…
‘Hey,’ a voice calls from the dark entrance to the old Assembly Rooms, a figure leans forward off the cardboard that patterns the steps. Mark has got too casual. He steps off the pavement into the gutter, rests his boot’s worn-down studs on the high kerb, doesn’t want to run or look too startled, his heart going.
A hand reaches out at him from the gloom.
‘Hey, geezer, all right?’
It’s Bobby Ahmed grinning at him, not quite looking at him. Still, Bobby must be the only person in the whole of the Iron Towns not to call Mark by name. It irritates him for a moment. Geezer. No one says that within a hundred miles radius, more.
They came to see Bobby fight here when he was a kid, no more than a little boy really, before he switched to kickboxing and steroids and weed, and whatever else he is doing now, boys boxing against clubs from the Welsh valleys or the Black Country. Iron Towns, Iron Towns, Iron Towns would echo from the back of the hall. He went to one once with the team where there were blokes eating steaks watching kids batter each other’s heads in. Kill him, Bobby, they would shout.
‘Penny for the guy, blood?’
Bobby’s open hand reaches out to him, cracked and dirty. Mark thinks he must have slept on the steps, it’s not much after first light, a thick dew on the world, cold first thing in a morning now but the sun still shines in the afternoons. Bobby’s mum and dad live in a mansion somewhere up by the Heathside, he must still have his bedroom there. Just go home, Bobby, he wants to say.
It was a mistake to stand down the kerb like this with Bobby standing over him, no one else around, this the turning that the bread lorries use for the bakery and be careful not to step back and get flattened, Mark thinks, and somewhere wonders at his own capacity for survival. But then there’s Bobby’s soft face and the way he doesn’t really look at him. The idea that he really would hand some money over to him, although he’s done it in the past, of course.
‘Where’s your guy?’
‘What?’
‘You ain’t got no guy, Bobby.’
He sees that Bobby is surprised that he uses his name, wonders if he can actually see anything, looking like a blind beggar, some roadside penitent from a painting of centuries past, dressed in a ragged Nike track suit.
‘You can’t ask for money with no guy, mate.’
Bobby giggles like a little boy. Mark feels a stab of pity and then disgust. He has a handful of change in his pocket. He is going to the back hatch at the bakery to buy a warm misshaped loaf, teacakes if they’ve got any.
‘It’s trick or treat they go for now, Bobby, any road. You should try that instead, mate.’
Bobby nods and smiles, his shoulders tremble with mirth and he laughs again. The punch comes quick, so fast that Mark is out on the wet pavement before he even realises he has been hit. Bobby had nothing in his hand, he will think later, when he tries to convince himself he’s been hit by a brick, by some gargoyle tumbling off one of the ruins, but no, it’s Bobby’s fist all right, hard and fast and the last ability to leave him.
Mark covers up in the gutter, waits for more blows. Instead there’s an iron grip on his shoulder and lips that brush his ear.
‘I am the fucking guy,’ Bobby says, steps over him, hasn’t even bothered to pick up the change that jangles from Mark’s pocket.
He lies on the wet stones for a bit, his head getting bigger and then smaller, the street rising and falling. The running man was Goldie, a thought that comes with the throb in his head, like a vision across the years.
A bread van slows as it goes past him, the sound of the tyres on the tarmac like that of a tide coming in, going out, he moves so they don’t think he’s dead, and the van doesn’t stop.
…
Stanley Matthews, Duncan Edwards, Billy Wright. Men from Hanley and Dudley and Ironbridge. Princes of Mercia, like Offa, like Kenelm. They run together around the Highbury pitch at England training, conscious of the photographer’s gaze. They match each other’s stride. Legs built on cobbles, by racing up slag heaps and terraces. Stanley Matthews runs on Blackpool sands. It’s one reason why he plays until he’s fifty. Duncan Edwards wears a jumper to build up a sweat, the two older men wear shirts open at the neck, day-trippers at the seaside. Older men: Matthews is forty-two, in his last year with the England team. There’s a happiness and confidence and determination in their look.
