‘Has he still not been in touch?’ Liz asked him. ‘Always the same, that boy. I don’t know what went wrong.’
He pictures Liam riding there on the bus or the tram, can’t quite put it past him, as if some Brylcremed ghost. Half the team used to travel on the 29 bus when Joey first started going to matches, 56-57. That was the year they played the Busby Babes in the cup. Same year they played Bishop Auckland six times with all the replays. It’s why they’re playing them today, a tradition revived. You can think what you like about Ally Barr, and Joey does not think much these days, but he likes to follow tradition.
Back then they would walk up out of the valley to Wrexham Road after his dad’s shift had finished, catch the bus to the castle, then squeeze on the tram, the old tram that clattered through busy streets, through the Lowtown Bull-Ring and Lascar and across the river into the Anvil Yards. The air became heavier, wetter, as you came down the hill, closer to the rivers. The tram windows would steam up. When the works were open the fogs were worse. There’d be half a dozen Saturdays every season when you’d descend into it. He’d watched games when you could only see a third of the pitch, Stanley Matthews come slicing out of the gloom like Excalibur from the lake. There are moments now when Joey thinks they have all outlived themselves, him and his dad. Liam too, truth be told, still playing at almost forty, kids old enough to be his sons alongside him, skipping by him.
…
There is no Iron Town.
They are plural – Anvil Yards, Iron Towns – but the years have reduced them.
Back in the seventies the authorities made them singular, an act of rationalisation, enclosure.
You used to see the letter s graffitied on signs along bleak slip roads on the way out of Cardiff and Birmingham and Liverpool. Older people would scrawl addresses in bold: Anvil Yards, Iron Towns, and that used to make Joey Corwen smile on his post round. You don’t see it so often these days. The Anvil Yards are close to empty. Joey is retired. The anger has died off, turned inward, assumed a hundred thousand different forms. Take the shiny new tram that goes nowhere in particular, from the Spider House to the Heath, and see the messages on the bridges and the crumbling Victorian brick.
Lascar Intifada, Ddraig Pengwern, Kowton Bullet Krew.
The people of the towns tell themselves they have greater concerns than an abandoned letter s.
There is Hightown, with its cliff and ruined castle keep that looks west for insurgents who never come. There is Lowtown and its Spider House and markets. Oxton and Cowton, with their Rangers and Celtic supporters’ clubs, high-rises of third generation Glaswegian families who once thought they were moving south for a better go of things, the Sheep Folds beyond them where the roads run out. There is Salop, and Calon, with their avenues of sycamores and 1930s villas. And pit villages all along the Far Valley and Welsh Ridge. There are no pits. The villages are emptying out. The Iron Towns are shrinking. Lascar and the Ironport have their vacant docks and rusting cranes, Chaintown has its dark terraces that have dodged the wrecking ball. There’s the Pengwern estate, a lost pebble-dashed valley edged by canals and scrap. Then there’s the Heath, remnants of wildness and witches and common land, and the long roads of Heathside on its fringes, with its golf club, and Tory councillors, and dreams of a different England.
And there along the valley bottom, between the two rivers, is the Anvil Yards, a maze of ancient works and roofless brick factory buildings. The blocks of the old Greenfield Ironworks stand at its heart like some secret kaaba. Names from the glory days of a revolution appear on road signs and raised in metal. Newcomen and Stephenson and Darby and Boulton and Watt. And there at its edge, hard against the bank of the River Chain, is the football ground, built to look like one of the factories, still going, creaking into life for another season, one more year. There is talk of tearing it down, that the club will fold soon, the same talk there has been during all its years in the wilderness, much of the last hundred years. But it’s there for one more season. And even now, people come through the spaces between the empty factories, just not so many of them any more. They shuffle up the remaining terrace and sit on clacking seats in the stand, huddled, laughing and grumbling against whatever might come next.
…
‘Are you Dee Dee Ahmed, pet?’
She drops the tray of freshly washed glasses at her feet. They clatter across the lino behind the bar and by some miracle don’t break. Not one. There are half-hearted cheers from the few drinkers in the lounge.
