Black Car Burning

by Helen Mort

  I’m full. I don’t know what to do with so many people. There are students in the pared-back cafés, sipping macchiatos and nibbling croissants, queuing up at cashpoints to withdraw crisp tenners. The boutique shops bustle with paper bags that smell like unworn boots. The Frog & Parrot is full of early drinkers. I can’t entertain them all. I was built for trade and footfall, the distant rumble of trams. I was made to roll gently into the city. To be a concrete river, a stream, pooling around Devonshire Green, the meeting point with West Street. I watch the amber bubbles in a woman’s pint. How her hand warms it, how condensation forms on the cool glass. How quickly the liquid disappears. How her throat moves as she swallows, a furtive shift, like a small animal. How she places both hands on the bar stool and closes her eyes. How her pockets are empty and her bag is forgotten on the floor. On the street, a child lets go of a unicorn balloon and does not cry as it rises, like water, like fever, like blood to the head. It lifts above the City Hall and the bodies, the people seem to move in formation. He kicks an empty can down the pavement and for a moment it gathers momentum, then it slows and slows and stops under the wheels of a car. In the bar, the woman orders another.

  Alexa

  Throughout the 1980s there was considerable ambiguity about South Yorkshire Police’s and Sheffield Wednesday FC’s crowd management responsibilities within the stadium.

  There was so much Alexa should have been thinking about, so much she should have been doing, but instead she was frozen in her dad’s spare room, going through his papers, reading things she couldn’t put down.

  The management of the crowd was viewed exclusively through a lens of potential crowd disorder, and this ambiguity was not resolved, despite problems at previous semi-finals. SWFC and SYP were unprepared for the disaster that unfolded on the terraces on 15 April 1989.

  ‘You all right, love?’ The house was smaller than she remembered. His voice from downstairs boomed.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Not only was there delay in recognising that there were mass casualties, the major incident plan was not correctly activated and only limited parts were then put into effect.

  ‘Thought you might be lost.’

  ‘Won’t be a sec.’

  It is not possible to establish whether a more effective emergency response would have saved the life of any one individual who died. Given the evidence disclosed to the panel of more prolonged survival of some people with partial asphyxiation, however, a swifter, more appropriate, better-focused and properly equipped response had the potential to save more lives.

  He had printed out the lot. Highlighting and lines and scribbles everywhere. Alexa felt giddy. She’d been like it all day, as if she was floating an inch above herself. She put the papers back on the desk and made her way downstairs. She realised she was walking very slowly, because she didn’t want to get to the bottom.

  Eight years after the disaster it was revealed publicly that statements made by SYP officers were initially handwritten as ‘recollections’, then subjected to a process of ‘review and alteration’ involving SYP solicitors and a team of SYP officers.

  Review and alteration. She took the stairs carefully, as if she was drunk.

  Some 116 of the 164 statements identified for substantive amendment were amended to remove or alter comments unfavourable to SYP.

  Her dad was in the living room with a tinny. The walls hadn’t changed. The wedding picture, him all sideburns and tash. The picture of them all in Brid, when Alexa was very small and very blonde. Next to the door, with a jolt, she noticed her graduation picture. He’d kept it after all, kept it up all this time. She posted it to him, without a note. She’d written something, torn it up, written it again. In the end, she sent nothing, just the photo with its huge mortar board and insipid blue background.

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘No ta.’

  She felt like she should sit on the floor, but she drew up a chair at the small wooden dining table. He’d hung a large clock above the telly, plastic with big red hands. United colours. It ticked very loudly. She wanted to say something. Where did all the things you wanted to say in your head go when you opened your mouth?

  ‘So you’ve been OK? I mean, things are OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Review and alteration. Review and alteration.

  ‘You must have thought I was a right bastard. All this time.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Come on. You must have.’

  The carpet was brown and scuffed at the edges. There was a cigarette burn by the table leg, but Dad didn’t smoke. Never had. She looked up.

