Hemispheres (29 page)

I thought about Yan. I had it in my head that I was going to let him go, like one of them birds you trap in a mist net and
let off with a ring round its leg. Had it in my head too that he wouldn’t be as obedient or go as quiet as a ringed bird.
Not yet, anyway. I was waiting for September, for the cool and blustery winds you get from the sea, for the wide blue sky
swept clean with a yardbrush. When autumn was here and passage migrants were finding a desperate landfall along the coast,
then it would be time.

*

Going to check out the new supplier in Hartlepool, yelled Hagan up the stairs. Are you coming?

The van sped along the Seaton Carew road, heat squatting on us like a truculent frog, flat expanses of reclaimed land scorched
from green to yellow. Petrochemical plants no longer bristled but drooped like a Dalí wristwatch. Outside the fire station
there were two figures waiting and Hagan slowed and pulled up. Kurt and Magoo. They loped to the back of the van and jumped
into the cargo bay. One of them thumped the plywood partition and Hagan moved off again. I looked at him with raised eyebrows.
He was totally relaxed, designer sunglasses pushed up onto his forehead and a matchstick twirling between his lips. Drummed
a rhythm against the wheel with his thumbs. He saw me studying him.

They’re going to help us load some gear, he said.

But at the roundabout we turned right, and pulled up at the security gate of the nuclear power station. The guard came out,
sweltering in a military style navy jumper. Flashed a thumbs-up sign at Hagan, and I recognized Franco. He raised the barrier
and then jumped into the back of the van with the others. Hagan sped off down the approach road.

Quick detour, he said, but his mouth was becoming tense, teeth squeaking on the matchstick. The great concrete stump of the
power station brooded over us. No vegetation around it, just a vast spread of recycled slag where the odd dusty thistle had
gained a footprint. Beyond this were tall mesh fences topped with razor wire. We skirted the power station and continued behind,
the ground becoming scrubby with mounds of overgrown rubble. Butterflies beating lazily from plant to plant, revelling in
the heat. A red admiral flopped onto a thistlehead, angling velvet wings to the sun.

We came to a halt at the end of the road. Beyond us was the estuary, dark grey and unconscious where the river limped into
the sea. A bare bank of shingle leading down to the water, and across the river the vast
sheds and elevators of British Steel shimmering in heat haze.

Help us unload, said Hagan breezily, slipping out of the driver’s door. I wondered what was going on. Fly tipping, maybe.
Jumped out and slammed the passenger door. Crickets were lazily creaking in the spoil heaps. Round to the back of the van.
Hagan flung the doors open and the three of them jumped out. Magoo, blubbery and sweating. Franco, lean and knotted. Kurt,
tall and athletic. Each holding a hollow steel pole six foot long, the sort they use in metal fence panels. Spines of mesh
still attached, where they’d been twisted away. They formed a triangle around me.

What’s going on lads?

A sharp sick feeling in my stomach. I tried to push out of the encirclement but Franco rapped me hard on the kneecap with
his pole. A hard hot flare of pain and I knelt down clutching the knee. Hagan spoke from outside the circle.

Stand up.

His voice was calm, empty. I stood, my knee throbbing.

On the beach lads, he said.

They began to walk forward, herding me in the middle with the steel poles. We walked down onto the shingle bank, towards the
water’s edge. The beach had a steep rake and soon we were hidden from the approach road. Eventually, they stopped. My heart
was racing.

Just do it, I said. Whatever you’re going to do. Just do it.

Hagan smiled. He stepped inside the circle.

I’m in control, he said. Not you.

Grabbed my face in a huge hand, squashing my cheeks and lips together.

Smelt the piss, he said. But you kept on coming. Look at me.

I looked.

The tanned, handsome, pudgy face, sparkling blue eyes and white teeth, the single gold earring and streaked blond hair. He
had thick black eyebrows. I wondered what his natural hair colour was.

*

Raz was right about the bedtime stories, you see. He told me this one once about the seven whistlers, six curlews searching
for their lost companion. They searched through the ages of the world but they haven’t found him yet. And if they ever do,
then the world will end. I thought that was a bit odd, when I was a kid. I could imagine the world ending in fire or flood
or a fuckoff big earthquake, but I couldn’t imagine the world ending in curlews.

