Head Injuries

by Conrad Williams

  The links with my friends didn't appear reduced in any way. If anything, they were stronger than the last time I'd seen them, though I couldn't be sure if this was anything to do with the fact that we'd outgrown our petty phase, or the focus of our conviction had shifted to this new crisis.

  A watery sun was doing its best to warm me through the window. I shifted slightly, trying to ignore my back's protest but the pain was too intense. I grunted and felt woozy again, close to fainting. The bus driver's eyes filled his rear-view mirror, black with intent. I felt guilty, like a schoolboy caught defacing the seats.

  Somehow I got back to the guest house though I had to stop every few yards and wait for my dizziness to pass. Once inside, I took off my clothes-apart from my T-shirt, which had stuck to my back-and stood under a hot shower until I was able to peel the material away from my skin. My back felt bloated with pain. I washed it gingerly, then rinsed the smoke and beer out of my hair and skin. Uncomfortable as I was, it was heartening to feel cleansed of last night's excesses.

  I crumbled some crackers into a mug of instant soup. Duncan walked into the kitchen and showed me his set of socket spanners. 'Got 'em for twenty quid off a bloke round the corner who was about to chuck 'em.' His eyes went waxy. 'I will do great things with these. Let me know if there's anything of yours I can, em, spanner for you. Bike. Or a go-kart. Anything.'

  'I will, thanks.'

  I sipped my soup lying on my front in bed. Music seemed attractive until I switched on the radio and found a squelchy mass of static. I made do with silence. Towards sleep, I felt her head press gently against me. Her lungs gurgled as she sucked air through the ruin of her chest. Boys bent down to pick crabs from her hair for cricket practice. But I didn't want to see her face. No, not that.

  ***

  Cricket filled my life when I was small. My father played every Saturday which meant my summer weekends were given to fields by polluted rivers, petrochemical stations, breweries. My immediate horizons were broken by rooftops and chimneys and pylons and pavilions peopled by heavy men dressed in white.

  Dad's cricket bag was made from brown canvas and long enough to accommodate his bat. During the closed season, it would reside in the cubby-hole beneath the stairs and I would sometimes crawl under there to open it and smell the summer ghosts it had trapped. There was always a scuffed cricket ball or two, a pair of gloves with their meaty finger shields, a couple of old bails. There was also a box, which was meant to provide protection but felt deeply uncomfortable whenever I tried it on.

  As well as the musty smells of canvas and leather, there hung around the bag's pale innards a detergent whiff, of Vosene and astringent soaps, sticking plaster. Although I was too big, I wanted to crawl inside the bag and lie next to the perished rubber grip of the bat and imagine my dad's strong, tanned arms flexing as he used it. I bowled at him once he'd padded up, happy that I could help him practise.

  When he was in the field, Helen, Seamus and me would walk the perimeter boundary until we were close enough for him to hand us sticks of Juicy Fruit. We'd sit a little distance away and watch rabbits scampering or swallows skimming the pitch.

  Dad was the captain, an excellent bowler, very fast and accurate. He raced up to the popping crease, shirt open to his navel, a blur of purpose. We'd cheer when he got a wicket. When the players came in for tea, we'd run up to him and he'd slip us jam and marge sandwiches from the table.

  The sideboard at home became cluttered with trophies. His performances became like a history of code to me: 9 for 32,5 for 2,5 for 36.1 would look through his scoring books, often when the cricket season had finished, and decipher their strange markings, the dots and dashes that represented an entire game. I'd look forward to June when we'd troop out to our Fiat 127 and he'd take me somewhere I'd never been before where I could watch him from the branch of a tree or a bench on the boundary. End of an over-a maiden or a wicket-he might wave to me and I'd give him the thumbs-up. Pop (with a pulpy paper straw) and crisps in the bar afterwards.

  And then he stopped playing. The canvas bag disappeared and he cleared away his trophies. Summers were never so carefree and innocent again. The first year of his retirement from the game, I got pissed with Shay at Seven Arches and met a gang that sat around in the dank shadows necking beer and talking as candles turned the curve around them into an uncertain ceiling, a different kind of night. We were in our early teens and we'd sit a respectful distance from the ringleaders, watching them hungrily when the girls arrived offering kisses that were hot and wet and yielding as freshly laid bitumen. Every woman had a curve and for every curve there was a male hand to cup it.

