Hemispheres Read online

  Scissors cut paper, he says, passing it to me. But if you lose it, you come back with us tonight.

  And if I win?

  Joe doesn’t answer. I turn back to the others.

  Dave, Fabián, I match your five, and I raise you fifty thousand American. Blink. There is an audible squawk from Dave.

  I watch a moth brushing at the window glass, drawn by the lamp, gentle and insistent. I watch a gob of sweat come adrift from Dave’s hairline and sway down the side of his face, making a neat detour round the eye socket and the corner of the mouth, disappearing below the neckline of his shirt. His hands appear on the table, cards in the left, the right hand tugging insistently at the watch strap. He has the cards.

  Thou shalt have a fishy, when the boat comes in.

  I fold, Fabián says. It is too much.

  His pupils are deflating to small, sharp coals. Blink.

  I don’t have that much with me, says Dave. Could get it in a couple of days, maybe.

  Nobody says nothing. Dave buckles and unbuckles the watch strap. The ash on his cigarette is almost to the filter, beginning to bend under its own weight, about to drop.

  Okay, he says, the boat. It’s ocean-going. You boys might need that. It must be worth the money.

  Blink. Blink. Blink. He has the cards.

  We’ll take the boat, I say, but you must show first.

  Dave nods, and then he begins to lay his cards down, one by one. The dancing light of paraffin, cards in motion, nothing decided. I try to stretch it out. I try to make it last for ever. One heart after another, fat red berries. He has a heart flush. Must have been dealt it straight.

  I drain my glass of beer. Astringent, medicine for the heart. Their eyes are on me, shining. The deep mahogany sheen of the tabletop. I begin to lay my cards down, one by one. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Four jacks.

  Softly and soundlessly, the pillar of ash drops into the ashtray and the cigarette dies. A moth still presses at the window, patiently and persistently, looking for the moon.

  2. Red-Throated Diver

  (Gavia stellata)

  The cold moon burned like a thumbprint smeared on the windowglass of the sky. I leaned back against the shutters of the pub and teased bitter cigarette smoke into my lungs. It was three years to the day since Yan went missing on the Falklands. I remember the phone ringing in the bar that day and Kate running to get it. She looked happy as she went, the smell of hairspray trailing behind her.

  Back then it was all clunky mechanics, before fibre-optics and satellites and that. The baffling sequence of tiny relays and micro-switches it took to patch a phone call through the exchanges from one place to another. And if one switch among thousands flipped in the wrong direction you could be diverted to the far side of the world. Me and Paul used to play this game with the phone book. You pick an international code and dial a random number. Sometimes you get number unobtainable or the phone just rings and rings. But once in a while there’s a click as someone picks up and then you hear a voice. A real person, from Uzbekistan, or Tasmania, or Tierra del Fuego, someone you’ll never see. Someone you’ll never meet.

  When this happened we pissed ourselves laughing and slammed the receiver down.

  Kate didn’t like to see me smoking. Even though I was sixteen and she chained herself hoarse on them Superkings. You know the ones, look like a magician’s wand when you wag them between finger and thumb.

  I’m your mam Danny, she said. It’s a do as I say not as I do thing.

  Not my fault, I said. It’s the absence of a father figure.

  I leaned against those blistered shutters and tried to get my technique right. How did he smoke? There was a thumb and forefinger raise to the mouth, then a quick sucking of breath, the cheeks concave. Pursed lips and a furtive look around like a schoolkid smoking in the bogs.

  I watched the early traffic on Port Clarence Road, winding down towards the Transporter. My cigarette died in the raw blustery wind rattling down the river, and inside the pub the phone began to shrill.

  Phones get me thinking about life, about the complexity of patching yourself through from there to here like an electron singing in a wire. Each time you make a choice – no matter how trivial – you flip one of them micro-switches, you make a new connection. And maybe that’s enough to derail the future onto some inscrutable new track. Maybe that’s enough to send you to Uzbekistan. And maybe your old track – your old destiny – just shrivels up and dies right there and then and you never even know it was laid out ready for you.

