Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

You remember Helena? Fraser’s missus? She thought you were Yan’s lad, didn’t she? Ahead of me.

  He’s not my dad. He would of told me. When he saw what I was doing to meself. Where me life was headed. He would of fucking stepped in Dan. Wouldn’t he? He would of put me back on the rails.

  I don’t know.

  He shakes his head.

  Anth was my dad, he said. Like two peas in a pod. I saw meself in his eyes, that day on the bus.

  The boat passes below us, into the placid and oilslicked water of the harbour, the engine rattling comfortably. There are five crew, one of whom has come out of the wheelhouse to prepare for mooring. He looks up at us haughtily and dispassionately with hooded eyes, a young man with a sallow complexion and shoulder-length black hair gathered in a ponytail. As the boat moves on his eyes flick away to some other detail of the harbourside. I take Paul by the shoulders and gently turn him round to face me.

  Let me help you, I say. You need your medication. You need a safe place to stop.

  A derisive curl to his lip which grows as I speak. He grips my wrists with his raw hands, which burn like molten iron.

  Get your hands off, he says, angrily. I don’t want it.

  Don’t want what?

  Pity. There’s no pity in the world. Look at it.

  He gestures around him at the bleak sea and sky, at the bleary port in the winter morning.

  It’s cold, he says. Got to keep swimming or you get bashed against the rocks. In the end it’s always the same. You’re too weak. You have to give in.

  Paul.

  No. I don’t need a dad, or a brother. Not now.

  Firmly, with surprising strength, he disengages my hands from his shoulders, holds my wrists for a moment, anger welling in his face as if he would snap me. Then he lets go with a shrug, turns back to the railings.

  Paul, I say, imploringly.

  He ignores me. I pull one of the business cards out of my wallet, push it towards him.

  Look, my number’s on there. Home and mobile. If you ever change your mind. Just reverse the charges.

  He makes no attempt to take the card. I slip it into the top pocket of his jacket and begin to walk away down the pier. A long walk, hoping that Paul will turn and shout, or come running down after me, knowing at the same time that he won’t. When I reach the lighthouse I look back at the distant hunched figure, one foot resting on the lowest railing, and fancy I see a small white card spiral down like a sycamore seed into the restless sea.

  20. Herring Gull

  (Larus argentatus)

  I lay stranded on the shingle until the pain was no longer a sky of sharp stars like ground glass, until it became a dull but insistent dawn over-cast with cloud. And then I got up and stumbled towards Seaton with the breaking summer weather and the cloud boiling up out of the hazy estuary and the thunder beginning a low throat-clearing grumble somewhere far off. It was hot. Too hot. All the frustrations and non-events of the summer precipitating out and taking solid form in the sweat on my neck and the blood crusting my clothes and the bruises swelling like clumsy purple fists in my flesh. Going to rain soon, and hard.

  Charlie said Yan was damaged goods and now I was damaged to match. Broken nose and a couple of teeth gone and when I tried to move my left shoulder there was a twang like a snapped elastic band and a bright shaft of pain. When a dislocated shoulder jumps back into its socket there’s a sudden agony like a star imploding and then bliss, but it had left something torn in there – muscle, ligament, tendon. My ribs were the worst, a hot blade of it every time I breathed or jigged an arm, a rusty saw quartering my chest cavity.

  Seaton Carew, shambling and downtrodden in the heat. Boneheads in the crumbling art deco bus station, drinking from cans and stomping them down into the concrete. I thought of Paul. Every time I’d seen him over the summer he was bagged off his head.

  The beach sprawled out towards a leaden North Sea, shabby gift shops and chippies along the road. A herring gull perched on top of a waste bin and the cowl of its head was aspirin white and painless but the beady yellow eye connived in the world with a fullstop at the centre. I stared back and the gull cracked the snowy head open like a snapdragon and showed me its gape all slick and sharp-tongued like a spread vulva.

  Hissed. Tossed its head back and ululated somewhere in between alleycat and pterodactyl.

  Down the road a man came out of a chippie and chucked a bag of scraps across the pavement and there was a mugging of wings and beaks and howling, yelling, ripping.

