Hemispheres (2 page)

There’s no shame in it, says Joe Fish. Who’s to know, anyway? The fog of war. If you come back with us now Yan, no fucker
will ever know you were missing.

I notice Horse Boy on the floor, asleep. A happy knack. The lamp casts a sheen over his bare back where muscles shiver in
the blue autumn night, and his close-cropped head ripples like rabbit fur. Only Dave is left in.

Joe yawns and stretches. We are the proxies, he says. For the real villains. They need mugs like us to fight it out for them
because they lack the
cojones
. We are exploited, man. Pure exploited.

Men like us, I say to him. Coal hewers and crucible pullers and farm navvies. Ripping the guts out of hawthorn hedges in raw
November. They think we’re just doing what we’re told. But all along we’re creating ourselves. It’s in our blood to mine our
own history in the dark, black and glittering carboniferous lumps of it.

That’s what I’m saying, he persists. We do the dying, and they get the glory.

But none of it matters man. It’s over in the blink of an eye. Steamer ducks spent a hundred million years down here evolving
flightlessness.

Metaphysics, says Joe Fish, I’m trying to dig you out of a hole here, and you start in on the metaphysics.

He lights a fag, a straight, and the smoke gurgles upward. When I say it doesn’t matter what I mean is it doesn’t exist. There
is no war. Just the five of us, and the cards, and darkness outside.

Dave lays down his cards, one by one. A flush. Five spades like ripe, black fruit. He scoops the pot again, and yawns, like
an elephant seal.

Call it a day? Or should I say a night?

He proffers a queasy smile, begins to get up. Must be up hundreds on the last few hands.

The night is without end, says Joe Fish. And sleep is not for men like us.

He grips Dave’s forearm and looks at him steadily from the ruined face. His eye sockets loom enormously, teeth like tombstones.

Play, he says. You deal.

Almost apologetically, Dave sits. Joe releases him. He deals. Five beatific faces in the lamplight, one cloaked in sleep,
four hooded over the cards.

I have two jacks and some fluff, but Fabián Rodriguez is pushing things before the draw.

Two thousand, he says, his eyes black.

We take this on board silently. Dave has lit another cigarette and like its predecessor it clings to the notch of the ashtray,
smoke blooming upwards. The beer is bitter and citrus and clear. Joe Fish beaches his cards with a grunt of disgust.

Fabián has something up his sleeve, I say, pushing notes into the middle.

His eyes remain black, unreadable, a dancing mote of lamplight in the pupil.

This is more like it boys, says Dave. Proper wedge.

He too shuffles some paper into the pot. His hands go under the table. I can’t see the watch, can’t read him at all.

Dance for tha’ daddy, sing for tha’ mammy, croons Joe, leaning back, scrolls of smoke issuing from mouth and nostrils.

One card, says Fabián, jerking his head like a horse as the card slides across to him.

One card. The probabilities churn inside my head. If he’s holding two pair and drawing to a full house it’s one in six and
a half. If he’s drawing one card to a flush it’s one in four.

I’ll take three, I say. Makes it obvious I’m holding a pair or nothing, but it can’t be helped. Empty my head and let the
cards come to me, sliding across the table. Stretch out this moment of not knowing. Of not being.

No cards, says Dave. Smugly.

His dimpled hands come out from under the table, fluttering like flames. He unscrews the cap from the whisky bottle. Pours
himself a generous measure, trying not to spill. He must be holding full house or better. Unless he’s bluffing. The hands
go back under the table. I look at him and blink three times and he sees it. His cigarette in the ashtray, untouched, the
ash tongue beginning to grow.

Dance for tha’ daddy, for tha’ mammy sing. Joe drums on the table-top with those clubbed fingertips, the nails ridged and
stripped back.

I raise. Five thousand, says Fabián. His pupils are becoming more dilated, tunnels into the centre of his head.

Thou shalt have a fishy, on a little dishy.

I will smell you Fabián, I say. This is the last of my cash, though the others don’t know it. I can’t raise any further. Blink.
Blink.

See your five, and raise another five, says Dave. He’s bluffing. Must be. Three or four solid hands in a row and it can’t
go on for ever. Probabilities. Hands under the table. Tobacco being slowly consumed, the untapped ash halfway to the filter.

