It’s hard to believe that was only a month ago. Time grinds when you’re all alone.
There was nee fanfare when the moment came. Nee popping corks either, mind, and nee-one to tell that I’m not coming back to this shite hole. Just a kick up the scut and me bus fare home, and then there’s just me and me thoughts and then the world suddenly pouring in like the walls I’ve built around us have just sprung a leak. Loads of bloody leaks. The world streaming into us.
I’m walking out through the foyer across the car park out the front, past the trimmed little hedge and the turning circle for the mini-buses that’ll soon be bringing in the next lot of gobshites, and then left out into the road by which point I’m going Adios gimlets. Adios the bloody lot of you.
And that’s it. Five years is ower and gone in the time it takes to draw breath and I’m stood there facing forward, thinking about nowt much but putting one foot in front of the other.
Smalls steps towards a brighter future, all being well.
It’s warm out, proper warm, full summer an that, and the air is so fresh I can taste it. I can bite crunchy chunks out of it. The fresh air tastes lush. Luxurious. I suck it in and feel it blowing away the lingering smells of stale farts, cheap hash, buckets of bleach and steaming bowls of liver and bloody onions.
It cleans us from the inside out, this fresh air. The world smells good. Smells of freedom.
It’s quiet out here an all. It’s not like how you’ve read about, where cons on the street are bombarded by the noise and speed of the outside world so much that they want to turn and run back inside, cowering. Na. No way. It’s inside where you’re bombarded. All that bang and clatter. All them braggarts and blowhards whose howls and bellows merge into ghostly echoes at night, the echoes of scared little boys rebounding in the corridors and rec rooms and disinfected dining halls.
Fresh air and silence. Bloody lovely.
I get to moving, glad to finally be left alone at last.
I walk.
I walk without my shoes squeaking and without feeling edgy or para.
I take deep breaths and I walk in a straight line along an empty road that leads back into town. I’ve not walked this far in a straight line without some hand at me elbow or breath down me neck for bloody yonks.
I could get a bus but I’m not going to. I never got them before and I’m not about to start now. If you can’t fetch yersel somewhere by foot, then it’s not worth fetching to. Or you’re a lazy get, in which case you should get out more, like.
And these boots are made for walking, marrer.
It’s not long before I’ve got a nice sweat on. I could walk for miles without tiring, me. Always have done. It’s in me blood.
I take me top off and drape it round me neck to give me pits an airing.
I just want to keep walking past it all, keep on ganning down the streets, across the cobbles and through the town and out the other bloody side, out into the dark dense woodlands, just get mesel away from this bloody place and on up to far-flung fields and hills and moors, keep on walking all the way up to the sky.
Because this town’s not for me. Never was really. I prefer to be on me tod and that’s hard to do when there’s nebby nose gadgies everywhere.
Aye. It’s not like in the fillums. There’s nee words of wisdom and clip round the ear-hole from the friendly screw. There’s nee greeting party out here. Not for me, anyway. Nee lasses to snog us, nee new born bairns with leering Winston whatsit faces and heads to wet; nee fat cigars or slaps on the back.
Neebody’s missed this lad.
But there’s somewhere to gan though. They’ve got us in this place so they can keep an eye on us. It’s one of me parole conditions. I signed a bit of paper. A contract. I made promises. All that blether.
The estate where me new flat is, is through the town and up the hill to a jumble of red bricks and dog shit.
I’ve been here already mind, up on day release with the case worker, then after that with the re-assimilation worker and then with the social worker and then finally with Dickhead Derek my probation coordinator, a right tit of a man with nostril hairs like spider’s legs and a proper bad case of dandruff. It’s like, do you not have mirrors in your house or summat. Sort it out, you bell-end.
Aye, cos they’ve been easing us back in slowly. Or easing us out. Really it’s like going from one prison to another, a big one to a small one, but at least I can come and go now. At least I’m away from all them povvy gimlets inside.
So there’s been tests to do and forms to fill in just to get us to here. Hods of them. Bloody hundreds actually. It’s a good job I’ve been working on me reading and writing otherwise they could have had us signing owt they fancied. And there’s been one-to-ones and head to heads an all; assessments and interviews and medicals.
Because there are channels to go through, they say.
Processes and protocols, they say.
Conditions and that.
Mebbes they just want to keep their conscience clean when they unleash us into this town. This town of bloody ghosts and shite and nightmares. Putting us back in the past like this. Well, it can’t be good can it. I’d rather they sent us somewhere else like, where me family name wasn’t known. Switzerland or summat. Or Middlesbrough mebbe.
The flat they’ve put us in is an insult to humans and pigs alike, but I’m not arsed, me. At least I get to lock the doors mesel for once. Got me own key an everything. And anyroad, I’m not stopping long. This is the thought I cling to: I’m not stopping long.
So it’s up the hill I go. Up the hill and into the estate where broken windows watch us, and eyeballs blink from darkened doorways and footsteps disappear down grubby little snickets. It’s a right rabbit warren, this place.
Aye. This flat is a proper insult, and that’s exactly what I telt them when they brought us here a month or two back, all of them cooing like pigeons, gannin ooh look at this John you can see the dual carriageway from your bedroom window, and me going, big wow – and by the way it’s John-John not John. Take that name and double it.
