…
INTERVIEWER: But you are hopeful, Ally, for the season to come?
ALLY BARR: It’s August. Listen son, in August there’s always hope.
INTERVIEWER: Even in Irontown?
ALLY BARR: Even in the Iron Towns.
LIAM CORWEN (aside): Wait until September.
(Laughter)
…
A dead pigeon hangs in the mesh suspended from the giant concrete awning. The Lowtown bus station is choked with fumes and lit by yellow strip-lights, even though the sun shines brightly on the building’s open side. Goldie waits for his bag, muses on the pigeon. He wants to feel something, something to make it all seem real. Twenty years can be a lifetime, as well he knows. Though the twenty years in his head seem longer than the ones that have passed here. Prison time lasts longer in some ways, in other ways does not pass at all. It wasn’t like he’d been in prison all that time anyway, less than half if you added it all up. He had made a life in Birmingham with Nadine, and look what that had come to now, same as everything else. The pastel coloured murals, the daytime twilight, the food stalls, are all the same as the last time he came here. He remembers now, waiting for Sonia and Dee Dee to come back on the London bus from an audition, a Friday night not long after he first got a car. Excited, all of them. Liam and Mark were with him, must have been June, outside the football season, otherwise Liam would’ve been tucked up behind the net curtains in his nice Black Park bedroom. It might well be that he has come back to slit Liam Corwen’s throat.
On Fridays a big van used to pull up on the waste ground outside, where the football coaches parked, and set off racing pigeons. They would rise with their wings sounding like applause. He’d had a row once, stupid, in the workshops at Winson Green about whether pigeons and doves are the same bird, different colours. This is what it sounds like… There was a Prince tape he wore out playing in the car and on the roof at Mark’s flats. It was the one that was playing when they crashed. Pigeons can fly, he thinks, and wonders why these ones choose to stay here, pecking at scraps of burger and dying in the rafters.
‘This yours, chief?’ A Brummie accent, the driver wants to get a move on, has to go back the other way in twenty minutes or so.
‘Thanks, mate.’ Goldie hauls the kit-bag onto his shoulder, an army surplus, he bought it at a kiosk in the Rag Market. He thought it might make him look like a soldier back on leave. It just makes him look like who he is, what he is. He can see his reflection in the glass barrier. When he looks away he sees the departure board. Buses to Manchester, London, Holyhead/Dublin. He has been to none of these places. He could head to the ticket counter, go for whichever bus comes first. He can do what he likes. He feels the same weightlessness he had that morning, walking down through Digbeth, leaving the city that had been his home in one way or another for much of the past twenty years, his adult life. He can go wherever he wants. But he knows what he’s doing. He asked for a ticket to Lowtown.
‘Return, love?’
‘I ain’t coming back.’
But coming back is exactly what he is doing. The bus only took an hour and a half, came the long way too. He is deflated by the paltriness of the distance, the way time collapses. In his head it is like the crossing of a great continent. There was traffic on the Hagley Road.
He wants this to feel like an occasion. He puts his hand to his jacket pocket. There’s a roll of notes, a couple of half-smoked spliffs and a little tub of diazepam. One of Nadine’s brothers must have borrowed the coat. Goldie hasn’t smoked for years. He doesn’t need any more paranoia. He thinks they might come after him. He can sell the tablets. The place won’t have changed that much.
There used to be a bar just here, been done out as a café now, you can see in through the windows and out to the market on the other side. There are plastic tables with umbrellas out on the concrete. The windows were blacked out in those days. The Eight Ball, it was called. Sometimes Stan Ahmed himself would sit there at the bar, his thick arms resting on it. A few times Goldie was told to call in there, get his instructions, explain himself. More usually it was at the bookies at the corner of the docks road in Lascar. Goldie tried to read the signs, what a meeting here or there might signify. He could never tell whether he was being spoken to because he had done something well or not, if he was on his way up or down.
