Black Car Burning

by Helen Mort

  The match he’d been thinking about when he nodded off was at Anfield and he’d refused to wear red, even though they were in The Kop, even though she’d teased him all the way there. Not my team, he’d said, all mock-pride. But really, he’d loved being there with her. Held in the bowl of the stadium, held in the noise. It was so cold you could see your breath when you spoke, hanging in the air like an afterthought. Everyone was wrapped up in thick winter coats. Angela was wearing one that looked like a railway signalman’s jacket. They were both deliciously young.

  Angela told him about coming here with her dad as a kid and climbing on his shoulders so she could see better, climbing him as if he was a tree. And he asked her – half-joking – if that was where it came from, her love of heights, that urge to climb mountains. And she turned the headlamps of her stare on him and said Maybe, and he was an animal under her gaze, slipping his hand into her hand and holding it in the oversized pocket of his coat. Tweed. He even had a flat cap in those days as well. A Yorkshire cliché. And then she was telling him about climbing trees in Sefton Park as a kid, about wanting to sleep in the branches in summer, hidden above the city. And he laughed when she said that the only time she’d even felt like that since was bivouacking on a mountain, waking up on the hill and forgetting where you were for a minute. He almost kissed her then, even with the noise around them, even though the men would have whistled and jeered, but it was kick-off and there was a song forming in the air. He squeezed her knuckles and knew he didn’t need to say anything.

  The players were electric. They moved so fast he could hardly keep his eyes on them. Blood-red colours and grass stains. A header that seemed to last forever, the ball sailing through the air, almost suspended there. At half-time the air smelled faintly of gravy. In the end, Liverpool beat Everton 3–1. Kenny Dalglish scored twice, ran in triumphant circles as the other players massed around him. Ian Rush finished things off with a third goal in the seventy-fifth minute and the stadium erupted then, people kissing each other, looking like they were going to nut each other. Angela squeezed his hand hard and jigged up and down, trying to get a better view over the heads of the others.

  Years later, when he joined the force, she laughed the first time she saw him in uniform. She stroked his chest and slapped him on the arse too hard and told him he looked like he was booked for a hen do. She never had to wear a uniform in her life. Only her Liverpool kit and she never kept up with the new ones each season. Angela was lithe and sinewy. She wore her hair loose over her shoulders and she never put on make-up, not even if they were going out to a do. She always moved very deliberately, on the rock when she was guiding someone up a route, or in the house, stooping slightly to fill the kettle. She made everything she did seem important. Like the precision with which she packed for expeditions, setting all her kit out on the floor in neat rows: pairs of gloves, crampons, axes. The first time, he begged her not to go and he didn’t care how weak he must have sounded. But it was her job. More than her job – her vocation. She was a natural climber, fluid and confident.

  Slowly, over the years after they married, their house filled with photographs, bright with ice: the Karakoram, the Alps, the Rockies. He still had them in a shoebox – his favourite was an unnaturally blue photo of Angela climbing in Canada. In the picture, she was leaning in to the slope, he could almost feel the points of her axes biting into it. Back turned away from him, intent and purposeful, small on the great face. After each trip, he’d ask her what it was like and she’d be lost for words; the photographs held more of the mountains than she could. He understood that. Even though he could never climb like her, he loved the speechlessness of it, the way some climbs refused commentary. That was something they’d always shared. He felt closest to her when they were on a rope together, him belaying her usually: holding her ropes, making sure they were tight enough, trying to guess her movements, ready to brace if she fell. They spoke best through the easy language of climbing. Watch me. Climb when ready. When their daughter was born, he paced up and down in the hospital, wishing there was a code for that, too, or something that tethered him to her. When they cut the child’s umbilical cord, purplish and thicker than he expected, he thought of rope, thought of Simon Yates, the Sheffield climber who cut the lifeline that linked him to his partner, Joe Simpson, when Simpson fell down a crevasse. Angela was always sanguine about it: Yates had no choice. If they’d stayed connected, they’d both have died. She was always more logical than him, better equipped to let go of things. He was sentimental sometimes, romantic, in the grip of high ideals. No good for a copper really.

