‘What’s going on?’ Liam asks and Tony waves him away from the broken glass. A display case is smashed.
‘I’ll get a brush. Watch that glass is still hanging.’ Tony reaches up to bolt the door and says ‘Fuckin’ Bobby.’
There is blood on the glass still in the case, a foam of spit where Bobby had gobbed past Tony’s ear, more blood spots on the chequered lino floor.
‘What, your Bobby? What’s he done that for?’
‘He ain’t our Bobby no more. He wants me to do his face. I’ve told him no faces. He only comes in when he’s drunk or off his head on summat else. Do me face, he says to me. I’ve told him not to bother me with his crap and I get this.’
‘You better watch that blood, Tone.’
‘Eh? Oh. I’ll get some gloves on, stand back.’
As they work they remember Bobby as young boy, big and round faced, a cheeky boy whose big crazy hair the grownups would ruffle and give him a pound for an ice cream. Liam watched him up close at the gym a couple of times, so quick, and with something in him, jagged and clever. He watched him fight a boy from up in Cowton, quite fancied before he got in with Bobby, at the Hightown Town Hall, how Bobby sliced down all the angles so the boy was cornered, big punches to the body and angled kicks to the head. Bobby left the boy standing for his own amusement, a cat with an injured bird. The ref stepped in and the crowd booed.
‘Kill him, Bobby, kill him.’ He remembers a voice from somewhere at the back of the room. It was Gracie, Bobby’s own mother. Liam knew the plea in that voice; how people look at you and want you to do what they can’t, feel you’ve betrayed them if you can’t do it either. He is glad his own mother has stopped coming to watch him. She is not speaking to him since he didn’t turn up for that Sunday roast. He needs to find a way to make amends, feels he’s been trying to do that to people one way or another half of his life. He’ll send her some flowers or something.
He sweeps up the pieces of glass from the floor, fills the bucket for the mop and Tony removes the big jagged edges from the display case, broken heart designs and pictures of sailors’ girls beneath.
‘We used to look after him Tuesday nights upstairs at the pub, me and Dee Dee. For years, really, when he was a little kid, two, three.’
‘Tuesday nights was when they went to the bingo,’ Tony says.
‘That’s right.’
‘Where was I?’
‘What?’
‘I wonder where I was, if you babysat Bobby.’
‘I don’t know. You’re, what, seven years older than him. Maybe yer mum never went. Maybe Natalie or somebody had yer.’
‘That’s my point, though. Nobody can remember, even me. But we can all remember where Bobby was.’
Liam is not sure where this is going.
‘What yer saying, Tone? Who’d yer rather be? Yerself or Bobby? Look at the state he’s in.’
‘Killed by love, eh, all that attention.’
‘He ain’t dead, though, is he? Maybe he’ll sort himself out.’
With this Tony makes a sort of noise in his throat, like he won’t even grace that with an answer. Bobby is only going in one direction. He has cleared the glass from the case, wrapped it in a towel.
‘I’ll make another cup of tea.’
‘What’s he want, any road?’
‘What?’
‘On his face?’
‘Eh, oh, tonight it was a spider and a web he wanted. Round his bad eye down onto his cheek, had it all planned out.’
‘Man of tradition, see. Couldn’t yer just do it for him?’
The same noise from Tony.
‘I’ll phone Lionel tomorrow. He’ll know someone who can do it cheap, I hope. The son smashes it and the dad patches it up, eh?’
‘I don’t know. Lionel’s done his fair share of smashing things up, I reckon.’
Liam pulls a couple of notes from his wallet.
‘Here, have this towards it.’
Tony goes to wave it away.
‘Go on,’ Liam says, ‘put it on me account.’
…
The leaves sweep down Meeting House Lane with the gusts that come now, bonfire weather, great pyres going up on the wasteground at Cowton and by the Peng scrapyards, kids dressed as witches and spiders roaming the streets and demanding money and sweets. There’s the sound of fireworks every night, whistles in the dark, the crack of bangers up the hillsides, barking dogs. It makes it sounds like there’s life, but there’s no one in the pub. Dee Dee is scared to look at the books, pays Roni out of petty cash, then her own purse, prays there’s enough in the bank for Paul. God knows what she’s going to do for the Christmas boxes. At least Lionel hasn’t invoiced for the cameras.
