Hemispheres (8 page)

Okay. I triggered the till and cushioned the noise when it opened. Plenty of notes in there. Hagan only cashed up once or
twice a week. My breath was coming quick, spots swimming in my vision. But I stretched out a hand and brushed the pile of
banknotes and then snatched it back when the front door banged and voices clattered in the hallway.

It’s showtime, Magoo was yelling.

I slammed the till shut and got back into the mixer store. Got the cellar trapdoor open and tumbled inside and lowered the
lid again. Boots in the saloon, dockers and dealers, on the boarded floor behind the bar. Resounding through my head, the
world filling up with boots. Paul’s boots in the cinder yard, Yan’s boots coming up the stairs.

I was a kid, lying in bed in the dark.

There were voices up there, and the clatter and sigh of the beer pump as Hagan shelled out pints and the bump of the full
glasses when he planted them on the bar.

You’ve got to do him Franco.

Get him on the ground and lace his head till it bounces.

Aye, but make sure you stop short of killing the bastard.

Not too far short, mind.

Remember when you had that pikey lad. Had to drag you off him like a radge dog.

Never liked that O’Rourke kid, intoned Gary Hagan. Some bad wiring inside his head. Loose connection somewhere.

Needs kicking back into circuit, like. Do the cunt a favour.

He must be doing summat right. Franco’s lass is well tidy, like.

Was it his lass or his daughter?

It was both, I heard.

She’s only fucking fifteen.

Well, if there’s grass on the wicket.

Take the piss when he’s been through your daughter, the fucking baghead, growled Franco.

What are you gonna say to him Franco?

Aye. Go on. Do the voice.

Do you feel lucky punk? creaked Franco in a strange high voice. They erupted into laughter.

Sounds fuck all like Clint, that.

Well do yeh?

Down on the cellar steps I shivered. Dark and clammy in here, no light at all, not even the smallest glint from the metal
kegs. I leaned my head against the brickwork and started to drift.

Rare birds drift off, sooner or later. When something tasty crashes into Teesmouth and word gets around there can be a bit
of a circus. Twitchers come in from all over the gaff and you never need to ask where the bird is. Just follow the scopes
and the cagoules.

The bird itself – Siberian rubythroat, semi-palmated sandpiper, whatever – is a wreck when it lands here. First landfall after
the North Sea, the Arctic Ocean, the Atlantic, and it crashes down on the brink of death with its fat reserves empty. Needs
to feed in a hurry so it stays put for a while, resting and replenishing. But in the end, after a few days or a few weeks,
it disappears from the radar. No more sightings.

So what happens next? Some just die, of course. Exhaustion, starvation, predation. And there are records of birds trying to
get back to where they should have been in the first place. What drives them I don’t know. Maybe the stars just look wrong
here.

And some of them stay. Just get on with it. Immerse themselves in flocks of similar species and hope nobody will notice.

In nineteen eighty-two there was a Wilson’s phalarope on Reclamation Pond. It was a transatlantic vagrant, the first record
for Tees mouth, and it became a local celebrity for a couple of weeks. We didn’t get down there straight away because Yan
was about to go back to the regiment, the Task Force assembling for the Falklands. He knew he was going, even when it wasn’t
clear how the government would respond or whether these remote sheep-encrusted rocks were even worth
fighting over. The day it started, when they reported the Argentine invasion on the news, he snapped off the TV.

Well, he said. I’m going for a little holiday. It’s good birding down there Dan.

By the time we got out to Reclamation it was quiet. A vacant early Saturday morning, cold and blue. We parked up on the rise
behind Dorman’s and looked out over the open water and the tall reedbanks and the exoskeleton of the refinery beyond. Picked
out the phalarope straight away, a small delicate wader swimming on the open water, head bowed in prayer with the needle-fine
bill tucked down. It span slow in the water, white and grey and silver in the lucid dawn like a small apologetic ghost. Like
a swimming moon.

We watched it from the window of the rusty Renault Twelve and I could smell Yan beside me in the donkey jacket which had absorbed
years of his scent. Cigarette smoke and a raw tang of sweat. He had a few days’ stubble on his chin.

Phalarope, he said, comes from the Greek, like. For ‘coot-footed’.

