The Romanians are already at work. They strike an expanse of concrete with picks. Cairo does not know to what end, for pipes buried there too, or Saxon gold. He sees their heads lift to watch the rich man’s car pass. Tony comes by most mornings to check up on them. The Romanians stand in their hats and hoods in the rain. One of the older men wipes his hands on a rag, looks at the gaffer’s car. They are not even Romanian. They are from Moldova, the man drying his hands speaks some English, told Cairo when they stood around waiting for the vans to turn up late one darkening Friday afternoon early in the year. ‘Moldova,’ he’d said, like some country from a storybook. It is the same with the Albanians. Cairo has not seen them for a while. They come from Kosovo, call themselves Albanian, these men who worked in the sleet last winter, have been through wars, who disappear in the mist.
Tony does not even turn off the engine. He sits for a while and watches them get wet, then opens the window to call Alan over. Cairo watches Alan’s face in Tony’s mirrored glasses. Why does he need sunglasses when it’s pissing down with rain? And he can see, as Alan’s eyes narrow and his face creases and droops with his moustache, that Tony is telling them to knock off, even though everyone knows that the rain will blow over. Tony wants to save a day’s money and Cairo can feel a sickness rising in him. He’ll be a day short now this week. He worries about Nat, what he might say to her, the money, she works out interest on what he owes her. He could stay out of the way, he supposes, the broken phone makes that easier.
Men like Tony are never skint. These men have cash-flow problems, issues with liquidity and leverage and solvency, words Cairo knows but has no clue as to their meaning, doesn’t want to either. You can cover anything with words. They are never plain-out skint, but he bets that Tony hasn’t got the money to pay them the full week, is using the rain as his excuse.
He watches Alan nod his head again, sign for their money a day short, plus a tenner for getting soaked this morning, not even with a pen. Alan traces his name onto the screen of Tony’s phone, some gimmick Tony has started using, even though he pays them all in dog-eared notes in cash bags from the post office like they are men from some bygone era. Like they are men who would go walking up the lane here from this factory back when it was still standing, men with an early Friday finish, going to tend their allotments and stand up at bars and walk their dogs and go home to their families and fill in the football coupon and dream of a week at the seaside. As if there is any of that any more.
Cairo spits into the trench at his feet, looks up again with the rest of the men as they watch Tony drive away across the wasteland. The car has the same shine as his glasses, reflects the pockmarked ground and shapes of the men standing there in the dying rain. The hole in Cairo’s right boot has filled with water. He hopes Tony hits a puddle, splashes mud up the bodywork, but he’d only get it cleaned, leave it sitting there shining on the drive of his house up in Oakham, like no one knows where he comes from, like he isn’t who he is, has become something else.
He’d lamped Tony once, when they were kids, Cairo had. Given him a right paling, as they used to say. There’d been some feud about something, he can’t remember what, and Cairo had thumped him, blacked his eye, wished he’d thrown him in the cut now, held his head under the water. He remembers one of their lads saying, ‘Yome in trouble now, Cairo, that’s one of the Clanceys,’ and him saying that he did not give a shit, even though he was scared to go anywhere for a month afterwards, until some sort of truce was brokered. They were mates then for a while. Tony even got them that modelling work. They had to pose on the towpath down at Windmill End, by the tunnel mouth and Cobb’s Engine House, wearing clothes from the Littlewoods catalogue. He wonders if Tony can even remember that, half a life and more away now. Money lets you forget everything. Tony Clancey in his German car and his Leave sticker, in his Italian shirts, with his English attitudes, with Cairo’s ex-wife and sometimes his daughter and sometimes his grandson, a man who has taken his family, no better than any one of the men standing here in the rain, no better, drives off to his golf club to wait for the rain to stop.
Before
‘So like a documentary?’
