He thinks of calling out, saying hello. It might be a trick of his imagination that the boy came in here at all, probably on a short cut to fill his car with petrol, or more likely off to set light to something somewhere, it doesn’t have to be here. He smells smoke and not blossom, is sure of it, crouches at the top of the stairs, should’ve tried the door at the end of the walkway, just gone down the rusty fire escape, he thinks, too late, instead waits here with a knife in his hand, looking at the turn in the stairs.
…
‘You’ve heard then,’ Ally stands at the door to Steve Stringer’s office and Steve nods, looks at the desk and the closed computer on it, the folders and old copies of football yearbooks on the shelves, at Chain Street down below, empty. There’s an old framed photo of the team with the FA Cup at Hightown Station, the last time they won it, when they brought it back from Crystal Palace on the train, a hundred years gone by and more. He thinks he could take that with him, imagines the bare patch of wall it will leave behind. They hear the shouts when the players emerge back onto the pitch.
Steve waits for the words to come, thinks he might not even stay for the second half, will drive home, and his wife’s head will jerk up when he comes through the door at this odd hour, she hates football but will have the commentary on all the same, and he’ll tell her that there is no job for him any more, that he is finished, washed up, a familiar old Iron Towns tradition.
‘You better get ready to get on the phone, son. When that ban gets lifted we’re gonna need to get some new players in for next season, I don’t care what league we’re in, a lot of that shower have got to go.’
Steve looks at himself in Ally’s sunglasses. Ally pats him on the arm.
‘Come on,’ Ally says to him, as they hear the whistle blow, ‘let’s get settled for the second half. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
…
And the boy comes up and round the last step with a knife too in his hand, with Goldie crouched there before him, and there’s a twitch and a flicker in both of their faces that they might just both turn and run, but where would they even go now? And Goldie springs at him with a sound coming from within him that he cannot fathom. The boy drops the knife, it clatters onto the steps, but his hands are quick and he hits Goldie once, twice, three times and Goldie can see that these are his fists but can’t quite believe it, thinks they are lumps of iron, and it’s as if the boy is above him now like some great, breaking wave, but he still has the knife in his hand held tight, tight, and the boy goes to kick him and some instinct means he throws his arm at him, feels the knife go in hard, hit something which must be a bone. There was a plan he and Liam made once that they’d go to Spain, to the bull running when the football season ended, but they never did because Liam was always so full of shit.
Goldie knows it’s bad straight away, the boy falls backwards, cracks his head on the step, but it’s the blood that’s the thing, such a spurt of it already, and Goldie saw this once in the dinner queue, inside, when a bloke got stabbed in the neck with one of those plastic shanks people used to make in the workshops, an old Irish fellow it was, who was in for fiddling his pension and got involved in some other kind of scam, only just survived, pints and pint of blood, and Goldie lands on top of him with his momentum and he can see from the boy’s eyes straight away that it’s no good. It’s true that he’s an Ahmed, he looks just like Dee Dee, just here, with the colour draining from him, blood everywhere, the smell of smoke and apple blossom all around.
…
Joey stands and stares at the empty urinal. They’ve kicked off. He’ll tell Liz she’s right, been right all along. His old man won’t live for ever, although he’ll try his best to. They should start looking at what they could get, maybe see about Spain, Portugal, wherever. She’s always wanted to leave and she’s right, she’s right. The girls can come and visit with the children, a bit of sun will do them good. He’ll tell her when they get back tonight, whatever the result. Liam can’t play for ever, either. He has to look to see if he’s actually had a piss or not.
When he gets to the top of the walkway he sees Kyran move, a bit of space at last, and for a second, just a second, it’s Mark Fala skipping in from that wing, inside the fullback, running at the centre-half now and inviting a challenge. He hits a shot, a cross more like, but Julius does not move, and it clips the defender with the keeper already moving to his left, and the ball takes a lazy, lovely arc from the deflection and drops into the net, and they’ve had a bit of luck at last, the first for a hundred years or more from what Joey can tell, and he goes running down the steps past the directors’ box with his arms aloft, his flies undone, his tie flailing.
