A Japanese car plant (before the Japanese economy went the way of the Iron Towns).
A new home for the BBC.
A mega-casino and attendant hotel development. (Quickly nicknamed Ironvegas, this idea is unique in that part of it was actually built. The hotel in which Liam currently lives is the only building that was completed before permission was halted and the money ran out. The project revived the idea of using a dock as the lake, for a giant lap-dancing venue called Guinevere’s. A topless lady of the lake was set to emerge each evening.)
Another shopping centre.
Arcadia: an eco-development which meant emptying out anything that was left and letting nature take its course, introducing deer, eagles, even wolves in one version of the plan. Chernobyl-chic.
An airport and giant freight terminal. (In one set of plans called London Iron Town. The developers tried the old Eusébio trick.)
A privately run complex of super-prisons.
A Chinese-owned steelworks with surrounding factories supplying the People’s Army (in spite of terrible feng-shui, it was the absence of any skilled workers that put an end to this plan. The whole thing has now gone on so long that there are plenty of people who were in their teens when the Anvil Yards began to rust, now approaching retirement age, who have never worked).
There are arguments about who owns the land, contamination, decontamination, compensation, what to do with the businesses that simply refuse to die, not to mention the people who live there and refuse to move, viewed by developers in the way that divers look at molluscs on the hulk of the Titanic. Then there is the issue with UNESCO placing the Greenfield Ironworks, the Samson Foundry, the Watkins Cylinder Factory, Lysaght’s, the East Stand and half the docks on their World Heritage Sites list. Soldiers in blue helmets, Bengali, Armenian, Dutch, might arrive to halt any dynamiting.
…
Mark Fala did not go to school that morning. There were days when his mum said not to bother, he helped carry her shopping bags or took wet clothes up to the washing line on the roof. Or he would spend the whole day on the uneven wasteland that doubled as Wembley, Anfield, the Azteca, and drill his tennis ball against the flats’ end wall and take the rebound anywhere on his body, on the full, and drop the ball dead to do the same thing all over again.
That morning she asks him to take two empty pop bottles back for the deposit, and to drop his dad’s sandwiches at work for him. He has left them sitting in the foil in which she wrapped them last night next to the sink, distracted by something out of the window in the blue dawn light.
His dad hauls a chain, backlit by a furnace which burns somewhere deep in the works. He sees him, sees Mark standing there outside in the yard, his foot on his ball, an empty pop bottle in each hand, a thin plastic bag holding the sandwiches hangs from his wrist. They both smile. His dad goes to raise an arm. Mark thinks it is to motion him to the gates, or wave, or tell him to wait, when something happens to the chain.
His dad jumps backwards and then the bucket that swings above the moulds, that his dad is set to pour, wobbles and spills. Here is the molten metal, so white hot that it burns a shape into Mark’s eyes that he is not sure he ever really blinks away. And it pours, liquid and heavy, not into the mould, but onto Antony Fala. The movements are slapstick, innocent, a broken chain, a spilled bucket, a fall-guy. Mark sees his dad crumple, his body withers, the way a match does if you leave it alight and wait for it to burn your fingertips. There are screams, shouts. Men run. A bell starts to ring over the clanging sounds from elsewhere in the factory. Mark remembers later that there was a magpie chuckling, hopping across a pile of scrap metal in the yard. The magpie flies away as the men run through the gates. When he thinks of this later, he believes that it is his dad’s soul leaving his body and jumping into that of the bird. He puts silver foil pellets on his window ledge to see if the magpies will come.
‘The boy, look, the boy.’
‘What?’
‘His boy, Fala’s boy, in the yard.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’
‘Come here, son, come here.’
‘Get him away from here.’
This is Mark Fala, eleven years old. High clouds move over the Anvil Yards. Mark stands with his foot on his ball, a bottle in either hand, the sandwiches his dad will never eat hanging from his wrist and he looks past the running, shouting men and sees the blackened shape on the floor. The empty mould sits on the stopped conveyor, a broken chain swings back and forth above it. Mark does not remember anything about what comes next, days, weeks. He kicks his ball against the end wall.
