‘That’s one hell of a neg zone,’ Nuala said. ‘They should bring some kids here, let them play on the accident spot for a while, try to rescue it.’
‘You want to see kids playing in the fast lane of the motorway?’
‘They could cordon them off, or something.’
‘Jesus.’
We travelled in our own pockets of silence, the almost inaudible drone of commentators on Radio 4 the only intrusion until we reached the outskirts of Birmingham, where the traffic began to seize up again. We crawled, until the suck of the city diminished, cars filtering off to the surrounding districts.
Nuala put her head against my shoulder.
‘Has anybody tried to hurt you, since I saw you last?’
‘Marlon the cat,’ I said. ‘He tried to have my face off last night. For no reason other than for kicks. Apart from that, no.’
‘What I meant,’ insisted Nuala, although I could tell that she was becoming more good-humoured, enjoying the games I was playing, ‘was: has somebody, you know, tried to kill you? Again.’
‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’
She was quick to put out a restraining arm, although I hadn’t lost my temper. ‘No, I do. I believe that somebody gave you a maximum spook the other night. It doesn’t matter what happened. I’m concerned. It might happen again.’
‘It might, but I’ll be ready next time.’ I had the knife in my pocket, the knife the girl had given me at the party. Lucas didn’t know who she was when I described her to him. He didn’t know an awful lot, Lucas. He didn’t know where he’d gone to when he buggered off during the party. Not to worry, I told him, we were pissed. I don’t remember where I got to either. I might have had a narcoleptic blackout. I didn’t know. I was that trousered.
As we drove through the grey channels that swept through the centre of Birmingham, it began to rain. Very soon, water had collected on the Tarmac and was being sprayed into the air by juggernauts in the left-hand lane. Where the sky’s ceiling existed, a whitish blur extended, rubbing out a view of the road beyond. I had to believe there was something to drive into when I overtook the lorries, had to have a blind faith in what lay ahead: more road, hopefully empty. While I gripped the wheel, Nuala slipped a cassette into the player; Billie Holiday singing Georgia On My Mind. It calmed me down a little.
‘You might try switching the wipers on, Adam?’
I did so. Sunlight staggered across the industrialised piles of the Midlands, igniting the mist of rain and casting uncertain spectrums above the motorway.
‘Now that’s what I call pretty,’ I said, trying not to clench my jaw. ‘The spray of petrol-stained water, dancing with colour, against the muddied arse of an Eddie Stobart wagon.’
‘It’s okay, Adam,’ she said, rubbing my leg. I felt a crazy urge to grab her, smell her fingers to see if traces of H. lingered. ‘It’s only a squall. There’s clear sky up ahead, see?’
She was right. Nevertheless, as we escaped the borders of the storm, it took Nuala’s coaxing – her gentle massage of my arms and legs – to help loosen my white-knuckled grip on the wheel. We were doing almost a hundred and twenty. I forced myself to relax, to slow down, and noticed that my heart had been beating madly, the hundred miles we’d travelled since joining the M1 at Hendon.
‘What’s wrong, Adam?’ she pressed. Checking the mirror, I saw that I was ashen, with a light coating of sweat on my forehead and cheeks. The skin around my eyes had turned grey. It had nothing to do with the funeral, or the storm. Or H. making love to Nuala.
‘It’s because we left London,’ I said. She didn’t scoff.
I explained everything to her. And once I’d exhausted all the panic involved with leaving Laura behind in the past, my odd interaction with the city, my mind’s blackspots (especially the blackspots), I told Nuala about my feelings for her. I occasionally spotted my face in the mirror as I let it all come tumbling out and I was surprised to see no masks there, no attempt to conceal the raw emotion.
‘In London, it’s like putting a belt on and trying to kid yourself that it will go one notch tighter. You end up walking around feeling constricted all the time, unable to loosen yourself in public, always sucking in your gut and pretending to be impenetrable, unassailable.’
I wasn’t sure what I was saying any more, but Nuala was nodding.
