Entertaining Angels Unawares
I got two or three weeks’ work with a firm that specialised in high and difficult access jobs in and around Halifax. They needed a labourer, someone to fetch and carry, clean the site up behind them. The job was on the tower of a church about thirty miles northeast of the town. I wasn’t sure what I thought about that. I wondered what I’d say to the vicar if he ever appeared, but he never did.
Generally it was a quiet job. I was there on my own with the supervisor, a man called Ed Brinklow.
Brinklow picked me up every morning in the firm’s van. He drove the van as if he expected it to be a motorcycle, changing lanes at high speed among slow traffic, overtaking on the inside. He made the engine rev and snap so that other motorists stared suddenly over their shoulders. Until I was used to this I didn’t have much to say, but we got on well enough, and after a day or two he began to tell me about a recurring dream he had. In it he found himself chasing people through a city.
I asked him what sort of city. Larger than Sheffield, he said, but not as large as London. It was old. ‘Not right old – not ages and ages ago – but not right modern, either.’ It was a Victorian city, blackened with soft coal smoke, rotten with industry. In the dream Brinklow went up and down the stairwells of factories and tenements, sometimes at a run, sometimes a floaty dreamlike walk, broken glass and iron pipework all around him. ‘It were the usual thing wi’ dreams – corners turn into dead ends just as you get there, even though you’ve seen people go round them. Anyway, there I were, going along, and I had this absolutely mega sword.’
I stared at him.
‘A sword,’ I said.
‘Biggest fucker you’ve seen,’ he said. ‘Biggest fucker you’ve ever seen.’
His memories of this sword were vivid and exact. It wasn’t new. It had been resharpened many times. He could tell from irregularities in the chamfer of the blade. Its hilt – which he called ‘the handle’ – was built up out of gold rings; and it came in its own long leather scabbard – which he called ‘the holster’ – fastened with a press stud for quick access. ‘I can just imagine it now in front of me. I feel as I’ve got one of these somewhere. Anyway, this dream basically consisted of walking around, then going on to tube trains and stuff, and –’
He stared at me, unsure how to proceed.
‘– and, well, just basically hacking people’s heads off.’
‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘Steady away.’
‘Weird, eh? Isn’t that fucking weird?’
I had to say it was. ‘Do you have it a lot,’ I said, ‘This dream?’
He thought.
‘Often enough,’ he admitted.
To get to the job you had to drive through wooded hills on steep, narrow roads. It was beautiful country, even the way Brinklow drove. What the fuck, I thought, I might as well sit back and enjoy the ride. The trees were green and lush, oaks and birches. It was rainforest Britain in the second year of Century 21. Then you turned a corner suddenly and the church was in front of you, a blackened square edifice flanked on one side by a farmyard full of wrecked machinery, and on the other by a neat garden in which tame rabbits lolloped stupidly around all morning. Its blue and gold clock had stopped at half past five. They had strung the site sign across the tower near the top:
GEX ACCESS.
No one, Brinklow admitted, was sure what GEX stood for. But the story on the church was this: when it was built in 1830, the buttresses were an afterthought. They had no real engineering function. Instead of supporting the building they were just leaning against it. By 1900 they were beginning to sag and banana away. A hundred years later, eight inch gaps had opened up, and the church had been condemned unless it could be fixed. That job was finished now. The GEX team had gone in and driven thirty six ten-foot, 12 tpi, stainless steel bolts through the buttresses into the fabric of the tower itself, cementing them in with aerospace resins. You had to hide that, of course, so afterwards the restorers came along with something called ‘gobbo’, a kind of grout made from mud and goat-hair, and sealed it all up. There were a lot of jokes about gobbo. Not counting assessment and planning it had taken less than a fortnight. All that remained was a bit of repointing. Brinklow had also promised he would take the rotten stone louvres out of the belltower.
‘They’re all laminated,’ he told me.
‘You mean they’re fucked,’ I said.
‘That too.’