  I once saw a girl, Patti, crouched on the floor in front of a big guy, MacCreadle, sucking at him slowly and deeply while he looked into the mist rising on the canal as if seeing something form there. Her flexed fingers clawed at his thighs with every upstroke, her muffled grunt of pleasure or pain punctuated the limit of her journey down. I dreamed about her for weeks.

  Delia bore thick ropes of crimson scar tissue on her throat like an extravagant necklace; her father had tried to strangle her with a length of barbed wire when she was a baby. Rifle knew a boy called Pook who had been battered and left to drown in the pond of a nearby pleasure park; the two of them haunted the rides at night. Pepper had driven the sharp end of a claw hammer into his maths teacher's cheek. Pris got drunk and danced topless around the candles.

  We watched them and, when MacCreadle was sent to prison for a crime that nobody dared talk about, we spoke to them, especially the quieter, more approachable ones. The low orders. Delicate Freddy, Hangfire, Juckes and Smoac. We wished we knew stories about the dark harlequin figures that capered in the town's underbelly. Instead, we recounted their tales in the playground, gaining the kind of brainless respect that passes for currency at school. Even the nutcases gave us a wide berth. One memorable day, Helen, Shay and me walked into the canteen and the queue dissolved for us. We knew MacCreadle, every child's wardrobe nemesis at bedtime. We were on speaking terms with Sawdust, who had torched a judge's car outside Crown Court.

  As summer turned rusty and the weather deteriorated, we started fires under the arch and talked less, concentrating on keeping out the cold. The starts of those evenings were almost magical, despite the deracinated look on everyone's faces, the scarified appearance of the wasteland around us. MacCreadle's bike would suddenly tear a hole in the night somewhere behind the ranks of lock-up garages on the other side of the railway. Its cry would descend from all sides, as if he were flying the machine.

  We'd curry favour with them by bringing takeouts. Once, shortly before MacCreadle was put away, he winked at me when I handed him a carton of Chinese. Sometimes, if we stayed out all night wrapped up in sleeping bags, we'd wake up to find everyone gone and a few twists of tin foil, spent syringes at the ash surround of the fire. We didn't know what they got up to when they weren't at Seven Arches, but gradually, over the years, they drifted away, leaving me with the same emptiness I'd felt when Dad's cricketing summers finished. It was as if the focus of my life was constantly being redefined and lost at a crucial point, when the cementing of who I was seemed about to happen. I didn't realise it then, but it wasn't the cricket or the nights under Seven Arches that ratified my character. Helen and Shay were the nucleus of my development, the constants, the positive and negative centres to my universe.

  We kept up the visits to Seven Arches, just the three of us now. Exorcised their ghosts, drew a little less menace from the shadows and vandalised brickwork. It became less a place for dormant violence and quick sex and cheap beer than a quiet retreat where I found my thoughts assuming greater clarity. I was able to relax more completely there than at home and acquire a peace that I'd never know elsewhere.

  Nobody could get at me here. The traffic and pollution, the people that criss-crossed my life's path were as distant as one of the stars winking through the effluvia piled up over the cooling towers of Fiddlers Ferry power station. Helen and Seamus we
re a calming restraint on my reveries and a catalyst for my energies. We were an equilateral triangle and we knew the measure of each other intimately, holding each other in check: three scorpions clasping claws and dancing in a circle, stings raised high. A lot of talk went on at the arches. We discussed our aspirations. We grew so close that the separate entities we projected seemed ridiculous; three bodies cleaved into one. Sometimes I would dream of going up on to the tracks with them and lying on the rails, waiting for the tickle and hiss of rails to signify the splitting of our body into its constituent parts.

  ***

  I remember MacCreadle best like this. Only like this. Jesus, I wish I didn't…

  He leaned over Seamus. Spat a wad of Bubblicious on to his cheek.

  'Cock-sucking mother-fucking cunt-reaming A-wipe. You fetid scuzz-bag shit-eating cleft-dabbling felcher. Lick my nads, slit-peeler. Fucking scrote-scrubber. Jit-gargling tip-weeping vomit-fart tube-tugging dog-frotting chiselling twatter. Christ. You make me want to throw my ring up. Ream your shaft with a rusty spoon, spunk-guzzling fuck. You… fuck.'

