by Graham Mort
The railway ran close to the village. There was a crossing with a white signal box and an iron bridge where the railway lines went over the canal. On each side of the bridge a rampart of stone swept up to the metalwork in a long curve that held the banking on either side. You could walk up the slabs. At the top was a ledge that led into a space between the ironwork and the stone uprights. When you squeezed through you were in an iron box, hidden from view, the black ribbon of the canal spooling below. If you stayed there long enough a train would come by and the noise of iron wheels on iron tracks in an iron box was amazing. It shut out everything else until the surface of the water shuddered and the sound grated through to the roots of your teeth. The stones was cold against your bottom and legs and you had to be careful not to get tar on your clothes from the little stones that had dropped there. They called the bridge the iron clanger and it had a little chamber at each of its four corners. Annie had her favourite one just above the words Ken loves Pat? that someone had sprayed onto the stone with silver paint. She wondered about the question mark.
When her father got home from work he was careful to wash his hands at the kitchen sink. They were cold looking, red-skinned with blond hairs that grew up his arms and ticked your face and legs. He’d take off his wristwatch and soap them first, locking his fingers into each other, massaging his thumbs, wringing soap into his skin. Then he’d rinse them and dry them on the towel that hung over a radiator. It reminded Annie of the surgeons she’d seen on TV. He was washing away a good day’s work, he said, but she saw threads and clots of blood flushing into the drain then down to the backyard grid where moss grew between the stones. Sometimes he brought home liver or slices of belly pork for their tea. At weekends it might be a joint of brisket or a corner of ham. A butcher could afford to eat well, if nothing else. Whenever she opened the fridge to get some orange juice or find the eggs for her mother’s baking, there was usually a piece of meat lying on a special willow pattern plate. It was weird to think that the red muscle lying there had once been warm and alive. Cattle had wet, slobbery black noses and pigs had white eyelashes. Lambs were really cute and clean until they reached a certain age when they became just as stupid and shitty and forgetful as their mothers.
Annie liked the bathroom where you could shoot the long bolt on the door and run a deep soak in the cast-iron tub. God knows how much water it used, but her Mum and Dad never minded that. She loved to lie there, feeling herself buoyant, floating away in the steam that rose to the ceiling and formed little droplets. She remembered the shouts in the swimming pool in the town, the sting of chlorine, the way voices were shut out when you dived and felt the pressure in your nose and ears, everything bleary as the tiles wavered. The bath water was heated by a big gas boiler that grumbled away in the basement. It was like having an imp down there, making things work, knowing everything. There was a blue glow from the pilot light, deep shadows you could steal away to and the smell of old cardboard. In the bath her knees were rough from playing out and the skin on her thighs was mottled red from standing too close to the coal fire in the lounge. She loved the roughness of the big bath towel before her mum started nagging at the door to use the toilet, telling her to get on with it in the voice that came down her nose when she was cross. Then it was pyjamas, toothbrush and toothpaste; then her mum putting her hair into pigtails, her dad reading her a bedtime story, his feet coming up the creaking stairs like falling weights. Annie imagined him as dense matter, a collapsing star, a black hole treading the timbers towards her, sucking in all the shadows of the house.
Down below the village in the river meadows they were building new bungalows. A terrible eyesore her mother called them, with that tight little sniff. Bloody numpties, her father said for building where the river would flood them, not got God’s sense they were born with. Down there the diggers were parked at night when the workmen went home, carrying their hard hats. There was a stack of pipes that would line the new drains. They were so big that Jodie and Annie could crawl into them and sit sideways so their spines curled against the circle of cement, their knees almost touching their noses. Once Annie went down there on her own and crawled into one of the pipes and lay there in her duffle coat hearing her mother shouting her to come in for her tea. She waited a long time, then went home in the failing light, just so no one would worry. What she’d really wanted to do was go to sleep there inside that tight circle, inside the sycamore roots, shrinking herself down to something tiny and invisible. Once she caught a frog in the composter in the garden and held it in her hand so that its flat head and its bulging eyes stuck out. She wondered if it felt safe or felt frightened. When she put it down under the laurel bush it was too stunned to move, its legs hunched under itself, its throat panting. The frog was cold and her hand had been warm. It was strange to imagine its chilled blood, its cold heart pumping, its reptilian soul of ice.
At the end of that summer, in September, she’d be starting at the High School in town. That meant getting the bus each morning with Jodie and the older village kids. It meant braving the bullies who climbed on from the farms and villages on the way. Her mother was small with an upturned nose and springy brown hair that was going grey. Stay away frae them and they’ll leave ye be, her mother said, as if she didn’t believe Annie about the name-calling and sly punches. Gie as good as ye get, her father said, gie ’em a smart crack. But somehow Annie didn’t think he ever could. Even her mother said he was soft-hearted and weak when it came down to it. Talking the talk but nae walking the walk.
