‘I’ll speak to yer, yeah. Come on,’ is what he said.
And she was grateful for this too. This was the interview that played on and off for months, shared on Twitter and repeated on news cycles, the one she sold, which gave her enough money to actually employ Franco as a cameraman for a couple of days and set about making the film, which interested funders, which set the whole thing in motion, one small piece of the collage of images and things said that had come to define the vote on screens in the weeks both before and after it happened.
‘We’ve had enough,’ is what he said, with the sun on the footballer and the church and the castle behind him and the soft shadow of the buildings and his face dusted with some unknown material, which he would no doubt breathe in and whatever it was would be there in his lungs, burning through the years, the dust speckling his handsome face, his cheekbones, and his eyes shining out from the dust, daring you to keep looking, challenging you, as he stared into the camera and was not meant to, spoke directly to the people on the other side of the screen, mocking slightly, a smile not far from his lips, but deadly serious. ‘We’ve had enough,’ and he went on, and sometimes on television they put subtitles under his words, translated into his own language, and sometimes they did not. But there he was, playing on some endless loop, making sense, not making sense at all, and she knew, the moment he looked at the camera and started talking, knew it the moment he said, ‘I’ll speak to yer, yeah. Come on,’ that something shifted inside her. And she could tell herself now that this was all in retrospect, that she was creating a story that was not there, a kind of bitter nostalgia taking hold of her, and possibly bitter nostalgia was a kind of answer to the question she should’ve been posing all along, but she knew that she was not that cynical. That all these feelings had been real.
‘Cairo, we’ll see yer up there, mate,’ one of the other men, the darker, older one, the one who had kept out of the way of the camera, and whom she wanted to film because of that, called over to him, another man with a face of shadows and light. Cairo raised his hand, half turned, waved as if to dismiss them. She saw the small, dark man swear into his moustache.
‘I won’t keep you, Cairo, but thanks for your time.’ She used his name straight away, wanted to ask him about it.
‘Doh worry about them. We finished some work early today. They’m happy to get paid. We’m going for a drink to celebrate. Some money in their pockets. For a bit, any road.’
‘What do you do?’ she said, and pointed to the disclaimer form for him to sign after she’d explained what she was doing, not sure herself, testing the waters, trying to get the voices of ordinary people, conscious of saying ordinary people and all that might mean, on the way they might vote, and why.
‘Clean up industrial sites, you know, tatting basically. You know what that is?’ He smiled like it was a joke. ‘We dig ditches and knock down old walls. Pick up bits of scrap for the gaffer.’
‘There’s a lot to clean up, from what I can see.’
‘The place is a mess, is what you mean.’
‘No, I didn’t mean.’
But of course she did, in a way, because from the train window that morning she had looked at an expanse of rubble as they came out of Birmingham, a motorway flyover somewhere, the curve of iron bridges creating a mesh that reflected back in the canal water. It struck her that the place was best approached by water, along the narrow canals, from out of the green hills or through canyons of blackened brick. It was a cliché, not the whole story at all, like the stares of those young women, like the stares of those young men, but it was part of the story, no doubt.
He smiled. ‘Keeping us in work, any road. What else am yer filming?’
The truth was that she didn’t know, but she was on to something, wasn’t sure what to say. She needed him to be interested in it.
‘I’m back and forth for a few weeks,’ she said, and was not sure if this was a lie or she was wishing it into being. ‘They say the UKIP bus will be here at some point, it’s coming here, I mean right here, to the marketplace, I think. Farage, you know.’
‘I’ll give that a miss.’ He smiled, gentler than she imagined.
‘I thought he might interest you, given what you’ve said.’ This sense of wanting to pick away at something, that there was something more to what he was trying to say. Only a few minutes ago she attempted to hide her surprise at how articulate he had been with his answers to her. He spoke of the weight of the past on the present, a sense of betrayal, of something undone, of retribution on some grand, futile scale.
‘Oh no, don’t get me wrong. I doh want nothing to do with him, nor any of em to be honest. We’ve had enough of folks like that and all. I cor speak for everybody here, of course. Anyway.’
He made a motion to leave. She wanted more, wanted to dig deeper.
She asked him about immigration. He looked at her. She felt she had struck some kind of nerve.
‘I’ve told you what I think, that people have had enough of a lot of things.’
‘But obviously you live in a place where there has been a lot of immigration.’
‘All you people want to say is that it’s about immigration. That we’m all racist. That we’m all stupid. You doh wanna hear that it’s more complicated than that. It lets all of you lot off the hook. Never considered the problem might be you.’
You people, is what struck her. That and the anger that flickered for a moment in his eyes, her own anger ignited briefly. You people, these judgements. She was not so blind to herself to realize it might have been her own prejudice reflected back at her. You people. These people.
‘Can I ask what you mean by “you people”?’
‘On the telly, and that, like you can see everybody else’s faults but your own.’
It seemed suddenly as if he would rather be anywhere else, he looked away and then back at her. ‘I’m sorry, love. I don’t know you. I don’t mean to be rude. I shouldn’t have stopped. Like I say, I think people here have had enough of a lot of things.’