  He clomped away, his metal-tipped heels clanging on the fire escape. When they crunched, faintly, on the broken glass of the alleyway behind the detergent factory, Seamus let out a long sigh.

  'Don't shit it, Shay,' said Rifle, looming out of the dark, his face haloed by orange light from the spliff in his mouth. 'You might think I'm selling you a bent one here, pal, but…' he drew on the roach, spoke haltingly through his chestful of smoke, '… Mac likes you.'

  'Slit-peeler?' Shay said. 'Dog-frotting chiselling twatter?'

  We fell about, laughing.

  'Mere expressions of affection, mate,' Rifle went on. 'He's a poetic cunt, granted, when it comes to abuse, but you should see him when he's pissed off with people. Someone shagged his bird, Patti, while he was in clink once. He went down to London, found her, found the bloke who did it.'

  'What did he do?'

  'Spoilt his face, bad style. Took a blade and opened his mouth from ear to ear. They call the poor bastard Fliptop now'

  Candles sputtered into life as the winterwhite sun was doused by crippled rooftops at the edge of the town. Slowly, bodies became discernible in the gloom, crumpled, spannered out of their gourds thanks to Classic's booze. Classic himself was crouched on a mattress singing John Lee Hooker songs. I couldn't be sure, but I reckoned there were around half a dozen wasted bodies in the squat, many of whom I'd only met last night.

  We were sitting in a derelict office building right at the heart of the new town complex. Sardine can factories all over the shop. From the window, the panorama was one of car parks and stylised green areas.

  'MacCreadle coming back?' I asked, watching Delia as she stroked her choker of scars. They drifted, the women in this group, like unseen ghosts, like partnerless sharks in a dark ocean. Their objectives seemed without concrete shape. Direction meant nothing to them. They drifted, as if, by stopping, it would somehow prove to be their undoing. Delia traded places with Pris, who had been tattooing the word HOPE on to Pepper's forearm. Delia finished it off. Patti sat with Juckes, neither of them saying a word, but you could see the air between them solidify with meaning, layers of understanding softly forming like the gradual build-up of scale in a kettle. Smoac leaned back into a space that Hangfire unwittingly filled. Their bodies collided and they stayed like that, supporting each other. It was all instinct. There didn't seem to be any room for accidents. Unless you counted Delicate

  Freddy, trying to piss into the mouth of a bottle while he held a sandwich.

  Rifle kicked off his DMs and lay back on a mattress. 'Yeah, he'll be back. Much as he's with us, he's a loner. If you can understand that. Shit, I can't. Fucking hate being on my tod, I do.'

  I did understand MacCreadle's craving for his own space. Sometimes being around other people felt unfathomable, unnatural. I answered more readily to the calls my body made as a singular unit, something that was essentially alone. I knew where MacCreadle would have gone, though, and I stared at Helen and Seamus in the dark. Their polished, straining eyes were enough of a spur. I left them to snack on each other and followed Mac's ghost.

  He'd taken his Harley-we'd heard the tubercular rumble of it for long minutes after he'd left-but it was only a twenty-minute walk. It was a cold night and I zipped my leather jacket up around my ears. Lights seem to burn so much more brightly when there's a frost looming; the streetlamps in the distance formed an unbroken chain of wet fire up to a point where they petered out, down by the bottom of the school field where houses were now springing up since its closure, a few years ago. I made it to the canal and bore left, slipping through a rusting fence and following the canal bank west towards the thick black arm of the viaduct clawing across the gulley of the park and into the meat of the railway embankment.

  We hadn't been down here for maybe a week, since the weather began to chill over, and I felt the same sickly attraction to the place as I did every time I made this approach. The old school was a low bank of black, with its broken clock-tower and mish-mash of architectural styles ranging from the functional 1930s brick to the pre-fabricated dross of the 1970s. The canteens had been demolished; large, cream chunks of breezeblock lay as a testament to all those hundreds of thousands of ice cream scoops of malty potato, all those water-ridden heaps of cabbage.