You got big
cojones
Danny, eh? said Hagan.

There was some sniggering from the others.

The lad’s got exams, shouted Hagan. He’s supposed to be brainy. He thinks he’s better than the rest of us.

He delved in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of paper and threw it up so that little snowflakes of it drifted down on
me like tickertape.

I found it in the dustbin, he said. Tell me what it is.

I didn’t need to look.

You know what it is, I said.

Aye, I do. It’s a fucking claim form for the insurance, that some panda-eyed bitch kept me hanging around for and never had
any intention of sending. And Santa’s little helper here told me he’d put it in the post himself.

He smashed a meaty fist, studded with rings, into my face with the full force of his pumped-up body. There was an explosion
in the front of my head, and I found myself splattered across the shingle, my nose pulped and blood pouring from it.

Get up, he said.

I stayed down.

Stay down and you’re dead.

He kicked the side of my head like a football and it bounced on the ground. There was a flash and my hearing had gone. I groped
around in silence and clawed my way back to my feet and they looked at me, laughing. Hagan was saying something but I only
heard a high-pitched whine. He walked away down to the water’s edge and picked up a handful
of flat round pebbles. Tested one in his hand and skimmed it out across the river and I watched it bounce up six or seven
times before nuzzling finally down. The sun, hammering at my bare skull.

I asked Yan about the end of the world and he said bollocks to it son, it’s only a tall story. If you ask me the world will
just run out of juice and go dark and cold until there’s nowt left. Curlews are just doing their own thing – I daresay they’re
either hungry or horny or both. Birds are in a world of their own, Dan, unconnected to us. That’s what I like about them.

So I watched Kurt and Magoo and Franco close on me, and Magoo swung his pole up above his head and thrashed it down across
my left shoulder and dislocated it. The pain jumped like a salmon screaming in the unbearable air with its tail beating. Kurt
took a run-up and got me full in the ribs and I was down on the ground struggling for breath and my skin was shredded where
spines of mesh had ripped it.

They stepped back and waited and I saw Franco mouth the words get up.

I got up.

Franco smiled.

Then he lashed me across the mouth and I tasted the raw metal as I spat teeth and blood and my lips and tongue were beginning
to swell. Hagan span another pebble out into the Tees. It undulated across the calm water, five bounces, and was gone. Magoo
smashed his pole into the small of my back and I flipped over and slammed back into the ground.

They stepped back and waited.

I struggled to my feet.

Another pebble jumping out across the water, skimming in silence.

It wasn’t so much the stories, though they were good. It was his voice, dark and smooth and strong as coffee. He always said
the same thing
when he came in, in this mock stern voice.

You should be asleep.

The bedside lamp had a yellow glow like a small planet and there was darkness beyond the curtains all the way across the sea
to Denmark.

I wanted to sleep, that blinding day on the estuary. Lie down and sleep. A few minutes of backbreaking pain and then nothingness
ebbing out to the sea. But instead I did what I was told. Got to my feet, got knocked back down. I was drenched in my own
blood, dark splashes of it dripping silently onto the pebbles. It poured from my nose and gums and ran thick and salty down
my throat The stones drank it up and there were container ships and a power station and steelworks and chemical plants all
humming away oblivious in the roaring summer heat. Hagan kept flicking his wrist, sending a new pebble bouncing across the
surface of the river.

And then I was kneeling on the shingle with a heavy steel pole bouncing off the top of my skull, watching a pebble crawl from
Gary Hagan’s hand and saunter in an elegant loop towards the surface of the river, when a curlew alighted a little further
along the beach, right by the water’s edge. They’ll be coming off the moors this time of year, off the breeding grounds and
back to the coast. Brown plumage, speckled like an egg, and the long bill drooping moist and black like an anteater’s tongue.
Another blow across my shoulders forced tears from my eyes and the pebble rotated on its axis and bounced on the water. I
watched the breeze stir the freckled neck feathers as I began to leak away into the shingle. Vertebrae bouncing on the water,
running out of energy, almost skimming the surface, and beach pebbles alighting at the water’s edge, fresh from the moors
and freckled with salt and chiming sweetly together and curlews hammering at my spine.