Still though. It’s better than that povvy half-way house in town that they had us in at weekends. Just about.
Christ almighty – what a place that was though. Worse than being in prison. Mould and damp and more locks than the big house. Full of winderlickers too. Proper nutty, some of that lot. Proper pervs.
So four year into the sentence and they get us out on the day release. One day a week for starters. Then after a bit it’s alternate weekends, stopping at the half-way house with the jalkies.
Then after that it’s every weekend. Then it’s every weekend and Wednesday nights. So, three nights a week. And that’s been going on for the past however long.
Easing us out. Easing us back in.
Nice and easy, John-John lad, they telt us. Keep a cool head. Nee-one’s out to get you no more. We’re here to help you lad. Got a nice little flat for you to help you find your feet.
Help you whatsit. Aye – assimilate.
So now they’ve got us up in this flat on the estate with its broken fences, the kiddies on bikes and mingers loitering in skirts that only just cover their barely hairy fannys. There are always lads kicking about, with this helmet hair they never used to have when I went in, and everyone talking on mobile phones, looking like they’re yapping into thin air like proper numpties. They all look the same as they ever did but yet different somehow. Like they’re one step removed from the place I remember. Like they’ve fast forwarded themsels into the future and left me behind to try and make sense of it all.
Cars flash by and I finger the key in my pocket. I’ve got me bag on my back, with me books and baccy in there.
Mind, for all this estate’s faults I’m glad to be away from the case workers and all them nebs in suits. They’re nee better than the screws in Deerbolt, Low Newton, Hassockfield or any of them places. Worse sometimes. At least the screws make no bones about not giving a shit about us. Them social workers have to pretend
to care and that fake sincerity proper boils my piss.
I gan through the arch and up the stairwell. Put the key in the door.
Live here, they telt us. Live here, it’s lovely. Your own place. Look – you can see the dual carriageway from your window.
I can’t live here, I telt them.
Why not?
It’s not my way. It’s not what we do.
You’ll be fine.
And though it pains us to say it, I say it anyway: looker, I’ve never lived in a bloody house before.
Well beggars can’t be choosers, John.
I’m nee beggar, like. And it’s bloody John-John. I telt you already. Take that name and double it.
Sorry. John-John. We didn’t mean you were a beggar.
I should have telt them I was sick of being kept in smelly boxes. I should have telt them how I’d rather be anywhere but here, how confinement is even worse for us than it is for everyone else and I’d rather kip in a ditch. How despite the way I talk and what me file says and what they already think about us, I’m not one of them charver kids that spent his life indoors eating crisps and watching telly while mummy sucked off podgy truckers for money upstairs. I should have let them know how I spent me years in the fields in the fresh air, just as nature intended, just as generations did before us, and if that makes us an animal, then so be it. Then I’m an animal.
But I didn’t say that. I just sucked it up and took the key and signed the forms and nodded in all the right places. Yes sir, no sir, kiss me rusty sheriff’s badge sir.
The stairwell is dark and dank and acidic in me nostrils.
Indoors it’s nee better. The flat is shadowy and sparse and fusty, barely fit for vermin. It’s exactly the type of place me Mam would screw her nose up at, shaking her head and gannin look at them poor bastards stuck in them brick boxes like bloody hamsters. It’s not right, that.
Because Mam was a woman of the fields and woods, and a lady of the road an all, a proper traveller from good travelling stock, and she always kept the vans spotless, whatever was gannin on. Whatever me Dad done. Whatever he’d been up to she’d always be there behind him, sweeping up the broken glass and mopping up the stains.
I turn on the light and the wall crackles. Dodgy electrics.
There’s a halo of flies around the bare light bulb and some weird stain on the carpet. A faint smell of shite in the air makes us feel right at home. There’s nowt much else to see. Just an armchair and a crappy MDF unit in the living room, a bedroom with a mattress and some blankets on it, and a kitchen with a fridge and a cooker and a microwave with nee door on it. Mouse winnets on the floor.
Oh aye, and a view of the dual carriageway.
I chuck down my stuff and do a rollie. I get up again and light it off the blue flame from the hob in the kitchen, then sit down and inhale.
Well, I think.
I’m out, I think.
Finally out.
Then I exhale.
*
We’ve always been short and stout, the Dunnes. Built like bullets, me Dad always said. It’s in the breeding, he reckoned. In the bloodline.
Land-grafters, most of us. The men and the women. Agriculturalists and farm labourers. Scythers and bailers. Wood cutters and pail-fetchers.
Good people; strong and stoic people, our bodies compacted from the years of stooping and planting; compressed from generations of being near to the ground that fed and clothed us.
There was no duckering or chorring amongst our ancestors. No. The Dunnes could be trusted. Country folk knew us. Knew we were different.
Your Gran and Granda moved around for seven or eight or more months a year following the seasonal work. They’d pick apples down in Somerset and hops over in Kent. They’d help with the harvest in Hampshire and when the going was good they bought and sold horses at the fairs of Cambridgeshire and Cumbria. And when it was bad they knocked on farmhouse doors offering labour for bait, milk and somewhere to stop.
