Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  The flames of the Chimera, he says.

  We’re looking out over the shimmering expanses of the Billingham site where constellations of white light are strewn across the transformers, the columns and the converters, sparkling saltily like the winter sky. I can hear the place breathing, a faint hiss and inrush of air followed by a deep contented exhalation. Clouds of vapour drift across the lights, backlit in ghostly white and orange. But above it all are the gas flares, luminous in the pure chemical colours of copper and sodium and potassium, green and turquoise and orange cat tongues flickering at the sky. We watch them silently for what seems like hours, father and son standing close together on the roof while molecules evaporate and burn in the mineral night.

  Yan totters over to the rim of a ventilation shaft and perches on it like an emaciated gnome on the edge of a toadstool. Flare-light flickers over the fragile, concave skin of his cheeks. He sucks in a breath.

  When me and Paul put Hagan in the car, he says. I was going to do him. No mistake. We took him down Back Saltholme. Off the road. Paul drags him out of the boot. Throws him on the ground. He’s off his tits. What are we going to do with him Yan? he kept saying. What are we going to do with him?

  His voice is ragged, a saw blade in the night, luminous flame leaping behind him.

  Paul started it. Picks up a concrete slab from a pile of rubble. Lashes him over the head with it. He screams like a shrew. That’s just seen the cat. And I thought. Yeah, we’re going to kill him. Clear and cold, like sea water over me. Hagan’s rolling around on the floor. The black bag over his head. Pleading like a snotty kid. Please Yan. Please no. Please mate.

  I shivered. It was cold on the roof, heat leaking out into space.

  I’m thinking. Grab a bit of slab. Hit him a hundred times. Hit him until the whimpering stops. And there’s just a sick wet noise from inside the plastic. Rip his cock off, dripping black blood. And fucking throw it to the dog. I’m pottering about these piles of rubble. Looking for the right bit of slab. That’s going to do the job. Try a couple in my hand.

  A breeze lifts the sparse hair at his temples. I wait.

  But then I thought about that kid. Secundino. What I felt when I plugged him. Plugged him till there was nowt left. When it was finished. That high-pitched whine in my ears. And I took his boots off. Peeled them off over his socks. With the white feet under. There wasn’t a windscreen between us Dan. Not any more. Those white perfect feet. I touched them. They were my feet Danny. He was me and I was him. Or even worse than that. They were your feet. And I killed my own son.

  Seems like we’re hovering at the edge of space. Flames below us. The aurora borealis licking at the world.

  I heard Hagan whining inside the bag. There were coot feeding in the lagoon. Redshank stalking through the shallows. A beautiful day. The tide going in and out. I thought about Secundino. His bare foot, in my bare hand. How I felt that warmth dying away. Through the thin skin of his feet. And I walked. Just walked away and left him lying there.

  Like you walked away from Mount Longdon.

  Just the same. The end and the beginning.

  *

  We stay there for minutes without talking, but it’s getting cold. Yan tries to stand and I take his arm, steer him towards the stairwell. He subsides against me with relief and we work our way down the stairs, moving our limbs carefully and placing them in unison like one creature with four slow feet.

  But what happened to Hagan, after you left him there?

  Ended up in Pattaya, same as me, he mutters. Skin cancer got him in the end. Should have stayed off them sunbeds.

  I wish I’d been there, instead of Paul.

  Do you?

  Inside the building I flip the torch back on but the batteries are dying and the faint light barely smudges walls and floor. We pick our way back to the open lift shafts, thick stains of shadow in the floor. Yan stops. Takes the brass lighter out of his pocket and holds it out, the metal almost liquid in the darkness.

  Here, he says. Tried to give it you. That day at Jonah’s.

  I didn’t want it then.

  I always meant to clean it up. Get a new wick, refill it. Get it working again. All the time I was away. All the years in Pattaya. Never got round to it. Just sat in my pocket. It was only when I came back here. When I knew I was ill.