You’re making it up.

Nah, honest. They have these lobed feet. You know, like a coot or a moorhen. When they swim the feet stir up the sediment
from the bottom, full of nice invertebrates, and then the bird spins round and snaps up the goodies from the water.

Right.

When your mam was pregnant with you I used to wash her feet. She couldn’t reach round the bump. They swelled right up from
the weight of the baby.

Why are you telling me this?

Dunno. Just came into my head.

The bird bobbed and span gently for a few seconds longer, and then it rose from the water and sprang into the sky like a pale
swallow, dark wings and silver body. We tracked it in our bins, south over the reeds, a white punctuation mark in the blue
sky. Eventually it became too small to see.

And that was it. The phalarope wasn’t seen again on Teesmouth, and Yan left for the Falklands on the Tuesday.

Yan Thomas would have killed him, boomed Magoo, from above. Remember what happened to Jimmy Dillon?

And I was wide awake, questing into the darkness like a dog, heartbeat flaring. I heard Magoo subside heavily onto a bar stool
which complained under his weight.

Jimmy Bananas? came Kurt’s voice, muffled and indistinct.

Aye. The bloke came on to Kate, while Yan was on a tour in Belfast.

She’s a canny splitarse man. I cannot blame the gadge.

Well he was shiteing his duds when Yan came back and she told him about it. Now then Bananas, he said. You and me need to
go for a drive. Jimmy was browning it but he went along anyway. They got into that rustbucket of his, that old white Renault,
and drove off. No fucker ever saw Bananas again.

Pal, said Gary Hagan, you’re talking out of your jug. Yan took him down the bus station in Boro, stuck him on a National Express
to sheepshagger land and told him not to come back.

Tommy Hatton reckons Yan killed the gadge. Told him about it one night, when it was just the two of them in the bar. Somewhere
lonely out on the brinefields, one of them places only birders go. Ripped his fucking throat out with a Stanley knife, let
him bleed out on the mud so he wouldn’t mess up the car seats. Told Tom he couldn’t let it go, not even the once.

Ripped his balls off as well, I heard, said Franco, and fed them to his dog.

You’re joking, aren’t you? interrupted Kurt.

There was a pause and I heard him stifle a yawn. Pints clattered against the bar top.

Tommy Hatton talks out of his back door, he continued. He once tried to tell me his cousin was Muhammad fucking Ali, just
so I’d buy him a pint.

A raw splurge of laughter. Hagan plonked his meaty forearms against the bar.

Local hardmen, he said, are ten-a-penny round here. No fucking shortage. Yan was mean enough, when he wanted to be. But when
I was on the rigs I knew plenty of lads could have knocked seven shades off of him.

Fucking cable-pullers, laughed Franco. They’re all meatheads. Every cable-puller you meet has a black eye, apart from the
ones who’ve got two.

Nah, said Magoo, persisting. Yan’s another one with some loose wiring. Fucking psycho on the sly, I reckon.

But he’s not coming back, said Hagan. Is he?

The conversation drifted away, Hagan reminiscing about his years offshore. Chew. Women. Throwing up on the helicopter, watching
Debbie Does Dallas
on freezeframe. More chew. More women. My feet were cramped up beneath me on the cellar steps, toes becoming numb, my arm
folded awkwardly against the wall. But I fell asleep anyway, descended into a place where boots reverberated in the sky like
thunder, kicked and stomped at the wooden clouds until they split.

Can’t believe it, said Paul, leaning back against the bus stop and necking the can I’d given him. You’re doing a runner.

You want to watch Franco and them. They’re after giving you a kicking.

I can handle meself.

Was it his daughter or his missus you went through?

He shrugged. The grey-green eyes looked bored.

I’m down to London next Saturday meself, he said. Crystal Palace. Always good for a barney like.

Thought you were working.

He shrugged again.

Day off, he said. If you’re in that neck of the woods you could meet us at King’s Cross after the game. Six o’clock, top of
the main escalators.

How are you going to afford the train?

He looked at me like I was remedial.

I’m bunking the fucker, he said.

