Hemispheres (37 page)

The estuary tide lifted and fell with a sleeper’s breath and slipped back like a skin over miles of wet and metallic mudflats
and mudbanks, creeks and runnels. And befuddling numbers of dunlin and sanderling, redshank and greenshank and knot, godwit
and ruff, curlew and whimbrel and oystercatcher, grey plover and golden plover, scampered and delved like black ants and rose
into the air and blew and twisted like hanks of dark smoke. The rain parted and I startled awake in a grey room in a grey
house in Seaton Carew. A grey wind toyed with the win dow glass and it groaned like a wobbleboard. Everything hurt. I raised
a hand to my throbbing face, felt the tracery of dried blood across my nose.

I lay for a while gazing at the ceiling of Jonah’s box room. There was a broken patch in it. He must have slipped, up in the
loft, put his foot through the ceiling. Cracks radiated from the point of impact like a star. I thought of the luminous stars
I had stuck to my bedroom ceiling in the pub, how they glowed with a sick green light in the dark. A child’s universe made
of plastic. There wasn’t much left of that universe. Less and less with each day.

Could you do with a cup of tea Dan? said Jonah, shouldering through the door and offering a mug to me, steam billowing. I
rubbed my eyes and propped myself up on the pillows, then took the mug,
cupping its heat between my palms. Sipped at the scalding liquid, felt the peaty tannins nibbling at my stomach.

It’s nearly dinnertime, said Jonah. He’s already up.

I’m not coming, I said. I’ve had enough of it.

You’re coming, he said.

Grey eyes and a bald patch. Sparse and wispy hair. A cigarette clamped between his lips. Seized me by the upper arm, fingers
like an iron grab. Propelled me out of the door into bitter morning light, into a car I’d never seen before. Then he was driving
and I was in the passenger seat next to him.

Where did you get the car?

Cologne. She bought it for me.

Who?

I lost my soul. She helped me get it back.

The red car ran quietly along the edge of the estuary, across the reclaimed land, taut green fields lifting and falling in
the wind, pylons striding out alongside. Ahead was the blue skeleton of the Transporter and the giant sheds of the Swan Hunter
yards. We drove for years without speaking. On the southern shore, blast furnaces coughed themselves into life one by one,
and a small town shimmered into being, reticent at first, then spreading in wrinkle upon wrinkle of terraced housing, rippling
like a tattooed skin across the land until it broke against the dark flanks of the Eston Hills. From the outermost points
of the estuary twin breakwaters grew like the shy horns of a snail, shaped from cold impurities shattered like brittle toffee.
The swollen furnaces roared day and night and the sky bloomed orange. Tides lifted and fell, and behind the northern breakwater
new sea walls snaked across the mud like varicose veins. Mudflats hardened into fields as green and square as stamps blowing
in an album, and from the fields sprang a silver forest of metallic vines and creepers, mushrooms and tubers, stamens and
stigmata, sepals and petals, breathing the sour spores of transpiration into the sky. Gas flares wove their delicate flames
and the whole estuary
was a living thing, hissing and humming and grumbling inside my head.

The car drifted up past the old shipyards to where a solitary building stood on the corner. Tired paintwork, peeling maroon
gloss around the windows and the door. Turned onto the abandoned lot next door and the tyres crunched over gravel and cinder.
The engine stopped and nothing happened for a long time. The man next to me sat drumming on the wheel with his thumbs.

One by one the furnaces blinked out, melting into landscapes of rubble and wire mesh. The metallic jungle was in retreat,
whole swathes clear-felled and logged out, leaving isolated stands back-to-back in defiance. The concrete husk of a power
station blew along the shore before gripping the marram grass and putting down roots.

You go in first, he said. Check it out. Don’t acknowledge me when I come in. When it all kicks off, we’ll get busy.

The room was busy. Sunday lunch, always a few in. The mouths of the drinkers flapped open and shut, disclosing pimpled and
discoloured tongues, rows of uneven tobacco-stained teeth. Their faces distended in laughter, they gesticulated across the
bar, clouds of smoke bloomed from them. Hagan and his mates were clustered around the pool tables, fagsmoke curdling beneath
the overhead lights. Cue leapt into ball and ball thumped into pocket.