…
Bobby lies on the factory steps, huddled, with his hands in his lap and a pool of blood forming fast, too fast, underneath him, spreading and running onto the step below and then the one below that, too fast. Goldie sees a plume of blood that must have sprayed against the wall as the knife hit, a whole wall freckled with blood and he sees it now on his own hands, feels the punches still on his stinging face and head, and he wants to run, and he wants to hold the boy’s head and tell him everything will be OK and there is blood pumping away down the step and it cannot go that fast, you cannot lose it at that speed and think anything is going to be all right and Goldie wonders how he got here, cradling the head of a boy he has just stabbed on these dirty steps and he just wants to start over, if he could just start again, he would never leave his room, he would lie on his bed and wait to hear the sound of horses’ hooves.
…
They used to call what is now the East Stand ‘The Bank’ and what is now the Greenfield End ‘The Hill’. The miners would come down the valley and stand on The Hill, those from the port would stand on The Bank, the workers from Greenfields would fill the space in between, so many more of them, and they would all stand as one, but always these differences between them, delineations. They fought among themselves when the miners went out on strike and the factories back to work, although people pretended differently now, if they talked of those days at all. Divide and rule has always been the way to control these islands. Today people bicker over houses and cars and phones. They killed that boy for his trainers. They swam out of drowned Welsh valleys and walked shoeless from Black Country slums. There is the faintest cloud of smoke above the Anvil Yards, as if the fires have started up again.
…
He can see that the boy is dead, but thinks at the same time, no, and imagines him getting to his feet and prepares himself for another assault but the boy does not move and Goldie can feel his heart beating in his chest and a feeling of dread, a different dread to the one that says to be ready for the boy to get to his feet because he will not, because he is dead, the same one he felt before on that riverbank, looking back at the car with his baby girl in his arms and thinking where’s Sonia? Where is Sonia? As if he didn’t really know, so that he knew she was in the car and under the water and didn’t all at the same time. It is exactly that, because there is the boy lying dead on the concrete steps and Goldie still stands ready with a knife in his hands and looks for the boy to get to his feet.
…
The ball bounces towards Tommy Starr and Liam looks at the line, sluggish to move up, the end of the season, the end of time itself he can see, as the ref motions towards the linesman and has the whistle in his mouth. Tommy pumps the ball forward, comes after it, comes to join the party, there was that keeper who scored on the last day to keep Carlisle up, Jimmy Glass, he drives a cab somewhere down south now, the crowd noise has gone up a notch to a kind of slowed-down high-pitch shriek.
Liam jumps and he wins it, he feels it, just the faintest of touches, exactly like when he played for England. They always say he never touched the ball, but he did, just like that, with the lightest of touches as he jumped for a header that took the ball away from his marker. He gets clattered, all arms and legs as he hits the ground and he wants to shout for a foul but can’t get the words out
as the air is knocked from him.
The ball hits the turf, bounces into the area, and there is Kyran, one last burst, clear of his man and onto the ball. Liam is still on the floor when Kyran pulls back his left foot, Liam sees him there, frozen, both feet off the ground, his head down, thousands of people behind him in a full-throated roar as if he is leaping into the crowd. And he sees the trip, the defender gets back, Kyran lands in a heap, and Liam is back on his feet now, shouting, ‘Penalty! Penalty!’ along with everyone else in the Anvil Yards, and for a second he thinks the ref is blowing for time but, no, he points with great deliberation towards the spot.