That year they went on holiday near Anstruther, eating fish and chips on the beach, paddling in freezing seawater, watching the sun go down behind the harbour, her father’s arm around her, her mother’s eyes a bright slate blue in the falling light. They’d rented a fisherman’s cottage in Cellardyke with crooked sash windows. Annie had imagined that lost way of life: fishing boats putting to sea or riding out the storms, the fishermen mending creels and nets on the cobblestones, their wives gutting the dead-eyed fish. In the evenings her father went for a pint in The Haven and she watched television with her mum or sat on the harbour wall watching the gulls rake over the sea until it went dark. At the night the floorboards creaked in a deep rhythm, like the movement of the sea, and she thought she could hear voices whispering through the hiss of waves.
Jodie’s dad had come to the door once, the day after her dad had taken them to the pictures for Annie’s tenth birthday and her mother had stayed at home to decorate the cake. They’d watched the film in the dark cinema that smelled of bubble gum. She couldn’t remember what it was, the film, something weird. Something unsuitable. And something had happened though she never found out what it was. Jodie had started crying, then gone quiet on the way home in the van. Naw, naw, her father had said and his voice sounded like he was pleading with Jodie’s dad who was a wiry wee bastard. No like that Jamie, ye ken full well it wasnae like that. After that, he sent Annie round with some meat for Jodie’s mum – That mingin’ wee bitch. Something ay special, a piece of topside with blood staining the paper, making it sticky. She’d stopped to smell the meat and it’d smelt like her dad’s hands smelled after work.
Jodie’s family were left-footers and there always seemed to be a new baby to look after and the house smelled of milk. Jodie’s mum had a nose ring and worked part-time at the newsagent selling The Scotsman and lottery tickets and cans of lager. Her dad didn’t do much. Nae work, Jodie said, shrugging. She became a mother at seventeen, like her own mother. Nae bother. Annie saw her once after leaving school, but she’d already gone her own way.
Once Annie was at the High School, she did her own pigtails and started her periods and there were no more stories and the stairs were silent as she lay in bed reading or listening to her radio, or finishing homework. Strange, how that silence seemed louder than the creak of timber under shoe leather and her father’s bulk. She began to think of life after school, of life beyond the village, of a life that was her own and not everyone else’s.
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Down in the little bit of swampland beyond the sycamore there was a pathway you could find if you were careful. It was made of barrel lids laid on the marsh. James Gowan had showed her. You had to step carefully, feeling for the timber with your feet, balancing as the marsh gave up an eggy smell of decay. The pathway led to a little island overgrown with willow trees. A wild place where no one went, where you couldn’t be seen. In spring the hazels and willows were covered in yellow catkins and pussy willow. In late summer, there were bulrushes. You could brush your face against their brown velvet cylinders. They seemed a kind of perfection, symmetrically formed, perfect in their way, unspoilt. They reminded her of the story of Moses, the abandoned baby rescued by the pharaoh’s daughter and restored to his mother.
That was a story about destiny. Destiny was a thing to dream about. Sometimes Annie went to the marsh and sat for hours, watching dragonflies and damsel flies flicker over orange water that let out bubbles of gas. There were sticklebacks and newts and tadpoles in spring. Mr Nidrie, their biology teacher, told them about the damsel flies, how they mated on the wing. He’d give a small smile at his own daring, pulling at his tie, blushing a little. He had short dark hair and dimples and some of the girls had a crush on him. Damsels in distress. She’d seen the gas-flame-blue insects stuck together, still hovering, coordinating their wing beats in a blur of passion. He told them about the mayfly, how it lived for one short summer’s day; how in that day it had to find all the happiness and freedom that life could offer it as light faded and air turned cold and dusk came and the end of everything came.
Mr Monroli lived in the top end of the village, up the long hill where the houses were detached and looked down to the church and along to the open countryside. He had dark eyebrows that joined in the middle and a huge St Bernard dog with white fur and a crooked brown stripe on its head. Mr Monroli’s dog was called Mortimer and he’d let them ride on its back when they were children. He drove the fruit and veg van that called in at all the villages and towns that lay at the foot of that line of hills. Somehow he’d come into money. Not by graftin’ for it like the rest of us, her father said. Her dad wanted a bigger house with a wide garden and gravel drive to park a car on and that’s why he worked so hard in the butcher’s shop.
Once she’d seen the dog chained outside her father’s shop and her father and Mr Monroli chatting inside, behind rain clouds caught in the window glass. Mortimer peed up against the drainpipe and then his thing came out like a red dagger and he’d walked towards her until the leash dragged him back. Her father had seen all that and said something to Mr Monroli and they laughed, her father jerking his head in a certain way. She’d carried on walking to Jodie’s, but she wished he hadn’t laughed. She wished she hadn’t seen the dog, its dark blank eyes under the dense bone of its brow. It made her flush for all the times she’d stroked it and climbed onto its back, feeling its fur silky and hot. She thought of her father feeding it scraps of liver and laughing.