Mark stands at the hatch, shifts from foot to foot, in need of his overcoat today, although he’s worn it all summer anyway.
‘My god Mark what have you done to yer face? Who’s done that to you?’
He is shocked by her shock, has spent a week or more living with it, staring into the mirror at an eye that would not open, bathing it in warm salt water, something remembered, he thinks, from his mum. It had been swollen tight at first, then slowly turned purple until a jaundiced yellow spread across that half of his face and the eye opened a crack. There’s a lump still on his cheek, which he wondered if he’d broken, but there’s not much pain, a numbness to it, a tingling in the morning. He thought of walking to A&E at the Bethel, the colour of the leaves changing over the Heath. He’s OK as long as he remembers to chew up the side and he doesn’t eat so much anyway. He has reduced his life. But he’s been staring in the mirror and thinking about how stupid he’s been and then trying to tell himself how lucky as well, could have been much worse, the white of his eye has begun to show again, criss-crossed with blood, much worse, in an attempt to ward off demons.
He nearly says he walked into a door. He remembers how Sonia turned up with a black eye once and no one did anything about it, Goldie with scratch marks all down his face, mind. She’d been dancing with some boy from the posh houses up by the Heath. They split up for a few weeks, Dee Dee indignant about it, warning Goldie to steer clear.
‘Admit it, though, she was asking for it,’ Liam had said to him while they sat waiting for the minibus to training, he remembers it now, same time of year and the pitches strewn with big yellow leaves old Ted got them to rake up down at the training ground, and he hadn’t said anything at all, just put his back into the work.
‘Fell off the pavement,’ he says, a variation on a theme, ‘when I run into your Bobby the other day.’
‘And he did that to yer?!’
Mark shrugs, ‘You should see what he looks like, eh.’
He turns to her, with his good eye and his half-closed one. She can’t remember the last time she’d seen his face, not properly, not without him looking down at the ground, shuffling about, eyes always somewhere else. She knows he hasn’t seen a doctor, decides not to even bother with that line.
‘Fucking hell, Mark.’ Tears come quickly to her eyes and she leans through the hatch. He is just a step too far away, the counter a bit too wide and she is left on tiptoe with one arm rubbing his shoulder and her hair falling out of its clip between them. They both smile at the position they are in.
‘Do you want to come in Mark? Do you want a cup of tea? Something to eat?’ He has never been in the pub, never been in a room with her since a couple of times when he came to see her when she first took Alina, when she and Liam still lived together and he knew Liam was at training, and he knew Liam was leaving her, the first year he stopped playing and the club were trying to persuade him to come back, threatening all sorts on the one hand, trying to get him in the Bethel on the other.
‘I don’t need a psychiatrist, Dee Dee, I don’t need doctors, nothing, I just need to stop playing football,’ is what he said to her, looking out of the leaded windows onto the hills, like they’d trespassed into some other country, which they had in a way, he supposed. He spent a lot of time tryi
ng to sneak back, to get home, that’s what he thinks. He had needed a psychiatrist, needed some help at least, they were right on that score.
‘No Dee Dee, thanks, you’re all right. I’ll let you know if I need anything.’
She is crying, trying not to, sniffs, feels the anger rising at the same time.
‘Hang on there a minute. I’ll get you something.’
He nearly says that he thinks he saw Goldie, but the certainty left him when the headache eased, why should he worry her over nothing, a phantom, a ghost? He tries to forget what Freddie Rogers said to him. He has scared her enough with his face, with the ghost of her cousin, too many ghosts all still alive, trick or treat, he thinks, and what is he?
She expects him to disappear, but there he is standing in a pattern of leaves in the autumn light, an autumn pattern across his face. She gives him a bottle of whisky and two packs of Co-Codamol. She worries afterwards that he’ll take them all in one go.