They sat in the hotel bar at Castle Gate. She had gone back to London, come back again for another visit. He stood in front of the narrow wardrobe mirror, tried on a couple of different shirts. The name of the place was new, the whole development, cinema and gym and diner and so on, like it was bloody California. Well, twenty years or so new. They were on the edge of where the old County Ground had been, which Cairo’s grandad helped to build, had worked on the building of the zoo as well, had been a quarryman there in the castle pits. His dad told him he used to get sent to fetch the old man back when he was a kid, would find him in a deckchair by the side of the old pavilion, tucked away out of the wind watching Tom Graveney, George Headley, sipping his mild ale. Cairo used to sneak onto the site as a kid with his mates, after it had been abandoned, unsafe with the collapses. They would run through the long grass, bounce on the twisted metal fences that were put up to keep the kids and the tatters out, but had fallen or been pulled down. There were pictures of dogs but no dogs. Perhaps they’d fallen in the holes. Cairo would imagine the ground shifting beneath his feet, the world swallowing them all up.
‘Yes, trying to show how people feel like they have lost out.’
She looked at him across the table. He seemed younger, out of his work clothes, his hair parted and free from dust. They were closer in age than she had first assumed, although it was hard to tell. He was talking about the 1830s, cholera, the digging of trenches and pits, the digging of tunnels, like he had actually been there. She could ask him, of course. There was a loose thread that came from the top button of his shirt and she wanted to reach out to it.
‘I doh think they feel like they’ve lost out. They have lost out.’
‘Isn’t that the same thing?’
‘No, thass part of the problem, thinking that it is. We’m sitting on one of the places we’ve lost. You make out like it’s our problem, it’s only about how we feel, but we have lost, it doh really matter what we feel about it. It’s a fact. You can prove it.’
‘What can you prove?’
‘The loss, actual loss. Jobs, houses, security, all them things.’ He paused. ‘But maybe yome right that there’s the feelings as well, of loss, of having lost.’
He had never spoken about things in quite this way, would ramble on sometimes when he’d had a drink, but who was there to even listen to him these days? He knew the history. He was named for an ancestor who had dug the Netherton Tunnel, fought bare knuckle. His old man had folders full of family stories, local history, used to lead walks along the cut, through the tunnels, would tell stories as he went, would send articles with hand-drawn maps and sketches to the Bugle, the Blackcountryman. Sometimes Cairo’s mother used to tell him to stop harking back. ‘Yow have to know where yow’ve come from to know where yome headed,’ is what his dad said. Cairo considered that it might be better not to know at all where they were headed, given where it seemed to be.
The idea of loss conjured up his boxing, and that is what he had been, a boxer with a losing record, someone people would book for fights because he made other fighters look good, would last, make them work, give people what they wanted, which was not the same as being no good at it, not at all. He waited for the chance to say to Grace, ‘When I was a boxer…’
‘I think you’re right, Cairo, that there is a culture here that has been neglected, forgotten,’ which is what she had come to believe, and was why she was here, she told herself. Her own family had come through this way, after all, which is why she picked the town in the first place. Near the end, her dad had become obsessed with tracing his family’s roots. He had spent his academic career writing about Roman slaves, the empire’s industries, about the invisible men (‘And women too,’ she heard her mother’s voice say) who mined the lead, who hammered the chains, where they came from, who they were. It was onl
y at the very end, when he came home from hospital to lie in bed and look out of the window at the trees on the Heath, that she understood that this work had also been about himself. He traced the routes his ancestors took, from pirate ships and Cornish coves and tin mines, to Devon as weavers, north to Kidderminster for more work, into the Black Country as iron masters, then south to Oxford and London. On family holidays they had walked by glittering waters, on Tresco, on Bryher, imagined the tide sweeping them away, the edges of the islands, the Continent.
‘Like on the telly and that, the papers, just being told we’m all stupid, held up for ridicule.’
‘What?’
‘Like with the wheel.’
He tapped the front of the newspaper. Grace was the one who’d bought the paper with the headline about the town’s new Ferris wheel.
‘These people have got it coming,’ he said with a feeling she found hard to understand. This man she had known for a few hours, less. She surprised herself when she noticed no wedding ring, not that it meant anything. They had talked so far of fathers and newspaper stories.