  It was dark in the bar with stacks of chalky unwashed glasses, dead and wounded butts mounded up in the ashtrays. The sharp smell of stale beer like vomit, like kissing a girl with rancid breath. Hagan never cleared up after a stoppy-back.

  I gripped the receiver, one of them old bakelite things.

  Cape of Good Hope.

  A trickle of electrons rattled into the earpiece and came out as a familiar voice, the accent so thick it was almost Scouse.

  Now then daft cunt, it’s Jonah.

  Now then Uncle Jonah.

  I’d been half expecting him to ring today. Mark the anniversary somehow.

  Red-throated diver, he said. Hartlepool Fish Quay. Worth a gander?

  Aye. I’ll meet you down there. Do you know what day it is?

  He was silent for a moment. Gusts of static on the line.

  I know, he said.

  I fumbled for a tab and flipped the lighter, flame fluttering like a moth in the ugly darkness of the bar. Franco was over there, stretched out asleep on the fake leather bench under the window. Must have drawn the short straw and missed out on a bed. I walked over and looked down at him, knotty and pickled like a conker that’s been in vinegar, fading tats on the forearms and a little tache bobbing gently on his upper lip. He snuffled, tugging the leather jacket further over him, eyeballs swivelling in sleep behind the wrinkled lids. I sucked long and hard at the cigarette, extended it carefully above his face. I smiled at the thought. I was going to tap a gobbet of ash onto his eyelid, soft and bristling like a woolly bear caterpillar.

  But I didn’t. I let the ash fall on the floor and walked out into the morning.

  Haverton Hill was a ghost town, them days. Used to be a thriving little place round the shipyards on the Tees. Then they built the ICI at Billingham, right on the doorstep, the biggest chemical complex in Europe, and the pollution knackered Haverton. The people had to go, even though they were here first. So a few year before I was born they knocked most of it down, moved people onto estates further out.

  Now there was just the Cape, beached on its corner plot like a ship on a reef. And the railway bridge, a second-hand car lot and a scrapyard and an old gadge called Decko who lived in a caravan in the middle of his pigeon sheds. And further out were the pikeys with them threadbare horses chained up in the fields around the Hole and then the saltmarsh and the sharp wind crackling with sea and impending rain.

  Along Port Clarence Road the hoardings groaned in the wind in front of the railway embankment. The River Tees over there, flat and brown, slipping quietly to the sea.

  Now then Danny charver, do us a ciggy.

  Paul lurched out of the bus shelter and fell into step with me.

  I’ve left the tabs at home marra.

  He started wheedling.

  Away, I’m fucking gasping here.

  I shrugged and we carried on and the tramp of his boots echoed from the pavement.

  Me and Paul were near enough the same age but you wouldn’t know it to look. He was half a head taller than me and grown into his muscles with a bonehead haircut that made him look like an Easter Island statue. He was fledged from rubble, from bramble and thorn, dragged up by his mam in one of the houses behind the Social Club. When we were at Port Clarence Primary he was the kid everyone was scared of, who got slippered for calling Mrs Reresby a saggy-titted old bitch and then just walked out of the gate and went home. He got away with murder cos he had these cool green eyes like unripe sloes an
d full raspberry lips and brown skin with a bloom behind it that made you want to touch. He just grinned at teachers and they melted. Even now, sheared and bagged off his head with lighter fluid on his breath and pupils the size of dinnerplates.

  Rain began to whirl out of a sky which was bulging and thickening like a varicose vein. Icy drops swarmed over Paul’s rosy, shorn head.

  You’ve been through that lass, then. The Paki one.

  Raz?

  Aye. Carlo said.

  She’s Bangladeshi. I go there to do homework. Can’t get any space in the pub with Hagan and all them.

  Homework, he erupted, with a barking laugh. Shook his head. We crossed over these little stumpy streets of terraces, fifty yards of houses and then Back Saltholme. Half of them were empty and the council had cages on the windows.

  That Gary Hagan, said Paul. One of these days he’ll get his napper tapped off.

  Our feet tramping in the wet, the huge metal sheds of Swan Hunter looming ahead.

  Has he nailed yer mam yet?

  Kate? He wants to. I don’t reckon she’s having it, mind.

