by David Wood
Maybe they are, and maybe they aren't; that's immaterial. I enjoy my occasional drag, and that's healthy enough for me right now. When the doctors tell me I'm riddled with lung cancer and have three months to live, well by then it'll be too late anyway, so I'll probably start chain-smoking my home-rolled Virginia leaf and taking nicotine intravenously.
Stifling another yawn, I knuckled the ache out of the bones in the base of my back and stretched, rolling the muscles of my shoulders. I was exhausted, and it felt as if the last week had been an endless series of to-ing and fro-ing between Gateshead and the pianos of the civilised world. London and back twice in the space of three days, and all aches twelve hundred miles could inflict centred on the two-inch square of vertebrae above my belt. Two times over. Once to Golden Square to lay down six tracks worth offree fall backing piano for Tachyon Web's Live And Unplugged session on Virgin 1215 though what a Tech-Metal band wanted with a jazz pianist I shudder to think and then again to Charlotte Street to audition for the resident piano slot on one of those night-time chat shows The Channel 4 Gurus have been rehashing ever since The Last Resort went its own sweet way.
This marathon was served up with a Jazz Club chaser, backing a band called Poetic Justice, and a late night poker session with the boys after the performance.
Still, to misuse a cliché; mine is not to reason why, mine is just to grab the money with both hands and make like one little Linford. If they are prepared to pay me to play, I'll play. I'm all for prostituting what little talent God gave me.
The lights changed again. This time I went with them.
Indicating left, I swung out onto the Old Durham Road.
I hate cities. I always have.
Gateshead at night is a dying animal. The streets have emptied. The gangs of kids have gone home to bed, and the older, more dangerous ones have risen from their pits to prowl, attracted by the danger-pheromones drifting off lonely car stereos. The bag ladies and the old soaks have crawled back under their shopping trolleys and park benches, taking their bottles and bad breath with them. Women walk in pairs because one in three streetlights don't work. Every avenue has its own boarded up windows. They've even built a garage on Lover's Lane. One more strut from the scaffold supporting my childhood that has been dismantled by greed. A second-hand fix-it workshop cut into the arches beneath the Railway Bridge, its rust-buckets spilling out and down the alley where the good kids and I was one of them were supposed to emerge winking and wisecracking when they had: 'Been there, and done that.'
Cats and dogs, all slack skin and stuck-out bones, run wild, scavenging after whatever scraps the bins have to offer. The litter looks more at home on the road than the cars do. More common, too.
As a place, it reeks of abuse, filth and decay, and I have to call it home.
Two
The road curled around into the onset of the local labyrinth. Nothing as elaborate as Daedalus' creation for the Cretan king; it mazed through avenues of redbrick and cement up away from the harbour of the Tyne Valley into the avenues around Saltwell Park and home.
I wasn't lying when I said I hate cities; there are few things I am more passionate about. I hate the lies they offer with their numbers and bodies close packed. I hate the innocence they stole from me, and from others like me, pretending to offer the world in return. I know how it feels to walk the streets and feel the brittle and naive dreams of youth crack between the soles of your shoes and the chill hardness of the pavement. I walked alone, surrounded by people smiling because they weren't alone. I survived. So many others didn't. So many more won't.
The music changed. I stopped listening. Noise was noise. I was thinking about Aimee and the sort of day she must have had at the Arnessen Refuge, battered children and all. She knew my feelings. She wasn't hard enough to cope with the sorts of abuse those bastards dished out. I'd be there when things got nasty, and on her first day I had made a promise to myself; not a single 'I told you so.'
It must have been the absence of other cars on the road, or the repetitious regularity of the twisting and twining road where it followed the familiar contours of the houses, the built-up monotony of the cityscape all around. I started to drift. Felt the car drifting, too. Riding the white line. Faster than was safe in the rain. Yawning, I corrected for my lapsing concentration. Knuckled the sleep out of my eyes.
'Oh, don't you dare. . . Don't you bloody well dare.'
