It had been Cairo she wanted to speak to anyway, Grace, not to Alan, not to Luke or the others. When did any of them ever speak to women called Grace? Although not even that is true, because he remembers his mom has a cousin called Gracie, who owned an Alsatian and had a caravan at Bromyard. Still, Gracie, not Grace. He knows that makes the difference.
Before
The wheel went faster than Grace imagined it would, like an old-fashioned fairground ride. There were kids running around at the base of it, laughing and shrieking, Friday afternoon. The children held biscuits with smiley faces done in icing or chocolate, the brown and white faces of the biscuits chased the brown and white faces of the children, and they laughed and whirled in the square below. He told her that when they put the wheel up in Birmingham the commentary that played was in French, described what you might see as you rose above Paris. Said people wanted to keep it on, how you could hear about the Champs-Élysées as you looked across the Midlands traffic. There was no commentary here, the wind suddenly whipped against you when you were carried above the buildings.
Up and over the pub below, The Saracen’s Head and Freemasons’ Arms, said the austere lettering, and what history was locked in that name? she wondered. This had been his boxing club, he told her. Saracens, there by the potato merchants, steps that went down into the gloom of potato dust and the lights of the gym. He told her that the club had been forced to change its name from the Saracen’s Head, move away from the badge of a bearded, decapitated man, in order to gain some funding. Political correctness, he said, in the same deadpan tone as he described taking Paris for Birmingham, as if he was mentioning a change in the weather, and he maintained his stare as he said it, and she hadn’t said anything at all and nodded. He said he didn’t go to the club any more anyway, but it meant something to him.
It was very green around the castle, which came into view like exposed bone, over the pub roof, and so were the hills that rippled away from the edge of the town. When she came back she would film at the zoo in the castle grounds. She wanted images of llamas, parrots, giraffes, and the soundtrack of people lamenting what they’d lost, the shrieks of children playing and laughing all at the same time. There was something definite now, some shape to what she was doing. There was a BBC producer she had to ring back about Cairo’s interview, they might want to use it. The wind blew as they reached the top of the arc and she looked through the wheel’s white mesh and leaned against him as they dipped back towards the buildings.
‘This is all right,’ is what he said, but with genuine inflection in his voice, a sense of delight in it. The children’s cries came back, the sounds of happy people. There were things here that did not add up, that’s what she felt. She stayed leaned into him as they dipped and rose again.
He told her that this was a hill country of long views. He had taken her to the top of the hill, the bank as he had called it, looked out towards Malvern, said there had once been a viewing platform where they stood, a watchtower with a telescope at the top, built to look for the French when Napoleon threatened invasion. You could see the sea then, he said, Lundy Island out there in the choppy brown water between England and Wales. There had been carnivals on the bank and people queued to go up and have a look. Later there had been a plan to build the world’s tallest building on the site of the old steelworks, where the shopping centre was.
‘You’re making this up,’ she said.
‘You couldn’t make that up,’ is what he said in return.
She thought back to the newspapers. Something did seem weirdly amiss, about a country that might ridicule such an innocent thing as a big wheel turning above the buildings of a town, to dismiss the view of the hills beyond, some deep fissure that was about more than fairground rides and innocent ways to pass ten minutes in the springtime blossom in England.
Afterwards they sat in the Saracen’s Head at a table near the window. They could see the wheel as it turned, the children gone home now. People drifted across the square, workers from the council offices nearby. When the pub door opened he would glance up at it, watch whoever came in as they walked to the bar, then turn his attention back to Grace. He picked at the edge of a beer mat.
‘You OK?’ she said. And after a pause, ‘Thank you for this afternoon. You’ve really helped me with all this. I appreciate it.’
She had assumed that to come to the pub was a good idea, but now she was not so sure, the way he looked through the window to the door, back again, picked at the beer mat. She had asked him about the gym, the club, whether they could call in there, and he’d said, ‘Leave it with me,’ but it was possible that was it. He said he’d been away from all that for a long time.
The last time he was in here was years ago. He and Nat used to come here, Saturday nights, and if he was in training he’d drink cordial and soda water and stand straight-backed near the doors and let people look over and nod towards him, and sometimes people would come up and shake his hand and ask him when he was next fighting and it had felt good, to be somebody. Now he could see his reflection in the window where they sat, Grace next to him, and he didn’t want to see anyone who knew him. There’s Cairo Jukes, that old boxer, people might say, if they said anything at all, making a fool of himself with that woman, look. Must think he’s summat pretty special.
‘Would you like another drink?’ she asked, motioned to the pint he’d drunk and not tasted.
He’d got the car, which was another reason not to drink, and he had money in his pocket, but there was the money he owed Natalie and what he needed to give to Luke, should at least fill the car up with petrol, turn up a bit of rent at home, slip Stacey-Ann something for Zachariah. He should stay out of the pub. ‘Women like that, they’m bad news, mate, in the end,’ is what Luke had said. Luke wasn’t a headcase, not like Alan. Even Luke, giving him a kind of warning.
‘I’ll get one,’ he said, and stood up.