He feels something now. He looks in through the window at the young girl serving, scans the faces at the tables quickly. Maybe that old man there, maybe, with his blue eyes staring out of the window towards the markets, is that a flicker of recognition? It jolts him. He knows that Stan Ahmed has long gone, to his villa first, and then a private hospital somewhere near Marbella. Stan’s brothers too, sold up, moved out, or ruined, inside, or dead, a little bit of all these things in the aftermath of a fallen empire. Lionel’s still around, he knows that. He is exposed here, looking at his own shadow. The old man stares through the window, takes a sip of tea, his eyes pass over Goldie, look through him. Something like disappointment makes him sag a little. He wants to hide, wants to be seen.
He wanders through the light and shade of the market edges. This is dangerous now, the Lowtown Bull Ring. Things don’t change that much here. Maybe twenty years is not so long. The woman there at the fruit stand with the perm, didn’t he used to collect money from her on a Friday?
‘Tell him, he’ll have the rest next week, chick.’
‘He won’t be happy, darling, I can tell yer that for nothing.’
And there at the taxi rank, where the drivers lean against their cabs and flick through the papers, stroke their phones, wasn’t he one of Lionel Ahmed’s little crew? The man turns his thick neck out of the sun, puts his hand on the car top, see: only three fingers. People said that Lionel had cut his mate’s fingers off over a girl they both liked, but that was crap, a length of steel cable had torn it off at the Ironport. It’s him. Goldie cannot remember the bloke’s name, ducks his head, weaves between the shoppers. It all hits him now. He keeps his head down. Every glance now, he’s like a kid in a story lost in a wood, faces in the branches stare out at him. And he feels the darkness creeping in at the edges of his vision as sweat runs into his eyes. There, and there, and there, and that girl in her summer dress just there, Sonia’s face looks back at him. Sonia’s face back then, still twenty years old and full of life. He edges past the man with henna in his beard, selling batteries from a pink plastic bucket, meets the fence, walks along it, away from the market, expects to hear his name called, expects footsteps behind him, feels the weight of the bag on his shoulders, although god knows what is in it for it to weigh like this, everything he owns, and the money from behind the panel at the back of the airing cupboard, and his knives. He worked in the kitchens at the hospital when he first came out on licence, was lucky to get a place doing anything, taught him how to use a knife. They will come after him. He walks with the market behind him now, lines of buses between him and the bus station. This road runs down into the Anvil Yards. And here, there’s a gap in the fence, signs warning of dogs and security, but he’ll take his chances. He slips through the gap, sun bounces off the bus windows, and he glances back at not a soul around, goes down a set of crumbling blue brick steps where nettles and dock leaves grow, and into the shadows again.
…
There are rooms in this house that no one has stepped inside for years. No one has ever been in that extension, she’s sure of it, since the builders finished years ago. By the time that was done Dee Dee and Liam were already coming apart. Dee Dee chose the child over him and that was the end of that.
This is a family home. Liz looks out of the leaded window at the turn in the stairs, looks out at the green hills turning blue in the distance, the roses in the garden below. That lawn is dying. This house is more than most people dream of, she thinks, the kind of house people might climb the hill to get a glimpse of, drive past on summer evenings, on Sunday afternoons, and say one day, if all our ships come in, we’ll live somewhere like this. Liam bought it from a
consultant at the Bethel, Mr Jenkins, same one who’d operated on Joey’s mum that first time, small world they said. Small world for sure, it was Mr Jenkins’s replacement, Mr Ali, who spoke to Liz in that hot, side-room off the ward and discussed procedures and ways forward and strategies to contain and then eradicate her cancer. You knew it was bad if they ushered you into those little rooms. They never used to use the word itself. Your nan is very ill they said to Liam and the girls when it was Joey’s mum’s turn; Molly is very ill they would tell people, and people would nod and understand.
Liam and Dee Dee were twenty-one, same age as when she and Joey got married, except they’d moved into his mum and dad’s back bedroom, waited on the council list. She remembers having no idea how Liam could afford it, but he’d played for England, Dee Dee had been on Top of the Pops. It was the very start of those years when the banks lent money hand over fist. They had the money. They had everything.
