Wreckage (18 page)

Aaaaahhh.

Shakes off, washes his hands. Thinks about waiting in here for the poet to finish but that might take ages and he’s got important stuff to do so he leaves the
toilets
and re-enters the caff. The poet’s now saying something about a frigging
bee
or something for God’s sakes and as Alastair reappears he gets caught on one word stuttering:

—I, I, I, I …

Eyes again on Alastair. Oo such disapproving eyes in a soft groomed face scar-free and creaseless a face in which the fiercest thing that has ever resided is a perverse desire for more worse hurt. Alastair addresses it:

—The fucker
you
lookin at, knob’ed? Fancy a photograph, do yeh?

The poet sniffs. —What am I looking at? Evidently someone without the manners and bladder control to wait for me to finish.

This amuses Alastair. He laughs loudly and leaves the caff shaking his hatted head in humoured bemusement at the people of this world and their forever estranging ways and turns left on to busy Bold Street and checks out several emporia thereon, pubs and bars and caffs and also the shops selling designer clothes and shoes because truly where else if not such places would a pair of teenage scallies suddenly monied possibly be.

At the bottom of Bold Street by the side entrance to Central Station a swaying beggar is being addressed by two policemen. One of these officers looks a lot to Ally like one of those who gave him a wellying in the Copperas Hill bridewell some time ago although he does not recall much about that night nor indeed since it of his life before, not in any great detail any more, no, not really. As he draws level Alastair stares
hard
into this officer’s face and is met by pebble eyes and a muzzied smirk which might mean that he
is
one of Alastair’s assailants or might just as easily mean that he
isn’t
, Ally isn’t sure. He doesn’t with any certainty know. Only that there is a knotty fibrous lump on his skull beneath the skin and he has headaches with a greater frequency and of greater pain than before, just that.

Fuckers. Fuckin bizzies. Bad, bad scallies, no lie.

He moves on through the city. Sock-tucked shelly and basey and shaven skull beneath that and stubble and blue eyes and ears like satellite dishes on each side of his head, no different from a thousand others yet unique in his stride and purpose although many others roundabout seek money too and also revenge. In many faces he sees Darren’s unyielding glare and that spurs his steps down on to Matthew Street and into all the bars there and through the tourists milling around the Beatles Experience and up then into the business district and down past Ma Boyle’s and on to the Dock Road and along that thoroughfare until he re-enters the city via Chinatown and there is no Robbo, no Freddy, although there are very many of their sort. Drizzle has yet again begun to hang and drift and at the sides of hissing roads people gather in doorways and bus stops and under brollies and St Luke’s reappears again rain-darkened, fallen timbers akimbo through the glassless webs of the windows and giant-leaved plants deeply green and visible through those holes and the entire thing hulked and harmed and scorched and steaming and apocalyptic, this ever-present ruin bellowing of wreckage among the unheeding human commerce about.

Drifting Alastair, yet how he drifts with one purpose, that purpose becoming need. Need becoming desperation. Fucking Darren. That hammer. That old lady falling. Fucking two little scallies Robbo and Freddy they call themselves can’t trust anyone these days man no lie. Whole world’s falling apart.

Mid-afternoonish, he finds himself at the hospital. He is tired and pissed off and gritting his teeth against futility and the attendant frustration. He is thinking about extinction and has been doing so for some time so he stands in a bus shelter away from the rain and smokes a cigarette and then enters the hospital into a too-high disinfectant heat and retraces the route he has taken many times before, along corridors and up several flights of stairs as if seeking a destination made deliberately difficult to reach, this hot scoured warren seemingly designed by a race of mortals agog to deny or at least hide that which makes them so. As he nears his destination he starts to smell it again, coppery rot, a ferric morbidity and if this is mere fancy or otherwise he cares not either way because he can smell it,
smell
it, he always can.

A nurse stops him. A big woman with a kindly face despite the hairy wart on her upper lip like a beauty spot in negative. Her name tag says:
W
ENDY
M
URRAY
RGN.

—Can I help you? You look a bit lost.

—No, I’m sound. I know the way. Just looking for me granny.

—D’you mind telling me her name? Sorry to have to ask but y’know. Can never be too careful these days.

Alastair gives a name and the nurse gives a small smile.

—Oh yes, Katie? She’s down on the left in Ward H.

—I know, yeh.