Fabián is unblinking. Very well, I match your five.

They look at me.

Joe, I say. He holds my gaze. Joe.

Throw for it, he says, and slaps a hand onto the table, flat, with his palm upwards. He looks at my hand, with the forefinger
and middle finger extended. The paraffin lamp picks out his palm, my fingers, the sheen on our faces.

Scissors cut paper, I say.

Joe reaches somewhere deep into his kit bag, and pulls out a metal cylinder, a thermos flask. He unscrews the lid and delves
inside, withdraws a fat roll of notes.

Scissors cut paper, he says, passing it to me. But if you lose it, you come back with us tonight.

And if I win?

Joe doesn’t answer. I turn back to the others.

Dave, Fabián, I match your five, and I raise you fifty thousand American. Blink. There is an audible squawk from Dave.

I watch a moth brushing at the window glass, drawn by the lamp, gentle and insistent. I watch a gob of sweat come adrift from
Dave’s hairline and sway down the side of his face, making a neat detour round the eye socket and the corner of the mouth,
disappearing below the neckline of his shirt. His hands appear on the table, cards in the left, the right hand tugging insistently
at the watch strap. He has the cards.

Thou shalt have a fishy, when the boat comes in.

I fold, Fabián says. It is too much.

His pupils are deflating to small, sharp coals. Blink.

I don’t have that much with me, says Dave. Could get it in a couple of days, maybe.

Nobody says nothing. Dave buckles and unbuckles the watch strap. The ash on his cigarette is almost to the filter, beginning
to bend under its own weight, about to drop.

Okay, he says, the boat. It’s ocean-going. You boys might need that. It must be worth the money.

Blink. Blink. Blink. He has the cards.

We’ll take the boat, I say, but you must show first.

Dave nods, and then he begins to lay his cards down, one by one. The dancing light of paraffin, cards in motion, nothing decided.
I try to stretch it out. I try to make it last for ever. One heart after another, fat red berries. He has a heart flush. Must
have been dealt it straight.

I drain my glass of beer. Astringent, medicine for the heart. Their eyes are on me, shining. The deep mahogany sheen of the
tabletop. I begin to lay my cards down, one by one. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Four jacks.

Softly and soundlessly, the pillar of ash drops into the ashtray and the cigarette dies. A moth still presses at the window,
patiently and persistently, looking for the moon.

The cold moon burned like a thumbprint smeared on the windowglass of the sky. I leaned back against the shutters of the pub
and teased bitter cigarette smoke into my lungs. It was three years to the day since Yan went missing on the Falklands. I
remember the phone ringing in the bar that day and Kate running to get it. She looked happy as she went, the smell of hairspray
trailing behind her.

Back then it was all clunky mechanics, before fibre-optics and satellites and that. The baffling sequence of tiny relays and
micro-switches it took to patch a phone call through the exchanges from one place to another. And if one switch among thousands
flipped in the wrong direction you could be diverted to the far side of the world. Me and Paul used to play this game with
the phone book. You pick an international code and dial a random number. Sometimes you get number unobtainable or the phone
just rings and rings. But once in a while there’s a click as someone picks up and then you hear a voice. A real person, from
Uzbekistan, or Tasmania, or Tierra del Fuego, someone you’ll never see. Someone you’ll never meet.

When this happened we pissed ourselves laughing and slammed the receiver down.

Kate didn’t like to see me smoking. Even though I was sixteen and she chained herself hoarse on them Superkings. You know
the ones, look like a magician’s wand when you wag them between finger and thumb.

I’m your mam Danny, she said. It’s a do as I say not as I do thing.

Not my fault, I said. It’s the absence of a father figure.

I leaned against those blistered shutters and tried to get my technique right. How did he smoke? There was a thumb and forefinger
raise to the mouth, then a quick sucking of breath, the cheeks concave. Pursed lips and a furtive look around like a schoolkid
smoking in the bogs.

I watched the early traffic on Port Clarence Road, winding down towards the Transporter. My cigarette died in the raw blustery
wind rattling down the river, and inside the pub the phone began to shrill.