‘Sorry my love, I’m sorry. I never meant to startle yer.’
The man leans against the bar and talks in a soft north-east accent. Dee Dee looks at him, realises he is not some ghost come to haunt her, but just a man standing at a bar early Saturday afternoon having a pint before the football.
‘Yes. Yes I am,’ she says, wipes her hands on her apron, bends at her knees to crouch and put the spilled glasses onto a shelf.
‘Someone told me you ran this place.’
She nods. Sun comes through the pub’s high windows.
‘I saw you sing,’ the man says, ‘a few times I think. I was a roadie for a bit. Charcoal, The Carnations. Newcastle bands, you know?’
Dee Dee nods again, not quite sure where this is going, folds her arms. He does not look like a friend of Goldie’s, not at all, in his Hendrix T-shirt, tugging at his earring.
‘I don’t sing any more.’
‘Well, life moves on, I suppose. King Tut’s, I saw you. Then that Primal Scream gig in Newcastle. I don’t have much to do with it either now. Not at all?’
‘In the shower, maybe.’
He looks down at his pint and smiles. She thinks he might even be blushing above the start of a beard.
‘Well you had a lovely voice, Dee Dee, pet. I’m sure you still do. That’s all I wanted to say.’
He sees his drink off and looks at her and smiles. Warm, she thinks, kind.
She mumbles thanks.
‘You take care of yourself.’
‘I’ll try,’ she says, ‘I’ll try.’
He’s already gone. There’s a group of them down from County Durham for the afternoon from what she can tell. The man’s companions get up from their table by the door. An old bloke in a flat cap, maybe his dad, and a young lad in a blue-quartered football shirt, his son, she reckons, a couple of other men, short sleeves and tattoos, different ages. It’s a long way to come on a summer’s afternoon, for a pint in the Salamander and a game of football at the Anvil Yards. It happens all year, though, from places like Rochdale and Hartlepool and Mansfield. Names from the football coupon. At least they can enjoy the sunshine today.
She keeps her arms folded across her chest. Running a pub is no way to hide yourself.
…
The club was founded by bearded Victorian men, Methodists, cricketers after some winter training. They stare out of old photographs like Marx and Nietschze. The only Anglican of the group, the fifth James Greenfield, heir to the Greenfield Ironworks, was an old Etonian. That’s why the club’s shirts are Eton Blue. Ted hangs them on the dressing-room hooks. Eton Blue is pale green against wood panelling.
The gas lamp under which Iron Towns Football Club was formed in November 1874 had been preserved until the late sixties, when the square on which it stood was demolished to build the flyover. Mount Zion, the chapel, was taken down brick by numbered brick and reassembled a few miles down the road at the Heritage Museum. There is talk of doing similar to the closed East Stand and its iron railings, a joke that they might have to do the same to Liam Corwen.
…
Where the lane meets Wrexham Road Joey hears drumming come like squalls of rain across the fields. At the junction he winds down the window. He sees a police girl, a wisp of blonde hair astray across her cheek. She walks in the middle of the road, her right arm up to slow the traffic. In front of her Joey sees a broad back and a bowler hat. The Orangemen, of course. He’s forgotten all about them. It’s still marching season. They linger on past
all thoughts of the Boyne and into early August here. Everything goes on too long, Joey thinks.
He recognises the bulk of the man who limps out in front, sees him in profile as he turns his head. Pink veins mark his face, comb lines run through his steel coloured hair. His white shirt collar has rubbed a red line on his neck. Joey gets a strange sense of looking at himself. Not that this kind of thing is his cup of tea.
The sash my father wore, they sing, tuneless and lost in the wind.
It’s Billy Kerr, he knows him from years back. Billy’s dad had been a miner, worked the same shift as Joey’s at Black Park. The sun shines on Billy’s Brassoed ceremonial chain. He walks like he’s got corns. Half a dozen others straggle along with him. An old boy limps with the flag held out in front. A handful of kids march along the verge. They wear berets. There’s a boy on a drum, a boy on a flute. A handful of scattered spectators stand on the corner by the shops. A woman comes out of the butchers’ with a bag of square sausage, puts her arm out for the bus, oblivious.