We decided to do the louvres first. We spent three or four mornings dropping them eighty feet to the floor where they went off like bombs. It was tiring work getting them out of their slots. We would chuck a few of them down then go up to the top of the tower and have a drink of tea. From up there you could see that the church stood at a confluence of valleys, streams and lanes. You would never have understood that from the ground, Brinklow said, because of all the hills and ridges. It would have been impossible to unravel by eye. I drank my tea and said:
‘That dream of yours. The one with the sword. I mean, what’s the point? What’s the story on that?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. There’s no story. It’s more like a video game. Hacking people’s heads off, that’s the point. And it’s not just the odd person. It’s doing a lot. That’s the tick: getting loads of people all at once. Five or six people are stood round you, and you just sort of start spinning round with this thing – footoof! – and getting all their heads off.’ While he was talking two houseflies landed on the parapet and began to copulate on the warm stone. The sun glittered off them blue and green, and off the mica crystals in the stone around them.
‘Hey, look at these fuckers,’ I said. ‘They’re at it.’
‘Leave them alone,’ Brinklow said. ‘You wouldn’t want people watching you.’
I watched the flies a minute more. I could see they were unaware of me, unaware of anything. Every so often they buzzed groggily and lurched into a new position. ‘I hate flies,’ I said. ‘I hate the dirt of them.’ I crushed them with my thumb, then I wiped my thumb along the parapet to clean it.
‘Jesus,’ Brinklow said. ‘They were only fucking.’
‘Are you yourself?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘In this dream, are you yourself?’
‘I suppose I am,’ he said. ‘I never thought about it.’ Then he said: ‘I’m taller.’
We never ate lunch at the top of the tower. It was too hot by then. We could have gone to the local pub, but Brinklow wasn’t much of a drinker. Anyway, as he said, at lunchtime it was always full of locals playing Fistful of Money. If they weren’t doing that they were selling one another shotgun cartridges. So most of the time we took sandwiches down into the back of the church, whatever that’s called, which had been converted into a miniature parish hall. It stayed cool there all day. They had a kitchen where we could make tea. There were chairs and tables, and a piano. It was all separated from the rest of the church by a long glass screen. Pictures and bits of writing by Sunday school kids were displayed on red felt pinboards. Every morning we found a fresh display of leaflets on one of the tables. Someone had arranged them carefully in a fan.
‘“Keep Yourself Pure”!’ Brinklow quoted. He laughed. ‘What’s the difference between perverse and perverted?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re perverse if you tickle your arse with a feather. If you’re perverted you use the whole chicken.’
‘How do you feel,’ I said, ‘in this dream you’re having?’
‘Weird,’ he said. ‘I feel weird.’ He drank some of his tea. ‘I’m myself, but I don’t feel as if I’m inside myself.’
‘You’re watching yourself,’ I suggested.
‘I suppose I am.’
‘That’s what you’re doing.’
He was watching himself stalk this gloomy industrial city, getting their heads off. One night adults, the next night children. One moment he was in a huge park with silent blackened monuments, the next following a woman and child
along a disused gantry. Suddenly he found himself, hours later, in a tube tunnel. ‘All these kids came on to the tube-station platform –’ Or was it a platform? At its shadowy edges it seemed to him to blend into a kind of courtyard, with a ramp for wheelchairs. ‘It felt like you were on a platform. But at the same time you could feel you were somewhere else – in this courtyard.’ Anyway, he was with two lads off the hi tech team, Steve and Paul. He told them to lie down quietly on the ramp out of harm’s way. ‘Then all these kids came running round the corner – you know, eight, nine year old kids, and suddenly it went really dark, and I just remember squatting down to get the right height and –’
‘Footoof!’ I said.
‘– all their heads off, five or six heads at one go.’
I went and looked at the noticeboards where the Sunday school kids had pinned their work up. A recent drawing exercise for the boys had been ‘My route to church’. They had made light work of it, drawing themselves in red Ferraris and adding commentary: ‘My house.’ ‘Whooosh!’ ‘Hinchcliffe Arms.’ ‘Screeech!’ ‘Church Bank Lane.’ ‘Bang!’ The energy of these journeys undercut the cheap parsonical metaphor they were based on. The girls had done paper samplers which read JESUS IS LORD OF LIFE.