And then the bird opens its beak and that call bubbles up like ether into my silence, breaking in the middle and lifting like
the absence of pain. The sound of loneliness. Casual, everyday loneliness, sharp and lovely enough to end the world.

And then the bird was up and Hagan’s boots were tramping back across the beach. He grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled
my head up.

You look amazing, he said. Listen, here’s the deal. You go now, and you don’t come back. Ring Kate and make up an excuse.
I don’t want to see you in my pub again.

My pub.

He dropped my head back onto the ground. I tried to focus on the salt-encrusted stones in front of me. I heard their footsteps
crunching away, the van engine coughing and receding into the distance and the world ending in curlews.

I’m still in the air but I can smell Europe already. The musk of petrol engines, people who stop at red lights, policemen
without guns. And them old cities built on boneyards. The layers going down, medieval and Frankish and Roman right down to
the black mud.

We’ve begun the descent into Köln–Bonn, engines treading water and the nose inclined down. Look out of the window where the
sky is darkening, a livid blaze of light at the horizon like a splash of mercury. And below us the wrinkled surface of a cloudbank
ripples away to the edge of the world. In two days I’ll be home, with Kate and Danny. My heart skips a beat and I don’t know
whether it’s anticipation or terror.

At the airport taxi rank I glance at my reflection in the glass partition. Rumpled and mundane as fuck in a dark suit and
scuffed brogues. And this taxi pulls up and the parking light glowers above the driver’s head. He’s dark-skinned with these
meaty forearms resting on the wheel and they’re carpeted with thick grey hair. Some untipped cancer stick clamped between
two fingers with thick smoke pouring steadily from the tip, up past the evil eye charm in blue glass which dangles from the
mirror. He sits and takes a long phlegmatic suck on his cigarette and lets me load my own suitcase into his boot, and when
I’m inside he moves off, blowing smoke through a small crack of open window. The meter and the fascia of the radio glow a
ghostly red and green in the darkness. With hairy fingers he punches buttons on the radio, and Middle Eastern music wails
into the Rhineland night. The taxi
turns out of the airport and towards the city and the black heart of Europe swallows us.

An hour later I’m in a petrified forest of tenement buildings, squat and rectangular and cast from crumbling concrete. A raw
winter night, smelling of snow. There’s an open space in front of me, bleary sodium light shimmering from damp pavers, and
in the centre of it there’s a sculpture – a concrete human forearm sprouting from the ground and topped with a clenched fist
like a defiant flower. I follow the driver’s directions, along a walkway diving like a canyon between two walls of apartments,
and my footsteps punctuate the night with metallic pockmarks. And here’s the apartment block, a pair of swing doors with
panels of security glass. I stub out my cigarette underfoot and push through the doors into the stairwell.

Leck mich am Arsch
, says somebody loud and insistent inside one of the flats.
Leck mich am Arsch
. A wave of cold air bursts over the parapet like stale vomit. I hurry on, until I find the right flat. No light visible inside.
Blue paint on the door, cracked by the weather, and brass numbers nailed on aslant. I knock. Silence and darkness. I wait
a minute or two and pound my fist against the door again. There’s somebody moving inside. I cram my mouth to the letterbox
and yell.

Is anybody there? It’s Yan.

Bitte warten
, comes a creaky, muffled voice from inside the flat. Wait. Slow footsteps pad towards the door, the latch scrapes, and the
door opens.

That was classic, laughs Joe Fish, sprawling back in the armchair. Yan, you really are a tool. Stood there clutching your
suitcase like one of them evacuees in the war. Thought you were going to pee yerself.

You snidey gets, I grin. Pause and look at the three of them. It’s good to see you.

The flat is ugly but warm, electric fires pumping out heat. The furniture is shabby and the place is carpeted with hideous
orange shagpile, much the worse for wear. Horse Boy slumps on the sofa, chugging a can
of cheap lager. The trouserlegs of his suit are too short and ride up, exposing six inches of white calf. He raises the can.