Hemispheres (32 page)

I looked at her as she sprawled across the bed like an earth mother.

Okay, I said.

There was a brief silence while flames roared in the grate.

Is that all you have to say?

Yes. It’s simple. I’m ready too – I think.

She reached a hand round to the nape of my neck and began to pull me down towards her.

We can start now, she said.

The bed gave an admonitory squeak, but I continued moving down towards the veins of fire lashing across her body.

It was a good weekend, that one. As good as it got. The bed carried on squeaking and we carried on regardless, quaking with
laughter when we heard voices and footsteps in the corridor outside. We were happy, then. Even talked about buying a boat
down here. Nowt fancy, just enough for a bit of day fishing offshore. Never got round to it mind.

I lie back on the bed, feeling sick from self-loathing, and there’s no creaking, just a soft sigh from the mattress.

Next morning the sea has calmed to a brisk surf and I find Paul again at the far end of the West Pier. On the footbridge across
to the outer arm I pause and look down at the sea crawling between my feet. Crests clash in the narrow space and spew foam
up towards me, troughs suck
the water away from weed-draggled stone almost down to the seabed. I steady myself and continue onto the wooden walkway towards
the figure at the far end, hunched over the railings. He stands out from the early-morning fishermen wrapped up in all-weather
gear, flinging out their near-invisible lines into turbulent water. As I approach he raises a can to his lips and drinks deeply.

I edge past the metal struts and ladders of the harbour beacon, breathing in the faint tang of rust and urine. He swivels
towards me and grins, drinks from the can again, turns back and leans against the railing facing out to sea where the water
is shredded by a raw wind. I lean on the railings next to him, feeling the slight warmth of his shoulder through my jacket.
He offers me the can and I shake my head. He drains it, crushes it like a moth in his fist, sends it spiralling down into
the water. I think of the guillemot. Paul lights one of the fags I bought for him yesterday, shielding the lighter flame from
the bruising wind. His hands are like lumps of meat.

I decide to blurt it out, no preamble.

Yan’s your dad, I say. You’re my brother. Half-brother.

He brings the cigarette up between the fingers of a flat hand, sucks lazily, and lets the smoke sprawl out of his mouth before
it’s torn away by the wind. A long pause, while herring gulls echo across the harbour and the sea continues a destructive
conversation with itself. I feel obliged to carry on, to fill the vacuum.

He told me the other night. Slept with her, just the once. When she used to work in the pub.

A fishing boat wallowing towards the harbour mouth, tilting one way and then the other in the heavy swell. I can hear the
engine working above the sound of the sea. Gulls whirl behind it, glittering in the early sun.

No, says Paul. Turns towards me and shakes his head. No.

The cigarette spins down into the sea, still smoking until the moment it hits the cold water and dies. Paul turns away again
and hunches over the railings. I wait a moment, then I touch his upper arm.

She went with anyone Danny, he says. Anyone. Used to hear her through the wall when I was a bairn. On that logic, I’d have
a hundred dads.

The boat approaches the harbour, steadying itself to pass crisply midway between the two outer piers. Figures inside the wheelhouse,
dark jerseys and pale faces. Voices raised in laughter, cigarette smoke.

You remember Helena? Fraser’s missus? She thought you were Yan’s lad, didn’t she? Ahead of me.

He’s not my dad. He would of told me. When he saw what I was doing to meself. Where me life was headed. He would of fucking
stepped in Dan. Wouldn’t he? He would of put me back on the rails.

I don’t know.

He shakes his head.

Anth was my dad, he said. Like two peas in a pod. I saw meself in his eyes, that day on the bus.

The boat passes below us, into the placid and oilslicked water of the harbour, the engine rattling comfortably. There are
five crew, one of whom has come out of the wheelhouse to prepare for mooring. He looks up at us haughtily and dispassionately
with hooded eyes, a young man with a sallow complexion and shoulder-length black hair gathered in a ponytail. As the boat
moves on his eyes flick away to some other detail of the harbourside. I take Paul by the shoulders and gently turn him round
to face me.

Let me help you, I say. You need your medication. You need a safe place to stop.

A derisive curl to his lip which grows as I speak. He grips my wrists with his raw hands, which burn like molten iron.

Get your hands off, he says, angrily. I don’t want it.

Don’t want what?

