What he thinks is that she changed her mind. That itself was unusual. Something else he got from her was that he knew his own mind, never had any doubts. That’s why packing it in was a question of when and not if. He tried to drink himself to death. He thought that might be a solution, but it was harder than you might think. His heart wasn’t in it maybe, he had never been that much of a drinker, would get drunk and pass out. You had to really give yourself over to it, like Stevie and Jigsaw and the others at the Quakers. You could admire their determination in a way. He wasn’t joking. To achieve anything, you had to put some effort in, even if it was just leaving. He thinks she changed her mind, thought that what she wanted was to leave and then realised too late that she wanted to live, if only for him. In dreams she would come to him and ask for forgiveness and he would say it’s OK, it’s OK, Mum, don’t cry. Maybe she just wanted to be with his dad, but he wasn’t sure that any of them believed in that stuff, not really. You didn’t go anywhere. You just stayed here in the Iron Towns.
He can’t swim. It occurs to him that one day he might do the same as she did, but he doubts it now. He’s come through dark days, hours, minutes, sometimes the world just reduced to nothing, but he has started to not feel so bad. He wonders if it is simply the fact of getting older. He couldn’t play football now even if he wanted to. He can’t drive. He has not had a girlfriend for twenty years, even back then just someone to hold hands with. He wasn’t like Liam, like Goldie. He used to look at Sonia and imagine, dream about what it might be like. She had all sorts under her fingernails too, she had clawed for life too, but then Sonia had never wanted to die.
The wind changes and the rain drills against the window. When it comes at a certain angle, a wind out of the north-west, from out of the far mountains, the water gets in and patters the floor in his mother’s room, sometimes the bed cover. He’ll go and get some old sheets from the cupboard. Everything is still here. He thinks of it as her room. There’s still some stuff of his dad’s in the back of the wardrobe. His funeral suit, for one thing. Didn’t need it, after all. He is not sure what clothes he was buried in. There was a kid who died, one of the ones they’d visit down at the children’s ward at the Bethel, buried with one of Mark’s shirts. The grave wasn’t far from Sonia’s plaque, just outside the garden of remembrance. Mark thought about it every time he went up there. When the wind blows from the other way, it brings his name on it. The way they still sing it. They need some new songs, is what he thinks.
…
With the game off, Liam sits and drinks in the hotel bar with Devon and Julius. The car parks are under water, both at the ground and the hotel. Devon and Julius are shipwrecked.
‘So if the ball went over the stand, right, you had to scamper down these steps and open this door, like a hobbit door, right. There was three of ’em. One level with each penalty spot and another at halfway.’
‘Scampering, that’s a great word, scampering.’ Julius grins at his bottle of beer.
‘And each door opens onto the riverbank, right, except there ain’t much bank just there. You know you could only get into the East Stand at either end of the ground, it’s one of the reasons they closed it, right.’
‘Health and safety considerations,’ Devon says.
‘Exactly. Anyway, you’d open this door and have to watch your step, what with studs on the concrete, to not end up in the drink, and then you’d put your head out and, I swear to God, there’d come this old bloke in a bobble hat rowing a little boat, a coracle it’s called, this kind of boat, and he’d fish the ball out with a net and row it over to you to take back. I can’t think of his name.’
‘Someone needs to scamper to the bar.’
‘I can’t think of his name. This bloke was ancient, all bent over, thick glasses on, three coats in winter. Looked like he slept in the boat, but, get this, his old man had done the same job before him, right, before they even built the stand and there was just a bank and a wall down that side, so what, the twenties or summat, the same boat, a coracle.’ He is losing them, their eyes glaze, fix on their drinks, with this story of his days as a ballboy, on the results of games that have made it through the weather. They toast and drink whenever they hear Irontown mentioned. ‘Archie Hill stuck it in the river six times one afternoon, I swear.’
‘Archie Hill is a cock,’ says Julius.
Archie had dropped him, named the team yesterday, decided to try Kyran up front, and then the rain came.
