Head Injuries (11 page)

    We kept up the visits to Seven Arches, just the three of us now. Exorcised their ghosts, drew a little less menace from the shadows and vandalised brickwork. It became less a place for dormant violence and quick sex and cheap beer than a quiet retreat where I found my thoughts assuming greater clarity. I was able to relax more completely there than at home and acquire a peace that I'd never know elsewhere.

    Nobody could get at me here. The traffic and pollution, the people that criss-crossed my life's path were as distant as one of the stars winking through the effluvia piled up over the cooling towers of Fiddlers Ferry power station. Helen and Seamus were a calming restraint on my reveries and a catalyst for my energies. We were an equilateral triangle and we knew the measure of each other intimately, holding each other in check: three scorpions clasping claws and dancing in a circle, stings raised high. A lot of talk went on at the arches. We discussed our aspirations. We grew so close that the separate entities we projected seemed ridiculous; three bodies cleaved into one. Sometimes I would dream of going up on to the tracks with them and lying on the rails, waiting for the tickle and hiss of rails to signify the splitting of our body into its constituent parts.

    

    

    
I remember MacCreadle best like this. Only like this. Jesus, I wish I didn't…

    He leaned over Seamus. Spat a wad of Bubblicious on to his cheek.

    'Cock-sucking mother-fucking cunt-reaming A-wipe. You fetid scuzz-bag shit-eating cleft-dabbling felcher. Lick my nads, slit-peeler. Fucking scrote-scrubber. Jit-gargling tip-weeping vomit-fart tube-tugging dog-frotting chiselling twatter. Christ. You make me want to throw my ring up. Ream your shaft with a rusty spoon, spunk-guzzling fuck. You… fuck.'

    He clomped away, his metal-tipped heels clanging on the fire escape. When they crunched, faintly, on the broken glass of the alleyway behind the detergent factory, Seamus let out a long sigh.

    'Don't shit it, Shay,' said Rifle, looming out of the dark, his face haloed by orange light from the spliff in his mouth.
'You
might think I'm selling you a bent one here, pal, but…' he drew on the roach, spoke haltingly through his chestful of smoke, '… Mac likes you.'

    
'Slit-peeler?'
Shay said. 'Dog-frotting chiselling
twatter?'

    We fell about, laughing.

    'Mere expressions of affection, mate,' Rifle went on. 'He's a poetic cunt, granted, when it comes to abuse, but you should see him when he's pissed off with people. Someone shagged his bird, Patti, while he was in clink once. He went down to London, found her, found the bloke who did it.'

    'What did he do?'

    'Spoilt his face, bad style. Took a blade and opened his mouth from ear to ear. They call the poor bastard Fliptop now'

    Candles sputtered into life as the winterwhite sun was doused by crippled rooftops at the edge of the town. Slowly, bodies became discernible in the gloom, crumpled, spannered out of their gourds thanks to Classic's booze. Classic himself was crouched on a mattress singing John Lee Hooker songs. I couldn't be sure, but I reckoned there were around half a dozen wasted bodies in the squat, many of whom I'd only met last night.

    We were sitting in a derelict office building right at the heart of the new town complex. Sardine can factories all over the shop. From the window, the panorama was one of car parks and stylised green areas.

    'MacCreadle coming back?' I asked, watching Delia as she stroked her choker of scars. They drifted, the women in this group, like unseen ghosts, like partnerless sharks in a dark ocean. Their objectives seemed without concrete shape. Direction meant nothing to them. They drifted, as if, by stopping, it would somehow prove to be their undoing. Delia traded places with Pris, who had been tattooing the word HOPE on to Pepper's forearm. Delia finished it off. Patti sat with Juckes, neither of them saying a word, but you could see the air between them solidify with meaning, layers of understanding softly forming like the gradual build-up of scale in a kettle. Smoac leaned back into a space that Hangfire unwittingly filled. Their bodies collided and they stayed like that, supporting each other. It was all instinct. There didn't seem to be any room for accidents. Unless you counted Delicate

    Freddy, trying to piss into the mouth of a bottle while he held a sandwich.

    Rifle kicked off his DMs and lay back on a mattress. 'Yeah, he'll be back. Much as he's with us, he's a loner. If you can understand that. Shit, I can't. Fucking hate being on my tod, I do.'