  They’ll fucking eat anything these, he said as I passed. Bog roll, johnnies, turds off the sewage outfall. Rats of the sea, I call them.

  Aye, I said, smiling at him. He was short and bald, a film of sweat on his scalp.

  When you think what it eats, he said. Where it sticks its head. How can it stay so fucking white? Crystal white. That’s what I don’t get.

  I pressed on. People were hurrying now as clouds bulked up like bruises. A sudden wind revved up from the sea, squalls of dry sand scampering across the road. And then the rain, vertical and vindictive, gouts of water bursting on the hot concrete and the tarmac. I was drenched in seconds, rain hammering at me like pebbles. The shingle beach.

  I knocked on the door of a pebbledashed grey house in one of the bleak streets behind the sea front. Small windows to keep out the North Sea. The rain was unabated, rivulets of water gathering and beginning to hurry down the roadway. The door opened and a man stood there in a rumpled tee-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, no socks. His dark skin was wrinkled and his hair was cut close like grey ash. Jonah. He had a can in his hand, regarded me for a moment as if weighing things up.

  Danny, he said. Come in man.

  He ushered me into the doorway and I stumbled through into a front room littered with bulging ashtrays and empty beer cans.

  I’d give up the boxing if I was you, he said. Looks like you’re not much cop. I started out on a smile but my face knacked so I stopped.

  You should see the other bloke, I said.

  He grinned.

  I can’t go back to the pub, I said. Wondered if I could stop here. Just for a day or two.

  Lowered myself into an armchair, which bulged lazily under my weight. No lights on in the house. Livid stormlight slopped through the windows, through broadfingered fronds of rain.

  Temporary problem, said Jonah apologetically. Had a slight disagreement with the electric. A few modifications I made to the meter.

  He winked at me. I knew better than to try a smile.

  We’re still cookin’ on gas though, he quipped.

  He sat down opposite me, glanced at the doorway through to the back kitchen. A slow arc of lightning flapped across the sky, and we waited a second or two for the bellow of rage to reach us. The window frames rattled. I didn’t think the rain could get any louder, any harder. And then it did. A small pool began to well under the front door.

  All the time I’ve been in the merchant navy, it’s been me biggest fear, boomed Jonah, over the noise. Trapped inside a ship that’s going down. In a bubble of steel and air with miles of water closing over your head. I never thought it’d happen to me in my own house.

  The lightning crawled again and the shell burst, closer this time. Jonah looked pensive.

  Let’s have a look over you son, he said. I got some medical training at sea, years ago. We need to work out what’s what. You might have to go to hospital.

  I nodded acquiescence, wearily.

  Jonah swam over and perched on the edge of the armchair. He commenced measuring me with his nimble, quiet fingers moving like a draughtsman’s compasses, pinching here, appraising there.

  Heard you’d been away, he said. Does that hurt?

  I shook my head through gritted teeth.

  Should have come and told me how you got on. How about that?

  I bellowed in affirmation as pain shot through me, synchronized with another lightning bolt, another explosion.

  Still, he said. It’s your funeral.
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  With a flick of the wrist he twisted my nose straight, and I almost passed out.

  Sorry about that, he said. Diversionary tactics. You’ve been lucky, I’d say. Nose. Ribs. A bit of ripped muscle. The rest of it’s just bruising. Nothing medical science can do to help you there. Rest and healing, that’s all. So how did you get on then?

  He was a waster, I said. Wasn’t he? A right feckless bastard. Didn’t connect right with anyone – just thought of himself.

  That doesn’t sound like you talking, said Jonah. Who’s been working on you?

  Never mind that. It’s true, isn’t it?

  It’s easy to be swayed, said Jonah. Easy to paint a caricature of the man. But sometimes the real thing isn’t black and white and you got to make your own mind up about that. Weigh things up for yerself. Nobody’s whiter than white.

  He looked appraisingly at my face.

  Looks like you’ve been getting into some chew yourself, he said. Maybe you’re not the one to point the finger.

  I looked down at the floor. Jonah stood up and shifted from foot to foot.