‘I am the curse,’ is what Julius had said when he’d had a couple of drinks. ‘Archie better believe it.’
Liam can see a man reflected in a mirrored column. He stands near the reception desk, looks uncomfortable, checks a heavy-looking watch, dark blue suit and – this is what has caught Liam’s attention – dark glasses. It is pouring with rain in the English Midlands.
‘Is that one of the Portuguese?’ Liam nods towards the mirror and looks at the other two. When he looks back there is no one there.
‘What Portuguese? I’ll have another.’ Julius rarely drinks, is feeling it.
‘Remember,’ Liam starts, ‘that kid, start of the season, Luis…’ Then, ‘You heard about that club that takes their ground with them, erects a whole stadium? They build the stadium the week of the game out in the desert, out where they don’t have football, like Mongolia and places, play their match, then that’s it they’re away and the ground goes with them, on to the next place.’
‘What you on about? Who do they play?’
‘You two need to slow down a bit,’ Devon says, ‘I’ll get a round in.’
‘They travel round like nomads and that. Wanderers. That’s where the team name Wanderers comes from, teams that didn’t used to have a home ground.’ He says this to no one in particular, sometimes has conversations he thinks he might have with Jari in the future in his head, out loud too now, it seems. If Jari can speak English by then, if Liam can speak Finnish or Swedish or Russian or German or whatever else he might learn.
Liam stands and walks towards the mirror, walks around the column with his drink in his hand, no one there, shakes his head, and walks back to their seats. He’d been sure.
Devon comes back with the drinks on a tray, motions to the TV screen. On the news they show Eusébio’s coffin, carried high through weeping streets, into the stadium, out onto the pitch. It is pelting with rain in Lisbon.
…
It rained whenever Caesar came.
The shield Nennius used was forged on Manawydan’s stone. It swallowed Caesar’s sword the first time he came, and Nennius took the sword and cut the invaders down so that the valley filled with blood.
Caesar sailed up the river but the people were ready. They set great iron spikes beneath the still waters. Caesar’s ships were drowned and the valley filled with water.
Then Caesar came a third time and the people ran and hid, and the valley filled with ghosts.
There is always a war. Invaders come and go, settle and remain, become the people that live among the valleys and the stones, wait things out, hollow out the hills and burn their black insides. There is always a war, always a fire that burns within, without, and the rivers only ever run with blood.
Arthur died on the muddy, muddy banks.
There was no boat to carry him.
…
He needs three or four attempts to get the card in the door lock and then even when he opens it he misses the doorway and walks into the frame. A bump rises on his forehead and he puts his fingers to it to check for blood and this sobers him enough to realise how drunk he is. He giggles and unzips himself and pisses loud and long in the toilet bowl in the dark with the doors open to the corridor, sings ‘Oh it’s a grand old team to play for,’ loudly, and then stops and puts the card in the slot to operate the lights and puts his cock away and zips up carefully and only then closes the door as quietly as he can and then slumps against it and sits down and wonders if he has left a can of beer in the fridge.
He was probably thi
s far gone the night they pulled him up for drink-driving. He had not been playing, had been out with a heel injury and then not back in the side for a couple of months or more, but he kept plugging away in training and got a chance when they played Shrewsbury on a Friday night, live on telly, and he came on with them one-down and getting murdered, only for them to come back and win 3-1 with Liam getting the second himself from a corner.
They’d had a drink in the hotel that night, celebrated, Ally included, with a couple of them with rooms booked because of the late finish. Liam had already been too drunk to drive when he left them and drove back to his house on the hill. He was still trying to live there on his own then and not doing very well at it. So when he got in he turned every light on and got a bottle of wine from cupboard, he’d had intentions at one point of a cellar, and drank that looking out into the dark from the living room, still restless. That was when he went back out for another drive, to see what was happening, Friday night and all that, put some old stuff that he used to listen to with Dee Dee on the stereo as he drove, went back down the hill towards the Anvil Yards with the vague intention of returning to the hotel bar, telling Ally he deserved a start next match.
