Hemispheres (11 page)

Today I’m doing a webcam setup for the local archaeology unit – the only decent job I’ve got on at the moment. They want to
film parts of a dig in realtime and link it back to their website. It’s an Iron Age settlement, quite a juicy one apparently,
and when Matt rang to offer me the contract I bit his fucking hand off.

For a start, I’m out of the office, away from that non-ringing phone. And it’s good to be out on the gently rising clay lands
north of the Tees, looking across the sprawl of Teesside to the Cleveland Hills, the contorted shapes of industry, the Transporter
and the Newport Bridge all throwing back the insipid spring sun. They’ve stripped the ground back with an excavator and against
that cheesy glacial clay you can see the scrawl of vanished ditches, houses, pits, blooming like black hieroglyphs. Matt bounds
over to a trench, webcam in hand. It’s a wireless one – saves them dragging cables in the mud.

I feel like Tony fucking Robinson, he yells, running about with this thing. Here we have the first Teessiders, looking out
across the impenetrable forests of Stockton, dragging their knuckles on the floor.

Less of the cheek, I tell him.

I was born here as well, he says. I’m allowed to rip the piss.

He shows me round the site. The diggers are cleaning up where the machine’s been working, shovelling and trowelling, wrapped
up against a raw April day.

Good thing you brought wellies Dan, says Matt. The developer
turned up in shiny shoes. Brogues, or something. Buffed to within an inch of their lives. Wanted a look round and fell right
on his jacksy in the mud. I now have a degree in laughter suppression.

So what happens when you finish? I ask him.

Whole thing gets knackered. It’s going to be new houses, an executive development, they call it. They’ll probably name one
of the roads Boudicca Crescent. You can’t stand in the way of progress. Or should I say profit?

Crowds of jackdaws and rooks are massing in pylons, along the towers and even on the wires, almost ready to return en masse
to their roosts. Turning over and over in a lengthy and garrulous public conversation. We adjourn to the site hut and I walk
him through the basic functions on the webcam.

So does the site get written up somewhere? I ask him.

Yeah, we churn out a report for the developer. I don’t suppose they ever read it. Just gets their planning permission sorted.
Thing is, it’s hard to say the things you want to say. Vanished people, vanished lives, what made them tick?

He sips on a cup of coffee, spilling steam into the air.

See, he says. Someone once told me that human skin is actually made from holes. It looks like a continuous surface but when
you look through a microscope it’s holes all the way.

I scan the inside of the portakabin. Strewn tabloids, polystyrene coffee cups heaped with ash and dog ends.

The past, he says, is like that as well. It’s a landscape of holes. Think about your own memory. Your brain can’t possibly
store every single experience, every single sensation. It has to pick and choose. It just takes snapshots of the big stuff
and sort of blurs it into what you think is a continuous surface. Your memory’s like skin – it looks solid but when you get
up close there’s just holes. Think about yourself ten years ago, twenty years ago. What have you got in common with that person?
Over that time every single cell in your body has died and been renewed. The only connection you have is this electricity
in your head, these
flashes of light and sound we call memory. It’s a frightening thought.

He pauses, scratches at his stubble.

When you go beyond living memory, it’s even worse. We don’t even know our ancestors two or three generations back, what their
names were, how they lived. History tells us about the rich and powerful but the average Joe has vanished from the record.

So why do you bother?

He thinks for a moment, blowing more steam from his coffee.

Well, it pays the rent, just about, he grins. But it’s more than that. These scatters of pottery, the voids left behind where
wooden posts have rotted – they prove that there were people here once, real people with beating hearts and brains full up
with experience.

Touching vanished lives, I say.

Yeah, sort of. Or rather, not quite touching. Overlapping. You can’t ever quite touch.

Outside, a huge cloud of black birds begins to stream from the power lines, heading back towards Teesside in the evening gloom,
whirling and chattering. We step outside the hut to watch them.

It’s like that Hitchcock film, says Matt. At least I’ve got me hard hat if they come a-pecking.

The diggers stop to watch the stream of birds.

Back to work, scum, yells Matt, cracking an imaginary whip.

