Hemispheres (36 page)

Not much to tell, I say. Thrush nightingale. It’s the ultimate little brown job. It hopped around, flew towards that boundary
wall. You should have seen the scopes all juddering round like Jodrell fucking Bank.

He laughs. Then he sucks at the oxygen and the tank clacks against the wall. And outside there’s a clutch of young lasses
striding up the street, deep in counsel, with stifled giggles and headlong glances.

You can’t really do it second hand, he says. I guess you’ve got to be there. In the moment. That small life beating against
yours. The tick.

I know what you mean, I say.

You see it doesn’t care, he carries on. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The bird wears it lightly. It doesn’t
care. About the past. Just right now. The tick. The match flaring in the dark.

Human history is a piss in the sea, I say. When you think about it.

Birds are free. From all that, he croaks. Birds are liberating.

There’s a long pause. Then he almost whispers.

And what about Paul?

Aye, I say wearily. I found him. But he wouldn’t believe me. Wouldn’t come back.

Didn’t have a bunch of twitchers. On his tail.

No. Just the one.

What did he say?

If you were really his father, you’d have helped him out, when he was going down the pan. You’d have stopped it happening.

Yan doesn’t say anything. Sits up in the bed, duvet at his chin, staring into space. Stays like that for a long time.

Jean looks worn out, grey circles around her eyes. She bends over the washing-up, suds rising around her slender forearms.

Didn’t realize he ate so little, I say.

She shrugs.

Oh aye, love. Just picks at it now. Never has much of an appetite.

She rinses the petroleum sheen from a mug under the cold tap.

He’s getting skinny, she says, pensive. Can’t believe how much worse it’s got, the last couple of month. He says it’s like
breathing through a straw. Christmas time he was like a rabbit.

She smiles.

Nowadays I even have to help him go to the bog. Laugh a minute. Might get one of them chemical ones for under the bed.

Her eyes are suddenly sprung with tears but I touch her arm and she steadies.

Anyway Danny. What’s going on with you?

Don’t ask.

I just did.

So I mop a plate with a damp teatowel, tell her about the letter from Martin. How Kelly left it lying around on the coffee
table, the bright green envelope torn open.

You read her mail?

It was just a thank-you note, for the weekend. This one sentence though.

Go on.

‘I can’t help thinking you could do with a bit more excitement in your life.’

The words come out pat from where they’re stored.

You think he was talking about you?

Of course he was talking about me. Don’t know. We’ll sort it out. Once things have settled down.

Jean looks at me hard.

Don’t put it off, she says. Things might never settle down. Listen, I need to tell you something about your dad.

He’s dying, I say. I know.

She laughs but her face is stark and desperate under the harsh overhead lighting.

He has night terrors, she says. More and more these nights. He
likes me to be there if he wakes up in the dark.

Some grim stuff happened in the Falklands, I say. It doesn’t lie down easy, that kind of shit.

It’s not that so much. But he wakes up and he doesn’t know who I am. Stares at me like a skull, like I’m a cockroach he’s
about to crush. I’m scared he might hurt me one of these nights. Don’t know if I can take much more.

He won’t hurt you, I say.

Twelve-bar blues playing on the stereo in his room.

Charlie Musselwhite, he says. One of my favourites.

The band is ripping through a guitar break. He takes a deep suck of oxygen, the white pyjama cuff falling back to reveal a
painfully thin forearm.

Charlie isn’t dead yet, he says.

He gasps painfully and spends a good minute behind the oxygen mask. The room is warm and the radiator throbbing out heat and
the bedside lamp casts a pool of lucidity.

You spend years, he says. Watching birds. Each one a little separate being. A little world. No matter how hard you watch.
You can’t touch. There’s always a windscreen between you. And you can put your fingers on the glass. But you can’t reach through.

Sometimes, I say. I think there’s more to birds. You know, when a flock moves like a twister, like it’s one being made of
all them little cells. A collective consciousness. Maybe the individual doesn’t matter so much when it’s wired in to so many
others. When I was a kid I used to imagine I could do that. Sort of empty my brain out and let other people’s thoughts and
feelings move through me. Felt like I was connected to an endless grid of life.