There’s a penalty at the Anvil Yards… he can hear a radio playing behind the goal, there would always be men when he was a kid with a transistor held to their ear. They would relay scores from other matches, relevant or important or not, a litany of names and numbers, a spell to protect you from the world. Penalty at the Anvil Yards… he hears, as it plays out into empty bedrooms and rose-filled gardens and across the burning yards themselves, from out of Eli’s kitchen window and up over the hill, into Archie Hill’s hospital room at the Bethel, from the laptop by Stan Ahmed’s bed in his hospital room in Marbella as he slips in and out of the world, their chests rise and fall to its sound, across a patio that overlooks the Atlantic waves, Dorothea’s head nodding asleep, into empty rooms in houses up the hill, in the Salamander, where Dee Dee sings.
…
They recede into the crowd, not completely, of course, but enough to see them as one of many, a whole people, hundreds of thousands for every one of them, who would walk the factory streets to watch them play. Those who moved to the percussion of clanging metal, of great booms across docks and rivers, of bells and sirens and whistles, along black paths and across green fields, through all the iron towns of the world.
Di Stéfano sits on a cushion in the Bernabeau, George Best sits in the corner of the pub, Eusébio watches the eagle as it soars against the hard blue light and into the shadowed rafters. Billy Meredith stands at the bar of the Stretford Road Hotel, talks with the men that come and go about City, about United, sips orange juice. Steve Bloomer walks on Cromer pier, sees boys fishing for crabs off the sides, looks into the grey northern waters, shoulder to shoulder with men who once cheered his name.
And the crowds recede like an ebbing tide, the iron towns rust, and you might think them all ghosts if you think of them at all, but do not be mistaken, they will not die, they take new forms.
…
He can smell petrol that comes off the boy, he is sure now, and there is a curl of smoke that comes up the steps. He should run, needs to run, he understands that. Smoke comes up the steps, a curl of it at first but then a thicker rope of it, as if he could grab hold of it and haul himself to safety and he does put his hand to it, drops the knife which clatters off down the steps and he thinks that this is another mistake because his prints are on the knife. He does not wear a glove. You see kids now on the back of buses, they wear a golf glove like they’re off to play the Sunday medal but everyone knows what it’s meant to show and they haven’t killed anyone, these boys, they haven’t hurt anyone, you can see it in their eyes most of them, but that’s what we’re left with, he thinks. Everyone wants to be a bad man. He goes to follow the knife but as he turns a corner of the stairs the heat and smoke rise and hit his face like the way Nadine slapped him once, just out of nowhere, while they stood in the kitchen trying to do the dishes.
He turns back and the blood runs through under him, pools on an uneven step and he has to step over the boy who lies at a strange angle, feels something in his stomach and stumbles across the wide floor where they had fought, not even a fight, not really, over in seconds, what the football commentators say is a coming together. There is blood on his hand, a handprint on the concrete, his own blood, must have cut himself as he stabbed him. He is crouched, looks at his own palm print there on the floor and then looks up and tries to rise, sees the smoke above him drifting in the murky light that comes through the skylights. Clumps of moss look like black clouds.
There is something he is aware of now, as he moves away from the heat and starts to run towards the far wall. He remembers the way the stairs just melted in the rain during the storm. He gets to the wall and cannot even see the door that would lead there with the smoke all around him now, filling this great space. It is very hot. He hears a pop from the fire below and a surge in the heat. From beyond the murky skylights he thinks he can hear the shouts of the crowd.
He remembers the way the staircase peeled off the building, nothing but rust, disintegrated in the rain. He can fall or he can burn, he thinks, like some great truth revealed, as if that was always the only choice open to him and he looks up towards the light but there is just thick black smoke now, and the heat, and the sound of the flames getting nearer and he understands there is no way out, probably never was.
…
We are here.
We come as the creatures from the edges of your dreams, as the griffin and the salamander. We are the ash that will fall on your towns, the pattern of the smoke in the brick, the spores that you will breathe in. We are the iron roar that you thought you’d silenced. We sing of better days. Better days to come.
