The college idea is all to do with moving on. Stacey-Ann has this fantasy that she wants to collect exams like her mom collects boots. She had thought she was stuck, having packed in sixth form, gone to work at the salon. Grace had said there were access courses, that you didn’t have to do A-levels or go to college full-time to go to university. And Stacey-Ann felt stupid for not really having grasped this before. Although she did know it, she knew people found ways of making things happen. Other people.
‘I think people could be a bit kinder to each other, a bit less judgemental,’ is what she’d said to Grace when she came to the new mothers’ group. She wasn’t filming then. She’d said that she was here to ask some questions if anyone was willing to stay, and that was when the others all rushed off, put their heads down and looked at the floor, so Stacey-Ann stayed to talk to her out of a sense of kindness. There was a feeling that the people who mattered, the ones Grace really wanted to talk to, had left.
She told her her name was Ann, realized too late it was because she wanted to impress this woman, was ashamed of the way Stacey-Ann might sound to a woman like Grace. Realized the irony that she was sitting in the clinic, nineteen years old, with a baby on her lap, thrown out of her mother’s house and no sign of the dad, so if anyone wanted to make judgements it wasn’t her name she need worry about. And Grace gave her a card with her name on it and email and number, like that was the most natural thing in the world.
So Stacey-Ann gave her one in return, one from the salon that she dug from her purse, Puerto Rico Nail and Tan Bar, Rowley Village, and she scribbled her number and email address on it like she sometimes does for customers. Did. She is not working. She says she is on maternity leave, but it all comes down to whether her mother will have her back in the house, let alone the shop. Whether she will go back if she asks her. Which is what she imagines this rattling on the door is all about.
Zach is on his play mat. In a while she will put him in his pram, go for a walk along the quiet roads, towards the park, so he can look at the tree branches above him. There’s an envelope on the doormat, she picks it up, her name, her mother’s writing. Thinks she’ll put the kettle on first, put Zach in his rocker.
When she emailed Grace she had considered writing, You interviewed my dad and it was on the telly, but thought better of it. And when her dad said he’d been interviewed she didn’t tell him that she had too because he seemed so pleased about it, like literally more happy about it than anything for years, apart from Zach. He was happy about being a grandad and she was proud of that. Proud of her own dad, if that was possible, like she was the parent. Except not of what he said about the voting. He was too negative. It was because of his own experiences, of course, but he shouldn’t apply his own life like it was a rule. He’d been unlucky. It made her feel disloyal thinking about him like this, but it was the truth. Tony said you made your own luck in the world. She didn’t agree. Her mother was wrong to think that Zach was a mistake of some kind. Even though she didn’t see Duane, that was true. Things might come good there. And if not, she would look after Zach, and who knows for the future? You couldn’t tell.
She looks at the envelope. She picks up Zach, holds him on her hip and opens the front door, walks down the path with him and shuts the gate. She picks up the envelope on the way back in.
Before
He tried to see the house through her eyes, understood that he could not. There was blossom in the air and a breeze that came through the screen of trees at the back of the houses, cottages you might even call them, that sounded like the sea. The hydrangeas had started to flower early. The new people at the end of the row had left a settee half on the pavement for collection.
He looked at Grace, looked away, ushered her up the path, berated himself again about whatever it was that had taken hold of him. She said she was looking for people to interview, for background, a portrait of the place, not opinions, more like stories, layers, depths, the way things had been, the ways they had changed. He said his parents would be perfect. The word parents was strange in his mouth, he was not sure he had ever used it, only ever said ‘Mom and Dad’, and he only really meant his dad. ‘Yow must be joking, Cairo,’ is what his mother said. He had not used the front door since the day of his nan’s funeral, years ago, he always went up the entry, round the back. His dad opened the door before they got to it. His mother stood behind in the hall, shadowy, holding a plate of biscuits.