‘Which people?’
‘The people who write this crap.’
‘But they want people to vote leave, most of the papers do.’
‘Iss just a game to them, a funny game, like life’s a game. I bet the people writing these papers don’t vote to leave, I bet they live in fancy houses in London and they’ll vote to stay. They’m all doing fine, thank you very much. It’s like a double bluff.’
‘Who’s playing games now?’
‘You get what I mean, though?’
‘I’m not sure I do. You mean that people here will vote against whatever they think the perceived elite will vote?’
‘Here you go again. It ay perceived. There is an elite.’
‘But some of the elite want you to vote to leave.’
‘They doh mean it.’
‘What do you mean, they don’t mean it?’
‘I’ve told yer, it’s all a game of double bluff. They’ll all argue about it. We’ll have the vote. It’ll be a vote to stay in. They’ll fix it if they need to. Then they’ll get on with whatever’s next on the agenda, all mates together again.’
‘I think they mean it, and anyway, what, it’s all one big conspiracy?’
‘You said it. A conspiracy of the elite, thass your word by the way, these are your own words, against the rest of us. You should write this down, put it in your film.’
‘I will.’ She suddenly had to laugh.
‘You should be paying me for this stuff, it’s gold dust.’ His face broke out into a broad smile. ‘You’ll probably win another prize.’ His indignation seemed to have blown itself out.
She had made sure she told him about the Balkan film, the prize they had won for it. She wanted to signal to him that she was a professional film-maker, their relationship was a professional one. She did not want to think of him as an attractive man. After all, he might be picking up on it, getting the wrong idea.
He paused for a moment, then added, ‘You got time for another drink?’
‘I have, why not? Thank you.’
He came back with two bottles of beer.
‘Cheers.’ He tilted his bottle towards her. ‘What I’m saying is that this place used to be somewhere.’ He took a sip of his beer. ‘And still could be,’ he added, but sounded less sure about that.
After
The door knocker rattles through the house. Stacey-Ann would never go to the door when in on her own, but she does wonder for a moment if it is Duane. This thought is a surprise to her. Zach kicks his legs on the changing mat and she gets up from her knees and crouches at the upstairs window, peers above the ledge through the net, smiles at her own ridiculousness. She cannot see the door but the knocker goes again with some urgency. A dog barks nearby at the noise. She has heard of a scam lately, someone at the front door saying they are from the council, and then someone round the back breaking in. For what? A bit of change, most likely. Money for kids’ sweets or the bingo. She would not go to the door, but it worries her that her nan might, if in on her own, no matter how many times you tell her not to. Her nan and grandad are up the road collecting a prescription. Stacey-Ann asked her nan to stay in. But she got her walker and said she wanted to talk to the pharmacist. Out of pure stubbornness.
‘Stacey-Ann.’ It is her mother’s voice. Is she in the house? Maybe she has a key, after all these years, an old key she has kept. Stacey-Ann waits to hear her on the stairs.
‘Stacey-Ann, I know yome in there, love. I want to speak to yer. This is ridiculous.’
The letter box, of course. She is talking through the letter box. Stacey-Ann pictures her mom crouched down there on the path and this pleases her for a moment, more than it should. Zach begins to make loud squeaking noises, kicks his legs on the changing mat, and Stacey-Ann crawls across the bedroom and giggles and shushes the boy. Alert now, she hears her mother on the path below, footsteps, high-heeled boots. When she creeps back to the window she sees her mother standing there by the gate, looking up at the house. Her mother narrows her eyes. She needs glasses and doesn’t wear them. Stacey-Ann feels confident she will not notice her here, hidden under the window, but half wants her to. She must have watched the house, to know she is in on her own with Zach. He shouts out again, a laugh. He is a happy baby. This must have taken a lot, for her mom to have done this. Her mom is not a woman to change her mind, to admit she might have been wrong. And Stacey-Ann decides to go down and let her mom in. But before she has time to turn from the window, she watches as her mother’s shoulders slump and the woman turns and goes through the gate, leaving it open, which will annoy Grandad, and then disappears on the other side of the hedge, the clack of her heels receding. And after a moment there is the sound of a car starting.
