‘Would it not make it hard to heat, all that glass?’ You could only let so many obvious questions go by.
‘It’s a special type,’ the taxi driver said, like he had been waiting to be asked it. ‘Keeps it from getting too cold in winter and too hot in summer.’
‘For all the summer you’re going to get in this place.’
‘Oh, it’s not here,’ said the driver, a quarter turn of the head in Herbie’s direction, ‘it’s Iran.’
Herbie must have shot him a glance. The driver smiled. ‘My mother’s side, only they still call it Persia. I was surprised myself first time I went there, thought I was going to stick out like a sore thumb, but no, not a bit. Everywhere I went there was a whole heap of people looked just like me. Up in the northeast, this is, near the border with Afghanistan.’ He moved his left elbow a fraction, the cipher of a nudge. ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire, what?’ He said it again a couple of times more, under his breath – ‘Out of the frying pan… Out of the frying pan’ – before drifting into silence.
Herbie was content to let it settle. He moved his tongue behind his teeth, trying to conjure again the sensation of another’s.
‘Just past those traffic lights there,’ he said at length. ‘Then first on your right.’
The driver nodded, hit the indicator, and as though he had been on pause and had now pressed play again said, ‘Here’s the funny thing. See in Iran? I’m the big landowner. Here? Piece of dirt – worse than dirt – the way some of the punters treat you. Students are the worst, the girls and the fellas both. I’d make the whole lot of them do a class their first week there, How to Act Like a Reasonable Human Being Even When You’ve Had a Skinful.’
‘This is me here,’ said Herbie.
The driver stopped the meter. Five thirty. ‘Call it a fiver dead.’
‘You’ll be a long time building your bungalow that way.’
The driver made a minute adjustment to the angle of his seat, took a drink from the bottle. ‘Another day or two of this isn’t going to kill me.’
Herbie wished he could be so certain. He let himself in, out of habit, rather than ringing the bell. He was conscious of a fumbling on the other side as he put his hand on the handle of the living-room door.
‘I wasn’t expecting to see you home so soon,’ Beth said, sitting up straighter on the sofa. In fairness she looked like she meant it, facemask on, dressing gown on, foam dividers between her nail-varnished toes, bottles, jars, cotton wool wipes on the towel that took up the sofa’s remaining cushions. ‘Did you at least have fun while it lasted?’
‘It was nice, yeah. No, it was.’ Louise had kissed him. Draped her arms about his neck and kissed him. ‘Really nice.’
He passed through into the kitchen to switch on the kettle, came out again a second later, sniffing the air.
‘Have you been smoking dope?’
He thought he could see the colour rise even through the facemask’s avocado. The Busted Blush. She dug her hand into her dressing-gown pocket and drew out from among the balled Kleenex a little brass pipe.
He took it from her. It looked like it had come off a radiator. It smelt (nose to the blackened bowl) like a room in his life he had forgotten was ever there.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve any left?’
‘You serious?’
‘Well, I’ve never used one of these before, but, yeah, why not?’
The mask cracked. ‘Give us it here,’ she said. ‘And just so’s you know, nobody says dope any more.’
It was too hot to be pleasant, was his first reaction, too hot certainly to be able to hold in enough to have any effect. He had a second try. ‘I’m not sure this is going to work for me,’ he said and then the clock moved on half an hour and Beth was refilling the bowl again and mentioning, a propos of something that in the next moment escaped him entirely, a London friend who was knocked down on the way home from the pub crossing a road… well, dual carriageway, which was stupid obviously, but the nearest footbridge was half a mile away and anyway he had done it loads of times before, just never when there was some oul lad trying to retune his car radio to Radio 4 – he had only just got DAB and kept brushing the channel change with his sleeve when he went to change gears – it was that sensitive – and thump!
Killed outright.
Twenty-five years of age, youngest child, only son, his parents, you can imagine, completely destroyed.
Herbie could imagine it all too well, or thought he could, but Beth was only getting started.