…
Bladud was a leper, cured by the waters of the willow streams, and a good king too. He could speak to the dead as well as to the living, to Maddan, his father, Gwendolen, his mother, and Corineus his father’s father. He lit fires that burned his whole life, that heated the baths that he built to wash away the evils of the world.
He had a son named Leir. To entertain him, Bladud had red kite feathers collected from the fields, stitched them into a great set of wings, did not heed the dead voices in his ear, and launched himself from the highest treetop.
The boy laughed to see that his father could fly and Bladud swooped through the clouds and flew for a while without a care, saw the green island, the white island, spread out beneath him, and then tumbled and fell, as men must do, and was dashed into pieces on the city that grew beneath him.
‘The boy, look, the boy.’
‘What?’
‘Bladud’s boy there in the yard.’
A magpie hopped across the stones and strewn body and called something to Leir that he could not understand, spent his whole life wondering, and he watched as it flew over the ruins, over the island, and on out of sight.
…
On the coach journey up to Hartlepool, a six-pointer in the December gloom, Liam watches the man commonly agreed to be the world’s second best footballer chase a ball across a field in Stockholm. Sometimes he watches all three goals and waits until Ronaldo disappears under a pile of gambolling teammates, under the whole of Portugal, laughing and cheering and crying with joy. Sometimes he pauses it after the second goal, the real killer punch, the young man stood off by the near-post where he finished his run, his hair still perfectly in place, banging his chest, bellowing, and then opens the images Greta has sent that week, in an email with no heading or text at all, just attachments, pictures and video of their little boy, one swift exit left from Greta’s bottom half in a long skirt and barefoot in one of the clips which he has now played twenty times or more. He touches the screen. When did we start stroking these things? He can’t remember. Jari ran his hands across the old television set at his grandad’s in an effort to find a cartoon. There he is, running with the mud between his toes. These films from the last weeks at the lake house before they boarded it up for winter. They had been back at the house in town for weeks now, darkness settling in.
When it gets too much he turns back to Ronaldo. Liam is conscious of telling himself that it is too much, aware somehow outside himself of playing the role of the heartbroken, absent father, feels his throat tighten. This is no state, he tells himself, at the same time aware that he tells himself, this is no state to be in, as if he could choose something else, some other way of being Liam Corwen, iron man from the Iron Towns, football man, tough and classy defender, heartbroken absent dad, failed husband. Ronaldo accelerates over the halfway line, after the ball, with all the movements of a man who knows what is coming, what is written, as though he has scored this goal a hundred thousand times before, knows he will outpace these chasing defenders even with the ball at his feet, knows how the keeper will come towards the near-post and how he will hit it low and hard across him into the far corner, none of his showmanship here, until the ball sits softly in the net, and he turns to the side of the goal and waits for the world to catch up.
‘I am here!’ is what Ronaldo shouts, bangs his chest, ‘I am here! I am here!’
Liam has started six matches in a row now. Unprecedented in these later years, he tells himself in a voice that is not his own, some highlights-reel voice-over. Everything hurts. He cannot get his hip comfortable on this seat, shifts himself again, these long coach rides are a problem themselves, past Wakefield, Doncaster, Beverley, in the English rain.
‘Unbelievable,’ Devon has moved down the aisle, stands and looks at the screen, ‘He ain’t human.’
Liam shakes his head, eyes wide, in a kind of mock-awe that he really means.
‘Think of all the things they might try to stop him.’
‘Force him wide…’
‘There is no stopping him.’
‘…get bodies between him and the goal, that’s all, bodies.’
‘They can try and kick him if they catch him, look, but he’s six foot odd, built like a cruiserweight.’
‘Bodies, that’s all it is, all you’ve got. Sit deep is all you can do. Chasing the game, Sweden are fucked.’