Brinklow came and looked over my shoulder. ‘See that?’ he said. ‘One of them’s written BORD OF LIFE. Little tinker.’ He studied his watch. ‘Hey, time to drop a few more bombs,’ he said.
‘I’m having a piss first.’
‘You can do that if you want,’ Ed Brinklow said. I went into the lavatory. ‘Remember though,’ he called after me: ‘More than two shakes is a wank.’
The graveyard was famous for something, but Brinklow couldn’t remember what. I ought to go and have a look at it anyway, he told me. It was worth seeing: there were graves out there the size of supertankers. I went round one lunchtime. He was right. The graveyard was also full of fantastic stone obelisks and gesticulating angels. Insects whizzed through the air between them. Brambles, thistles and fern had sprung up in one corner. Elsewhere it was the kind of grass you only ever see in cemeteries.
There were more children out there than I expected. They buried them close to the church. The ones that died before 1900 were miniature adults full of some earnest future. They got proper graves, serious graves. Today’s kids slipped their moorings in childish boats piled with toys. If the older graves were like supertankers, these new ones went bobbing along in the church wake like condom packets behind a ferry. I had a look down at them. LOVE NEVER DIES. But we all know it does. Clarence and Katherine lose John, their beloved son. Not much later, Clarence loses Katherine. Two years after that the world loses Clarence, and that’s that until GEX arrive. Thrash metal blares from their radio. They hang a yellow plastic bucket out of the belfry. They bolt everything back together with fucking great bolts. Thinking about this, I went back into the church where Brinklow was finishing his tea.
‘What do you reckon then?’ he said.
‘It’s disgusting. People are expected to leave monuments to their tragedies, even though that makes them harder to forget.’
He stared at me uncertainly.
‘Here’s that goat’s hair you wanted to see,’ he said.
He threw it on to the table, where it settled next to my cup, a dark brown swatch flecked with grey. It was full of goat dandruff, the biggest dandruff you’ve ever seen.
‘Thanks a lot Ed.’
‘You said you were interested,’ he said. ‘That’s what they bound the gobbo with. Don’t ask me how successful it was. In the end they just poured a couple of buckets of it down between the tower and the buttresses. Lo-tech fuckers. Sand and cement, bound up with that stuff. They just call it gobbo to distinguish it from structural concrete.’ He said: ‘We could make some up if you like. I mean, if you’re that bothered. Apparently the hair needs to be fresh.’
I was fascinated by the whole idea.
‘So do they have to keep a goat?’ I said. ‘The restorers?’
‘Feel it,’ he said. ‘It’s just like women’s hair.’
‘Fucking hell. What sort of women do you go out with?’
He was right though. With your eyes closed it felt exactly like human hair.
‘We had a chemistry teacher at school called Gobbo,’ I said. ‘But that was because he spat a lot when he talked. Really thick spit.’ We were thirteen, we loved that. We also loved the rubber tubes that fed the Bunsen burners; after six months or so, I told Brinklow, we stopped laughing at Gobbo’s spit problem and concentrated on setting them on fire instead. ‘Do they still have Bunsen burners?’ I said, but he didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘It was a fair old time ago,’ I had to admit.
Another thing that struck me about the graveyard was this: some of the headstones had undergone such mechanical erosion you couldn’t read what they said. Despite that the words on them seemed to remain beneath the surface, as if now was just water running over them. ‘In memory’; ‘also of three infants’; ‘a glorious eternity’. With the right focus, you thought, you might be able to bring them back. But in the end no meaning swam up into view.
Brinklow had done every kind of difficult access engineering, from avalanche-netting in Gibraltar to cleaning windows in the City of London; but his fame came from stabilising the chalk cutting at the entrance to one of the big rail stations on the south coast. The problem was, in that environment explosives couldn’t be used to remove the unstable stuff: so he drilled rows of holes one metre apart which he then pumped full of a fast-expanding chemical grout. ‘Levered it off nicely. Not a bad solution.’ He’d been on the tower blocks too, everyone in that trade has. He wouldn’t go back to it. Gangs of kids wreck your work behind you. The adults steal your equipment: they aren’t much more than kids themselves, and they couldn’t give a toss about where or how they live.
