighter, just for a moment, as if a terrible weight has shifted and eased and then settled again as his eyes fix back to their stare.
She moves her hand onto the table and touches his. There are scars on his fingers, knife cuts and scabs. He is cold. He does not know what to do now and neither does she and she feels calmer for a moment, can hear her own breathing with just the trace of a rattle in it, because she can see it is no longer in him, perhaps never was, not really, an unlucky boy is all, out of his depth.
They could have stood up in that water, something that stuck with her from what the papers wrote afterwards. He’d only taken the car to show off, jealous of Liam and Mark, is what Dee Dee thinks, she was sure at the time, some inkling. Liam hadn’t let Dee Dee go to the match, he was a big one for luck back then, all superstitions and ritual to be followed. She never went to away games so she wouldn’t go to Wembley. His parents went, of course. So she helped out here in the pub where they set a screen up in the lounge and then there was some problem with it and Lionel rigged up a bedsheet on the wall on which to project the match, right there under the ticking clock. Then when Mark missed that penalty and then the goal went in at the other end, Goldie was off, stamping around, he’d never even liked football, but he was angry now, and the next thing they got was the phone call.
‘I want to see her, Dee Dee.’
‘I understand,’ is what she says, and then, ‘Not like this though, Goldie, eh?’ and gestures towards him, at his dirty clothes and his exhausted face, this many-coated man.
‘No,’ he says, ‘no.’
…
The bar door is ajar, Liam opens it, smells the mopped tiles and the traces of beer underneath. He steps inside and for a moment, just stands there because this is harder than he imagined. There’s something else, Liam, she’d said. He is wearing a roll-neck jumper because she hates his tattoos, he knows this, she always said to him, don’t get any more now, after those first few, and then after that she had no say anyway. He thinks he can hear voices in the other room.
‘Hello?’ he says. ‘Hello, Dee Dee?’
They used to come and sit here in the cool of the bar sometimes, with all the old timers, the clack of dominoes and the telly playing quietly off to the side, sit and hold hands and look at the smoke coil up towards the ceiling. He hears a commotion, the thump of a chair going over and a little cry, like a whimper or something and he can tell it’s Dee Dee’s voice but no sound he ever heard from her, not even when they would ride out to that clearing in the woods or when they bou
ght that house up the hill and would wander through those rooms naked, a curse on that place he is sure now, and he thinks that he is disturbing something here, and does not want to see her, does not want to see her like that, as if you might find her with a boyfriend at this time of the morning with the door open, and as he thinks this he walks through the open hatch at the bar and off the tiles and onto the lino with the swirls where someone has mopped, still drying, and he sees them in a mirror etched with a picture of the old Chain brewery, two figures standing facing each other. Her hair has never changed. He loved her hair and her voice and he sees her shape in the mirror and this other figure half turned to him that he doesn’t know, with an old coat on and the smell and he thinks for a minute that it is Mark, but then thinks it can’t be, and something in his head is not making sense, which is when he sees the knife.
He shouts, is not sure what, into the mirror, and then again as he turns through the doorway into the lounge. There is still the bar between them and he sees the man’s hand go for the table and hears Dee Dee scream and run towards the hatch.
And he tries to vault the bar, his hands firm on it, but there are too many matches locked in his knees for that, too great a distance run, and it’s more of a scramble, this, kicks a tray of drying glasses, which smash, and he comes over the bar towards the man with the knife in his hand head first, not with his feet, as he thought to, and sees the blade and thinks, this is it, and that he should’ve grabbed a glass, too late.
Goldie –
…
He is not dead, not dead, but changed.
At low tide the men on the cliff-top sleep in their tents. The giants and parts of giants lie strewn across the rocks and shingle down to the foam of the receding sea. Gogmagog, what’s left of him, severed head and a severed arm pulling it along, drags himself across a ribbon of rough sand, assembles limbs on the rocks as the rain comes down, a spray comes in. He pieces together arms and legs from his comrades and his own head like a crown atop them, and scuttles along the cliff-base like a monstrous crab.
Up the wet rock he goes in the rain, a sea fret coming in to hide him, just the shape of legs working through the mist. The creature moves through the grey morning, through the green island, the white island, looks for a quiet hollow hill in which to rest, to wait.
…
– it is Goldie, the way he moves in this big coat like the way he used to dance that Liam always envied, even now his movement smooth across the floor and the knife is going away from him and not towards him. Goldie turns and gets to the lounge doors, rattles the bolt, and Liam has his hands up to grab him, is coming at him, but there is the knife held out in front of Goldie, and Liam stops, and in that moment of indecision Goldie has the door open, flings it open so the patterned glass shatters at Liam’s feet, and he is away down the road and Liam starts after him and is through the door and onto the pavement and would catch him no problem but for Dee Dee’s screams. So with Goldie halfway down the road he turns back to see her hanging onto the bar as if it’s a raft.
There’s something else, she had said to him, there’s something else.
…
Oh I wish I was you Billy Meredith
I wish I was you, I envy you, indeed I do.
When he lifts the cup they sing his name. You cannot see the crowd’s end, they fill the square and the streets beyond, the gaps between the grand brick buildings. They lean from windows, edge along tree branches in the far distance, throw their caps in the air and cheer and sing. He lifts the cup and they sing his name.
