The Folded Man (2 page)

2.

Early hours Friday, Brian's stoned and lonesome and not going to bed – a six-deck of lager in his guts with some down his top – and ranting down the blower to Mel at The Cat Flap.

Only Mel at The Cat Flap doesn't want to know.

Listen love, it's not that they mind seeing you, she's saying, over and over, tired and absent or halfway dead, but they're not coming round there again. No, not even in a pair. Not after last time. Hobby's over with this place unless you pay up front and pay more. None of your tricks neither.

Last time, he's saying back. What about last time? What even about last time. I'll pay for their donkey. Won't take twenty now will it? It's late. No patrols at this hour. Know a few lads with curfew licences anyway. It's safe, our road.

So come in and see us instead
, Mel is saying, getting frustrated. Come here and have the
choice. Cassie does scenes with anyone, ninety for half-hour
. Door's open all –

Den of slags, he goes, interrupting. Hive of bloody wretches.

Mel from The Cat Flap sighs and hangs up.

Brian throws the phone at the wall.

Brian turns on the monitors, fuming and breathing hard. Dark out – too dark for the sensors – so he flips the night vision and starts to skin up another jay. Not tired now. Not sleeping soon. That damn purple Transit still outside. Not any neighbour he knows.

Brian leans back, blows smoke at the ceiling. Remorse and resentment. He's frustrated and he fears his dreams.

Half a man, he says out loud to nobody, his spare hand on his crotch, stick-man shadows thrown long behind.

He pulls on the joint till his lips burn hot.

Half a man with
itches to scratch.

 

Friday proper, the doorbell and the tannoy system wake him to spilled ashtrays and bad smells.

A visitor, sir, the tannoy says.

A new day. Another day. The same old day.

Morning has come with beer cans and brown chunks down his front. Spilled tobacco, smashed glasses and raw, sore skin. New scabs and old scars. Bile tickling his throat. There's a slender figure on the monitors and dry come in his hand.

Brian rubs his eyes. He scratches his thighs. His broken, stinging skin. He looks closer at the screen and sees a girl. He pulls his hat over his hair, clears his throat with the sour dregs of a beer. He wheels across to the intercom, ready for a battle.

I'm not in, he says.

The girl presses the doorbell again.

I'm not in, he says. Bugger off.

She turns and looks up at the camera dome. He can hear her through all the speakers in the lounge – can hear the echo on the relays upstairs.

A moment of your time, sir, she says. For the better good.

So Brian is ready for war. He buzzes the locks and wheels himself into the porch, arms cold and aching. The floor never seemed so old.

He opens the door. Some virtuous prick with a clipboard. Young, big teeth. A tight top groaning with promise.

Morning, she goes. I'm not here to sell God.

Bit of a shame, Brian says. I'm still after one of those.

Just want to ask you a few questions, she says, scanning the peeling wallpaper, the stripy rubber marks running over lino from door to door. If you've a few moments spare.

Not interested in sales, he says. On enough bastard databases aren't I? No brass to buy owt with, anyway. He rubs his hands together, then points at the purple Transit. That your van by there?

She shakes her head, glancing up and down and away, trying her hardest to ignore the shapes under his blanket.

Anyway, sir, won't keep you, she goes. I mean I suppose you, like all your other neighbours, love animals?

Brian pauses. Bites the tip of his finger, as though he's thinking. Then he says, Hate them. The neighbours too. Spies and liars, the lot of them.

She wilts, edges back, her smile gone.

He nods. That's right. Now clear off.

 

Daytime telly is soldiers and loansharks – soldiers and loansharks and heavy static since the reception gets worse every week. The soldiers are relentless, and getting younger with every tour. Fighting, surviving. Sleeping and waking and fighting some more. Out there, all together in the longest war.

Brian, he looks on through the fuzz – squinting and slowly smoking his last eighth in four long joints he made to last the day. Squinting and watching life filtered through head-cams on His Majesty's soldiers. Images of mortar tubes loaded, gunships landing, tracer fire lasering clouds. The waits through long government adverts about interest rates.