That was my first thought when I saw him standing at the roadside. One hundred yards away, give or take. An inch-high dark stain in the perfect circle of the Midget's spotlights that the wipers couldn't sluice away. His squalid gabardine coat tattered in the wind like black rags. Streamers of cotton and wool lapped at his legs, swam around his lower half like a terrier snapping at his heels. He was staring straight at me through the full-beam, waving a bottle of something, and all I could think was:
The bastard thinks he's playing chicken!
I don't know where it came from. It was as if a bolt-hole opened in the back of my head to let in this one suddenly cold certainty. The crazy old bastard was psyching himself up for a race his rickety old pegs couldn't hope to win.
'You want to kill yourself,' I muttered, trying to shake off the soupy blanket that tiredness was draping over my head. 'Fine, but I don't need you on my conscience.'
His face was split by a grim parody of a smile; a rictus that had to be a trick of the peculiar light. As the distance rapidly narrowed, the hazy edges of my perception hardened and the visceral world the real world trapped out there on the other side of the glass snapped into focus. Inside the bizarre chiaroscuro the old man seemed oddly content to meet his maker, both legs shattering on the radiator grille even as his body was tossed up into air like rag doll.
We looked at each other, sharing the same terrible token of recognition; murderer and victim. I tried to convince myself it was the dazzle reflecting back from the glare of the headlights, but it wasn't. The rain blurred the sight, as if he were losing some shape. His eyes seemed to be pleading with me to put my foot down on the accelerator and plough straight through him. I couldn't do it. Without thinking I was slamming my left foot down on the brake and praying a litany:
‘Pleasegodpleasegodpleasegodplea’
To whatever deity or angel watched over bums and piano players at three o'clock on a Saturday morning.
The bite of the rubber on the road was a short-lived sensation, replaced by the sickening glide of the wheels locking as the water on the road undermined the little tread that hadn't worn away. The Midget was sliding away from me before I had the chance to start wrestling with the wheel.
My prayer had fallen on deaf ears; not that I should have expected anything more.
He stepped out into the road and stopped, holding his hands and bottle out as if to cushion the impact or turn the free-wheeling momentum of the Midget aside. His rakish, chicken-bone skeleton had no realistic chance of succeeding at either, and the taut rictus he wore in place of a smile said he knew as much.
The speedometer was arresting; a hideously graceful fall from sixty down to zero. The car wasn't slowing.
'Why me?' I wanted to scream I was screaming, but I couldn't lay claim to any particular sounds that might have been deciphered by sharper ears than mine.
And then he was punched high into the blue-black sky and the only sound I could hear was laughter.
Three
The thought went from gas to solid inside my head. I was sure I had killed him. I couldn't move; not even to find out. Suddenly I was the victim, sitting in stunned agony after the battering, waiting for the sirens, the police and the ambulances to come and pick up the pieces.
But my hands plotted rebellion, popping the lock on the door and opening it. Before the shakes could take hold they were levering me up out of the driver’s seat and I was planting my feet on the road, dimly aware of the presence of other sounds now. Music. The tape was still playing, but what, I couldn't tell. Other cars in other streets, loud enough to be he
ard in the tempered quiet that seemed to have swallowed the entirety of the road, from the hotel on the corner right back to the lights. Muted televisions feeding the host of insomniacs behind closed doors. But no sirens.
I wiped the blood from my eyes.
After hitting the old wino, the car had gone into spin and instead of doing the right thing and trying to steer into it, I was screaming and pulling against the momentum of the fishtailing Midget, which took her into a tighter arc. I was suddenly sure she was going to roll. Blind runners of panic succeeded in shutting outeverything as the car span through a series of wild three-sixties ending with the bone-jarring impact of her front-ending a lamppost.