  3.28 a.m. He got out of bed and unhooked his dressing gown from the door. He was so practised he didn’t even need to turn the light on. The wooden floorboards protested under his weight and he creaked downstairs, shrugging the gown over his shoulders. He sat in the darkness on his small sofa and flicked on the TV, lighting the room palely. It was a twenty-four-hour shopping channel. American. A woman with a neon-green crop top and cycling shorts was demonstrating the different uses of an abs trainer. He watched with the sound off as she did crunches with her knees tilted to either side. Behind her was a topless man with a defined six-pack, arms folded across his chest to accentuate the muscles. Now he was using the crunch trainer to do tricep dips. The man’s bristling shoulders and large hands looked fit to crush it. His teeth were like dice. There was an untouched can of Oranjeboom next to the sofa, along with some empties, and Pete opened it now, enjoying the deflated sound of the ring pull. The first sip was lukewarm. A new advert for jogging bottoms was playing on repeat. He took another swig and found it hard to swallow.

  How many did you have to drink that day? How many people did you see drunk? Did your son like to have a drink before the match? The families shaking in the waiting room. The interviewing officers who didn’t let their faces show a thing.

  When he got home that night in April, close to midnight and found her shaking in the lounge, she was holding her Liverpool top like a cleaning rag, balled into her fist and they’d clung to each other and thanked God she wasn’t there, thanked a god they didn’t believe in that she’d taken a mountaineering client out that day and didn’t even know about it until she got home and switched on the telly. And she rang her mum and dad and her cousins and talked through the night, her accent getting harder, the way it always did when she talked to other Scousers. He went to check on the baby, movements like a ghost. He was numb. He felt like nothing could touch him. Angela would have to do the crying for the both of them.

  Afterwards, when she’d hung up and he was still in the kitchen in his work clothes, staring at the back door, eyes fixed on the bit of paint he’d missed when he did the house up last summer, convinced he’d made a bad job of it, she came and stood behind him with her arms looped around his waist and murmured that she kept trying to work out what she’d been doing at 3.06 p.m. She thought they’d probably been on The Rasp at Higgar. She was certain that was it. Maybe she’d have been at the top by then, belaying. It had been a good day, perfect for the time of year. She’d led it well, the client was happy and they’d both got home safe.

  It’s like climbing, she said. Something like this. Out the blue. You never know when it’s going to be your time. He’d tried to get those words out of his head ever since.

  Kelham Island

  Everything left messy as if someone might pick up tools round here again. The door of The Gardeners pub is permanently ajar. In the new apartments, students from Hong Kong and Mumbai and Tokyo sleep with their windows open, letting the sound of traffic from Shalesmoor filter in. Their neighbours are graphic designers, bakery owners from Neepsend, property developers whose nightmares are architectural, who shut their eyes and fall asleep and dream of being lost inside marble corridors, buildings that could be temples, shrines to unknown gods. All the roofs round here are slightly crooked. Car alarms sound through the night. There’s the sign for the old saw manufacturers, the crocodile grin of it, the smashed glass and the ru
bble of brickwork. There’s the mark on the side of The Fat Cat ale house where the flood water reached years ago, seeping through carpets, touching the sills. There’s peace, shut inside gastropubs and cafés and boarded up inside ex-foundries, the cavernous heart of the climbing wall where nobody hangs from a rope at this hour, nobody shouts Take me!, nobody drops through the air like dread, like fear in the pit of a stomach.

  Alexa

  They’d had reports of a middle-aged woman drunk and walking the length of Willoughby Street, knocking on doors. She’d spent the afternoon in the only pub open in Page Hall, before getting ejected for smoking in the toilets. When Alexa found her, she was leaning against a propped-up mattress outside one of the houses, arms spread wide. Alexa recognised her immediately. She’d picked her up before in someone’s garden after the residents had phoned in about an intruder. The woman was asleep, wrapped in a sheet from the washing line. Alexa had almost regretted disturbing her, she looked so peaceful.