These were the travellers that the farmers who are old enough to remember speak of fondly: them that wafted in with the first warm breeze of spring and hitched up and out with the turning of the leaves, leaving no trace except for a stale patch or two of grass where the kids had put up a couple of makeshift hazelwood bender tents.
It was the coal that brought us to the north-east. Before they had me the Dunnes tried their hands at sea-coaling up in Northumberland. Lynemouth Bay, I believe. They worked the tide with nowt but a rented horse and a rotten auld salty cart, knee-deep in the swell day after day. They lived on steamed kelp and limpets and the blackness did stay in their skin and under their fingernails for a long time after. This was when coal washed up on the beach of course. Back before it all changed.
Me Dad – your Granda – Cooper had not long married your Grandma Pearl of the Smith lot. There were gypsy Smiths all ower the place so I’d not bother trying to track down that side of your family if you value your time. There’s a Tinker Smith or a Tommy Smith or a John Smith on any site you’d care to name, and they’d all lay claim to be your relative if they thought there was summat in it for them.
Well then. Fate must have brought them together because they were married that winter and by the next summer they were working the eastern shoreline, from Teesside to the crumbling coasts of County Durham, up past Wearmouth and the Tyne and on to the black beaches up as far as Lynemouth. Back-breaking times.
It was the fields and meadows of the land of the Prince Bishops that they liked best though, and that was where they decided to stop for a while, labouring patchwork land that was waiting to be ploughed and turned and tilled. From then on they were Cooper and Pearl Dunne: no fixed abode, but plenty of places to stay.
And stay they did.
And that’s where a part of you comes from, my son.
*
I get mesel a job the second day I’m out. Piece of piss. It’s no thanks to the spanners down at the parole board mind, who tell us I’m a special case. Those are the words that they use: special case.
A special case that they’re monitoring closely on account of all that happened. Load of bloody bollards, the lot of it. I can’t wipe me scut without being assessed first. And according to them I can’t get a bloody job without their say-so either.
Your reputation precedes you John-John, they go.
I said nowt to this. Just let them speak, like.
Finding work may not be easy, they said. You’re known around the town. And beyond the town too. People know your name, John-John. They remember you. They remember what happened. And if they don’t remember what happened they still remember the Wisdoms.
So I stood up.
What are you saying, like.
It’s alright John-John. There’s no need to get upset. It’s just going to take time that’s all. Time to readjust and slowly re-integrate you back into mainstream society.
The silly twats. They knew fine well I’d not been a part of any of that in the first place. Or they would if they’d bothered to have read my case notes and not just them newspaper clippings they’ve got filed away. It was circumstance that put us away – they know that. They even telt us as much.
It’s not your fault John-John, they said. It was your domestic situation. The abuse. Mac.
Aye. Well.
You know, your case was quite well publicised they said, their voices all greasy in their throats.
Folk have heard of you John-John, they said. You and your father.
Oh, you’re off your heads you lot are, I telt them. One minute you’re telling us I need to get me head down and get a job to keep on the bloody whatsit – straight and narrer – the next you’re telling us to do nowt. Well, listen to this: I’ll get a job mesel. And it’ll be a good one and all. And I’ll keep me bloody head down and I’ll pay hods of bloody taxes and you can mark it down as repayment for the rent up in the big house. And don’t be bringing me auld man into it neither. He’s got nowt to do with this.
OK John-John.
OK John-John, I mimicked, the dumpling-arsed, grey-faced numpties.
Off your bloody heads.
Then I got up and left.
And it’s me that’s laughing now because here I am, a couple of days out, and I’ve already got mesel a job selling bloody ice creams for Arty Vicari to the bairns around the town.
So just to re-cap in case any one is monitoring us even more closely than I thought: I’ve got a flat, a job and I’ve got big plans. Git big bloody plans to get as far away from here as possible. So far away you’ll never see us again.
So what do you lot think of that then?
Aye – just what I thought. Stunned into silence.
*
We were stopping on a site a few miles out of town, up on the side of a valley flooded with bluebells when I met your Dad in the beer garden of The Shoulder Of Mutton during the earliest days of summer.
I’m no good with dates. It was the year that England won at the football, I remember that much, a long summer of endless possibility. For three long golden months it did feel like the sun was shining down on our own green corner of the world.
The only travelling we did that season was by foot. It was a time of cook-outs and long walks over the auld viaduct and along the meandering river bank paths down into town.
Mac showed me new places. He brought the landscape alive. He could do that just by pointing out something other people wouldn’t notice. Animal tracks funnelling their way through the long grass, the fallen limb of a tree scratched to pieces by a passing badger.
Betimes we’d take all day strolling through the buttercup patches and freshly-shorn fields, clouds of dust ballet-dancing over the stubble and the hum of distant hay-balers hanging heavy in the air as we followed the Wear down into the city. We’d stop off at The Shakespeare or The Dun Cow for a drink or two before getting chips or a roast pork sandwich from the indoor market that we’d eat on the long slow walk back, me arm looped through Mac’s, his thick muscles pressing against my thin crook.
Pig Iron Page 2