  ‘I never expected to see you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What made you come?’

  ‘Leigh. She talked me round. Recently, I …’

  Of course. It was her. Meddling. Putting things together. Trying to patch things up. Alexa felt angry and sad at the same time, and nothing for any good reason, nothing she could explain.

  The panel’s access to all of the relevant records has confirmed that the notion of a single, unvarying and rapid cause of death in all cases is unsustainable. Some of those who died did so after a significant period of unconsciousness, during which they might have been able to be resuscitated.

  A significant period of unconsciousness.

  ‘Fuck it.’ He put his beer can down on the floor. ‘Does it matter why I came? You’re here now, aren’t you?’

  She nodded. Her head was very heavy.

  ‘I want … ’ he said. ‘I want to make up for lost time.’

  She spoke, but her voice was hardly anything now. ‘You don’t know anything about me any more.’

  He was in front of her, kneeling, trying to get down below her level.

  ‘I do. I do. I promise. I just don’t know what I can do to make you trust me again.’

  Review and alteration. A significant period of unconsciousness.

  Alexa leaned backwards into the chair and let the room take her weight.

  * * *

  This was her childhood bedroom. She remembered the crack in the ceiling, the one she always thought was the leg of a thin, giant spider. He hadn’t changed anything. The bed that was too short for her now and felt too short for her then. The magnolia wallpaper that she wanted to change for purple stripes. The Michael Owen poster on the wardrobe doors, his face discoloured by sun. He looked as ill as she felt. The window where she used to plan getaways those evenings when Dad sat downstairs on his own. Down the drainpipe, onto the porch roof and next door’s shed, taking a spotted bag made from a handkerchief with her, like Dick Whittington. Alexa closed her eyes and she could see red shapes in front of her. Reddish brown on black. The shape of a woman. No, the shape of a man on a roof in Page Hall. Now there were lots of them, small dots that spread and became larger, and she was caught in a crowd again, the hot, sticky day of the EDL march. Or the dream she had about the ambulance.

  She sank into a fitful sleep. The same scene, the one she had on repeat. The stadium and the mesh of the fences, the stadium she’d never been into except like this, at night. The impossible way she knew it by heart. The gear stick and the windscreen. The medical equipment. The rushing bodies in front of her and then all around her, like a sea, or something less contained. A moving landscape. And her white hands on the steering wheel. The ambulance going nowhere. But this time, there was a woman right in front of the vehicle. She was trying to get away, jostling through the crowd as if she needed to get to someone, needed to save someone. And as if she could tell Alexa was there, she turned around and looked over her shoulder. And the face was Caron’s. And she was startled, caught. Deer in headlights. Thief in the night. She looked right into her eyes and through them. And Caron carried on pushing away.

  ‘It’s all right, Lexie, you’re safe.’

  She was bathed in sweat and the sheets were pulled tight around her. Her dad was beside her, leaning down. Michael Owen’s face was huge on the wooden doors behind him, making him look mad,
two-headed.

  ‘You need some rest.’

  ‘What happened last night?’

  ‘You just dropped. Like a brick. I reckon you fainted.’

  She didn’t have the energy to nod.

  ‘Place hasn’t changed, eh?’

  She managed a weak smile.

  ‘I know it’s mad. I always had this idea that I should keep everything, in case you were ever coming home. I know how that sounds.’

  Outside, Fat Billy was mowing his lawn. He did it on Sundays in all seasons, whether the grass needed cutting or not. Something about the drone was comforting. She remembered hangovers when she was a teenager, how the sound would split her head.

  ‘Noisy twat,’ said her dad. Then his face clouded. ‘Marge isn’t well. I think that’s why he’s out so much. She had breast cancer.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Alexa. She remembered Marge taking her to the corner shop for sweets. She loved the smell of them more than the taste. When she hit fourteen, she found it embarrassing. Marge was always trying to be motherly to her. Lending her magazines. When her period started, Marge took her to one side and offered her paracetamol and to make her a hot-water bottle and Alexa shrank with shame. As if she didn’t know everything anyway. As if she didn’t read or have friends at school. When Marge called round, she’d sometimes hide in her room and try not to make a sound. The thought shamed her now.

