Always the Sun

by Neil Cross

  ‘What do you mean, lose him?’

  She told him to be quiet. He was shouting. She said, ‘If Social Services think Jamie’s living in an incestuous household, he’ll go straight on the At Risk register. I don’t know how long this rumour’s been doing the rounds. All it needs is to reach one teacher who’s inclined to listen—and that’s it.’

  Sam stood and rushed to the bathroom. He vomited into the sink. When the spasm had passed, he turned on the taps and pushed the scraps down the plughole. Then he rinsed his mouth and splashed his sweating face. He padded slowly back to the unlit bedroom.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, next to Mel, a gloved fist inside his head.

  He said, ‘Don’t leave us.’

  ‘I have to.’

  He put out his hand. Mel withdrew.

  He let the hand flop heavily into his lap.

  Mel stood as if to go. But she sagged again on the edge of the bed and put her head in her hands.

  He said, ‘Mel. We’re a family.’

  ‘Not that kind of family.’

  ‘Don’t even joke about it.’

  ‘It’ll blow over,’ she said. ‘He’s just jealous—that’s all.’

  ‘Jealous how?’

  ‘How do you think?’

  He sat up.

  He said, ‘Did you and Dave Hooper—? With Dave Hooper?’

  ‘A long time ago, yeah.’

  ‘He’s married.’

  ‘Technically, yes. But that’s beside the point. We had a fling, I don’t know—three years ago? He got funny about it. He kept phoning. When he was drunk. You know what men are like.’

  He sloughed the sweat from his brow.

  ‘I can’t believe you never told me this.’

  ‘It didn’t seem relevant.’

  ‘Well, it seems pretty fucking relevant now.’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Yeah. Sam, he’s had half the women in the Cat and Fiddle over the years.’

  ‘And what? You didn’t want to be left out?’

  Their eyes met and locked and he was surprised by the ferocity of his emotion. But the pain was too great and he collapsed again, pressing the cool underside of the pillow to his eye.

  Mel didn’t slam the door, but she didn’t close it quietly either.

  Sam lay with the pillow pressed to his eyes. He imagined them together. Hooper was made of rage and tendon and sinew. The erotic charge of his murderer’s hands. Mel’s body, pawed and scratched and rammed. He thought of the bolt that pounded pig skulls, a thousand times a day. And Mel screaming and squealing and biting his back, until they were two pigs, biting and fucking, with wild, white-rolled eyes, in the back of a slurry-spilled, slat-sided lorry slowing to pull in to the white-lit slaughterhouse.

  He lay and listened, hoping to hear Mel’s footsteps on the stairs. Instead she paid a visit to the bathroom, then went to her room and began to pack. He heard noises that he interpreted as her struggling to lever her suitcase from the top of the wardrobe. He pictured her on tiptoes, straining.

  He stood. The room oscillated and he reached out for the wall, steadying himself. Like an inmate of a penal colony, shuffling as if in leg-irons, squinting against the fierce, unaccustomed light of the hallway, he shuffled to the bathroom. He ran the shower cold. He took a deep breath and, fully clothed, clambered under it. There was a bright, clear moment of shock. He yelled and stayed under. His scalp and the flesh of his face grew taut, his clothes sopping and heavy. He counted down from a minute, then gave it thirty seconds more. He gave up at twenty.

  There were various ways to attack a migraine. There were those people who, at the first signs, went for a run, or played squash, or did as many press-ups as they were able. Some masturbated. For Sam, only the shock of cold water had ever proved even slightly beneficial.

  He stepped out of the bath and shambled like a sea monster to Mel’s room.

  Her suitcase lay open on the bed. She was taking armfuls of clothes from the wardrobe, the floor and the bedside table and stuffing them in the suitcase. The bare soles of her feet were dirty and there were ancient chips of red varnish on her big toes.

  She said, ‘You’re dripping all over the carpet.’

  He shrugged. Cold, wet clothing touched his skin.

  He said, ‘Don’t leave.’