  ‘Marjorie,’ she said. ‘Shall we get you home?’

  The woman opened one eye, then the other and laughed at her.

  ‘I’m resting. Give us a minute.’

  A kid rode past them on a scooter, veering close, almost hitting Marjorie.

  ‘Little Paki bastard!’ she shouted after him. She turned to Alexa with her hands up. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not racist. It just come out.’

  ‘OK.’ Alexa took hold of her arm. ‘Shall we walk?’

  ‘Get off me! I can walk myself.’

  She followed Alexa, a step behind, then drew level with her.

  ‘I’m not racist at all. I don’t understand all that. There was two of them in The Ball earlier, two blokes, blaming them Roma for the pub going under. Talking about refugees. I said to them, “Wouldn’t you do the same? If it was your country that was like that? Wouldn’t you move?”’

  Alexa nodded. She should be asking Marjorie questions, trying to find out why she’d been knocking on the doors on Willoughby Street, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was the logic of drink.

  ‘People don’t like it, though, do they? When summat’s different. That’s why all these bastards …’ – she spun round in a circle with her arms wide, taking in the whole street – ‘… that’s why they’ve got no time for me. Because I’m different.’

  Alexa didn’t know what she thought about that word. People like Marjorie used it as if it was a badge. But Alexa had never felt that way. She felt marked, like she was always on the wrong side of the line, even though she was quiet, softly spoken, even though there was nothing in her appearance to mark her out and the clothes she wore didn’t court attention like Caron’s. She was different at school when she wanted to keep her head down, when the teacher went out of the classroom and everyone else whooped and hollered and she was scared. She was different at university when she tried to talk to her friends about love. Different in the force when she tried to sink her lukewarm white wine in the pub and the others downed their pints and talked about their marriages. It made her awkward. Detached.

  Marjorie was sobbing. Very softly. Her shoulders were shaking.

  ‘Come on now,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you back home.’

  ‘Where’s that, yeah? Is it here?’ Marjorie gestured at the long street, the packed-in cars, the abandoned bikes. She pointed to the last house on the road. ‘Here?’

  It was a good question. Alexa thought about all the times someone had asked her where she was from and she’d said Sheffield without thinking, without really knowing what that meant. At university, all the girls she met on the first day were from towns in Surrey and Suffolk. They had confident voices and clear skin. Some of them even said London, the word like a punch in the air, though she wasn’t sure what it really meant to come from London either. To those girls, Sheffield was exciting. Sheffield was cheap real ale and The Leadmill and seeing bands with ironic names like Burn After Listening before anyone else and putting Henderson’s Relish on your chips to prove that you liked it. Sheffield was complaining that your thighs were getting bigger because of all the hills, and shivering in winter, and sitting out in the beer garden of The Lescar in summer, smoking weed. When they asked Alexa where her home was and she said Here, some of them looked at her quizzically, as if to say Why wouldn’t you get away? And sometimes at night she’d sit in her new box room in Ranmoor and think about how close she was to the street where she grew up, and how strange it was to be here, with a crap kitchen and an upstairs neighbour who played reggae before 8 a.m., just for the sake of independence, whatever that meant. And she wasn’t sure which version of the city was hers, the ordinary, boring Saturdays, the markets and back gardens and late buses and the view from the green hill beyond Forge Dam she’d seen so many times she could trace the skyline, or the new Sheffield, the one that came alive at night with pills and Plug and girls in Doc Martens and crop tops who knew the words to ‘Common People’ better than she did. The Sheffield that was in your face or the Sheffield that was under your fingernails.

  Her first term, she couldn’t say the names of all the tram stops properly. Malin Bridge. Alexa said it with a flat ‘a’, instead of pronouncing it like Mailing. And the others laughed at her and said You’re supposed to be the local, and Alexa felt ashamed, like she was only pretending to be from Sheffield. And it was funny, how there were always places in your own town that you’d never go to, just like there were places in your own body you’d never see, bones you wouldn’t know the names of. Sheffield felt like that sometimes when she was a student – like a muscle that started hurting after a long walk or a long bike ride, one you never knew was there until you used it, unexpectedly.