‘No, what you were saying was interesting.’ She understood as she said this that she did so to placate him, to keep him talking, but to barb him too. I’m sorry, love irritated her. She wondered if her courtesy might flare the rage in him, but then what did she know of men like him? ‘I’d like to understand more of what you meant, and about what you said about here, the experiences of this town, your own experiences.’
He shook his head as if surfacing from water.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
There was an awkward moment. She held out her hand for him to shake. He looked uncertain what to do, wiped his hands against his torn blue sweatshirt.
He had already turned to walk away when he said, ‘Listen, if you need any help,’ motioned for the pen and scribbled a number on the edge of the form, passed her the paper in a hurry, as if before he changed his mind. ‘Look, what I mean is, I could probably show you some places.’
‘I’m sure you could, Cairo.’ There she went, using his name again, a Gypsy name, could be, some history to it, some weight, flirting with him, trying to make a joke, put him at some sort of ease, knowing that she needed a way in. She looked at his hands as he passed her the slip of paper.
‘Anyway,’ he said.
‘That’s kind of you, really nice of you.’
He was already walking away.
‘I’ll give you a missed call and you’ll have my number.’ She started jabbing at her phone, a little bit too quickly perhaps. ‘Grace,’ she said, ‘my name’s Grace Trevithick.’ She had already told him her name. She had a card that she could have given him, did not want to. He did not look like a man who dealt in business cards.
‘It was very nice to meet you, Grace,’ is what he said, formal all of a sudden, a man out of time in his torn work clothes, walking off up the High Street. She watched him go, she remembered, had wondered if he would turn to look back.
He didn’t.
After
Th
at boy from Lupin Road is ahead of him. Again. Cairo pulls himself up the hill, conscious of his ankle as he turns. His ankle, his hip, his knees. It is not his head that anyone should be worried about. It never has been his head, not really, although you let people hit you in it for a living you might expect some sort of trouble. No, the only issue he has ever had is being too clever for his own good.
Summer is fading now, the rain coming down.
He looks at the soles of the boy’s trainers as he strides up St John’s Road. His feet barely touch the ground. His ankles and calves are slender. His broad back is heading away up the hill. Cairo is sure that he’s wearing a Saracen’s Head club top, or Saracens now, as they must call it, the name was changed a while ago. The red top is one reason he wants to get nearer to the boy. That, and to prove to himself that he’s still got it in him, chasing down someone half his age. Up the hill. Eating the yards, the miles. Yet there is no sense of this being hard work for the kid. While Cairo, on the other hand, is knackered. A weariness in his bones that he tells himself he can outrun, and some mornings truly believes.
They attack the steepest part of the hill. The boy turns off before the church hall, which they use as the church itself since they boarded the real church shut, although even that is unshuttered again, simply no longer a church. Nothing stays fixed here, which bothers Cairo. The boy runs along the path through the bungalows and out of sight.
Cairo turns left, along Watson’s Green Road, into the gloom. He has the idea of running the opposite way up the hill, should meet the boy somewhere on Cawney Bank, the other side of the watershed, where the water slips down the hill and on and on to the River Severn and then out to sea and then back again as rain on the hills. At least he’s got that knowledge and bets the kid does not.
Cairo never sees the boy from the front on these runs, only ever his heels, the bottoms of his shoes, his red back. He saw him in profile one morning when he had ducked down one of the entries on Lupin Road and disappeared. The way he holds his hands, poised. He must be in training, the way he runs on the balls of his feet, like it’s nothing to get up these hills.
This is not even a boxing town. It is all football, of course, cricket in the old days. Cairo’s great-grandad had helped build the County Ground in the thirties, but that is long gone too now. It is a fighting town, all right, that much is true. The hill is the thing that keeps you hanging on in the last seconds of a round, that keeps you upright.
At the turn he starts to breathe hard, not a great sign. He should’ve gone straight up the hill, cheating himself will bring no improvement. A patina of mud has come off the park and has slid across the pavement. Cairo takes care not to slip. He feels his feet against the ground as they push him upwards, feels a stone through his pump’s thin sole, knows he could do with more protection, some decent running shoes. He has always felt heavier than he looks. It has helped him, his thick legs used to anchor him, let him soak up punishment. A dubious talent, for sure.
The breathing becomes easier again, going up towards the jagged outline of the new flats. He always thinks of them as that even though they are almost as old as he is, thirty-eight going on forty-five, split the difference.
Things are working out, Stacey-Ann in the house, his mom and dad’s health steady, the babby with them. That there is a baby to replace another baby. That isn’t how things work – after all, Zach is not his son but his grandson, he should not think this. But he knows deep down that he does.
The boy in the red hoodie has now gone. No sign of him. A ghost through the morning rain.
Cairo feels a sense of betrayal at this and he winds down the run as if he’s a slowing clock.
Before
He ran further those mornings in the spring, through pains in his heel, his knees, the road unspooling beneath him. They had work, money coming in, he was paying Natalie off what he owed her, finally, had started to feel better about having had to borrow money from his ex-wife. He was getting up over the hill. He had started thinking about fighting again.