  Do you want to see it? he said, almost shy. He slid a drawer open in the dresser and passed me a slim package wrapped in tissue paper. I opened it, curious. There was some kind of transparent membrane folded in there, crisp and weightless like the husk left behind when a reptile slips its skin.

  It’s your caul, he said. Part of you, once. Like you were part of your dad. Do you want it back?

  No. I don’t want it.

  I thrust it back at him with a fierceness I didn’t understand. He took it, sort of reverently.

  Hope it brings you luck, I said.

  He winked at me.

  You should go and get some kip, he said, but there’s someone here you ought to meet first.

  He glanced round again. Then he led the way through the rain-streaked room to the kitchen door.

  In the grate a young fire was fledging, trying out new feathers. It mewed and bawled and puked gently, knitting the darkness into a dense knot of red coals and flame. The room gravitated around it, a twilit solar system leaning towards an infant sun, and the distant rumbling of rain and thunder were forgotten, in another galaxy altogether. A couple of shabby armchairs were pulled up close to the fireguard, and in one of them an old man sat gazing into the fire’s heart and into his own thoughts. His hair was long and straggling and dirty and the bald patch at his crown glowed a deep red in the firelight. He raised a hand to his lips and sucked on a skinny hand-rolled cigarette. The nub glowed brightly in the draught of oxygen and then it subsided. Jonah cleared his throat and the old man turned to look at the two of us framed in the doorway. His eyes were grey and crinkled at the corners and as limitless as the sea. They seemed to frame a question, eyebrows slightly raised. These disparate features blurred and swam and finally knit together into a familiar grin. It was Yan.

  Nice weather for ducks Danny, he said.

  21. Black Redstart

  (Phoenicopterus ochruros)

  A flake of light spirals down like a sycamore seed into the husk of a man floating upon the water. The rise and fall of the ocean, inbreath and outbreath. The gentle applause of water in the eardrums and the wind riffling through wavetops. Herds of cumulus mass above him miles up in the clean sky, moving and migrating according to the rules of their kind. Black voices rumbling in the void beneath him, blind fish groping for their prey.

  I was once a man, walking on the earth.

  Cornelius, says Johann. How did you come to be on the streets? You would like us the story to tell, yes?

  The fire splutters, threatens to subside. A thick rime of frost on the ground, on the piles of rubble and the sprawling brambles. Michael Cornelius – the name’s in my passport. It was in my jacket pocket, along with a heavy brass lighter, when Johann and Franz Josef pulled me out of the Rhine that night. The night I was born.

  I don’t remember me, I tell him. I don’t have a story.

  Desperation, he says. Yourself in the river to throw.

  I was running, I say. Down the stairs, away from a flat. I don’t know why.

  Johann shrugs.

  Look, he says. The little pigdog. He steals the fire. I follow his pointing finger to where a small ash-grey bird is hopping away, tail and rump blazing russet like sycamore leaves in autumn.

  In his tail, Johann roars. Like a red-hot poker.

  He laughs and I can smell his rotten breath crackling with alcohol. In agreement, the fire begins to choke and collapse inward, flames dwindling and shrinking.

  Be damned, Johann spits, and throws a stone at the little bird.

  It simply hops away, head on one side, regarding us quizzically, and then carries on feeding.

  Since fifteen years, since I here came, have they my fire stolen, he says. But one day, one day soon, I will him catch, and I will him slit and his tiny heart out-pull. No bigger than my little fingernail, he croons, raising a pitted nail crusted with filth. And I will it in my mouth pop like a bonbon, sweet and pure. And no more will this bird our fire steal. From now on, every wino, in every concrete city, will warm feet have, until the end of the world.

  I look at him, plastered blond hair around his red and lumpen face, a stinking overcoat tied with string. Raise the half-empty bottle of raw spirit to my lips and drink. Small grey birds hop across the surface of my brain with scratchy claws. I look around at the graffiti and the rubble, the railway tracks over to our left and the tenements beyond. It could be any city, any corner of the earth.

  What is this place Johann? I say.

  Behind him the old man, Franz Josef, chokes with laughter behind that big white tobacco beard.