‘In the few years I’ve been here, I’ve got caught up in it. I’ve started running for buses, even when I know there’ll be another one along in two minutes. I go out with a scowl on my face. Shit, I’ve even started drinking London Pride.’
I listened to Billie Holliday singing Romance in the Dark. For a second, it was just me, Billie, the long, long road and London somewhere in my rear-view mirror. The city was a long-gone explosion of sunshine on the horizon. I felt like I was in one of those bulb-shaped glasses used in yard-of-ale competitions. I could imagine people getting indoors, shedding their coats, throwing their Evening Standards on to the sofa, peeling away their poker faces to reveal a tragic rictus. How they break down and cry.
‘It’s not the people that get me in London, although they have their own strange agendas, I’m sure of it. It’s the buildings. It’s the massive weight of history that hits you, the history in the dust that shifts around your feet when, oh, I don’t know, when you go for a walk through the City at the weekend or find yourself on Waterloo Bridge at sunset, or a park when there’s nobody else around. I wonder, sometimes, what’s in that dust, who is in that dust.’
‘We’re only going to Warrington for the day.’
‘I know, but… it felt like I’d been in the city too long, that it had got its claws into me.’
She was trying to understand, but I could see she was having trouble cottoning on. Me too, for that matter. Fair enough, I was talking pretty weird stuff. I was talking, as Greg would put it, shit.
We stopped off at Keele Services for coffee, edgy from the long drive. Everyone looked half-alive, aghast, as if they’d been brought out of the oven ten minutes early. The enervation of non-arrival.
‘So enough about me. What was your problem when we left this morning?’
‘I’m problem free, my sweet,’ she said, arching her eyebrow and looking directly at me, as if to say What, do you want to make something of it?
I decided I did.
‘You had a face on you as grim as a wardrobe full of tank tops.’
She huddled beneath the acreage of her jumper. Light colour fled across her cheekbones. She mumbled something and then turned her attention back to her coffee. I felt bad, and considered asking her if she’d like something to go with her coffee. A doughnut, perhaps. But she’d have shot me down because of the E numbers, or monosodium glutamate. I got her one anyway, and she bit into it. Congealed jam oozed out of it. Her chin was trembling as she chewed; I reached out and touched her hand. She put the doughnut down and came round to my side of the table, where she held me and sobbed against my neck. Tears trickled under the collar of my T-shirt. I didn’t mind a jot. The pale, half-eaten doughnut bled its gelid innards across the plate. It looked like a poultice failing to staunch a wound.
‘He wanted to come on my tits,’ she was saying. ‘He wanted to spray all that wonderful power away, instead of channelling it into me, where I could use it.’
It would have been easy to laugh, but I was too busy wishing I was H. and looking at the soft globes of wool beneath which her breasts would be warm and thick with the smell of her.
‘Who is H.?’ I asked. ‘What does his name stand for?’
‘Oh, God, do you know, I haven’t a clue. He’s always just been H. to me. H. Glaber.’
‘Glaber?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think it’s German.’
‘Do you feel up to getting back in the car? I’m worried we might be late.’
She nodded. And then she said: ‘It’s not everything.’ She looked uncertain for a moment, then she bit her bottom lip and seemed to come to a decision. ‘There’s more I
need to tell you. I can tell you. When we get back to London.’
‘I hate that. Tell me now.’
‘I can’t. I have to show you something. It’ll be easier for me just to show you.’
The further away from London we got, the more comfortable I felt. It was like backing away from a fierce bonfire.
‘I had these friends,’ I said, thinking of Meddie and Iain. And Yoyo. It seemed strange to refer to them in the past tense. ‘People I worked with, really. But okay. Well, some of them were okay. Kind of okay. Kind of friends. They were London nutty for a while. You know, trying to discover the real London, the skull beneath the skin. One of them, Iain, used to poke around old churches in the City or have a day in Hackney or root around the library in Kentish Town in case he discovered some lost text, a key that would unlock the city’s underworld.’ I glanced at her to see if she was listening; she had a sleepy smile on her face. The morning light was being kind to Nuala; it lit up her green eyes and painted the softly angular lines of her nose and jaw.