Phones get me thinking about life, about the complexity of patching yourself through from there to here like an electron singing
in a wire. Each time you make a choice – no matter how trivial – you flip one of them micro-switches, you make a new connection.
And maybe that’s enough to derail the future onto some inscrutable new track. Maybe that’s enough to send you to Uzbekistan.
And maybe your old track – your old destiny – just shrivels up and dies right there and then and you never even know it was
laid out ready for you.

It was dark in the bar with stacks of chalky unwashed glasses, dead and wounded butts mounded up in the ashtrays. The sharp
smell of stale beer like vomit, like kissing a girl with rancid breath. Hagan never cleared up after a stoppy-back.

I gripped the receiver, one of them old bakelite things.

Cape of Good Hope.

A trickle of electrons rattled into the earpiece and came out as a familiar voice, the accent so thick it was almost Scouse.

Now then daft cunt, it’s Jonah.

Now then Uncle Jonah.

I’d been half expecting him to ring today. Mark the anniversary somehow.

Red-throated diver, he said. Hartlepool Fish Quay. Worth a gander?

Aye. I’ll meet you down there. Do you know what day it is?

He was silent for a moment. Gusts of static on the line.

I know, he said.

I fumbled for a tab and flipped the lighter, flame fluttering like a moth in the ugly darkness of the bar. Franco was over
there, stretched out asleep on the fake leather bench under the window. Must have drawn the short straw and missed out on
a bed. I walked over and looked down at him, knotty and pickled like a conker that’s been in vinegar, fading tats on the forearms
and a little tache bobbing gently on his upper lip. He snuffled, tugging the leather jacket further over him, eyeballs swivelling
in sleep behind the wrinkled lids. I sucked long and hard at the cigarette, extended it carefully above his face. I smiled
at the thought. I was going to tap a gobbet of ash onto his eyelid, soft and bristling like a woolly bear caterpillar.

But I didn’t. I let the ash fall on the floor and walked out into the morning.

Haverton Hill was a ghost town, them days. Used to be a thriving little place round the shipyards on the Tees. Then they built
the ICI at Billingham, right on the doorstep, the biggest chemical complex in Europe, and the pollution knackered Haverton.
The people had to go, even though they were here first. So a few year before I was born they knocked most of it down, moved
people onto estates further out.

Now there was just the Cape, beached on its corner plot like a ship on a reef. And the railway bridge, a second-hand car lot
and a scrapyard and an old gadge called Decko who lived in a caravan in the middle of his pigeon sheds. And further out were
the pikeys with them thread-bare horses chained up in the fields around the Hole and then the saltmarsh and the sharp wind
crackling with sea and impending rain.

Along Port Clarence Road the hoardings groaned in the wind in front of the railway embankment. The River Tees over there,
flat and brown, slipping quietly to the sea.

Now then Danny charver, do us a ciggy.

Paul lurched out of the bus shelter and fell into step with me.

I’ve left the tabs at home marra.

He started wheedling.

Away, I’m fucking gasping here.

I shrugged and we carried on and the tramp of his boots echoed from the pavement.

Me and Paul were near enough the same age but you wouldn’t know it to look. He was half a head taller than me and grown into
his muscles with a bonehead haircut that made him look like an Easter Island statue. He was fledged from rubble, from bramble
and thorn, dragged up by his mam in one of the houses behind the Social Club. When we were at Port Clarence Primary he was
the kid everyone was scared of, who got slippered for calling Mrs Reresby a saggy-titted old bitch and then just walked out
of the gate and went home. He got away with murder cos he had these cool green eyes like unripe sloes and full raspberry lips
and brown skin with a bloom behind it that made you want to touch. He just grinned at teachers and they melted. Even now,
sheared and bagged off his head with lighter fluid on his breath and pupils the size of dinnerplates.

Rain began to whirl out of a sky which was bulging and thickening like a varicose vein. Icy drops swarmed over Paul’s rosy,
shorn head.

You’ve been through that lass, then. The Paki one.

Raz?

Aye. Carlo said.

She’s Bangladeshi. I go there to do homework. Can’t get any space in the pub with Hagan and all them.

Homework, he erupted, with a barking laugh. Shook his head. We crossed over these little stumpy streets of terraces, fifty
yards of houses and then Back Saltholme. Half of them were empty and the council had cages on the windows.