Grace held her hand out for his dad to shake and he worried for a moment that the man would not take it, would not know what to do, but of course he took her hand and asked her in.
‘I love your hydrangeas,’ Grace said.
His dad smiled, things would be all right. She was a woman who said she loved things very easily. The hydrangeas were all right, could have done with tidying up a bit. His old man had not stopped moaning about them all week.
They sat in the front room. Grace and Cairo sat. His mother hovered at the doorway. His dad stood with his back to the wall while they drank their tea and took biscuits from the plate that sat on the heavily polished table under the window. The light filtered through the net curtains.
Cairo stood up to get his dad to sit down, all so awkward, squeezed himself against his dad’s belly as he came to the chair. They could have done this in the back, had more space, but of course they had to use the best room. Grace set the camera up. His dad sat down heavily in the armchair. Cairo trod carefully into the hall and pulled the door behind him.
‘What a lovely-looking girl,’ his mom said.
He could hear Grace saying something to his dad. Then his dad talked to the camera, in a voice he did not fully recognize.
‘I worked at the same foundry for thirty-one years, from aged fifteen to when I was forty-six,’ he heard him say, then crept backwards down the hall to the kitchen, looking at the lines of the wallpaper as he went, noticed the way there was a light socket they’d never trimmed the paper from properly, told himself he might finish it that afternoon.
He wiped the cups that his mother had already washed. She sat now to drink her own cup of tea, dip a biscuit. A blackbird flitted around outside the window. He stood at the doorway to listen, could hear his dad talking, in full flow now.
‘You’d look out at night and all you could see was light – fires from the furnaces, you know, as far as you could see, the place all lit up. There was work for all the men. Man’s work, not like now. I know that’s something yow ay meant to say any more, so forgive me. There was a culture that went alongside the work. And doh get me wrong, for the most part it had been a hard life. I’m the youngest of ten. Me brothers and sisters was born all through the twenties and thirties and they used to talk about how things was. I had other brothers and sisters who died as babbies. After the war it was easier, for a bit, for a long time, I suppose, when they built these houses, others like em, and we all moved up from the town. My ancestors was nailers and puddlers and coal-pickers and navvies and so on. They dug canals and tunnels. My ode mon dug rock out the hill under the castle. None of them jobs exist no more. They ay done for years. Maybe that’s a good thing. Folks had hard lives. And things am easier now. Some things am easier. Although you wouldn’t think it, some of the things that have happened, some of the stuff the young uns face now. What I’m saying is you shouldn’t wish it back, but we never wished for the way things am today either. We need to start afresh, change direction.’
‘What’s he saying now?’ his mother asked from the kitchen table.
‘The way things was, Mom, all the works and that, you know.’
‘The usual,’ she said. ‘I doh see the point of keep looking back, Cairo, I really doh. I’ve told him, get on with things. Stop pestering about things that have gone. Concentrate on what’s here.’ She looked out of the window at the listing back fence.
‘I know, Mom, I know,’ he said.
While the man talked Grace looked at the framed photographs on the wall. She had been looking at the girl for a
while before she recognized her. It was the girl she had spoken to at the doctor’s surgery, what was her name? There were photos of the baby, too, in white knitted clothes, and even as she looked at them, she could not make the link between Cairo and the girl with the baby, which reminded her she said she would speak to her again, while the man talked about fires as far as the eye could see.
When they finished, and she’d thanked him and was packing away the camera, she motioned to the photos on the wall. ‘That’s a beautiful baby,’ she said.
‘Me great-grandson,’ the man said. ‘They’ll be back in a bit. Zachariah, the babby’s named. Thass Stacey-Ann, me granddaughter, Cairo’s daughter.’ He pushed himself up from the chair.
‘You have a lovely family, Mr Jukes,’ she said.
He looked at her for a moment as if trying to work out the joke.
After
They trudge up the slope towards the access road.
‘I swear to God this rain’s already easing off,’ Luke says.