‘The three of them went out to Mudchute on the first day’s hunt, later they split up and went off on their own, but first day, all mates together. There’s a farm and a park near the DLR station. They went in, Iain clouted his head on the kissing gate, slipped on the mud walking up the path and land on his arse. Two seconds into their first search, he’s covered in shit and his eye’s swelling up. Iain doesn’t even notice, twittering on about the view and the aeroplanes banking overhead as they take off from City airport. Then it started raining. ’
We’d just passed Knutsford services. Twenty minutes away from Dad’s.
‘Sounds like a nightmare. Why did they go all the way out there?’
‘Have a guess?’
‘Not just the view. Pigs and sheep?’
‘No.’ My bottom had turned numb from all this driving; my right foot had contracted, I don’t know what the affliction might be called – accelerator ankle? – due to the constant dipping when we’d been crawling along. Five hours it had taken. We seemed like different people to the ones that had moved through the darkness of north London all that time ago.
‘They wanted to see the centre of London or, as he put it, the omphalos. The true centre. Apparently, there’s a ley-line runs through the farm. He thought that if they found the line, if they stood at the heart of London, something would be revealed.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe the strange places in the rest of the city. The places they ended up finding later. They had all these maps. They didn’t need any of them, in the end.’
‘So did they find something at this, what was it? Hephalump?’
I laughed. ‘Omphalos. No. A few drains, some tractor tyres. Lots of cow shit.’ The Thelwall viaduct hove into view, possibly for the first time this century uncluttered by traffic. We were really here.
‘But didn’t they feel energised?’
‘You weren’t the best person to tell this story to, with hindsight.’
‘Oh Adam,’ she chided, and I was glad that old joshing tone had crept back into her voice. She seemed more relaxed, the incident at the service station forgotten, or rather buried, for now.
Thinking of the others made me feverish for a while. They were in London, unearthing treasure. And I was up here, going to see someone bury it. London seemed the most magical places on Earth. But then I thought of Lewis Carroll, who had been born in Daresbury, just outside Warrington. I thought of Alan Garner’s Alderley Edge. Ramsey Campbell’s Merseyside. There were glittering cracks in reality around here too. There was magic in the moors, the Pennines, the old industrial towns.
I peeled the car off on to the M62 and stayed in the nearside lane, the filter for the A49 and Warrington. Dad would like Nuala, I guessed. And she’d fall for him, just like every other girlfriend I’d had. A line my mum told me when I was younger: He could charm the leaves down from the trees.
North Warrington’s outer limits unfurled before me as we cruised the dual carriageway. An ugly place, especially this end, with its corrugated ‘sardine-can’ business parks and anonymous estates. We saw the obligatory stray dog; the gang of kids crouching by a large yellow GRIT container; a tanned blond man in a tight black T-shirt filling up his Cosworth at the petrol station while a tanned blonde girl in a tight black T-shirt waited inside.
I turned right, past the former gasworks and under a tiny bridge, upon which foot-high letters had been painted: WELCOME TO DALLAM. The new hotchpotch of council houses being built at the other side were all boarded up. Kids on mountain bikes ripped through the building site. We caught a sliver of choice language, coated in the Warrington tongue, a hybrid of Scouse and Mancunian:
‘Oi, Benneh, put that fuckin’ brick down now, right, or ah’ll fuckin’ drop yoh, yoh fuckin’ wankoh.’
Nuala fidgeted beside me. I patted her knee and swung the car down Lilford Avenue. Allotments sprang up; a field ran away to the horizon where it lost itself to a small wood. An old house winked at us between the trees.
‘Did you grow up around here?’
I nodded and dropped down a gear, took the car around a sharp curve into Lodge Lane. I parked in behind my dad’s old Toyota and smiled at Nuala. Approaching the front door, I glanced towards the garage. Through the window I could see the driver’s window and a little of its roof, the dull red glint of Mum’s Fiat 127. Dad had never sold it, never driven in it, after she died.