  ‘I was born in Page Hall,’ said Marjorie. ‘Did you know that?’

  Alexa nodded, steering her back on to the pavement. ‘You said.’

  ‘Do you think it means owt?’

  Alexa shrugged.

  ‘Because I don’t.’

  They passed a lad in a hoodie and smart trousers, and he acknowledged Marjorie with a movement of his head.

  ‘He was born here, too. Ranjit. But if you told that to some of them wankers, would they believe you?’

  ‘If you told that to who?’

  ‘The wankers.’ She threw her hands in the air. ‘They’re everywhere.’

  Sometimes, you could walk down the street and believe that. That everyone around you was just going about their business single-mindedly, seeing you as an inconvenience. Other days, someone would open a door or smile and call you love on the bus and make it all right.

  Marjorie had stopped crying now. With Alexa still holding on to her arm, she sunk to the pavement, cross-legged.

  ‘Come on Marjorie, we need to get you home.’

  ‘I am home.’ She was grinning at Alexa now, a wide-toothed smile. ‘I’ve decided. This’ll do.’

  A car racing down to the T-junction beeped at her, the bass line from the stereo lingering, following it like an afterthought. Marjorie raised one hand in a friendly wave.

  ‘This is my stop, love.’

  The sun was faintly out. It was not yet dark. Alexa leaned against the wall in the brief silence of the street. She couldn’t argue.

  * * *

  Alexa woke alone, she was on Caron’s side of the bed and she’d hardly slept. Before she drifted off, she’d been trying to remember something, and she’d been groping towards it in the night. Awake with her fist clenched and Caron’s pyjama shorts looped round her ankle, she felt like she had a hold.

  She was a kid – she couldn’t remember how old – and the Tube train was very hot, the kind of heat that gets into your eyes and your throat. Her and her dad and her uncle who wasn’t her uncle, Rob. The men were wearing scarves in Rob’s team colours, trying to loosen them as the carriage got warmer. They’d been to the theatre in Leicester Square, but it was match day and the Tube was heaving. Everyone was trying to get out of everyone else’s way, but nobody could, not really. There were armpits and bellies everywhere. No one could make them
selves smaller. They stood in silence, holding on to the rails and loops, and Alexa’s dad squeezed her shoulder and asked her if she was OK. She was waist-height and the train was a forest of legs. She shifted, balancing on one leg, in case that made her more tiny. Rob was swearing and puffing, and her dad said Not in front of Alexa and she wondered why, because he was always saying those words in the house, on the phone or even to himself and saying them louder than that, too.

  The train got to a station and stopped too quickly. Everyone jerked forwards. The doors opened and the sound was like someone being winded, and they all waited for people to spill out, but they didn’t, instead more people got on; men from the football, who were shoving each other to get through the doors and who smelled of beer and warmth and new sweat. Everyone was touching now; Alexa could feel their legs pressing against her. Her dad pulled her a little closer to him and put one hand on the crown of her head, ruffling her hair, and she wanted to smoothe it back the way it was, but she couldn’t really move her arms that far.

  At the next station, the doors opened and there were more people, rows of them on the platform. Someone shouted that the train was full, but Alexa could feel herself being pushed backwards, her body tightening, braced against whoever was behind. A big man was shoving his way forwards and everyone was getting shunted back into the space that wasn’t there. Rob was turning purple. Mate, you have to get off the train. There’s a kid down here. The voices were too loud, jostling for their own positions in the air. Get off the fucking train, mate.

  And all the time Alexa’s dad held her hand and she stared at it and saw the knuckles turning white. She wanted to say that he was hurting her, but she couldn’t; she had no breath and anyway it was nice being held by him for the first time since Mum and the accident. She stared right ahead of her. She didn’t look up. Rob’s voice was getting higher and louder. She wondered if a voice could break like a glass, like the pubs they’d walked past earlier where a man dropped his pint as he talked and it opened up on the pavement in front of him, in pieces.