The mother in particular couldn’t reconcile herself, kept coming back to the neighbourhood where her son had been living, wanting to talk to the people he was with that night, trying to break down those last hours into minutes, the minutes into seconds, the seconds into fractions, as if by delving deeper and deeper she would stop all forward motion and never actually arrive at the point where the oul lad looked up from his tinkering with the DAB and saw – too late – her beautiful twenty-five-year-old boy frozen in the headlights, the look of surprise that was still on his face, closed eyelids notwithstanding, as he lay in the mortuary… What way did he turn his head when he said that thing about childhood family holidays before leaving the bar? And did he smile? Was it that little sideways smile – his secret smile, his daddy always used to call it – the eyebrow on the opposite side going up involuntarily, which even if you couldn’t see his mouth was a giveaway… all that sort of thing, over and over, and over. It got so she was never away from there, going out with his friends to pubs and clubs – they were hardly going to tell her to get lost, were they? – and then the next thing she had left her husband and she had started seeing this guy that her son had been with right before he ran out into the road, though ‘seeing’ didn’t really do it justice – pretty torrid, it was, and she had taken to doing things too like wearing her son’s old camelhair coat, his shirts, his jumpers, this pair of vintage Lee jeans he had with big turn-ups. It wasn’t that she wanted to be him exactly. She just wanted to be one with him.
‘It all got too much in the end,’ Beth said.
Herbie declined her offer of the pipe. ‘Sounds to me like it was too much from the start.’
‘I suppose until you’ve been there yourself…’
Please, please, never let me be. ‘I suppose.’
‘Anyway, the guy couldn’t take it any more. Another week, he’d have been ready for the madhouse. And she – she very nearly got her wish for oneness with her son, took a razor to her wrists one night lying in the bath with his Lee jeans on and his favourite Hole T-shirt.’
‘Hole?’
‘Band. Courtney Love, was married to Kurt Cobain of…’
‘Him I know.’
‘Right. Well, she bolloxed it completely of course. All she managed to do was squirt blood all up the walls. Her husband came to pick her up, absolutely mortified, you know, one of those men, all his life he had known the right thing to do, and now…’
‘Not.’
‘And now not at all, no. Not a flipping baldy. About the only word he could get out was sorry. You’d have thought from the way he said it he was apologising for his whole life and hers.’
Much, much later, the pipe long since set aside, coals grown grey and cold, she said, ‘That friend of mine who died?’
‘Out on the road.’
‘Mm. The guy who was with him that night? That wasn’t a guy, that was me.’
‘I had started to think that… So all the other stuff?’
‘Well, if it wasn’t a guy it can’t have happened to him.’
And that was the last she ever talked about it.
6
Paul hadn’t been back to Sam’s since the night of his run-in with the brigadier, getting on for a month and a half ago now, and since the morning after, when Yolanda rang to see how he was keeping (‘fine, I’m absolutely fine’), hadn’t spoken to any of the regulars. Emmet had made a point of calling at the house a couple of times, when he was cleaning bins the next st
reet over, but Paul was never in, or, if he was, he never answered.
‘Saw the sister-in-law – or I take it it was her – peeking out the blinds,’ he said after his second visit, and repeated what Yolanda said when she’d driven Paul home. ‘A weird set-up, that.’
Herbie got the address from them and caught the bus up there one evening on his way from the Records Office. The house was of a type in which the east of the city particularly abounded, built, in stone, in the late-late 1910s for soldiers returning from the First World War. (Those that is who were able to walk back into their old way of life. For those who were not, then or afterwards, there was the Somme Hospital tucked away in the trees on the extreme eastern edge of town.) The plots were generous for the times: recompense for the cramped and filthy conditions the returning heroes had lived in the past four years, and in all likelihood, the vast majority of them, in the years before they enlisted too. Inevitably most of the extra space had in time been eaten into by driveways and garages, timber to begin with, then cement block and – most substantial but least sympathetic to the original building materials – unrendered red brick. Some of those garages had themselves been augmented, becoming fully incorporated extensions. And some had just had bits stuck on top, more or – as in the case of Paul’s – less coherently.