—She’s asleep at the moment, I think. Try not to wake her. She’s over a hundred years old, you know. You should be proud. Did she get a telegram off the Queen?

—Erm …

—Well, be gentle with her. She, erm, she hasn’t been quite with us for the last few weeks …

Alastair nods. Comprehends fully the world in which his granny lives now and has done for some time and can almost grasp how torn and scrambled it must be in her head. Spatial, temporal, shredded and dispersed. Can almost imagine how blasted everything must get after passing through the sharkskin desiccation of such old ears, such old eyes.

He thanks the nurse and squeaks down the corridor to Ward H. Skeletons in beds with candyfloss hair. Eyes implore through rheum and some colourless sunken lips attempt to smile, one or two to speak. One withered hand like a fistful of driftwood twigs reaches towards him out of a nightie sleeve hanging loose.

The end bed. Kate. His grandmother.

THUNK.

Christ she looks old. Not surprising; she was born in nineteen friggin hundred or something like that. Aye but she’s always seemed ancient anyway cos she was dead late having Ally’s mum but fuckin hell she was always there for him and she fed him he would’ve starved if it wasn’t for her cos the mother was never out of the bleedin pub. Aye and Katie’d drink too
often
to excess but when bevvied she wouldn’t hit Alastair she’d hold him she was always there when he was sad and the stories she’d tell about being in service for the rich people in Toxteth when that place was wealthy and the hospitals she worked in looking after war victims
both
world wars no arms legs eyes ears faces minds some of them. God the life

God the fucking
life

—Nan? Nan? Can yeh hear me, Nan?

The shut eyelids do not twitch or flicker much less open. Alastair takes her hand very gently, feels it just tepid with what wanes within it and the skin like the fibre of his tracksuit, somewhat satiny, unmoist. Feels the faint pulse in it as if a separate life more animate is ensnared there, a smaller yet mightier animal kicking to be free with the final scrap of its strength.

—Nan? It’s me, Alastair. Can yeh hear me?

THUNK.

That bastard. That evil bastard.

God her
face
. All her hard history written in this face, life with its razors and the harrowing of years. And, at her birth, say we were presented with an itinerary of her life to come, a blueprint for the years ahead and told that this is how it will be for her, this is the pattern her life will take; would it not appear utterly unbearable? We’d think no, surely, one person cannot take that much anguish. Any one person does not deserve that much pain. And seem it must as a pre-planned scheme to wreck a life with suffering and reel we would at the cruelty and the record that nor is this unique. That this begins to hover an inch below the ceiling at the moment of the click of the first formed zygote. And any response
alternative
to mere endurance would be favoured completely but that is all this carapace mudbent and moribund immediately has.

Alastair bites his lip.

—Nain?

Soft but instant response. Eyelids flutter and the pulse seems to quicken and does the handskin warm or is that merely the fancied wish of the scally who clasps that hand.

—
Nain?

The lips part with a delicate rip, almost undetectable. A word escapes:

—Eira.

And then another:

—Mynyddoedd.

Words which Alastair does not clearly hear but he feels them on his face as the gentlest breeze or as the soul departing a minute life, a songbird, say, or a skink. A cold and bare whispered drifting like the breath of ryegrass or animus of ice.

He holds her hand a touch tighter then releases it and stands to leave. He sees the tiny rise and fall of her sunken chest beneath the bedclothes and sees her eyelids ripple as she dreams and would stay longer, perhaps to fathom those dreams or at least attempt to, but there are things of huge importance that he is compelled to do.

THUNK.

That bastard.

Leave here, Alastair, and rejoin the city, move among those with life enough able still to betray. Pure got to
find
that fucking money, lad.

* * *

—Onions on that, love?

—Yeh, loads.

—Eeyar. One sixty please, love.

—Ta.

—Mustard there if yeh wannit. Or red sauce.

Squeeze. Ketchup leaves the nozzle with a wet red fart.

Bite, chew, swallow. Stay under the awning out of the drizzle keep yourself and your hunger dry. Bite. Oh and fuckin look at that; tomato sauce all over the shelly. Bastard.

—What can I get yeh, love?

—Cheeseburger please. With onions. And a cup of oh hello there Darren. Fancy meeting
yew
here.

FUCK
. —Lenny.

—Been lookin for yew, I yav.

—Oh aye? Why’s that, well?

God he looks big this Lenny. Bigger than he usually does. That leather coat buttoned up across his chest and them buttons about to ping off.