    I did understand MacCreadle's craving for his own space. Sometimes being around other people felt unfathomable, unnatural. I answered more readily to the calls my body made as a singular unit, something that was essentially alone. I knew where MacCreadle would have gone, though, and I stared at Helen and Seamus in the dark. Their polished, straining eyes were enough of a spur. I left them to snack on each other and followed Mac's ghost.

    He'd taken his Harley-we'd heard the tubercular rumble of it for long minutes after he'd left-but it was only a twenty-minute walk. It was a cold night and I zipped my leather jacket up around my ears. Lights seem to burn so much more brightly when there's a frost looming; the streetlamps in the distance formed an unbroken chain of wet fire up to a point where they petered out, down by the bottom of the school field where houses were now springing up since its closure, a few years ago. I made it to the canal and bore left, slipping through a rusting fence and following the canal bank west towards the thick black arm of the viaduct clawing across the gulley of the park and into the meat of the railway embankment.

    We hadn't been down here for maybe a week, since the weather began to chill over, and I felt the same sickly attraction to the place as I did every time I made this approach. The old school was a low bank of black, with its broken clock-tower and mish-mash of architectural styles ranging from the functional 1930s brick to the pre-fabricated dross of the 1970s. The canteens had been demolished; large, cream chunks of breezeblock lay as a testament to all those hundreds of thousands of ice cream scoops of malty potato, all those water-ridden heaps of cabbage.

    'Shagging school dinners,' I muttered, remembering the skill I'd employed, hiding my uneaten, inedible peas under a thin remainder of pie crust, or slipping my semolina-with its wound of raspberry jam-into the pocket of some gobbling idiot sitting next to me.

    Up ahead, framed by broken goalposts, I saw a match burst into life and the uncertain appetite of candles as they sucked at the musty air beneath the arch. My heart barrelled around my chest like a pebble in a washing machine. As I neared, I could see that MacCreadle was not alone. He was lying on his back and reaching up to a woman who was standing in the soft swell of light, her upper body swathed in loose bandages. She was passing things down to him from the dark pockets each loop created and he was consuming them, a pained look on his face. Twenty feet away, hugged by the night, I stopped and watched. I was suddenly very frightened. The woman had no eyes, had no top to her head. I could see broad red stains in the bandage, spreading beneath the uppermost layer. MacCreadle was being fed babies, or rather, tiny, barely formed foetuses. The rictus of his mouth was flush with blood. He was crying silently, the prominent nub of his Adam's apple shuttling back and forth along his throat. Still he accepted them, still the woman offered more to him. Until, sensing someone near, she swung my way and made to show me what was moving about beneath her shroud.

    MacCreadle launched himself upright, a rope of gore unravelling from his mouth. He shouted-'No!'-a flat order which bore immediate results. The woman dwindled into a thin streak of light above the candles. Only when she had gone did I realise just how quiet the entire episode had been. A breath of traffic from Lovely Lane whispered across the field. MacCreadle looked at me, tears streaking all the dirt and blood.

    I sat down in the dirt and tried to say something but I didn't know what it was I wanted to talk about.

    'Leave me alone,' he said, spitting what looked like the skeletal remains of a tiny hand on to the floor.

    'Who was she?'

    He was coming to his senses now. He wiped his mouth and levered himself upright. 'You fuckin' followed me.'

    'I followed you, yes. I just wanted to talk, without everyone else hanging round your arse.'

    'You're hanging round my arse now. I don't much like it, friend.' The skin above his beard had grown bluish with shock. I had to lean forward to gauge his eyes, see if any humour lurked in there. They were dead as fish eyes. I wondered how many people MacCreadle had made suffer. I wondered if, as the stories went, he had killed anybody.

    'I'm not well,' he said, eyeing me, I was sure, for any disbelief on my features. 'I… am in great pain all the time.'

    'Have you been to a doctor?'

    'It's nothing they can treat,' he said, flatly. 'You got anything to smoke?'