There were a couple of fairly major cracks in the steps leading up to his front door. The jagged line where they met the side of the garage was etched in bright green slime.
From the little outer landing before the front door Herbie had an uninterrupted view still further east to the parliament buildings, clinging to the side of the Craigantlet Hills, rising above the tree line of Stormont estate. The image came back to him of the stripped-out Portakabin abandoned on the Upper Springfield Road.
Ungivers of Fuck.
He rapped the door. Waited. Rapped again. Not a sound. He walked back down the steps and round the front of the garage to the house door. His finger on the bell unleashed a piece of Mozart but was otherwise unproductive. He had noticed, as he approached, a wrought-iron gate on the other side of the house, filling the narrow space between it and the redbrick wall of the extension next door.
He wasn’t sure what possessed him to open it now. Walk up the passageway. Round the back of the house. Somebody else’s house. Their house, the man and the woman – he saw them through the window – in full-length aprons, leaning in over a table spread with newspapers on which lay… Actually, Herbie had no idea what. Apart from the fact it was the width of his own thigh but twice as long, tapering to a point at either end. And black, with orange flashes, which they were still touching in with paintbrushes.
The man looked up. Paul’s face, add ten and take away something vital.
‘I’m sorry,’ Herbie said towards the small window open on the latch. ‘I was looking for Paul.’
It was the woman who spoke. ‘Paul has his own flat.’
‘He wasn’t answering his door.’
‘He must be out. He has his own life too.’
The man – the brother – had already returned to dabbing at the model, as Herbie now supposed it to be, with his brush. From what depths Herbie did not know, the term ‘Cigar Ship’ floated to the surface of his mind.
‘Would you go now, please?’ the woman said. ‘This is private property.’
‘I just wanted to know how he was doing. If you see him would you tell him…’ He didn’t finish. Of course they wouldn’t tell him anything. He turned towards the passage. Turned back. ‘Did you not hear your bell?’
‘We weren’t expecting anyone.’
He walked back round the front of the house and up the steps beside the garage a second time. The only thing he could find to write on was his bus ticket. Paul, he wrote, give me a call, Herbie, and added his number before slipping the ticket under the door.
He was never in his life so glad to leave anywhere.
It was Beth who caught up with Paul in the end, a week or so later. ‘I just brought a book with me and sat on my bag at the top of the stairs until he came back,’ she told Herbie that evening as they were unwrapping dinner (one cod supper, one scampi and small chips). ‘He asked me in for coffee. It’s actually a really nice wee flat he has there. Well, bedsit. A bit draughty round the ankles. I don’t know that they’ve insulated the garage ceiling very well. At all, maybe. I think he’s a bit embarrassed, how it all looks, him living up there with not even his own meter box. Yolanda must have really gone to town on the brother and his wife over that. He told me they lost their parents when he was still at school. His brother was already married. It seemed like a good solution at the time. Anyway, he said he was dead sorry he hadn’t been in touch with anyone. Just, you know, one thing and another.’
‘Vinegar?’ Herbie asked.
‘I’m all right.’
Paul had given up the Uber. That was the big news. Or the Uber had given him up: no car, no shifts, no buts, no ifs. All he walked away with from that whole business was the scrap value of his car. At least it gave him a couple of weeks to look around.
‘So, what’s he doing now?’
‘Pizza delivery.’
‘Ah, come on.’
‘What do you mean, come on?’
‘I mean it’s good he’s got something, but, I don’t know, like it wasn’t so long ago he was talking about some management fast-track programme he was on… He looked set.’
Beth raised an eyebrow at that. ‘Seriously, Dad? Set? Did you not know, they’ve taken that one out of the dictionary?’
He cut into his cod. He thought how rarely this moment disappointed. Every fish looked like the ideal of fish rather than the fish itself. And how quickly, once he started to eat, the experience palled.