Oh I wish I was you
Indeed I do
Indeed I do.
And he lifts the cup and thinks but you are me. I am you and you are me. They have come from their factories and mills and docks and he has come from the deep black underground and into the light.
He would feed the ponies in the mine, feel their wet noses on his hand, the clink of chains, crawl down those tunnels and dream of the green fields above, the path of the ball across it, the arc of it across a bright sky. Those crosses he hit to Sandy Turnbull, the goal in the final, how he let it run across his body to strike it, to whip his foot through it with the force of all his dreams, all that came from the blackness, from his brothers too, of course, but the force of it, the whip of it so no one would stop it, that came from the very depths. And when it went in, and when he lifts the cup now, it’s like that moment you see the daylight when you’re coming from deep below, that surge inside yourself. It’s the same for them, he can see that, his dark eyes like there is still coal dust on them, star dust.
Oh I wish I was you Billy Meredith
I wish I was you, I envy you, indeed I do.
And I am you and you are me, he thinks, though there be many members yet there is one body, Corinthians, he remembers the preacher on a Sunday, the green hill, and they cheer as he raises the cup.
…
Steve Stringer hears footsteps come out of Chain Street and along under the grandstand, sees a figure running, his overcoat flapping open, what he thinks could be a knife in his hand. He hears the man breathing, heavy, running full pelt, the slap of the soles of his shoes offers percussion to the echoing steps. Steve gets just a glimpse and he is gone. He stays here, rests his cup of tea on the scaffolding pole, looks up and down the street for a pursuer. He sees nothing but a fox nosing around at some bins at the far end of the street. It is quiet. This place, he thinks, shakes his head, thinks of the curse for a moment and wonders if he should contact anyone about the running man, maybe not, probably not a knife anyway, he couldn’t be sure, and why break this new sense of optimism? This is the first month he can remember for years when he hasn’t been talking to the bank about how to pay the wages. The posters are in a pile in the corner of his office, to be pasted up on the corrugated iron at the Greenfield End later today. He’d checked the design of those from 1957, gone for the same look:
Football Association Challenge Cup
3rd Round Tie,
Sunday January 5th 2pm ko
Irontown FC v. Manchester United
There are banners that say SOLD OUT to paste up over them and add to the effect. The phone rings in his office, unusual these days, people usually call his mobile. Might be the FA themselves, he thinks, as he looks up and down the empty street.
‘Discrepancy?’ he says, when he hears out the voice on the other end of the line, thinks he can hear steps again in the street below, not so much worried as a sense of unease rising within him, ‘What do you mean, a discrepancy?’
…
He has his arms around her at the bar and she sobs into his chest. He kisses the top of her head, not sure what to do.
‘It’s OK,’ he says, ‘it’s OK. He’s not going to hurt you.’
She has her arms against his chest and it feels good to hold her like this, and he knows he should not be thinking of this right now, looks at the upturned table and chair and the threadbare carpet, hears the ticking clock, feels the palms of her hands on his chest and she pushes him away.
‘What you come in like that for?’ she says. ‘You could’ve just phoned. I was talking to him,’ she says. ‘Why didn’t you just phone back?’ She hits him in the chest with the flat of her hands, ‘Like any normal person,’ she says, and thumps him again and starts to sob.
He hugs her to him again and she shakes as she cries.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘He had a knife, Dee Dee, he had a knife. Jesus, what did you want me to do?’ but softly, quietly into her hair, like he is telling her a story in the middle of the night because she has woken from a bad dream.
They stay like this, at the edge of the bar. In the mirror that reflects into the other room Liam sees a man come in wearing an ill-fitting suit. He stands at the bar for a while. Then he rings the little bell but they stand there and don’t say anything. The man cannot see them in the mirror. Liam sees the man go to speak and then shake his head and turn and leave.
Then they sit and look at each other over
the righted table, each with a cup of tea. Dee Dee has poured them each a brandy, she says, ‘For the shock,’ with the intention of making a joke, but knows she just sounds like her nana, who would often reach for a glass after closing, shock or no. ‘Goldie never finished his,’ she says, again in a voice completely neutral, drained of all colour, and Liam doesn’t reply.
He tells her to ring the police and she says no and he doesn’t know what else to say.
She has put the bolts back on but is conscious she wants them open again soon, to act like nothing at all has happened. While the kettle was on she hurried upstairs, changed her clothes as quick as she could, heard water running in the bathroom, and stood at the door.
‘All right, love?’ she called, then a moment of surging panic when there was no reply, her hand flat against the locked door, until she heard Alina’s quiet singing and smiled. She wore her headphones in the bath, could never hold a tune.
The room is quiet and cold with the air coming through the door’s broken window.
‘So nothing before? Just the phone call. No contact, no turning up like that before?’
‘Nothing between when he phoned and now. I mean, that’s five months, I thought it was just talk, a mistake, you know, tried to put it out of my mind.’
‘You need to phone the police, Dee Dee.’
‘Maybe,’ she says.
‘Maybe Lionel or somebody…’ he starts, but his words tail off.
Alina comes from upstairs, moves behind the bar, looks confused, her hair up in a towel.
‘What’s going on?’
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