  I take it from him, feel the weight. It’s heavy, full. I close my hand around it.

  Never brought me luck, he says. Maybe it’ll bring you some.

  He places both hands on my shoulders. The weight is negligible, tiny birds perching there. The warmth drains from his face.

  What are you going to do?

  I’ve never been afraid, he says. To jump in the dark. You see, we wrought the world. With our hands. Men like me. Miners, steelmakers, shipbuilders. Like the Greek heroes.

  His face is a pale sheen in the dying torchlight, eyes and mouth swallowed in cavernous shadow.

  We would rather be full. Of guilt and story. Than be empty and blame less. But our sons are afraid. Call-centre monkeys. And pizza boys. Get their kicks on a computer. Instead of for real.

  Maybe we prefer it that way, I say, gently.

  I’ve still got free will, he says. The dice are frozen in motion. Just like the painting. The deep mahogany sheen. Of the tabletop. See, I’m not going to be a lump. In a hospice. They’re not going to give me. A fucking leaflet. About this.

  He lifts his hands from my shoulders, birds gusting into the air.

  Dad, I say. I don’t want you to go.

  I grab at his upper arms with both hands, but there is nothing under the jacket. The sleeves scrunch uselessly in my fists. Cigarettes and stale sweat, leather and blood. His face still floats there like a mask, beset by shadow.

  We took their boots, he says. But it was only a lend. I reckon they’ll be wanting them back now.

  He glances up as if straining for a sound.

  Let them in Danny, he whispers.

  Then he steps back into the blackness of the shaft and is gone. And I can hear them thudding at the window boards. The stars are clubbing at the window with blackest boots. All the dark and pitiless boots of the universe, smelling of sweaty leather and banging out a tattoo of hate.

  Julie lifts the calcified bubble of the skull, marvelling at its lightness. She turns it in her hand, admiring the stark and massive bill, imagining the brain that once burned behind the empty sockets. Then she slips it into the finds bag with the rest. She seals the bag, running her fingertips along its rim, and brushes stray crumbs of earth from the outside before climbing out of the pit for the last time. She looks down at where the raven lay. There’s no imprint in the ground, no sign at all that it ever existed.

  25. Dunlin

  (Calidris alpina)

  The summer pisses by like a gas leak only there’s nobody left to make a spark. Kelly drops in for her stuff with Miriam’s bloke and ends up taking most of the furniture. I haven’t the heart to stop her. I’m in the kitchen with my head down on the worktop, sobbing great gobfuls of self-pity. And she stands in the front door with the clean air around her and the wind blowing through from the estuary.

  See ya Danny, she says. And her voice is tender and embarrassed and sad and itching to get the hell out of there. Then she closes the door and it makes a good seal. It’s one of them white plastic sealed units. Closes me in.

  I stay here for an indeterminate time, drinking my own recycled air while the oxygen content dwindles. It’s all I can do to get down the garage for a boil-in-the-bag curry and a few packets of dry roasted and a raft of wifebeater. Under the duvet my heart is too loud, whamming in my chest like a piledriver, reverberating through my stomach.

  Let them in Danny. How many weeks is it?

  Sooner or later the social will come round, because he discharged himself from hospital and didn’t check in anywhere else. Sooner or later the police will come round, because they’ve finished stripping out Billingham House for redevelopment and found him there at the bott
om of the shaft. There is a safety net. There are checks and balances. People don’t just die and not get found.

  It’s a crap summer anyway, cold and wet with rain bearing down from the Atlantic in wave on wave. In the front garden the grass is on overdrive but it’s never dry enough to cut. We never get them hot summers any more.

  It was truer to what he wanted and I thought I owed him that. He wanted that fall into the dark to be the end. He didn’t want them scraping around in the bottom of the shaft, didn’t want the curtains at the crem and the crappy flowers outside lying on concrete, didn’t want the smoke going up.

  Didn’t want them giving me a leaflet about bereavement.