Beth popped half a scampi into her mouth. ‘Fo’ wha’ i’s wo- wo—,’ she said, then stopped to draw in air, cool the fish, chew, ‘for – what – it’s – worth, he did tell me delivering pizzas was not exactly what he had fantasised about doing when he was a wee lad, but then neither was living over the garage of his brother’s house. But you know, needs must, and the pizza place provides the van. Here he was to me, let whoever wants to run into me now: not my problem.’ She moved a chip about the plate, gathering salt. ‘You can see the attraction. I told him if I had my licence I’d maybe be joining him.’
‘What do you mean if you had your licence?’
He was as certain as he could be of anything he hadn’t misremembered that. The week leading up to her test, Tanya taking her out for extra lessons, on the basis that she was the less likely to panic in the passenger seat, coming home one of the nights ashen-faced. ‘She hasn’t a hope in hell.’
So of course she walked it. Drove it. Practically flawlessly.
‘Oh,’ she said now. ‘Did I not say? Ah. I lost it.’
‘How?’
‘How do you think?’
‘Not drink?’
‘Not drink, no. The other.’ She mimed a pipe. ‘Thirteen miles an hour in a fifty zone. Four in the morning, like, not a sinner about. Not another one. Unless you count the cops. I’m not proud. It’s not been a great year, but you know if I can pack all this crap into twelve months, get it out of the way…’ She held the heavily salted chip poised before her mouth. ‘I’ll maybe think about giving these up too.’ She chewed a moment then smiled. ‘Nah.’
*
It was still early when Herbie turned out of his street on to the main road the next day. A September morning to stand for all September mornings. Cloudless, sky-high sky-blue sky, all earthly things put in their place, the limits – of hills and buildings alike – darkly delineated.
He glimpsed over the roof of a delivery van a long-necked metal crook nuzzling the leaves and petals of a basket hanging from the lamppost level with the Post Office. Looking down he saw that the footpath was wet around the base of the lampposts nearer to him – the undersides of the baskets, when he glanced up again, dripping – and sure enough, as the delivery van indicated and pulled away, there w
as the man from the council gripping the metal crook, left-handed, while his right hand played out the hose that joined it to a plastic tank mounted on the bed of a truck with the council’s crest on the door. There were dead heads on the tarmac at his feet. From the splay of them it might have been the fall that killed them. Herbie didn’t see this man more than two or three times in the year, and always unexpectedly, which only added to the delight he took at the sight of him. He looked this morning, as he always looked, as though he had stepped through a tear in the space–time continuum: yes, he had the flatbed truck (new-looking too since the last time Herbie saw him) and the big green plastic tank on the back, but the rest of him, the wellie boots, tan bib-and-brace dungarees, one strap perpetually undone, the woolly hat pushed back off his forehead, seemed to belong to another era, of lamplighters and knocker-uppers (the dungarees were one shade off sepia). He walked his pole to the next lamppost, just down from the bakery, turning it so that the nozzle didn’t drip until it was safely in among the plants again, where he watched it like a thing joined to him by something stronger than steel. Look at you, how good you are at doing that, his expression said as the crook worked its way around. People passed – Herbie passed eventually – but the man only had eyes, only ever had eyes, for what was going on over all their heads.
In a few minutes he would be packed up and gone to another part of the city and that would be the last Herbie or anyone else round here would see of him till winter or beyond. More power to you. Keep on the move. One step ahead of the hirers and firers and rationalisers. Don’t stop until you choose to.
Past the Catch-phrase church Herbie went, whistling (‘Hit me with your rhythm stick’, arrived at unconsciously via ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3’: ‘hanging basket tenders, overall suspenders… chrys-an-the-mums’), downhill into what a couple of hundred years before had been estuary mud and only ten years before tight-packed Victorian kitchen houses finally beginning to fall in on themselves. There was landscaping going on along the banks of the river that ran transversely beneath the road, all the trolleygators and wide-mouthed bagfish culled. A couple of inner-city ducks surfaced, shaking their heads, and turned tight circles as though still trying to figure out where their erstwhile river mates had gone.
Where Are We Now? Page 9