  She keeps him hanging round, though, eh?

  She likes having a man behind the bar.

  I’ve seen her looking, he said. She wants me.

  Fuck off.

  A bus shimmied past us, headlights rippling like moonlight on the wet road. We swerved to avoid the spray.

  I might fit her in me busy schedule, leered Paul. One of these days.

  Go on then, I said. You’re going to tell me anyway.

  Paul’s Munchausen sexual adventures. I assumed they were fiction, I half feared they were true.

  Well, he said. There’s this one. Hazel, from Pally Park. Went through seventeen squaddies in one go, what I heard. Me and Dog were up there the other night, panelling fuck out of it, one end each. Get yourself down with us sometime, you could squirt your beans in there as well.

  There was a pause while I considered this tempting invitation. We were nearly at the bus stop.

  I’m on the bus, I said. I hoped he wouldn’t come along.

  On the bus. There’s cigarette smoke lazing through a shaft of sunlight and you lean your head on the window and the rattle of the diesel makes your thoughts dance away on a tide of vibration. Reclaimed fields on the estuary, unearthly green where the spring grass is beginning to stir, and below them the black earth and ballast and the alluvium of the old estuary in volume on volume like the pages of a damp book. A pair of teal rise on stiff wings and the air thrums in their tailfeathers and they fly for the shelter of a pair of cooling towers where steam blossoms high above the rim.

  I called Jonah my uncle but he was just a mate of Yan’s, back to when Noah was a lad. We went birding together, now and then, but his heart wasn’t in it. He did it because it kept us in touch, and because of Yan. Like there was a thread he had to keep spinning.

  Yan and me did the circuit two or three times a week, when he wasn’t on base or on a tour. Haverton Hole, Saltholme and Back Saltholme and the Triangle, Dorman’s and Reclamation, Greatham Creek and Calor Gas and Seal Sands and the Long Drag. Plus we turned out when a real crippler came in.

  It’s got to be some of the best birding in the country – one of the few consolations for living in this shitheap, said Yan. Maybe that’s why he did what he did. But I always liked it here, where the river runs out of energy and the pylons are stalking their prey across country and the refineries and petrochemical plants come to fruition in giant rock formations, in hard cliffs and crags above the reclaimed land. I like the Cleveland Hills making a bunched fist on the horizon, shafts of cold sunlight sweeping across their flanks, across the distant estates of Middlesbrough.

  I like hanging on by the fingernails. The honesty of it.

  It wasn’t the battery of telescopes you get for a real rarity, but a few of them at the edge of the dock with nowt better to do on a Saturday morning. I recognized a couple of the blokes and we nodded without speaking. I pulled my bins out and focused on the diver down there beyond the staithes, long and low and the water gulping right over its back. Right on the membrane between two elements. Sea and sky. Water and air.

  You always find them at the front of the bird book because they’re supposed to be the most primitive family, the furthest back towards reptiles. A seamless curve of bill and head and neck, sharp and snaky as a new pencil. Sea grey above and ghost white below and the eye like a bead of blood.

  The bird blinked upside-down, silver membrane wiping the eyeball from below. Humped its back and dived. We glanced around and someone lit a cigarette. I thought of mine, still sat on the bar in the Cape. Rain stippled the surface of the water, soft and insistent, and the bird bobbed back to the surface with a shrug. It didn’t notice the rain. The eye, like a berry.

  Blink.

  Water.

  Blink.

  Air.

  They winter at sea, red-throated divers. Range all over the Arctic and the north Atlantic and only bad weather brings them to harbour looking for shelter. They’re out there now, weighing about the same as a bag of sugar.

  Blink.

  Water.

  Blink.

  Air.

  A hand clapped on my shoulder and I whirled round to see Jonah.

  Danny, he said, with a grin. A brown face creased like a well-worn slipper, the mouth baggy but the eyes sharp. Rain-beaded grey hair on his skull like coal ash.

  Saw these nesting up in Shetland once, he said. On Fetlar. Handsome things in breeding plumage, like. They call it the rain goose up there. Used to believe it could predict the coming of storms. Some still do, I dare say. When you see the rain goose there’s a storm on the way. Close up the shutters, get the livestock inside.

