Hemispheres (40 page)

You’re real enough Yan.

Look, he says. What you got to remember is. You aren’t in control. You aren’t the egghead in the lab coat Danny.

What am I then?

You’re the fucking cat boy. We both are. You can never open the box. Live your whole life. Trapped inside it.

Aye, I reckon.

Mind, he says. We can still wave our tails about. Let some fucking air in, eh?

He takes a step but the knotted purple legs give way and before I can reach him he crumples to the floor. I bend down and
scoop him up, one arm under his knees and the other round his shoulders. He weighs fuck all and the flesh behind his knee
is cold and scaly to the touch and his body close up gives off this sweet odour of decay. I find the doorway and the service
stairs and lug him up, trying not to scrape his feet against the walls. He grunts and sighs and drops in and out of consciousness.
And we emerge onto the roof, where the mouths of vent shafts and heating flues blossom from the concrete surface. At the edge
I set him on his feet. He seems to wake up, supports himself.

The flames of the Chimera, he says.

We’re looking out over the shimmering expanses of the Billingham site where constellations of white light are strewn across
the transformers, the columns and the converters, sparkling saltily like the winter sky. I can hear the place breathing, a
faint hiss and inrush of air followed by a deep contented exhalation. Clouds of vapour drift across the lights, backlit in
ghostly white and orange. But above it all are the gas flares, luminous in the pure chemical colours of copper and sodium
and potassium, green and turquoise and orange cat tongues flickering at the sky. We watch them silently for what seems like
hours, father and son standing close together on the roof while molecules evaporate and burn in the mineral night.

Yan totters over to the rim of a ventilation shaft and perches on it like an emaciated gnome on the edge of a toadstool. Flare-light
flickers over the fragile, concave skin of his cheeks. He sucks in a breath.

When me and Paul put Hagan in the car, he says. I was going to do him. No mistake. We took him down Back Saltholme. Off the
road. Paul drags him out of the boot. Throws him on the ground. He’s off his tits. What are we going to do with him Yan? he
kept saying. What
are we going to do with him?

His voice is ragged, a saw blade in the night, luminous flame leaping behind him.

Paul started it. Picks up a concrete slab from a pile of rubble. Lashes him over the head with it. He screams like a shrew.
That’s just seen the cat. And I thought. Yeah, we’re going to kill him. Clear and cold, like sea water over me. Hagan’s rolling
around on the floor. The black bag over his head. Pleading like a snotty kid. Please Yan. Please no. Please mate.

I shivered. It was cold on the roof, heat leaking out into space.

I’m thinking. Grab a bit of slab. Hit him a hundred times. Hit him until the whimpering stops. And there’s just a sick wet
noise from inside the plastic. Rip his cock off, dripping black blood. And fucking throw it to the dog. I’m pottering about
these piles of rubble. Looking for the right bit of slab. That’s going to do the job. Try a couple in my hand.

A breeze lifts the sparse hair at his temples. I wait.

But then I thought about that kid. Secundino. What I felt when I plugged him. Plugged him till there was nowt left. When it
was finished. That high-pitched whine in my ears. And I took his boots off. Peeled them off over his socks. With the white
feet under. There wasn’t a wind-screen between us Dan. Not any more. Those white perfect feet. I touched them. They were my
feet Danny. He was me and I was him. Or even worse than that. They were your feet. And I killed my own son.

Seems like we’re hovering at the edge of space. Flames below us. The aurora borealis licking at the world.

I heard Hagan whining inside the bag. There were coot feeding in the lagoon. Redshank stalking through the shallows. A beautiful
day. The tide going in and out. I thought about Secundino. His bare foot, in my bare hand. How I felt that warmth dying away.
Through the thin skin of his feet. And I walked. Just walked away and left him lying there.

Like you walked away from Mount Longdon.

Just the same. The end and the beginning.

*

We stay there for minutes without talking, but it’s getting cold. Yan tries to stand and I take his arm, steer him towards
the stairwell. He subsides against me with relief and we work our way down the stairs, moving our limbs carefully and placing
them in unison like one creature with four slow feet.

But what happened to Hagan, after you left him there?