  'Shagging school dinners,' I muttered, remembering the skill I'd employed, hiding my uneaten, inedible peas under a thin remainder of pie crust, or slipping my semolina-with its wound of raspberry jam-into the pocket of some gobbling idiot sitting next to me.

  Up ahead, framed by broken goalposts, I saw a match burst into life and the uncertain appetite of candles as they sucked at the musty air beneath the arch. My heart barrelled around my chest like a pebble in a washing machine. As I neared, I could see that MacCreadle was not alone. He was lying on his back and reaching up to a woman who was standing in the soft swell of light, her upper body swathed in loose bandages. She was passing things down to him from the dark pockets each loop created and he was consuming them, a pained look on his face. Twenty feet away, hugged by the night, I stopped and watched. I was suddenly very frightened. The woman had no eyes, had no top to her head. I could see broad red stains in the bandage, spreading beneath the uppermost layer. MacCreadle was being fed babies, or rather, tiny, barely formed foetuses. The rictus of his mouth was flush with blood. He was crying silently, the prominent nub of his Adam's apple shuttling back and forth along his throat. Still he accepted them, still the woman offered more to him. Until, sensing someone near, she swung my way and made to show me what was moving about beneath her shroud.

  MacCreadle launched himself upright, a rope of gore unravelling from his mouth. He shouted-'No!'-a flat order which bore immediate results. The woman dwindled into a thin streak of light above the candles. Only when she had gone did I realise just how quiet the entire episode had been. A breath of traffic from Lovely Lane whispered across the field. MacCreadle looked at me, tears streaking all the dirt and blood.

  I sat down in the dirt and tried to say something but I didn't know what it was I wanted to talk about.

  'Leave me alone,' he said, spitting what looked like the skeletal remains of a tiny hand on to the floor.

  'Who was she?'

  He was coming to his senses now. He wiped his mouth and levered himself upright. 'You fuckin' followed me.'

  'I followed you, yes. I just wanted to talk, without everyone else hanging round your arse.'

  'You're hanging round my arse now. I don't much like it, friend.' The skin above his beard had grown bluish with shock. I had to lean forward to gauge his eyes, see if any humour lurked in there. They were dead as fish eyes. I wondered how many people MacCreadle had made suffer. I wondered if, as the stories went, he had killed anybody.

  'I'm not well,' he said, eyeing me, I was sure, for any disbelief on my features. 'I… am in great pain all the time.'

  'Have you been to a doctor?'

  'It's noth
ing they can treat,' he said, flatly. 'You got anything to smoke?'

  I shook my head and he kicked at the gravel. A train farted in the distance, approaching from the east. I moved closer and sat down on the edge of a rotting suitcase. The flames shivered, webbing the sooty curve of the arch with sickly light. I withdrew into the paltry shelter of my leather jacket, peeking over the collars, wishing I'd put my track suit bottoms on under these ripped jeans. The train crossed overhead, shedding echoes that engulfed us. Through the thunder, his eyes keen on me, MacCreadle said: 'Atonement.'

  'What about it?' I asked, as the train slowed for Warrington Central.

  'Do you know why I come here?' his voice was a low burble, irresistible not because of who he was, but because of this sudden show of vulnerability. I didn't mind trumping my questions if it meant he'd unload a little of his self upon me.

  'Because you like being on your own?'

  'Fuck off. I can be on my own anywhere. I can be on my own in the middle of a fucking scrum down the Rope and Anchor, mate. Watch me switch off. No, I come here because it's as close to death as I can get without actually doing myself in. Fuck the cem and the crem. I might as well be wandering round a garden centre. There's death in these arches. Some mad fuckers have caused a right old stink here in the past. The Seventies? A couple of rapes and one of the nastiest murders a human being could come up with.'

  I think I was going to ask him if he had ever killed anyone then, but the enormity of the question beat me. In that moment I suppose I passed from being a child who thinks that death is just another cartoonish stage in life to something more serious, more personal. That night I went home and cried quietly, my face hot and itchy against the pillow, understanding completely the loss I was going to feel when my parents died. It was a horrible feeling, a feeling that I was missing them already, even though I could have gone downstairs and sat with my mum on the sofa while she watched television or listened to Joni Mitchell with my dad in his den.