  ‘I made you some toast.’

  He held out a plate of cold, thin slices. The white bread was undercooked and pale, the way she liked it.

  ‘No, ta. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Do you want me to leave you in peace?’

  She almost nodded.

  ‘No. I want you to stay, Dad.’

  It was the first time she’d said that word to him since she’d seen him again. He swallowed, sat down.

  ‘Tell me if I’m boring you. I’ve become a right boring bastard, Alexa. Ask Leigh.’

  ‘I don’t know Leigh.’

  Her face had tightened and he sensed it.

  ‘She’s a good kid. She wants to do right. Put things right. I would say that, wouldn’t I? I mean, I trust her with my life.’

  ‘Climbing?’

  ‘You can tell a lot about someone by the way they hold a rope.’

  Alexa tried to remember how she’d felt when Caron belayed her up Flying Buttress Direct. Tight. Held. Not safe exactly, but anchored.

  ‘What can you tell?’

  ‘Whether they’re watching you. Whether they’re bored. Whether they’re willing you on. You can tell without looking. Well, I can.’

  ‘What was it like climbing with Mum?’

  He didn’t look at her when he answered.

  ‘Sometimes I loved it. Sometimes … it was too much.’

  Something about illness, something about being sick that means people can talk to you. And you can listen. Something about being trapped in bed. No, not trapped – contained. Kept in the white softness of the duvet and propped up by pillows. Alexa wondered why she hadn’t tried to talk to Caron when she was in hospital, when she couldn’t walk. Leyton had visited more than she did. Somehow, that didn’t matter now. She didn’t feel angry any more, not with Caron or anyone. She just felt blank.

  He talked and she listened. Or she talked and he nodded at her, and it wasn’t the nod of someone who wants to be seen to be paying attention, but the unbidden kind. He was taking it all in, hearing her voice for the first time in years, its flattened accent, softer than his, blunted by university. She told him about work and Dave and how bad things had got in Page Hall. The Section 30 and the trouble in Parson Cross. He talked about what the area used to be like when he was growing up. His life after the police, the knobheads and show-offs in the climbing shop.

  ‘A lad came to try some shoes the other day and I said he could mess about in them for a bit, see if they suited. I caught him doing chin-ups on the doorframe, arms pumped to buggery. His girlfriend was pretending to watch. Leigh’s good with the TOTs.’

  ‘TOTs?’

  ‘Top-off Twats.’

  She giggled, a spontaneous, snotty kind of laugh. She was embarrassed. He handed her a tissue.

  ‘It’s good to have you back.’

  ‘Who says I’m back?’

  ‘I mean, it’s good to see you again.’

  ‘I’m just messing.’

  ‘If you knew how many times I’d thought …’

  ‘It’s all right. You don’t have to apologise.’

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realised he never had. She couldn’t remember her dad saying sorry, not to her as a kid, not to anyone.

  He turned his face to hers.

  ‘I am sorry, though. You know I am.’

  So he could look her in the eye.

  ‘Dad, can I ask you something?’

  ‘You know you can. I’ve got no secrets.’

  ‘What is it about the Hillsborough Inquiry? All the papers and notes …’

  He had broken her stare. He wasn’t speaking any more, he was mumbling.

  ‘You know what it is. I was there.’

  ‘I never knew that, though, did I? Not properly. Not back then. Because you never said.’

  ‘What was there to say? You were a baby.’

  ‘I don’t mean then. Later. When I was older.’

  ‘You were still too young for that.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me.’

  He laughed a harsh laugh. ‘Well, maybe I was too young for it then.’

  She knew she should drop it, but she couldn’t.