Yan looks at me, the grey eyes mobile.

You’re as much a loner as me, he says. Look at you. You’re on your own inside your own head and your own dreams. And in there
nobody else can touch you.

That’s not true.

He looks at me. Flock behaviour, he says. It’s an illusion of connectedness. It just suits the individual. Keeps it safer
from predators. Like people, really.

There must be more than that.

He grins.

I was going to tell you, he says. About Mount Longdon.

Why?

Because you asked me.

But why now?

I told you I couldn’t remember. Not strictly true. I told you I felt drunk. But I didn’t. It was crystal-clear, that morning.
One of them bell-like mornings. When your voice carries for miles. These fucking dago conscripts. Soaking wet and pale and
shivering in them rain capes. I was shelling out fags. Wanted to share a smoke. And I never saw the kid go for his service
pistol. Honestly Dan, I never did.

Barlow said he was only seventeen or eighteen.

None of them. Was much more than that. Secundino, his name was. Secundino Vargas.

How do you know?

Looked at his tags after. I never saw him go for the Beretta. And I never saw George pop him. Just heard the roar. You’re
fucking deaf that close up. Your ears singing.

George shot him through the eye, didn’t he?

More like blew half his fucking head off. Only he wasn’t dead.

Of course he was dead.

Only he wasn’t. Fell on the floor with half his head missing. Started convulsing. Fitting. Jigging about with his feet fucking
tapdancing. Boots banging a tattoo on the earth.

Christ.

Saw some kittens once. The tom had been at them. Eaten half their heads. Just dragging themselves round in circles. Crying.
Had to drown them. And they fought against me. Fought to the fucking end.

So you put him out of his misery.

Aye, I did.

That’s not so bad. Any human being would have done that.

It was the anger. Like a cold wall of sea. The stupid little bastard. Dancing that dance. I blew the rest of his stupid head
off. Just to make him stop. The details you remember. Wisps of cloud high up and lonely. Cirrus and cirro-stratus. A little
tic in the corner of my eye. Ears throbbing in the wind. And the little ratchet of the selfloader. As it racked up the next
round. Like a polite cough. Ears throbbing. Joe had to stop me. Putting rounds into him. But by then the magazine. Was empty
anyway.

I understand, I say. I understand why you walked away.

No, he says. You don’t.

But then Charlie Musselwhite storms into a harmonica solo with the band swinging and stomping beneath him and Yan relaxes
and beams and leans back on his pillow. Death is a cipher and past and future are mad dreams without interpretation, dead
alphabets with no Rosetta Stone, and there is only the harp leaping and squealing and powered by Charlie’s breath.

I fall asleep in the chair, an uneasy slumber peopled with wild dreams. His voice, when it comes, is harsh like a walnut cracking.

You.

I spring upright, don’t know for a moment where I am. He flips the light on and I see him massing in the bed like a storm
cloud.

Arse, I say. Must have fallen asleep. Long day at work.

I get up and yawn. He stares at me, eyes arctic.

Why did you come back? he says, glaring at me. After all these years.

I turn at the doorway and look at him and his eyes are those black coals at the centre of the fire.

I’ve always been here, I say. I’m not the one who came back.

He shuffles crablike across the bed towards me, like he wants to jump at my throat.

Don’t come back now, he says. When it’s too fucking late.

He fixes me with the boiling eyes, unblinking. Frustration inside me, cold and slow, and my voice haggard and roughened with
sleep.

It’s not too late, I say. I don’t know why you left it till now, but even so it’s not too late.

You pushed me away. Didn’t want to know me.

I can’t make sense of you. Never could. You wax lyrical over lapwings and then you leave a man to burn in a hotel room. You’re
a husband and father but you fuck some desperate barmaid in a car. You got to burn things up Yan, like some pyromaniac kid,
just to watch the flames burning bright. And I pushed you away because I didn’t understand – don’t understand. But even now
it’s not too late. I’m here and you’re here and you don’t need flames to remind you you’re alive. Just make me understand.

But he’s lying back on the pillow, shrunken and dazed. Hasn’t heard a word.

Dan, he says. Didn’t know you were still here.

