Authors: Niall Griffiths
I feel him snortin again off me chest, feel the rolled-up note run up me skin as if makin a cut with no pain. Me eyes’re closed an I don’t wanner open them cos I can see some great shapes altho I’m dyin for another toot but these are some ace shapes.
—LIVIN FUCKIN LARGE, LAR!
I’m laughin. That’s
exactly
what we’re doin. Strange thing, tho, I mean usually lyin back over a bloke’s lap like this I’d be able to feel his hard-on pressin into me back but with this one there’s nothing, I can’t feel anythin. Maybe he just needs some more coke, like Nathan used to before he could get it up. That’s probly it. Oh yeh. Livin fuckin
massive
.
CHILD
Them long sticks I don’t like an them ones shaped like ‘s’. Ziggyzaggy ones. Can never fit them ones in …
Funny man in my room. With a baseball hat on his head like Michael Lewis in my class always wears cos he’s got a mark on his head.
—Alright, big feller?
Must be from the party. But he’s older than them ones. He’s a proper mister.
—Don’t worry, lad, I just wanner watch the news. Got a telly?
He’s a proper mister. All misters always want to watch the news. And mums.
—What’s yer highest score then?
Dunno, I tell him. He’s watchin the telly. Must be somethin dead sad on cos I think he’s havin a cry.
—You okay, mister?
Why’s he crying? Funny man wantin to watch stuff to make him sad. Got his head in his hands now so he can’t see the sad stuff any more and it can’t see him.
—You okay, mister?
He can’t talk. He goes back out without sayin tara. Funny man. Just wanted to come in and be sad … they all wanner do that. They all like bein sad and cryin loads. Haven’t cried for yonks me only when I got stung on the tongue from that wasp cos he wanted my Calypso. Never gunner be like them, never gunner cry like them. They all like crying an bein sad.
Another ziggyzaggy one … bloop. Fuck.
Baaaaaad
word.
Tell Mum about that sad man but not that bad bad word. That funny man.
ALASTAIR
Fuckin bastard out on the landin with that skinny girl he’s gunner fuckin get iz no werd of a lie he’ll be hert he’ll be sufferin that bastard that poor ahl lady where’s the bugle give me some bugle need another bump that bastard this plan
my
plan thinks I’m soft that bastard sicko get he’s gunner get iz you just fuckin
watch
me
DARREN
Oooooaaggghh yes yer fucker giz it here GIZ IT GIZ IT
GIVE IT TO ME GIVE IT TO ME SLUT GIVE IT TO ME
ME ME ME ME ME
CAR
Against his wife Ronnie’s advice, Ernie Morrison bought the car first and only then read up on its history. This was in 1968, two years before the saloon models ceased production and one year before the last model, the Traveller, rolled out of the factory for the final time. Ernie discovered that William Richard Morris, 1st Viscount (1877–1963) and nicknamed ‘Nuffield’ after his financial support to the Oxford college of that name, opened the first Morris factory in 1912 and that he described the making of its first car as assembling ‘a poached egg’.
—A poached egg! Ernie laughed, reading the manual in bed, nudging his wife. —Not fried or anything, Ronnie! Poached!
Ronnie murmured something. Probably already asleep.
—We’ll go somewhere tomorrow in our egg, Ernie said. —Where shall we go in our egg, Veronica?
—Rhyl.
—Righty-o, then. To Rhyl we shall go. In our new poached egg.
The Morris Minor 1000 Series V, he read, had begun production six years ago in 1962 and the updated model he had bought that day and which sat new and gleaming and possible under the corrugated plastic carport had, in competition with the Mini and the
Ford
Cortina, been boosted with the following modifications; an enlarged 1098 cc engine; maximum power of 48 bhp at 5,100 rpm; a top speed of 77 mph and an acceleration rate of 0–50 in 16.1 seconds. Fair bit of power. It represented, to Ernest Stanley Morrison, the last bastion of the Great British automobile industry against European and Asian imports. Quality workmanship over shoddy and inexpensive modern mass production. Reliability as opposed to the quick fix.
They drove to Rhyl in it the very next day, and on the head of the Great Orme in a warm breeze with the flat sea so blue beneath them they drank tea and ate meat-paste sandwiches and apples and fruit cake. Ernie positioned himself so that the car remained always in his field of vision, parked at the side of the road above him, the headlights and radiator grille sparkling new in the sun. A better view than the sea, he thought, representing as it did his reward for months of long and tiring hours as a fitter in the Moreton Cadbury’s. More than that, of course; it stood for mobility, success, purpose. Freedom, of a sort.