  But one morning the daylight nudges me awake and I don’t turn my face back to the wall. One morning I can hear next door’s dog above my own heartbeat, and their new baby roaring somewhere in between cat and gargoyle.

  I’m starving hungry.

  I told myself it was truer to what he wanted but the truth is I was afraid. I was afraid they’d search the bottom of the shaft and find nothing. Them white shinbones in the peat on East Falkland, after all. Would that have been better? Sparks flying up and the tracks dwindling in the darkness. Shrivelling away to nothing.

  I crack that door open and the wind shoulders it against me. Green wind loping through from the estuary, brinefields and rain and the sea on its breath. That dog barking next door. Sounds like he’s trying to batter his way out. I let myself into the front garden and breathe.

  I’m in Tesco at White House Farm. Get myself a take-out from their coffee shop. Full-fat rocket fuel with an extra shot. It’s proper flinty black stuff. Liquid obsidian. Thunder bangs overhead.

  Shopping is dangerous when you’re this hungry. I’ve got punnets of overripe strawberries with that blousy cream-soda smell, fresh flour-dusted bread from the bakery, biteable as Kelly’s flesh. Two pots of crunchy peanut butter. I stand in line at the checkout behind an Asian woman with a little boy and a mountain of a weekly shop. The checkout monkey pings down her shopping too quick and she’s getting flustered, struggling to keep up with the packing. The boy grabs a chocolate bar and puts it on the conveyor.

  No Mahmoud, she says. Picks it up and puts it back. The boy starts whinging. Please mam. Away, go on.

  I unload my stuff from the basket and she turns and looks at me. She’s got too much eyeliner on. It’s caked in the wrinkles round her eyes.

  Hiya Danny, she says. Brings me up short and it takes me a minute to recognize her.

  Raz. It’s been a few year, like.

  Away mam. It’s only one chocky bar.

  Go on, she says. Have your chocolate. Chucks the bar onto the conveyor with the rest.

  Outside in the car park she manhandles her shopping bags.

  You need a hand getting them to the car?

  Nah, we’re on the bus.

  Let me give you a lift.

  She looks at me, dark headscarf framing her sharp face. The eyes are weathered. Saltglazed from the sea.

  Go on then, she says.

  I load the bags into the back of the van, open up the front for them to climb in.

  It’s only a two-seater, says Raz.

  I’m riding shotgun, yells Mahmoud. Aren’t I Danny? He climbs in and wedges himself between the seats, above the handbrake. Razia shrugs.

  How old are you Mahmoud? I ask him as we drive. He’s got a brown moon face and his hair spiked up with gel.

  Eight and three-hundred-and-sixty-four three-hundred-and-sixty-fifths, he says.

  Ah, right. So that means it’s your birthday on Saturday.

  No stupid. Tomorrow.

  Tomorrow?

  Yes.

  Where are we going? I ask Raz.

  Dad’s house, she says.

  I never knew you were back there.

  He had a stroke a couple of month back. We moved in with him.

  How’s he getting on?

  He’s not good.

  We pull up outside and I help them lug bags to the front door. She puts the Yale in the lock and cracks it open like a secret.

  Shh, she says to Mahmoud. Don’t wake your grandad.

  I’ll be off, I say. Turn to go.

  Dan.

  Her fingers are on my forearm, gripping the cuff of my jacket. I look down at them and she flushes.

  How did we lose touch? she says.

  Dunno. Guess it was when you and Sean moved away. Same sort of time I got together with Kelly. Both had other fish to fry.

  We were both pretty crap at keeping in contact, she says, wrinkling her nose.

  I thought your dad disapproved of Sean. More or less kicked you out, didn’t he?

  She grins at me, tongue between her teeth. The old Raz.

  Yeah, well he needs me now. And he hasn’t got any choice about it.

  Well, give him my regards.

  Dan.

  The hand is still there.

  He’d like to see you, she said. It’d do him good. Not that he’ll be able to talk to you, but it’ll still do him good.

  Okay, I say.

