Broken Ghost

by Niall Griffiths

  More rabbits, outside, in the field that whisks by; a scattering of them, grass-cropping, a few on their hind legs to watch the train. That those little animals might come to caper now around Adam; that there is the possibility of that happening, if only in his mind. As it is enough, or almost enough, to be aware that the most dangerous creature on the planet is a man who is terrified of being seen as a wimp. Yet somewhere in the world there must be things that are born and which live entirely and then die underground; worms, maybe, or some kind of mole. And even in the deepest of seas there are eels, oarfish, huffing noiselessly past with coxcomb crests and binlid eyes. And in those spans of life such creatures have the slightest of sight, if that, and the world is just touch or sound waves felt in the skin, vibrations in the aura, smells turned to taste and no need ever to scent the warnings brought on the wind or to have to know the sun.

  Borth, and waiting on the platform is a trolley-dolly, someone who’ll have alcohol for sale. Like a predator sensing the spillage of blood, the proximity of alcohol has Adam upright in his seat, alert. The train stops and the doors open and fresher air washes along the coach and Adam’s arm-hairs sway like the cilia of anemones, plankton-searching, famished in their way. This craving in him, this thing inside. Not in the pipes perhaps, but somewhere a bug full of demands has set up insistent camp. Let there be a clink, soon. Let there be a hiss of a ring pull. This thirsty earth.

  And there is Borth, outside. The sea on the left and on the right is the baked bog and the far blue hills and the hit of gym-knicker whiff from the weed in rot on the shore-shingle nearby. And there was a recent photograph here, wasn’t there? A happy dinosaur on the yellow t-shirt of a happy little boy and his happy little sister beside. Some kind of key-fob too. He took all the money and he would’ve taken the phone had there been one in the bag and flogged it for a flim in some dingy pub. And there was a defacing urge, and he remembers that with a sore lurch and just for a few seconds he very nearly gets it, can almost see the source of that urge for what it truly was and is but then the dryness blares at the back of his tongue and fills most things. If only he’d never gone up that fucking mountain. If only he’d never taken that fucking pill. In them hills there, away over the bog, the baked expanse under which vapours pop and send clods in somersaults into the air. Some birds on it – geese, a few egrets blinding white – sluggish, slow, as if caught by the webs in the immense festering swelt.

  The train tugs itself into motion again. Browne has found a Metro and is flicking through its pages. There is a clink of glass from somewhere further down the train and then another one louder and Adam is digging in his hip pocket for money. The cart is wrestled through the vestibule. He watches it come towards. Fears he might whimper, salivate.

  —Ah, yer mahn. Time for a bit of the oul brekko, says Browne, and eyes Adam. —Ye drinking?

  Ad nods. —Just a couple. Take the edge off, like.

  —A few only. And eat something aye. Got to keep yer bap clear for Wolverhampton, ye hear me?

  —Aye, yeh. Just a few, that’s all. Take the edge off.

  They buy four cans of tepid Stella from the cart and two miniature whiskies and some snack-bags and Browne buys a butty. Ad is into his first can in seconds, sucking at its warm and coppery thickness, the lump in his throat leaping with the gulps, all of what he is opening to receive it.

  —Ey, now. Go easy I said.

  Adam opens a whisky and pours it into his half-empty can. —Fuck me that’s better.

  —Aye well. Go fuckin easy. I’m not having me back-up all coggly, ye hear me?

  Adam busies himself opening the packets along their side seams and arranging them platter-like on the table. —There ye go. Birkenhead tapas.

  Browne, a lip curled in distaste, picks some limp green-ness out of his sarnie. Shows it to Adam.

  —Seen this? Look at it, mahn. Cheese fuckin sanger I asked for. What’s all this shite? A cheese sanger is a slice of cheese between two bits of bread. I never had, had green in me piece as a wean. Can’t get anything simple these days. Some kind of grass or somethuing in yeer cheese piece, Christ.

  Adam laughs and eats a Cheddar. Sucks at the can – the sour cheap Scotch in the vegetable-soup lager. He long ago learnt to suppress his gag reflex when such a thing is called for. Alcoholic Cup-a-Soup, that’s what it’s like. Horrendous. But the work gets done.