…
Liam picks up the ball and puts it on the penalty spot, thinks he sees it move in the breeze which comes stronger now, warm, places it again. He rubs his hands on the turf either side of the ball. The pitch held up well in the end, he thinks, remembers suddenly a story Dee Dee made him read once, a kid winning a prison race who loses on purpose, throws himself down on the floor when he is miles ahead, because he can, because he won’t win for the people in power. Liam grins now. He said to Dee Dee, ‘Why didn’t he just keep running?’ and she shook her head and said he didn’t understand.
He smells burning. The crowd are still going nuts behind the goal. He cannot ever remember the ground this packed, he sees bodies, arms and legs and heads jumping, writhing, and a great roar coming from them. This is louder now, like something restored, like the days of the old iron roar that he could not even remember if he tried.
There are players still in the box, god knows what anyone is arguing about, as clear a penalty as you might ever see. One of the defenders tries to say something to Liam, he is smiling, it’s like he’s asking him when the next bus is due, where he’s going on his holidays, but Liam cannot hear him and walks close to him to show he is not backing down from anything, his guard will not slip now. Kyran is on his feet he can see, just to the side of the pitch and he tries to beckon him on and looks at the ref but the ref is already pacing out to the side of the ball with the whistle in his mouth, ushers the keeper towards his line and a hush settles. These things are over so quickly, these moments, to be replayed again and again, on television screens and in memories, locked in people’s heads.
Liam turns and looks at the ball and looks at the goal, not at the keeper, at the net either side of him. The faces in the Greenfield End merge into one. There is the blur of orange stewards’ jackets in front of the hoardings. Everything is still now. The breeze comes again.
Liam takes a breath and then another, moves his hand in front of his face. Is this snow? A shower of white flakes falls through the spring sunshine. Ash. Something is burning. He glances for a moment at the old East Stand, checks the thing isn’t in flames. There’s a pattern at the back of the stand where there are holes in the concrete and the light shines through like all the stars in the sky, he thinks he can see the shape of a man at the back of the stand, there is a plume of smoke off in the distance somewhere over the Anvil Yards. They had a match in the Pengwern once where there was a burning car in the next field, they played on through the smoke. There are fires that have burned all their lives.
It is silent, all those people and not a murmur, and the referee blows his whistle into the falling ash and the breeze. Liam takes another breath, empties his mind completely of everything other than the only thing he has ever really un
derstood, the shape of a ball struck across a green field.
He knows what to do.
…
The fire burned all night. They said there were oil tanks underground that everyone had forgotten about. Old gas cylinders exploded like the sound of gunfire up the valley and there was the deep rumble of walls and ceilings collapsing. Alina thought of the apple trees, of the foxes that would flee from the blaze and streak up the hillsides in the dark, as she dozed in her nana’s old chair by the window. Her mum made endless cups of tea. The foxes’ tails were alight, spreading fire and mayhem as they ran. She felt strangely calm, shocked maybe, she thought to herself. Her mum looked much the same. Dee Dee stood at the off sales hatch or on the lounge steps with her head craned out to watch the fire-fighters move the cordon nearer and nearer to the pub and then stop not fifty yards or so down the road, a high tide of flame lapping at their doors.
The police used the lounge to co-ordinate things. They had a pub at each corner of the Anvil Yards, kept radioing people in The Magpie three miles distant on a back road into the Heath, which was where the smoke was being blown. Dee Dee hoisted cans of pop from the cellar with Tyrone, bought cups and the kettle down from upstairs. No one slept much and their eyes felt gritty in the morning from the lack of sleep and the smoke that had got into everything. The bulk of the smoke hung as a huge black cloud above the Anvil Yards and drifted slowly to the east.
…
Sunday morning Alina and Tyrone drove up above the smoke, to the head of the valley where the road dips and runs into the Sheep Folds and the Iron Towns disappear, set a blanket out some way from the roadside with pastries and the flask of coffee that Alina made that morning while listening to the radio, fire crews from as far afield as North Wales and Birmingham is what they said, that the blaze was contained, it would continue to burn but was under control, and a miracle that there had been no injuries.
Iron Towns Page 23