He and Cairo hold opposite ends of a tarpaulin, kindling and rags and a can of petrol sloshing about in the hammock that they have formed. Alan walks next to them, hands in his pocket. They were meant to have burnt the rubbish this afternoon, anything they couldn’t use, but it was too damp to do it now and would have to wait. Cairo is not sure such fires are allowed any more, whether they ever were, and is dubious about why they might be burning things on Tony’s behalf, destroying evidence of some kind. Luke says he’ll take the stuff and keep it in his car, keep it dry.
‘What did he say to yer?’ Cairo asks Alan.
‘Just said it was setting in, the rain, that we was best to finish now. The drainage on there’s fucked anyway. We’ll be knee deep in water.’
‘What’s he, a weatherman now as well as everything else? Some kind of fucking drainage engineer.’
Alan does not say anything. Instead he passes Cairo his pay packet. Cairo grips the tarpaulin in the other hand. He holds the money tight in his fist. The veins bulge and he pictures his fists wrapped, gloved, the minutes before a fight starts, before that first bell sounds.
‘Says we might be finishing up here next week any road.’ Drops of water are trapped in Alan’s moustache.
‘Did he say anything about more work?’
Alan says nothing.
‘Fucking hell,’ Cairo says, and he hears the panic in his own voice, and he wishes he’d shut up, wishes he did not always give himself away. He’d be no poker player, that much is certain. That is one avenue closed to him.
‘Coming up Dudley after?’ Alan says.
‘I thought yow was banned?’
Alan shrugs. ‘Come up this after, if yer fancy.’
‘I might,’ Cairo says.
There are snails on the path in the rain. Cairo steps carefully to miss them, as they carry the tarpaulin to Luke’s car. He can feel his ankle, there might be something wrong with the pins that hold his joint in place, like they are coming loose or rusting or something. He limps at the end of most days, tries to run with it strapped up, knows that this cannot be doing it much good. He sees a snail smashed under a boot up in front of them, walks past another which is still moving, struggling, dying, with half of itself squashed and oozing in a trail behind it, the shell smashed to bits. He cannot bring himself to step on it and put the thing out of its misery. He is sure the new kid ahead of them is stamping on the snails on purpose.
‘Watch them snails,’ he shouts out to the kid.
‘What?’
‘I said watch them snails. Step round em.’
The boy stops, turns, looks at him, waits for Cairo to laugh, but he doesn’t.
‘Am yer joking?’
‘No, I ay fucking joking. Watch where yome walking.’
‘Yow watch who yome talking to.’
‘All right, Cairo, eh? Don’t worry, mate. Don’t worry, our kid.’ Alan has his arm around Cairo. The boy weighs things up for a moment before turning and carrying on up the track.
‘Fucking hell, Cairo. Calm down, eh?’
‘Why would yer stamp on the fucking snails though? They’m living things, fuck’s sake.’
Luke veers with the tarpaulin and keeps Cairo’s hands busy, and the boy carries on up the road in front of them. Cairo sees the shape of his back, the way he holds himself. Looks like the boy from Lupin Road.
‘Let me know if yer need the motor later, Cairo. I’m gonna drop it back and then go for a drink,’ Luke says, and Cairo knows Luke is trying to keep him talking, sees the kid glaring at him from the top of the slope.
‘Ta, mate, I’m probably stopping in,’ he says, ignores the boy.
This arrangement has lasted years now. Cairo is not supposed to drive, had his licence revoked when he had that fit after the series of concussions, after his last fights, ten years or so now. Has felt fine with all that for years, more or less, but has never tried to get the licence back. He uses Luke’s car when he needs to, walks over the hill to pick it up from where Luke parks it outside his back gate, fills it up with petrol or slips him a twenty every now and again, when they get paid for a full week. He has even taken his mother to a hospital appointment in it a few times. Everyone turns a blind eye. It helps Luke out a bit, he’s got his own troubles, although the car will not last much longer, a battered red Peugeot 206 with a big dent in the back passenger door. He breathes in the smell of the petrol as they fold the tarpaulin into the car boot.
