Hemispheres (16 page)

Back on the landing. Now it’s time to go down to the others. But there’s a feeling of incompleteness. I shine my torch down
the landing and there’s a door at the far end. Planks and cross-braces, the brass doorknob shimmering, and when I look at
it my head swims and my heart hammers. The bubble climbing my throat, hard and pneumatic like a ball of undigested food.

Go downstairs, I tell myself. That’s what you did. Go downstairs to the others. But my body’s beyond control now, moving towards
the door, one step and then another. Go downstairs, my mind screams, but my hand reaches for the doorknob. It turns and I
hear the latch click and the bubble has almost reached the surface where it will burst and whisper small words of oblivion
wriggling like worms into the emptiness.

The door swings towards me and I step back and there’s a stairwell, leading upwards, wooden steps painted white. An attic
up there under the bones of the roof. A wave of nausea sweeps over me but my feet are on the stairs and the sound of my boots
swelling out, filling the world. The bubble of horror at the back of my throat, burning in the nasal cavity and behind the
eyes. Stomach acid crawls into my mouth. The lighter still in my hand, warm now. Hot.

And then I reach the top and see the two dago conscripts crouched there where they’ve been hiding from us all along, and there’s
no sound because they’ve already fired their rifles and the last thing I see is the two ragged muzzle flashes like the last
pale stars nuzzling at the belly of morning.

I wake up and the first pale and unhealthy light is creeping into the eastern sky and I’m retching gobbets of half-digested
meat into the pebbles of a lonely beach on Tierra del Fuego. The forest is full of ghosts and the sea is full of fish and
beside me Matteo and Joe are sleeping the sleep of the dead.

Thought you were dead this morning, he says.

I was asleep.

Bet Kelly gave you a hard time, the old man banging at the front door at five o’clock.

No, she didn’t.

The sound of our boots crunching through cinder, each footfall like a dry cough. When I was a kid he woke me with a cup of
coffee, bitter and outrageously hot, and it was still night outside when I tumbled out of bed and pulled jeans on over my
pyjama bottoms. I remember the handbrake creaking off on the battered Renault Twelve as he willed it out of the yard on those
perishing mornings, and the pear drop smell of the upholstery as we headed down the Seaton road to Saltholme and Dormans,
the reedbeds by Reclamation, the Long Drag. My feet already pulsing with cold inside the wellingtons and that coffee still
burning inside.

You were up early, I say. You had that dream again? The one where you die.

Aye, he says. It’s always the same dream.

We’re tramping down Long Drag towards the Seal Sands hide. It’s a rough cinder track running alongside a low bank which used
to be the sea wall, before reclamation. Tidal pools beyond there now, fringed with reeds. They dumped thousands of tons of
slag to drive out the sea – the excreta of steel creating the land on which the chemical industry
grew, back in the thirties and forties. Like tomato plants springing from undigested seed in the beds of a sewage farm.

My nan had the same dream every night, he says. When she was dying from stomach cancer. She dreamed of pork pies.

That’s cruel.

There’s an early haze over the marshland, the rough grass and thorn scrub. Refineries and distillation columns and gas flares
looming with their feet in the mist, the strange fruit of industry sprouting from quiet earth. Pipelines rearing into pipe-bridges
and burrowing beneath our feet. Brinefield valves like rusting root crops in flat green fields.

They use them for storage these days, says Yan. Inert gases and that. Nitrogen.

Where?

Under the ground man. That’s what brinefields are. They used high-pressure water to scour out the salt deposits, and left
these immense voids underground.

Right.

When I wake up, he says, three, four in the morning, I think to meself I should have died back there. If I’d gone up them
stairs. See, I cheated it somehow.

Aye, well. That time in the morning, it’s hard to keep those thoughts away.

I cheated it then but it’s catching up with me now. I feel smaller Dan. Like I’m shrinking. Do I look smaller?

No. You’re all right.

Maybe one day I’ll just disappear, and the next thing you hear will be that they’ve found my bones in the Falklands. In some
old tumble-down house. And that I was there all along. And that I never came back at all.

Is that right?