They didn’t see me, and I sidled over to the bar. Michelle’s rodent eyes flickered to me as she worked the pump but she didn’t
say nothing. The place felt clean and sharp, hard light on dark wood. Swept clean by sea and wind.

And a man came through the door. A tramp, or a pikey. He came to the bar and Michelle served him and his eyes moved over her,
lingered on her bare legs. When he had his pint he knocked it back and put the glass back on the bar and rubbed tentatively
at his bald spot. The dregs of the beer sank down the sides of the glass and pooled in the base. Then he walked over to the
pool table and put some change down.

Magoo looked at him.

It’s a closed table, he said. No pikeys.

He picked up the money and hurled it and it ricocheted from walls and tables in hailstones of light and metal. Franco pushed
the tramp in the chest and he slipped and went down and sprawled on his arse on the floor. You could see it in his face, biting
into the touchpaper, cold as the sea. Michelle was smirking behind the bar and he looked over at her, just for a moment. Then
he got carefully to his feet and went over to where Hagan was leaning against one of the tables with them slabby arms crossed
over his chest. Behind him Lovebite fed the jukebox and began to dance with an imaginary lass.

They looked at each other. The hardbitten derelict in the shabby leather jacket and Hagan inflated double his size with that
steroid face and gelled hair and single gold hoop.

You ever play for proper money in here? said the derelict.

Hagan broke into a grin and slapped him on the back, one of the trimmed eyebrows rakishly raised.

What’s your name pal?

Dermot.

That’s a pikey name. You a gyppo?

If you say so.

Dermot produced a bundle of wedge and placed it down on the rail. Took a cue from the rack and rested the butt down with one
fingernail tapping against the tip.

There’s a couple of thou there, said Hagan.

Like I said, proper money.

Where d’you get it? Scrap metal? You must be the king of the gyppos mate.

If you say so.

Michelle shovelled notes from the till and handed them over to Hagan and he slapped them down on the table. Then he stepped
up and put his ball on the break line and began.

I was sat at the bar but I couldn’t taste the lager. They drew in around
the table and Lovebite stopped his dance. They cast crisp shadows, sharp as a blade, in the white light streaming through
the street windows. Dancing like moths.

Hagan started his usual routine, bullying the balls with muscle. Blasted the pack from the break and got two reds direct.
He swaggered round the table and the onlookers gave him room. Started to put a break together but ran out of position and
left one on the jaws. Raised his eyes to heaven. I followed his gaze, up to the artex ceiling. Whorls and scallops in the
yellowing plaster, dagger-sharp.

Dermot came to the table, grinned.

You got to take them by surprise, he said. When they’re not looking.

They laughed at him and he cued way off line and sent the ball squirting wide. Hagan smirked. Potted two more reds. There
was a fly, trapped between two panels of the sash window. I watched it ricochet desperately from pane to pane. The bottle-green
sheen of the body, the miraculous structure of the compound eye, the honeycomb of spiracles. Dead in a moment. Hagan planted
the last red into the corner. Smiled broadly, the cue ball still scooting around the angles.

I looked at the security glass in the door, crazed and impact-rippled long ago but never replaced. Light crawled over the
surface and rattled off a million facets, off the capillaries of wire mesh running through each shard. It seemed to resolve
into a human face, mouth open and each tooth a talon of glass. Then it splintered into white noise.

The cue ball plopped into the middle pocket and the smile dropped from Hagan’s face. He retrieved it and replaced it on the
break line, not looking too bothered. He only had the black left and Dermot hadn’t potted a ball. I gripped the bar stool
beneath my backside, metal tubing and vinyl cladding. It gave an arthritic squeak, shifted and trembled under me.

Dermot hunkered down over the table and his grey eyes sparkled.

Charm, he said. Got to charm them in, not bully them.

But the white span comically off his cue again and missed all the yellows. The room dissolved into laughter and Hagan shook
his head.

You taking the piss?

I’m trying me best son. Just getting me eye in, like.

An ashtray next to me on the bar, mounded high with cigarette butts, some still smouldering, others with smears of vermilion
lipstick. Sour smoke rose, the agglomerated butts bristling like a hedgehog.

Hagan was on the black. He sighted on it and thumped the shot hard, but the ball rattled between the jaws like a beam of light
refracted in a prism. Stopped. Hagan examined the baize and picked a tiny glittering fragment of something out of the nap.
It was broken glass. He flicked it across the room.