Billy Wright’s dad worked in a foundry, big Duncan’s too. Matthews’s was a barber and pro boxer; his own son plays tennis, wins the Boys championship at Wimbledon just five years hence, they say he’s the new Fred Perry. But this photo offers nothing of what is to come. Look at the big young man in the middle of the three. Ten months after the picture is taken he is dead, twenty-one. Later, Duncan Edwards’s dad leaves his foundry job, works at the cemetery where his son is buried, tends the flowers and the verges and the graves.
…
Liam sometimes went to watch the Villa on his own, midweek or on a Sunday, when they hadn’t got a game. This in the years when it went wrong for them, Irontown, for him, with the team struggling, with Mark gone, no chance of an England call ever coming again, just ridicule, in fact, because Taylor had been sacked and everyone said the players he’d picked had been no good. And the big money and the TV came now and they’d missed out on it all thanks to a fluffed penalty, a loss of heart, loss of nerve. When he played away from home now Liam was singled out with braying donkey noises, even though he held that defence together, and that’s what Ally whispered in his ear, and Ally kept him going. It was a kind of big man syndrome, everyone wanting to have a pop at him. His dad kept quiet, like he thought he had it coming. Maybe he did.
‘If they’re making a noise, son, you’re doing something right. They are scared of you, terrified. You just carry on as you are,’ Ally would stand naked in the middle of the dressing room, telling them that Liam is the best defender he’s ever worked with.
Sometimes their opponents – places like Peterborough and Doncaster – would sing ‘Where’s Mark Fala gone?’ to the tune of ‘Where’s your caravan?’ but it never really took off, and the Iron Towns support would drown it out with his name, over and over, like he’d gone nowhere at all. It was Liam they really liked to taunt, sensing a wound, sensing blood.
He’d pull a cap down tight, bury his face in an old scarf, lose himself in the crowd round Villa Park, in the red brick and the rain. There was a cup match he went away to, Sheffield United, Bramall Lane in the snow, when Yorke chipped a penalty just like Mark had tried.
You needed an iron will to do it, to carry it off.
Yorke runs up as if to strike it, does not shorten his stride, but instead digs his foot underneath it, like a pitching wedge or something and hits it with back-spin, almost too hard, so it dips just under the cross bar and into the net and he runs off to the side of the goal, laughing.
Back then people fixated on Yorke’s smile, like it was all a joke, which it was of course, but they’d patronise him and say he played with a smile on his face, like none of it mattered, like you didn’t need an iron will to pull that off, to come from where he had come from and end up where he did, that’s what Liam thought. Everyone missed the point. He might have had a happy smile but he had balls of fucking iron.
Then they ended up with Liverpool in the semi-final. Liam went to that too. They got undone by Robbie Fowler, who flitted in and out of the Villa area like he wore an invisible cloak. It was at Old Trafford, that semi-final, in the time before they played them all at Wembley. He wouldn’t have gone to Wembley, was glad when they pulled the place down. He stood and looked at the Busby Babes’ stopped clock before the match. He wished he had Mark to talk to, Dee Dee as well, too late now. Most clocks keep ticking.
…
He can hear horses’ hooves. It must be a Friday, Goldie thinks, and is caught somewhere between now and then, because it is Friday, and there really is the sound of horses’ hooves echoing through the estate.
They used
to call the Pengwern the Lost Valley or The Island. There was a little iron bridge that went over the cut, the Navvy they used to call it, the Chain Navigation, and led into Lysaght’s, where the men had worked, and apart from the road that ran down from Lowtown, that was the only way on and off the place without a coracle. The gate at the bridge was rusted shut now, of course. There was the gasworks on one side, towers of scrap and the river itself on the other, so the Peng had always been a little world to itself.