She’s lying on the sofa when I come in, knees tucked up towards her chest, one hand neatly under her cheek. At first I think
she’s asleep. She doesn’t stir when the latch clicks shut behind me. But when I come into the living room I see that her eyes
are open.

Tried to call you, she says, her voice passive, drained of colour. The eyes don’t look at me. She’s gazing into space, not
really focusing on anything in particular. I go over to her, try to brush aside a tendril of blonde hair which has flopped
over her face, but she flinches away.

No reception out there, I tell her, retreating back to the armchair and perching on the edge.

It hasn’t worked, she says, baldly. I did the test today. It’s negative.

I try to think of the appropriate platitude.

I’m as gutted as you are, I tell her. It’s not the end of the world, though. We could have another cycle. Or we could think
about adoption.

We’d have to go private to get another cycle. And we don’t have the money.

Her voice betrays no emotion. Like she’s rehearsed this conversation a dozen times, lying here waiting for me.

I go over to the sofa and squash onto the opposite end, lift her feet up and place them on my lap, bare and cold with blunt
toes and rough skin at the heels. I start to rub them with my hands, massaging with my thumbs up into the instep the way she
likes it. And some of the tension melts out of her.

It
is
the end of the world, she says, quietly.

It feels like that, I say. You just have to take it easy. Just look after yourself for a few days. Don’t do too much thinking.

Yeah, she says, uncertainly.

I was thinking Kel. Why don’t I take a day off work tomorrow. We could drive down to Whitby, you know, like the old days.
Walk on the beach, fish and chips on the pier, lob a week’s wages in the fruities.

She smiles, reluctantly. Don’t think I’ve got the energy, she says.

Do you good to get away. Change the scenery, blow some cobwebs away. Remember that hotel we used to stay at?

She giggles.

Fucking hell, that squeaky bed. Didn’t get much sleep, did we?

We’re both quiet for a moment but it doesn’t feel uncomfortable.

Aye, she says, eventually. Let’s go. Maybe you’re right.

I’ll put a brew on, I say, levering myself up from the sofa. Then I remember.

Shit. Said I’d meet Yan tomorrow, up the Headland.

I hover in the doorway waiting for her response.

Thick as thieves, you two, is all she says.

She sits up, and her voice is flat again, and weary.

I don’t know, I say, shrugging.

You always made him out to be a bit of an ogre. Self-obsessed, short fuse, wanderlust.

That’s all true. But he’s growing on me. I spent all those years resisting the
idea
of him, I’d forgotten how likeable he is in reality. Even though he’s dying, it doesn’t feel uncomfortable.

He’s working the charm on you, she says. That’s what it is. The blarney.

I know. But I can handle it.

What do you talk about?

Nothing important. Just banter, really.

You don’t talk about us. The fertility stuff.

Of course not.

Because that’s private.

She crosses her legs under the dressing gown, purses her lips.

Dan. Flip him off tomorrow. Let’s do Whitby anyway.

I hesitate.

Can’t stand up a dying man, I say, my voice wheedling. We can go Sunday instead.

She breathes out, long and slow, deflating like a balloon.

No, she says. You can’t stand up a dying man.

So the next day me and Yan and more than a dozen others are peering over a back garden wall close to the church on Hartlepool
Headland. The doctor’s garden, they call it, though who the doctor was or what he thought about the army of anoraks at the
bottom of his garden is not recorded. After October storms and spring gales the Headland can be teeming with migrants blown
off course from Siberia, Scandinavia, the Arctic. It’s the first landfall after the North Sea.

Pallas’ warbler, says Yan. And she’s a beauty.

On the other side of the garden there’s a tiny bird, pirouetting like a leaf among the tendrils of a bedraggled climber. Yellow
stripes through the eyes and across the crown of the head, yellow wing bars
and rump flashing whenever it flutters to a new perch. It’s not a life tick for either of us, but enough to get us out here
on a raw Saturday morning.