Something as small as a hand of cards. Or which way you fall off a roof. Which stone you hit. It can change everything. It
can put things on a different track.

We walk on. The wide silver pools hold the compass of the sky within their placid surface. The low pervasive hum of the refineries
like a quiet respiration.

When you get to the end of the Drag you see the Seal Sands hide stark against the sky and beyond it the tidal flats sweeping
out towards the river’s mouth. It’s a new hide – arsonists got the last one back in the late eighties. The creosote catches
beautifully and the whole thing goes up like a hayrick.

We approach it with careful feet and slow breath blooming in clouds, and nobody else is awake and the sky is a deep milky-blue
just creeping into life. Mount the steps, shudder the door open and breathe the dry and pent-up air inside, heady with creosote.
We wait in the darkness for a few minutes to let things settle, light chinking in shyly through cracks and knot-holes. Wormholes
of light tunnelling through wooden planks. Plenty of room for both of us.

Yan lights a fag and the lighter flame splashes from his face.

Is that it?

Yes, he says, handing it to me. Still warm from his hands.

Funny to think you picked it up on the other side of the world.

Mmm. Didn’t need much cleaning up, really. Just a new wick and a dab of Brasso.

I try the mechanism, relishing the warm, oily smell of petrol, the big sprawling dab of flame. And then I lower the little
cap to dowse it.

We could have another shot at IVF, I tell him. But we’d have to fund it ourselves. And there’s still only a one-in-four chance
of a viable pregnancy at the end of it. Reading between the lines, they think we’re too old anyway. They keep dropping hints
about fostering.

One in four, that’s not bad, you know, he says, quietly, shifting on the bench. In my poker-playing days I’d have taken them
odds. One card to a flush, say. If you gave me those odds of seeing the next couple of years out, I’d bite your fucking hand
off.

Do they give you the numbers? You know. Percentages.

Sometimes, if you push hard enough.

He sounds weary, suddenly. Clears his throat.

They’re pretty confident I’ll get into next year. That’s only a couple of month, mind, so I’d have to go downhill pretty snappish
not to make it. Five to ten per cent chance of getting to the end of next year.

It’s still a chance.

Aye.

It’s true, he says, about your horizons shrinking. Used to think, if I was given a death sentence like this, that I’d just
make a quick clean end. Under a train, off a block of flats. What’s the point in spinning it out?

But now?

Well, the end of next year is an eternity away. If I can get a few more months, a few more weeks. Days even. It would be worth
it.

He pauses to cough. Not a particularly alarming or sinister cough. Just persistent.

Your life list, I say. How many?

Britain?

I nod.

Three nine eight. I’d like to get four hundred.

We lapse into silence, absorbing the still darkness of the hide. Neither of us wants to open the shutters, breaking the moment
open with light. The rapidfire calls of redshank outside, jabbing urgently into the dawn sky like the bleep of an electronic
alarm.

They’re nervous buggers, says Yan. Keep going off like a dicky trip-switch.

Aye.

In the darkness I sense him smiling, and I feel close to him.

Yan slips the shutters open and secures them and the vast mudflats of Seal Sands are spread before us. There are thousands
of waders feeding across the mud, crawling over the glutinous surface, and loose parties of duck further out in open water
– wigeon, merganser, shelduck. In winter there are whooper swans on the ice-encrusted flats, visitors
from the Arctic. And in the distance you can make out the bulky forms of seals hauled out on the more remote banks.

We scan with bins, and Yan sets the scope up between us. I like to watch waders feeding. Tiny white sanderling skittering
over the mud like clockwork mice in perpetual motion. A couple of piebald oyster-catchers winkling shellfish from the ground
with those garish plastic orange bills, using the prehensile tips to unlock the shells. Pale dunlin everywhere, nagging insistently
at the mud. Groups of redshank moving through the shallows with their high-stepping walk and orange legs.

Greenshank, over there, says Yan. See the three refraction columns on the horizon? Follow the middle one down until you get
to a group of knot. Count in three from the left and you’re there.

Got him. There’s a whimbrel in there as well.

Yeah?

You’ve got the twitcher gene, I say.