It’s why he phoned Grace, he supposed, how he had the confidence to do it, confidence that had been gone for a long time. There had been something, when they spoke at the bottom of the marketplace, he wanted to say something, about the sense of his world being made invisible, mute, and he wanted to go against that. You had to fight your corner. That was something Alan and the others did not understand, even Tony. They ignored the world as it was and then felt angry with it. Not that he wasn’t angry.
It was chance they finished up that day when they did, digging up the ground of the old abattoir, a big job that had paid something for once. Tony even seemed happy handing the money over.
One morning near the end of the job they dug up bones, wondered what to do with them, found a few scattered about the place, half a ribcage, a shallow, scattered grave. At first they thought the bones were human. What a fuss that would have created. They debated reburying them and saying nothing, until Alan pieced the skeleton together, the body of a pig, remnants of what used to go on there. Both Alan and Luke used to work there, when it was the abattoir, with the meat-packing factory next door. It had closed down years ago. Maybe the skeleton was of one last escapee. They used to make a run for it, Luke explained, the pigs were not stupid, knew what was coming to them, packed together in their dark lorries, herded down ramps into sterile factory buildings.
‘I stood at my pork chop machine just about here,’ Luke said, standing on the rutted ground. They had a break, sat on steel coils in a coven around the skeleton, toasted the pig with tea and bacon rolls that they sent one of the younger lads to fetch and laughed about, put the bones back in a trench they’d dug and covered them over. Everyone was happy because there was work and they were getting paid.
And that had been the feeling when he bumped into Grace, a roll of money in his pocket, and a gang of mates to have a drink with, and a roof over his head that wasn’t going to disappear. That was how he felt that morning, so he could think about other things, was happy with what he’d said to her, ‘Look around, people have had enough,’ but not angry, apart from when she said it was all racism or because people were stupid. He could back up his theories, from afternoons spent with his old man at the local history groups, he was interested in all that stuff. Where we came from, where we were going. You had time to think, digging trenches, running up hills, and that was the hazard sometimes, you could think too much, so this was better, talking to a good-looking woman in the sunshine, spring here already, summer on its way, not so many summers left even if he lived into old age. Make the most of what you’ve got is what he told himself.
It went to voicemail when he phoned and he almost rang off. He was standing out the back, looking at the washing line, thinking he’d cut the grass for his dad, who insisted on hacking at it with an old pair of shears, the sagging fence and garage roofs, dandelions on the lawn, moss on the fence, the place seeping back into the hill.
‘Hello, er, Grace. This is Cairo Jukes. We met in Dudley the other day. I wondered if. I’m interested in what you’re filming. I think I could maybe say summat more, help you out maybe, I don’t know. Give me a call if you think you might, you know. Well, thanks anyway.’
He regretted it straight away, ringing a girl like some kid asking to go out. It had been years since he had made a phone call where the person on the other end did not know what he was going to say. I’m interested in what you’re filming, Jesus, like he knew anything about anything at all. He was a grandad.
His face was hot and he went inside and splashed water on it and tried to put the call out of his mind, but she phoned back and said she would love to meet up, that was what she said, and that she was back in Dudley, was staying at the new hotel by the cinema, and he said he could meet her there, said he would change from his work clothes as a joke that she didn’t quite get, said that he lived not far away, which was true of course, although it all depended on how you measured these things.
After
> Like the taste of coal in his mouth, a lump of coal, and the feeling of rain on his body. He is naked, here in the dark, in the cool rain, wishes he had never cursed it. He wishes it would rain now for ever.
They need the rain to stop to get paid for a full day. The job involves digging up pipes in Great Bridge, not far from where they dug up that pig. Everything above ground has gone, even the concrete floor of what had once been a factory building has disintegrated, so there is access to the pipes below the surface, copper and lead. They’ve dug a trench which has filled with water the length of the old factory wall, dug inwards to the pipes to wrench them out. The pipes worry him. There was that other place not far from here, somewhere in Tipton, where he pulled a length of copper off the wall and water had burst from it and then there he was with his finger stuck in the hole like in the story of the little Dutch boy at the dyke. He was left with one foot on the cherry picker and the other in mid-air. Alan went on the phone to the Water Board fifty feet below him.
‘Is it an emergency?’ he’d heard Alan say, with a bit less urgency than he’d hoped for. Women worked on sewing machines down below him. They should not have been there at all. The gaffer, a white bloke, spoke to the women in their own language. The women giggled and opened umbrellas at their benches while it rained inside the ruined factory and Cairo clung to the pipe. He stayed there, had no choice, with the water coming through his clothes like he was some great cloud blown in from the Welsh hills and watched the level-crossing gates dip and rise for the trains from out of the dirty window. There was a blue sky beyond the streaks of bird shit. His arm went numb while he waited for them to find a stopcock. All he ended up with was a bollocking from Tony. The bloke had some nerve.
Alan whistles ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ through his moustache as they hack away at the ground beneath their feet.
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