They used to ride pony traps all around the estate on Friday afternoons. The ponies came off the back field next to the river. The traps were customised, seats from old cars, rigs from the fairground, all from the scrapyards that petered out into the back field. All the kids who never bothered with school used to meet down the stables early afternoon and sort out who was riding with who, a kind of rough democracy, common ownership to it all. A mate of his called Tommy Knock used to take him out. Goldie was scared of horses. This was in the days before he started to hang around with Liam and Mark, Dee Dee and Sonia, before he got into all that stuff with the Ahmeds. He should’ve just stayed here, he thinks, not for the first time in his life, looks at the grass that grows out of the gutter, up the middle of the road in places. There were people when he was growing up who’d never even been into Hightown. He wasn’t sure his mum ever had. He could’ve stayed here, headed out in the dark for warehouses packed with treasure, ridden around in a carriage like a prince on a Friday afternoon.
It looks the same, the houses anyway, more or less. There are grilles here up at the windows and doors at the end house where the Sadlers used to live, a family where it was the women who used to go to prison, forward thinking, thieving even when everyone else was still trudging over the bridge to start their shift. Nana Sadler was an old flame of Stan Ahmed’s, would fence stuff down at the row of garages. They called her the Black Cat, perhaps because of her ability to get away with things, but also because of her luck at the bingo, at the horses. She’d been a bookie’s runner as a girl, left from the pubs and the factory gates to take messages to the Carter boys who waited at the Hightown station. There is nothing left of the Sadlers. He wonders what is behind the green metal shutters. With eyes half-closed they look like windows on a doll’s house, or on postcards of happy places in the mountains in countries far from here. There is the odd blue brick among the red.
The hooves get louder, closer, there is a whooping shout from somewhere and then a flashing movement from the end of the street and a young brown horse comes trotting down the middle of the road and he sees the trap make a clean arc around the bend behind it. He steps onto the pavement and tugs at his hood and when he looks again, swears to god that it is Tommy Knock’s freckled face above that of the horse. Red freckles on Tommy, white freckles on the horse’s face, a mop of red hair on both. Tommy holds the reins three-quarters taut in his hands. A young girl sits next to him, leaning back and laughing, pale faced, with black hair tied up on her head, wearing clothes too thin for the weather.
And then they are gone, and he listens to the sound bouncing off the Sadlers’ empty house and he puts his hands on the low wall and takes a gulp of air to steady himself.
He will have had kids, Tommy, of course he will have. He probably still lives down there on Stream Crescent, out the other end of the road, past the shops or whatever is left of them, past Goldie’s old house. Where would he have gone? The towers of scrap are all still there. It was Tommy’s son, must have been.
His legs will not move as he wants them to, will not go one step more in the direction he wants to go. He listens to the hooves as they fade and the boy drives the trap on the old circuit, Goldie can tell from the sounds, down to the road that runs parallel with the cut, where you could really get a speed up before having to slow into the corner, unless you wanted to end up in the drink. In summer, they’d have races after tea as the sky turned a darker blue. Lads would come to race cars there on Sunday nights. There is just a faint clip-clop now in the distance, that far corner, and Goldie turns his back and walks up the road back towards the Lowtown turning. He’ll come back another time, another day, when he feels a bit better, a bit more up to it.
He has not seen his mother since she used to get the early morning bus to Birmingham, visiting orders in her handbag, wearing her best clothes and trying not to catch anyone’s eye, but all that faded, and they have not spoken since he moved in with Nadine, wrote the address carefully in a Christmas card that he sent her much too late. Strange, how they’d got through the hardest part, she could’ve just disowned him, never spoken to him again, but she didn’t, then everything faded away after he’d been released, like she thought he should still be inside. Maybe that had been easier for her. A few days won’t make any difference now.
…
In the photograph Tony has laid out on the desk for him, there is a man running, telephone wires stretched above him. Abundant green leaves explode at the roadside. In the foreground another man, shirtless, wearing a beret, turns and smiles, a rifle held down at his side. He seems to look back at the man in mid-stride who stares nowhere in particular, down the road and out of shot. But it is not the running man at whom he smiles but the severed head that sits in the road like an unkicked football, eyes half-open, a snail’s trail of blood behind it.