  ‘I’ve been here too long anyway.’

  ‘But we like having you here.’

  He heard Jamie on the stairs behind him and stepped aside to let him enter.

  Jamie looked at Mel.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m going home.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Love, I have to. It’s where I live.’

  ‘But I’ll get bored.’

  ‘You’ll be all right. I’ll still be round here all the time.’

  ‘But it won’t be the same.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But it’s a laugh, having you here.’

  ‘I’ve had a laugh, too.’

  Jamie glowered at Sam.

  ‘Has Dad said something?’

  Mel laughed. She stuffed a pair of tights, with a pair of knickers still visibly rolled into the gusset, into the suitcase.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then why are you going?’

  She stopped and put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Please don’t,’ said Jamie. ‘Really.’

  Mel hung her head and laughed again.

  ‘Don’t give me a hard time,’ she said.

  Sam watched them and understood that Dave Hooper’s wrath was beyond his power to control. The police couldn’t control him. The neighbourhood could exert no sanctions because it feared and liked him. Dave Hooper and his family could say what they chose and do as they pleased, and the only way to stop them was to be more terrible than them.

  Sam looked at his son.

  He saw a strange, frightened boy whose first battle had proved to be unwinnable. Sam wondered what kind of lesson that would teach him. What kind of timorous adult would this turn him into? He marvelled at what the Hoopers—without doing much—had done to them, to the fragmented remains of his family. He wondered what the Hoopers, with the perfume of victory in their nostrils, might continue to do. He saw that killing the dog had been no victory. It was a small act of resistance, of terrorism. It hardly made up for the sour knowledge that Dave Hooper had fucked his sister.

  He brushed the sopping wet fringe from his eyes. Then he went downstairs, to find Unka Frank’s telephone number.

  16

  Dating in parts to the fifteenth century, the church of St Mary Whitcliff had finally fallen derelict sometime during the Cold War. Eaten away by time, its stone corpse was so old as to be almost invisible. But it occupied a great deal of valuable city-centre real estate and, two years earlier, the Town Council had sold the grounds to a property developer, who won the sealed bid with an audacious and committed plan to take the sacred ground into the furthest reaches of twenty-first century retail. The churchyard was to become part of a shopping mall and integrated leisure complex.

  The church had been there since before the city was a city, while its boroughs and wards were a nexus of villages, beyond which their denizens seldom stepped. Not quite 3,000 people had been buried there. And they lay there still, interred in the graveyard and the vaulted crypt.

  The presence of the dead was an inconvenience. Nobody cared much about what actually happened to the bodies, but nobody wanted to play squash or buy a handbag or a cappuccino on a shiny floor beneath which lipless skulls grinned upwards.

  So the bodies had to be moved. To do this, the property developer had subcontracted one of its affiliates, Blueberry Hill Relocations Ltd, which specialized in this sort of thing. In turn, Blueberry Hill Relocations Ltd employed Unka Frank as foreman.

&nbs
p; Sam made his way down there in the morning. He parked round the back of Castle Green, just the other side of the river, walked down Fairfax Street, then up towards Fulton-Mangle. The church stood at the tip of a broad peninsula that divided two one-way road systems. The site was surrounded by a lashed, heavily graffitied corrugated iron fence. Much of the spraypaint was faded and ancient, referring to bands long since split and teenagers long since become parents. Generations of posters had been ripped down by passing hands until only scraps and corners remained, thick as cardboard with months and years of overpasting.

  He found a makeshift gate. He took its weight on his shoulder, lifted half the sagging, ropy construction clear of the ground and heaved it forward. The iron shrieked and he squeezed self-consciously through the gap he had created.

  Despite the good weather, it was chilly within the iron walls, whose gloominess the spring sun barely penetrated. The ground had not dried since the last heavy rain. Thick, grey mud clung to the soles of his boots.