There was no answer when I rang the bell. We walked round to the back garden and I knew where he’d be, almost knew what posture he’d be taking, when I smelled wood smoke, saw its thin colour drifting across the lawn. I wasn’t wrong.
Dad was in the waste patch of land by his shed, sating his desires for compost and combustion. Mrs Munro next door was flapping around the washing line, taking in her whites before the smoke from the fire could ruin them. Dad already had a good blaze going, and was leaning against his beloved garden fork, looking deep into the fire’s core. He became an unreliable figure in the mist; that moment before he turned smudged the age from him – he could have come from any chapter of my childhood. My fear for him rose in me – it always did when I was around him – a strange, switched paternal concern, as if he had always been my charge, rather than the other way. I was reluctant to call him in case he was startled and fell into the flames. But then he turned and saw us.
‘Hello there!’ he said, and picked his way through the rubble towards us. I was gladdened by his enthusiasm. A picture flashed behind my eyes: me walking into my parents’ room to find them in bed, watching TV, holding hands.
As always, the most acute feeling that I missed my dad consumed me when I was standing a mere foot away from him.
‘What do you know?’ he nodded at Nuala, who smiled awkwardly in return. ‘Come on, let’s get you inside. Want a coffee?’
‘What about the fire?’ I asked.
‘It’s okay. It’ll just burn itself out.’
I remembered one night in high summer as a boy, waking when it was still fairly light outside, the fumes from burning matter scorching the back of my throat. Dad had incinerated some newspapers and a broken old bookcase and left the fire to die once it had turned the wood to embers and the flames were gone. Mum spent a good hour pouring buckets of water over the majority of the back lawn, which was steadily smouldering. He couldn’t admit that he’d been wrong, pointing out that the lawn would benefit from a good burn and it was something he was thinking of doing for a long time. ‘Scorched earth policy, Frances,’ he’d said to her from the back door as she did her thing with the buckets. ‘The lawn’ll come up a treat and a half.’
Something he’d once said, forgotten till now, leapt unbidden into my head: Hey, Adam, what’s the best way to get rid of rubbish? Burn it.
I shook my head and followed him and Nuala indoors, where he set about making mugs of very strong instant coffee.
‘Do you want something to eat?’ he asked, nodding towards the breadbin. If I did, I’d
have to make it myself. He was like that, Dad, charming and hospitable without any application. ‘I’ll take Nuala away and entertain her with my collection of insect carapaces, you’d like that wouldn’t you?’
Nuala looked at me, wide-eyed, unable to see that he was joking. I made a plate of cheese sandwiches. In the living room, Nuala was laughing at something he was saying, her body language locked on to him. Dozens of thriving plants vomited thick, waxy green leaves at me from earthenware pots and broad wall baskets, as though taunting me for my impoverished attempts back at Cherry’s stall. I thought about the stall, filled with desiccated flakes of brown and grey. The soil was always better up here.
‘What are you doing up here?’ asked my dad amiably, as if just visiting him wasn’t enough.
‘Funeral,’ I said, suddenly realising that I hadn’t brought any suitable clothes. ‘You don’t have a black suit I could borrow, do you?’
He nodded and I knew it would be the suit in which he’d seen my mother’s coffin slide out of view on the short journey to the crematorium. I’d wondered after that if his appetite for fire might have waned but it seemed to have stuck around. His smell – of charred things – filled the room. A cat wandered in and looked at us then walked out again.
I told him about Claire. He asked me about work, if I had any news, what the weather was like in the city. He asked about my narcolepsy and I told him I was taking medication, that I had it under control. We ate the cheese sandwiches. Dad asked Nuala what she did for a living. She told him she was a hairdresser.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘You should take some clippers to my old wig. I need a good trim.’
I went up to take a shower, trying to keep a lid on the insane laughter that was trying to spill out of me. Nuala could stay with my dad for the afternoon; I needed to do this on my own. She didn’t object too strongly, and anyway, she didn’t have any black clothes either.
London Revenant Page 18