…
‘I found a johnny in the toilets this morning, Dee Dee.’
‘What?’
‘Has it been that long that you’ve forgot what one is? A condom, a johnny, in the bogs.’
Dee Dee pauses to consider this.
‘Used?’
‘I wouldn’t say otherwise, would I?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d got that much life in them.’
Dee Dee is suddenly pleased by this news, that she might be running somewhere that inspires enough passion for a quickie in a toilet cubicle. She thinks for a minute about who was drinking in the lounge last night.
‘Which toilets?’ she asks. Roni holds her mug of tea in both hands. Her pyjamaed legs are folded beneath her.
‘The ladies,’ she says, ‘in the bar.’
‘In the bar?’ Dee Dee says.
‘In the bar, behind the cistern. I fetched it out with the mop.’
‘The only people we had in the bar last night was Manjit Kohli and them from the bakery.’
The bakery is the last factory open in the Anvil Yards, sliced bread on an industrial scale, Sikh men backlit by yellow sodium at all hours of the day and night.
Roni shrugs.
‘Life in the old dogs yet, Dee Dee.’
‘Am yer having me on?’
‘I swear to god. Behind the tank in one of the ladies cubicles. Disgusting, really, they could put it in the bin.’
‘Well,’ Dee Dee says, pauses for effect, doesn’t look at Roni, ‘I had it in the bogs here once.’
Roni spits a mouthful of tea onto the yard, swears. ‘What? Who with?’
‘Who with? Who’d yer think? Liam. Who else would it have been? Who with?!’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘In the lounge, mind. We had standards. I did, anyway.’
…
He rises from the French mud, where he lay bootless.
Leônidas rises, this mud man, as if a ghost of the middle passage torn from the seabed, and then skips and dances with the ball through the hacking legs. Defenders move like magnets repelled.
This European dream of Brazilian football is born in Strasbourg. Men think of that goal, some of them in their motley workers’ caps, as they trudge away from the river, as their trains slowly pick up speed, heading south and west, when they evacuate the city, empty it completely, when the Germans come across the Rhine. Another iron town, with its factories and cranes and its port so many miles inland.
Wenger grew up there, in a pub stained brown with tobacco smoke, in a town stained grey from chimney smoke. Liam tells himself the pub was called the King of Sparta. He doesn’t even know if pubs have names in France.
Leônidas’s footsteps, which barely mark the ground, become those of Vava and Didi and Garrincha and Pelé and Jahrinio and Zico and Eder and Socrates and Ronaldinho, a whole string of little Juninhos, and Ronaldo and Neymar and on and on into the future.
I am the resurrection and I am the life, runs the text in the shape of Leônidas’s dash for the goal, which winds along Liam’s spine towards Ronaldo as Christ the Redeemer.
‘Biblical quotations,’ says the journalist, a woman in her twenties, into her recorder, her dark hair cut into a harsh fringe. She looks at him and her fingers almost brush his flesh.
‘Nah, The Stone Roses,’ he says, then wishes he hadn’t and had just held her stare. The words were T
ony’s idea. The words do not mean anything, but the swaying run through the mud, the goal that brings the sun out in Strasbourg, the one that Leônidas scores without a boot on his foot, to make it Brazil 5, Poland 4, they win 6-5, that is real. He wonders if the boots remain buried. Some corner of a foreign field.
Except he watched it later, after the tattoo, some bleached-out newsreel resurrected on the internet, and the mud isn’t there, not really, and the sun shines and it is so, well, deflating, and lacks all of the grandeur that they have invested in it, words or not, this dark figure rising from European mud etched halfway up his back.
‘And what does it mean?’ she asks him, and he is struck that no one English would ever ask this kind of question with this earnestness, no one he has ever met, anyway.
‘Leônidas was the King of Sparta,’ he says, ‘leader of the three hundred, hero of Thermopylae.’ And she nods but looks confused, not sure if he is serious, or if this is just one big English joke, and this time he holds her gaze, smiling, with a kind of half-mocking look. Of course it isn’t serious. Of course it is. He knows she is staying in the hotel. He cannot play golf, has no share prices to check, just the afternoons to fill stuck inside the room’s four walls, inside his own head.