It was to be the only car he ever owned. They took it everywhere, he and Ronnie; to Pembrokeshire, where they walked the coastal path, to London to see their daughter and her family, to Cornwall, on the ferry to Skye. Once, even, to France, where they intended to drive it down to the Vendée but had to cut the holiday short and return home when Veronica fell ill, probably due to the platter of fruits-de-mer she’d eaten in Le Havre. She had an accident in the car back in England and Ernie had to bleach the stains
out
at a roadside rest stop; it seemed to him that the car never smelled quite right after that. And when they divorced in 1988 Ernie kept the car, insisted on keeping it in fact even although it had been the main site of Ronnie’s infidelities, and this saddened her but she agreed to it and accepted without much enthusiasm her new lover’s gift of a late-model Fiesta. It was too small, she thought, too poky; but then again, what was an old girl like herself doing carrying on like some hormonal lovesick teenager in the back of a car …
Ernie’s final trip in the Egg was, of course, back to Rhyl. Again he ate a packed lunch on the head of the Orme, this time alone, and he pictured himself sitting in the car, pointing it at the sea at the head of the steep dingle and simply releasing the handbrake. But he was too old for that, he thought; suicide was a young man’s prerogative. Aged felo de se seemed ignoble and hysterical and impatient. And indeed on the journey home he stopped for tea at a Little Chef and over the salad bar got chatting to a widow whom he was to live with in Prestatyn until his death in 1999 from a heart attack, two months short of the millennium’s end he had always wanted to see. On his back he died, underneath the Egg, far too old to be tinkering with the failing vehicle and all the while explaining to his second wife how the Morris Minor was never allowed to develop its full potential and how that in itself was symbolic of the demise of the British automobile industry as a whole and –
Ernie? Ernie? No answer. Dead Ernie. His lifeless feet sticking out from underneath the bonnet, splayed in slippers.
Widow Twice, as her neighbours now took to calling her, put the car up for sale although it pained her to do so in the
Daily Post
and it was bought for the asking price a week later by a taciturn yet friendly Welshman who introduced himself as Leonard and reassured her that the car was going to a good home and that it would be well looked after. And for some years it continued to serve, acquiring much mileage and some dents and some stains both on the back seat and in the spacious boot, blood and oil, and on the dashboard too from a squashed cleg fly and then it came to be sitting at the bottom of the canal that skirts the town of Wrexham, murky water for passengers and weed and discarded carrier bags caught in its struts and axles, a dead and uprooted rush draped over the rear-view mirror like some odd St Christopher, journey-blesser for the firecrest newt clinging to the steering wheel or the skaters and boatmen and whirligigs that dart across the surface some feet above the already-rusting roof and that cast fast shadows upon it. Horse leeches suck at tyre rubber and ram’s-horn snails decal the doors; tubifex worms reach from the black mud up towards the sump as if thirsty for that gunk and male sticklebacks will scout the wheel arches for suitable nest sites come spring when their underbellies will turn fiery red. And at the advent of that spring some children will swim through the open windows of the car and one of them will get his foot caught underneath the passenger seat and will yell for help and thus inhale water and will for some moments be clinically dead until the owner of a nearby field will rescue him and revive him and for the rest of his
life
until he dies in a car crash at the age of forty-four that child will yearn with an almost physical pain for a recalled fleeting peace, a vast calm and warmth that seemed to solve all confusion, annul all fear. And after the rescue the field owner will use his tractor to drag the car out of the canal into the furthest corner of his field beneath the ancient hawthorn tree and will intend to take it to the breaker’s yard but never actually will and the car will remain there even after his death, almost completely overgrown and sunk in the soil, athrive with vegetative and insectile life until around the middle of this century the Wrexham expansion will creep out this way and the dissolving hulk will be bulldozed into the soil and concreted over with the footings for a new overspill estate. Rot it will until the metal will crumple like paper and become not much more than unusually acidic soil. Not much more than one deeper darkness buried in the dark earth, unsunned, just dust wet and unseen.