‘No, let me,’ she said, and it angered him suddenly, the ease of all this, the ease with which she sat here and then offered to buy him drinks and looked at him like she did, from her world that was not his. Easy come, easy go. She might go back to London tonight, she might not. All so simple. She put her hand on his, smiled at him, and he felt the anger shift in him again, the churn of it, the way it came and went and became other things. He wanted her to leave her hand on his. Looked at her, but she had already turned to go to the bar. He shifted in the chair, watched the sun on the square outside, tried to enjoy things while they were here.
She wanted to tell him she could put it on the film’s budget, claim some sort of expenses, but there was no budget of course. She assumed it was that she got the drinks that annoyed him, although he seemed reassured now, sitting back at the table.
‘There’s a place,’ she said when she sat back down, ‘an Indian restaurant, I’ve got an address for it. It’s quite near, I think. I know some of the UKIP activists meet there on a Friday night, someone I spoke to. I wondered if you fancied going. I mean, if you’re not busy or anything later. I could call the people I spoke to, but I thought I might go and have a look around. Anyway, I haven’t had a curry here, people have said to, what with the reputation for it and everything. It might be fun.’
What swayed him was when she said it might be fun. She actually used the word fun. She was a person who used words such as fun and wonderful, and he was not sure he’d ever met anyone who spoke like this in real life, or anywhere else for that matter. It seemed to open something up. Maybe it was OK, changing again after years, to feel himself becoming someone new, when he’d assumed he’d shrink away.
She mentioned the name Jamie Iqbal and it made him laugh. She said something earnest about how one strategy of the party, of the far right in general, in order to legitimize itself, was to use people of colour. That was the phrase she used, people of colour, and he remembered it as something strange. Zachariah was a person of colour, Cairo was not. Was that what it meant? Jamie Iqbal was indeed a person of colour. The idea that people like Grac
e thought certain politics were illegitimate, and how that might make those politics more appealing to other people, that was what she didn’t get. People were sick of being told what to think and not think. He would try to explain that to her. Again. Not here though, not right now.
‘I know Jamie, was mates with him once, I suppose. It’ll be him using them, doh worry about that.’
For a moment he had been concerned that it might have been Tony she’d been talking to, it was possible, but there was part of him that would not have worried at all about bumping into Tony and Natalie, UKIP activists if that was what they were now, if that was what you called them, with Grace standing next to him, the way he might look them in the eye and they could pay him a bit of the respect he was due, their jaws would probably drop open. Instead of laughing at him. He knew they did, that he was yesterday’s man and they ridiculed him, if they talked about him at all.
He saw himself again reflected in the window. Imagined the man there getting up, taking Grace’s hand, walking off into a different life altogether.
The restaurant was on a back road in the Lye, on an industrial estate, not too promising. Cairo could see the railway viaduct that came out of Stourbridge over the grey warehouses, the sky already underlit with orange street lights. It was later than he would have liked.
In the paper Jamie talked about running gala nights, big crowds, at this new place. People could eat their curry ringside and watch the fights, and there would be singers, cabaret between the bouts. Jamie, shameless, said he planned to bring a bit of Las Vegas to the Black Country, which made Cairo laugh when his dad passed him the Dudley News, and said, ‘Have yer seen what your mate’s doing now?’ But, still, it was something to think about. Though he wondered about Grace, asking questions.
‘Like they don’t have cab firms here,’ she said to him, smiling when he’d insisted on driving, a couple of pints in, and he should be careful, he understood that.
‘It ay like London, you know,’ he said, wasn’t really sure what he meant by this and was glad she didn’t press him on it. When he’d had those fights in London, the people had been much the same as at home. This woman was none of those things, in her patterned dress and cardigan and masses of hair and ideas that things might be fun. She had changed and he had waited in the hotel bar, had the good sense to drink a Coke. When she came into the bar he wanted to say she looked beautiful, didn’t say anything at all.
Easy come, easy go. She’d been to places, making films, talking to people, Serbia and Kosovo and Greece, places from the news, and it surprised him how much someone might know and not know. She spoke some Russian, had said things to him in it, and how would someone go about learning Russian? Maybe clever people were always naive.
‘This place will be rougher than it looks,’ he said. And he said it as a joke, because it didn’t look much from the outside. They stepped around a puddle of smashed glass. He realized when they parked up that it was an old factory social club. The factory had long gone. There were orange houses built on what had been the football ground and bowls club behind it. He had a vague recollection of once being here with his dad. She slipped her arm into his and said, ‘You’d better look after me, then.’ He could feel her body against his and her hair against his cheek.
There were stone leopards on either side of the doors and a big man in white gloves standing inside the entrance to take their coats and usher them to their seats. The place was not full, a couple of big groups laughing and all talking at once, clinking glasses, people done up for a night out. There were tables with kids eating ice cream, a few couples leaning towards each other across their food. Candles flickered in the golden fittings. He breathed a bit more easily, recognized the elephants at the top of the stairs, and the wooden screens and lamps. He put his hand on the broad forehead of one of the elephants, the wood was cool to the touch. He saw the waiter look at him, Grace too.