Now I reckon my luck’s in, said Dermot, twirling his cue.

He pinged the cue ball into a clutch of yellows and the balls leapt like a shoal of fish awakened by the sun. Two straight
to pockets and another two on the jaws. More balls rattling home like wayward comets. At the window, net curtains shifted
lazily on gentle draughts of air. Ethereal limbs, spun from nicotine-yellow material, floated out into the room, gesticulated,
and sank.

Now he was on the black.

Come to daddy, he said, with a wink at Hagan. Dynamited the ball around the table from cushion to cushion, sucking the room
towards it. The ball slowed, flopped lazily off the side cushion. There was an intake of breath. The black plopped square
into the corner pocket.

Dermot grinned and picked up the pile of notes. Their mouths opened and closed. No words, just the sound of insects feeding,
an army of locusts on the move. Trajan bounded into the bar with spittle lashing from his jowls and jumped straight at him
with paws on his shoulders and muzzle in his face. Dermot pushed him down but Hagan was looking at him, looking deep into
his eyes. Saw the clouds racing across the sea, saw the mountainous waves streaming in ranges towards the shore. Recognition
dawned. Yan grinned like a loon and slammed the butt of his cue into Hagan’s face.

I’ve seen any number of pub fights. It’s a respectable pastime in this town. We play down the violence. Talk about a bit of
chew, a barney.
That’s rhyming slang, by the way. Barney Rubble. The chew explodes out of nowhere and subsides almost as quick, like a sudden
squall of bitter weather. And five minutes later you might be shaking hands and looking sheepish over your pints. But this
one was different. This one had to be pursued like a theorem, right down to the proof.

There was a welter of movement, pumped-up tattooed flesh thrashing and bellowing like cattle on the killing floor. Hagan collapsing
like a slaughtered ox, Yan slamming Lovebite’s head through the window and into the street, turning to thump a roundhouse
into Magoo’s guts. Drinkers were going for the door, knocking over furniture in panic. Yan grabbed Magoo by the ears and planted
a knee into his face and Michelle was stock-still behind the bar, absolutely entranced.

His eyes, looking at me out of the middle of it. Open and grey and full of the sea, mobile as weather systems over the Baltic.

Franco backed Yan towards the juke box with a lager bottle in each hand. Burst each one against the pool table and thrust
the jagged ends out in front.

The eyes were looking again. I stayed rooted to the stool. He wanted me to help. It bothered him. Then the door to the bar
fluttered open and Paul O’Rourke stood there, grinning like a mule with his newly shaven head shining like the moon.

I love a barney, me, he said.

And he rampaged towards Franco, bisected them broken bottles and stuck the nut on him sweet and square as you ever saw. Franco’s
nose exploded like a barrage balloon and his blood and snot lashed across Paul’s face.

But Hagan wasn’t finished. He arose from his wreck on the floor and launched himself at Yan. The two of them in this staggering
thrashing embrace, half fight and half fuck. Colour drained out of it and they carried on in monochrome, flickering like a
silent film. Paul grabbed Hagan from behind and his teeth sought out that gold hoop and ripped it triumphantly from the lobe.
Hagan bellowed and the back of his napper battered into Paul’s face but Paul held on, twining his legs and
arms round the thrashing body while Yan groped for a pool cue. He began to flog Hagan about the head and shoulders, the cue
rising and falling like a scythe until it snapped and the tip clattered to the ground in slow motion, bouncing slow across
the floor of the bar like it was the surface of the moon. And Yan belaboured Hagan with the splintered shaft, his jaw set
in concentration and his muscles jumping and bunching with the effort, and Hagan lost consciousness and slumped down but Yan
carried on. The bar became dark, splashes of light and shadow moving slow and attenuated. He was a broken spring, shuddering
and flailing, the stump of the pool cue still moving like a pendulum in his hand.

When I got back to Jonah’s I found him in the kitchen, peeling potatoes over the sink.

Thought I’d rustle up some chips, he said. Can’t afford the oven ones. Anyway, I prefer it the old-fashioned way. No E numbers.
Just good honest grease. The peeler flickered over the tubers, exposing the ghostly white flesh.