Veronica, of course, will have died long before this has come to pass. She will die demented in Clatterbridge hospital, rambling about a Morris Minor car. And in the lucid remnants of her mind she will wonder about that car and what became of it. Where it is now. Whether after death she might ride in it again.
STATION ATTENDANT
Knew
they were up to no good, those two. Could tell it a mile off; it’s easy with them types, see, the way they walk all kind of swaggery, strut around as if they
own
the bloody place. I’d bet a month’s wages that the curly-headed one wasn’t carrying around a packed bloody lunch in that bloody rucksack either. Way he was clutchin it to his chest. And his pal, as well, the one with the cap, something wrong with him, didn’t have a clue where he was … Something wrong with them
both
. Up to no bloody good. Mischief. The one with the rucksack, he comes right up to the window, see, leans right up against the glass so that his spit sprays against it and says:
—Lime Street. Two singles.
No please or thank you, mind, and oh now
there’s
a surprise – Liverpool Lime Street, could’ve guessed, there’s no other place in Britain that them two characters were going to come from, not with their tracksuits with the trousers tucked into the white sports socks and the body language of them both giving it the big I AM. Scouse scally written all over them, see. Wish they’d leave this bloody town alone, I do. This town wouldn’t be half as bad if it wasn’t for them; they bring the drugs here they do, trying to open up new markets I suppose they’d call it, bring the burglaries, the crime, the bloody football violence … Overbloody
joyed
I was a couple of seasons ago when Tranmere got relegated cos I thought we’d then seen the last of that bloody fixture, a guaranteed one-day-per-season of mayhem. Oh aye, I know the Rovers fans insist that they’re not Scousers, that they’re from Birkenhead, but they’re not fooling me – they’ve got the same accent, the same clothes, the same bloody swagger. And they’d pile out of trains and the trains’d be covered in sick and urine and rubbish and graffiti,
they
’d terrify the women and children, like, and they’d smash up the station and people like Joe bloody Muggins here’d have to clean up the mess, and the abuse! The foul language! Only trying to earn a decent day’s wage, see, put bread on the table for me family … shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of treatment, should I? Animals, they are, nothing but bloody animals, except that’s an insult to the beasts of the field … So yes, I was very happy indeed to see Tranmere go down. But then Wrexham followed them the very next season and the whole thing started all over again. Worse, in fact, because then I had the Cardiff contingent to contend with as well and they’re just as bloody bad. Give Wales a bad name, they do. The Wrexham fans, they wouldn’t be half as bad if it wasn’t for the Rovers and the Bluebird fans winding them up. Bringing trouble to the area. Best thing my grandfather ever did, move from Liverpool to North Wales, best thing he ever did bar none. That city should be cordoned off, and Cardiff too; lawless places, they are. Bloody lawless. Put big barbed-wire fences around them both and let them just get on with it, shooting and stabbing each other and all the rest of it, crime and drugs and all the bloody rest of it …
So yes, here we go again – no ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ or anything like that, just ‘Lime Street. Two singles.’ And doesn’t he only go and pay with a fifty-pound note? Now where on earth does a dodgy individual like that get his hands on a fifty-pound note? I didn’t recognise it at first, thought it was a foreign currency or something I did. Monopoly money, see. Barely had enough change in the till.
It’s just not fair.
Bound
to be ill-gotten gains, that fifty pound. Boy like that gets that kind of money legitimately and I’ll tell you what, I’ll eat my bloody hat. I will, I’ll eat my hat. Which is part of the uniform which I wear with pride and I’m entitled to bloody do so because it’s not an easy job, this, see, not with them two and their ilk. People like that. At least they bought singles; that means they’re not coming back. And good bloody riddance, I say.
Crimestoppers
is on telly tonight. I’ll be glued to the bloody screen, I will.
PASSENGER
Oo, the
language
. Shocking, it is. Why they see the need to swear like that, I don’t know. I just don’t understand it. ‘F’ this and ‘f’ that, there’s no
need
for that kind of talk. There are plenty of other words to use in the English language to express yourself, aren’t there? Sign of a lazy mind, it is; all this ‘f’ and ‘c’ and ‘b’. What are they taught at school these days? I blame the parents. No child of mine ever spoke like that, not even Robert, my eldest, and he was in the army. Fought in the Gulf he did. Lovely, polite boy. Never swore. Simply no need for that kind of language, not that
I
can see anyway.