  At Dyfi Junction an osprey swoons from its nest, close to the train; unfurls its great and brindled wings and drops and then sheers outwards. Beats its pinions and is taken in by the haze. Nearby as it is, some passengers see it and make appreciative noises but when Adam turns his gaze out there the bird has gone, drawn deeper into the steely sheen of the air. Hills in that haze and aren’t Adam’s powers of recall hard at work this morning, even with the drink-damage, because as he sits and sips and stares he remembers how walking in those very hills, one spring day, he’d gotten off the train here at Dyfi Junction and just walked – water in his bag, a turkey roll and an apple, a book, and a pair of binoculars. He came across a farm high on one of those ridges half-erased now in the heat haze, a lofted smallholding – a cottage and some sagging outbuildings, dangling barbed loops and fertiliser bags half-submerged in slicks of slurry, which was everywhere: the overall feeling was of a faecal flood. There was a pervasive reek and an abrupt shadow came over all and turned the spring day darker and a scream had come from one of the tumbledown sheds, an outraged animal bellow, and no birds sang and the sun was veiled and Adam knew for certain that, in those rackety outhouses, pigs were hoisted up by their back legs and put to death with sledgehammers. A scabby dog had dragged itself out of a standing pool of liquid shit and slaveringly chased him away with much bearing of brown and broken fangs. A nightmare place it had been; visited before, yes, but only in the very worst of delirium – the kind that comes after a week on the brandy and the speed and the skunk. Demented.

  A shake, a shudder goes through Adam and Browne asks him what’s wrong and Adam says ‘nothing’ and Browne turns back to his Metro and the train slides into motion again and Adam thinks that he could get off at the next stop, Machynlleth, just get off and go over the platform and jump on the next Cambrian Coaster up to Cricieth and get off there and go and see Ebi. Stop the terrible hurtle. Call Ebi. Take the promised job. Aye but that all would hinge on two things: that Ebi himself has stayed sober, and that the better part of Adam was not left behind in the ocean, refusing to return and shuck its gills and fins.

  The train turns inland. Ad crumples his empty can and immediately opens another and Browne raises an eyebrow.

  —Easy now. Keep the bap clear I said.

  —I will, man, I will. I’m just smoothing out the edges.

  They pick at the food on the table and by Mach the packets are empty. A man clears them away, a man with the words TRAIN MAINTENANCE TEAM on the back of his tabard. Outside, there are pink ribbons tied around the railings and posts of the station platform and Adam genuflects with his can and will not dwell on what those ribbons signify – an abomination forced into the world and into some of the lives it contains. Whatever’s inside Adam, whatever it is that crackles and cuts and is twisting him into such shapes as he has not welcomed nor even invited and what could with a certain level of accuracy be called pain, he offers it up so that the anguish of others may in turn and in however small a part be relieved. And then he takes a big, big suck at his can. And then he focuses on a blackbird on the roof of the public shelter; the golden beak haughtily cocked skywards. Such things sing.

  The lady robot announces that at this station the train will adjoin two more carriages and you may experience a small jerk.

  —Nothing new there, Ad says, and raises a smile from Browne. And there is a jerk, a double shunt, and organs move within, in their stabilising jellies, and hills pass by again. Cottages and hedgerows. Streams. And over it all the never-ceasing sun.

  Browne stretches – a great big bone-cracking unfurling of his limbs. He stands up, his hands
on his lower back, chest and belly out-thrust.

  —Think I’m off for a wee daunder.

  —A what?

  —Wee daunder. Bit of a wee stroll.

  —Where?

  —Up and down the train, where’d ye think, mahn? Not good for ye to sit too long so it’s not. Ye get that, that thing, what is it now, sounds like trombones.

  —Thrombosis?

  —That’s the boy. Deep-vein thrombosis. Got to keep the blood flowing around ye.

  —Giz a bang on that vape, then, before yeh go.

  They each take a few tokes on the tube.

  —Think I’ll try for a shite as well. Been bound up for a few days so Ah have but it’s that butty-grass – it’s given me the skitters. No more bevvy after them, alright?

  —Alright.

  —I mean it now, d’ye hear me?

  —I said alright, didn’t I?