  The church squatted in the middle of what resembled a building site. It was a low and stumpy building with a twisted spire like an ill-set finger. It could never have been beautiful. Its windows were boarded with plywood. Its studded doors had been removed from the great hinges, perhaps to be inspected by local historians. If so, they had been rejected as of little interest and now stood propped against a mossy wall, close to a generator that vibrated and leapt from side to side like an excited child. A thick snake of cable ran inside the church, into the darkness.

  Men in workclothes, steel-capped boots and hard-hats came and went, smoking roll-up cigarettes. They didn’t look like typical builders. There was something variant and diverse about them. They had the air of stragglers at a motorcycle rally.

  Long neglected, the graveyard was now a ploughed mess of oozing clay and ancient, leaning headstones, worn smooth and discoloured like dentures. Among them, earthmoving machines, wheelbarrows and men were parked indiscriminately. Although there was a great deal of miscellaneous activity, Sam could see little actual work being perpetrated.

  Two men in suits and hard-hats appeared to be inspecting the site. Sam assumed they were Frank’s employers, come to ensure the dead were being disposed of in the quickest, most cost-efficient­ manner permitted under European legislation.

  In all the random activity, it was difficult to single out an individual. Sam seized on a prematurely wizened little man with a dried-apricot face and asked if he knew where Frank was. The small man responded in a language Sam didn’t understand and pointed. Sam’s gaze followed his index finger to the south end of the grounds, where a clutch of antiquated caravans were propped up on oily breeze-blocks. The caravans had gone yellow like old Sellotape and they rocked visibly when a large vehicle passed by on the other side of the fence. Sam watched the caravans for a while, but they seemed to be empty.

  Instead, he walked into the shadow of the church and through its doorless portal. Inside, the cold dampness settled on him. The familiar smell of church was undercut by fragrant ribbons of cigarettes and wet soil. The interior was illuminated by a rickety lighting rig, which took its energy from the fat main cable that snaked across the floor. Shovels, spades and pick-axes were arranged haphazardly in the available empty space, from which the pews had long since been removed. There was old graffiti on the inside walls the white, dripping anarchy signs and more long-dead bands: Sam gazed sadly at an aerosoled marker that read THE SPECIALS 2 TONE RULES. There was a great variety of other equipment: boxes in wood and metal, wheelbarrows full of unidentifiable junk, corners of skirting board, bits of plaster, wiring, crushed Coke cans. And against the far wall, where the altar had once stood, were stacked a large number of rotten old coffins wrapped in plastic sheeting.

  A broken stream of clay-caked, long-haired men in hard-hats emerged from the crypt, three or four to a team, carrying coffins as if they were delivering sofas.

  Sam stopped one of the teams and, attempting to ignore their freight, asked where Frank was. A bearded man with a small pentagram tattooed between his eyebrows told him that Frank was ‘downstairs’. He smiled with such satisfaction that Sam felt challenged and he stomped off in the direction the coffins were coming from.

  It was like entering a shallow-cast mine. The crypt was lit with arc lamps that cast quick, extravagant shadows. It was cold and damp. Sam clutched the neck of his jacket and wished he’d brought his scarf.

  He couldn’t guess at the size of the crypt: its far edges bled into the shadows. The walls, as far as he could see them, were lined with shallow recesses, in many of which a coffin was still placed. Few of the coffins were complete. Some had rotted enough to offer a glimpse of their contents. He averted his gaze, and he averted it again. There was nowhere safe to look.

  More systematically than he might have guessed, the coffins were being removed from their recesses and organized on the ground. As he watched, one of the five or six men clearly assigned to the task prised open a lid and knelt to assess the contents. After applying what criteria Sam could not guess (the men pried around like car mechanics, probing the interiors with powerful torches whose beams he could see from this distance, like luminous glass rods), the coffins were wrapped in plastic, awaiting transport to the surface.

  Finally, he spotted Frank. He wore blue overalls, muddy at the knees and arse, and work boots whose leather toes had worn away to reveal dull grey steel toecaps. He’d grown a full beard and his waist-length hair was tied in a ponytail. He was deep in conversation with a similarly dressed man.