Stacey-Ann picks up Zach and carries him downstairs carefully, half expects her mother’s face to loom up at the window. Her grandparents have left the telly on with the sound off, a habit they have got into, so that if anyone does look through the window it might convince them there are people in the house. A quiz show plays. Subtitles appear on the screen. Her nan watches the telly with subtitles now. But when her dad’s interview came on telly, they played subtitles for everyone to read, like he wasn’t speaking English at all, and she saw it grieved him when he watched it, but he just shrugged his shoulders when she asked him about it. ‘What do you expect?’ he said.
Grace said that she would be back over the summer and Stacey-Ann took her at her word, and then emailed and texted, but she has had no reply. The summer has faded. Grace said she would find out about college stuff for her, or find someone who could. It isn’t as if Stacey-Ann is desperate and, anyway, she could find all this stuff for herself, she isn’t stupid, but it’s more like the thing itself is important, the contact. Grace had been someone nice to talk to, someone different, even though Stacey-Ann only stayed that time because all the other mothers left, had places to go to, or said they did, put their heads down and didn’t look at the pretty woman with the posh accent, as if they were ashamed of something. It’s not that not getting back to her would let her, Stacey-Ann, down. No. Stacey-Ann doesn’t want Grace to let herself down.
When her dad was on the teatime news, Stacey-Ann said as little as possible. They showed him talking to Grace by Dudley marketplace. ‘People have had enough,’ is what he said, with or without subtitles, talking about the EU, like he knew much about it. For all she knows, he does. He knows a lot about history, her grandad too, but more like little stories, like the Tipton Slasher and his pet monkey. Her dad used to make up stories about the monkey to get her to sleep when she was a kid. The monkey was called Ronaldo, he said, like the footballer. She wants to ask him to tell those stories to Zach as he grows. They will be all right, of that she will make sure, and she thinks if she mentions the stories to her dad he’ll see that they’ll be all right. Although he’s got his own worries.
And she doesn’t agree with him, her
dad, not about the vote anyway. Not that she’s about to launch into any big debate with him about it, they’ve got other more important things to think about, but it’s not right, all this carrying on about foreigners, people moving on to get a better life, although she doesn’t understand herself, not really, it’s not like you can believe politicians, they are just in it for themselves. Maybe the foreign politicians are as bad as our own. They might be worse. You couldn’t think people were better because they were foreign. Some people did, teachers they’d had at school. There’s just another kind of prejudice.
Stacey-Ann wishes it had been Duane at the door, and again the wish surprises her. She thinks she hears her mother’s heels on the path again and stands at the window and there is no one there. A lone bee veers above the front garden. She can hear the traffic, distant on the main road.
She doesn’t agree with her dad, or her other dad, Tony, in fact, who’s worse than her real dad about this kind of thing. He really is racist. Just wrong. She wonders how he thinks he can say the things he does when there’s a brown baby there in front of him, or not in front of him during these last few months, that he wants to call him Grandad, even though he is really nothing of the sort. They’ve got a Leave poster up in the front garden on one of those boards that the estate agents use. She asked her mom what she thought and she said she didn’t know anything about it. Her dad, her real dad, thinks her mom is only interested in things, in the house and the cars and what she looks like. He might be right. Still, it’s good to have a nice house, to not have to worry about things so much, so that’s not such a terrible crime either. Her mother is jealous of baby Zach, that’s what it comes down to. That’s why she threw her, Stacey-Ann, out of the house and told her to go back to her dad, her real dad.
The sound of boots on the path, she is certain this time. Even the sound of the boots are important to her mom, they have to sound expensive, say something about her place in the world, where she is going, the distance she has come. The letter box rattles and Stacey-Ann stands dead still, can’t decide whether to move or not, and hears the boots on the path again. The boots sound impatient. She pulls back the curtain this time, watches her mom as she walks away.
The Cut Page 3