This was the kind of house where children ran back and forth across the lawn, laughing and playing, protected from the Iron Towns by the high walls around the garden and the money in the lanes that led down to the stables and the tennis and golf clubs at the edge of the Heath. She has told him she’ll just come once a week from now on. She gets tired now much more quickly than before, maybe her strength will build, but more because there is nothing to clean.
This was the kind of house that should be full of voices on a Sunday night, brothers and sisters and uncles and aunties and cousins and grandparents, laughter rising out of open windows and across the hills like those fire lanterns that have become popular now. She half expects one to drift down the valley from a birthday party on one of these lawns one Saturday and burn down the Anvil Yards. If only, she thinks, if only. She has spent her life getting away from the place and still only made it halfway up the hill.
Liam barely speaks to his sisters. Their girls have a cousin who they don’t know, an uncle who takes no interest in any of them. He is not a good son, has not been a good husband.
The house could not have been colder when she was here with the boy. Little Jari, her grandson, her own flesh and blood, half a world away even when he was here in the summer. She kept speaking to him in their language, explaining what his nan and grandad had said to him. Finland. You may as well say Timbuktu. She knows Liam asked her to stay here with him. You think she’d be happy to move from the cold, the dark. He has mislaid two wives and a son now with this carelessness, that’s what she thinks, but by the time she’s finished the banister rails, she’s back to lamenting how those girls were not good enough for him. It was they who refused him, her once beautiful blue-eyed boy.
…
She sings at funerals. That’s what she could have told the man at the bar. A few through the years now, that’s for sure. Her nana’s, of course, a couple of her uncles’. Dee Dee imagines when Stan dies they’ll fly the body back, can’t arrest a dead man. She sang at Sonia’s, at the wake, though, that she and Liam organised. The service had been plain, barely any ceremony, police stood discreet at the back of the chapel of rest. Sonia’s parents had not wanted any of them there at all.
Liam drove back across the Heath after the service, pulled into a clearing off a back lane. She wore black tights too hot for a summer’s day, torn them off herself, climbed in the back, only a few hundred yards from where the car had gone in the river, not even much of a river there. They tore at each other. She dug her nails into his arse, bit his neck. They froze at the noise of a tractor going past, animals in their burrow.
‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing, just fuck me Liam,’ she said. For years afterwards she felt ashamed of that half an hour or whatever it was, no longer than that, for sure, under the trees, the day of her best friend’s funeral, the car roof sticky with sap. It made more sense as the years went by. She thought of it now in moments of quiet, one of the true things of her life.
Dee Dee loves that line from Dylan Thomas, After the first death there is no other. Not as a negation of what comes after, more that whatever comes afterwards simply amplifies the past. She tries not to think of Sonia at all, then looks at Alina, her daughter, her daughter already past the age at which she died.
Were they older then, somehow? Dee Dee was more certain of herself that’s for sure, certain of the world, already married a year, of course. I’ll take care of her, she said. It was years of hating him for not going along with it before she realised she had never even asked him.
She sings at funerals, likes Dylan Thomas, doubts every single thing she has ever known. She could’ve told him that, the handsome stranger at the bar.
‘Are you Dee Dee Ahmed, pet?’
‘I don’t know, love. I honestly could not tell you.’
…
Mark Chapman: Of all tonight’s ties, none are more loaded with history than the one at the Anvil Yards, Irontown against Wolverhampton Wanderers. Redolent of another age. Pat Murphy is there for us.
Pat Murphy: Yes Mark, it’s thirty years or more since a rather uncharitable former manager of both of these clubs said that if the Wolves were sleeping giants then Irontown were a comatose pygmy. He had just been sacked, mind you, by the once all-powerful Greenfield family, very much absentee landlords these days. Dorothea Greenfield-Carter, last of the dynasty, lives out her days in Madeiran exile and refuses to sell or invest. Nothing soporific about tonight, though, as you can probably hear. The Anvil Yards is full. Its capacity is just over ten thousand these days, with the closure of the East Stand and other health and safety issues. Gone are the days of fifty thousand plus and the old ‘iron roar’. The crowd is boosted by a large contingent from the nearby Black Country, hopeful of a new dawn under Kenny Jackett. There used to be a big rivalry between these two, of course, but they haven’t played each other regularly since they slid down the leagues together in the dark days of the 1980s. One last thing, for those of you of a certain age, Liam Corwen, he of England infamy and Irontown legend, forty next year, is on the bench tonight and is currently laying out cones for the warm-up, a rondel, Barcelona-style, in front of the away fans. The PA system is playing ‘My Sweetest One’, sung by his ex-wife’s girl band. Perhaps he’s wearing earplugs!