An age of celebrity caved to these anonymous heroes, these faceless villains. But really, Brian watches his country's endless war for love between the dead and dying. For hipflasks of hope passed round between the bombed.

 

It's funny: Brian doesn't remember where he was for the big things. The death of so-and-so, the bombing of here and there. Not like you're meant to. Not with dates and times. He can't ever say, if anybody asks. And actually, he only remembers the events of his own life through ­association. The personal events; the icons that scaffold a person's identity. Defining memories only remembered through the fixtures of everyday living.

So for Brian, he remembers the pattern of the curtains he was looking at when he took the call about his mother. The song on the radio when the first satellite fell, burning a streak over the Atlantic. The bubblebath turned flat by soap when they announced the very first curfew.

 

By nine evening there's a textbook sky, that rare thing, the colour of a thousand happy endings. Manchester blinks into life in the distance, suddenly more than sagging towers held up by billboards, entire buildings wrapped in holo-vinyls, lighting rigs you can still see clearly from eight miles out. The lights you can see from every approach; from the hills around; from the moors; from the roads that all point inwards.

Greater Manchester, he gets to thinking, looking out on his city. Fifty miles square, half a mile tall, five years dead.

And Brian, with a beer to open and a joint on the bounce, looking at those towers, thinks about new chances and new contracts. The ideas made at the top of them; the strategies okayed in boardrooms higher up. He gets to thinking about coke, so much coke, and then the girls. The brass.

How none of it comes down from those towers – just flits between.

At ten they switch on the city pillar – the Beetham ­memorial light. Brian watches the light flung tall. Their way to spear the moon. Their way to say sorry –

It's hard to know what we're remembering, Brian says, talking to the broken men on his telly.

 

Brian's out of weed and can't find the phone, forgetting it bounced or that he threw it to start with. He cuts a trail through card and forks, through smashed glass and fag dimps, to the hall and the foot of his stairs.

Brian hoists himself onto the stairlift platform, presses the right arrow for up. He looks at the stripes his tyres have left in the hall. The lift squeals. The chains grip, move. Brian climbs slowly over clean red carpets. Never used.

At the top of the stairs, he unstraps himself. He eases into his second wheelchair and turns a sharp right. Up the landing and into his archives.

His archives are the only thing he's ever built. Collected and stored and arranged by theme, they take up the lower half of almost every wall upstairs – shelves and drawers, dressers and baskets. Books, papers, trinkets. Posters, propaganda, beer mats. Notes from the DHSS, old cheques from birthday cards he forgot to cash, council replies to complaint letters – complaints about the reduced Metrolink running times, the state of the pavements. Photos of departed icons: the Big Bang, the Hacienda, the Cornerhouse. Photocopies he's made of receipts and of favourite pages from books at the library, before the library burnt. A pot of fifty-pence pieces he keeps for emergencies.

Dead skin in tupperware boxes. Nail clippings and elastic bands in another.

It's Brian's narrow, useless history of a time they lost – the golden years they never knew they had.

And Brian stops by the Olympic banner – five faded rings pulling him six years back. Before the riots and the radicals. Before the sharpline walls and all those lost wages. Before things rusted and the machines went bust. Before these decrepit vehicles salvaged to barely work in this functioning hell.

He picks up the phone by the bed he never sleeps in.N for Noah, he says into the mouthpiece – old buddy, old pal. He hears the click and the connection.

He notes the hesitation.

Hullo, comes a voice.

Avon calling, says Brian.

Meredith, you grubby old bastard! laughs Noah. How are you?

You know me, Brian says. Squaring circles.

And which service does Brian require? says Noah.

Usual.

Noah laughs again. I can be there in twenty. You're coming for a drive.

 

Noah talks the same old, same old, all the way up the hill to Werneth – old conquests and old wives, his terrible retirement and how he went about getting himself unretired. This rare, clear weather. How the rain will be home in the morning.

How he hasn't done too badly for some teenage graffiti artist turned freelance tagger by an ability to climb and aim a paint can. His old agent, Harry. All the fun they had.