  ‘You’ve underlined it all. All the findings.’ She’d never seen so much writing. When she was a child, her dad never wrote anything down. Not even a shopping list. Seeing his cramped-up letters had been strange, intimate, a kind of trespass. ‘It’s like you’re obsessed.’

  His face was red. She was sick with the memory. Times he used to look at her like that. Times he was angry and silent.

  ‘I am fucking obsessed,’ he spat. ‘Because it was the worst day of my life. And when I thought it was over, they made us write it all down, what we’d done. And then they reviewed it. They made us change the fucking lot.’

  His eyes were shining and his mouth was wet.

  ‘Worse than the day Mum died?’ she said quietly.

  ‘It was the day your mum died.’

  She looked at him, her face clouded with hurt. She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand anything.

  ‘It was. Because it was the day I came back from it. Because I tried to be the same and I couldn’t. I’d had it knocked out of me. Pride or whatever. And there was never an end to it. Months and years. Not the same. That’s what pushed her away. That’s when she started going on more trips.’

  He was half-pleading, looking at Alexa as if she might remember. But she didn’t remember. Not those things. Not those subtleties. She remembered Mum’s rucksack in the hall. The ice axes she always wanted to pick up and swing. She remembered Mum and Dad kissing and how she felt like she should look away. And she remembered the weeks of waiting.

  ‘That’s when she took more work in the Alps. Because I was good for fuck all.’

  Alexa felt like there was less of her than before. She was very light in the bed in the room she grew up in, the room where she must have been half a person all along, not seeing and noticing anything that mattered, being happy when the sun came through the high window and sad when the rain hammered the roof and sad when Mum was away and Dad was quiet, and not thinking there could be anything else to it, nothing past that window and that white room.

  ‘You know, I always thought she was having an affair. Do you know that?’

  ‘Dad, I don’t want to hear this.’ She felt sick again.

  ‘No, you have to know. I thought she was with someone else. Lucy, the woman she climbed with. I thought she was going to leave me, Alexa. And I’ve always been so fucking old-fashioned. You meet a girl and you marry her for life and you don’t piss about. Neit
her of you. Like my mam and dad, I suppose. It was this fear. And it ate away at me, at what I’d got left. Every time she was away. That jealousy. Looking at my mates when we were in the pub. Wondering what they thought of her. If they would. I wanted things to be simple.’

  She nodded. She was biting down on her lip very hard.

  ‘There’s no point being jealous.’ He was hitting his fist against his leg, as if he wanted to hurt himself. ‘It only makes it happen. What you’re afraid of.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  ‘That’s why I couldn’t take it. Not at first. What you were …’

  ‘What I am.’

  ‘I can’t think of a right way to put it, can I? I’m in the fucking Dark Ages here.’

  ‘What I chose.’

  ‘I’ve never understood it, love. If you feel for someone, I mean, love someone. If you love someone the way I loved your mum, why would you want anyone else?’

  She wished she had the words. She wished she could unfold them like a long scarf made of wool. She wished she was clever like Caron or confident like Leyton.

  ‘Trust,’ she said. ‘It’s about trust. It’s about putting it into words.’

  ‘I’ve thought about it a lot, you know. Thought back to the way I was. Things I got wrong. It makes more sense to me now than it ever did.’

  ‘It’s not about sense.’

  ‘I just don’t see how it can work.’

  She’d fallen quiet again.

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  She paused. ‘On the people.’

  He laughed a hoarse laugh. Fat Bill’s mower cut out in the garden.

  ‘So we’re all as bad as one another? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘The bottom line is we’re all screwed.’

  He laughed and rocked back and forwards. He laughed until he was almost crying with it and they clung on to each other, and the day was almost over before it had begun and Fat Bill started his mower up again, and she thought about Billy, outside, going over and over the same patch of bald grass, trying to get the measure of it.

  ‘Now,’ Dad chuckled. ‘Tell me how the hell you’ve stuck it out in the police.’