There’s a chippie just across the road with a crowd of kids hanging around outside. Lads in baseball hats and baggy sportswear,
lasses with bare and blotchy legs. They smoke, swear raucously to impress. But the crowd of birders doesn’t merit comment.
Just part of the scenery here. Saturday morning cars drone past bound for out-of-town superstores.

All the way from Siberia, says Yan.

The bird is deftly picking small insects from the leaves and bark, intent and exhaustive.

No wonder she needs to feed up, he says. She’s not much bigger than a mouse, blown right across from the far side of Europe.
Pound for pound that’s like you or me trying to hitch-hike to the moon.

I don’t answer him because his words barely register. I’m thinking about Kelly, the failed IVF cycle.

What’s eating you, anyway? he asks.

Have I missed something and you’ve turned into Jeremy Kyle overnight?

He laughs.

Fair dos, he says. I know we haven’t talked much over the years. But sometimes it helps to blurt it out, kick it around.

I’ll bear that in mind.

We watch the bird again for a while in silence, following its delicate movements, the green and yellow plumage like spring
sun dripping through new leaves, a splinter of stained glass in the dour October day.

She’s intent on surviving, he says. Isn’t she? Totally single-minded. The chances of that tiny thing making it here must be
a million to one against.

But she’s here, I say.

Aye. She’s still here.

*

After, we head to the chippie. Yan’s still not looking too bad if you consider the radical therapy he’s getting. Red rims
around his eyes and a flush at his cheekbones, but otherwise fine. I follow him into the shop. It’s warm inside, the air heavy
with grease. The girl at the counter looks at him blearily, crusts of pea mush on her apron and a short denim skirt underneath.

Small chips and mushies, he says. Salt and vinegar.

She goes for the scoop, sweat on her forehead, frayed ends of hair stuck to it.

Had a long day, he says.

Tell us about it.

What time do you finish?

Don’t be nosey.

She plonks a scoop of chips onto the paper, sprays salt and vinegar on top. Grabs a plastic cup and ladles mushies into it,
thick and vivid green.

Industrial relations, he says. Got to make sure you’re not being exploited. Long hours and that.

Righto, she says. Rolls up the paper over the tray.

Three o’clock, she says.

That’s not so bad.

He hands over the money.

Might have to sit outside in the car, he says. Just to check.

You do that, she says.

She hands him the change, looks down and flushes, trying to push her hair out of the way.

Still got it, he says, when we’re out of the door.

We walk past St Hilda’s church, named for the abbess who planted a monastery on this rock fourteen hundred years ago, and
continue through streets of terraces to the sea. Cast-iron railings along the front and jumbled flat rocks below where waders
dart and skim at low tide. Turnstone and purple sandpiper, the smell of rotting seaweed. We lean on the railings and look
out into the distance, into the mist. Yan grazes
on his chips. Then we turn and walk along the front, past big Victorian townhouses three and four storeys high with attic
windows towering over the sea. Dirty wood and paint decaying in the constant salt wind, falling away. Televisions flicker
behind replacement plastic windows.

How’s Jim? I ask.

Getting on like a house on fire, says Yan. Apart from his taste in music. He’s a modern jazz kind of carcinoma, and you know
I’m strictly rock and blues.

We had a cycle of IVF, I tell him, surprising myself. It didn’t work.

He takes this on board, worries at the buttons of his donkey jacket.

I feel the cold more since the chemo, he says. You ever think about adoption?

I shake my head, feeling the words tickle inside me, but leaving them unspoken. Blood’s thicker than water.

And then I change the subject, tell him about the archaeologists and the webcam.

Always wondered about being an archaeologist, says Yan, sucking on a cigarette. But then I never stayed on at school. Taught
meself everything I know. Must be fascinating, digging in the ground. You never know what you’re going to find. I bet that’s
a thrill, when the blade of the excavator bites into the soil.

You’re more educated than anybody I know.

That’s because I decided what I was going to read. Never let the schoolteachers decide for me.

We’re walking down the Heugh breakwater. Silent grey waves rush down the seaward side in the mist. The other side, towards
the docks, is calmer. In the mist there is no view towards Teesside. The world is blanked out. The moment, now, shrinks to
two people, perhaps a father and son, walking along a breakwater.