The eyes are calm and grey again. He’s just a man. Walked around on the earth for a while. He happened to people and people
happened to him. Not much walking to be done, now. To the toilet and back, a few more times.

You were talking in your sleep, I say. It’s nothing. Nothing at all.

Downstairs, Jean is going out of the back door. Looks flustered when I come downstairs and see her, turns and stands framed
in the light with a holdall in her hand like she’s been caught.

I can’t do this, she says.

The light on her hair, lifting out the silver threads.

It doesn’t matter, I say. I understand.

Tell him, she says. Tell him I’ll be thinking of him.

I will.

He’s got you, she says. He’s not on his own.

Aye.

She tries to smile, her face gaunt, and then she’s gone. I go out and stand for a moment in the darkened yard, smelling the
smoky air of February and listening to dogs bark in a hundred, in a thousand back yards, growing fainter and fainter across
Hartlepool and dying away like smoke.

Yan had a smell that was peculiar to him and real like an old sofa. It encompassed cigarettes and stale sweat, leather and
blood. But it was more than those things and less. I’d more or less airbrushed the man out of the official photos. There was
a gap on the balcony where he once stood, between me and Kate and Lenin. But I couldn’t legislate for that smell and if he’d
said something or done something right then I would have thrown myself on that smell and foundered upon it. But he didn’t,
and I didn’t. We sat back down in the armchairs by the fire.

Dan, he said.

He began rolling up a cigarette, nimbly twisting the paper in the fingers of one hand, dispensing a wisp of tobacco and securing
it with a dab of spit. A match flared and he sucked at the tiny roll-up. Clots of smoke dribbled from his nostrils.

I’ll take one of them, I said.

He looked at me sharply.

It’s a mug’s game. You should give it up, before it does you some damage.

I will. Just not tonight.

He seemed to relax, handed me the tobacco pouch.

Keep forgetting you’re seventeen.

Sixteen.

Aye. Sixteen.

I clumsily fashioned a cigarette and lit up. Smoke sprouted in the
room as the day collapsed into exhaustion, and the coals of our cigarettes flared.

So, he said, tell me. How did you get your face rearranged? How’s your mam?

I told him, as night gathered and rain still thrummed outside. About the afternoon on the beach, only hours ago but already
dropping into eclipse. Watched his face grow gaunt and bleak and the firelight across his skin turn to ash. Thoughts in his
head congealing into a cold hard mass like a neutron star and the smoke flickering from his mouth like dragon’s breath. When
I finished he ground the nub of his cigarette into the ashtray, mashing the filter right into the glass. Jonah appeared with
two more cans. Yan took one and popped the ring pull with a hiss. Took a long gulp of the yeasty fluid.

Now you, I said.

He yawned and stretched. What?

Tell me about you.

We’ve got unfinished business, you and me. We’ll get that out of the way first. Get my head down for a bit, and we’ll go in
the morning.

Jonah hovered.

You’ve kept the boy waiting three years, he said. We’ve got all night, and there’s plenty of sleeping when you’re dead.

Yan looked at him hard. It’s a long story, he said. It can wait.

He rummaged in his pocket, held out a big old-fashioned lighter. Firelight trickled over the brass skin.

Brought this back from the Falklands. You can have it.

He dropped it into my hand. I tested its weight, shook it. Put it down on the arm of the chair.

It’s empty, I said.

Here you go, said Jonah, standing by the bed. This’ll keep you warm. Real eiderdown, this. Warm as toast. Used to belong to
the old man. When he first came over from Barbados he didn’t half feel the cold.

He tossed a thick maroon quilt down over me, threadbare but miraculously warm. I tucked it around me, up and over my aching
head, the feathers of long-dead birds trapping my fugitive body heat in a secure cocoon.

So I slid into sleep and a curtain of rain swept aside and a raft of ducks huddled on the sea, wrinkles of grey water lifting
and falling beneath the large soft bodies. Big vermiculated females like brindled cats in tabby and tortoiseshell, shrugging
and shuffling their backs as the rain pockmarked the water, deep and watchful black eyes on the half-grown chicks clustered
between. Rain craters grew and spread as the sea squall passed over, and the coast swam into view, the mouth of the Tees with
the long sweep of pale sand to the north.