‘This used to be somewhere else,’ he said, by way of explanation. And it had, in a place in Dudley where he used to go with Natalie, but which had closed down, done out with carved elephants and water features much like this place, and that was like the Jamie he remembered, big on ideas, but never his own. And they walked through the restaurant alongside the narrow canal that crossed the floor and wound between the tables back to a central fountain. There was the sound and sparkle of tumbling water. There were koi carp swimming by their feet.
‘This place is incredible,’ she said. ‘I love it.’
And she did, because there was something she wanted to say to him, about how for all his talk of loss and defeat there were people having a good time here, making the most of things, getting on with life. The zoo animals in the middle of the town, riding on the Ferris wheel, the sound of laughter: that was the story as well, she wanted to say. It wasn’t everyone or everything that was sinking, it seemed to her, not like the way he described it. The truth was that the people she’d spoken to, with the exception of Cairo, had said they were voting to give things a go, that the country would be fine on its own in the world. Even Cairo’s dad had said that, after a fashion. People shrugged their shoulders and said it was no big deal. Grace had learned to think that this was delusional, held back from saying so in the interviews, but was not quite as sure as she had been. She thought of her mother muttering at the television news, was struck by something Cairo had said to her: ‘Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?’ She was not convinced it ever had.
Cairo said he had never been one for spicy food after the waiter got their orders the wrong way round. She worried momentarily that this would wound him, wondered why it bothered her, as he pulled carefully at the naan bread, looked at the dishes between them.
Some hair had tumbled out of her clip and fallen onto her neck, and he looked at her and it seemed to say something about her. That there was some carelessness to her, he thought, that if you had so much going for you, you could afford to be careless. She looked over to a table that she said must be the UKIP people, though how she could tell was beyond him. He looked at the way her hair fell against her neck, wanted to touch her hair, her neck.
Which is how the fight came to surprise him. There was a shout from a few tables away, from behind one of the wooden screens that partitioned the space, the smash of glass and a woman’s scream, the sound of things overturned. Two men crashed through the screen and grappled and tumbled half into the water. A carp brushed the ear of the man on the bottom. The man on top had a tear in the shoulder of his suit jacket, a trickle of blood ran from behind his ear. They breathed heavily, humped each other across the floor, half in and half out of the water. Cairo sensed the fight had already blown itself out, he heard one of the men grunt, ‘Enough,’ although whether as statement or question he wasn’t sure.
The waiters were running now, the big man from the door too, tearing off his white gloves, and the men grappled slowly, their upset table some way behind them, and wives and girlfriends and brothers and mates stood with their hands to their mouths in shock, silver balloons with the number 40 printed on them hung suspended in the air around them. The two men had been eating together. And it looked like that would be it, some kind of minor diversion, entertainment, and that the men would dust themselves down in the car park outside and perhaps even resume their night out, something to laugh off tomorrow afternoon in the pub, when the big man from the door, the waiters buoyed and cocky in his presence, came and hauled the bloke on top that bit too aggressively, and Cairo saw he gave him a little dig to the kidneys as he raised him, and who could blame him really, but his family and mates all saw too, their table upset, their food and the night going to ruin, and that was when it all kicked off.
One of the men who had stood at the upset table came to life, his glasses askew on his red face, bent and picked up an already broken pint glass and hurled it at the bouncer. It was a wild throw, missed by a good few feet and shattered against the wall by which Cairo and Grace sat. Cairo felt a couple of chips of glass hi
t him, reached across the table, touched Grace’s arm and motioned for her to get down, hemmed in as they were, actually put his hand on top of her head, but she manoeuvred herself out of the way, and everyone in the restaurant stood or ducked below the tables or made a run for it. Cairo saw a family of four, young boys in matching shirts, one holding an ice cream like an injured bird, scramble up the steps to the exit doors. There was the sound of more breaking glass.
The men who had started the fight were already halfway to the doors, harried by waiters and chefs, who appeared from nowhere. A man in stained white kitchen clothes waved a heavy rolling pin. Cairo wondered if he’d go back and fetch a knife. One of the wooden elephants tottered and crashed on its side. The people from the table followed, as if in a carnival procession, men and women both throwing punches now, at each other, at the waiters.
A man stumbled, came crashing towards Cairo and Grace’s table, the man who had thrown the glass, he was sure, but with no glasses on his face, possibly the man’s brother. There was a tablecloth somehow tucked into the man’s belt, so he dragged upset curries and pickles that bled across the white material behind him. He blundered wildly at Cairo, windmilled his arms, so Cairo punched him, instinctively the first time, and when the man did not go to ground, but waved his arms even more wildly in front of him, punched him a second time, with more purpose, and it wasn’t a great connection, but the bloke went back the way he came anyway, treading through the food that he’d strewn behind him, splashing korma and rogan josh up his trousers and across the room before he went down onto the floor, from where two waiters dragged him towards the door.
And then it was over as suddenly as it had begun and everything went quiet. The sounds of flowing water and sitar music came back. There was a shout from out in the car park, and then another, and the waiters and kitchen staff came back in through the doors and started righting chairs and tables, sweeping up glass, people at half a dozen separate tables sat down or re-emerged and dusted themselves off and all tried to decide what to do.
The Cut Page 5