Pity. There’s no pity in the world. Look at it.

He gestures around him at the bleak sea and sky, at the bleary port in the winter morning.

It’s cold, he says. Got to keep swimming or you get bashed against
the rocks. In the end it’s always the same. You’re too weak. You have to give in.

Paul.

No. I don’t need a dad, or a brother. Not now.

Firmly, with surprising strength, he disengages my hands from his shoulders, holds my wrists for a moment, anger welling in
his face as if he would snap me. Then he lets go with a shrug, turns back to the railings.

Paul, I say, imploringly.

He ignores me. I pull one of the business cards out of my wallet, push it towards him.

Look, my number’s on there. Home and mobile. If you ever change your mind. Just reverse the charges.

He makes no attempt to take the card. I slip it into the top pocket of his jacket and begin to walk away down the pier. A
long walk, hoping that Paul will turn and shout, or come running down after me, knowing at the same time that he won’t. When
I reach the lighthouse I look back at the distant hunched figure, one foot resting on the lowest railing, and fancy I see
a small white card spiral down like a sycamore seed into the restless sea.

I lay stranded on the shingle until the pain was no longer a sky of sharp stars like ground glass, until it became a dull
but insistent dawn over-cast with cloud. And then I got up and stumbled towards Seaton with the breaking summer weather and
the cloud boiling up out of the hazy estuary and the thunder beginning a low throat-clearing grumble somewhere far off. It
was hot. Too hot. All the frustrations and non-events of the summer precipitating out and taking solid form in the sweat on
my neck and the blood crusting my clothes and the bruises swelling like clumsy purple fists in my flesh. Going to rain soon,
and hard.

Charlie said Yan was damaged goods and now I was damaged to match. Broken nose and a couple of teeth gone and when I tried
to move my left shoulder there was a twang like a snapped elastic band and a bright shaft of pain. When a dislocated shoulder
jumps back into its socket there’s a sudden agony like a star imploding and then bliss, but it had left something torn in
there – muscle, ligament, tendon. My ribs were the worst, a hot blade of it every time I breathed or jigged an arm, a rusty
saw quartering my chest cavity.

Seaton Carew, shambling and downtrodden in the heat. Boneheads in the crumbling art deco bus station, drinking from cans and
stomping them down into the concrete. I thought of Paul. Every time I’d seen him over the summer he was bagged off his head.

The beach sprawled out towards a leaden North Sea, shabby gift
shops and chippies along the road. A herring gull perched on top of a waste bin and the cowl of its head was aspirin white
and painless but the beady yellow eye connived in the world with a fullstop at the centre. I stared back and the gull cracked
the snowy head open like a snapdragon and showed me its gape all slick and sharp-tongued like a spread vulva.

Hissed. Tossed its head back and ululated somewhere in between alleycat and pterodactyl.

Down the road a man came out of a chippie and chucked a bag of scraps across the pavement and there was a mugging of wings
and beaks and howling, yelling, ripping.

They’ll fucking eat anything these, he said as I passed. Bog roll, johnnies, turds off the sewage outfall. Rats of the sea,
I call them.

Aye, I said, smiling at him. He was short and bald, a film of sweat on his scalp.

When you think what it eats, he said. Where it sticks its head. How can it stay so fucking white? Crystal white. That’s what
I don’t get.

I pressed on. People were hurrying now as clouds bulked up like bruises. A sudden wind revved up from the sea, squalls of
dry sand scampering across the road. And then the rain, vertical and vindictive, gouts of water bursting on the hot concrete
and the tarmac. I was drenched in seconds, rain hammering at me like pebbles. The shingle beach.

I knocked on the door of a pebbledashed grey house in one of the bleak streets behind the sea front. Small windows to keep
out the North Sea. The rain was unabated, rivulets of water gathering and beginning to hurry down the roadway. The door opened
and a man stood there in a rumpled tee-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, no socks. His dark skin was wrinkled and his hair was
cut close like grey ash. Jonah. He had a can in his hand, regarded me for a moment as if weighing things up.

Danny, he said. Come in man.

He ushered me into the doorway and I stumbled through into a front room littered with bulging ashtrays and empty beer cans.

I’d give up the boxing if I was you, he said. Looks like you’re not much cop. I started out on a smile but my face knacked
so I stopped.