  Browne taps a finger to his temple. —Hard bap, d’ye hear me? Clear bap keep it.

  —Yes, lad, I heard yeh. Now goan have yer crap.

  Adam watches Browne go. Watches his leg move around that blaring scar that serpents around from his shinbone to his calf and down into his sock. Trace fossil: first life-signs when that life’s long gone. Marks in rock when rock was soft. Thrown out of the mad and ancient mix, out of the age of despair and its span.

  Adam drains his can and cracks another. Swipes the Metro towards him across the sweaty Formica and starts to read; devils out there. Dementia in 140 characters. Some suit declaring again, again, that some event cannot be blamed on Brexit. Paragraphs of extinction, an obituary of the newly dead: drowned in the Med, welfare-reformed to death, shot or blown up or stabbed, and then a list of which women or girls have most recently been raped or abducted or killed. And then the entertainment pages; recipes, reviews. Something for his eyes to do and the nerves behind them and the fire in the synapses, the alcohol breeding these sparks like midges and like them they swarm and bite. So he drinks more. The elbow lifts and the throat dilates and the heart and its blades rest where they must and slice where they must and the train stripes across Wales towards England at the edge of the continent on the curve of the earth. The void almost close enough to touch, and smell, if smell it has at all.

  The trolley man returns to the carriage and someone asks for tea. That drink: how serious the making of it was when Adam was a kid, as if it was a test of manhood – crackin brew that, son. The boy’s doing well, Viv. Sooner that, tho, than the other shite that skirted his life and was to later roughly intrude. The dad he had. The damaged part of the world that he was born into. The passenger gets her tea and Adam raises his hand to the trolley man and buys more cans and miniatures. There’s a slight raise of a judging eyebrow so Adam is effusive in his thanks, guessing that the sarcasm of that will be unrecognised. He can drink whatever, and whenever, he likes; he’s an adult – he’s a grown-up, now. But in truth, there was never, for him, in booze, that incredibility that there seemed to be for others; he never really experienced that immense and terrific seize of the blood that he discovered, later, in other drugs – the white rock and the brown powder. But in those lies calamity now and in any case it’s not entirely about the hit. Not entirely. It’s about the putting of him into the world in a condition of disassembly, all defences drowned, a declaration: there was an event that did this to me. Do not help me rebuild but look upon me in this awful vulnerability and see what powers I have felt and encountered and how bereft their passing has left me. Pray that you never know such visitation. And if you’re asked to go up the mountain then never ever go.

  The train gulps the country and shits it out behind, leaving a faint diesel tang and the rising scatter of birds, startled up from the fields by its blattering passage. The land passes, blasted, its usually watery parts inspissated down into thick and viscous slicks, gluey gloops in which amphibians pant their last. Adam looks out at it and he recollects, not long ago, it being under flood; rescue boats in the lanes, the lower hills become islands on the crowning humps of which groups of people sat and waved for help and animals stood dumb. On the news was a drowned land and now there is this drought, an escarpment of parch, all crisped and rusted and dehydration is dragging itself across places that have never known it. Sticklebacks lie curled and dried, caught halfway up the desiccated rushes and the fading fire of their bellies is the colour of alarm. It is a land in which it is fully understood that there are storms which arise from nowhere and uproot its inhabitants as they do trees and that such refugees need without question compassionate support. And toads burp their ultimate breaths in small salt pans; barren dry splats that were reed beds, not all that long ago.

  At Newtown a beautiful woman boards and Adam guesses Polish; those Slavic features, the cheekbone peaks, the full jut of the lips drawing the jawline towards and into them. The slight snubbiness in the nose. She has hair dyed the colour of a fantastic thing, the red of a paradise bird, and she takes a seat further down the carriage from Adam on the other side of the aisle and she puts a phone to her ear and Adam strains to listen; hears the language and allows himself a satisfied nod. If not Poland then somewhere close. He gulps at the tepid beer. On the bubbles that pop in his brain they rise: Sion, Benji, Quilty the astonishing cat, Suki, Ebi, Sally. All those he met on his last trip up to Rhos and what will they do now, let go as they are, abandoned. The cat will be fine; feral soul, he’ll steal and hunt and importune; his type can survive in any world. But the hominids: follow the wailing and the trails of blood. The lost shoes.