…
And if you’re the Baggies,
or the Wolves,
or them sheep shagging bastards,
then you ain’t no friend of mine.
All together now,
My old man…
They do not sing about us, these other clubs, Liam thinks from the dugout, his feet up on the breeze block, concentrating on the pock marks the players’ studs have made and the sheen of mud and the white line in front of him as the lights become stronger. He will not get on today. The game drifts along rudderless. Needles of rain come suddenly in the lights. He hears the clatter of seats behind him as people stand to leave before the end. He cannot understand this, begins to lift his head and turn to glare at the punters behind, but what’s the point? He wears a snood. Dee Dee and Sonia had them once, luminous green and orange. His is Eton Blue. He sees Sonia’s eyes waiting for him through the rain. They saw each other once at a bus shelter on the Heath, like a mossy cave with the rain beating on it, down by the Goat Wood where the witches meet.
And those other clubs do not sing about the Iron Towns, do not even consider them worth acknowledging, not even Wrexham he doesn’t think, not even Newport, unless you count ‘Stand up if you hate England.’
‘We need some new songs,’ he says.
Shaunie McLaughlin nods his head, now neither of them are starting. Ally’s got a lad in on loan from Cheltenham Town, looks half-decent.
‘New songs,’ Shaunie repeats and nods like this is wisdom of great import. Ally must have told him to listen to everything Liam says. That’s all the kid needs, Liam thinks, wipes his nose on his snood.
…
Caller: I mean, you lot all talk about how Liam Corwen is a great player, a great servant to this club. Listen, when he got in the team we was fifteenth in the old second division or whatever it was called then. He’s played for twenty years and in that time we’ve had relegations, all them money worries and nothing but trouble. Them years he was away, we had the Trophy final, we had the play-offs again. They was the best years of the last twenty. Then he come back. What’s he come back for? He’s on the biggest contract, the highest wages. Bleeding the club dry, that’s what people like him am doing. That Julius Williams, Devon Samuels, the same. Listen, my old man worked on the railways. They used to have a name for folks who’d bring bad luck, straight from the Old Testament. He’s a Jonah, Liam Corwen. Throw him overboard now, before it’s too late.
Dave ‘Iron’ Willis: Graham, Graham, you cannot be seriously saying that the problems faced by Irontown Football Club are caused by Liam Corwen? He’s a club legend. The guy bleeds Eton Blue.
Caller: Legend? I’ve told yer what he is. And it’s not just him to blame, no. I’ll tell yer what, though. He is plain bad luck.
Joey turns the radio off and sits in the car outside the shops. They used to say pay no attention to the table until October was out. They might win a few and be in the play-off places come the new year. He knows this will not happen.
They are a cancer, these phone-ins. Joey does not use the term lightly. Liam wasn’t even getting a game. Maybe if Ally picked him for more than one game out of three, if Ally picked the same back four two games running, in fact where was Ally in all this moaning? That bloke could swim through honey, nothing stuck to him.
Cancer the crab, he thinks of pincers taking hold, of never letting go. It’s why the disease is so named, pub quiz knowledge. He thinks of young doctors, consultants, peering at pictures of Liz’s insides between rounds of golf or skiing trips, or whatever they do, these men from a different world, their hands on your wife, cutting your wife, laying her down on their cold slabs.
They would pore over the shapes and patterns that come from Liz’s insides like maps of some strange empire, discuss strategy, absentee generals. Not for too long, though, had tee-off times to meet and the like. Mr Ali is not here on Friday afternoons. Dr Roberts isn’t in until tomorrow. The arms, pincers, tentacles stretch and writhe inside her body. Some terrible, invisible war raging. And then thank you doctor, thank you doctor, thank you…
The nurses were better, the porters. At least they spoke to you like you were another human being, like if you saw them in the street or at the football or whatever they’d smile and say hello.