He’d spent years on that. Even so he was quite a lot younger than me. He had a wife and two kids in Rotherham. He didn’t get on with her any more, but he saw the kids every weekend. He showed me a photograph of the whole family on some flat northern beach. The tide was out as far as you could see. The wife was nice, a looker in an ordinary kind of way. One glance at her face and you could understand why they were separated. She didn’t trust him, she didn’t trust the job with all its risks and its foreign travel opportunities; she didn’t trust the tattoos up his arm. Who would? Still, the kids were beautiful – two boys, five and seven, in their England football shirts – and he clearly loved them. In the end that’s why I couldn’t understand the dream he was having.
‘So how do you do with it?’ I asked him. ‘I mean, having these kids of your own? You must feel pretty shit about killing children in a dream.’
He thought for a moment.
‘I felt like an animal,’ he said, ‘the first time I had it.’
It always ended the same way, he said, that dream. Footoof! – off came the heads of all these kids. One little lad lost only the top of his head, ‘the top bit like the scalp. I have to give it three or four goes, so it comes off in slices –’
‘Christ, Ed!’
‘– and eventually I get it. Oh, it doesn’t look like you’re cutting somebody’s head,’ he said. ‘It looks more like a cabbage or summat.’ He paused to consider this. ‘Coming off in slabs.’
After that he always ran for it, in a convulsion of fear and glee – ‘I can really feel me heart pounding, every step’ – and then the dream seemed to jump very quickly and he was out of the city altogether, with a job selling agricultural machinery in some great prairie farming waste, somewhere where the dust boiled off the landscape all summer. ‘There I am, talking about experimental tractors to some old bloke in a farmhouse but thinking all the time:
‘I’m going to get caught. I’m going to get caught.’
He wanted to get caught.
‘They’re never my kiddies,’ he said. ‘But I feel like an animal every time I have that dream, and I want to get caught.’
The j
ob went well. We pried the rest of the louvres out and replaced them with brand new stone a rosy colour so faint it was almost white. The church people weren’t up for sandblasting the rest of the building to match, so we started in on the pointing. Good weather was a requirement for that, and we got it. At the same time we needed shade and cool air. Nine in the morning, we’d already been working three hours. We hung off the abseil ropes, pointing as fast as we could, trying to get a section done before the grout dried up in the bucket. We were working in shorts, drinking four or five litres of water a day, gasping like animals. From up on the tower, the surrounding hills resounded with light. By noon it was so baked and airless the only place you could bear was the inside of the church. About four days of this and the job was finished.
‘We’ll clear the site tomorrow,’ Brinklow said. ‘It’ll be a late start. I’ve to go to the dentist in the morning.’
‘Ouch.’
‘I don’t mind it, me,’ he said.
He had an interesting relationship with his dentist, who had once dared him to have a filling without anaesthetic. ‘It won’t take a minute,’ he promised, staring steadily at Brinklow. The challenge was obvious. Brinklow looked steadily back at him for fifteen seconds and bought it.
‘Did it hurt?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘It were bearable. But I love those fucking dental drills! Watercooled, five hundred thousand rpm. Shit hot. You can see this fucking aerosol of stuff flying out of your mouth when they’re working. Tooth debris, water droplets, saliva, blood, bacteria. The fucking works.’ Seeing my expression, he laughed. ‘Anyway we’re done here. We’ll have a nice short day tomorrow.’
He got out his cellphone. ‘I’ll just make arrangements for someone to collect that laminated stone.’
He drove me back to Halifax in his usual way, overtaking people on blind bends as if the van was some Kawasaki he’d once owned. I got him to drop me in the centre of town, so I could go round Sainsburys and buy a few things; then I walked home with the stuff in two plastic bags.
You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts Page 5