The seatbelt probably saved my life. Without it, the whiplash would almost certainly have thrown me headfirst through the windscreen. As it was, the snap of the seatbelt cut across my neck, virtually garrotting me as I was thrown about in the driver's seat. My forehead slammed down into the steering wheel. I was thrown back into the bucket seat and suddenly I was seeing the world through a red filter. Blood in my eyes. Even as I was going back I felt myself being catapulted into the steering wheel again as if I weighed nothing at all. Less than nothing. At least one rib cracked as I bounced between the harnesses extremes like a human crash test dummy. I felt it splinter inwards. It should have been agony, but I must have been tripping on adrenaline or something because all I felt was numbness. The only twinges seemed to be when my breath hitched on the inward pull. Like a stitch, almost, but one of the splinters must have punctured a lung because each successive breath was that little bit more difficult to draw than the last.
As if my lungs were starting to fill with blood. Or starting a gradual collapse.
My morbid imagination was busy constructing cemetery thoughts even as my hands committed their coup: Haemorrhaging. Internal bleeding. Punctured lung. Rest in pieces.
Out of the driver's seat, I collapsed. I forced myself to my feet, sagged, needing the car to lean on.
Blood guttered in my eyes. I thumbed it away without actually breaking the red washing filter.
He was lying in a puddle in the middle of the tarmac, dissected by the white line; a broken doll. The streetlight caught half of his body and threw the remainder into shadowy relief. The old wino looked small and pathetic. Broken by the fall. Crumpled. Leaking stuffing. His gabardines were ripped and torn and blackened by the blood and water soaking into them. Red and wet where they had pulled around his stomach. A laceration slit his belly from rib to groin. Opened him like a textured map of corruption. A secret glimpse at the anatomy of this place.
He had died in a whorish sprawl, legs splayed inviting the next traveller to drive between them. I couldn't stand to look.
Thank God he was faceless. The tarpaulin of shadows negated the dead set of his features. He owned nothing; no eyes, no nose, no mouth to breath through the thickening clot of blackness. Nothing.
We must have looked like the ugly remnants of a gunfight. Two gunslingers. One dead with a modern day bullet through the head; the other walking wounded. Hurt badly, but not down. Not yet.
Forcing my legs into motion and I hurt I went to where he had fallen. It was one of those forever sensations, walking, walking, and not seeming to move or get any closer. Each step was one on a road littered with upturned nails, where knives were driven into my chest, and steps were taken at the expense of my heaving lungs. I could feel myself drowning on my own blood, my breathing locked in an ever decreasing cycle as my lungs’ capacity dwindled. Then I was on top of him, looking into the ruination carved by the accident. A hole had been punched into his neck by the bottle. The bottleneck had broken off and stayed lodged inside the wound, gouting pulses of blood as I sank to my knees. The stub of broken glass was working like an improvised catheter intended to let the blood run free; but even that died.
There was nothing to be gained by checking for vital signs, but I needed to be doing something. Hesitantly, I rested my palm against the dead man's cheek. Felt a coldness so deeply entrenched it couldn't possibly have been less than two minutes old. I flinched; I didn't want to, but at the same time I did. Looking at him, I saw how old he was, and how frail. 'Oh, my God. . .' It went from a whisper to a scream. His eyes stayed open, seemed to be looking me straight in the eye. Penetrating. I wanted to apologise, say I was sorry. I wanted to hear him say it was all right. It wasn't my fault. It was an accident. But even between us, we didn't have the breath to spare for so many words. We shared blood, seeping from the rags wrapped around his torn chest into the material covering my own. We shared blood, little else.
Standing again was a sheer agony of sharp gasps. My lungs had virtually nothing left to give or take. For a moment I honestly thought I wasn't going to be able to do it, that I wasn't going to be able to stay on my feet even if I could stand. I was going to fall and in minutes be dead, side by side with him, but then I was up and moving unsteadily back towards the car. The entire bonnet had folded around the listing lamppost. It looked like a falling angel, wings spread to catch itself. I stopped twice, more than twice, needing the support of parked cars, street signs and the lamppost-angel before I collapsed back into the driver's seat.
The cellular phone wasn't in the charger. I fumbled open the glove compartment. It wasn't in there either. It had fallen under the passenger seat. I dialled 999 and listened impatiently to the ringing.