  Someone gets on with a small dog. Adam clicks his tongue and winks and the dog regards him and thumps its tail and Adam asks it how it’s doing and wishes Browne was here so he could set him a task; try talking to an animal without asking it a question. It can’t be done. Where is Browne, anyway? His wee daunder up and down the train – he’s been gone for an hour.

  Forward motion again. Out of Newtown. He drinks and reads the paper. An interview with some bloke who blew most of his huge inheritance on drugs but saved himself finally by putting his last million into an import venture, shipping Harley Davidson bikes over from America. I dared to dream, he says. Adam swallows brassy saliva. Heat builds around his eyes. Because what it is – remove the need for money and it’s all just a bit of dicking around. That’s all it fucking is. The woman with the lapdog glances at Adam and he opens his mouth to speak then shuts it, quickly because no sober person has ever tried to engage a drunken stranger in conversation on a train. Money signifies, and in that dies value. Vixens in heat past midnight, the noises they make on the starlit hills – that sound is not in the junk, not in the hit because nothing is in the hit, but it is in the getting of money to get the hit. Only that shrieks. Don’t have to fight to find it then all it is is poker for pennies. Adam must still be staring because the lady gives him a nervous kind of half-smile – the copse of cans and little bottles on his table – so he half smiles back then looks away. Out of the window, not back at the newsprint. He sees more hills pass and knows that power wants matter. Power needs to touch and manipulate and it has the means to do so. Him with the bikes, in his quest was a realisable endpoint that could be straddled and ridden and so it was not a quest at all yet power could make it seem so. All a thing, an object, another thing in a world of things. That he could afford to do. Adam drinks. The circumstances of his life could never entice him into the arena of games: never were his energies so squanderable. Oh the sordor around. He glances at the little dog which is curled up sleeping on the seat and thinks of Quilty, how he has never even half-belonged to him. Yowling apparition at his kitchen window that cold night and he was only ever semi-loaned from the wilds he slunk out of, the leopard-in-the-world that would happily feed on Adam’s face if, when, all the human things crumble and collapse. Such is the antidote. And no matter how far that feller may travel on one of his Harleys he’ll always end up at the same place which is exactly where he started from.

  That’s better. That’s a bit better. Oh the squ
alor. If you’re invited up the mountain never fucking go unless you’re prepared for what could possibly happen and no one ever is or ever could be.

  The lady carries her small dog off at Welshpool and once out of that station Browne returns, rocking in his walk a bit as if aboard a boat. He retakes his seat and holds a hand out, over the cans and little bottles.

  —Fuck’s sakes, mahn! Ah told ye to go easy!

  —Yeh well I was bored shitless, wasn’t I? What took yeh?

  —Drumming up some business so Ah was. Advance orders. Few fellers I know on board. Pissed and useless now, are ye?

  —No. Adam stiffens a bit, camply affronted. —Not in the slightest. No lightweight me, lad.

  Browne leans, sniffs and looks into Adam’s eyes. Adam opens up his face, wide, juts his jaw, returns the stare. Three seconds, four, then Browne nods and sits back.

  —But no more. That’s yeer lot. We turn up with ye rolling all over the fuckin shop … this could go bad for us, mahn. Ye’ve got to cover for me. Ah’m trusting ye here, now. Relying on ye to have me back. Right?

  —There’s two cans left. You have one. So I can’t drink em both.

  Adam opens a can and pushes it over the table at Browne who takes it up and drinks from it. —Ah. Hot day like today, hits the spot, that does, lovely bit of ice-cold lager. So refreshing. He winces. —Manky fuckin pish.

  —Does the job, dunnit?

  —Fuckin horrible so. Mushroom Cup-a-Soup with a wee bit of a kick.

  They drink. The border approaches.

  —How many orders did yeh get, anyway?

  —A few. Not bad. More than me capital, anyway, let’s put it that way. They all make good on em and Ah’m already seeing a profit. Shagaluf here I come.

  They gaze out of the dirty window.

  Into England, now. A proliferation of flags here, St George banners hanging limp in the gardens, Union flags tacked up on the sides of sheds. Shibboleths from a cult not close to these two moving men.