‘Fucking hell,’ Liam says. He realises the shock is in not seeing the head at first. Or that you see it – it is right there in the middle of the picture, it is what is being photographed – but don’t register it. And that is what the running man does too. The longer that Liam looks at the picture the more he believes that the running man has not seen the head. It is the man in the foreground who makes us see it, grinning back at it. The other man runs down the road, towards something, away from something, both, maybe that isn’t important. This is just another picture from some unknown African war. Liam wonders briefly about the men, the boys who straggle in a line by the tree. That everyone in this picture is now dead. Another image forms, another photo he must have seen once or something half-registered from the telly. It is one of the men today, maybe the man that grins and holds his gun down, older but not that much, another roadside. The man rides a wobbly bicycle, rings a bell. An icebox is balanced on the handlebars and leaks across his shorts. In the box he keeps cold beers, bottles of pop, river fish, whatever he can buy and sell. Sometimes at night he dreams that he opens the icebox and finds a severed head.
‘Just think about the shape of the figures,’ Tony says. Liam shuffles the cuttings and sketchbook pages on the desk. Running men across all of them. The door bell rings and Tony steps away to pull back the curtain which separates this small space at the back of the shop, which he insists on calling his studio, which has the table at which they sit and an old green velour comfy chair that Liam thinks used to be in Dee Dee’s nana’s front room and a rattling fridge which leaks water against the back door. The door and window are barred and look out onto the yard. A bag of rubbish has burst across the uneven concrete, chicken bones and batter, and Liam thinks of the foxes, how there are so many more of them each year and how only that morning he’d seen one sitting out on the path that ran along the old railway line under the hotel window and how the colour of the path with no rain is the same as that in the picture. He wonders what the fox might do, confronted with a head on the path in the Anvil Yards. How it might accept it, unquestioning, circle it and lap at the bloody trail or whether it would become spooked by the heavy lidded eyes and hide.
More men running. This time Liam recognises the face in the picture a while before he realises who it is, half-listening to the muffled voices at the front of the shop. The young man’s face is almost hidden behind the bulk of an older man, bearded and fierce, who leads the run.
‘Run so I can throw a goal net over you all,’ was a line Freddie Rogers used to use when he had them training at Lascar Boys. Liam uses it himself, now, when he sometimes trains the kids or leads a warm-up. It is how these men run, how the camera has caught
them, beads of sweat and a gob of spit glint in the sunlight, their feet arch or leave the ground completely as they run slightly askance to the white touchline. Behind them the spindle and mesh of a half-finished football stand rises. There is a distant worker in a yellow hard-hat. Beyond that are mountains, with snow on top although these players shine with sweat and water bottles dot the pitch.
Luis. It is Luis, Liam is sure. The slender black boy, half-hidden behind the bearded man. He pulls the picture closer to him. It has been torn hastily from a magazine and the desk lamp catches the page’s gloss.
…a team of nomads that have so far played matches across Central Asia. They take their ground with them, the club erects a temporary stadium the week before a match in a feat of impressive engineering, dismantles it after the game and moves on. The club have played local sides in front of thousands in the middle of the Gobi Desert, on the Mongolian plains and in the shadow of banks of…
The threat of bans from FIFA dooes not seem to have bothered these trans-national mercenaries. The club employs players from several African countries, Brazil and Eastern Europe. ‘It’s the future of football,’ says the club founder and president Yusuf Khan, a petrochemical bil lionaire with influence in several Central Asian states, in his strangely Midlands-inflected English (learned in spells at Business School in Oxford and, oddly, Birmingham, he says). ‘Certainly the future of football here.’ His ambition is to play one of the great European clubs somewhere out in the Gobi Desert. To paraphrase what Kevin Costner’s character is told in Field of Dreams, ‘If you build it, they will come.’
There is a crash from the front of the shop, glass breaking, a shout. Liam jumps, spills tea across the pictures and bends to get under the rows of pictures hanging low from the washing lines. Not for the first time he is too big for a room, so that by the time he has struggled around the chair and got to the doorway, the shop’s front door is swinging shut.
Iron Towns Page 11