    I shook my head and he kicked at the gravel. A train farted in the distance, approaching from the east. I moved closer and sat down on the edge of a rotting suitcase. The flames shivered, webbing the sooty curve of the arch with sickly light. I withdrew into the paltry shelter of my leather jacket, peeking over the collars, wishing I'd put my track suit bottoms on under these ripped jeans. The train crossed overhead, shedding echoes that engulfed us. Through the thunder, his eyes keen on me, MacCreadle said: 'Atonement.'

    'What about it?' I asked, as the train slowed for Warrington Central.

    'Do you know why I come here?' his voice was a low burble, irresistible not because of who he was, but because of this sudden show of vulnerability. I didn't mind trumping my questions if it meant he'd unload a little of his self upon me.

    'Because you like being on your own?'

    'Fuck off. I can be on my own anywhere. I can be on my own in the middle of a fucking scrum down the Rope and Anchor, mate. Watch me switch off. No, I come here because it's as close to death as I can get without actually doing myself in. Fuck the cem and the crem. I might as well be wandering round a garden centre. There's death in these arches. Some mad fuckers have caused a right old stink here in the past. The Seventies? A couple of rapes and one of the nastiest murders a human being could come up with.'

    I think I was going to ask him if he had ever killed anyone then, but the enormity of the question beat me. In that moment I suppose I passed from being a child who thinks that death is just another cartoonish stage in life to something more serious, more personal. That night I went home and cried quietly, my face hot and itchy against the pillow, understanding completely the loss I was going to feel when my parents died. It was a horrible feeling, a feeling that I was missing them already, even though I could have gone downstairs and sat with my mum on the sofa while she watched television or listened to Joni Mitchell with my dad in his den.

    'It was a nurse, from the hossie across the road. She was going over the footbridge one night when she was jumped. Knifed, she was. Shredded. Cunt got away. I dream about that woman. Though I never knew her, never clapped eyes on her. I was only ten when she died. It fucked me up at school. I wrote poetry about her. Every picture I drew was of some nurse walking on a bridge. I kept reliving the death, thinking that somehow this time she'd escape. Like watching
Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.
No matter how often I see that film, I keep hoping that
this
time they'll leg it away from all those Bolivian wankers.

    'I started getting bad pains in my stomach. I couldn't concentrate on anything else. My mum would have been concerned, I'm sure, if she didn't have her gob either round the end of a bottle of Bells or some new cunt's cock. I started throwing up. I started throwing up stones.'

    'Stones?' I could barely utter the word, I was so cold.

    'Right.' Some of the colour was returning to his face now, although he still looked shattered, starved, like a badly composed effigy of himself. 'Stones. Black stones, incredibly smooth. I filled a one-pound beetroot jar with them in a week.'

    'Did you see a doctor?

    'Course I fuckin' did. You've got doctors on the brain, kid. They're all cunts. They did all kinds of tests, gave me a barium meal, but couldn't find anything wrong. GP told me to stop fucking about with his precious time. The chiselling twatter.'

    'So what is it? Where are the stones coming from?'

    'I don't know. But they comes whenever I start brooding over badstuff. I see a knife fight in a pub in town, someone gets sliced, I choke a stone. Someone in the local rag I'm reading over Ready Brek gets mugged, there's a stone in my Horlicks come bedtime.'

    'Jesus, Mac,' I said. 'Stay clear of war reports, won't you?'

    'Funny,' he said, deadpan. 'But it don't work like that. It's personal. It's next door stuff. Stuff that hits home. It isn't third-person reportage" from some desert. This stuff has a face, a fucking horrible face, and it forces me to have a good old look.'

    'What about the woman?'

    His lips disappeared into his beard. What woman?'

    'When I got here, I saw someone with you. Feeding you…'

    'We'll never discuss this again, either one on one or in a debating chamber with everyone and his fucking hamster. You've got a problem if you saw anything, kid. You've got a big pile of shit coming your way.'

    'What do you mean?'

    'I'm making up for… certain things that happened, things that I've done in my past. I did some time for the things I've done, but that matters not one shitty speck in some circles. Sometimes you have to keep on paying. And you'd better keep whatever it is well buried, chum. Or you're going to find yourself spinning like a hanged man between the shit you can see on planet Earth and the shit that nobody deserves to see. Because that shit,' he said, spitting out a fragment, 'is bad shit.'