Ended up in Pattaya, same as me, he mutters. Skin cancer got him in the end. Should have stayed off them sunbeds.

I wish I’d been there, instead of Paul.

Do you?

Inside the building I flip the torch back on but the batteries are dying and the faint light barely smudges walls and floor.
We pick our way back to the open lift shafts, thick stains of shadow in the floor. Yan stops. Takes the brass lighter out
of his pocket and holds it out, the metal almost liquid in the darkness.

Here, he says. Tried to give it you. That day at Jonah’s.

I didn’t want it then.

I always meant to clean it up. Get a new wick, refill it. Get it working again. All the time I was away. All the years in
Pattaya. Never got round to it. Just sat in my pocket. It was only when I came back here. When I knew I was ill.

I take it from him, feel the weight. It’s heavy, full. I close my hand around it.

Never brought me luck, he says. Maybe it’ll bring you some.

He places both hands on my shoulders. The weight is negligible, tiny birds perching there. The warmth drains from his face.

What are you going to do?

I’ve never been afraid, he says. To jump in the dark. You see, we wrought the world. With our hands. Men like me. Miners,
steelmakers, shipbuilders. Like the Greek heroes.

His face is a pale sheen in the dying torchlight, eyes and mouth swallowed in cavernous shadow.

We would rather be full. Of guilt and story. Than be empty and
blame less. But our sons are afraid. Call-centre monkeys. And pizza boys. Get their kicks on a computer. Instead of for real.

Maybe we prefer it that way, I say, gently.

I’ve still got free will, he says. The dice are frozen in motion. Just like the painting. The deep mahogany sheen. Of the
tabletop. See, I’m not going to be a lump. In a hospice. They’re not going to give me. A fucking leaflet. About this.

He lifts his hands from my shoulders, birds gusting into the air.

Dad, I say. I don’t want you to go.

I grab at his upper arms with both hands, but there is nothing under the jacket. The sleeves scrunch uselessly in my fists.
Cigarettes and stale sweat, leather and blood. His face still floats there like a mask, beset by shadow.

We took their boots, he says. But it was only a lend. I reckon they’ll be wanting them back now.

He glances up as if straining for a sound.

Let them in Danny, he whispers.

Then he steps back into the blackness of the shaft and is gone. And I can hear them thudding at the window boards. The stars
are clubbing at the window with blackest boots. All the dark and pitiless boots of the universe, smelling of sweaty leather
and banging out a tattoo of hate.

Julie lifts the calcified bubble of the skull, marvelling at its lightness. She turns it in her hand, admiring the stark and
massive bill, imagining the brain that once burned behind the empty sockets. Then she slips it into the finds bag with the
rest. She seals the bag, running her fingertips along its rim, and brushes stray crumbs of earth from the outside before climbing
out of the pit for the last time. She looks down at where the raven lay. There’s no imprint in the ground, no sign at all
that it ever existed.

The summer pisses by like a gas leak only there’s nobody left to make a spark. Kelly drops in for her stuff with Miriam’s
bloke and ends up taking most of the furniture. I haven’t the heart to stop her. I’m in the kitchen with my head down on the
worktop, sobbing great gobfuls of self-pity. And she stands in the front door with the clean air around her and the wind blowing
through from the estuary.

See ya Danny, she says. And her voice is tender and embarrassed and sad and itching to get the hell out of there. Then she
closes the door and it makes a good seal. It’s one of them white plastic sealed units. Closes me in.

I stay here for an indeterminate time, drinking my own recycled air while the oxygen content dwindles. It’s all I can do to
get down the garage for a boil-in-the-bag curry and a few packets of dry roasted and a raft of wifebeater. Under the duvet
my heart is too loud, whamming in my chest like a piledriver, reverberating through my stomach.

Let them in Danny. How many weeks is it?

Sooner or later the social will come round, because he discharged himself from hospital and didn’t check in anywhere else.
Sooner or later the police will come round, because they’ve finished stripping out Billingham House for redevelopment and
found him there at the bottom of the shaft. There is a safety net. There are checks and balances. People don’t just die and
not get found.