Liz wants to move and who can blame her. She’d wanted to go when the kids were young. He hadn’t wanted to move Liam, already showing a bit of promise, hadn’t thought the whole place would close down, just showed what he knew. They say they stay for his old man now, so Liz can do his ironing, clean the house, take his meals round. But Joey knows it’s really him they stay for. He tells himself he’ll look at those brochures she put out, houses in Bridgnorth and Brecon, retirement villages on the Algarve and Costa Dorada, anywhere, anywhere but here.
‘Cup of tea, love?’
‘Yes please.’
What else to say?
Now it’s over, she’s better. They don’t say better, but she’s clear, and there’s nothing to say to each other at all. If Liam visited once in those months without being reminded, without still just sitting himself down and his tea done for him, then Joey was being kind.
Cup of tea, love, cup of tea, love, cup of tea…
…
These noises would destroy most men, that’s what Goldie tells himself these first few weeks. He’d adjusted to prison noises over time, the breathing of other men close by, shouts down tiled corridors, a low, constant hum of strip-lights. The twitches and pain in your temples at the sharp movements or sudden sounds of other men who might do you real damage, given half a chance. With time, with the days, that sense eases, but only somewhat. If he thinks about it all, perhaps that feeling has always been with him, way before prison days, that knowledge of the harm you might inflict, that might be done to you, always there, the steady hum at the temples, the sound of windowless rooms and boys’ shouts down tiled corridors.
Noises and the dark fill his mind. The first night he hears an owl hoot and imagines the rustle of wings. There are bars at the window. The desk drawers are stuffed full of reams of typed paper, fading text and digits in purple and grey. The figures make an indentation on the paper, each one a little hammer blow. Rats splash in the narrow canal under the window. The men left the place as if everyone would be back in work tomorrow, thirty years and more now. No one is coming back.
He has five hundred pounds in dirty notes done up in red elastic bands that the postmen use and little plastic change bags. Some of it from the back of Nadine’s underwear drawer; some from the biscuit tin in the cupboard in her mum’s kitchen, first places anyone would look. It was money to go away with. They were going to book something for the bank holiday week, Nadine, her mum and the girls. That has passed now. Summer is over
. He was tired of trying to look after another man’s kids and not doing very well at it. He has not done a good job of anything since climbing through those skylights into warehouses stuffed full with treasure all those years ago.
‘Here comes Spider-Man,’ Stan Ahmed had said to him, clapped him on his back, so hard as to knock him over, just to let him know who was boss. He thought the name might stick but it never did.
This morning he sits on a step in a doorway that opens onto the canal towpath. The gap between the tall buildings makes a ravine that the water runs through, iron rings and hooks jut from the brickwork, rust stains trailing from them. He is safe here, he thinks. No one comes this far into the works, not even people up to no good. He looks at the blue swirl of the lion’s mane on the signs which warn of security guards and dogs. They walk the perimeters from a Portakabin office over by the Ironport, sometimes they drive around the buildings in small white vans. The roads are subsiding, potholed, soon they’ll need diggers, caterpillar tracks, bulldozers. One day they’ll flatten the place but not yet. This will do for now.
When he stands his trousers fall down over his arse. He was always skinny, now his hips jut out and his jeans hang from them. When he came out the second time, after he’d gone back in for robbing and whatnot, like what was he expected to do now, to keep going, put food in his empty belly while they expected him to carry on in one scheme or the other, cleaning the kitchens at the college, chopping onions and taking scraps out to the bins, giving him a knife. He remembers the shock of seeing soft-faced white boys on the bus with their trousers falling down to show their pants. Everyone wants to be a bad boy now.
He is safe as he can be here, he thinks. No one comes this far into the world of cobwebs and typed paper and telephone dials, back through time and space. The money will run out. His trousers will fall down. Winter will come. He thought phoning Dee Dee would spur him on, make him do something. It got him here. He used to dream about Dee Dee and Sonia together, wanking as quiet as he could under scratchy blankets, still does sometimes. He wishes he hadn’t phoned now, let them all know. He’d like to see Liam, he thinks, to see Mark. There are days he thinks he’d like to meet them with a knife, they just cut him off, not one message or card or anything like that. Something will come to him, he thinks, something is out there waiting for him.
Iron Towns Page 10