‘Want a lift?’ Luke asks.
‘No, mate. I’m gooin the other way,’ he says, although he isn’t.
He shouts ta-ra to the others. The kid has stopped looking.
‘Duane, come,’ says one of the other young lads. The name registers dully with Cairo. He is not sure why.
Alan calls Cairo back and presses a fiver into his hand and tells him to get summat for the babby, must know he’s short.
Cairo turns left without really thinking, the wrong direction to get home, but at least out of the way of the pub, and talk of the pub, towards Great Bridge, with the traffic idling at the lights, some people still on their way to work, and he, Cairo, already finished up for the day.
And it almost feels good, to have no work to go to, to feel the day open up in front of him. The rain has eased, there is a lighter grey to the sky over Dudley Castle, even some shreds of blue from where the weather comes. Cairo can do without the pub, that wait for them to open up, then sitting there all day and watching the light change through the bar as time passes, a game of pool, something to eat, pissing your money away. Alan does not care. He sits out on the benches with a few cans when the pubs refuse to serve him, does not care who comes past, gets his shirt off if the sun breaks through, shouts hello if he sees anyone looking over at him. Cheerful, everyone’s mate, until at some point that switches and he is everyone’s enemy, including his own. Get down the road before that happens, that is Cairo’s advice to the kids hanging round him, even Duane, this kid from Lupin Road who can skip up the hill away from him and will not look away from his stare. Not that anyone asks his advice.
And not that he is not Alan’s mate. The other week he’d gone out with him, down West Brom, because Alan had gone to see his ex-missus first, and they had started in the Wetherspoon’s, there in the old snooker hall, and gradually worked their way back up the hill. Some mad fucker had stood on a table of a pub he couldn’t remember the name of, backstreets, off Carters Green, and had sung Wolves songs at the top of his voice and everyone threw stuff at him. Cairo and Alan had come laughing up the road, rolling drunk and shocked to find it was only teatime. Later, they sat in Alan’s front room, what had been his front room, all the windows boarded up and two deckchairs facing where the telly used to be. Cairo started to tell Alan about Grace then, had to talk to someone about it or he’d go crazy, looked across at Alan asleep in his deckchair with his shirt off, a smoking ashtray on one side of him, a tumbler with his glass eye sitting in it on the other, and he sneaked out, threw up into the hedge, swore neve
r again.
That is Alan’s party trick, taking his eye out. He’d lost it, had it glassed out in a big fight with the Gypsies back when they were kids. And the thing is Alan does not care, does not give a shit, as he happily tells anyone who might ask, a bit too forcefully if you want Cairo’s opinion. His missus and his kids have gone, his furniture too, eviction notices and court summonses make a carpet across the hall, that moustache just grows longer and scraggier, and if you ask him how he is he says all right, mate, or shrugs his shoulders, or tells you he couldn’t give a shit.
‘What yer talking to her for?’ Alan had asked him, when he did the interview in the marketplace. The interview and everything else. He pictured her in the room for a moment, standing by the mirrored wardrobes, tries to push that image away. He had wanted to say to Alan it was so that he could speak to the woman with the long hair and the microphone and the soft skin, because when would someone like that ever speak to someone like them, smile at blokes like them? Grace, her name was Grace, but Alan knew that well enough and had already called her a stuck-up bitch and walked off up the High Street.
‘About the vote, y’know, the Europe vote.’
‘I doh know nothing about that,’ Alan said.
‘Have yer ever voted?’ Cairo asks him.
‘Have I fuck.’
See, could not give a shit. Whereas Cairo had always been proud to vote, had it drummed into him by his old man.
‘And a fat lot of use it’s always done yer,’ is what Alan said to him. ‘Have a look around yer, sunshine. See what good voting does.’
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