  Unka Frank’s authority appeared to be designated by the clipboard he held in his right hand. Now and again he’d glance at it, occasionally lifting the soiled top sheet to read what lay beneath. From where Sam stood, he could see the white paper was a patchwork of grubby fingerprints. He thought of the boot of the courtesy car.

  He approached Unka Frank and held out his hand.

  Unka Frank turned and regarded him with alarm.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘you can’t come down here without a hard-hat.’

  Immediately and quite uselessly, Sam ducked. He looked up into the darkness, within which was concealed the ancient ceiling.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re on site, dickhead, and because we’ve got the fucking inspectors in.’

  Sam knitted his hands above his head.

  ‘OK,’ he said, stooping. ‘I’ll see you up top.’

  ‘Don’t you fucking move,’ Unka Frank told him. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. A member of a coffin team looked up.

  Unka Frank called out, ‘Ted. Do us a favour! Chuck us your hat.’

  Ted, who was neither clean nor delighted, removed his hat and chucked it like a Frisbee in Unka Frank’s direction. Then he scooted quickly to the surface.

  Unka Frank retrieved the hat and handed it to Sam.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘You’ll get me shot.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Sam. He made an apologetic face. Then he inspected the greasy interior of the hard-hat. Inside, two strips of white plastic intersected, forming a cross designed to save his skull from the impact of heavy stone objects accelerating at 30 feet per second squared. He settled the hat on his head. His scalp crawled.

  He looked up again.

  ‘Is the roof unstable?’

  Frank joined him. They stood there, looking up.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Frank. ‘This place has stood for seven hundred years. I’m sure it’ll last another five minutes.’

  He reached up and rapped on Sam’s helmet.

  ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘there’s not much a hard-hat can do for you, if this place collapses.’

  Sam had thought so too.

  ‘So why all the fuss?’

  ‘Rules are rules,’ said Unka Frank. Then he clapped his hands and said, ‘Time for tea.’

  Sam followed him, ducking all the way.<
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  Outside the church, Unka Frank broke away to have a brief conversation with the inspectors. Sam hung round awkwardly, then followed Frank towards the antediluvian caravans. Frank’s was the smallest of them. An upended milk-crate functioned as doorstep and welcome mat.

  Inside, the tiny space smelled strongly of Frank, and unwashed clothing and Calor gas. The kitchenette was in browns and mustards. Its stained and torn work-surfaces were dotted with squeezed, dried tea-bags, yolky forks, empty bean tins and handle-­less mugs in which pooled stagnant tea. Frank emptied two of them into the sink and put a beaten aluminium kettle on to boil. He gestured for Sam to sit.

  Sam found an orange, foam rubber bench and sat facing a black and white portable television with a wire coat-hanger for an aerial.

  ‘It’s not much,’ said Frank. ‘But it’s home.’

  Sam peeked behind an orange paisley curtain at the activity outside.

  ‘You’re living here?’

  Frank poured boiling water into two cups. He made a face: his skin concertinaed into deep crevasses and valleys. Sam saw that he really was not a young man any more.

  ‘I’m not living here,’ said Frank, ‘not exactly. But I’m sleeping on site, yeah.’

  Sam went cold.

  ‘Christ, with all these dead people?’

  Frank shrugged.

  ‘The dead can’t hurt you. It’s the living who’ll do that, every time.’

  ‘Well,’ Sam said. ‘Yeah. But—Jesus. Doesn’t it get creepy?’

  Frank handed him a mug. Sam found a few square inches of floorspace and put it down there.

  ‘Does your place?’ said Frank.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, how old is it? A hundred years? Hundred and twenty?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sam. ‘Eighty, maybe?’

  ‘OK, say eighty years. During that time, how many people have died there? Do you ever think about that?’

  Sam shrugged, uncomfortable.

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘How is it different? Put it this way: you die, right? And then you’re a ghost. Where do you haunt? The place you know and love, or some grimy shit-hole of a church, just because that’s where they’ve stashed your bones. It’s home, innit? Stands to reason.’