When the emergency operator finally asked which service, my breathing had become so laboured I could barely phrase the word ambulance. I told her where I was. What had happened. Then I dropped the phone, closed my eyes and waited for the sirens or suffocation, whichever won the race to be with me.
(When I'm With You I'm) All Alone
One
Waking was bitter-sweet. Aimee was sat on the edge of the bed when I opened my eyes; hiding behind her tears as she shuffled and dealt the cards. Forty Two immram cards, hand painted and arranged in a circular spread with her heart's desire at its core, tools to occupy her fretting fingers. The sun came streaming in through the fly-window, though it wasn't the sun that she hid from. She ran slender fingers through her hair, impatiently ruffling the peroxide white-blonde bob so it danced across her bare shoulders; a savage reminder of paradise. I tried to smile. She wasn't looking at me.That was a blessing in itself. She didn't see the way my lips betrayed me with a twist.
She shifted, looked thoughtfully at the unfolding pattern of islands, from harbour to landfall through the realms of many colours, terrors, glass and wonders, with the nameless maiden from the shores of Tir nan Beo, the Everliving Realms, her soul guide through the repugnantly innocent repetitions of greens and golds and blues and reds fanning out over the bed covers. Aimee supported her thoughtful face with fingertips beneath the chin. I tried to guess, from the changing set of her mouth, which card was under her gaze at which moment: the Revolving Beast, with spirit antlers rooted in the skull of a great hound, a fantastic beast with the body of a stag and a fine white tail that evaporated into a mist of transformations, hound to lion to eagle in a cycle of incarnations; Cannibal Horses, in battle on a plain above a sea of crimson; the Shuttered Door, a plateau on a pillar of stone, no approach to it save a locked door at the pillar's foot; the Green and Burning Tree, in leaf with a foliage of flame; Sorrow, a grief-stricken woman lamenting on the cliff edge, the familiar crimson sea and the engraved pillar-stone with its face of primal misery at her side. . .
I knew Aimee wasn't going to say, 'Oh, Declan,' when she saw I was awake; she wasn't an 'Oh, Anyone,' sort of woman. Despite the way she made herself look black Levi 501's cut off to make culottes, black hiking socks and eighteen hole Doc Martins, cheap white tee-shirt and black waistcoat elaborately embroidered with dragon-headed endless knots that somehow suggested change within themselves without physically changing she was far too sensible for anything even remotely like that. I sank back into the bolstered pillow, content to watch her play out the hand, tears glistening in my eyes even as she blinked her own away.
Aimee wasn't beautiful by any stretch of the imagination; her nose was slightly too long, her complexion slightly too waxy, her feet slightly too big, frame slightly too tall. Every little thing about her was untamed. Raw, fresh and refreshing. She chewed on her bottom lip as she read some sort of meaning into the immrama.
Her hands moved with a deceptively fluid sureness, gathering up the immram cards, shuffling and recreating the immrama three times more before she tidied the cards and folded them inside the turquoise reading rag. Three times the Island of Sorrow was turned over at her harbour, preventing Aimee from asking any more about her chosen journey. Maybe hospital wards gave off bad karma, or something. I don't know. I won't pretend that I believe in that hocus-pocus New Age shit. I don't. But she does and the coincidence of three Sorrows affected her badly. Her eyes had narrowed, hiding the blue, and her breathing was coming short and fast.
I tried to lever myself into the sitting position, but the pain in my ribs flared and I sank back into the pillow again. I must have greyed out for a moment; two heartbeats. That, or I closed my eyes against the pain, so when I looked her way again Aimee was already looking at me.
There was so much in that look. So much heartbreak experienced in that one shared second. And I was right; there was no 'Oh, Declan,' to greet me as I returned to the land of the living. No kiss. My eyes said, 'I love you.' Hers, 'You betrayed me.'
The pain in my chest wasn't all physical. I sniffed. Aimee did her best to smile. 'Some pair,' she said, wiping at her eyes and almost unconsciously hiding the deck of cards. She knew my feelings about her New Age crutch.