He drove around, sobering up, he thought, when he saw the young kids queueing to get into a club under the arches in Lowtown that he did not know the name of, did not know existed. And something, in the music and thoughts of the night’s match and hating the transition between being surrounded by the crowd and laughter and noise and being on his own in his own silent house and bed, made him keep driving. He thought he might go and bang on Mark’s door, go and visit him, had these grand visions of a reconciliation, arms round each other crying, he was crying as he was driving now, of course, but when he got down near the flats he couldn’t work out how to drive into them, he had never gone there with a car and Goldie had always parked out here on the main road and he was not stupid or drunk enough to be leaving an almost new BMW parked halfway across the pavement in the Anvil Yards, so he did a couple of circuits, couldn’t see any lights on in Stevedore House anyway, and drove off, leaving the big reconciliation for another night. It had been twenty years since they last spoke, after all.
Still, that wasn’t enough though, and after driving down to see if the Salamander was still serving, which of course it wasn’t as it was after two o’clock by this point, and looking forlornly at the lights on in the upstairs of the pub, even thinking he saw a shape, Dee Dee, pass behind the net curtains, he headed out towards the Heath, past the big cut-out of himself advertising the entrance to Lionel Ahmed’s car yard and the reason he was driving a BMW in the first place, just over the hump-backed bridge where he began to list towards the left-hand verge and drove along half in the hedge for thirty yards or so before fully leaving the road. He stayed in the car for a while, might even have slept for a few moments, so peaceful it was here at the Heath’s edge in the dead of night. The driver’s door was jammed against a branch in the hedgerow and so he was halfway out of the sunroof, and struggling with this, stiffening up with driving after a match, when a police car came round the corner on its way back to the Lowtown station for a shift-change.
He could have killed someone. The following day his head was full of this. Or he could’ve killed himself, which at the time felt much the lesser of the evils, he was only a few turns in the road from where Goldie had crashed with Sonia and Alina. In fact, where he was headed in the car at that hour was the clearing in the Goat Wood, to sleep in his car under the trees and think of better days. And he could’ve gone to prison, something that only really dawned on him on the day of his trial and he couldn’t stop his legs shaking when he stood up in court and had to listen to himself described in ways that he did not want to listen to at all. It was a stupid thing to have done, OK but these fuckers in their wigs and with their accents which came from nowhere near the Iron Towns had no right to pass any judgement. Well, there was a judgement, of course, banned for three years, an alcohol awareness course, a speed awareness course, a few hundred hours of community service.
‘You’ll have to stop your drinking now Liam. You could’ve killed somebody.’ His mum’s voice that night as he sat in their front room still in his court suit, still in the dock from what he could tell, with his sisters looking at him through the breakfast hatch and his old man not looking at him at all but his lips disappearing in that grim smile he used to get just before he’d blow, drop the nut on someone if he had to. As if the drinking was the problem, really. In court, his barrister had talked about the stress of Liam’s estrangement from his wife and young child. It wasn’t a word he would have used, but it made sense. His own wife and son becoming strangers to him, the same with everyone he had ever known.
‘You’ll have to smarten up your act, love,’ his mum repeated phrases she used to say to him when he was a kid. He smiled at this, a man in his thirties crumpled in the soft armchair in his parents’ front room.
‘All their furniture is too big for the house,’ is something Greta had said to him, and it was true, he’d never noticed before, but it was.
Strangers all of them, to each other, to themselves.
…
Liam has only ever seen the girl, what, half a dozen times. No more than a few minutes each time. Less than that usually, like when she stood behind the bar the other day and then was gone, like the Portuguese, who are not even Portuguese, in the bar downstairs.
It unnerves him every time, though. He lies on the bed, half-clothed, too pissed to undress. This is what hotels are for, he thinks, is not unhappy right now this moment, but knows he must be pissed to be thinking of it like this.