  It is a watchmaker’s factory, he rambles. I many times told him. Straight up and no mistake. But he declined to listen. Lick me on the arse. Lick me on the arse I tell you.

  Johann rolls his eyes at me.

  Cologne, he says. In the Federal Republic of Germany. Although you should yourself remember.

  Cologne, I say. But why speak we all English?

  Johann roars with laughter, flashing big yellow teeth like a horse, deposits of calculus stuck to them.

  Cornelius my friend, we speak not English, he says. We speak German. You have it quite well picked up, since you on the streets were. But your accent is shocking.

  He holds out a hand for the bottle and I reluctantly pass it to him. The U-Bahn rattles past on the tracks, raddled with graffiti. The old man climbs unsteadily to his feet. He is wearing a padded jacket as an extra pair of trousers, with his skeletal legs thrust into the arms. The hood flaps obscenely down in front of his groin. He begins to sing.

  I am, from head to foot, wrapped around with love.

  Yes, that is my world, and otherwise nothing.

  Later, when Johann is unconscious, the old man sits down next to me.

  The little bird, he says. He doesn’t steal the fire. That one, that Johann.

  He makes a gesture indicating a screw loose, rolls his eyes.

  It was after the war, you see. There were great open spaces like this, from the bombing and the firestorms. It was a terrible thing, I heard. All the oxygen out of the air by the flames sucked. Women and children in the houses trapped, screaming.

  He pauses and shakes his head.

  Many of us came into the city then. Vagrants and broken men. And the grey bird with the burning tail came too. He was a bird of the villages and the farms, but after the war came he to the broken cities, and he liked what he found. So he stayed here, nearby the rubble and the railway tracks. He is one of us.

  His face balloons in the firelight.

  But, he splutters, his voice rising, I tell him to come back to the watchmaker’s factory and he does not listen. He does not listen.

  At dusk we wander into the city centre, find a department store with a deep entranceway making a sheltered pocket from the cold. The old man is soon asleep under several layers of cardboard. Me and Johann squat in the darkness, out of the wind. We have cigarette
s, but no matches. I finger the brass lighter in my pocket, but I know it doesn’t work. Needs a new wick, a refill of fluid. Johann goes out onto the street, starts asking people for a light. I don’t see them, mushrooming out of the dark, but when I look up he’s surrounded by boneheads.

  Do you want a light junkie? Do you?

  They crowd in, young and excited, spray-on jeans and knee-high boots and the shaved heads shimmering like pale moons on a sea of streetlight. One of them clicks a lighter open and sends a flame shooting a foot in the air and they shrill with laughter.

  Burn him, shrieks one of them. Do it Hank.

  Listen, gentlemen, we only for a light asked, says Johann, hands raised in placatory manner. I have cigarettes. You are very welcome.

  He holds the crumpled packet out towards them. The sheltered entranceway now a trap, in which we are cornered.

  Filthy habit, says one of the lads, casually smashing the packet out of Johann’s hand and stamping on the cigarettes until they are pulped.

  You look cold, says one of them. Poor things, out here all night. Perhaps can we you up-warm.

  He has a bottle of spirits in his hand, schnapps or cheap brandy. Walks over to the pile of cardboard where Franz Josef slumbers, unscrews the bottletop and splashes the contents all over the makeshift shelter. The others are giggling nervously.

  Give me the lighter Hank, says the boy.

  He only looks sixteen or seventeen. A puppy’s face, with big plaintive eyes below the shorn skull. Hank throws the lighter over. The puppy looks at us.

  Run junkies, run, he says. Unless you want in our bonfire to join.

  We run as he lights the cardboard and leaps back, and there’s a roar of blue flame and splintering glass. The boneheads are already sprinting away as the alarm system begins to wail, and Johann and I run helter-skelter in the opposite direction, not stopping until we’ve covered several blocks. We stop on the apron of a busy road, cars teeming by into the night.

  What about the old man? I say. Shall we go back for him? Johann shakes his head.

  He’s dead. Sure as shit. It’s an occupational hazard Cornelius.