It’s a crap summer anyway, cold and wet with rain bearing down
from the Atlantic in wave on wave. In the front garden the grass is on overdrive but it’s never dry enough to cut. We never
get them hot summers any more.

It was truer to what he wanted and I thought I owed him that. He wanted that fall into the dark to be the end. He didn’t want
them scraping around in the bottom of the shaft, didn’t want the curtains at the crem and the crappy flowers outside lying
on concrete, didn’t want the smoke going up.

Didn’t want them giving me a leaflet about bereavement.

But one morning the daylight nudges me awake and I don’t turn my face back to the wall. One morning I can hear next door’s
dog above my own heartbeat, and their new baby roaring somewhere in between cat and gargoyle.

I’m starving hungry.

I told myself it was truer to what he wanted but the truth is I was afraid. I was afraid they’d search the bottom of the shaft
and find nothing. Them white shinbones in the peat on East Falkland, after all. Would that have been better? Sparks flying
up and the tracks dwindling in the darkness. Shrivelling away to nothing.

I crack that door open and the wind shoulders it against me. Green wind loping through from the estuary, brinefields and rain
and the sea on its breath. That dog barking next door. Sounds like he’s trying to batter his way out. I let myself into the
front garden and breathe.

I’m in Tesco at White House Farm. Get myself a take-out from their coffee shop. Full-fat rocket fuel with an extra shot. It’s
proper flinty black stuff. Liquid obsidian. Thunder bangs overhead.

Shopping is dangerous when you’re this hungry. I’ve got punnets of overripe strawberries with that blousy cream-soda smell,
fresh flour-dusted bread from the bakery, biteable as Kelly’s flesh. Two pots of crunchy peanut butter. I stand in line at
the checkout behind an Asian woman with a little boy and a mountain of a weekly shop. The
checkout monkey pings down her shopping too quick and she’s getting flustered, struggling to keep up with the packing. The
boy grabs a chocolate bar and puts it on the conveyor.

No Mahmoud, she says. Picks it up and puts it back. The boy starts whinging. Please mam. Away, go on.

I unload my stuff from the basket and she turns and looks at me. She’s got too much eyeliner on. It’s caked in the wrinkles
round her eyes.

Hiya Danny, she says. Brings me up short and it takes me a minute to recognize her.

Raz. It’s been a few year, like.

Away mam. It’s only one chocky bar.

Go on, she says. Have your chocolate. Chucks the bar onto the conveyor with the rest.

Outside in the car park she manhandles her shopping bags.

You need a hand getting them to the car?

Nah, we’re on the bus.

Let me give you a lift.

She looks at me, dark headscarf framing her sharp face. The eyes are weathered. Salt-glazed from the sea.

Go on then, she says.

I load the bags into the back of the van, open up the front for them to climb in.

It’s only a two-seater, says Raz.

I’m riding shotgun, yells Mahmoud. Aren’t I Danny? He climbs in and wedges himself between the seats, above the handbrake.
Razia shrugs.

How old are you Mahmoud? I ask him as we drive. He’s got a brown moon face and his hair spiked up with gel.

Eight and three-hundred-and-sixty-four three-hundred-and-sixty-fifths, he says.

Ah, right. So that means it’s your birthday on Saturday.

No stupid. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow?

Yes.

Where are we going? I ask Raz.

Dad’s house, she says.

I never knew you were back there.

He had a stroke a couple of month back. We moved in with him.

How’s he getting on?

He’s not good.

We pull up outside and I help them lug bags to the front door. She puts the Yale in the lock and cracks it open like a secret.

Shh, she says to Mahmoud. Don’t wake your grandad.

I’ll be off, I say. Turn to go.

Dan.

Her fingers are on my forearm, gripping the cuff of my jacket. I look down at them and she flushes.

How did we lose touch? she says.

Dunno. Guess it was when you and Sean moved away. Same sort of time I got together with Kelly. Both had other fish to fry.

We were both pretty crap at keeping in contact, she says, wrinkling her nose.

I thought your dad disapproved of Sean. More or less kicked you out, didn’t he?

She grins at me, tongue between her teeth. The old Raz.

Yeah, well he needs me now. And he hasn’t got any choice about it.

Well, give him my regards.

Dan.

The hand is still there.