He thinks of last things, does this sometimes to try to get to sleep, a variation on running through League Cup winners, or trying to remember every player he has ever played with. He thinks of the things that when he dies will go as well, locked inside his head, things that he knows or remembers and, if he lives long enough, will be the last to know.
Such as coal scuttles, the one at his nan and grandad’s, the one that still sits in a bucket by his grandad’s back door, and dial telephones and houses with no phone at all, like Goldie’s all the time they knew him, and Mark’s for a good while too, no washing machine; spin dryers; no telly in the daytime or after midnight, black and white, turned on early to warm it up for your programme; copying machines that you got asked to wind the handle of if you were a good boy in class, the print a fading purple; the half-time scores being put up on an old wooden scoreboard under the East Stand, letters of the alphabet that correspond to the day’s fixtures; the man in the coracle to fish out any balls that went in the river, and what was his name?
The smell of piss and the sheen of the tiles in the outside toilets; clean, evenly hung net curtains as a sign of something, what?, important to your mum, your position in the world; changes of shift and the men coming up or down the valley like a tide, lines of cars in the rain, a procession huddled along the pavements; seeing Concorde at the air show, a flickering white splinter through the clouds.
They are locked in his head, these last things.
There’s the shape of Mark Fala as he sends a volley off the factory wall, then another, then another, always the same poised follow-through, dead still for an instant, like Zidane when he hit that volley at Hampden, like a kid exaggerating a footballer’s movements, someone taking the piss, but then you see his face and you know he’s for real, the real thing, and the ball hits the same spot time and again. Dee Dee pushing her hair from her face, kneeling over him in that single-bed with the tight white sheets on the top floor of the pub. Sonia, not looking at him, looking at the road, sunshine, then shadow from the trees, then sun again, goading him he tells himself, they shouldn’t even be in the car together, have already gone too far.
‘I don’t believe you want to Liam, I think you’re all talk, full of it.’
Last, last things.
…
Hengist said he’d bring peace but Hengist brought war. But
first he brought his daughter, the most beautiful woman on the island since Elstridis was drowned. Vortigern, the new king, saw her and wanted her, believing in the power of kings.
‘What will you offer for my daughter?’ Hengist asked.
And Vortigern thought, and he bargained, but what he said and what he thought were different things.
‘I will give you the island and everything in it,’ is what Hengist heard.
And they burned Vortigern in his tower in the end.
…
Liam takes the page from one of the broadsheets that has been left open on the table he sits at for breakfast. Before looking at the paper, he watches the geese that waddle across the car park leaving a trail of green shit. Amir sends cleaners out to scrub the tarmac. The geese used to stay the other side of the water, but Liam reckons they’ve got scared by the foxes and whatever else is there in the ruins. They aren’t stupid, he thinks to himself, as he concentrates on his egg and ignores the newspaper. He likes to watch them fly in formation from out of his window. If only his own back four could maintain some of their awareness of each other.
He doesn’t like these newspapers, the accent they are written in, so that they make football sound like something that is theirs and not his own. Ours, theirs, he knew he sounded like his grandad, this reduction to us and them. He looks across to the Anvil Yards. The workers have disappeared. Us and them was how football worked, as well. But the workers have not disappeared, of course, just become invisible most of the time, because here come the cleaners with buckets of soapy water to scrub away the shit so the mobile phone salespeople and the like, workers themselves of course, but god knows how that was work, although more work than chasing a ball across a field maybe, have a nice clean car park to drive on to. One of the cleaners, a woman, older than the two young men with her, wearing a turban above her green uniform shoos the geese with a broom, doesn’t speak. One of the geese spreads its wings, hisses, but its heart isn’t in the fight and the geese file away towards the canal towpath. Liam knows this woman, nods to her in the foyer and the corridor, where she trails a small vehicle stacked with all sorts of cleaning materials behind her, more a headdress than a turban, and she nods back, doesn’t speak. She is African, he supposes, realises that he could not guess one thing about her, what country she is from, who she has at home, how she ended up here. Silence, even in his own head.
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