Later I lay on my bed in the box room and waited. Fully clothed, boots on, the red glow of the radio alarm on my bedside table.
Numbers cycling painfully, time grinding to a halt. In my hand was Yan’s diary, curled up into a tube. I wound it tighter.

There was something going on in Michelle’s room next door. Bumping, shuffling, a sudden loud laugh and then a long female
moan. She put it on a plate for just about anybody them days.

She was an odd one, Michelle. Always semi-bewildered, like you asked her a question and her eyes roved around in confusion
before she hit on the right thing to say. I never worked out why Yan gave her the hours behind the bar, but fair play to him,
she turned out to be a natural. Yan had this habit of adopting waifs and strays now and then. Paul O’Rourke was another one
he helped out a couple of times when his mam had kicked him out. He was staying at ours when he first had the bonehead done
but Yan didn’t say owt, just looked at him funny.

You ever get that done, he said to me later, you’ll be moving out.

No shit. I smiled as I plugged in the clippers and turned them on and then my hair began to fall across the pages of yesterday’s
Gazette
, the soundless precipitation obscuring the newsprint. The blades ranged across my scalp, buzzing dispassionately. When it
was finished I brushed stray hairs away and looked in the mirror at my own head gleaming nude like a pool ball. Ran a hand
across the shorn scalp, felt it tickling like the new pink skin under a blister.

Downstairs in the bar it was pitch dark. I’d waited long after the last sound, long after the last arsehole had pitched out
into the night. I counted out nine steps to the bar, hands stretched in front of me until I felt the pitted wood of the counter.
Lifted the flap and sidled through, ran my fingers along the cold metal sides of the till, the drawer
springing open and butting against my palm. Fingertips danced across the compartments inside, scooped up a wad of notes and
smuggled it into my pocket. It felt like a lot. I stopped to listen. Nothing. Just the night-time breath of an old building.
The bleating of water in copper pipes, the scratchy stubble of stale plaster, the insect legs of the clock crawling. I picked
up the phone and dialled, flinching each time the dial clicked back against the stops.

I waited under the railway bridge, just a hundred yards down the road. I was nervous, skittering the sports bag against my
ankles, fingering the notes in my pocket. There was no traffic here in the small hours. A street lamp flickered on and off,
alive, dead, alive, and the air was cold. A minicab pulled up next to me, engine idling, and the driver wound his window down.
It was Mr Shahid, eyes sharpened above the moustache.

Daniel, he said.

Darlo station, I said.

The train carriage was brightly lit and almost deserted. Flickering through the sleeping country like the calendar riffling
past, the lighted windows of the year. Bright and rattling, and then gone, a memory. I leaned back in my seat and lit a cigarette.
It gurgled as I did so, the flame searing into the paper and the dry tobacco. I unzipped the sports bag and looked over my
supplies. Chocolate bars and crisps, a token apple. Some cans from the bar. I pulled out a can of McEwan’s and ripped it open.
It wasn’t cold, but was rich and malty in the throat. I gulped at it.

Lightning crawled across the sky as the train ran south. I put my head back against the headrest and slowed my breathing.
Emptied my conscious brain until the night country moved through me, the clay lands of the Vale of York, wide fields and ancient
woodland, flat country and hill country, sleeping villages and dreaming farms. Hawthorn hedges knitting the land like sutures.
A flock of sheep ghostly in the damp night. One or two of them coughing in their sleep, facing the east where the light was
already beginning to mass. Wood beetles deep inside
decaying trees, chewing at the timber, drumming with their hind legs. Birds roosting everywhere like fruit, half asleep and
half awake, ever watchful for the death which comes in the night. Men and women and children asleep behind the blank windows
of houses, in each other’s arms, back to back like bookends, or alone. After sex, after arguments, after beatings, after bedtime
stories, after full or empty lives, but mostly half full or half empty. And the sleepless were reading, masturbating, or just
worrying, turning over and over to find a comfortable position, in the small cold hours of the night when dawn seemed an impossible
solution.

You should try your colleagues’ solution. Sarah laughs, gest uring with her golden head towards the far Nissen hut. It might
help with the insomnia.

A solution of forty per cent ethanol in water? I throw back. Don’t touch nothing stronger than beer, me. Not for fifteen years.