Meaning?

You’re always looking for the odd one out. If it was just dunlin you’d be off home.

He grunts.

Aye, he says. Always been one of them birders. You can keep the common stuff.

Been there, done that, I say.

There’s something about a rare bird, he says. It’s a survivor. Come over them uncharted seas from fuck knows where.

We’re opposites, me and you. I could look at the common stuff all day.

He snorts, goes back to the scope.

What have you got anyway?

Couple of little stint over there, in among the dunlin. Couple of bar-tailed godwit out there. Elegant buggers, dipping their
beaks right in to the hilt.

Yeah, got them.

And let’s have a blast through these redshank, see if we can get us a spotted.

He starts to scan through the mixed flock, and I focus in on them too.

Got it. Spotted redshank. Left-hand end of the flock. Paler than the rest, stripe through the eye.

I can’t see a stripe at this distance man. But yeah, there is a paler one. See how it’s feeding different to the rest? Sweeping
its bill through the water, like. Side to side.

Like your missus doing the vacuuming, he laughs.

Careful now, she’ll have your guts. Mind, she doesn’t do much of that these days.

What, the vacuuming or having your guts?

Either. Both.

I bet this fertility business has hit her hard Dan.

Aye. It’s like we circle round each other but never really meet. She goes out with her mates, comes back mashed.

Nowt wrong with a bender now and then, he says, calmly.

I know. But sometimes she doesn’t come back till the morning. Says she slept over at a mate’s house. That’s why you never
woke her up this morning.

She wasn’t there.

Right. Look, I shouldn’t be telling you this. You’ve got enough on your plate.

What you mean is I never earned your confidence. You feel disloyal, spilling your guts to me.

Yeah, that’s what I mean.

You’ve got to talk to someone.

Did you ever regret blowing it with Kate? You could have come back from the Falklands and made a go of it. You could have
been a stay-at-home husband and dad.

Pipe and slippers, he says.

Garden centre on a weekend.

Nah, he says. Life’s too short for regrets. You can’t look back.

I look at him but he’s got the bins up to his eyes.

Me and Kelly, I say. It used to feel like we were a unit. We’d do stuff together. Nowt special, like – the pub, the flicks,
club on a weekend. We had a sex life. But none of it’s happening any more. We haven’t got anything in common except childlessness.
It’s like we remind each other of the problem.

Sounds like you need to ship out, he says. It’s making you unhappy.

It’s not that simple.

It is from where I’m standing.

He coughs, softly.

The sun rises beyond the flats, beginning as a small red disk nudging at the horizon. The flat surfaces of mud and water become
gilded, subtly at first but then flaring into life like fields of molten copper, like the surface of the sun. And a collective
dread begins to pass through the waders. They shrug and shuffle their feathers, looking around more often, concentrating less
on feeding. I can’t see any possible cause for this. No bird of prey visible, no other birders around, no dogwalkers. Sometimes
it just happens. Fear gusts unbridled through the flock like a virus.

And there’s only ever one outcome. Thousands of waders rise into the air, the vast flock turning and wheeling as one, a huge
double helix twisting itself inside out. The spotted redshank disappears among the others, among the telegraphy of white rumps
and wing edges. They raise their voices now and the empty air fills with the urgent message carried from ten thousand feathered
throats.

We used to roll back to the Cape around nine o’clock and fry up bacon and eggs for breakfast, scorching and salty. You felt
glad that you’d sat in that wooden icebox, that you’d been outside in the cold for hours when everyone else was only just
swimming into consciousness. And there wasn’t any time or space beyond this, at all.

*

The door to the hide clatters behind us and I look at Yan and appreciate for the first time how much weight he’s lost. He’s
a skeleton, with the donkey jacket dwarfing him, flapping up around his scrawny neck. And he’s struggling to keep up. I can
see his chest working, red spots flaring in his cheeks. I slow down appreciably, and he fires me a hard glance, keeps striding
ahead.

That fucking eyepatch of Barlow’s, he barks. I never knew about that. He always played it by the book, did Geordie. Regulations
man, all the way. And it turns out he’s got a screw loose all along.