Sometimes, when she helped her father on Saturdays, she climbed inside the big fridge in the back room of the shop and almost – but never quite – closed the door so that the electric light went out and there was just a crack of daylight. The chill began to enter her as she stood with the gutted carcases of pigs and lambs hanging next to her. You could see where their spinal cords had been, where their skulls had been split, their eyes and brains taken out. Once her father had caught her in there and he’d been upset and explained to her very quietly how dangerous it was. He’d hugged her and told her how if the door ever clicked shut on her and he didn’t know where she was, she’d never be able to get out. That eventually she’d suffocate from lack of air or freeze to death. Annie knew that, had always known it. And so she did do it again, feeling the big rubber seal of the door almost touch, the heavy chrome catch click against its sneck, the light extinguishing, the cold from dead animals chilling her.
Years later, following a memory to its source, she did it after her father had a stroke and couldn’t work any more and the shop was being emptied to be converted into an estate agent’s office. She’d been called home from university because he’d started to mix up his words, and then collapsed. Went down like an ox, her mother said. By the time he left hospital, he couldn’t walk or talk, but sat in a special chair with furious blue eyes and curled fingers. He lost two stone in weight and his hands felt like the dried skin on the back of the fur she’d played with as a child. Annie found the scraps as she wandered the house, still stuffed into the metal trunk in the attic, asking her mother the old questions and getting the same vague, impatient answers. She stepped into the fridge in the tiled back room of the shop, one last time. The electricity was disconnected and warm instead of cold, smelling of old blood from the sheep and pigs and cattle that had hung there on steel hooks. Annie felt that lovely touch of darkness as the chink of light narrowed and the metal catch touched and clicked and swung ajar again. She pushed it open with both hands, walking free. She’d taken a year off from her studies to help her mum get things straight. It should have been her study abroad year, teaching at a primary school in Barcelona. But it could wait. She wondered what had happened to Jodie in the years that had swirled between them.
The day after they buried her father, Annie went on a walk that passed through all her childhood places, a stream of moment and memory. She thought of her father, his tread on the stairs, the dark mass of him touching her as he settled on the bed to read to her. Thank God he hadn’t lasted. She thought of the boiler there in the basement, its light like the thwarted blue in her father’s eyes.
On that thin November day she found the shrunken fragments of childhood that had stayed in her dreams. The frayed noose of rope; the tangled roots of the sycamore; the built bungalows, their red brick still livid; the iron bridge with its fading graffiti; the water of the canal shivering under the heft of a train, brightly lit and heading away to the cities that burned up the night to horizons where hours would harden into years. She thought about what had happened, what hadn’t, about what she’d imagined and hoped. The hazel bushes and alders and willow trees were bare in the little swamp and a cold wind was starting from the east. A few flakes of snow had come down onto the turned earth of the kirkyard, but had ceased upon the final prayer. There was a thin skim of ice between the reeds and a stand of bulrushes still erect, their cylinders of brown velvet firm and smooth and exact.
She thought of a child in Egypt hidden in a fisherman’s creel. She thought about destiny. When she breathed, moisture puffed and faded, her body heat dissipating. She was seeing a boy who was studying medicine, in his third year now. Gavin. He had cold hands so that she laughed and flinched and squirmed away when they made love. Annie said she pitied his patients, remembering her father’s hands under the kitchen tap. Sometimes she had to shut that out, feeling him yelp and come in a little splutter of breath, then withdrawing gently, bending his head to kiss her belly button.
Annie wondered where he was now. Maybe thinking about her. Maybe not. She’d think about him on the train tomorrow, all the way to the city. He’d be a doctor one day, saving lives; she’d teach children to speak in foreign tongues, reshaping the world through the mouth’s small sounds. She let go of the velvety heads. They rustled against dried reeds, swayed to a standstill. In the summer there’d be maiden flies and dragonflies and damsel flies; the rusty water would teem with sticklebacks and tadpoles and newts. Even if the rest of the world was annihilated, life could start again here, evolving over a million, million years. Maybe human beings or something close to them would emerge again to touch each other, to make love and language, to name everything again. Ice splintered underfoot as she shivered and turned to leave, brushing dried willow leaves from the branches. A stiff easterly deadened her cheeks as she walked towards tomorrow, towards home where her mother was sorting through her father’s things. Three white cooling towers stood at the horizon, extinct.
JENNY BROWN’S POINT
Col settled his han
ds on the wheel. They were red from hot water. One wing mirror was broken and the black electrical tape he’d used to mend it fluttered from the shattered glass. The windscreen wipers were smearing spray from a lorry. He switched on the radio. There was a local station up here now. 96.9 FM. A woman’s voice sang it to a corny tune. Jason was strapped into the child seat behind. Col had access every other weekend, but this morning Janine had been a real cow about it. You’ve got to make your mind up, Col. We can’t plan anything like this.
Like what? He’d missed a couple of weekends because of work, so things had got a bit out of sync. She’d had another kid – Kaylie – after he left, after shacking up with Simon who’d moved into the house. Simon who still had acne and did fuck-all in the scheme of things. They were supposed to be going to a kids’ party together, Jason and Kaylie who was three now. Janine said it wasn’t fair, expecting Jason to give that up. Col almost told her to fuck off but he bit his tongue because she’d be on the phone to her solicitor slagging him off if he didn’t behave.