Their voices sound strange to Liam, amphibian, muffled by the coach seats and drowned in the sound of spray. There is the odd thumping beat from the other players’ headphones up and down the coach. It strikes him that the build-up to games has become quieter and quieter over the years. The young lads barely say anything. And it wasn’t just their age, even Ally, Archie Hill, spoke in calm, measured tones these days, most of the time, that is. Liam prefers a bit of sound and fury. When he first got in the team they still had headcases like Wayne Coombs in the side who would shout ‘Who wants it? Who fucking wants it?’ and stare unfocussed into your eyes and carry that on right into the tunnel. They had Kevin Burns playing Iron Maiden on one of those twin-tape decks. And the thing was, these were better players than the ones they had now would ever hope to be. When Liam first got in the first team squad there was a card school up the back of the coach that preferred these long trips to the north-east to get the pot built up. He and Mark would pass mix-tapes back and forth – not Iron Maiden – and listen to their Walkmans, sometimes a headphone each, the way Dee Dee and Sonia did. They’d never do that anywhere other than the sanctuary of the coach. Liam glances backwards now and sees Kyran stroke his phone, not attached to him by wire, but a pair of goldie-looking headphones sat like a crown on his head.
The coaches have not changed, the sort that would take them to Weston or Rhyl or Alton Towers when they were kids, the kind with ashtrays that pulled out from the headrest in front, with plastic covers on the seats or else plastic fake-leather that his grandad would organise from the Miners’ Welfare to take them each October, a real adventure, over land and sea, to Longchamp and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, sick bags and rare cigar smoke, tots of whisky in hip flasks. He thought the Arc was the race, not the monument. Dee Dee caught him out with it and laughed. They went to Paris for a weekend once. He fancies a drink right now, which is not a great sign three hours before kick-off. He read that McGrath played pissed a few times, Tony Adams too. Had decent games. He is not them.
They are sealed inside this coach. The young lads are sealed inside their headphones, all of them locked inside their own heads. They wait quietly in rooms. His hotel room. The dressing room. Until out they spill when that bell goes, spat out onto the scrap of green, silent no more, hidden no more, exposed. He used to dream recurrently of playing naked.
Devon walks back up the coach aisle. He is playing well. Devon is keeping him in the team, truth be told, but he doesn’t care. They work well together, fit each other, though neither of them is getting any quicker. Devon moves soft on his feet for a big man, he treads like an astronaut negotiating a space station corridor, unce
rtain of the gravity. There are signs for Scarborough and Darlington. There are ferries to Norway up here somewhere. He imagines continuing. He could hitch lifts through the forests, the tundra, cross borders, ride into Lapinlahti in the snow, look up at a lighted window, a man come home.
‘I am here!’ Ronaldo shouts, ‘I am here!’ and it seems to Liam, at least right now at this moment, heading through rainy England, half a continent distant from his wife and son – that it is maybe all most of us ever, ever want to say.
‘I am here! I am here!’
…
Goldie’s old man had twenty kids. A bloke told him that once in the back room of The Magpie, an old pub with sagging walls that sat just outside the Greenfield East Gates. He’s sure the pub has gone now, the man too, who he remembers toothless, his lips puckered over a barley wine and half a mild. Those men have gone, he thinks to himself, twenty years gone by and more, because he was a kid when he heard that, tilting the pool table in the back room to get a free game when no one was looking, Tuesday, Wednesday afternoons when he should’ve been at school. Men in daytime pubs knew him, knew who he was and where he came from. The bloke that day must have assumed he never saw his dad, never knew him, but he was wrong on that score. He would come by and stay a few days every year when he was a kid, must have stopped when he was nine or ten or so. He took him fishing a couple of times, right up onto the Welsh Ridge one time to an old run-down farm, ‘To see a man about a dog,’ he had said, and it was true that dogs had barked all through the yard and in pens out against the hill, and for ages Goldie thought he was getting a dog and it was years later that he heard it as a saying, and understood, too late by then to do anything about it, too late always to catch on to things. His old man had grown up on farms, worked on them, and on the roads, when they built the motorways, was never at home in the towns. It’s strange to think he might still be alive, but Goldie guesses he would’ve heard somehow if he’d died, maybe not, people slipped through the cracks, into the shadows. He never had twenty kids anyway, but a few, here and there.
Iron Towns Page 12