‘To see my British brethren all of honour and of fame.’
Joey looks at these men, red blotches the shapes of empire on their faces.
The road dips away here and the Iron Towns spread out beneath them. The castle stands bone white against its hill and the ground falls away again beyond it to a patchwork of dark buildings and the green bowl of the hills. There is a glimmer of the rivers and the canal and docks at the Ironport. Joey tries to pick out the floodlight pylons at the ground. From here it all looks the same as it ever did. No smoke, no fire, of course, but the shape of it is the same, more or less. He can see all the way to the Goat Wood, past the training ground, at the far end of the Heath, where when he was a kid they said witches met in the clearings, where the people killed a German parachutist during the war, stuffed his body in an old mine shaft and never told anyone about it. His ghost joined all the others. There is no noise from the valley like there once was, carried up the rivers on the wind, just the notes of a flute and rattle of a drum drifting off into English summer air.
‘If the call should come we’ll follow the drum, and cross that river once more.’
He has no doubt they would, despite their ragged look. Under the castle, there in the wall that marks the boundary with Lowtown, is the Crusader stone. It’s where they met to leave to go to Worcester and follow the Lionheart on his holy war. Joey likes his history. The stone itself is much older, left by Druids on their exodus west, patterned with lichen and faint Ogham lettering. They say Manawydan forged shields on it. This had been one of the cities of the legions, its name lost in time. The Pals Brigades would touch the stone for luck before they left for the First World War. They would have looked just as ragged, men and boys full of a strange anger, dreaming of Jersualem and Mons, followed by patient crows.
A few cars line up behind his. A horn sounds. The police girl follows the heavy union flag into the turning for the shops and the Cowton Orange Lodge, which sits flat-roofed on a car park of sparkling broken glass. She waves everyone down the hill. There is nothing more to see.
…
The city and the country Eusébio was born in are no longer there. Or rather, their names have changed, as has so much else with time and war. They are different places. It used to say This is Portugal high up on the dock buildings, and in the look in people’s eyes, for better or much, much worse. It wasn’t, of course, wrong continent, wrong hemisphere, except in some ways it was. Such is empire.
That night in Amsterdam, the shooting at home is soon to start, has already begun in Angola, where his dad was born. His brother is ready to lift his gun. Eusébio has left the hammering sun and the glitter of the bay of Lourenço Marques. This is Portugal he would see as he ran with his feet barely touching the ground.
And Barracas, Buenos Aires, too is changed utterly, transfigured by rust and the years of the generals. Di Stéfano remembers being taken to see the old iron bridge pulled down. The men spoke in hushed Italian dialects. His dad was from the island of Capri, his mother was German, Irish. Europe was finished for them. He is Argentinian, becomes Colombian, becomes Spanish. Barracas is a place of shadows now, empty factories and stock yards. Trains clatter through, don’t stop.
But these are men of movement, do not look back, keep the world spinning with their footsteps.
…
Paul, her bar manager, puts his head round the corner of the lounge.
‘You’ve got a visitor at the off sales, Dee Dee.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t worry. Just your usual Saturday dinner gentleman caller.’
She doesn’t know why she’s kept the hatch open. She tells herself it was what her nana would’ve liked, but times change. Dee Dee used to sit on a stool in the space between the bar and the lounge on long ago Sundays and watch her nana serve at the hatch which opens onto Meeting House Lane. At 3 o’clock they’d lock the doors and she’d always do a song or two in the empty lounge bar under the chandeliers before they went upstairs for dinner.
Mark Fala stands at the counter. He’s spread a pile of change across it. No more than a pound, she can see, runs her hand over it. There are a couple of washers, an old Italian coin. Lira doesn’t even exist any more. She can’t tell if he’s serious, pulls a bottle of sherry from the shelf and some cans of cider from the chiller nevertheless. She takes down forty Superkings too, her own, not even the pub’s, although it’s the same thing she supposes. She bought them at the new Ukrainian shop.