You should see the other bloke, I said.

He grinned.

I can’t go back to the pub, I said. Wondered if I could stop here. Just for a day or two.

Lowered myself into an armchair, which bulged lazily under my weight. No lights on in the house. Livid stormlight slopped
through the windows, through broadfingered fronds of rain.

Temporary problem, said Jonah apologetically. Had a slight disagreement with the electric. A few modifications I made to the
meter.

He winked at me. I knew better than to try a smile.

We’re still cookin’ on gas though, he quipped.

He sat down opposite me, glanced at the doorway through to the back kitchen. A slow arc of lightning flapped across the sky,
and we waited a second or two for the bellow of rage to reach us. The window frames rattled. I didn’t think the rain could
get any louder, any harder. And then it did. A small pool began to well under the front door.

All the time I’ve been in the merchant navy, it’s been me biggest fear, boomed Jonah, over the noise. Trapped inside a ship
that’s going down. In a bubble of steel and air with miles of water closing over your head. I never thought it’d happen to
me in my own house.

The lightning crawled again and the shell burst, closer this time. Jonah looked pensive.

Let’s have a look over you son, he said. I got some medical training at sea, years ago. We need to work out what’s what. You
might have to go to hospital.

I nodded acquiescence, wearily.

Jonah swam over and perched on the edge of the armchair. He commenced measuring me with his nimble, quiet fingers moving like
a draughtsman’s compasses, pinching here, appraising there.

Heard you’d been away, he said. Does that hurt?

I shook my head through gritted teeth.

Should have come and told me how you got on. How about that?

I bellowed in affirmation as pain shot through me, synchronized with another lightning bolt, another explosion.

Still, he said. It’s your funeral.

With a flick of the wrist he twisted my nose straight, and I almost passed out.

Sorry about that, he said. Diversionary tactics. You’ve been lucky, I’d say. Nose. Ribs. A bit of ripped muscle. The rest
of it’s just bruising. Nothing medical science can do to help you there. Rest and healing, that’s all. So how did you get
on then?

He was a waster, I said. Wasn’t he? A right feckless bastard. Didn’t connect right with anyone – just thought of himself.

That doesn’t sound like you talking, said Jonah. Who’s been working on you?

Never mind that. It’s true, isn’t it?

It’s easy to be swayed, said Jonah. Easy to paint a caricature of the man. But sometimes the real thing isn’t black and white
and you got to make your own mind up about that. Weigh things up for yerself. Nobody’s whiter than white.

He looked appraisingly at my face.

Looks like you’ve been getting into some chew yourself, he said. Maybe you’re not the one to point the finger.

I looked down at the floor. Jonah stood up and shifted from foot to foot.

Do you want to see it? he said, almost shy. He slid a drawer open in the dresser and passed me a slim package wrapped in tissue
paper. I opened it, curious. There was some kind of transparent membrane folded in there, crisp and weightless like the husk
left behind when a reptile slips its skin.

It’s your caul, he said. Part of you, once. Like you were part of your dad. Do you want it back?

No. I don’t want it.

I thrust it back at him with a fierceness I didn’t understand. He took it, sort of reverently.

Hope it brings you luck, I said.

He winked at me.

You should go and get some kip, he said, but there’s someone here you ought to meet first.

He glanced round again. Then he led the way through the rain-streaked room to the kitchen door.

In the grate a young fire was fledging, trying out new feathers. It mewed and bawled and puked gently, knitting the darkness
into a dense knot of red coals and flame. The room gravitated around it, a twilit solar system leaning towards an infant sun,
and the distant rumbling of rain and thunder were forgotten, in another galaxy altogether. A couple of shabby armchairs were
pulled up close to the fireguard, and in one of them an old man sat gazing into the fire’s heart and into his own thoughts.
His hair was long and straggling and dirty and the bald patch at his crown glowed a deep red in the firelight. He raised a
hand to his lips and sucked on a skinny hand-rolled cigarette. The nub glowed brightly in the draught of oxygen and then it
subsided. Jonah cleared his throat and the old man turned to look at the two of us framed in the doorway. His eyes were grey
and crinkled at the corners and as limitless as the sea. They seemed to frame a question, eyebrows slightly raised. These
disparate features blurred and swam and finally knit together into a familiar grin. It was Yan.