  She leads the way through the house and up to the front bedroom. The house hasn’t changed much and it feels odd, just twenty years more threadbare. The thunderstorm that’s been threatening suddenly breaks and it’s hailing outside, door handles rattling and green stormlight at the window like ferns. I think of that afternoon at Jonah’s.

  Mr Shahid’s propped up in the bed and there’s a telly on in the corner but it’s hard to tell whether he’s looking at it or not. The eyes are dark and liquid but not particularly focused on anything.

  Dad, says Raz. It’s Danny, from the Cape. You remember Danny? Used to do his homework here, scoff the frozen pizzas out of the freezer.

  Mmm, he says.

  You took me to Darlo station once, I say. When I was doing a runner with the takings.

  The limpid eyes move above the little moustache. I don’t know where to look, end up half watching some bollocks on the telly. And then his hand slides into mine like a child’s, the palm dry and crackling like brown paper. And above the miracle of his body working and the heat of his hand I don’t need the Southern Ocean and I don’t need crazy birds on South Georgia. We’re going down with the ship, with the green fingers of the rain, and the house is drowning but it’s a good sort of drowning.

  We’re going to the beach tomorrow, yells Mahmoud from the front room as I leave. For my birthday.

  I peer round the door and find him plugged into some console game, wasting oversize space bugs.

  What, in the rain?

  It’s going to be sunny, he says. We can have candy floss. You can give us a lift if you want.

  So the next morning we’re sat in the van on the front at Seaton watching rain bounce and boil on the bonnet and the steam from a flask of coffee grazing the windscreen. Stormclouds are bullying and brawling like cattle, blue heifers of the sea with splinters and rifts of pure brightness between. Cracks in the hairline of the world.

  It’s not fair, says Mahmoud.

  He’s bought a penny floater from one of the tat shops but it’s sitting unused in the footwell.

  Actually, I say. I’ll tell you a secret.

  What? he says.

  No. Maybe I’d better not.

  He thumps me on the arm and it hurts.

  Tell me.

  Ah, go on then. Human beings, you know, are actually waterproof. You can go out in the rain and all that happens is you get wet.

  Right, he says.

  Opens the door.

  You be in goal, he says.

  The beach and sea and sky are one surface running with silver tide and rain, the three of us walking on water, walking on a skin of mercury. Soaked to the fucking core. Mahmoud runs ahead, booting that penny floater around with the hair plastered down to his skull. I look at Raz, a triangle of face in the headscarf, her slap running in the rain. She looks like herself.

  How’s Sean? I say. I was surprised when you two got together. Always
thought you’d go to university.

  He left me. Some girl who worked in the cab office.

  Right. Sorry.

  Ah, it doesn’t matter.

  Remember how you used to say there were a zillion different maybes, all hanging around in the wind.

  Aye. It feels like that when you’re sixteen.

  But not now.

  She shrugs and smiles sideways.

  Maybe there’s just one, she says. And the others are make believe.

  Or maybe you grab one, I say. And the rest just shrivel up.

  It’s the same difference, she says. In the end. A human being is just about the weirdest, most improbable thing you can get. The chance of me being in that bar at the same time as Sean, the chance of him deciding to come over. Millions to one. And without all that Mahmoud would never have been. He’s improbability made solid.

  Aye.

  What happened to your dad? she said.

  Well, you know he went out to Thailand.

  I heard something about it.

  He died out there, not long ago.

  Sorry to hear that. What are you going to do now?

  I dunno. Might buy a boat, take it down to Whitby.

  You got the money?

  Not really.

  We carry on along the empty beach. Rain tatters our senses on a vacuous wind, sending car alarms off in the town. Raz slips her hand through my arm, pale fingers on my sodden sleeve. Mahmoud looks round.

  Dan, he yells.

  I finger the lighter in my pocket. Improbability made solid. I’d forgotten it was there.

  The hand slips away from my arm.

  Danny, she says. It’s good to see you, but there’s no way I’m looking for a relationship right now. No way.