‘All right, Mark,’ she says.
‘Thanks Dee Dee. I appreciate it.’
‘You take care of yourself,’ she says, looks at the shadow under his eye, can’t decide if it’s a bruise or not.
He doesn’t move straight away, sways a little, as he arranges his bottle and cans into his plastic bag. He stuffs the cigarettes deep into his overcoat pocket. He used to go weeks without speaking at all. He has always shown up here though, always early in the afternoon on matchdays. She wonders if he used to walk down here with his dad when he’d been a kid, something pulls him back, not just a few handouts. There are plenty of people who’ll give him them.
‘You got anything for me dog, Dee Dee?’
‘Your dog? I didn’t know you had a dog, Mark.’
He shrugs.
‘Sometimes.’
She reaches to the back shelf, pulls a couple of bags of scratchings off the thin cardboard display.
‘Thanks, Dee Dee,’ he says, ‘thanks. I’ll see you soon.’ And he turns and limps away. She’ll get him some shoes, she thinks, but doesn’t know if he’d accept them. He doesn’t have to dress like he does. He’s not down and out. She knows he still lives in the flats, although they’re slated to come down when they begin the work. When he turns the corner at the sagging wall his shadow angles across the road and a smaller, lower shadow follows.
She has kept the hatch open for Mark Fala, of course. That’s how things work. People do things for him. She stands and catches the sunlight on her face, mouths a song to herself, slow and quiet, hears the bell ringing for service in the lounge.
…
There is no match traffic. There isn’t when the season is in full swing, so certainly not today. Clouds move up the River Anvil, high and slow over the cars and floodlights and cranes. An ice cream van has pulled into the kerb by the car park entrance. Joey considers buying one. A lone figure stands nearby with a pile of new copies of the fanzine. New season special! The fanzine is called 46 seconds. It angers Joey every time he sees one. His boy played for England and all people do is take the piss. They say he never touched the ball, even, but he did, he won a header, a flick-on. People never get anything right.
He puts his hand up to acknowledge the seller, a young, balding man, prematurely aged, wears a hearing aid, and whose name Joey can never remember, with the new away shirt spread across his belly. This shirt’s official colour is chocolate, another legacy of the Greenfield family. James Greenfield played cricket, briefly, for Surrey, and
the shirt is the colour of their county cap. Like dog shit on a lawn, Ally Barrr once said when the team had been given a hiding somewhere, Plymouth or Yeovil was it? Some team in green. Everyone says they hate these brown shirts, but they are the only thing at the club that turns a profit. They get orders from Salt Lake City and Mannheim and Daegu, men young and old buying a piece of football folklore.
Joey turns in through the club gates. In front of the offices, a couple of Mercedes shine in the sun and Ally’s BMW, a new car for the new season courtesy of Lionel Ahmed, who had probably intended it for Liam. The Mercedes must belong to the Portuguese, already here. Joey decides against pulling into the space marked Club Captain/LC, drives instead across the tarmac to the unpaved ground under the fence by the canal. He sits in the meshed shadow for a while, thinks about moving the car to the shade. It looks cool under the solid end wall of the old Watkins Cylinder Works. Ivy has grown and spilled down a length of the wall. Elder branches arc over the towpath. Everything is still. From the tunnel of branches comes a man, limping, limping and swaggering in equal parts. He wears a long overcoat in spite of the weather and a football boot on his left foot, an unlaced brogue on his right, a carrier bag of drink swings from his wrist. The shoes account in part for the limp. His face stays in shadow but Joey knows full well who it is.
Mark Fala’s walk has retained some of the old character it used to bring to a football pitch, although he’s not stepped on one for nearly twenty years. Wasps swim out above the water, zigzag against the pattern of the brick, as if they move for him. Joey would not bet against it. That boy. Mark drops his head and disappears from sight under the bridge. Joey sits for a while.
Iron Towns Page 2