That cheeky bastard wanted to pay five grand, Noah's telling Brian.

Well, I says to him, I go, Harry, you cheeky frigging bastard, I don't go south for less than fifteen. Not without a cannon and a cloak-suit. Send a man lone-wolf, past Brum – on the bastard plod no less – and you pay danger money for your troubles. Only he wasn't having that, Bri, and I could swear he laughed at me. He says, My clients don't pay danger money, our kid. So I says well you don't get our kid then. Bald twat.

Brian nods away. Owing to the weed, he's content to listen.

But every cloud, Brian, says Noah. This other time – and stop me if you've heard this – he's got me doing radio paint for a Sheffield agency, right? Like a proper job, this – archways and walls you colour in and turn on later. So there I am, dangling from ropes and suckers and earning our dinner, stencilling big names in big letters like always, and this bird with perfect tits walks under me – doesn't look up, doesn't notice. And I mean, they are perfect. Perfect. So I think fast and drip some drops of this rad-paint on her hair and down her back, a perfect shot. And I'm thinking, when they turn on this artwork tonight, love, I'll be seeing you around.

At the top of the hill, the peak of Werneth Low, Noah stops his dying old car. They look through dirty windows – the neon-lit city scattered before them.

So skin up, son, says Noah, rubbing his hands. Been too long.

The pair of them look out to the bright concrete. The grey city burning up with lights. Getting noisy down there, no doubt. Soldiers in the streets – the home guard tipped from their barracks. Dancers and hookers, the pushers, the pills, the poppers.

And in the centre, the brightest and whitest of all, the Deansgate memorial column goes up and up and up.

Just look at that beautiful sodding torch, Noah says to Brian, who's already rolling cardboard into a roach. Still gets me now to think of it falling. Funny how we hated it the first month it were up. And those tropical bastards who brought it down . . . Still. You remember that ad I pulled off, don't you fella?

Brian nods, concentrating on his build. This is what they always talk about on Werneth Low; this hill overlooking the slate basin.

Of course Brian remembers that ad.

The best, the best. Still the best, Noah says. The Beetham top panel, by me, your Noah – Captain Advertising, Captain Visibility. Mind you, I don't even remember the client's name now. Nobody would. But Brian, those tits! That big panel spread, those big tits and that grin; the tallest tits for miles! That were me, Brian – me and only me. Me on my tod with a vac-pack and no chalk. Me, gliding up them greasy window panels, looking in at all the call farms and laughing. Me, in the papers, me on the front page instead of our lads on the front.

And them fucking bastards came and took it all from me, Brian. Took my dreams with their backpacks.

Brian nods, lights the joint.

Council ever starts poking the sky again, I'll be up there, up there fast to say up yours to all of them, under black skies, hot sun, come rain or shine –

Brian nods, knocks the burning paper off the joint.

To say it were me and my lads who put this city in lights and large fonts and colours, hung its finest pictures, made Manchester proud –

Brian nods, inhaling.

To say it were me and my lads who did the dirty work and the deadly work besides –

Brian nods, blowing smoke.

Because you stand tall in this new world, young sparrow, even if this new world sits back and takes aim.

Brian nods. Passes the joint. Says, Do us a favour and drop me at The Cat Flap on the way back.

 

So Noah drops Brian in the old Asda car park round the corner. Less hassle that way. Plus it's not strictly a supermarket anymore, more a derelict warehouse for riot tanks.

Now don't be getting mugged off in there, goes Noah to Brian. You know these girls like to giggle and they like to gang up.

Been before, says Brian. Then he winks. Only the once or twice.

Still not a white face in there I'll expect, says Noah.

Odds that make? Brian says.

Not many, Noah replies. Some people have no trust for our darker sisters, is all. But still, if that Mel's still on the door I'd put one in the bank for her pal. Kind of woman you take time with, kid. Peel her open. Model material, or could've been. Sticky pages at the very least.

Brian grunts.

But anyway, listen, goes Noah, stepping out to help Brian into his chair on the passenger side. Come round the shop tomorrow. Crack of sparrows if you can. Something I want to tell you about.