Drum of rain on the awning.

—Cracking shiner that is, mun. Nose looks chipped an all if yew don’t mind me saying and how many stitches did they put in yewer noggin?

Bite, chew, swallow. Don’t answer this Welsh bastard. Enough left of the burger and it still hot enough to stuff into this fucker’s smiling face and –

—Tommy wants a word, Darren. Quick as yew can finish yewer dinner ey an let’s go see him, aye?

—Don’t think so, Lenny, no.

—What?

—Pure
is
not gunner happen, lar, me goin to see T
with
youse.
Is
not gunner fuckin happen. I’m just gunner eat me berga likes an then I’m gunner –

—Two pounds please, love.

—Thankyew.

—Ta.

— … go lookin for that fuckin Alastair an then am gunner –

Lenny takes his cheeseburger in one hand, removes the top half of the bread roll with the other and rams the steaming meat and melted cheese and fried onions into Darren’s bruised face. Darren roars and the woman in the serving hatch yells about taking it elsewhere and Lenny spins Darren so that he can clutch him backwards to his chest and apologises to the woman and bundles the bellowing Darren away towards the cab rank opposite the Hanover Arms just a matter of yards away.

—Me eyes! It’s in me friggin
eyes
yeh cunt!

Lenny locks Darren’s wrists together behind his back in one big hand. Darren’s wounded scalp fills his vision, the glued slit like a slash of bared bone across the blue patch shaved bald. Shoppers stare then look away quickly and rain falls. Darren bellows about cutting Lenny up. Lenny smells onions and melted processed cheese coming off his captive’s head and reflects on how hungry he is. Waste of a good bastard burger, that. Two quid n all.

Rain falls.

—Al fuckin
merda
yeh yeh fuckin cunt al fuckin –

—Okay now, shut the gob. People’re looking. Just accept it, Darren mun. Tommy only wants a quick word, that’s all, see.

—Al rip yer fuckin face off cunt al fuckin –

—Aye, yeh, am sure yew will, mun. Yur we go now, nice an quiet, ey?

He scans the street for prowling police and sees none then scans the taxi rank for a tame cabbie and sees one, big silver head, and marches shackled Darren over the road through honking fuming traffic and bundles him into the taxi without releasing his wrists.

The cabbie regards them in the rear-view mirror with some alarm. —Aw, Lenny, wharrer yeh tryna do to me, lad? Get me inter fuckin trouble, you.

With one hand Lenny grabs Darren’s nape and forces his head down between his knees. Muffled roars, arms flailing. With the other Lenny digs some notes out of his jacket pocket and passes them through the hatch.

—Stop yewer skriking, Shirl. Buy yewer missus something nice on-a way home.

—Yeh but for fuck’s sakes, Lenny. Mean ter say, like. Droppin me in the shite here you are. The taxi edges out into the traffic. —Out of order this, lar. Where am I takin yiz, anyway? Tommy’s gaff?

—The office, aye. Quick as yew can, like.

—In
this
fuckin traffic? Jokin, aren’t yeh?

Lenny looks out at the city behind the windows running with greasy rain. Bent-double Darren has ceased thrashing but continues still to roar, a muffled voice rising up from somewhere near the vehicle’s floor. The rage rising off his hunched back and cut skull smells to Lenny somewhat appetising.

The mug of tea Alastair ordered is growing cold but he’s not going back to his table in
this
state, no way,
not
with this water running down his battered face. Crying like a fucking babby, man. Disgrace this is. Got his face in his hands and his shoulders are shaking and he’s gritting his teeth to dampen the sobs so that the other visitors to this toilet won’t be able to hear him. Fucking sad. Fuckin blubbin away here what kinda man Jesus Christ how the fuck are yeh ever gunner –

Mountains and lakes and he was a child once and so was she more of a mother than his own frigging mother who is now where? So old so old like that and the words she whispered that voice like a ghost itself that body almost broken who she is and the THUNK of that hammer and the fall and crack of the pool cue on skull and the screaming in his head and the blackness and nowt goes right nothing ever goes right he’s tryna only fucking tryna gorrer get that fuckin money back gorrer fuckin gerra grip stop this stop this it’s all fucked up the
mess
we’re in how the fuck do we how do we ah Jesus friggin Christ what is wrong here it’s all gone wrong when will it ever