  The bird dived again, rain becoming harder.

  Is there a storm on the way? I asked him.

  There’s always a storm somewhere, said Jonah. He pulled the tatty denim jacket closer round himself and shivered.

  We stood in silence for a while and watched the diver working its way back towards open water. Jonah shook his head.

  Birders, he said, with a grin. Are we a bunch of fruitloops or are we the sanest bastards on the planet? Or is it just a good excuse to get away from the ball and chain?

  All of the above, I said. And none of the above.

  Jonah pulled out a pouch and began to roll a cigarette one-handed. It was like watching a card sharp, fingers blurring, flying. He tore a cardboard roach and notched it into the end, lit a match behind his hand. The smoke billowed from his mouth.

  I taught your dad how to skin one-handed, he said. We would have been about fifteen. Mind you, he always rolled too thin. Like a fucking convict, he was, sucking at them little straws.

  What was Yan, then? Sane, mental, or itchy feet?

  Loony, said Jonah. Always a storm brewing, always a high wind racing behind them eyes.

  I laughed.

  Nah, he was a strange one. It was almost like he was a rare bird himself. One of these vagrants and passage migrants, blown around the place.

  You know these birds, the journeys they make, I drawled, in imitation of Yan’s voice. Makes Marco Polo look like a travelling salesman. Makes Neil Armstrong look like an average high-jumper. If you want a mythical hero, he’s wearing feathers.

  Jonah smirked. That’s exactly what he used to say.

  I know.

  See, he said, we both had this restlessness thing – the itchy feet business. It was straightforward for me. Easy come, easy go, a woman in every port. The old cliché. Simple enough in the merchant navy. But your dad, he wanted it every which way.

  Rain streaming down now, droplets worming down the back of my collar, twisting at the corners of my mouth.

  I mean, he wanted the adventure, Jonah continued. But he wanted the home life as well, the family. Later on, when he had Kate and you, I couldn’t help thinking that he’d got it right. All I had was an empty council house to rattle around in every few months, and a few extra notches on
the bedpost. A few ships, a few tinnies and a few fucks. Not much to base a life on.

  He grinned sheepishly, dragged hard at the cigarette which was struggling in the rain.

  Anyways, he said, glancing at his watch. I’ve got a young lady to entertain. But I thought I might nip into the Cape tonight, for a quick one. We can have a pint on the old bastard if nothing else. Nine-ish?

  Aye. See you then.

  He buffeted me on the shoulder again and stumped away, disappearing quickly in the monsoon. Out in the harbour the bird dived, the black surface of the water untroubled. I didn’t wait for it to surface.

  I was drenched when I reached the pub. Paul was leaning against the wall equally sodden, snakes of water twining over his oxblood Docs. Pushed himself off as I approached, with a shake and a sneeze like a wet dog.

  Hang on out here.

  I cracked the door and swung into the bar. Still blousy, uncleaned, bilious. Franco had vanished from the bench. I stood a moment and listened. Thumping from upstairs, somebody blundering about, bath taps thundering. That was probably Kate. Ten thirty and the bar still a swamp. The pack of Embassy lying on the bar unclaimed. I swept it up and made for the door, then turned on second thoughts and dived behind the bar. Crisps, chocolate, cans from the chiller.

  Nice one, said Paul, as I emerged. Special Brew. You know how to treat a lady.

  We took shelter in one of the abandoned lots along Cowpen Bewley Road, found a portakabin, gutted and derelict but still almost watertight. Used to be the office for a car dealership, moved out two years ago. Old filing cabinets spilled their guts, paperwork strewn over the floor, the carpet sprouting mould.

  Listen to your Uncle Paul, he boomed, several cans later, already leaden-faced with the alcohol. You want to get out, start living. I’m looking after your best interests here son.

  I tossed over a can, the last one. I was pole-axed, sprawled on the floor, holding on to shreds of consciousness.

  I’ve got a job now, chuntered Paul. On the landfill up the road here. Cash in hand. Better than the YTS – know what that stands for?