Mark Chapman: Thanks, Pat. Updates from the Anvil Yards and elsewhere throughout the evening…
…
This is more like it. His dad has even lifted his summer ban for the night. The Wolves at home in the League Cup under the lights.
One of the last great crowds here had been when they had the League Cup run in the early eighties. They’d played Liverpool in the semi-final, there’d been traffic all up to Hightown before the first leg, young lads scaling the walls at the Greenfield End. He remembered the way the ground used to look for those night matches, the glow of the floodlights, and the bigger glow of the Anvil Yards beyond, lighting the clouds that came up the river. The sound, the roar. And the lighting of the whole sky. If you came along the Monmouth or Wrexham Roads back in those days, from way out, looking over the hills, it was like you were approaching the crack of doom itself, matchday or not. The red valley they used to call it then. But then that couldn’t be right. By the time of that Liverpool game the works were already closing. They had a red flag that filled the away end, sang Dalglish all night until they started on You’ll Never Walk Alone. It was Rush, though, who’d scored twice. Liverpool had won three, four, was it? Won the second leg six-nothing. They were sat in line with Rush’s second goal, he’d fouled big Archie Hill, clipped his heels as the ball was played and then left him for dead. Joey remembered Liam alongside him, eight, nine years old, screaming at the linesman to stick his flag up.
…
‘We are English, Welsh, Black Irish,’ Mark Fala’s dad would say to him, tugging at his dark curly hair, ‘pirates from the Spanish Main, gypsies at home in any hedgerow,’ tell him stories of where their name came from. The stories would always start and end in the same way. A young man would leave his valley for the last time, sometimes with his brothers, s
ometimes alone, to the sound of wolves howling across the mountain snows or the sun coming patterned through the cork trees. His route, and all the generations that followed him, eventually brought him here on the road between the Ironport and the Anvil Yards, to the sound of iron being struck.
It would depend on how much his dad had drunk, how long and complex the way became, but there was always the flight from the mountains, from wolves and bandits and hunger and vicious landowners. And there was always a first glimpse of the sea.
Sometimes it was a fishing village set among the green cliffs, sometimes the harbour of a great city. One version had the young man arriving in Lisbon as the Armada massed, and signing up for a place on one of the impossible floating castles, bigger than the village the lad had left, that sat out in the estuary. Another longer, even taller tale had the man and his brothers join other ships and cross the Atlantic to the slave markets and jungles and great cities of gold. The man returns with jewels and chocolate and a tame crocodile but somehow loses all this and can’t find his way home and is blown by a storm into the rainy north. There is always a storm and a shipwreck. In the Armada story, defeat and bad weather has the ships floundering off the Irish coast and just as the hull splinters on some rocks the man leaps and swims ashore, led by mermaids whose names are Estrildis and Habren, through the waves to a deserted beach, where he lies on the edge of the water half dead but still somehow escapes the soldiers who wait to kill him.
There is always Ireland in the story, in some guise or other. The man is his sons and grandsons and great-grandsons and so on. He is hundreds of years old. He moves inland through the mist and silent fields and peat bogs. He is chased like a fox by the English, goes out of his mind with hunger when the famine comes.
He sets sail again, to New York, to Australia, to the Liverpool docks or Lancashire mills or Midland factories.
‘We are English, Welsh, Black Irish,’ his dad would say to him, take a sip of his mild ale. He smelled of chemical soap from the works, and he’d look up out of the valley where he’d always lived to the limestone hills and appear every inch a man of the Iron Towns. A man made of coal and iron and wiry muscle.
Iron Towns Page 4
